In Youth I Have Known One
Lines:36Movement:Romanticism
_How often we forget all time, when loneAdmiring Nature's universal throne;Her woods--her wilds--her mountains--the intenseReply of Hers to Our intelligence!_ In youth I have known one with whom the Earth In secret communing held--as he with it,In daylight, and in beauty, from his birth: Whose fervid, flickering torch of life was litFrom the sun and stars, whence he had drawn forth A passionate light such for his spirit was fit--And yet that spirit knew--not in the hour Of its own fervor--what had o'er it power. Perhaps it may be that my mind is wrought To a ferver by the moonbeam that hangs o'er,But I will half believe that wild light fraught With more of sovereignty than ancient loreHath ever told--or is it of a thought The unembodied essence, and no moreThat with a quickening spell doth o'er us pass As dew of the night-time, o'er the summer grass? Doth o'er us pass, when, as th' expanding eye To the loved object--so the tear to the lidWill start, which lately slept in apathy? And yet it need not be--(that object) hidFrom us in life--but common--which doth lie Each hour before us--but then only bidWith a strange sound, as of a harp-string broken T' awake us--'Tis a symbol and a token-- Of what in other worlds shall be--and given In beauty by our God, to those aloneWho otherwise would fall from life and Heaven Drawn by their heart's passion, and that tone,That high tone of the spirit which hath striven Though not with Faith--with godliness--whose throneWith desperate energy 't hath beaten down; Wearing its own deep feeling as a crown.