Featured Member's Choice Outdoors Rivers and Lakes 28 September 2007 Most Downloaded Archives October 2007 ~ Photo taken 11 September 2007 ~ A Summer Pilgrimage ~ Sunset on Chena Lakes ~ Alaska ~ "To kneel before some saintly shrine, To breathe the health of airs divine, Or bathe where sacred rivers flow, The cowled and turbaned pilgrims go. I too, a palmer, take, as they With staff and scallop-shell, my way To feel, from burdening cares and ills, The strong uplifting of the hills. The years are many since, at first, For dreamed-of wonders all athirst, I saw on Winnipesaukee fall The shadow of the mountain wall. Ah! Where are they who sailed with me The beautiful island-studded sea? And am I he whose keen surprise Flashed out from such unclouded eyes? Still, when the sun of summer burns, My longing for the hills returns; And northward, leaving at my back The warm vale of the Merrimac, I go to meet the winds of morn, Blown down the hill-gaps, mountain-born, Breathe scent of pines, and satisfy The hunger of a lowland eye. Again I see the day decline Along a ridged horizon line; Touching the hill-tops, as a nun Her beaded rosary, sinks the sun. One lake lies golden, which shall soon Be silver in the rising moon; And one, the crimson of the skies And mountain purple multiplies. With the untroubled quiet blends The distance-softened voice of friends; The girl’s light laugh no discord brings To the low song the pine-tree sings; And, not unwelcome, comes the hail Of boyhood from his nearing sail. The human presence breaks no spell, And sunset still is miracle! Calm as the hour, methinks I feel A sense of worship o’er me steal; Not that of satyr-charming Pan, No cult of Nature shaming man, Not Beauty’s self, but that which lives And shines through all the veils it weaves,— Soul of the mountain, lake, and wood, Their witness to the Eternal Good! And if, by fond illusion, here The earth to heaven seems drawing near, And yon outlying range invites To other and serener heights, Scarce hid behind its topmost swell, The shining Mounts Delectable A dream may hint of truth no less Than the sharp light of wakefulness. As through her vale of incense smoke. Of old the spell-rapt priestess spoke, More than her heathen oracle, May not this trance of sunset tell That Nature’s forms of loveliness Their heavenly archetypes confess, Fashioned like Israel’s ark alone From patterns in the Mount made known? A holier beauty overbroods These fair and faint similitudes; Yet not unblest is he who sees Shadows of God’s realities, And knows beyond this masquerade Of shape and colour, light and shade, And dawn and set, and wax and wane, Eternal verities remain. O gems of sapphire, granite set! O hills that charmed horizons fret I know how fair your morns can break, In rosy light on isle and lake; How over wooded slopes can run The noonday play of cloud and sun, And evening droop her oriflamme Of gold and red in still Asquam. The summer moons may round again, And careless feet these hills profane; These sunsets waste on vacant eyes The lavish splendour of the skies; Fashion and folly, misplaced here, Sigh for their natural atmosphere, And travelled pride the outlook scorn Of lesser heights than Matterhorn. But let me dream that hill and sky Of unseen beauty prophesy; And in these tinted lakes behold The trailing of the raiment fold Of that which, still eluding gaze, Allures to upward-tending ways, Whose footprints make, wherever found, Our common earth a holy ground." Poetry by John Greenleaf Whittier 1883