You slip and shine by boughs that bend to kiss you, You dream by curvèd banks of shimmering green; And where you swerve the alien meadows miss you, But happy are the banks you glide between.
You drift, a solace to the great woods under, Wimpling wide in many a watery moon; And when you sing, the hours, in soft-eyed wonder, Lean, finger on lip, entrancèd by your tune.
Out by dim, hazy shores, in reedy shallows, The drowsy cattle sun them in the heat; And, far from woody slopes and ragged fallows, A lazy wind goes loitering in the wheat.
You fill the summer with your magic chanting Your sleepy music out by field and fell; And spirits elusive in your bosom haunting, Sleep like the genie in the Arabian well.
In low green capes, by country ways descending, Where your tides wind by many a braided shore, The great cool elms, the heaven and water blending, Mirror their ghosts within thy shimmering floor.
By pebbly shoals whereon your tides are driven, In silvery surge and far-heard slumb’rous song, Your sleeping shores and the white hosts of heaven Hearken your tender droppings all night long.
Where out along the dusk, all white-mist laden, You cradle deep in wells of azure light,— Like to the virgin dreams of some sweet maiden,— In your glad breast the million stars of night.
The great, hot city calls with its loud clamour, Unrecked, unheeded here at night or noon; Faint, far-away breaks in its baleful glamour ’Mid wildernesses ’neath the sun and moon;
Across your silver bars whereby you glisten, Oblivious of the throe of earth’s wild mart, You leap and sing, and then you lie and listen, As if to hear the throbbing of your heart.
O happy, happy stream, drift softly, slowly, Through sunlit hours in musical, sweet ways, Thine are the haunts all unprofaned and holy, Far from earth’s life and all its maddened maze.