The frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind.
The Owlet's cry came loud,
And hark again,
Loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage,
All at rest,
Have left me to that solitude,
Which suits obstrucer musings.
Save that at my side,
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
Tis calm indeed,
So calm that it disturbs and vexes meditation with its strange and extreme silentness.
Sea,
Hill,
And wood,
This populous village.
Sea,
And hill,
And wood,
With all the rest of the world.
Inaudible as dreams.
The thin blue flame lies on my low burnt fire,
And quivers not.
Only that film,
Which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there,
The sole unquiet thing.
Methinks its motion,
In this hush of nature,
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling spirit.
By its own moods,
Interprets everywhere echo or mere seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of thought.
But oh,
How oft,
How oft at school with most believing mind,
Presageful,
Have I gazed upon the bars to watch that fluttering stranger,
And as oft with unclosed lids already had I dreamt of my sweet birthplace and the old church tower,
Whose bells the poor man's only music rang from morn to evening,
All the hot fair day,
So sweetly that they stirred and haunted me with a wild pleasure falling on my ear,
Most like articulate sounds of things to come.
So gazed I,
Till the soothing themes I dreamt lulled me to sleep,
And sleep prolonged my dreams.
And so I brooded,
All the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face,
Mine eye fixed with mock study on my swimming book,
Save if the door half opened and I snatched a hasty glance,
And still my heart leapt up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman or aunt or sister more beloved,
My playmate,
When we both were clothed alike.
Dear babe that sleepeth cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies and momentary pauses of the thought.
My babe so beautiful,
It thrills my heart with tender gladness thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes,
For I was reared in the great city,
Pent mid cloister's dim,
And saw not lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou my babe shalt wander like a breeze by lakes and sandy shores,
Beneath the cracks of ancient mountain,
And beneath the clouds which image in their bulk both lakes and shores and mountain cries.
So shalt thou see and hear the lovely shapes and sounds intelligible of that eternal language which thy God utters,
Who from eternity doth teach himself in all,
And all things in himself.
Now,
Great universal teacher,
He shall mould thy spirit,
And by giving make it ask.
Therefore,
All seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth with greenness,
Or the red rest sit and sink betwixt the doughts of snow on the bare branch of mossy apple tree,
While the night thatch smokes in the sun-thaw,
Whether the eve drops fall,
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
