Could I Remount The River Of My Years To The First Fountain Of Our Smiles And Tears, I Would Not Trace Again The Stream Of Hours Between Their Outworn Banks Of Withered Flowers, But Bid It Flow As Now - Until It Glides Into The Number Of The Nameless Tides. * * * * * What Is This Death? - A Quiet Of The Heart? The Whole Of That Of Which We Are A Part? For Life Is But A Vision - What I See Of All Which Lives Alone Is Life To Me, And Being So - The Absent Are The Dead, Who Haunt Us From Tranquillity, And Spread A Dreary Shroud Around Us, And Invest With Sad Remembrancers Our Hours Of Rest. The Absent Are The Dead - For They Are Cold, And Ne'er Can Be What Once We Did Behold; And They Are Changed, And Cheerless, - Or If Yet The Unforgotten Do Not All Forget, Since Thus Divided - Equal Must It Be If The Deep Barrier Be Of Earth, Or Sea; It May Be Both - But One Day End It Must In The Dark Union Of Insensate Dust. The Under-Earth Inhabitants - Are They But Mingled Millions Decomposed To Clay? The Ashes Of A Thousand Ages Spread Wherever Man Has Trodden Or Shall Tread? Or Do They In Their Silent Cities Dwell Each In His Incommunicative Cell? Or Have They Their Own Language? And A Sense Of Breathless Being? - Darkened And Intense As Midnight In Her Solitude? - Oh Earth! Where Are The Past? - And Wherefore Had They Birth? The Dead Are Thy Inheritors - And We But Bubbles On Thy Surface; And The Key Of Thy Profundity Is In The Grave, The Ebon Portal Of Thy Peopled Cave, Where I Would Walk In Spirit, And Behold[74] Our Elements Resolved To Things Untold, And Fathom Hidden Wonders, And Explore The Essence Of Great Bosoms Now No More. * * * * * Diodati, July, 1816. [First Published, Letters And Journals, 1830, Ii. 36.]