Their fairest blossomed beans and poppied corn ;
The chuckling linnet its five young unborn,
To sing for thee; low creeping strawberries
Their summer coolness; pent-up butterflies
Their freckled wings; yea, the fresh budding year
All its completions-be quickly near,

By every wind that nods the mountain pine,
O forester divine!

Thou, to whom every fawn and satyr flies
For willing service; whether to surprise
The squatted hare while in half-sleeping fit;
Or upward ragged precipices flit

To save poor lambkins from the eagle's maw;
Or by mysterious enticement draw

Bewildered shepherds to their path again;
Or to tread breathless round the frothy main,
And gather up all fancifullest shells.

For thee to tumble into Naiads' cells,
And, being hidden, laugh at their outpeeping;
Or to delight thee with fantastic leaping,
The while they pelt each other on the crown
With silvery oak apples, and fir cones brown—
By all the echoes that about thee ring,
Hear us, O satyr king!

"O Hearkener to the loud-clapping shears, While ever and anon to his shorn peers A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn, When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn Anger our huntsman: Breather round our farms, To keep off mildews, and all weather harms: Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, That come a-swooning over hollow grounds, And wither drearily on barren moors:

Dread opener of the mysterious doors
Leading to universal knowledge-see,
Great son of Dryope,*

The many that are come to pay their vows
With leaves about their brows!

"Be still the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,

Then leave the naked brain : be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal—a new birth :

Be still a symbol of immensity;

A firmament reflected in a sea;

An element filling the space between ;

An unknown-but no more: we humbly screen
With uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending,
And giving out a shout most heaven rending,
Conjure thee to receive our humble pæan,
Upon thy Mount Lycean!"

Even while they brought the burden to a close,
A shout from the whole multitude arose,
That lingered in the air like dying rolls
Of abrupt thunder, when Ionian shoals

Of dolphins bob their noses through the brine.
Meantime, on shady levels, mossy fine,
Young companies nimbly began dancing
To the swift treble pipe, and humming string.
Ay, those fair living forms swam heavenly

To tunes forgotten-out of memory :

Fair creatures! whose young children's children bred
Thermopyla its heroes-not yet dead,

* Dryope, a nymph of Arcadia, the mother (Mercury was supposed to be the father) of Pan.

But in old marbles ever beautiful.
High genitors, unconscious did they cull
Time's sweet first-fruits-they danced to weariness,
And then in quiet circles did they press
The hillock turf, and caught the latter end
Of some strange history, potent to send
A young mind from its bodily tenement.
Or they might watch the quoit-pitchers, intent
On either side; pitying the sad death
Of Hyacinthus, when the cruel breath
Of Zephyr slew him,*-Zephyr penitent,
Who now, ere Phoebus mounts the firmament,
Fondles the flower amid the sobbing rain.
The archers, too, upon a wider plain,
Beside the feathery whizzing of the shaft,
And the dull twanging bowstring, and the raft,
Branch down sweeping from a tall ash top,
Called up a thousand thoughts to envelope

Those who would watch. Perhaps, the trembling knee
And frantic gape of lonely Niobe,

Poor, lonely Niobe! when her lovely young

Were dead and gone, and her caressing tongue

Lay a lost thing upon her paly lip,

And very, very deadliness did nip

Her motherly cheeks. Aroused from this sad mood

By one, who at a distance loud hallooed,

Uplifting his strong bow into the air,

Many might after brighter visions stare :

* Hyacinthus, a young Greek prince, greatly favoured by Apollo. Zephyrus (the west wind) is fabled to have been jealous; and one day, when Apollo was playing quoits with Hyacinthus, he blew the quoit thrown by the god on the head of the young mortal, who was killed by the blow. Apollo, greatly grieved, made a flower spring from the blood of his lost favourite, which is called Hyacinth, from his name. The flower was said to bear on its leaves the letters Ai, Ai, the last cry of Hyacinthus. Yearly festivals were instituted by the Spartans in memory of the nephew of their king.

After the Argonauts, in blind amaze
Tossing about on Neptune's restless ways,
Until, from the horizon's vaulted side,
There shot a golden splendour far and wide,
Spangling those million poutings of the brine
With quivering ore: 'twas even an awful shine
From the exaltation of Apollo's bow;

A heavenly beacon in their dreary woe.
Who thus were ripe for high contemplating,
Might turn their steps towards the sober ring
Where sat Endymion and the aged priest
'Mong shepherds gone in eld, whose looks increased
The silvery setting of their mortal star.
There they discoursed upon the fragile bar
That keeps us from our homes ethereal;
And what our duties there: to nightly call
Vesper, the beauty-crest of summer weather;
To summon all the downiest clouds together
For the sun's purple couch; to emulate
In minist'ring the potent rule of fate
With speed of fire-tailed exhalations;

To tint her pallid cheek with bloom, who cons
Sweet poesy by moonlight: besides these,

A world of other unguessed offices.

Anon they wandered, by divine converse,
Into Elysium; vieing to rehearse

Each one his own anticipated bliss.

One felt heart-certain that he could not miss
His quick gone love, among fair blossomed boughs
Where every zephyr-sigh pouts, and endows
Her lips with music for the welcoming.
Another wished, 'mid that eternal spring,
To meet his rosy child, with feathery sails,
Sweeping, eye-earnestly, through almond vales:
Who, suddenly, should stoop through the smooth wind,
And with the balmiest leaves his temples bind;

And, ever after, through those regions be
His messenger, his little Mercury.

Some were athirst in soul to see again

Their fellow huntsmen o'er the wide champaign
In times long past; to sit with them, and talk
Of all the chances in their earthly walk;
Comparing, joyfully, their plenteous stores
Of happiness, to when upon the moors,
Benighted, close they huddled from the cold,
And shared their famished scrips. Thus all out-told
Their fond imaginations,-saving him
Whose eyelids curtained up their jewels dim,
Endymion yet hourly had he striven

To hide the cankering venom, that had riven
His fainting recollections. Now indeed.
His senses had swooned off: he did not heed
The sudden silence, or the whispers low,
Or the old eyes dissolving at his woe,
Or anxious calls, or close of trembling palms,
Or maiden's sigh, that grief itself embalms:
But in the self-same fixed trance he kept,
Like one who on the earth had never stept.
Ay, even as dead-still as a marble man,
Frozen in that old tale Arabian.

Who whispers him so pantingly and close? Peona, his sweet sister: of all those,

His friends, the dearest. Hushing signs she made,
And breathed a sister's sorrow to persuade

A yielding up, a cradling on her care.
Her eloquence did breathe away the curse:
She led him, like some midnight spirit nurse,
Of happy changes in emphatic dreams,
Along a path between two little streams,-
Guarding his forehead, with her round elbow,
From low-grown branches, and his footsteps slow