| |
| I HEARD them talking and praising the grey French country, | |
| Dotted with red roofs high and steep, | |
| With just one gray stone church-tower keeping sentry | |
| Over the quiet dead asleep. | |
| Grey skies and greyer dunes, as grey as duty, | 5 |
| Grey sands where grey gulls flew. | |
| And I said in my passionate heart, they know not beauty, | |
| Beloved, who know not you. | |
| |
| I heard them praise the gold of the stormy sunset | |
| And the pale moon’s path on the sea; | 10 |
| I thought of your clouds with their wild magnificent onset, | |
| Your eagles screaming free. | |
| I thought of your mild kind mountains, angel-bosomed, | |
| Quiet in dusk and dew. | |
| What flower of beauty that ever in Paradise blossomed, | 15 |
| Love, was denied to you? | |
| |
| I thought of the pale green dawns, and gold day’s closes. | |
| Dear, I shall not forget | |
| Nights when your skies were full of the flying roses, | |
| Millions and millions yet. | 20 |
| All your still lakes and your rivers broad and gracious, | |
| Dear mountain glens I knew; | |
| When the trump of judgment sounds and the world’s in ashes | |
| I shall remember you. | |
| |
| Remember! foretaste of Heaven you are, O Mother! | 25 |
| By bog-lands brown and bare, | |
| Where every little pool is the blue sky’s brother, | |
| Your wild larks spring in the air. | |
| Land of my heart! smiling I heard their praises, | |
| Smiling and sighing too. | 30 |
| I would give this gray French land for a handful of daisies | |
| Plucked from the breast of you. | |
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