May feel not surely if heaven upon earth be sweet;

And here is my sense fulfilled of the joys of earth,

Light, silence, bloom, shade, murmur of leaves that meet.

Bloom, fervour, and perfume of grasses and flowers aglow,

Breathe and brighten about me: the darkness gleams,

The sweet light shivers and laughs on the slopes below,

Made soft by leaves that lighten and change like dreams;

The silence thrills with the whisper of secret streams

That well from the heart of the woodland: these I know:

Earth bore them, heaven sustained them with showers and beams.

I lean my face to the heather, and drink the sun

Whose flame-lit odour satiates the flowers: mine eyes

Close, and the goal of delight and of life is one:

No more I crave of earth or her kindred skies.

No more? But the joy that springs from them smiles and flies:

The sweet work wrought of them surely, the good work done,

If the mind and the face of the season be loveless, dies.

Thee, therefore, thee would I come to, cleave to, cling,

If haply thy heart be kind and thy gifts be good,

[Pg 140]

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