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Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades. For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life! Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains but every hour is saved

:

From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port: the vessel puffs her sail : There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with

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Death closes all but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

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Push off, and, sitting well in order, smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It

may be that the gulfs will wash us down : It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

LOCKSLEY HALL.

COMRADES, leave me here a little, while as yet 'tis early

morn:

Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle horn.

'Tis the place, and round the gables, as of old, the cur

lews call,

Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley

Hall;

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy

tracts,

And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to

rest,

Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,

Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime

With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of

Time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land

reposed;

When I clung to all the present for the promise that it

closed:

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could

see;

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that

would be.

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