On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor, As thus the snows arise; and foul, and fierce, All winter drives along the darkened air; In his own loose revolving fields, the swain Disastered stands: sees other hills ascend, Of unknown joyless brow; and other scenes, Of horrid prospect, shag the trackless plain : Nor finds the river, nor the forest, hid Beneath the formless wild: but wanders on From hill to dale, still more and more astray; Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps, Stung with the thoughts of home; the thoughts of home Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth In many a vain attempt. How sinks his soul! What black despair, what horror fills his heart! When for the dusky spot, which fancy feigned His tufted cottage rising through the snow, He meets the roughness of the middle waste, In the loose marsh, or solitary lake, Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils. But what is this? our infant Winter sinks, Divested of his grandeur, should our eye Astonished shoot into the frigid zone; Where, for relentless months, continual Night Holds o'er the glittering waste her starry reign. There, through the prison of unbounded wilds, Barred by the hand of nature from escape, Wide roams the Russian exile. Nought around Strikes his sad eye, but deserts lost in snow; And heavy loaded groves; and solid floods, That stretch athwart the solitary vast Their icy horrors to the frozen main; And cheerless towns far distant, never blessed, Save when its annual course the caravan Bends to the golden coast of rich Cathay, With news of human-kind. Yet there life glows; Yet cherished there beneath the shining waste, The furry nations harbour; tipt with jet, Fair ermines, spotless as the snows they press; Sables of glossy black; and dark embrowned; Or beauteous freaked with many a mingled hue, Thousands besides, the costly pride of courts. There, warm together pressed, the trooping deer, Sleep on the new-fallen snows; and scarce his head Raised o'er the heapy wreath, the branching elk Lies slumbering sullen in the white abyss. The ruthless hunter wants nor dogs nor toils, Nor with the dread of sounding bows he drives The fearful flying race; with ponderous clubs, As weak against the mountain heaps they push Their beating breast in vain, and piteous bray. He lays them quivering in the ensanguined snows, Still pressing on, beyond Tornea's lake, And Hecla flaming through a waste of snow, And farthest Greenland, to the pole itself, Where failing gradual, life at length goes out, The Muse expands her solitary flight; And, hovering o'er the wild stupendous scene, Beholds new scenes beneath another sky, Throned in his palace of cerulean ice, Here Winter holds his unrejoicing court; And through his airy hall the loud misrule Of driving tempest is for ever heard: Here the grim tyrant meditates his wrath; Here arms his winds with all-subduing frost; Moulds his fierce hail, and treasures up his snows, With which he now oppresses half the globe. Thence winding eastward to the Tartar's coast, She sweeps the howling margin of the main; Where undissolving, from the first of time, Snows swell on snows, amazing, to the sky; And icy mountains, high on mountains piled, Seem to the shivering sailor from afar, As with first prow, (what have not Britons dared 1) 1 |