Build for my love a costly sepulchre;

Not underneath cathedral arches dim,

Where the sad soul may wake to comfort her

The stately music of a funeral hymn;

Nor on some wind-swept hill, whose wavering grass

Sways to the summer breezes blowing free,

While the great cedars, rustling as they pass,

Murmur a cadence of the mournful sea;

Not in the arched depths of the solemn woods,

Within the flickering shadows cool and deep,

Where the still wing of silence ever broods,

And woos the weary soul to dreamless sleep.

But build it in the temple of my heart,

And from the sacred and mysterious shrine

A flame of deathless memory shall start,

Tended by Sorrow and by Love divine.

All sweetest recollections of past joy

Shall haunt that shrine, to make it heavenly fair:

All memories of bliss without alloy

Shall cluster in undying beauty there.

There quiet peace shall hold resistless sway:

Softer than snow the holy hush shall be.

Till even Sorrow gently glide away,

And Love divine alone keep watch with me.