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?’