Explore "A Thought from the Rhine" by Charles Kingsley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I heard an Eagle crying all alone / Above the vineyards through the summer night, / Among the skeletons of robber towers: / Because the ancient eyrie of his race / Was trenched and walled by busy-handed men; / And all his forest-chace and woodland wild, / Wherefrom he fed his young with hare and roe, / Were trim with grapes which swelled from hour to hour, / And tossed their golden tendrils to the sun / For joy at their own riches: -- So, I thought, / The great devourers of the earth shall sit, / Idle and impotent, they know not why, / Down-staring from their barren height of state / On nations grown too wise to slay and slave, / The puppets of the few; while peaceful lore / And fellow-help make glad the heart of earth, / With wonders which they fear and hate, as he, / The Eagle, hates the vineyard slopes below.
On the Rhine, 1851.