Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 422

Very quiet—very silent—whether shines the mocking sun
Through the wintry blue, or lowering drift the feathery
snow-clouds dun:
Always quiet, always silent, be it night or be it day,
With that pale shroud coldly lying where the heather-blossoms lay.

Can they be the very mountains that we looked at, you and I?
One long wavy line of purple painted on the sunset sky;
With the new moon's edge just touching that dark rim, like
dancer's foot,
Or young Dian's, on the hill-side for Endymion waiting mute.

O how golden was that even!—O how balm the summer air!
How the bridegroom sky bent loving o'er its earth so virgin fair!
How the earth looked up to heaven like a bride with joy oppressed,
In her thankfulness half-weeping that she was thus overblest!

Ghostly mountains! 'Silence—silence!' now is aye your soundless
voice,
Lifted in an awful patience o'er the world's uproarious noise;
O'er its jarrings and its greetings—o'er its loving and its
hate—
Silence! Bare thy brows all dumbly to the snows of heaven,
and—wait!'

notes

1

Or the Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness. By Captain Mayne Reid. London: Bogue. 1852.

2

Notes from Life.

3

Ibid.

4

Literary Remains.

5

Lectures on the History of France.

6

Namely, Jacques van Artevelde, 'the noblest and the wisest man that ever ruled in Ghent,' and whom the factious citizens slew at his own door.

7

Duke of Burgundy, in the last scene of Part II.

8

Beginning:—

'Rocks that beheld my boyhood! Perilous shelf
That nursed my infant courage! Once again
I, stand before you—not as in other days
In your gray faces smiling; but like you
The worse for weather.'…

How sweet the lines:—

The sun shall soon
Dip westerly; but oh! how little like
Are life's two twilights! Would the last were first,
And the first last! that so we might he soothed
Upon the thoroughfares of busy life
Beneath the noon-day sun, with hope of joy
Fresh as the morn,' &c.

    —Act II. scene ii.

9

Preface to Notes from Life.

10

Levana, of which an able translation was published by Messrs Longman in 1848.