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The Works of John Hookham Frere In Verse and Prose

Now First Collected with a Prefatory Memoir by his Nephews W. E. and Sir Bartle Frere

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LXXXVI.

For noble minds the worst of miseries,
Worse than old age or wearisome disease,
Is poverty—from poverty to flee,
From some tall precipice prone to the sea
It were a fair escape to leap below!
In poverty, dear Kurnus, we forego
Freedom in word and deed, body and mind:
Action and thought, are fetter'd and confined.
Let me then fly, dear Kurnus, once again!
Wide as the limits of the land and main,
From these entanglements; with these in view
Death is the lighter evil of the two.