The Priest replied--"An office you impose For which peculiar requisites are mine; Yet much, I feel, is wanting--else the task 660 Would be most grateful. True indeed it is That they whom death has hidden from our sight Are worthiest of the mind's regard; with these The future cannot contradict the past: Mortality's last exercise and proof 665 Is undergone; the transit made that shows The very Soul, revealed as she[475] departs. Yet, on your first suggestion, will I give, Ere we descend into these silent vaults, One picture from the living. "You behold, 670 High on the breast of yon dark mountain, dark With stony barrenness,[GT] a shining speck Bright as a sunbeam sleeping till a shower Brush it away, or cloud pass over it; 674 And such it might be deemed--a sleeping sunbeam; But 'tis a plot of cultivated ground, Cut off, an island in the dusky waste; And that attractive brightness is its own. The lofty site, by nature framed to tempt Amid a wilderness of rocks and stones 680 The tiller's hand, a hermit might have chosen, For opportunity presented, thence Far forth to send his wandering eye o'er land And ocean, and look down upon the works, The habitations, and the ways of men, 685 Himself unseen! But no tradition tells That ever hermit dipped his maple dish In the sweet spring that lurks 'mid yon green fields; And no such visionary views belong To those who occupy and till the ground, 690 High on that mountain where they long have dwelt[476] A wedded pair in childless solitude. A house of stones collected on the spot, By rude hands built, with rocky knolls in front, Backed also by a ledge of rock, whose crest 695 Of birch-trees waves over the chimney top; A rough abode--in colour, shape, and size,[477] Such as in unsafe times of border-war Might have been wished for and contrived, to elude The eye of roving plunderer--for their need 700 Suffices; and unshaken bears the assault Of their most dreaded foe, the strong South-west In anger blowing from the distant sea. --Alone within her solitary hut; There, or within the compass of her fields, 705 At any moment may the Dame be found, True as the stock-dove to her shallow nest And to the grove that holds it. She beguiles By intermingled work of house and field The summer's day, and winter's; with success 710 Not equal, but sufficient to maintain, Even at the worst, a smooth stream of content, Until the expected hour at which her Mate From the far-distant quarry's vault returns;