For Those Still Older

Nature, Country, and the Open Air

To Meadows

Ye have been fresh and green,
Ye have been fill'd with flowers;
And ye the walks have been

Where maids have spent their hours.

You have beheld how they

With wicker arks did come

To kiss and bear away

The richer cowslips home.

You've heard them sweetly sing,
And seen them in a round:
Each virgin like a spring,
With honeysuckles crown'd.

But now we see none here

Whose silv'ry feet did tread

And with dishevelled hair

Adorn'd this smoother mead.

Like unthrifts, having spent

Your stock, and needy grown,
You're left here to lament

Your poor estates, alone.

ROBERT HERRICK.

The Brook

I come from haunts of coot and hern,'

I make a sudden sally,

And sparkle out among the fern,
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.

2

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

1hern: heron.

thorps: villages.

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

I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I wind about and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling.

And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel

With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.