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“Whereof thy youth felt all the spell,
And traversed all the shade–
Though late, though dimm’d, though weak, yet tell
Hope to a world new-made!

“Help it to fill that deep desire,
The want which rack’d our brain,
Consumed our heart with thirst like fire,
Immedicable pain;

“Which to the wilderness drove out
Our life, to Alpine snow,
And palsied all our word with doubt,
And all our work with woe–

“What still of strength is left, employ
That end to help attain:
One common wave of thought and joy
Lifting mankind again!”

–The vision ended. I awoke
As out of sleep, and no
Voice moved;–only the torrent broke
The silence, far below.

Soft darkness on the turf did lie.
Solemn, o’er hut and wood,
In the yet star-sown nightly sky,
The peak of Jaman stood.

Still in my soul the voice I heard
Of Obermann!—-away
I turned; by some vague impulse stirr’d,
Along the rocks of Naye

Past Sonchaud’s piny flanks I gaze
And the blanch’d summit bare
Of Malatrait, to where in haze
The Valais opens fair,

And the domed Velan, with his snows,
Behind the upcrowding hills,
Doth all the heavenly opening close
Which the Rhone’s murmur fills;–

And glorious there, without a sound,
Across the glimmering lake,
High in the Valais-depth profound,
I saw the morning break.

[Footnote 1:

Glion?—-Ah, twenty years, it cuts.

Probably all who know the Vevey end of the Lake of Geneva, will recollect Glion, the mountain-village above the castle of Chillon. Glion now has hotels, pensions, and villas; but twenty years ago it was hardly more than the huts of Avant opposite to it,–huts through which goes that beautiful path over the Col de Jaman, followed by so many foot-travellers on their way from Vevey to the Simmenthal and Thun.]

[Footnote 2:

The gentian-flower’d pass, its crown
With yellow spires aflame.

The blossoms of the Gentiana lutea.]

[Footnote 3:

And walls where Byron came.

Montbovon. See Byron’s Journal, in his Works, vol. iii. p. 258. The river Saane becomes the Sarine below Montbovon.]