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| BETWEEN Loch-Foyle and Greenan’s ancient fort, | |
| From Derry’s famous walls a little way, | |
| There dreams a gorsy glen, in whose lone heart | |
| I mused a Sabbath day. | |
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| A nameless glen, one mass of yellow gorse, | 5 |
| That hides the sparkle of a trotting burn, | |
| Save where in dimpling pools it stays its force, | |
| Or takes a rocky turn. | |
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| The sandy linnet sang, the tiny wren | |
| Poured in the burn its tiny melodies. | 10 |
| The air was honey-laden, and the glen | |
| All murmurous with bees. | |
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| A straggling crow, upon its woodward way, | |
| Might start an echo with its rusty croak; | |
| But all around the quiet Sabbath lay, | 15 |
| Hushed from the week-day yoke. | |
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| Near, yet all hidden from, the ways of men, | |
| No foot into my sanctuary stole; | |
| I wandered with my shadow in the glen,— | |
| The only living soul. | 20 |
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| Yet many more were in the glen, ’t would seem: | |
| I heard, or thought I heard, their whispered words, | |
| And knew ’t was not the bees, the babbling stream, | |
| Or carol of the birds. | |
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| And sometimes through the sunniest gleams of day | 25 |
| There passed a light intenser than the gleam,— | |
| A living soul without its grosser clay? | |
| Or but my waking dream? | |
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| Who knows? who knows? The dream to-day is found | |
| A verity to-morrow. Things have been | 30 |
| Forever with us in our daily round, | |
| Though now but newly seen. | |
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| Ah! could we by a purer life refine | |
| The veil that keeps the inward from our ken, | |
| No lonely fellowship had then been mine | 35 |
| Within the gorsy glen. | |
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