"again ye come, ye hovering forms! i find ye,
as early to my clouded sight ye shone!
shall i attempt, this once, to seize and bind ye?
still over my heart is that illusion thrown?
ye crowd more near! then be the reign assigned ye
and sway me from your misty, shadowy zone,
from magic airs that round your march awaken.
of joyous days ye bring the blissful vision;
the dear, familiar phantoms rise again,
and like an old and half-extinct tradition,
first love returns with friendship in his train.
renewed is pain; with mournful repetition
life tracks his devious labyrinthine chain,
and name the good, whose cheating fortune torn them
from happy hours, and left me to deplore them.
they hear no longer these succeeding measures
the souls to whom my earliest songs i sang;
dispersed the friendly troop, with all its pleasures,
and still alas! the echoes first that rang.
i bring the unknown multitudes my treasures;
their very plaudits, give my heart a pang,
and those beside, whose joy my song so flattered,
if still they live, wide through the earth are scattered.
and grasps me now a long - unwonted yearning
for that serene and solemn spirit land;
my song, to faint aeolian murmurs turning,
sways like a harp string by the breezes fanned.
i thrill and tremble, tear on tear is burning,
and the stern heart is tenderly unmanned.
what i possess, i see far distant lying,
and what i lost, grows real and undying. "
--- Dedication from Faust, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe; translated by Bayard Taylor
--- i never got to finish the book... this poem remain a favorite. today i feel i've ended something... even only in mind... i somehow felt free.
