"With many a curve my banks I fret,
By many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland set
With willow-weed and mallow.
* * * *
"I wind about, and in and out,
With many a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling.
"And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me as I travel,
With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel.
* * * *
"I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel covers;
I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.
"I slide, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeam dance
Against my sandy shallows.
"I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;
"And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever."
The Brook.
In the course of the evening, the poet would retire to the "den" for a second "sacred half-hour" of unbroken silence, into which we need not follow him. Lastly, when slumber filled the house, and night hung black above the trees, he ascended to a platform on the leads of the house-top, to observe the march and majesty of the stars. Farringford, it has been said, "seemed so remote and still, and as though the jar of the outside world had never entered it." But in the throbbing starlight, the sea purring in the distance, the seer on the roof communing with the mysterious skies above him, it was more than ever a House of Dream—a house whose roof touched heaven. Here and thus were thrilling nocturnes imagined.
"Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
* * * *
"Now lies the Earth all Danäe to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
"Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.
"Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me."
The Princess.
And so we leave Alfred Tennyson, at the end of his day, gazing "forward to the starry track glimmering up the height beyond," alone with the Creator.