Around this lovely valley rise
The purple hills of Paradise.
O, softly on you banks of haze,
Her rosy face the Summer lays!
Becalmed along the azure sky,
The argosies of cloudland lie,
Whose shores, with many a shining rift,
Far off their pearl-white peaks uplift.
Through all the long midsummer-day
The meadow-sides are...
Not a sound disturbs the air,
There is quiet everywhere;
Over plains and over woods
What a mighty stillness broods!
All the birds and insects keep
Where the coolest shadows sleep;
Even the busy ants are found
Resting in their pebbled mound;
Even the locust clingeth now
Silent to the barky bough:
Over hills and over...
With a ripple of leaves and a tinkle of streams
The full world rolls in a rhythm of praise,
And the winds are one with the clouds and beams—
Midsummer days! midsummer days!
The dusk grows vast; in a purple haze,
While the west from a rapture of sunset rights,
Faint stars their exquisite lamps upraise—
Midsummer nights! O...
The Spacious Noon enfolds me with its peace—
The affluent Midsummer wraps me round—
So still the earth and air, that scarce a sound
Affronts the silence, and the swift caprice
Of one stray bird’s lone call does but increase
The sense of some compelling hush profound,
Some spell by which the whole vast world is bound,
Till star-...
