Who makes by force his merit known And lives to clutch the golden keys, To mould a mighty state’s decrees, And shape the whisper of the throne; And moving up from high to higher, Becomes on Fortune’s crowning slope The pillar of a people’s hope, The centre of a world’s desire; Yet feels, as in a pensive dream, When all his active powers are still, A distant dearness in the hill, A secret sweetness in the stream, The limit of his narrower fate, While yet beside its vocal springs He played at counsellors and kings, With one that was his earliest mate; Who ploughs with pain his native lea And reaps the labour of his hands, Or in the furrow musing stands; ‘Does my old friend remember me?’ LXIII. Sweet soul! do with me as thou wilt; I lull a fancy trouble-tost With ‘Love’s too precious to be lost, A little grain shall not be spilt.’ And in that solace can I sing, Till out of painful phases wrought There flutters up a happy thought, Self-balanced on a lightsome wing: Since we deserved the name of friends, And thine effect so lives in me, A part of mine may live in thee, And move thee on to noble ends. LXIV. You thought my heart too far diseased; You wonder when my fancies play To find me gay among the gay, Like one with any trifle pleased. The shade by which my life was crost, Which makes a desert in the mind, Has made me kindly with my kind, And like to him whose sight is lost; Whose feet are guided thro’ the land, Whose jest among his friends is free, Who takes the children on his knee, And winds their curls about his hand: He plays with threads, he beats his chair For pastime, dreaming of the sky; His inner day can never die, His night of loss is always there. LXV. When on my bed the moonlight falls, I know that in thy place of rest By that broad water of the west, There comes a glory on the walls: Thy marble bright in dark appears, As slowly steals a silver flame Along the letters of thy name, And o’er the number of thy years. The mystic glory swims away; From off my bed the moonlight dies; And closing eaves of wearied eyes I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray: And then I know the mist is drawn A lucid veil from coast to coast, And in the chancel like a ghost Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn. LXVI. When in the down I sink my head, Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, times my breath; Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, knows not Death, Nor can I dream of thee as dead: