Nature

Hence vain deluding joyes,
The brood of folly without father bred,
How little you bested,
Or fill the fixèd mind with all your toyes;
Dwell in some idle brain,
And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess,
As thick and numberless
As the gay motes that poeple the Sun Beams,
Or likest hovering dreams
The fickle Pensioners of Morpheus train.
But hail thou Goddess, sage and holy,
Hail divinest Melancholy,
Whose Saintly visage is too bright
To hit the Sense of human sight;
And therefore to our weaker view,
Ore laid with black staid Wisdoms hue.
Black, but such as in esteem,
Prince Memnons sister might beseem,
Or that starr’d Ethiope Queen that strove
To set her beauties praise above
The Sea Nymphs, and their powers offended,
Yet thou art high...

Not only sun-kissed heights are fair.    Below
The cold, dark billows of the frowning deep
Do lovely blossoms of the ocean sleep,
Rocked gently by the waters to and fro.
The coral beds with magic colours glow,
    And priceless pearl-encrusted molluscs heap
    The glittering rocks where shining atoms leap
Like living broken rainbows.

    Even so
We find the sea of sorrow.    Black as night
    The sullen surface meets our frightened gaze,
    As down we sink to darkness and despair.
But at the depths -such beauty! such delight!
    Such flowers as never grew in pleasure's ways!
    Ah! not alone are sun-kissed summits fair.

Son of the old Moon-mountains African!
Chief of the Pyramid and Crocodile!
We call thee fruitful, and that very while
A desert fills our seeing's inward span:
Nurse of swart nations since the world began,
Art thou so fruitful? or dost thou beguile
Such men to honour thee, who, worn with toil,
Rest for a space 'twixt Cairo and Decan?
O may dark fancies err! They surely do;
'Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste
Of all beyond itself. Thou dost bedew
Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste
The pleasant sunrise. Green isles hast thou too,
And to the sea as happily dost haste.

Reading sometyme, my sorrowes to beguile,
I find old Poets hylls and floods admire:
One, he doth wonder monster-breeding Nyle,
Another meruailes Sulphure Aetnas fire.
Now broad-brymd Indus, then of Pindus height,
Pelion and Ossa, frosty Caucase old,
The Delian Cynthus, then Olympus weight,
Slow Arrer, franticke Gallus, Cydnus cold.
Some Ganges, Ister, and of Tagus tell,
Some whir-poole Po, and slyding Hypasis;
Some old Pernassus where the Muses dwell,
Some Helycon, and some faire Simois:
    A, fooles! thinke I, had you Idea seene,
    Poore Brookes and Banks had no such wonders beene.

    Incumbent seemingly
    On the jagged points of peaks
    That end the visible west,
    The rounded moon yet floods
    The valleys hitherward
    With fall of torrential light,
    Ere from the overmost
    Aggressive mountain-cusp,
    She slip to the lower dark.
    But here, on an eastward slope
    Pointed and thick with its pine,
    The forest scarcely remembers
    Her light that is gone as a vision
    Or ecstasy too poignant
    And perilous for duration.
    Withdrawn in what darker web
    Or dimension of dream I know not,
    In silence pre-occupied
    And solemnest rectitude
    The pines uprear, and no sigh
    For the rapture of moonlight past,
    Comes from their bosom of boughs.
    Far in their secrecy

Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies
    Behold the Spirit of the musky South,
A creole with still-burning, languid eyes,
    Voluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth:
    Swathed in spun gauze is she,
From fibres of her own anana tree.


Within these sumptuous woods she lies at ease,
    By rich night-breezes, dewy cool, caressed:
'Twixt cypresses and slim palmetto trees,
    Like to the golden oriole's hanging nest,
    Her airy hammock swings,
And through the dark her mocking-bird yet sings.


How beautiful she is!    A tulip-wreath
    Twines round her shadowy, free-floating hair:
Young, weary, passionate, and sad as death,
    Dark visions haunt for her the vacant air,
    While movelessly she lies
With lithe, lax, fo...

