While pastoral pipes and streams the landscape lull, And bells of passing mules that tinkle dull, In solemn shapes before the admiring eye Huge convent domes with pinnacles and towers, From such romantic dreams my soul awake, Lo! Fear looks silent down on Uri's lake; Where by the unpathwayed margin still and dread Was never heard the plodding peasant's tread: Tower like a wall the naked rocks, or reach Far o'er the secret water dark with beach; More high, to where creation seems to end, Shade above shade the desert pines ascend. Yet, with his infants, man undaunted creeps And hangs his small wood-hut upon the steeps, Where'er, below, amid the savage scene Peeps out a little speck of smiling green. A garden-plot the mountain air perfumes, Mid the dark pines a little orchard blooms; A zig-zag path from the domestic skiff, Threading the painful crag, surmounts the cliff. -Before those hermit doors, that never know For whom at morning tolled the funeral bell; The gentle Power that haunts the myrtle plain, There hang in fear, when growls the frozen stream, Mid stormy vapours ever driving by, Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer, Dwindles the pear on autumn's latest spray, Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies, Her crest a bough of Winter's bleakest pine, While thrills the "Spartan fife" between the blast. "Tis storm; and, hid in mist from hour to hour, All day the floods a deepening murmur pour; The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight: Dark is the region as with coming night; But what a sudden burst of overpowering light! Triumphant on the bosom of the storm, Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form; Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline; Wide o'er the Alps a hundred streams unfold, At once to pillars turned that flame with gold; Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire. -AND sure there is a secret Power that reigns Or summer hamlet, flat and bare, on high Of drowsy bells for ever tinkling round; Faint wail of eagle melting into blue Beneath the cliffs, and pine-woods steady sugh ↑ ; * This picture is from the middle region of the Alps. ↑ Sugh, a scotch word expressive of the sound of the wind through the trees. The solitary heifer's deepen❜d low; Or rumbling heard remote of falling snow; WHEN warm from myrtle bays and tranquil seas, To silence leaving the deserted vale, Mounts, where the verdure leads, from stage to stage, |