There is in souls a sympathy with sounds,

And as the mind is pitched the ear is pleased

With melting airs or martial, brisk or grave;

Some chord in unison with what we hear

Is touched within us, and the heart replies.

How soft the music of those village bells

Falling at intervals upon the ear

In cadence sweet, now dying all away,

Now pealing loud again, and louder still,

Clear and sonorous as the gale comes on.

With easy force it opens all the cells

Where memory slept. Wherever I have heard

A kindred melody, the scene recurs,

And with it all its pleasures and its pains.

Such comprehensive views the spirit takes,

That in a few short moments I retrace

(As in a map the voyager his course)

The windings of my way through many years.

Short as in retrospect the journey seems,

It seemed not always short; the rugged path,

And prospect oft so dreary and forlorn,

Moved many a sigh at its disheartening length.

Yet feeling present evils, while the past

Faintly impress the mind, or not at all,

How readily we wish time spent revoked,

That we might try the ground again, where once

(Through inexperience as we now perceive)

We missed that happiness we might have found.

Some friend is gone, perhaps his son’s best friend

A father, whose authority, in show

When most severe, and mustering all its force,

Was but the graver countenance of love;

Whose favour, like the clouds of spring, might lower,

And utter now and then an awful voice,

But had a blessing in its darkest frown,

Threatening at once and nourishing the plant.

We loved, but not enough, the gentle hand

That reared us. At a thoughtless age allured

By every gilded folly, we renounced

His sheltering side, and wilfully forewent

That converse which we now in vain regret.

How gladly would the man recall to life

The boy’s neglected sire! a mother too,

That softer friend, perhaps more gladly still,

Might he demand them at the gates of death.

Sorrow has since they went subdued and tamed

The playful humour; he could now endure

(Himself grown sober in the vale of tears)

And feel a parent’s presence no restraint.

But not to understand a treasure’s worth

Till time has stolen away the slighted good,

Is cause of half the poverty we feel,

And makes the world the wilderness it is.

The few that pray at all, pray oft amiss,

And, seeking grace to improve the prize they hold,

Would urge a wiser suit than asking more.

The night was winter in his roughest mood,

The morning sharp and clear; but now at noon

Upon the southern side of the slant hills,

And where the woods fence off the northern blast,

The season smiles, resigning all its rage,

And has the warmth of May. The vault is blue

Without a cloud, and white without a speck

The dazzling splendour of the scene below.

Again the harmony comes o’er the vale,

And through the trees I view the embattled tower

Whence all the music. I again perceive

The soothing influence of the wafted strains,

And settle in soft musings, as I tread

The walk still verdant under oaks and elms,

Whose outspread branches overarch the glade.

The roof, though movable through all its length,

As the wind sways it, has yet well sufficed,

And, intercepting in their silent fall

The frequent flakes, has kept a path for me.

No noise is here, or none that hinders thought:

The redbreast warbles still, but is content

With slender notes and more than half suppressed.

Pleased with his solitude, and flitting light

From spray to spray, where’er he rests he shakes

From many a twig the pendant drops of ice,

That tinkle in the withered leaves below.

Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft,

Charms more than silence. Meditation here

May think down hours to moments. Here the heart

May give an useful lesson to the head,

And learning wiser grow without his books.

Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one,

Have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells

In heads replete with thoughts of other men;

Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.

Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass,

The mere materials with which wisdom builds,

Till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place,

Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich.

Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much,

Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

Books are not seldom talismans and spells

By which the magic art of shrewder wits

Holds an unthinking multitude enthralled.

Some to the fascination of a name

Surrender judgment hoodwinked. Some the style

Infatuates, and, through labyrinths and wilds

Of error, leads them by a tune entranced.

While sloth seduces more, too weak to bear

The insupportable fatigue of thought,

And swallowing therefore without pause or choice

The total grist unsifted, husks and all.

