The very heart and core of ages past, The reason why men lived, and worked, and died, The essence and quintessence of their lives. And we may know them better, and divine The inner motives whence their actions sprang, Far better than the men who only knew Their bodily presence, the soul forever hid From those with no ability to see. They wait here quietly for us to come And find them out, and know them for our friends; These men who toiled and wrote only for this, To leave behind such modicum of truth As each perceived and each alone could tell. Silently waiting that from time to time It may be given them to illuminate Dull daily facts with pristine radiance For some long-waited-for affinity Who lingers yet in the deep womb of time. The shifting sun pierces the young green leaves Of elm trees, newly coming into bud, And splashes on the floor and on the books Through old, high, rounded windows, dim with age. The noisy city-sounds of modern life Float softened to us across the old graveyard. The room is filled with a warm, mellow light, No garish colours jar on our content, The books upon the shelves are old and worn. 'T was no belated effort nor attempt To keep abreast with old as well as new That placed them here, tricked in a modern guise, Easily got, and held in light esteem. Our fathers' fathers, slowly and carefully Gathered them, one by one, when they were new And a delighted world received their thoughts Hungrily; while we but love the more, Because they are so old and grown so dear! The backs of tarnished gold, the faded boards, The slightly yellowing page, the strange old type, All speak the fashion of another age; The thoughts peculiar to the man who wrote Arrayed in garb peculiar to the time; As though the idiom of a man were caught Imprisoned in the idiom of a race. A nothing truly, yet a link that binds All ages to their own inheritance, And stretching backward, dim and dimmer still, Is lost in a remote antiquity. Grapes do not come of thorns nor figs of thistles, And even a great poet's divinest thought Is coloured by the world he knows and sees. The little intimate things of every day, The trivial nothings that we think not of, These go to make a part of each man's life; As much a part as do the larger thoughts He takes account of. Nay, the little things Of daily life it is which mold, and shape, And make him apt for noble deeds and true.