Whereupon a child began
With spirit running up to man
As by angels' shining ladder,
(May he find no cloud above!)
Seeming he had ne'er been sadder
All his days than now,
Sitting in the chestnut grove,
With that joyous overflow
Of smiling from his mouth o'er brow
And cheek and chin, as if the breeze
Leaning tricksy from the trees
To part his golden hairs, had blown
Into an hundred smiles that one.
III.
"O rare, rare Earth!" he saith,
"I will praise thee presently;
Not to-day; I have no breath:
I have hunted squirrels three—
Two ran down in the furzy hollow
Where I could not see nor follow,
One sits at the top of the filbert-tree,
With a yellow nut and a mock at me:
Presently it shall be done!
When I see which way these two have run,
When the mocking one at the filbert-top
Shall leap a-down and beside me stop,
Then, rare Earth, rare Earth,
Will I pause, having known thy worth,
To say all good of thee!"
IV.
Next a lover,—with a dream
'Neath his waking eyelids hidden,
And a frequent sigh unbidden,
And an idlesse all the day
Beside a wandering stream,
And a silence that is made
Of a word he dares not say,—
Shakes slow his pensive head:
"Earth, Earth!" saith he,
"If spirits, like thy roses, grew
On one stalk, and winds austere
Could but only blow them near,
To share each other's dew;—
If, when summer rains agree
To beautify thy hills, I knew
Looking off them I might see
Some one very beauteous too,—
Then Earth," saith he,
"I would praise ... nay, nay—not thee!"
V.
Will the pedant name her next?
Crabbèd with a crabbèd text
Sits he in his study nook,
With his elbow on a book,
And with stately crossèd knees,
And a wrinkle deeply thrid
Through his lowering brow,
Caused by making proofs enow
That Plato in "Parmenides"
Meant the same Spinoza did,—
Or, that an hundred of the groping
Like himself, had made one Homer,
Homeros being a misnomer
What hath he to do with praise
Of Earth or aught? Whene'er the sloping
Sunbeams through his window daze
His eyes off from the learned phrase,
Straightway he draws close the curtain.
May abstraction keep him dumb!
Were his lips to ope, 't is certain
"Derivatum est" would come.
VI.
Then a mourner moveth pale
In a silence full of wail,
Raising not his sunken head
Because he wandered last that way
With that one beneath the clay:
Weeping not, because that one,
The only one who would have said
"Cease to weep, beloved!" has gone
Whence returneth comfort none.
The silence breaketh suddenly,—
"Earth, I praise thee!" crieth he,
"Thou hast a grave for also me."
VII.