He rose, find homeward by the slumbering stream
  Walked with the morn-dew glistening on his shoon. 
  The sun was up, and his outbursting beam
  Touched tower and tree and pasture hills aboon;
  The stars were quenched, and vanished was the moon;
  Loud lowed the herds and the glad partridge’ cry
  Made corn-fields musical as groves at noon;
  Birds left the perch, bee following bee hummed by,
  And gladness reigned on earth and brightness claimed the sky.

MINSTRELSY.

  I sing of days in which brave deeds of arms
  And deeds of song went hand in hand:  our kings
  Heroic feelings had and owned the charms
  Of minstrel lore—­they loved the magic strings
  More than the sceptre; still their kingdom rings
  With their gay musings and their harpings high. 
  To noble deeds fair poesie lends wings;
  She lifts them up from grovelling earth to sky,
  And bids them sit in light, and live and never die.

FAME.

  Fame, fame—­thou warrior’s wish, thou poet’s thought,
  Thou bright delusion; like the rainbow thou
  Glitterest, yet none may touch thee; thing of naught,
  Star-high with heaven’s own brightness on thy brow,
  Blazoned and glorious I beheld thee grow—­
  Vision, begone,—­for I am none of thine. 
  Of all that fills my heart and fancy now,
  From dull oblivion not one word or line
  Wilt thou touch with thy light and render it divine.

  Even be it so.  I sing not for thy smiles—­
  I sing to keep down sighs and ease the smart
  Of care and sadness, and the daily toils
  Which crush my soul and trample on my heart. 
  Far mightier spirits of the inspired art
  Are mute and nameless, mid the muse in grief
  Calls from the eastern to the western airt,
  On tale, tradition, ballad, song, and chief
  On thee, to give their names one passage bright and brief. 
  She calls in vain; like to a shooting star
  Their storied rhymes shone brightly in their birth,
  And shot a dazzling lustre near and far;
  Then darkened, died, as all things else on earth.

EVENING.

                                     The sun
  Behind the mountain’s summit slowly sank;
  Crows came in clouds down from the moorlands dun,
  And darkened all the pine-trees, rank on rank;
  The homeward milch-cows at the fountains drank;
  Swains dropt the sickle, hinds unloosed the car—­
  The twin hares sported on the clover-bank,
  And with the shepherd o’er the upland far,
  Came out the round pale moon, and star succeeding star. 
  Star followed star, though yet day’s golden light
  Upon the hills and headlands faintly stream’d;
  To their own pine the twin-doves took their flight;
  From crag and cliff the clamorous seamews screamed,
  In glade and glen the cottage windows gleam’d;
  Larks left the cloud, for flight the grey owl sat;
  The founts and lakes up silver radiance steamed;
  Winging his twilight journey, hummed the gnat—­
  The drowsy beetle droned, and skimmed the wavering bat.