Flotsam and Jetsam :: :: University of Virginia Library

Azure-cleaving
Hill-tops heaving
Like a sea's great billows drifting!
Snow-plots those blue summits scarring
Like its foam when winds are warring!
Cliffs, whose ruddy ramparts rise up
Gleaming grandly to the skies up,
Where that speck—an Eagle—flies up!
Shining softly—
Shadowed softly,
Lower slopes of green uplifting
Hamlets, fields, and woods that cluster
Richly round the Lake's blue lustre!

II

Fishes leaping
O'er the sleeping
Mirror, where so many a mansion,

Many a cottage shyly cowering,
Bosomed soft mid trees embowering,
Peeping out like things suspected,
Or in bolder groups collected,
Are in long white streaks reflected,
Which so lightly—
O so lightly
Hung all round that blue expansion,
Snowy silken fringe resemble—
Shimmeringly hang and tremble!

III

Boats slow-stealing
As if feeling
Their calm way to secret blisses;
Some with sails, tall, white, and doubled
In the water, clear, untroubled;
Some with low-peaked prows advancing,
Dipping oars each moment glancing,
White and scarlet pennons dancing
Only faintly—
Very faintly,
To the languid lazy kisses
Stolen by some tiny toying
Breeze, itself the calm enjoying!—

IV

Come then, fairest,
Brightest, rarest!
Be no more by slumber cheated!
See! in sunshine many a boat, love,
Seems to beckon us afloat, love,
Gay with red-striped awning yonder,
To a scene where love might wander
Ever, and grow ever fonder!
Take one, dearest!
—Let us, dearest!—
And my Sylph-queen therein seated,
To these charms of earth and heaven,
What a crowning charm were given!