Page:The poetical works of Matthew Arnold, 1897.djvu/288

250

And you, ye stars,

Who slowly begin to marshal,

As of old, in the fields of heaven,

Your distant, melancholy lines!

Have you, too, survived yourselves?

Are you, too, what I fear to become?

You too once lived;

You too moved joyfully,

Among august companions,

In an older world, peopled by gods,

In a mightier order,

The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent sons of heaven.

But now ye kindle

Your lonely, cold-shining lights,

Unwilling lingerers

In the heavenly wilderness,

For a younger, ignoble world;

And renew, by necessity,

Night after night your courses,

In echoing, unneared silence,

Above a race you know not,

Uncaring and undelighted,

Without friend and without home;

Weary like us, though not

Weary with our weariness.

No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you,

No languor, no decay! languor and death,

They are with me, not you! ye are alive,—

Ye, and the pure dark ether where ye ride