And led him through the blissful climes, And show’d him in the fountain fresh All knowledge that the sons of flesh Shall gather in the cycled times. But I remain’d, whose hopes were dim, Whose life, whose thoughts were little worth, To wander on a darken’d earth, Where all things round me breathed of him. O friendship, equal-poised control, O heart, with kindliest motion warm, O sacred essence, other form, O solemn ghost! O crowned soul! Yet none could better know than I, How much of act at human hands The sense of human will demands, By which we dare to live or die. Whatever way my days decline, I felt and feel, though left alone, His being working in mine own, The footsteps of his life in mine; A life that all the Muses deck’d With gifts of grace that might express All-comprehensive tenderness, All-subtilising intellect: And so my passion hath not swerved To works of weakness, but I find An image comforting the mind, And in my grief a strength reserved. Likewise the imaginative woe, That loved to handle spiritual strife, Diffused the shock through all my life, But in the present broke the blow. My pulses therefore beat again For other friends that once I met; Nor can it suit me to forget The mighty hopes that make us men. I woo your love: I count it crime To mourn for any overmuch; I, the divided half of such A friendship as had master’d Time; Which masters Time indeed, and is Eternal, separate from fears. The all-assuming months and years Can take no part away from this: But Summer on the steaming floods, And Spring that swells the narrow brooks, And Autumn, with a noise of rooks, That gather in the waning woods, And every pulse of wind and wave Recalls, in change of light or gloom, My old affection of the tomb, And my prime passion in the grave: My old affection of the tomb, A part of stillness, yearns to speak; ‘Arise, and get thee forth and seek A friendship for the years to come. I watch thee from the quiet shore; Thy spirit up to mine can reach; But in dear words of human speech We two communicate no more.’ And I ‘Can clouds of nature stain The starry clearness of the free? How is it? Canst thou feel for me Some painless sympathy with pain?’ And lightly does the whisper fall; ‘’Tis hard for thee to fathom this; I triumph in conclusive bliss, And that serene result of all.’ So hold I commerce with the dead; Or so methinks the dead would say; Or so shall grief with symbols play, And pining life be fancy-fed.