INNOCENT spirits, bright, immaculate ghosts! <br />Why throng your heavenly hosts, <br />As eager for their birth <br />In this sad home of death, this sorrow-haunted earth? <br /> <br />Beware! Beware! Content you where you are, <br />And shun this evil star <br />Where we who are doomed to die, <br />Have our brief being and pass, we know not where or why. <br /> <br />We have not to consent or to refuse; <br />It is not ours to choose: <br />We come because we must, <br />We know not by what law, if unjust or if just. <br /> <br />The doom is on us, as it is on you, <br />That nothing can undo; <br />And all in vain you warn: <br />As your fate is to die, our fate is to be born.<br /><br />William Dean Howells<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/from-generation-to-generation-3/
