Explore "The Divine Tragedy" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
MANAHEM. / Welcome, O wilderness, and welcome, night / And solitude, and ye swift-flying stars / That drift with golden sands the barren heavens, / Welcome once more! The Angels of the Wind / Hasten across the desert to receive me; / And sweeter than men's voices are to me / The voices of these solitudes; the sound / Of unseen rivulets, and the far-off cry / Of bitterns in the reeds of water-pools. / And lo! above me, like the Prophet's arrow / Shot from the eastern window, high in air / The clamorous cranes go singing through the night. / O ye mysterious pilgrims of the air, / Would I had wings that I might follow you!
I look forth from these mountains, and behold / The omnipotent and omnipresent night, / Mysterious as the future and the fate / That hangs o'er all men's lives! I see beneath me / The desert stretching to the Dead Sea shore, / And westward, faint and far away, the glimmer / Of torches on Mount Olivet, announcing / The rising of the Moon of Passover. / Like a great cross it seems, on which suspended, / With head bowed down in agony, I see / A human figure! Hide, O merciful heaven, / The awful apparition from my sight!