SILENCE.— Here on a rock in blue mid-air nine thousand feet, The whole encircling sky flooded with light—the sun an unfaceable point in the dazzling zenith, Warm, windless, basking—the snow at our feet a million bright points glittering; And far around a multitudinous sea of peaks, Frozen, of rock and ice, and fields of rounded whiteness, And jutting shoulders, and slopes of shale, and walls, Behind each other rising: All drenched, dissolved, in light, And waiting, silent, rapt, as if to break into song. But not a sound. Buried in invisible valleys—'mid pine and larcn and torrent-beds below— Villages ply their daily round of labor; The peasant hacks deep the soil around his vine-roots, or with his long pole beats the boughs of olive; Far by the sea, mid garden-terraces, hotels and villas, the great town keeps its carnival of Easter— Unseen, unthought-of, here. Here only rests the stillness of the Earth, waiting upon the glory of the Sun; or here and there in some calm lakelet imaged. Ages fly by, and almost without change; dim lines of floating cloud just fringe the horizon; vistas of far lands, distant times, unfold; And the silence of centuries holds the secret of history Lost in the light of heaven. |