Love - Esaias Tegnér

Love! our being's waking bliss! 
Spirit garb of Happiness! 
Heaven's halo, sent to shine 
O'er a world no more divine! 
Nature's heart, whose choicest measure 
Beats in time to promised pleasure; 
Drop to drop, within the ocean;
   Star to star, in heaven above. 
Moving, with harmonious motion.
   Round the Sun they love;
Brotherhood and Sympathy 
Are the laws that flow from thee. 
Love! that art, within the mind 
Of our erring, hapless kind. 
Even this, — a recollection 
Of a holier affection.
   Born in heaven; fairest then, 
With the silver chaplets round it 
Of the singing stars that bound it. 
Then nestled on its father's breast. 
With angel-wings to shade its rest, —
   Reflected last on men. 
Ere then, as rich as Thought, as fair 
As minstrel-dreams, its speech was Prayer; 
Its kindred sweet, those forms that bless 
This world with their own loveliness; 
And fill the sense with music, flung 
From harps unearthly. Spirit-strung. 
What if it fell to mix with men. 
And none must feel it pure again? 
At some sweet times, it seems to wear 
The seraph-robes that erst it bare; 
At some sweet times, its whispers come 
Like echoes from its heavenly home.
   When heart meets heart, and life is love. 
The breath that fans the spring's blue sky, 
The minstrel's magic melody.
   In such soft numbers move; 
But liker still, for that they be 
Themselves the brood of Memory, 
Those recollected distant chants 
Of homes for which the Switzer pants. 
That raise beneath the tropic's glow 
His old, familiar Alpine snow.

---

Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846) Sweden
Translator not stated
Source:  The poets and poetry of Europe. With introductions and biograpical notices by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Carey and Hart, 1845