Page:Ballads, Stevenson, 1890.djvu/62

 So it was spoken; and she, girding her garment high,

Fled and was swallowed of woods, swift as the sight of an eye.

Night over isle and sea rolled her curtain of stars,

Then a trouble awoke in the air, the east was banded with bars;

Dawn as yellow as sulphur leaped on the mountain height;

Dawn, in the deepest glen, fell a wonder of light;

High and clear stood the palms in the eye of the brightening east,

And lo! from the sides of the sea the broken sound of the feast!

As, when in days of summer, through open windows, the fly

Swift as a breeze and loud as a trump goes by,

But when frosts in the field have pinched the wintering mouse,

Blindly noses and buzzes and hums in the firelit house:

So the sound of the feast gallantly trampled at night,

So it staggered and drooped, and droned in the morning light.

IV. THE RAID.

It chanced that as Rua sat in the valley of silent falls,

He heard a calling of doves from high on the cliffy walls.

Fire had fashioned of yore, and time had broken, the rocks;

There were rooting crannies for trees and nesting-places for flocks;

And he saw on the top of the cliffs, looking up from the pit of the shade,

A flicker of wings and sunshine, and trees that swung in the trade. 50