Thou hast not lived, why shouldst thou perish, so?
  Thou hadst one aim, one business, one desire:
   Else wert thou long since number’d with the dead!
  Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire!
   The generations of thy peers are fled,
     And we ourselves shall go;
  But thou possessest an immortal lot,
   And we imagine thee exempt from age
   And living as thou liv’st on Glanvil’s page,
  Because thou hadst—what we, alas, have not!

For early didst thou leave the world, with powers
  Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
   Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
  Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
   Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.
     O life unlike to ours!
Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,
    Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,
   And each half lives a hundred different lives;
Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.

Thou waitest for the spark from Heaven! and we,
  Vague half-believers of our casual creeds,
   Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will’d,
  Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
   Whose weak resolves never have been fulfill’d;
    For whom each year we see
  Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
   Who hesitate and falter life away,
   And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day—
Ah, do not we, Wanderer, await it too?

Yes, we await it, but it still delays,
  And then we suffer; and amongst us One,
   Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly
  His seat upon the intellectual throne;
   And all his store of sad experience he
    Lays bare of wretched days;
  Tells us his misery’s birth and growth and signs,
   And how the dying spark of hope was fed,
   And how the breast was soothed, and how the head,
And all his hourly varied anodynes.

This for our wisest: and we others pine,
  And wish the long unhappy dream would end,
   And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear,
  With close-lipp’d Patience for our only friend,
   Sad Patience, too near neighbour to Despair:
    But none has hope like thine.
  Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray,
   Roaming the country-side, a truant boy,
   Nursing thy project in unclouded joy,
And every doubt long blown by time away.

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
  And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
   Before this strange disease of modern life,
  With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
   Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife—
    Fly hence, our contact fear!
  Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!
   Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern
   From her false friend’s approach in Hades turn,
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude.

Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
  Still clutching the inviolable shade,
   With a free onward impulse brushing through,
  By night, the silver’d branches of the glade—
   Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,
    On some mild pastoral slope
  Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales,
   Freshen thy flowers, as in former years,
   With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,
From the dark dingles, to the nightingales.

But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!
  For strong the infection of our mental strife,
   Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;
  And we should win thee from thy own fair life,
   Like us distracted, and like us unblest.
    Soon, soon thy cheer would die,
  Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfix’d thy powers,
   And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made:
   And then thy glad perennial youth would fade,
Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.

Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!
  —As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
   Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
  Lifting the cool-hair’d creepers stealthily,
   The fringes of a southward- facing brow
    Among the Ægean isles;
  And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
   Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
   Green bursting figs, and tunnies steep’d in brine;
And knew the intruders on his ancient home,

The young light-hearted Masters of the waves;
  And snatch’d his rudder, and shook out more sail,
   And day and night held on indignantly
  O’er the blue Midland waters with the gale,
   Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,
    To where the Atlantic raves
  Outside the Western Straits, and unbent sails
   There, wheredown