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I cannot think he wished so soon to die With all his senses full of eager heat, And rosy years that stood expectant by To buckle the winged sandals on their feet,

He that was friends with Earth, and all her sweet

Took with both hands unsparingly:
Truly this life is precious to the root,
And good the feel of grass beneath the
foot;

To lie in buttercups and clover-bloom, 420
Tenants in common with the bees,
And watch the white clouds drift through
gulfs of trees,

Is better than long waiting in the tomb;
Only once more to feel the coming spring
As the birds feel it, when it bids them
sing,

Only once more to see the moon Through leaf-fringed abbey-arches of the elms

Curve her mild sickle in the West Sweet with the breath of hay-cocks, were

a boon

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Το

Them overtakes the doom

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snap the half-grown flower upon the loom

(Trophy that was to be of life-long pain), The thread no other skill can ever knit again.

'T was so with him, for he was glad to live,

'T was doubly so, for he left work begun; Could not this eagerness of Fate forgive

Till all the allotted flax were spun ? It matters not; for, go at night or noon, A friend, whene'er he dies, has died too soon, 460

And, once we hear the hopeless He is

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Nature rebels at: and it is not true Of those most precious parts of him we

knew:

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THREE MEMORIAL POEMS

'Coscienza fusca

O della propria o dell' altrui vergogna
Pur sentirà la tua parola brusca.'

If I let fall a word of bitter mirth1

When public shames more shameful pardon won,
Some have misjudged me, and my service done,
If small, yet faithful, deemed of little worth:
Through veins that drew their life from Western earth
Two hundred years and more my blood hath run

In no polluted course from sire to son;
And thus was I predestined ere my birth
To love the soil wherewith my fibres own
Instinctive sympathies; yet love it so
As honor would, nor lightly to dethrone
Judgment, the stamp of manhood, nor forego
The son's right to a mother dearer grown

With growing knowledge and more chaste than snow.

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Crimson stained; and, as to and fro
Her sandals flash, we see on them,
And on her instep veined with blue,
Flecks of crimson, on those fair feet,
High-arched, Diana-like, and fleet,
Fit for no grosser stain than dew:
Oh, call them rather chrisms than stains,
Sacred and from heroic veins !
For, in the glory-guarded pass,
Her haughty and far-shining head
She bowed to shrive Leonidas
With his imperishable dead;
Her, too, Morgarten saw,

Where the Swiss lion fleshed his icy paw;
She followed Cromwell's quenchless star
Where the grim Puritan tread

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Shook Marston, Naseby, and Dunbar:
Yea, on her feet are dearer dyes
Yet fresh, not looked on with untearful
eyes.

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Where now our broad-browed poet sleeps,
Dear to both Englands; near him he
Who wore the ring of Canace;
But most her heart to rapture leaps
Where stood that era-parting bridge,
O'er which, with footfall still as dew,
The Old Time passed into the New;
Where, as your stealthy river creeps,
He whispers to his listening weeds
Tales of sublimest homespun deeds.
Here English law and English thought
'Gainst the self-will of England fought;
And here were men (coequal with their
fate),

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Who did great things,, unconscious they were great.

They dreamed not what a die was cast With that first answering shot; what then? There was their duty; they were men Schooled the soul's inward gospel to obey, Though leading to the lion's den.

They felt the habit-hallowed world give

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Widening each year their leafy coronet ? Felt they no pang of passionate regret

From all heaven's caverns rushing unconfined,

For those unsolid goods that seem so much I, Freedom, dwell with Knowledge: I

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abide

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I hear the voice, and unaffrighted bow;
Ye shall not be prophetic now,

Heralds of ill, that darkening fly

Between my vision and the rainbowed sky, Or on the left your hoarse forebodings croak

From many a blasted bough
On Yggdrasil's storm-sinewed oak,

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That once was green, Hope of the West, as

thou:

Yet pardon if I tremble while I boast;
For I have loved as those who pardon most.

X

Away, ungrateful doubt, away! At least she is our own to-day. Break into rapture, my song,

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