University of Virginia Library

Spirit, who waftest me where'er I will,
And seest, with finer eyes, what infants see,
Feeling all lovely truth
With the wise health of everlasting youth,
Beyond the motes of Bigotry's sick eye,
Or the blind feel of false Philosophy,—
O Spirit, O Muse of mine,
Frank, and quick-dimpled to all social glee,
And yet most sylvan of the earnest Nine,
Who on the fountain-shedding hill,
Leaning about among the clumpy bays
Look at the clear Apollo while he plays;—
Take me, now, now, and let me stand
On some such lovely land,
Where I may feel me, as I please,
In dells among the trees,
Or on some outward slope, with ruffling hair,
Be level with the air;
For a new smiling sense has shot down through me,
And from the clouds, like stars, bright eyes are beckoning to me.

Arrived! Arrived! O shady spots of ground,
What calmness ye strike round,
Hushing the soul as if with hand on lips!
And are ye seen then but of animal eyes,
Prone, or side-looking with a blank surmise?
And do ye hear no finer-fancied words
Than the sweet whistle of the repeating birds?
And are ye haunted of no lovelier trips
Than the poor stag's, who startled, as he sips,
Perks up with timid mouth, from which the water drips?

O ye whom ancient wisdom, in it's graces,
Made guardians of these places;
Etherial human shapes, perhaps the souls
Of poets and poetic women, staying
To have their fill of pipes and leafy playing,
Ere they drink heavenly change from nectar-bowls;
You finer people of the earth,
Nymphs of all names, and woodland Geniuses,
I see you, here and there, among the trees,
Shrouded in noon-day respite of your mirth:
This hum in air, which the still ear perceives,
Is your unquarrelling voice among the leaves;
And now I find, whose are the laughs and stirrings
That make the delicate birds dart so in whisks and whirrings.

There are the fair-limbed Nymphs o' the Woods, (Look ye,
Whom kindred Fancies have brought after me!)
There are the fair-limbed Dryads, who love nooks
In the dry depth of oaks;
Or feel the air in groves, or pull green dresses
For their glad heads in rooty wildernesses;
Or on the golden turf, o'er the dark lines,
Which the sun makes when he declines,
Bend their white dances in and out the pines.
They tend all forests old, and meeting trees,
Wood, copse, or queach, or slippery dell o'erhung
With firs, and with their dusty apples strewn;
And let the visiting beams the boughs among,
And bless the trunks from clingings of disease
And wasted hearts that to the night-wind groan.
They screen the cuckoo when he sings; and teach
The mother blackbird how to lead astray
The unformed spirit of the foolish boy
From thick to thick, from hedge to layery beech,
When he would steal the huddled nest away
Of yellow bills, up-gaping for their food,
And spoil the song of the free solitude.
And they, at sound of the brute, insolent horn,
Hurry the deer out of the dewy morn;
And take into their sudden laps with joy
The startled hare that did but peep abroad;
And from the trodden road
Help the bruised hedgehog. But when tired, they love
The back-turned pheasant, hanging from the tree
His sunny drapery;
And handy squirrel, nibbling hastily;
And fragrant-living bee,
So happy, that he will not move, not he,
Without a song; and hidden, amorous dove,
With his deep breath; and bird of wakeful glow,
Whose louder song is like the voice of life,
Triumphant o'er death's image; but whose deep,
Low, lovelier note is like a gentle wife,
A poor, a pensive, yet a happy one,
Stealing, when day-light's common tasks are done,
An hour for mother's work; and singing low,
While her tired husband and her children sleep.

Then, there the Hamadryads are, their sisters,
Simpler crown twisters,
Who of one favourite tree, in some sweet spot,
Make home and leave it not,
Until the ignorant axe downs it's fine head,
And then the nymph is fled.

And there are the Napeads,—names till now
Scarce known, I know not how,
To the rich bosom of my mother soil;
For they in meads and little corner bowers
Of hedge-row fields take care of the fresh flowers,
Keeping their innocent wealth from early spoil
Of beasts and blasts, and other blind mishaps,
For little children's laps,
And for the poet when he goes to hide him
From the town's sight, and for the lass beside him.
'Tis they who nurse in the moist dells
The mild primrose, and ring the sky-blue bells
To the bee's ear in a grass-gliding breeze;
Tis they encourage, and from tearful wet
Dry up the grateful-breathing violet;
And they that set at ease
The sheath-enfolded fans of rosy bushes,
Ready against their blushes;
And for the Water-Nymphs', their cousins', sake,
Lay out the lily on the lake;
And teach the gentle cattle, when they sup,
To leave the daisy and the buttercup;
That when the bright-eyed Sun
Looks out in May to see what has been done,
The laughing meadows may be bold,
And shew their bosoms to him, white and gold.

Too far for me to see, the Limniad takes
Her pleasure in the lakes;
She, that with hills about her, loves to be
At once at home and at her liberty.
Far off I fancy, 'twixt their bowery isles,
Her and her sisters playing their sweet wiles
About a boat, which one of them sits in
And will not let them win;
Till comes a sudden gust, and parts them with new smiles.

