Classic Poem

O Charnwood, be thou called the choicest of thy kind,
The like in any place, what flood hath happed to find?
No tract in all this isle, the proudest let her be,
Can show a sylvan nymph for beauty like to thee:
The satyrs and the fauns, by Dian set to keep,
Rough hills, and forest holts, were sadly seen to weep,
When thy high-palmed harts, the sport of bows and hounds,
By gripple borderers' hands, were banished thy grounds.
The dryads that were wont thy lawns to rove,
To trip from wood to wood, and scud from grove to grove,
On Sharpley that were seen, and Cademan's aged rocks,
Against the rising sun, to braid their silver locks,
And with the harmless elves, on heathy Bardon's height,
By Cynthia's colder beams to play them night by night,
Exiled their sweet abode, to poor bare commons fled,
They with the oaks that lived, now with the oaks are dead.
Who will describe to life a forest, let him take
Thy surface to himself, nor shall he need to make
Another form at all, where oft in thee is found
Fine sharp but easy hills, which reverently are crowned
With aged antique rocks, to which the goats and sheep
(To him that stands remote) do softly seem to creep;
To gnaw the little shrubs, on their steep sides that grow;
Upon whose other part, on some descending brow,
Huge stones are hanging out, as though they down would drop,
Where under-growing oaks on their old shoulders prop
The others' hoary heads, which still seem to decline,
And in a dimble near (even as a place divine,
For contemplation fit) an ivy-sealed bower,
As Nature had therein ordained some sylvan power.