All day with hay and idle mowers. She dubbed me knight in pixy bowers, Where in the hindering undergrowth I caught the singing of the flowers, Ah me, how distant!... I was blest in my young lord who shared the test, Being sent upon this pilgrimage, his snow-white love still unpossessed. He, too, was paler than a ghost, as though already all were lost. She dreamed of empery for him. He taught me this to show the cost: _My heart was mine. Ambition kept it whole. I gained the world, And so I lost my soul._ _Then you were mine, But only mine in part. You loved the world, And so I lost my heart._ Only my tutor lay abed, calling us savages, and read His pagan books. The fever would abate, he sneered, when we were bled. He chilled me. His head was like a block of ice, so clear. He tried to shock Me with his whispered flings that saints and monarchs came of laughing-stock, Or boasted some loud organ, Reason, which doctors had confused with treason, Looked round lest walls should hear, then wept that he was one born out of season. Our preaching-man pronounced a ban upon him, cried good riddance: he Was like to lead young men astray because he knew geography, (And sciences, as medicine, reduce the value of a shrine). My tutor passed for riding gnomes through space upon a pack of tomes. But at the water-parting I waved to the castle green and dun, A tapestry where liquid sun--or tears--had made the colours run. I looked my last on every stone and tree to whom my face was known. The warriors smiled and called me child. They had not understood the Rhone, Nor that I _loved_ the birchwood's skin, the pansy's face, the sheep-dog's grin, That sleep with Nature in a field was sweet to me as mortal sin. For love so fierce I stole: I gave my summer holidays to save Lambs from the butcher, built for them sanctuary at my wolf-cub's grave. I stroked the landscape like a lute. No scentless words, no colours mute, Could paint its music. Henceforth I had only heaven for substitute.