All who see us love us,

We befit all places:

Unto sorrow we give smiles,-and unto graces,

races

Mark our ways, how noiseless
All, and sweetly voiceless,

Though the March-winds pipe, to make our passage clear;

Not a whisper tells

Where our small seed dwells,

Nor is known the moment green, when our tips

appear.

We thread the earth in silence,

In silence build our bowers,

And leaf by leaf in silence show, till we laugh a-top, sweet flowers.

The dear lumpish baby,

Humming with the May-bee,

Hails us with his bright star, stumbling through the grass;

The honey-dropping moon,

On a night in June,

Kisses our pale pathway leaves, that felt the

bridegroom pass.

Age, the wither'd clinger,

On us mutely gazes,

And wraps the thought of his last bed in his

childhood's daisies.

See (and scorn all duller

Taste) how heav'n loves colour;

How great Nature, clearly, joys in red and green;

What sweet thoughts she thinks

Of violets and pinks,

And a thousand flushing hues, made solely to be

seen:

See her whitest lilies

Chill the silver showers,

And what a red mouth is her rose, the woman of her flowers.

Uselessness divinest,

Of a use the finest,

Painteth us, the teachers of the end of use;

Travellers, weary eyed,

Bless us, far and wide;

Unto sick and prison'd thoughts we give sudden

truce:

Not a poor town window

Loves its sickliest planting,

But its wall speaks loftier truth than Babylonian

vaunting.

Sagest yet the uses,

Mix'd with our sweet juices,

Whether man or May-fly, profit of the balm,

As fair fingers heal'd

Knights from the olden field

We hold cups of mightiest force to give the wild

est calm.

Ev'n the terror, poison,

Hath its plea for blooming;

Life it gives to reverent lips, though death to the presuming.

And oh! our sweet soul-taker,
That thief, the honey maker,

What a house hath he, by the thymy glen!
In his talking rooms

How the feasting fumes,

Till the gold cups overflow to the mouths of men' The butterflies come aping

Those fine thieves of ours,

And flutter round our rifled tops, like tickled flowers with flowers.

See those tops, how beauteous!

What fair service duteous

Round some idol waits, as on their lord the Nine Elfin court 'twould seem;

And taught, perchance, that dream Which the old Greek mountain dreamt, upon nights divine.

To expound such wonder

Human speech avails not;

Yet there dies no poorest weed, that such a glory exhales not.

Think of all these treasures

Matchless works and pleasures

Every one a marvel, more than thought can say Then think in what bright showers

We thicken fields and bowers,

And with what heaps of sweetness half stifle wanton May:

Think of the mossy forests

By the bee-birds haunted,

And all those Amazonian plains, lone lying as enchanted.

Trees themselves are ours;
Fruits are born of flowers;

Peach, and roughest nut, were blossoms in the

spring:

The lusty bee knows well

The news, and comes pell-mell,

And dances in the gloomy thicks with darksome

antheming.

Beneath the very burthen

Of planet-pressing ocean,

We wash our smiling cheeks in peace,

for meek devotion.

Tears of Phoebus,-missings

Of Cytherea's kissings,

,-a thought

Have in us been found, and wise men find them

still;

Drooping grace unfurls

Still Hyacinthus' curls,

And Narcissus loves himself in the selfish till: Thy red lip, Adonis,

Still is wet with morning;

And the step, that bled for thee, the rosy brier adorning,

O! true things are fables,

Fit for sagest tables,

And the flowers are true things, yet no fables

they;

Fables were not more

Bright, nor loved of yore,

Yet they grew not, like the flowers, by every old

pathway:

Grossest hand can test us;

Fools may prize us never:

Yet we rise, and rise, and rise,-marvels sweet for ever.

Who shall say, that flowers

Dress not heaven's own bowers?

Who its love, without us, can fancy-or sweet

floor?

Who shall even dare

To say, we sprang not there,

And came not down that Love might bring one piece of heaven the more?