Crossing the Alleghanies

As look'd the traveller for the world below,
The lively morning breeze began to blow;
The magic curtain roll'd in mists away,
And a gay landscape smiled upon the day.
As light the fleeting vapours upward glide,
Like sheeted spectres on the mountain side,
New objects open to his wondering view
Of various form, and combinations new.
A rocky precipice, a waving wood,
Deep, winding dell, and foaming mountain flood,
Each after each, with coy and sweet delay,
Broke on his sight, as at young dawn of day,
Bounded afar by peak aspiring bold,
Like giant capp'd with helm of burnish'd gold.
So when the wandering grandsire of our race
On Ararat had found a resting-place,
At first a shoreless ocean met his eye,
Mingling on every side with one blue sky;
But as the waters, every passing day,
Sunk in the earth or roll'd in mists away,
Gradual, the lofty hills, like islands, peep
From the rough bosom of the boundless deep,
Then the round hillocks, and the meadows green,
Each after each, in freshen'd bloom are seen,
Till, at the last, a fair and finish'd whole
Combined tc» win the gazing patriarch's soul.
Yet, oft he look'd, I ween, with anxious eye,
In lingering hope somewhere, perchance, to spy,
Within the silent world, some living thing,
Crawling on earth, or moving on the wing,
Or man, or beast — alas! was neither there
Nothing that breathed of life in earth or air;
'T was a vast, silent, mansion rich and gay,
Whose occupant was drown'd the other day;
A churchyard, where the gayest flowers oft bloom
Amid the melancholy of the tomb;
A charnel-house, where all the human race
Had piled their bones in one wide resting-place;
Sadly he turn'd from such a sight of wo,
And sadly sought the lifeless world below.