Grow old and die, rich Day,
Over some English field—
Chartered to come away
What time to Death you yield!
Pass, frost-white ghost, and then
Come forth to banish'd men!
I see the stubble's sheen,
The mist and ruddled leaves,
Here where the new Spring's green
For her first rain-drops grieves.
Here beechen leaves drift red
Last week in England dead.
For English eyes' delight
Those Autumn ghosts go free—
Ghost of the field hoar-white,
Ghost of the crimson tree.
Grudge them not, England dear,
To us thy banished here!
Arthur Shearly Cripps.
Tell the tune his feet beat
On the ground all day—
Black-burnt ground and green grass
Seamed with rocks of grey—
"England," "England," "England,"
That one word they say.
Now they tread the beech-mast,
Now the ploughland's clay,
Now the faery ball-floor of her fields in May.
Now her red June sorrel, now her new-turned hay,
Now they keep the great road, now by sheep-path stray,
Still it's "England," "England,"
"England" all the way!
Arthur Shearly Cripps.
On alien ground, breathing an alien air,
A Roman stood, far from his ancient home,
And gazing, murmured, "Ah, the hills are fair,
But not the hills of Rome!"
Descendant of a race to Romans-kin,
Where the old son of Empire stood, I stand.
The self-same rocks fold the same valley in,
Untouched of human hand.
Over another shines the self-same star,
Another heart with nameless longing fills,
Crying aloud, "How beautiful they are,
But not our English hills!"
Mary E. Coleridge.
He walked in glory on the hills;
We dalesmen envied from afar
The heights and rose-lit pinnacles
Which placed him nigh the evening star.
Upon the peaks they found him dead;
And now we wonder if he sighed
For our low grass beneath his head,
For our rude huts, before he died.
William Canton.
In the highlands, in the country places,
Where the old plain men have rosy faces,
And the young fair maidens
Quiet eyes;
Where essential silence cheers and blesses,
And for ever in the hill-recesses
Her more lovely music
Broods and dies.
O to mount again where erst I haunted;
Where the old red hills are bird-enchanted,
And the low green meadows
Bright with sward;
And when even dies, the million-tinted,
And the night has come, and planets glinted,
Lo, the valley hollow
Lamp-bestarred!
O to dream, O to awake and wander
There, and with delight to take and render,
Through the trance of silence,
Quiet breath;
Lo! for there, among the flowers and grasses,
Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
Only winds and rivers,
Life and death.
Robert Louis Stevenson.
Yonder in the heather there's a bed for sleeping,
Drink for one athirst, ripe blackberries to eat;
Yonder in the sun the merry hares go leaping,
And the pool is clear for travel-wearied feet.
Sorely throb my feet, a-tramping London highways,
(Ah! the springy moss upon a northern moor!)
Through the endless streets, the gloomy squares and byways,
Homeless in the City, poor among the poor!
London streets are gold—ah, give me leaves a-glinting
'Midst grey dykes and hedges in the autumn sun!
London water's wine, poured out for all unstinting—
God! For the little brooks that tumble as they run!
Oh, my heart is fain to hear the soft wind blowing,
Soughing through the fir-tops up on northern fells!
Oh, my eye's an ache to see the brown burns flowing
Through the peaty soil and tinkling heather-bells.
Ada Smith.
Too soothe and mild your lowland airs
For one whose hope is gone:
I'm thinking of a little tarn,
Brown, very lone.
Would now the tall swift mists could lay
Their wet grasp on my hair,
And the great natures of the hills
Round me friendly were.
In vain!—For taking hills your plains
Have spoilt my soul, I think,
But would my feet were going down
Towards the brown tarn's brink.
Lascelles Abercrombie.
Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,
Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
My heart remembers how!
Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,
Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor,
Hills of sheep, and the homes of the silent vanished races,
And winds, austere and pure:
Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,
Hills of home! and to hear again the call;
Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying,
And hear no more at all.
Robert Louis Stevenson.
Through the sunny garden
The humming bees are still;
The fir climbs the heather,
The heather climbs the hill.
