And over the glens and the wild sea floors
She peers so still as she counts her cost,
With the whaups low calling over the moors,
‘Woe, woe, for the great ones she hath lost.’
William Wilfred Campbell.
SCOTT
CXCIX
QUEBEC
Fierce on this bastion beats the noon-day sun;
The city sleeps beneath me, old and grey;
On convent roofs the quivering sunbeams play,
And batteries guarded by dismantled gun.
No breeze comes from the northern hills which run
Circling the blue mist of the summer’s day;
No ripple stirs the great stream on its way
To those dim headlands where its rest is won.
What thunders shook these silent crags of yore!
What smoke of battle rolled up plain and gorge
While two worlds closed in strife for one brief span!
What echoes still come ringing back once more!
For on these heights of old God set His forge;
His strokes wrought here the destinies of man.
Frederick George Scott.