IV

Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
  Into the silent hollow of the past;
    What is there that abides
  To make the next age better for the last? 
    Is earth too poor to give us 70
  Something to live for here that shall outlive us? 
    Some more substantial boon
Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune’s fickle moon? 
    The little that we see
    From doubt is never free;
    The little that we do
    Is but half-nobly true;
    With our laborious hiving
What men call treasure, and the gods call dross,
  Life seems a fest of Fate’s contriving, 80
  Only secure in every one’s conniving,
A long account of nothings paid with loss,
Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires,
  After our little hour of strut and rave,
With all our pasteboard passions and desires,
Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires,
  Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. 
  But stay! no age was e’er degenerate,
  Unless men held it at too cheap a rate,
  For in our likeness still we shape our fate. 90
    Ah, there is something here
  Unfathomed by the cynic’s sneer,
  Something that gives our feeble light
  A high immunity from Night,
  Something that leaps life’s narrow bars
To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven;
  A seed of sunshine that can leaven
  Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars,
        And glorify our clay
  With light from fountains elder than the Day; 100
    A conscience more divine than we,
    A gladness fed with secret tears,
    A vexing, forward-reaching sense
    Of some more noble permanence;
        A light across the sea,
  Which haunts the soul and will not let it be,
Still beaconing from the heights of undegenerate years.

V

        Whither leads the path
        To ampler fates that leads? 
        Not down through flowery meads, 110
        To reap an aftermath
    Of youth’s vainglorious weeds,
    But up the steep, amid the wrath
  And shock of deadly-hostile creeds,
  Where the world’s best hope and stay
By battle’s flashes gropes a desperate way,
And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds. 
  Peace hath her not ignoble wreath,
  Ere yet the sharp, decisive word
Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword 120
    Dreams in its easeful sheath;
But some day the live coal behind the thought,
    Whether from Baael’s stone obscene,
    Or from the shrine serene
    Of God’s pure altar brought,
Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen
Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught,
And, helpless in the fiery passion caught,
Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men: