If still the reckless change we mourn, A reconciling thought may turn To harm that might lurk here, 45 Ere judgment prompted from within Fit aims, with courage to begin, And strength to persevere. Not Fortune's slave is Man: our state Enjoins, while firm resolves await 50 On wishes just and wise, That strenuous action follow both, And life be one perpetual growth Of heaven-ward enterprise. So taught, so trained, we boldly face 55 All accidents of time and place; Whatever props may fail, Trust in that sovereign law can spread New glory o'er the mountain's head, Fresh beauty through the vale. 60 That truth informing mind and heart, The simplest cottager may part, Ungrieved, with charm and spell; And yet, lost Wishing-gate, to thee The voice of grateful memory 65 Shall bid a kind farewell! Agate--though not the "moss-grown bar" of 1828--still stands at the old place, where Wordsworth tells us one had stood "time out of mind;" so that a "blank wall" does not now shut out the "bright landscape," at the old, and classic, spot. Long may this gate stand, defying wind and weather!--ED. A JEWISH FAMILY (IN A SMALL VALLEY OPPOSITE ST. GOAR, UPON THE RHINE) Composed 1828.--Published 1835 [Coleridge, my daughter, and I, in 1828, passed a fortnight upon the banks of the Rhine, principally under the hospitable roof of Mr. Aders of Gotesburg, but two days of the time we spent at St. Goar in rambles among the neighbouring valleys. It was at St. Goar that I saw the Jewish family here described. Though exceedingly poor, and in rags, they were not less beautiful than I have endeavoured to make them appear. We had taken a little dinner with us in a basket, and invited them to partake of it, which the mother refused to do, both for herself and children, saying it was with them a fast-day; adding, diffidently, that whether such observances were right or wrong, she felt it her duty to keep them strictly. The Jews, who are numerous on this part of the Rhine, greatly surpass the German peasantry in the beauty of their features and in the intelligence of their countenances. But the lower classes of the German peasantry have, here at least, the air of people grievously opprest. Nursing mothers, at the age of seven or eight-and-twenty, often look haggard and far more decayed and withered than women of Cumberland and Westmoreland twice their age. This comes from being under-fed and over-worked in their vineyards in a hot and glaring sun.--I. F.] One of the "Poems of the Imagination."--ED.