The countryside becomes my Inn, And I its happy guest.

KEATS

AN English lad, who, reading in a book,
A ponderous, leathern thing set on his knee,
Saw the broad violet of the Egean Sea
Lap at his feet as it were village brook.
Wide was the east; the gusts of morning
shook;

Immortal laughter beat along that shore; Pan, crouching in the reeds, piped as of yore;

The gods came down and thundered from that book.

He lifted his sad eyes; his London street Swarmed in the sun, and strove to make him heed;

Boys spun their tops, shouting and fair of cheek:

But, still, that violet lapping at his feet, — An English lad had he sat down to read; But he rose up and knew himself a Greek.

✓ RESERVE

KEEP back the one word more,
Nor give of your whole store;
For, it may be, in Art's sole hour of need,
Lacking that word, you shall be poor in-
deed.

II

It is the Saxon soul that speaks in her, The stanchest soul that earth has ever wrought

To guide humanity in faith and light. The shivering slave has been her worshipper,

And with defiant courage she has taught Red Tyranny to cringe before the Right.

TO A CHILD

I LOOK upon thy happy face-
Dear child with those undarkened eyes
Like glimpses of transparent skies -
And dream of things which have no place

In that small, golden head of thine;
Things that no ten-year-old has yet
Dared in his roguish wit to set
To thought, or word, or rhythmic line.

And it is better so, I think,
Better the child should be a child,
That he should grow as glad and wild
As flowers upon a river's brink.

Laugh, then, and romp, and kiss the

But dreams of an aspiring soul,
That yearns with all its human might
To steal the secrets of the night,
To reach some high millennial goal.

Here, at this hour, I view the sweep
Of a vast century to its close,
Sublime in its titanic throes,
And in its plummet ocean-deep-

A century thrilled from start to end
With fearless striving, fearless hope,
Whose larger mind and wider scope
In one eternal progress tend. . . .

Yet thine will be the loftier tread,
And thine will be the swifter pace;
When thou shalt be as I, the race
Will scorn the marvels of the dead.