Thou through the fields and through the woods

dost stray,

Roaming the country-side, a truant boy,

Nursing thy project in unclouded joy, And every doubt long blown by time away.

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,

With its sick hurry, its divided aims,

Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife
Fly hence, our contact fear!

Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!
Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern

From her false friend's approach in Hades

turn,

Wave us away, and keep thy solitude!

Still nursing the unconquerable hope,

Still clutching the inviolable shade,

With a free, onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silver'd branches of the glade--
Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,
On some mild pastoral slope

Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales
Freshen thy flowers as in former years
With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,
From the dark dingles, to the nightingales!

But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!
For strong the infection of our mental strife,
Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for

rest;

And we should win thee from thy own fair life,

Like us distracted, and like us unblest.

Soon, soon thy cheer would die,

Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfix'd thy powers, And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made; And then thy glad perennial youth would

fade,

Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.

Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!
-As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow

Lifting the cool-hair'd creepers stealthily,
The fringes of a southward-facing brow
Among the Ægæan isles;

And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,

Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green, bursting figs, and tunnies steep'd in

brine

And knew the intruders on his ancient home,

The young light-hearted masters of the waves-
And snatch'd his rudder, and shook out more sail;
And day and night held on indignantly
O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale,
Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,

To where the Atlantic raves

Outside the western straits; and unbent sails

There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets

of foam,

Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;

And on the beach undid his corded bales.

THYRSIS.5

A MONODY, to commemorate the author's friend, ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH, who died at Florence, 1861.

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 daysThyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm, Past the high 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 Gipsy-Scholar, 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.