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Home  »  library  »  poem  »  The Growth of Love

C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

The Growth of Love

By Robert Bridges (1844–1930)

(No. 50)

THE WORLD comes not to an end: her city-hives

Swarm with the tokens of a changeless trade,

With rolling wheel, driver, and flagging jade,

Rich men and beggars, children, priests and wives.

New homes on old are set, as lives on lives;

Invention with invention overlaid:

But still or tool or toy or book or blade

Shaped for the hand, that holds and toils and strives.

The men today toil as their fathers taught,

With little better’d means; for works depend

On works and overlap, and thought on thought:

And thro’ all change the smiles of hope amend

The weariest face, the same love changed in nought:

In this thing too the world comes not to an end.