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page 36
A shining mirror to the moon's pale orb,
Which, dim and waning, o'er the shadowy cliffs,
The solemn woods, and spiry mountain tops,
Her glimmering faintness threw: now every eye,
Oppress'd with toil, was drown'd in deep repose,
Save that the unseen Shepherd in his watch,
Propp'd his crook, stood listening by the fold,
And gaz'd the starry vault, and pendant moon;
Nor voice, nor sound, broke on the deep serene;
But the soft murmur of soft-gushing rills,
Forth issuing from the mountain's distant steep,
(Unheard till now, and now scarce heard) proclaim'd
All things at rest, and imag'd the still voice
Of quiet, whispering in the ear of night."*
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* Dr. Brown, the author of this fragment, was from
his infancy brought up in Cumberland, and should have
remembered that the practice of folding sheep by night is
unknown among these mountains, and that the image of the
Shepherd upon the watch is out of its place, and belongs
only to countries, with a warmer climate, that are subject
to ravages from beasts of prey. It is pleasing to notice a
dawn of imaginative feeling in these verses. Tickel, a man
of no common genius, chose, for the subject of a Poem,
Kensington Gardens, in preference to the Banks of the
Derwent, within a mile or two of which he was born. But this
was in the reign of Queen Anne, or George the first.
Progress must have been made in the interval; though the
traces of it, except in the works of Thomson and Dyer, are
not very obvious.
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