DE AMICITIA

Friends are ourselves.

Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.

All things through thee take nobler form,

And look beyond the earth,

The mill-round of our fate appears

A sun-path in thy worth.

Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;

The fountains of my hidden life

Are through thy friendship fair.

THE

'HE churl in spirit, up or down
Along the scale of ranks, through all,
To him who grasps a golden ball,
By blood a king, at heart a clown;

The churl in spirit, howe'er he veil
His want in forms for fashion's sake,
Will let his coltish nature break

At seasons through the gilded pale.

For who can always act? but he,
To whom a thousand memories call,
Not being less but more than all
The gentleness he seemed to be,

Best seemed the thing he was, and joined
Each office of the social hour

To noble manners, as the flower
And native growth of noble mind:

Nor ever narrowness or spite,
Or villain fancy fleeting by,

Drew in the expression of an eye,
Where God and Nature met in light;

And thus he bore without abuse

The grand old name of gentleman,
Defamed by every charlatan,

And soiled with all ignoble use.

ALFRED TENNYSON.

From In Memoriam'

OST thou look back on what hath been,

DOST

As some divinely gifted man,

Whose life in low estate began And on a simple village green;

Who breaks his birth's invidious bar,

And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance, And grapples with his evil star;

FROM IN MEMORIAM'

Who makes by force his merit known
And lives to clutch the golden keys,
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,
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,

The limit of his narrower fate,

While yet beside its vocal springs He played at counsellors and kings, With one that was his earliest mate;

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

ALFRED TENNYSON.