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| MY travels’ dream and talk for many a year, | |
| At length I view thee, hoary Silchester! | |
| Pilgrim long vowed; now only hither led, | |
| As with new zeal by fervent Mitford fed, | |
| Whose voice of poesy and classic grace | 5 |
| Had breathed a new religion on the place. | |
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| ’Scaped from the pride, the smoke, the busy hum | |
| Of our metropolis, a later Rome, | |
| How sweet to win one calm, uncrowded day, | |
| Where congregated man hath passed away! | 10 |
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| For these old city-walls, a half-league round, | |
| Are but the girdle now of rural ground; | |
| These stones from far-off fields, toil-gathered thence | |
| For man’s protection, but a farm’s ring-fence; | |
| The fruit of all his planning and his pain | 15 |
| By Nature’s certain hand resumed again! | |
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| Yet eyes instructed, as along they pass, | |
| May learn from crossing lines of stunted grass, | |
| And stunted wheat-stems, that refuse to grow, | |
| What intersecting causeways sleep below. | 20 |
| And ploughshare, deeplier delving on its path, | |
| Will oft break in on pavement quaint or bath; | |
| Or flax-haired little one, from neighboring cot, | |
| Will hap on rusted coin, she knows not what; | |
| ’Bout which, though grave collectors make great stir, | 25 |
| Some pretty pebble found had more contented her. | |
| |
| From trees that shade thine amphitheatre, | |
| Hoarse caws the rook, and redbreast carols clear; | |
| All silent else! nor human foot nor call | |
| Are heard to-day within its turfy wall; | 30 |
| Gone—many a century since—its shouts, its shows; | |
| Here thought may now hold commune with repose. | |
| |
| Yet sheds the sun no other evening glow | |
| Than tinged these walls two thousand years ago; | |
| While leaves, e’en such as then in autumn fell, | 35 |
| Twirling adown with faint decaying smell, | |
| Mix with the pensive thoughts of ruin well. | |
| |
| These walls already reared did Cæsar see? | |
| Rose they, Stonehenge! coevally with thee, | |
| Whose years, in prose untold or Druid-rhyme, | 40 |
| Still baffle thought,—the riddle of old Time? | |
| Or was it Rome first fixed to fortify | |
| This pleasant spot? deserted when? or why? | |
| What name, familiar to historic ear, | |
| Ruled this hill-circled track, Proconsul here; | 45 |
| And master of these fields, though fair they be, | |
| Sighed for his sunny vines beyond the Tyrrhene sea? | |
| |
| Within these bounds when Jove’s high altar stood, | |
| Was the oak worshipped in yon sloping wood? | |
| And did each creed, as creeds are wont to do, | 50 |
| The other scorn, and hold itself the true? | |
| |
| Declare, Geologist! what ancient sea | |
| These flinty nodules fashioned, thus to be | |
| Ruin or rock, as each—a mystery! | |
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| Thy very name a puzzle! Yet, I wis, | 55 |
| Scanning these flints, ’t was “Castrum Silicis.” | |
| My books away, I vouch not how it is; | |
| For heavy tomes of antiquarian lore | |
| Burden the traveller much, if reader more. | |
| |
| In vain for cicerone round I seek; | 60 |
| Speak, ancient bulwarks! your own story speak: | |
| Vexed heretofore by dilettanti lungs, | |
| How often have I wished that stones had tongues! | |
| |
| Can he explain, stretched silent as his fold, | |
| Perchance of Latin blood, yon shepherd old, | 65 |
| Himself a crumbling ruin of fourscore? | |
| “The Romish folk,” he says, “dwelt here of yore”; | |
| ’T is all he knows,—the learned scarce know more. | |
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| Slow I muse on, in idle question lost, | |
| If knowledge or if mystery please the most. | 70 |
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