Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Thou Form sublime, that drawest upward ever
To airy points thy far receding slopes,—
Cathedral mountain, 'mid the thousand shrines
That lift their gorgeous steeples all around,
Replete with heavenward praise, where every morn
The wild winds ring for worship; let me add
My puny voice to all the mighty chant
That down thy sculptured aisles a thousand streams
Chant as they march white-vested. Temple vast,
Great Dome, instinct with awe and thought profound,
Whose silent regions and unmeasured space
Distil a sense of power and majesty,—
Whose mighty walls of fretted rock, and slopes
That front all aspects of the hollow sky,—
Whose forms that in their changes infinite
Make thee complete in unity,—whose vastness
And grandeur, that do unimpaired embrace
The exquisite perfection of each part

Wrought with minutest skill, — whose noon-day glory
Scored with black shades of deep-cut masonry,—
Whose vaults with lavish beauty studded, bossed
With clusters of huge angles, feathered o'er
With foliage of all grace,—whose marble floors
Of airy lakes, that see the starry hosts
March nightly by,—whose proud head wreathèd round
With lightning storms, — whose sudden shouting rush
Of hurricane, and tumult of swift winds,—
Whose winter torrents, and whose glazèd snows,—
Yea, and whose gem-like flower most delicate
Nursed in a cleft of rock amid the spray
Of waterfalls,—all gloriously exalt
Thine awful Architect;—I would bow low,
Great Mountain, in thy vast and silent courts,
Filling my soul with worship unto Him
Who built thee for a temple to His praise.

(1850.)