Nugae Canorae :: :: University of Virginia Library

Wild scenes! tho' absent from my sight,
Remembrance often views your wakeful charm:
She cherishes with fond delight
The enthusiastic thrill, the feeling warm,
The glow poetic, and the wild alarm,
That ever wait, enchanting scenes! on you.
She often sees your hanging wood
Wave on the mountain's brow,
And kens your mild reflecting flood
Sleep in the vale below,
With feelings keenly true;------

She views the mountain torrent white with foam,
As its big mass darts wildly from on high;
While conscious shades that shed an awful gloom,
From the rude glare of Day's unwelcome eye
Shroud many a fairy form that loves to hover nigh.
Majestic views!
What trembling effort of my votive muse,
May dare to hail
Shades where Sublimity shall ever dwell?
Where oft She points the melancholy rock,
To make it frown more dread;
And bids the beetling crag more proudly mock
The embrio storm that hovers round its head.
While She, of rapturous thought the Magic Queen,
Wakes every ruder grace,
Beauty, more lovely in an awful scene,
Adorns of nature the expressive face
With many a sweeter charm,
And hues divinely warm,—
Bids the torrent as it flows
In the vale below repose,

Bids the glowing car of day
Shed a soft attemper'd ray,
Gives the groves a fresher green
Where mild zephyr sails serene.
Beauty calms the liquid lake,
And ever bids it sweetly take
The margin rock, and each time-hallow'd wood,
Each mountain wildly high, sublimely rude,
With soft reflected grace in its reposing flood.

Methinks I see in native charm attir'd
All the bright forms of Keswick's happy vale:
Methinks I see the scene, which oft inspir'd
The glow of Genius, and the Muses' tale.
Derwent! I view thy lake of clearest glass,
Which Nature decks in beauty all thine own—
The liquid lustre of its level face
Where the gay pinnace glitters to the sun.
“I feel the balmy gales that blow,”
Its surface brightly clear along;
And now I hear them murmur low,
The lightly trembling woods among.
The cluster'd isles that scarcely peep
From the blue bosom of the deep,

Which loves their grassy sides to lave,
Now meet excursive Fancy's eye,
And with a sweet diversity
Break the wide level of the rippling wave.
Ah! as thy varying scene I mark,
What cloud-clad rocks, what mountains huge appear:
Here Wallow frowns, with Skiddaw in its rear,
A vast stupendous mass! and, hark!
Methinks I seem in Fancy's dream to hear
A deep majestic sound
From yon rude rocks rebound,
Where wild woods ever wave 'mid fragments drear.
On breezes borne, that fan the day,
Now louder, and now louder roars
The hollow sound on Keswic's shores,
As on I urge my way.—
'Till led by Fancy to the impending shade,
O'ercanopied by melancholy rocks,
Lodore is seen to thunder thro' the glade,
And from the appalling steep with fearful shocks

To urge the fragment thro' the opening air,
Big with impending fate and deep despair
To Him, the unlucky wight, that wont to wander near.

Tremendous flood!
Which flingst thy foam on many a fragment rude;
And bid'st the forest quake
And listening nature shake,
As down thou tumblest 'mid the humid wood.
For thee, her showers may summer send,
And still replenish every spring!
For thee, the lone Enthusiast's friend
Her wildest storms may winter bring!
May many a mountain torrent mix with thine,
And seek thy favourite haunt, sublimity divine!

What are the graces of the polish'd scene
Where the wild form of Nature's sought in vain,
Where artificial elegance is seen
A supplement to Beauty's beamy train!
What, when compar'd to Lodore's shade!—
Here wanton Nature's boundless grace,
Fancy, sweet visionary maid,
Is often fondly seen to trace.

Here all the viewless forms that still
Awake the enthusiastic thrill;
Here fairy phantoms that dispense
Rapture to sublimated sense,
Impart their highest influence—
There, Dulness leaning on some statue near
(Her emblem meet) wears out the insipid year,
And talks of Nature with an ideot joy
While Nature, absent maid, ne'er blest her vacant eye.