Rolls up the sound of thy tumult of billows?
“Jehovah! Jehovah! crashes in the bursting ice!
Avalanche-thunders roll it in the cleft downward:
Jehovah! it rustles in the bright tree-tops;
It whispers murmuring in the purling silver-brooks.
“This is very grand. Who but a mighty poet, one seeing with ‘the vision and the faculty divine’—what, but a transfusing, all-conquering imagination—would have dared the attempt to compose another poem on the same subject, or to carry this to a greater hight of sublimity, by melting it down anew, so to speak, and pouring it out into a vaster, more glorious mold? The more one thinks of it, the more he will see, in the poem so produced, a proof most remarkable, of the spontaneous, deep-seated, easily exerted, and almost exhaustless power and originality of Coleridge’s genius. Now let us peruse, ‘with mute thanks and secret ecstacy,’ his own solemn and stupendous lines.
HYMN BEFORE SUNRISE, IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNY.
[Besides the rivers Arve and Arveiron, which have their sources in the foot of Mont Blanc, five conspicuous torrents rush down its sides; and, within a few paces of the glaciers, the Gentiana Major grows in immense numbers, with its ‘flowers of loveliest blue.’]
“Hast thou a charm to stay the Morning Star
In his steep course? so long he seems to pause