"If thou trowest

How the chemic eddies play,

Pole to pole, and what they say; 235 And that these gray crags

Not on crags are hung,

But beads are of a rosary

On prayer and music strung;

And, credulous, through the granite seeming, 240 Seest the smile of Reason beaming;Can thy style-discerning eye

The hidden-working Builder spy,

Who builds, yet makes no chips, no din,
With hammer soft as snowflake's flight; -

245 Knowest thou this?

O pilgrim, wandering not amiss!
Already my rocks lie light,

And soon my cone will spin.

"For the world was built in order,

250 And the atoms march in tune;

Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder,
The sun obeys them, and the moon.
Orb and atom forth they prance,
When they hear from far the rune,
255 None so backward in the troop,
When the music and the dance
Reach his place and circumstance,
But knows the sun-creating sound,
And, though a pyramid, will bound.

260"Monadnoc is a mountain strong,
Tall and good my kind among;
But well I know, no mountain can,
Zion or Meru, measure with man.

263. Meru is a fabulous mountain in the centre of the world, eighty thousand leagues high, the abode of Vishnu, and a per

For it is on zodiacs writ,

265 Adamant is soft to wit:

And when the greater comes again
With my secret in his brain,

I shall pass, as glides my shadow
Daily over hill and meadow.

270 "Through all time, in light, in gloom, Well I hear the approaching feet

On the flinty pathway beat

Of him that cometh, and shall come;
Of him who shall as lightly bear
275 My daily load of woods and streams,
As doth this round sky-cleaving boat
Which never strains its rocky beams;
Whose timbers, as they silent float,
Alps and Caucasus uprear,

280 And the long Alleghanies here,

And all town-sprinkled lands that be,
Sailing through stars with all their history.

"Every morn I lift my head,

See New England underspread,

285 South from Saint Lawrence to the Sound From Katskill east to the sea-bound. Anchored fast for many an age,

I await the bard and sage,

Who, in large thoughts, like fair pearl-seed,

290 Shall string Monadnoc like a bead.

fect paradise. It may be termed the Hindû Olympus. These lines are in the spirit of the German philosopher Hegel's dictum, that one thought of man outweighed all nature.

276. In this bold figure the earth, with its mountains and town-sprinkled lands, is made the image of the lofty mind which dwells among the higher thoughts, and carries the mountain in its hands as a very little thing.

Comes that cheerful troubadour,

This mound shall throb his face before,
As when, with inward fires and pain,

It rose a bubble from the plain.

295 When he cometh, I shall shed,
From this wellspring in my head,
Fountain-drop of spicier worth
Than all vintage of the earth.
There's fruit upon my barren soil
300 Costlier far than wine or oil.
There's a berry blue and gold,
Autumn-ripe, its juices hold

Sparta's stoutness, Bethlehem's heart,
Asia's rancor, Athens' art,

305 Slowsure Britain's secular might,
And the German's inward sight.

I will give my son to eat
Best of Pan's immortal meat,
Bread to eat, and juice to drain,

310 So the coinage of his brain

Shall not be forms of stars, but stars,
Nor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars.
He comes, but not of that race bred
Who daily climb my specular head.
315 Oft as morning wreathes my scarf,
Fled the last plumule of the Dark,
Pants up hither the spruce clerk
From South Cove and City Wharf.
I take him up my rugged sides,
320 Half-repentant, scant of breath,
Bead-eyes my granite chaos show,

15. The scarf is the vesture of the mountain, and the light of the morning, revealing it, may be said to wind it about the nountain; or it may be the wreathing vapor.

321. I show the little clerk with his bead-eyes my granite chaos and the glittering quartz which is my midsummer snow.

And my midsummer snow;
Open the daunting map beneath, -
All his county, sea and land,
325 Dwarfed to measure of his hand;
His day's ride is a furlong space,
His city-tops a glimmering haze.

I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding:
'See there the grim gray rounding

330 Of the bullet of the earth

Whereon ye sail,

Tumbling steep

In the uncontinented deep.'

He looks on that, and he turns pale. 335 'Tis even so, this treacherous kite, Farm-furrowed, town-incrusted sphere, Thoughtless of its anxious freight, Plunges eyeless on forever;

And he, poor parasite,

340 Cooped in a ship he cannot steer, Who is the captain he knows not, Port or pilot trows not,

Risk or ruin he must share.

I scowl on him with my cloud,
345 With my north wind chill his blood;
I lame him, clattering down the rocks;
And to live he is in fear.

Then, at last, I let him down

Once more into his dapper town,

329. The small-souled man whom the mountain is jeering is bidden scan the horizon and see the immensity of the universe in which his little earth is rolling. The petty soul trembles before this vastness as the looked for mighty one was to comprehend and weigh it all in his balances. The contrast is between the blind animal-man, overpowered by nature, and the god-like Boul-man serenely ruling nature.

350 To chatter, frightened, to his clan, And forget me if he can."

As in the old poetic fame
The gods are blind and lame,
And the simular despite

355 Betrays the more abounding might.

So call not waste that barren cone
Above the floral zone,

Where forests starve:

It is pure use;

360 What sheaves like those which here we glean and

bind

Of a celestial Ceres and the Muse?

Ages are thy days,

Thou grand affirmer of the present tense,

And type of permanence!

365 Firm ensign of the fatal Being,

Amid these coward shapes of joy and grief,
That will not bide the seeing!

Hither we bring

Our insect miseries to thy rocks;

370 And the whole flight, with folded wing,
Vanish, and end their murmuring, -
Vanish beside these dedicated blocks,
Which who can tell what mason laid?
Spoils of a front none need restore,

375 Replacing frieze and architrave;

Yet flowers each stone rosette and metope brave;

352. Fame, common story.

374. In remote allusion to the removal to England of the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon at Athens; there was much discussion as to the right of England to these spoils, which were granted by the Turkish government, and a murmur in Greece after independence was obtained, that they should be restored.