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Teachest the woods to re-echo thy game-killing recantations,
Teachest thy verse to exalt Amryllis, a Countess' daughter?
What, thou forgettest, bewildered, my Master, that rightly considered
Beauty must ever be useful, what truly is useful is graceful?
She that is handy is handsome, good dairy-maids must be good looking.
If but the butter be nice, the tournure of the elbow is shapely,
If the cream-cheeses be white, far whiter the hands that made them,
If—but alas, is it true? while the pupil alone in the cottage
Slowly elaborates here thy system of feminine graces,
Thou in the palace, its author, art dining, small-talking and dancing,
Dancing and pressing the fingers kid-gloved of a Lady Maria.
These are the final words, that came to the Tutor from Balloch.
Yes, you have conquered, my friend you will meet me, I hope, in Oxford,
Altered in manners and mind. I yield to the laws and arrangements,
Yield to the ancient existent decrees: who am I to resist them?
Yes, you will find me altered in mind, I think, as in manners,
Anxious too to atone for six weeks' loss of your Logic.
So in the cottage with Adam, the Pupils five together,
Read, and bathed, and roamed, and thought not now of Philip,
All in the joy of their life, and glory of shooting jackets.
VI.
Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnin.
BRIGHT October was come, the misty-bright October,
Bright October was come to burn and glen and cottage;
But the cottage was empty, the matutine deserted.
Who are these that walk by the shore of the salt sea water?
Here in the dusky eve, on the road by the salt sea water?
Who are these? and where? it is no sweet seclusion;
Blank hill sides slope down to a salt sea loch at their bases,
Scored by runnels, that fringe ere they end with rowan and alder;
Cottages here and there out-standing bare on the mountain,
Peat-roofed, windowless, white; the road underneath by the water.
There on the blank hill side, looking down through the loch to the ocean,
There with a runnel beside, and pine trees twain before it,
There with the road underneath, and in sight of coaches and steamers,
