I HAD a vision, such as fills the eye
That dwells upon the past while shadowing forth
The future, mirroring the things to come.
An icy plain expanded to where sky
And earth met blending; that wild waste was rent,
Ocean-like, rough and barren, onward rolled;
Yawning with black ravines down whose steep sides
Lay the striped snows, far-stretching to where heaved
A wilderness of hills that, cloud-like, rose
Steadfastly fixed, mountains on mountains piled;
Earth's visible Titans watching from their thrones
Great Day and Night reposing at their feet!

II

Earth's glorious forms, her veins that are the streams,
Her hair, the woods, bosomed with heaving hills,
Voiced with winds, waves, and thunders, there were not;
Stilled, and extinct as they had never been.
All was a soundless, motionless wilderness,
Where air was breathless, frozen as the ground.
There Echo, life's elastic spirit, haunting
Else desolate solitudes, was heard no more.
Nought breathed there, fowl, nor creeping thing that lives
And dies in darkness; it was Nature's grave,
Her skeleton bared naked before heaven.
Silence reigned there, presiding deity;
The unreality became a presence,
Whose sway was felt within the heart, and shed
Mystery, and awe, and fear.

III

One lonely crag
From that illimitable plain shot up
Its granite spear. It held communion
Or with the rising and the setting sun;
With tempests rushing round it, answering
While welcoming their fury; with the fine
And subtle motions of the summer air;
With touches of ethereal moonlight coming
And vanishing like spirits; with the Stars,
Those everlasting watchers of the heavens,
Looking down from their brightness on that rock
Of durability that matched their own.

IV

One human being lived and suffered there,
To suffer is to live; upon himself
He took the burthen of humanity,
To prove to man the enduring faculty
Folded within him, the immutable will.
All that he may evoke from depths of thought,
Fathomless as his life; all he may draw
From the imagination's winged power,
That doth exalt above this world of pain;
All that he proves of bodily agony,
Of hope, his nature strengthening; all pangs
Prostrating thought, or maddening; all joys,
Soothing or sublimating life, were borne
Concentrated within that lonely breast.
Upon that open plain the arena spread
Before him and attesting heaven, he watched
Sufferings he felt not; the ordeal was proved,
Endurance had become familiar;
A sense subdued, even as despair or hope,
Subjected to the mind's supremacy.

V

Midway that solitary form was bound;
A shape sublime, as man first walked on earth
In growth developed, when the tree of life
Shot up and flourished, ere disease had sapped,
Time seared, or passion paralysed his powers.
His arms were bound above his head, and feet
Nailed to the cliff without a resting-place.
All the beatitude of holy sleep,
Renewing life foredone, unfolding doors
Of shadowy being to escape the real,
Steeping o'erwearied sense like dew-hung flowers
In soft oblivion, were to him unknown.
Thought dwelt a sleepless spirit in his breast,
Wherefore, but to assert its faculty:
To form the type of the enduring man
Subjecting sense to reason, and oppose
To adverse elements the steadfast will,
Resistance, which is inborn liberty;
Evoking from the depths of his great soul
The spirit of faith, that is the prescience
Of an undying life that disciplines
The earthlier passions to its rule; or hate,
Anger, disdain, or triumph, or despair.

VI

Lo! there ambition's human recompense,
Erring, yet god-like, that could not descend
To own the weakness which is ignorance,
Or yield to agonies that overcame.
What his reward for all he taught and bore?
The worn-out hope, the doubt and the despair
Returning on him still, rock-like repelled
By that impenetrable spirit; these
The harvests won with sweat whose drops were blood;
This the bare height attained to open on
Waste desolation, the Tantalean thirst
Unslaked that lives beyond the grave; these are
The unfabled vultures gnawing on the heart.

VII

The elements whose life is rolling change
Wrought none on him, or when the Sun arose,
Or bade him on that desolate waste farewell.
Whether the fine airs of the summer slept
Around him in the shadows of the rock,
Or tempests wreaked their wrath on his bared head,
His eyes were open; his concentred mind
Worked out its destiny; to infuse in man
The wisdom that, Athena-like, remoulds
From the old clay, that mourns not, nor defies,
Which in vain boasting conscious strength disdains;
Calmly to yield to that necessity
Whose name is life; the Nemesis that sits,
Unseen, but felt, behind the Thunderer's throne!
To share the throbbings of the heart of life,
Upheaving round him, he, the central star;
The image of the deity enthroned
In unapproachable solitude. The lightnings,
Uncurtaining the darkness, flashed upon
His upraised face, where sate endurance still,
On his mute lips compressed with thought; and showed
The embodied will stamped on that marble brow,
Calm, rigid, motionless, immutable!