EUGENE PARKER CHASE

A boy stood on the windy Sussex downs, Resting a moment in his lonely walk To gaze at the fresh fields, and their neighbour towns Sunk in the valleys watered by thin streams And sheltered by the pallid hills of chalk. It seemed a land for slow and leisured dreams, For fantasy, vague and cool as the mist. The church there in the field, with yew-trees round Should send across the air a silver sound Of holy bells. The loud rooks should desist A moment from their cawing; the dim sun Brighten his face, the rounded meadows glisten, And all the windswept grassy hillsides listen And then take up the sound the bells begun. Slowly, at length, rounding the hill, a white, Long, slender, floating airship flies. It, of this quiet landscape, is the sight Most peaceful—white splash on the blue spring skies. It passes over the church-crowned slope, it blends Its whiteness for a moment with the cloud, And finally, with nose a little bowed, Off towards the distant sea its course it bends. The watching boy beheld no other change In all the placid, comfortable scene, And yet he deeply realized what mean The airships and the other things that are strange, But form a living part of England now; And when he left the place where he had been, He seemed to have become a man somehow.