I

Beyond the Northern Lights, in regions haunted

Of twilight, where the world is glacier planted,

And pale as Loki in his cavern when

The serpent's slaver burns him to the bones,

I saw the phantasms of gigantic men,

The prototypes of vastness, quarrying stones;

Great blocks of winter, glittering with the morn's

And evening's colors,—wild prismatic tones

Of boreal beauty.—Like the three gray Norns,

Silence and solitude and terror loomed

Around them where they labored. Walls arose,

Vast as the Andes when creation boomed

Insurgent fire; and through the rushing snows

Enormous battlements of tremendous ice,

Bastioned and turreted, I saw arise.

II

But who can sing the workmanship gigantic

That reared within its coruscating dome

The roaring fountain, hurling an Atlantic

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