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 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 mouldered

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;

I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle's

ward.

Or to burst all links of habit-there to wander far

away,

On from island unto island at the gateways of the

day.

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, droops 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

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 forever 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, 1 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.