Page:The poems of George Eliot (Crowell, 1884).djvu/321

 'T was easy following where invention trod—

All eyes can see when light flows out from God.

And thus did Jubal to his race reveal

Music their larger soul, where woe and weal

Filling the resonant chords, the song, the dance,

Moved with a wider-winged utterance.

Now many a lyre was fashioned, many a song

Raised echoes new, old echoes to prolong,

Till things of Jubal's making were so rife,

"Hearing myself," he said, "hems in my life,

And I will get me to some far-off land,

Where higher mountains under heaven stand

And touch the blue at rising of the stars,

Whose song they hear where no rough mingling mars

The great clear voices. Such lands there must be,

Where varying forms make varying symphony—

Where other thunders roll amid the hills,

Some mightier wind a mightier forest fills

With other strains through other-shapen boughs;

Where bees and birds and beasts that hunt or browse

Will teach me songs I know not. Listening there,

My life shall grow like trees both tall and fair

That rise and spread and bloom toward fuller fruit each year."

He took a raft, and travelled with the stream

Southward for many a league, till he might deem

He saw at last the pillars of the sky,

Beholding mountains whose white majesty

Rushed through him as new awe, and made new song

That swept with fuller wave the chords along,

Weighting his voice with deep religious chime,

The iteration of slow chant sublime.

It was the region long inhabited