Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/69

ALICE OF MONMOUTH She grew to perfect ladyhood,—

Unwittingly the mate and peer

Of the proudest of her husband's blood.

XI

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an affluent, royal town, the summer camps

Of a hundred thousand men are stretched away.

At night, like multitudinous city lamps,

Their numberless watch-fires beacon, clear and still,

And a glory beams from the zenith lit

With lurid vapors that over its star-lights flit;

But wreaths of opaline cloud o'erhang, by day,

The crystal-pointed tents, from hill to hill,

From vale to vale—until

The heavens on endless peaks their curtain lay.

A magical city! spread to-night

On hills which slope within our sight:

To-morrow, as at the waving of a wand,

Tents, guidons, bannerols are moved afar,—

Rising elsewhere, as rises a morning-star,

Or the dream of Aladdin's palace in fairy-land.

2

Camp after camp, like marble square on square;

Street following street, with many a park between;

Bright bayonet-sparkles in the tremulous air;

Far-fading, purple smoke above their sheen;

Green central fields with flags like flowers abloom;

And, all about, close-ordered, populous life:

But here no festering trade, no civic strife,

Only the blue-clad soldiers everywhere,

Waiting to-morrow's victory or doom,—

Men of the hour, to whom these pictures seem,

Like school-boy thoughts, half real, half a dream.

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