A thousand fairy lights may shimmer With tender sheen, with glossy glimmer, O'er curve advanced and salient edge Of many a luminous water-ledge; A thousand slanting shadows pale May fling their thin transparent veil O'er deep recess and shallow dent In many a watery stair's descent : Yet, mellow-bright, or mildly dim, Both lights and shades, both dent and rim, Each wavy streak, each warm snow-tress, Stand rigid, mute, and motionless! No faintest murmur, not a sound, Relieves that cataract's hush profound; No tiniest bubble, not a flake Of floating foam, is seen to break The smoothness where it meets the lake; Along that shining surface move No ripples; not the slightest swell Rolls o'er the mirror darkly green, Where, every feature limned so well, Pale, silent, and serene as death, The cataract's image hangs beneath The cataract, but not more serene, More phantom-silent, than is seen The white rose-hued reality above.
They paddle past, for on the right. Another cataract comes in sight; Another broader, grander flight Of steps, all stainless, snowy-bright!
their curious way they track Near thickets made by contrast black; And then that wonder seems to be A cataract carved in Parian stone, Or any purer substance known, Agate or milk-chalcedony !
Its showering snow-cascades appear Long ranges bright of stalactite, And sparry frets and fringes white, Thick-falling, plenteous, tier o'er tier; Its crowding stairs, in bold ascent Piled up that silvery-glimmering height, Are layers, they know, accretions slow Of hard silicious sediment:
For as they gain a rugged road, And cautious climb the solid rime, Each step becomes a terrace broad, Each terrace a wide basin brimmed With water, brilliant, yet in hue The tenderest, delicate harebell-blue Deepening to violet! Slowly climb The twain, and turn from time to time To mark the hundred baths in view, - Crystalline azure, snowy-rimmed, The marge of every beauteous pond Curve after curve, each lower beyond The higher, outsweeping white and wide, Like snowy lines of foam that glide O'er level sea-sands lightly skimmed By thin sheets of the glistening tide. They climb those milk-white flats incrusted
And netted o'er with wavy ropes Of wrinkled silica. At last, Each basin's heat increasing fast, The topmost step the pair surmount, And lo, the cause of all! Around, The circling cliffs a crater bound,
Cliffs damp with dark-green moss, their slopes All crimson-stained with blots and streaks, White-mottled and vermilion-rusted;
And in the midst, beneath a cloud That ever upward rolls and reeks And hides the sky with its dim shroud, Look where upshoots a fuming fount, - Up through a blue and boiling pool Perennial, a great sapphire steaming, In that coralline crater gleaming. Upwelling ever, amethystal,
Ebullient comes the bubbling crystal! Still growing cooler and more cool As down the porcelain stairway slips The fluid flint, and slowly drips, And hangs each basin's curling lips With crusted fringe each year increases, Thicker than shear-forgotten fleeces ; More close and regular than rows, Long rows of snowy trumpet-flowers Some day to hang in garden-bowers, When strangers shall these wilds enclose.
EEP Hades of the seven Phlegethons! From thy basaltic pillared walls I gaze, Through sulphurous clouds that ceaselessly ascend From fiery maelstroms in red, rushing whirl, Into thy vast abyss with silent awe.
Eve's curtains gather round thee like a shroud, And drape in shadow Mauna Loa's dome; The trade-wind o'er the bending forest sweeps, Cold and mist-laden from the eastern wave; And as it parts the fire-born clouds below, The smouldering ruins of a city vastA giant Moscow in a sea of flame
Appear with blackened walls, and dome and spire Of church and grand cathedral crashing fall; Turret and tower and monument go down,
As round them lap and whirl the eddying flames, Like those lost cities which Jehovah's wrath O'erwhelmed in sulphury hail and fiery rain, Till from the ruined plain the smoke went up, Seething and dense as from a furnace blast.
Thou fiery wonder of the untaught mind! The simple natives of the isles had made A home in thee for Pele, fiery power, Goddess of the volcano's hot domain;
How like the ancient Greeks, who wove their dreams
Of the ideal in poetic forms,
And robed Cocytus' son with Pele's power Over their burning, weird, infernal river.
No Stygian waves surround thy Hades deep, No Iris bright descends with golden vase, To bring the dreaded draught to perjured gods; Yet thy wild, fiery glare hath lighted up A scene more brilliant than Greek poet's dream, Sublime in moral courage and the faith That rent asunder superstition's chains, And by her incandescent throne of power, Defied the Goddess Pele in thy depths. Kapiolani -- noblest of her race, Kapiolani-type of womankind, - In high moral heroism born of love, In past or present and in every clime, Immortal as the faith which fired her heart, Her deed sheds lustre on these ocean isles!
O'er fire-browned clinkers and through tangled woods, Up mountain steeps a hundred miles she walked, Trampling the creeds of ages 'neath her feet, Braving the wrath of all the mythic gods, That, like dark incubi on heart and brain, Had checked the progress of Hawaii's race, She sought thy depths to tempt and to defy The rage, the power of their multiple gods; While awe-struck thousands on thy lofty rim Gazed tremblingly beneath in firm belief That Pele in her wrath would hurl her fires On one who dared her in her sulphury home.
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