Page:A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields.djvu/345

These plains of perfume, this clear horizon green rounded,
The murm'ring Aveyron, by swards sloping bounded,
The Tescoud with flat pensive shores,
The Tarn wild and fierce, the Garonne, whose wave dashes
Convulsive 'gainst islands green bannered, and flashes
Around the dark boats with long oars.

And then, down there, upon the horizon see yonder,
Mountains bathed in azure and sunlight, and ponder
If they are a whale's huge skeleton
Tost in wrath from the oceans, or rather some Babel,
Some ruin of giants or genii in fable,
On which thunder its work has done.

No. The granite wall girding this paradise peerless,
'Twas Charlemagne, 'twas Roland, the Paladin fearless
That notched it so deep and so far;
The last lopped the Valier, white and pyramidal,
In whirling his sword like the fire-sword of Michael
Against the proud Moors in the war.

The Moors have defeated the Goth kings at Xeres,
Their battalions mown down, like the ripe sheaves of Ceres,
Lie open on fields to the breeze.
The Arabs in the steps of Musa el Kevir
Have urged their white horses from the blue Guadalquivir
To the foot of the grey Pyrenees.

But one day that Musa el Kevir had followed
An old grisly bear to its cave that was hollowed
On their top, in the tumult and whirl
He gained the peak snowy of Valier. . . . Blinded,
He saw flowers heaped on flowers, and streamlets that winded
And Toulouse i' the midst like a pearl.