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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=349983" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Oldest Inhabitant</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">'AND when came I to this town?' did he say!<br>A question asked for the asking's sake,<br>Answered merely an answer to make,<br>As stranger to stranger may;<br>Answered enough with ''Twas yesterday,'<br>And a talk of the journey travelled so fast.<br>Had I said, 'Since I dwelt here first have passed <br>Hundreds of years away'!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Aye, and there be who, if they knew,<br>Would envy me, as a cripple must long,<br>Looking on limbs erect and strong,<br>To have his freedom given him too<br>And rise and reach to whither he would:<br>'What!' they would think, 'Is the gift not good<br>Beyond all gifts for earth or for time?<br>Life, and no shadow of death o'ercast,<br>Life, and the joy of manhood's prime,<br>Life, and the lore of a boundless past,<br>Life, and still life to come and to last! '<br>And I even, even now,<br>I know not what that spirit might be,<br>Whether of love or of hate to me,<br>That stood in the dusk on the mountain's brow,<br>Alone with the stars I had climbed to see nigh,<br>And smiled, and gave, and was no more there.<br>There was no trace broke the sky,<br>There was no breath stirred the air,<br>Nought from the heaven or the earth to tell<br>If it were well:<br>And how much surer to-day know I<br>Whether he meant me a boon or a curse,<br>Whether to wait or to die be worse?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ah, how I joyed for so many years!<br>Death under my heel with his hindering fears,<br>And I the lord of my life for ever!<br>Leisure and labour limitless,<br>And always the joy of the earned success<br>Crowned with the joy of the new endeavour!<br>And I thought 'I will make all wisdoms mine;'<br>And I thought 'The world shall be glad of me.'<br>Ah, how I joyed! for could I divine<br>What the fruit of immortal days must be?<br>But alas for the numbness of wont on all,<br>For the heart that has loved too often to prize,<br>For the eyes that have wept too often for tears,<br>For the listless feet and the careless ears,<br>For the brain that has learned that to learn is vain,<br>For forgotten joy and forgotten pain,<br>For the life too frequent for memories!<br>And I taste no joy because it will pall,<br>And I watch no grace because it will wane,<br>And I seek no good for it will not remain,<br>And I knit no tie because it will sever.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">If I were not alone: if the gift were shared<br>With but some one soul in the world beside,<br>Some one for whom I might have cared,<br>Who would not so soon have grown old and died.<br>But ever and ever to build all anew,<br>And ever and ever to see all decay;<br>To fashion my life as the others do<br>And have my place among fellow-men,<br>To sit content in my home—and then<br>To have lived, and the rest has faded away:<br>There are the graves, and I part of the past,<br>Forgotten with them whom I outlast.<br>Let it be; 'tis a foolish game,<br>The game that children play on the beach,<br>With its ending always the same,<br>Building amain till the tide-waves reach<br>And the sands will be bare to build on to-morrow. <br>Let it be; for what is the worth?<br>Long since I wearied of saying good-bye:<br>And what or whom should I cherish on earth<br>Where I go as might one from some world on high<br>Unmeet for the short-lived pleasure or sorrow?<br>Only the men who look to die<br>Can have or hope in a world where death reigns:<br>Do I pity that slight ephemerous fly,<br>Whirling and resting there in the sun,<br>Because his day will be so soon done?<br>All remains while his day remains;<br>He will not have known that a rosebud wanes.<br>How if he lived for ever, as I?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Truly 'tis even so,<br>To die betimes is scarcely to know<br>How death is around us everywhere.<br>But ever for me the birth and blow<br>Are but a part of decay that is there, <br>And the living come but to go:<br>Till at length I am one who, drawing aside,<br>Where the crowd sweeps by in one jostling race,<br>Stands unstirred in his lonely place<br>And leaves off noting face after face;<br>I am one who wait stranded, alone, by the tide<br>Of Life, which has also Death for name<br>Because for the world the two are the same,<br>The tide that goes winding back whence it came, <br>Bearing all thither save me;<br>And I dream and I scarcely seem to be,<br>And I know no count of time as it flies,<br>And the river passes, passes, passes,<br>Smooth and for ever, and changelessly glasses<br>Summers and winters and changing skies, <br>Passes, and passes, and passes,<br>And nothing abides and nothing is strange;<br>And oh for rest to my languid eyes<br>Weary of change that is never change!