Behold my soul? She sits so far above you Your wildest dream has never glanced so high; Yet in the old-time when you said, "I love you," How fairly we were mated, eye to eye How long we dallied on in flowery meadows, By languid lakes of purely sensuous dreams, Steeped in enchanted mists, beguiled by shadows, Casting sweet flowers upon loitering streams, My memory owns, and yours; mine with deep shame, Yours with a sigh that life is not the same. What parted us, to leave you in the valley And send me struggling to the mountain-top? Too weak for duty, even love failed to rally The manhood that should float your pinions up. On my spent feet are many half-healed bruises, My limbs are wasted with their heavy toil, But I have learned adversity's "sweet uses," And brought my soul up pure through every soil; _Have I_ no right to scorn the man's dead power That leaves you far below me at this hour? Scorn you I do, while pitying even more The ignoble weakness of a strength debased. Do I yet mourn the faith that died of yore-- The trust by timorous treachery effaced? Through all, and over all, my soul mounts free To heights of peace you cannot hope to gain, Sings to the stars its mountain minstrelsy, And smiles down proudly on your murky plain; 'Tis vain to invite you--yet come up, come up, Conquer your way toward the mountain-top! TO MRS. ----. I cannot find the meaning out That lies in wrong and pain and strife; I know not why we grope through grief, Tear-blind, to touch the higher life. I see the world so subtly fair, My heart with beauty often aches; But ere I quiet this sweet pain, Some cross so presses, the heart breaks. To-day, this lovely golden day, When heaven and earth are steeped in calm; When every lightest air that blows, Sheds its delicious freight of balm. If I but ope my lips, I sob; If but an eyelid lift, I weep; I deprecate all good or ill, And only wish for endless sleep. For who, I ask, has set my feet In all these dark and troubled ways? And who denies my soul's desire, When with its might it cries and prays? In my unconscious veins there runs Perchance, some old ancestral taint; In Eve _I_ sinned: poor Eve and I! We each may utter one complaint:-- One and the same--for knowledge came Too late to save _her_ paradise; And I my paradise have lost; Forsooth because _I_ am not wise. O vain traditions! small the aid We women gather from your lore: Why, when the world was lost, did death Not come our children's birth before? It had been better to have died, Sole prey of death, and ended so; Than to have dragged through endless time, One long, unbroken trail of woe.