And walk, glad, even to tears, among the wheat,
  Not doubting this to be the first of lands;
And, while in foreign words this murmuring, meet
  Some little village school-girls (with their hands
Full of forget-me-nots), who, greeting me,
I count their English talk delightsome melody;

And seat me on a bank, and draw them near,
  That I may feast myself with hearing it,
Till shortly they forget their bashful fear,
  Push back their flaxen curls, and round me sit—­
Tell me their names, their daily tasks, and show
Where wild wood-strawberries in the copses grow.

So passed the day in this delightful land: 
  My heart was thankful for the English tongue—­
For English sky with feathery cloudlets spanned—­
  For English hedge with glistening dewdrops hung. 
I journeyed, and at glowing eventide
Stopped at a rustic inn by the wayside.

That night I slumbered sweetly, being right glad
  To miss the flapping of the shrouds; but lo! 
A quiet dream of beings twain I had,
  Behind the curtain talking soft and low: 
Methought I did not heed their utterance fine,
Till one of them said, softly, “Eglantine.”

I started up awake, ’twas silence all: 
  My own fond heart had shaped that utterance clear: 
And “Ah!” methought, “how sweetly did it fall,
  Though but in dream, upon the listening ear! 
How sweet from other lips the name well known—­
That name, so many a year heard only from mine own!”

I thought awhile, then slumber came to me,
  And tangled all my fancy in her maze,
And I was drifting on a raft at sea. 
  The near all ocean, and the far all haze;
Through the while polished water sharks did glide,
And up in heaven I saw no stars to guide.

“Have mercy, God!” but lo! my raft uprose;
  Drip, drip, I heard the water splash from it;
My raft had wings, and as the petrel goes,
  It skimmed the sea, then brooding seemed to sit
The milk-white mirror, till, with sudden spring,
She flew straight upward like a living thing.

But strange!—­I went not also in that flight,
  For I was entering at a cavern’s mouth;
Trees grew within, and screaming birds of night
  Sat on them, hiding from the torrid south. 
On, on I went, while gleaming in the dark
Those trees with blanched leaves stood pale and stark.

The trees had flower-buds, nourished in deep night,
  And suddenly, as I went farther in,
They opened, and they shot out lambent light;
  Then all at once arose a railing din
That frighted me:  “It is the ghosts,” I said,
And they are railing for their darkness fled.

“I hope they will not look me in the face;
  It frighteth me to hear their laughter loud;”
I saw them troop before with jaunty pace,
  And one would shake off dust that soiled her shroud: 
But now, O joy unhoped! to calm my dread,
Some moonlight filtered through a cleft o’erhead.