Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Africa: Vol. XXIV. 1876–79.
The Enchanted Baths
By Robert Southey (17741843)
T
Awoke his recollection first at morn.
A scene of wonders lay before his eyes.
In mazy windings o’er the vale
A thousand streamlets strayed,
And in their endless course
Had intersected deep the stony soil,
With labyrinthine channels islanding
A thousand rocks, which seemed
Amid the multitudinous waters there
Like clouds that freckle o’er the summer sky,
The blue ethereal ocean circling each,
And insulating all.
Were of a thousand shapes,
And Nature with her various tints
Diversified anew their thousand forms;
For some were green with moss,
Some ruddier tinged, or gray, or silver-white,
And some with yellow lichens glowed like gold,
Some sparkled sparry radiance to the sun.
Here gushed the fountains up,
Alternate light and blackness, like the play
Of sunbeams on a warrior’s burnished arms.
Yonder the river rolled, whose ample bed,
Their sportive lingerings o’er,
Received and bore away the confluent rills.
Strange and beautiful, as where
By Oton-tala, like a sea of stars,
The hundred sources of Hoangho burst.
High mountains closed the vale,
Bare rocky mountains, to all living things
Inhospitable; on whose sides no herb
Rooted, no insect fed, no bird awoke
Their echoes, save the eagle, strong of wing,
A lonely plunderer, that afar
Sought in the vales his prey.