ART glad with the gladness of youth in thy veins,
In thy hands, for the spending, earth's joy and its gains?
Lo! winged with storm shadows the torturers come,
And to-night, or to-morrow, thy lips shall be dumb,
Thy hands wet with pain-thrills, thy nerves, that were strung
To fineness of sense by earth's pleasure, be wrung
With pangs the beast knows not, nor he who in tents
Lives lone in the desert, and knoweth not whence
The bread of the morrow. Pain like to a mist
Goeth up from the earth, and is lost, and none wist
Why ever it cometh, why ever it waits
In the heart of our loves, like a foe in our gates.
Lo! summer and sunshine are over the land,—
Who marshalled yon billows? what wind of command
Drives ever their merciless march on the strand?
Thus, dateless, relentless, the children of strife
None have seen, on the sun-lighted beaches of life
March ever the ravening billows of pain.
O heart that is breaking, go ask of the brain
If aught of God's spending is squandered in vain?
Yea, where is the sunshine of centuries dead?
Yea, where are the raindrops of yesterday shed?
God findeth anew his lost light in the force
That holdeth the world on its resolute course,
And surely, as surely the madness of pain
Shall pass into wisdom, and come back again
An angel of courage if thou art the one
That knoweth to deal with the lightnings that stun
To blindness the many. A thousand shall fall
By the waysides of life, and in helplessness call
For the death-alms which nature gives freely to all;
And one, like the jewel, shall break the fierce light
That blindeth thy vision, and flash through the night
The colors what read us its meaning aright.