What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a Lover's head! "O mercy!" to myself I cried, "If Lucy should be dead!" VIII. SHE dwelt among the untrodden ways A Maid whom there were none to praise And A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! -Fair as a star, when only one She lived unknown, and few could know The difference to me! IX. I TRAVELLED among unknown men, Nor, England! did I know till then 1799. 17 'Tis past, that melancholy dream! A second time; for still I seem Among thy mountains did I feel The joy of my desire; And she I cherished turned her wheel Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed And thine too is the last green field That Lucy's eyes surveyed. [WRITTEN at Rydal Mount. Suggested by the condition of a friend.] ERE with cold beads of midnight dew Had mingled tears of thine, I grieved, fond Youth! that thou shouldst sue Immoveable by generous sighs, She glories in a train Who drag, beneath our native skies, An oriental chain. Pine not like them with arms across, Forgetting in thy care How the fast-rooted trees can toss Their branches in mid air. The humblest rivulet will take Its own wild liberties; And, every day, the imprisoned lake Then, crouch no more on suppliant knee, A Briton, even in love, should be [WRITTEN at Rydal Mount. Prompted by the undue importance attached to personal beauty by some dear friends of mine.] Look at the fate of summer flowers, Which blow at daybreak, droop ere even-song; If human Life do pass away, Perishing yet more swiftly than the flower, What space hath Virgin's beauty to disclose The deepest grove whose foliage hid Then shall love teach some virtuous Youth That dreads not age, nor suffers from the worm, 1824. XII. THE FORSAKEN. [THIS was an overflow from the "Affliction of Margaret and was excluded as superfluous there, but preserved in the faint hope that it may turn to account by restoring a shy lover to some forsaken damsel. My poetry has been complained of as deficient in interests of this sort,-a charge which the piece beginning, "Lyre! though such power do in thy magic live,' will scarcely tend to obviate. The natural imagery of these verses was supplied by frequent, I might say intense, observation of the Rydal torrent. What an animating contrast is the ever-changing aspect of that, and indeed of every one of our mountain brooks, to the monotonous tone and unmitigated fury of such streams among the Alps as are fed all the summer long by glaciers and melting snows. A traveller observing the exquisite purity of the great rivers, such as the Rhine at Geneva, and the Reuss at Lucerne, when they issue out of their respective lakes, might fancy for a moment that some power in nature produced this beautiful change, with a view to make amends for those Alpine sullyings which the waters exhibit near their fountain heads; but, alas! how soon does that purity depart before the influx of tributary waters that have flowed through cultivated plains and the crowded abodes of men.] THE peace which others seek they find; When will my sentence be reversed ? O weary struggle! silent years 1804. XIII. 'Tis said, that some have died for love: Because the wretched man himself had slain, And there is one whom I five years have known; Upon Helvellyn's side: He loved the pretty Barbara died; |