| |
| Doctor. Ah! thou, too, | |
| Sad Alighieri, like a waning moon | |
| Setting in storm behind a grove of bays! | |
| Balder. Yes, the great Florentine, who wove his web | |
| And thrust it into hell, and drew it forth | 5 |
| Immortal, having burn’d all that could burn, | |
| And leaving only what shall still be found | |
| Untouch’d, nor with the small of fire upon it, | |
| Under the final ashes of this world. | |
| Doctor. Shakespeare and Milton! | 10 |
| Balder. Switzerland and home. | |
| I ne’er see Milton, but I see the Alps, | |
| As once, sole standing on a peak supreme, | |
| To the extremest verge summit and gulf | |
| I saw, height after depth, Alp beyond Alp, | 15 |
| O’er which the rising and the sinking soul | |
| Sails into distance, heaving as a ship | |
| O’er a great sea that sets to strands unseen. | |
| And as the mounting and descending bark, | |
| Borne on exulting by the under deep, | 20 |
| Gains of the wild wave something not the wave, | |
| Catches a joy of going, and a will | |
| Resistless, and upon the last lee foam | |
| Leaps into air beyond it, so the soul | |
| upon the Alpine ocean mountain-toss’d, | 25 |
| Incessant carried up to heaven, and plunged | |
| To darkness, and still wet with drops of death | |
| Held into light eternal, and again | |
| Cast down, to be again uplift in vast | |
| And infinite succession, cannot stay | 30 |
| The mad momentum, but in frenzied sight | |
| Of horizontal clouds and mists and skies | |
| And the untried Inane, springs on the surge | |
| Of things, and passing matter by a force | |
| Material, thro’ vacuity careers, | 35 |
| Rising and falling. | |
| Doctor. And my Shakespeare! Call | |
| Milton your Alps, and which is he among | |
| The tops of Andes? Keep your Paradise, | |
| And Eves, and Adams, but give me the Earth | 40 |
| That Shakespeare drew, and make it grave and gay | |
| With Shakespeare’s men and women; let me laugh | |
| Or weep with them, and you—a wager,—aye, | |
| A wager by my faith—either his muse | |
| Was the recording angel, or that hand | 45 |
| Cherubic, which fills up the Book of Life, | |
| Caught what the last relaxing gripe let fall | |
| By a death-bed at Stratford, and hence-forth | |
| Holds Shakespeare’s pen. Now strain your sinews, poet, | |
| And top your Pelion,—Milton Switzerland, | 50 |
| And English Shakespeare— | |
| Balder. This dear English land! | |
| This happy England, loud with brooks and birds, | |
| Shining with harvests, cool with dewy trees, | |
| And bloom’d from hill to dell; but whose best flowers | 55 |
| Are daughters, and Ophelia still more fair | |
| Than any rose she weaves; whose noblest floods | |
| The pulsing torrent of a nation’s heart: | |
| Whose forests stronger than her native oaks | |
| Are living men; and whose unfathom’d lakes | 60 |
| Forever calm the unforgotten dead | |
| In quiet graveyards willow’d seemly round, | |
| O’er which To-day bends sad, and sees his face. | |
| Whose rocks are rights, consolidate of old | |
| Thro’ unremember’d years, around whose base | 65 |
| The ever-surging peoples roll and roar | |
| Perpetual, as around her cliffs the seas | |
| That only wash them whiter; and whose mountains, | |
| Souls that from this mere footing of the earth | |
| Lift their great virtues thro’ all clouds of Fate | 70 |
| Up to the very heavens, and make them rise | |
| To keep the gods above us! | |
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