HOLD FAST TO YOUR DREAMS - Louis Driscoll, Old Poetry

Hold fast your dreams!
Within your heart
Keep one still, secret spot
Where dreams may go,
And, sheltered so,
May thrive and grow
Where doubt and fear are not.
O keep a place apart,
Within your heart,
For little dreams to go!

Think still of lovely things that are not true.
Let wish and magic work at will in you.
Be sometimes blind to sorrow. Make believe!
Forget the calm that lies
In disillusioned eyes.
Though we all know that we must die,
Yet you and I
May walk like gods and be
Even now at home in immortality.

We see so many ugly things—
Deceits and wrongs and quarrelings;
We know, alas we know
How quickly fade
The color in the west,
The bloom upon the flower,
The bloom upon the breast
And youth's blind hour.
Yet keep within your heart
A place apart
Where little dreams may go,
May thrive and grow.
Hold fast—hold fast your dreams!

-Louis Driscoll (read it in High School)

CHARACTER

"Not all who seem to fail, have failed indeed;
Not all who fail have therefore worked in vain:
For all our acts to many issues lead;
And out of earnest purpose, pure and plain,
Enforced by honest toil of hand or brain,
The Lord will fashion, in His own good time,
(Be this the labourer's proudly humble creed.)
Such ends as, to His wisdom, fitliest chime.
With His vast love's eternal harmonies
There is no failure for the good and wise;
What though thy seed should fall by the wayside
And the birds Snatch it; yet the birds are fed;
Or they may bear it far across the tide,
To give rich harvests after thou art dead."*

*Politics for the People,1848
From CHARACTER-The Discipline of Experience
-SAMUEL SMILES