XXIV

550

Nought of his sire's ungenerous part Polluted Wilfrid's gentle heart, A heart too soft from early life To hold with fortune needful strife. His sire, while yet a hardier race Of numerous sons were Wycliffe's grace, On Wilfrid set contemptuous brand For feeble heart and forceless hand; But a fond mother's care and joy Were centred in her sickly boy. No touch of childhood's frolic mood Showed the elastic spring of blood; Hour after hour he loved to pore On Shakespeare's rich and varied lore, But turned from martial scenes and light, From Falstaff's feast and Percy's fight, To ponder Jaques' moral strain, And muse with Hamlet, wise in vain, And weep himself to soft repose O'er gentle Desdemona's woes.

XXV

560

570

In youth he sought not pleasures found By youth in horse and hawk and hound, But loved the quiet joys that wake By lonely stream and silent lake; In Deepdale's solitude to lie, Where all is cliff and copse and sky; To climb Catcastle's dizzy peak, Or lone Pendragon's mound to seek. Such was his wont; and there his dream Soared on some wild fantastic theme Of faithful love or ceaseless spring, Till Contemplation's wearied wing The enthusiast could no more sustain, 580 And sad he sunk to earth again.

Wilfrid must love and woo the bright Matilda, heir of Rokeby's knight. To love her was an easy hest, The secret empress of his breast; To woo her was a harder task To one that durst not hope or ask. Yet all Matilda could she gave In pity to her gentle slave; Friendship, esteem, and fair regard, And praise, the poet's best reward! She read the tales his taste approved, And sung the lays he framed or loved; Yet, loath to nurse the fatal flame Of hopeless love in friendship's name, In kind caprice she oft withdrew The favoring glance to friendship due, Then grieved to see her victim's pain, And gave the dangerous smiles again.

XXVIII

237

590

600

610

620

630

640

650

The lovely heir of Rokeby's Knight
Waits in his halls the event of fight;
For England's war revered the claim
Of every unprotected name,
And spared amid its fiercest rage
Childhood and womanhood and age.
But Wilfrid, son to Rokeby's foe,
Must the dear privilege forego,
By Greta's side in evening gray,
To steal upon Matilda's way,
Striving with fond hypocrisy
For careless step and vacant eye;
Calming each anxious look and glance,
To give the meeting all to chance,
Or framing as a fair excuse
The book, the pencil, or the muse;
Something to give, to sing, to say,
Some modern tale, some ancient lay.
Then, while the longed-for minutes last,
Ah! minutes quickly over-past! -
Recording each expression free
Of kind or careless courtesy,
Each friendly look, each softer tone,
As food for fancy when alone.
All this is o'er - but still unseen
Wilfrid lurk in Eastwood green,
To watch Matilda's wonted round,
While springs his heart at every sound.
She comes! 't is but a passing sight,
Yet serves to cheat his weary night;
She comes not he will wait the hour 670
When her lamp lightens in the tower;
'T is something yet if, as she past,
Her shade is o'er the lattice cast.
'What is my life, my hope?' he said;
'Alas! a transitory shade.'

may

XXX

Thus wore his life, though reason strove
For mastery in vain with love,
Forcing upon his thoughts the sum
Of present woe and ills to come,
While still he turned impatient ear
From Truth's intrusive voice severe.

660

680

Gentle, indifferent, and subdued,
In all but this unmoved he viewed
Each outward change of ill and good:
But Wilfrid, docile, soft, and mild,
Was Fancy's spoiled and wayward child;
In her bright car she bade him ride,
With one fair form to grace his side,
Or, in some wild and lone retreat,
Flung her high spells around his seat,
Bathed in her dews his languid head,
Her fairy mantle o'er him spread,
For him her opiates gave to flow,
Which he who tastes can ne'er forego,
And placed him in her circle, free
From every stern reality,
Till to the Visionary seem

Her day-dreams truth, and truth a dream.

XXXI

Woe to the youth whom Fancy gains, Winning from Reason's hand the reins, Pity and woe! for such a mind Is soft, contemplative, and kind; And woe to those who train such youth, And spare to press the rights of truth, The mind to strengthen and anneal While on the stithy glows the steel! O teach him while your lessons last To judge the present by the past; Remind him of each wish pursued, How rich it glowed with promised good; Remind him of each wish enjoyed, How soon his hopes possession cloyed! Tell him we play unequal game Whene'er we shoot by Fancy's aim; And, ere he strip him for her race, Show the conditions of the chase: Two sisters by the goal are set, Cold Disappointment and Regret; One disenchants the winner's eyes, And strips of all its worth the prize. While one augments its gaudy show, More to enhance the loser's woe. The victor sees his fairy gold Transformed when won to drossy mould, But still the vanquished mourns his loss, And rues as gold that glittering dross.

XXXII More wouldst thou know

vey,

-yon tower sur

Yon couch unpressed since parting day, Yon untrimmed lamp, whose yellow gleam Is mingling with the cold moonbeam, And yon thin form! the hectic red

240

Wears with his rage no common foe;
For pebbly bank, nor sand-bed here,
Nor clay-mound, checks his fierce career,
Condemned to mine a channelled way
O'er solid sheets of marble gray.

