Explore "A Fragment" by Lord Byron on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Could I remount the river of my years / To the first fountain of our smiles and tears, / I would not trace again the stream of hours / Between their outworn banks of withered flowers, / But bid it flow as now-until it glides / Into the number of the nameless tides.
What is this Death? -a quiet of the heart? / The whole of that of which we are a part? / For Life is but a vision-what I see / Of all which lives; alone is Life to me, / And being so-the absent are the dead, / Who haunt us from tranquillity, and spread / A dreary shroud around us, and invest / With sad remembrancers our hours of rest. / The absent are the dead-for they are cold, / And ne'er can be what once we did behold, / And they are changed, and cheerless,-or if yet / The unforgotten do not all forget, / Since thus divided-equal must it be / If the deep barrier be of earth, or sea, / It may be both-but one day end it must / In the dark union of insensate dust.