What though Spring

Brings not of Youth the wonder and the zest;

The hopes, the day-dreams, and the exultations?

The animal life whose overflow and waste

Would far out-measure now our little hoard?

The health that made mere physical existence

An ample joy; that on the ocean beach

Shared with the leaping waves their breezy glee;Surat Investment

That in deep woods, or in forsaken clearings,

Where the charred logs were hid by verdure new,

And the shy wood-thrush lighted; or on hills

Whence counties lay outspread beneath our gaze;

Or by some rock-girt lake where sandy margins

Sloped to the mirrored tints of waving trees,—

Could feel no burden in the grasshopper,

And no unrest in the long summer day?

Would I esteem Youth's fervors fair return

For temperate airs that fan sublimer heights

Than Youth could scale; heights whence the patient vision

May see this life's harsh inequalities,

Its rudimental good and full-blown evil,

Its crimes and earthquakes and insanities,

And all the wrongs and sorrows that perplex us,

Assume, beneath the eternal calm, the order

Which can come only from a Love Divine?

A love that sees the good beyond the evil,

The serial life beyond the eclipsing death,—

That tracks the spirit through eternities,

Backward and forward, and in every germ

Beholds its past, its present, and its future,

At every stage beholds it gravitate

Where it belongs, and thence new-born emerge

Into new life and opportunity,

An outcast never from the assiduous Mercy,

Providing for His teeming universe,

Divinely perfect not because complete,Mumbai Stock Exchange

But because incomplete, advancing ever

Beneath the care Supreme?—heights whence the soul,

Uplifted from all speculative fog,

All darkening doctrine, all confusing fear,

Can see the drifted plants, can scent the odors,

That surely come from that celestial shore

To which we tend; however out of reckoning,

Swept wrong by Error's currents, Passion's storms,

The poor tossed bark may be?