Lyth and listen, gentlemen,
That be of high born blood,
I'll tell you of a brave booting
That befell Robin Hood.

Robin Hood upon a day,
He went forth him alone,
And as he came from Barnsdale
Into fair evening,

He met a beggar on the way,
Who sturdily could gang;
He had a pike-staff in his hand
That was both stark and strang;

A clouted clock about him was,
That held him frae the cold,
The thinnest bit of it, I guess,
Was more than twenty fold.

His meal-poke hang about his neck,

BOOK III .

THE ARGUMENT .

Come then, my soul: I call thee by that name,
Thou busy thing, from whence I know I am:
For, knowing what I am, I know thou art;
Since that must needs exist, which can impart.
But how cam'st thou to be, or whence thy spring?
For various of thee priests and poets sing.
Hear'st thou submissive: but a lowly birth,
Some separate particles of finer earth,
A plain effect which nature must beget,

BOOK II .

Try then, O man, the moments to deceive,
That from the womb attend thee to the grave;
For wearied nature find some apter scheme:
Health be thy hope, and pleasure be thy theme:
From the perplexing and unequal ways,
Where study brings thee; from the endless maze,
Which doubt persuades to run, forewarn'd, recede
To the gay field and flowery path, that lead
To jocund mirth, soft joy, and careless ease:
Forsake what may instruct, for what may please;
Essay amusing art, and proud expense,

Fix thy corporeal, and internal Eye
On the Young Gnat, or new-engender'd Fly;
On the vile Worm, that Yesterday began
To crawl; Thy Fellow-Creatures, abject Man!
Like Thee they breath, they move, they tast, they see,
They show their Passions by their Acts like Thee:
Darting their Stings, they previously declare
Design'd Revenge, and fierce intent of War:
Laying their Eggs, they evidently prove
The Genial Pow'r, and full Effect of Love.
Each then has Organs to digest his Food,
One to beget, and one receive the Brood:

The lonely fox roams far abroad,
On secret rapine bent, and midnight fraud;
Now haunts the cliff, now traverses the lawn,
And flies the hated neighbourhood of man:
While the kind spaniel, or the faithful hound,
Likest that fox in shape and species found,
Refuses through these cliffs and lawns to roam,
Pursues the noted path, and covets home;
Does with kind joy domestic faces meet,
Take what the glutted child denies to eat,
And, dying, licks his long-loved master's feet.

BOOK I .

THE ARGUMENT .

Y E sons of men, with just regard attend,
Observe the preacher, and believe the friend,
Whose serious Muse inspires him to explain,
That all we act, and all we think is vain.
That in this pilgrimage of seventy years,
Over rocks of perils, and through vales of tears,
Destin'd to march, our doubtful steps we tend,
Tir'd with the toil, yet fearful of its end.
That from the womb we take our fatal shares

. . .
But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste,
Under the solitary moon; — he flow'd
Right for the polar star, past Orgunje,
Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles —
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had

So, on the bloody sand, Sohrab lay dead;
And the great Rustum drew his horseman's cloak
Down o'er his face, and sate by his dead son.
As those black granite pillars, once high-reared
By Jemshid in Persepolis, to bear
His house, now 'mid their broken flights of steps
Lie prone, enormous, down the mountain side--
So in the sand lay Rustum by his son.
And night came down over the solemn waste,
And the two gazing hosts, and that sole pair,
And darkened all; and a cold fog, with night,
Crept from the Oxus. Soon a hum arose,

He spoke; and Sohrab smiled on him, and took
The spear, and drew it from his side, and eased
His wound's imperious anguish; but the blood
Came welling from the open gash, and life
Flow'd with the stream; all down his cold white side
The crimson torrent ran, dim now and soil'd,
Like the soil'd tissue of white violets
Left, freshly gather'd, on their native bank,
By children, whom their nurses call with haste
Indoors from the sun's eye; his head droop'd low,
His limbs grew slack; motionless, white, he lay--

I

The war was weary long.
How long and wearisome it was,
That strife 'twixt valiant right and valiant wrong,
'Twixt anarchy and crystallizing laws!
How weary, weary were the marches
In lands where noontide parches
The pulsing torrents of the veins!
How many steaming plains,
Now ashy waste,
Now thick with honeyed canes,
Our footfalls slowly paced
From glaring rim to rim,