Too solemn for the comic touches in them,
Like our wild Princess with as wise a dream
As some of theirs - God bless the narrow seas!
I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad."
"Have patience," I replied, "ourselves are full Of social wrong; and maybe wildest dreams Are but the needful preludes of the truth: For me, the genial day, the happy crowd, The sport half-science, fill me with a faith. This fine old world of ours is but a child Yet in the go-cart. Patience! Give it time To learn its limbs there is a hand that guides."
In such discourse we gained the garden rail
And there we saw Sir Walter where he s'ood
Before a tower of crimson holly-oaks,
Among six boys, head under head, and looke、
No little lily-handed Baronet he,
A great broad-shouldered genial Englishnas
A lord of fat prize-oxen and of sheep,
A raiser of huge melons and of pine,
A patron of some thirty charities,
A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,
A quarter sessions chairman, abler none
Fair-haired and redder than a windy morn;
Now shaking hands with him, now him, of those
That stood the nearest- now addressed to speech -
Who spoke few words and pithy, such as closed
Welcome, farewell, and welcome for the year
To follow a shout rose again, and made
The long line of the approaching rookery swerve
From the elms, and shook the branches of the deer
From slope to slope through distant ferns, and rang
Beyond the bourn of sunset; O, a shout
More joyful than the city-roar that hails
Premier or king! Why should not these great Sirs
Give up their parks some dozen times a year
To let the people breathe? So thrice they cried,
I likewise, and in groups they streamed away.
But we went back to the Abbey, and sat on,
So much the gathering darkness charmed: we sat
But spoke not, rapt in nameless reverie,
the future man: the walls
Blackened about us, bats wheeled, and owls whooped
And gradually the powers of the night,
That range above the region of the wind,
Deepening the courts of twilight broke them up
Through all the silent spaces of the worlds,
Beyond all thought into the Heaven of Heavens.
Last little Lilia, rising quietly,
Disrobed the glimmering statue of Sir Ralph
From those rich silks, and home well pleased we went.
I HATE the dreadful hollow behind the little
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood
The red-ribb'd ledges drip with a silent horror of
And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her,' answers
|