Yet still a goodly height it seems From which the mountain pours his streams, Or hinders, with caressing hands, The sunlight seeking other lands. Like some great giant, strong and proud, He fronts the lowering thunder-cloud, And wrests its treasures, to bestow A guerdon on the realm below; Or, by the deluge roused from sleep Within his bristling forest-keep, Shakes all his pines, and far and wide Sends down a rich, imperious tide. At night the whistling tempests meet In tryst upon his topmost seat, And all the phantoms of the sky Frolic and gibber, storming by. By day I see the ocean-mists Float with the current where it lists, And from my summit I can hail Cloud-vessels passing on the gale,-- The stately argosies of air,-- And parley with the helmsmen there; Can probe their dim, mysterious source, Ask of their cargo and their course,-- _Whence come? where bound?_--and wait reply, As, all sails spread, they hasten by. If foiled in what I fain would know, Again I turn my eyes below And eastward, past the hither mead Where all day long the cattle feed, A crescent gleam my sight allures And clings about the hazy moors,-- The great, encircling, radiant sea, Alone in its immensity. Even there, a queen upon its shore, I know the city evermore Her palaces and temples rears, And wooes the nations to her piers; Yet the proud city seems a mole To this horizon-bounded whole; And, from my station on the mount, The whole is little worth account Beneath the overhanging sky, That seems so far and yet so nigh. Here breathe I inspiration rare, Unburdened by the grosser air That hugs the lower land, and feel Through all my finer senses steal The life of what that life may be, Freed from this dull earth's density, When we, with many a soul-felt thrill, Shall thrid the ether at our will, Through widening corridors of morn And starry archways swiftly borne.