Christopher Pearse Cranch

Sonnet 54. Idle Hours

YE idle hours of summer, not in vain,
To one by Nature's beauty fed, ye pass —
Though sending through the mental camera glass
No philosophic lesson to the brain,
But only pictures fair of shaded lane,
Of dappled cows knee-deep in meadow grass;
Bright hill-tops with their sloping forest mass,
Or barn-roofs glimmering gray across the plain.
Earth, air, and water, and the sacred skies
Have something still to tell, not less, I ween,
Than famous books the learned sages prize,
Weighted with thought abstract and logic keen,
Where Concord pores with metaphysic eyes
O'er vasty deeps of the unknown and unseen.