Expectatio.
XXII.
A sweet exhaustion seems to hold
In spells of calm the shrouded eve:
The gorse itself a beamless gold
Puts forth:—yet nothing seems to grieve.
The dewy chaplets hang on air;
The willowy fields are silver-grey;
Sad odours wander here and there;—
And yet we feel that it is May.
Relaxed, and with a broken flow,
From dripping bowers low carols swell
In mellower, glassier tones, as though
They mounted through a bubbling well.
The crimson orchis scarce sustains
Upon its drenched and drooping spire
The burden of the warm soft rains;
The purple hills grow nigh and nigher.
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Nature, suspending lovely toils,
On expectations lovelier broods,
Listening, with lifted hand, while coils
The flooded rivulet through the woods.
She sees, drawn out in vision clear,
A world with summer radiance drest,
And all the glories of that year
Which sleeps within her virgin breast.
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XXIII.
Still on the gracious work proceeds;—
The good, great tidings preached anew
Yearly to green enfranchised meads,
And fire-topped woodlands flushed with dew.
Yon cavern's mouth we scarce can see;
Yon rock in gathering bloom lies meshed;
And all the wood-anatomy
In thickening leaves is over-fleshed.
That hermit oak which frowned so long
Upon the spring with barren spleen,
Yields to the holy Siren's song,
And bends above her goblet green.
Young maples, late with gold embossed,—
Lucidities of sun-pierced limes,
No more surprise us—merged and lost
Like prelude notes in deepening chimes.
Disordered beauties and detached
Demand no more a separate place:
The abrupt, the startling, the unmatched,
Submit to graduated grace;
While upward from the ocean's marge
The year ascends with statelier tread
To where the sun his golden targe
Finds, setting, on yon mountain's head.