Alfred Noyes

“I will lift up mine eyes to the hills.”

I

Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,

Ere I waken in the city—Life, thy dawn makes all things new!

And up a fir-clad glen, far from all the haunts of men,

Up a glen among the mountains, oh my feet are wings again!

Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,

O mountains of my boyhood, I come again to you,

By the little path I know, with the sea far below,

And above, the great cloud-galleons with their sails of rose and snow;

As of old, when all was young, and the earth a song unsung

And the heather through the crimson dawn its Eden incense flung

From the mountain-heights of joy, for a careless-hearted boy,

And the lavrocks rose like fountain sprays of bliss that ne’er could cloy,

From their little beds of bloom, from the golden gorse and broom,

With a song to God the Giver, o’er that waste of wild perfume;

Blowing from height to height, in a glory of great light,

While the cottage-clustered valleys held the lilac last of night,

So, when dawn is in the skies, in a dream, a dream, I rise,

And I follow my lost boyhood to the heights of Paradise.

Life, thy dawn makes all things new! Hills of Youth, I come to you,

Moving through the dew, moving through the dew.

Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,

Floats a brother’s face to meet me! Is it you? Is it you?

For the night I leave behind keeps these dazzled eyes still blind!

But oh, the little hill-flowers, their scent is wise and kind;

And I shall not lose the way from the darkness to the day,

While dust can cling as their scent clings to memory for aye;

And the least link in the chain can recall the whole again,

And heaven at last resume its far-flung harvests, grain by grain.

To the hill-flowers clings my dust, and tho’ eyeless Death may thrust

All else into the darkness, in their heaven I put my trust;

And a dawn shall bid me climb to the little spread of thyme

Where first I heard the ripple of the fountain-heads of rhyme.

And a fir-wood that I know, from dawn to sunset-glow,

Shall whisper to a lonely sea, that swings far, far below.

Death, thy dawn makes all things new. Hills of Youth, I come to you,

Moving through the dew, moving through the dew.