Chapter XV

She roused me, crying out, “Look toward the porch!”
I look’d, and there beheld our waiting friends,
And, grouped with them, some ruddy German maids
Whose deeper hues but finely rimmed with shade
The subtler beauty of our special hosts.
These came from out that western world wherein,
By fresher breezes and by brighter suns,
The Saxon tissue, sweeten’d and refined,
Unfolds, each season, more ethereally.

The two then moving from their sister-maids,
Like petals loos’d from roses when in bloom,
Came forth to welcome us; and, greetings o’er,
Of Europe, Edith spoke, and Germany,
And books, and music—how the church of Greece
Had carved earth’s pivot that earth whirls upon
Within the centre of a flag-stone round
That paves a chapel in Jerusalem.
But she, who track’d that viewless whirl by sound,
And deem’d all harmony to centre here,
A Grecian only in her love of art,
Had found that pivot fix’d in Germany.