And spoke no word, nor seemed alive at all,
But a mere shape and counterfeit of life;
Or, urged by some swift hunger for green boughs,
Would bid the hound to heel, and disappear
Into the forest, with himself communing
For lack of gossip. So do lonely men
Make themselves tedious to their tedious selves.
Thus passed he once in a white blaze of noon
Under his oaks, and muttered as he went:

"'My father's daughter' and 'your father's son'!
Faith, but it was a shrewd and nimble phrase,
And left me with no fitting word at tongue.
The wench hath wit and matter of her own,
And beauty, that doth seldom mate with wit,
Nature hath painted her a proper brown--
A russet-colored wench that knows her worth.
And mincing, too--should have her ruff propt up
With supertasses, like a dame at Court,
And go in cloth-of-gold. I'll get a suit
Of Genoa velvet, and so take her eye.
Has she a heart? The ladies of Whitehall
Are not so skittish, else does Darrell lie
Most villainously. Often hath he said
The art of blushing 's a lost art at Court.
If so, good riddance! This one here lets love
Play beggar to her prudery, and starve,
Feeding him ever on looks turned aside.
To be so young, so fair, and wise withal!
Lets love starve? Nay, I think starves merely me.
For when was ever woman logical
Both day and night-time? Not since Adam fell!
I doubt a lover somewhere. What shrewd bee
Hath buzzed betimes about this clover-top?
Belike some scrivener's clerk at Bideford,
With long goose-quill and inkhorn at his thigh--
Methinks I see the parchment face of him;
Or one of those swashbuckler Devon lads
That haunt the inn there, with red Spanish gold,
Rank scurvy knaves, ripe fruit for gallows-tree;
Or else the sexton's son"--here Wyndham laughed,
Though not a man of mirth--indeed, a man
Of niggard humor; but that sexton's son--
Lean as the shadow cast by a church spire,
Eyes deep in the sockets, noseless, high cheek-boned,
Like nothing in the circle of this earth
But a death's-head that from a mural slab
Within the chancel leers through sermon-time,
Making a mock of poor mortality.
The fancy touched him, and he laughed a laugh
That from his noonday slumber roused an owl
Snug in his oaken