Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them,--thou hast thy music too, While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river-sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft, And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. --JOHN KEATS. TO A WATERFOWL Whither, 'midst falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue Thy solitary way? Vainly the fowler's eye Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong, As, darkly painted on the crimson sky, Thy figure floats along. Seek'st thou the plashy brink Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, Or where the rocking billows rise and sink On the chafed ocean side? There is a power whose care Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,-- The desert and illimitable air,-- Lone wandering, but not lost. All day thy wings have fann'd, At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere; Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land, Though the dark night is near. And soon that toil shall end; Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend Soon o'er thy sheltered nest. Thou'rt gone--the abyss of heaven Hath swallow'd up thy form--yet on my heart Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given, And shall not soon depart. He, who from zone to zone Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone, Will lead my steps aright. --WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer rul'd as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien. --JOHN KEATS. RECESSIONAL