Eleven years, and two fair months beside,
Full to the brim with various love and joy,
My life has known since last I drew apart
Into this huge sky-shouldering mountain dome,
And, listening, heard the winds among the pines
Making a music as of countless choirs,
Chanting in sweet and solemn unison;
And, standing here where God's artificers,
Angels of frost and fire and sun and storm,
Have made a floor with nameless gems inlaid,
Saw, like a roof, the slopes of living green
Go cleaving down to meet the lower hills, —
Firm-buttressed walls, their bases over-grown
With meadow-sweet and ferns and tangled vines,
And all that makes the road-sides beautiful;
While, all around me, other domes arose,
Girded with towers and eager pinnacles,
Into the silent and astonished air.
Full oft, since then, up-looking from below,
As naught to me has been the pleasantness
Of meadows broad, and, 'mid them, flowing wide
The Androscoggin's dark empurpled stream,
Enamoured of thine awful loveliness,
Thy draperies of forests overspread
With shadows and with silvery, shining mists,
Thy dark ravines and cloud-conversing top,
Where it would almost seem that one might hear
The talk of angels in the happy blue; —
And so, in truth, my heart has heard to-day.

Dear sacred Mount, not thine alone the charm
By which thou dost so overmaster me,
But something in thy lover's beating heart,
Something of memories vague and fond and sweet,
Something of what he cannot be again,
Something of sharp regret for vanished joys,
And faces that he may no more behold,
And voices that he listens for in vain,
And feet whose welcome sound he hears no more,
And hands whose touch could make his being thrill
With love's dear rapture of delicious pain, —
Something of all the years that he has lived,
Of all the joy and sorrow he has known,
Since first with eager feet and heart aflame
He struggled up thy steep and shaggy sides,
Sun-flecked, leaf-shaded realms of life in death,
And stood, as now, upon thy topmost crest,
Trembling with joy and tender unto tears; —
Something of all these things mingles with thee, —
Green of thy leaves and whiteness of thy clouds,
Rush of thy streams and rustle of thy pines, —
With all thy strength and all thy tenderness,
Till thou art loved not for thyself alone,
But for the love of many who are gone,
And most of all for one who still remains
To make all sights more fair, all sounds more sweet,
All life more dear and glad and wonderful.

Eleven years, and thou so little changed!
No change but what the changing season brings;
For then, in June, thou wast all greenery;
Now, in September, thou art turning sere,
Or hanging many a leafy banner out,
Blazoned with gold; and 'mid the sombre rows
Of priest-like pines, along thy forest aisles,
Gleams here and there a red-cloaked cardinal;
And old decay is covered everywhere
With the fresh-fallen leaves, making such show
As never caliph with his floors entiled
With warmest-hued and shapeliest arabesques.
Thou hast not changed. As it were yesterday
I stood upon thy moss-grown parapet,
Familiar seems each lightning-splintered crag,
Each slope that shimmers in the sunny wind,
Each outer court through which with crackling tread
I pressed into thy presence-chamber vast,
And dared to sit upon thy sculptured throne.
Still through the broad and grassy intervale
The river into which thy torrents run
Flows swiftly on, setting with amethyst
Full many a little emerald-tinted isle,
Past many a pebbly, drought-discovered shoal,
And over many a shallow, rippling ford,
For ever singing as it hurries by,
Impatient to be mingled with the sea.
And still on every side stand reaching up
Into the blue, illimitable air
Thy huge, sky-cleaving, cloud-compelling peers,
Baring their knotted bosoms to the sun.
Still, as of yore, the shadows troop adown
Their mighty slopes, or ever deeper grow
Amid the brawn of every dark ravine.
Thou art not changed; the same from year to year
Are all thy great and dear companions.
There comes to thee no morn when thou dost miss
This one or that from his accustomed place,
And watch in vain for him to come again.
Would it were so with me! But, as I gaze
Abroad upon thy stalwart brotherhood,
A dimness comes, which is not of the hills,
Between me and their everlastingness,
To think that since I hailed thy glory first
So many of my mates have gone away
Beyond the misty mountain-tops of death,
That well-nigh for each peak I count a grave.
Fades out the valley's peace, the purple glow
That now begins to bathe the distant hills,
And in their stead I see the faces strong
And sweet of dear ones whom I shall not meet again
Until I bid my last farewell to thee.

Dear, mighty friend, oh deem not that I chide
Aught thou hast done to make thyself appear
Spectral and dim, and with thee all thy kin,
And nothing real but those faces pure
That in the infinite space of heart and mind
Press cheek to cheek, so dense the angel-throng;
As in the backgrounds Raphael loved to paint
For Mary and her wonder-gifted child:
No other service thou couldst render me
Would seem so tender and so good as this.
Yet were my heart ungrateful if alone
Of vanished joys I heard the solemn voice
Of all thy sounds and all thy silences
Soft-speaking, here, as hour succeeds to hour,
Each than the last more rare and mystical.
" Though much has gone, " thou say'st, " since first I tried
Thy youthful strength with rigors all unknown,
How much remains! How much is now thine own
Which then thou hadst no knowledge of or dream!
What joy of friends and books, and perfect days
When earth to heaven seemed nearer than its wont;
What sacred hours of high companionship;
What deeper love where love was rife before;
What faces and what voices from the void,
Shaping themselves for thee to bend and kiss,
Rounding themselves for thee to list and hear;
What deeper sense of all the mystery
In which thou liest embosomed evermore! "

Thou sayest this? Nay, 'tis no voice of thine.
Not to remember either loss or gain
Do thy enchantments lure the hearts of men.
'Tis their device to use thy beetling crags
For rock-hewn stairs, by which they may ascend
To secret shrines of memory and prayer.
'Tis thine to make them lose themselves in thee;
Ay, to forget their individual life,
And feel themselves but parts of that which breathes
With thy sweet-scented breath of trees that sway
And rustle in the wind; of that which creeps
In every lichen's slow and noiseless tread,
Or warms thy heart with ardors of the sun,
Sleep, mind and heart, and let the body wake
And every sense with speechless rapture thrill.
Full soon, somehow, God's wondrous alchemy
The senses' joy shall turn to spirit's praise;
Seeing that soul and sense are not at war,
But each the other's gentle servitor.
Drink deep, O sense, and there shall come a day
When heart and soul shall share thy freshening.
And for this perfect peace in which I lie,
Bathing myself in heaven's upper air,
Curtained with clouds, with carpets for my feet
Such as the proudest sultan could not buy
With all the hoarded wealth of centuries, —
For this I know, that when — no, not too soon —
Again I thread the city's crowded ways,
And mingle with its mighty swarm of men,
And bend myself to do the tasks I love,
I shall with stouter heart and firmer mind
Pursue my way; sustained by greater hopes;
Cheered by a deeper faith in all the world,
And a more loving trust, my God, in Thee.