By what unseen and subtile bands

Were you two lovers bound and wed?

By tiny unborn baby-hands

Your spirits were together led.

Your meeting passions, seeming-blind

Were in Life's prescient control;

You looked--there was conceived a mind;

You smiled--there was conceived a soul;

You kissed--and in the country dim

That lies beyond the bounds of space,

Foreshadowed was a baby's limb,

Prefigured was a baby's face.

This was your love's supernal source,

And this its mystic mundane goal,--

The grip of the creative Force

That needs a body for a soul.

O wondrous is the eugeny,

That finds a soul its avatar;

God's baby-dream you could not see

Drew you together from afar;

And if perchance you lovers twain

Had been by Fate asunder torn,

Then had God's baby-dream been vain,

A baby soul had died unborn.