Chapter Chapter 13 · A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow--

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream:

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision or in none,

Is it therefore the less _gone_?

_All_ that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand--

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep

While I weep--while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

_One_ from the pitiless wave?

Is _all_ that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

1849.

* * * * *

TO MARIE LOUISE (SHEW).

Of all who hail thy presence as the morning--

Of all to whom thine absence is the night--

The blotting utterly from out high heaven

The sacred sun--of all who, weeping, bless thee

Hourly for hope--for life--ah, above all,

For the resurrection of deep buried faith

In truth, in virtue, in humanity--

Of all who, on despair's unhallowed bed

Lying down to die, have suddenly arisen

At thy soft-murmured words, "Let there be light!"

At thy soft-murmured words that were fulfilled

In thy seraphic glancing of thine eyes--

Of all who owe thee most, whose gratitude

Nearest resembles worship,--oh, remember

The truest, the most fervently devoted,

And think that these weak lines are written by him--

By him who, as he pens them, thrills to think

His spirit is communing with an angel's.

1847.

* * * * *

TO MARIE LOUISE (SHEW).

Not long ago, the writer of these lines,

In the mad pride of intellectuality,

Maintained "the power of words"--denied that ever

A thought arose within the human brain

Beyond the utterance of the human tongue:

And now, as if in mockery of that boast,

Two words--two foreign soft dissyllables--

Italian tones, made only to be murmured

By angels dreaming in the moonlit "dew

That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill,"--

Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart,

Unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thought,

Richer, far wilder, far diviner visions

Than even the seraph harper, Israfel,

(Who has "the sweetest voice of all God's creatures,")

Could hope to utter. And I! my spells are broken.

The pen falls powerless from my shivering hand.

With thy dear name as text, though hidden by thee,

I cannot write--I cannot speak or think--

Alas, I cannot feel; for 'tis not feeling,

This standing motionless upon the golden

Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams,

Gazing, entranced, adown the gorgeous vista,

And thrilling as I see, upon the right,

Upon the left, and all the way along,

Amid empurpled vapors, far away

To where the prospect terminates--_thee only_!

* * * * *

Poem 14.