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According as his humours lead,
A meaning suited to his mind.
And liberal applications lie

In Art like Nature, dearest friend; So 'twere to cramp its use, if I

Should hook it to some useful end.

L'ENVOI.

1.

You shake your head. A random string
Your finer female sense offends.
Well-were it not a pleasant thing
To fall asleep with all one's friends;
To pass with all our social ties

To silence from the paths of men;
And every hundred years to rise

And learn the world, and sleep again; To sleep thro' terms of mighty wars,

And wake on science grown to more, On secrets of the brain, the stars,

As wild as aught of fairy lore;
And all that else the years will show,

The Poet-forms of stronger hours,
The vast Republics that may grow,

The Federations and the Powers; Titanic forces taking birth

In divers seasons, divers climes; For we are Ancients of the earth, And in the morning of the times.

II.

So sleeping, so aroused from sleep

Thro' sunny decads new and strange, Or gay quinquenniads would we reap The flower and quintessence of change.

III.

Ah, yet would I — and would I might!

So much your eyes my fancy takeBe still the first to leap to light

That I might kiss those eyes awake! For, am I right, or am I wrong,

To choose your own you did not care; You'd have my moral from the song, And I will take my pleasure there: And, am I right or am I wrong,

My fancy, ranging thro' and thro', To search a meaning for the song, Perforce will still revert to you; Nor finds a closer truth than this

All-graceful head, so richly curl'd,

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'Tis said he had a tuneful tongue,

Such happy intonation, Wherever he sat down and sung He left a small plantation; Wherever in a lonely grove

He set up his forlorn pipes,
The gouty oak began to move,
And flounder into hornpipes.

The mountain stirr'd its bushy crown,
And, as tradition teaches,
Young ashes pirouetted down

Coquetting with young beeches;
And briony-vine and ivy-wreath
Ran forward to his rhyming,
And from the valleys underneath
Came little copses climbing.

The linden broke her ranks and rent
The woodbine wreaths that bind her,
And down the middle, buzz! she went
With all her bees behind her:
The poplars, in long order due,
With cypress promenaded,

The shock-head willows two and two
By rivers gallopaded.

Came wet-shod alder from the wave,
Came yews, a dismal coterie;
Each pluck'd his one foot from the
grave

Poussetting with a sloe-tree:

Old elms came breaking from the vine,
The vine stream'd out to follow,
And, sweating rosin, plump'd the pine
From many a cloudy hollow.

And wasn't it a sight to see,

When, ere his song was ended,
Like some great landslip, tree by tree,
The country-side descended;
And shepherds from the mountain-eaves
Look'd down, half-pleased, half-fright-
en'd,

As dash'd about the drunken leaves
The random sunshine lighten'd!

Oh, nature first was fresh to men,
And wanton without measure;
So youthful and so flexile then,
You moved her at your pleasure.
Twang out, my fiddle! shake the twigs!
And make her dance attendance;
Blow, flute, and stir the stiff-set sprigs,
And scirrhous roots and tendons.

'Tis vain! in such a brassy age

I could not move a thistle;
The very sparrows in the hedge
Scarce answer to my whistle;
Or at the most, when three-parts-sick
With strumming and with scraping,
A jackass heehaws from the rick,
The passive oxen gaping.

But what is that I hear? a sound
Like sleepy counsel pleading;
O Lord!-'tis in my neighbour's ground,
The modern Muses reading.

They read Botanic Treatises,

And Works on Gardening thro' there,
And Methods of transplanting trees
To look as if they grew there.

The wither'd Misses! how they prose
O'er books of travell'd seamen,
And show you slips of all that grows
From England to Van Diemen.
They read in arbours clipt and cut,

And alleys, faded places,
By squares of tropic summer shut
And warm'd in crystal cases.

But these, tho' fed with careful dirt, Are neither green nor sappy; Half-conscious of the garden-squirt, The spindlings look unhappy. Better to me the meanest weed

That blows upon its mountain, The vilest herb that runs to seed Beside its native fountain.

And I must work thro' months of toil,
And years of cultivation,
Upon my proper patch of soil

To grow my own plantation.
I'll take the showers as they fall,
I will not vex my bosom:
Enough if at the end of all
A little garden blossom.

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But o'er the dark a glory spreads,

And gilds the driving hail.

I leave the plain, I climb the height;
No branchy thicket shelter yields;
But blessed forms in whistling storms
Fly o'er waste fens and windy fields.

A maiden knight-to me is given
Such hope, I know not fear;

I yearn to breathe the airs of heaven
That often meet me here.

I muse on joy that will not cease,
Pure spaces clothed in living beams,
Pure lilies of eternal peace,

Whose odours haunt my dreams;
And, stricken by an angel's hand,

This mortal armour that I wear, This weight and size, this heart and eyes, Are touch'd, are turn'd to finest air.

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