Page:Poems Dudley.djvu/43

"But he smiled," do you say, in greeting,
 "And lifted his head in pride?"
It is true that his heart is beating;
 His soul—'twas his soul that died;

As the hectic of life burns reddest,
 On cheeks while their death-bells toll,
So the man is by far the deadest
 Whose body outlives his soul;

But, you urge, he was "lawfully wedded;"
 He might have been "lawfully" hung:
The law is a thing to be dreaded
 When the headsman's axe is swung;

Nut the heart, you may starve or stone it,
 And if it be "lawfully" dead,
Not a soul that will pause to bemoan it,—
 A heart does not weigh with a head.

There is law, that unwritten, unspoken,
 Holds man to its iron creed,
And its sentence is death if once broken
 In thought, or in word, or in deed;

And this mystical law of the spirit
 It was that our Reuben denied,
When he stood where high heaven could hear it
 Before that great altar and lied.