So oft the doing of God's will
Our foolish wills undoeth! And yet what idle dream breaks ill, Which morning light subdueth; And who would murmur or misdoubt, When God's great sunrise finds him out?
I MIND me in the days departed,
How often underneath the sun
With childish bounds I used to run
To a garden long deserted.
The beds and walks were vanished quite;
And wheresoe'er had struck the spade,
The greenest grasses Nature laid,
To sanctify her right.
I called the place my wilderness,
For no one entered there but I.
The sheep looked in, the grass to espy,
And passed it ne'ertheless.
The trees were interwoven wild,
And spread their boughs enough about
To keep both sheep and shepherd out,
But not a happy child.
Adventurous joy it was for me!
I crept beneath the boughs, and found
A circle smooth of mossy ground
Beneath a poplar tree.
Old garden rose-trees hedged it in, Bedropt with roses waxen-white Well satisfied with dew and light And careless to be seen.
Long years ago it might befall,
When all the garden flowers were trim,
The grave old gardener prided him
On these the most of all.
Some Lady, stately overmuch,
Here moving with a silken noise,
Has blushed beside them at the voice
That likened her to such.
The dustman's cry down the areagrate :
The young maid's jest, and the old wife's scold,
The haggling talk of the boys at a stall; The fight in the street which is backed for gold,
The plea of the lawyers in Westminster Hall:
The drop on the stone of the blind man's staff
As he trades in his own grief's sacred
The brothel shriek and the Newgate laugh,
The hum upon 'Change, and the organ's grinding,
The grinder's face being nevertheless
Dry and vacant of even woe,
While the children's hearts are leaping
At the merry music's winding!
The black-plumed funeral's creeping
Long and slow (and yet they will go As fast as Life though it hurry and strain !)
Creeping the populous houses through And nodding their plumes at either side,
At many a house where an infant, new To the sunshiny world, has just struggled and cried:
At many a house, where sitteth a bride
Trying the morrow's coronals
With a scarlet blush to-day.
Slowly creep the funerals,
As none should hear the noise and say, The living, the living, must go away To multiply the dead!
Hark! an upward shout is sent! In grave strong joy from tower to steeple The bells ring out
The trumpets sound, the people shout, The young Queen goes to her parlia
She turneth round her large blue eyes More bright with childish memories Than royal hopes, upon the people : On either side she bows her head
Lowly, with a Queenly grace, And smile most trusting-innocent, As if she smiled upon her mother! The thousands press before each other
O blue sky! it mindeth me
Of places where I used to see
Its vast unbroken circle thrown
From the far pale-peakèd hill
Out to the last verge of ocean-
As by God's arm it were done
Then for the first time, with the emo-
tion
Of that first impulse on it still.
Oh, we spirits fly at will,
Faster than the winged steed
Whereof in old book we read,
With the sunlight foaming back
From his flanks to a misty wrack,
And his nostril reddening proud
As he breasteth the steep thunder-
cloud!
Smoother than Sabrina's chair
Gliding up from wave to air,
Which she smileth debonair
Yet holy, coldly and yet brightly,
Like her own mooned waters nightly,.
Through her dripping hair.
Very fast and smooth we fly,
Spirits, though the flesh be by.
All looks feed not from the eye,
Nor all hearings from the ear;
We can hearken and espy
Without either; we can journey,
Bold and gay as knight to tourney;
And though we wear no visor down To cark our countenance, the foe Shall never chafe us as we go.
I am gone from peopled town!
It passeth its street-thunder round
My body which yet hears no sound:
For now another sound, another
Vision, my soul's senses have.
O'er a hundred valleys deep,
Where the hills' green shadows sleep,
Scarce known, because the valley trees
Cross those upland images-
O'er a hundred hills, each other
Watching to the western wave-
I have travelled,-I have found
The silent, lone, remembered ground.
I have found a grassy niche
Hollowed in a seaside hill,
As if the ocean-grandeur which
Is aspectable from the place
Had struck the hill as with a mace
Sudden and cleaving. You might fill
That little nook with the little cloud
Which sometimes lieth by the moon
To beautify a night of June:
A cavelike nook, which, opening all
To the wide sea, is disallowed
From its own earth's sweet pastoral;
Cavelike, but roofless overhead,
And made of verdant banks instead
Of any rocks, with flowerets spread,
Instead of spar and stalactite
Such pretty flowers on such green sward,
You think the sea they look toward
Doth serve them for another sky
As warm and blue as that on high.
And in this hollow is a seat,
And when you shall have crept to it,
Slipping down the banks too steep
To be o'erbrowzed by the sheep,
Do not think-though at your feet
The cliff's disrupt-you shall behold
The line where earth and ocean meet;
You sit too much above to view
The solemn confluence of the two:
You can hear them as they greet;
You can hear that evermore
Distance-softened noise, more old
Than Nereid's singing,-the tide spent
Joining soft issues with the shore
In harmony of discontent,-
And when you hearken to the grave
Lamenting of the underwave,
You must believe in earth's communion,
Albeit witness not the union.
you
Except the sound, the place is full
Of silences, which when you cull
By any word, it thrills you so
That presently you let them grow
To meditation's fullest length
Across your soul with a soul's strength:
And as they touch your soul, they
borrow
Both of its grandeur and its sorrow,
That deathly colour which the clay
Leaves on its deathlessness alway.
Alway! alway! must this be?
Rapid Soul from city gone,
Dost thou carry inwardly
What doth make the city's moan?
Must this deep sigh of thine own
Haunt thee with humanity?
Green-visioned banks that are too steep
To be o'erbrowzed by the sheep,
May all sad thoughts adown you creep
Without a shepherd ?-Mighty sea,
Can we dwarf thy magnitude,
And fit it to our straitest mood?-
O fair, fair Nature! are we thus
Impotent and querulous
Among thy workings glorious,
Wealth and sanctities,-that still
Leave us vacant and defiled,
And wailing like a soft-kissed child,
Kissed soft against his will?
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