fair;'
And, further inland, voices echo'd--'Come
With all good things, and war shall be no more.'
At this a hundred bells began to peal, 80
That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed
The clear church-bells ring in the Christmas-morn.

THE BROOK

Here, by this brook, we parted; I to the East
And he for Italy--too late--too late;
One whom the strong sons of the world despise;
For lucky rhymes to him were scrip and share,
And mellow metres more than cent for cent; 5
Nor could he understand how money breeds;
Thought it a dead thing; yet himself could make
The thing that is not as the thing that is.
O had he lived! In our schoolbooks we say,
Of those that held their heads above the crowd, 10
They flourish'd then or then; but life in him
Could scarce be said to flourish, only touch'd
On such a time as goes before the leaf,
When all the wood stands in a mist of green,
And nothing perfect: yet the brook he loved, 15
For which, in branding summers of Bengal,
Or ev'n the sweet half-English Neilgherry air
I panted, seems; as I re-listen to it,
Prattling the primrose fancies of the boy,
To me that loved him; for 'O brook,' he says, 20
'O babbling brook,' says Edmund in his rhyme,
'Whence come you?' and the brook, why not? replies:

I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern, 25
To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges. 30

Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

'Poor lad, he died at Florence, quite worn out, 35
Travelling to Naples. There is Darnley bridge,
It has more ivy; there the river; and there
Stands Philip's farm where brook and river meet.

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles, 40
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret
By many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland set 45
With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatte