Poems, partly of rural life, (in national English.) ::

'Twas a dark summer day
That was fading away,
And a mist flew over the plain;
And the meadows were shorn,
And the ripening corn,
Was all wet with the slow-falling rain.
And I heard not a sound but the wood-thrushes strain,
As beside the hedgerows,
Where the woodbine and rose
And green oak were my shelter, I sunk to repose.

And with turf for my bed,
And with boughs o'er my head,
There I seem'd, while pond'ring, to see
The old Britons, to whom
Such a wide-spreading gloom
Of the oak, their most favorite tree,
Afforded in summer a cool canopy;
While abroad in the mead
The wide herd or the steed
Came down from the mountain-top fastness to feed.

There the blue woady streaks
On their arms and their cheeks,
And their bows, I seem'd to behold;
And the temple that stood
In the dark hallow'd wood,
And the mistletoe cut down with gold.

In allusion to the hallowing of the Mistletoe or Misseltoe by the Druids, who are said to have cut it down with a golden hook:

“Loranthus europæus seems to be the original, or most common Misseltoe, ιξος, of the Greeks, which grows usually on some kind of Fir-tree. But our Viscum album is likewise found in Greece, though rarely, growing on the Oak; and this has been preferred from the most remote antiquity. Hence, when the superstitions of the East travelled westward, our Druids adopted a notion of the Misseltoe of the Oak being more holy, or efficacious, in conjurations or medicine, than what any other tree afforded, the Loranthus, or ordinary Misseltoe, not being known here. This superstition actually remains, and a plant of Viscum gathered from an oak, is preferred by those who rely on virtues, which perhaps never existed in any Misseltoe whatever.”

—Smith's English Flora.

And the berry-fed Druid, and Bard as he told
Of the green oaken crown
Worn by men of renown
When the sword-wingèd

The British Covinus or war chariot, having its wheels armed with projecting scythes. (Mela, iii; Lucan, i; Silius, xvii.)

car cut their enemies down.

For where hillocks may swell
From the wood-shaded dell,
On which only our own eyes may look;
With the brown summerleaze,
Or the wind-shaken trees,
Or the lily that floats on the brook:
The quick fancy creates for each green voiceless nook
Some unvoiced human face
With its motion and grace,
To give life to the lovely but desolate place.

University of Virginia Library

DAY DREAMS.