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| O HEARTS that never cease to yearn! | |
| O brimming tears that ne’er are dried! | |
| The dead, though they depart, return | |
| As though they had not died! | |
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| The living are the only dead; | 5 |
| The dead live,—nevermore to die; | |
| And often, when we mourn them fled, | |
| They never were so nigh! | |
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| And though they lie beneath the waves, | |
| Or sleep within the churchyard dim, | 10 |
| (Ah! through how many different graves | |
| God’s children go to him!)— | |
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| Yet every grave gives up its dead | |
| Ere it is overgrown with grass; | |
| Then why should hopeless tears be shed, | 15 |
| Or need we cry, “Alas”? | |
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| Or why should Memory, veiled with gloom, | |
| And like a sorrowing mourner craped, | |
| Sit weeping o’er an empty tomb, | |
| Whose captives have escaped? | 20 |
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| ’T is but a mound,—and will be mossed | |
| Whene’er the summer grass appears; | |
| The loved, though wept, are never lost; | |
| We only lose—our tears! | |
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| Nay, Hope may whisper with the dead | 25 |
| By bending forward where they are; | |
| But Memory, with a backward tread, | |
| Communes with them afar. | |
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| The joys we lose are but forecast, | |
| And we shall find them all once more; | 30 |
| We look behind us for the Past, | |
| But lo! ’t is all before! | |
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