The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 4 | Page 9

countenance with rosy light?

Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?
And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad!
Who called you forth
from night and utter death,
From dark and icy caverns called you
forth,
Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks,
Forever
shattered and the same forever?
Who gave you your invulnerable life,

Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy,
Unceasing
thunder and eternal foam?
And who commanded (and the silence
came),
Here let the billows stiffen, and have rest?
Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous
ravines slope amain,--
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,

And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless
torrents! silent cataracts!
Who made you glorious as the gates of
Heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you
with rainbows? Who, with living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread
garlands at your feet?
God!--let the torrents, like a shout of nations,

Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!
God! sing, ye
meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves, with your
soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of
snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!
Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost!
Ye wild goats sporting
round the eagle's nest!
Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain-storm!

Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds!
Ye signs and
wonders of the elements!
Utter forth God, and fill the hills with
praise!
Thou, too, hoar Mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks,
Oft from whose

feet the avalanche, unheard,
Shoots downward, glittering through the
pure serene,
Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breast,--
Thou too
again, stupendous Mountain! thou
That, as I raise my head, awhile
bowed low
In adoration, upward from thy base
Slow travelling with
dim eyes suffused with tears,
Solemnly seemest, like a vapory cloud,

To rise before me,--Rise, O, ever rise!
Rise, like a cloud of incense
from the Earth!
Thou kingly Spirit throned among the hills,
Thou
dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven,
Great Hierarch! tell thou the
silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth with her
thousand voices, praises God.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

THE HILLS OF THE LORD.
God ploughed one day with an earthquake,
And drove his furrows
deep!
The huddling plains upstarted.
The hills were all a-leap!
But that is the mountains' secret,
Age-hidden in their breast;
"God's
peace is everlasting,"
Are the dream-words of their rest.
He hath made them the haunt of beauty,
The home elect of his grace;

He spreadeth his mornings on them,
His sunsets light their face.
His thunders tread in music
Of footfalls echoing long,
And carry
majestic greeting
Around the silent throng.
His winds bring messages to them,
Wild storm-news from the main;

They sing it down to the valleys
In the love-song of the rain.
Green tribes from far come trooping,
And over the uplands flock;

He weaveth the zones together
In robes for his risen rock.
They are nurseries for young rivers;
Nests for his flying cloud;


Homesteads for new-born races,
Masterful, free, and proud.
The people of tired cities
Come up to their shrines and pray;
God
freshens again within them,
As he passes by all day.
And lo, I have caught their secret,
The beauty deeper than all.
This
faith--that life's hard moments,
When the jarring sorrows befall,
Are but God ploughing his mountains;
And the mountains yet shall
be
The source of his grace and freshness
And his peace everlasting
to me.
WILLIAM CHANNING GANNETT.

SUNRISE.
As on my bed at dawn I mused and prayed,
I saw my lattice prankt
upon the wall,
The flaunting leaves and flitting birds withal--
A
sunny phantom interlaced with shade;
"Thanks be to Heaven," in
happy mood I said,
"What sweeter aid my matins could befall
Than
this fair glory from the east hath made?
What holy sleights hath God,
the Lord of all,
To bid us feel and see! We are not free
To say we
see not, for the glory comes
Nightly and daily, like the flowing sea;

His lustre pierces through the midnight glooms,
And at prime hours,
behold! he follows me
With golden shadows to my secret rooms."
CHARLES TENNYSON TURNER.

GOD AND MAN.
FROM THE "ESSAY ON MAN," EPISTLES I AND IV.
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or

hears him in the wind:
His soul, proud science never taught to stray

Far as the solar walk or Milky Way:
Yet simple Nature to his hope
has given,
Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heaven;
Some
safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the
watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No
fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To Be, contents his
natural desire;
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;
But thinks,
admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.

Go, wiser thou! and in thy scale of sense,
Weigh thy opinion
against Providence:
Call imperfection what thou fancy'st such,--

Say, here he gives too little, there too much;
Destroy all creatures for
thy sport or gust,
Yet cry, If man's unhappy, God's unjust,--
If man
alone engross not Heaven's high care,
Alone made perfect here,
immortal there;
Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod,

Re-judge his justice, be the god of God.
In pride, in reasoning pride,
our error lies;
All