Corn-Flowers
Book II The Sabbath
Fresh glides the brook and blows the gale,
Yet yonder halts the quiet mill;
The whirring wheel, the rushing sail,
How motionless and still!
Six days of toil, poor child of Cain,
Thy strength the slave of Want may be;
The seventh thy limbs escape the chain—
A God hath made thee free!
Ah, tender was the law that gave
This holy respite to the breast,
To breathe the gale, to watch the wave,
And know—the wheel may rest!
But where the waves the gentlest glide
What image charms, to lift, thine eyes?
The spire reflected on the tide
Invites thee to the skies.
To teach the soul its nobler worth
This rest from mortal toils is given;
Go, snatch the brief reprieve from earth
And pass—a guest to Heaven.
They tell thee, in their dreaming school,
Of Power from old dominion hurl’d,
When rich and poor, with juster rule,
Shall share the alter’d world.
Alas! since Time itself began,
That fable hath but fool’d the hour;
Each age that ripens Power in Man,
But subjects Man to Power.
Yet every day in seven, at least,
One bright republic shall be known;—
Man’s world awhile hath surely ceased,
When God proclaims his own!
Six days may Rank divide the poor,
O Dives, from thy banquet-hall—
The seventh the Father opes the door,
And holds His feast for all!
The Hollow Oak
Hollow is the oak beside the sunny waters drooping;
Thither came, when I was young, happy children trooping;
Dream I now, or hear I now—far, their mellow whooping?
Gay below the cowslip bank, see the billow dances,
There I lay beguiling time—when I lived romances;
Dropping pebbles in the wave, fancies into fancies;—
Farther, where the river glides by the wooded cover,
Where the merlin singeth low, with the hawk above her
Came a foot and shone a smile—woe is me, the Lover!
Leaflets on the hollow oak still as greenly quiver,
Musical amid the reeds murmurs on the river;
But the footstep and the smile?—woe is me for ever!