<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=396735" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Foresight And Patience</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain,<br>Are they who point our pathway and sustain.<br>They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.<br>When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">To see Life's formless offspring and subdue<br>Desire of times unripe, we have these two,<br>Whose union is right reason: join they hands,<br>The world shall know itself and where it stands;<br>What cowering angel and what upright beast<br>Make man, behold, nor count the low the least,<br>Nor less the stars have round it than its flowers.<br>When these two meet, a point of time is ours.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As in a land of waterfalls, that flow<br>Smooth for the leap on their great voice below,<br>Some eddies near the brink borne swift along<br>Will capture hearing with the liquid song,<br>So, while the headlong world's imperious force<br>Resounded under, heard I these discourse.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">First words, where down my woodland walk she led,<br>To her blind sister Patience, Foresight said:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Your faith in me appals, to shake my own,<br>When still I find you in this mire alone.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- The few steps taken at a funeral pace<br>By men had slain me but for those you trace.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Look I once back, a broken pinion I:<br>Black as the rebel angels rained from sky!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Needs must you drink of me while here you live,<br>And make me rich in feeling I can give.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- A brave To-be is dawn upon my brow:<br>Yet must I read my sister for the How.<br>My daisy better knows her God of beams<br>Than doth an eagle that to mount him seems.<br>She hath the secret never fieriest reach<br>Of wing shall master till men hear her teach.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Liker the clod flaked by the driving plough,<br>My semblance when I have you not as now.<br>The quiet creatures who escape mishap<br>Bear likeness to pure growths of the green sap:<br>A picture of the settled peace desired<br>By cowards shunning strife or strivers tired.<br>I listen at their breasts: is there no jar<br>Of wrestlings and of stranglings, dead they are,<br>And such a picture as the piercing mind<br>Ranks beneath vegetation. Not resigned<br>Are my true pupils while the world is brute.<br>What edict of the stronger keeps me mute,<br>Stronger impels the motion of my heart.<br>I am not Resignation's counterpart.<br>If that I teach, 'tis little the dry word,<br>Content, but how to savour hope deferred.<br>We come of earth, and rich of earth may be;<br>Soon carrion if very earth are we!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The coursing veins, the constant breath, the use<br>Of sleep, declare that strife allows short truce;<br>Unless we clasp decay, accept defeat,<br>And pass despised; 'a-cold for lack of heat,'<br>Like other corpses, but without death's plea.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- My sister calls for battle; is it she?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Rather a world of pressing men in arms,<br>Than stagnant, where the sensual piper charms<br>Each drowsy malady and coiling vice<br>With dreams of ease whereof the soul pays price!<br>No home is here for peace while evil breeds,<br>While error governs, none; and must the seeds<br>You sow, you that for long have reaped disdain,<br>Lie barren at the doorway of the brain,<br>Let stout contention drive deep furrows, blood<br>Moisten, and make new channels of its flood!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- My sober little maid, when we meet first,<br>Drinks of me ever with an eager thirst.<br>So can I not of her till circumstance<br>Drugs cravings. Here we see how men advance<br>A doubtful foot, but circle if much stirred,<br>Like dead weeds on whipped waters. Shout the word<br>Prompting their hungers, and they grandly march,<br>As to band-music under Victory's arch.<br>Thus was it, and thus is it; save that then<br>The beauty of frank animals had men.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Observe them, and down rearward for a term,<br>Gaze to the primal twistings of the worm.<br>Thence look this way, across the fields that show<br>Men's early form of speech for Yes and No.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My sister a bruised infant's utterance had;<br>And issuing stronger, to mankind 'twas mad.<br>I knew my home where I had choice to feel<br>The toad beneath a harrow or a heel.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Speak of this Age.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- When you it shall discern<br>Bright as you are, to me the Age will turn.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- For neither of us has it any care;<br>Its learning is through Science to despair.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Despair lies down and grovels, grapples not<br>With evil, casts the burden of its lot.<br>This Age climbs earth.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">-To challenge heaven.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Not less<br>The lower deeps. It laughs at Happiness!<br>That know I, though the echoes of it wail,<br>For one step upward on the crags you scale.<br>Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust,<br>Which means our soul asleep or body's lust,<br>Until from warmth of many breasts, that beat<br>A temperate common music, sunlike heat<br>The happiness not predatory sheds!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- But your fierce Yes and No of butting heads<br>Now rages to outdo a horny Past.<br>Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vast<br>Are thrown by every novel light upraised.<br>The world's whole round smokes ominously, amazed<br>And trembling as its pregnant Aetna swells.<br>Combustibles on hot combustibles<br>Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire<br>The mountain-torrent of infernal ire<br>And leave the track of devils where men built.<br>Perceptive of a doom, the sinner's guilt<br>Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud,<br>If drops the chillness of a passing cloud,<br>To conscience, reason, human love; in vain:<br>None save they but the souls which them contain.<br>No extramural God, the God within<br>Alone gives aid to city charged with sin.<br>A world that for the spur of fool and knave<br>Sweats in its laboratory what shall save?<br>But men who ply their wits in such a school<br>Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Much have I studied hard Necessity!<br>To know her Wisdom's mother, and that we<br>May deem the harshness of her later cries<br>In labour a sure goad to prick the wise,<br>If men among the warnings which convulse<br>Can gravely dread without the craven's pulse.<br>Long ere the rising of this age of ours,<br>The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.<br>Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring,<br>And are as lasting as the parent thing.<br>Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill,<br>They might o'ermatch and have mankind at will.<br>Behold such army gathering; ours the spur,<br>No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer.<br>Not fool or knave is now the enemy<br>O'ershadowing men, 'tis Folly, Knavery!<br>A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach.