Everything lies, after all, in the point of view. The dawn was decidedly too pink for safety, and the clumps of Lilies that looked so pious and recollected have got “the disease” badly in their stalks. Yet realism can never blight that exquisite hour of breaking day in her thoughts!
The only time we degenerates ever really see the dawn is coming home from some London ball; or again, travelling. The dawn in London often gives an impression of extraordinary blue in atmosphere and heaven, we suppose because it is seen contrasted with artificial illuminations. But that sapphire blue, when it permeates park and streets, when the sky seems to hold unplumbed depths beyond depths of the same wonderful colour, is a thing to dwell in the memory likewise, though travellers have the better part. Dawn in the Alps! A night not to be depicted! Such vastness of tinted heights; such black chasms where the pines hang; spume of waterfalls all golden crimson, and deep rivers, green and terrible and beautiful with a glint on them as they rush!
One of us ‹the fourth in the lucky clover leaf at Villino Loki; one who is poet and musician besides many other things, and sometimes poet and musician together› has defined the indefinable. It is not the dawn of the day she hymns, but the dawn of the young Spring.
Though the poem is printed in a recently published volume, it seems to fit naturally into this page.
THE ST. GOTHARD
April and I—
Each with each greeting amid tumbled ice,
Travel these wastes of frozen purity.
Here the wild air above the precipice