On the crag I sat in wonder,
Stars above me, forests under;
Through the valleys came and went
Tempest forces never spent,
And the gorge sent up the thunder
Of the stream within it pent.
Round me with majestic bearing
Stood the giant mountains, wearing
Helmets of eternal snows,
Cleft by nature’s labour throes—
Monster faces mutely staring
Upward into God’s repose.
At my feet in desolation
Swayed the pines, a shadowy nation,
Round the woodlake deep and dread,
Round the river glacier-fed,
Where a ghostly undulation
Shakes its subterranean bed.
And I cried, “O wildernesses!
Mountains! which the wind caresses,
In a savage love sublime,
Through the bounds of space and time,
All your moods and deep distresses
Roll around me like a chime.
“Lo, I hear the mighty chorus
Of the elements that bore us
Down the course of nature’s stream,
Onward in a haunted dream
Towards the darkness, where before us
Time and death forgotten seem.
“Now behold the links of lightning
Round the neck of storm-god tightening,
Madden him with rage and shame
Till he smites the earth with flame,
In the darkening and the brightening
Of the clouds on which he came.
“Nature! at whose will are driven
Tides of ocean, winds of heaven,
Thou who rulest near and far
Forces grappling sun and star,
Is to thee the knowledge given
Whence these came and what they are?
“Is thy calm the calm of knowing
Whence the force is, whither going?
Is it but the blank despair
Of the wrecked, who does not care
Out at sea what wind is blowing
To the death that waits him there?
“Mother Nature, stern aggressor,
Of thy child the mind-possessor,
Thou art in us like a flood,
Welling through our thought and blood—
Force evolving great from lesser,
As the blossom from the bud.
“Yea, I love thy fixed, enduring
Times and seasons, life procuring
From abysmal heart of thine;
And my spirit would resign
All its dreams and hopes alluring
With thy spirit to combine.