With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity!5 Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
35 Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue ocean! So my Friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
40 On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence. A delight
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
45 As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not marked
Much that has soothed me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watched
Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see
50 The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree
Was richly tinged, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
55 Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight: and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble bee
Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know
60 That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
65 'Tis well to be bereft of promised good, That we may lift the Soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beat its straight path along the dusky air
70 Homewards, I blessed it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had crossed the mighty orb's dilated glory,
While thou stood'st gazing; or when all was still,
4. Despite Coleridge's claim, Charles Lamb emi- 5. Some ten months earlier Charles Lamb's sister, nently preferred London over what he called 'dead Mary, had stabbed their mother to death in a fit of
Nature.' For Lamb's love of city life, see his letter insanity,
to Wordsworth at Norton Literature Online.
.
430 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 75Flew creeking o'er thy head, and had a charm For thee, my gentle- hearted Charles, to whom No sound is dissonant which tells of Life. 1797 1800
1. Coleridge describes the origin of this poem in the opening section of chap. 14 of Biographia Literaria. In a comment made to the Reverend Alexander Dyce in 1835 and in a note on 'We Are Seven' dictated in 1843,
