Among the Mountains
My mountains, how I love your forms that stand
So beautiful, so bleak, so grim, so grand.
Your gleaming crags above my boyhood’s play,
Undimm’d as hope, rose o’er each rising day.
When now light hope has yielded place to care,
O’er steadfast work I see you steadfast there.
And when old age at last shall yearn for rest,
By your white peaks will each aspiring glance be blest.
How bright and broad with ever fresh surprise,
The scenes ye brought allured my youthful eyes!
Now, when rude hands those views of old assail,
When growing towns have changed the lower vale,
When other friends are lost or sadly strange,
Ye stand familiar still, ye do not change.
And when all else abides as now no more,
In you I still may see the forms I loved of yore.
Ye mounts deserve long life. Your peaks at dawn
Catch light no sooner from the night withdrawn,
Than those ye rear see truth, when brave men vow
To serve the serf, and bid the despot bow.
In vales below, if tyrants make men mild,
The weak who scale your sides learn winds are wild,
That beasts break loose, and birds awaken’d flee,
As if in deepest sleep they dream’d of being free.
High homes of manhood, human lips can phrase
No tribute fit to echo half your praise.
By Piedmont’s church and Ziska’s rock-wall’d see,
By Swiss and Scot who left their children free,
By our New England, when she named him knave
Who, flank’d by bloodhounds, chased his fleeing slave,
Stand ye like them, whose memories, ever grand,
Tower far above earth’s lords, as ye above its land.
Ay, stand like monuments in lasting stone
To souls as lofty as the world has known.
Ye fitly symbol, when with kindling light
The dawn and sunset gild your summits white,
The glories of their pure, aspiring worth
Who aim’d at stars to feed the hopes of earth;
And fitly point where they, in brighter skies,
View grander scenes than yours where your heights cannot rise.