*
A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen
things, even as they are little things, not much otherwise
than we have seen them, will continue to the end to be one
of life's choicest pleasures.
*
The morning drum-call on my eager ear
Thrills unforgotten yet; the morning dew
Lies yet undried along my field of noon.
But now I pause at whiles in what I do,
And count the bell, and tremble lest I hear
(My work untrimmed) the sunset gun too soon.
*
The ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria,
and haunting of the grave, is nothing else than naked,
ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he sees dead;
those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague
epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for
where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration,
he goes through fire unshielded. In every part and corner
of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget
oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable, and
tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself,
giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus.
But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured
body, slip abroad and gather flowers. Then shall death
appear before him in an altered guise; no longer as a doom
peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning injustice or
his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value him;
but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not
without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving
and yet storing up.
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