Ever upon your lips, and vainly look,
Because, dear, truth is an old habit in you,
But not in this.  Here in the night enchanted,
With not an ear to catch the whispered truth,
Let nothing but the truth between us be—­
I love you, Lake; I love the fair mind moving
In equal joy among men’s praise or censure;
I love the courage of its lonely flight,
Here in a land of light convenience. 
I love you for the years that you have given
To Sussex plough and pasture till they are grown
Surer and richer in your wit than any. 
I love you for the love in which you gather
My mind that from youth on has gone unmated,
And then I love you for the bearing kept
In you when slight occasions something royal
Take on because you silently are there. 
I know you, Lake, for a man worthy honour,
And well to honour is well to delight. 
But, dear, with all this giving of my love,
Great and unmeasured giving, sending back
In joy the worship that you bring to me,
I love your glowing body, and you love mine. 
No words, or thrift of philosophic thought,
Can put that love out of the love we are. 
At night, alone, when the dark covers me,
I ache for you, body for body I ache. 
And then I know that over you as well
The dear, forlorn, resistless pain is full. 
We may persuade, virtuously persuade,
That this is but an accident of love,
Not of love’s very being, a thing to bind
In brave captivity at the world’s bidding,
But I know, as you know it, that persuasion
So made is outcast in the house of truth. 
I love you, and the thing I love is made
All wonderful of flesh and spirit both,
Body and mind inseparably one,
And I must spend my love on all or nothing. 
Should I but love those limbs so rightly planned
By ancestry so wise of English earth,
It were a simple harlotry in me. 
But, Lake, to love the life and not the house,
The living house so admirably built
Of tissue flawless as the material stars,
Wherein the life I love is manifest,
Were harlotry no less I know than that. 
You, the dear Lake of my idolatry,
For I am something near it, as you are,
Are one life, whereto pilgrim thought conspires
With all the cunning moulding of the flesh,
And of my brain and body is my love,
Dream to your dream, desire to your desire. 
If you should die, my memory of you
Would be no tale of the mere mind conceiving,
Of contemplation thriving thus or thus,
In trance of spaces where not even wings nor breath
Recall the moving of substantial things. 
Rather in me for ever should be glowing
The imaging mind mated in equal limbs,
Thought visible in lines of the athlete,
Wisdom persuading in the lover’s clasp. 
And how should thought know thought until the whole
Of body’s beauty is by body learnt? 
Until the trial of that most dear seclusion
Is past, and all the dangers of mere lust
Disproved, when in possession is no stale
Regret and disillusion, how should be known
That the still hours of thought with thought are stable
Against the wearing of dissolving time? 
Dear, we must love by all the tokens of love,
Before the presence of love beyond dispute
Is between us and for ever fixed.