MY GARDEN.
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f I could put my woods in song,And tell what's there enjoyed,All men would to my gardens throng,And leave the cities void. In my plot no tulips blow,--Snow-loving pines and oaks instead;And rank the savage maples growFrom spring's faint flush to autumn red. My garden is a forest ledgeWhich older forests bound;The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,Then plunge to depths profound. Here once the Deluge ploughed,Laid the terraces, one by one;Ebbing later whence it flowed,They bleach and dry in the sun. The sowers made haste to depart,--The wind and the birds which sowed it;Not for fame, nor by rules of art,Planted these, and tempests flowed it. Waters that wash my garden sidePlay not in Nature's lawful web,They heed not moon or solar tide,--Five years elapse from flood to ebb. Hither hasted, in old time, Jove,And every god,--none did refuse;And be sure at last came Love,And after Love, the Muse. Keen ears can catch a syllable,As if one spake to another,In the hemlocks tall, untameable,And what the whispering grasses smother. AEolian harps in the pineRing with the song of the Fates;Infant Bacchus in the vine,--Far distant yet his chorus waits. Cast thou copy in verse one chimeOf the wood-bell's peal and cry,Write in a book the morning's prime,Or match with words that tender sky? Wonderful verse of the gods,Of one import, of varied tone;They chant the bliss of their abodesTo man imprisoned in his own. Ever the words of the gods resound;But the porches of man's earSeldom in this low life's roundAre unsealed, that he may hear. Wandering voices in the air,And murmurs in the wold,Speak what I cannot declare,Yet cannot all withhold. When the shadow fell on the lake,The whirlwind in ripples wroteAir-bells of fortune that shine and break,And omens above thought. But the meanings cleave to the lake,Cannot be carried in book or urn;Go thy ways now, come later back,On waves and hedges still they burn. These the fates of men forecast,Of better men than live to-day;If who can read them comes at last,He will spell in the sculpture, 'Stay!'
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