 Oh joy! oh height of happiness!
         To wish no more than life,
 To feel of pleasure, of distress,
 A normal more, a normal less,
         By friend or child or wife!
 None of these for my soul can be
 For more than madness is in m
 I weep sad tears - oh, not to live
         As these in human joy!
 Oh, that I could as much believe
 As sense and custom joint can give
         Which living cannot cloy!
 Man's happiness is poor, I know,
 But true - a thing all unlike wo
 Sometimes I dream that I might sit
         By my own fire, and quiet
 Might see my wife and children flit 
 Half in a sleep and not a whit
         In one of dreamy riot;
 And I might noble be and pure
 In mind, not stupid or obscur
 Sometimes I dream one of these homes
         Secluded socially
 One for the many thousand tomes
 Of life might keep my heart that roams
         Weak, desolate and free;
 That quiet haply might console
 My aching heart, my pining sou
 But as the thought of such a glad
         Existence simple here,
 As if the thing a venom had
 I shiver, tremble and grow sad
         As with a mystic fear;
 I dread to think my life might pass
 Like that of men, as is and wa
 I dread to think of a life sweet
         By family and friend
 Mine eyes the finite that they meet
 Abhor - the houses and the stree
         And all things that have end
 I know not to what I aspire,
 Yet know this I cannot desir
 So always incompatible
         And by the usual cold,
 I go about, my own deep hell,
 Hearing to toll in me the bell
         That tells me I grow old,
 Yet this in such an accent strange
 lt bears the mystery of Chang
 And so - alas! must e'er I be
 A stranger everywhere;
 The leper in his leprosy
 In his exclusion nears not me
         Who cannot living bear:
 The world my home, my brother men
 Are prisons, chains that bind and pe
 I pas The windows are behind,
         And I forget their peace,
 But tremble yet at what my mind
 Conceives and feels; and in the wind
         I wander without cease,
 Glad yet sad in me to perceive
 Something none other can conceiv