Page:Poems by William Wordsworth (1815) Volume 1.djvu/132

72 Nod the cloud-piercing pines their troubled heads,

Spires, rocks, and lawns, a browner night o'erspreads.

Strong terror checks the female peasant's sighs,

And start the astonished shades at female eyes.

The thundering tube the aged angler hears,

And swells the groaning torrent with his tears.

From Bruno's forest screams the affrighted jay,

And slow the insulted eagle wheels away.

The cross with hideous laughter Demons mock,

By angels planted on the aereal rock.

The "parting Genius" sighs with hollow breath

Along the mystic streams of Life and Death.

Swelling the outcry dull, that long resounds

Portentous, through her old woods' trackless bounds,

Vallombre, mid her falling fanes, deplores,

For ever broke, the sabbath of her bowers.

More pleased, my foot the hidden margin roves

Of Como bosomed deep in chesnut groves.

No meadows thrown between, the giddy steeps

Tower, bare or sylvan, from the narrow deeps.