There is a music fills The oaks of Belmont and the Wayland hills Southward to Dewing’s little bubbly stream, The heavenly weather’s call! Oh, who alive Hastes not to start, delays not to arrive, Having free feet that never felt a gyve Weigh, even in a dream? But thou, instead, hast found The sunless April uplands underground, And still, wherever thou art, I must be. My beautiful! arise in might and mirth, For we were tameless travellers from our birth; Arise against thy narrow door of earth, And keep the watch for me. [Illustration] _A Seventeenth-Century Song_ SHE alone of Shepherdesses With her blue disdayning eyes, Wo’d not hark a Kyng that dresses All his lute in sighes: Yet to winne Katheryn, I elect for mine Emprise. None is like her, none above her, Who so lifts my youth in me, That a littel more to love her Were to leave her free! But to winne Katheryn, Is mine utmost love’s degree. Distaunce, cold, delay, and danger, Build the four walles of her bower; She ’s noe Sweete for any stranger, She ’s noe valley flower: And to winne Katheryn, To her height my heart can Tower! Uppe to Beautie’s promontory I will climb, nor loudlie call Perfect and escaping glory Folly, if I fall: Well to winne Katheryn! To be worth her is my all. [Illustration] _On the Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford_ I IMPERIAL Iffley, Cumnor bowered in green, And Templar Sandford in the boatman’s call, And sweet-belled Appleton, and Wytham wall That doth upon adoring ivies lean; Meek Binsey; Dorchester where streams convene Bidding on graves her solemn shadow fall; Clear Cassington that soars perpetual; Holton and Hampton, and ye towers between: If one of all in your sad courts that come, Belovèd and disparted! be your own, Kin to the souls ye had, while time endures, Known to each exiled, each estrangèd stone Home in the quarries of old Christendom,-- Ah, mark him: he will lay his cheek to yours. II Is this the end? is this the pilgrim’s day For dread, for dereliction, and for tears? Rather, from grass and air and many spheres In prophecy his spirit sinks away; And under English eaves, more still than they, Far-off, incoming, wonderful, he hears The long-arrested and believing years Carry the sea-wall! Shall he, sighing, say, “Farewell to Faith, for she is dead at best Who had such beauty”? or with kisses lain For witness on her darkened doors, go by With a new psalm: “O banished light so nigh! Of them was I who bore thee and who blest; Even here remember me when thou shalt reign.” [Illustration] _The Still of the Year_