Page:Poems - Tennyson (1843) - Volume 2 of 2.djvu/139

 "If Nature put not forth her power About the opening of the flower, Who is it that could live an hour?

"Then comes the check, the change, the fall. Pain rises up, old pleasures pall. There is one remedy for all.

"Yet hadst thou, thro' enduring pain, Link'd month to month with such a chain Of knitted purport, all were vain.

"Thou hadst not between death and birth Dissolved the riddle of the earth. So were thy labour little-worth.

"That men with knowledge merely play'd, I told thee—hardly nigher made, Tho' scaling slow from grade to grade;