Oh listen, listen, ladies gay!
No haughty feat of arms I tell;
Soft is the note, and sad the lay
That mourns the lovely Rosabelle.

"Moor, moor the barge, ye gallant crew,
And, gentle lady, deign to stay!
Rest thee in Castle Ravensheuch,
Nor tempt the stormy firth to-day.

"The blackening wave is edged with white;
To inch and rock the sea-mews fly;
The fishers have heard the Water-Sprite,
Whose screams forbode that wreck is nigh.

"Last night the gifted seer did view
A wet shroud swathed round lady gay;

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;

For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down

Call it not vain--they do not err,
Who say, that when the poet dies,
Mute Nature mourns her worshipper,
And celebrates his obsequies;
Who say, tall cliff, and cavern lone,
For the departed bard make moan;
That mountains weep in crystal rill;
That flowers in tears of balm distil;
Through his loved groves that breezes sigh,
And oaks, in deeper groan, reply;
And rivers teach their rushing wave
To murmur dirges round his grave.
Not that, in sooth, o'er mortal urn
Those things inanimate can mourn;
But that the stream, the wood, the gale,

Sweet Teviot! on thy silver tide
The glaring bale-fires blaze no more;
No longer steel-clad warriors ride
Along thy wild and willowed shore;
Where'er thou wind'st by dale or hill,
All, all is peaceful, all is still,
As if thy waves, since Time was born,
Since first they rolled their way to Tweed,
Had only heard the shepherd's reed,
Nor started at the bugle-horn.

Unlike the tide of human time,
Which, though it change in ceaseless flow,
Retains each grief, retains each crime,
Its earliest course was doomed to know;

They smile on us by Time cut down
Who always while we lived lookt sour,
So grass smells sweeter when it's mown
Than fresh and waving in full flower.

Mitford, the candid Critic of my lays,
Who oft when wild my careless Muse would sing
Smooth'd the rough note, and check'd her vagrant wing,
Accept the humble gift she grateful pays;
Though now your thoughts to bolder heights you raise,
By History's awful Goddess taught to bring
Celestial flowers from Freedom's hallow'd Spring
To crown the Chiefs of G RECIA 's happier days,
Yet how to harmonize the tuneful strain
Your voice has shewn A ONIA 's listening throng;
Nor will you, though your nicer ear retain
What sounds to purest Melody belong,

Not by fine straining above our natural powers,
Or standing tiptoe over greater heads,
Do we beget that greatness nature weds
To her sure actions and her patient hours.
Nor yet by building arrogant Babel towers,
And aping genius, do we spin those threads
Of grave existence, which the world besteads
When fortune fails and life's horizon lowers.

Not thus doth Nature tread her patient rounds
In gloom of darkness or in wine of light,
Flaming the wheel of her slow fixèd bounds,
Revivifying day in womb of night:

Passing a room, there stood a desk;
When I carried the bedclothes in,
There on a book—a marble skull,
Seen at night through shadows dim.

Here my wearied spirit gushed in phantom urge,
The glow in elegy of bygone love!
A bone with holes, here set to prove the ages …
O ghost, tell me, dost thou mortally surge?

But dreams do not repeat!
Thence I burst upon this skull.
Away, ye weird visions real!
Thou art but a symbol
To dote my memory fold,
To serve this seal.

E SCAP'D the gloom of mortal life, a soul
Here leaves its mouldering tenement of clay,
Safe, where no Cares their whelming billows roll,
No Doubts bewilder, and no Hopes betray.

Like thee, I once have stemm'd the sea of life;
Like thee, have languish'd after empty joys';
Like thee, have labour'd in the stormy strife;
Been griev'd for trifles, and amus'd with toys.

Yet for a while 'gainst Passion's threatful blast
Let steady Reason urge the struggling oar;
Shot through the dreary gloom the morn at last
Gives to thy longing eye the blisful shore.

Along the grave green downs, this idle afternoon,
Shadows of loitering silver clouds, becalmed in blue,
Bring, like unfoldment of a flower, the best of June.

Shadows outspread in spacious movement, always you
Have dappled the downs and valleys at this time of year,
While larks, ascending shrill, praised freedom as they flew.
Now, through that song, a fighter-squadron's drone I hear
From Scratchbury Camp, whose turfed and cowslip'd rampart seems
More hill than history, ageless and oblivion-blurred.