How beautiful is life--the physical joy of sense and breathing;
The glory of the world which has found speech and speaks to us;
The robe which summer throws in June round the white bones of winter;
The new birth of each day, itself a life, a world, a sun!

I love all things that are young and happy and eternal,
Eternal in their change and growth as I too changing grow.
Old am I, and how many voices that I loved are heard not!
Yet the world lives, and in its life I live and laugh and love.

I woke to--day at daybreak, thrilled with a new sense of pleasure near me,
Because a bird sang at my window and had ceased, afraid.
A while I lay and listened conscious only of my being,
The same fool school--boy as in days gone by, nerve, sinew, vein.

Who tells us we are changed, that we with our wise years grow older?
I am a poet, may be patriot, soldier, statesman, priest.
Yet none the less I lay to--day and watched in childish wonder
The flies tie and untie their knots, a mystery unrevealed.

The flies' way in the air perplexed me ever and perplexes
No less this hour than in old time. So Solomon the wise,
Spite of his wit, essayed in vain the riddle of the eagles;
And I a child to--day lay there, a child, less than a child.

And I heard tones well--known and prudent words and phrases ventured
Gently to chide me for hours wasted thus in ease,
Till I too spoke and vowed aloud new ways of life amended,
And for the thousandth time in pain arraigned and blamed my dreams.

Then I rose hastily, as one who hears and fears reproving,
Although, God help me, there is living none now dares to chide or blame,
And I broke through the curtain of the dusk, and from the Orient
The sun's face through the window smiled, the lord of a new day.

How dare I grieve in the fair presence of the lord of morning?
How dare I not rejoice who thus its king in Eden reign?
God's peace is on this place proclaimed, and named, and promised,
A sentient joy of living things which fills and thrills the Earth.

Here all things joyous are. Birds breed in sedge and thicket;
Hares feed in pairs, and squirrels leap from spray to spray;
Dead limbs of elms make nests for the woodpeckers;
The coots' cry from the mere comes loud and tells of rain.

Naught here may harm or hurt. This is a sanctuary
For the world's weak, hedged in with love and fenced and sealed--
Man its sole outcast, the earth's mad disturber branded
Still with the mark of Cain and death from which life flees.

Thus musing in my pride, and shame too somewhat, I descended,
Led by invisible hands towards the trees and fields below.
Along these self--same paths my childhood ran exulting,
Following the poor lost dead who loved them as I love.

What was their pride then in their leafy fair possession,
Theirs in their day, who planned these glades and thickets round!
How has their presence vanished from the silent pastures,
The poor lost dead who held my hand and loved them as I love!

Yet not to mourn I came. No day of joy destroyed deserves our anguish.
Pleasure's whole soul is this, to feel the living stream which flows.
That which they did I do. In me they live unvanquished.
My voice is theirs to--day, my step their step, my soul their soul.

For them I live ungrieving, and ungrieved their fruit I gather
From trees they planted bravely in their pride of life and time.
They fashioned these old gardens. Let my soul their joy inherit,
Their passion heaped on passion, life on life, for my life's prize.

Who were they all? Some names they bore well--known, some others fameless.
A box of parchments yellow lies in the dull dust of age;
A few poor letters, written by fond hands to fonder faces;
Through all the passionate love of home, this home of mine, once theirs.

The primaeval tiller of the soil enjoyed, the soil ancestral,
Whence came he? What his lineage? Nay, 'tis hidden.
Some have told
Tales of high daring done, lands won, through lines remote descending
From old Norse sources and the potent loins of kings and gods.

Or, with less pomp, of armoured knights, when knights were held heroic,
Of prudent counsellors and priests and men revered for law,
Dim--featured ghosts of vanished names set in forgotten story,
Pleading for memory still of their last son through years of change.

And yet I know not. Truth and fable here are strangely blended.
Nay, rather let me set before my face in fancy one
Like to myself, a clod of Sussex earth more kindly kneaded,
And mostly noble through the love of right, the sense of wrong.

I see him stand beneath these pollard oaks, the same, hardhanded,
With hook, and axe, and bill, a wrestler with the forest's green,
A man grave--featured, dull of thought and wit, slow--paced, unyielding,
Stern i