POEMS OLD AND NEW
while well exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple
of scholars, who had formerly been of his acquaintance. They
quickly spied out their old friend among the gipsies ; and he gave
them an account of the necessity which drove him to that kind of
life, and told them that the people he went with were not such
impostors as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional
kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power
of imagination, their fancy binding that of others : that himself
had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the
whole secret, he intended, he said, to leave their company, and
give the world an account of what he had learned.—GLANVIL'S
Vanity of Dogmatizing, 1661.]
Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill ;
Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes !
No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,
Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,
Nor the cropp'd herbage shoot another head.
But when the fields are still,
And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,
And only the white sheep are sometimes seen
Gross and recross the strips of moon-blanch'd
green,
Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest ! 10
Here, where the reaper was at work of late—
. In this high field's dark corner, where he leaves
His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse,
And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,
Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to
use—
Here will I sit and wait,
While to my ear from uplands far away
The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,
With distant cries of reapers in the corn—
All the live murmur of a summer's day. 20
Screen9d is this nook o'er the high, half-reap'd field,
And here till sun-down, shepherd ! will I be.
Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,
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