Towards democracy

432 Towards Democracy

Warm, windless, basking—the snow at our feet a million bright points glittering ;

And far around a multitudinous sea of peaks,

Frozen, of rock and ice, and fields of rounded whiteness,

And jutting shoulders, and slopes of shale, and walls,

Behind each other rising:

All drenched, dissolved, in light,

And waiting, silent, rapt, as if to break into song.

But not a sound.

Buried in invisible valleys—mid pine and larch and torrent-beds below—

Villages ply their daily round of labor ;

The peasant hacks deep the soil around his vine-roots, or with his long pole beats the boughs of olive ; ;

Far by the sea, mid garden-terraces, hotels and villas, the | great town keeps its carnival of Easter—

Unseen, unthought-of, here.

Here only rests the stillness of the Earth, waiting upon the glory of the Sun; or here and there in some calm lakelet imaged. ;

Ages fly by, and almost without change; dim lines of” floating cloud just fringe the horizon; vistas of far lands, distant times, unfold ;

And the silence of centuries holds the secret of history)

Lost in the light of heaven.