The cat runs races with her tail. The dog
Leaps oer the orchard hedge and knarls the grass.
The swine run round and grunt and play with straw,
Snatching out hasty mouthfuls from the stack.
Sudden upon the elmtree tops the crow
Unceremonious visit pays and croaks,
Then swops away. From mossy barn the owl
Bobs hasty out--wheels round and, scared as soon,
As hastily retires. The ducks grow wild
And from the muddy pond fly up and wheel
A circle round the village and soon, tired,
Plunge in the pond again. The maids in haste
Snatch from the orchard hedge the mizzled clothes
And laughing hurry in to keep them dry.

Come to me, O ye children!
    For I hear you at your play,
And the questions that perplexed me
    Have vanished quite away.

Ye open the eastern windows,
    That look towards the sun,
Where thoughts are singing swallows
    And the brooks of morning run.

In your hearts are the birds and the sunshine,
    In your thoughts the brooklet's flow,
But in mine is the wind of Autumn
    And the first fall of the snow.

Ah! what would the world be to us
    If the children were no more?
We should dread the desert behind us
    Worse than the dark before.

What the leaves are to the forest,
    With light and air for food,
Ere their sweet and tender juices
    Have been hardened into wood,--

That to the world are childre...

The moon has left the sky, love,
The stars are hiding now,
And frowning on the world, love,
Night bares her sable brow.
The snow is on the ground, love,
And cold and keen the air is.
I 'm singing here to you, love;
You 're dreaming there in Paris.

But this is Nature's law, love,
Though just it may not seem,
That men should wake to sing, love,
While maidens sleep and dream.
Them care may not molest, love,
Nor stir them from their slumbers,
Though midnight find the swain, love,
Still halting o'er his numbers.

I watch the rosy dawn, love,
Come stealing up the east,
While all things round rejoice, love,
That Night her reign has ceased.
The lark will soon be heard, love,
And on his way be winging;
When Nature's poets wake, ...

Her mist of primroses within her breast
Twilight hath folded up, and o'er the west,
Seeking remoter valleys long hath gone,
Not yet hath come her sister of the dawn.
Silence and coolness now the earth enfold:
Jewels of glittering green, long mists of gold,
Hazes of nebulous silver veil the height,
And shake in tremors through the shadowy night.
Heard through the stillness, as in whispered words,
The wandering God-guided wings of birds
Ruffle the dark. The little lives that lie
Deep hid in grass join in a long-drawn sigh
More softly still; and unheard through the blue
The falling of innumerable dew,
Lifts with grey fingers all the leaves that lay
Burned in the heat of the consuming day.
The lawns and lakes lie in this night of love,
Admitted to the majesty...

How sweet to be thus nestling deep in boughs,
Upon an ashen stoven pillowing me;
Faintly are heard the ploughmen at their ploughs,
But not an eye can find its way to see.
The sunbeams scarce molest me with a smile,
So thickly the leafy armies gather round;
And where they do, the breeze blows cool the while,
Their leafy shadows dancing on the ground.
Full many a flower, too, wishing to be seen,
Perks up its head the hiding grass between,--
In mid-wood silence, thus, how sweet to be;
Where all the noises, that on peace intrude,
Come from the chittering cricket, bird, and bee,
Whose songs have charms to sweeten solitude.

Who includes diversity, and is Nature,
Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also,
Who has not look'd forth from the windows, the eyes, for nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing;
Who contains believers and disbelievers - Who is the most majestic lover;
Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the aesthetic, or intellectual,
Who, having consider'd the Body, finds all its organs and parts good;
Who, out of the theory of the earth, and of his or her body, understands by subtle analogies all other theories,
The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of These States;
Who believes not only in our globe, with its sun and moon, but i...

With little here to do or see
Of things that in the great world be,
Daisy! again I talk to thee,
For thou art worthy,
Thou unassuming Common-place
Of Nature, with that homely face,
And yet with something of a grace,
Which Love makes for thee!

