Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A GREAT GULF. If any tender sire Who sits girt round by loving faces And happy childhood's thousand graces, Through sudden crash or fire Should 'scape from this poor life to some mysterious air, And, dwelling solitary there, Should feel his unfilled yearning father's heart Pierced through by some intolerable smart; And, sickening for the dear lost lives again, Should through his overmastering pain Break through the awful bounds the Eternal sets between That which lives Here, and There, the Seen and the Unseen; And having gained once more The confines of the Earth, the scarce-left place Which greets him with unchanged familiar face— The well-remembered door, The rose he watered blooming yet, Nought to remember or forget, No change in all the world except in him, Nor there save in some sense, already dim Before the unchanged past, so that he seem A mortal spirit still, and what was since, a dream; And in the well-known room Should find the blithe remembered faces Grown sad and blurred by recent traces Of a new sorrow and gloom, And when his soul to comfort them is fain Finds his voice mute, his form unknown, unseen, And thinks with irrepressible pain Of all the happy days which late have been, And feels his new life's inmost chambers stirred If only of his own, he might be seen or heard ; Then if, at length, The father's yearning and o'erburdened soul Burst into shape and voice which scorn control Of its despairing strength,— Ah Heaven ! ah pity for the present dread Which strikes the old affection, dull and dead ! Ah, better were it far than this thing to remain, Voiceless, unseen, unloved, for ever and in pain ! So when a finer mind, Knowing its old self swept by some weird change And the old...