Readingliterature Author:Harriette Taylor Treadwell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A Legend of Bregenz Girt round with rugged mountains, The fair Lake Constance lies; In her blue heart reflected, Shine back the starry skies; And watchi... more »ng each white cloudlet Float silently and slow, You think a piece of heaven Lies on our earth below! Midnight is there: and silence, Enthroned in heaven, looks down Upon her own calm mirror, Upon a sleeping town; For Bregenz, that quaint city Upon the Tyrol shore, Has stood above Lake Constance A thousand years and more. Her battlements and towers Upon their rocky steep Have cast their trembling shadow For ages on the deep; Mountain and lake and valley A sacred legend know, Of how the town was saved one night, Three hundred years ago. Far from her home and kindred A Tyrol maid had fled, To serve in the Swiss valleys, And toil for daily bread; And every year that fleeted So silently and fast Seemed to bear farther from her The memory of the past. She served kind, gentle masters, Nor asked for rest or change; Her friends seemed no more new ones, Their speech seemed no more strange; And when she led her cattle To pasture every day, She ceased to look and wonder On which side Bregenz lay. She spoke no more of Bregenz With longing and with tears; Her Tyrol home seemed faded In a deep mist of years. She heeded not the rumors Of Austrian war and strife; Each day she rose contented, To the calm toils of life. Yet, when her master's children Would clustering around her stand, She sang them the old ballads Of her own native land; And when at morn and evening She knelt before God's throne, The accents of her childhood Rose to her lips alone. And so she dwelt: the valley More peaceful, year by year; When suddenly strange p...« less