| |
| RUNNING along the high level | |
| Of Jura, wild and hard, | |
| With the charms of the great Rhone Valley yet lingering in my eyes,— | |
| I heard the porter out calling | |
| The station-name “Bellegarde!” | 5 |
| And then in a moment later I saw wedded earth and skies. | |
| |
| A snow-bank reached to heaven, | |
| And the clouds below its crown | |
| Seemed shrinking off from its summit in a natural fear and awe;— | |
| Great feathery swales suggesting | 10 |
| The lightness of eider-down, | |
| And held in that air-solution by nature’s chemical law. | |
| |
| And there, but a little eastward, | |
| Slim needles, greenly white, | |
| Thrust up through the higher strata their points so fatal keen; | 15 |
| Catching and breaking and changing | |
| The wonderful play of light, | |
| But never losing that radiance denied to the lowlands mean. | |
| |
| The great white Alps, and their monarch, | |
| Mont Blanc of the royal fame, | 20 |
| And the Aiguillettes resplendent, that hem the robes of a king: | |
| These were the long-sought glories | |
| That to me that moment came; | |
| And the hour must be far, far distant, an answering thrill to bring. | |
| |
| It seemed as if toil and danger, | 25 |
| As if absence and pain and grief, | |
| In that one supremest moment were a thousand times repaid,— | |
| Like slaking the drouth of the thirsty, | |
| And giving the sick relief, | |
| And allowing the tired to slumber in the cool and pleasant shade. | 30 |
| |
| “Mont Blanc!” I cried; I remember | |
| How calmer companions stared | |
| And looked, from the carriage window to see me insanely leap: | |
| “Mont Blanc!—Thy throne, Almighty!— | |
| And thine eye its brow has dared, | 35 |
| As we have so often dreamed in our broken prophetic sleep!” | |
| |
| “How far away? Is it twenty, | |
| Is it thirty, or fifty miles?” | |
| And a pleasant voice makes answer, of a Swiss beside us there, | |
| While her face is lit with the calmest | 40 |
| Of sweet, compassionate smiles: | |
| “’T is an hundred miles from here the great mountain heaves in air.” | |
| |
| An hundred miles! So reach us | |
| At a distance beggaring thought, | |
| The great deeds that the wise and the mighty have done to exalt our race! | 45 |
| So the might of the art creative, | |
| And the marvels it has wrought, | |
| Outstrip the thought that is laggard and make vassals of time and space! | |
| |
| Since then, by sunlight, by moonlight, | |
| At soft eve and radiant morn, | 50 |
| I have watched the Alpine monarch and studied his smile and frown;— | |
| Have seen moraine and glacier | |
| Where ice-bound rivers are born, | |
| And passed the spot where the avalanche comes crashing and thundering down. | |
| |
| But he gives me no hour exultant | 55 |
| Like that when I seemed to choke, | |
| On the wooded heights of Jura, with a pleasure akin to pain,— | |
| When the wild white Alpine glory | |
| To my waiting spirit spoke, | |
| And the scene was forever pictured on the nerves of heart and brain. | 60 |
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