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| O BLESSED Dead! beyond all earthly pains: | |
| Beyond the calculation of low needs; | |
| Thy growth no longer chok’d by earthly weeds; | |
| Thy spirit clear’d from care’s corrosive chains. | |
| O blessed Dead! O blessed Life-in-death, | 5 |
| Transcending all life’s poor decease of breath! | |
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| Thou walkest not upon some desolate moor | |
| In the storm-wildering midnight, when thine own, | |
| Thy trusted friend, hath lagg’d and left thee lone. | |
| He knows not poverty who, being poor, | 10 |
| Hath still one friend. But he who fain had kept | |
| The comrade whom his zeal hath overstept. | |
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| Thou sufferest not the friendly cavilling | |
| Impugning motive; nor that worse than spear | |
| Of foeman,—biting doubt of one most dear | 15 |
| Laid in thy deepest heart, a barbed sting | |
| Never to be withdrawn. For we were friends: | |
| Alas! and neither to the other bends. | |
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| Thou hast escap’d continual falling off | |
| Of old companions; and that aching void | 20 |
| Of the proud heart which has been over-buoy’d | |
| With friendship’s idle breath; and now the scoff | |
| Of failure even as idly passeth by | |
| Thy poor remains:—Thou soaring through the sky. | |
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| Knowing no more that malady of hope— | 25 |
| The sickness of deferral, thou canst look | |
| Thorough the heavens and, healthily patient, brook | |
| Delay,—defeat. For in thy vision’s scope | |
| Most distant cometh. We might see it too, | |
| But dizzying faintness overveils our view. | 30 |
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| And when disaster flings us in the dust, | |
| Or when we wearily drop on the highway-side, | |
| Or when in prison’d, exil’d depths the pride | |
| Of suffering bows its head, as oft it must, | |
| We cannot, looking on thy wasted corse, | 35 |
| Perceive the future. Lend us of thy force! | |
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