Canto the Fifth. The Fountain-Terraces.
1. An illusion. 2. The great Terraces. 3. Silica-flowers. 4. The Moon. Beauty a true Evangelist. 5. Mahána—the warm Lake. Waterfowl. 6. The singing Islet.
I.
“How beautiful! how wonderful! how strange!”—
Such words, less thought than mere emotion, well
Might Ranolf with abated breath, in tone
That wonder-stricken to a whisper fell,
For Amo's looks of triumph now exchange:
So fair a vision charmed our loiterers lone,
As at the closing of a sultry day,
In search of some good camping-ground
They paddled up Mahána's Lake,
Where they a small canoe had found
(Which Amo settled they might take)
With little care half-hid in sedge
Flax-fastened to the water's edge—
Its owners clearly far away.
From the low sky-line of the hilly range
Before them, sweeping down its dark-green face
Into the lake that slumbered at its base,
A mighty Cataract—so it seemed—
Over a hundred steps of marble streamed
And gushed, or fell in dripping overflow;
Flat steps, in flights half-circled—row o'er row,
Irregularly mingling side by side;
They and the torrent-curtain wide,
All rosy-hued, it seemed, with sunset's glow.—
But what is this!—no roar, no sound,
Disturbs that torrent's hush profound!
The wanderers near and nearer come—
Still is the mighty Cataract dumb!
A thousand fairy lights may shimmer
With tender sheen, with glossy glimmer,
O'er curve advanced and salient edge
Of many a luminous water-ledge;
A thousand slanting shadows pale
May fling their thin transparent veil
O'er deep recess and shallow dent
In many a watery stair's descent:
Yet, mellow-bright, or mildly dim,
Both lights and shades—both dent and rim—
Each wavy streak—each warm snow-tress—
Stand rigid, mute and motionless!
No faintest murmur—not a sound—
Relieves that Cataract's hush profound;
No tiniest bubble, not a flake
Of floating foam is seen to break
The smoothness where it meets the Lake:
Along that shining surface move
No ripples; not the slightest swell
Rolls o'er the mirror darkly green,
Where, every feature limned so well—
Pale, silent, and serene as death—
The Cataract's image hangs beneath
The Cataract—but not more serene,
More phantom-silent than is seen
The white rose-hued reality above.
II.
They paddle past—for on the right
Another Cataract comes in sight;
Another broader, grander flight
Of steps—all stainless, snowy-bright!
They land—their curious way they track
Near thickets made by contrast black;
And then that wonder seems to be
A Cataract carved in Parian stone,
Or any purer substance known—
Agate or milk-chalcedony!
Its showering snow-cascades appear
Long ranges bright of stalactite,
And sparry frets and fringes white,
Thick-falling, plenteous, tier o'er tier;
Its crowding stairs, in bold ascent
Piled up that silvery-glimmering height,
Are layers, they know,—accretions slow
Of hard silicious sediment.
For as they gain a rugged road,
And cautious climb the solid rime,
Each step becomes a terrace broad—
Each terrace a wide basin brimmed
With water, brilliant yet in hue
The tenderest delicate harebell-blue
Deepening to violet!
Slowly climb
The twain, and turn from time to time
To mark the hundred baths in view—
Crystalline azure, snowy-rimmed—
The marge of every beauteous pond
Curve after curve—each lower beyond
The higher—outsweeping white and wide,
Like snowy lines of foam that glide
O'er level sea-sands lightly skimmed
By thin sheets of the glistening tide.
They climb those milk-white flats incrusted
And netted o'er with wavy ropes
Of wrinkled silica. At last—
Each basin's heat increasing fast—
The topmost step the pair surmount,
And lo, the cause of all! Around,
Half-circling cliffs a crater bound;
Cliffs damp with dark-green moss—their slopes
All crimson-stained with blots and streaks—
White-mottled and vermilion-rusted.
And in the midst, beneath a cloud
That ever upward rolls and reeks
And hides the sky with its dim shroud,
Look where upshoots a fuming fount—
Up through a blue and boiling pool
Perennial—a great sapphire steaming,
In that coralline crater gleaming.
Upwelling ever, amethystal,
Ebullient comes the bubbling crystal!
Still growing cooler and more cool
As down the porcelain stairway slips
The fluid flint, and slowly drips,
And hangs each basin's curling lips
With crusted fringe each year increases,
Thicker than shear-forgotten fleeces;
More close and regular than rows,
Long rows of snowy trumpet-flowers
Some day to hang in garden-bowers,
When strangers shall these wilds enclose.
III.
But see! in all that lively spread
Of blue and white and vermeil red,—
How, dark with growths of greenest gloss
Just at the edge of that first ledge,
(Calcareous string to cliff-formed bow
O'er which the hot-pool trickles slow)
A little rocky islet peeps
Into the crater-caldron's deeps.
Along the ledge they lightly cross,
And from its midway islet gaze
O'er all the scene—and every phase
The current takes as down it strays.
They note where'er, by step or stair,
By brimming bath, on hollow reef
Or hoary plain, its magic rain
Can reach a branch, a flower, a leaf—
The branching spray, leaf, blossom gay,
Are blanched and stiffened into stone!
