There came a bark that, blowing forward, bore
  King Arthur, like a modern gentleman
  Of stateliest port; and all the people cried,
  ‘Arthur is come again:  he cannot die.’ 75
  Then those that stood upon the hills behind
  Repeated—­’Come again, and thrice as fair;’
  And, further inland, voices echo’d—­’Come
  With all good things, and war shall be no more.’ 
  At this a hundred bells began to peal, 80
  That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed
  The clear church-bells ring in the Christmas-morn.

THE BROOK

  Here, by this brook, we parted; I to the East
  And he for Italy—­too late—­too late;
  One whom the strong sons of the world despise;
  For lucky rhymes to him were scrip and share,
  And mellow metres more than cent for cent; 5
  Nor could he understand how money breeds;
  Thought it a dead thing; yet himself could make
  The thing that is not as the thing that is. 
  O had he lived!  In our schoolbooks we say,
  Of those that held their heads above the crowd, 10
  They flourish’d then or then; but life in him
  Could scarce be said to flourish, only touch’d
  On such a time as goes before the leaf,
  When all the wood stands in a mist of green,
  And nothing perfect:  yet the brook he loved, 15
  For which, in branding summers of Bengal,
  Or ev’n the sweet half-English Neilgherry air
  I panted, seems; as I re-listen to it,
  Prattling the primrose fancies of the boy,
  To me that loved him; for ‘O brook,’ he says, 20
  ‘O babbling brook,’ says Edmund in his rhyme,
  ‘Whence come you?’ and the brook, why not? replies: 

      I come from haunts of coot and hern,
        I make a sudden sally,
      And sparkle out among the fern, 25
        To bicker down a valley.

      By thirty hills I hurry down,
        Or slip between the ridges,
      By twenty thorps, a little town,
        And half a hundred bridges. 30

      Till last by Philip’s farm I flow
        To join the brimming river,
      For men may come and men may go,
        But I go on for ever.

  ’Poor lad, he died at Florence, quite worn out, 35
  Travelling to Naples.  There is Darnley bridge,
  It has more ivy; there the river; and there
  Stands Philip’s farm where brook and river meet.

      I chatter over stony ways,
        In little sharps and trebles, 40
      I bubble into eddying bays,
        I babble on the pebbles.

      With many a curve my banks I fret
        By many a field and fallow,
      And many a fairy foreland set 45
        With willow-weed and mallow.