Chapter I

All the Lydian notes revealing,
Son of Leto, oh, come stealing
As the wind Thessalian rivers
Whisper of! the wind that shivers
Every ripple into stars,
In the sunlight's golden bars.
Touch thy harp, that haunts the oaks,
With the mastery that invokes
Naiad music of the fount,
Oread music of the mount;
And such satyr song as keeps
Revel on Lycæan steeps,
When night nods, a Mænad shape,
Purple with dusk's staining grape.
Wake such chords as dewy grounds
Echo when no mortal hounds
Bell the hunt, whose spear-point shines
Through Arcadia's tangled vines,
When the half-awakened Dawn,
Dreaming on a mountain lawn,
Lets her golden sandals lie
And walks barefooted through the sky;
And by Arethusa's bank,
Swift upon the red hart's flank,
Drives Diana's buskined band
Down the cistus-blossomed strand.
Then Love's minors, swooning o'er
The mountain hush, the ocean roar,
As Selene, stealing, sails
Over Lemnos' lakes to vales
Where Endymion dreams and feels
Love her stolen kiss reveals.

II

Thou hast sung of Helicon:
How the sister Muses won
From the nine Pierides
Empire o'er the harmonies.
Thou hast sung of Tempe's maid,
And the sudden laurel's aid.
Thou hast sung of many loves
Of the gods that haunt the groves
Where the marble altar stands
Rose-heaped by the balmy hands
Of Romance and Beauty; where,
High upon the temple stair,
Priest-like, bay-crowned, white of hair,
Old Tradition, looking up,
Pours libation from his cup.
Thou hast sung, all sweet of tongue,
As once wild Amphion sung,
Songs,--Parnassian rocks,--that swung
Each in its lyric niche, and massed
Such mural heights of song and vast,
Melodious walls of poesy,
That Time himself shall not outlast,
Enduring as eternity.

III

Ours shall be no island song,
Suited to a maiden throng,
Dancing with their wreaths of roses
To the double-flute's soft closes!--
But a Nation's! whose large eyes
With life's liberty are wise,
And consenting sympathies
Of all arts and sciences.
She! who stands above the storms
With truth's thunder in her arms,
And the star-serenity
Of her hope bound burningly
Round her brow; and at her knee
The Spirit of Progress who is shod
With ethereal fire of God....
Yea! thy last shall still be first--
Some wild epopee to burst
With such organ notes as rang
When the stars of morning sang,
And the Sons of Heaven sent
Shoutings through the firmament;
As our years have justified
And the stars have prophesied.

1886.

JOTUNHEIM

I

Beyond the Northern Lights, in regions haunted
Of twilight, where the world is glacier planted,
And pale as Loké in his cavern when
The serpent's slaver burns him to the bones,
I saw the phantasms of gigantic men,
The prototypes of vastness, quarrying stones;
Great blocks of winter, glittering with the morn's
And evening's colors,--wild prismatic tones
Of boreal beauty.--Like the three gray Norns,
Silence and solitude and terror loomed
Around them where they labored. Walls arose,
Vast as the Andes when creation boomed
Insurgent fire; and through the rushing snows
Enormous battlements of tremendous ice,
Bastioned and turreted, I saw arise.

II

But who can sing the workmanship gigantic
That reared within its coruscating dome
The roaring fountain, hurling an Atlantic
Of liquid ice that flashed with flame and foam?
An opal spirit, various and many formed,--
In whose clear heart reverberant fire stormed,--
Seemed its inhabitant; and through pale halls,
And deep diaphanous walls,
And corridors of whiteness,
Auroral colors swarmed,
As rosy-flickering stains,
Or lambent green, or gold, or crimson, warmed
The pulsing crystal of the spirit's veins
With ever-changing brightness.
And through the Arctic night there went a voice,
As if the ancient Earth cried out, "Rejoice!"
"My heart is full of lightness!"

III

Here well might Thor, the god of war,
Harness the whirlwinds to his car,
While, mailed in storm, his iron arm
Heaves high his hammer's lava-form,
And red and black his beard streams back,
Like some fierce torrent scoriac,
Whose earthquake light glares through the night
Around some dark volcanic height;
And through the skies Valkyrian cries
Trumpet, as battleward he flies,
Death in his hair and havoc in his eyes.

IV

Still in my dreams I hear that fountain flowing;
Beyond all seeing and beyond all knowing;
Still in my dreams I see those wild walls glowing
With hues, Aurora-kissed;
And through huge halls fantastic phantoms going,
Vast shapes of snow and mist,--
Sonorous clarions of the tempest blowing,--
That trail dark banners by,
Cloudlike, underneath the sky
Of the caverned dome on high,
Carbuncle and amethyst.--
Still I hear the ululation
Of their stormy exultation,
Multitudinous, and blending
In hoarse echoes, far, unending;
And, through halls of fog and frost,
Howling back, like madness lost
In the moonless mansion of
Death and demon-haunted love.

V

Still in my dreams I hear the mermaid singing;
The mermaid music at its portal ringing;
The mermaid song, that hinged with gold its door,
And, whispering evermore,
Hushed the ponderous hurl and roar
And vast æolian thunder
Of the chained tempests under
The frozen cataracts that were its floor.--
And, blinding beautiful, I still behold
The mermaid there, combing her locks of gold,
While at her feet, green as the Northern Seas,
Gambol her flocks of seals and walruses;
While, like a drift, her dog,--a Polar bear,--
Lies by her, glowering through his shaggy hair.

VI

O wondrous house, built by supernal hands
In vague and ultimate lands!
Thy architects were behemoth wind and cloud,
That, laboring loud,
Mountained thy world foundations and uplifted
Thy skyey bastions drifted
Of piled eternities of ice and snow;
Where storms, like ploughmen, go,
Ploughing the deeps with awful hurricane;
Where, spouting icy rain,
The huge whale wallows; and through furious hail
Th' explorer's tattered sail
Drives like the wing of some terrific bird,
Where wreck and famine herd.--