--_Spencer's Travels._
MOUNTAINS IN SNOW.
Cold--oh, deathly cold--and silent, lie the white hills 'neath
the sky,
Like a soul whom fate has covered with thy snows, Adversity!
Not a sough of wind comes moaning; the same outline, high and
bare,
As in pleasant days of summer, rises in the murky air.
Very quiet--very silent--whether shines the mocking sun
Through the wintry blue, or lowering drift the feathery
snow-clouds dun:
Always quiet, always silent, be it night or be it day,
With that pale shroud coldly lying where the heather-blossoms lay.
Can they be the very mountains that we looked at, you and I?
One long wavy line of purple painted on the sunset sky;
With the new moon's edge just touching that dark rim, like
dancer's foot,
Or young Dian's, on the hill-side for Endymion waiting mute.
O how golden was that even!--O how balm the summer air!
How the bridegroom sky bent loving o'er its earth so virgin fair!
How the earth looked up to heaven like a bride with joy oppressed,
In her thankfulness half-weeping that she was thus overblest!
Ghostly mountains! 'Silence--silence!' now is aye your soundless
voice,
Lifted in an awful patience o'er the world's uproarious noise;
O'er its jarrings and its greetings--o'er its loving and its
hate--
Silence! Bare thy brows all dumbly to the snows of heaven,
and--wait!'
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