sometimes milder hours she knew,Nor wanted sun, nor rain, nor dew,
Nor pastimes of the May,
They all were with her in her cell,
And a wild brook with chearful knell
Did o’er the pebbles play.
When Ruth three seasons thus had lain
There came a respite to her pain,
She from her prison fled;
But of the Vagrant none took thought,
And where it liked her best she sought
Her shelter and her bread.
Among the fields she breath’d again:
The master-current of her brain
Ran permanent and free,
And to the pleasant Banks of Tone
She took her way, to dwell alone
Under the greenwood tree.
The engines of her grief, the tools
That shap’d her sorrow, rocks and pools,
And airs that gently stir
The vernal leaves, she loved them still,
Nor ever tax’d them with the ill
Which had been done to her.
A Barn her winter bed supplies,
But till the warmth of summer skies
And summer days is gone,
(And in this tale we all agree)
She sleeps beneath the greenwood tree,
And other home hath none.
If she is press’d by want of food
She from her dwelling in the wood
Repairs to a road side,
And there she begs at one steep place,
Where up and down with easy pace
The horsemen-travellers ride.
That oaten pipe of hers is mute
Or thrown away, but with a flute
Her loneliness she cheers;
This flute made of a hemlock stalk
At evening in his homeward walk
The Quantock Woodman hears.
I, too have pass’d her on the hills
Setting her little water-mills
By spouts and fountains wild,
Such small machinery as she turn’d
Ere she had wept, ere she had mourn’d
A young and happy Child!
Farewel! and when thy days are told
Illfated Ruth! in hallow’d mold
Thy corpse shall buried be,
For thee a funeral bell shall ring,
And all the congregation sing
A Christian psalm for thee.
LINES WRITTEN WITH A SLATE-PENCIL UPON A STONE, THE LARGEST OF A HEAP LYING NEAR A DESERTED QUARRY, UPON ONE OF THE ISLANDS AT RYDALE.
Stranger! this hillock of mishapen stones
Is not a ruin of the ancient time,
Nor, as perchance thou rashly deem’st, the Cairn
Of some old British Chief: ‘tis nothing more
Than the rude embryo of a little dome
Or pleasure-house, which was to have been built
Among the birch-trees of this rocky isle.
But, as it chanc’d, Sir William having learn’d
That from the shore a full-grown man might wade,
And make himself a freeman of this spot
At any hour he chose, the Knight forthwith
Desisted, and the quarry and the mound
Are monuments of his unfinish’d task. —
The block on which these lines are trac’d, perhaps,
Was once selected as the cornerstone
Of the intended pile, which would have been
Some quaint odd plaything of elaborate skill,
So that, I guess, the linnet and the thrush,
And other little builders who dwell here,
Had wonder’d at the work. But blame him not,
For old Sir William was a gentle Knight
Bred in this vale to which he appertain’d
With all his ancestry. Then peace to him
And for the outrage which he had devis’d
Entire forgiveness. — But if thou art one
On fire with thy impatience to become
An Inmate of these mountains, if disturb’d
By beautiful conceptions, thou hast hewn
Out of the quiet rock the elements
Of thy trim mansion destin’d soon to blaze
In snow-white splendour, think again, and taught
By old Sir William and his quarry, leave
Thy fragments to the bramble and the rose,
There let the vernal slow-worm sun himself,
And let the redbreast hop from stone to stone.
In the School of —— is a tablet on which are inscribed, in gilt letters, the names of the federal persons who have been Schoolmasters there since the foundation of the School, with the time
