With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
205 Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife?
Fly hence, our contact fear!
Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!
Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern
From her false friend's approach in Hades turn,6
210 Wave us away, and keep thy solitude!
4. An adverb modifying 'lives.' 6. Dido committed suicide after her lover, Aeneas, 5. Probably Goethe, although possibly referring to deserted her. When he later encountered her in Tennyson, whose In Memoriam had appeared in Hades, she silently turned away from him (see Vir1850! gil's Aeneid, book 6).
.
THE SCHOLAR GYPSY / 1367
Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free, onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silvered branches of the glade?
215 Far on the forest skirts, where none pursue.
On some mild pastoral slope
Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales
Freshen thy flowers as in former years
With dew, or listen with enchanted ears, 220 From the dark dingles,0 to the nightingales! small deep valleys
But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!
For strong the infection of our mental strife,
Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;
And we should win thee from thy own fair life,
225 Like us distracted, and like us unblest.
Soon, soon thy cheer would die,
Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfixed thy powers,
And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made;
And then thy glad perennial youth would fade,
230 Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.
Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!
?As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily,
235 The fringes of a southward-facing brow Among the Aegean isles;
And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green, bursting figs, and tunnies0 steeped in brine? tuna fish
240 And knew the intruders on his ancient home,
The young lighthearted masters of the waves?
And snatched his rudder, and shook out more sail;
And day and night held on indignantly
O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale,
245 Betwixt the Syrtes7 and soft Sicily, To where the Atlantic raves
Outside the western straits; and unbent sails
There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,
Shy traffickers, the dark tberians8 come;
250 And on the beach undid his corded bales.9
1853
