With bye and bye a brook to cross Oer which a little arch is thrown: No brook is here, I feel the loss From home and friends and all alone. --The stone pit with its shelvy sides Seemed hanging rocks in my esteem; I miss the prospect far and wide From Langley Bush, and so I seem
Alone and in a stranger scene, Far, far from spots my heart esteems, The closen with their ancient green, Heaths, woods, and pastures, sunny streams. The hawthorns here were hung with may, But still they seem in deader green, The sun een seems to lose its way Nor knows the quarter it is in.
I dwell in trifles like a child, I feel as ill becomes a man, And still my thoughts like weedlings wild Grow up to blossom where they can. They turn to places known so long I feel that joy was dwelling there, So home-fed pleasure fills the song That has no present joys to hear.
I read in books for happiness, But books are like the sea to joy, They change--as well give age the glass To hunt its visage when a boy. For books they follow fashions new And throw all old esteems away, In crowded streets flowers never grew, But many there hath died away.
Some sing the pomps of chivalry As legends of the ancient time, Where gold and pearls and mystery Are shadows painted for sublime; But passions of sublimity Belong to plain and simpler things, And David underneath a tree Sought when a shepherd Salem's springs,
Where moss did into cushions spring, Forming a seat of velvet hue, A small unnoticed trifling thing To all but heaven's hailing dew. And David's crown hath passed away, Yet poesy breathes his shepherd-skill, His palace lost--and to this day The little moss is blossoming still.
Strange scenes mere shadows are to me, Vague impersonifying things; I love with my old haunts to be By quiet woods and gravel springs, Where little pebbles wear as smooth As hermits' beads by gentle floods, Whose noises do my spirits soothe And warm them into singing moods.
Here every tree is strange to me, All foreign things where eer I go, There's none where boyhood made a swee Or clambered up to rob a crow. No hollow tree or woodland bower Well known when joy was beating high, Where beauty ran to shun a shower And love took pains to keep her dry,