AN ODE TO THE HILLS

Æons ago ye were,

Before the struggling changeful race of man

Wrought into being, ere the tragic stir

Of human toil and deep desire began:

So shall ye still remain,

Lords of an elder and immutable race,

When many a broad metropolis of the plain,

Or thronging port by some renownèd shore,

Is sunk in nameless ruin, and its place

Recalled no more.

Empires have come and gone,

And glorious cities fallen in their prime;

Divine, far-echoing, names once writ in stone

Have vanished in the dust and void of time;

But ye, firm-set, secure,

Like Treasure in the hardness of God's palm,

Are yet the same for ever; ye endure

By virtue of an old slow-ripening word,

In your grey majesty and sovereign calm,

Untouched, unstirred.

Tempest and thunderstroke,

With whirlwinds dipped in midnight at the core,

Have torn strange furrows through your forest cloak,

And made your hollow gorges clash and roar,

And scarred your brows in vain.

Around your barren heads and granite steeps

Tempestuous grey battalions of the rain

Charge and recharge, across the plateaued floors,

Drenching the serried pines; and the hail sweeps

Your pitiless scaurs.

The long midsummer heat

Chars the thin leafage of your rocks in fire:

Autumn with windy robe and ruinous feet

On your wide forests wreaks his fell desire,

Heaping in barbarous wreck

The treasure of your sweet and prosperous days;

And lastly the grim tyrant, at whose beck

Channels are turned to stone and tempests wheel,

On brow and breast and shining shoulder lays

His hand of steel.

And yet not harsh alone,

Nor wild, nor bitter are your destinies,

O fair and sweet, for all your heart of stone,

Who gather beauty round your Titan knees,

As the lens gathers light.

The dawn gleams rosy on your splendid brows,

The sun at noonday folds you in his might,

And swathes your forehead at his going down,

Last leaving, where he first in pride bestows,

His golden crown.

In unregarded glooms,

Where hardly shall a human footstep pass,

Myriads of ferns and soft maianthemums,

Or lily-breathing slender pyrolas

Distil their hearts for you.

Far in your pine-clad fastnesses ye keep

Coverts the lonely thrush shall wander through,

With echoes that seem ever to recede,

Touching from pine to pine, from steep to steep,

His ghostly reed.

The fierce things of the wild

Find food and shelter in your tenantless rocks,

The eagle on whose wings the dawn hath smiled,

The loon, the wild-cat, and the bright-eyed fox;

For far away indeed

Are all the ominous noises of mankind,

The slaughterer's malice and the trader's greed:

Your rugged haunts endure no slavery:

No treacherous hand is there to crush or bind,

But all are free.

Therefore out of the stir

Of cities and the ever-thickening press

The poet and the worn philosopher

To your bare peaks and radiant loneliness

Escape, and breathe once more

The wind of the Eternal: that clear mood,

Which Nature and the elder ages bore,

Lends them new courage and a second prime,

At rest upon the cool infinitude

Of Space and Time.

The mists of troublous days,

The horror of fierce hands and fraudful lips,

The blindness gathered in Life's aimless ways

Fade from them, and the kind Earth-spirit strips

The bandage from their eyes,

Touches their hearts and bids them feel and see;

Beauty and Knowledge with that rare apprise

Pour over them from some divine abode,

Falling as in a flood of memory,

The bliss of God.

I too perchance some day,

When Love and Life have fallen far apart,

Shall slip the yoke and seek your upward way

And make my dwelling in your changeless heart;

And there in some quiet glade,

Some virgin plot of turf, some innermost dell,

Pure with cool water and inviolate shade,

I'll build a blameless altar to the dear

And kindly gods who guard your haunts so well

From hurt or fear.

There I will dream day-long,

And honour them in many sacred ways,

With hushèd melody and uttered song,

And golden meditation and with praise.

I'll touch them with a prayer,

To clothe my spirit as your might is clad

With all things bountiful, divine, and fair,

Yet inwardly to make me hard and true,

Wide-seeing, passionless, immutably glad,

And strong like you.