11. Ye are not one alike! In fork and fell,— To spurn most distant each retiring dell! Lightnings have scathed your peaks but could not quell And were this all, how noble 't were to gaze, To call each height by its own rank and shape, While with a rising joyance of amaze We saw, as sudden pass and gorge should gape, A scale to try where still in richer blaze Earth shoots sublime to Heaven's blue waves her loftiest Cape! III. But ye are more! The Monuments of power! may start, His love would fill the void itself alone! And writes it on your Tablets of unmouldering stone! IV. My soul swells through you! On you live once more,- Or heave on high the thunder-rifted head,— Through all their grand and ever-varying range The great Jehovah's fixed and loved abode. Fair Olivet, from Thee ascends our God! V. Ye to me always were a life intense! My youth disported on your cliffs at ease, My cheek, unfurrowed then! flushed in your breeze ;While infancy reposed 'neath your defence, Still would mine eye trace out the uplands whence Ye left our nether earth, and then combined With your proud barriers other worlds behind, The curtains of unknown magnificence ! How my mind teemed with your sublimity! -Its transcendental thoughts were then its life, And as it wrought itself a passage free, Present and past, like flow and ebb in strife, Chafed up its yearnings to their last degree! And my heart strangely grew with feelings new and rife! VI. Ye are not strewn in vain ! Ye have a voice, When silvery runnels tinkle, mix, and greet :- And the deep-groaning belted Forest shakes,— Who tunes your mighty music! Low incline Plains, Streams, and Woods, with you shall vie in zeal,— VII. Since eye first rested on your wondrous heaps, What looks of youth and age, of grief and joy, Have turned toward you nor found that ye could cloy, And yet the fondest in its burial sleeps, And from its orbit the foul reptile creeps! What awful changes roll on at your base! Nathless the turmoil strives in vain to rase Your rock-foundations, or to bow your steeps! For all is else inconstant,-though it seem Firm and trustworthy, 't is the wind and cloud : And Hope is the poor offspring of a dream,— The husbandman the empty air has ploughed,The pilgrim faints o'er the false mirage-stream,And there is only left, the bier, the grave, the shroud! VIII. Blest trance of calm! A sabbath evening stays, O sweet among these grandeurs 't is to find SONNETS COMPOSED AT THE SEA-SIDE AND IN VIEW OF FLAMBOROUGH HEAD. THE SEA. WHATE'ER man images of profound and great! In tide and main and ocean, Thou roll'st round! In gentlest ripple,—heave by cape, through strait ! M M Like lute Æolian or in trumpet-peals! Eternal Grand and Fair! Thy power can strew As spray, and break as foam, the proudest keels! Beneath the orient, or at eve, what hue Thy crisped surface like a prism steals,— Earth's fairest green, and Heaven's deepest blue ! THE CALM. WHAT is this field so smooth? No furrowed trace ? Where undistracted stellar concaves shine, THE TEMPEST. THE storm-clouds burst along as demon-vans |