O pleasant eventide!
        Clouds on the western side
Grow gray and grayer, hiding the warm sun:
The bees and birds, their happy labors done,
        Seek their close nests and bide.

        Screened in the leafy wood
        The stock-doves sit and brood:
The very squirrel leaps from bough to bough
But lazily; pauses; and settles now
        Where once he stored his food.

        One by one the flowers close,
        Lily and dewy rose
Shutting their tender petals from the moon:
The grasshoppers are still; but not so soon
        Are still the noisy crows.

        The dormouse squats and eats
        Choice little dainty bits
Beneath the spreading roots of a broad lime;
Nibbling his fill he stops from time to time
        And listens where he sits.

        From far the lowings come
        Of cattle driven home:
From farther still the wind brings fitfully
The vast continual murmur of the sea,
        Now loud, now almost dumb.
        The gnats whirl in the air,
        The evening gnats; and there
The owl opes broad his eyes and wings to sail
For prey; the bat wakes; and the shell-less snail
        Comes forth, clammy and bare.

        Hark! that's the nightingale,
        Telling the self-same tale
Her song told when this ancient earth was young:
So echoes answered when her song was sung
        In the first wooded vale.

        We call it love and pain
        The passion of her strain;
And yet we little understand or know:
Why should it not be rather joy that so
        Throbs in each throbbing vein?

        In separate herds the deer
        Lie; here the bucks, and here
The does, and by its mother sleeps the fawn:
Through all the hours of night until the dawn
        They sleep, forgetting fear.

        The hare sleeps where it lies,
        With wary half-closed eyes;
The cock has ceased to crow, the hen to cluck:
Only the fox is out, some heedless duck
        Or chicken to surprise.
        Remote, each single star
        Comes out, till there they are
All shining brightly: how the dews fall damp!
While close at hand the glow-worm lights her lamp
        Or twinkles from afar.

        But evening now is done
        As much as if the sun
Day-giving had arisen in the east:
For night has come; and the great calm has ceased,
        The quiet sands have run.