Oh Lift Me As A Wave, A

Thou Who Didst Waken From His Summer Dreams The Blue Mediterranean, Where He Lay, Lull'd By The Coil Of His Crystalline Streams Beside A Pumice Isle In Baiæ's Bay, And Saw In Sleep Old Palaces And Towers Quivering Within The Wave's Intenser Day, All Overgrown With Azure Moss And Flowers So Sweet, The Sense Faints Picturing Them.

Thou Demandest What Is Love? It Is That Powerful Attraction Towards All That We Conceive, Or Fear, Or Hope Beyond Ourselves, When We Find Within Our Own Thoughts The Chasm Of An Insufficient Void, And Seek To Awaken In All Things That Are, A Community With What We Experience Within Ourselves.

It Is A Modest Creed, And Yet Pleasant If One Considers It, To Own That Death Itself Must Be, Like All The Rest, A Mockery.

O World! O Life! O Time! On Whose Last Steps I Climb

Until The Mind Can Love, And Admire, And Trust, And Hope, And Endure, Reasoned Principles Of Moral Conduct Are Seeds Cast Upon The Highway Of Life Which The Unconscious Passenger Tramples Into Dust.