Changed and wild the picture rising; land of crags and mountains riven
From their thunder-splitten foreheads shot their granite spears in heaven;
Chasms by the earthquake cloven through rent Nature's sides apart,
Her Titanic ribs revealing and bared pulses of her heart.

Caverns fathomless of darkness lightened by the eyeballs gleaming
Of the torrent wildly flashing, o'er its headlong pathway streaming;
Where ancestral Chaos lingers buried mid his wrecks alone,
Heat, cold, damp, the Anarch-triad, ever warring round his throne.

Where the sky pales through the fissures of earth's blue veins ice-embossed,
Palsied by enduring winter, hardened by eternal frost;
Where faint wild flowers in life blossom but to feel that life's decay,
In the sunbeams failing o'er them, fleeting and as frail as they;

Where fantastic heat, bright Summer's daughter, with dishevelled hair
In her loosened vestrejoicing, trips along, nor pauses there,
From those bearded Mountains turning with their brows austere and grey,
Where behind them, robed in sunlight, lurks and laughs Italian day.

Where the sun mid swirling storm-clouds from the rack glares out in wrath,
Through the vapours by its red rays rent as by the thunder-path.
Lighting with the levin's flashings the pale mists that bodying rise
From the gorges' depths, like giants still aspiring to the skies;

Where the winds, their eddying circles broken, mid imprisoning walls,
How! along on maddened pinions; where the rushing cataract calls
On the storm met midway bursting; where the mountain from it flings
The wild avalanche descended on annihilating wings;

Where, throned o'er the unheard turmoil, silent as a steadfast cloud,
B LANC apart enfolded rises wrapped in his eternal shroud,
Lone in heaven as the Angel that before the Godhead stands,
The white wreath around his forehead, and the incense in his hands;—

'T is the land that stamps its purpose on the Switzer's iron soul,
Cradled by the tempests, sharing their fierce freedom as they roll;
But, as on austerest foreheads dwells awhile a mood serene,
As, mid rack of thunderous vapour hues of azure tint are seen,

So the mountain's wildest foreheads, with expression softened, greet
Beauty sleeping on their bosoms, or reposing at their feet;
Nor hath poet dreamed Arcadia with a richer glory crowned
Than where blue-eyed Vevay slumbers with her hills engirding round.

So the Pilgrim deemed while gazing on her from the craggy peak,
Its grey forehead in the Leman mellowed with a tenderer streak,
Drinking in his heart the sunbeams as they fondly lingered there,
While he felt pervading beauty, spirit-like, filled earth and air.

But all changed that Pilgrim's aspect, time and he had met too soon,
And his brow with trenches furrowed, ere touched on his manhood's noon,
But the visage calm and passive of resignment showed the trace
Of a brotherhood recorded that had mingled with his race.

Like a pale hill rose his forehead, shadowed by the mist of years,
Scathed by passion's fiery traces, channelled by repentant tears;
On its wasted sides the verdure still renewed and softening spread
O'er the furrowed fissures, blending with the ashes on its head.

He looked down on Ferney, nameless until deathlessly entwined
With a living Spirit, stamping there its impress on mankind;
Potency of good and evil, till that spot a shrine became,
Where the pilgrims from the idol drew a portion of their fame.

For that Titan the mind's lightnings, ray-like, gathered in his own,
Till its strength concentred, striking, shook an empire, rent a throne;
And the shivered toys cast round him, with life's farce the Proteus played,
Mocking veneration outraged, feelings withered, faiths decayed.

The light-bearer walking earthward with his torch awhile astray,
Bard, historian, wit, sophist, triumphs won and passed away;
But his name ensphered by memory the great leader that assailed
Tyranny and foiled, that plucked the mask from falsehood's face unveiled.

