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A Far Place
By John Collings Squire, Sir
(To K. Wigram.)
Sheltered, when the rain blew over the hills it was,
Sunny all day when the days of summer were long,
Beyond all rumour of labouring towns it was,
But at dawn and evening its trees were noisy with song.
There were four elms on the southward lawn standing,
Their great trunks evenly set in a square
Of shadowed grass in spring pierced with crocuses,
And their tops met high in the empty air.
Where the morning rose the grey church was below us,
If we stood by the porch we saw on either hand
The ground falling, the trees falling, and meadows,
A river, hamlets and spires: a chequered land,
A wide country where cloud shadows went chasing
Mile after mile, diminishing fast, until
They met the far blue downs; but round the corner
The western garden lay lonely under the hill.
* * * * *
And closed in the western garden, under the hillside,
Where silence was and the rest of the world was gone,
We saw and took the curving year's munificence:
Changing from flower to flower the garden shone.
Early its walks were fringed with little rock-plants,
Sprays and tufts of blossom, white, yellow, and blue,
And all about were sprinkled stars of narcissus,
And swathes of tulips all over the garden grew.
White groups and pink, red, crimson and lemon-yellow,
And the yellow-and-red-streaked tulips once loved by a boy;
Red and yellow their stiff and varnished petals,
And the scent of them stings me still with a youthful joy.
And in the season of perfect and frailest beauty,
Pear-blossom broke and the lilacs' waxen cones,
And a tranced laburnum trailing its veils of yellow
Tenderly drooped over the ivied stones.
The lilacs browned, a breath dried the laburnum,
The swollen peonies scattered the earth with blood,
And the rhododendrons shed their sumptuous mantles,
And the marshalled irises unsceptred stood.
And the borders filled with daisies and pied sweet-williams
And busy pansies; and there as we gazed and dreamed,
And breathed the swooning smell of the packed carnations,
The present was always the crown of all: it seemed
Each month more beautiful sprang from a robe discarded,
The year all effortless dropt the best away
And struck the heart with loveliness new, more lavish;
When the clambering rose had blown and died, by day
The broad-leaved tapering many-shielded hollyhocks
Stood like pillars and shone to the August sun,
The glimmering cups of waking evening primroses
Filled the dusk now the scent of the rose was done.
* * * * *
A wall there was and a door to the rose-garden,
And out of that a gate to the orchard led,
And there was the last hedge, and the turf sloped upward
Till the sky was cut by the hill's line overhead.
And thither at times we climbed, and far below us
That world that had made the world remote was seen,
Small, a huddle of russet roofs and chimneys,
And its guard of elms like bushes against the green:
One spot in the country, little and mild and homely,
The nearest house of a wide, populous plain....
But down at evening under the stars and the branches
In the whispering garden we lost the world again.
* * * * *
Whispering, faint, the garden under the hillside...
Under the stars.... Is it true that we lived there long?
Was it certainly so? Did ever we know that dwelling,
Breathe that night, and hear in the night that song?
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