Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/370

 'cepting it be an owd rabbit, and it ain't oftens you can get howd of them."

In Memoriam has many cantos descriptive of Somersby, both of the happy summer evenings on the lawn, when Mary

"brought the harp and flung A ballad to the bright'ning moon,"

or of the walks about home with Arthur Hallam—

by "Gray old grange or lonely fold, Or low morass and whispering reed,  Or simple stile from mead to mead, Or sheepwalk up the windy wold."

Or the winter nights when

"The Christmas bells from hill to hill Answer each other in the mist."

And nothing could be more full of tender feeling than this farewell to the old home in Canto CI., beginning—

"Unwatched, the garden bough shall sway, The tender blossom flutter down,  Unloved, that beech will gather brown, This maple burn itself away."

And in Canto CII.—

"We leave the well-beloved place Where first we gazed upon the sky;  The roofs that heard our earliest cry Will shelter one of stranger race.

We go, but ere we go from home As down the garden walks I move, Two spirits of a diverse love Contend for loving masterdom.

One whispers 'here thy boyhood sung Long since its matin song, and heard The low love-language of the bird In native hazels tassel-hung.'

The other answers, 'yea, but here Thy feet have strayed in after hours With thy lost friend among the bowers, And this hath made them trebly dear.'

These two have striven half the day, And each prefers his separate claim, Poor rivals in a loving game, That will not yield each other way.