Thou cricket, that at dusk in the damp weeds, 
all that, alack! my sickly garden breeds, 
silverest the brown air with thy liquid note 
now eve is sharp, I, hearkening, dream remote 
the home my exiled heart hath somewhere known 
far from these busy days that make me lone, 
in twilit past, where the soon autumn damp 
is gather'd black above the yellow lamp 
that guides my feet towards the rustic roof 
infrequent, on the forest edge, aloof, 
as I return, nor fail to greet the way 
(ah, when?) the witness of my childish play, 
and feel that soon the silver-piled snow 
will make the watches warm beside the glow 
that just reveals, amid the enfolding gloom, 
the smoky joists of the familiar room: 
and while thy supper-song is shrilling thro' 
that well-kept nook, my musing shall renew 
its kindred of romance, the friendly throng 
that haunts the winters when the nights are long.

Dusk lowers in this uneasy pause of rain; 
a blackness clings and thickens on the pane 
and damp grows; westward only, watery pale, 
two yellow streaks, wan glory, slowly fail: 
night shall be loud and thick with driving spears. ? 
And this was also in the haunting years 
this life hath never known, nor this abode, 
when the lone window watch'd the lonely road 
winding into the exiled west, across 
the desolate plain, with, seldom on its fosse 
tipt black against grey gloom, a poplar spire; 
and I could know the sunset's broken fire 
burn'd sombrely in many a leaden glass 
whose look was dead amid the morbid grass 
where never a dancing foot of harvest came 
and ways were lost, a land of vanish'd name.