The Golden Treasury of Irish Songs & Lyrics

Complete Text & Lyrics

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300 THE GOLDEN TREASURY OF
Till they come to where the rowan-trees in lonely beauty grow,
Beside the Fairy Hawthorn gray.
The Hawthorn stands between the ashes tall and slim, Like matron with her twin granddaughters on her knee; The rowan-berries cluster o'er her low head gray and dim
In ruddy kisses sweet to see.
The merry maidens four have ranged them in a row, Between each lovely couple a stately rowan stem, And away in mazes wavy, like skimming birds they go,—
O never carolled bird like them !
But solemn is the silence of the silvery haze
That drinks away their voices in echoless repose, And dreamily the evening has stilled the haunted braes, And dreamier the gloaming grows.
And sinking one by one, like lark notes from the sky When the falcon's shadow saileth across the open shaw, Are hushed the maidens' voices, as cowering down they lie
In the flutter of their sudden awe.
For from the air above and the grassy ground beneath, And from the mountain-ashes and the old white­thorn between,
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