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(Excerpt)
OFT had I visited this splendid Bay, | |
| Or River of January, so miscalled | |
| By the old voyagers, who deemed that here | |
| Some mighty stream, rivalling the Amazon, | |
| Emptied its wealth of waters; oft my fancy | 5 |
| Had soared to the Sublime, scaling the heights | |
| Around me, with all Beauty at its feet: | |
| But I had been content, with bodily foot | |
| Planted upon no loftier pinnacle | |
| Than the ship’s deck, to gaze, not undelighted, | 10 |
| Upon this lucid harbor-sheet, embosomed | |
| In its sweet zone of hills, so wild and lovely | |
| That Nature seems, in her most frolic mood, | |
| To have shaped out and richly pranked them forth, | |
| Lavish of light and generous with her green. | 15 |
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| Now, more aspiring, I have wearily toiled | |
| Up the steep bed of mountain streams, beside | |
| The gray-mossed aqueduct, through forests dense, | |
| Shut from the wind but open to the sun, | |
| With limbs grown languid and quick-panted breathing; | 20 |
| And I have reached the topmost crag which crowns | |
| The Corcovado: its peculiar peak, | |
| Seen from below, with one precipitous side, | |
| Not all unlike a superincumbent billow | |
| Walled up against the shore in act to break,— | 25 |
| So pausing “on the curl” forevermore. | |
| But here, on its high summit all-commanding, | |
| What view is mine? Alas! a blinding mist | |
| Is all, which, swept from seaward by the breeze, | |
| Foldeth the mountain in its white cloud-fleeces. | 30 |
| There is a heavy sound upon the wind, | |
| Whether from over, under, or around, | |
| A roaring like the noise of many waters, | |
| A roll like thunders long reverberate, | |
| Filling the wide air with sustainèd pealing. | 35 |
| As did Ixion, in the Grecian fable, | |
| I have stretched forth my hand to clasp a goddess, | |
| Seeking and yearning for the Beautiful | |
| In its divinest essence,—and I meet | |
| The embraces of a cloud;—and angry Jove | 40 |
| Threatens with the loud thunder all the while! | |
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| The passing thought fleets with the passing cloud, | |
| Which travels inland, riding on the wind,— | |
| And, lo! the blue Atlantic, breaking white | |
| Upon the white-beached mainland and the islands, | 45 |
| With a long roll and a loud roar,—in chorus | |
| Booming the mighty multitudinous Deep! | |
| All lesser tumult heard not at this height, | |
| I listen to the voice of sovereign Power; | |
| Power, the majestic, the unchainable, | 50 |
| The infinite and eternal Power of God! | |
| Here speaks it ever.—But how solemnly | |
| Is the primeval and enduring Force | |
| Of all things stamped on these insensate cliffs! | |
| There was a time, when, silent as they stand, | 55 |
| Hard now and steadfast, chaos rocked and raged, | |
| And they, with fierce heat liquid, were upheaved | |
| Into these forms fantastic: so convulsed | |
| Was never Ocean in his stormiest hour. | |
| The lapsing ages leave them as they are, | 60 |
| Revealing yet Earth’s strong original frame, | |
| But showing, too, how Strength is loved of Beauty, | |
| Whose gentler spirit, like a younger Nature, | |
| Doth, with caressing tendrils clasping it, | |
| Make, as Love ever doth, its object lovely: | 65 |
| Hebe had bound, with rosy-taper fingers, | |
| A chaplet thus on brows of Hercules: | |
| So doth a childish sister love to sport | |
| With a stern elder, dear to her withal: | |
| The very rocks, the great rocks ramparting | 70 |
| The dusk ravines, are, by her summer breath, | |
| Made gay, laughing out into lustrous flowers; | |
| And all the massy tropical foliage | |
| Glows, in her sunlight, of so glad a green | |
| It welcometh the wanderer from the sea | 75 |
| With the warm welcome of a loved one’s smile! | |
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| With Youth and Morning, from the smoking crater | |
| Of dark Vesuvius, I have seen the sun | |
