Can I but relive in sadness? I will turn that earlier page. Hide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous Mother-Age!

Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,

When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my

life;

Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,

Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field,

And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn,

Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary

dawn;

And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then, Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs

of men ;

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:

That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be ;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew

From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central

blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rush

ing warm,

With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags

were furl'd

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

So I triumph'd, ere my passion sweeping thro' me left me dry,

Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye;

Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint,

Science moves, but slowly slowly, creeping on from point to point :

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 thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.

What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,

Tho' the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy's?

Knowlege comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,

And the individual withers, and the world is more and

more.

Knowlege 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 bugle-horn,

They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their

scorn:

Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder'd

string?

I am shamed thro' 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, match'd 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; I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle's ward.