What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys, Tho’ the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy’s? Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore, And the individual withers, and the world is more and more. Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast, Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest. Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn, They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn: Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder’d string? I am shamed thro’ all my nature to have loved so slight a thing. Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman’s pleasure, woman’s pain—[12] Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain: Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match’d with mine, Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine— Here at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some retreat Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat; Where in wild Mahratta-battle fell my father evil-starr’d;— I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle’s ward. Or to burst all links of habit—there to wander far away, On from island unto island at the gateways of the day. Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.[13] Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag, Slides the bird o’er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer[14] from the crag; Droops the heavy-blossom’d bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree— Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea. There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind, In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind. There the passions cramp’d no longer shall have scope and breathing-space; I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race. Iron-jointed, supple-sinew’d, they shall dive, and they shall run, Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun; Whistle back the parrot’s call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks. Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books— Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I _know_ my words are wild, But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child. _I_, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,[15] Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains! Mated with a squalid savage—what to me were sun or clime? I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time— I that rather held it better men should perish one by one, Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua’s moon in Ajalon! Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range. Let the great world spin[16] for ever down the ringing grooves[17] of change. Thro’ the shadow of the globe[18] we sweep into the younger day: Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.[19]