Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.
Sunset on the Bearcamp
By John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)A
Of hills, the river runs,
As down its long, green valleys falls
The last of summer’s suns.
Along its tawny gravel-bed,
Broad-flowing, swift, and still,
As if its meadow levels felt
The hurry of the hill,
Noiseless between its banks of green,
From curve to curve it slips:
The drowsy maple-shadows rest
Like fingers on its lips.
Unstoried and unknown;
The ursine legend of its name
Prowls on its banks alone.
Yet flowers as fair its slopes adorn
As ever Yarrow knew,
Or, under rainy Irish skies,
By Spenser’s Mulla grew;
And through the gaps of leaning trees
Its mountain-cradle shows,—
The gold against the amethyst,
The green against the rose.
A glory never sung,
Aloft on sky and mountain-wall
Are God’s great pictures hung.
How changed the summits vast and old!
No longer granite-browed,
They melt in rosy mist; the rock
Is softer than the cloud;
The valley holds its breath; no leaf
Of all its elms is twirled:
The silence of eternity
Seems falling on the world.
Of mystery is this:
Yon miracle-play of night and day
Makes dumb its witnesses.
What unseen altar crowns the hills
That reach up stair on stair?
What eyes look through, what white wings fan
These purple veils of air?
What Presence from the heavenly heights
To those of earth stoops down?
Not vainly Hellas dreamed of gods
On Ida’s snowy crown!
The golden water pales;
And over all the valley-land
A gray-winged vapor sails.
I go the common way of all:
The sunset-fires will burn,
The flowers will blow, the river flow,
When I no more return.
No whisper from the mountain-pine
Nor lapsing stream shall tell
The stranger, treading where I tread,
Of him who loved them well.