But trees, and rivulets whose rapid course

Defies the check of winter, haunts of deer,

And sheep-walks populous with bleating lambs,

And lanes, in which the primrose ere her time

Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root,

Deceive no student. Wisdom there, and truth,

Not shy as in the world, and to be won

By slow solicitation, seize at once

The roving thought, and fix it on themselves.

What prodigies can power divine perform

More grand than it produces year by year,

And all in sight of inattentive man?

Familiar with the effect we slight the cause,

And in the constancy of Nature’s course,

The regular return of genial months,

And renovation of a faded world,

See nought to wonder at. Should God again,

As once in Gibeon, interrupt the race

Of the undeviating and punctual sun,

How would the world admire! but speaks it less

An agency divine, to make him know

His moment when to sink and when to rise

Age after age, than to arrest his course?

All we behold is miracle: but, seen

So duly, all is miracle in vain.

Where now the vital energy that moved,

While summer was, the pure and subtle lymph

Through the imperceptible meandering veins

Of leaf and flower? It sleeps: and the icy touch

Of unprolific winter has impressed

A cold stagnation on the intestine tide.

But let the months go round, a few short months,

And all shall be restored. These naked shoots,

Barren as lances, among which the wind

Makes wintry music, sighing as it goes,

Shall put their graceful foliage on again,

And more aspiring and with ampler spread

Shall boast new charms, and more than they have lost.

Then, each in its peculiar honours clad,

Shall publish even to the distant eye

Its family and tribe. Laburnum rich

In streaming gold; syringa ivory pure;

The scented and the scentless rose; this red

And of a humbler growth, the other tall,

And throwing up into the darkest gloom

Of neighbouring cypress, or more sable yew,

Her silver globes, light as the foamy surf

That the wind severs from the broken wave;

The lilac various in array, now white,

Now sanguine, and her beauteous head now set

With purple spikes pyramidal, as if

Studious of ornament, yet unresolved

Which hue she most approved, she chose them all;

Copious of flowers the woodbine, pale and wan,

But well compensating their sickly looks

With never-cloying odours, early and late;

Hypericum all bloom, so thick a swarm

Of flowers like flies, clothing her slender rods,

That scarce a leaf appears; mezereon too,

Though leafless, well attired, and thick beset

With blushing wreaths investing every spray;

Alth?a with the purple eye; the broom,

Yellow and bright as bullion unalloyed

Her blossoms; and luxuriant above all

The jasmine, throwing wide her elegant sweets,

The deep dark green of whose unvarnished leaf

Makes more conspicuous, and illumines more

The bright profusion of her scattered stars.—

These have been, and these shall be in their day,

And all this uniform uncoloured scene

Shall be dismantled of its fleecy load,

And flush into variety again.

From dearth to plenty, and from death to life,

Is Nature’s progress when she lectures man

In heavenly truth; evincing, as she makes

The grand transition, that there lives and works

A soul in all things, and that soul is God.

The beauties of the wilderness are His,

That make so gay the solitary place

Where no eye sees them. And the fairer forms

That cultivation glories in, are His.

He sets the bright procession on its way,

And marshals all the order of the year.

He marks the bounds which Winter may not pass,

And blunts his pointed fury. In its case,

Russet and rude, folds up the tender germ

Uninjured, with inimitable art,

And, ere one flowery season fades and dies,

Designs the blooming wonders of the next.

Some say that in the origin of things,

When all creation started into birth,

The infant elements received a law

From which they swerve not since; that under force

Of that controlling ordinance they move,

And need not His immediate hand, who first

Prescribed their course, to regulate it now.

Thus dream they, and contrive to save a God

The encumbrance of His own concerns, and spare

The great Artificer of all that moves

The stress of a continual act, the pain

Of unremitted vigilance and care,

As too laborious and severe a task.

So man the moth is not afraid, it seems,

To span Omnipotence, and measure might

That knows no measure, by the scanty rule

And standard of his own, that is to-day,

And is not ere to-morrow’s sun go down.

