And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three sums to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port: the vessel puffs her sail :

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honor and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
"T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It

It

may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

LOCKSLEY HALL.

COMRADES, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn :

Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle horn.

"T is the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews

call

Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley

Hall;

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,

And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went

to rest,

Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade,

Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth

sublime

With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of

Time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land

reposed;

When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the Robin's breast;

In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another

crest;

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished

dove;

In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.