Until the peopled streets being all dismissed, House-rows and groups all scattered like a flock, The market-gardens thickened, and the long White walls beyond, like spiders’ outside threads, Stretched, feeling blindly toward the country-fields Through half-built habitations and half-dug Foundations,—intervals of trenchant chalk, That bite betwixt the grassy uneven turfs Where goats (vine-tendrils trailing from their mouths) Stood perched on edges of the cellarage Which should be, staring as about to leap To find their coming Bacchus. All the place Seemed less a cultivation than a waste: Men work here, only,—scarce begin to live: All’s sad, the country struggling with the town, Like an untamed hawk upon a strong man’s fist, That beats its wings and tries to get away, And cannot choose be satisfied so soon To hop through court-yards with its right foot tied, The vintage plains and pastoral hills in sight! We stopped beside a house too high and slim To stand there by itself, but waiting till Five others, two on this side, three on that, Should grow up from the sullen second floor They pause at now, to build it to a row. The upper windows partly were unglazed Meantime,—a meagre, unripe house: a line Of rigid poplars elbowed it behind, And, just in front, beyond the lime and bricks That wronged the grass between it and the road, A great acacia, with its slender trunk And overpoise of multitudinous leaves, (In which a hundred fields might spill their dew And intense verdure, yet find room enough) Stood, reconciling all the place with green.