Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin Forms and warms the life within; And bird and blossom swell In sod or sheath or shell. All things rising, all things sizing Mary sees, sympathising With that world of good, Nature's motherhood. Their magnifying of each its kind With delight calls to mind How she did in her stored Magnify the Lord. Well but there was more than this: Spring's universal bliss Much, had much to say To offering Mary May. When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple Bloom lights the orchard-apple And thicket and thorp are merry With silver-surfed cherry And azuring-over greybell makes Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes And magic cuckoocall Caps, clears, and clinches all-- This ecstacy all through mothering earth Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth To remember and exultation In God who was her salvation. _19 Binsey Poplars felled 1879_ MY aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank. O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew-- Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being so slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene. _20 Duns Scotus's Oxford_ TOWERY city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook- racked, river-rounded; The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did Once encounter in, here coped and poised powers; Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded Rural rural keeping--folk, flocks, and flowers. Yet ah! this air I gather and I release He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace; Of realty the rarest-veined unraveller; a not Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece; Who fired France for Mary without spot. _21 Henry Purcell_ _The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man's mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally._