A light, methought, broke from her dark, dark eyes,
And shot itself into the singing winds;
A light, methought, flash'd even from her white robe,
As from a glass in the sun, and fell about
My footsteps on the mountains.

About sunset
We came unto the hill of woe, so call'd
Because the legend ran that, long time since,
One rainy night, when every wind blew loud,
A woful man had thrust his wife and child
With shouts from off the bridge, and following, plunged
Into the dizzy chasm below. Below,
Sheer thro' the black-wall'd cliff the rapid brook
Shot down his inner thunders, built above
With matted bramble and the shining gloss
Of ivy-leaves, whose low-hung tresses, dipp'd
In the fierce stream, bore downward with the wave.
The path was steep and loosely strewn with crags
We mounted slowly: yet to both of us
It was delight, not hindrance: unto both
Delight from hardship to be overcome,
And scorn of perilous seeming: unto me
Intense delight and rapture that I breathed,
As with a sense of nigher Deity,
With her to whom all outward fairest things
Were by the busy mind referr'd, compared,
As bearing no essential fruits of excellence.
Save as they were the types and shadowings
Of hers--and then that I became to her
A tutelary angel as she rose,
And with a fearful self-impelling joy
Saw round her feet the country far away,
Beyond the nearest mountain's bosky brows,
Burst into open prospect--heath and hill,
And hollow lined and wooded to the lips--
And steep down walls of battlemented rock
Girded with broom or shiver'd into peaks--
And glory of broad waters interfused,
Whence rose as it were breath and steam of gold;
And over all the great wood rioting
And climbing, starr'd at slender intervals
With blossom tufts of purest white; and last,
Framing the mighty landskip to the West,
A purple range of purple cones, between
Whose interspaces gush'd, in blinding bursts,
The incorporate light of sun and sea.

At length,
Upon the tremulous bridge, that from beneath
Seemed with a cobweb firmament to link
The earthquake-shattered chasm, hung with shrubs,
We passed with tears of rapture. All the West,
And even unto the middle South, was ribb'd
And barr'd with bloom on bloom. The sun beneath,
Held for a space 'twixt cloud and wave, shower'd down
Rays of a mighty circle,