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| THERE is a stream, I name not its name, lest inquisitive tourist | |
| Hunt it, and make it a lion, and get it at last into guide-books, | |
| Springing far off from a loch unexplor’d in the folds of great mountains, | |
| Falling two miles through rowan and stunted alder, enveloped | |
| Then for four more in a forest of pine, where broad and ample | 5 |
| Spreads, to convey it, the glen with heathery slopes on both sides: | |
| Broad and fair the stream, with occasional falls and narrows; | |
| But, where the glen of its course approaches the vale of the river, | |
| Met and block’d by a huge interposing mass of granite, | |
| Scarce by a channel deep-cut, raging up, and raging onward, | 10 |
| Forces its flood through a passage so narrow a lady would step it. | |
| There, across the great rocky wharves, a wooden bridge goes, | |
| Carrying a path to the forest; below, three hundred yards, say, | |
| Lower in level some twenty-five feet, through flats of shingle, | |
| Stepping-stones and a cart-track cross in the open valley. | 15 |
| But in the interval here the boiling, pent-up water | |
| Frees itself by a final descent, attaining a basin, | |
| Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury | |
| Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror; | |
| Beautiful there for the color deriv’d from green rocks under; | 20 |
| Beautiful, most of all, where beads of foam up-rising | |
| Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness. | |
| Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendant birch boughs, | |
| Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and pathway, | |
| You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water, | 25 |
| Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the goddess of bathing. | |
| Here, the pride of the plunger, you stride the fall and clear it; | |
| Here, the delight of the bather, you stride the fall and clear it; | |
| Here into pure green depth drop down from lofty ledges. | |
| Hither, a month agone, they had come, and discover’d it; hither | 30 |
| (Long a design, but long unaccountably left unaccomplish’d), | |
| Leaving the well-known bridge and pathway above to the forest, | |
| Turning below from the track of the carts over stone and shingle, | |
| Piercing a wood, and skirting a narrow and natural causeway | |
| Under the rocky wall that hedges the bed of the streamlet, | 35 |
| Rounded a craggy point, and saw on a sudden before them | |
| Rounded a craggy point, and saw on a sudden before them | |
| Slabs of rock, and a tiny beach, and perfection of water, | |
| Picture-like beauty, seclusion sublime, and the goddess of bathing. | |
| There they bath’d, of course, and Arthur, the glory of headers, | 40 |
| Leap’d from the ledges with Hope, he twenty feet, he thirty; | |
| There, overbold, great Hobbes from a ten-foot height descended, | |
| Prone, as a quadruped, prone with hands and feet protending; | |
| There in the sparkling champagne, ecstatic, they shriek’d and shouted. | |
| “Hobbes’s gutter” the Piper entitles the spot, profanely, | 45 |
| Hope “the Glory” would have, after Arthur, the glory of headers: | |
| But, for before they departed, in shy and fugitive reflex | |
| Here in the eddies and there did the splendor of Jupiter glimmer; | |
| Adam adjudged it the name of Hesperus, star of the evening. | |
| Hither, to Hesperus, now, the star of the evening above them, | 50 |
| Come in their lonelier walk the pupils twain and Tutor; | |
| Turn’d from the track of the carts, and passing the stone and shingle, | |
| Piercing the wood, and skirting the stream by the natural causeway, | |
| Rounded the craggy point, and now at their ease look’d up; and | |
| Lo, on the rocky ledge, regardant, the Glory of headers, | 55 |
| Lo, on the beach, expecting the plunge, not cigarless, the Piper.— | |
| And they look’d, and wonder’d, incredulous, looking yet once more. | |
| Yes, it was he, on the ledge, bare-limb’d, an Apollo, down-gazing, | |
| Eying one moment the beauty, the life, ere he flung himself in it, | |
| Eying through eddying green waters the green-tinting floor underneath them, | 60 |
| Eying the bead on the surface, the bead, like a cloud, rising to it, | |
| Drinking in, deep in his soul, the beautiful hue and the clearness, | |
| Arthur, the shapely, the brave, the unboasting, the glory of headers; | |
| Yes, and with fragrant weed, by his knapsack, spectator and critic, | |
| Seated on slab by the margin, the Piper, the Cloud-compeller. | 65 |
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