Environment, of house, of city centres, city quarters
Which I look upon and where I walk; years and years.

I have created you in the midst of joy and in the midst of sorrows;
With so many circumstances, with so many things.

And you have been made sensation, the whole of you, for me.

Mad Patsy said, he said to me,
That every morning he could see
An angel walking on the sky;
Across the sunny skies of morn
He threw great handfuls far and nigh
Of poppy seed among the corn;
And then, he said, the angels run
To see the poppies in the sun.

A poppy is a devil weed,
I said to him - he disagreed;
He said the devil had no hand
In spreading flowers tall and fair
Through corn and rye and meadow land,
by garth and barrow everywhere:
The devil has not any flower,
But only money in his power.

In the morning of life, when its cares are unknown,
And its pleasures in all their new lustre begin,
When we live in a bright-beaming world of our own,
And the light that surrounds us is all from within;
Oh 'tis not, believe me, in that happy time
We can love, as in hours of less transport we may; --
Of our smiles, of our hopes, 'tis the gay sunny prime,
But affection is truest when these fade away.

When we see the first glory of youth pass us by,
Like a leaf on the stream that will never return,

"O lonely workman, standing there
In a dream, why do you stare and stare
At her grave, as no other grave where there?"

"If your great gaunt eyes so importune
Her soul by the shine of this corpse-cold moon,
Maybe you'll raise her phantom soon!"

"Why, fool, it is what I would rather see
Than all the living folk there be;
But alas, there is no such joy for me!"

"Ah - she was one you loved, no doubt,
Through good and evil, through rain and drought,
And when she passed, all your sun went out?"

Here, where the noises of the busy town,
The ocean's plunge and roar can enter not,
We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,
And muse upon the consecrated spot.

No signs of life are here: the very prayers
Inscribed around are in a language dead;
The light of the "perpetual lamp" is spent
That an undying radiance was to shed.

What prayers were in this temple offered up,
Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,
By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!

CHORUS
Come we shepherds whose blest sight
Hath met love's noon in nature's night;
Come lift we up our loftier song
And wake the sun that lies too long.

To all our world of well-stol'n joy
He slept, and dreamt of no such thing,
While we found out heav'n's fairer eye,
And kiss'd the cradle of our King.
Tell him he rises now too late
To show us aught worth looking at.

Tell him we now can show him more
Than he e'er show'd to mortal sight,
Than he himself e'er saw before,

My dear wife sits beside the fire
With folded hands and dreaming eyes,
Watching the restless flames aspire,
And wrapped in thralling memories.
I mark the fitful firelight fling
Its warm caresses on her brow,
And kiss her hands' unmelting snow,
And glisten on her wedding-ring.

The proud free head that crowns so well
The neck superb, whose outlines glide
Into the bosom's perfect swell
Soft-billowed by its peaceful tide,
The cheek's faint flush, the lip's red glow,
The gracious charm her beauty wears,

IN the Dean's porch a nest of clay
With five small tentants may be seen;
Five solemn faces, each as wise
As if its owner were a Dean.

Five downy fledglings in a row,
Packed close, as in the antique pew
The school-girls are whose foreheads clear
At the Venite shine on you.

Day after day the swallows sit
With scarce a stir, with scarce a sound,
But dreaming and digesting much
They grow thus wise and soft and round:

They watch the Canons come to dine,
And hear, the mullion-bars across,

I lay beneath the pine trees,
And looked aloft, where, through
The dusky, clustered tree-tops,
Gleamed rent, gay rifts of blue.

I shut my eyes, and a fancy
Fluttered my sense around:
"I lie here dead and buried,
And this is churchyard ground.

"I am at rest for ever;
Ended the stress and strife."
Straight I fell to and sorrowed
For the pitiful past life.

Right wronged, and knowledge wasted;
Wise labour spurned for ease;
The sloth and the sin and the failure;
Did I grow sad for these?

1

In Salem dwelt a glorious King,
Raised from a shepherd's lowly state;
That did His praises like an angel sing
Who did the World create.
By many great and bloody wars
He was advanced unto Thrones
But more delighted in the stars
Than in the splendour of his precious stones;
Nor gold nor silver did his eye regard
The Works of God were his sublime reward,


2

A warlike champion he had been,
And many feats of chivalry
Had done: in kingly courts his eye had seen
A vast variety