University of Virginia Library

XII

Once again thou art alone,
From that other sorrow thrown
All too quickly upon this:
Oh, few days of fleeting bliss!
Where shall they who fain would speak
Comfort now, the mourner seek?
'Mid his old ancestral towers,
His twice-desolated bowers?
On the battle-fields of Spain,
Where the hardy Goths maintain
Their Asturian mountains well,
Thrusting back the infidel?
Rather in the deep recess
Of a pathless wilderness,
Out of knowledge, out of sight,
Seek a lonely eremite.
Him has good Hidulphus blest,
Praised his purpose, and his quest
(Even before this life shall close)
Of a place of sure repose.
So a church in that wild wood
Rises, where that cross had stood:
Underneath the altar high
Genoveva's relics lie:
And that cross, of Angel hands
Wrought, above the altar stands.
He, within a rugged grot,
In the very self-same spot
Where she saw those cruel years,
Where she wept those many tears,
Dwells—where Genoveva knelt,
Kneels—where Genoveva knelt;
From the self-same spring doth take
Water for his thirst to slake,
Often knows no other food
Than the wild roots of the wood;
Well content to undergo
Some small portion of the woe,
Which so long he made her know,
There he waits for his release,
There in God finds perfect peace:—
Till the long years end at last,
And he too at length has past
From the sorrow and the fears,
From the anguish and the tears,
From the desolate distress
Of this world's great loneliness,
From the withering and the blight,
From the shadow of its night,
Into God's pure sunshine bright.