The sweetest eyes of Normandie
Shall watch for me in vain.
“Yet onward still to ear and eye
The baffling marvel calls;
I fain would look before I die
On Norembega’s walls.
“So, haply, it shall be thy part
At Christian feet to lay
The mystery of the desert’s heart
My dead hand plucked away.
“Leave me an hour of rest; go thou
And look from yonder heights;
Perchance the valley even now
Is starred with city lights.”
The henchman climbed the nearest hill,
He saw nor tower nor town,
But, through the drear woods, lone and still,
The river rolling down.
He heard the stealthy feet of things
Whose shapes he could not see,
A flutter as of evil wings,
The fall of a dead tree.
The pines stood black against the moon,
A sword of fire beyond;
He heard the wolf howl, and the loon
Laugh from his reedy pond.
He turned him back: “O master dear,
We are but men misled;
And thou hast sought a city here
To find a grave instead.”
“As God shall will! what matters where
A true man’s cross may stand,
So Heaven be o’er it here as there
In pleasant Norman land?
“These woods, perchance, no secret hide
Of lordly tower and hall;
Yon river in its wanderings wide
Has washed no city wall;
“Yet mirrored in the sullen stream
The holy stars are given:
Is Norembega, then, a dream
Whose waking is in Heaven?
“No builded wonder of these lands
My weary eyes shall see;
A city never made with hands
Alone awaiteth me—
“ ‘Urbs Syon mystica;’ I see
Its mansions passing fair,
‘Condita cœlo;’ let me be,
Dear Lord, a dweller there!”
Above the dying exile hung
The vision of the bard,
As faltered on his failing tongue
The song of good Bernard.
The henchman dug at dawn a grave
Beneath the hemlocks brown,
And to the desert’s keeping gave
The lord of fief and town.
Years after, when the Sieur Champlain
Sailed up the unknown stream,
And Norembega proved again
A shadow and a dream,
He found the Norman’s nameless grave
Within the hemlock’s shade,
And, stretching wide its arms to save,
The sign that God had made.
The cross-boughed tree that marked the spot
And made it holy ground:
He needs the earthly city not
Who hath the heavenly found.
MIRIAM
TO FREDERICK A. P. BARNARD
[When Whittier was an editor in Hartford, Mr. Barnard, afterward President of Columbia College, was a teacher in the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb in that place. Both men were at the time especially interested in Eastern history and romance.]
The years are many since, in youth and hope,
Under the Charter Oak, our horoscope
We drew thick-studded with all favoring stars.
Now, with gray beards, and faces seamed with scars
From life’s hard battle, meeting once again,
We smile, half sadly, over dreams so vain;
