O! The spring-time of life is the season of blooming,
And the morning of love is the season of joy;
Ere noontide and summer, with radiance consuming,
Look down on their beauty, to parch and destroy.
0! faint are the blossoms life's pathway adorning,
When the first magic glory of hope is withdrawn;
For the flowers of the spring, and the light of the morning,
Have no summer budding, and no second dawn.

Through meadows all sunshine, and verdure, and flowers
The stream of the valley in purity flies;

NOT in rich glebe and ripe green garden only
Does Summer weave her sweet resistless spells,
But in high hills, and moorlands waste and lonely,
The vast enchantment of her presence dwells.
Wide sky, and sky-wide waste of thyme and heather,
Perpetual sleepy hum of golden bees--
If you and I were only there together,
Free from the weight of all your garden's trees!


The north is mine; though bred by elm and meadow,
Pines, torrents, rocks, and moors my heart loves best;
I love the plover's wail, the cleft hill's shadow,

Sleep! Cast thy canopy
Over this sleeper's brain,
Dim grow his memory,
When he wake again.

Love stays a summer night,
Till lights of morning come;
Then takes her winged flight
Back to her starry home.

Sleep! Yet thy days are mine;
Love's seal is over thee:
Far though my ways from thine,
Dim though thy memory.

Love stays a summer night,
Till lights of morning come;
Then takes her winged flight
Back to her starry home.

In mirth he mocks the other birds at noon,
Catching the lilt of every easy tune;
But when the day departs he sings of love,--
His own wild song beneath the listening moon.

An age in her embraces passed
Would seem a winter's day;
When life and light, with envious haste,
Are torn and snatched away.
II
But, oh! how slowly minutes roll.
When absent from her eyes
That feed my love, which is my soul,
It languishes and dies.
II
For then no more a soul but shade
It mournfully does move
And haunts my breast, by absence made
The living tomb of love.
IV
You wiser men despise me not,
Whose love-sick fancy raves
On shades of souls and Heaven knows what;
Short ages live in graves.
V

An age in her embraces passed
Would seem a winter's day;
When life and light, with envious haste,
Are torn and snatched away.

But, oh! how slowly minutes roll.
When absent from her eyes
That feed my love, which is my soul,
It languishes and dies.

For then no more a soul but shade
It mournfully does move
And haunts my breast, by absence made
The living tomb of love.

You wiser men despise me not,
Whose love-sick fancy raves
On shades of souls and Heaven knows what;
Short ages live in graves.

At first awhile sits he,

With calm, unruffled brow;
His features then I see,
Distorted hideously,--

An owl's they might be now.

What is it, askest thou?
Is't love, or is't ennui?

'Tis both at once, I vow.

The night we felt the earth would move
We stole and plucked him by the hand,
Because we loved him with the love
That knows but cannot understand.

And when the roaring hillside broke,
And all our world fell down in rain,
We saved him, we the Little Folk;
But lo! he does not come again!

Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
Of such poor love as wild ones may.
Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake,
And his own kind drive us away!

The Blue-Eyed Giant, the Miniature Woman
and the Honeysuckle

He was a blue-eyed giant,
He loved a miniature woman.
The woman's dream was of a miniature house
with a garden where honeysuckle grows
in a riot of colours
that sort of house.

The giant loved like a giant,
and his hands were used to such big things
that the giant could not
make the building,
could not knock on the door
of the garden where the honeysuckle grows
in a riot of colours
at that house.

He was a blue-eyed giant,

Hail, MAY! lovely MAY! how replenish'd my pails!
The young Dawn overspreads the East streak'd with gold!
My glad heart beats time to the laugh of the Vales,
And COLIN'S voice rings through the woods from the fold.

The Wood to the Mountain submissively bends,
Whose blue misty summits first glow with the sun!
See thence a gay train by the wild rill descends
To join the glad sports:... hark! the tumult's begun.

Be cloudless, ye skies!... Be my Colin but there,
Not the dew-spangled bents on the wide level Dale,