Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/125

Rh The sweetest eyes of Normandie
 * Shall watch for me in vain.

“Yet onward still to ear and eye
 * The baffling marvel calls;

I fain would look before I die
 * On Norembega’s walls.

“So, haply, it shall be thy part
 * At Christian feet to lay

The mystery of the desert’s heart
 * My dead hand plucked away.

“Leave me an hour of rest; go thou
 * And look from yonder heights;

Perchance the valley even now
 * Is starred with city lights.”

The henchman climbed the nearest hill,
 * He saw nor tower nor town,

But, through the drear woods, lone and still,
 * The river rolling down.

He heard the stealthy feet of things
 * Whose shapes he could not see,

A flutter as of evil wings,
 * The fall of a dead tree.

The pines stood black against the moon,
 * A sword of fire beyond;

He heard the wolf howl, and the loon
 * Laugh from his reedy pond.

He turned him back: “O master dear,
 * We are but men misled;

And thou hast sought a city here
 * To find a grave instead.”

“As God shall will! what matters where
 * A true man’s cross may stand,

So Heaven be o’er it here as there
 * In pleasant Norman land?

“These woods, perchance, no secret hide
 * Of lordly tower and hall;

Yon river in its wanderings wide
 * Has washed no city wall;

“Yet mirrored in the sullen stream
 * The holy stars are given:

Is Norembega, then, a dream
 * Whose waking is in Heaven?

“No builded wonder of these lands
 * My weary eyes shall see;

A city never made with hands
 * Alone awaiteth me—

“ ‘Urbs Syon mystica;’ I see
 * Its mansions passing fair,

‘Condita cœlo;’ let me be,
 * Dear Lord, a dweller there!”

Above the dying exile hung
 * The vision of the bard,

As faltered on his failing tongue
 * The song of good Bernard.

The henchman dug at dawn a grave
 * Beneath the hemlocks brown,

And to the desert’s keeping gave
 * The lord of fief and town.

Years after, when the Sieur Champlain
 * Sailed up the unknown stream,

And Norembega proved again
 * A shadow and a dream,

He found the Norman’s nameless grave
 * Within the hemlock’s shade,

And, stretching wide its arms to save,
 * The sign that God had made.

The cross-boughed tree that marked the spot
 * And made it holy ground:

He needs the earthly city not
 * Who hath the heavenly found.

years are many since, in youth and hope, Under the Charter Oak, our horoscope We drew thick-studded with all favoring stars. Now, with gray beards, and faces seamed with scars From life’s hard battle, meeting once again, We smile, half sadly, over dreams so vain;