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In Memoriam A.H.H.

         
            LXIV.
             
      Dost thou look back on what hath been,
          As some divinely gifted man,
          Whose life in low estate began
      And on a simple village green;

      Who breaks his birth’s invidious bar,
          And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
          And breasts the blows of circumstance,
      And grapples with his evil star;

      Who makes by force his merit known
          And lives to clutch the golden keys,
          To mould a mighty state’s decrees,
      And shape the whisper of the throne;

      And moving up from high to higher,
          Becomes on Fortune’s crowning slope
          The pillar of a people’s hope,
      The centre of a world’s desire;

      Yet feels, as in a pensive dream,
          When all his active powers are still,
          A distant dearness in the hill,
      A secret sweetness in the stream,

      The limit of his narrower fate,
          While yet beside its vocal springs
          He play’d at counsellors and kings,
      With one that was his earliest mate;

      Who ploughs with pain his native lea
          And reaps the labour of his hands,
          Or in the furrow musing stands;
      ‘Does my old friend remember me?’
       


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