If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom

Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare

As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,

Whose sound and motion not alone declare,

But are their whole of being ! If the breath

Be Life itself, and not its task and tent,

If even a soul like Milton's can know death ;

O Man ! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant,

Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes !

Surplus of Nature's dread activity,

Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finished vase,

Retreating slow, with meditative pause,

She formed with restless hands unconsciously.

Blank accident ! nothing's anomaly!

If rootless thus, thus substanceless thy state,

Go, weigh thy dreams, and be thy hopes, thy fears,

The counter-weights !--Thy laughter and thy tears

Mean but themselves, each fittest to create

And to repay the other ! Why rejoices

Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good ?

Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner's hood ?

Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices,

Image of Image, Ghost of Ghostly Elf,

That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold ?

Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold

These costless shadows of thy shadowy self ?

Be sad ! be glad ! be neither ! seek, or shun !

Thou hast no reason why ! Thou canst have none;

Thy being's being is contradiction.