I knew. But this your fault: You see me as apart, Over, removed, at enmity with You. You are in Me, and of Me, even at one With Me. But there's your soul--your soul may be The germinal cell of vaster evolution. Why try to tell you? If I gave a cell Voice to inquire, and it should ask you this: "After me what, a stalk, a flower, life That swims or crawls?" And if I gave to you Wisdom to say: "You shall become a reed By the water's edge"--how could the cell foresee What the reed is, bending beneath the wind When the lake ripples and the skies are blue As larkspur? Therefore I, who moved in darkness Becoming light in suns and light in souls And mind with thought--for what is thought but light Sprung from the clash of ether?--I am with you. And if beyond this stable state that stands For your life here (as cells are whole and balanced Till the inner urge bring union, then a breaking And building up to higher life), there is No memory of this world nor of your thought, Nor sense of life on this world lived and borne; Or whether you remember, know yourself As one who lived here, suffered here, aspired-- What does it matter?--you cannot be lost, As I am lost not. Therefore be at peace. And from the laws whose orbits cross and run To seeming tangles, find the law through which Your soul shall be perfected till it draw,-- As the green cell the sunlight draws and turns Its chemical effulgence into life-- My inner splendor. All the rest is mine In infinite time. For if I should unroll The parchment of the future, it were vain-- You could not read it. TERMINUS Terminus shows the ways and says, "All things must have an end." Oh, bitter thought we hid away When first you were my friend. We hid it in the darkest place Our hearts had place to hide, And took the sweet as from a spring Whose waters would abide. For neither life nor the wide world Has greater store than this:-- The thought that runs through hands and eyes And fills the silences. There is a void the agéd world Throws over the spent heart; When Life has given all she has, And Terminus says depart. When we must sit with folded hands, And see with inward eye A void rise like an arctic breath To hollow the morrow's sky. To-morrow is, and trembling leaves, And 'wildered winds from Thrace Look for you where your face has bloomed, And where may bloom your face. Beyond the city, over the hill, Under the anguished moon, The winds and my dreams seek after you By meadow, water and dune. All things must have an end, we know; But oh, the dreaded end; Whether in life, whether in death, To lose the cherished friend. To lose in life the cherished friend, While the myrtle tree is green; To live and have the cherished friend With only the world between.