Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE COMFORT OF THE HILLS, by SILAS WEIR MITCHELL


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE COMFORT OF THE HILLS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Here have I wandered oft these many years
Last Line: God's angelus, is sighing in the trees.
Subject(s): Comfort; God; Mountains; Nature - Religious Aspects; Hills; Downs (great Britain)


Blessed of the Lord be his land, for the chief things of the ancient
mountains, and for the precious things of the lasting hills.

HERE have I wandered oft these many years
Far from the world's restraint, my heart at ease,
With equal liberty of joy or tears
To welcome Nature's generosities,
Where these gray summits give the unburdened mind
To clearer thought, in freedom unconfined.
What made this wide estate of hill and plain
So surely mine to-day? Of God, the law
That gave to joy the right of ampler reign—
For in love's title none may find a flaw,
And mine the equities of tribute brought
From vassal lands no earthly gold has bought.

As flit gray gulls, with silver flash of wings,
Leap and are lost the whitecaps of the sea
When swoops the norther o'er the deep and sings
Mad music in the hemlocks, and for me
A litany of joy and hope and praise,
Sweet to the man who knows laborious days.

The wild hawk here is playmate of my thought.
Like him I soar, upon as eager wings,
And something of his liberty have caught,
The simple pleasure in material things,
Unvexed, in thoughtless joy a child to be,
The moment's friend of all the eye can see.

Kind to the dreamer is this solitude.
Fair courtesies of silence wait to know
What hopes are flattering a poet mood,
Stirred by frail ecstasies that come and go,
Like birds that let the quivering leaves prolong
The broken music of their passing song.

Here may we choose what company shall be ours;
Here bend before one fair divinity
To whose dear feet we bring the spirit-flowers,
Fragments of song, stray waifs of poetry,
The orphans of dead dreams, more sweet than aught
Won by decisive days of sober thought.

Day-dreams that feed the folly of the fool,
The wisdom of the wise, the hour endears;
Despite the discipline of life's stern school,
And the gray quiet of monastic years,
I sit, companioned by life's young desires,
And warm my fancies at yon sunset fires.

For 't is the children's hour, and I, the child,
Self-credulous, am pleased myself to tell
Stories that have no ending, ventures wild
O'er chartless oceans to glad isles where dwell
Loves that no bitter debt to time shall pay,
Loves that to-morrow shall be as to-day.

Ay, 't is enchantment's hour. A herald star
Marshals the silent armies of the night.
The eastward scarlet frets the waves. Afar
Fades in the pallid west a violet light,
And murmurs of the tide rise up to me,
Huge breathing of the sea's immensity.

Among the hills I know a dreaming lake
No wind disturbs, and drowsily it seems
The pictured stillness to itself to take.
All day it sleeps, and then at evening dreams
Brown twilight shadows,—till it dreams at dark
A silver dream, the pale moon's crescent bark.

There is a hill-crest where the dwarfish forms
Of crippled pines a scant subsistence win:
Gnarled by long battle with the winter storms,
Scarred cousins of their stately forest kin,
Whence came the force that waged victorious strife
For the mere hold upon their meagre life?

Companionable folk are they; at ease
Upon the rocks their wooden elbows rest.
Something they hint of ancient pleasantries;
Grim burgher soldiers they, who take with zest
Their pension of the sunshine, half aware
Of one with right their lazing life to share.

As wearily the mountain crest I gain,
Mysterious vigor feels the freshened mind,
And wide horizons gladden eye and brain.
Serenely confident I wait to find
Thoughts that no clouded hours knew to guess
Float upward to the light of consciousness.

Here truth the certainty of instinct feels,
When joy akin to awe the soul acquires,
And beauty, God's interpreter, reveals
Something of Him no meaner hour inspires.
Help Thou my unbelief, that I may be
By Nature's mother-hand led near to Thee.

Once, all there was of beauty on the earth
Became religion. Love was but a prayer
To gentle deities, whose sylvan mirth
Heard man or maid, at dusk of eve, aware
Of gods who shared love's piety, and of faint
Sweet whispers from some pagan flower saint.

