Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/132

122 "One such I knew, and from my childhood's hour

He drew me with him, set my heart aflame

In boyhood, and unfolded my soul's flower,—

The passion for my race that in me grew,

And swelled my breast, and, full in youth, burst forth

The glory of my country's chivalry,

Rose of her garden, spearhead of her wars,—

O why recall? Why mourn? Why chronicle

The tears of time that every people knows,

Fulfilling destiny on fatal heights

Of high achievement to its last dismay?

I was the incarnation of the land;

I drank its life, I treasured up its soul;

I was made one with it, its voice, its deed,

Its hope, its triumph, its catastrophe.

Now blown about the desert world is all

My empire; and its breath, a memory,

Dies from the lips of time; and here I bide

'Mid scenes that are as ghosts of vanished years;

For, as at times men look on earth and sky,

And see lost recollections of a world

Once theirs, so fair, so dear, so intimate

They shine upon the eye and reach the heart,

Thus in the waste dominion round me strown

The immortal shadow of my own sweet land