REUBEN
Begloom’d; but, childlike, telling to the sun
Its every little pebble, yet with means
Abundant in its strait and shallow scope
To charm the glad, the weary to revive,
And cleanse the travel-stain’d. Not very wise,
And no way great was Mercy—save in prompt
And plain goodwill: the gracious wish to please,
The gracious inclination to be pleas’d;
No queen o’ertopp’d her there.
And like some rock
Was Reuben, which the singing stream endues
With fern and fresh green mosses, which no less
Of the sweet song the mute occasion is.
Older than Mercy by ten years, more aged
By thirty, bow’d in body, slow, infirm,
But of a sure mind, he was much her charge
Yet order’d both their lives. A gaunt old man
With settled lips and deep dumb eyes of blue
(A diver he had been, and some shy sense,
Of that inhuman isolation bred
In the remote dim regions of the sea,
Possess’d him still, and like an unseen wall
Secreted him from neighbourhood, in show
If not in fact): a man of his own way,
Of even judgment and a quiet heart:
Just before generous, generous after just:
Who, when boys robb’d his garden, prosecuted—
“In rightness to the neighbours and the boys,”
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