On simple minds with a pure natural joy;
And if the sacred load oppressed our brain,
We had the power to feel the pressure eased,
The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,
In the delightful commerce of the world.
We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
Thought's slaves, and dead to every natural joy.
The smallest thing could give us pleasure then,—
The sports of the country-people,
A flute-note from the woods,
Sunset over the sea;
Seed-time and harvest,
The reapers in the corn,
The vinedresser in his vineyard,
The village-girl at her wheel.
Fulness of life and power of feeling, ye
Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,
Who dwell on a firm basis of content!
But he who has outlived his prosperous days;
But he whose youth fell on a different world
From that on which his exiled age is thrown,—
Whose mind was fed on other food, was trained
By other rules than are in vogue to-day;
Whose habit of thought is fixed, who will not change,
But, in a world he loves not, must subsist
In ceaseless opposition, be the guard
Of his own breast, fettered to what he guards,
That the world win no mastery over him;
Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one
Who has no minute's breathing-space allowed
To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy,—
Joy and the outward world must die to him,
As they are dead to me.
