Classic Poem

At last the sacred path is opening out before me:
Its mists and dews of night and scents of flowers fold o'er me
Ceaseless and sudden wings.
The path that Byron trod, and Keats,—are we to tread it?
So many have passed along the road, and shall we dread it?
Lo! the whole road with weird soft whispers rings.

Whispers there are of men, and whispers soft of lovers
Among the groves that line the path and fill the covers
With soft luxuriant bloom.
Ah! this is not the path of death. Nay surely, surely
Death's path is darker far, and tenanted obscurely
By grey-winged ghost-shapes shuddering from their tomb.

This path is very fair. We mark old well-known faces:
Full are the banks of ferns, and full are the wild places
Of flowers whose scent is meet:—
We deemed the path of death was terrible. We tread it,
And lo! that moment cease, for ever cease, to dread it;
And even its terrors wax exceeding sweet.

What terror can be left when, rocky, grassy, gravelled,
Flowerless or full of flowers, not one yard is untravelled
Of the once lonely way?
Thousands have gone before, and made the pathway brighter:
Yea, women's souls have left the roadside blossoms whiter
And men's strong souls have left its ghosts less grey.

We soon shall have the right to tread the lonely valley.
The buglers of the ghosts will sound their wrathful rally;
But we reck not of these:
We think of poets great who trod the valley-border
And entered heaven beyond in spite of watch and warder
And drank the fragrance of the heavenly breeze.

And I,—I think of thee. No road that thou wilt travel,
Though o'er it mists and fogs their wild wet locks unravel,
Can deadly or dangerous be.
If thou must one day pass along the road, it follows
That Love dreads not the path's dim darkest deepest hollows
More than sea-birds the green gulfs of the sea.