Awe in his breast with holiest love unites, And the near heavens impart their own delights. When downward to his winter hut he goes, Through Nature's vale his homely pleasures glide, With one bright bell, a favorite heifer's neck; Of thrice ten summers dignify the board. Alas! in every clime a flying ray Is all we have to cheer our wintry way; And here the unwilling mind may more than trace The general sorrows of the human race: Full oft the father, when his sons have grown When long familiar joys are all resigned, Why does their sad remembrance haunt the mind? Lo! where through flat Batavia's willowy groves, O'er the curled waters Alpine measures swell, * The well known effect of the famous air, called in French Ranz des Vaches, upon the Swiss troops. Gay lark of hope, thy silent song resume! Ye flattering eastern lights, once more the hills illume! Fresh gales and dews of life's delicious morn, Fades like the lustre of an evening cloud; 'Mid savage rocks, and seas of snow that shine Between interminable tracts of pine, Within a temple stands an awful shrine, By an uncertain light revealed, that falls On the mute Image and the troubled walls. Oh! give not me that eye of hard disdain That views, undimmed, Ensiedlen's* wretched fane. While ghastly faces through the gloom appear, Abortive joy, and hope that works in fear; While prayer contends with silenced agony, Surely in other thoughts contempt may die. If the sad grave of human ignorance bear One flower of hope — oh, pass and leave it there! - *This shrine is resorted to, from a hope of relief, by multitudes, from every corner of the Catholic world, laboring under mental or bodily afflictions. The tall sun, pausing on an Alpine spire, Flings o'er the wilderness a stream of fire: Now meet we other pilgrims ere the day Close on the remnant of their weary way; While they are drawing toward the sacred floor Where, so they fondly think, the worm shall gnaw no more. How gayly murmur and how sweetly taste The fountains * reared for them amid the waste! Their thirst they slake: — they wash their toilworn feet, And some with tears of joy each other greet. In that glad moment when your hands are prest Last, let us turn to Chamouny, that shields With rocks and gloomy woods her fertile fields: Five streams of ice amid her cots descend, And with wild flowers and blooming orchards blend ; A scene more fair than what the Grecian feigns Of purple lights and ever-vernal plains ; Here all the seasons revel hand in hand: *Rude fountains built and covered with sheds for the accommodation of the pilgrims, in their ascent of the mountain. 'Mid lawns and shades by breezy rivulets fanned, They sport beneath that mountain's matchless height That holds no commerce with the summer night. What marvel then if many a Wanderer sigh, While roars the sullen Arve in anger by, That not for thy reward, unrivall❜d Vale! Waves the ripe harvest in the autumnal gale; That thou, the slave of slaves, art doomed to pine And droop, while no Italian arts are thine, To soothe or cheer, to soften or refine. Hail Freedom! whether it was mine to stray, With shrill winds whistling round my lonely way, On the bleak sides of Cumbria's heath-clad moors, Or where dank sea-weed lashes Scotland's shores; To scent the sweets of Piedmont's breathing rose, And orange gale that o'er Lugano blows; Still have I found, where Tyranny prevails, That virtue languishes and pleasure fails, While the remotest hamlets blessings share In thy loved presence known, and only there; Heart-blessings,—outward treasures too which the eye |