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Tam'd by the cruel season, crowd around
The winnowing store, and claim the little boon
Which providence assigns them. One alone,
The red-breast, sacred to the household gods,
Wisely regardful of th' embroiling sky,

In joyless fields, and thorny thickets, leaves
His shiv'ring mates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit. Half-afraid, he first

Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights
On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling family askance,

And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is:
Till more familiar grown, the table-crumbs
Attract his slender feet. The foodless wilds
Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare,
Though timorous of heart, and hard beset
By death in various forms, dark snares, and dogs,
And more unpitying men, the garden seeks,
Urg'd on by fearless want. The bleating kind
Eye the bleak heav'n, and next the glist'ning earth,
With looks of dumb despair; then, sad dispers❜d,
Dig for the wither'd herb through heaps of snow.

Now, shepherds, to your helpless charge be kind,

Baffle the raging year, and fill their pens
With food at will; lodge them below the storm,
And watch them strict; for from the bellowing east,
In this dire season, oft the whirlwind's wing
Sweeps up the burden of whole wintry plains
At one wide waft, and o'er the hapless flocks,
Hid in the hollow of two neighb'ring hills,
The billowy tempest whelms; till, upward urg'd,
The valley to a shining mountain swells,
Tipt with a wreath high-curling in the sky.

As thus the snows arise; and foul, and fierce,
All Winter drives along the darken'd air;
In his own loose-revolving fields, the swain
Disaster'd stands; sees other hills ascend,
Of unknown joyless brow; and other scenes,
Of horrid prospect, shag the trackless plain:
Nor finds the river, nor the forest, hid
Beneath the formless wild; but wanders on
From hill to dale, still more and more astray:
Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps,
Stung with the thoughts of home; the thoughts
of home

Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth

In many a vain attempt. How sinks his soul!
What black despair, what horror fills his heart!
When for the dusky spot, which fancy feign'd
His tufted cottage rising through the snow,
He meets the roughness of the middle waste,
Far from the track, and blest abode of man;
While round him night resistless closes fast,
And ev'ry tempest, howling o'er his head,
Renders the savage wilderness more wild.
Then throng the busy shapes into his mind,
Of cover'd pits, unfathomably deep,

Á dire descent! beyond the pow'r of frost;
Of faithless bogs; of precipices huge,

Smooth'd up with snow; and, what is land unknown,
What water, of the still unfrozen spring,

In the loose marsh or solitary lake,

Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils. These check his fearful steps; and down he sinks Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift, Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death, Mix'd with the tender anguish nature shoots Through the wrung bosom of the dying man, His wife, his children, and his friends unseen..

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