ths in yonder dell.
Since ages longer than he can tell.

Here is his dream--born in the radiant glow.
Of joy and young oblivion, long ago--
That in black fields of science he let go,
That he hath clothed with flame and embers bright,
--Red wings plucked off from Folly in her flight--
That he hath launched toward inaccessible
Spaces afar, toward the distance there,
The golden conquest of the Impossible,
And that the limitless, refractory sky,
Sends back to him again, or it has ere
So much as touched the immobile mystery.

The grave-digger turneth it round and round--
With arms by toil so weary made,
With arms so thin, and strokes of spade--
Since what long times?--the dried-up ground.
Here, for his anguish and remorse, there throng
Pardons denied to creatures in the wrong;
And here, the tears, the prayers, the silent cries,
He would not list to in his brothers' eyes.
The insults to the gentle, and the jeer
What time the humble bent their knees, are here;
Gloomy denials, and a bitter store
Of arid sarcasms, oft poured out before
Devotedness that in the shadow stands
With outstretched hands.

The grave-digger, weary, yet eager as well.
Hiding his pain to the sound of the knell,
With strokes of the spade turns round and round
The weary sods of the dried-up ground.

Then--fear-struck dallyings with suicide;
Delays, that conquer hours that would decide:
Again--the terrors of dark crime and sin
Furtively felt with frenzied fingers thin:
The fierce craze and the fervent rage to be
The man who lives of the extremity
Of his own fear:
And then, too, doubt immense and wild affright.
And madness, with its eyes of marble white,
These all are here.

His head a prey to the dull knell's sound,
In terror the grave-digger turns the ground
With strokes of the spade, and doth ceaseless cast
The dried-up earth upon his past.

The slain days, and the present, he doth see,
Quelling each quivering thrill of life to be.
And drop by drop, through fists whose fingers start.
Pressing the future blood of his red heart;
Chewing with teeth that grind and crush, each part
Of that his future's body, limb by limb,
Till there is but a carcase left to him;
And shewing him, in coffins prisoned,
Or ever they be born, his longings dead.

The grave-digger yonder doth hear the knell,
More heavy yet, of the passing bell.
That up through the mourning horizons doth swell
What if t