Invite to Eternity

In crime and enmity they lie
Who sin and tell us love can die,
Who say to us in slander's breath
That love belongs to sin and death.
From heaven it came on angel's wing
To bloom on earth, eternal spring;
In falsehood's enmity they lie
Who sin and tell us love can die.

'Twas born upon an angel's breast.
The softest dreams, the sweetest rest,
The brightest sun, the bluest sky,
Are love's own home and canopy.
The thought that cheers this heart of mine
Is that of love; love so divine
They sin who say in slander's breath
That love belongs to sin and death.

The sweetest voice that lips contain,
The sweetest thought that leaves the brain,
The sweetest feeling of the heart--
There's pleasure in its very smart.
The scent of rose and cinnamon
Is not like love remembered on;
In falsehood's enmity they lie
Who sin and tell us love can die.

Wilt thou go with me, sweet maid?
Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me?
Through the valley-depths of shade,
Of night and dark obscurity?
Where the path has lost its way,
Where the sun forgets the day;
Where there's nor life nor light to see,
Sweet maiden, wilt thou go with me?

Where stones will turn to flooding streams,
Where plains will rise like ocean's waves,
Where life will fade like vision'd dreams,
And mountains darken into caves?
Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me
Through this sad non-identity;
Where parents live and are forgot,
And sisters live and know us not?

Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me,
In this strange death of life to be;
To live in death and be the same,
Without this life or home or name?
At once to be, and not to be,
That was and is not, yet to see
Things pass like shadows, and the sky,
Above, below, around us lie?

The land of shadows wilt thou trace,
Nor look nor know each other's face;
The present marr'd with reason gone,
And past and present both as one?
Say, maiden, can thy life be led
To join the living and the dead? --
Then trace thy footsteps on with me,
We are wed to one eternity.

Sweet the merry bells ring round
On even zephyrs dying swells
The sweetest chord the harp can sound
Sounds not so sweet as evening bells
   O merry chiming bells

Swinging falls and melting rise
On viewless echo how it swells
Tis but the music of the skies
Can breath so sweet as evening bells
  O merry chiming bells

Faint and fainter how they fall
Humming through the lonely dells
No sounds to charm this earthly ball
Can charm so sweet as evening bells
  O merry chiming bells

Zephyrs breathing once again
Once again the zephyr swells
Still I lie upon the plain
Entranc’d to hear the evening bells
  O merry chiming bells

While the runnel curdles clear
Once again the zephyr swells
Sweeter still the strains appear
O evening bells o evening bells
  How sweet is evening bells

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish [in]1 oblivious host,
[Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost]2;
And yet I am, [and live with shadows tossed]3

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking [dreams]4,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
[But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest - that I loved the best -]5
Are strange - nay, [rather]6 stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
[Untroubling and untroubled where I lie]7, -
The grass below - above the vaulted sky.