Another landscape at my feet Unfolds its nearer grace the while, Where gorses gleam with golden smile; Where Inula lifts a russet head The shepherd's spikenard sweet; And closing Centaury points her rosy red. One light cicada's simmering cry, Survivor of the summer heat, Chimes faint; the robin, shrill and sweet, Pipes from green holly; whilst from far The rookery croaks reply, Hoarse, deep, as veterans readying for war. --Grief on a happier future dwells; The happy present haunts the past; And those old minstrels who outlast Our looser-textured webs of song, Nursed in Hellenic dells, Sicilian, or Italian, hither throng. Why care if Turk and Tartar fume, Barbarian 'gainst barbarian set, Or how our politic prophets fret, When on this tapestry-thyme and heath, Fresh work of Nature's loom, Thus, thus, we can diffuse ourselves, and breathe Autumnal sparkling freshness?--while The page by some bless'd miracle saved When Goth and Frank 'gainst Hellas raved. Paints how the wanderer-chief divine, Snatch'd from Circaean guile, Led by Nausicaa past Athene's shrine, In that delicious garden sate Where summer link'd to summer glows, Grapes ever ripe, and rose on rose; And all the wonders of thy tale --O greatest of the great-- Whose splendour ne'er can fade, nor beauty fail! Or by the city of God above In rose-red meadows, where the day Eternal burns, the bless'd ones stray; The harp lets loose its silver showers From the dark incense-grove; And happiness blooms forth with all her flowers. O Theban strain,--remote and pure, Voice of the higher soul, that shames Our downward, dry, material aims, The bestial creed of earth-to-earth,-- Owning with insight sure The signs that speak of Man's celestial birth! Or white Colonos here through green Green Dorset winds his holy vale, Where the divine deep nightingale Heaps note on note and love on love, In ivy thick unseen, While goddesses with Dionysos rove. Another music then we hear, A cry from the Sicilian dell, 'Here 'mid sweet grapes and laurel dwell; Slips by from wood-girt Aetna's dome Snow-cold the stream and clear:-- Hither to me, come, Galataea, come!' --Voices and dreams long fled and gone! And other echoes make reply, The low Maenalian melody ''Twas in our garth, a twelve-year child, I saw thee, little one, Pick the red fruit that to thy fancy smiled, 'Thee and thy mother: I, your guide:'-- O sweet magician! Happy heart! Content with that unrivall'd art,-- The soul of grace in music shrined,-- And notes of modest pride, To sing the life he loved to all mankind!