ad
All her gifts on the shrine,
Though the glass may be red
With the blush of the vine,
What boots--if the while
Fall no spark on the hearth;
If the heart do not smile
With the instinct of mirth?--
From the clouds, from God's breast
Must our happiness fall,
'Mid the blessed, most blest
Is the moment of all!
Since creation began
All that mortals have wrought,
All that's godlike in man
Comes--the flash of a thought!
For ages the stone
In the quarry may lurk,
An instant alone
Can suffice to the work;
An impulse give birth
To the child of the soul,
A glance stamp the worth
And the fame of the whole. [17]
On the arch that she buildeth
From sunbeams on high,
As Iris just gildeth,
And fleets from the sky,
So shineth, so gloometh
Each gift that is ours;
The lightning illumeth--
The darkness devours! [18]

THE LAY OF THE MOUNTAIN.

[The scenery of Gotthardt is here personified.]

To the solemn abyss leads the terrible path,
The life and death winding dizzy between;
In thy desolate way, grim with menace and wrath,
To daunt thee the spectres of giants are seen;
That thou wake not the wild one [20], all silently tread--
Let thy lip breathe no breath in the pathway of dread!

High over the marge of the horrible deep
Hangs and hovers a bridge with its phantom-like span, [21]
Not by man was it built, o'er the vastness to sweep;
Such thought never came to the daring of man!
The stream roars beneath--late and early it raves--
But the bridge, which it threatens, is safe from the waves.

Black-yawning a portal, thy soul to affright,
Like the gate to the kingdom, the fiend for the king--
Yet beyond it there smiles but a land of delight,
Where the autumn in marriage is met with the spring.
From a lot which the care and the trouble assail,
Could I fly to the bliss of that balm-breathing vale!

Through that field, from a fount ever hidden their birth,
Four rivers in tumult rush roaringly forth;
They fly to the fourfold divisions of earth--
The sunrise, the sunset, the south, and the north.
And, true to the mystical mother that bore,
Forth they rush to their goal, and are lost evermore.

High over the races of men in the blue
Of the ether, the mount in twin summits is riven;
There, veiled in the gold-w