Read "The Youth who Carried a Light" by Thomas Hardy online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I SAW him pass as the new day dawned, / Murmuring some musical phrase; / Horses were drinking and floundering in the pond, / And the tired stars thinned their gaze; / Yet these were not the spectacles at all that he conned, / But an inner one, giving out rays.
Such was the thing in his eye, walking there, / The very and visible thing, / A close light, displacing the gray of the morning air, / And the tokens that the dark was taking wing; / And was it not the radiance of a purpose rare / That might ripe to its accomplishing?
What became of that light? I wonder still its fate! / Was it quenched ere its full apogee? / Did it struggle frail and frailer to a beam emaciate? / Did it thrive till matured in verity? / Or did it travel on, to be a new young dreamer's freight, / And thence on infinitely?