Explore "The Occultation of Orion" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I saw, as in a dream sublime, / The balance in the hand of Time. / O'er East and West its beam impended; / And day, with all its hours of light, / Was slowly sinking out of sight, / While, opposite, the scale of night / Silently with the stars ascended.
Like the astrologers of eld, / In that bright vision I beheld / Greater and deeper mysteries. / I saw, with its celestial keys, / Its chords of air, its frets of fire, / The Samian's great Aeolian lyre, / Rising through all its sevenfold bars, / From earth unto the fixed stars. / And through the dewy atmosphere, / Not only could I see, but hear, / Its wondrous and harmonious strings, / In sweet vibration, sphere by sphere, / From Dian's circle light and near, / Onward to vaster and wider rings. / Where, chanting through his beard of snows, / Majestic, mournful, Saturn goes, / And down the sunless realms of space / Reverberates the thunder of his bass.