Add thick espaliers where the bullfinch came To strew much budding wealth, and was not chid. Then add wide pear trees on the warmèd wall, The old red wall one cannot see beyond. That is the garden. In the wall a door Green, blistered with the sun. You open it, And lo! a sunny waste of tumbled hills And a glad silence, and an open calm. Infinite leisure, and a slope where rills Dance down delightedly, in every crease, And lambs stoop drinking and the finches dip, Then shining waves upon a lonely beach. That is the world. An all-sufficient world, And as it seems an undiscovered world, So very few the folk that come to look. Yet one has heard of towns; but they are far The world is undiscovered, and the child Is undiscovered that with stealthy joy Goes gathering like a bee who in dark cells Hideth sweet food to live on in the cold. What matters to the child, it matters not More than it mattered to the moons of Mars, That they for ages undiscovered went Marked not of man, attendant on their king. A shallow line of sand curved to the cliff, There dwelt the fisherfolk, and there inland Some scattered cottagers in thrift and calm, Their talk full oft was of old days,--for here Was once a fosse, and by this rock-hewn path Our wild fore-elders as 't is said would come To gather jetsam from some Viking wreck, Like a sea-beast wide breasted (her snake head Reared up as staring while she rocked ashore) That split, and all her ribs were on their fires The red whereof at their wives' throats made bright Gold gauds which from the weed they picked ere yet The tide had turned. 'Many,' methought, 'and rich They must have been, so long their chronicle. Perhaps the world was fuller then of folk, For ships at sea are few that near us now.' Yet sometimes when the clouds were torn to rags, Flying black before a gale, we saw one rock In the offing, and the mariner folk would cry, 'Look how she labours; those aboard may hear Her timbers creak e'en as she'd break her heart.' 'Twas then the grey gulls blown ashore would light In flocks, and pace the lawn with flat cold feet.