26

The multitudinous dead, like books unread,
Are somewhere in the library of Time.
Glimpses we get, of what they felt and said, —
Humdrum and homely, or loftily sublime:
But mostly they are ghostly, nameless, nought,
Whose journeying shadows fell and left no trace;
Whose worlds in worlds of woven and welded thought
Are now the language of a vanished race.
Nothing exists in life more strange than these
Lost lineaments of human histories.