If that I hate wild winter's spiteThe gibbet trees, the world in white, The sky but gray wind over a grave Why should I ache, the season's slave?

I'll sing from the top of the orange-tree Gramercy, winter's tyranny.

'I'll south with the sun, and keep my clime;
My wing is king of the summer-time;
My breast to the sun his torch shall hold;
And I'll call down through the green and
gold

Time, take thy scythe, reap bliss for me,
Bestir thee under the orange-tree.'

But now when the noon is no more, and riot is rest,

And the sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West,

And the slant yellow beam down the woodaisle doth seem

Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream,

Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak,

And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke

Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,

And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know,

And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,

30

That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the Marshes of Glynn Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore

When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,

And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain

Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain, —