Page:Sentimental reciter.pdf/9

 How high you lift your heads into the sky!

How huge you are! how mighty and how free!

Ye are the things that tower, that shine-whose smile

Makes glad-whose frown is terrible-whose forms,

Robed or unrobed, do all the impress wear

Of awe divine. Ye guards of liberty,

I'm with you once again!-I call to you

With all my voice!-I hold my hands to you

To show they still are free. I rush to you

As though I could embrace you!

Sealing yonder peak,

I saw an eagle wheeling near its brow

O'er the abyss: his broad expanded wings

Lay calm and motionless upon the air,

As if he floated there without their aid,

By the sole act of his unlorded will,

That buoy'd him proudly up. Instinctively

I bent my bow; yet kept he rounding still

His airy circle, as in the delight

Of measuring the ample range beneath,

And round about absorbed, he heeded not

The death that threaten'd him.-I could not shoot!-

'Twas liberty!-I turned my bow aside,

And let him soar away!

Heavens, with what pride I used

To walk these hills, and look up to my God,

And bless him that it was so! It was free!

From end to end, from cliff to lake 'twas free-

Free as our torrents are that leap our rocks,

And plough our valleys, without asking leave:

Or as our peaks that wear their caps of snow,

In very presence of the regal sun,

How happy was it then! I loved

Its very storms. Yes, Emma, I have sat

In my boat at night, when, midway o'er the lake,

The stars went out, and down the mountain gorge

The wind came roaring. I have sat and eyed

The thunder breaking from his cloud, and smiled

To see him shake his lightnings o'er my head,

And think I had no master save his own.

You know the jutting cliff round which a track

Up hither winds, whose base is but the brow

To such another one, with scanty room

For two a-breast to pass ? O'ertaken there

By the mountain blast, I've laid me flat along,

And while gust followed gust more furiously,