Alas, long-suffering and most patient God, Thou need’st be surelier God to bear with us Than even to have made us! thou, aspire, aspire From henceforth for me! thou who hast, thyself, Endured this fleshhood, knowing how, as a soaked And sucking vesture, it would drag us down And choke us in the melancholy Deep, Sustain me, that, with thee, I walk these waves, Resisting!—breathe me upward, thou for me Aspiring, who art the way, the truth, the life,— That no truth henceforth seem indifferent, No way to truth laborious, and no life, Not even this life I live, intolerable! The days went by. I took up the old days With all their Tuscan pleasures, worn and spoiled,— Like some lost book we dropt in the long grass On such a happy summer-afternoon When last we read it with a loving friend, And find in autumn, when the friend is gone, The grass cut short, the weather changed, too late, And stare at, as at something wonderful For sorrow,—thinking how two hands, before, Had held up what is left to only one, And how we smiled when such a vehement nail Impressed the tiny dint here, which presents This verse in fire for ever! Tenderly And mournfully I lived. I knew the birds And insects,—which look fathered by the flowers And emulous of their hues: I recognised The moths, with that great overpoise of wings Which makes a mystery of them how at all They can stop flying: butterflies, that bear Upon their blue wings such red embers round, They seem to scorch the blue air into holes Each flight they take: and fire-flies, that suspire In short soft lapses of transported flame Across the tingling Dark, while overhead The constant and inviolable stars Outburn those lights-of-love: melodious owls, (If music had but one note and was sad, ’Twould sound just so) and all the silent swirl Of bats, that seem to follow in the air Some grand circumference of a shadowy dome To which we are blind: and then, the nightingales, Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall, (When walking in the town) and carry it So high into the bowery almond-trees, We tremble and are afraid, and feel as if The golden flood of moonlight unaware Dissolved the pillars of the steady earth And made it less substantial. And I knew The harmless opal snakes, and large-mouthed frogs, (Those noisy vaunters of their shallow streams) And lizards, the green lightnings of the wall, Which, if you sit down still, nor sigh too loud, Will flatter you and take you for a stone, And flash familiarly about your feet With such prodigious eyes in such small heads!— I knew them, though they had somewhat dwindled from My childish imagery,—and kept in mind How last I sate among them equally, In fellowship and mateship, as a child