Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/41

And gray despair re-settling on the world;
Till on that slope, as from the visioned mount,
The Roamer saw the kingdoms of this world,
O, not for glorious conquest, but despair,—
Craven and conqueror leveled in contempt,
Him foolishest who most would save the world!
⁠The moon dropped down behind the shouldering rocks;
The gauntlet narrowed on; the cliffs closed in,
Age-shattered spurs compact of rocky spires,
Slim monoliths and boulder-pilèd towers,
Fantastic masonry—earth's nakedness—
Dark colored veins of purple porphyry,
Volcanic thrusts, dull spots of hematite,
Chaotic sediment; there, as he stood,
He held the skull of Nature in his hand
Musing, and curiously turned it o'er;
And versed he was to read what there is found—
For some is known, and some is darkly guessed—
The cosmic tale that vaunts its ignorance,
No chaos, no catastrophe, no more
But definite order in indefinite time,
Events, successions, processes, fixed change.
He touched the gray grooves of the icy flood,
The delicate print of tropic fern and flower,

Strange petrifactions of the forest; saw,