| |
| WHILE summer airs scarce breathe along the tide, | |
| Oft pausing, up the mountain’s scraggy side | |
| We climb, how beautiful, how still, how clear | |
| The scenes that stretch around! The rocks that rear | |
| Their shapes in rich fantastic colors dressed, | 5 |
| The hill-tops where the softest shadows rest, | |
| The long-retiring bay, the level sand, | |
| The fading sea-line and the farthest land, | |
| That seems, as low it lessens from the eye, | |
| To steal away beneath the cloudless sky! | 10 |
| But yesterday the misty morn was spread | |
| In dreariness on the bleak mountain’s head; | |
| No glittering prospect from the upland smiled, | |
| The driving squall came dark, the sea heaved wild, | |
| And, lost and lonely, the wayfarer sighed, | 15 |
| Wet with the hoar spray of the flashing tide. | |
| How changed is now the circling scene! The deep | |
| Stirs not; the glancing roofs and white towers peep | |
| Along the margin of the lucid bay; | |
| The sails descried far in the offing gray | 20 |
| Hang motionless, and the pale headland’s height | |
| Is touched as with sweet gleams of fairy light! | |
| O, lives there on earth’s busy stirring scene, | |
| Whom nature’s tranquil charms, her airs serene, | |
| Her seas, her skies, her sunbeams, fail to move | 25 |
| With stealing tenderness and grateful love! | |
| Go, thankless man, to misery’s care,—behold | |
| Captivity stretched in her dungeon cold! | |
| Or think on those who, in yon dreary mine | |
| Sunk fathoms deep beneath the rolling brine, | 30 |
| From year to year amid the lurid shade, | |
| O’er-wearied ply their melancholy trade; | |
| That thou may’st bless the glorious sun, and hail | |
| Him who with beauty clothed the hill and vale, | |
| Who bent the arch of the high heavens for thee, | 35 |
| And stretched in amplitude the broad blue sea! | |
| Now sunk are all its murmurs; and the air | |
| But moves by fits the bents that here and there | |
| Upshoot in casual spots of faded green; | |
| Here straggling sheep the scanty pasture glean, | 40 |
| Or on the jutting fragments that impend, | |
| Stray fearlessly, and gaze as we ascend. | |
| Mountain, no pomp of waving woods hast thou, | |
| That deck with varied shade thy hoary brow; | |
| No sunny meadows at thy feet are spread, | 45 |
| No streamlets sparkle o’er their pebbly bed! | |
| But thou canst boast thy beauties: ample views | |
| That catch the rapt eye of the pausing Muse; | |
| Headlands around new-lighted; sails and seas, | |
| Now glassy-smooth, now wrinkling to the breeze; | 50 |
| And when the drizzly winter, wrapped in sleet, | |
| Goes by, and winds and rain thy ramparts beat, | |
| Fancy can see thee standing thus aloof, | |
| And frowning, bleak and bare and tempest-proof, | |
| Look as with awful confidence, and brave | 55 |
| The howling hurricane, the dashing wave; | |
| More graceful when the storm’s dark vapors frown | |
| Than when the summer suns in pomp go down! * * * * * | |
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