Ontario

No sound is on the ear, no boatman's oar
Drops its dull signal to the watchful shore;
But all is listening, as it were to hear
Some seraph harper stooping from her sphere
And calling on the desert to express
Its sense of Silence in her loveliness.
What holy dreaming comes in nights like these,
When, like yon wave, unruffled by a breeze,
The mirrors of the memory all are spread
And fanning pinions sail around j our head;
When all that man may love, alive or dead,
Come murmuring sweet, unutterable things,
And nestle on his heart with their young wings,
And all perchance may come, that he may fear,
And mutter doubtful curses in his ear;
Hang on his loaded soul, and fill his brain
With indistinct forebodings, dim, and vain....
The moon goes lightly up her thronging way,
And shadowy things are brightening into day;
And cliff and shrub and bank and tree and stone
Now move upon the eye, and now are gone.
A dazzling tapestry is hung around,
A gorgeous carpeting bestrews the ground;
The willows glitter in the passing beam
And shake their tangling lustres o'er the stream;
And all the full rich foliage of the shore
Seems with a quick enchantment frosted o'er,
And dances at the faintest breath of night,
And trembles like a plume of spangles in the light!...
This dark cool wave is bluer than the deep,
Where sailors, children of the tempest, sleep;
And dropp'd with lights as pure, as still, as those
The wide-drawn hangings of the skies disclose,
Far lovelier than the dim and broken ray,
That Ocean's flashing surges send astray....
This is the mirror of dim Solitude,
On which unholy things may ne'er intrude;
That frowns and ruffles when the clouds appear,
Refusing to reflect their shapes of fear.
Ontario's deeps are spread to multiply
But sunshine, stars, the moon, and clear-blue sky.
No pirate barque was ever seen to ride,
With blood-red streamer, chasing o'er that tide;
Till late, no bugle o'er those waters sang
With aught but huntsman's orisons, that rang
Their clear, exulting, bold, triumphant strain,
Till all the mountain echoes laugh'd again;
Till caverns, depths, and hills, would all reply,
And heaven's blue dome ring out the sprightly melody.