Edward Cracroft Lefroy: His Life and Poems including a Reprint of Echoes from Theocritus: By Wilfred Austin Gill: With a Critical Estimate of the Sonnets by the late John Addington Symonds |
Edward Cracroft Lefroy: His Life and Poems | ||
XVIII
SOMETHING LOST
How changed is Nature from the Time antique!
The world we see to-day is dumb and cold:
It has no word for us. Not thus of old
It won heart-worship from the enamoured Greek.
Through all fair forms he heard the Beauty speak;
To him glad tidings of the unknown were told
By babbling runlets, or sublimely rolled
In thunder from the cloud-enveloped peak.
He caught a message at the oak's great girth,
While prisoned Hamadryads weirdly sang:
He stood where Delphi's Voice had chasm-birth,
And o'er strange vapour watched the Sibyl hang;
Or where, mid throbbings of the tremulous earth,
The caldrons of Dodona pulsed and rang.
Edward Cracroft Lefroy: His Life and Poems | ||