Over Hermon

SCALING mighty Hermon’s crown,
Oh, the windings up and down
That the dizzy pathway took !
Now along the craggy bed
Of a sun-dried mountain brook;
Now along a ledge that led
By a chasm’s crumbling brink,
Dropping deep and sheer away
Through the golden Syrian day
To the dreamy blur of pink
That the oleanders made, —
Here in sun, and there in shade.

Up, and up, and up we went,
While a spacious azure tent,
Arabesqued with morn, the sky
Hung above us radiantly.
We beheld the glowing urn
Of the red anemone ;
Nodding ’mid the parsley-fern
Saw the poppy chalice burn ;
Marked in cyclamen the bee
Ply his roving robbery.

Now we passed the flower line ; now
Left behind the fruited bough ;
Came to where, in crannies deep,
Summer-long the snowdrifts sleep,
That the thirsty Damascene,
In his orchard-garden green,
Blesses, as he raises up
To his lips the sherbet cup
Where the snows, dissolving, swim
At the beaker’s crystal brim.

Now we stood on Hermon’s crown,
Broad and barren, bleak and brown,
Where the long-since-riven veil
Hid the sacred shrine of Baal.
Everywhere, outspread for us,
Shone the scene miraculous:
Cinctured by the rush and reed,
Like a mirror Merom lay;
And a strip of tawny brede,
Jordan wound its gleaming way ;
Lebanon outstretched afar,
Violet and cinnabar;
And beyond green Galilee
Burned the blue Sidonian sea.

And, oh, sovereign and supreme,
The dream-city of our dream,
Bosomed in its bloomy bowers,
Showed its minarets and towers !
What a coil of strife and sin
Slept its gloomy past within, —
Khalid, Timur, Saladin !
And the while we gazed we knew
With what jostle and what jars
Still along its packed bazaars
Ebbed and surged a motley crew,
Druse and Dervish, Frank and Jew.

Ay, the olden lure was there,
Calling through the orient air :
Waters lucid as the morn ;
Blossoms whiter than the thorn ;
All the fairest fabrics spun
In the countries of the sun ;
Blades and jewels strangely blent;
Attar richly redolent;
Buddy fruitage, melting ripe,
And the bubbling water-pipe;
Then, at eve, the nightingale,
Burdened with its deathless tale!

Such the charm that drew us down
From majestic Hermon’s crown.