English

A pale and livid halo spread
Its flood above the hoar hill's head,
As slowly from behind it rose
The large blank Moon in grey repose,
Faint gleaming like the spectral skull
Of buried day: her frontlet dull
Black shadows trenched where lights had been,
Like eyes their sockets sunk within;
A formless visage faintly traced,
With shade and glimmer half effaced.
The ancient rocks caught fitfully
The tremulous light of her wan eye,
As beneath her filmy veil
She showed her brow so high, so pale;

But, while I paced along, a change
Stole o'er that scene so wild and strange.
The shapes of Nature round grew rife
With meaning and mysterious life.
My soul was opened, and I saw,
With a sense of fear and awe,
How the forms of earth apart
Lived, pulsed by one inspiring heart.
The jagged trunks, grotesque and bare,
Leafless, and hoary, and moss-dried,
Threw out abrupt into the air
Their limbs and sinews petrified.
The blind crags, the earth's giant-born,
Raised, with a wild air and forlorn,

I gazed on the disturbing Scene
As on a place where I had been,
Remembered from anterior birth,
Ere darkened by the life of earth,
Rent crags on the wild ground were strewed,
Ruins of that grey solitude;
Records were on their foreheads traced,
By time and tempest half effaced;
Strange mystic figures graved thereon
By hands whose very dust was gone;
Thoughts of old seers, their birth and breath
Lost in the infinite of death.
And amidst them, scattered wide,
Broken columns thrown, the pride

I came up from the hoary Sea,
Like Pilgrim from a far countree;
The path wound through an ancient wood,
A silent solemn solitude,
I felt my human foot the first
That ever had its stillness burst.
A sense of awe, and doubt, and fear,
The expectancy of evil near,
The shadow, not to be put by,
Of following necessity,
Crept o'er me as the jagged trees,
Muttering above their mysteries,
Impended o'er, their fringing boughs
Arched over me like hollow brows,
Instinct with eyes that on me dwelt,

THE Vision came upon my sleep
From the phantom-land of dreams;
And, with its prophetic gleams,
Song was sent me, wild and deep,
To tell all I did behold.
The ethereal fire is warm
That stamped upon my mind each form;
But the words which should unfold
Are effaced from memory;
And those shapes fade from my eye,
Faint as records graven on
Fragments of some mouldering stone,
With grey weed and moss o'ergrown,
When the tale they told is gone.
I will painfully essay
To trace them through their decay,

True , there are those of our impassioned blood
Who can forget but slowly that thy great
Misread the omens of our later strife,
And knew not Freedom when she called to thee.
These think they hate thee! — these, who have embraced
Before the altar their fraternal foes!
Not white of York and red of Lancaster
More kindly mingle in thy rose of peace
Than blend in cloudless dawn our blue and gray.
Already Time and History contend
For sinking rampart and the grassy ridge
That with its challenge startles pilgrim feet

Oh, the mind and its kingdom are goodly, and well for the brain
That has craft to discover and cunning to bind to its will
And wisdom to weigh at its worth all the wealth they contain.
But the heart has its empire as well, and he shall fare ill
Who has learned not the way of its meadows. His knowledge shall be
A bitter taste in his heart; he shall spit at his skill;
And the days of his life shall be sterile and salt as the sea.

Ay, save man's love he made greater, even knowledge shall wane,

O Dartmouth, nurse of men, I see your games
To make men strong, your books to make them wise;
But there is other sight than that of eyes,
And other strength than that which strikes and maims.
What hast thou done to purge the passions pure,
To wake the myriad instincts that lie sleeping
Within us unaroused and undivined,
As forests in a hazel-nut endure;
To fashion finelier our joy and weeping,
Inspire us intuitions swift and sure,
And give us soul as manifold as mind;
To make us scholars in the lore of feeling,

Daughter of the woods and hills, Dartmouth, my stern,
Rock-boned and wind-blown sibyl of the snows!
First in thy praise whom we can never praise
Enough, I lay my laurel in my turn
Before thee in thy uplands. No one goes
Forth from thy granite through the summer days.
And many a land of apple and of rose,
Keeping in his heart more faithfully than I
The love of thy grim hills and northern sky.

Mother of Webster! Mother of men! Being great,
Be greater; let the honor of thy past,
For which we sit in festival, elate,

Out of the hills came a voice to me,
Out of the pine woods a cry:

" Thou hast numbered and named us, O man. Hast thou known us at all?
Thou hast riven our rocks for their secrets, and measured our heights
As a hillock is measured. But are we revealed? Canst thou call
Ascutney thy fellow? Or is it thou Kearsage invites?
What speech have we given then, measurer — cleaver of stones?