Nor can I see the lightsome-footed maids,
The Oreads, that frequent the lifted mountains;
Though by the Muses' help I still might shew,
How some go leaping by the laughing fountains
Down the touched crags; and some o'er deep ravines
Sit listening to the talking streams below;
And some in sloping glades
Of pines lie musing, or betwixt high screens
Of fern and flowers; or, like pavilioned queens
Covered from heat of the blue silent skies,
Sit perfumed underneath the cedarn shades,
Feeding the gazel with his lamping eyes.
Elsewhere, from ridge to ridge
They lay the tempest-levelled tree for bridge;
And help down the poor goat
That stands close-footed with his shivering coat
On a lone point; and echo the sweet calls
The herdsman makes, when singing to their stalls
The loitering cows with his home-loving strain,
That sighs, and carols, and then sighs again,—
A song the sweeter for a taste of pain:
And these are the kind terrors, that with sounds
Of groans about the air, or earthly quaking,
Or great gigantic shadows, that stand making
Gestures upon the fog, warn the low grounds
Against the dreadful snow-rocks, that at last
Loos'd by the voiceful blast,
Burst down from their heaped ices; and come raking
O'er the crushed trees and dwellings nestling under,
Into the dash'd-up stream, with loads of misty thunder.
And O ye sweet and coy Ephydriads, you,
Why are your names so new
To islands which your liquid lips serene
Keep ever green?
There, there the Ephydriads haunt;—there, where a gap
Betwixt a heap of tree-tops, hollow and dun,
Shews where the waters run,
And whence the fountain's tongue begins to lap.
There lie they, lulled by little whiffling tones
Of rills among the stones,
Or by the rounder murmur, glib and flush,
Of the escaping gush,
That laughs and tumbles, like a conscious thing,
For joy of all its future travelling.
The lizard circuits them; and his grave will
The frog, with reckoning leap, enjoys apart,
Till now and then the woodcock frights his heart
With brushing down to dip his dainty bill.
Close by, from bank to bank,
A little bridge there is, a one-railed plank;
And all is woody, mossy, and watery.
Sometimes a poet from that bridge might see
A Nymph reach downwards, holding by a bough
With tresses o'er her brow,
And with her white back stoop
The pushing stream to scoop
In a green gourd cup, shining sunnily.

The rills, a little farther onward, leave
The shady hollows; and united, heave
A river forth, that looking out as 'twere
For his fine way, turns, and with widening fair,
Lapses, full-bedded, between lawny brims.
Thence, from the dazzling of the noon, he swims
With darker sides into the woods, and there
Washes the Nymphs, that in sun-sprinkled ease
Haunt the white liquid spots, 'twixt shade-reflecting trees.

Those are the Naiads, who keep neat
The banks from sedge, and from the dull-dropp'd feet
Of cattle that break down the fibrous mould.
They snap the selfish nets, that, overbold,
Cross the whole river, and might trip the keels
Of summer boats. Their's are the kind appeals
And unseen beckoning, holding baits of grass,
That win the sheep into their washing-place;
And they too, in their gentleness, uphold
The sighing nostrils of the stag, when he
Takes to the wrapping water wretchedly;
And tow'rds the amorous noon, when some young poet
Comes there to bathe, and yet half thrills to do it,
Hovering with his ripe locks, and fair light limbs,
And trying with cold foot the banks and brims,
They win him to the water with sweet fancies,
Till in the girdling stream he pants and dances.
There's a whole bevy there in that recess
Rounding from the main stream: some sleep, some dress
Each other's locks, some swim about, some sit
Parting their own moist hair, or fingering it
Lightly, to let the curling air go through:
Some make them green and lilied coronets new;
And one there from her tender instep shakes
The matted sedge; a second, as she swims,
Looks round with pride upon her easy limbs;
A third, just holding by a bough, lets float
Her slumberous body like an anchored boat,
Looking with level eye at the glib flakes
And the strange crooked quivering which it makes,
Seen through the weltering of the watery glass:
Others (which make the rest look at them) pass,
Nodding and smiling, in the middle tide,
And luring swans on, which like fondled things
Eye poutingly their hands; yet following, glide
With unsuperfluous lift of their proud wings.

And far beyond upon another side,
Remembrance almost helps me to discern
Their stouter sisters, the great Nereids, turn
And toss upon the ocean's lifting billows,
Making them banks and pillows,
Upon whose springiness they lean and ride;
Some with an inward back; some upward-eyed,
Feeling the sky; and some with sidelong hips,
O'er which the surface of the water slips.
Sometimes, when morning runs along the sea
In a gold path, they cross it glancingly;
Sometimes they may be seen, going along
By the red sun-set in a silver throng;
And sometimes, when the black clouds send before
Their windy voices, they come past the shore,
Stooping in haste, and driving through the foam
The hunch-backed dolphins home
But most they love sleek seas and springy sands
Under green rocks, on days of golden weather;
And there, in their free beauty, they'll take hands
And dance about a boat, which to the shore
They helped the night before;
Or dress their locks with myrtles or pearl bands;
Or sit and make them fans of many a feather
Which the gull sheds; or colour, like their own,
The parted lips of shells that are up thrown,
With which, and coral, and the glib sea flowers,
They furnish their faint bowers.
I have not told your loves; I have not told
Your perfect loves, ye Nymphs! Those are among
The perfect virtues only to be sung
By your own glorious lovers, who have passed
Death, and all drear mistake, and sit at last
In the clear thrill of their hoped age of gold.