I Could Not Stop For

But A Book Is Only The Heart's Portrait- Every Page A Pulse.

The Life We Have Is Very Great. The Life That We Shall See Surpasses It, We Know, Because It Is Infinity, But When All Space Has Been Beheld And All Dominion Shown The Smallest Human Heart's Extent Reduces It To None.

Till The First Friend Dies, We Think Our Ecstasy Impersonal, But Then Discover That He Was The Cup From Which We Drank It, Itself As Yet Unknown.

I Stepped From Plank To Plank So Slow And Cautiously; The Stars About My Head I Felt, About My Feet The Sea. I Knew Not But The Next Would Be My Final Inch,— This Gave Me That Precarious Gait Some Call Experience.

My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close; It Yet Remains To See If Immortality Unveil A Third Event To Me, So Huge, So Hopeless To Conceive, As These That Twice Befell. Parting Is All We Know Of Heaven, And All We Need Of Hell.