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(From Night)
FROM Avon backward to the north we fly, | |
| And see blind Ossian sitting ’neath the moon, | |
| His hair a snowy storm, his solemn eye | |
| A star eclipsed, yet burning through its veil; | |
| Unbent his stature, and his cheek a rose, | 5 |
| Blooming beneath a glacier’s icy shade, | |
| Glencoe’s dark hills above him sternly piled, | |
| Here running into ridgy walls of rock, | |
| There shooting up in naked, lonely peaks, | |
| Where eagles build, and storms essay to pause, | 10 |
| But cannot for their weary feet find rest, | |
| Scourged ever onward by a viewless wrath; | |
| And where the clouds disport their misty wings, | |
| And weave their crowns of vapor or of fire, | |
| With colors cold as lead or warm as gold. | 15 |
| Now breaking into those prodigious shapes, | |
| Those three wild mountains, the Weird Sisters named, | |
| Colossal company of Gorgon heads, | |
| Shedding strange night and fear upon the vale; | |
| And yonder, bending in one awful frown | 20 |
| Of dark and beetling rock upon a lake, | |
| Which in enchanted terror sleeps below, | |
| Its dream the “Black Crag of Glencoe” forever! | |
| While through the whole a melancholy voice | |
| As of a spirit, bound in watery chains, | 25 |
| Goes onward night and day in endless wail, | |
| Recalling now some past of agony, | |
| Prophetic now of direr coming woe. | |
| It is the cry of Cona, lonely stream! | |
| And with that cry are blended kindred sounds: | 30 |
| Winds stirring the wild myrtle and the heath; | |
| Crags toppling down, and falling at the foot | |
| Of the blind bard, who hears besides the notes | |
| Of foxes’ howl, scream of awakened bird, | |
| Snow sliding off some wall-like precipice, | 35 |
| And voice of spirits passing through the night, | |
| On moonbeams riding, or on lightning forks | |
| Transfixed and writhing in their hopeless doom. | |
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