While sunburnt hills their swarthy looks conceal,

And swelling haycocks thicken up the vale:

When the loos’d horse now, as his pasture leads,

Comes slowly grazing thro’ th’ adjoining meads,

Whose stealing pace, and lengthen’d shade we fear,

Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear:

When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food,

And unmolested kine rechew the cud;

When curlews cry beneath the village walls,

And to her straggling brood the partridge calls;