Explore "Morning in the Hills" by Bliss Carman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
How quiet is the morning in the hills! / The stealthy shadows of the summer clouds / Trail through the canyon, and the mountain stream / Sounds his sonorous music far below / In the deep-wooded wind-enchanted cove.
Hemlock and aspen, chestnut, beech, and fir / Go tiering down from storm-worn crest and ledge, / While in the hollows of the dark ravine / See the red road emerge, then disappear / Towards the wide plain and fertile valley lands.
My forest cabin half-way up the glen / Is solitary, save for one wise thrush, / The sound of falling water, and the wind / Mysteriously conversing with the leaves.
Here I abide unvisited by doubt, / Dreaming of far-off turmoil and despair, / The race of men and love and fleeting time, / What life may be, or beauty, caught and held / For a brief moment at eternal poise.
What impulse now shall quicken and make live / This outward semblance and this inward self? / One breath of being fills the bubble world, / Colored and frail, with fleeting change on change.
Surely some God contrived so fair a thing / In a vast leisure of uncounted days, / And touched it with the breath of living joy, / Wondrous and fair and wise! It must be so.