4. Yet Love, if Love in such an hour In her who lives and him who dies. 5. "Twere sweet, my Psyche! to the last Thy features still serene to see: Forgetful of its struggles past, E'en Pain itself should smile on thee. 6. But vain the wish-for Beauty still Will shrink, as shrinks the ebbing breath; And woman's tears, produced at will, Deceive in life, unman in death. 7. Then lonely be my latest hour, Without regret, without a groan! For thousands Death hath ceased to lower, And pain been transient or unknown. 8. 'Ay, but to die, and go," alas! Where all have gone, and all must go! To be the nothing that I was Ere born to life and living woe! 9. Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, STANZAS. "Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!" 1. AND thou art dead, as young and fair As aught of mortal birth; And form so soft, and charms so rare, Though Earth received them in her bed, There is an eye which could not brook 2. I will not ask where thou liest low, Nor gaze upon the spot; There flowers or weeds at will may grow, So I behold them not: It is enough for me to prove That what I loved and long must love To me there needs no stone to tell, 3. Yet did I love thee to the last As fervently as thou, Who didst not change through all the past, And canst not alter now. The love where Death has set his seal, Nor age can chill, nor rival steal, Nor falsehood disavow: And, what were worse, thou canst not see Or wrong, or change, or fault in me. 4. The better days of life were ours; The worst can be but mine: The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers, Shall never more be thine. The silence of that dreamless sleep That all those charms have pass'd away; 5. The flower in ripen'd bloom unmatch'd And yet it were a greater grief Since earthly eye but ill can bear 6. I know not if I could have borne To see thy beauties fade; The night that follow'd such a morn Thy day without a cloud hath past, As stars that shoot along the sky 7. As once I wept, if I could weep To gaze, how fondly! on thy face, And show that love, however vain, 8. Yet how much less it were to gain, The all of thine that cannot die Through dark and dread Eternity, And more thy buried love endears |