Next morning quite early the Poet threw his window wide open and looked out into his garden. It was not a trim and commonplace garden; it was an acre of good ground that had grown by degrees into a garden, as in the course of ages of village life one owner after another had turned it to his own purposes. The Poet looked over a bit of lawn, in the corner of which stood one of his favourite rowans, to an old bulging stone wall, buttressed up with supports of red brick of various shades, and covered with ivy. Over the top of it he could see the church tower, also ivy-clad, the yews of the churchyard, and the elms in the close beyond, in the tops of which the rooks were already busy and noisy. A thick and tall yew hedge separated the lawn from the village allotments, where one or two early labourers were collecting the winter’s rubbish into heaps and setting them alight; the shadow of the hedge upon the lawn was sharply marked by a silvery grey border of frost. On these things the Poet’s eye lingered with wonderful content for a while, and then wandered across the allotments over meadow and rich red ploughland to the line of hills that shut in his view to the south. There came into his mind the name he used to give to the moors above his Yorkshire dale in his young days when his mother read the Pilgrim’s Progress to her children—the Delectable Mountains. He was suddenly recalled to his garden by a low melodious pipe, as of a bird practising its voice for better use in warmer days; it came from one of the rowans. Sometimes the notes were almost whispered; sometimes they rose for an instant into a full and mellow sweetness, and then died away again. They were never continuous—only fragments of song; as if the bird were talking in the sweetest of contralto voices to a friend whose answers were unheard. No other bird was singing, and the rooks were too far away in the elms to break harshly with their cawing on the blackbird’s quiet strain. The Poet listened for a while enraptured, watching the dark form of the singer, and the “orange-tawny” bill from which the notes came so softly, so hesitatingly; and then drew in his head and began to dress, still keeping the window open, and repeating to himself— “O Blackbird, sing me something well: Though all the neighbours shoot thee round, I keep smooth plats of garden ground Where thou may’st warble, eat, and dwell. “The espaliers, and the standards, all Are thine; the range of lawn and park: The unnetted blackhearts ripen dark, All thine, against the garden wall.”