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| HAIL to thee, monarch of African mountains, | |
| Remote, inaccessible, silent, and lone,— | |
| Who, from the heart of the tropical fervors, | |
| Liftest to heaven thine alien snows, | |
| Feeding forever the fountains that make thee | 5 |
| Father of Nile and Creator of Egypt! | |
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| The years of the world are engraved on thy forehead; | |
| Time’s morning blushed red on thy first-fallen snows; | |
| Yet, lost in the wilderness, nameless, unnoted, | |
| Of man unbeholden, thou wert not till now. | 10 |
| Knowledge alone is the being of Nature, | |
| Giving a soul to her manifold features, | |
| Lighting through paths of the primitive darkness | |
| The footsteps of Truth and the vision of Song. | |
| Knowledge has borne thee anew to Creation, | 15 |
| And long-baffled Time at thy baptism rejoices. | |
| Take, then, a name, and be filled with existence, | |
| Yea, be exultant in sovereign glory, | |
| While from the hand of the wandering poet | |
| Drops the first garland of song at thy feet. | 20 |
| |
| Floating alone, on the flood of thy making, | |
| Through Afric’s mystery, silence, and fire, | |
| Lo! in my palm, like the Eastern enchanter, | |
| I dip from the waters a magical mirror, | |
| And thou art revealed to my purified vision. | 25 |
| I see thee, supreme in the midst of thy co-mates, | |
| Standing alone ’twixt the earth and the heavens, | |
| Heir of the sunset and herald of morn. | |
| Zone above zone, to thy shoulders of granite, | |
| The climates of earth are displayed as an index, | 30 |
| Giving the scope of the Book of Creation. | |
| There, in the gorges that widen, descending | |
| From cloud and from cold into summer eternal, | |
| Gather the threads of the ice-gendered fountains,— | |
| Gather to riotous torrents of crystal, | 35 |
| And, giving each shelvy recess where they dally | |
| The blooms of the North and its evergreen turfage, | |
| Leap to the land of the lion and lotus! | |
| There, in the wondering airs of the Tropics | |
| Shivers the Aspen, still dreaming of cold: | 40 |
| There stretches the Oak, from the loftiest ledges, | |
| His arms to the far-away lands of his brothers, | |
| And the Pine-tree looks down on his rival, the Palm. | |
| |
| Bathed in the tenderest purple of distance, | |
| Tinted and shadowed by pencils of air, | 45 |
| Thy battlements hang o’er the slopes and the forests, | |
| Seats of the gods in the limitless ether, | |
| Looming sublimely aloft and afar. | |
| Above them, like folds of imperial ermine, | |
| Sparkle the snow-fields that furrow thy forehead,— | 50 |
| Desolate realms, inaccessible, silent, | |
| Chasms and caverns where Day is a stranger, | |
| Garners where storeth his treasures the Thunder, | |
| The Lightning his falchion, his arrows the Hail! | |
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| Sovereign mountain, thy brothers give welcome: | 55 |
| They, the baptized and the crownéd of ages, | |
| Watch-towers of continents, altars of earth, | |
| Welcome thee now to their mighty assembly. | |
| Mont Blanc, in the roar of his mad avalanches, | |
| Hails thy accession; superb Orizaba, | 60 |
| Belted with beech and ensandalled with palm; | |
| Chimborazo, the lord of the regions of noonday,— | |
| Mingle their sounds in magnificent chorus | |
| With greeting august from the Pillars of Heaven, | |
| Who, in the urns of the Indian Ganges | 65 |
| Filter the snows of their sacred dominions, | |
| Unmarked with a footprint, unseen but of God. | |
| |
| Lo! unto each is the seal of his lordship, | |
| Nor questioned the right that his majesty giveth: | |
| Each in his awful supremacy forces | 70 |
| Worship and reverence, wonder and joy. | |
| Absolute all, yet in dignity varied, | |
| None has a claim to the honors of story, | |
| Or the superior splendors of song, | |
| Greater than thou, in thy mystery mantled,— | 75 |
| Thou, the sole monarch of African mountains, | |
| Father of Nile and Creator of Egypt! | |
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