So let her dream, even as beauty should!
Let the white plumes athwart her slumbers sway!
Why should I steep their swaling snow in blood,
Or bid her think of battle’s grim array?
Truth will too soon her blinding star display,
And like a fearful comet meet her eyes.
And yet how peaceful they pass on their way!
How grand the sight as up the hill they rise!—
I will not think of cities reddening in the skies.
How sweet those rural sounds float by the hill!
The grasshopper’s shrill chirp rings o’er the ground,
The jingling sheep-bells are but seldom still,
The clapping gate closes with hollow bound,
There’s music in the church-clock’s measured sound.
The ring-dove’s song, how breeze-like comes and goes,
Now here, now there, it seems to wander round:
The red cow’s voice along the upland flows;
His bass the brindled bull from the far meadow lows.
“Cuckoo! cuckoo!” ah! well I know thy note,
Those summer-sounds the backward years do bring,
Like Memory’s locked-up barque once more afloat:
They carry me away to life’s glad spring,
To home, with all its old boughs rustleìng.
’Tis a sweet sound! but now I feel not glad;
I miss the voices which were wont to sing,
When on the hills I roamed, a happy lad.
“Cuckoo!” it is the grave—not thee—that makes me sad.
Tell me, ye sages, whence these feelings rise,—
Sorrowful mornings on the darkened soul;
Glimpses of broken, bright, and stormy skies,
O’er which this earth—the heart—has no control?
Why does the sea of thought thus backward roll?
Memory’s the breeze that through the cordage raves,
And ever drives us on some home-ward shoal,
As if she loved the melancholy waves
That, murmuring shore-ward break, over a reef of graves.
Hark how the merry bells ring o’er the vale,
Now near, remote, or lost, just as it blows.
The red cock sends his voice upon the gale,
From the thatched grange his answering rival crows:
The milkmaid o’er the dew-bathed meadow goes,
Her tucked-up kirtle ever holding tight;
And now her song rings through the green hedge-rows,
Her milk-kit hoops glitter like silver bright:—
I hear her lover singing somewhere out of sight.
Where soars that spire, our rude forefathers prayed;
Thither they came, from many a thick-leaved dell
Year after year, and o’er those footpaths strayed,
When summoned by the sounding Sabbath bell,—
For in those walls they deemed that God did dwell.
And still they sleep within that bell’s deep sound.
Yon Spire doth here of no distinction tell;
O’er rich and poor, marble, and earthly mound,
The Monument of all,—it marks one common ground.
See yonder smoke, before it curls to Heaven
Mingles its blue amid the elm-trees tall;
Shrinking like one who fears to be forgiven,
So on the earth again doth prostrate fall,
And ’mid the bending green each sin recall.
Now from their beds the cottage-children rise,
Roused by some early playmate’s noisy bawl;
And, on the door-step standing, rub their eyes,
Stretching their little arms, and gaping at the skies.
The leaves “drop, drop,” and dot the crisped stream
So quick, each circle wears the first away;
Far out the tufted bulrush seems to dream,
And to the ripple nods its head alway;
The water-flags with one another play,
Bowing to every breeze that blows between,
While purple dragon-flies their wings display:
The restless swallow’s arrowy flight is seen,
Dimpling the sunny wave, then lost amid the green.
The boy who last night passed that darksome lane,
Trembling at every sound, and pale with fear;
Who shook when the long leaves talked to the rain,
And tried to sing, his sinking heart to cheer;
Hears now no brook wail ghost-like on his ear,
No dead-man’s groan in the black-beetle’s wing:
But where the deep-dyed butterflies appear,
And on the flowers like folded pea-blooms swing,
With napless hat in hand he after them doth spring.
In the far sky the distant landscape melts,
Like pilèd clouds tinged with a darker hue;
Even the wood which yon high upland belts
Looks like a range of clouds, of deeper blue.
One withered tree bursts only on the view,—
A bald bare oak, which on the summit grows,
(And looks as if from out the sky it grew:)
That tree has borne a thousand wintry snows,
And seen unnumbered mornings gild its gnarled boughs.