This round of hours, the daily flowers I cull
Are more to me than all the rolling spheres,
A wounded bird at hand more pitiful
Than some great seraph's tears.

How should I join the great wise choir above
With my starved spirit's pale inhuman dearth,
Who never heard the cry of heavenly love
Rise from the sweet-souled earth?

Yet it is I he needs, and I for whom
His greed exceeds, his dreams fly wide of the mark!
Is it all self? I wander in the gloom;
The ways of God grow dark;
I watch the rose that withers in the cheek,
The leaden rings that mark us old and wise;
And Time that writes what Pity dares not speak
Around the fading eyes.

XII

And ever as Anwyl went the unknown end
Faded before him, back and back and back
He saw new empty heavens for ever bend
Over his endless track;

And memory, burning with new hopeless fire,
Showed him how every passing infinite hour
Made some new Crucifix for the World's Desire
Is some new wayside flower:

He saw what joy and beauty owed to death;
How all the world was one great sacrifice
Of Him, in whom all creatures that draw breath
Share God's eternal skies;

How Love is lord of all the world at once;
And never bids the encircled spirit roam
To the circle's bound, beyond the moons and suns,
But makes each heart its home,

And every home the heart of Space and Time,
And each and all a heaven if love could reign
One infinite untranscended heaven sublime
With God's own joy and pain.

XIII

Out of the deep, my dream, out of the deep,
A little child came to him in his sleep
And led him back to what was Paradise
Before the years had darkened in his eyes,
And showed him what he ne'er could lose again--
The light that once enshrined the child Etain.

Ah, was it Yrma with those radiant eyes
That came to greet and lead him through the skies;
Ay; all the world was one wide rose-white flame,
As down the path to meet him Yrma came
And caught the child up in her arms and cried,
This is my child that moved in Etain's side,
Thy child and Etain's: I the unknown ideal
And she the rich, the incarnate, breathing real
Are one; for me thou never canst attain
But by the love I yield thee for Etain;
Even as through Christ