Classic Poem

Toys for the angry lightning in its play,
Summits, and peaks, and crests untrod and steep,
And precipices where the eyes delay,
Sheer gulfs that madly plunge in valleys deep,
Overhung valleys curtained by dark forms,
Ye, nourished by the energetic storms,
I seek you lost in spell-bound shuddering sleep.

Within your rifts hang gem-like crystal stars,
Eyeless by day they glitter through the nights,
Full-zoned Venus, and red visaged Mars,
And that serenest Jupiter's round lights,
Peer o'er your terrible eminences near,
But throned too high to stoop with mortal fear,
Dreading you not, ye Ocean-stemming heights.

Your awful forms pale wandering mists surround,
Dim clouds enfold you in funereal haze,
In the white frosted Winters ye abound,
And your vast fissures with the Frost-work glaze,
Slippery and careless of ascending feet,
Holding out violent death, and thus may meet
The Olympians, — mortals with unshrinking gaze.

The fierce bald Eagle builds amid your caves,
Shrieks fearless in your lonely places where
Only his brothers of the wind make waves,
Sweeping with lazy pinions the swift air,
For far below the stealthy wolf retreats,
The fox his various victims crafty greets,
Breeze-knighted birds alone make you their lair.

Sometime in the green valley peasants stand
Shading their glance at mid-day as they pass,
And wonder at such beacons in the land,
Bending again their eyes upon the grass;
Ye heaven-high Mountains deign to stand alone,
Only the airy amphitheatre to own,
Only the shapely clouds, the snows' drear mass.

What are ye, grand, unuttered words of Power,
Why stand you thus, balancing only earth,
Shall not an echo wake, an untold hour
Stir in your cavernous breasts a giant birth,
Shall ye not answer to the roar of seas,
Send back your greeting to the running breeze;
Mountains, I hear you, in your mighty mirth.