When is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?
Most men eddy about
Here and there,—eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurled in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and, then they die,—
Perish; and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
And there are some, whom a thirst
Ardent, unquenchable, fires,
Not with the crowd to be spent.
Not without aim to go round
In an eddy of unmeaningless dust.
—
My Autumn time and Nature's hold
A dreamy tryst together,
And, both grown old, about us fold
The golden-tissued weather.
When the enemy has failed in all other artifices, he will propose friendship, that under its appearance, he may effect what he could not compass as an open adversary.—
