So let her dream, even as beauty should! Let the white plumes athwart her slumbers sway! Why should I steep their swaling snow in blood, Or bid her think of battle’s grim array? Truth will too soon her blinding star display, And like a fearful comet meet her eyes. And yet how peaceful they pass on their way! How grand the sight as up the hill they rise!-- I will not think of cities reddening in the skies. How sweet those rural sounds float by the hill! The grasshopper’s shrill chirp rings o’er the ground, The jingling sheep-bells are but seldom still, The clapping gate closes with hollow bound, There’s music in the church-clock’s measured sound. The ring-dove’s song, how breeze-like comes and goes, Now here, now there, it seems to wander round: The red cow’s voice along the upland flows; His bass the brindled bull from the far meadow lows. “Cuckoo! cuckoo!” ah! well I know thy note, Those summer-sounds the backward years do bring, Like Memory’s locked-up barque once more afloat: They carry me away to life’s glad spring, To home, with all its old boughs rustleìng. ’Tis a sweet sound! but now I feel not glad; I miss the voices which were wont to sing, When on the hills I roamed, a happy lad. “Cuckoo!” it is the grave--not thee--that makes me sad. Tell me, ye sages, whence these feelings rise,-- Sorrowful mornings on the darkened soul; Glimpses of broken, bright, and stormy skies, O’er which this earth--the heart--has no control? Why does the sea of thought thus backward roll? Memory’s the breeze that through the cordage raves, And ever drives us on some home-ward shoal, As if she loved the melancholy waves That, murmuring shore-ward break, over a reef of graves. Hark how the merry bells ring o’er the vale, Now near, remote, or lost, just as it blows. The red cock sends his voice upon the gale, From the thatched grange his answering rival crows: The milkmaid o’er the dew-bathed meadow goes, Her tucked-up kirtle ever holding tight; And now her song rings through the green hedge-rows, Her milk-kit hoops glitter like silver bright:-- I hear her lover singing somewhere out of sight. Where soars that spire, our rude forefathers prayed; Thither they came, from many a thick-leaved dell Year after year, and o’er those footpaths strayed, When summoned by the sounding Sabbath bell,-- For in those walls they deemed that God did dwell. And still they sleep within that bell’s deep sound. Yon Spire doth here of no distinction tell; O’er rich and poor, marble, and earthly mound, The Monument of all,--it marks one common ground.