ng-lit,
Scurried up a dewy gray.
Vague as in Romance we saw
From the fog one riven trunk,
Its huge horny talons shrunk,
Thrust a hungry dragon's claw.
And we climbed two hours thro'
The dawn-dripping Jellicoes,
To that wooded rock that shows
Undulating peaks of blue:
The vast Cumberlands that sleep,
Weighed with soaring forests, far
To the concave welkin's bar,
Leagues on leagues of purple sweep.
Range exalted over range
Billowed their enormous spines,
And we heard the priestly pines
Hum the wisdom of their change.
We were sons of Nature then;
She had taken us to her,
Closer drawn by brier and burr,
There on lonely Devil's Den.
We were pupils of her moods:
Taught the beauties of her loins
In those bloom-anointed coignes,--
Love in her eternal woods:
How she bore or flower or bud;
Pithed the wiry sapling-oak;
In the long vine zeal awoke
Aye to climb a leafy flood.
Her waste fantasies of birth:
Sponge-like exudations fair--
Dainty fungi everywhere
Bulging from the loamy earth.
Coral-vegetable things;
Crystals clamily exhaled;
Bulbous, marble-ribbed and scaled,
Vip'rous colored; then close rings
Of the Indian Pipe that cleft
Pink and white the woodland lax,--
Blossoms of a natural wax
The brown mountain-fairies left.
We on that parched precipice,
Stretched beneath the chestnuts' burrs,
Breathed the balsam of the firs,
Felt the blue sky like a kiss.
Soft that heaven; stainless as
The grand woodlands lunging on,
Wound majestic in the sun,
Or as our devotion was!
Freedom sat there cragged we saw,
Freedom whom hoarse forests sang;
Heaven-browed her eyes, whence sprang
Audience august with law.
Wildernesses, from her hips
Sprung the giant forests there,
Tossed the cataracts from her hair,
Thunders lightened from her lips.
Oft some scavenger, with vane
Motionless, above we knew
Wheeled thro' altitudes of blue
By his rapid shadow's stain.
Or some cloud of sunny white,--
Puffed a lazy drift of pearl,--
Balmy breezes o'er would whirl
Shot with coruscating light.
So we dreamed an hour upon
Those warm rocks, dry, lichen-scabbed.
Lounged beneath long leaves that dabbed
At us coins of shade and sun.
Then arose and down some gorge
Made a bowldered torrent broad
The hurled pathway of our roa