Collected Works (Vol. II)

THE HILLS 55 conscious and unconscious strain, his peace and pleasure and pain, his reflex life, his deepest-seated deed of mere brute muscle and nerve! Thence, by great Will new- freed, the ardent life leaps, sixth, to Effort’s tower, invoking the occult, the secret power, found in the void when all but Will is lost ; so, seventh, he bends it from its bodily station into the great abyss of Meditation, whence the firm level is at last his own and Rapture’s royal throne is more than throne, sarco- phggus! an end! an end! Resounds the echo in the stone, incalculable myriads of tons poised in gigantic balance overhead, about, beneath. O blend your voices, angels of the awful earth! dogs! demons leaping into hideous birth from the imprisoned deserts of the Nile! And thou, O habitant most dread, disastrous crocodile, hear thou the Law, and live, and win to peace ! THE HILLS. TO OSCAR ECKENSTEIN. WHENCE the black lands shudder and darken, Whence the sea birds have empire to range, Whence the moon and the meteor hearken The perpetual rhythm of change, On earth and in heaven deluded With time, that the soul of us kills, I have passed. I have brooded, fled far to the wooded And desolate hills. Not there is the changing of voices That lament or regret or are sad, But the sun in his strength rejoices, The moon in her beauty is glad. As timeless and deathless time passes, And death is a hermit that dwells By the imminent masses of ice, where the grasses Abandon the fells. There silence, arrayed as a spectre, Is visible, tangible, near, To the cup of the man pours nectar, To the heart of the coward is fear: Though the desolate waste be enchaunted By a spell that bewilders and chills, To me it is granted to worship the haunted Delight of the hills. To me all the blossoms are seedless, Yet big with all manner of fruit : And a voice in the waste is needless Since my soul in its splendour is mute. Though the height of the hill be deserted, The soul of a man has its mate; With the wide sky skirted his heart is reverted To commune with Fate. Far flings out the spur to the sunset; Its help to the hope of the sun That all be unfolded if one set, That none be apart from the One ; And the sweep of the wings of the weather, - Marked bright with the silvery ghylls For flickering feather, brings all things together To nest in the hills. Like a great bird poised in the ether, The mountain keeps watch over earth, On the child that lies sleeping beneath her Wild-eyed from a terrible birth. But by noise of the world unshaken, By dance of the world not bedinned, The hill bides forsaken, yet only to waken Her lover, the wind. Like a lion asleep in his fastness, Or a warrior leant on his spear, The hill stands up in the vastness, And the stars grow strangely near; For the secret of life and its gladness Are hidden in strength that distils A potion of madness from berries of sadness Grown wild in the hills.