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Yet am

I prone to guess

that he would not

Have conn'd, or known, or loved her half so well.

She was a stranger to his opening eyes,
Clad with the charm of still renew'd surprise.

And finding little in the daily round

To fashion fancy from the things of sense, His love of kin was all the more profound; Not wide in surface, but in act intense, Affection still a dutiful reality,

The ground and law, and soul of all morality.

Yet keeping still his little heart at home,

He wander'd with his mind in realms remote, Made playmates of the Fairy, Sylph, and Gnome,

And knew each Giant, Knight, and Wight of note Whate'er of wonderful the East and North, Darkly commingling, gender'd and brought forth.

Sweet thought he found, and noble, in the story
Of the Wehr-Wolf and sweet Red Ridinghood,
Shudder'd at feast of Ogre, raw and gory,

And watch'd the Sleeping Beauty in the wood.

THE LARCH GROVE.

LINE above line the nursling larches planted,
Still as they climb with interspace more wide,
Let in and out the sunny beams that slanted,

And shot and crankled down the mountain's side.

The larches grew, and darker grew the shade;
And sweeter aye the fragrance of the Spring;
Pink pencils all the spiky boughs arrayed,

And small green needles called the birds to sing.

They grew apace as fast as they could grow,
As fain the tawny fell to deck and cover,
They haply thought to soothe the pensive woe,
Or hide the joy of stealthy tripping lover.

Ah, larches! that shall never be your lot;

Nought shall you have to do with amorous weepers,

Nor shall ye prop the roof of cozy cot,

But rumble out your days as railway sleepers.

DENT.

I.

THERE is a town, of little note or praise,
Narrow and winding are its rattling streets,
Where cart with cart in cumbrous conflict meets,
Hard straining up or backing down the ways,
Where insecure the crawling infant plays,

And the nigh savour of the hissing sweets
Of pan or humming oven rankly greets

The hungry nose that threads the sinuous maze ;
Yet there the lesson of the pictured porch,
The beauty of Platonic sentiment,

The sceptic wisdom, positive in doubt,

All creeds and fancies, like the hunter's torch, Caught each from each, perfection find in Dent, Where what they cannot get they do without.

GEOLOGY.

II.

In that small town was born a worthy wight,
(His honest townsmen well approve his worth,)
Whose mind has pierced the solid crust of earth,
And roam'd undaunted in the nether night.
His thought a quenchless incorporeal light,
Has thrid the labyrinth of a world unknown,
Where the old Gorgon time has turned to stone
Long thorny snake and monstrous lithophyte.
Long mayst thou wander in that deep obscure,
And issuing thence, good sage, bring with thee still
That honest face, where truth and goodness shine;
Right was thy creed, as all thy life was pure.
And yet if certain persons had their will,

The fate of Galileo had been thine.

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