The Task.

BOOK V.

THE WINTER MORNING WALK.

"Tis morning; and the sun, with ruddy orb
Ascending, fires th' horizon; while the clouds,
That crowd away before the driving wind,
More ardent as the disk emerges more,
Resemble most some city in a blaze,

Seen through the leafless wood. His slanting ray
Slides ineffectual down the snowy vale,
And, tinging all with his own rosy hue,
From every herb and every spiry blade
Stretches a lenghth of shadow o'er the field.
Mine, spindling into longitude immense,
In spite of gravity, and sage remark
That I myself am but a fleeting shade,
Provokes me to a smile. With eye askance

I view the muscular proportioned limb

Transformed to a lean shank. The shapeless pair,

As they designed to mock me, at my side
Take step for step; and, as I near approach
The cottage, walk along the plastered wall,
Preposterous sight! the legs without the man,

The verdure of the plain lies buried deep
Beneath the dazzling deluge; and the bents,
And coarser grass, upspearing o'er the rest,
Of late unsightly and unseen, now shine
Conspicuous, and in bright apparel clad,
And, fledged with icy feathers, not superb.
The cattle mourn in corners, where the fence
Screens them, and seem half petrified to sleep
In unrecumbent sadness. There they wait
Their wonted fodder; not like hungering man
Fretful if unsupplied; but silent, meek,

And patient of the slow paced swain's delay.
He from the stack carves out th' accustomed load,
Deep-plunging, and again deep-plunging oft,
His broad keen knife into the solid mass:
Smooth as a wall the upright remnant stands,
With such undeviating and even force

He severs it away: no needless care,
Lest storms should overset the leaning pile
Deciduous, or its own unbalanced weight.
Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcerned
The cheerful haunts of man; to wield the axe,
And drive the wedge in yonder forest drear,
From morn to eve his solitary task.

Shaggy and lean, and shrewed, with pointed ears,
And tail cropped short, half lurcher and half cur,
His dog attends him. Close behind his heel
Now creeps he slow; and now, with many a frisk
Wide-scampering, snatches up the drifted snow
With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout;
Then shakes his powdered coat, and barks for joy.

Heedless of all his pranks, the sturdy churl
Moves right toward the mark; nor stops for aught,
But now and then with pressure of his thumb
T'adjust the fragrant charge of a short tube,
That fumes beneath his nose; the trailing cloud
Streams far behind him, scenting all the air.
Now from the roots, or from the neighbouring pale,
Where, diligent to catch the first faint gleam.
Of smiling day, they gossipped side by side,
Come trooping at the housewife's well-known call
The feathered tribes domestic. Half on wing,
And half on foot, they brush the fleecy flood,
Conscious and fearful of too deep a plunge.
The sparrows peep, and quit the sheltering caves,
To seize the fair occasion; well they eye
The scattered grain, and thievishly resolved
T'escape th' impending famine, often scared
As oft return, a pert voracious kind.

Clean riddance quickly made, one only care
Remains to each, the search of sunny nook,
Or shed impervious to the blast. Resigned
To sad necessity, the cock foregoes
His wonted strut; and, wading at their head
With well-considered steps seems to resent
His altered gait and stateliness retrenched.
How find the myriads, that in summer cheer
The hills and valleys with their ceaseless songs,
Due sustenance, or where subsist they now? [safe
Earth yields them nought; th' imprisoned worm is
Beneath the frozen clod; all seeds of herbs
Lie covered close; and berry-bearing thorns,,

That feed the thrush, (whatever some suppose)
Afford the smaller minstrels no supply.

The long protracted rigour of the year

Thins all their numerous flocks. In chinks and holes
Ten thousand seek an unmolested end,

As instinct prompts; self-buried ere they die.
The very rooks and daws forsake the fields,
Where neither grub, nor root, nor earth-nut, now
Repays their labour more; and perched aloft
By the wayside, or stalking in the path,
Lean pensioners upon the traveller's track,
Pick up their nauseous dole, through sweet to them
Of voided pulse or half-digested grain.

The streams are lost amid the splendid blank,
O'erwhelming all distinction. On the flood,
Indurated and fixed, the snowy weight
Lies undissolved; while silently beneath,
And unperceived, the current steals away.
Tiot so, where, scornful of a check, it leaps
The mill dam, dashes on the restless wheel,
And wantons in the pebbly gulf below:
No frost can bind it there; its utmost force
Can but arrest the light and smoky mist,
That in its fall the liquid sheet throws wide.
And see where it has hung the embroidered banks
With forms so various, that no powers of art,
The pencil or the pen, may trace the scene!
Here glittering turrets rise, upbearing high
(Fantastic misarrangement !) on the roof

Large growth of what may seem the sparkling trees
And shrubs of fairy land. The crystal drops;

That trickle down the branches, fast congealed,
Shoot into pillars of pellucid length,

And prop the pile they but adorned before.

Here grotto within grotto safe defies

The sunbeam; there, embossed and fretted wild,
The growing wonder takes a thousand shapes
Capricious, in which fancy seeks in vain
The likeness of some object seen before.
Thus nature works as if to mock at Art,
*And in defiance of her rival powers;
By these fortuitous and random strokes
Performing such inimitable feats,

As she with all her rules can never reach.
Less worthy of applause, though more admired,
Because a novelty, the work of man,
Imperial mistress of the fur-clad Russ,
Thy most magnificent and mighty freak,
The wonder of the North. No forest fell,

When thou wouldst build; no quarry sent his stores
T'enrich thy walls: but thou didst hew the floods,
And make thy marble of the glassy wave.
In such a palace Aristæus found

Cyrene, when he bore the plaintiff tale
Of his lost bees to her maternal ear;

In such a palace Poetry might place
The armory of Winter: where his troops,

The gloomy clouds, find weapons, arrowy sleet,
Skin-piercing volley, blossom-bruising hail,

And snow, that often blinds the traveller's course,
And wraps him in an unexpected tomb.

Silently as a dream the fabric rose ;

No sound of hammer or of saw was there