Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/81

ALICE OF MONMOUTH Had mirrored along its course?

All—from that summer morn

When she seemed to meet in the field

One whom she vowed to love,

And with whom she wandered thence,

Leaving the home of her youth?

Were they visions indeed,—

The pillars of smoke and flame,

The sound of a hundred fights,

The grandeur, and ah! the gloom,

The shadows which circled her now,

And the wraith of the one she loved

Gliding away from her grasp,

Vanishing swiftly and sure?

Yes, it was all a dream;

And the strange, sad man, who moved

To the other side of the couch,

Bending over it long,

Pressing his hand on his heart,

And gazing, anon, in her eyes,—

He, with his scanty hair,

And pallid, repentant face,

He, too, was a voiceless dream,

A vision like all the rest;

He with the rest would fade

When the day should dawn again,

When the spectral mist of night,

Fused with the golden morn,

Should melt in the eastern sky.

XVI

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The dying soldier, and strives amain

To rise from the pillow and his pain.

Wild and wandering are his eyes, 51