You remember how the mist,
When we climbed to Devil's Den,
Pearl-white in the mountain glen,
And above us, amethyst,
Throbbed and circled? then away,
Through the wildwoods opposite,
Torn and scattered, morning-lit,
Vanished into dewy gray? —
Vague as in romance we saw,
From the fog one riven trunk,
Talon-like with branches shrunk,
Thrust a monster dragon claw.
And we climbed for hours through
The dawn-dripping Jellicoes,
To a wooded rock, whence those
Undulating leagues of blue
Summits,— mountain-chains that lie
Dark with forest, bar on bar,—
Ranged their wild, irregular,
Purple peaks beneath a sky
Ocean-azure. Range on range
Billowed their enormous spines,
Where the rocks and priestly pines
Sat eternal, without change.
We were sons of Nature then:
She had taken us to her,
Drawn us, bound with brier and burr,
Closer her than other men:
Intimates of all her moods,
From her bloom-anointed looks,
Wisdom of no man-made books
Learned we in those solitudes:
How the seed contained the flower;
How the acorn held the oak;
How within the vine awoke
The wild impulse still to tower:
How in fantasy or mirth,
Springing when she summoned there,
Sponge-like fungi everywhere
Bulged, exuded from the earth:
Coral-vegetable things,
That the underworld exhaled,
Bulbous, fluted, ribbed, and scaled,
Many colored and in rings,
Like the Indian-Pipe that grew
Pink and white in loamy cracks,
Flowers of a natural wax,
She had turned her fancy to.—
On that laureled precipice,
Where the chestnuts dropped their burrs,
Warm with balsam of the firs,
First we felt her mother-kiss
Full of heaven and the wind;
While the forests, wood on wood,
Murmured like a multitude
Giving praise where none hath sinned.—
Freedom met us there; we saw
Freedom giving audience;
In her face the eloquence,
Lightning-like, of love and law:
Round her, on majestic hips,
Lounged the giant mountains, where
Streaming cataracts tossed their hair,
God and thunder on their lips.—
Oft an eagle, or a hawk,
Or a scavenger, we knew
Winged above us through the blue
By its shadow on the rock.
Or a cloud of templed white
Moved, a lazy berg of pearl,
Through the sky's pacific swirl,
Shot with cool, cerulean light.
So we dreamed an hour upon
That high rock the lichens mossed,
While around us, glimmering, tossed
Golden mintings of the sun:
Then arose; and a ravine,
Which a torrent once had worn,
Made our roadway to the corn
In the valley, deep and green;
[Extract]