62 
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
Such baffled searches mock man’s prying pride, 
The Gop oF NATURE is your secret guide ! 
While deep’ning shades obscure the face of day, 
To yonder bench leaf-shelter’d let us stray, 
Till blended objects fail the swimming sight, 
And all the fading landscape sinks in night ; 
To hear the drowsy dorr come brushing by 
With buzzing wing, or the shrill cricket cry ; 
To see the feeding bat glance through the wood ; 
To catch the distant falling of the flood ; 
While o’er the cliff th’ awaken’d churn-owl hung 
Through the still gloom protracts his chattering song ; 
While high in air, and poised upon his wings, 
Unseen, the soft enamor’d! woodlark sings : 
These, NATURE’S works, the curious mind employ, 
Inspire a soothing melancholy joy : 
As fancy warms, a pleasing kind of pain 
Steals o’er the cheek, and thrills the creeping vein ! 
Each rural sight, each sound, each smell combine ; 
The tinkling sheep-bell or the breath of kine : 
The new-mown hay that scents the swelling breeze, 
Or cottage chimney smoking through the trees. 
The chilling night-dews fall : — away, retire ! 
For see the glow-worm lights her amorous fire ! 2 
Thus, ere night’s veil had half obscured the sky, 
Th’ impatient damsel hung her lamp on high ! 
True to the signal, by love’s meteor led, 
Leander hasten’d to his Hero’s bed. 
1JIn hot summer nights wood-larks soar to a prodigious height, and 
hang singing in the air.— W. 
2 The light of the female glow-worm (as she often crawls up the stalk of 
a grass to make herself more conspicuous) is a signal to the male, which is 
a slender dusky Scarabeus.— W. This was, and indeed is still, the gen- 
erally received notion, but the fact is that both sexes of the glow-worm are 
phosphorescent. 
