Читать книгу Mountain Idylls, and Other Poems - Alfred Castner King - Страница 7

The mountain rill its pleasant music makes,

As the descendant waters roll along,

In rhythmic flow and dulcet cantabile,

In various concord and harmonious pitch,

Pursuant of its journey to the sea;

The murmuring treble of the rivulet,

Uniting with the deep and ponderous bass

Of torrent wild and foaming cataract;

The thunderous, reverberating tones

And seething ebullition of the falls

Are blended in one grand euphonious chord.

Far in the hazy distance, as the eye

With vague perceptive vision penetrates,

Lie the vast mesas of ethereal hue,

Stretched in a calm and sleepy quietude,

Dreamy repose and blue tranquillity;

The eye which rests upon the drowsy scene

Beholds a dim horizon, which presents

No line of demarcation or of bounds;

A merging union, blurred and indistinct;

Fuliginous confusion, that the eye

In viewing gazes, but no more discerns

Which is the earth, and which the azure sky.

But mark the change!

A cloud, which floated in the atmosphere,

An inconsiderable and feathery speck

Of no proportions, now augmented, wears

A threatening aspect, ominously dark;

Enveloping the heaven's canopy

In lowering shadow and portentous gloom;

In pall of ambient obscurity.

The fork-ed lightnings ramify and play

Upon a background of sepulchral black;

The growling thunders rumble a reply

Of detonation awful and profound,

To every corruscation's vivid gleam;

In deep crescendo and fortissimo,

In quavering tremolo and stately fugue

Echoes, reverberates and dies away!

But soon the sun, with smiling radiance,

Through orifice, through rift and aperture,

Invades the storm, and dissipates the clouds,

Which scatter, cowering and ephemeral,

Hugging the cliffs, and o'er the dire abyss

Hover, in fleecy, ever changing form,

And in a transient season disappear;

Vanish, as man must vanish, and are gone.

The moist precipitation of the storm

Revives, refreshes and invigorates

The various vegetation, and bedews

Each blade of grass and floweret with a tear;

As nature, weeping o'er the faults of man.