drinking hour by hour, Drinking, drinking all alone With candles and a wall of stone. Now and then he sobered down, And stayed a night with me in town. If he found me with a crowd, He shrank and did not speak aloud. He sat in a corner silently, And others of the company Would note his curious face and eye, His twitching face and timid eye. When they saw the eye he had They thought perhaps that he was mad. I knew he was clear and sane But had a horror in his brain. He had much money and one friend And drank quite grimly to the end. Why he chose to die in hell I did not ask, he did not tell. LINES When London was a little town Lean by the river's marge, The poet paced it with a frown, He thought it very large. He loved bright ship and pointing steeple And bridge with houses loaded And priests and many-coloured people ... But ah, they were not woaded! Not all the walls could shed the spell Of meres and marshes green, Nor any chaffering merchant tell The beauty that had been:  The crying birds at fall of night, The fisher in his coracle, And grim on Ludgate's windy height, An oak-tree and an oracle. Sick for the past his hair he rent And dropt a tear in season; If he had cause for his lament We have much better reason. For now the fields and paths he knew Are coffined all with bricks, The lucid silver stream he knew Runs slimy as the Styx; North and south and east and west, Far as the eye can travel, Earth with a sombre web is drest That nothing can unravel. And we must wear as black a frown, Wail with as keen a woe That London was a little town Five hundred years ago. 

These quiet lakes, these stretched dreaming fields,

Pointing the ridges of their sloping shields.

These tawnier sands where grass and tree are not,

Long, long ago or ever we forgot;

And what the pathway is and what the goal;

That guard the ancient fortress of the soul.

Over the sundering worlds of hill and plain

The unnamed mountains of old days again.

The chasms, the lines of trees that foot the snow,

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