How fresh the morning meadow of the spring, Pearl-seeded with the dew: adown its path, Bored by the worms of night, the Old Soldier takes His wonted walk, and drinks into his heart The gush and gurgle of the cold green stream. The huddled splendour of the April noon; Glancings of rain; the mountain-tops all quick With shadowy touches and with greening gleams; Blue bent the Bow of God; the coloured clouds, Soaked with the glory of the setting sun,-- These all are his for pleasure: his the Moon, Chaste huntress, dipping, o'er the dewy hills, Her silver buskin in the dying day. The summer morn is up: the tapering trees Are all a-glitter. In his garden forth The Old Soldado saunters: hovering on Before him, oft upon the naked walk Rests the red butterfly; now full dispread; Now, in the wanton gladsomeness of life, Half on their hinges folding up its wings; Again full spread and still: o'erhead away, Lo! now it wavers through the liquid blue. But he intent from out their straw-roofed hives Watches his little foragers go forth, Boot on the buds to make, to suck the depths Of honey-throated blooms, and home return, Their thighs half smothered with the yellow dust. Dibble and hoe he plies; anon he props His heavy-beaded plants, and visits round His herbs of grace: the simple flowerets here Open their infant buttons; there the flowers Of preference blow, the lily and the rose. Fast by his cottage door there grows an oak, Of state supreme, drawn from the centuries. Pride of the old man's heart, in many a walk. Far off he sees its top of sovereignty, And with instinctive loyalty his cap Soldierly touches to the Royal Tree-- King of all trees that flourish! King revered! Trafalgars lie beneath his rugged vest, And in his acorns is The Golden Age! Summer the time; thoughtful beneath his tree The Veteran puffs his intermittent pipe, And cheats the sweltering hours; yet noting oft The flight of bird, and exhalation far Quivering and drifting o'er the fallow field, And the great cloud rising upon the noon, The sultry smithy of the thunder-forge. Anon the weekly journal of events Conning, he learns the doings of the world, And what it suffers--justice-loosened wrath Falling from Heaven upon unrighteous states, Famine, and plague, earthquake, and flood, and fire; Lean Sorrow tracking still the bread-blown Sin; A spirit of lies; high-handed wrong; the curse Of ignorance crass and fat stupidity; Glib demagogue tongues that sow the dragon-teeth Of wars along the valleys of the earth; And maddened nations at their contre-dance Of revolutions, when each bloody hour Comes staggering in beneath its load of crimes, Enough to bend the back of centuries.