HERE 'midst the crowd the jingling hoop is driven,
Full many a leg is hit and curse is given.
There on the pavement mystic forms are chalked,
Defaced, renewed, delayed, but never balked.
There romping Miss the rounded slate may drop,
And kick it out with persevering hop.
There in the dirty current of the strand
Boys drop the rival corks with ready hand,
And, wading through the puddle with slow pace,
Watch in solicitude the doubtful race!
S Ednam, then, so near us? I must gaze
On Thomson's cradle-spot, -
(Theocritus and Maro blent in one)
As ever graced the name, and on the scenes
That first to poesy awoke his soul,
In hours of holiday, when boyhood's glance
Invested nature with an added charm."
So saying to myself, with eager steps,
Down through the avenues of Sydenham
(Green Sydenham, to me forever dear,
As birth-house of the being with whose fate
Mine own is sweetly mingled, even with thine,
My wife, my children's mother), on I strayed
In a perplexity of pleasing thoughts,
Amid the perfume of blown eglantine,
And hedgerow wild-flowers, memory conjuring up
In many a sweet, bright, fragmentary snatch,
The truthful, soul-subduing lays of him
Whose fame is with his country's being blent,
And cannot die; until at length I gained
A vista from the road, between the stems
Of two broad sycamores, whose filial boughs
Above in green communion intertwined;
And lo! at once in view, nor far remote,
The downward country, like a map unfurled,
Before me lay,
-green pastures, forests dark, —
And, in its simple quietude revealed,
Ednam, no more a visionary scene.
A rural church; some scattered cottage roofs, From whose secluded hearths the thin blue smoke, Silently wreathing through the breezeless air, Ascended, mingling with the summer sky; A rustic bridge, mossy and weather-stained; A fairy streamlet, singing to itself; And here and there a venerable tree
In foliaged beauty, of these elements,
And only these, the simple scene was formed.
TO THE SHADE OF THOMSON.
WHILE virgin Spring, by Eden's flood,
Unfolds her tender mantle green,
Or pranks the sod in frolic mood,
Or tunes Æolian strains between;
While Summer with a matron grace
Retreats to Dryburgh's cooling shade,
Yet oft, delighted, stops to trace
The progress of the spiky blade;
While Autumn, benefactor kind,
By Tweed erects his aged head,
And sees, with self-approving mind,
Each creature on his bounty fed;
While maniac Winter rages o'er
The hills whence classic Yarrow flows, Rousing the turbid torrent's roar,
Or sweeping, wild, a waste of snows,
So long, sweet Poet of the year,
Shall bloom that wreath thou well hast won;
While Scotia, with exulting tear,
Proclaims that Thomson was her son.
HERE is a stillness on the night;
Glimmers the ghastly moonshine white
On Learmonth's woods and Leader's streams,
Till Earth looks like a land of dreams:
Up in the arch of heaven afar,
Receded looks each little star,
And meteor flashes faintly play
By fits along the Milky Way.
Upon me in this eerie hush,
A thousand wild emotions rush,
As, gazing spellbound o'er the scene,
Beside thy haunted walls I lean,
Gray Ercildoune, and feel the Past
His charméd mantle o'er me cast;
Visions, and thoughts unknown to Day,
Bear o'er the fancy wizard sway,
And call up the traditions told
Of him who sojourned here of old.
What stirs within thee? "T is the owl
Nursing amid thy chambers foul
Her impish brood; the nettles rank
Are seeding on thy wild-flower bank;
The hemlock and the dock declare
In rankness dark their mastery there;
And all around thee speaks the sway
Of desolation and decay.
In outlines dark the shadows fall
Of each grotesque and crumbling wall.
Extinguished long hath been the strife
Within thy courts of human life.
The rustic, with averted eye,
At fall of evening hurries by,
And lists to hear, and thinks he hears,
Strange sounds, the offspring of his fears;
And wave of bough, and waters' gleam,
Not what they are, but what they seem
To be, are by the mind believed,
Which seeks not to be undeceived.
Thou scowlest like a spectre vast
Of silent generations past,
And all about thee wears a gloom
Of something sterner than the tomb.
For thee, 't is said, dire forms molest,
That cannot die, or will not rest.
Backward my spirit to the sway
Of shadowy Eld is led away,
When underneath thine ample dome
Thomas the Rhymer made his home,
The wondrous poet-seer, whose name,
Still floating on the breath of fame,
Hath overpast five hundred years,
Yet fresh as yesterday appears,
With spells to arm the winter's tale,
And make the listener's check grow pale.
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