And we should come like ghosts to trouble

joy.

Or else the island princes over-bold

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Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings Before them of the ten years' war in Troy, And our great deeds, as half-forgotten

things.

Is there confusion in the little isle?

Let what is broken so remain.

The Gods are hard to reconcile;

'T is hard to settle order once again.
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,
Long labour unto aged breath,

Sore tasks to hearts worn out by many wars And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

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VII

But propt on beds of amaranth and moly, How sweet-while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly

With half-dropped eyelid still,

Beneath a heaven dark and holy,

To watch the long bright river drawing

slowly

His waters from the purple hill

To hear the dewy echoes calling

From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined

vine

To watch the emerald-colour'd water falling

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Thro' many a woven acanthus-wreath divine! Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling

brine,

Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine.

VIII

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak,
The Lotos blows by every winding creek;
All day the wind breathes low with mellower
tone;

Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone
Round and round the spicy downs the
yellow Lotus-dust is blown.

We have had enough of action, and of

motion we,

Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when

the surge was seething free,

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.

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Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,

In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie

reclined

On the hills like Gods together, careless of

mankind.

For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd

Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds

are lightly curl'd

Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world;

Where they smile in secret, looking over

wasted lands,

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake,

roaring deeps and fiery sands,

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Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song

Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale

of wrong,

Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words

are strong;

Chanted from an ill-used race of men that

cleave the soil,

Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,

Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;

Till they perish and they suffer—some, 't is whisper'd-down in hell

Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,

Resting weary limbs at last on beds of

asphodel.

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore

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Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;

Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not

wander more.

1833.

Lord Tennyson.

THE SOWER

I SAW a Sower walking slow

Across the earth, from east to west;
His hair was white as mountain snow,
His head drooped forward on his breast.

With shrivelled hands he flung his seed,
Nor ever turned to look behind;

Of sight or sound he took no heed;

It seemed he was both deaf and blind.

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His dim face showed no soul beneath,
Yet in my heart I felt a stir,

As if I looked upon the sheath,
That once had held Excalibur.

I heard, as still the seed he cast,

How, crooning to himself, he sung,

I sow again the holy Past,

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The happy days when I was young.

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"Then all was wheat without a tare,

Then all was righteous, fair, and true;
And I am he whose thoughtful care
Shall plant the Old World in the New.

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"The fruitful germs I scatter free,
With busy hand, while all men sleep;
In Europe now, from sea to sea,
The nations bless me as they reap."

Then I looked back along his path,
And heard the clash of steel on steel,
Where man faced man, in deadly wrath,
While clanged the tocsin's hurrying peal.

The sky with burning towns flared red,
Nearer the noise of fighting rolled,
And brother's blood, by brothers shed,
Crept curdling over pavements cold.

Then marked I how each germ of truth
Which through the dotard's fingers ran
Was mated with a dragon's tooth
Whence there sprang up an armèd man.

I shouted, but he could not hear;
Made signs, but these he could not see;
And still, without a doubt or fear,
Broadcast he scattered anarchy.

Long to my straining ears the blast

Brought faintly back the words he sung:

“I sow again the holy Past,

The happy days when I was young." 1848.

James Russell Lowell.

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