"Many Mansions

The last majority attained,
And shut from its small house of dust,
Into the heritage of air
The spirit goes because it must:
And halts before the multiple plane
To look more ways than left and right,
And weeping walks its father's house
Like something homeless in the night:
For now less largely let abroad,
Though but the world they say is mine,
I shiver as I take the road."

Léonie Adams

Excerpts from the 1847 edition of Festus by Philip James Bailey:

...Death does his work
In secret and in joy intense, untold,
As though an earthquake smacked its mumbling lips
O’er some thick peopled city.

This is to be a mortal and immortal!
To live within a circle,--and to be
That dark point where the shades of all things around
Meet, mix and deepen.

...To blow
A kiss, a bubble and a prayer hath like
Effect and satisfaction.

So I betook me to the sounding sea;
And overheard its slumberous mutterings
Of a revenge on man; whereat almost
I gladdened, for I felt savage as the sea.

The science of the future is to man
But what the shadow of the wind might be.

Most men glide quietly and deeply down:
Some seek the bottom like a cataract.

Ye hate the truth as snails salt--it dissolves ye...