Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry / Came loud -- and hark, again! loud as before. / The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, / Have left me to that solitude, which suits / Abstruser musings: save that at my side / My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. / 'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs / And vexes meditation with its strange / And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, / This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, / With all the numberless goings-on of life, / Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame / Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; / Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, / Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. / Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature / Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, / Making it a companionable form, / Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit / By its own moods interprets, every where / Echo or mirror seeking of itself, / And makes a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft, / How oft, at school, with most believing mind, / Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars, / To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft / With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt / Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, / Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang / From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, / So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me / With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear / Most like articulate sounds of things to come! / So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, / Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! / And so I brooded all the following morn, / Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye / Fixed with mock study on my swimming book: / Save if the door half opened, and I snatched / A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up, / For still I hoped to see the _stranger's_ face, / Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, / My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!