Under clouds, my lonely head,

Old as the sun, old almost as the shade;
And comest thou

To see strange forests and new snow,
And tread uplifted land?

And leavest thou thy lowland race,
Here amid clouds to stand?

And wouldst be my companion,

Where I gaze, and still shall gaze,

Through tempering nights and flashing days,
When forests fall, and man is gone,

Over tribes and over times,

At the burning Lyre,

Nearing me,

With its stars of northern fire,
In many a thousand years?

'Gentle pilgrim, if thou know
The gamut old of Pan,
And how the hills began,

The frank blessings of the hill
Fall on thee, as fall they will.

'Let him heed who can and will;
Enchantment fixed me here
To stand the hurts of time, until
In mightier chant I disappear.

If thou trowest

How the chemic eddies play,
Pole to pole, and what they say;
And that these gray crags
Not on crags are hung,
But beads are of a rosary

On prayer and music strung;

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And, credulous, through the granite seeming, 235
Seest the smile of Reason beaming;-

Can thy style-discerning eye

The hidden-working Builder spy,

Who builds, yet makes no chips, no din,

With hammer soft as snowflake's flight;-
Knowest thou this?

O pilgrim, wandering not amiss!

Already my rocks lie light,

And soon my cone will spin.

240

For the world was built in order,

245

And the atoms march in tune;

Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder,
The sun obeys them, and the moon.
Orb and atom forth they prance,

When they hear from far the rune ;
None so backward in the troop,
When the music and the dance
Reach his place and circumstance,
But knows the sun-creating sound,
And, though a pyramid, will bound.

'Monadnoc is a mountain strong,
Tall and good my kind among;
But well I know, no mountain can,
Zion or Meru, measure with man.
For it is on zodiacs writ,

Adamant is soft to wit:

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255

260

259. Meru is a fabulous mountain in the centre of the world, eighty thousand leagues high, the abode of Vishnu, and a perfect paradise. It may be termed the Hindu Olympus. These lines are in the spirit of the German philosopher Hegel's dictum, that one thought of man outweighed all nature.

And when the greater comes again
With my secret in his brain,
I shall pass, as glides my shadow
Daily over hill and meadow.

'Through all time, in light, in gloom
Well I hear the approaching feet
On the flinty pathway beat

Of him that cometh, and shall come;
Of him who shall as lightly bear
My daily load of woods and streams,
As doth this round sky-cleaving boat
Which never strains its rocky beams;
Whose timbers, as they silent float,
Alps and Caucasus uprear,

And the long Alleghanies here,

And all town-sprinkled lands that be,

Sailing through stars with all their history.

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275

Anchored fast for many an age,

I await the bard and sage,

Who, in large thoughts, like fair pearl-seed,
Shall string Monadnoc like a bead.
Comes that cheerful troubadour,

This mound shall throb his face before,
As when, with inward fires and pain,

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272. In this bold figure the earth, with its mountains and
town-sprinkled lands, is made the image of the lofty mind which
dwells among the higher thoughts, and carries the mountain in
its hands as a very little thing.

It rose a bubble from the plain.
When he cometh, I shall shed,
From this wellspring in my head,
Fountain-drop of spicier worth
Than all vintage of the earth.
There's fruit upon my barren soil
Costlier far than wine or oil.
There's a berry blue and gold,
Autumn-ripe, its juices hold

Sparta's stoutness, Bethlehem's heart,
Asia's rancor, Athens' art,
Slowsure Britain's secular might,
And the German's inward sight.

I will give my son to eat

Best of Pan's immortal meat,

Bread to eat, and juice to drain;

So the coinage of his brain

Shall not be forms of stars, but stars,
Nor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars.
He
comes, but not of that race bred
Who daily climb my specular head.
Oft as morning wreathes my scarf,
Fled the last plumule of the Dark,
Pants up hither the spruce clerk
From South Cove and City Wharf.
I take him up my rugged sides,
Half-repentant, scant of breath,—
Bead-eyes my granite chaos show,
And my midsummer snow:

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315

311. The scarf is the vesture of the mountain, and the light of the morning, revealing it, may be said to wind it about the mountain; or it may be the wreathing vapor.

317. I show the little clerk with his bead-eyes my granite chaos and the glittering quartz which is my midsummer snow.

Open the daunting map beneath,-
All his county, sea and land,

Dwarfed to measure of his hand
His day's ride is a furlong space,
His city-tops a glimmering haze.

;

I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding;
"See there the grim gray rounding

Of the bullet of the earth

Whereon ye sail,

Tumbling steep

In the uncontinented deep."

He looks on that, and he turns pale.
'Tis even so, this treacherous kite,
Farm-furrowed, town-incrusted sphere,
Thoughtless of its anxious freight,
Plunges eyeless on forever;
And he, poor parasite,

Cooped in a ship he cannot steer,—
Who is the captain he knows not,
Port or pilot trows not,

Risk or ruin he must share.

I scowl on him with my cloud,

With my north wind chill his blood;

I lame him, clattering down the rocks;
And to live he is in fear.

Then, at last, I let him down

Once more into his dapper town,

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345

325. The small-souled man whom the mountain is jeering is bidden scan the horizon and see the immensity of the universe in which his little earth is rolling. The petty soul trembles before this vastness as the looked for mighty one was to comprehend and weigh it all in his balances. The contrast is between the blind animal-man, overpowered by nature, and the god-like soul-man, serenely ruling nature.