The needs of the first sight absorb my blood, Drag a ridiculous age. To-day, when friends approach, and every hour Brings book, or starbright scroll of genius, And all the costly liquor runs to waste; Why need I volumes, if one word suffice? After the master's sketch fills and o'erfills My apprehension? why seek Italy, Who cannot circumnavigate the sea Of thoughts and things at home, but still adjourn The nearest matters for a thousand days? BLIGHT. GIVE me truths; For I am weary of the surfaces, And die of inanition. If I knew Only the herbs and simples of the wood, Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain, and agrimony, Milkweeds, and murky brakes, quaint pipes, and sundew, Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,- Of their imperfect functions. But these young scholars, who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood, And travelling often in the cut he makes, Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names. The old men studied magic in the flowers, And human fortunes in astronomy, And an omnipotence in chemistry, Preferring things to names, for these were men, And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell, And coldly ask their pottage, not their love. Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us But the sweet affluence of love and song, The rich results of the divine consents Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover, And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves Daily to a more thin and outward rind, Therefore, to our sick eyes, Turn pale and starve. The stunted trees look sick, the summer short, Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay, And nothing thrives to reach its natural term; Even at its greatest space is a defeat, |