Page:Roden Noel - A Little Child's Monument - 1881.pdf/26



twenty years and still I seem to stand, As then, aloft in the tall tower-tomb So far within the expanse of Syrian sand, Alone, where long long ages in the gloom Of yon stone shelves a human dust hath lain,

How stealthily the memory removed

Later, the men who built the tomb dispersed, Their conquerors were heedless of the dead; Race following race, remembrance of the first, Like some fair pageant of the cloud, is fled; They, and the memory of them all erased, Faint characters an idle mood hath traced In sands of yonder ever-wandering waste. The shelves are void an alien spoiler soon

Upon these raving winds that roam the wild, For ever to be scattered, whirled, or piled