A Kiss

By a wall the stranger now calls his,

Was born of old a particular kiss,

Without forethought in its genesis;

Which in a trice took wing on the air.

And where that spot is nothing shows:

There ivy calmly grows,

And no one knows

What a birth was there!

That kiss is gone where none can tell -

Not even those who felt its spell:

It cannot have died; that know we well.

Somewhere it pursues its flight,

One of a long procession of sounds

Travelling aethereal rounds

Far from earth's bounds

In the infinite.

A quote from a Hardy novel

“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted."
"Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?"
"A blighted one.”  (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

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