THE TABLES TURNED

Up! up, my friend! and quit your books,
Or surely you'll grow double;

Up! up, my friend! and clear your looks!
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow

Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife;
Come, hear the woodland linnet
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it!

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of things-
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless,
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect

Misshapes the beauteous forms of things-
We murder to dissect.

Enough of science and of art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

William Wordsworth

CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE

How happy is he born and taught
That serveth not another's will;
Whose armour is his honest thought
And simple truth his utmost skill!

Whose passions not his masters are,
Whose soul is still prepared for death,
Untied unto the world by care

Of public fame, or private breath;

Who envies none that chance doth raise
Nor vice; who never understood
How deepest wounds are given by praise;
Nor rules of state, but rules of good:

Who hath his life from rumours freed,
Whose conscience is his strong retreat;
Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
Nor ruin make oppressors great;

Who God doth late and early pray
More of His grace than gifts to lend;
And entertains the harmless day
With a religious book or friend;

This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;
Lord of himself, though not of lands;
And having nothing, yet hath all.

Sir Henry Wotton

THE HEATH THIS NIGHT MUST BE MY

SONG OF THE YOUNG

BED

HIGHLANDER SUMMONED

FROM

THE SIDE OF HIS BRIDE BY THE "FIERY CROSS OF
RODERICK DHU

The heath this night must be my bed,
The bracken curtain for my head,
My lullaby the warder's tread,

Far, far from love and thee, Mary;
To-morrow eve, more stilly laid
My couch may be my bloody plaid,
My vesper song, thy wail, sweet maid!
It will not waken me, Mary!

I may not, dare not, fancy now
The grief that clouds thy lovely brow,
I dare not think upon thy vow,

And all it promised me, Mary.
No fond regret must Norman know;
When bursts Clan-Alpine on the foe,
His heart must be like bended bow,
His foot like arrow free, Mary.

A time will come with feeling fraught!
For, if I fall in battle fought,
Thy hapless lover's dying thought

Shall be a thought on thee, Mary.
And if returned from conquered foes,
How blithely will the evening close,
How sweet the linnet sing repose,
To my young bride and me, Mary!

Sir Walter Scott

CONTEMPLATE ALL THIS WORK

Contemplate all this work of Time,

The giant labouring in his youth; Nor dream of human love and truth As dying Nature's earth and lime;

But trust that those we call the dead
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends. They say
The solid earth whereon we tread

In tracts of fluent heat began,

And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,

Till at the last arose the man

Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime,
The herald of a higher race,

And of himself in higher place,

If so he type this work of time

Or, crown'd with attributes of woe

Like glories, move his course, and show That life is not an idle ore,

But iron dug from central gloom,

And heated hot with burning fears, And dipp'd in baths of hissing tears, And batter'd with the shocks of doom

To shape and use. Arise and fly

The reeling Faun, the sensual feast! Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die !

Alfred Tennyson