IX. Resignation

And is it true? can such sweet dreams not lie?
O true Egeria of a crownless lord!
Not by cool waterfall and mossy grot,
Beneath the mild light of a temperate sun,
With nature for a temple, do we meet;
But, as we parted, in a busy town,
Among the selfish throng of commerce; here,
Where alien schemers buy a chance of fortune
With sacrifice of all; we meet again—
And I who was the worst and least of those
Learned life’s sweet lesson from thy lips of love,
Young Alchemist, whose heaven-directed search
Has found the great Magistrum, oft denied
To wise men and to prophets of the world.
“Thou didst not think to teach me.” What of that?
Feeling is more than knowledge, thought than speech.
The lesson much I needed, and do still;
My life is not as I would; a dull round
Of trivial cares, and sordid, worldly aims,
Intrench’d by poverty, and sunder’d far
From all my spirit values; I, God wot,
To toil long years in this distemper’d clime,
Cut off from art and sweet commerce of books,
When, in the converse of congenial hearts,
A glorious work had crown’d my sinking head.
It was a dream; yet who is there can say,
“I have awakened, and will dream no more”?
Yet here is work too, though the end be far;
And here, even in exile, is a home—
For some short years a home; while yet I see
The roses not all wither’d on your cheek,
Our little ones still round their mother’s knee;
The sunshine of a hearth, though mostly cold,
And Love, that waits on Virtue—here is home.