[The scenery of Gotthardt is here personified.]
To the solemn abyss leads the terrible
path,
The life and death winding
dizzy between;
In thy desolate way, grim with menace
and wrath,
To daunt thee the spectres
of giants are seen;
That thou wake not the wild one
, all silently tread-
Let thy lip breathe no breath in
the pathway of dread!
High over the marge of the
horrible deep
Hangs and hovers a bridge
with its phantom-like span,
Not by man was it built, oer
the vastness to sweep;
Such thought never came to
the daring of man!
The stream roars beneath-late
and early it raves-
But the bridge, which it threatens,
is safe from the waves.
Black-yawning a portal, thy soul
to affright,
Like the gate to the kingdom,
the fiend for the king-
Yet beyond it there smiles but a
land of delight,
Where the autumn in marriage
is met with the spring.
From a lot which the care and the
trouble assail,
Could I fly to the bliss of that
balm-breathing vale!
Through that field, from a fount
ever hidden their birth,
Four rivers in tumult rush
roaringly forth;
They fly to the fourfold divisions
of earth-
The sunrise, the sunset, the
south, and the north.
And, true to the mystical mother
that bore,
Forth they rush to their goal, and
are lost evermore.
High over the races of men in the
blue
Of the ether, the mount in
twin summits is riven;
There, veiled in the gold-woven
webs of the dew,
Moves the dance of the clouds-the
pale daughters of heaven!
There, in solitude, circles their
mystical maze,
Where no witness can hearken, no
earthborn surveys.
August on a throne which no ages
can move,
Sits a queen, in her beauty
serene and sublime,
The diadem blazing with diamonds
above
The glory of brows, never
darkened by time,
His arrows of light on that form
shoots the sun-
And he gilds them with all, but
he warms them with none!
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