I would not miss one sigh or tear, Heart-pang or throbbing brow; Sweet was the chastisement severe, And sweet its memory now. Yes! let the fragrant scars abide, 25 Love-tokens in thy stead, Faint shadows of the spear-pierced side, And thorn-encompassed head. And such thy tender force be still, When self would swerve or stray, 30 Shaping to truth the froward will Along thy narrow way. Deny me wealth; far, far remove The lure of power or name; Hope thrives in straits, in weakness love, 35 And faith in this world’s shame. _John Henry Newman._ CCCIII _THE GRAVE._ I stood within the grave’s o’ershadowing vault; Gloomy and damp it stretched its vast domain; Shades were its boundary; for my strained eye sought For other limit to its width in vain. Faint from the entrance came a daylight ray, 5 And distant sound of living men and things; This, in the encountering darkness passed away, That, took the tone in which a mourner sings. I lit a torch at a sepulchral lamp, Which shot a thread of light amid the gloom; 10 And feebly burning ’gainst the rolling damp, I bore it through the regions of the tomb. Around me stretched the slumbers of the dead, Whereof the silence ached upon mine ear; More and more noiseless did I make my tread, 15 And yet its echoes chilled my heart with fear. The former men of every age and place, From all their wanderings gathered; round me lay; The dust of withered empires did I trace, And stood ’mid generations past away. 20 I saw whole cities, that in flood or fire, Or famine or the plague, gave up their breath; Whole armies whom a day beheld expire, By thousands swept into the arms of Death. I saw the old world’s white and wave-swept bones, 25 A giant heap of creatures that had been; Far and confused the broken skeletons Lay strewn beyond mine eye’s remotest ken. Death’s various shrines--the Urn, the Stone, the Lamp-- Were scattered round, confused, amid the dead; 30 Symbols and Types were mouldering in the damp, Their shapes were waning, and their meaning fled. Unspoken tongues, perchance in praise or woe, Were charactered on tablets Time had swept; And deep were half their letters hid below 35 The thick small dust of those they once had wept. No hand was here to wipe the dust away; No reader of the writing traced beneath; No spirit sitting by its form of clay; Nor sigh nor sound from all the heaps of Death. 40