Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher, Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire. Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys, Though the deep heart of existence beat forever like a boy's? Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers; and I linger on the shore, And the individual withers, and the world is more and more. Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast, Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest. Hark! my merry comrades call me, sounding on the buglehorn, They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn. Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moldered string? I am shamed through all my nature to have loved so slight a thing. Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman's pleasure, woman's pain Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain. Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, matched with mine, Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine Here at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some retreat Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat! Where in wild Mahratta-battle fell my father, evil-starred; Or to burst all links of habit,—there to wander far away, Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise. Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,— Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag,— Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavyfruited tree,— Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea. There, methinks, would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind. There the passions, cramped no longer, shall have scope and breathing-space; I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race. Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive, and they shall run, Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun, Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks, Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild, But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child. I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains, Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains! Mated with a squalid savage,-what to me were sun or clime? I, the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time, I, that rather held it better men should perish one by one, Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon! Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range; Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day; Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. Mother-Age, for mine I knew not,-help me as when life begun, Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the sun. O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set; Ancient founts of inspiration well through all my fancy yet. Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall! Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall. Comes a vapor from the margin, blackening over heath and holt, Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt. Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow; For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go. Alfred Tennyson [1809-1892] THE SCHOLAR-GIPSY Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill; No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed, Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats, And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest, And only the white sheep are sometimes seen Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanched green; Come, Shepherd, and again begin the quest. Here, where the reaper was at work of late, And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves, While to my ear from uplands far away The bleating of the folded flocks is borne, With distant cries of reapers in the cornAll the live murmur of a summer's day. Screened is this nook o'er the high, half-reaped field, Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep, And air-swept lindens yield Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers And near me on the grass lies Glanvil's book- The story of that Oxford scholar poor, Who, tired of knocking at Preferment's door, His friends, and went to learn the Gipsy lore, But once, years after, in the country lanes, And they can bind them to what thoughts they will: "And I," he said, "the secret of their art, When fully learned, will to the world impart: But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill!" This said, he left them, and returned no more, That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray, The same the Gipsies wore. Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring; At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors, On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frocked boors Had found him seated at their entering, But, 'mid their drink and clatter, he would fly: And put the shepherds, Wanderer, on thy trace; Moored to the cool bank in the summer heats, |