The wreathing clouds are fleeting fast
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Deep shade upon the hills they cast While through their openings ever shew Enormous pyramids of snow Scarce can you tell in middle air
If cloud or mountain rises there Yet may you mark the glittering light That glances from the glaciered height And you may mark the shades that sever The throne where winter sits for ever
The avalanches thunder rolling No summer heat his reign controlling The gloomy tyrant in his pride Spreads his dominion far & wide Till set with many an icy gem
Rises his cliffy diadem
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Above a steepy crag we wound Where gloomy pines his forehead crowned And heard we with a sullen swell The turbid Arve dash through the dell
You might have thought it moaning by Wail for the loss of liberty For high the rocks whose mighty screen Confined the narrow pass between And many a mass of granite grey
Opposed the torrents forceful way So headlong rushed the lightning tide No pass was there for aught beside And we high oʼer those cliffs so sheer Must climb the mountain barrier
Until unfolded to the eye The fruitful fields of Chamouni
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It lay before us as a child Of beauty in the desert wild Full strange it seemed that thing so fair,
So fairy like could harbour there For fields of bending corn there grew Close to the glaciers wintry blue And saw we the same sunray shine On pasture gay and mountain pine
Whose dark & spiry forests rose Till mingled with eternal snows That climbed into the clear blue sky In peaked impending majesty ʼTis passing strange that such a place
In all its native loveliness Should, pent within those wilds so lone For many ages pass unknown Unknown save by a simple few Who their own valley only knew
Nor dared the mountain ridge that bound That lovely vale with terrors round That lived secluded from mankind Contented yet in heart and mind That lived within that world alone
A world of beauty of their own
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And now Helvetiaʼs cliffy reign Contains not in her Alpine chain In valley deep, on mountain high, A race like those of Chamouni
For they have loved at dawn of day To trace the chamois fearful way Or on the toppling shelf of snow With crags above and clouds below Or on the peak whose spiry head
Is beetling oer abysses dread Where place for foot, and grasp for hand, Is all the hunter can command Or on the glaciers rigid wave Where he may find a chasmy grave
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