from the road.

XXXVII

My body which my dungeon is,
And yet my parks and palaces:--
Which is so great that there I go
All the day long to and fro,
And when the night begins to fall
Throw down my bed and sleep, while all
The building hums with wakefulness--
Even as a child of savages
When evening takes her on her way
(She having roamed a summer's day
Along the mountain-sides and scalp),
Sleeps in an antre of that alp:--
Which is so broad and high that there,
As in the topless fields of air,
My fancy soars like to a kite
And faints in the blue infinite:--
Which is so strong, my strongest throes
And the rough world's besieging blows
Not break it, and so weak withal,
Death ebbs and flows in its loose wall
As the green sea in fishers' nets,
And tops its topmost parapets:--
Which is so wholly mine that I
Can wield its whole artillery,
And mine so little, that my soul
Dwells in perpetual control,
And I but think and speak and do
As my dead fathers move me to:--
If this born body of my bones
The beggared soul so barely owns,
What money passed from hand to hand,
What creeping custom of the land,
What deed of author or assign,
Can make a house a thing of mine?

XXXVIII

Say not of me that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,
The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,
To play at home with paper like a child.
But rather say: _In the afternoon of time
A strenuous family dusted from its hands
The sand of granite, and beholding far
Along the sounding coast its pyramids
And tall memorials catch the dying sun,
Smiled well content, and to this childish task
Around the fire addressed its evening hours._

BOOK II

IN SCOTS

NOTE TO BOOK II

The human conscience has fled of late the troublesome domain of conduct
for what I should have supposed to be the less congenial field of art:
there she may now be said to rage, and with special severity in all that
touches dialect: so that in every novel the letters of the alphabet are
tortured, and the reader wearied, to commemorate shades of
mispronunciation. Now, spelling is an art of great difficulty in my
eyes, and I am inclined to lean upon the printer, even in common
practice, rather than to venture abroad upon new quests. And the Scots
tongue has an orthography of its own, lacking neither "authority nor
author." Yet the temptati