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Not soon is God’s delight
in us completed,
Nor with one life we
end;
Termlessly in us are our spirits seated
And termless joy
intend.
Our souls and heaven are of an equal
stature
And have a dateless
birth;
The unending seed, the infinite mould of
Nature,
They were not made on
earth,
Nor to the earth do they bequeath their
ashes,
But in themselves they
last.
An endless future brims beneath thy lashes,
Child of an endless
past.
Old memories come to us, old dreams invade
us,
Lost people we have
known,
Fictions and pictures; but their frames
evade us, -
They stand out bare,
alone.
Yet all we dream and hope are memories
treasured,
Are forecasts we
misspell,
But of what life or scene he who has
measured
The boundless heavens
can tell.
Time is a strong convention; future and
present
Were living in the
past;
They are one image that our wills
complaisant
Into three schemes have
cast.
Our past that we forget, is with us
deathless,
Our births and later
end
Already accomplished. To a summit
breathless
Sometimes our souls
ascend,
Whence the mind comes back helped; for
there emerges
The ocean vast of Time
Spread out before us with its infinite
surges,
Its
symphonies sublime;
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And even from this veil of
mind the spirit
Looks out sometimes and
sees
The bygone aeons that our lives inherit,
The unborn centuries:
It sees wave-trampled realms expel the
Ocean, -
From the vague depths
uphurled
Where now Himaloy stands, the flood’s
huge motion
Sees measuring half the
world;
Or else the web behind us is unravelled
And on its threads we
gaze, -
Past motions of the stars, scenes long
since travelled
In Time’s
far-backward days.
Seasons
Day and night begin, you tell
me,
When the sun may choose
to set or rise.
Well, it may be; but for me their changing
Is determined only by
her eyes.
Summer, spring, the fruitless winter
Hinge, you say, upon
the heavenly sun?
Oh, but I have known a yearlong winter!
Spring was by her
careless smiles begun.
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