Records and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

I cry for rest! e'en cast a weary eye
Within a quiet grave, if then my soul
Might find a heaven of meditative rest.
And O for one, the humblest though it were,
Of all the sanctuaries of still life
That lie secluded in this restless age,
Inherited perhaps by an Abuse!
But here I pant and whirl from place to place,
Bearing these wretched samples of my wares—
Goods! goods transform'd to evils in my thoughts—
Plague-spots, that fester in my very dreams!
Day after day, town after town—no end!
All days and places shuffled in a heap,
Each morn I need to search my jumbled brain
To find my when and where.

Yet, in this whirl,
I ever fall to momentary rest.
All peaceful things absorb me. In the stream
Of rushing cities I am often swirl'd
Into some grass-grown street; and, ere I know,
Shut from the buying, selling, cheating world.
Cathedrals with their quiet cloister'd yards,
Their soft-wing'd swallows and their ancient daws,
Do with me what they please—make me a monk.

And if to straggling suburbs business leads.
Some hedge-row, or a meadow's deeper green,
Takes me beyond all business: or a well,
Sun-lit within the sombre of a wood;
A daisy folding on a bank at eve;
A rain-drop on a thorn; a sleeping tree.—
O peaceful, thoughtful rest! thee and a crust!
But thus to be for ever on the bound,
My sacred aims, and hoarded, unread books,
Heart-breaks—which not to know at all were bliss—
Gardens of honey'd beds in which my soul,
With joy could work away its busy hours!

But I repine at Justice—with the Right
Make faithless argument. What have I done
To gain or to deserve the envied place?
My life has been a wandering, broken waste;
A constant shunning of the beaten roads;
And in this wilderness of no results
I fret for those reach'd by the beaten roads.

Of opportunity and thoughtful rest
I mourn the want, yet use not what I have:
My evenings squander'd with contented fools;
Long nights in sleep, or, for unneeded sleep,
Turning and moaning, and the morning light
Falling in vain on my sloth-blinded eyes.
O till that waste of time is all wrought up,
'Tis shame, and squander'd breath, to ask for more.
He ever drifts from opportunity

Who knows not to haul in the slack of time.
'Twere meanness to hold other than I have,
If this be my deserving. If the yoke
Unfit me, let me feel its galling just,
And in the pride of Right lose my complaint.
The world is full enough of well-placed men:
They serve old ends, but give it nothing new.
An unshaped man, put in their steads, would bring
New ways, new thoughts, to the exhausted spheres.
In my unfitting office I may find
What none else could, what nowhere else I can.
Why seek to do what is already done?
Or fill a place already snugly fill'd?
For ease—ignoble ease? O be thyself,
And let thy office shape to thee, or cease.

Come, then, my wretched budget, come my cross!
I'll kiss and bear thee on from town to town.
For thou art mine in being mine: by right
Or wrong, or fault, or weakness, thou art mine;
And, till that right's wrought out, that fault retrieved,
That weakness strengthen'd, or that wrong made right,
I may not lay thee down. Come then, my cross!