Youth and Love: I by Robert Louis Stevenson

Once only by the garden gate

   Our lips we joined and parted.

I must fulfil an empty fate

   And travel the uncharted.

Hail and farewell!  I must arise,

   Leave here the fatted cattle,

And paint on foreign lands and skies

   My Odyssey of battle.

The untented Kosmos my abode,

   I pass, a wilful stranger:

My mistress still the open road

   And the bright eyes of danger.

Come ill or well, the cross, the crown,

   The rainbow or the thunder,

I fling my soul and body down

   For God to plough them under