University of Virginia Library

As, you come over the hill, a little way down, the road
Suddenly sweeps to the right, and lo! a green valley and broad;
Through it a river runs swift, its water broken by rocks
And boulders, cleaving its way as by rapidest bounds and shocks;
Now with a clear rush on, and now recoiling again,
To wheel round the barrier huge, it has hammered for ages in vain,
Only dinting deep holes in its ribs, and chafing itself into foam,
Then swirling away to the bank to bite at the softer loam.
Yonder an old peel tower, hid in clumps of the ivy green,
Perched on its crag like an eyrie, and there the whole valley is seen;
Not an approach South or North, East or West, but the watchman's eye
Would catch the sheen of the spears, and the banners would well descry,
And sound the alarm in time for hoisting the drawbridge high.
Away to the right on its lawn, close-shaven by mowing machines,
Stands the house which the great cotton-lord built out of his bobbins and skeins:
Brand-new, all gables and turrets and chimneys, stack upon stack,
Something top-heavy it looks, and bare too and cold, but the lack
Of trees is made up, by acres of glass for magnificent vineries,
Palm-houses, ferneries, cucumber beds, and great melon-frames and the pineries.
Far at the end of the valley, open three narrow glens,
Each with its own marked features, charactered clear as men's;
Each with its own fair water finding its fitting way,
Rough o'er the rocky channel, or still by the broomy brae.
That to the left is rugged; one side, a bare bleak hill
With a cataract, rugged, of stones down-rushing as if they would fill
The glen with grey desolation; and half-way down a thorn
Seems as it stayed the torrent, and was bent with the weight and worn.
Only that thorn on the hillside grapples the stones with its root,
Only some scraggy hazel bushes straggle about its foot,
Only the curlew wails there, and the grouse-cock crows at morn:
Only the goat and the coney poise on those stony heaps,
Only the parsley fern along their barren spaces creeps.
And far below in the hollow the stream goes plunging on
From the rocky steep to the rocky pool, and the rumbling boulder stone.
The middle glen is wooded; there the ancient lords of the land,
Leaving their high-pitched eyrie, built a stately house and grand
Right under the Murrough-crag, pine-clad up to the top,
And they belted the woods all round them, and bade the highways stop,
And they made them a goodly forest, stocked with the wild red deer,
And they drew the stream into fishponds, and swept with their nets the mere.
The wild deer bound in the woodlands now, but there is none to care,
And the trout are fat in the fishponds, and the water-lily is fair,
Stately and grand the house is still, and the terraced gardens fine,
But the young lord comes not ever—he is drinking the beaded wine,
Or pigeon-shooting by Thames, or marking the red by the Rhine.
Fair is the glen to the right, in its pastoral beauty still,
Green in its holms and hollows, green to the top of each hill;
A line of alder and drooping birch marks where its river flows,
But in its bare upper reaches only the juniper grows:
The stream comes out of a tarn on the hill, whose oozy edge
Is fringed with a ring of lilies and an outer ring of sedge;
And there is no road beyond that, only a mountain high,
And a cairn of stones where the withered bones of Three brave Martyrs lie.

Now, at the mouth of that green glen, hid in a bosk of trees,
The oak and the beech and the chestnut, and lime, honeyed haunt of the bees,
And the yew and the ash, and many a shrub, blossomy, fragrant, green,
Nestled a quaint old mansion; bit by bit, it had been
Built now and then, as they could, yet it rambled somehow into shape,
Picturesque, here a low gable rising step upon step,
There a long corridor broken with quaint dormer windows, and then
An old square tower of rough rubble, built for the rough fighting men;
But the front is all draped now with creepers, with scarlet and golden flower,
Till it looks in its summer beauty like some fairy-haunted bower,
Hid in its bosk of trees, under the shade of the hill
Where the river sweeps clear from the bridge down to the red-roofed mill.
Austen sat there with his mother, alone at the close of day,
Sat with a visage perplexed, while she looked hard and gray,
With furrows drawn deep on her forehead, and temples fallen away
Into blue-veined pits, and you plainly saw the shadow of death on her face;
But she sat erect in her high-backed chair, and sternly held her place,
As if she would say, While there's breath in me, lo! in weakness I will show
Weakness to no one, but keep at arm's length the terrible foe.
So, with a Bible before her, and a spinning-wheel at her side,
Hardly and sharply she spoke, and he, with bated breath, replied.