Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
England: Vols. I–IV. 1876–79.
Lines
By John Edmund Reade (18001870)I
In the fulness of my gratitude and with a joy sedate;
Alone on that wild heath I stood, and offered up apart
The frankincense of love that, fount-like, gushed from my deep heart.
And my heart gathered gladness in its calm and equal flow,
While the sun shone within me, and the air elastic played,
And to and fro the wheat-field like the wavy ocean swayed;
Light glinting on the grassy sward as broken rays flashed through,
I felt that Nature answered like an angel from her throne,
And echoed back the rapture of my bosom from her own.
As if it led through vistas to some throne or shore of gold,
And while the light breeze murmured there like sighs of love suppressed,
My heart poured forth its blessing on the loveliness it blessed.
To boyhood’s years far faded on the verge of memory:
Sacred to me the gray-haired man who drank God’s blessed air,
Though thirty years had rolled away since last I entered there!
Gray Doulting’s spire above the waste a sheeted spectre rose;
And Mendip’s bleak and barren heights again enclosed me round,
Like faces of forgotten friends met on forgotten ground.
I felt I stood a stranger there, the place and me estranged:
Each glance was memory, each step a joy, a welcome sense
Of gratitude’s fine ecstasy, calm, voiceless, but intense.
While staid Reflection looked within the glass of what had been;
For not a mound I trod upon was unforgot, nor tree
Rose in that surging scene whose image had not entered me.