blush’d, till he
  Laugh’d also, but as one before he wakes, 215
  Who feels a glimmering strangeness in his dream;
  Then looking at her; ’Too happy, fresh and fair,
  Too fresh and fair in our sad world’s best bloom,
  To be the ghost of one who bore your name
  About these meadows, twenty years ago. 220

  ‘Have you not heard?’ said Katie, ’we came back. 
  We bought the farm we tenanted before. 
  Am I so like her? so they said on board. 
  Sir, if you knew her in her English days,
  My mother, as it seems you did, the days 225
  That most she loves to talk of, come with me. 
  My brother James is in the harvest-field: 
  But she—­you will be welcome—­O, come in!’

IN MEMORIAM

  XXVII

  I envy not in any moods
    The captive void of noble rage,
    The linnet born within the cage,
  That never knew the summer woods: 

  I envy not the beast that takes 5
    His license in the field of time,
    Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,
  To whom a conscience never wakes;

  Nor, what may count itself as blest,
    The heart that never plighted troth 10
    But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
  Nor any want-begotten rest.

  I hold it true, whate’er befall;
    I feel it, when I sorrow most;
    ’Tis better to have loved and lost 15
  Than never to have lov’d at all.

  LXIV

  Dost thou look back on what hath been,
    As some divinely gifted man,
    Whose life in low estate began
  And on a simple village green;

  Who breaks his birth’s invidious bar, 5
    And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
    And breasts the blows of circumstance,
  And grapples with his evil star;

  Who makes by force his merit known
    And lives to clutch the golden keys, 10
    To mould a mighty state’s decrees,
  And shape the whisper of the throne;

  And moving up from high to higher,
    Becomes on Fortune’s crowning slope
    The pillar of a people’s hope, 15
  The centre of a world’s desire;

  Yet feels, as in a pensive dream,
    When all his active powers are still,
    A distant dearness in the hill,
  A secret sweetness in the stream, 20

  The limit of his narrower fate,
    While yet beside its vocal springs
    He play’d at counsellors and kings,
  With one that was his earliest mate;

  Who ploughs with pain his native lea 25
    And reaps the labour of his hands,
    Or in the furrow musing stands;
  “Does my old friend remember me?”

  LXXXIII

  Dip down upon the northern shore,
    O sweet new-year delaying long;
    Thou doest expectant nature wrong;
  Delaying long, delay no more.