With fear or love or pleasure's twin-born, pain.

Fiercely the gaunt woods to the grim soil cling

That bears for all fair fruits

Wan wild sparse flowers of windy and wintry spring

Between the tortive serpent-shapen roots

Wherethrough their dim growth hardly strikes and shoots

And shews one gracious thing

Hardly, to speak for summer one sweet word

Of summer's self scarce heard.

But higher the steep green sterile fields, thick-set

With flowerless hawthorn even to the upward verge

Whence the woods gathering watch new cliffs emerge

Higher than their highest of crowns that sea-winds fret,

[Pg 312]

Hold fast, for all that night or wind can say,

Some pale pure colour yet,

Too dim for green and luminous for grey.

Between the climbing inland cliffs above

And these beneath that breast and break the bay,

A barren peace too soft for hate or love

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