Page:The Excursion, Wordsworth, 1814.djvu/258

232 Bright as a sun-beam sleeping till a shower

Brush it away, or cloud pass over it;

And such it might be deemed—a sleeping sun-beam;

But 'tis a plot of cultivated ground,

Cut off, an island in the dusky waste;

And that attractive brightness is its own.

The lofty Site, by nature framed to tempt

Amid a wilderness of rocks and stones

The Tiller's hand, a Hermit might have chosen,

For opportunity presented, thence

Far forth to send his wandering eye o'er land

And ocean, and look down upon the works,

The habitations, and the ways of men,

Himself unseen! But no tradition tells

That ever Hermit dipped his maple dish

In the sweet spring that lurks mid yon green fields;

And no such visionary views belong

To those who occupy and till the ground,

And on the bosom of the mountain dwell—

A wedded Pair, in childless solitude.

—A House of stones collected on the spot,

By rude hands built, with rocky knolls in front,

Backed also by a ledge of rock, whose crest