hour or a lifetime Gauged by the ebb and the flow of the ages Shown in the tidemarks on crags prehistoric? If, as men say, time is measured by heartbeats, I wandered through years of vivid emotions. Pelion and Ossa, by arrogant Titans Profanely uplifted to challenge Olympus, Repeated themselves in the blueness above me. Sunsets and dawns such as glowed on the marshes, Silurian haunts of the early creation, Long ere the age of humanity's advent, Gleamed through the vapours and red exhalations Rising from bottomless pits to encolour Weirdly the matrix, volcanic, primeval, Riven and torn in the birth-throes of Cosmos. Slippery ledges uneven and narrow, Through rarefied air that maddens the pulses, Treacherous footpaths inviting destruction, Where fear in the heart disorders the senses. Vertiginate chasms, abysmal, terrific, Unfathomed and sheer with never a foothold, Compelling the gaze with cold fascination. Stretches of billowy acres of whiteness Dimming the eyes with their endless expanses; Ridges upstanding in ice walls cemented By glacial pressure of slow-moving masses. Caverns with ice shapes, blue-tinted, translucent: Columns and altars and figures fantastic, Imagined in dreams or pictured in fever, Softly illumed by the moonlight's reflection. There is the haunt of the evil ice maidens, The servants of Death, who lure with their beauty, Who bathe in the stream of the glacier water, The glacial water that flows through the caverns, Silent and deep as the river of Lethe. These memories hold me. I live in a fever. The air that I breathe, the influence round me Are charged with a strange and volatile essence That throbs in my veins and quickens my breathing. Held by the mountains, I languish in bondage Under the masterful sway of their presence. Restless though weary I dream of their perils, Slipping down chasms with death at the bottom, Or over the desolate ice fields I wander, Hopeless, forgotten and lost in the snowdrifts, Wandering ever past hope of redemption. Sometimes I swing with a pendulum's measure, Fitfully swayed by the wind o'er a chasm That gapes far below, relentless and cruel, Conscious of all in the terrible moments That pass till I drop to the doom that is waiting Far in the depths of the yawning crevasses, And wake at the instant supreme of destruction. 

 To-morrow at dawn I fly from the village Back to the peace of the waters of Leman. 

 Gone, gone at last, is the morbid obsession! Gone to the shade in the regions of Limbo. Far, far away, o'er the waters of Leman, Mistily outlined and faint in the distance, Threatening no longer, the dream-haunted mountains Lazily whisper of rest and contentment. 

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