The Eternity of Nature

Leaves, from eternity, are simple things
To the world's gaze — where, lo! a spirit clings
Sublime and lasting. Trampled under foot,
The daisy lives, and strikes its little root
Into the lap of time: centuries may come,
And pass away into the silent tomb,
And still the child, hid in the womb of time,
Shall smile and pluck them, when this simple rhyme
Shall be forgotten, like a churchyard stone,
Or lingering lie unnoticed and alone.

When eighteen hundred years, our common date,
Grow many thousands in their marching state,
Aye, still the child, with pleasure in his eye,
Shall cry — the daisy! a familiar cry —
And run to pluck it, in the self-same state,
As when Time found it in his infant date;
And, like a child himself, when all was new,
Might smile with wonder, and take notice too.

It's little golden bosom, frilled with snow,
Might win e'en Eve to stoop adown, and show
Her partner, Adam, in the silky grass,
This little gem, that smiled where pleasure was,
And loving Eve, from Eden followed ill,
And bloomed with sorrow, and lives smiling still.

As once in Eden under heaven's breath,
So now on earth, and on the lap of death
It smiles for ever. — Cowslips of gold bloom,
That in the pasture and the meadow come,
Shall come when kings and empires fade and die;
And in the closes, as Time's partners, lie
As fresh two thousand years to come as now,
With those five crimson spots upon their brow.
The little brooks that hum a simple lay,
In green unnoticed spots, from praise away,
Shall sing, when poets in time's darkness hid,
Resemble memory in a pyramid,
Forgetting, yet not all forgot though lost,
Like a thread's end in ravelled windings crost.
The little humble-bee shall hum as long
As nightingales, for Time protects the song;
And Nature is their soul, to whom all clings,
Of fair or beautiful in lasting things.
The little robin in the quiet glen,
Hidden from fame and all the strife of men,
Sings unto Time a pastoral, and gives
A music that lives on and ever lives.
Spring and autumnal years shall bloom, and fade,
Longer than songs that poets ever made.
Think ye not these, Time's playthings, pass proud skill?
Time loves them like a child, and ever will;
And so I seek them in each bushy spot,
And sing with them, when all else notice not:
And feel the music of their mirth agree
With that sooth quiet that bestirs in me.
And if I touch aright that quiet tone —
That soothing truth that shadows forth their own,
Then many a year to come, in after-days,
Shall still find hearts to love my quiet lays.

Thus cheering mirth with thoughts sung not for fame,
But for the joy that with their utterance came,
That inward breath of rapture urged not loud,
— Birds, singing lone, fly silent past a crowd —
In these same pastoral spots, which childish time
Makes dear to me, I wander out and rhyme;
What hour the dewy morning's infancy
Hangs on each blade of grass and every tree,
And sprents the red thighs of the humble bee,
Who 'gins betimes unwearied minstrelsy;
Who breakfasts, dines, and most divinely sups,
With every flower save golden buttercups, —
On whose proud bosoms he will never go,
But passes by with scarcely "how do ye do,"
Since in their showy, shining, gaudy cells,
Haply the summer's honey never dwells.
All Nature's ways are mysteries! Endless Youth
Lives in them all, unchangeable as Truth.
With the odd number five, her curious laws
Play many freaks, nor once mistake the cause;
For in the cowslip-pips this very day
Five spots appear, which Time wears not away,
Nor once mistakes in counting — look within
Each pip, and five, nor more nor less are seen.
So trailing bindweed, with its pinky cup,
Five leaves of paler hue go streaking up.
And many a bird too keeps the rule alive,
Laying five eggs, nor more nor less than five.
But flowers, how many own that mystic power;
With five leaves ever making up the flower!
The five-leaved grass, mantling its golden cup
Of flowers — five leaves make all for which I stoop.