V.
Nor are the summer mountains of the sky
Mere arbiters or witnesses for peace;
Who shall explore their vaulted palaces
Or tell their towers or battlements, or spell
The story of their ivory monuments!
Look where he may on this exultant day,
A Briton shall but read of kingly power;
Then, for a day, these towering clouds are ours:
They lend themselves to forms majestical;
To lore of legends end mythologies;
Temples and triremes and Olympian games,
Deities, oracles and Iliads,
Kings end agoras of the Heroic age,
And Britons of Britannia's calendar:
And thereby, widely, on their Alpine heights,
They join the deeds of Theocratic days
To Richard Cœur de Lion's brave crusades,
The glorious enterprises of our arms,
Our battleships and ever-spreading realm.
Thus, where the clouds take form and character,
There, to the Joy of Britain's Argonauts,
Jason, adored by fair Medea, flaunts
The Golden Fleece, victorious, at the prow;
In honour of Spartan valour, Leonidas,
With famed Lycurgus, in Laconia, stands,
And Pyrrha, with Deucalion, dexterous, climbs
To high Parnassus, from the o'erflowing flood.
These giant clouds along the fore-front range;
As might the mighty men of Ashtaroth,
Along the shadowy valleys of Lebanon
Or where the Arnon flows, or Tabor stands,
Down from the wooded heights of Hermon wind:
O rightful home of Zeus, where the clouds,
Pelion on Ossa-like, piled hugely up,
Enthrone great Alfred in an imperial place
High as the heavens, in vastness infinite!
Lo, where he calls his princes and his court
And an array of horsemen, helmed and plumed,
And bids Antiquity rejoice with us!
What god-like forms from out the clouds appear!
Mark where the lithesome Ganymede attends,
—4—
