A transient pleasure sparkles in his eyes,

He hears and smiles, then thinks again and sighs:
For now he journeys to his grave in pain;
The rich disdain him; nay, the poor disdain:
Alternate masters now their slave command,
Urge the weak efforts of his feeble hand,

And, when his age attempts its task in vain,
With ruthless taunts, of lazy poor complain.

Oft may you see him when he tends the sheep, His winter charge, beneath the hillock weep: Oft hear him murmur to the winds that blow O'er his white locks and bury them in snow, When, roused by rage, and muttering in the morn, He mends the broken hedge with icy thorn:

"Why do I live, when I desire to be

At once from life and life's long labor free?
Like leaves in spring, the young are blown away,
Without the sorrows of a slow decay;

I, like yon withered leaf, remain behind,

Nipped by the frost and shivering in the wind;
There it abides till younger buds come on,
As I, now all my fellow-swains are gone;
Then, from the rising generation thrust,
It falls, like me, unnoticed to the dust.

"These fruitful fields, these numerous ficcks I see, Are others' gain, but killing cares to me;

To me the children of my youth are lords,
Cool in their looks, but hasty in their words:

Wants of their own demand their care; and who
Feels his own want and succors others too?
A lonely, wretched man, in pain I go,

None need my help, and none relieve my woe;

Then let my bones beneath the turf be laid,
And men forget the wretch they would not aid."

Thus groan the old, till by disease oppressed,
They taste a final woe, and then they rest.

88

O,

George Crabbe

THE SCHOLAR GYPSY 1

Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill!

G%

Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes!

No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,

Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,
Nor the cropped grasses shoot another head!
But when the fields are still,

And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,

And only the white sheep are sometimes seen Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanched green. Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest!

Here, where the reaper was at work of late

In this high field's dark corner, where he leaves

His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse,

And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,

Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use

Here will I sit and wait,

"There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by poverty forced to leave his studies there; and at last to join himself to company of vagabond gypsies. Among these extravagant people, by the sinuating subtilty of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and eem as that they discovered to him their mystery. After he had been a etty while well exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of olars, who had formerly been of his acquaintance. They quickly spied I their old friend among the gypsies; and he gave them an account of necessity which drove him to that kind of life, and told them that the ople he went with were not such impostors as they were taken for, but at they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wons by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others: that self had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the ole secret, he intended, he said, to leave their company, and give the rld an account of what he had learned."-GLANVII.'S Vanity of Dogmang, 1661. [Author's note.]

While to my ear from uplands far away

The bleating of the folded flocks is borne, With distant cries of reapers in the cornAll the live murmur of a summer's day.

Screened in this nook o'er the high, half-reaped field, And here till sundown, shepherd, will I be!

Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep, And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see Pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep;

And air-swept lindens yield

Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers.

And near me on the grass lies Glanvil's book—
Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!
The story of that Oxford scholar poor,
Of shining parts and quick inventive brain,
Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door,
One summer morn forsook

His friends, and went to learn the gypsy lore,
And roamed the world with that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deemed, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.

But once, years after, in the country lanes,
Two scholars whom at college erst he knew
Met him, and of his way of life inquired;
Whereat he answered, that the gypsy crew,

His mates, had arts to rule as they desired
The workings of men's brains;

And they can bind them to what thoughts they will. "And I," he said, "the secret of their art,

When fully learned, will to the world impart; But it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill!"

This said, he left them, and returned no more.—
But rumors hung about the countryside

That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray,
Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,
In hat of antique shape, and cloak of gray,
The same the gypsies wore.

Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring;
At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors,
On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frocked boors
Had found him seated at their entering,

But, mid their drink and clatter, he would fly;-
And I myself seem half to know thy looks,

And put the shepherds, wanderer, on thy trace;
And boys who in lone wheatfields scare the rooks
I ask if thou hast passed their quiet place;

Or in my boat I lie

Moored to the cool bank in the summer heats,

Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills, And watch the warm green-muffled Cumner hills, And wonder if thou haunt'st their shy retreats.

For most, I know, thou lov'st retired ground!
Thee, at the ferry, Oxford riders blithe,

Returning home on summer nights, have met
Crossing the stripling Thames at Bablock-hithe,
Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,
As the punt's rope chops round;

And leaning backward in a pensive dream,
And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers
Plucked in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers,
And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream!

And then they land, and thou art seen no more!
Maidens who from the distant hamlets come

To dance around the Fyfield elm in May,
Oft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam,
Or cross a stile into the public way.

Oft thou hast given them store

Of flowers the frail-leafed, white anemone,

Dark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves, And purple orchises with spotted leaves— But none has words she can report of thee.

And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time's here
In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames,
Men who through those wide fields of breezy grass
Where black-winged swallows haunt
haunt the glittering

Thames,

To bathe in the abandoned lasher pass,

Have often passed thee near

Sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown;

Marked thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare, Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted airBut, when they came from bathing, thou wast gone!

At some lone homestead in the Cumner hills,
Where at her open door the housewife darns,
Thou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate
To watch the threshers in the mossy barns.
Children, who early range these slopes and late
For cresses from the rills,