For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun’s hot eye,
With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give, 40
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison-wall. 
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labour fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near, 45
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast;
A while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
And the rest, a few,
Escape their prison and depart 50
On the wide ocean of life anew. 
There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
Nor doth he know how these prevail,
Despotic on that sea, 55
Trade-winds which cross it from eternity. 
Awhile he holds some false way, undebarr’d
By thwarting signs, and braves
The freshening wind and blackening waves
And then the tempest strikes him; and between 60
The lightning-bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck. 
And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguished face and flying hair,
Grasping the rudder hard, 65
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore. 
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom 70
And he, too, disappears and comes no more.

Is there no life, but there alone? 
Madman or slave, must man be one? 
Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain! 
Clearness divine. 75
Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign
Of languor, though so calm, and though so great
Are yet untroubled and unpassionate;
Who though so noble, share in the world’s toil. 
And, though so task’d, keep free from dust and soil! 80

I will not say that your mild deeps retain
A tinge, it may he, of their silent pain
Who have longed deeply once, and longed in vain—­
But I will rather say that you remain
A world above man’s head, to let him see 85
How boundless might his soul’s horizon be,
How vast, yet of which clear transparency! 
How it were good to live there, and breathe free! 
How fair a lot to fill
Is left to each man still! 90

GEIST’S GRAVE deg.

Four years!—­and didst thou stay above
The ground, which hides thee now, but four? 
And all that life, and all that love,
Were crowded, Geist! into no more?

Only four years those winning ways, 5
Which make me for thy presence yearn,
Call’d us to pet thee or to praise,
Dear little friend! at every turn?