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And over the Cyprian Isle The skies shed their silent smile; And the Forest's green heart was rife With the stir of the gushing life The life that had leap'd to birth, In the veins of the happy earth! Hail! oh, hail! The dimmest sea-cave below thee, The farthest sky-arch above, In their innermost stillness know thee: And heave with the Birth of Love! Gale! soft Gale!

It was a still, bright, hot day. Little puffs of rosy cloud hung motionless under the burning blue sky-arch; small, gaily-plumaged birds twittered in the bushes; the tiny black ants scurried to and fro in the pinkish sand of the river beach.

The vast height and width of the sky-arch, as seen from those flats as from an ocean the grey haze shrouding the horizon of our narrow land-view, and closing us in, till we seemed to be floating through infinite space, on a little platform of earth; the rich poplar-fringed farms, with their herds of dappled oxen the luxuriant crops of oats and beans the tender green of the tall-rape, a plant till then unknown to me the long, straight, silver dykes, with their gaudy carpets of strange floating water-plants, and their black banks, studded with the remains of buried forests the innumerable draining-mills, with their creaking sails and groaning wheels the endless rows of pollard willows, through which the breeze moaned and rung, as through the strings of some vast AEolian harp; the little island knolls in that vast sea of fen, each with its long village street, and delicately taper spire; all this seemed to me to contain an element of new and peculiar beauty.