TWILIGHT
1
Sweet twilight, nurse of dews
And mother of sweet hours
With thee a walk I choose
Among the hawthorn bowers
That overhang the molehil greenly gray
Made as it were to intercept the way
2
Beetles are thy trumpeters
And to thy silence play
Where the soft still rustle stirs
O'er dead winds of the day
Mid marshy sedge dull aspens and pasture rushes
O'er green corn fields and hedge row bushes
3
Thy hours have one light place
Streaky and dunly grey
As if the night was giving place
And bringing back the day
The sun seems coming so the eye beleives
But darkness deepens round and undeceives
4
O'er brooks the weeping ash
Hangs cool and grimly dark
I hear the water splash
And then half fearing mark
In ivy'd ash a robber near the stream
'Till from a nearer view I find it but a dream
5
Sweet twilight nurse of night
Thy path the milk maid treads
With nimble step so light
Scarce bends the cowslips heads
But hastening on ere by thy light forsook
She leaves her cows all resting by the brook
6
Sweet twilight thy cool dews
Are beautifully spread
Where the nightingale its song renews
Close by the old cow shed
In that low hazel oft' I've heard her sing
While sombre evening came on downy wing
7
The playful rabit too
Its white scut glancing
Amid the silver dew
I've seen them oft advancing
In troops from spiney's where they love to dwell
Dancing on molehills in the open dell
8
Spring leaves seem old in green
And the dull thorn is lost in the[e]—
Dun twilight—but the hazel still is seen
In sleeping beauty by the old oak tree
Giving the woods a beauty and a power
While earth seems Eden in such an hour
9
Sweet twilight in thy dews
And silence I rejoice
Thy odd stars bid me muse
And give to silence voice
Now twilight ceases on the verge of even’
And darkness like a pawl spreads over heaven
