O friendly shades, where anciently I grew!

me entering at dawn a child ye knew,

all little welcoming leaves, and jealous wove

your roof of lucid emerald above,

that scarce therethro’ the envious sun might stray,

save smiling dusk or, lure for idle play,

such glancing finger your chance whim allows,

all that long forenoon of the tuneful boughs;

which growing on, the myriad small noise

and flitting of the wood-life’s busy joys,

thro’ tenuous weft of sound, had left, divined,

the impending threat of silence, clear, behind:

and, noon now past, that hush descended large

in the wood’s heart, and caught me in its marge

of luminous foreboding widely flung;

so hourlong I have stray’d, and tho’ among

the glimpsing lures of all green aisles delays

that revelation of its wondrous gaze,

yet am I glad to wander, glad to seek

and find not, so the gather’d tufts bespeak,

naked, reclined, its friendly neighbourhood —

as in this hollow of the rarer wood

where, listening, in the cool glen-shade, with me,

white-bloom’d and quiet, stands a single tree;

rich spilth of gold is on the eastward rise;

westward the violet gloom eludes mine eyes.

This is the house of Pan, not whom blind craze

and babbling wood-wits tell, where bare flints blaze,

noon-tide terrific with the single shout,

but whom behind each bole sly-peering out

the traveller knows, but turning, disappear’d

with chuckle of laughter in his thicket-beard,

and rustle of scurrying faun-feet where the ground

each autumn deeper feels its yellow mound.

Onward: and lo, at length, the secret glade,

soft-gleaming grey, what time the grey trunks fade

in the white vapours o’er its further rim.

‘Tis no more time to linger: now more dim

the woods are throng’d to ward the haunted spot

where, as I turn my homeward face, I wot

the nymphs of twilight have resumed, unheard,

their glimmering dance upon the glimmering sward.