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"In what an idle luxury
of joy
Would thy spoiled heart its useless hours employ!
In what a selfish loneliness of light
Wouldst thou exist, read we thy dream aright!
How hath thy sleeping spirit broke the chain
Which knits thy human lot to other's pain,
And made this world of peopled millions seem
For thee and for the lover of thy dream!
"Think not my heart with cold indifference heard
The various feelings which in thine have stirred,
Or that its sad and weary currents know
Faint sympathy, except for human woe:
Well have the dormant echoes of my breast
Answered the joys thy gentle voice expressed;
Conjured a vision of the stately mate
With whom the flattering vision linked thy fate;
And followed thee through grove and woodland wild,
Where so much natural beauty round thee smiled.
"What man so worldly-wise, or chilled by age,
Who, bending o'er the faint descriptive page,
Recals not such a scene in some falr nook -
(Whereon his eyes, perchance, no more shall look;)
Some hawthorn copse, some gnarled majestic tree,
The favourite play-place of his infancy?
Who has not felt for Cowper's sweet lament, (7 )
When twelve years' course their cruel change had sent;
When his felled poplars gave no further shade,
And low on earth the blackbird's nest was laid;
When in a desert sunshine, bare and blank,
Lay the green field and river's mossy bank;
And melody of bird or branch no more
Rose with the breeze that swept along the shore?
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