The Youth Of Nature
    By Matthew Arnold  

 Rais’d are the dripping oars
   Silent the boat: the lake,
   Lovely and soft as a dream,
   Swims in the sheen of the moon.
   The mountains stand at its head
   Clear in the pure June night,
   But the valleys are flooded with haze.
   Rydal and Fairfield are there;
   In the shadow Wordsworth lies dead.
   So it is, so it will be for aye.
   Nature is fresh as of old,
   Is lovely: a mortal is dead.

   The spots which recall him survive,
   For he lent a new life to these hills.
   The Pillar still broods o’er the fields
   Which border Ennerdale Lake,
   And Egremont sleeps by the sea.

   The gleam of The Evening Star
   Twinkles on Grasmere no more,
   But ruin’d and solemn and grey
   The sheepfold of Michael survives,
   And far to the south, the heath
   Still blows in the Quantock coombs,
   By the favourite waters of Ruth.
   These survive: yet not without pain,
   Pain and dejection to-night,
   Can I feel that their Poet is gone.

   He grew old in an age he condemn’d.
   He look’d on the rushing decay
   Of the times which had shelter’d his youth.
   Felt the dissolving throes
   Of a social order he lov’d.
   Outliv’d his brethren, his peers.
   And, like the Theban seer,
   Died in his enemies’ day.

   Cold bubbled the spring of Tilphusa,
   Copais lay bright in the moon;

   Helicon glass’d in the lake
   Its firs, and afar, rose the peaks
   Of Parnassus, snowily clear:
   Thebes was behind him in flames,
   And the clang of arms in his ear,
   When his awe-struck captors led
   The Theban seer to the spring.
   Tiresias drank and died.
   Nor did reviving Thebes
   See such a prophet again.

   Well may we mourn, when the head
   Of a sacred poet lies low
   In an age which can rear them no more.
   The complaining millions of men
   Darken in labour and pain;