Classic Poem

My Castle stands alone,
In some delicious clime,
Away from Earth and Time,
In Fancy's tropic zone,
Beneath its summer skies,
Where all the livelong year the summer never dies!
A stately marble pile, whose pillars rise
From sculptured bases, fluted to the dome,
With wreathed friezes crowned, and rare device
Of carven leaves like pendant drifts of foam;
A thousand windows front the rising sun,
Deep-set between the columns, many paned,
Tri-arched, emblazoned, gorgeously stained,
Crimson and purple, green and blue and dun,
And all their wedded colors fall below,
Like rainbows shattered on a field of snow.
Before the Castle lies a shaven lawn,
Sloping and sparkling in the dews of dawn,
With turfy terraces, and garden bowers
Where rows of slender urns are full of flowers;
Broad oaks o'erarch the winding avenues
Edged round with evergreens of fadeless bloom,
And pour a thousand intermingling hues,
A misty flood of green and golden gloom:
Far-seen through twinkling leaves,
The fountains gush aloft like silver sheaves,
Drooping with shining ears, and crests of spray,
And foamy tassels blowing every way,
Shaking in marble basins, white and cold,
A drainless beaded shower of diamond grain,
Which winnows off in sun-illumined rain
Its dusty chaff, a cloud of misty gold;
And snowy swans are floating round the tide,
Through beds of bowing lilies chaste and white,
Like virgin queens in soft disdain and pride
Sweeping amid their maids with trains of light.
A little herd of deer, with startled looks,
In quiet parks within whose shade they browse,
Drink from the lucid brooks,
Their antlers mirrored with the tangled boughs.
My rivers flow beyond, with guardant ranks
Of silver-liveried poplars on their banks;
And barges rock along the grassy piers,
With gilded pennons blown from side to side;
And bridges span the waves with arches wide,
Their stony 'butments mossed and gray with years;
Then comes a dreamy range of hazy bowers,
With rounded hills, and hollow vales between,
And folded lawns in everlasting green; —
And then a line of palaces and towers,
That lessen on till mountains bar the view,
Shooting their jagged peaks sublimely up the blue!