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
Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise
very few to love:

And

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

-Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

IX.

I TRAVELLED among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;

Nor, England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.

1799.

17

'Tis past, that melancholy dream!
Nor will I quit thy shore

A second time; for still I seem
To love thee more and more.

Among thy mountains did I feel

The joy of my desire;

And she I cherished turned her wheel
Beside an English fire.

Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed
The bowers where Lucy played;

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
To haughty Geraldine.

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
Is flowing in the breeze.

Then, crouch no more on suppliant knee,
But scorn with scorn outbrave;

A Briton, even in love, should be
A subject, not a slave!

[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;
And, grieved for their brief date, confess that ours,
Measured by what we are and ought to be,
Measured by all that, trembling, we foresee,
Is not so long!

If human Life do pass away,

Perishing yet more swiftly than the flower,
If we are creatures of a winter's day ;

What space hath Virgin's beauty to disclose
Her sweets, and triumph o'er the breathing rose?
Not even an hour!

The deepest grove whose foliage hid
The happiest lovers Arcady might boast,
Could not the entrance of this thought forbid :
O be thou wise as they, soul-gifted Maid!
Nor rate too high what must so quickly fade,
So soon be lost.

Then shall love teach some virtuous Youth
To draw, out of the object of his eyes,'
The while on thee they gaze in simple truth,
Hues more exalted, ' a refinèd Form,'

That dreads not age, nor suffers from the worm,
And never dies.

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;
The heaviest storms not longest last;
Heaven grants even to the guiltiest mind
An amnesty for what is past;

When will my sentence be reversed ?
I only pray to know the worst;
And wish as if my heart would burst.

O weary struggle! silent years
Tell seemingly no doubtful tale;
And yet they leave it short, and fears
And hopes are strong and will prevail.
My calmest faith escapes not pain;
And, feeling that the hope is vain,
I think that he will come again.

1804.

XIII.

'Tis said, that some have died for love:
And here and there a church-yard grave is found
In the cold north's unhallowed ground,

Because the wretched man himself had slain,
His love was such a grievous pain.

And there is one whom I five years have known;
He dwells alone

Upon Helvellyn's side:

He loved the pretty Barbara died;