If these were dreams, I envy those who dreamed
Into the world long dramas of belief,
This joyous passion-play of gods who seemed
To be so near to human joy and grief;
Or were they tender yearnings willed by Him
Whose creed left lonely all the woodways dim?

If I have lost this heritage divine,
Some pentecostal hour may give to me
The tongues earth's childhood knew, and it be mine
To read beyond what seems reality.
Grant me this gift of wisdom's fullest flower,
O fair Egeria of the evening hour.

Lo, in the twilight's dim confessional
Come agèd voices from this ice-scarred rock;
I hear the avalanche in thunder fall,
The glacier's many voices, and the shock
When from these granite shoulders, seaward hurled,
Fell the white ruin of an elder world.

My summer friends, the maples, cease to shed
Their red and gold, are bare and gaunt and gray.
In changeless quiet, towering overhead,
Hemlock and pine defy the autumn's sway,
The wintry winds. To them the call of spring
A gracious autumn with the birds shall bring.

If time might hold for us no sad surprise
Of autumn's mournful change, what joy it were,
Earth-fed, deep-rooted, year by year to rise
Where thought uplifted breathes serener air,
And at life's ripest, of a summer day
To feel the lightning fall and pass away.

Among these rifted rocks creep stealthily
Faint dusking shadows, and the forest air
Stirs when the topmost leaves, uneasily,
A moment shiver in the winds that bear
Hoarse murmurs from the unrepentant deep;
Like one who mutters of far deaths in sleep.

A strange supremacy of quietness
Awaits the thoughtful where, in wreckage vast,
These riven rocks old agonies confess,
The half-told story of a dateless past;
Prophetic dooms of change the soul oppress,
And some chill sense of ancient loneliness.

Why in this scene my truant footsteps found
Should come to me the urgent thought of death?
For when this ruin fell, the barren ground
Knew naught of life, nor any mortal breath.
Yet generous of color are to-day
These moss-clad rocks, with fern and lichen gay.

Alas, vain thought! Death's royal loneliness
Still bids the voice of love its silence share,
Where, in that land of grief companionless,
Familiar things a far remoteness wear,
And futile thoughts, like yearning tendrils, find
No hold secure, and hope and faith are blind.

Yet Nature stands, a finger on her lips,
Glad mother of mysterious sympathy,
Sure as the light that through the greenery slips,
Far-winged at eve with loving certainty,
To gild these glooming rocks, by glaciers worn,
With constant promise of another morn.

If Nature, soulless, knows not how to weep,
Take that she has for thee. Wilt know how much?
Bring here thy cares, and find upon the steep
Some kingly healing in the wild wind's touch.
The best of love and life is mystery,—
Take thou the pine-trees' benedicite!

The years that come as friend and leave as foe,
The years that come as foes, and friends depart,
Leave for remembrance more of joy than woe,
All memory sifting with Time's gentle art,
Till He who guides the swallow's wintry wing
Gives to our grief-winged love as sure a spring.

The mountain summit brings no bitter thought;
And in my glad surrender to its power,
Familiar spirits come to me unsought,
But unto thee, my child, the twilight hour,
When level sun-shafts of the waning day
Their girdling gold upon the forest lay.

Here, long ago, we talked or silent knew
The woodland awe of things about to be,
And, as the nearing shadows round us drew,
Some growing sense of unreality,
Ancestral pagan moods of far descent
That thronged the peopled woods with wonderment.

Art with me now, and this thy gentle hand?
Or is it that love's yearning love deceives,
And in too real a solitude I stand,
Hearing no footfall in the rustling leaves,
Sole comrade of far sorrows, left alone
The wakened memory of a dream to own?

Slow fades the light of day's most solemn hour.
The autumn leaves are drifting overhead.
In vain I yearn for some compelling power
To keep for me these ever-living dead.
Peace, peace, and heart; for thee a gentle breeze,
God's angelus, is sighing in the trees.





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