But how should matter occupy a charge

Dull as it is, and satisfy a law

So vast in its demands, unless impelled

To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force,

And under pressure of some conscious cause?

The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused

Sustains and is the life of all that lives.

Nature is but a name for an effect

Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fire

By which the mighty process is maintained,

Who sleeps not, is not weary; in whose sight

Slow-circling ages are as transient days;

Whose work is without labour, whose designs

No flaw deforms, no difficulty thwarts,

And whose beneficence no charge exhausts.

Him blind antiquity profaned, not served,

With self-taught rites and under various names

Female and male, Pomona, Pales, Pan,

And Flora and Vertumnus; peopling earth

With tutelary goddesses and gods

That were not, and commending as they would

To each some province, garden, field, or grove.

But all are under One. One spirit—His

Who bore the platted thorns with bleeding brows—

Rules universal nature. Not a flower

But shows some touch in freckle, streak, or stain,

Of His unrivalled pencil. He inspires

Their balmy odours and imparts their hues,

And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes,

In grains as countless as the sea-side sands,

The forms with which He sprinkles all the earth.

Happy who walks with Him! whom, what he finds

Of flavour or of scent in fruit or flower,

Or what he views of beautiful or grand

In nature, from the broad majestic oak

To the green blade that twinkles in the sun,

Prompts with remembrance of a present God.

His presence, who made all so fair, perceived,

Makes all still fairer. As with Him no scene

Is dreary, so with Him all seasons please.

Though winter had been none had man been true,

And earth be punished for its tenant’s sake,

Yet not in vengeance; as this smiling sky,

So soon succeeding such an angry night,

And these dissolving snows, and this clear stream,

Recovering fast its liquid music, prove.

Who then, that has a mind well strung and tuned

To contemplation, and within his reach

A scene so friendly to his favourite task,

Would waste attention at the chequered board,

His host of wooden warriors to and fro

Marching and counter-marching, with an eye

As fixt as marble, with a forehead ridged

And furrowed into storms, and with a hand

Trembling, as if eternity were hung

In balance on his conduct of a pin?

Nor envies he aught more their idle sport,

Who pant with application misapplied

To trivial toys, and, pushing ivory balls

Across the velvet level, feel a joy

Akin to rapture, when the bauble finds

Its destined goal of difficult access.

Nor deems he wiser him, who gives his noon

To Miss, the Mercer’s plague, from shop to shop

Wandering, and littering with unfolded silks

The polished counter, and approving none,

Or promising with smiles to call again.

Nor him, who, by his vanity seduced,

And soothed into a dream that he discerns

The difference of a Guido from a daub,

Frequents the crowded auction. Stationed there

As duly as the Langford of the show,

With glass at eye, and catalogue in hand,

And tongue accomplished in the fulsome cant

And pedantry that coxcombs learn with ease,

Oft as the price-deciding hammer falls

He notes it in his book, then raps his box,

Swears ’tis a bargain, rails at his hard fate

That he has let it pass—but never bids.

Here unmolested, through whatever sign

The sun proceeds, I wander; neither mist,

Nor freezing sky, nor sultry, checking me,

Nor stranger intermeddling with my joy.

Even in the spring and play-time of the year

That calls the unwonted villager abroad

With all her little ones, a sportive train,

To gather king-cups in the yellow mead,

And prank their hair with daisies, or to pick

A cheap but wholesome salad from the brook,

These shades are all my own. The timorous hare,

Grown so familiar with her frequent guest,

Scarce shuns me; and the stock-dove unalarmed

Sits cooing in the pine-tree, nor suspends

His long love-ditty for my near approach.

Drawn from his refuge in some lonely elm

That age or injury has hollowed deep,

Where on his bed of wool and matted leaves

He has outslept the winter, ventures forth

To frisk awhile, and bask in the warm sun,

The squirrel, flippant, pert, and full of play.

