Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Within an old wood's solitary gloom,
A maiden sat beneath a broad-boughed tree,
In leafy Summer's green and flowery bloom;
A brook brawled forth its forest-minstrelsy,
By many a jagged bank, and mossy way,
While open on her lap, sweet Shakspeare's volume lay.

II

And as the stream stole murmuring along,
Her kindled fancy with its music rose;
And her ears caught Ophelia's dying song,

Rising and falling to each liquid pause;
A weeping willow o'er the water bended,
And lower seemed to sink until her sweet lay ended.

III

And huge fantastic trunks, gnarled, old, and gray,
Assumed the heath-hag forms in that dim scene,
And bending boughs shut out the dazzling day;
The wood, cave-dark, showed lips of livid green
Sprung from the leaves, and muttering mystic tones,
While in the pebbly brook were heard their eldrich groans.

IV

The fairy visions softly fluttered by,
Like merry birds darting through bosky dells;
She heard them on the earth, and in the sky,
While some, like bees, sang in the wild-flower bells,
Or on the spider's silvery thread did glide,
Or in the fox-glove flowers their tiny forms did hide.

V

Then giant shadows moved in dim array,
Who in their graves had slept a thousand years,—
Spirits that filled the world with pale dismay,
And deluged cities deep in blood and tears,—
Egypt and Troy, the awakened dead of ages,
That will outlive all time in his immortal pages.

VI

Battles and banners moved before her eyes,
And many a sceptred king, and stately queen;
Sorrow and care, and tears and common sighs,
Beneath the imperial purple then was seen;
The self-same heart-aches in each breast she found,
Whether the brow with gold, or “hodden grey” was bound.

VII

Then mask and revel glided through the wood,
And proud processions swept along the glades,
Till the tall flowers, which bent across the flood,

Seemed changed to waving plumes and brandished blades,
While shout, and drum, and trumpets' fearful clang,
The sylvan silence rent, and through its alleys rang.

VIII

Shakspeare unlocked man's heart, laid bare a world,
Distilled its blight and beauty, and then flew
To his own mighty mind, and from it hurled
A new creation, forms that never grew
Beneath an earthly eye, he made and moved,
Who, as he willed it, lived and laughed, or wept, or loved.

“Exhausted worlds and then imagined new.”