But a quiet sense conveyed; If I err not, thus it said: 'Many feet in summer seek, None save dappling shadows climb, Old as the sun, old almost as the shade. To see strange forests and new snow, And leavest thou thy lowland race, And wouldst be my companion, Where I gaze, and still shall gaze, Through tempering nights and flashing days, When forests fall and man is gone, Over tribes and over times, At the burning Lyre, Nearing me, With its stars of northern fire, In many a thousand years? 'Ah! welcome, if thou bring My secret in thy brain; To mountain-top may Muse's wing With good allowance strain. Gentle pilgrim, if thou know The gamut old of Pan, And how the hills began, The frank blessings of the hill 'Let him heed who can and will; To stand the hurts of time, until 'If thou trowest How the chemic eddies play, Pole to pole, and what they say, Not on crags are hung, But beads are of a rosary On prayer and music strung; And, credulous, through the granite seeming, Seest the smile of Reason beaming; Can thy style-discerning eye The hidden-working Builder spy, Who builds, yet makes no chips, no din, O pilgrim, wandering not amiss! Already my rocks lie light, And soon my cone will spin. 'For the world was built in order, And the atoms march in tune; Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder, Cannot forget the sun, the moon. Orb and atom forth they prance, When they hear from far the rune; None so backward in the troop, When the music and the dance Reach his place and circumstance, But knows the sun-creating sound, And, though a pyramid, will bound. 'Monadnoc is a mountain strong, And when the greater comes again I shall pass, as glides my shadow 'Oft as morning wreathes my scarf, His day's ride is a furlong space, His city-tops a glimmering haze. I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding: "See there the grim gray rounding Of the bullet of the earth Whereon ye sail, Tumbling steep In the uncontinented deep." He looks on that, and he turns pale. Cooped in a ship he cannot steer, - Risk or ruin he must share. I scowl on him with my cloud, With my north wind chill his blood; Then, at last, I let him down Once more into his dapper town, As in the old poetic fame The gods are blind and lame, And the simular despite Betrays the more abounding might, So call not waste that barren cone Above the floral zone, Where forests starve: It is pure use ;· What sheaves like those which here we glean and bind Of a celestial Ceres and the Muse? Ages are thy days, Thou grand expresser of the present tense, And type of permanence! Firm ensign of the fatal Being, Amid these coward shapes of joy and grief, That will not bide the seeing! Hither we bring Our insect miseries to the rocks; Spoils of a front none need restore, Replacing frieze and architrave; Yet flowers each stone rosette and metope brave; Still is the haughty pile erect Of the old building Intellect. Emerson |