Elm City, by Herbert Randall

SUNSET FROM EAST ROCK.

“I gazed on the beauty of vanishing hills
The chisel of time had enwrought;
I longed for the genius to fashion the words,
By masterly touches of thought,
In musical metre and blending of tone,
With spark and poesy blest,
To tell to the world how the day dropped to sleep
In the arms of the warm-bosomed west.
I peeked thro’ the windows of diamond panes,
With curtains of soft, misty pink;
The tree-tops were parted that I might see in;
One kindly star blossomed to blink;
A primrose new blown opened shining and full;
The crystal deeps thrilled with delight;
And veins of the violets pulsed into play
When the rosy-cheeked day said good-night.
A song-sparrow waited till late with its lay,
Then mingling, as sunshine and rain,
His sweet vesper warble from birches and oak,
Fused thankfulness over the plain;
The lashes of evening drooped over the blue;
The lights from a train rumbled by;
But day was at rest, as by mother-heart blest,
A crescent-moon love-watching nigh.
The picture returns like a vision from Faust,
Dissolves in the mem’ry of night;
As closes the drama in breathless array
On Gounod’s sweet transfixing flight,
So steals to me now the enchantment of then,
I found when that dream-incense, sleep,
From out of the stillness the heavens exhaled,
Fell over the face of the deep.”
-Excerpt and (top) image courtesy of the Digital Commonwealth Massachusetts Collections Online, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Library, David A. Hanson Collection of the History of Photomechanical Reproduction, “Elm City: picture and verse,” by Herbert Randall, 1896