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Worlds were there of a happiness great and grave And action tinged with dream, laughter with thought, And passion there could wait for its desire Until it heard the near approach of God.

Only to be was a supreme delight, Life was a happy laughter of the soul And Joy was king with Love for minister.

There were vasts of the glory of life's absolutes: All laughed in a safe immortality And an eternal childhood of the soul Before darkness came and pain and grief were born

On a spiritual and mysterious peak Only a miracle's high transfiguring line Divided life from the formless Infinite And sheltered Time against eternity.

Thou shalt not shrink from any brother soul. Thou shalt be attracted helplessly to all. Men seeing thee shall feel my hands of joy, In sorrow's pangs feel steps of the world's delight,

Even in changing worlds bereft of peace, In an air racked with sorrow and with fear And while his feet trod on a soil unsafe, He saw the image of a happier state.

In front he saw a boundary ever unreached And thought himself at each step nearer now,— A far retreating horizon of mirage.

It had no grace of error or defeat, It had no room for fault, no power to fail.

Thence comes the mystic substance of our souls Into the prodigy of our nature's birth, There is the unfallen height of all we are And dateless fount of all we hope to be.