Page:Poems by William Wordsworth (1815) Volume 1.djvu/132

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72

Nod the cloud-piercing pines their troubled heads,
Spires, rocks, and lawns, a browner night o'erspreads.
Strong terror checks the female peasant's sighs,
And start the astonished shades at female eyes.
The thundering tube the aged angler hears,
And swells the groaning torrent with his tears.
From Bruno's forest screams the affrighted jay,
And slow the insulted eagle wheels away.
The cross with hideous laughter Demons mock,
By [1]angels planted on the aereal rock.
The "parting Genius" sighs with hollow breath
Along the mystic streams of [2]Life and Death.
Swelling the outcry dull, that long resounds
Portentous, through her old woods' trackless bounds,
[3]Vallombre, mid her falling fanes, deplores,
For ever broke, the sabbath of her bowers.
More pleased, my foot the hidden margin roves
Of Como bosomed deep in chesnut groves.
No meadows thrown between, the giddy steeps
Tower, bare or sylvan, from the narrow deeps.

  1. Alluding to crosses seen on the tops of the spiry rocks of the Chartreuse, which have every appearance of being inaccessible.
  2. Names of Rivers at the Chartreuse.
  3. Name of one of the vallies of the Chartreuse.