Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
Ere I waken in the city—Life, thy dawn makes all things new!
And up a fir-clad glen, far from all the haunts of men,
Up a glen among the mountains, oh my feet are wings again!
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
O mountains of my boyhood,
I come again to you,
By the little path I know, with the sea far below,
And above, the great cloud-galleons with their sails of rose and snow As of old, when all was young, and the earth a song unsung And the heather through the crimson dawn its Eden incense flung From the mountain-heights of joy, for a careless-hearted boy,
And the lavrocks rose like fountain sprays of bliss that ne’er could cloy, From their little beds of bloom, from the golden gorse and broom,
With a song to God the Giver, o’er that waste of wild perfume;
Blowing from height to height, in a glory of great light,
While the cottage-clustered valleys held the lilac last of night,
So, when dawn is in the skies, in a dream, a dream,
I rise,
And I follow my lost boyhood to the heights of Paradise.
Life, thy dawn makes all things new!
Hills of Youth,
I come to you, Moving through the dew, moving through the dew.
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
Floats a brother’s face to meet me!
Is it you?
Is it you?
For the night I leave behind keeps these dazzled eyes still blind!
But oh, the little hill-flowers, their scent is wise and kind;
And I shall not lose the way from the darkness to the day,
While dust can cling as their scent clings to memory for aye;
And the least link in the chain can recall the whole again,
And heaven at last resume its far-flung harvests, grain by grain.
To the hill-flowers clings my dust, and tho’ eyeless Death may thrust All else into the darkness, in their heaven I put my trust;
And a dawn shall bid me climb to the little spread of thyme Where first I heard the ripple of the fountain-heads of rhyme.
And a fir-wood that I know, from dawn to sunset-glow,
Shall whisper to a lonely sea, that swings far, far below.
Death, thy dawn makes all things new.
Hills of Youth,
I come to you,
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew.
