Stops of Various Quills/Temperament

by William Dean Howells

TEMPERAMENT

HERE love and hate, honor and infamy,
Change and dissolve away, and cease to be;
Where good and evil in effect are one
In the long tale of years beneath the sun;
Where like the face a man sees in a glass
And turns from, character itself shall pass—
Out of the mystery whence we came we bring
One thing that is the one immutable thing,
Through which we fashion all that we do here,
Which is the body of our hope and fear,
The form of all we feel and all we know,
The color of our weal and of our woe,
And which alone, it may be, we shall bear
Back to that mystery when we go there.