THE BROOK

I COME from haunts of coot and hern,

I make a sudden sally,

And sparkle out among the fern,

To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.

Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

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 chatter, chatter, as I flow

To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.

I wind about, and in and out,
With here 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,

And draw them all along, and flow
To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

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 slip, 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

LOCKSLEY HALL

COMRADES, leave me here a little, while as

yet 'tis early morn,

Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle horn.

'Tis the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,

Dreary gleams about the moorland, flying over Locksley Hall:

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,

And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cata

racts.

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,

Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the

west.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade,

Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime

With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;

When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed;

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,

Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.

In the spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast;

In the spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;

In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove;

In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young,

And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.