Flower o' the thorn :: :: University of Virginia Library

Suffering the Autumn and the Winter bind them
With chains of cold and gloom in icy bands,
Fast on the far horizon still we find them,
Back with their barriers from the sunset-strands,
Sentries unflinching from the task assigned them,
Shouldering relentlessly our straining hands.

All that is here below to us forbidden,
All our lost Edens, wood and wold and stream,
All the Chimaeras of our thought bestridden,
All the far glories of the sunset-gleam,
These all behind their giant holdfasts hidden,
Within their frowning fastnesses, we deem,
Nor doubt, each man, the rampart once o'erridden,
To lay his hand upon his darling dream.

Yet of those few who have their spurs surmounted
And stood at gaze upon their topmost spires,
Who have (not all, alas!) returned, recounted
'Tis that no dreamland of their long desires
On high they found, no Eden fairy-founted,
No Paradise of palms and seraph-choirs,
Nay, but a waste of Alp on Alp uncounted,
Forth-stretching far beyond the sunset-fires.

But we, unmindful of their warning pages,
Life's Near-at-hand neglect and to the vain
Dream of the summits, where the storm still rages,
Yearn with the yearning of a soul in pain.
Still, maimed recoiling from the mountain-stages,
Back to th'ascent we brace ourselves again,
Forgetful still that, if, (as say the sages)
Hope of the hills is, peace is of the plain.

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II. THE HUSH OF THE HILLS.

ABOUT the slumbering plains, in moonshine steeping,
Gaunt, stern and white,
The mountains stand, like giant warders keeping
The watch of night.

The moon upon them pours, the still world winding
In stark repose,
Unto Earth's transient green with silver binding
Th'eternal snows.

The summer landscape by the weird light shrouded
In Winter's hue,
The lonely mountains and the valleys crowded
Are like to view.

Life in the sun-flood and the daylight's fountains
Thrones on the plain;
But in the moon-pale night the placid mountains
All Life o'erreign.

There, smiling down on Earth's unending changes
Their changeless smile,
To Heaven their rude, unalterable ranges,
Pile over pile,

They lift, their sempiternal witness bearing
To the world's Prime,
Its ageless ermine on their shoulders wearing
Of snow and rime.

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To fore-eternal epochs testifying,
When, frozen deep,
The dead world slumbered, stark and silent lying
In the ice-sleep,

There, in the calm of certitude unbating,
They stand at gaze,
The aeon's foreassigned return awaiting,
Th'appointed days,

When, the last fire-cell frozen at Earth's centre,
Shall sea and shore
Their antenatal graves of gloom reenter
For evermore,

When Life fore'er from out Time's faded pages
Shall blotted be
And they alone look down, like snow-clad sages,
On shore and sea.

To them our fleeting day of feeble violence
A hyphen seems
Between two grim eternities of silence
And glacial dreams.

III. THE HALLUCINATION OF THE HILLS.

CLIFF over cliff,
The mountain tow'rs into the topmost blue,
As if
The shining sojourns of the Gods to seek.
Hard by those heights, aglow

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With sempiternal snow,
To those, who from below
Their soaring silver in the valley view,
Heaven shows. On yon pellucid peak,
Themseems,
The home is of their hopes, the dwelling of their dreams.

But, once the crest,
After long toil, with aching muscles won
And breast
Well nigh to bursting strained as in a vice,
Look round you, where you stand,
And you on every hand
No bright enchanted land
Of ivory turrets shining in the sun,
But a wild waste of snow and ice
Will find,
Shorn by the storm and rent by the relentless wind.

The snow not white,
But grey you'll find, the ice not crystal-clear
And bright,
As to the looker showed it from afar,
But muddy and opaque,
The sky a cold cloud-lake
Of lead, without a break.
A world of horror dumb and silence drear
It is, the cold corpse of a star,
To death
Frozen in the frantic last convulsive fight for breath.

So with whate'er
We picture bright, because it lies far hence,
And fair,

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Because it is beyond our reach and call.
Its glow and goodlihead
Are of our fancy bred.
Jesus “The Kingdom” said
“Of Heaven within you is;” and one and all
Man's Heavens, be they of thought or sense,
Of plain
Or mountain, owe their birth and being to his brain.

IV. THE HONOUR OF THE HILLS.

THE Spring hath over the grey old mountains drawn
Its glamorous webs of wit-bewildering gladness;
Each hillside slope, each upland lea and lawn
Is drunken with a Dionysiac madness.

