Doctor. Ah! thou, too, Sad Alighieri, like a waning moon Setting in storm behind a grove of bays! Balder. Yes, the great Florentine, who wove his web And thrust it into hell, and drew it forth Immortal, having burn’d all that could burn, And leaving only what shall still be found Untouch’d, nor with the small of fire upon it, Under the final ashes of this world. Doctor. Shakespeare and Milton! Balder. Switzerland and home. I ne’er see Milton, but I see the Alps, As once, sole standing on a peak supreme, To the extremest verge summit and gulf I saw, height after depth, Alp beyond Alp, O’er which the rising and the sinking soul Sails into distance, heaving as a ship O’er a great sea that sets to strands unseen. And as the mounting and descending bark, Borne on exulting by the under deep, Gains of the wild wave something not the wave, Catches a joy of going, and a will Resistless, and upon the last lee foam Leaps into air beyond it, so the soul upon the Alpine ocean mountain-toss’d, Incessant carried up to heaven, and plunged To darkness, and still wet with drops of death Held into light eternal, and again Cast down, to be again uplift in vast And infinite succession, cannot stay The mad momentum, but in frenzied sight Of horizontal clouds and mists and skies And the untried Inane, springs on the surge Of things, and passing matter by a force Material, thro’ vacuity careers, Rising and falling. Doctor. And my Shakespeare! Call Milton your Alps, and which is he among The tops of Andes? Keep your Paradise, And Eves, and Adams, but give me the Earth That Shakespeare drew, and make it grave and gay With Shakespeare’s men and women; let me laugh Or weep with them, and you—a wager,—aye, A wager by my faith—either his muse Was the recording angel, or that hand Cherubic, which fills up the Book of Life, Caught what the last relaxing gripe let fall By a death-bed at Stratford, and hence-forth Holds Shakespeare’s pen. Now strain your sinews, poet, And top your Pelion,—Milton Switzerland, And English Shakespeare— Balder. This dear English land! This happy England, loud with brooks and birds, Shining with harvests, cool with dewy trees, And bloom’d from hill to dell; but whose best flowers Are daughters, and Ophelia still more fair Than any rose she weaves; whose noblest floods The pulsing torrent of a nation’s heart: Whose forests stronger than her native oaks Are living men; and whose unfathom’d lakes Forever calm the unforgotten dead In quiet graveyards willow’d seemly round, O’er which To-day bends sad, and sees his face. Whose rocks are rights, consolidate of old Thro’ unremember’d years, around whose base The ever-surging peoples roll and roar Perpetual, as around her cliffs the seas That only wash them whiter; and whose mountains, Souls that from this mere footing of the earth Lift their great virtues thro’ all clouds of Fate Up to the very heavens, and make them rise To keep the gods above us! Sydney Thompson Dobell
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