THE

BROTHERS:

A PASTORAL POEM.

The BROTHERS*.

"These Tourists, Heaven preserve us! needs

must live

A profitable life: some glance along,
Rapid and gay, as if the earth were air,

And they were butterflies to wheel about

Long as their summer lasted: some, as wise,
Upon the forehead of a jutting crag

Sit perched, with book and pencil on their knee,
And look and scribble, scribble on and look,
Until a man might travel twelve stout miles,
Or reap an acre of his neighbour's corn.

* This Poem was intended to be the concluding poem of a series of pastorals, the scene of which was laid among the mountains of Cumberland and Westmoreland. I mention this to apologize for the abruptness with which the poem begins.

But, for that moping Son of Idleness,

Why can he tarry yonder ?-In our church-yard
Is neither epitaph nor monument,

Tomb-stone nor name-only the turf we tread,
And a few natural graves." To Jane, his wife,
Thus spake the homely Priest of Ennerdale.
It was a July evening; and he sate

Upon the long stone-seat beneath the eaves
Of his old cottage, as it chanced, that day,
Employed in winter's work. Upon the stone
His Wife sate near him, teasing matted wool,

While, from the twin cards toothed with glittering

wire,

He fed the spindle of his youngest Child,

Who turned her large round wheel in the open

air

With back and forward steps. Towards the field In which the Parish Chapel stood alone,

Girt round with a bare ring of mossy wall,

While half an hour went by, the Priest had sent Many a long look of wonder, and at last,

Risen from his seat, beside the snow-white ridge

Of carded wool which the old man had piled
He laid his implements with gentle care,

Each in the other locked; and, down the path
Which from his cottage to the church-yard led,
He took his way, impatient to accost

The Stranger, whom he saw still lingering there.

'Twas one well known to him in former days,
A Shepherd-lad: who ere his thirteenth year
Had changed his calling, with the mariners
A fellow-mariner, and so had fared
Through twenty seasons; but he had been reared
Among the mountains, and he in his heart
Was half a Shepherd on the stormy seas.

Oft in the piping shrouds had Leonard heard

The tones of waterfalls, and inland sounds

Of caves and trees :—and, when the regular wind Between the tropics filled the steady sail,

And blew with the same breath through days and

weeks,