Our world and all it holds of good for us Our fathers and unselfish mothers made, With noble passion and enduring toil, Strenuous, frugal, reverent, and elate, Caring above all else to guard and save The ampler life of the intelligence And the fine honor of a scrupulous code-- Ideals of manhood touched with the divine. For this they founded these great schools we serve, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, Amherst and Williams, trusting to our hands The heritage of all they held most high, Possessions of the spirit and the mind, Investments in the provinces of joy. Vast provinces are these! And fortunate they Who at their will may go adventuring there, Exploring all the boundaries of Truth, Learning the roads that run through Beauty’s realm, Sighting the pinnacles where good meets God, Encompassed by the eternal unknown sea! Even for a little to o’erlook those lands, The kingdoms of Religion, Science, Art, Is to be made forever happier With blameless memories that shall bring content And inspiration for all after days. And fortunate they whom destiny allows To rest within those provinces and serve The dominion of ideals all their lives. For whoso will, putting dull greed aside, And holding fond allegiance to the best, May dwell there and find fortitude and joy. In the free fellowship of kindred minds, One band of scholar gypsies I have known, Whose purpose all unworldly was to find An answer to the riddle of the Earth-- A key that should unlock the book of life And secrets of its sorceries reveal. This, they discovered, had long since been found And laid aside forgotten and unused. Our dark young poet who from Dartmouth came Was told the secret by his gypsy bride, Who had it from a master over seas, And he it was first hinted to the band The magic of that universal lore, Before the great Mysteriarch summoned him. It was the doctrine of the threefold life, The beginning of the end of all their doubt. In that Victorian age it has become So much the fashion now to half despise, Within the shadow of Cathedral walls They had been schooled and heard the mellow chimes For Lenten litanies and daily prayers, With a mild, eloquent, beloved voice Exhorting to all virtue and that peace Surpassing understanding--casting there That “last enchantment of the Middle Age,” The spell of Oxford and her ritual. So duteous youth was trained, until there grew Restive outreaching in men’s thought to find Some certitude beyond the dusk of faith. They cried on mysticism to be gone, Mazed in the shadowy princedom of the soul.