Ice Crystals (1881)

Lives there not deep in Nature's heart a spark
     Of some divine, unquenchable fire?
A spirit working in the ley dark; 
An aim no hinderance forces from its mark,
     A dumb, unconquerable desire?
An eager, stretching of invisible hands
          From the midnight of the tomb
          Toward the sunshine and the bloom?
An instant to break from the duplicate hands
          Of destruction and death,
          To rise and re-make
In spectral show, the summer’s Golden Age?
          Despite the Winter’s biting breath,
          The storm-god’s eyeless rage?
Aye, in the very victory of the frost,
When Beauty’s scepter seems forever lost,
          We see the blind groping,
          The yearning and hoping
That, smothered under the frozen sod,
     Stirs the dull heart of Earth with thrills
Of the creative fiat, as when God
     Spake, and the world was!
          See; the air that chills
     The hueless blood of the titan hills,
Turns every drop to beauty! On the pane
That charms from you the winter’s bitter reign
          Your light, invisible breath
          Caught by that angel of death,
Slips from his mortal clutch and lives again,
In all weird phantasies, and subtle dreams
Of earliest foliage, such as fringed the streams
Of the young world when glorious life began
In splendid solitudes, ere the bird of man!
The dying world remembers her first-born;
     Forgetting all the wealth of fruit, and blooms
Of latest summer, and her greenery torn
     By the last gales of autumn, she resumes
The old, old fashions, in her senile thought,
The fleeting phantoms of the forms she wrought
In untold ages gone,— those splendid ferns
That made the living drapery of the urns
Of nymph and naiad, and those feathery palms
          That filled the golden calms
Of endless tropics as with angel-plumes;
And pines primeval, with primeval glooms
Meshed in their branches, and whose deep roots lay
Close to the central fires, while rose the spray
In airs no wing-beat winnowed! These and more
Fantastic shapes than ever in Beauty’s train
          That gorgeous summer wore
          To glorify her reign,
In crystal splendor crowd the frosty pane.

Along the roadside where the moistened earth
     Touched by the chemic frost, shoots, crystal-pure,
     A thousand mimic towers in miniature,
As of a fairy city;—in fierce mirth
The loitering school-boy, who in fancy plays
     The role of earthquake, with an eager dash
Tramples down Lisbons and Calabrias
     And feels exultant in the crash and clash
Of crumbling turrets and keen spires of white,
Built by the frost-gnome in a single night!
And he remembers in a far-off day
The beauty lavished on his lowly way,
After the joy titanic to have wrecked
All the weird work of that blind architect!