Nay, but Nature brings thee solace; for a tender voice

will cry.

'Tis a purer life than thine: a lip to drain thy trouble dry.

Baby lips will laugh me down: my latest rival brings thee rest.

Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother's breast.

O, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not

his due.

Half is thine and half is his: it will be worthy of the

two.

O, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part, With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart.

"They were dangerous guides the feelings she her

self was not exempt―

Truly, she herself had suffer'd

contempt!

Overlive it- lower yet

I care?

be happy! wherefore should

I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair.

What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?

Every door is barr'd with gold, and opens but to golden keys.

Every gate is throng'd with suitors, all the markets

overflow.

I have but an angry fancy: what is that which I should do?

I had been content to perish, falling on the foeman's ground,

When the ranks are roll'd in vapour, and the winds are laid with sound.

But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honour

feels,

And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's

heels.

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 some

thing 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

rushing 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-dy

ing fire.