Ah! life is brief, though love be long; The altar and the bier, The burial hymn and bridal song, Were both in one short year! Her rest is quiet on the hill, Beneath the locust's bloom Far off her lover sleeps as still Within his scutcheoned tomb. The Gascon lord, the village maid, In death still clasp their hands; The love that levels rank and grade Unites their severed lands. What matter whose the hillside grave, Or whose the blazoned stone? Forever to her western wave Shall whisper blue Garonne! O Love!--so hallowing every soil That gives thy sweet flower room, Wherever, nursed by ease or toil, The human heart takes bloom!-- Plant of lost Eden, from the sod Of sinful earth unriven, White blossom of the trees of God Dropped down to us from heaven! This tangled waste of mound and stone Is holy for thy sale; A sweetness which is all thy own Breathes out from fern and brake. And while ancestral pride shall twine The Gascon's tomb with flowers, Fall sweetly here, O song of mine, With summer's bloom and showers! And let the lines that severed seem Unite again in thee, As western wave and Gallic stream Are mingled in one sea! 1863. AMONG THE HILLS This poem, when originally published, was dedicated to Annie Fields, wife of the distinguished publisher, James T. Fields, of Boston, in grateful acknowledgment of the strength and inspiration I have found in her friendship and sympathy. The poem in its first form was entitled The Wife: an Idyl of Bearcamp Water, and appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for January, 1868. When I published the volume Among the Hills, in December of the same year, I expanded the Prelude and filled out also the outlines of the story. PRELUDE.