In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne'er remember
Apollo's summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting

About the frozen time.

Ah! would 't were so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any

Writh'd not at passèd joy?
To know the change and feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbèd sense to steal it,
Was never said in rhyme.

WRITTEN IN DISGUST OF VULGAR SUPERSTITION

THE church bells toll a melancholy round,
Calling the people to some other prayers,
Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound.
Surely the mind of man is closely bound

In some black spell; seeing that each one tears
Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,
And converse high of those with glory crown'd.
Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp —
A chill as from a tomb, did I not know
That they are dying like an outburnt lamp;
That 't is their sighing, wailing ere they go
Into oblivion; that fresh flowers will grow,
And many glories of immortal stamp.

SONNET

HAPPY is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own;
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods with high romances blent :
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment

For skies Italian, and an inward groan

To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,

And half forget what world or worldling meant.
Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;
Enough their simple loveliness for me,

Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging: Yet do I often warmly burn to see

Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their sing ing,

And float with them about the summer waters.

ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET

THE poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the Grasshopper's - he takes the lead In summer luxury, he has never done

With his delights; for when tired out with fun, He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there
shrills

The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one, in drowsiness half lost,

The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

SONNET

AFTER dark vapours have oppress'd our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved its pains,

Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play,
Like rose leaves with the drip of summer rains.
And calmest thoughts come round us; as, of leaves
Budding, fruit ripening in stillness, — Autumn

suns

Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves,

Sweet Sappho's cheek, a sleeping infant's breath,

The gradual sand that through an hour-glass

WRITTEN ON THE BLANK SPACE AT THE END OF CHAUCER'S TALE OF 'THE FLOURE AND THE LEFE'

THIS pleasant tale is like a little copse:
The honied lines so freshly interlace,
To keep the reader in so sweet a place,
So that he here and there full-hearted stops;
And oftentimes he feels the dewy drops

Come cool and suddenly against his face,
And, by the wandering melody, may trace
Which way the tender-legged linnet hops.
Oh! what a power has white simplicity!
What mighty power has this gentle story!
I, that do ever feel athirst for glory,
Could at this moment be content to lie

Meekly upon the grass, as those whose sobbings
Were heard of none beside the mournful robins.

ON SEEING THE ELGIN MARBLES

My spirit is too weak-mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 't is a gentle luxury to weep

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceivèd glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an indescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time- with a billowy main
A sun- a shadow of a magnitude.

TO HAYDON

(WITH THE PRECEDING SONNET)

HAYDON! forgive me that I cannot speak
Definitively of these mighty things;

Forgive me, that I have not Eagle's wings-
That what I want I know not where to seek :
And think that I would not be over meek,
In rolling out upfollow'd thunderings,
Even to the steep of Heliconian springs,
Were I of ample strength for such a freak-

Think too, that all those numbers should be thine;
Whose else? In this who touch thy vesture's

hem?

For when men star'd at what was most divine
With browless idiotism - o'erwise phlegm —

Thou hadst beheld the Hesperean shine

Of their star in the East, and gone to worship them.

TO LEIGH HUNT, ESQ.

[A DEDICATION]

GLORY and loveliness have pass'd away;
For if we wander out in early morn,
No wreathed incense do we see upborne
Into the east, to meet the smiling day :
No crowd of nymphs soft-voic'd and young, and

gay,

In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,
Roses, and pinks, and violets, to adorn
The shrine of Flora in her early May.
But there are left delights as high as these,
And I shall ever bless my destiny,
That in a time, when under pleasant trees
Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,

A leafy luxury, seeing I could please
With these poor offerings, a man like thee.

ON THE SEA

It keeps eternal whisperings around

Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound. Often 't is in such gentle temper found,

That scarcely will the very smallest shell Be mov'd for days from where it sometime fell, When last the winds of Heaven were unbound. O ye! who have your eyeballs vex'd and tir'd, Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;

O ye! whose ears are dinn'd with uproar rude, Or fed too much with cloying melody, ·

Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth, and brood Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quired!