Is Grimes dead? No! He lives to-day, buckles on his armour, and with a grim, brave look in his English eyes goes forth to battle, that the helpless may live.
And Pauline? She still sings of England to exiled men, wherever Waylao has wept for her race in the savage, ravished South.
I often hear their old songs as the winds and birds sing in the windy poplars, in the green woods and English fields. I never go forth in the summer nights but I can hear her shadow-feet pattering down the dusky lanes beside me, and the sweetest songs of far-off romance echo in my ears. Ah! could I catch the beauty of those songs, what a composer would I be. But I can only write down the spindrift of those glorious strains.
I often sit dreaming far into the night. It is then that she comes back from the shadows and kneels with me at the altar of my dreams—and sings some far-off strain of my beautiful, dead Romance.
- Transcriber’s Notes:
- Music files have been provided for the song presented on page 18, “On yonder high mountain.” If your browser supports it, clicking on the MP3 link will play the piano music; clicking on the MIDI link may open a program that can play MIDI files; and clicking on the Music XML link may download the MXL file to your computer. The music will probably not play in a device that uses ePub format or on a Kindle.
- Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
- Typographical errors were silently corrected.
- Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book.