O memory-haunted eyes, that learned the light
On springtime pastures of his youth, when first,
Sweet in his blood, the bud of boyhood broke
Wide-open to the dalliance of the morn!
But here no change of season met his view,
Nor hint of birth or death; eternal seemed
The summer air, the landscape, and the sky,
And beauty without alteration found.
Before him a wide river-bottom lay,
Smooth as a floor, where clumps of elm and oak
Opened obscure and nameless solitudes,
Bathing in dawn; in undiscovered lands
Sweep such vast floods amid the fragrant wild,
And wander many a forest-mantled league
Unlooked on, till the lost explorer come,
Tracking his hopes. There plunged the Roamer down
In that far country, sunken in the West;
And all along the steep precipitous
The mobile scene made pictures as he went,
That borrowed nothing from the poet's eye;
The landscape recomposed at every step
With change kaleidoscopic, ever new,
And crag, and pass, and vistas opening heaven
Cast dreaming beauty in that air divine,
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THE ROAMER