So round about lurks tracery strewn
Of daintiest-moulded porcelain-ware,
Or coral wreaths and clusters rare,
A white flint-foliage!—rather say
Such fairy work as frost alone
Were equal to, could it o'erlay
With tender crust of crystals fair,—
Fine spikes so delicately piled—
Not wintry trees, leafstripped and bare,
But summer's vegetation, rich and wild.
IV.
But while all this they watch, lo, still and grand,
The enormous Moon!—how, like
A great gold cymbal on its edge upright,
Upon the mountain's ridge it takes its stand
So close—there balanced broad and steady,
To bathe in dreamily-magical light
What seemed a magical dream already,
Twice beautify the beautiful, and strike
Transcended sense dead-mute with admiration!—
And who could mark, with wondering soul-elation,
That revel of redundant loveliness,
Nor truths that Ranolf leapt to, half confess?
“O these charms of great Nature! who ever has seen them
In their glory as these are, nor owned that the notion
They force on the thinker, is true, not illusive—
That our senses and they, so composed as between them
To awake in the mind such delightful emotion,
Are proofs self-attested, as logic conclusive,
Of Benevolence somewhere, in what can convene them—
Adapt them to act and react on each other?
A sentiment this, that no Science can smother.
Nor condemn it as anthropomorphical folly,
Since a cause they must have, one intelligent wholly,
To hold that the Cause of these marvels must mean them
To display that Benevolence—mutely reveal it
In delight to the creature most fitted to feel it!
—Aye truly! and though by stern reasoning's parity
You maintain that in Nature, the baleful, disgusting
Should be proof in its Cause of defect of such charity—
That if Beauty be vaunted as sign of Benevolence,
Deformity equally argues Malevolence,—
Yet the first so outsplendours the last—so exceeds it—
And the last has such uses, Mankind almost needs it—
'Tis hard not to side with the hopeful and trusting!
Yes, cavil and carp, the nice balance adjusting,
Yet is Beauty in literal truth, nothing less
Than a Gospel—an embassy mute yet express
From some Power imperial, of friendliness felt
For mankind—say of Love! one that never will cease
To diffuse its serene revelations of peace;
Bright dawns and rich sunsets its eloquent books;
And the broad laugh of flowers, and the soft-chiming brook's
Secret murmurs of joy, and the rapture of birds,
Its angelical whispers—accredited words:
But holiest Woman's affectionate looks,
Most thrillingly potent to move and to melt,
Are the pages where clearest its plenary power
Of divine Inspiration for ever has dwelt!
And he who has basked but one bliss-giving hour
In their sunshine and solace, like me must avow,
With the loveliest lessons of Love, it is thou
O Beauty, bright Mystic, the spirit canst fill;
Aye, 'tis Thou, in all shapes, of celestial good-will,
Art the sweetest, most suasive Evangelist still!”—
V.
Content that night no more to see,
The wanderers push off merrily
To what that night their home shall be:
A little rugged isle (another
Beside it standing, its twin-brother
In conformation strange) that lifts
Its verdurous tufts o'er tortuous rifts
Misshapen—many a dip and rent
In rock that—ever bathed, besprent
With oozy hotspring, fervid play
Of steam that finds a viewless vent—
Is softening slow to pallid clay.
By isles—mere knots of waving grass,
By thin-spread rush and reed they pass;
And fright a thousand birds that rise
From bubbling channel, heated marsh;
And flee in flocks away, with cries
Now plaintive—wild, now hoarse and harsh;
Coot, teal and that rich gallinule
Of velvet violet plumage proud;
That, night and day, each open pool
Or warm and watery covert crowd;
And stalk and strut and peer and pry
With jerking tail and searching eye;
Or plash and paddle, duck and dive,
And through green bills quick-gargling drive
The scooped-up Lake's clear lymph. And see,
Pink-legged, snow-white or sable-pied,
Those strangers from far Ocean's side;
Bluff oyster-catcher, avocet,
And tripping beach-birds, seldom met
Elsewhere—come hither, not for food,
But on this warm delight to brood,
This tepid inland luxury.
VI.
The pair have left the light canoe
And cross the soil with cautious tread,
Whose treacherous crust they scarce can trust—
Each step, it seems, may break it through.
With springy swelling moss 'tis spread,
An emerald, warm, and soaking sod,
In places; then their way they track
Through little thickets, very black
In shade against the tumbled blocks,
The steaming, white and moonlit rocks;
But cherished there to richness rare
Of fragrant broom and ferny plume
And winding woven lycopod
Close-creeping—all luxuriant, lush,
In that pervading vapour-gush.
Then on a grassy spot the brake
Left free—just large enough to make
A couch for two, fenced all around
With aromatic leptosperm—
A soft green gapless wall—they heap
Elastic fern and broom to keep
Down to a pleasant warmth the heat
The ground gives out; where they may sleep—
Could Love desire a bower more sweet?—
Secure no noxious reptiles creep
Throughout the land—envenomed worm
Or poison-snake you dread to meet:
And lulled by that low changeless churme,
The hissing, simmering, seething sound
That sings and murmurs all the while
And ever round that mystic isle;
May sleep a blissful sleep profound,
Plunged in the calm unconscious heaven
To youth and health out-wearied given.
