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And sweetly by that flower is typified
Her loveliness and spotless purity;
And the green myrtle, waving by its side,
Her certain hope of immortality!

The sable yew-tree throws its solemn shade
O'er yon green mound in dreary loneliness,
And tells that he who there in death is laid,
While living was the victim of distress;
His youth was folly, and his age no less;
But let that pass: his was the lot of all
Who seek in vanity for happiness,

And when too late their hours would fain recall.

Beneath those cedars rest a gentle pair,

Of lowly station and of humble name;

Their peaceful course was free from pain and care; In life they were but one, in death the same: And well their virtues may the tribute claim

With which affection has adorned the spot. Ah! who would covet wealth or power or fame, If happiness like theirs could be his lot?

Where yonder bay erects his graceful form,
There sleeps the hapless, gifted child of song;
No more exposed to envy's bitter storm,

Nor longer keenly feeling every wrong:
And there is one who loves to linger long

Where the green turf his hallowed dust enshrines; And, hiding from the giddy, senseless throng Her hopeless misery, o'er his fate repines!

Yon holly marks the village lawyer's grave,
Those oaks the patriot's ashes canopy,
The laurels o'er the sleeping warrior wave,

And yonder spring flowers shelter infancy.
Lady! when in the dust this form shall lie,
If then thy breast my memory would recall,
Let the dark cypress tell my destiny,
And the green ivy form my funeral pall.

Gideon Algernon Mantell.

Donnerdale.

THE PLAIN OF DONNERDALE.

HE old inventive poets, had they seen,

THE

Or rather felt, the entrancement that detains Thy waters, Duddon ! mid these flowery plains, The still repose, the liquid lapse serene, Transferred to bowers imperishably green,

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Had beautified Elysium! But these chains
Will soon be broken; a rough course remains,
Rough as the past; where thou, of placid mien,
Innocuous as a firstling of the flock,

And countenanced like a soft cerulean sky,

Shalt change thy temper, and, with many a shock

Given and received in mutual jeopardy,

Dance, like a Bacchanal, from rock to rock,
Tossing her frantic thyrsus wide and high!

William Wordsworth.

WHO

Dorchester.

DORCHESTER HILLS.

HO may misprize Dorchestrian hills? What though
They tower to no such height as looks with scorn
Over a dwindled plain; what though no crags
Be there to fortify; no forest belts

To gird them midway round; yet theirs, instead,
Are graceful slopes with shadowy dips between,
And theirs are breezy summits, not too high
To recognize familiar sights, and catch

Familiar sounds of life,

the ploughman's call,

Or tinkling from the fold. Yet thence the eye
Feeds on no stinted landscape, sky and earth
And the blue sea; and thence may wingéd thought,
Which ever loves the vantage-ground of hills,
Launch amid buoyant air, and soar at will.

Fair, amid these, art thou, camp-crested Mount,
In some far time, for some forgotten cause,
Named of the Maiden.1

Nor doth surer lore

Attest if Briton or if Roman wound

These triple trenches round thee; regular

As terraces, by architect upbuilt

For princely pleasure-ground, or those, far-famed,

By ancient hunters made

so some have deemed

Or else by Nature's self in wild Glenroy.

Along thy sides they stretch, ring above ring,

1 Maiden Castle is a hill, with a camp on it, near Dorchester.

Marking thee from afar; then vanish round
Like the broad shingly banks which ocean heaves
In noble curves along his winding shore.
The passing wayfarer with wonder views,
E'en at imperfect distance, their bold lines,
And asks the who, the wherefore, and the when;
Wafting his spirit back into far times,

And dreaming as he goes. But whoso stays,
And climbs the turf-way to thy tabled top,
Shall reap a füller wonder; shall behold

Thy girdled area, of itself a plain,

Where widely feeds the scattered flock; shall mark
Thy trenches, complicate with warlike art,
And deep almost as natural ravine

Cut in the mountain; or some startling rent
In the blue-gleaming glacier; or as clefts,
Severing the black and jagged lava-walls,
Which old Vesuvius round his crater flings,
Outworks, to guard the mysteries within.
But these are smooth and verdant. Tamed long since,
Breastwork abrupt and palisaded mound

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Are, now, but sloping greensward; as if Nature,
Who vainly her mild moral reads to man,
Still strove to realize the blessed days,

By seers avouched, by statesmen turned to dreams,
When war shall be no more.

So mused I there!

As who had failed to muse? But now the sun,

Silently sunken, with departing light

Had fused the whole horizon; not alone

His western realm, but flooded refluent gold

Back to the southern hills, along whose tops
Are seen to stretch, in far continuous line,
Sepulchral barrows. Brightly-verdant cones
I marked them rise beneath his earlier ray;
But now they stood against that orange light
Each of a velvet blackness, like the bier
Before some high-illumined altar spread

When a king lies in state; and well might seem
To twilight fantasy like funeral palls,
Shrouding the bones of aboriginal men,

Who there had lived and died, long ere our tribes
Had heard the name or felt the conquering arms
Of Rome or Roman; or as yet had seen,
Mocking their hearths of clay and turf-built huts,
The prætor's quaint mosaic or tiled bath;

Or heard our hard school-task, the phrase of Terence
Bandied in common parlance round the land.

Doulting.

LINES

WRITTEN UPON DOULTING

John Kenyon.

SHEEP-SLATE, NEAR SHEPTON

I

MALLET, SOMERSETSHIRE.

KNELT down as I poured my spirit forth by that

gray gate,

In the fulness of my gratitude and with a joy sedate; Alone on that wild heath I stood, and offered up apart The frankincense of love that, fount-like, gushed from my deep heart.

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