C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

A Picture

From the ‘Poems’

From Howitt’s ‘Literature of Northern Europe’

I LAY on my heathery hills alone;

The storm-winds rushed o’er me in turbulence loud;

My head rested lone on the gray moorland stone;

My eyes wandered skyward from cloud unto cloud.

There wandered my eyes, but my thoughts onward passed,

Far beyond cloud-track or tempest’s career;

At times I hummed songs, and the desolate waste

Was the first the sad chimes of my spirit to hear.

Gloomy and gray are the moorlands where rest

My fathers, yet there doth the wild heather bloom,

And amid the old cairns the lark buildeth her nest,

And sings in the desert, o’er hill-top and tomb.