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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;
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, 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;
Go, Shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes:

No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,

Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,
Nor the cropped grasses shoot another head.
But when the fields are still,

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,
In this high field's dark corner, where he leaves
His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruise,

And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,
Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use;
Here will I sit and wait,

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,
And here till sundown, Shepherd, will I be.

Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,
And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep:

And air-swept lindens yield

Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers:

And near me on the grass lies Glanvil's book-
Come, let me read the oft-read tale again:

The story of that Oxford scholar poor,
Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,

Who, tired of knocking at Preferment's door,
One summer morn forsook

His friends, and went to learn the Gipsy lore,
And roamed the world with that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deemed, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.

But once, years after, in the country lanes,
Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew,
Met him, and of his way of life inquired.
Whereat he answered that the Gipsy crew,
His mates, had arts to rule as they desired
The workings of men's brains;

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,
But rumors hung about the country-side,

That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray,
Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,
In hat of antique shape, and cloak of gray,

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 I myself seem half to know thy looks,

And put the shepherds, Wanderer, on thy trace;
And boys who in lone wheatfields scare the rooks
I ask if thou hast passed their quiet place;
Or in my boat I lie

Moored to the cool bank in the summer heats,
'Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills,
And watch the warm green-muffled Cumnor hills,
And wonder if thou haunt'st their shy retreats.

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