This grave, unlabouring beauty of the dusk,
Stars and still fields and swallows in the sky,
These cool, damp odours faint with earthen musk,
The fading sheep like ghosts of sheep gone by,—
Have held so long the thought of brooding men,
That something like a mood has gathered there,
Piled deep and high, again and yet again,
A moving, thoughtful presence on the air.

So when the last light passes from the hill,
Leaving these fields a glimmering grey and blue,
And the last bell has sounded and grown still,—
These blinking stars awake and tremble through,
Re-blossomed from those gathering moods of time,
Like brooding thoughts that flower into rhyme.