Roses, lilies, side by side,

Violets in families!

By the heart of Man, his tears,

By his hopes and by his fears,

Thou, too heedless, art the Warden

Of a far superior garden.

Thus then, each to other dear,

Let them all in quiet lie,

Andrew there, and Susan here,
Neighbours in mortality.

And, should I live through sun and rain
Seven widowed years without my Jane,
O Sexton, do not then remove her,
Let one grave hold the Loved and Lover!

THE DANISH BOY

A FRAGMENT

1799 1800

Written in Germany. It was entirely a fancy; but intended as a prelude to a ballad poem never written.

I

BETWEEN two sister moorland rills

There is a spot that seems to lie
Sacred to flowerets of the hills,
And sacred to the sky.

And in this smooth and open dell
There is a tempest-stricken tree;
A corner-stone by lightning cut,
The last stone of a lonely hut;
And in this dell you see

A thing no storm can e'er destroy,
The shadow of a Danish Boy.

II

In clouds above, the lark is heard,
But drops not here to earth for rest;
Within this lonesome nook the bird

Did never build her nest.

No beast, no bird hath here his home;,
Bees, wafted on the breezy air,

Pass high above those fragrant bells
To other flowers: to other dells
Their burthens do they bear;

The Danish Boy walks here alone:

The lovely dell is all his own.

III

A Spirit of noon-day is he;

Yet seems a form of flesh and blood; Nor piping shepherd shall he be,

Nor herd-boy of the wood.

A regal vest of fur he wears,

In colour like a raven's wing;

It fears not rain, nor wind, nor dew;

But in the storm 't is fresh and blue

As budding pines in spring;

His helmet has a vernal grace,

Fresh as the bloom upon his face.

IV

A harp is from his shoulder slung;
Resting the harp upon his knee,
To words of a forgotten tongue
He suits its melody.

Of flocks upon the neighbouring hill
He is the darling and the joy;

And often, when no cause appears,
The mountain-ponies prick their ears,
-They hear the Danish Boy,
While in the dell he sings alone

Beside the tree and corner-stone.

V

There sits he; in his face you spy
No trace of a ferocious air,

Nor ever was a cloudless sky

So steady or so fair.

The lovely Danish Boy is blest

And happy in his flowery cove:

From bloody deeds his thoughts are far; And yet he warbles songs of war,

That seem like songs of love,

For calm and gentle is his mien;
Like a dead Boy he is serene.

LUCY GRAY

OR, SOLITUDE

1799 1800

Written at Goslar in Germany. It was founded on a circumstance told me by my Sister, of a little girl who, not far from Halifax in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a snow-storm. Her footsteps were traced by her parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other vestige of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body however was found in the canal. The way in which the incident was treated and the spiritualising of the character might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influences which I have endeavoured to throw over common life with Crabbe's matter of fact style of treating subjects of the same kind. This is not spoken to his disparagement, far from it, but to direct the attention of thoughtful readers, into whose hands these notes may fall, to a comparison that may both enlarge the circle of their sensibilities, and tend to produce in them a catholic judgment.

OFT I had heard of Lucy Gray:

And, when I crossed the wild,

I chanced to see at break of day

The solitary child.

No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;

She dwelt on a wide moor,