Page:A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields.djvu/192

I say not you must my book often read,
No such devotion or penance I need.
But at Val, sometimes in the eve, when the sky
Looks, sprinkled with stars, like a pall hung on high,
When silver clouds swell out the gold on their sails,
And sweep through a sea where the crescent prevails:
When grows in the dim wood dark and darker the day,
And the nightingale wakes with her soul-thrilling lay,
When the heads of the flowers bend languishing down
As to sleep, and like folds of marble brown
Winds the fog round the trunks of the aged trees,
In a drapery dense, unstirred by the breeze,
When glowworms tremble in the blades of the grass,
Like sapphires from heaven dropt by angels that pass;
And fly hither and thither the wandering lights
Around the marshes, and far over the heights,
Say then, my friends, ‘Here's the hour of his choice!
In the woods our dear father now used to rejoice,
Roaming about in the darkness at will,
Intent on his thought, pursuing it still,
Or on the watch silent—like a hunter grim,
For it to start forth from its twilight dim.
His traces everywhere have now disappeared,
The branch once so green is blasted and seared,
But it behoves us now, at his favourite time
To think of him tenderly, or to read his rhyme.'

Speak often of me: my shade, night and day,
Will hover around you, though it darken your way;
Love verses that spring from kind hearts like your own,
They are echoes from heaven, stray beams from the throne;
While I slumber in earth, whisper gently of me—
'His tune was old Virgil's, though far lower his key.
If the world never thought so, the reason is clear—