“FOREVER” [Sidenote:  Calverley]

  Forever; ’tis a single word! 
    Our rude forefathers deem’d it two: 
  Can you imagine so absurd
      A view?

  Forever!  What abysms of woe
    The word reveals, what frenzy, what
  Despair!  For ever (printed so)
      Did not.

  It looks, ah me! how trite and tame! 
    It fails to sadden or appal
  Or solace—­it is not the same
      At all.

  O thou to whom it first occurr’d
    To solder the disjoin’d, and dower
  Thy native language with a word
      Of power: 

  We bless thee!  Whether far or near
    Thy dwelling, whether dark or fair
  Thy kingly brow, is neither here
      Nor there.

  But in men’s hearts shall be thy throne
    While the great pulse of England beats,
  Thou coiner of a word unknown
      To Keats!

  And nevermore must printer do
    As men did long ago; but run
  “For” into “ever,” bidding two
      Be one.

  Forever! passion-fraught, it throws
    O’er the dim page a gloom, a glamour
  It’s sweet, it’s strange; and I suppose
      It’s grammar.

  Forever!  ’Tis a single word! 
    And yet our fathers deem’d it two: 
  Nor am I confident they err’d;
      Are you?

OPEN AIR
[Sidenote:  Thoreau]

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness.  Give me the ocean, the desert or the wilderness!  In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility.  The traveller Burton says of it:  “Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded....  In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust.  There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.”  They who have been travelling long on the steppes of Tartary say:  “On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilisation oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.”  When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp.  I enter a swamp as a sacred place—­a sanctum sanctorum.  There is the strength, the marrow of Nature.  The wild-wood covers the virgin mould—­and the same soil is good for men and for trees.  A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.  There are the strong meats on which he feeds.  A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.  A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below—­such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages.  In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.