e laves the dust that soils their feet
In coming from the distant lands.

Or, leading down some sinuous path,
Where the shy stream's encircling heights
Shut out all prying eyes, invites
Her lily daughters to the bath.

There, with a mother's harmless pride,
Admires them sport the waves among:
Now lay their ivory limbs along
The buoyant bosom of the tide.

Now lift their marble shoulders o'er
The rippling glass, or sink with fear,
As if the wind approaching near
Were some wild wooer from the shore.

Or else the parent turns to these,
The younglings born beneath her eye,
And hangs the baby-buds close by,
In wind-rocked cradles from the trees.

And as the branches fall and rise,
Each leafy-folded swathe expands:
And now are spread their tiny hands,
And now are seen their starry eyes.

But soon the feast concludes the day,
And yonder in the sun-warmed dell,
The happy circle meet to tell
Their labours since the bygone May.

A bright-faced youth is first to raise
His cheerful voice above the rest,
Who bears upon his hardy breast
A golden star with silver rays:[109]

Worthily won, for he had been
A traveller in many a land,
And with his slender staff in hand
Had wandered over many a green:

Had seen the Shepherd Sun unpen
Heaven's fleecy flocks, and let them stray
Over the high-pealed Himalay,
Till night shut up the fold again:

Had sat upon a mossy ledge,
O'er Baiae in the morning's beams,
Or where the sulphurous crater steams
Had hung suspended from the edge:

Or following its devious course
Up many a weary winding mile,
Had tracked the long, mysterious Nile
Even to its now no-fabled source:

Resting, perchance, as on he strode,
To see the herded camels pass
Upon the strips of wayside grass
That line with green the dust-white road.

Had often closed his weary lids
In oases that deck the waste,
Or in the mighty shadows traced
By the eternal pyramids.

Had slept within an Arab's tent,
Pitched for the night beneath a palm,
Or when was heard the vesper psalm,
With the pale nun in worship bent:

Or on the moonlit fields of France,
When happy village maidens trod
Lightly the fresh and verdurous sod,
There was he seen amid the dance:

Yielding with sympathizing stem
To the quick feet that round him flew,
Sprang from the ground as they would do,
Or sank unto the earth with them:

Or, childlike, played with girl and boy
By