And joyful light;
    From antique ashes, whose departed flame
    In thee has finer life and longer fame;
  From wounds and balms,
  From storms and calms,
    From potsherds and dry bones,
        And ruin-stones. 
  So to thy vigorous substance thou hast wrought
  Whate’er the hand of Circumstance hath brought;
    Yea, into cool solacing green hast spun
    White radiance hot from out the sun. 
  So thou dost mutually leaven
  Strength of earth with grace of heaven;
    So thou dost marry new and old
    Into a one of higher mould;
    So thou dost reconcile the hot and cold,
            The dark and bright,
  And many a heart-perplexing opposite: 
              And so,
    Akin by blood to high and low,
  Fitly thou playest out thy poet’s part,
  Richly expending thy much-bruised heart
    In equal care to nourish lord in hall
          Or beast in stall: 
    Thou took’st from all that thou might’st give to all.

O steadfast dweller on the selfsame spot
Where thou wast born, that still repinest not—­
Type of the home-fond heart, the happy lot!—­
Deeply thy mild content rebukes the land
Whose flimsy homes, built on the shifting sand
Of trade, for ever rise and fall
With alternation whimsical,
Enduring scarce a day,
Then swept away
By swift engulfments of incalculable tides
Whereon capricious Commerce rides.

  Look, thou substantial spirit of content! 
  Across this little vale, thy continent,
    To where, beyond the mouldering mill,
    Yon old deserted Georgian hill
  Bares to the sun his piteous aged crest
        And seamy breast,
    By restless-hearted children left to lie
    Untended there beneath the heedless sky,
    As barbarous folk expose their old to die. 
  Upon that generous swelling side,
        Now scarified
    By keen neglect, and all unfurrowed save
    By gullies red as lash-marks on a slave,
  Dwelt one I knew of old, who played at toil,
  And dreamed himself a tiller of the soil. 
    Scorning the slow reward of patient grain,
    He sowed his soul with hopes of swifter gain,
    Then sat him down and waited for the rain. 
  He sailed in borrowed ships of usury—­
  foolish Jason on a treacherous sea,
  Seeking the Fleece and finding misery. 
    Lulled by smooth-rippling loans, in idle trance
    He lay, content that unthrift Circumstance
    Should plough for him the stony field of Chance. 
  Yea, gathering crops whose worth no man might tell,
  He staked his life on a game of Buy-and-Sell,
  And turned each field into a gambler’s hell. 
    Aye, as each year began,
    My farmer to the neighboring city ran,
  Passed with a mournful anxious face
  Into the banker’s inner place;
  Parleyed, excused, pleaded for longer grace,
    Railed at the drought, the