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(From The Bridal of Pennacook)
WE had been wandering for many days | |
| Through the rough northern country. We had seen | |
| The sunset, with its bars of purple cloud, | |
| Like a new heaven, shine upward from the lake | |
| Of Winnipiseogee; and had felt | 5 |
| The sunrise breezes, midst the leafy isles | |
| Which stoop their summer beauty to the lips | |
| Of the bright waters. We had checked our steeds, | |
| Silent with wonder, where the mountain wall | |
| Is piled to heaven; and, through the narrow rift | 10 |
| Of the vast rocks, against whose rugged feet | |
| Beats the mad torrent with perpetual roar, | |
| Where noonday is as twilight, and the wind | |
| Comes burdened with the everlasting moan | |
| Of forests and of far-off waterfalls, | 15 |
| We had looked upward where the summer sky, | |
| Tasselled with clouds light-woven by the sun, | |
| Sprung its blue arch above the abutting crags | |
| O’er-roofing the vast portal of the land | |
| Beyond the wall of mountains. We had passed | 20 |
| The high source of the Saco; and bewildered | |
| In the dwarf spruce-belts of the Crystal Hills, | |
| Had heard above us, like a voice in the cloud, | |
| The horn of Fabyan sounding; and atop | |
| Of old Agiochook had seen the mountains | 25 |
| Piled to the northward, shagged with wood, and thick | |
| As meadow mole-hills,—the far sea of Casco, | |
| A white gleam on the horizon of the east; | |
| Fair lakes, embosomed in the woods and hills; | |
| Moosehillock’s mountain range, and Kearsarge | 30 |
| Lifting his Titan forehead to the sun! | |
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| And we had rested underneath the oaks | |
| Shadowing the bank, whose grassy spires are shaken | |
| By the perpetual beating of the falls | |
| Of the wild Ammonoosuc. We had tracked | 35 |
| The winding Pemigewasset, overhung | |
| By beechen shadows, whitening down its rocks, | |
| Or lazily gliding through its intervals, | |
| From waving rye-fields sending up the gleam | |
| Of sunlit waters. We had seen the moon | 40 |
| Rising behind Umbagog’s eastern pines, | |
| Like a great Indian camp-fire; and its beams | |
| At midnight spanning with a bridge of silver | |
| The Merrimac by Uncanoonuc’s falls. | |
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