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SAY NOT THE STRUGGLE NOUGHT AVAILETH.

By Arthur Hugh Clough.

Say not, the struggle nought availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light:
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.


TO R. T. H. B.

By William Ernest Henley.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade.
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate.
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.


LIFE IS STRUGGLE.

By Arthur Hugh Clough.

To wear out heart, and nerves, and brain
And give oneself a world of pain;
Be eager, angry, fierce, and hot,
Imperious, supple—God knows what,
For what's all one to have or not;
O false, unwise, absurd, and vain!
For 'tis not joy, it is not gain,
It is not in itself a bliss,
Only it is precisely this
That keeps us all alive.

To say we truly feel the pain,
And quite are sinking with the strain;—
Entirely, simply, undeceived,
Believe, and say we ne'er believed
The object, e'en were it achieved,
A thing we e'er had cared to keep;
With heart and soul to hold it cheap,
And then to go and try it again;
O false, unwise, absurd, and vain I
O, 'tis not joy, and 'tis not bliss,
Only it is precisely this
That keeps us still alive.

From "Poems," by Arthur Hugh Clough
(Macmillan & Co., Publishers, New York,);
and "A Book of Verses," by William Ernest Henley
(Charles Scribner's Sons, Publishers, New York).