Full summer dusk was round him as he stood
On the hill-top, over the calling sheep
Drifting along the pastured downs.  The moon
Far off was rising from the Sussex sea. 
Above him, building up into the sky,
Black, and with pointing sails now skeletoned,
A windmill gathered strays of evening wind
Whispering through the splitting timbers.  Still
The setting sun washed with a fuller gold
The golden sheaves patterned upon a cone
Of downland by him farther from the sea. 
So still, he seemed a thing woven of earth,
A life rooted and fixed as were the oaks
Locked in the soil, their bases webbed with fleece
Of sheltering ewes, he watched across the valley,
And the hour passed, and the black mill grew and grew,
And then a light came in a far window
Of a grey farm cresting the hill beyond,
And sudden tides beat on him as he saw
A white dress moving in the distant pines.

.....

Lake Winter, a five hundred acre man,
Was English, bred far back, a part of England,
With South and North and Midland in his blood. 
And somewhere Devon, somewhere Suffolk too. 
He had been born of love.  They had been lovers,
Who made him, and no more, but they were lovers. 
She of a proud house, proud to make it prouder
With wit and beauty, and a young brain glowing,
And a swift body fearless and pitiful;
And he a Cotswold yeoman, thrift and power,
And mastery of earth and herds and flocks,
And knowledge of all seasons and their fruits,
And a heart of meditation, all his birthright;
Ten generations deep from Gloucester stone. 
And those two met, and loved, and of their love
Came a new purity of blood and limb,
As of a purpose slowly moulding them. 
And long they waited, and then one summer noon,
He, coming northward from his Cotswold home,
Found her by Rydal as she had bidden him,
And proudly stride to stride they took the road,
Sure youth by youth, and to Helvellyn’s foot
They came, and climbed up to the brighter air,
And into the wind’s ardour still went on,
Until upon the mountain top they stood,
And lake by lake was fading in the dusk. 
Out of the plains they saw the moon move up
And over them the deeper blue came on,
The faint stars glowing into mastery. 
And in that splendour of a summer hill,
Amid the mellow-breathing night, where yet
The poppies of the valley could not come,
There was conceived a boy.... 
                       And sorrow came
Upon their love.  Before the moon again
Was full upon Helvellyn, the Cotswold lover
With a great elm was blasted in a storm,
And lay, a burnt thing, in a Cotswold grave. 
And she went out, took her inheritance,
And lived apart, and the man-child was born. 
She called him Lake, for those fading lakes of dusk,
And gave him her own name.  And twenty years
She tended him, and died; and from her substance
Lake Winter now for fifteen years had kept
His Sussex acres in fertility. 
Such was the man, so born, so passionately made,
So knit of English earth and generations,
Who now upon the summer evening watched—­
His manhood full upon his middle years—­
A white dress moving in the distant pines.