Page:Translations (1834).djvu/167

Seems, mid yon rugged mountain forms,
(Like heav’n’s bow mid primeval storms)
Of better hopes the token—
Seems to a rifled land the trace
Of peace, of glory, and of grace,
When all around is broken!
The earthquake, with its iron shock—
That heaves the plain, that rends the rock,
Flings the thick city like a cloud—
All transiently thy face has ploughed!
When tower and tent with death are teeming—
Calm as the heav’ns around thee gleaming
Sleeps thy unruffled lake,
No record on its virgin spray
Of storm or earthquake past away—
No ripple on its mirror torn,
Save what the passing mountain horn
Might with its echoes wake,
Or breath of deer that pants to slake
The fever of the noontide hours,
In thy pure waters—Llyn^[1] of flowers!—
Still art thou calm, and clear, and bright—
E’en in this hour of death and flight,
When ey’ry flow’ret on thy brink
Is doomed of war’s red tide to drink;
As if thy waters did inherit
A peaceful gloom—a pensive spirit
From the lovely dead^[2] that rest
Sepulchred within thy breast—

1. ‘Llyn’—a lake.
2. An allusion to the legend before narrated, that the maidens of Flower Aspect’s court, under the influence of terror, walked backward into the lake, and were all drowned.