Page:Mistral - Mirèio. A Provençal poem.djvu/218

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Is left Mirèio: yet her course she keeps,
Toiling over the burning, moving heaps
Of sand; over the salt-encrusted waste—
Seamed, swollen, dazzling to the eye—doth haste.
On through the tall marsh-grasses and the reeds
And rushes, haunted by the gnat, she speeds,

With Vincen ever in her thought. And soon,
Skirting the lonesome Vacarès lagune,
She sees it loom at last in distance dim,—
She sees it grow on the horizon's rim,—
The Saints' white tower, across the billowy plain,
Like vessel homeward bound upon the main.

And, even at that blessèd moment, one
Of the hot shafts of the unpitying sun
The ill-starred mdden's forehead pierced, and she
Staggered, death-smitten, by the glassy sea,
And dropped upon the sand. Weep, sons of Crau,
The sweetest flower in all the land lies low.

When, in a valley by the river-side,
Young turtle-doves a huntsman hath espied,
Some innocently drinking, others cooing,
He, through the copse-wood with his gun pursuing,
At the most fair takes aiway his first aim,—
The cruel sun had only done the same.