Robert Parkes
High travelling winds by royal hill
Their awful anthem sing,
And songs exalted flow and fill
The caverns of the spring.
To-night across a wild wet plain
A shadow sobs and strays;
The trees are whispering in the rain
Of long departed days.
I cannot say what forest saith —
Its words are strange to me:
I only know that in its breath
Are tones that used to be.
Yea, in these deep dim solitudes
I hear a sound I know —
The voice that lived in Penrith woods
Twelve weary years ago.
And while the hymn of other years
Is on a listening land,
The Angel of the Past appears
And leads me by the hand;
And takes me over moaning wave,
And tracts of sleepless change,
To set me by a lonely grave
Within a lonely range.
The halo of the beautiful
Is round the quiet spot;
The grass is deep and green and cool,
Where sound of life is not.
Here in this lovely lap of bloom,
The grace of glen and glade,
That tender days and nights illume,
My gentle friend was laid.
I do not mark the shell that lies
Beneath the touching flowers;
I only see the radiant eyes
Of other scenes and hours.
I only turn, by grief inspired,
Like some forsaken thing,
To look upon a life retired
As hushed Bethesda’s spring.
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poem by Henry Kendall
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