E'en now, while walking down the rural | Alike regardless of their smile or frown, And quite determined not to be laughed down.
He lopped the wayside lilies with his
"How can I teach your children gentle
And mercy to the weak, and reverence For Life, which, in its weakness or excess,
Is still a gleam of God's omnipotence, Or Death, which, seeming darkness, is no less
The selfsame light, although averted hence,
When by your laws, your actions, and your speech,
You contradict the very things I teach ?"
With this he closed; and through the audience went
A murmur, like the rustle of dead leaves;
The farmers laughed and nodded, and some bent
Their yellow heads together like their sheaves;
Men have no faith in fine-spun senti
Who put their trust in bullocks and
The birds were doomed ; and, as the record shows,
A bounty offered for the heads of crows.
"What! would you rather see the inces- There was another audience out of reach,
Who had no voice nor vote in making
The Summer came, and all the birds | But the next Spring a stranger sight was
And made a river of the road;
A sea of mist that overflowed
The house, the barns, the gilded vane,
And drowned the upland and the plain,
Through which the oak-trees, broad and
high,
Like phantom ships went drifting by ;
And, hidden behind a watery screen,
The sun unseen, or only seen
As a faint pallor in the sky;
Thus cold and colorless and gray,
The morn of that autumnal day,
As if reluctant to begin,
Dawned on the silent Sudbury Inn,
And all the guests that in it lay.
With crack of whip and bark of dog
Plunged forward through the sea of fog,
And all was silent as before,
All silent save the dripping rain.
Then one by one the guests came down,
And greeted with a smile the Squire,
Who sat before the parlor fire,
Reading the paper fresh from town.
First the Sicilian, like a bird,
Before his form appeared, was heard
Whistling and singing down the stair;
Then came the Student, with a look
As placid as a meadow-brook;
The Theologian, still perplexed
With thoughts of this world and the
next;
The Poet then, as one who seems
Walking in visions and in dreams;
Then the Musician, like a fair
Hyperion from whose golden hair
Full late they slept. They did not The radiance of the morning streams;
The challenge of Sir Chanticleer,
Who on the empty threshing-floor,
Disdainful of the rain outside,
Was strutting with a martial stride,
As if upon his thigh he wore
The famous broadsword of the Squire,
And said, "Behold me, and admire !
Only the Poet seemed to hear,
In drowse or dream, more near and near
Across the border-land of sleep
The blowing of a blithesome horn,
That laughed the dismal day to scorn;
A splash of hoofs and rush of wheels
Through sand and mire like stranding
keels,
As from the road with sudden sweep
The Mail drove up the little steep,
And stopped beside the tavern door;
A moment stopped, and then again
And last the aromatic Jew
Of Alicant, who, as he threw
The door wide open, on the air
Breathed round about him a perfume
Of damask roses in full bloom,
Making a garden of the room.
The breakfast ended, each pursued
The promptings of his various moed ;
Beside the fire in silence smoked
The taciturn, impassive Jew,
Lost in a pleasant revery;
While, by his gravity provoked,
His portrait the Sicilian drew,
And wrote beneath it "Edrehi,
At the Red Horse in Sudbury."
By far the busiest of them all,
The Theologian in the hall
Was feeding robins in a cage,
Two corpulent and lazy birds,
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