GOOD BYE.

GOOD BYE.
426.4

Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home:
Thou are not my friend, and I’m not thine.
Long through thy weary crowds I roam:
A river-ark on the ocean brine,
Long I’ve been tossed like driven foam,
And now proud world I’m going home.

Good-bye to Flattery’s fawning face;
To Grandeur with his wise grimace;
To upstait Wealth’s sverted eye;
To supple Office, low and high;
To crowded halls, to court and street;
To frozen hearts and hasting feet;
To those who go and those who come:
Good-bye proud world I’m going home.

I’m going to my own hearth-stone,
Bosomed in yon green hills alone- A secret nook in a pleasant land.
Whose groves the frolle fairies plan- ned:
Where arches green the live-long day
Echo the blackbird’s roundelay.
And vulgar feet have never trod
A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

O when I am safe in my sylvan home,
I trend on the pride of Greece and Rome:
And when I am stretched beneath the pines the evening star so holy shines,
Where I laugh at the lore and pride of man,
At the sophist schools and the learn- ed clan;
For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may moet?
-Ralph Waldo Emerson.