By everything, yea, when reversed, Blazing, in fury, brighter, wink, Flicker, and into darkness shrink, When all else glows, baleful or brave, In the keen air beyond the grave? Beware; for fiends in triumph laugh O'er him who learns the truth by half! Beware; for God will not endure For men to make their hope more pure Than His good promise, or require Another than the five-string'd lyre Which He has vow'd again to the hands Devout of him who understands To tune it justly here! Beware The Powers of Darkness and the Air, Which lure to empty heights man's hope, Bepraising heaven's ethereal cope, But covering with their cloudy cant Its ground of solid adamant, That strengthens ether for the flight Of angels, makes and measures height, And in materiality Exceeds our Earth's in such degree As all else Earth exceeds! Do I Here utter aught too dark or high? Have you not seen a bird's beak slay Proud Psyche, on a summer's day? Down fluttering drop the frail wings four, Missing the weight which made them soar. Spirit is heavy nature's wing, And is not rightly anything Without its burthen, whereas this, Wingless, at least a maggot is, And, wing'd, is honour and delight Increasing endlessly with height. 11 If unto any here that chance Fell not, which makes a month's romance, Remember, few wed whom they would. And this, like all God's laws, is good; For nought's so sad, the whole world o'er, As much love which has once been more. Glorious for light is the earliest love; But worldly things, in the rays thereof, Extend their shadows, every one False as the image which the sun At noon or eve dwarfs or protracts. A perilous lamp to light men's acts! By Heaven's kind, impartial plan, Well-wived is he that's truly man If but the woman's womanly, As such a man's is sure to be. Joy of all eyes and pride of life Perhaps she is not; the likelier wife! If it be thus; if you have known, (As who has not?) some heavenly one. Whom the dull background of despair Help'd to show forth supremely fair; If memory, still remorseful, shapes Young Passion bringing Eshcol grapes To travellers in the Wilderness, This truth will make regret the less: Mighty in love as graces are, God's ordinance is mightier far; And he who is but just and kind And patient, shall for guerdon find, Before long, that the body's bond Is all else utterly beyond In power of love to actualise The soul's bond which it signifies, And even to deck a wife with grace External in the form and face. A five years' wife, and not yet fair? Blame let the man, not Nature, bear! For, as the sun, warming a bank Where last year's grass droops gray and dank, Evokes the violet, bids disclose In yellow crowds the fresh primrose, And foxglove hang her flushing head, So vernal love, where all seems dead, Makes beauty abound. Then was that nought, That trance of joy beyond all thought, The vision, in one, of womanhood? Nay, for all women holding good, Should marriage such a prologue want,