James and Mary Ford, eds. Every Day in the Year. 1902.
November 14The Traveller at the Source of the Nile
By Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835)I
A wanderer proudly stood
Beside the well-spring, deep and lone,
Of Egypt’s awful flood;
The cradle of that mighty birth,
So long a hidden thing to earth.
A low mysterious tone;
A music sought, but never found
By kings and warriors gone;
He listen’d—and his heart beat high—
That was the song of victory!
Rush’d burning through his frame,
The depths of that green solitude
Its torrents could not tame,
Though stillness lay with eve’s last smile,
Round those calm fountains of the Nile,
There swept a sudden change,
E’en at the pilgrim’s glorious goal,
A shadow dark and strange,
Breathed forth the thought, so swift to fall
O’er triumph’s hour—And is this all?
First by that spring to stand?
A thousand streams of lovelier flow
Bathed his own mountain land!
Whence, far o’er waste and ocean track,
Their wild sweet voices call’d him back.
His childhood’s haunt of play,
Where brightly through the beechen shade
Their waters glanced away;
They call’d him, with their sounding waves,
Back to his father’s hills and graves.
Of each familiar scene,
Rose up a fearful vision, fraught
With all that lay between,—
The Arab’s lance, the desert’s gloom,
The whirling sands, the red simoon!
The spirit born to roam?
His weary heart within him died
With yearnings for his home;
All vainly struggling to repress
That gush of painful tenderness.
Beheld his bursting tears,
E’en on that spot where fate had given
The meed of toiling years.
O happiness! how far we flee
Thine own sweet paths in search of thee!