Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. _GROWING OLD._ What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for beauty to forego her wreath? --Yes, but not this alone. Is it to feel our strength-- Not our bloom only, but our strength--decay? Is it to feel each limb Grow stiffer, every function less exact, Each nerve more loosely strung? Yes, this, and more; but not, Ah! ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be. ’Tis not to have our life Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,-- A golden day’s decline. ’Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fulness of the past, The years that are no more. It is to spend long days, And not once feel that we were ever young; It is to add, immured In the hot prison of the present, month To month with weary pain. It is to suffer this, And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel. Deep in our hidden heart Festers the dull remembrance of a change, But no emotion,--none. It is--last stage of all-- When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost, Which blamed the living man. _THE PROGRESS OF POESY._ A VARIATION. Youth rambles on life’s arid mount, And strikes the rock, and finds the vein, And brings the water from the fount,-- The fount which shall not flow again. The man mature with labor chops For the bright stream a channel grand, And sees not that the sacred drops Ran off and vanished out of hand. And then the old man totters nigh, And feebly rakes among the stones. The mount is mute, the channel dry; And down he lays his weary bones. _PIS ALLER._ “Man is blind because of sin; Revelation makes him sure: Without that, who looks within Looks in vain, for all’s obscure.” Nay, look closer into man! Tell me, can you find indeed Nothing sure, no moral plan Clear prescribed, without your creed? “No, I nothing can perceive! Without that, all’s dark for men. That, or nothing, I believe.”-- For God’s sake, believe it, then! _THE LAST WORD._ Creep into thy narrow bed,-- Creep, and let no more be said. Vain thy onset! all stands fast. Thou thyself must break at last.