Page:Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Hitherto unpublished, 1921.djvu/39

 Close following down this alley, one came near

The place where it descended sudden, sheer,

Into a dell betwixt two wooded hills,

Where ran a river made of many rills.

Near where to this the little alley stream

Lapsed in a turmoil, stood as in a dream

A lone, small mill-house in the vale aloof

With orange mosses on a grey slate roof

And all the walls and every lintel stone

With water mosses cunningly o'ergrown.

Its four-paned windows looked across a pool

By shadow of the house and trees kept cool;

Pent by the mossy weir that served the mill,

Its little waters lay unmoved and still,

Save for a circular, slow, eddy-wheeling

That on its bubble-spotted breast kept stealing

And now and then the sudden, short windsway

Of some elm branch or beachen, that all day

Trailed in the shadowed pool; but far below

The enfranchised waters, in tumultuous flow,

Splashed round the boulders and leapt on in foam

Adown the sunshine way that led them home. [ 31 ]