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Poems with Fables in Prose

By Frederic Herbert Trench

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And now, upon that watcher in the air,
Outpost Promethean, Earth's protagonist,
That nothing saw beyond our realms of mist,
Slow from the zenith is downbreathed the rose.
(Hush, the world's candle!—every star grows pale)
Until the nine-peak'd ocean-mantling mass
Lit—every cleft and cranny of his snows

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And sea-curved crystals into which arose
The groaning precipices—with peace superb
Becomes the altar of the soul of Dawn.
Prostrate night-vapours travel down each vale
In darkness, the obscurers, and the frail—
But the ancient iron summit in his shroud
Of radiance, every pike and bastion dour
Belted with awe of glacier and crevasse,
Floats up, transfigured, at this limpid hour,
A walled and heavenly city, clear as glass—
A new acropolis of mourning rosed,
Aerial, lighter than a branch in flower—
An absolute, but of our strifes composed.