To Humphry Repton, Esq.

Ingenious REPTON, from thy pencil warm,
Shines this loved scene, with more than scenic charm;
Since each soft feature, by th’ associate powers,
Of youth and love and friendship’s blissful hours,
Brings back, thro’ every season, as it veers,
Some striking image of the vanish’d years;
Whether the months of bloom, and light, and love,
With silver blossoms curtain yonder grove;
With golden king-cups bid the mead be gay,
And all the lake in molten glass inlay;
Or when less genial mornings of the spring,
Chill’d by retreating Winter’s icy wing,
The darkling waters with their gusts assail,
And curl the mists along the rainy vale.

Dear is that vale, when Summer’s sultry days
In one white, dazzling, circumambient blaze,
Shadeless, excessive, all distinctness hide,
Straining the visual rays, that scarce divide
The circling hills, blue lake, and mossy tower,
The hedge-row motionless, the silent bower;
While shrink mute birds, where central branches spread,
And lowing mothers hang the heavy head,
Wade in the sedgy brook that sluggish flows,
Or crowd beneath the alder’s dusky boughs.

Dear, when the amber noon of autumn gilds
The flame-tipt umbrage, and the level fields;
Dear, e’en tho’ sullen wintry clouds impend,
And showers of leaves, in eddying winds, descend;
While the mild auburn nymph, that crowns the year,
Mourns her swoln waters, and her forests sear;
To Fancy’s eye her exile seems to wail,
And, down the little, desolated vale,
To press, with lingering step, as one that grieves,
Its white, shrunk petals, and its rustling leaves.

When o’er the livid lake, and grey waste fields
His blasting rod the stormy despot wields;
And thro’ the rifled grove, in wild career,
Howls the loud knell of the expiring year,
Yet loved the scene:--And now, when tempests roar,
Thick snows descend, and ice incrusts the shore,
On its changed face no more my eye shall dwell,
No fruitless sighs ’gainst Nature’s laws rebel;
But be it mine the glowing hearth to pile,
And woo the mild Penates’ lively smile!

Thus, while ascending fires, with influence bright,
Deride the sickly sun and howling night,
In as disarming power thy tints shall foil
The year’s grim tyrant, yelling o’er his spoil,
Charm’d, since the consecrated vale I see
In one eternal Summer cloth’d by thee.