when we will, resign.
I in the world must live:—but thou,
Thou melancholy Shade!
Wilt not, if thou canst see me now,
Condemn me, nor upbraid.
For thou art gone away from earth,
And place with those dost claim,
The Children of the Second Birth,
Whom the world could not tame;
And with that small, transfigur’d Band,
Whom many a different way
Conducted to their common land,
Thou learn’st to think as they.
Christian and pagan, king and slave,
Soldier and anchorite,
Distinctions we esteem so grave,
Are nothing in their sight.
They do not ask, who pin’d unseen,
Who was on action hurl’d,
Whose one bond is that all have been
Unspotted by the world.
There without anger thou wilt see
Him who obeys thy spell
No more, so he but rest, like thee,
Unsoil’d:—and so, Farewell!
Farewell!—Whether thou now liest near
That much-lov’d inland sea,
The ripples of whose blue waves cheer
Vevey and Meillerie,
And in that gracious region bland,
Where with clear-rustling wave
The scented pines of Switzerland
Stand dark round thy green grave,
Between the dusty vineyard walls
Issuing on that green place
The early peasant still recalls
The pensive stranger’s face,
And stoops to clear thy moss-grown date
Ere he plods on again;—
Or whether, by maligner Fate,
Among the swarms of men,
Where between granite terraces
The blue Seine rolls her wave,
The Capital of Pleasure sees
The hardly heard-of grave—
Farewell! Under the sky we part,
In the stern Alpine dell.
O unstrung will! O broken heart!
A last, a last farewell!
Human Life
What mortal, when he saw,
Life’s voyage done, his heavenly Friend,
Could ever yet dare tell him fearlessly:
“I have kept uninfring’d my nature’s law;
The inly-written chart thou gavest me,
To guide me, I have steer’d by to the end”?
Ah! let us make no claim
On life’s incognizable sea,
To too exact a steering of our way!
Let us not fret and fear to miss our aim
If some fair coast have lured us to make stay,
Or some friend hail’d us to keep company!
Aye, we would each fain drive
At random, and not steer by rule!
Weakness! and worse, weakness bestow’d in vain!
Winds from our side the unsuiting consort rive,
We rush by coasts where we had lief remain;
Man cannot, though he would, live chance’s fool.
No! as the foaming swathe
Of torn-up water, on the main,
Falls heavily away with long-drawn roar
On either side the black deep-furrow’d path
Cut by an onward-labouring vessel’s prore,
And never touches the ship-side again;
Even so we leave behind,
As, charter’d by some unknown Powers,
We stem across the sea of life by night,
The joys which were not for our use design’d,
The friends to whom we had no natural right,
The homes that were not destined to be ours.
Courage
True, we must tame our rebel will:
True, we must bow to Nature’s law:
Must bear in silence many an ill;
Must learn to wail, renounce, withdraw.
Yet now, when boldest wills give place,
When Fate and Circumstance are strong,
And in their rush the human race
Are swept, like huddling sheep, along;
Those sterner spirits let me prize,
Who, though the tendence of the whole
They less than us might recognize,
Kept, more than us, their strength of soul.
Yes, be the second Cato17 prais’d!
Not that he took the course to die—
But that, when ’gainst himself he rais’d
His arm, he rais’d it dauntlessly.
And, Byron! let us dare admire
If not thy fierce and turbid song,
Yet that, in anguish, doubt, desire,
Thy fiery courage still was strong.
The sun that on thy tossing pain
Did with such cold derision shine,
He crush’d thee not with his disdain—
He had his glow, and thou hadst thine.
Our bane, disguise it as we may,
Is weakness, is a faltering course.
Oh that past times could give our day,
Join’d to its clearness, of their force!
Self-Dependence
Weary of myself, and sick of asking
What I am, and what I ought to be,
At this vessel’s prow I stand, which bears me
Forwards, forwards, o’er the starlit sea.
And a look of passionate desire
O’er the sea and to the stars I send:
“Ye who from my childhood up have calm’d me,
Calm me, ah, compose me to the end.
“Ah, once more,” I cried, “ye Stars, ye Waters,
On my heart your mighty charm renew:
Still, still let me, as I gaze upon you,
Feel my soul becoming vast like you.”
From the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven,
Over the lit sea’s unquiet way,
In the rustling night-air came the answer—
“Wouldst thou be as these are? Live as they.
“Unaffrighted by the silence round them,
Undistracted by the sights they see,
These demand not that the things without them
Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.
“And with joy the stars perform their shining,
And the sea its long moon-silver’d roll.
For alone they live, nor pine with noting
All the fever of some differing soul.
“Bounded by themselves, and unobservant
In what state God’s other works may be,
In their own tasks all their powers pouring,
These attain the mighty life you see.”
O air-born Voice! long since, severely clear,
A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear.
“Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he
Who finds himself, loses his misery.”
Destiny
Why each is striving, from of old,
To love more deeply than he can?
Still would be true, yet still grows cold?
—Ask of the Powers that sport with man!
They yok’d in him, for endless strife,
A heart of ice, a soul of fire;
And hurl’d him on the Field of Life,
An aimless unallay’d Desire.
Youth’s Agitations
When I shall be divorced, some ten years hence,
From this poor present self which I am now;
When youth has done its tedious vain expense
Of passions that for ever ebb and flow;
Shall I not joy youth’s heats are left behind,
And breathe more happy in an even clime?
Ah no! for then I shall begin to find
A thousand virtues in this hated time.
Then I shall wish its agitations back,
And all its thwarting currents of desire;
Then I shall praise the heat which then I lack,
And call this hurrying fever, generous fire,
And sigh that one thing only has been lent
To youth and age in common—discontent.
The World’s Triumphs
So far as I conceive the World’s rebuke
To him address’d who would recast her new,
Not from herself her fame of strength she took,
But from their weakness, who would work her rue.
“Behold,” she cries, “so many rages lull’d,
So many
