[216]
]And Phyl herself had had a secret idea that it was a masterpiece.
The poem was about a soldier who clasped a fair maiden in his arms in anguished farewell, then “light to his saddle prest—
“Away o’er the grassy plain, far away thro’ the stilly air,
Away from all that was lovely,—away from all that was fair.”
The maiden of course languished through several verses. Indeed all the school-girls would have been quite hurt had she stayed healthily alive to welcome her lover back from his wars.
“‘Good-bye to sadness and sorrow! Good-bye to parting and pain.
Oh, welcome to death,’ she cries, ‘which binds us together again.’”
And the soldier at last comes spurring back from the battle only to find—
“’Tis over, the hope and the love, the dream of his earthly life,
Sorrow has taken his goblet up and filled it with sadness and strife.