Written on a Bridge

"Cease, empty Faith, the Spectrum saith,     I was, and lo, have been;     I, God, am nought: a shade of thought,     Which, but by darkness see"

"These are the words of Jacobs wives, the words     Which Leah spake and Rachel to his ears,     When, in the shade at eventide, he sat     By"

"To spend uncounted years of pain,     Again, again, and yet again,     In working out in heart and brain     The problem of our being here;"

"On grass, on gravel, in the sun,     Or now beneath the shade,     They went, in pleasant Kensington,     A prentice and a maid.     That Sun"

"Here morning in the ploughman's songs is met     Ere yet one footstep shows in all the sky,     And twilight in the east, a doubt as yet,     S"

"The Text is taken from Percy's Reliques (1765), vol. i. p. 71, 'given from two MS. copies, transmitted from Scotland.' Herd had a very similar bal"