A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields/Souvenir d'un Vieil Air (Valéry Vernier)

SOUVENIR D'UN VIEIL AIR.


VALÉRY VERNIER.

'Tis strange, there needs nothing but a ballad romance,
The far-off remembrance of an air, brought by chance,
To give back to our heart its purity entire,
Our earliest bashfulness, and our candour and fire.

O refrain half-forgotten, from some delicate hand!
Fragment of a sonata, old, simple and grand!
O dream of Mozart that he had never written out,
That I hum in my sleep, and that floats all about!
Thou awaken'st one by one the blest days of my prime,
Framed like a picture in a landscape sublime;
Thou restorest me Hours that pass smiling again,
Hand linked in hand as of fair wood-nymphs a train,
Treading down the high grass that green borders the road
Which leads to our village, to my childhood's abode.

From the plane-tree high lifted the twilight falls down;
O Night, Cleopatra with the bright starry crown!
Stop, stop a moment thy car, and quench not the sun,
Leave, leave us alone until our pastimes be done!
We are gathered together by Friendship divine.
How pleasant to run under the boughs that entwine!
The sward is so verdant and so lovely the hour!
To-morrow to meet thus, shall fate grant us the power?

At last comes the darkness; we embrace, bid adieu;
Then home through the shadows while the stars are yet few!
At her side the good mother in prayer makes us kneel,
Saying—'When tired of our pleasures 'tis fit that we feel
Our God's hand around us, for all good comes from Him!'
Song rises, rises prayer, by the hearth embers dim.
Thus learnt, can those prayers, can those songs pass away?
Their echoes still ring and make us purer to-day.
The chaste sweet remembrance of the days that are past
Is the gold key that opens the soul's treasures shut fast,
For it opens the gardens enchanted—the bowers,
Where the bloom is eternal on the fruits and the flowers.