Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.
The Old Man of the Mountain
By John Townsend Trowbridge (1827–1916)
A
From drooping boughs their showers of pearl;
From floating skiff to towering cliff
The rising vapors part and curl.
The west-wind stirs among the firs
High up the mountain side emerging;
The light illumes a thousand plumes
Through billowy banners round them surging.
And in a halo of the haze,
Flushed with faint gold, far up, behold
That mighty face, that stony gaze!
In the wild sky upborne so high
Above us perishable creatures,
Confronting Time with those sublime,
Impassive, adamantine features.
The profile of a human face!
No kin art thou, O Titan brow,
To puny man’s ephemeral race.
The groaning earth to thee gave birth,—
Throes and convulsions of the planet;
Lonely uprose, in grand repose,
Those eighty feet of facial granite.
Thine eyes (if eyes be thine) beheld
But solitudes of crags and woods,
Where eagles screamed and panthers yelled.
Before the fires of our pale sires
In the first log-built cabin twinkled,
Or redmen came for fish and game,
That scalp was scarred, that face was wrinkled.
That ancient countenance was young;
Thy sovereign brow was seamed as now
When Moses wrote and Homer sung.
Empires and states it antedates,
And wars, and arts, and crime, and glory;
In that dim morn when man was born
Thy head with centuries was hoary.
Nor tempest leaves on thee its trace;
The stormy years are but as tears
That pass from thy unchanging face.
With unconcern as grand and stern,
Those features viewed, which now survey us,
A green world rise from seas of ice,
And order come from mud and chaos.
What forces moved, or fast or slow;
How grew the hills; what heats, what chills,
What strange, dim life, so long ago?
High-visaged peak, wilt thou not speak?
One word, for all our learnéd wrangle!
What earthquakes shaped, what glaciers scraped,
That nose, and gave the chin its angle?
Our petty questionings are vain;
In its great trance thy countenance
Knows not compassion nor disdain.
With far-off hum we go and come,
The gay, the grave, the busy-idle;
And all things done to thee are one,
Alike the burial and the bridal.
Will mock the pride of mortals still.
Returning springs, with songs and wings
And fragrance, shall these valleys fill;
The free winds blow, fall rain or snow,
The mountains brim their crystal beakers;
Still come and go, still ebb and flow,
The summer tides of pleasure-seekers:
The eagles, many a future pair;
The gray scud lag on wood and crag,
Dissolving in the purple air;
The sunlight gleam on lake and stream,
Boughs wave, storms break, and still at even
All glorious hues the world suffuse,
Heaven mantle earth, earth melt in heaven!
And times unborn grow old and change;
New governments and great events
Shall rise, and science new and strange;
Yet will thy gaze confront the days
With its eternal calm and patience,
The evening red still light thy head,
Above thee burn the constellations.
The little worth of words or fame!
I go my way, but thou wilt stay
While future millions pass the same:
But what is this I seem to miss?
Those features fall into confusion!
A further pace—where was that face?
The veriest fugitive illusion!
When eyes that make thee onward move;
Whose vast pretence of permanence
A little progress can disprove!
Like some huge wraith of human faith
That to the mind takes form and measure;
Grim monolith of creed or myth,
Outlined against the eternal azure!
A withered cliff is all we see;
That giant nose, that grand repose,
Have in a moment ceased to be;
Or still depend on lines that blend,
On merging shapes, and sight, and distance,
And in the mind alone can find
Imaginary brief existence!