I said, “The years with change advance: If I make dark my countenance, I shut my life from happier chance. “Some turn this sickness yet might take, Ev’n yet.” But he: “What drug can make A wither’d palsy cease to shake?” I wept, “Tho’ I should die, I know That all about the thorn will blow In tufts of rosy-tinted snow; “And men, thro’ novel spheres of thought Still moving after truth long sought, Will learn new things when I am not.” “Yet,” said the secret voice, “some time, Sooner or later, will gray prime Make thy grass hoar with early rime. “Not less swift souls that yearn for light, Rapt after heaven’s starry flight, Would sweep the tracts of day and night. “Not less the bee would range her cells, The furzy prickle fire the dells, The foxglove cluster dappled bells.” I said that “all the years invent; Each month is various to present The world with some development. “Were this not well, to bide mine hour, Tho’ watching from a ruin’d tower How grows the day of human power?” “The highest-mounted mind,” he said, “Still sees the sacred morning spread The silent summit overhead. “Will thirty seasons render plain Those lonely lights that still remain, Just breaking over land and main? “Or make that morn, from his cold crown And crystal silence creeping down, Flood with full daylight glebe and town? “Forerun thy peers, thy time, and let Thy feet, millenniums hence, be set In midst of knowledge, dream’d not yet. “Thou hast not gain’d a real height, Nor art thou nearer to the light, Because the scale is infinite. “’Twere better not to breathe or speak, Than cry for strength, remaining weak, And seem to find, but still to seek. “Moreover, but to seem to find Asks what thou lackest, thought resign’d, A healthy frame, a quiet mind.” I said, “When I am gone away, ‘He dared not tarry,’ men will say, Doing dishonour to my clay.” “This is more vile,” he made reply, “To breathe and loathe, to live and sigh, Than once from dread of pain to die. “Sick art thou—a divided will Still heaping on the fear of ill The fear of men, a coward still. “Do men love thee? Art thou so bound To men, that how thy name may sound Will vex thee lying underground? “The memory of the wither’d leaf In endless time is scarce more brief Than of the garner’d Autumn-sheaf. “Go, vexed Spirit, sleep in trust; The right ear, that is fill’d with dust, Hears little of the false or just.” “Hard task, to pluck resolve,” I cried, “From emptiness and the waste wide Of that abyss, or scornful pride! “Nay—rather yet that I could raise One hope that warm’d me in the days While still I yearn’d for human praise. “When, wide in soul, and bold of tongue, Among the tents I paused and sung, The distant battle flash’d and rung. “I sung the joyful Paean clear, And, sitting, burnish’d without fear The brand, the buckler, and the spear— “Waiting to strive a happy strife, To war with falsehood to the knife, And not to lose the good of life—