Page:Poems - Tennyson (1843) - Volume 1 of 2.djvu/191

 To hear each other's whisper'd speech; Eating the Lotos, day by day, To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, And tender curving lines of creamy spray: To lend our hearts and spirits wholly To the influence of mild-minded melancholy; To muse and brood and live again in memory, With those old faces of our infancy Heap'd over with a mound of grass, Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, And dear the last embraces of our wives And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change; For surely now our household hearths are cold: Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange: And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy. Or else the island princes over-bold Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings Before them of the ten-years' war in Troy, And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.