"She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro' the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look'd down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side, 'The curse is come upon me,' cried The Lady of Shalott." _The Lady of Shalott._ Sitting in his old oak armchair in the drawing-room after dinner, the Laureate "talked of all that was in his heart, or read some poem aloud, with the landscape lying before us like a beautiful picture framed by the dark-arched bow-window. His moods," says Mrs. Bradley, "were so variable, his conversation so earnest, his knowledge of all things so wide and minute!" Wide and minute above all, perhaps, was his acquaintance with Nature. The long quiet years in Lincolnshire had endowed him with an almost unrivalled power of detail: and, as the old Farringford shepherd said in dying, "Master was a wonderful man for nature and life." No one quotation could do justice to his powers: but the lesser music of the countryside tinkles and ripples audibly through _The Brook_ and all the exquisite details of its landscape. "I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley. * * * * * "I chatter over stony ways, In little sharps and trebles, I bubble into eddying bays, I bubble on the pebbles. "With many a curve my banks I fret, By many a field and fallow, And many a fairy foreland set With willow-weed and mallow. * * * * * "I wind about, and in and out, With many a blossom sailing, And here and there a lusty trout, And here and there a grayling. "And here and there a foamy flake Upon me as I travel, With many a silvery waterbreak Above the golden gravel. * * * * * "I steal by lawns and grassy plots, I slide by hazel covers; I move the sweet forget-me-nots That grow for happy lovers. "I slide, I slide, I gloom, I glance, Among my skimming swallows; I make the netted sunbeam dance Against my sandy shallows. "I murmur under moon and stars In brambly wildernesses; I linger by my shingly bars; I loiter round my cresses; "And out again I curve and flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever." _The Brook._