III

Nor Tees alone in dawning bright Shall rush upon the ravished sight; But many a tributary stream

40

Each from its own dark cell shall gleam :
Staindrop, who from her sylvan bowers
Salutes proud Raby's battled towers;
The rural brook of Egliston,
And Balder, named from Odin's son;
And Greta, to whose banks ere long
We lead the lovers of the song;
And silver Lune from Stanmore wild,
And fairy Thorsgill's murmuring child, 50
And last and least, but loveliest still,
Romantic Deepdale's slender rill.
Who in that dim-wood glen hath strayed,
Yet longed for Roslin's magic glade?
Who, wandering there, hath sought to
change

Even for that vale so stern and strange
Where Cartland's crags, fantastic rent,
Through her green copse like spires are
sent ?

Yet, Albin, yet the praise be thine,
Thy scenes and story to combine !
Thou bid'st him who by Roslin strays
List to the deeds of other days;

60

Mid Cartland's crags thou show'st the

Each on his own deep visions bent,
Silent and sad they onward went.
Well may you think that Bertram's mood
To Wilfrid savage seemed and rude;
Well may you think bold Risingham
Held Wilfrid trivial, poor, and tame;
And small the intercourse, I ween,
Such uncongenial souls between.

V

Stern Bertram shunned the nearer way Through Rokeby's park and chase that lay,

And, skirting high the valley's ridge, They crossed by Greta's ancient bridge, Descending where her waters wind Free for a space and unconfined As, 'scaped from Brignall's dark-wood glen, She seeks wild Mortham's deeper den. There, as his eye glanced o'er the mound Raised by that Legion long renowned Whose votive shrine asserts their claim Of pious, faithful, conquering fame, 'Stern sons of war!' sad Wilfrid sighed, 'Behold the boast of Roman pride! What now of all your toils are known? A grassy trench, a broken stone !'This to himself; for moral strain To Bertram were addressed in vain.

VI

100

Of different mood a deeper sigh Awoke when Rokeby's turrets high Were northward in the dawning seen To rear them o'er the thicket green. O then, though Spenser's self had strayed Beside him through the lovely glade, Lending his rich luxuriant glow Of fancy all its charms to show, Pointing the stream rejoicing free As captive set at liberty, Flashing her sparkling waves abroad, And clamoring joyful on her road; Pointing where, up the sunny banks, The trees retire in scattered ranks, Save where, advanced before the rest, On knoll or hillock rears his crest, Lonely and huge, the giant Oak, As champions when their band is broke Stand forth to guard the rearward post, The bulwark of the scattered hostAll this and more might Spenser say, Yet waste in vain his magic lay, While Wilfrid eyed the distant tower Whose lattice lights Matilda's bower.

open

VII

The vale is soon passed o'er, Rokeby, though nigh, is seen no more; Sinking mid Greta's thickets deep, A wild and darker course they keep, A stern and lone yet lovely road As e'er the foot of minstrel trode ! Broad shadows o'er their passage fell, Deeper and narrower grew the dell; It seemed some mountain, rent and riven, A channel for the stream had given, So high the cliffs of limestone gray Hung beetling o'er the torrent's way, Yielding along their rugged base A flinty footpath's niggard space,

140

Where he who winds 'twixt rock and

wave

May hear the headlong torrent rave, And like a steed in frantic fit, That flings the froth from curb and bit, May view her chafe her waves to spray O'er every rock that bars her way, Till foam-globes on her eddies ride, Thick as the schemes of human pride That down life's current drive amain, As frail, as frothy, and as vain!

VIII

150

The cliffs that rear their haughty head High o'er the river's darksome bed Were now all naked, wild, and gray, Now waving all with greenwood spray; Here trees to every crevice clung And o'er the dell their branches hung; 160 And there, all splintered and uneven, The shivered rocks ascend to heaven; Oft, too, the ivy swathed their breast And wreathed its garland round their

crest,

Or from the spires bade loosely flare Its tendrils in the middle air.

As pennons wont to wave of old

O'er the high feast of baron bold, When revelled loud the feudal rout

169

And the arched halls returned their shout, Such and more wild is Greta's roar, And such the echoes from her shore, And so the ivied banners gleam, Waved wildly o'er the brawling stream.

241

180

Forming such warm and dry retreat
As fancy deems the lonely seat
Where hermit, wandering from his cell,
His rosary might love to tell.
But here 'twixt rock and river grew
A dismal grove of sable yew,
With whose sad tints were mingled seen
The blighted fir's sepulchral green.
Seemed that the trees their shadows cast
The earth that nourished them to blast;
For never knew that swarthy grove
The verdant hue that fairies love,
Nor wilding green nor woodland flower
Arose within its baleful bower:
The dank and sable earth receives
Its only carpet from the leaves
That, from the withering branches cast,
Bestrewed the ground with every blast.
Though now the sun was o'er the hill,
In this dark spot 't was twilight still,
Save that on Greta's farther side
Some straggling beams through copsewood
glide;

And wild and savage contrast made
That dingle's deep and funeral shade
With the bright tints of early day,

190

200

Which, glimmering through the ivy spray, On the opposing summit lay.