Listen to the Water-Mill:
Through the live-long day
How the clicking of its wheel
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Listen to the Water-Mill:
Through the live-long day
How the clicking of its wheel
Wears the hours away!
Languidly the Autumn wind
Stirs the forest leaves,
From the field the reapers sing
Binding up their sheaves:
And a proverb haunts my mind
As a spell is cast,
"The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past."

Those who misremember the past are pleased to repreat it as "proof.".

Those who misremember the past are pleased to repreat it as "proof.".

Don't brood on the past, but don't forget it either.

Don't brood on the past, but don't forget it either.

O Death! O Change! O Time!
Without you, O! the insufferable eyes
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
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O Death! O Change! O Time!
Without you, O! the insufferable eyes
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
These fatuous, ineffectual yesterdays.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.

Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures, And all the various things that lock our wrists to the read more

It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures, And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.