Mountain Spirit, The
I am the Queen of the Mountain,
I walk the towering crag,
And my song goes out with the cataract's shout
As it leaps from jag to jag.
I wreathe my head with the sun-bows,
Where the waters are torn to mist,
And the plash of my feet into jewels beats
The pool by the moonbeam kissed.
When Hurricane - storm's black shepherd –
Comes driving his bellowing flocks,
I pluck from their fleece the shaggy frieze
That mantles my midnight rocks.
But dyed in the splendors of Morning,
Their robes are like banners unrolled,
When I snatch and sow, through the valleys below,
Her jewels of beryl and gold.
As the feet of a hovering petrel
Have glanced where the breakers curled,
So lightly I've sprung from the avalanche, hung,
Hair-poised, o'er a slumbering world.
With my hand in the eagle's eyrie,
And my foot on the dizziest peak,
I have snatched away his untorn prey
And laughed at his angry shriek!
But when a mysterious murmur,
And rote of invisible things,
Steal down the aisles of my dim defiles,
And you watch as for angel wings,
I sit in the arch of a moon-bow,
Where the mists of the cataract gleam,
And the low, weird hum of my song holds dumb
The world, in a magic dream.
O, I am the Queen of the Mountain!
The door of the dawn I unbar;
And the sunset waits at her golden gates
Till I kindle her evening star.
The cataracts weave my mantle,
Their rainbows are my crown;
This sceptre of mine is a splintered pine,
And the eagle's crag is my throne!
- Title
- Mountain Spirit, The
- Alternative Title
- I am the Queen of the Mountain
- Bibliographic Citation
- Oliver Optic's Magazine: Our Boys and Girls, 18:267:700 (October, 1875)
- Date
- 1875
- Creator
-
George Shepard Burleigh
- Subject
- Mountains
- Bodies of Water: Ocean
- Media
-
The Mountain Spirit