| |
(Excerpt)
ELEVEN years, and two fair months beside, | |
| Full to the brim with various love and joy, | |
| My life has known since last I drew apart | |
| Into this huge sky-shouldering mountain dome, | |
| And, listening, heard the winds among the pines | 5 |
| Making a music as of countless choirs, | |
| Chanting in sweet and solemn unison; | |
| And, standing here where God’s artificers, | |
| Angels of frost and fire and sun and storm, | |
| Have made a floor with nameless gems inlaid, | 10 |
| Saw, like a roof, the slopes of living green | |
| Go cleaving down to meet the lower hills,— | |
| Firm-buttressed walls, their bases overgrown | |
| With meadow-sweet and ferns and tangled vines, | |
| And all that makes the roadsides beautiful; | 15 |
| While, all around me, other domes arose, | |
| Girded with towers and eager pinnacles, | |
| Into the silent and astonished air. | |
| Full oft, since then, up-looking from below, | |
| As naught to me has been the pleasantness | 20 |
| Of meadows broad, and, mid them, flowing wide | |
| The Androscoggin’s dark empurpled stream, | |
| Enamored of thine awful loveliness, | |
| Thy draperies of forests overspread | |
| With shadows and with silvery, shining mists, | 25 |
| Thy dark ravines and cloud-conversing top, | |
| Where it would almost seem that one might hear | |
| The talk of angels in the happy blue;— | |
| And so, in truth, my heart has heard to-day. | |
| |
| Dear sacred Mount, not thine alone the charm | 30 |
| By which thou dost so overmaster me, | |
| But something in thy lover’s beating heart, | |
| Something of memories vague and fond and sweet, | |
| Something of what he cannot be again, | |
| Something of sharp regret for vanished joys, | 35 |
| And faces that he may no more behold, | |
| And voices that he listens for in vain, | |
| And feet whose welcome sound he hears no more, | |
| And hands whose touch could make his being thrill | |
| With love’s dear rapture of delicious pain,— | 40 |
| Something of all the years that he has lived, | |
| Of all the joy and sorrow he has known, | |
| Since first with eager feet and heart aflame | |
| He struggled up thy steep and shaggy sides, | |
| Sun-flecked, leaf-shaded realms of life in death, | 45 |
| And stood, as now, upon thy topmost crest, | |
| Trembling with joy and tender unto tears;— | |
| Something of all these things mingles with thee,— | |
| Green of thy leaves and whiteness of thy clouds, | |
| Rush of thy streams and rustle of thy pines,— | 50 |
| With all thy strength and all thy tenderness, | |
| Till thou art loved not for thyself alone, | |
| But for the love of many who are gone, | |
| And most of all for one who still remains | |
| To make all sights more fair, all sounds more sweet, | 55 |
| All life more dear and glad and wonderful. * * * * * | |
| |
