THE TALE OF ARCHAIS
27
Flush ! the music swells apace,
Rolls its silver billows up
Through the void demesné of space
To the heavens’ azure cup !
Hush, my love, and sleep shall sigh
This is immortality !
EPILOGUE.
IN LIOLLOW STONEs, SCAWFELL.
B.LiINnp the iron pinnacles edge the twilight ;
lind and black the ghylls of the mountain
clefted,
Crag and snow-clad slope in a distant
vision
Rise as before me.
Here (it seems) my feet by a tiny torrent
Press the moss with a glad delight of
being :
Here my eyes look up to the riven moun-
tain
Split by the thunder.
Rent and rifted, shattered of wind and
lightning,
Smilten, scarred, and stricken of sun and
tempest,
Seamed with wounds, like adamant, shod
with iron,
Torn by the earthquake.
Still through all the stresses of doubtful
weather
IIfold the firm old pinnacles, sky-defying ;
Still the icy feet of the wind relentless
Walk in their meadows.
Fields that flower not, blossom in no new
spring-tide ;
Fields where grass nor herb nor abounding
darnel
Flourish ; fields more barren, devoid, than
ocean’s
Pasture ungarnered.
Deserts, stone as arid as sand, savannahs!
Black with wrecks, a wilderness
fruitless ;
Still, to me, a land of the bluest heaven
Studded with silver.
evil,
Castles bleak and bare as the wrath of ocean,
Wasted wall and tower, as the blast had risen;
Taken keep and donjon, and hurled them
earthward,
Rent and uprooted.
Such rock-ruins people me tribes and nations,
Kings and queens and princes as pure as
dawning,
Brave as day and true; and a happy people
Lulled into freedom ;
Nations past the stormier times of tyrants,
Past the sudden spark of a great rebellion,
Past the iron gates that are thrust asunder
Not without bloodshed :
Past the rule of might and the rule of lying,
I'ree from gold’s illusion, and free to
cherish
Joys of life diviner than war and passion—
Falsest of phantoms.
Only now true love, like a sun of molten
Glory, surging up from a sea of liquid
Silver, golden, exquisite, overflowing,
Soars into starland,
Sphere on sphere unite in the chant of wonder;
Star to star must add to the glowing chorus ;
Sun and moon must mingle and speed the
echo
Flaming through heaven.
Night and day divide, and the music
strengthens,
Gathers roar of seas and the dirge of moor-
lands;
Tempest, thunder, birds, and the breeze of
summer
Join to augment it.
1 Spanish term for wide, grassy plains.