Robert Bridges, ed. (1844–1930). The Spirit of Man: An Anthology. 1916. | | | | From Melampus |
George Meredith (1828–1909) |
| | | WITH 1 love exceeding a simple love of the things | |
| That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck; | |
| Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings | |
| From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck; | |
| Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball; | 5 |
| Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook; | |
| The good physician Melampus, loving them all, | |
| Among them walk’d, as a scholar who reads a book. | |
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| For him the woods were a home and gave him the key | |
| Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs and flowers. | 10 |
| The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we | |
| To earth he sought, and the link of their life with ours: | |
| And where alike we are, unlike where, and the vein’d | |
| Division, vein’d parallel, of a blood that flows | |
| In them, in us, from the source by man unattain’d | 15 |
| Save marks he well what the mystical woods disclose … | |
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