The Summer Bower
It is a place whither I’ve often goneFor peace, and found it, secret, hushed, and cool,A beautiful recess in neighboring woods.Trees of the soberest hues, thick-leaved and tall,Arch it o’erhead and column it around,Framing a covert, natural and wild,Domelike and dim; though nowhere so enclosedBut that the gentlest breezes reach the spotUnwearied and unweakened. Sound is hereA transient and unfrequent visitor;Yet if the day be calm, not often then,Whilst the high pines in one another’s armsSleep, you may sometimes with unstartled earCatch the far fall of voices, how remoteYou know not, and you do not care to know.The turf is soft and green, but not a flowerLights the recess, save one, star-shaped and bright—I do not know its name—which here and thereGleams like a sapphire set in emerald.A narrow opening in the branchëd roof,A single one, is large enough to show,With that half glimpse a dreamer loves so much,The blue air and the blessing of the sky.Thither I always bent my idle steps,When griefs depressed, or joys disturbed my heart,And found the calm I looked for, or returnedStrong with the quiet rapture in my soul.But one day,One of those July days when winds have fledOne knows not whither, I, most sick in mindWith thoughts that shall be nameless, yet, no doubt,Wrong, or at least unhealthful, since though darkWith gloom, and touched with discontent, they hadNo adequate excuse, nor cause, nor end,I, with these thoughts, and on this summer day,Entered the accustomed haunt, and found for onceNo medicinal virtue.Not a leafStirred with the whispering welcome which I sought,But in a close and humid atmosphere,Every fair plant and implicated boughHung lax and lifeless. Something in the place,Its utter stillness, the unusual heat,And some more secret influence, I thought,Weighed on the sense like sin. Above I saw,Though not a cloud was visible in heaven,The pallid sky look through a glazëd mistLike a blue eye in death.The change, perhaps,Was natural enough; my jaundiced sight,The weather, and the time explain it all:Yet have I drawn a lesson from the spot,And shrined it in these verses for my heart.Thenceforth those tranquil precincts I have soughtNot less, and in all shades of various moods;But always shun to desecrate the spotBy vain repinings, sickly sentiments,Or inconclusive sorrows. Nature, thoughPure as she was in Eden when her breathKissed the white brow of Eve, doth not refuse,In her own way and with a just reserve,To sympathize with human suffering;But for the pains, the fever, and the fretEngendered of a weak, unquiet heart,She hath no solace; and who seeks her whenThese be the troubles over which he moans,Reads in her unreplying lineamentsRebukes, that, to the guilty consciousness,Strike like contempt.