So up the long and shorn foot-hills The river wound as it should wind; Their place the mountains took; The white torn fringes of their clouds Wore no unwonted look; Yet ne'er before that river's rim A presence, strange at once and known, Was it a dim-remembered dream? But from the vision ere it passed A tender hope I drew, And, pleasant as a dawn of spring, The thought within me grew, That love would temper every change, And, misty with the dreams of earth, The hills of Heaven arise. Whittier COM EVENTIDE. OMES something down with eventide, Beside the floating scents, beside Upon the river's rippling face, Flash after flash the white By chance my eye fell on the stream; Sleeps in us, sleeps, and doth not dream! For then my heart, so full of strife, No more was in me stirred; My life was in the river's life, And I nor saw nor heard. I and the river, we were one: A rushing thing in power serene I felt of having ever been And being still to be. Was it a moment or an hour? When, from that realm of awful power Thomas Burbridge. NEARING THE SNOW LINE. LOW toiling upward from the misty vale, SLO I leave the bright enamelled zones below; That on their ice-clad stems all trembling blow O'er thee undimmed the moon-girt planets shine, On thy majestic altars fade the fires That filled the air with smoke of vain desires, And all the unclouded blue of heaven is thine! Holmes. YET AGE AN EMINENCE. ́ET have I thought that we might also speak, As of a final EMINENCE; though bare In aspect and forbidding, yet a point Down from a mountain-top, say one of those High peaks, that bound the vale where now we are. Faint, and diminished to the gazing eye, Forest and field, and hill and dale appear, With all the shapes over their surface spread: To breathe in solitude, above the host Of ever-humming insects, 'mid thin air That suits not them. The murmur of the leaves Many and idle visits not his ear: This he is freed from, and from thousand notes Are occupied; and the Soul, that would incline And may it not be hoped, that, placed by age What more than that the severing should confer To the vast multitude; whose doom it is Wordsworth. H' VEILED. E stood there, a shape Titanic In the midst of the shining range; Moment by moment his features Beamed with some wonderful change: |