The Higher Kinship

           Life is too grim with anxious, eating care

                  To cherish what is best. Our souls are scarred

                  By daily agonies, and our conscience marred

            By petty tyrannies that waste and wear.

             Why is this human fate so hard to bear?

                  Could we but live with hill-lakes silver-starred,

                  Or where the eternal silence leaneth toward

            The awful front of nature, waste and bare:

            Then might we, brothers to the lofty thought

                 And inward self-communion of her dream,

            Into that closer kin with love be brought,

           Where mighty hills and woods and waters, wan,

           Moon-paved at midnight or godlike at dawn,

                 Hold all earth's aspirations in their gleam.
--William Wilfred Campbell