Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader · Chapter 273=352.= Contrast of Nature Without
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All day, as day is reckoned on the earth, I've wandered in these dim and awful aisles, Shut from the blue and breezy dome of heaven, … And now I'll sit me down upon yon broken rock, To muse upon the strange and solemn things Of this mysterious realm. All day my steps Have been amid the beautiful, the wild, The gloomy, the terrific; crystal founts Almost invisible in their serene And pure transparency, high pillared domes With stars and flowers, all fretted like the halls Of Oriental monarchs—rivers dark, And drear, and voiceless, as Oblivion's stream, That flows through Death's dim vale of silence,—gulfs All fathomless, down which the loosened rock Plunges, until its far-off echoes come Fainter and fainter, like the dying roll Of thunders in the distance. … Beautiful Are all the thousand snow-white gems that lie In these mysterious chambers, gleaming out Amid the melancholy gloom, and wild These rocky hills and cliffs, and gulfs, but far More beautiful and wild, the things that greet The wanderer in our world of light—the stars Floating on high, like islands of the blest,— The autumn sunsets glowing like the gate Of far-off Paradise; the gorgeous clouds On which the glories of the earth and sky Meet, and commingle; earth's unnumbered flowers, All turning up their gentle eyes to heaven; The birds, with bright wings glancing in the sun, Filling the air with rainbow miniatures; The green old forests surging in the gale; The everlasting mountains, on whose peaks The setting sun burns like an altar-flame.
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=Charles Constantine Pise, 1802-1866.= (Manual, p. 532.)
From "The Pleasures of Religion."