| Rise diamond-clear upon thy rosy sea, | |
| Thy mountain-islands and romantic shores, | 80 |
| O Naples, beautiful in boyish dreams! | |
| Disparagement seems sacrilege to thee, | |
| And thy domains, divine Parthenope! | |
| Yet may the New World claim fair rivalry, | |
| Her birthright, dowered by the Beautiful, | 85 |
| As here, with such exuberant natural charms | |
| They need no other ornament, and ask | |
| No interest borrowed from the storied past. | |
| What though no monuments nor memories, | |
| No mythic legend and no ethnic verse, | 90 |
| Haunt land and sea, and hallow all the air? | |
| Lo! down this precipice I could drop the plummet | |
| Into a bay surpassing Baia, | |
| By Virgil lined with his Elysian Fields: | |
| There, where its beauty nestles in the mountains, | 95 |
| Gardens are mapped beneath me, dark and rich | |
| With bowers, wherein no Queen of old Romance | |
| Hath woven enchantments and no antique Grace | |
| Breathed sanctity, yet to whose bloomy shades | |
| Dear Nature, visioned like Egeria, | 100 |
| Might come, though universal as the air, | |
| And look into the heart of him who loved her | |
| With a peculiar smile for him alone: | |
| There, in the mountain-shadows glossy green, | |
| Undimpled as the face of quiet thought, | 105 |
| Its waters scarcely crisp enough to mark | |
| Their margin on the silver-sanded shore, | |
| And the ear catches not their cadencing— | |
| Sweet bay of Botofogo! Far away, | |
| Yon Organ Mountains, through whose pipes stupendous, | 110 |
| Shooting up miles into the cloudless ether, | |
| Nature might swell eternal anthem-music | |
| To the beneficent Heaven,—with what superb | |
| Disdain would they o’erlook the Apennines! | |
| Capri and Ischia,—what are they to these | 115 |
| Islands and towery isolations round me, | |
| At once so picturesque and so imposing? | |
| Earth has no equal, glorious as thou art, | |
| Sea of the Siren! to this ocean-flood, | |
| Rolled up among the mountains and the hills; | 120 |
| Sweeping into deep coves with sheltering headlands, | |
| With long curves of white beach and creamy foam; | |
| Its whole broad surface like a shield of silver,— | |
| A noble shield, large as the giant-gods, | |
| Who, climbing Heaven, piled Pelion upon Ossa, | 125 |
| Might have upheld; a glittering shield, embossed | |
| With massive emeralds; such those linkèd hills | |
| And lovely isles seem in their gem-like green. | |
| Upon its bosom the tall thronging ships | |
| Show like a fleet of their own boats at anchor; | 130 |
| And, on its shores, the imperial capital | |
| Of the Brazils is dwarfed so by the distance | |
| It might beseem the court of Liliput, | |
| A populous ant-hill metropolitan: | |
| Yet scarce less spacious the still waters seem | 135 |
| Than when I viewed them from the ship or shore, | |
| Though from this lofty rock o’erlooking them, | |
| O’erlooking with the mountains—my compeers! | |
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| Yea, in the exaltation of my thought, | |
| And actual elevation, these huge piles | 140 |
| Of senseless granite look like things of life, | |
| And I am of them—they are my compeers! | |
| I drink in something of the strong delight | |
| Which plumes the eagle, drinking of the morning, | |
| Ere, soaring upward from his rock-built eyrie, | 145 |
| He melts away, a star into the sunlight. | |
| And I can fancy wingèd Mercury, | |
| When, having stolen Jove’s sceptre for a time, | |
| He lords it from the top of high Olympus,— | |
| The Universe beneath his feathered heel! | 150 |
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| Long shall my sense of ampler being, long | |
| This interfusion with sublimer things | |
| And this perception of diviner power | |
| Than oft are given us, live within my soul! | |
| Long shall this grandeur live upon my eye, | 155 |
| When, with its imagery magnificent, | |
| Its shadows broad and sunbright colorings, | |
| The panorama shall have passed away! * * * * * | |
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