COTTA. My God! hark how the trumpets bray! CHIEF. They do. You see the end of things. The power of a thousand kings Helped us to this, and now the power Is so much hay that was a flower. LUCIUS. We have been very great and strong. CHIEF. That's over now. LUCIUS. It will be long Before the world will see our like. CHIEF. We've kept these thieves beyond the dyke A good long time, here on the Wall. LUCIUS. Colonel, we ought to sound a call To mark the end of this. CHIEF. We ought. Look, there's the hill-top where we fought Old Foxfoot. Look, there in the whin. Old ruffian knave! Come on! Fall in! XIX. Night is on the downland, on the lonely moorland, On the hills where the wind goes over sheep-bitten turf, Where the bent grass beats upon the unploughed poorland And the pine-woods roar like the surf. Here the Roman lived on the wind-barren lonely, Dark now and haunted by the moorland fowl; None comes here now but the peewit only, And moth-like death in the owl. Beauty was here, on this beetle-droning downland; The thought of a Cæsar in the purple came From the palace by the Tiber in the Roman town-land To this wind-swept hill with no name. Lonely Beauty came here and was here in sadness, Brave as a thought on the frontier of the mind, In the camp of the wild upon the march of madness, The bright-eyed Queen of the Blind. Now where Beauty was are the wind-withered gorses, Moaning like old men in the hill-wind's blast; The flying sky is dark with running horses, And the night is full of the past. XX. MIDNIGHT The fox came up by Stringer's Pound; He smelt the south-west warm on the ground, From west to east a feathery smell Of blood on the wing-quills tasting well. A buck's hind-feet thumped on the sod, The whip-like grass snake went to clod, The dog-fox put his nose in the air To taste what food was wandering there. Under the clover down the hill A hare in form that knew his will. Up the hill the warren awake And the badger showing teeth like a rake. Down the hill the two twin thorpes Where the crying night owl waked the corpse, And the moon on the stilly windows bright Instead of a dead man's waking light. The cock on his perch that shook his wing When the clock struck for the chimes to ring, A duck that muttered, a rat that ran, And a horse that stamped, remembering man. XXI. Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover, Eyeing the grass. The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover As their shadows pass. Men are burning the gorse on the down's shoulder; A drift of smoke Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder, And the lungs choke. Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs, burning Men in the frame, Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning And the gods came.