A brighter, livelier scene succeeds;
In groupes the scattering wood recedes,
Hedge-rows, and huts, and sunny meads,
And corn-fields glance between;
The peasant, at his labour blithe,
Plies the hook’d staff and shorten’d scythe:—
But when these ears were green,
Placed close within destruction’s scope,
Full little was that rustic’s hope
Their ripening to have seen!
And, lo, a hamlet and its fane:—
Let not the gazer with disdain
Their architecture view;
For yonder rude ungraceful shrine,
And disproportion’d spire, are thine,
Immortal Waterloo!
III.
Fear not the heat, though full and high
The sun has scorch’d the autumn sky,
And scarce a forest straggler now
To shade us spreads a greenwood bough
These fields have seen a hotter day
Than e’er was fired by sunny ray.
Yet one mile on—yon shatter’d hedge
Crests the soft hill whose long smooth ridge
Looks on the field below,
And sinks so gently on the dale,
That not the folds of Beauty’s veil
In easier curves can flow.
Brief space from thence, the ground again
Ascending slowly from the plain,
Forms an opposing screen,
Which, with its crest of upland ground,
Shuts the horizon all around.
The soften’d vale between
Slopes smooth and fair for courser’s tread;
Not the most timid maid need dread
To give her snow-white palfrey head
On that wide stubble-ground;
Nor wood, nor tree, nor bush are there,
Her course to intercept or scare,
Nor fosse nor fence are found,
Save where, from out her shatter’d bowers,
Rise Hougoumont’s dismantled towers.
IV.
Now, see’st thou aught in this lone scene
Can tell of that which late hath been?—
A stranger might reply,
“The bare extent of stubble-plain
Seems lately lighten’d of its grain;
And yonder sable tracks remain
Marks of the peasant’s ponderous wain,
When harvest-home was nigh.
On these broad spots of trampled ground,
Perchance the rustics danced such round
As Teniers loved to draw;
And where the earth seems scorch’d by flame,
To dress the homely feast they came,
And toil’d the kerchief’d village dame
Around her fire of straw.”—
V.
So deem’st thou—so each mortal deems,
Of that which is from that which seems:—
But other harvest here
Than that which peasant’s scythe demands,
Was gather’d in by sterner hands,
With bayonet, blade, and spear.
No vulgar crop was theirs to reap,
No stinted harvest thin and cheap!
Heroes before each fatal sweep
Fell thick as ripen’d grain;
And ere the darkening of the day,
Piled high as autumn shocks, there lay
The ghastly harvest of the fray,
The corpses of the slain.
VI.
Aye, look again—that line so black
And trampled, marks the bivouack,
Yon deep-graved ruts the artillery’s track,
So often lost and won
And close beside, the harden’d mud
Still shows where, fetlock-deep in blood,
The fierce dragoon, through battle’s flood,
Dash’d the hot war-horse on.
These spots of excavation tell
The ravage of the bursting shell—
And feel’st thou not the tainted steam,
That reeks against the sultry beam,
From yonder trenched mound?
The pestilential fumes declare
That Carnage has replenish’d there
Her garner-house profound.