cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,
Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;
And on the beach undid his
corded bales.
HOW changed is here each spot man makes or fills!
In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the
same;
The village-street its haunted mansion lacks,
And from the sign is gone Sibylla’s name,
And from
the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks;
Are ye too changed, ye hills?
See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men
To-
night from Oxford up your pathway strays!
Here came I often, often, in old days;
Thyrsis and I; we still had
Thyrsis then.
Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm,
Up past the wood, to where the elm-tree
crowns
The hill behind whose ridge the sunset flames?
The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs,
The
Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames?—
This winter-eve is warm,
Humid the air; leafless, yet
soft as spring,
The tender purple spray on copse and briers;
And that sweet City with her dreaming spires,
She
needs not June for beauty’s heightening,
Lovely all times she lies, lovely to-night!
Only, methinks, some loss of habit’s power
Befalls me
wandering through this upland dim;
Once pass’d I blindfold here, at any hour,
Now seldom come I, since I
came with him.
That single elm-tree bright
Against the west—I miss it! is it gone?
We prized it dearly; while
it stood, we said,
Our friend, the Scholar-Gipsy, was not dead;
While the tree lived, he in these fields lived
on.
Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here!
But once I knew each field, each flower, each
stick;
And with the country-folk acquaintance made
By barn in threshing-time, by new-built rick.
Here, too,
our shepherd-pipes we first assay’d.
Ah me! this many a year
My pipe is lost, my shepherd’s-holiday!
Needs
must I lose them, needs with heavy heart
Into the world and wave of men depart,
But Thyrsis of his own
will went away.
It irk’d him to be here, he could not rest.
He loved each simple joy the country yields,
He loved
his mates; but yet he could not keep,
For that a shadow lower’d on the fields,
Here with the shepherds
and the silly sheep.
Some life of men unblest
He knew, which made him droop, and fill’d his head.
He
went; his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground;
He could not wait
their passing, he is dead!
So, some tempestuous morn in early June,
When the year’s primal burst of bloom is o’er,
Before
the roses and the longest day—
When garden-walks, and all the grassy floor,
With blossoms, red and
white, of fallen May,
And chestnut-flowers are strewn—
So have I heard the cuckoo’s parting cry,
From the
wet field, through the vext garden-trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
The bloom is
gone, and with the bloom go I.
Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?
Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come
on,
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,
Sweet-
William with its homely cottage-smell,
And stocks in fragrant blow;
Roses that down the alleys shine afar,
And
open, jasmine-muffled lattices,
And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,
And the full moon, and the
white evening-star.
He hearkens not! light comer, he is flown!
What matters it? next year he will return,
And we
shall have him in the sweet spring-days,
With whitening hedges, and uncrumpling fern,
And blue-bells
trembling by the forest-ways,
And scent of hay new-mown.
But Thyrsis never more we swains shall see!
See
him come back, and cut a smoother reed,
And blow a strain the world at last shall heed—
For Time, not
Corydon, hath conquer’d thee.
Alack, for Corydon no rival now!—
But when Sicilian shepherds lost a mate,
Some good survivor
with his flute would go,
Piping a ditty sad for Bion’s fate,
And cross the unpermitted ferry’s flow,
And relax
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