Poems: Old and New

by Frederick George Scott

 

THE UNNAMED LAKE.

 

IT sleeps among the thousand hills
   Where no man ever trod,
And only nature’s music fills
   The silences of God.

Great mountains tower above its shore,
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   Green rushes fringe its brim,
And o’er its breast for evermore
   The wanton breezes skim.

Dark clouds that intercept the sun
   Go there in Spring to weep,

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And there, when Autumn days are done,
   White mists lie down to sleep.

Sunrise and sunset crown with gold
   The peaks of ageless stone,
Where winds have thundered from of old

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   And storms have set their throne.

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No echoes of the world afar
   Disturb it night or day,
But sun and shadow, moon and star
   Pass and repass for aye.

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’Twas in the grey of early dawn,
   When first the lake we spied,
And fragments of a cloud were drawn
   Half down the mountain side.

Along the shore a heron flew,
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   And from a speck on high,
That hovered in the deepening blue,
   We heard the fish-hawk’s cry.

Among the cloud-capt solitudes,
   No sound the silence broke,
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Save when, in whispers down the woods,
   The guardian mountains spoke.

Through tangles brush and dewy brake,
   Returning whence we came,
We passed in silence, and the lake
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   We left without a name. [Page 11]