Her women, and Sir Tristram’s aged hound, Are there the sole companions to be found. But these she loves; and noisier life than this She would find ill to bear, weak as she is. She has her children, too, and night and day Is with them; and the wide heaths where they play, The hollies, and the cliff, and the sea-shore, The sand, the sea-birds, and the distant sails, These are to her dear as to them; the tales With which this day the children she beguiled She gleaned from Breton grandames, when a child, In every hut along this sea-coast wild; She herself loves them still, and, when they are told, Can forget all to hear them, as of old. 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 upcurled 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, By drying up our joy in every thing, 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 bald Cæsar, the famed Roman wight, Who wept at reading of a Grecian knight Who made a name at younger years than he; Or that renowned mirror of chivalry, Prince Alexander, Philip’s peerless son, Who carried the great war from Macedon Into the Soudan’s realm, and thundered on To die at thirty-five in Babylon. What tale did Iseult to the children say, Under the hollies, that bright winter’s day?