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The Avalanche.
Alone with God we were—far, far aboveThe narrow sympathies of valley life,'Mid those vast heights, where nature's sterner frontMakes play-ground for the elements unchained!How grey the shadows on the mountain fall,Dashed with a tint of purple from the sun,Whose palette heaped with broken colours layIn gorgeous tints upon the hoary rocksHurled down by avalanche, or mountain slide.E'en bird, nor insect, had mistook their wayFrom shelters safe below in sunlight wrapt,To flutter wing in frosty Alpine breeze—Naught but wild flowers smiled upon our path;The Soldanella raised her pale fringed cheekFrom some more sheltered cliff, or gentian blueClustered 'mid tufted ferns, that waved their crestsLike warriors' plumes o'er icy fields of Death.The path grew steeper, and more keen the air,As into regions of eternal snows,Our upward pathway tortuously wound.At length we pause, dismount, on ice-crust standBeside a grave, a traveller's lonely grave;Down twenty feet of snow and treacherous ice,Lurked this dark sepulchre in shiv'ring drifts.No mourner's tear had wet the new-made turf,And bid the golden flow'r of Hope to bloom,
