VII.
Were those not brave old races?—
Well, here they still abide;
And yours is one or other,
And the second's at your side,
So when you hear your brother say,
"Some loyal deed I'll do,"
Like old Valrennes, be ready with
"I'm here to answer you!"
WINTER'S DAWN IN LOWER CANADA.
To each there lives some beauteous sight: mine is to me most fair,
I carry fadeless one clear dawn in keen December air,
O'er leagues of plain from night we fled upon a pulsing train;
For breath of morn, outside I stood. Then up a carmine stain
Flushed calm and rich the long, low east, deep reddening till the sun
Eyed from its molten fires and shot strange arrows, one by one
On certain fields, and on a wood of distant evergreen,
And fairy opal blues and pinks on all the snows between:
(Broad earth had never such a flower, as in my country grows,
When at the rising winter sun, the plain is all a rose.)
Then seemed all nymphs and gods awake—heaven brightened with their
smiles,
The land was theirs; like mirages, stood out Elysian isles.
Westward the forests smiled in strength and glory like the plain,
Their bare boughs rose, an arrowy flight, and by them sped the train.
But dream-crown of that porcelain sea, those plains of sunrise snow,
The green woods east, the grey woods west, and molten carmine glow—
A light flashed through the sappling wastes and alders nearer by,
Where Phoebus worked the spell of spells that ever charmed an eye,
His bright spears to the forest-flakes reached; that on their branches
lay,
And each shot back, as we sped by, a single peerless ray.
More bright than starry hosts appeared that vision in the wood
And flashed and flew like fire-flies in a nightly solitude,
A maze of silver stars, a dance of diamonds in the day:
Through many lives though fly my soul as on that pulsing train,
That sparkling dawn shall oftentimes enkindle it again.