A simple muster-roll of death, Of pomp and romance shorn, The dry, old names that common breath Has cheapened and outworn. Yet pause by one low mound, and part The wild vines o'er it laced, And read the words by rustic art Haply yon white-haired villager What means the noble name of her An exile from the Gascon land He knelt with her on Sabbath morn, Her simple daily life he saw By homeliest duties tried, In all things by an untaught law For her his rank aside he laid; Of lowly life and toil, and made Yet still, in gay and careless ease, He brought the gentle courtesies, The nameless grace of France. And she who taught him love not less From him she loved in turn Caught in her sweet unconsciousness What love is quick to learn. Each grew to each in pleased accord, If she looked upward to her lord Or he to her looked down. How sweet, when summer's day was o'er, His violin's mirth and wail, The walk on pleasant Newbury's shore, The river's moonlit sail! Ah! life is brief, though love be long; The altar and the bier, The burial hymn and bridal song, Were both in one short year! Her rest is quiet on the hill, Beneath the locust's bloom; Far off her lover sleeps as still The Gascon lord, the village maid, What matter whose the hillside grave, Or whose the blazoned stone? Forever to her western wave Shall whisper blue Garonne! O Love! so hallowing every soil That gives thy sweet flower room, Wherever, nursed by ease or toil, The human heart takes bloom! Plant of lost Eden, from the sod Of sinful earth unriven, White blossom of the trees of God Dropped down to us from heaven! This tangled waste of mound and stone Is holy for thy sake; A sweetness which is all thy own Breathes out from fern and brake. And while ancestral pride shall twine The Gascon's tomb with flowers, Fall sweetly here, O song of mine, With summer's bloom and showers! And let the lines that severed seem Unite again in thee, As western wave and Gallic stream Are mingled in one sea! |