Lord Alfred Tennyson

With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans, And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair.

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.

Thy leaf has perished in the green, And while we breathe beneath the sun, The world which credits what is done Is cold to all that might have been.

Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone: And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown. For a breeze of morning moves, And the planet of Love is on high, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves On a bed of daffodil sky.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world.

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.

There sinks the nebulous star we call the sun.

This laurel greener from the brows Of him that utter'd nothing base.

This truth within thy mind rehearse, That in a boundless universe Is boundless better, boundless worse.

Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace! Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul, While the stars burn, the moons increase, And the great ages onward roll.