Assisted memory with his words, more lovely
Than herbs and flowers,—painted the happy past,
How sweet in native land ’mid friends and kin
To pass one’s youth, how many Litwin children
Knew not such bliss, in the Order’s fetters weeping.
I heard this on the plains, but on the beach,
Where the white billows break with roaring breasts,
And from their foamy throat cast streams of sand,
‘Thou seest,’ the old man then was used to say,
‘The grassy carpet of this seaboard meadow.