Who first beholds those everlasting clouds,
Seedtime and harvest, morning, noon, and night,
Still where they were, steadfast, immovable;
Who first beholds the Alps - that mighty chain
Of mountains, stretching on from east to west,
So massive, yet so shadowy, so ethereal,
As to belong rather to heaven than earth-
But instantly receives into his soul
A sense, a feeling that he loses not,
A something that informs him 't is a moment Whence he may date henceforward and forever! Italy.
Ill habits gather by unseen degrees,
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
Metamorphoses, Book xv. Translation of DRYDEN. OVID.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks
On whose fresh lap the swart-star sparely looks;
Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes,
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,
The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
The glowing violet,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears.
A Yellow Tansy
To the wall of the old green garden
A butterfly quivering came;
His wings on the somber lichens
Played like a yellow flame.
He looked at the gray geraniums,
And the sleepy four-o'-clocks,
He looked at the low lanes bordered
With the glossy growing box.
He longed for the peace and the silence
And the shadows that lengthened there,
And his wild wee heart was weary
Of skimming the endless air.
And now in the old green garden,-
I know not how it came,-
A single pansy is blooming,
Bright as a yellow flame.
And whenever a gay gust passes,
It quivers as if with pain,
For the butterfly soul within it
Longs for the winds again.
How falls it, oriole, thou hast come to fly
In tropic splendor through our Northern sky?
At some glad moment was it nature's choice
To dower a scrap of sunset with a voice?
Or did some orange tulip, flaked with black,
In some forgotten garden, ages back,
Yearning toward Heaven until its wish was heard, Desire unspeakably to be a bird?
Call for the robin-red breast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
The White Devil, Act v. Sc. 2.
J. WEBSTER.
What bird so sings, yet so does wail?
O, 't is the ravished nightingale -
Jug, jug, jug, jug - tereu she cries,
And still her woes at midnight rise.
Brave prick-song! who is 't now we hear?
None but the lark so shrill and clear,
Now at heaven's gate she claps her wings,
The morn not waking till she sings.
Hark, hark! but what a pretty note,
Poor Robin-red breast tunes his throat;
Hark, how the jolly cuckoos sing
"Cuckoo !" to welcome in the spring.
Alexander and Campaspe, Act v. Sc. 1.
⚫ Bartlett says, "It was Cowper who gave this now common name to the Mignonette."
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