The Woodman And The Nightingale.

A woodman whose rough heart was out of tune     (I think such hearts yet never came to good)     Hated to hear, under the stars or moon,     One nightingale in an interfluous wood     Satiate the hungry dark with melody; -     And as a vale is watered by a flood,     Or as the moonlight fills the open sky     Struggling with darkness - as a tuberose     Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie     Like clouds above the flower from which they rose,     The singing of that happy nightingale     In this sweet forest, from the golden close     Of evening till the star of dawn may fail,     Was interfused upon the silentness;     The folded roses and the violets pale     Heard her within their slumbers, the abyss     Of heaven with all its planets; the dull ear     Of the night-cradled earth; the loneliness     Of the circumfluous waters, - every sphere     And every flower and beam and cloud and wave,     And every wind of the mute atmosphere,     And every beast stretched in its rugged cave,     And every bird lulled on its mossy bough,     And every silver moth fresh from the grave     Which is its cradle - ever from below     Aspiring like one who loves too fair, too far,     To be consumed within the purest glow     Of one serene and unapproached star,     As if it were a lamp of earthly light,     Unconscious, as some human lovers are,     Itself how low, how high beyond all height     The heaven where it would perish! - and every form     That worshipped in the temple of the night     Was awed into delight, and by the charm     Girt as with an interminable zone,     Whilst that sweet bird, whose music was a storm     Of sound, shook forth the dull oblivion     Out of their dreams; harmony became love     In every soul but one.     ...     And so this man returned with axe and saw     At evening close from killing the tall treen,     The soul of whom by Nature's gentle law     Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever green     The pavement and the roof of the wild copse,     Chequering the sunlight of the blue serene     With jagged leaves, - and from the forest tops     Singing the winds to sleep - or weeping oft     Fast showers of aereal water-drops     Into their mother's bosom, sweet and soft,     Nature's pure tears which have no bitterness; -     Around the cradles of the birds aloft     They spread themselves into the loveliness     Of fan-like leaves, and over pallid flowers     Hang like moist clouds: - or, where high branches kiss,     Make a green space among the silent bowers,     Like a vast fane in a metropolis,     Surrounded by the columns and the towers     All overwrought with branch-like traceries     In which there is religion - and the mute     Persuasion of unkindled melodies,     Odours and gleams and murmurs, which the lute     Of the blind pilot-spirit of the blast     Stirs as it sails, now grave and now acute,     Wakening the leaves and waves, ere it has passed     To such brief unison as on the brain     One tone, which never can recur, has cast,     One accent never to return again.     ...     The world is full of Woodmen who expel     Love's gentle Dryads from the haunts of life,     And vex the nightingales in every dell.     NOTE:     _8 - or as a tuberose cj. A.C. Bradley.