Explore "Drifting Away: A Fragment" by Charles Kingsley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
They drift away. Ah, God! they drift for ever.
I watch the stream sweep onward to the sea, / Like some old battered buoy upon a roaring river, / Round whom the tide-waifs hang -- then drift to sea.
I watch them drift -- the old familiar faces, / Who fished and rode with me, by stream and wold, / Till ghosts, not men, fill old beloved places, / And, ah! the land is rank with churchyard mold.
I watch them drift -- the youthful aspirations, / Shores, landmarks, beacons, drift alike.
I watch them drift -- the poets and the statesmen; / The very streams run upward from the sea.
Yet overhead the boundless arch of heaven / Still fades to night, still blazes into day.
Ah, God! My God! Thou wilt not drift away
November 1867.