Or ev'n the sweet half-English Neil gherry air

I panted, seems, as I re-listen to it, Prattling the primrose fancies of the boy,

To me that loved him; for "O brook," he says,

"O babbling brook," says Edmund i: his rhyme,

"Whence come you?" and the brook why not replies.

I come from haunts of coot and hern
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.

Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

"Poor lad, he died at Florence, quite worn out,

Travelling to Naples. There is Darnley bridge,

It has more ivy; there the river; and there

Stands Philip's farm where brook and river meet.

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret
By many a field and fallow,

And many a fairy foreland set
With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.

"But Philip chatter'd more thai.

brook or bird;

Old Philip; all about the fields you caught

His weary daylong chirping, like the dry High-elbow'd grigs that leap in summer grass.

She and James had
Why?

What cause of quarrel? None, she said, no cause;

James had no cause: but when I prest the cause,

turn,

Her and her far-off cousin and betrothed,

James Willows, of one name and heart with her.

For here I came, twenty years back the week

Before I parted with poor Edmund,

crost

By that old bridge which, half in ruins then,

till makes a hoary eyebrow for the gleam

Beyond it, where the waters marry –

crost,

Whistling a random bar of Bonny Doon,

And push'd at Philip's garden-gate. The gate,

Half-parted from a weak and scolding hinge,

Stuck; and he clamor'd from a casement, 'Run'

To Katie somewhere in the walks below,

jealousies

Which anger'd her. Who anger'd James I said.

But Katie snatch'd her eyes at once from mine,

And sketching with her slender pointed foot

Some figure like a wizard pentagram On garden gravel, let my query pass Unclaim'd, in flushing silence, till I ask'd

If James were coming. 'Coming every day,'

She answer'd, 'ever longing to explain, But evermore her father came across With some long-winded tale, and broke him short;

And James departed vext with him and her.'

How could I help her? Would Iwas it wrong?'

(Claspt hands and that petitionary