He sees me, and at once, swift as a bird,

Ascends the neighbouring beech; there whisks his brush,

And perks his ears, and stamps and scolds aloud,

With all the prettiness of feigned alarm,

And anger insignificantly fierce.

The heart is hard in nature, and unfit

For human fellowship, as being void

Of sympathy, and therefore dead alike

To love and friendship both, that is not pleased

With sight of animals enjoying life,

Nor feels their happiness augment his own.

The bounding fawn that darts across the glade

When none pursues, through mere delight of heart,

And spirits buoyant with excess of glee;

The horse, as wanton and almost as fleet,

That skims the spacious meadow at full speed,

Then stops and snorts, and throwing high his heels

Starts to the voluntary race again;

The very kine that gambol at high noon,

The total herd receiving first from one,

That leads the dance, a summons to be gay,

Though wild their strange vagaries, and uncouth

Their efforts, yet resolved with one consent

To give such act and utterance as they may

To ecstasy too big to be suppressed—

These, and a thousand images of bliss,

With which kind nature graces every scene

Where cruel man defeats not her design,

Impart to the benevolent, who wish

All that are capable of pleasure pleased,

A far superior happiness to theirs,

The comfort of a reasonable joy.

Man scarce had risen, obedient to His call

Who formed him from the dust, his future grave,

When he was crowned as never king was since.

God set His diadem upon his head,

And angel choirs attended. Wondering stood

The new-made monarch, while before him passed,

All happy and all perfect in their kind,

The creatures, summoned from their various haunts

To see their sovereign, and confess his sway.

Vast was his empire, absolute his power,

Or bounded only by a law whose force

’Twas his sublimest privilege to feel

And own, the law of universal love.

He ruled with meekness, they obeyed with joy.

No cruel purpose lurked within his heart,

And no distrust of his intent in theirs.

So Eden was a scene of harmless sport,

Where kindness on his part who ruled the whole

Begat a tranquil confidence in all,

And fear as yet was not, nor cause for fear.

But sin marred all; and the revolt of man,

That source of evils not exhausted yet,

Was punished with revolt of his from him.

Garden of God, how terrible the change

Thy groves and lawns then witnessed! every heart,

Each animal of every name, conceived

A jealousy and an instinctive fear,

And, conscious of some danger, either fled

Precipitate the loathed abode of man,

Or growled defiance in such angry sort,

As taught him too to tremble in his turn.

Thus harmony and family accord

Were driven from Paradise; and in that hour

The seeds of cruelty, that since have swelled

To such gigantic and enormous growth,

Were sown in human nature’s fruitful soil.

Hence date the persecution and the pain

That man inflicts on all inferior kinds,

Regardless of their plaints. To make him sport,

To gratify the frenzy of his wrath,

Or his base gluttony, are causes good

And just in his account, why bird and beast

Should suffer torture, and the streams be dyed

With blood of their inhabitants impaled.

Earth groans beneath the burden of a war

Waged with defenceless innocence, while he,

Not satisfied to prey on all around,

Adds tenfold bitterness to death by pangs

Needless, and first torments ere he devours.

Now happiest they that occupy the scenes

The most remote from his abhorred resort,

Whom once as delegate of God on earth

They feared, and as His perfect image loved.

The wilderness is theirs with all its caves,

Its hollow glens, its thickets, and its plains

Unvisited by man. There they are free,

And howl and roar as likes them, uncontrolled,

Nor ask his leave to slumber or to play.

Woe to the tyrant, if he dare intrude

Within the confines of their wild domain;

The lion tells him, “I am monarch here;”

And if he spares him, spares him on the terms

Of royal mercy, and through generous scorn

To rend a victim trembling at his foot.

