I leave my neighbours to their thought;
My choice it is, and pride,
On my own lands to find my sport,
In my own fields to ride.
The hare herself no better loves
The field where she was bred,
Than I the habit of these groves,
My own inherited.
I know my quarries every one,
The meuse where she sits low;
The road she chose to-day was run
A hundred years ago.
The lags, the gills, the forest ways;
The hedgerows one and all,
These are the kingdoms of my chase,
And bounded by my wall.
Nor has the world a better thing,
Though one should search it round,
Than thus to live one's own sole king,
Upon one's own sole ground.
I like the hunting of the hare;
It brings me day by day,
The memory of old days as fair,
With dead men past away.
To these, as homeward still I ply,
And pass the churchyard gate,
Where all are laid as I must lie,
I stop and raise my hat.
I like the hunting of the hare;
New sports I hold in scorn.
I like to be as my fathers were,
In the days e'er I was born.
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We are indeed just now in a bookish and poetical district, for a little more than a mile to the east of Crabbet, in a beautiful Tudor house in a hollow close to the station, lived Frederick Locker-Lampson, the London lyricist; and here are treasured the famous Rowfant books and
manuscripts which
