THE HAPPY VALLEY. 
175 
One, half asleep, crushing the twined flowers, 
Upon a velvet slope like Dian lay ; 
When she within the twilight forest cowers; 
Her looped-up tunic, tossed in disarray, 
Showed rounded limbs too fair for earthly bowers— 
They looked like roses on a cloudy day, 
The warm white dulled amid the colder green; 
The flowers too rough a couch that lovely shape to 
screen. 
Some lay like Thetis’ nymphs along the shore, 
With ocean-pearl combing their golden locks, 
And singing to the waves for evermore ; 
Sinking like flowers at eve beside the rocks, 
If but a sound, above the muffled roar 
Of the low waves, was heard. In little flocks 
Others went trooping through the wooded alleys, 
Their kirtles glancing white, like streams in sunlit 
valleys. 
They were such forms as, imaged in the night, 
Sail in our dreams across the heaven’s deep blue; 
When the closed lid sees visions streaming bright, 
Too beautiful to meet the naked view, 
Like faces formed in clouds of silver light: 
Women they were ! such as the angels knew— 
Such as the Mammoth looked on, ere he fled, 
Scared by the lovers’ wings, that streamed in sunset 
red. 
