ar to the man who wrote
Arrayed in garb peculiar to the time;
As though the idiom of a man were caught
Imprisoned in the idiom of a race.
A nothing truly, yet a link that binds
All ages to their own inheritance,
And stretching backward, dim and dimmer still,
Is lost in a remote antiquity.
Grapes do not come of thorns nor figs of thistles,
And even a great poet's divinest thought
Is coloured by the world he knows and sees.
The little intimate things of every day,
The trivial nothings that we think not of,
These go to make a part of each man's life;
As much a part as do the larger thoughts
He takes account of. Nay, the little things
Of daily life it is which mold, and shape,
And make him apt for noble deeds and true.
And as we read some much-loved masterpiece,
Read it as long ago the author read,
With eyes that brimmed with tears as he saw
The message he believed in stamped in type
Inviolable for the slow-coming years;
We know a certain subtle sympathy,
We seem to clasp his hand across the past,
His words become related to the time,
He is at one with his own glorious creed
And all that in his world was dared and done.
The long, still, fruitful hours slip away
Shedding their influences as they pass;
We know ourselves the richer to have sat
Upon this dusty floor and dreamed our dreams.
No other place to us were quite the same,
No other dreams so potent in their charm,
For this is ours! Every twist and turn
Of every narrow stair is known and loved;
Each nook and cranny is our very own;
The dear, old, sleepy place is full of spells
For us, by right of long inheritance.
The building simply bodies forth a thought
Peculiarly inherent to the race.
And we, descendants of that elder time,
Have learnt to love the very form in which
The thought has been embodied to our years.
And here we feel that we are not alone,
We too are one with our own richest past;
And here that veiled, but ever smouldering fire
Of race, which rarely seen yet never dies,
Spri