16
Where all the rolling hillsides soft combine
On amphitheatres spread to open clefts,
There is hypnotic soothing in the line
Merging and melting in soft grassy wefts.
The brave bright cups that grail the open mead
Pour flower-libation on some tawny stretch;
And lily grails snowy processions lead,
And sweet fern banners guide the banded vetch.
17
And what does Man? He takes a wealth like this
And breaks it on the wheel of his machine.
Tarring it with the foul metropolis.
Caging its wildness and its free desmesne;
Little they know they build but to destroy,
Little they guess what gift they take away;
The heritage of every girl and boy
To roam these stretches of the heath and bay.
18
The exquisite clear candors of these moors
Seem to their eyes as sad as empty doom;
Their trivial gaze turns from the barren shores
And blurs along the ragged hills of broom.
They pant, they say, for human nature’s food,
Yes—but they have not walked with happy Solitude!
19
Grey rain slow drifting over summer hill,
Over corn fields and through the meadow rifts,
With falling curtain calms the water till
Under its scorcery the landscape drifts;
The loomed mirage goes sailing to the sky,
The deep lines darken on the distant moors,
A placid silence lifts in mystery,
And headlands purple down to light-struck shores.
20
Then open farm a sterner grandeur takes,
The church dome glitters on fantastic North,
The wild ducks’ chain expansion suddenly breaks,
And many a wedge-shaped line of geese fares forth;
Fateful the moorland looks and tawny drear,
Then the clouds lift and all the Island’s clear.