Robert W. Service

A half-dead thing in a stark dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold.

The Wanderlust has got me... by the belly-aching fire

Of Books and Scribes there are no end:This Plague--and who can doubt it?Dismays me so, I've sadly pennedAnother book about it.

No man can be a failure if he thinks he's a success; If he thinks he is a winner, then he is.

It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the lifelong race.

There's a race of men that don't fit in, A race that can't sit still;So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.They range the field and rove the flood, And they climb the mountain's crest; Their's is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don't know how to rest.

Be sure your wisest words are those you do not say.

It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out it's the grain of sand in your shoe.

A promise made is a debt unpaid.

The happy man is he who knows his limitations yet bows to no false gods.

Ah! the clock is always slow it is later than you think.

It's the plugging away that will win you the day So don't be a piker old pard! Just draw on your grit it's so easy to quit- It's the keeping your chin up that's hard.

This is the Law of the Yukon that only the strong shall thrive That surely the weak shall perish and only the fit survive.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold;The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.

Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory,Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? 'Done things' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul? Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders?(You'll never hear it in the family pew.) The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things__hen listen to the wild__t's calling you.

There__ gold, and it__ haunting and haunting; It__ luring me on as of old; Yet it isn__ the gold that I__ wanting So much as just finding the gold. It__ the great, big, broad land __ay up yonder, It__ the forests where silence has lease; It__ the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It__ the stillness that fills me with peace.

I have no doubt at all the Devil grins,As seas of ink I spatter. Ye gods, forgive my "literary" sins --The other kind don't matter.