Now hill to hill has
made the stride,
And distance waves the
without end:
Now in the breast a
door flings wide;
Our farthest smiles,
our next is friend.
And song of England’s
rush of flowers
Is this full breeze
with mellow stops,
That spins the lark
for shine, for showers;
He drinks his hurried
flight, and drops.
The stir in memory seem
these things,
Which out of moistened
turf and clay
Astrain for light push
patient rings,
Or leap to find the
waterway.
’Tis equal to
a wonder done,
Whatever simple lives
renew
Their tricks beneath
the father sun,
As though they caught
a broken clue;
So hard was earth an
eyewink back:
But now the common life
has come,
The blotting cloud a
dappled pack,
The grasses one vast
underhum.
A City clothed in snow
and soot,
With lamps for day in
ghostly rows,
Breaks to the scene
of hosts afoot,
The river that reflective
flows:
And there did fog down
crypts of street
Play spectre upon eye
and mouth:-
Their faces are a glass
to greet
This magic of the whirl
for South.
A burly joy each creature
swells
With sound of its own
hungry quest;
Earth has to fill her
empty wells,
And speed the service
of the nest;
The phantom of the snow-wreath
melt,
That haunts the farmer’s
look abroad,
Who sees what tomb a
white night built,
Where flocks now bleat
and sprouts the clod.
For iron Winter held
her firm;
Across her sky he laid
his hand;
And bird he starved,
he stiffened worm;
A sightless heaven,
a shaven land.
Her shivering Spring
feigned fast asleep,
The bitten buds dared
not unfold:
We raced on roads and
ice to keep
Thought of the girl
we love from cold.
But now the North wind
ceases,
The warm South-west
awakes,
The heavens are out
in fleeces,
And earth’s green
banner shakes.
The labourer
For a Heracles in his fighting ire there is never the glory that follows When ashen he lies and the poets arise to sing of the work he has done. But to vision alive under shallows of sight, lo, the Labourer’s crown is Apollo’s, While stands he yet in his grime and sweat—to wrestle for fruits of the Sun.
Can an enemy wither his cheer? Not you, ye fair yellow-flowering ladies, Who join with your lords to jar the chords of a bosom heroic, and clog. ’Tis the faltering friend, an inanimate land, may drag a great soul to their Hades, And plunge him far from a beam of star till he hears the deep bay of the Dog.
Apparition is then of a monster-task, in a policy carving new fashions: The winninger course than the rule of force, and the springs


