The sleek red horses o'er the sun-warmed ground

Stand pensively about in companies,

While all around them from the motionless trees

The long clean shadows sleep without a sound.

[38]

Under cool elm-trees floats the distant stream,

Moveless as air; and o'er the vast warm earth

The fathomless daylight seems to stand and dream,

A liquid cool elixir—all its girth

Bound with faint haze, a frail transparency,

Whose lucid purple barely veils and fills

The utmost valleys and the thin last hills,

Nor mars one whit their perfect clarity.

Thus without grief the golden days go by,

So soft we scarcely notice how they wend,

And like a smile half happy, or a sigh,

The summer passes to her quiet end;

And soon, too soon, around the cumbered eaves

Sly frosts shall take the creepers by surprise,

And through the wind-touched reddening woods shall rise

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