LX.

IF, in thy second state sublime,

Thy ransom'd reason change replies

With all the circle of the wise,

The perfect flower of human time;

And if thou cast thine eyes below,

How dimly character'd and slight,

How dwarf'd a growth of cold and night, How blanch'd with darkness must I grow!

Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,

Where thy first form was made a man ; I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can The soul of Shakspeare love thee more.

LXI.

THO' if an eye that 's downward cast

Could make thee somewhat blench or fail,

Then be my love an idle tale,

And fading legend of the past;

And thou, as one that once declined,
When he was little more than boy,
On some unworthy heart with joy,
But lives to wed an equal mind;

And breathes a novel world, the while

His other passion wholly dies,

Or in the light of deeper eyes

Is matter for a flying smile.

LXII.

YET pity for a horse o'er-driven,
And love in which my hound has part,

Can hang no weight upon my heart In its assumptions up to heaven;

And I am so much more than these,
As thou, perchance, art more than I,
And yet I spare them sympathy
And I would set their pains at ease.

So may'st thou watch me where I weep,

As, unto vaster motions bound,

The circuits of thine orbit round

A higher height, a deeper deep.

LXIII.

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,
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,

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;

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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 play'd 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?'