My heart is awed within me when I think
Of the great miracle that still goes on,
In silence, round me—­the perpetual work
Of thy creation, finished, yet renewed
For ever.  Written on thy works I read
The lesson of thy own eternity. 
Lo! all grow old and die—­but see again,
How on the faltering footsteps of decay
Youth presses—­ever gay and beautiful youth
In all its beautiful forms.  These lofty trees
Wave not less proudly that their ancestors
Moulder beneath them.  Oh, there is not lost
One of earth’s charms:  upon her bosom yet,
After the flight of untold centuries,
The freshness of her far beginning lies
And yet shall lie.  Life mocks the idle hate
Of his arch enemy Death—­yea, seats himself
Upon the tyrant’s throne—­the sepulchre,
And of the triumphs of his ghastly foe
Makes his own nourishment.  For he came forth
From thine own bosom, and shall have no end.

There have been holy men who hid themselves
Deep in the woody wilderness, and gave
Their lives to thought and prayer, till they outlived
The generation born with them, nor seemed
Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks
Around them;—­and there have been holy men
Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus. 
But let me often to these solitudes
Retire, and in thy presence reassure
My feeble virtue.  Here its enemies,
The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrink
And tremble and are still.  Oh, God! when thou
Dost scare the world with tempests, set on fire
The heavens with falling thunderbolts, or fill,
With all the waters of the firmament,
The swift dark whirlwind that uproots the woods
And drowns the villages; when, at thy call,
Uprises the great deep and throws himself
Upon the continent, and overwhelms
Its cities—­who forgets not, at the sight
Of these tremendous tokens of thy power,
His pride, and lays his strifes and follies by? 
Oh, from these sterner aspects of thy face
Spare me and mine, nor let us need the wrath
Of the mad unchained elements to teach
Who rules them.  Be it ours to meditate
In these calm shades thy milder majesty,
And to the beautiful order of thy works
Learn to conform the order of our lives.

“Oh fairest of the rural maids.”

Oh fairest of the rural maids! 
Thy birth was in the forest shades;
Green boughs, and glimpses of the sky,
Were all that met thy infant eye.

Thy sports, thy wanderings, when a child,
Were ever in the sylvan wild;
And all the beauty of the place
Is in thy heart and on thy face.

The twilight of the trees and rocks
Is in the light shade of thy locks;
Thy step is as the wind, that weaves
Its playful way among the leaves.

Thine eyes are springs, in whose serene
And silent waters heaven is seen;
Their lashes are the herbs that look
On their young figures in the brook.