An Hour With Nature And With Night. Poem by William Billington

I STOOD upon a steep cloud-haunted hill,
When clear and cloudless was the evening sky;
As bliss fills Heaven, did sacred silence fill
The wide-womb'd welkin; universal space
Throbbed with o'erfulness of the Deity;
The circumspheral Air, which doth embrace
The World, was hushed in worship mute and still;
Like spirit-beacons, star by star, apace
The constellations kindled-Earth did lie
In glory-trance beneath the Sun-god's eye,
Whose ardent love-gaze grew more mild and dim,
As though a flood of jealous tears did swim
Down his bright cheeks, at leaving her green breast
To Night's embrace, while he unmated sank to rest.

A range of giant hills enringed me round,
Like statues round a monument, that keep
Untiring watch while Time sweeps past age-crown'd,
And, bowed in homage, ever watch and weep;
As Ocean to the Moon, my heart did leap
With tidal impulse surging up to Heaven;
I fell his spirit-home is in the deep
Dim starry distance, maugre man's earth-leaven.
'Neath burning, cloud-built battlements, which flanked
Earth's utmost boundary like a wall of fire,
With golden towers and lightning-bastions pranked,
And castles kinged with many a flaming spire,
Through rosy light old Ocean's visage shone,
Like Lucifer's bright brow, when flushed with reddening dawn.

And when the Sea had rocked the Sun to rest,
And Earth, in dew, poured forth her farewell tears,
The queenly Moon arose, crowned with a crest
Of white and wavy flame; from east to west,
The darkened heavens were flushed with flaming spheres,
As dewdrops numberless! And God, the God
Of earth, is God of all those dark and bright
Unfathomable deeps, where wildest flight
Of human fancy fails! This mundane clod-
Man's temporal home-how infinitely small
Compared with Night whom world-starred robes invest!
Nor would our little Solar System's fall
E're dim the lustre of his crown of light,
For Night is God's own Bard-Oh! how I envy Night!