“ And the New Year stood beside me like a man of fifty years.
IV.
In a foggy cloud obscurely, entered Winter, ashy pale,
And his step was hard and heavy, and he wore an icy mail;
Blasting all the path before him, leapt a black wind from the north,
And from stinging drifts of sleet he forged the arrows of his wrath.
Yet some beauty still was found, for when the fogs had passed away,
The wide lands came glittering forward in a fresh and strange array;
Naked trees had got snow foliage, soft, and feathery, and bright,
And the earth looked dressed for heaven in its spiritual white. ”

“ Rapid, rosy-tinted lightnings, where the rocky clouds are riven,
Like the lifting of a veil before the inner courts of heaven;
Silver stars in azure evenings, slowly climbing up the steep;
Cornfields ripening to the harvest, and the wide seas smooth with sleep.
Circled with those living splendours, Summer passed from out my sight;
Like a dream that filled with beauty all the caverns of the night!
And the vision and the presence into empty nothing ran—
And the New Year was still older, and seemed now a youthful man.
III.
Autumn! ”

“ And the New Year had grown older, and no longer was a child.
II.
Summer, shaking languid roses from his dew-bedabbled hair,
Summer, in a robe of green, and with his arms and shoulders bare,
Next came forward; and the richness of his pageants filled the eye;
Breadths of English meadows basking underneath the happy sky.
Long grass swayin g in the playing of the almost wearied breeze;
Flowers bowed beneath a crowd of the yellow-armoured bees;
Sumptuous forests filled with twilight, like a dreamy old romance;
Rivers falling, rivers calling, in their indolent advance ”