Books and other items printed in Gaelic from 1871 to 1900 > Gaelic bards, and original poems

228
ORIGINAL POEMS.
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And friends, thank God, who still are friends,
Just as they were before.
And men and matrons—maids and youths,
Who are no friends at all;
They too come flocking to my side,
With or without a call:
The old, the young, the grave, the gay—
The short ones and the tall.
They troop into the village streets—
They stand as oft they stood,
Round the street-corners, talking long
Of bad things and of good;
For the flippant and the wise were there—
The civil and the rude.
Those streets and corners still are there,
But all the men are gone;
I see the houses, hills and shores,
And ways they walked upon;
But not the men—the sense seems lost
That on their doings shone.
Yet all the lifeless things remain
There in its old grey calm ;
The church still stands, where first I heard,
After a nasal Psalm,
A sermon preached by an old man,
Who spoke of Abraham.
And there by its green hill I see
The old and schoolboy spot,
And the scene where many a summer eve,
My Virgil was forgot,
While lightning hours of joy I spent
With the wizard Walter Scott.