The Hills

There is no joy of earth that thrills     My bosom like the far-off hills!     Th' unchanging hills, that, shadowy,     Beckon our mutability     To follow and to gaze upon     Foundations of the dusk and dawn.     Meseems the very heavens are massed     Upon their shoulders, vague and vast     With all the skyey burden of     The winds and clouds and stars above.     Lo, how they sit before us, seeing     The laws that give all Beauty being!     Behold! to them, when dawn is near,     The nomads of the air appear,     Unfolding crimson camps of day     In brilliant bands; then march away;     And under burning battlements     Of twilight plant their tinted tents.     The truth of olden myths, that brood     By haunted stream and haunted wood,     They see; and feel the happiness     Of old at which we only guess:     The dreams, the ancients loved and knew,     Still as their rocks and trees are true:     Not otherwise than presences     The tempest and the calm to these:     One, shouting on them all the night;     Black-limbed and veined with lambent light;     The other with the ministry     Of all soft things that company     With music an embodied form,     Giving to solitude the charm     Of leaves and waters and the peace     Of bird-begotten melodies     And who at night cloth still confer     With the mild moon, that telleth her     Pale tale of lonely love, until     Wan images of passion fill     The heights with shapes that glimmer by     Clad on with sleep and memory.