In the old days? But those old days are now.
O merciful, O bright, O valiant brow,
Can you seek freedom that way and I this?
Not in the single note is music free,
But where creation's climbing fires agree
In multitudes, in nights, in silences.
4
Shall we mark off our little patch of power
From time's compulsive process? Shall we sit
With memory, warming our weak hands at it,
And say: "So be it; we have had one hour"?
Surely the mountains are a better dower,
With their dark scope and cloudy infinite,
Than small perfection, trivial exquisite;
'Mid all that dark the brightness of a flower!
Lovers are not themselves: they are more, they are all:
For them are past and future spread together
Like a green landscape lit by golden weather:
For them the rhythmic change conjectural
Of time and place is but the question whether
Their God shall stand (as stand he must) or fall.
5
O cold remembrance, careful-careless kiss,
That does not wake to hope with waking day,
And at the hour of bed-time does not say:
"That was for rapture, that for peace, but this
Burns for the night's more terrible auspices,
And pangs and sweets of doubt and disarray!"--
Yet in one kiss two hearts found once the way
From perfect ignorance to perfect bliss.
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