Explore "The Hills" by Madison Cawein on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There is no joy of earth that thrills / My bosom like the far-off hills! / Th' unchanging hills, that, shadowy, / Beckon our mutability / To follow and to gaze upon / Foundations of the dusk and dawn. / Meseems the very heavens are massed / Upon their shoulders, vague and vast / With all the skyey burden of / The winds and clouds and stars above. / Lo, how they sit before us, seeing / The laws that give all Beauty being! / Behold! to them, when dawn is near, / The nomads of the air appear, / Unfolding crimson camps of day / In brilliant bands; then march away; / And under burning battlements / Of twilight plant their tinted tents.
The faith of olden myths, that brood / By haunted stream and haunted wood, / They see; and feel the happiness / Of old at which we only guess: / The dreams, the ancients loved and knew, / Still as their rocks and trees are true: / Not otherwise than presences / The tempest and the calm to these: / One shouting on them, all the night, / Black-limbed and veined with lambent light: / The other with the ministry / Of all soft things that company / With music -- an embodied form, / Giving to solitude the charm / Of leaves and waters and the peace / Of bird-begotten melodies -- / And who at night doth still confer / With the mild moon, who telleth her / Pale tale of lonely love, until / Wan images of passion fill / The heights with shapes that glimmer by / Clad on with sleep and memory.