Explore "A Quiet Life" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Let him who will, by force or fraud innate, / Of courtly grandeurs gain the slippery height; / I, leaving not the home of my delight, / Far from the world and noise will meditate. / Then, without pomps or perils of the great, / I shall behold the day succeed the night; / Behold the alternate seasons take their flight, / And in serene repose old age await. / And so, whenever Death shall come to close / The happy moments that my days compose, / I, full of years, shall die, obscure, alone! / How wretched is the man, with honors crowned, / Who, having not the one thing needful found, / Dies, known to all, but to himself unknown.