Classic Poem

Ha , ha, ha! — My coy Jungfra
Is tall, and robed in snow;
Yet at a leap to the cloudy steep
I bound from the glen below;
On her dizziest peak I sit and shriek
To the winds that around me blow,
And heard from afar is my ha, ha, ha!
The wild laugh echoes so.

In the forests dun round Lauterbrunn
That line each dark ravine,
I hide me away from the garish day
Till the howling winter's e'en;
Then I jump on high thro' the coal-black sky,
And light on some cliff of snow
That nods to its fall like a tottering wall,
And I rock it to and fro!

My summer's home is the cataract's foam,
As it floats in a frothing heap,
My winter's rest is the weasel's nest,
Or deep with the mole I sleep:
I ride for a freak on the lightning-streak,
And mingle among the clouds
My swarthy form with the thunder-storm,
Wrapped in its sable shrouds.

Often I launch the huge avalanche,
And make it my milk-white sledge,
When unappal'd to the Grindelwald
I slide from the Shrikehorn's edge:
Silent and soft to the ibex oft
I have stolen, and hurried him o'er
The precipice to the brittling ice
That smokes with his scarlet gore.

But my greatest joy is to lure and decoy
To the chasm's slippery brink
The hunter bold, when he's weary and old,
And there let him suddenly sink:
A thousand feet — dead! — he dropped like lead,
Ha! he couldn't leap like me;
With broken back, as a felon on rack,
He hangs in a split pine-tree.

And there mid his bones, that echoed with groans,
I make me a nest of his hair;
The ribs dry and white rattle loud as in spite
When I rock in my cradle there:
Hurrah, hurrah, and ha, ha, ha!
I'm in a merry mood,
For I'm all alone in my palace of bone,
That's tapestried fair with the old man's hair,
And dappled with clots of blood;
And when I look out all around and about,
The storm shouts high to the coal-black sky,
And the icicle sleet falls thick and fleet,
And all that I hear on the mountain drear,
And all I behold in the valleys cold,
Is deatHand solitude.