Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/132

"One such I knew, and from my childhood's hour
He drew me with him, set my heart aflame
In boyhood, and unfolded my soul's flower,—
The passion for my race that in me grew,
And swelled my breast, and, full in youth, burst forth
The glory of my country's chivalry,
Rose of her garden, spearhead of her wars,—
O why recall? Why mourn? Why chronicle
The tears of time that every people knows,
Fulfilling destiny on fatal heights
Of high achievement to its last dismay?
I was the incarnation of the land;
I drank its life, I treasured up its soul;
I was made one with it, its voice, its deed,
Its hope, its triumph, its catastrophe.
Now blown about the desert world is all
My empire; and its breath, a memory,
Dies from the lips of time; and here I bide
'Mid scenes that are as ghosts of vanished years;
For, as at times men look on earth and sky,
And see lost recollections of a world
Once theirs, so fair, so dear, so intimate
They shine upon the eye and reach the heart,
Thus in the waste dominion round me strown

The immortal shadow of my own sweet land