The low clouds have riven
A little rift through.
The hill climbs to heaven,
Far away and blue.
O the high valley, the little low hill,
And the cornfield over the sea,
The wind that rages and then lies still,
And the clouds that rest and flee!
O the gray island in the rainbow haze,
And the long thin spits of land,
The roughening pastures and the stony ways,
And the golden flash of the sand!
O the red heather on the moss-wrought rock,
And the fir-tree stiff and straight,
The shaggy old sheep-dog barking at the flock,
And the rotten old five-barred gate!
O the brown bracken, the blackberry bough,
The scent of the gorse in the air!
I shall love them ever as I love them now,
I shall weary in Heaven to be there!
Strike, Life, a happy hour, and let me live
But in that grace!
I shall have gathered all the world can give,
Unending Time and Space!
Bring light and air—the thin and shining air
Of the North land,
The light that falls on tower and garden there,
Close to the gold sea-sand.
Bring flowers, the latest colours of the earth,
Ere nun-like frost
Lay her hard hand upon this rainbow mirth,
With twinkling emerald crossed.
The white star of the traveller's joy, the deep
Empurpled rays that hide the smoky stone,
The dahlia rooted in Egyptian sleep,
The last frail rose alone.
Let music whisper from a casement set
By them of old,
Where the light smell of lavender may yet
Rise from the soft loose mould.
Then shall I know, with eyes and ears awake,
Not in bright gleams,
The joy my Heavenly Father joys to make
For men who grieve, in dreams!
Mary E. Coleridge.
God gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all;
That as He watched Creation's birth
So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
And see that it is good.
So one shall Baltic pines content,
As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove's droned lament
Before Levuka's trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
Yea, Sussex by the sea!
No tender-hearted garden crowns,
No bosomed woods adorn
Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs,
But gnarled and writhen thorn—
Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim,
And through the gaps revealed
Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim
Blue goodness of the Weald.
Clean of officious fence or hedge,
Half-wild and wholly tame,
The wise turf cloaks the white cliff edge
As when the Romans came.
What sign of those that fought and died
At shift of sword and sword?
The barrow and the camp abide,
The sunlight and the sward.
Here leaps ashore the full Sou'west
All heavy-winged with brine,
Here lies above the folded crest
The Channel's leaden line;
And here the sea-fogs lap and cling,
And here, each warning each,
The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring
Along the hidden beach.
We have no waters to delight
Our broad and brookless vales—
Only the dewpond on the height
Unfed, that never fails,
Whereby no tattered herbage tells
Which way the season flies—
Only our close-bit thyme that smells
Like dawn in Paradise.
Here through the strong unhampered days
The tinkling silence thrills;
Or little, lost. Down churches praise
The Lord who made the hills;
But here the Old Gods guard their round,
And, in her secret heart,
The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found
Dreams, as she dwells, apart.
Though all the rest were all my share,
With equal soul I'd see
Her nine-and-thirty sisters fair,
Yet none more fair than she.
Choose ye your need from Thames to Tweed,
And I will choose instead
Such lands as lie 'twixt Rake and Rye,
Black Down and Beachy Head.
I will go out against the sun
Where the rolled scarp retires,
And the Long Man of Wilmington
Looks naked toward the shires;
And east till doubling Rother crawls
To find the fickle tide,
By dry and sea-forgotten walls,
Our ports of stranded pride.
I will go north about the shaws
And the deep ghylls that breed
Huge oaks and old, the which we hold
No more than "Sussex weed";
Or south where windy Piddinghoe's
Begilded dolphin veers,
And black beside wide-banked Ouse
Lie down our Sussex steers.
So to the land our hearts we give
Till the sure magic strike,
And Memory, Use, and Love make live
Us and our fields alike—
That deeper than our speech and thought,
Beyond our reason's sway,
Clay of the pit whence we were wrought
Yearns to its fellow-clay.
God gives all men all earth to love,
But since man's heart is small
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Beloved over all.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
Yea, Sussex by the sea!
Rudyard Kipling.
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