Poem for Friday and Basilica of Saint Denis

From "The Princess"
By Alfred Tennyson

Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:
What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang),
In height and cold, the splendour of the hills?
But cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease
To glide a sunbeam by the blasted Pine,
To sit a star upon the sparkling spire;
And come, for Love is of the valley, come,
For Love is of the valley, come thou down
And find him; by the happy threshold, he,
Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,
Or red with spirted purple of the vats,
Or foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walk
With Death and Morning on the silver horns,
Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine,
Nor find him dropt upon the firths of ice,
That huddling slant in furrow-cloven falls
To roll the torrent out of dusky doors:
But follow; let the torrent dance thee down
To find him in the valley; let the wild
Lean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leave
The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke
That like a broken purpose waste in air:
So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales
Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth
Arise to thee; the children call, and I
Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,
The moan of doves is immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

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Except for a few minutes taking a walk in the amazingly gorgeous 70-degree weather to see bunnies and flowers before the rain of the morning returned abruptly while I was admiring my neighbor's daffodils, I spent the entire day working on my Shutterfly book with our France photos. It came in at 43 pages and I didn't even include my very best photo because I had a very similar one that had my kids in it, but I am very pleased with it and pleased that I got it done while my coupon was still good!

And my Google Music Manager is working again! Though I am not sure whether this is because I opened Port 80 and Port 443 or because either Google or Microsoft Firewall updated some setting. Either way, I am glad I can upload "Midnight Confessions" before it gets stuck in my head again. We watched two episodes of "Madam Secretary" which means that we are now halfway caught up, and I believe I am ready to review the penultimate episode of Deep Space Nine tomorrow before bracing myself for the finale.

Here are some photos of the Basilique Royale de Saint-Denis, the Gothic church from the 1100s where most French royals are buried (in whole or in part; some of the graves were ransacked during the Revolution, and monarchs who died during the conflict were buried elsewhere at first). In these photos are statues of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette plus their graves, Charles V and Jeanne de Bourbon, Clovis I and his son Childebert, Francis I and his queen Claude, and the heart of Louis XVII.