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(Excerpt)
THOU who wouldst see the lovely and the wild | |
| Mingled in harmony on Nature’s face, | |
| Ascend our rocky mountains. Let thy foot | |
| Fail not with weariness, for on their tops | |
| The beauty and the majesty of earth, | 5 |
| Spread wide beneath, shall make thee to forget | |
| The steep and toilsome way. There, as thou stand’st, | |
| The haunts of men below thee, and around | |
| The mountain summits, thy expanding heart | |
| Shall feel a kindred with that loftier world | 10 |
| To which thou art translated, and partake | |
| The enlargement of thy vision. Thou shalt look | |
| Upon the green and rolling forest tops, | |
| And down into the secrets of the glens, | |
| And streams, that with their bordering thickets strive | 15 |
| To hide their windings. Thou shalt gaze, at once, | |
| Here on white villages, and tilth, and herds, | |
| And swarming roads, and there on solitudes | |
| That only hear the torrent, and the wind, | |
| And eagle’s shriek. There is a precipice | 20 |
| That seems a fragment of some mighty wall, | |
| Built by the hand that fashioned the old world, | |
| To separate its nations, and thrown down | |
| When the flood drowned them. To the north, a path | |
| Conducts you up the narrow battlement. | 25 |
| Steep is the western side, shaggy and wild | |
| With mossy trees, and pinnacles of flint, | |
| And many a hanging crag. But, to the east, | |
| Sheer to the vale go down the bare old cliffs,— | |
| Huge pillars, that in middle heaven upbear | 30 |
| Their weather-beaten capitals, here dark | |
| With moss, the growth of centuries, and there | |
| Of chalky whiteness where the thunderbolt | |
| Has splintered them. It is a fearful thing | |
| To stand upon the beetling verge, and see | 35 |
| Where storm and lightning, from that huge gray wall, | |
| Have tumbled down vast blocks, and at the base | |
| Dashed them in fragments, and to lay thine ear | |
| Over the dizzy depth, and hear the sound | |
| Of winds, that struggle with the woods below, | 40 |
| Come up like ocean murmurs. But the scene | |
| Is lovely round; a beautiful river there | |
| Wanders amid the fresh and fertile meads, | |
| The paradise he made unto himself, | |
| Mining the soil for ages. On each side | 45 |
| The fields swell upward to the hills; beyond, | |
| Above the hills, in the blue distance, rise | |
| The mountain columns with which earth props heaven. * * * * * | |
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