Page:Poems - Tennyson (1843) - Volume 1 of 2.djvu/229



You ask me, why, though ill at ease, Within this region I subsist, Whose spirits fail within the mist, And languish for the purple seas?

It is the land that freemen till, That sober-suited Freedom chose, The land, where girt with friends or foes A man may speak the thing he will;

A land of settled government, A land of just and old renown, Where Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent: