| |
| THIS is the place | |
| Where far from the unholy populace | |
| The daughter of Philosophy and Sleep | |
| Her court doth keep, | |
| Sweet Contemplation. To her service bound | 5 |
| Hover around | |
| The little amiable summer airs, | |
| Her courtiers. | |
| |
| The deep black soil | |
| Makes mute her palace-floors with thick trefoil; | 10 |
| The grasses sagely nodding overhead | |
| Curtain her bed; | |
| And lest the feet of strangers overpass | |
| Her walls of grass, | |
| Gravely a little river goes his rounds | 15 |
| To beat the bounds. | |
| |
| —No bustling flood | |
| To make a tumult in her neighbourhood, | |
| But such a stream as knows to go and come | |
| Discreetly dumb. | 20 |
| Therein are chambers tapestried with weeds | |
| And screen’d with reeds; | |
| For roof the waterlily-leaves serene | |
| Spread tiles of green. | |
| |
| The sun’s large eye | 25 |
| Falls soberly upon me where I lie; | |
| For delicate webs of immaterial haze | |
| Refine his rays. | |
| The air is full of music none knows what, | |
| Or half-forgot; | 30 |
| The living echo of dead voices fills | |
| The unseen hills. | |
| |
| I hear the song | |
| Of cuckoo answering cuckoo all day long; | |
| And know not if it be my inward sprite | 35 |
| For my delight | |
| Making remember’d poetry appear | |
| As sound in the ear: | |
| Like a salt savour poignant in the breeze | |
| From distant seas. | 40 |
| |
| Dreams without sleep, | |
| And sleep too clear for dreaming and too deep; | |
| And Quiet very large and manifold | |
| About me roll’d; | |
| Satiety, that momentary flower, | 45 |
| Stretch’d to an hour: | |
| These are her gifts which all mankind may use, | |
| And all refuse. | |
| |
