The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Tennyson.

SONG OF THE ALPINE GUIDE.

N Zurich's spires, with rosy light,

ON

The mountains smile at morn and eve,

And Zurich's waters, blue and bright,

The glories of those hills receive. And there my sister trims her sail, That like a wayward swallow flies; But I would rather meet the gale

That fans the eagle in the skies.

She sings in Zurich's chapel choir,
Where rolls the organ on the air,
And bells proclaim, from spire to spire,
Their universal call to prayer.

But let me hear the mountain rills,
And old St. Bernard's storm-bell toll,
And, ’mid these great cathedral hills,
The thundering avalanches roll.

On Zurich's side my mother sits,
And to her whirring spindle sings —
Through Zurich's wave my father's nets
Sweep daily with their filmy wings.

To that belovèd voice I list

And view that father's toil and pride;
But, like a low and vale-born mist,

My spirit climbs the mountain side.

And I would ever hear the stir

And turmoil of the singing winds,
Whose viewless wheels around me whirr,
Whose distaffs are the swaying pines.
And, on some snowy mountain head,
The deepest joy to me is given,
When, net-like, the great storm is spread
To sweep the azure lake of heaven.

Then, since the vale delights me not,
And Zurich wooes in vain below,

And it hath been my joy and lot

To scale these Alpine crags of snow·
And since in life I loved them well,

Let me in death lie down with them,
And let the pines and tempests swell
Around me their great requiem.

T. B. Read.

CLE

LAKE LEMAN.

'LEAR, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake, With the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring.

This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing

To waft me from distraction; once I loved
Torn ocean's roar, but thy soft murmuring

Sounds sweet as if a sister's voice reproved, That I with stern delights should e'er have been so moved.

It is the hush of night, and all between
Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear,
Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly seen,
Save darkened Jura, whose capt heights appear
Precipitously steep; and drawing.near,

There breathes a living fragrance from the shore,
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear
Drops the light drip of the suspended oar,
Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more.

THE

STORM IN THE ALPS.

HE sky is changed!—and such a change! Oh
night,

And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,
Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light

Of a dark eye in woman! Far along,
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among
Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!

And this is in the night :- Most glorious night! Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, A portion of the tempest and of thee! How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea, And the big rain comes dancing to the earth! And now again 'tis black, — and now, the glee Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth, As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth. Lord Byron.

DREAMING OR WAKING?

OME say that gleams of a remoter world

SOM

Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live. I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
The veil of life and death? or do I lie

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Speed far around and inaccessibly

Its circles? for the very spirit fails,

Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes among the viewless gales!
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears, — still, snowy, and serene
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,

Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously
Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven. — Is this the scene
Where the old earthquake-demon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire envelop once this silent snow?

None can reply — all seems eternal now.

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be
But for such faith with nature reconciled;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good,
Interpret or make felt, or deeply feel.

Shelley.

MONT BLANC.

ONT BLANC is the monarch of mountains;
They crowned him long ago

On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,

With a diadem of snow,