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(From Dorchester Amphitheatre)
WHO may misprize Dorchestrian hills? What though | |
| They tower to no such height as looks with scorn | |
| Over a dwindled plain; what though no crags | |
| Be there to fortify; no forest belts | |
| To gird them midway round; yet theirs, instead, | 5 |
| Are graceful slopes with shadowy dips between, | |
| And theirs are breezy summits, not too high | |
| To recognize familiar sights, and catch | |
| Familiar sounds of life,—the ploughman’s call, | |
| Or tinkling from the fold. Yet thence the eye | 10 |
| Feeds on no stinted landscape, sky and earth | |
| And the blue sea; and thence may wingéd thought, | |
| Which ever loves the vantage-ground of hills, | |
| Launch amid buoyant air, and soar at will. | |
| |
| Fair, amid these, art thou, camp-crested Mount, | 15 |
| In some far time, for some forgotten cause, | |
| Named of the Maiden. 1 Nor doth surer lore | |
| Attest if Briton or if Roman wound | |
| These triple trenches round thee; regular | |
| As terraces, by architect upbuilt | 20 |
| For princely pleasure-ground, or those, far-famed, | |
| By ancient hunters made—so some have deemed— | |
| Or else by Nature’s self in wild Glenroy. | |
| Along thy sides they stretch, ring above ring, | |
| Marking thee from afar; then vanish round | 25 |
| Like the broad shingly banks which ocean heaves | |
| In noble curves along his winding shore. | |
| The passing wayfarer with wonder views, | |
| E’en at imperfect distance, their bold lines, | |
| And asks the who, the wherefore, and the when; | 30 |
| Wafting his spirit back into far times, | |
| And dreaming as he goes. But whoso stays, | |
| And climbs the turf-way to thy tabled top, | |
| Shall reap a fuller wonder; shall behold | |
| Thy girdled area, of itself a plain, | 35 |
| Where widely feeds the scattered flock; shall mark | |
| Thy trenches, complicate with warlike art, | |
| And deep almost as natural ravine | |
| Cut in the mountain; or some startling rent | |
| In the blue-gleaming glacier; or as clefts, | 40 |
| Severing the black and jagged lava-walls, | |
| Which old Vesuvius round his crater flings,— | |
| Outworks, to guard the mysteries within. | |
| But these are smooth and verdant. Tamed long since, | |
| Breastwork abrupt and palisaded mound | 45 |
| Are, now, but sloping greensward; as if Nature, | |
| Who vainly her mild moral reads to man, | |
| Still strove to realize the blessed days, | |
| By seers avouched, by statesmen turned to dreams, | |
When war shall be no more.
So mused I there! | 50 |
| As who had failed to muse? But now the sun, | |
| Silently sunken, with departing light | |
| Had fused the whole horizon; not alone | |
| His western realm, but flooded refluent gold | |
| Back to the southern hills, along whose tops | 55 |
| Are seen to stretch, in far continuous line, | |
| Sepulchral barrows. Brightly-verdant cones | |
| I marked them rise beneath his earlier ray; | |
| But now they stood against that orange light | |
| Each of a velvet blackness, like the bier | 60 |
| Before some high-illumined altar spread | |
| When a king lies in state; and well might seem | |
| To twilight fantasy like funeral palls, | |
| Shrouding the bones of aboriginal men, | |
| Who there had lived and died, long ere our tribes | 65 |
| Had heard the name or felt the conquering arms | |
| Of Rome or Roman; or as yet had seen, | |
| Mocking their hearths of clay and turf-built huts, | |
| The prætor’s quaint mosaic or tiled bath; | |
| Or heard our hard school-task, the phrase of Terence | 70 |
| Bandied in common parlance round the land. * * * * * | |
