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Written upon Doulting Sheep-Slate, near Shepton Mallet, Somersetshire
I KNELT down as I poured my spirit forth by that gray gate, | |
| In the fulness of my gratitude and with a joy sedate; | |
| Alone on that wild heath I stood, and offered up apart | |
| The frankincense of love that, fount-like, gushed from my deep heart. | |
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| And while I breathed that thankfulness, and felt its holy glow, | 5 |
| And my heart gathered gladness in its calm and equal flow, | |
| While the sun shone within me, and the air elastic played, | |
| And to and fro the wheat-field like the wavy ocean swayed; | |
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| And while the black firs tossed their boughs against the intense blue, | |
| Light glinting on the grassy sward as broken rays flashed through, | 10 |
| I felt that Nature answered like an angel from her throne, | |
| And echoed back the rapture of my bosom from her own. | |
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| I saw the rich red pathway in the opening distance rolled, | |
| As if it led through vistas to some throne or shore of gold, | |
| And while the light breeze murmured there like sighs of love suppressed, | 15 |
| My heart poured forth its blessing on the loveliness it blessed. | |
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| I felt I stood on sacred ground that hallowed was to me, | |
| To boyhood’s years far faded on the verge of memory: | |
| Sacred to me the gray-haired man who drank God’s blessed air, | |
| Though thirty years had rolled away since last I entered there! | 20 |
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| The oak drooped o’er that gate, a withered thing in dead repose, | |
| Gray Doulting’s spire above the waste a sheeted spectre rose; | |
| And Mendip’s bleak and barren heights again enclosed me round, | |
| Like faces of forgotten friends met on forgotten ground. | |
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| But heath and landscape, boundless once, were shrunken: all was changed: | 25 |
| I felt I stood a stranger there, the place and me estranged: | |
| Each glance was memory, each step a joy, a welcome sense | |
| Of gratitude’s fine ecstasy, calm, voiceless, but intense. | |
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| All stirring impulses of life were sobered by the scene, | |
| While staid Reflection looked within the glass of what had been; | 30 |
| For not a mound I trod upon was unforgot, nor tree | |
| Rose in that surging scene whose image had not entered me. * * * * * | |
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