Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
France: Vols. IX–X. 1876–79.
The Coming of Mont Blanc
By Henry Morford (1823–1881)R
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!”
And then in a moment later I saw wedded earth and skies.
And the clouds below its crown
Seemed shrinking off from its summit in a natural fear and awe;—
Great feathery swales suggesting
The lightness of eider-down,
And held in that air-solution by nature’s chemical law.
Slim needles, greenly white,
Thrust up through the higher strata their points so fatal keen;
Catching and breaking and changing
The wonderful play of light,
But never losing that radiance denied to the lowlands mean.
Mont Blanc of the royal fame,
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.
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.
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,
As we have so often dreamed in our broken prophetic sleep!”
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
Of sweet, compassionate smiles:
“’T is an hundred miles from here the great mountain heaves in air.”
At a distance beggaring thought,
The great deeds that the wise and the mighty have done to exalt our race!
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!
At soft eve and radiant morn,
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.
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.