LETHE.
"A sleep and a forgetting" is this birth ?
Then what is life but a forgetting too?
Where are our playmates of the early earth, Our childhood's love, our faith in heaven's blue ?
Year after year dark Lethe's wave Washes us onward to the grave.
Thief of the priceless Past, relentless stream, Thy rising mists obscure the morning light, The cloud-banks of thy whelming currents seem To steal the stars of memory from the night.
As one by one they disappear, Like music dying from the ear. • If death, indeed, be a profounder sleep, A deeper plunge in thy effacino. tide, What hope is there on yonder bank to keep A recollection of the other side ?
If all things are made new, I ween, We cease to know that we have been.
Give me another creed, and let me dream That the old faces will not pass away. Roll back dull Lethe, let me see the gleam Of the returning glories of the day ; Let the old loves, behind the veil, And the old fancies, never fail.
It may be so ; for, as with drowning men, Who strive with agonies of reviving sense, And, in a moment, live their lives again, So death may bring a vision more intense Of what we were and may attain Beyond the world-encircling main.
It must be so : the form alone can change ; Hidden beneath the crust of Lethe's foam, The hasn't awakens to a wider range, And brings the Past from echoing caverns home.
Roll on, thou scornful river, roll,
Thou canat not wash away the soul ! J. N.
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