Beauties of Tennyson

LADY CLARA VERE DE VERE.
PORTER & COATES, PHILADELPHIA. Copyright, 1885, By Porter & Coates.
I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley.
By thirty hills I hurry down, Or slip between the ridges, By twenty thorps, a little town, And half a hundred bridges.
I chatter over stony ways, In little sharps and trebles, I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles.
With many a curve my banks I fret By many a field and fallow, And many a fairy foreland set With willow-weed and mallow.
And here and there a foamy lake Upon me, as I travel With many a silvery waterbreak Above the golden gravel,
And draw them all along, and flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.
I CHATTER OVER STONY WAYS, IN LITTLE SHARPS AND TREBLES.
See what a lovely shell, Small and pure as a pearl, Lying close to my foot, Frail, but a work divine, Made so fairily well With delicate spire and whorl, How exquisitely minute, A miracle of design!
What is it? a learned man Could give it a clumsy name. Let him name it who can, The beauty would be the same.
The tiny cell is forlorn, Void of the little living will That made it stir on the shore. Did he stand at the diamond door Of his house in a rainbow frill? Did he push, when he was uncurl'd, A golden foot or a fairy horn Thro' his dim water-world.