Or at times a modern volume, Wordsworth's solemn-thoughted idyl, Howitt's ballad-verse, or Tennyson's enchanted reverie,-- Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which, if cut deep down the middle, Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.
Or at times I read there, hoarsely, some new poem of my making: Poets ever fail in reading their own verses to their worth, For the echo in you breaks upon the words which you are speaking, And the chariot wheels jar in the gate through which you drive them forth.
After, when we were grown tired of books, the silence round us flinging A slow arm of sweet compression, felt with beatings at the breast She would break out on a sudden in a gush of woodland singing, Like a child's emotion in a god--a naiad tired of rest.
Oh, to see or hear her singing! scarce I know which is divinest, For her looks sing too--she modulates her gestures on the tune, And her mouth stirs with the song, like song; and when the notes are finest, 'T is the eyes that shoot out vocal light and seem to swell them on.
Then we talked--oh, how we talked! her voice, so cadenced in the talking, Made another singing--of the soul! a music without bars: While the leafy sounds of woodlands, humming round where we were walking, Brought interposition worthy-sweet,--as skies about the stars.
And she spake such good thoughts natural, as if she always thought them; She had sympathies so rapid, open, free as bird on branch, Just as ready to fly east as west, whichever way besought them, In the birchen-wood a chirrup, or a cock-crow in the grange.
In her utmost lightness there is truth--and often she speaks lightly, Has a grace in being gay which even mournful souls approve, For the root of some grave earnest thought is understruck so rightly As to justify the foliage and the waving flowers above.
And she talked on--_we_ talked, rather! upon all things, substance, shadow, Of the sheep that browsed the grasses, of the reapers in the corn, Of the little children from the schools, seen winding through the meadow, Of the poor rich world beyond them, still kept poorer by its scorn.
So, of men, and so, of letters--books are men of higher stature, And the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear; So, of mankind in the abstract, which grows slowly into nature, Yet will lift the cry of "progress," as it trod from sphere to sphere.