"Come now, inherit the houses of doom;
Your fields of the sun shall be harried of gloom."
They laid them down; but over long
They rest,--for the goblin maids are strong.
The sun goes round; and Bareau Fen
Is a door of earth on the Kelpie men,--
Buried at dawn, asleep, unslain,
With not a mound on the sunny plain,
Hard by the walls of calm Rochelle,
Row on row by the crystal well.
And never again they are free to ride
Through all the years on the tossing tide,
Barred from the breast of the barren foam,
Where the heart within them is yearning home,--
For one long drench of the surf to quell
The cursing doom of the goblin spell.
Only, when bugling snows alight
To smother the marshes stark and white,
Or a low red moon peers over the rim
Of a winter twilight crisp and dim,
With a sound of drift on the buried lands,
The goblin maidens loose their hands;
A wind comes down from the sheer blue North;
And the Kelpie riders get them forth.
III
Twice have I been on Bareau Fen,
But the son of my son is a man since then.
Once as a lad I used to bear
St. Louis' cross through the chapel square,
Leading the choristers' surpliced file
Slow up the dusk Cathedral aisle.
I was the boy of all Rochelle
The pure old father trusted well.
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