Amid a vale in Norway stands a church,
An ancient building, on historic ground;
Its massive walls are white like newfall’n snow,
Its lofty spire seems golden in the sun;
Around it mighty elm-trees spread their boughs
And throw their shadows on the moss-grown graves,
And crumbling monuments of centuries,
Their music blending with the jack-daw’s cry
And with the deep, pure tones of bells, whose sound
Reecho ’mong the wooded hills and dells,
Awaking fancies of the Saga-age:
Of royal bards who sang before their king,
That early morning of the fatal day,
When Olaf ’neath his standard of the cross
Fought pagan armies from those sloping heights,
And lost his cause! The altar has been built
Above the stone, he leaned against, while flowed
His precious life-blood from the cruel wounds;
The ground was consecrated by his blood,
And when the people understood, and bowed
Before the Christ whose saint they slew, they built
A chapel on the place of martyrdom,
Which in succeeding ages was enlarged,
Until a worthy monument stood forth.
The ravages of time have wrought their change,
But it is ne’ertheless the trysting place
Between the valley’s people and their God,
A place which links the present to the past—
And heaven’s gates to Norway’s history.
* * * * * * * *
On parchment, dim with age, a chronicle,
Two cycles old, was found within a chest,
Amid the iron-coffins in the vaults
Below the church, which learnÈd parsons read,
And then restored it to its resting-place.
For some strange reason then the narrow door
Was closed up with a solid masonry;
But on the people’s lips, from age to age,
The legend of that chronicle has passed,
And I relate it here as told to me,
When but a boy, by my great grandmother.—
One day, the legend says, the parish priest,
A young and pious man, came to the church,
To read the mass for a departed friend,
When he beheld a lonely woman stand
Within the shadow of a mountain-ash,
Which spread its crown of green and red beside
The gate which led into the sacred place.
Her hair was black as night, her eyes a deep
Of melancholy mystery and dreams;
Her chiselled features had the striking charm
Of youthful beauty and a mind mature;
She was unlike the women of the vale,
A stranger whom the priest had never met;
And he espied her with a sense of fear.
Her sable garb and downcast mien betrayed
A state of grief, wherefore the kindly man,
Led by a heartfelt sympathy, did ask
What great bereavement weighed upon her soul,
To which she answered: “Sir, I sorrow not
For any one within this hallowed ground,
Nor elsewhere for the dead; but for this church
I grieve, when I behold how it is doomed
To dire destruction”—here she paused and sighed.
Now he surmised she was the prophetess,
The sibyl whose renown had come to him,
And therefore asked that she would further tell
About her vision of the things to be.
“I see two saplings, of the mountain ash,
Grow up, one on each side of this thy church,
I also see a breach made in the wall,
And when the saplings have grown up to meet—
As mighty trees above the chancel-roof,
And when the rent shall grow sufficient wide
To be the hiding of a prayer book,
Then shall the church sink down and be no more.”
Then quote the priest, with frown upon his face:
“The house built on a rock can never sink.”
“But what is built on sand the floods destroy,”
The sibyl said, and quickly went away.
* * * * * * * *
Into the church the parson passed, and knelt
Before the altar in an earnest prayer,
That God would have great mercy on the soul
Of his departed friend whose earthly life
Had been cut off in a most tragic way;
His widow now bestowing on the church
Rich offerings—atonements for his deeds
Of sinfulness—outweighing charity;
And while he prayed, he seemed to hear the cry
And groaning of the soul, from out the fire
Of purgatory; supplications strong
Ascended to the mercy-seat of God
From humble altar-steps, until he felt,
The soul was loosed in heaven as on earth.
Departing from the church, he looked about
For that strange, mournful face; but she was gone.
Then came a thought to him, a memory
Of something which the baron him had told:
How on a summer’s day, while on a hunt,
He met a maiden in a forest glen,
A slender girl of beauty, such as he
Had seldom seen—of Oriental cast,
Who weeping told him of his fate most dire,
That fire should him consume, a prophesy
So terribly fulfilled, and now, perchance,
The very same had prophesied to him;
This thought possessed his mind, as home he strode,
With dark forbodings of impending doom.
* * * * * * * *
It was a Sunday, in the month of June,
A morn of most bewitching summer-charms;
The air was charged with fragrance of the trees,
Of blooming cherry trees, and glist’ning birch,
Of mountain ash and tow’ring balsam trees,
Of hazel-wood and prickly juniper,
Of alder trees along the winding brooks,
Of mountain forest of the pungent pine;
Of thousand flowers in the meads and vales,
An odor sweet—unknown to tropic clime.—
Within God’s acre stood the nodding rose
In checkered sunlight, neath the cypr

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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