Poems: Old and New

by Frederick George Scott

 

QUEBEC.

 
FIERCE on this bastion beats the noon-day sun;
   The city sleeps beneath me, old and grey;
   On convent roofs the quivering sunbeams play,
And batteries guarded by dismantled gun.
No breeze comes from the Northern hills which run
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   Circling the blue mist of the Summer’s day;
   No ripple stirs the great stream on its way
To those dim headlands where its rest is won.

What thunders shook these silent crags of yore!
   What smoke of battle rolled up plain and gorge
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     While two worlds closed in strife for one brief span!
What echoes still come ringing back once more!
   For on these heights of old God set His forge;
     His strokes wrought here the destinies of man.

The King’s Bastion, 1899. [Page 137]
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