The poetry of earth is never dead: When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees; a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead In summer luxury,—he has never done With his delights; for when tired out with fun, He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never: On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever, And seems to one, in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.