A surge of blossom overbrims each crest;
Each Alp flings back the flower-foam to its neighbour:
The hills seem Maenads for the mysteries drest;
One hearkens after cymbal-clash and tabor.

What heart so hard but, when the mountains cast
Their winter-slough, like them, must doff its sorrow
And garb, forgetful of the piteous Past,
Itself in gladness for the summer morrow?

Although, like mine, his head, erst brown, be grey,
Who can, once seen, that sight without a fellow
Forget, the mountains in the flush of May
Belted with gentian blue and jonquil yellow?

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Yet, not alone when Bacchus from the East
Leads back the Nymphs, the Satyrs and Silenus,
My heart with them is in their flowering feast.
Whether in the month of Mars or that of Venus,

Whether in middle Spring or Summer late,
They garb themselves in vests of various glory
And with their rapturous riot celebrate
Life's transient triumph over Winter hoary;

Whether in each upland wood, for June newborn,
The lily of the valley's spathe uncloses
Or in the month of golden-glittering corn
Each pass is purple with the Alpine roses;

Whether narcissus silvers weald and wold
Or gentians carpet all the crests with heaven
Or amaryllis floods with fairy gold
The month whose number in the tale is seven;

Whether mild Autumn all the meadows fills
With saffron, careless of the coming severance,
Still to the flowering honour of the hills
My heart goes forth in flames of love and reverence.

Yea, of the mountains still for me, from first
To last, the old saw over all hath meetness;
Like that which cometh of the strong, as erst
Honey of the lion's mouth, there is no sweetness.

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V. THE HUNGER OF THE HILLS.

WITH you, hills, with you,
In the virginal air,
In the diamond shimmer of Dawn,
As you tower in the silence transcendent, like pillars of prayer,
Aspiration incorporate, Life from Death gendered anew,
From the darkness bygone
White and rose as a dove to the firmament soaring,
In ecstasy rises my spirit, itself like a fountain outpouring.

With you, at the hour
Of the summer noon-sleep,
When heavy with heat is the plain
And you, like to shepherds amidward their slumbering sheep,
You wake, when all else 'neath the scourge of the sun-tyrant cower
From his rutilant rain
And you only stand fast, his oppression rebating,
My soul with you shares in your vigil of solitude, watching and waiting.

How sore to you, hills,
As you glow on heaven's verge
In the gloaming, as sentinels stern,
As you thrust through the storm-clouds of evening and tower o'er the surge
And the surf of the sunsetting ocean, unstirred, like the sills
Of cathedrals etern,
On whose altars the fire of the phantasy burneth,
My heart through the haze of the heat and the dream of the distance out-yearneth!

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With you, in the dead
And the stillness of Night,
When the moon in the welkin shines wide,
When, under the sorrowful spell of her life-numbing light,
Earth lies without stir, white and cold, on her couch silverspread,
As a death-stricken bride,
And you alone live in the death-sheen are shining,
My thought over Life and Death soars to the regions of Peace unrepining.

VI. THE HORROR OF THE HILLS.

ABOVE the climbing pines,
Framed in the mountain's cleft, the far-off glacier shines.
Dropped like a dream from Heaven,
It glances in the glittering Alpine air,
A cloud of silver clear, seven times and seven times seven
Purged and made pure, refined in superstellar fire,
As 'twere.
The hills from out their rugged roots of duty,
It seems,
Have scions upward thrust of thrice-sublimed desires
And long-imprisoned dreams,
That blossom out in Heaven with blooms unearthly rare
Of radiance and beauty.

Throned on those argent piles,
Down on the smiling world below boon Nature smiles,
As placidly and cheerly
As if no storm her brows had ever blurred,
As if she ne'er had frowned nor ever looked austerely.

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With blandness by the thought of wind or winter wild
Unstirred,
Her benison she pours on man's existence:
But yet
There that is in her look, her eye serene and mild,
Which bids him ne'er forget,
If he her favour fain with tree and beast and bird
Would share, to keep his distance.

Beware lest thou ensue
The Goddess to the nooks where she of old makes new,
Where furbishing and mending
She plies upon this worn old earth of ours,
The haunts where she the world's beginning hides and ending,
Where, when some joint or screw gives way beneath storms, snows
And showers,
She sets herself in silence to renew it.
Beware,
I say, lest thou invade the place where in the throes
Of birth and death fore'er
Successive she abides: shun these her secret bowers;
Or by the Gods thou'lt rue it.

