("No love can quite forego...")

Sand and dust and ashes are less free!

Follow all paths that wings and spread sails know;

Unheralded you came, and even so

If so you will, may you take leave of me.

Yours is your life, and what you will shall be.

I ask no question: hasten or be slow!

But I who would not hold you-I who give

Your freedom to you with no word to say;

And, watching quietly, with my prayers all dumb,

Speed you to any life you choose to live-

Shall ask God's self, incredulous, some day,

Why in the name of Christ He let you come!

vill

No love can quite forego the battle-field;

Since life is struggle, and love and life are one.

No soul is quiet and sheltered enough to shun

The tireless foes at work to make love yield.

Not flowers and samite, but lance and shield

Were dower of love; not wreath but gonfalon;

And while the bitter struggle is unwon

Not even to faith is all the truth revealed.

Each heart its own most dreaded foe must meet;

Each heart its own conspiracies must lay,

And fight what it finds hardest to defeat.

Mine is it to meet Doubt in serried mass

Stronger and subtler with each toilsome day;

Yet steel my soul to swear, "They shall not pass."

Ix

It will be easy to love you when I am dead-

Shadowed from light and shut away from sound,

Held deeper than the wild roots underground,

Where nothing can be changed and no more said.

All will be uttered then: beyond the dread

Of failure in you or me, I shall have found

Most perfect quietness to fold me round,

Where I can dream while all Time's years are sped.

But now Life roars about me like a sea,

Sears me like flame, is thunder in my ears.

There is no time for song, no space for tears,

And every vision has forsaken me.

In'a world earthquake-shaken, lightning-charred,

Love is the hardest where all things are hard.