Among the Rocks

Aloft here, on the steep hill's crown, what mean 
These mighty ruins of primeval rock,
Scarred by the storms of many a thousand years, 
And strewn with fallen trunks that night have been
The javelins of beleaguering Anakim,—
Wrecks of an ancient world, the harsh, gray thrones
Of desolation and her awful peers?
Was here the armory of some giant brood.
Titans who warred with the Olympian gods, 
And there their jagged weapons, on the ridge 
Confus’dly piled,—petrific thunder bolts,
Ready to their fierce hands for prompt reply 
To Jove's descending fire-balls? or rude crags 
Wrenched from the steadfast hills to overwhelm 
The rebel angels in that wilder war 
That shook all heaven but heaven's Eternal Throne?

Well might we deem, to watch these blocks alone, 
We are pushed back uncounted centuries 
Nearer that awful overthrow, and see 
In the black, tattered lichens, shriveled shreds 
Of their torn scalps, that all the irreverent winds 
Hiss in triumphant scorn! While here and there
Those gentler natures—summer rain and sun—
Spread a soft mantle of green-and-golden moss
Over the blood-marks on the fatal crags!
Here the grim past confronts the golden now;
Far down the vale the fresh'ning landscapes bloom, 
While ghastly ruin holds the ancestral peaks.
We stand upon the rifted battlements
Where fierce convulsion made his last assault
When vasty Hrym, the hyperborean god, 
Drove his slew engine of the glacier, 
Patient and irresistible as fate!
That car at once was sea and continent:
A million winters to a plough-share forged
On the pole's anvil by eternal frost, 
To mellow the Impregnable rock to soil!
Thus far that rending coulter pushed its clods, 
Thus far that frozen ocean's age-long tides
Bore the crushed bones of mountains, as our sea 
Its grinding pebbles; and even like the sea, 
Just here it met God's flat, and stood still!
Then slowly, sullenly the old Norse Hrym, 
Battling the young Apollo, inch by inch 
Retreated to his hyperborean lair,
And left this drift-wrack of his silent shore!

Before us, while we stand upon the verge 
And shore-line of that icy deluge old,
Far as the eye can traverse the broad vale, 
To where the blue earth, with the horizon's ring, 
Weds the blue heaven, we see the nearer fields 
Gold-green and rippling in the bland May air, 
Where happy homes of mingled toll and peace 
Send up their slender threads of hearth-fire smoke 
To tint and mellow the deep atmosphere:
And far and faint, the thronging villages 
Lift the white spires of worship, and the shafts 
Of work, the hundred armed Briareus.
And every roof, and every sooty pile 
Gives a dream-glimpse of plenty, joy and love, 
To come like waves of sunshine on these crags, 
Hiding the old, dead ages they evoke,
As their most tender mosses hide the rock.

Thus gathered on the boundary of two worlds, 
The fair and frightful, we make peace between them,
Filling the hours with grave or merry thought, 
With words of wisdom, tramp of eager feet, 
And blithe girl laughter echoing from the wood;
The grim past vanishes, and glad to-day 
Is round us redolent of blooming May!