Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

The whole world lies beneath a spell—
A charm of dreadest power—
And life hath some new miracle
Worked for it every hour.
Hast thou ever been on a misty night
In a deep and solemn dale,
When the firs, like spirits, stand upright
In a soft, transparent veil,
While the moon with rings of muffled light
Hath girdled her chariot pale?
Hast thou ever sat on a mountain-brow
When the sun was bright and the wind was low,
And gazed on the groups of silent wood
That hang by the brink of a crystal flood,
When the wind starts up from his hidden lair,
Like a thing refreshed by sleep,
On the scene so summer-like and fair,
And the quietness so deep?
The far-off pass and the broken fell
With a hoarse and hollow murmur swell
As the giant rides along:
He comes with sceptre bare to break
The pageant mirrored in the lake;
And the whole forest depths to shake
With fury loud and strong.
He hath bent the poplar as he past,
As the tempest bends the tall ship-mast;

170

He hath twisted the boughs of the lofty ash,
And the old oak moaned beneath his lash.
And yet to thee like some strange dream
The wild winds savage sport doth seem,
For thou art still on thy mountain brow,
With the sun all bright and the wind all low!

Ah! such at best is this weak life,
A mournful and mysterious strife,
Where each man to his neighbour seems
Like the stirring forms in motley dreams;
And shadows fall from cloudless skies,
And lights in darkness gleam,
And endless are the mysteries
Of this unbroken dream.
And we gaze as dreamers have done of yore
On a sight they think they have seen before;
And the far-off hills, and the neighbouring woods
And the gleaming pools of the winding floods,
Are blent in the sunset's misty hue,
When color and distance are both untrue.

To the eye of mortal it may not be
To look on his own soul,
But like a dim half-hidden sea
Before him it doth roll.
It is green as the green earth's sunny grass,
It is blue as the bluest sky;
It is black as night when the tempests pass,
And the snow-white sea-birds cry.
The weary billow hath no soft sleeps,
For its colour and change are given
Not from the heart of its beating deeps,
But they fall from the face of heaven.

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When the day is fair, and the gale at sleep,
There are marvellous things that lie
Full many and many a fathom deep,
Moving and resting uncertainly:—
Things tinted, dark, and bright,
Brave jewels seen
Through the solid green,
Gleaming and giving light.
And after the storm, when the summer calm
Drops down on the sea like a holy charm,
When the clouds on high
Float quietly,
Like Angels winnowing by,—
We see by the dawn that the furrowed shore
With broken things is strewn all o'er,
From the hollow ocean brought;
Quaint carvéd works man never wrought,
And plants earth never bore,
New metals torn from their ancient bed,
And the wave-bleached bones of the unknown dead.

Can the beach that we scan
Be the Soul of Man
With the wrecks of its childhood's being—
With the tokens dread
That the life which is fled
Is blent with the life that is fleeing?