Here, as on
earth, I saw the gracious god
"Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
. . . . . .
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy."
But never here did "Heaven's sun" stain himself.
But, alas, owing, as I think, to some unworthiness in myself, my
private sun did stain himself, and
"Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly wrack on his celestial face," -
for before the god had reached the zenith the heavenly pavement
rose and embraced my wavering virtue, or rather I sank down again
into that "forlorn world," from which the celestial sun had hid
his visage, -
"How may a worm that crawls along the dust,
Clamber the azure mountains, thrown so high,
And fetch from thence thy fair idea just,
That in those sunny courts doth hidden lie,
Clothed with such light as blinds the angel's eye?
How may weak mortal ever hope to file
His unsmooth tongue, and his deprostrate style?
O, raise thou from his corse thy now entombed exile!"
In the preceding evening I had seen the summits of new and yet
higher mountains, the Catskills, by which I might hope to climb
to heaven again, and had set my compass for a fair lake in the
southwest, which lay in my way, for which I now steered,
descending the mountain by my own route, on the side opposite to
that by which I had ascended, and soon found myself in the region
of cloud and drizzling rain, and the inhabitants affirmed that it
had been a cloudy and drizzling day wholly.
