University of Virginia Library

Millions there are to whom great cities call
With luring voices: Theatre, Concert Hall,
Museum, Abbey, Mart. In many a street
Shuffle and grind and tap symphonic feet
Of unremitting strangers, who repose,
Or seem to, in such blunderment as throws
My heart to panic, beaten from the rose
And other wildings dear to men that roam
Where Stillness has, and needs, a country home,
Not greatly caring if the cuckoo sends
Loud love too often to his female friends;
But tides of tumult, were they now to leap
In swirls across the meadows where I keep
My hand in Solitude's, to fondle it
Till lofty lamps of silver-gold are lit
In eastward spaces, would, as though a death
About to fall upon and strangle breath,
Turn me from tame to wild ere swamping joys
With all those rough Niagaras of noise.
Blest are the heathland musers! for to these
Uproar's no dainty, silence no disease.

In chance-come shreds of workless time,
Morning a bell, and evenfall a chime,
Fast ran the fairy minutes when I found
Stars in a thistled heaven of common ground;
Aconites eager for the splitting fold
Of green well wrapped about the baby gold
Designed by Wisdom for the firstborn—Spring—
To watch a month ere yet the blackbirds sing;
Beetles so packed with hardihood, so squat,
So David-like in going forth to trounce
Goliath Log with half of half an ounce,
Masters and servants of their creeping lot;
Countryfolk pansies, taught how best to wear
June velvet with enough of seemly care
To make a flight of honey women think
Its newborn gloss the fairest of the fair;
Waters not running only through a vale
For minnow, marigold, and nightingale,
But also through the offices where men's
Queer farming tills a paper soil with pens,
Holiday tune of rivulets the sound
To help December's wheel go creaking round;
And then, still lingering for the scythe to cut,
As brown as sun can burn a hazelnut,
What men and plough and horse have sown,
And Clod, the ever-willing labourer, grown;
Ragworts, plebeian, if you will, but yet
Tough English peasants of the bygone cast,
Nodding their welcomes, be it fine or wet,
And, in the autumn, making money fast;
Fungus that flutters timid life with red—
The Cardinal's colour—angry on his head,
And stirs a poet, fretful at the sight,
To sit him down upon a stump and write
A lyric for his children to repeat
While clustered on the hearthrug at his feet.

Warm in the arms of Memory, when Rest,
Not wearied, makes the third of us in bed,
How soothingly I breathe the breath of flowers
While listening to a rivulet in my head!