CL.ENGLISH HEDGES.
I
Not without deep memorial truth are ye,
Partitions of sweet thorn! which intersect
Our blythest counties, bidding us reflect
Full oft upon our rural ancestry,
The unambitious thanes of Saxon days;
Who with their modest manors well content,
Of corn and mead and fragrant bean-field blent,
And woody pasture, lived in simple ways
And patriarchal virtues, ere the hand
Of Norman rule was felt; or feudal right,
Baneful exotic! settled like a blight
On the free customs of the pastoral land.
II
Behold—a length of hundred leagues displayed—
That web of old historic tapestry
With its green patterns, broidered to the eye,
Is with domestic mysteries inlaid!
Here hath a nameless sire in some past age
In quaint uneven stripe or curious nook,
Clipped by the wanderings of a snaky brook,
Carved for a younger son an heritage.
There set apart, an island in a bower,
With right of road among the oakwoods round,
Are some few fields within a ring-fence bound,
Perchance a daughter's patrimonial dower.
III
So may we dream, while to our fancy come
Kind incidents and sweet biographies,
Scarce fanciful, as flowing from the ties
And blissful bonds which consecrate our home
To be an earthly heaven. From shore to shore
That ample, wind-stirred net-work doth ensnare
Within its delicate meshes many a rare
And rustic legend, which may yield good store
Of touching thought unto the passenger.
Domestic changes, families decayed,
And love or hate, in testaments displayed
By dying men, still in the hedgerows stir.
IV
When Rome her British Eagles did recall,
Time saw the ages weave that web of green
Assiduously upon the rural scene,
Ere yet the lowly-raftered Saxon hall
Was watched from Norman fortalice. The fields
Escutcheons were, borne by those equal thanes,
While herald spring went wandering up the lanes,
Blazoning with green and white the yeomen's shields,
And as the Church grew there, beneath her eyes
The breadth of hedgerows grew with her, not loth
To be, as freedom is, an undergrowth
Of that true mother of all liberties.
V
The Saxon hedgerows stand, though twice assailed;
Once greedy barons in their pride of birth
For hunting grounds imparked the fertile earth,
Till peasant joys and pastoral ditties failed.
Now upstart wealth absorbs both far and nigh
The small ancestral farms: woe worth the day,
When fortunes overgrown shall eat away
The heart of our old English yeomanry!
The hedges still survive, shelters for flowers,
An habitation for the singing birds,
Cool banks of shadow grateful to the herds,
A charm scarce known in any land but ours.
VI
Ye modest relics of a simple past,
Most frail and most enduring monument,
Ye still are here, when Norman Keep is rent
And cruel Chace disparked into a waste
Of cheerful tillage: ye uninjured rise,
To nature and to human wants allied,
Therefore outliving works of lordly pride,
How rightly dear for what ye symbolize!
Long may the Saxon hieroglyphic stand,
A precious trophy in the yeoman's eye,
The wisdom of our ancient polity
Written in leafy cypher o'er the land!
