THE FIRST OF APRIL. [IBID.] WITH dalliance rude young Zephyr woos And shrinking at the northern blast, The morning hoar, and evening chill, Murmurs the blossom'd boughs around, That clothe the garden's southern bound: Scarce a sickly straggling flower Decks the rough castle's rifted tower: From the dark dell's entangled steeps: Slowly shoots the golden bloom: And, but by fits, the furze-clad dale Tinctures the transitory gale. While from the shrubbery's naked maze, Of Flora's brightest 'broidery shone, Save that the lilac hangs to view Scant along the ridgy land The beans their new-born ranks expand: The swallow, for a moment seen, Skims in haste the village green : Fraught with a transient, frozen shower, If a cloud should haply lower, Sailing o'er the landscape dark, And high her tuneful track pursues Where in venerable rows Widely-waving oaks inclose The moat of yonder antique hall, Swarm the rooks with clamorous call; And, to the toils of nature true, Wreathe their capacious nests anew. Musing through the lawny park, The lonely poet loves to mark How various greens in faint degrees Tinge the tall groups of various trees; While, careless of the changing year, The pine cerulean, never sere, Towers distinguish'd from the rest, And proudly vaunts her winter vest. Within some whispering osier isle, The fisher seeks his custom'd nook; O'er the broad downs, a novel race, Frisk the lambs with faltering pace, And with eager bleatings fill The foss that skirts the beacon'd hill. His free-born vigour yet unbroke To lordly man's usurping yoke, The bounding colt forgets to play, Basking beneath the noon-tide ray, And stretch'd among the daisies pied Of a green dingle's sloping side: While far beneath, where nature spreads Her boundless length of level meads, In loose luxuriance taught to stray, A thousand tumbling rills inlay With silver veins the vale, or pass Yet, in these presages rude, ODE ON THE APPROACH OF SUMMER. [IBID.] HENCE, iron-sceptred Winter, haste To bleak Siberian waste! Haste to thy polar solitude, Mid cataracts of ice, Whose torrents dumb are stretch'd in fragments rude, From many an airy precipice, |