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* * * * * A MIGHTY mass majestic, from the roots | |
| Of the old sea thou risest to the sky, | |
| In thy wild, bare sublimity alone. | |
| All-glorious was the prospect from thy peak, | |
| Thou thunder-cloven Island of the Forth! | 5 |
| Landward Tantallon lay, with ruined walls | |
| Sepulchral,—like a giant in old age, | |
| Smote by the blackening lightning-flash, and left | |
| A prostrate corpse upon the sounding shore! | |
| Behind arose your congregated woods, | 10 |
| Leuchie, Balgone, and Rockville,—fairer none. | |
| Remoter, mingling with the arch of heaven, | |
| Blue Cheviot told where, stretching by his feet, | |
| Bloomed the fair valleys of Northumberland. | |
| Seaward the Forth, a glowing green expanse, | 15 |
| Studded with many a white and gliding sail, | |
| Winded its serpent form,—the Ochils rich | |
| Down gazing in its mirror; while beyond | |
| The Grampians reared their bare, untrodden scalps; | |
| Fife showed her range of scattery coast-towns old— | 20 |
| Old as the days of Scotland’s early kings, | |
| Malcolm and Alexander and the Bruce— | |
| From western Dysart to the dwindling point | |
| Of famed and far St. Andrews; all beyond | |
| Was ocean’s billowy and unbounded waste, | 25 |
| Sole broken by the verdant islet May, | |
| Whose fitful lights, amid surrounding gloom, | |
| When midnight mantles earth and sea and sky, | |
| From danger warns the home-bound mariner; | |
| And one black speck—a distant sail—which told | 30 |
| Where mingled with its line the horizon blue. | |
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| Who were thy visitants, lone Rock, since man | |
| Shrank from thy sea-flower solitudes, and left | |
| His crumbling ruins mid thy barren shelves? | |
| Up came the cormorant, with dusky wing, | 35 |
| From northern Orkney, an adventurous flight, | |
| Floating far o’er us in the liquid blue, | |
| While many a hundred fathom in the sheer | |
| Abyss below, where foamed the surge unheard, | |
| Dwindled by distance, flocks of mighty fowl | 40 |
| Floated like feathery specks upon the wave. | |
| The rower with his boat-hook struck the mast, | |
| And lo! the myriad wings that like a sheet | |
| Of snow o’erspread the crannies,—all were up! | |
| The gannet, guillemot, and kittiwake, | 45 |
| Marrot and plover, snipe and eider-duck, | |
| The puffin and the falcon and the gull,— | |
| Thousands on thousands, an innumerous throng, | |
| Darkening the noontide with their winnowing plumes, | |
| A cloud of animation! the wide air | 50 |
| Tempesting with their mingled cries uncouth! | |
| Words cannot tell the sense of loneliness | |
| Which then and there, cloud-like, across my soul | |
| Fell, as our weary steps clomb that ascent. | |
| Amid encompassing mountains I have paused, | 55 |
| At twilight, when alone the little stars, | |
| Brightening amid the wilderness of blue, | |
| Proclaimed a world not God-forsaken quite; | |
| I ’ve walked, at midnight, on the hollow shore, | |
| In darkness, when the trampling of the waves, | 60 |
| The demon-featured clouds, and howling gales, | |
| Seemed like returning chaos,—all the fierce | |
| Terrific elements in league with night,— | |
| Earth crouching underneath their tyrannous sway, | |
| And the lone sea-bird shrieking from its rock; | 65 |
| And I have mused in churchyards far remote, | |
| And long forsaken even by the dead, | |
| To blank oblivion utterly given o’er, | |
| Beneath the waning moon, whose mournful ray | |
| Showed but the dim hawk sleeping on his stone: | 70 |
| But never, in its moods of fantasy, | |
| Had to itself my spirit shaped a scene | |
| Of sequestration more profound than thine, | |
| Grim throne of solitude, stupendous Bass! | |
| Oft in the populous city, mid the stir | 75 |
| And strife of hurrying thousands, each intent | |
| On his own earnest purpose, to thy cliffs | |
| Sea-girt, precipitous,—the solan’s home,— | |
| Wander my reveries; and thoughts of thee | |
| (While scarcely stirs the ivy round the porch, | 80 |
| And all is silent as the sepulchre) | |
| Oft make the hush of midnight more profound. | |
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