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I.
THE FORBURY, AT READING, VISITED ON A MISTY EVENING IN AUTUMN
SOFT uplands, that in boyhood’s earliest days | |
| Seemed mountain-like and distant, fain once more | |
| Would I behold you! but the autumn hoar | |
| Hath veiled your pensive groves in evening haze; | |
| Yet must I wait till on my searching gaze | 5 |
| Your outline lives,—more dear than if ye wore | |
| An April sunset’s consecrating rays,— | |
| For even thus the images of yore | |
| Which ye awaken glide from misty years | |
| Dream-like and solemn, and but half unfold | 10 |
| Their tale of glorious hopes, religious fears, | |
| And visionary schemes of giant mould; | |
| Whose dimmest trace the world-worn heart reveres, | |
| And, with love’s grasping weakness, strives to hold. | |
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II.
ON HEARING THE SHOUTS OF THE PEOPLE AT THE READING ELECTION, IN THE SUMMER OF 1826, AT A DISTANCE
HARK! from the distant town the long acclaim | 15 |
| On the charmed silence of the evening breaks | |
| With startling interruption; yet it wakes | |
| Thought of that voice of never-dying fame | |
| Which on my boyish meditation came | |
| Here, at an hour like this;—my soul partakes | 20 |
| A moment’s gloom, that yon fierce contest slakes | |
| Its thirst of high emprise and glorious aim: | |
| Yet wherefore? Feelings that from Heaven are shed | |
| Into these tenements of flesh ally | |
| Themselves to earthly passions, lest, unfed | 25 |
| By warmth of human sympathies, they die; | |
| And shall—earth’s fondest aspirations dead— | |
| Fulfil their first and noblest prophecy. | |
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III.
VIEW OF THE VALLEY OF READING, FROM TILEHURST, AT THE CLOSE OF THE SAME ELECTION
TOO long have I regarded thee, fair vale, | |
| But as a scene of struggle which denies | 30 |
| All pensive joy; and now with childhood’s eyes | |
| In old tranquillity, I bid thee hail; | |
| And welcome to my soul thy own sweet gale, | |
| Which wakes from loveliest woods the melodies | |
| Of long-lost fancy. Never may there fail | 35 |
| Within thy circlet spirits born to rise | |
| In honor,—whether won by Freedom rude | |
| In her old Spartan majesty, or wrought | |
| With partial, yet no base regard, to brood | |
| O’er usages by time with sweetness fraught; | 40 |
| Be thou their glory-tinted solitude, | |
| The cradle and the home of generous thought! | |
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