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Page 48 - OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face ; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe...
Page 156 - But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
Page 154 - For most men in a brazen prison live, Where in the sun's hot eye, With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give, Dreaming of nought beyond their prison- wall.
Page 238 - Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Page 155 - And then the tempest strikes him ; and between The lightning-bursts is seen Only a driving wreck, And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck With anguish'd face and flying hair Grasping the rudder hard, Still bent to make some port he knows not where, Still standing for some false, impossible shore. And sterner comes the roar Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom, And he too disappears, and comes no more.
Page 162 - He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth, Smiles broke from us and we had ease; The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o'er the sun-lit fields again; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. Our youth return'd; for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried up and closely furl'd, The freshness of the early world.
Page 320 - The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. "Know thyself:" long enough has that poor "self" of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to "know" it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan. It has been written, "an endless significance lies in Work;" a man perfects himself by working.
Page 247 - Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime ? There among the glooming alleys Progress halts on palsied feet, Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street. There the Master scrimps his haggard sempstress of her daily bread, There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead. There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor, And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of...
Page 215 - For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be ; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales...
Page 245 - Hold the hand that is helpless, and whisper, "They only the victory win, Who have fought the good fight and have vanquished the demon that tempts us within; Who have held to their faith unseduced by the prize that the world holds on high; Who have dared for a high cause to suffer, resist, fight — if need be, to die.