With hasty footsteps brush the dews away
On the high brow of yonder hanging lawn.
After this stanza in the same manuscript there was the following:—
Him have we seen the greenwood side along,
While o’er the heath we hied, our labour’s done,
Oft as the woodlark pip’d her farewell song,
With wistful eyes pursue the setting sun.
“I rather wonder (says Mr. Mason) that he rejected this stanza, as it completes the account of his whole day; whereas, this Evening scene being omitted, we have only his Morning walk, and his Noontide repose.”
29. Before the Epitaph, Mr. Gray originally inserted a very beautiful stanza, which was printed in some of the first editions, but afterwards omitted, because he thought that it was too long a parenthesis in this place. The lines however are, in themselves, exquisitely fine, and demand preservation.
There scatter’d oft, the earliest of the Year,