Dear heart, and true, in the seasons fled,
Has the world swept by me, and left me dead?

Have the pansies withered, I used to know?
Are the roses faded, of long ago?

Do the tapers glimmer, that lit the feast?
Has the pageant passed? Has the music ceased?

And, musing here on the sea-beat coast,
Am I living man, or a wandering ghost?

Still in the scent of the autumn air
I feel a rapture that's like despair:

The starlight, pale on the sleeping sea,
Is a nameless, sorrowful joy to me:

And, lit by orb or crescent of night,
Meadow and woodland are brave to sight.

Still I bend to the mystic power
Of the strange sea-breeze and the breath of flower;

And the face of beauty wakes the wraith
Of holy passion and knightly faith!

But, ever I hear an undertone —
A subtle, sorrowful, wordless moan;

The dying note of a funeral bell;
The faltering sigh of a last farewell:

And ever I see, through lurid haze,
The sombre phantoms of other days;

In light that's sad as the ruin it frets, —
The solemn light of a sun that sets.

Ah, never now does youth dream on
As it used to dream in the summers gone!

For round it dashes the tide of years;
Its eyes are darkened with mist of tears;

Its hopes are sere as the fading grass,
And nothing it wished has come to pass.

Yet ever, in wayward, passionate power,
Like a wind that moans through a ruined tower,

O'er memory's darkening fields along
It rustles the fallen leaves of song:

And, wild in the heart, it wakes the thrill
That nothing but death can ever still!