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Christmas at the hall

Chapter 24: The Mountain Height.
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About This Book

This collection presents a sequence of poems built around a framing Christmas family gathering that links diverse shorter pieces; it moves between domestic sketches, seasonal and religious meditations, elegies and occasional tributes. Maritime landscapes and coastal scenes appear alongside reflective night musings, sonnets and ballads, while personal aspiration toward the poetic calling recurs in a few direct addresses. The verse varies in metre and tone, alternating descriptive natural imagery, moral and devotional reflection, and narrative fragments, producing an earnest, uneven but sincere portrait of a nineteenth-century poet testing his powers across themes of home, nature, loss, and hope.

The Mountain Height.

Come with me, and climb the proud mountain’s brow,
To view with high wonder the scene below,
Where huge hills heave like a foaming sea
By enchantment struck to tranquility.
Oh naught can depict to the mind’s deep sight
The terrible view from a mountain height,
As to fancy that ocean in awful storm
Had been turned to stone, with each wave in form.
In vallies beneath, calm lakes glitter bright
With radiant gleams of silvery light,
As they sweetly lie mid fair woodland shores,
Whence the purple peak of the mountain soars.
The hollow wind moans round these lofty rocks,
Whence the waterfalls gush with echoing shocks,
As they bound from their steeps with sparkling glee
To sweep in bright streams to their parent sea.
Here slender blue bells, and the purple heath
With flowery thyme, sweet fragrance breathe;
And the rush, and the moss, and the short soft grass
Spread a verdant pathway inviting to pass.
Oh! come let us climb the wild mountain brow,
Where Solitude dwells mid the trickling flow
Of rock-channelled rills, and desolate winds,
And the strong winged eagle an eyrie finds.