While my lonesome life
Saw death but dimly in the dull distance
My lips were sealed to the unhappy tale;
Under my pride I hid a heavy heart.
"I was ambitious in my boyhood days,
And dreamed of fame and honors--misty fogs
That climb at morn the ragged cliffs of life,
Veiling the ragged rocks and gloomy chasms,
And shaping airy castles on the top
With bristling battlements and looming towers;
But melt away into ethereal air
Beneath the blaze of the mid-summer sun,
Till cliffs and chasms and all the ragged rocks
Are bare, and all the castles crumbled away.
"There winds a river 'twixt two chains of hills--
Fir-capped and rugged monuments of time;
A level vale of rich alluvial land,
Washed from the slopes through circling centuries,
And sweet with clover and the hum of bees,
Lies broad between the rugged, somber hills.
Beneath a shade of willows and of elms
The river slumbers in this meadowy lap.
Down from the right there winds a babbling branch,
Cleaving a narrower valley through the hills.
A grand bald-headed hill-cone on the right
Looms like a patriarch, and above the branch
There towers another. I have seen the day
When those bald heads were plumed with lofty pines.
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