<br>Now must the brother soul alive in each<br>His traitorous individual devildom<br>Hold subject lest the grand destruction come.<br>Dimly men see it menacing apace<br>To overthrow, perchance uproot, the race.<br>Within, without, they are a field of tares:<br>Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares,<br>And wherefore warrior service they must yield,<br>Shines visible as life on either field.<br>That is my comfort, following shock on shock,<br>Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock.<br>Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night,<br>Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight,<br>Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect,<br>The human and Satanic intellect,<br>Determined for their uses to control<br>What forces on the earth and under roll,<br>Their granite rock runs igneous; now they stand<br>Pledged to the heavens for safety of their land.<br>They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are:<br>Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- My sister, as I read them in my glass,<br>Their field of tares they take for pasture grass.<br>How waken them that have not any bent<br>Save browsing--the concrete indifferent!<br>Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff:<br>They fear not for the race when full the trough.<br>They have much fear of giving up the ghost;<br>And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- If I could see with you, and did not faint<br>In beating wing, the future I would paint.<br>Those massed indifferents will learn to quake:<br>Now meanwhile is another mass awake,<br>Once denser than the grunters of the sty.<br>If I could see with you! Could I but fly!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- The length of days that you with them have housed,<br>An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- O true, they have a cause, and woe for us,<br>While still they have a cause too piteous!<br>Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined,<br>They walk no longer with a stumbler blind,<br>And quicken in the virtue of their cause,<br>To think me a poor mouther of old saws!<br>I wait the issue of a battling Age;<br>The toilers with your 'troughsters' now engage;<br>Instructing them, through their acutest sense,<br>How close the dangers of indifference!<br>Already have my people shown their worth,<br>More love they light, which folds the love of Earth.<br>That love to love of labour leads: thence love<br>Of humankind--earth's incense flung above.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Admit some other features: Faithless, mean;<br>Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene;<br>Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells<br>On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles;<br>And if I bid it face what I observe,<br>Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Oft has your prophet, for reward of toil,<br>Seen nests of seeming cockatrices coil:<br>Disowned them as the unholiest of Time,<br>Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime.<br>Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry:<br>As little as Time's earliest knew the sky.<br>Perchance among them shoots a lustrous flame<br>At intervals, in proof of whom they came.<br>To strengthen our foundations is the task<br>Of this tough Age; not in your beams to bask,<br>Though, lighted by your beams, down mining caves<br>The rock it blasts, the hoarded foulness braves.<br>My sister sees no round beyond her mood;<br>To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood.<br>Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves,<br>It moves: O much for me to say it moves!<br>About his AEthiop Highlands Nile is Nile,<br>Though not the stream of the paternal smile:<br>And where his tide of nourishment he drives,<br>An Abyssinian wantonness revives.<br>Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims;<br>He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs,<br>The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills;<br>Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.<br>To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers,<br>He is the vast Insensate who devours<br>His golden promise over leagues of seed,<br>Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed.<br>The races which on barbarous force begin<br>Inherit onward of their origin,<br>And cancelled blessings will the current length<br>Reveal till they know need of shaping strength.<br>'Tis not in men to recognize the need<br>Before they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.<br>Then may sharp suffering their nature grind;<br>Of rabble passions grow the chieftain Mind.<br>Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed,<br>For tens up the safe mountains at his head.<br>Few would be fed, not far his course prolong,<br>Save for the troublous blood which makes him strong.<br>- That rings of truth! More do your people thrive;<br>Your Many are more merrily alive<br>Than erewhile when I gloried in the page<br>Of radiant singer and anointed sage.<br>Greece was my lamp: burnt out for lack of oil;<br>Rome, Python Rome, prey of its robber spoil!<br>All structures built upon a narrow space<br>Must fall, from having not your hosts for base.<br>O thrice must one be you, to see them shift<br>Along their desert flats, here dash, there drift;<br>With faith, that of privations and spilt blood,<br>Comes Reason armed to clear or bank the flood!<br>And thrice must one be you, to wait release<br>From duress in the swamp of their increase.<br>At which oppressive scene, beyond arrest,<br>A darkness not with stars of heaven dressed<br>Philosophers behold; desponding view<br>Your Many nourished, starved my brilliant few;<br>Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins,<br>Dive down the fumy AEtna of their brains.<br>Belated vessels on a rising sea,<br>They seem: they pass!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- But not Philosophy!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">- Ay, be we faithful to ourselves: despise<br>Nought but the coward in us! That way lies<br>The wisdom making passage through our slough.<br>Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow;<br>Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait.<br>Philosophy is Life's one match for Fate.<br>That photosphere of our high fountain One,<br>Our spirit's Lord and Reason's fostering sun,<br>Philosophy, shall light us in the shade,<br>Warm in the frost, make Good our aim and aid.<br>Companioned by the sweetest, ay renewed,<br>Unconquerable, whose aim for aid is Good!<br>Advantage to the Many: that we name<br>God's voice; have there the surety in our aim.<br>This thought unto my sister do I owe,<br>And irony and satire off me throw.<br>They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds,<br>Where numbers crave their sustenance in words.<br>Now let the perils thicken: clearer seen,<br>Your Chieftain Mind mounts over them serene.<br>Who never yet of scattered lamps was born<br>To speed a world, a marching world to warn,<br>But sunward from the vivid Many springs,<br>Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=George+Meredith">George Meredith</a><div class=q> <img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share"> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=396735" data-title="Foresight And Patience de George Meredith" data-description="Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain, Are they who point our pathway and sustain. They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired. When they do meet, it is our earth inspired. To see Life's formless offspring and subdue Desire of times unr..."></div> </div> </div>

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