BELIEVE the word our gentle augur spake:
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Sweet ever; and in naught so sweet as this:
That though the heavens be barred, if we but hold
An equal, quiet, will-illumined mind,
Such greatness in us, laborless, must win
Great answers: cheer from all created things,
And interchange of love by natural right
With the high few, a kinship not of clay.
Be these thy present comfort! Like a man
Who tends a watchlight on the hills alone
At Childermas, (and through a night so cold,
The red clots of the rowan-berry twirl
Incorporate with a small stiff cone of ice,
And the wind breaks his flail, and swineherds hear
Outside, the pine-boles crack with frost i’ the heart,)
Thou shalt, ere long, upon a distant peak
Descry a doubted smoke, a likelier spark,
A shadow shot across a glare, and then
Two spurts of flame that bare the under sea;
And climb, by much and more of certitude,
To praising God some other even as thou
Beneath his natal star himself maintains,
And in salute of souls coördinate,
There, till he perish, guards his lineal fire.