Yon glacier, which from far
Shines as the hills of Heaven beneath the midday star,
So white and smooth and candid
That from the valley showed, when viewed anear,
Is all with rocks and stones and gravel over-sanded:
Its smiling visage lowers, clay-coloured, harsh, misshaped,
Austere:
Each step you go, the way grows rougher, ruder,
And all
The slope with crannies huge and grim is over-gaped,

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That from the frowning wall
Of overhanging ice, like monstrous mouths, appear
To yawn for the intruder.

Forth of its clefts a breath
There overcometh thee, that is as ambient Death,
The night that hath no morning
Recalling to the sick and shuddering sense.
The marrow in the bones it numbs; 'tis Nature's warning
Unto the intruder rash that she his presence here
Resents,
Where she rough-hews the mountains' rugged faces
Of stone,
That in her workshop, where the worlds for joy or fear
She shapes, she would alone
Be nor have man invade with his irreverence
Her secret sacred places.

Nay, woman-like, her spleen
It rouses still to be in workday raiment seen;
It likes her not, a Goddess,
To be, with broom and brush and clout and pail
Awork, caught unawares in petticoat and bodice:
And if her warnings, ice, snow, cold, wind, rain and mist
All fail
Th'intruder to rebut and to imbue him
With heed
And reverence for her whim and he withal persist
In spying on her need,
The ruffled beldam sure, for ending of the tale,
A mischief is to do him.

Wherefore contented be
The mountains from the vale to view and bend the knee

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Submiss to Nature's ruling:
For she of the old Gods is, not the new,
And little patience hath, like them, with mortal fooling.
She, like the high Latonian twins, like Bacchus, Isis, Cybele,
Her due
From man exacts and suffers no denying:
Her rites
When she would secret hold, in vain it is that he
With her would bandy mights;
And woe to you and me if she catch me or you
Upon her mysteries spying!

VII. THE HALLOWING OF THE HILLS.

DUSK deepens on highland and lowland; the harpies of darkness descending
Go gathering up and devouring the last of the lingering light:
The day as a down-ridden beast is, that lies, at the long chase's ending,
Its death at the hand of its hunter awaiting, its conqueror, Night.

Awhile, with their whiteness phantasmal, like ghosts, 'gainst the shadow persisting,
Though else out of sight all the landscape is blotted, the snow-peaks shine pale;
Then, one by one, into the darkness they fade, as if tired of resisting,
And Night fore-eternal abideth sole monarch of mountain and dale.

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It is finished; no longer a hand's breadth to see of the hills' shining scalps is;
The glory is gone from the landscape: I sigh, as I turn to go in.
The dream of the daylight is over; for who face to face with the Alps is,
To meditate aught but the mountains, whilst light on them lasts, is a sin.

But lo! what is this that is dawning? What light in the Westward awaketh,
That is as the beam of the dayspring reborn from the Occident's sills,
That surgeth and soareth, sea-fashion? What is it in ripples that breaketh
Of radiance, with rose overflooding and flushing the roots of the hills?

O marvel! Behold how the mountains again from Night's graves have arisen;
But not, as they showed in the setting, as icicles pallid and cold:
Nay, now, like beatified spirits, new-radiant, released from Death's prison,
They thrust through the screen of the shadow, resplendent in rose and in gold.

Yet not rose and gold, as we know them, but rather such transfigurations
Of brightness and blossom for fancy as flower in the worlds unexplored,
The worlds beyond living and dying, undarkened of doubts and negations,

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Where other ideals Faith follows and otherguess Gods they call Lord.

See, Heavenward upsoaring, soft-flaming, the summits, like flambeaux funereal,
Clear-kindled in honour of heroes and demigods, shimmer, like pyres
For Hercules, Horus, Serapis, high-builded, like altars imperial,
From each of whose cloud-climbing censers the soul of some hero aspires.

There stand they, their pole-pointing pillars in mute aspiration upholding,
Like arms of adoring incessant upreared to some Godhead unknown;
And we, who no God know that's worthy our worship, their glory beholding,
Must bow to the power that up-pileth their spires for its luminous throne.

So poignant their pomp is, so voiceful, so solemn their silence, in wonder,
For pealing of paeans Elysian I listen, amazed that there comes
No waft to mine ears of the wailing of hautboys and horns and no thunder,
By clamorous silver of clarions through-lightened, of cymbals and drums.

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But see, now already the pageant is passing away. As I hearken,
The glory fades out from the glaciers. A second yet, pallid and white,
Their pinnacles gleam; then, as sudden anon as they lightened, they darken
And all things the prison re-enter of Silence sepulchral and Night.