Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/146

136 To bear his Cross, to wear his sacred sword,

Storied with causes lost and fallen arms

Of my companions dead; I know thee mine,

Who comest to thy own in the great waste."

As when the leader of the hope forlorn—

Or win or lose, his victory is secure—

Looks to the setting sun, on the last day,

And smiles to see his liegemen round him strown,—

So sweet and stern the closing of his lips,

The haunted eyes, that seemed to gaze far off

On things unseen, and saw beyond all sight

The heavenly passes; on that mystic face

The Roamer hung intent,—the mouth that seemed

To sweeten with the words before they came;

"In the heart only is the victory cried,"

He heard, amid the silence of the sands

Sounding, "and in the soul its sweetness found."

And yet a second time the faintness came

Upon him, and the momentary dark;

And when again the white hills round him stood

Clear, with a strange distinctness he beheld

How delicate the fingers of the wind,

The framing of the sandhills how sublime!

He lay by Chrestoval who o'er him bent

Between the sun and shadow; him he guessed

One of the comrades of his youth divine,