You ask me, why, though ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits fail within the mist,
And languish for the purple seas?
It is the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land, where girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will;
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom broadens slowly down
From precedent to precedent:
Page:Poems - Tennyson (1843) - Volume 1 of 2.djvu/229
