XXI.

THE MAN AND THE MOUNTAIN.

THE MOUNTAIN.

WHо art thou? who art thou?

Climbing up to my white brow

But half the size of the little pine tree

That

in the clefts below grows

my

knee?

What dost want? and what wouldst do

Between my cope and the frosty blue?

Amid my silent pinnacles

The hesitating avalanche dwells,

And issuing from my garnered snow

A hundred foaming torrents flow;—

Little creature-bold and vain,

Keep to the safety of the plain,

Nor tempt the heights, where, all alone,

I hurl the tempests from my throne.

THE MAN.

Proud mountain-since thou'st found a tongue,

Back be thy defiance flung!

Small as I am, and mighty thou,

With all thy centuries on thy brow,

I climb thy heights to make thee mine

From thy nether forests of waving pine,
Up to thy barest steeps afar,

Where the icicles gleam to the Polar star.

What are thy crags and glaciers rude,

Unless in their pregnant solitude

They teach me things I pine to know?

What are thy pinnacles of snow,

Thy caverns where the whirlwinds grow,

And all thy rivers, so fierce and free,

Unless they minister to me?

Great and awful as thou art,

Thou art but little to my

heart;

And thy supreme magnificence

Is but the creature of my sense.

True, I am smaller than the pine That grows beneath those feet of thine; But I'm thy master, thou not mine. I can measure thee, up and down, Base and girth and snowy crown; I can weigh thee to an ounce, And thy value can pronounce!

Nor thine alone, oh mountain high!

I can map

the orbs of the sky,

And tell the distances of Heaven;—

To me so small-to me is given

To weigh the ponderable sun,

And track the planets as they run. And shall not I, thou mountain proud, Scale thy small peaks above the cloud

Thou wert made for me to climb

Me-the humble-yet sublime!

I am little-thou art great

Yet what art thou, in all thy state,

Compared with me? Thou'rt but a grain In the great ocean of my brain!

Look up to heaven, thou haughty hill!

Roll thy torrents at thy will;

Loose from thy grasp the avalanche,
And crush the forests root and branch;
But learn thy place in Nature's plan-
The slave and minister of Man.

XXII.

DREAMING! IDLY DREAMING!

I.

DREAMING! idly dreaming!

In the summer bowers,

Came a whisper stilly

From the rose and lily

And the meadow flowers.

"Tho' we bloom to woo you,"

Seemed the voice to sigh,

"Leave, oh, leave us growing,

Or like wild-winds blowing

Touch, and travel by!

Beauty shrinks from selfish capture

Love is short that lives on rapture,

If you gather us-we die!"