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From “Poly-Olbion”
WAYBRIDGE, a neighboring nymph, the only remnant left | |
| Of all that forest kind, by time’s injurious theft | |
| Of all that tract destroyed, with wood which did abound, | |
| And former times had seen the goodliest forest-ground | |
| This island ever had: but she so left alone, | 5 |
| The ruin of her kind, and no man to bemoan. | |
| The deep-entrancéd flood, as thinking to awake, | |
| Thus from her shady bower she silently bespake: | |
| “O flood in happy plight, which to this time remain’st, | |
| As still along in state to Neptune’s court thou strain’st; | 10 |
| Revive thee with the thought of those forepasséd hours, | |
| When the rough wood-gods kept, in their delightful bowers | |
| On thy embroidered banks, when now this country filled | |
| With villages, and by the laboring ploughman tilled, | |
| Was forest, where the fir and spreading poplar grew. | 15 |
| O, let me yet the thought of those past times renew, | |
| When as that woody kind, in our umbrageous wild, | |
| Whence every living thing save only they exiled, | |
| In this their world of waste the sovereign empire swayed. | |
| O, who would e’er have thought that time could have decayed | 20 |
| Those trees whose bodies seemed by their so massy weight | |
| To press the solid earth, and with their wondrous height | |
| To climb into the clouds, their arms so far to shoot, | |
| As they in measuring were of acres, and their root, | |
| With long and mighty spurns to grapple with the land, | 25 |
| As nature would have said, that they shall ever stand: | |
| So that this place where now this Huntingdon is set, | |
| Being an easy hill where mirthful hunters met, | |
| From that first took the name.” | |
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