| |
| ROUGH pasture where the blackberries grow!— | |
| It bears upon its churlish face | |
| No sign of beauty, art, or grace; | |
| Not here the silvery coverts glow | |
| That April and the angler know. | 5 |
| |
| There sleeps no brooklet in this wild, | |
| Smooth-resting on its mosses sleek, | |
| Like loving lips upon a cheek | |
| Soft as the face of maid or child,— | |
| Just boulders, helter-skelter piled. | 10 |
| |
| Ungenerous nature but endows | |
| These acres with the stumps and stocks | |
| Which should be trees, with rude, gray rocks; | |
| Over these humps and hollows browse, | |
| Daily, the awkward, shambling cows. | 15 |
| |
| Here on the right a straggling wall | |
| Of crazy, granite stones, and there | |
| A rotten pine-trunk, brown and bare, | |
| A mass of huge brakes, rank and tall,— | |
| The burning blue sky over all. | 20 |
| |
| And yet these blackberries shy and chaste! | |
| The noisy markets know no such,— | |
| So ripe they tumble when you touch; | |
| Long, taper—rarer wines they waste | |
| Than ever town-bred topers taste. | 25 |
| |
| And tell me! have you looked o’erhead, | |
| From lawns where lazy hammocks swing, | |
| And seen such orioles on the wing? | |
| Such flames of song that flashed and fled? | |
| Well, maybe—I ’m not city-bred. | 30 |
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