LXXXV. In their full tides arrested as they rolled, Fixed in their fluctuation by one word, The Mountain Altars reared by God behold, Sphered in his heaven of heavens ! then, Nature heard, And the pure snows, her firstling gifts, preferred; The Clouds her frankincense, her priests the Woods, That, circling round, those shrines for ever gird; Her choral-hymn the Winds and rushing Floods, Sole Voices raised in these eternal solitudes! LXXXVI. Doubt'st thou her inspirations? lo, yon peaks As if they dared the thunder, when it wreaks Its heaviest vengeance; look-all headlong driven, Yon Waters hurled o'er precipices riven; Hark, to their roar in yon black fathomless dell! The ravings of the tortured unforgiven; Doth not thy mind their types already tell? Behold the Powers opposed-the war of Heaven and Hell! LXXXVII. Lo! round the Mountain's scathed sides, like a wall, Pines, lightning-blasted, wear such forms as wore The Angels of the damned! while, like a pall, The up-seething mists rise, shrouding white and hoar, Shapes that lie buried, crushed for evermore, Writhing beneath, and covering their bier Thick as the weeds on Ocean's surf-heaped shore; This is the Vale of Shade thou should'st revere, This was the Prophet's shrine-thy pilgrimage ends here. LXXXVIII. Oh! while these Autumn leaves are round me lying, Here-where this crag no foot has dared to scan, Here do I call thee, thou who walked on earth with man! TO JOHN MILTON. Mightiest of Poets !from a boy, my heart Thy Mind's sublimest heights I can descry. Thou stoodest like some Mountain on the earth, Irradiated with His light from heaven! Oh! if I sought to approach thee, be 't forgiven; For thou wert not of earth, a Prophet sent To turn the age from sins on which it leant. And the deep Waters, bursting at thy word, Told that they came from God-though called by thee! LXXXIX. Minster of Vallombrosa! not those halls Where the worn traveller is hailed with smiles But thou thyself, that art, midst these defiles, Dark Vallombrosa! hath in silence trod, And seen thy rock-reared shrines, where the Cloud piles Its frankincense, and heard the Winds abroad Swell up their choral hymn, nor felt thee built by God? XC. How reverentially are left behind The precincts of thy solemn Solitude! In such inspiring scenes to be renewed; We part-from thy grey heights mine eye did yearn To the blue Adriatic, from the rays that burn, XCI. Making life here a solitude;-away ! The sail gleams o'er yon far-off wave beneath; Borne on, we list not where, so from the heath To him who dares repose in feverish slumbers here. |