Page:Poems - Tennyson (1843) - Volume 2 of 2.djvu/178

 And had I lived when song was great, And legs of trees were limber, And ta'en my fiddle to the gate, And fiddled in the timber!

'Tis said he had a tuneful tongue, Such happy intonation, Wherever he sat down and sung He left a small plantation; Wherever in a lonely grove He set up his forlorn pipes, The gouty oak began to move, And flounder into hornpipes.

The mountain stirr'd its bushy crown, And, as tradition teaches, Young ashes pirouetted down Coquetting with young beeches; And briony-vine and ivy-wreath Ran forward to his rhyming, And from the valleys underneath Came little copses climbing.