Tier on tier of beautiful mountains and streams
Blue green vistas locked in white clouds
The mist makes my bandana wet
Dew coats my grass cape
My feet climb in straw sandals
My hand holds an old wooden stick
When I gaze down again on the dusty world
It has become a land of phantoms and dreams to me

Far away I've travelled
To stand once more alone.
And hear my memories echo
Through these hills that I call home.
As a child I roamed this valley,
I watched the seasons come and go.
I spent many hours dreaming
On these hills that I call home.

Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade! Ah, fields beloved in vain! Where once my careless childhood stray'd, A stranger yet to pain! I feel the gales that from ye blow A momentary bliss bestow.

Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy!

And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness,
Vaguely and incoherently, some dream
Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills . . .
A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam;
Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills.

What is that land of hill and dale
That is so beautiful,
The land aglow with summer days,
Land with the northern lights ablaze,
Whose beauty all the seasons share,
What is that land so fair? There many thousand lakes are bright
With twinkling stars at night
There many kanteles resound
And all around make hillsides sing
And on the golden heath firs ring:
That is the Finnish land.

Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; — Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more. — But there’s a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look’d upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Ah, the strange, sweet, lonely delight
Of the Valleys of Dream.

Carol, every violet has Heaven for a looking-glass! Every little valley lies Under many-clouded skies; Every little cottage stands Girt about with boundless lands; Every little glimmering pond Claims the mighty shores beyond; Shores no seaman ever hailed, Seas no ship has ever sailed. All the shores when day is done Fade into the setting sun, So the story tries to teach More than can be told in speech.