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.