Sarum Plain

Breakfast enjoy’d, ’mid hush of boughsAnd perfumes thro’ the windows blown;Brief worship done, which still endowsThe day with beauty not its own;With intervening pause, that paintsEach act with honour, life with calm(As old processions of the SaintsAt every step have wands of palm),We rose; the ladies went to dress,And soon return’d with smiles; and then,Plans fix’d, to which the Dean said ‘Yes,’Once more we drove to Salisbury Plain.We past my house (observed with praiseBy Mildred, Mary acquiesced),And left the old and lazy greysBelow the hill, and walk’d the rest.

The moods of love are like the wind,And none knows whence or why they rise:I ne’er before felt heart and mindSo much affected through mine eyes.How cognate with the flatter’d air,How form’d for earth’s familiar zone,She moved; how feeling and how fairFor others’ pleasure and her own!And, ah, the heaven of her face!How, when she laugh’d, I seem’d to seeThe gladness of the primal grace,And how, when grave, its dignity!Of all she was, the least not lessDelighted the devoted eye;No fold or fashion of her dressHer fairness did not sanctify.I could not else than grieve. What cause?Was I not blest? Was she not there?Likely my own? Ah, that it was:How like seem’d ‘likely’ to despair!

And yet to see her so benign,So honourable and womanly,In every maiden kindness mine,And full of gayest courtesy,Was pleasure so without alloy,Such unreproved, sufficient bliss,I almost wish’d, the while, that joyMight never further go than this.So much it was as now to walk,And humbly by her gentle sideObserve her smile and hear her talk,Could it be more to call her Bride?I feign’d her won: the mind finite,Puzzled and fagg’d by stress and strainTo comprehend the whole delight,Made bliss more hard to bear than pain.All good, save heart to hold, so summ’dAnd grasp’d, the thought smote, like a knife,How laps’d mortality had numb’dThe feelings to the feast of life;How passing good breathes sweetest breath;And love itself at highest revealsMore black than bright, commending deathBy teaching how much life conceals.

But happier passions these subdued,When from the close and sultry lane,With eyes made bright by what they view’d,We emerged upon the mounded Plain.As to the breeze a flag unfurls,My spirit expanded, sweetly embracedBy those same gusts that shook her curlsAnd vex’d the ribbon at her waist.To the future cast I future cares;Breathed with a heart unfreighted, free,And laugh’d at the presumptuous airsThat with her muslins folded me;Till, one vague rack along my sky,The thought that she might ne’er be mineLay half forgotten by the eyeSo feasted with the sun’s warm shine.

By the great stones we chose our groundFor shade; and there, in converse sweet,Took luncheon. On a little moundSat the three ladies; at their feetI sat; and smelt the heathy smell,Pluck’d harebells, turn’d the telescopeTo the country round. My life went well,For once, without the wheels of hope;And I despised the Druid rocksThat scowl’d their chill gloom from above,Like churls whose stolid wisdom mocksThe lightness of immortal love.And, as we talk’d, my spirit quaff’dThe sparkling winds; the candid skiesAt our untruthful strangeness laugh’d;I kiss’d with mine her smiling eyes;And sweet familiarness and awePrevail’d that hour on either part,And in the eternal light I sawThat she was mine; though yet my heartCould not conceive, nor would confessSuch contentation; and there grewMore form and more fair statelinessThan heretofore between us two.