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A WALK IN CHAMOUNI, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Together on the valley, white and sweet
Last Line: One neither of supremacy nor rest?
Subject(s): Alps; Chamonix, France; Mountains; Hills; Downs (great Britain)


TOGETHER on the valley, white and sweet,
The dew and silence of the morning lay:
Only the tread of my disturbing feet
Did break with printed shade and patient beat
The crispèd stillness of the meadow way;
And frequent mountain waters, welling up
In crystal gloom beneath some mouldering stone,
Curdled in many a flower-enamelled cup
Whose soft and purple border, scarcely blown,
Budded beneath their touch, and trembled to their tone.

The fringed branches of the swinging pines
Closed o'er my path; a darkness in the sky,
That barred its dappled vault with rugged lines,
And silver network,—interwoven signs
Of dateless age and deathless infancy;
Then through their aisles a motion and a brightness
Kindled and shook—the weight of shade they bore
On their broad arms, was lifted by the lightness
Of a soft, shuddering wind, and what they wore
Of jewelled dew, was strewed about the forest floor.
That thrill of gushing wind and glittering rain
Onward amid the woodland hollows went,
And bade by turns the drooping boughs complain
O'er the brown earth, that drank in lightless stain
The beauty of their burning ornament;
And then the roar of an enormous river
Came on the intermittent air uplifted,
Broken with haste, I saw its sharp waves shiver,
And its wild weight in white disorder drifted,
Where by its beaten shore the rocks lay heaped and rifted.

But yet unshattered, from an azure arch
Came forth the nodding waters, wave by wave,
In silver lines of modulated march,
Through a broad desert, which the frost-winds parch
Like fire, and the resounding ice-falls pave
With pallid ruin—wastes of rock—that share
Earth's calm and ocean's fruitlessness.—Undone
The work of ages lies,—through whose despair
Their swift procession dancing in the sun,
The white and whirling waves pass mocking one by one.

And with their voice—unquiet melody—
Is filled the hollow of their mighty portal,
As shells are with remembrance of the sea;
So might the eternal arch of Eden be
With angels' wail for those whose crowns immortal
The grave-dust dimmed in passing. There are here,
With azure wings, and scymitars of fire,
Forms as of Heaven, to guard the gate, and rear
Their burning arms afar,—a boundless choir
Beneath the sacred shafts of many a mountain spire.
Countless as clouds, dome, prism, and pyramid
Pierced through the mist of morning scarce withdrawn,
Signing the gloom like beacon fires, half hid
By storm—part quenched in billows—or forbid
Their function by the fullness of the dawn:
And melting mists and threads of purple rain
Fretted the fair sky where the east was red,
Gliding like ghosts along the voiceless plain,
In rainbow hues around its coldness shed,
Like thoughts of loving hearts that haunt about the dead.

And over these, as pure as if the breath
Of God had called them newly into light,
Free from all stamp of sin, or shade of death,
With which the old creation travaileth,
Rose the white mountains, through the infinite
Of the calm, concave heaven; inly bright
With lustre everlasting and intense,
Serene and universal as the night,
But yet more solemn with pervading sense
Of the deep stillness of omnipotence.
Deep stillness! for the throbs of human thought,
Count not the lonely night that pauses here,
And the white arch of morning findeth not
By chasm or alp, a spirit, or a spot,
Its call can waken, or its beams can cheer:
There are no eyes to watch, no lips to meet
Its messages with prayer—no matin bell
Touches the delicate air with summons sweet; —
That smoke was of the avalanche; that knell
Came from a tower of ice that into fragments fell.

Ah! why should that be comfortless—why cold,
Which is so near to Heaven? The lowly earth
Out of the blackness of its charnel mould
Feeds its fresh life, and lights its banks with gold;
But these proud summits, in eternal dearth,
Whose solitudes nor mourning know, nor mirth,
Rise passionless and pure, but all unblest:
Corruption—must it root the brightest birth?
And is the life that bears its fruitage best,
One neither of supremacy nor rest?





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