 | Poems by a Painter |  |
60
IN THE FOREST.
FRAGMENT.
Deep in the cedarn forest stands her bower,Where emerald glooms and golden lights for ever
Weave a gay morrice-dance o'er grass and flower—
As o'er the ripples of a wavy river
The arrowy sun-stars whirl and shoot and shiver;
Where the young dryad, Odour, panting flees,
Through glade and grove the long midsummer day,
Her music-pinioned paramour, the Breeze,
Till, faint with lovesome play,
They sink asleep, together lapt and folden,
Amid the sleeping lilies of a brook,
Or couched on mosses, purple, green, and golden,
In soome unfooted nook;
61
Witching the dark with lovelorn roundelay,
That echoes far the bosky vistas through,
With sweet reverberations ever new;
Where floats the white moth, from her tremulous wings
Thrilling pale radiance, and the small gnat sings
A drowsy requiem, ere he sinks to die
Under the harebell's drooping canopy;
Where, in his blazoned mail, the beetle glides,
Thrums the gaunt grasshopper his brazen sides,
Through the lush grass the elfin glow-worm gleams,
And aye unseen the shrewmouse flits and screams;
While, like some bandit o'er his garnered heap,
Hidden in mossy cavern, warm and deep,
The weary wood-bee hums himself asleep,
And overhead, throughout the silent night,
The mouldering beech-root looms with weird phosphoric light.
| Poems by a Painter | |