Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

A Barn her winter bed supplies;

But till the warmth of summer skies

And summer days is gone,

(And all do in this tale agree)

She sleeps beneath the greenwood tree,

And other home hath none.

An innocent life, yet far astray!

And Ruth will, long before her day,

Be broken down and old.

Sore aches she needs must have! but less

Of mind, than body's wretchedness,

From damp, and rain, and cold.

If she is pressed by want of food,
She from her dwelling in the wood
Repairs to a road-side;

And there she begs at one steep place,
Where up and down with easy pace
The horsemen-travellers ride.

That oaten Pipe of hers is mute,

Or thrown away; but with a flute
Her loneliness she cheers :

This flute, made of a hemlock stalk,
At evening in his homeward walk

The Quantock Woodman hears.

I, too, have passed her on the hills
Setting her little water-mills

By spouts and fountains wild

Such small machinery as she turned

Ere she had wept, ere she had mourned, A young and happy Child!

Farewell! and when thy days are told, Ill-fated Ruth! in hallowed mould

Thy corpse shall buried be;

For thee a funeral bell shall ring,
And all the congregation sing

A Christian psalm for thee.

LINES

Written with a Slate-pencil, upon a Stone, the largest of a heap lying near a deserted Quarry, upon one of the Istands at Rydale.

Stranger! this hillock of misshapen stones
Is not a ruin of the antient time,

Nor, as perchance thou rashly deem'st, the Cairn
Of some old British Chief: 'tis nothing more
Than the rude embryo of a little Dome

Or Pleasure-house, once destined to be built
Among the birch-trees of this rocky isle.

But, as it chanced, Sir William having learned
That from the shore a full-grown man might wade,
And make himself a freeman of this spot

At any hour he chose, the Knight forthwith
Desisted, and the quarry and the mound

Are monuments of his unfinished task.

The block on which these lines are traced, perhaps,
Was once selected as the corner-stone

Of the intended Pile, which would have been
Some quaint odd play-thing of elaborate skill,
So that, I guess, the linnet and the thrush,
And other little Builders who dwell here,
Had wondered at the work. But blame him not,
For old Sir William was a gentle Knight
Bred in this vale, to which he appertained
With all his ancestry. Then peace to him,
And for the outrage which he had devised
Entire forgiveness!But if thou art one
On fire with thy impatience to become
An inmate of these mountains, if, disturbed
By beautiful conceptions, thou hast hewn
Out of the quiet rock the elements

Of thy trim mansion destined soon to blaze
In snow-white glory, think again, and, taught
By old Sir William and his quarry, leave

Thy fragments to the bramble and the rose;
There let the vernal Slow-worm sun himself,
And let the Redbreast hop from stone to stone.

« AnteriorContinuar »