Oft on the dappled turf at ease
I sit, and play with similies,
Loose types of things through all degrees,
Thoughts of thy raising:
And many a fond and idle name
I give to thee, for praise or blame,
As is the humour of the game,
While I am gazing.

A nun demure of lowly port;
Or sprightly maiden, of Love's court,
In thy simplicity the sport
Of all temptations;
A queen in crown of rubies drest;
A starveling in a scanty vest;
Are all, as seems to suit thee best,
Thy appellations....

When insect wings are glistening in the beam
Of the low sun, and mountain-tops are bright,
Oh, let me, by the crystal valley-stream,
Wander amid the mild and mellow light;
And while the wood-thrush pipes his evening lay,
Give me one lonely hour to hymn the setting day.

Oh, sun! that o'er the western mountains now
Goest down in glory! ever beautiful
And blessed is thy radiance, whether thou
Colourest the eastern heaven and night-mist cool,
Till the bright day-star vanish, or on high
Climbest and streamest thy white splendours from mid-sky.

Yet, loveliest are thy setting smiles, and fair,
Fairest of all that earth beholds, the hues
That live among the clouds, and flush the air,
Lingering and deepening at the hour of dews.
Then softest gales are breat...

    (To K. Wigram.)

    Sheltered, when the rain blew over the hills it was,
    Sunny all day when the days of summer were long,
    Beyond all rumour of labouring towns it was,
    But at dawn and evening its trees were noisy with song.

    There were four elms on the southward lawn standing,
    Their great trunks evenly set in a square
    Of shadowed grass in spring pierced with crocuses,
    And their tops met high in the empty air.

    Where the morning rose the grey church was below us,
    If we stood by the porch we saw on either hand
    The ground falling, the trees falling, and meadows,
    A river, hamlets and spires: a chequered land,

    A wide country where cloud shadows went chasing
    Mile after mile, diminishing fast, ...

I.

NOON.

The tanned and sultry noon climbs high
Up gleaming reaches of the sky;
Below the balmy belts of pines
The cliff-lunged river laps and shines;
Adown the aromatic dell
Sifts the warm harvest's musky smell.
And, oh! above one sees and hears
The brawny-throated harvesters;
Their red brows beaded with the heat,
By twos and threes among the wheat
Flash their hot sickles' slenderness
In loops of shine; and sing, and sing,
Like some mad troop of piping Pan,
Along the hills that swoon or ring
With sounds of Ariel airiness
That haunted freckled Caliban:

"O ho! O ho! 'tis noon, I say;
    The roses blow.
Away, away, above the hay
The burly bees to the roses gay
Hum love-tunes all the livelong day,
    So low! ...

Glimmers gray the leafless thicket
    Close beside my garden gate,
Where, so light, from post to picket
    Hops the sparrow, blithe, sedate;
    Who, with meekly folded wing,
    Comes to sun himself and sing.

It was there, perhaps, last year,
    That his little house he built;
For he seems to perk and peer,
    And to twitter, too, and tilt
    The bare branches in between,
    With a fond, familiar mien.

Once, I know, there was a nest,
    Held there by the sideward thrust
Of those twigs that touch his breast;
    Though 'tis gone now. Some rude gust
    Caught it, over-full of snow, -
    Bent the bush, - and robbed it so

Thus our highest holds are lost,
    By the ruthless winter's wind,
When, with swift-dismantling...

I aimless wandered thro' the woods, and flung
My idle limbs upon a soft brown bank,
Where, thickly strewn, the worn-out russet leaves
Rustled a faint remonstrance at my tread.
The yellow fungi, shewing pallid stems,
The mossy lichen creeping o'er the stones
And making green the whitened hemlock-bark,
The dull wax of the woodland lily-bud,
On these my eye could rest, and I was still.
No sound was there save a low murmured cheep
From an ambitious nestling, and the slow
And oft-recurring plash of myriad waves
That spent their strength against the unheeding shore.
Over and through a spreading undergrowth
I saw the gleaming of the tranquil sea.
The woody scent of mosses and sweet ferns,
Mingled with the fresh brine, and came to me,
Bringing a laudanum to my ce...