THE SUPERLATIVE by FREDERICK GODDARD TUCKERMAN

How strange a paradox is human life,
Strange in repose, yet stranger in its strife:
A walking dream, or fierce and barren toil,
A shifting fixture, an enduring change,
Tempting to baffle, promising to foil,
Strange in the garnered sum, and in the instance strange.

Strange that a man, whose soul the earthquake throb
Of Genius, like a buried Titan's sob,
Has lifted into stillness and sunshine,
Should, amid sordid fogs and earthly jars
That beat about his base, again decline
In place of gazing heaven, and striking to the stars.

Stranger that Woman, clad in sanctity
Of gentleness and love, with modesty
To guard her vesture like a golden zone,
Should rend away her robes, and shameless stand
In the world's eye, a wrangler, to disown
Her sex, and make it monstrous in an outraged land.

But strangest still, of these, or aught beside
Of human crime or folly, is the pride
Born of the gentlest gift we reach from Heaven;
Where hearts like these, stung by its bitterness,
Cease from each other, wild to be forgiven,
Yet proud to nurse an unrelenting wretchedness.

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