The doves that so long
had been wont to answer with murmurs of their own to his "half-formed
melodies" still hung in the trees above his pathway; and many who
saw him there must have thought of the lines in which, his favourite
poet congratulates himself that he has not been exiled from his home.
Calm as thy sacred streams thy years shall flow;
Groves which thy youth has known thine age shall know;
Here, as of old, Hyblaean bees shall twine
Their mazy murmur into dreams of thine,--
Still from the hedge's willow-bloom shall come
Through summer silences a slumberous hum,--
Still from the crag shall lingering winds prolong
The half-heard cadence of the woodman's song,--
While evermore the doves, thy love and care,
Fill the tall elms with sighing in the air.
Yet words like these fail to give the solemnity of his last years,--
the sense of grave retrospection, of humble self-judgment, of
hopeful looking to the end. "It is indeed a deep satisfaction," he
writes near the close of life, "to hope and believe that my poetry
will be while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth,
especially among the young. As for myself, it seems now of little
moment how long I may be remembered.
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