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ah! men might marvel to hear me say<br>The world of my youth is the world of to-day;<br>Here, in this very home of my birth,<br>How they would answer from some old book,<br>'Thus and thus was the past; now look,<br>Are we as they of the older earth,<br>We and our ways, and the fields we plough?'<br>And the first-met gossip who knows but Now<br>Counts chances a score in half a year,<br>Tells me this was that, and there was here,<br>A hall is burnt, a new market is made,<br>A railway runs where the school-boys played,<br>He is married, and he is dead,<br>And he so rich goes begging his bread;<br>''Tis a world of change,' he will soberly sigh<br>For point to his tales: why, and so say I;<br>Chances and changes enough, I deem,<br>In a world that goes on like a shifting dream;<br>But, oh, the long sameness! Ebb and flow:<br>Billows that come, and billows that go!<br>Nothing is but will drift away,<br>Nothing was but will come:<br>Future finds Past, old becomes new;<br>What men have done that they will do.<br>'Tis but the counting coins of to-day <br>To measure the former sum, <br>But the naming laterwise<br>Things and thoughts of an ancient guise:<br>And what change for me who see life as some star,<br>The expanses of earth in one from afar?<br>Hill grows valley and valley grows hills<br>'Tis a world of hills and valleys still.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Did I dream I could have been wearied thus,<br>With truth and with wisdoms left to seek?<br>Alas, my learners who heard me speak<br>'Is not to learn enough for us?<br>Is not to strive a strength for the soul,<br>Though she never gained one foot to the goal?'<br>If you could waken now where you lie,<br>You and your graves forgotten as I<br>In our town that would tell our names for its praise;<br>If you could hear, and your pitying gaze<br>Could know the teacher who made you bold!<br>Nay, sleep on unconscious there in the mould:<br>You died with a joy as of something gained,<br>Something given to the world you left;<br>I laboured on to be ever bereft<br>Of the skill achieved, of the science attained.<br>For, lo, the end of all learning is this,<br>Only to know one has learned amiss,<br>Only to know that the art or the lore<br>With its rules and its axioms was nothing more<br>Than a working guess that did for the while;<br>Only to know that sage after sage<br>Has passed on a dream from age to age,<br>Till the world awakes, and the children smile<br>At the thoughts of the foolish grown-men of old.<br>Aye, sleep, ye who counted your lives well spent,<br>Sleep, ye who dreamed; ye are content<br>Thou who hadst gained the secret of gold,<br>Save that one last fusion left me to find;<br>Thou who hadst tracked the sun's path through the air;<br>Thou with thy skill of the stars; thou there<br>In the chapel vault, with thy name still shown<br>To sauntering strangers, cut on the stone,<br>With thy chronicle of the world left behind;<br>Thou who hadst learned and hadst lighted on cures<br>For every ill man's body endures,<br>And leftst me thy leechcrafts for legacy;<br>Thou; and thou; and thou; oh, poor fools,<br>Who dreamed ye had found the thing ye sought,<br>Sleep, sleep and know not. All goes by,<br>Lores, and crafts, and beliefs, and schools;<br>Wrought is unravelled; thought is new-thought;<br>Till meseems that truth's very self must die,<br>And be born again unto younger rules.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Whereto is life for me? And I would<br>I had now departed and knew the end.<br>Death—'tis a way even I might wend—<br>But were it evil or good?<br>Oh, had it been but a word to speak,<br>But a blow at once, or a venomous draught,<br>Long since I had said, or struck, or quaffed:<br>But all a seven days' week!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Each dawn and each dusk of a seven days' week,<br>To will it unwavering: all a week!<br>Vain, vain, o'er and o'er,<br>A thousand times and a thousand yet:<br>Lo, life with some one poor hope once more,<br>Some one poor grace worth a while for regret;<br>Lo, death grown awful with dread and doubt.<br>And oh, feeble will, and oh, sluggish heart,<br>Almost too weary to long to depart!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yet, dusk is at hand, see, the sunset fades out:<br>And here where was home life is loneliest to bear,<br>'Twere a goodly time to renew the test;<br>And I will it—Nay, is it worth the care?<br>'Tis but beginning a strife and unrest.<br>Seven days for life to lure back her thrall.<br>Oh, if I knew the end! knew all!<br>But, what if even life were the best?<br>What, if death were a new despair?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Augusta+Davies+Webster">Augusta Davies Webster</a><div class=q>
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A question asked for the asking's sake,
Answered merely an answer to make,
As stranger to stranger may;
Answered enough with ''Twas yesterday,'
And a talk of the journey travelled so fast.
Had I said, 'S..."></div>
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