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Like driftwood spars, which meet and pass
Upon the boundless ocean-plain,

So on the sea of life, alas!

Man meets man

meets, and quits again.

I knew it when my life was young;
I feel it still, now youth is o'er.

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The mists are on the mountain hung,
And Marguerite I shall see no more.

FROM "TRISTRAM AND ISEULT"

PART III

DEAR saints, it is not sorrow, as I hear,
Not suffering, which shuts up eye and ear
To all that has delighted them before,
And lets us be what we were once no more.
No, we may suffer deeply, yet retain

Power to be moved and soothed, for all our pain,
By what of old pleased us, and will again.
No, 'tis the gradual furnace of the world,
In whose hot air our spirits are upcurl'd
Until they crumble, or else grow like steel -
Which kills in us the bloom, the youth, the spring-
Which leaves the fierce necessity to feel,

But takes away the power this can avail,

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By drying up our joy in everything,

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To make our former pleasures all seem stale.
This, or some tyrannous single thought, some fit
Of passion, which subdues our souls to it,
Till for its sake alone we live and move

Call it ambition, or remorse, or love

This too can change us wholly, and make seem
All which we did before, shadow and dream.

And yet, I swear, it angers me to see
How this fool passion gulls men potently;
Being, in truth, but a diseased unrest,
And an unnatural overheat at best.
How they are full of languor and distress

Not having it; which when they do possess,

They straightway are burnt up with fume and care,
And spend their lives in posting here and there
Where this plague drives them; and have little ease,
Are furious with themselves, and hard to please.
Like that bold Cæsar, the famed Roman wight,
Who wept at reading of a Grecian knight
Who made a name at younger years than he;
Or that renown'd mirror of chivalry,
Prince Alexander, Philip's peerless son,
Who carried the great war from Macedon
Into the Soudan's realm, and thunder'd on
To die at thirty-five in Babylon.

A SUMMER NIGHT

IN the deserted, moon-blanch'd street,
How lonely rings the echo of my feet!
Those windows, which I gaze at, frown,
Silent and white, unopening down,
Repellent as the world; — but see,
A break between the housetops shows
The moon! and, lost behind her, fading dim

Into the dewy dark obscurity

Down at the far horizon's rim,

Doth a whole tract of heaven disclose!

And to my mind the thought

Is on a sudden brought

Of a past night, and a far different scene.

Headlands stood out into the moonlit deep
As clearly as at noon;

The spring-tide's brimming flow

Heaved dazzlingly between ;

Houses, with long white sweep,

Girdled the glistening bay;

Behind, through the soft air,

The blue haze-cradled mountains spread away,

The night was far more fair—

But the same restless pacings to and fro,

And the same vainly throbbing heart was there,
And the same bright, calm moon.

And the calm moonlight seems to say:
Hast thou then still the old unquiet breast,
Which neither deadens into rest,

Nor ever feels the fiery glow

That whirls the spirit from itself away,
But fluctuates to and fro,

Never by passion quite possess'd

And never quite benumb'd by the world's sway

And I, I know not if to pray

Still to be what I am, or yield and be

Like all the other men I see.

For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun's hot eye,

With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison-wall.
And as, year after year,

Fresh products of their barren labour fall
From their tired hands, and rest

Never yet comes more near,

Gloom settles slowly down over their breast;

And while they try to stem

?

The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest

Death in their prison reaches them,

Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

And the rest, a few,

Escape their prison and depart

On the wide ocean of life anew.

There the freed prisoner, where'er his heart

Listeth, will sail;

Nor doth he know how there prevail,

Despotic on that sea,

Trade-winds which cross it from eternity.
Awhile he holds some false way, undebarr'd

By thwarting signs, and braves

The freshening wind and blackening waves.
And then the tempest strikes him; and between
The lightning-bursts is seen

Only a driving wreck,

And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck

With anguish'd face and flying hair

Grasping the rudder hard,

Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar

Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.

Is there no life, but these alone?

Madman or slave, must man be one?

Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain!
Clearness divine!

Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign
Of languor, though so calm, and, though so great,
Are yet untroubled and unpassionate;

Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil,
And, though so task'd, keep free from dust and soil!

I will not say that your mild deeps retain

A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain

Who have long'd deeply once, and long'd in vain
But I will rather say that you remain

A world above man's head, to let him see

How boundless might his soul's horizons be,
How vast, yet of what clear transparency!

How it were good to abide there, and breathe free;
How fair a lot to fill

Is left to each man still!

XII

HENRY WADSWORTH LONG

FELLOW

(1807-1882)

ONGFELLOW has been perhaps the most popular poet of modern times, both in England and in America. The sweet melody of his verse, his home-like purity and affection, his perennial good temper, his culture and refined gentleness, have made him the friend of millions, and he has inspired and uplifted the hearts of many thousands.

By American critics he has doubtless been overpraised, and in some quarters we now see a reaction against his primacy in American literature, but Andrew Lang says:

"Longfellow, though not a very great magician and master of language, - not a Keats by any means, has often, by sheer force of plain simplicity, struck exactly the right note, and matched his thought with music that haunts us and will not be forgotten."

Walt Whitman has struck the keynote of modern criticism of Longfellow when he says:

"He comes as the poet of melody, courtesy, deference, poet of all sympathetic gentleness and universal poet of women and young people."

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Longfellow is one of the very few modern poets whose verse can be read and understood

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