For on sweet Malvern Hill one morn he lay,
Drowsed by the music of the constant stream:--
Loud sang the cuckoo, cuckoo!--for the May
Breathed summer: summer floating like a dream
From the far fields of childhood, with a gleam
Of alien freshness on her forehead fair,
And Heaven itself within the common air.

Then on the mead in vision Langland saw
A pilgrim-throng; not missal-bright as those
Whom Chaucer's hand surpass'd itself to draw,
Gay as the lark, and brilliant as the rose;--
But such as dungeon foul or spital shows,
Or the serf's fever-den, or field of fight,
When festering sunbeams on the wounded smite.

No sainted shrine the motley wanderers seek,
Pilgrims of life upon the field of scorn,
Mocking and mock'd; with plague and hunger weak,
And haggard faces bleach'd as those who mourn,
And footsteps redden'd with the trodden thorn;
Blind stretching hands that grope for truth in vain,
Across a twilight demon-haunted plain.

A land whose children toil and rot like beasts,
Robbers and robb'd by turns, the dreamer sees:--
Land of poor-grinding lords and faithless priests,
Where wisdom starves and folly thrones at ease
'Mid lavishness and lusts and knaveries;
Times out of joint, a universe of lies,