In measure, as by force of instinct drawn,

Or by necessity constrained, they live

Dependent upon man, those in his fields,

These at his crib, and some beneath his roof;

They prove too often at how dear a rate

He sells protection. Witness, at his foot

The spaniel dying for some venial fault,

Under dissection of the knotted scourge;

Witness the patient ox, with stripes and yells

Driven to the slaughter, goaded as he runs

To madness, while the savage at his heels

Laughs at the frantic sufferer’s fury spent

Upon the guiltless passenger o’erthrown.

He too is witness, noblest of the train

That wait on man, the flight-performing horse:

With unsuspecting readiness he takes

His murderer on his back, and, pushed all day,

With bleeding sides, and flanks that heave for life,

To the far-distant goal, arrives and dies.

So little mercy shows who needs so much!

Does law, so jealous in the cause of man,

Denounce no doom on the delinquent? None.

He lives, and o’er his brimming beaker boasts

(As if barbarity were high desert)

The inglorious feat, and, clamorous in praise

Of the poor brute, seems wisely to suppose

The honours of his matchless horse his own.

But many a crime, deemed innocent on earth,

Is registered in heaven, and these, no doubt,

Have each their record, with a curse annexed.

Man may dismiss compassion from his heart,

But God will never. When He charged the Jew

To assist his foe’s down-fallen beast to rise,

And when the bush-exploring boy that seized

The young, to let the parent bird go free,

Proved He not plainly that His meaner works

Are yet His care, and have an interest all,

All, in the universal Father’s love?

On Noah, and in him on all mankind,

The charter was conferred by which we hold

The flesh of animals in fee, and claim,

O’er all we feed on, power of life and death.

But read the instrument, and mark it well;

The oppression of a tyrannous control

Can find no warrant there. Feed then, and yield

Thanks for thy food. Carnivorous, through sin,

Feed on the slain, but spare the living brute.

The Governor of all, Himself to all

So bountiful, in whose attentive ear

The unfledged raven and the lion’s whelp

Plead not in vain for pity on the pangs

Of hunger unassuaged, has interposed,

Not seldom, His avenging arm, to smite

The injurious trampler upon nature’s law,

That claims forbearance even for a brute.

He hates the hardness of a Balaam’s heart,

And, prophet as he was, he might not strike

The blameless animal, without rebuke,

On which he rode. Her opportune offence

Saved him, or the unrelenting seer had died.

He sees that human equity is slack

To interfere, though in so just a cause,

And makes the task His own; inspiring dumb

And helpless victims with a sense so keen

Of injury, with such knowledge of their strength,

And such sagacity to take revenge,

That oft the beast has seemed to judge the man.

An ancient, not a legendary tale,

By one of sound intelligence rehearsed,

(If such, who plead for Providence may seem

In modern eyes) shall make the doctrine clear.

Where England, stretched towards the setting sun,

Narrow and long, o’erlooks the western wave,

Dwelt young Misagathus; a scorner he

Of God and goodness, atheist in ostent,

Vicious in act, in temper savage-fierce.

He journeyed, and his chance was, as he went,

To join a traveller of far different note—

Evander, famed for piety, for years

Deserving honour, but for wisdom more.

Fame had not left the venerable man

A stranger to the manners of the youth,

Whose face, too, was familiar to his view.

Their way was on the margin of the land,

O’er the green summit of the rocks whose base

Beats back the roaring surge, scarce heard so high.

The charity that warmed his heart was moved

At sight of the man-monster. With a smile

Gentle and affable, and full of grace,

As fearful of offending whom he wished

Much to persuade, he plied his ear with truths

Not harshly thundered forth or rudely pressed,

But, like his purpose, gracious, kind, and sweet.

“And dost thou dream,” the impenetrable man

Exclaimed, “that me the lullabies of age,

And fantasies of dotards such as thou,

Can cheat, or move a moment’s fear in me?

Mark now the proof I give thee, that the brave

Need no such aids as superstition lends

To steel their hearts against the dread of death.”

He spoke, and to the precipice at hand

Pushed with a madman’s fury. Fancy shrinks,

And the blood thrills and curdles at the thought

Of such a ............