There is a brook, that from its source
High in the rocky hill,
Pours o’er the plain its limpid course,
To pay to Teio’s monarch force
Its tributary rill;
Which, in the peaceful summer-tide,
The swarthy shepherd sits beside,
And loitering, as it rolls along
In cadence pours his rustic song--
Carol of love or pious chaunt,
Or tale of knight and giant gaunt,
And lady captive held;
Or strains, not fabled, of the war,
Where the great champion of Bivar
The Moorish pagan quell’d.
But now, no shepherd loiters there--
He flies, with all his fleecy care,
To mountains high and far,
And starts, and breathless stops to hear
Borne on the breeze, and to his fear
Seeming, at every gust, more near,
The distant roar of war.