I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art:I warm’d both hands before the fire of life;It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Walter Savage Landor · Finis
Comfort & remembrance
“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.”
- Author
- Walter Savage Landor
- Work
- Finis
- Found in
- The Oxford Book of English Verse
- Year
- 1853
- Length
- 35 words
- Source
- Project Gutenberg eBook #66619
Public domain. This passage is in the public domain. Walter Savage Landor died in 1864, more than 70 years ago, and the work was first published in 1853. You can copy, print, read aloud or sell it without asking permission; a credit is kind but not required. The text is copied word for word from the Project Gutenberg edition linked here.
Related passages
Under the wide and starry skyDig the grave and let me lie:Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he long’d to be;Home is the sailor, home from sea,And the hunter home from the hill.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits andAre melted into air, into thin air:And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Clouds come floating into my life from other days no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky.
Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,Nor the furious winter’s rages;Thou thy worldly task hast done,Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.Golden lads and girls all must,As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
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