And sweetly by that flower is typified The sable yew-tree throws its solemn shade 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, Nor longer keenly feeling every wrong: 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, And yonder spring flowers shelter infancy. 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, Had beautified Elysium! But these chains 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, William Wordsworth. WHO Dorchester. DORCHESTER HILLS. HO may misprize Dorchestrian hills? What though To gird them midway round; yet theirs, instead, Familiar sounds of life, the ploughman's call, Or tinkling from the fold. Yet thence the eye Fair, amid these, art thou, camp-crested Mount, 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 And dreaming as he goes. But whoso stays, Thy girdled area, of itself a plain, Where widely feeds the scattered flock; shall mark Cut in the mountain; or some startling rent Are, now, but sloping greensward; as if Nature, By seers avouched, by statesmen turned to dreams, 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 When a king lies in state; and well might seem Who there had lived and died, long ere our tribes Or heard our hard school-task, the phrase of Terence 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. |