There lies in a valley, where mountains Have walled it from all that is ours, A garden entangled with flowers; Where the whisper of echoing fountains Makes song in the balm-breathing bowers: Where torrents, plunged down from wild masses Of granite, from cavern-pierced steeps, With thunders sonorous cleave passes, And madden the world with their leaps, The clamorous foam of their leaps.
And, oh! when the sunlight comes heaping With glitter the mist of those chasms, The foam of those musical chasms, You may hear a lamenting and weeping, And see in the vastness far sweeping, In wild and æolian spasms, Down, down in those voluble chasms, The Spirits of Light and of Darkness. And the wave from the gray-hearted granite In rivers rolls rippling around; Meanders through shade-haunted forests, Where many rock-barriers can span it, And dash it in froth and in sound; Where the nights with their great moons can wan it, Or star its dark stillness profound.
And here with her harp doth she wander, That daughter of music, twice kissed Of the Spirits of Love and of Sorrow: Yea, here doth she wander and ponder, That maiden of moonlight and mist, With starlight on hair and on wrist; Yea, here doth she ponder and wander 'Mid blossoms with loveliness whist, 'Mid moonlight with fragrances kissed. And ever her being grows fonder Of forests where phantoms keep tryst, The people of moon and of mist: And often they troop to her singing, As she sits 'mid the undulant cedars-- All savage of wildness and scent-- Whose tops to her beauty are bent, Like the pennons and plumes of fierce leaders, In worship and testament: Like the pennons and plumes of fierce leaders, All ragged with battle and rent.
And oft when the moon, like a palace Of witchcraft, shines white overhead, Making pearl of the foam of the torrent, She wakes her wild harp in the valleys Where the blossoms have built her a bed: She sits where a fountain of flowers Rains fragrance from branches around, The blossomed lianas around, Keeping time with their petal-sweet showers To her harp; with its strain interwound; Unfolding, it seems, to the sound: While her song is as redolence round her, And their fragrance as music, it seems, Whose touch and enchantment have bound her With shadows and whispers of dreams, And she seems but a part of her dreams, A creature created of dreams.