He turned to a lesser spirit; to the ever-restless mind
That with Meillerie its errings and a fame unholy joined,
Who before great Nature's altars dared his inmost heart unfold,
All its shrouding veils discarded, all its pangs and madness told,

By the air inspired and mountains; till a prophet he became,
Whose quick words were inspirations, whose live oracles were flame;
Eloquence that on its weakness like a fallen angel leant,
That the bonds of virtue loosened and the social compact rent.

Clay with life spiritual blended, grandeur with the base allied,
Vanity by falsehood cradled, slave-humility by pride;
Self-love that confronted Godhead with confession's book unsealed,
Glorying in the sinuous windings of a reptile life revealed.

But within that fiery passion dwelt persuasion's tongue that made
Error lovely, till the spirit knelt to idols that betrayed;
Till confession even of baseness took from him a glorious tone,
Until colder bosoms thirsted that such utterance were their own.

But man leaves sand-printed traces; on Life's mighty ocean flows,
And the tide effacing slowly human foot-prints comes and goes;
Creeds of falsehood, sophist-visions, pass forgotten to the deep,
Pride ownsin the grave its pillow, vanity at last doth sleep.

And that Pilgrim turned from sophists, from grey teachers of the taught,
Child-like, uninstructed, seeking the lost footsteps of his thought,
Ties that bound him still to kindred, feelings that allied to earth,
And the faith beyond revealing a regenerated birth.

Breathless on the midnight mountains he had stood, on earth's lone brink,
And behind her heaving bosom watched the star-motes rise and sink,
There, where galaxied the cities of the Archetype revealed,
Scintillating space like bright eyes watching o'er that flower-crowned field.

Sunned with temples ever radiant, swept by tides of astral fires,
Serpenting through isles, whose being their ethereal light inspires;
Along constellated spaces, on unknown and viewless strands,
Where the sun-fire, gathering slowly, into widening life expands;

Conscious of a life perturbing that dwelt in them and around,
Of a presence felt but hidden, a creator but unfound;
Restlessness for ever striving to put forth its strength suppressed;
Everlasting motion throbbing from the central heart of rest!

So he watched those star-mists wandering streamlike in their sinuous course,
In their filamentous threadings gathering round a sightless source;
Like the folds unwreathing slowly that the spiral shell conceals,
Or the scrolls of light unwoven which the law of God reveals.

And the ever-breathless silence, living and pervading, felt
As a presence whose existence was the space wherein it dwelt;
Ocean of absorbing being spread our feeble ken before,
On whose flashing glories gazing we stand idly, and adore.

Where the old Assyrian, watching, saw in each a god enthroned,
Till he breathed that idol-worship which the heart hath not disowned;
Where the Grecian gazed till fancy from those woven leaves unsphered
Hero-forms, and shapes of beauty, brightening there, by time unseared;

There, where like a mighty ruin in the desert, Saturn crowned
Sits, the grey clouds on his forehead, with his belts of vapour bound,
While his moons like watchful spirits wheel around his misty throne,
With a motion stilled, and silence as unbroken as his own!

Where Cassiopeia, braiding her gemmed tresses, sits in pride
Of the beauty that the Nereids in their caves of pearl defied;
Where Andromeda her girdle circles round her form divine;
Where o'er Perseus' waving falchion studded lights like flower-wreaths twine;

Where Alcyone sits, queen-like, throned upon her radiant floor,
Glorified with rays whose lustre faintly tremble on our shore;
Where the Sister Pleiads veiling their bright eyes foretell the storm;
Where through meteor-phantoms cleaving gleams Orion's giant form!

From such aching visions turning, on the grass-blade he reposed,
On the lowliest plant beneath him that its asking eye unclosed.
There he saw the Eternal mirrored; there the secret pulse was shown
Of the life and conscious feeling germed and flowing from his own.

He felt man's profoundest wisdom was to turn to things he knew,
To the fruits of good and evil that on his own life-tree grew;
That one spirit's thought unfolded, that one feeling's source confessed,
Opened more to him of knowledge than that infinite expressed.