What thoughts must through the creature's brain have past! Even from the topmost stone, upon the steep, Are but three bounds-and look, Sir, at this last O Master! it has been a cruel leap. For thirteen hours he ran a desperate race; What cause the Hart might have to love this place, And come and make his death-bed near the well. Here on the grass perhaps asleep he sank, Lulled by the fountain in the summer-tide; This water was perhaps the first he drank When he had wandered from his mother's side. In April here beneath the flowering thorn Now, here is neither grass nor pleasant shade; Till trees, and stones, and fountain, all are gone." "Grey-headed Shepherd, thou hast spoken well; Small difference lies between thy creed and mine : This Beast not unobserved by Nature fell; The Being, that is in the clouds and air, The pleasure-house is dust :-behind, before, This is no common waste, no common gloom; But Nature, in due course of time, once more Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom. She leaves these objects to a slow decay, That what we are, and have been, may be known; But, at the coming of the milder day, These monuments shall all be overgrown. One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide, Taught both by what she shows, and what conceals; Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 1800. LINES, CCMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR. JULY 13, 1798. FIVE years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountainsprings With a sweet inland murmur.*-Once again Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, The river is not affected by the tides a few miles above Tintern Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, These beauteous forms, Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened :-that serene and blessed mood, If this How often has my spirit turned to thee ! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again : While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts |