Willie Winkie and Other Songs and Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Expecting a letter each morning and night
From you, my dear friend, I am really now quite
Perplexed and amazed,
Half-crazed and bombazed
What to think; for your silence all reasons have raised
That the season suggests. Are ye off to the hills
And the thyme-scented brims of the musical rills,
Where the gold-speck'led trout
Holds piscatory rout,
And in midsummer glee, leaps the water right out?
Where the wavelets are dancing,
And ripplets are glancing,
And whin, broom, and heather each other enhancing,
And the moss all bespotted with flowers, as if showers
Of bloom had new fallen from morn's rosy bowers.
If the rod and the line
Be a hobby of thine,
I can easy divine
Why I whimper and pine.
Could you not fleech the Nine
Your excursions to join?
And, mayhap, where some castle is crumbling and gray
By the stream bank, where genius will musingly stray,
Thee, beloved of the Muses! would sing such a lay
That the ruin for ever enshrined in thy song;

Its loop-holes and tall towers,
Its lichens and wall-flowers,
To us a song-picture would ever belong.
But, perhaps, you don't fish,
Nor I, but I wish
I was where the streams and the trout are,
Mid the pure mountain air,
To hope, I might dare,
Of returning both fresher and stouter.