What sights you met and sounds of dread!
Calcareous caldrons, deep and large
With geysers hissing to their marge;
Sulphureous fumes that spout and blow;
Columns and cones of boiling snow;
And sable lazy-bubbling pools

Of sputtering mud that never cools;
With jets of steam through narrow vents
Uproaring, maddening to the sky,
Like cannon-mouths that shoot on high,
In unremitting loud discharge,

Their inexhaustible contents;

While oft beneath the trembling ground
Rumbles a drear persistent sound
Like ponderous engines infinite, working
At some tremendous task below!
Such are the signs and symptoms - lurking
Or launching forth in dread display --
Of hidden fires, internal strife,
Amid that leafy, lush array

Of rank luxuriant verdurous life:

Glad haunts above where blissful love
Might revel, rove, enraptured dwell;

But through them pierce such tokens fierce
Of rage beneath and frenzies fell;

As if, to quench and stifle it,

Green Paradise were flung o'er Hell,
Flung fresh with all her bowers close-knit,
Her dewy vales and dimpled streams;
Yet could not so its fury quell

But that the old red realm accurst

Would still recalcitrate, rebel,
Still struggle upward and outburst
In scalding fumes, sulphureous steams.
It struck you as you paused to trace
The sunny scenery's strange extremes,
As if in some divinest face,

All heavenly smiles, divinest grace,
Your eye at times discerned, despite
Sweet looks with innocence elate,

Some wan, wild spasm of blank affright,
Or demon scowl of pent-up hate;
Or some convulsive writhe confest,
For all that bloom of beauty bright,
An anguish not to be represt.
You look, a moment bask in, bless,
Its laughing light of happiness;
But look again, what startling throes
And fiery pangs of fierce distress

The lovely lineaments disclose,

How o'er the fascinating features flit
The genuine passions of the nether pit!

Alfred Domett.

FOREST AND SEA-SHORE.

ND thus o'er many a mountain wood-entangled,

And sto o er by a united in

The bright-green oily anise; and hillsides
And valleys, where its dense luxuriance balks
With interclinging fronds and tough red stalks

The traveller's hard-fought path, they took their way.

Sometimes they traversed, half the dreary day,
A deep-glenned wilderness all dark and dank
With trees, whence tattered and dishevelled dangled
Pale streaming strips of mosses long and lank;
Where at each second step of tedious toil
On perfect forms of fallen trunks they tread,
And ankle-deep sink in their yielding bed,
Moss-covered rottenness long turned to soil,
Until, ascending ever in the drear

Dumb gloom forlorn, a sudden rushing sound
Of pattering rain strikes freshly on the ear,
'Tis but the breeze that up so high has found
Amid the rattling leaves a free career!
To the soft, mighty, sea-like roar they list:
Or else 't is calm; the gloom itself is gone;
And all is airiness and light-filled mist,
As on the open mountain-side, so lone
And lofty, freely breathing they emerge.

And sometimes through a league-long swamp they urge
Slow progress, dragging through foot-sucking slush
Their weary limbs, red-painted to the knees
In pap rust-stained by iron or seeding rush;
But soon through limpid brilliant streams that travel
With murmuring, momentary-gleaming foam
That flits and flashes over sun-warmed gravel
They wade, and laughing wash that unctuous loam
Off blood-stained limbs now clean beyond all cavil
And start refreshed new road-knots to unravel.
And what delight, at length, that glimpse instils,
That wedge-shaped opening in the wooded hills,
Which, like a cup, the far-off ocean fills!

Anon they skirt the winding wild sea-shore;
From woody crag or ferny bluff admiring
The dim-bright beautiful blue bloom it wore,
That still Immensity, that placid Ocean,
With all its thousand leagues of level calm,
Tremendously serene; he, fancying more
Than feeling, for tired spirits peace-desiring,
With the world-fret and life's low fever sore,
Weary and worn with turmoil and emotion,
The soothing might of its majestic balm.
Or to the beach descending, with joined hands
They pace the firm tide-saturated sands

Whitening beneath their footpress as they pass;
And from that fresh and tender marble floor
So glossy-shining in the morning sun,

Watch the broad billows at their chase untiring, -
How they come rolling on, in rougher weather,
How in long lines they swell and link together,
Till, as their watery walls they grandly lift,
Their level crests extending sideways, swift
Shoot over into headlong roofs of glass
Cylindric, thundering as they curl and run
And close, down-rushing to a weltering dance
Of foam that slides along the smooth expanse,
Nor seldom, in a streaked and creamy sheet
Comes unexpected hissing round their feet,
While with great leaps and hurry-skurry fleet,
His louder laughter mixed with hers so sweet,
Each tries to stop the other's quick retreat.
Or else on sands that, white and loose, give way
At every step, they toil, till labor-sped

Their limbs in the noon-loneliness they lay
On that hot, soft, yet unelastic bed,

With brittle seaweed, pink and black, o'erstrewn,
And wrecks of many a forest-growth upthrown,
Bare stem and barkless branches, clean, sea-bleached,
Milk-white, or stringy logs deep-red as wine,

Their ends ground smooth against a thousand rocks,
Dead-heavy, soaked with penetrating brine;

Or bolted fragment of some ship storm-breached
And shattered, all with barnacles o'ergrown,
Gray-crusted thick with hollow-coned small shells,
So silent in the sunshine still and lone,

So reticent of what it sadly tells.

Alfred Domett.

FROM

SILENT CATARACTS.

the low sky-line of the hilly range

Before them, sweeping down its dark-green face

Into the lake that slumbered at its base,

A mighty cataract, so it seemed,

Over a hundred steps of marble streamed
And gushed, or fell in dripping overflow,
Flat steps, in flights half-circled,
Irregularly mingling side by side;
They and the torrent-curtain wide,

row o'er row,

All rosy-hued, it seemed, with sunset's glow. -
But what is this! no roar, no sound,
Disturbs that torrent's hush profound!
The wanderers near and nearer come,
Still is the mighty cataract dumb!