ChatGPT rewrites The Masque of the Red Death

ChatGPT is pretty good at writing prose and, to a greater or lesser extent, can imitate different writing styles. So I wondered if it could write The Masque of the Red Death in a kind of modernist, stream-of-consciousness style. The answer is maybe, but not this time. 

The result is not too much like Woolf's or Joyce's prose, but it is very readable and is probably more accessible than the original, at least to the modern reader.

Note: ChatGPT can only generate a limited amount of text at a time, so to coax ChatGPT into writing the story in chunks, rather than trying to summarise it all at once, I had to prompt it with something like "Rewrite the following text from Poe's The Masque of the Red Death in the first person past tense from the point of view of a guardian knight, using a highly emotional, stream-of-consciousness style with interior monologue similar to that of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Be sure not to use any of the original sentences, and use evocative, painterly metaphors:" and "Continue the story from the perspective of the knight by rewriting the following text in the same vein. Be sure not to use any of the original sentences, and use evocative, painterly metaphors."

The Masque of the Red Death, in the style of Woolf and Joyce

 I was a guardian knight for the Prince Prospero, sworn to protect him at all costs. The Red Death had ravaged the land for months, leaving a trail of blood and despair in its wake. Its symptoms were brutal - sharp pains, dizziness, and then the inevitable bleeding from every pore, until death. The scarlet stains that marked its victims were a curse, condemning them to isolation and loneliness. The whole ordeal lasted just half an hour, but it was a lifetime of suffering.

But the prince was different. He was happy, fearless, and wise. As the plague decimated his kingdom, he called upon a thousand of his closest friends and knights, including myself, to join him in a secluded abbey. It was a grand and opulent structure, built to the prince's own unique taste, with high walls and iron gates. We all worked together to weld the gates shut, determined to keep out any impulses of despair or madness. The abbey was stocked with everything we needed to weather the storm - food, entertainment, wine, and beauty. The outside world could fend for itself, as long as we had each other and all the comforts within.

It was at the height of the plague, during the fifth or sixth month of our isolation, that the prince threw a masked ball of extraordinary splendor.

It was a luxurious masquerade, held in seven irregularly shaped rooms - an imperial suite. Most palaces have straight corridors with folding doors that slide open to reveal the full length of the suite, but not here. The prince had a taste for the bizarre, and each room was arranged in a way that only allowed a limited view at a time. There were sharp turns every twenty or thirty yards, each one revealing a new surprise. On either side of the walls, tall and narrow Gothic windows looked out onto a closed corridor that followed the twists and turns of the suite. The windows were made of stained glass, each one a different color corresponding to the hue of the room it opened into. The eastern room was blue, the second purple, the third green, the fourth orange, the fifth white, the sixth violet. The seventh room, however, was shrouded in black velvet tapestries that covered the ceiling and walls, falling in heavy folds onto a carpet of the same color. The windows in this room were scarlet, a deep blood color. None of the rooms had any lamps or candelabra, but in the corridors outside each window stood a heavy tripod with a brazier of fire that cast its rays through the tinted glass, brightly illuminating the rooms. This created a multitude of dazzling and fantastical appearances. But in the western, or black, room, the firelight streaming through the blood-tinted windows gave a ghastly appearance, causing many of the guests to avoid setting foot inside.

It was in the western room where a massive ebony clock stood against the wall. Its pendulum swung back and forth with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang, and when the minute hand completed a circuit of the face, the clock struck the hour with a clear, loud, deep, and extremely musical note that was so peculiar it caused the musicians in the orchestra to pause momentarily in their performance, and the waltzers to stop their dancing. The whole company was momentarily disconcerted, and even the giddiest of guests grew pale while the more mature ones passed their hands over their brows as if in confusion or contemplation. But as soon as the echoes had fully faded, light laughter filled the room as the musicians smiled at their own nervousness and made whispered vows to each other not to be affected by the next chime. Sixty minutes later, when the clock struck again, there was the same disconcert and hesitation among the guests.

Despite these moments of unease, it was a lavish and magnificent celebration. The prince had a unique taste for color and effects, disregarding the traditional decorations of fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his ideas glowed with a barbaric radiance. Some might have thought him mad, but those who knew him understood that he was not. It was necessary to see, hear, and touch him to be sure.
The prince had taken great care in decorating the seven rooms for the masquerade, and it was his own unique taste that gave character to the costumes of the guests. They were certainly bizarre, with mismatched limbs and extravagant adornments, delirious fancies, and a mix of the beautiful, wanton, and grotesque, with a hint of terror and disgust. The rooms were filled with a multitude of dreams that seemed to writhe and take on the hues of the rooms, and the wild music of the orchestra seemed like the echo of their steps. Suddenly, the ebony clock in the hall would strike, causing a moment of stillness and silence, as the dreams froze in place. But as the chimes faded, a light, half-subdued laughter followed them as they retreated. The music would swell again, and the dreams came back to life, writhing more merrily than before, taking on the colors of the tinted windows through which the light from the tripods streamed. But no one dared venture into the westernmost room, where the night was drawing to a close and a ruddier light shone through the blood-colored windows. The blackness of the sable drapery was intimidating, and the muffled peal of the nearby ebony clock, more solemn and emphatic than any of the other rooms, echoed through the chamber.

But while the western room was empty, the other rooms were densely crowded, pulsing with the energy of life. The revelry continued until midnight, when the music stopped and the dancing slowed, replaced by a tense stillness. The clock struck twelve times, and as the last echoes faded, many in the crowd found themselves noticing a masked figure that had not been there before. The rumor of this new presence spread quickly, and there was a whisper of disapproval and surprise, followed by fear, horror, and disgust. In a crowd of phantoms such as the ones at the masquerade, it would take a truly extraordinary appearance to stir such a reaction. The masker had gone beyond even the prince's loose standards of propriety, with a costume and bearing that showed no wit or propriety. The figure was tall and gaunt, dressed in the clothes of the grave and wearing a mask that so closely resembled a stiffened corpse that it took close scrutiny to see the deception. But the masker had gone even further, taking on the appearance of the Red Death itself. The costume was splattered with blood, and the broad forehead and features were sprinkled with the scarlet horror.

When the prince laid eyes on the ghostly figure, which moved slowly and solemnly among the waltzers as if to fully embrace its role, he was first overcome with terror or disgust, followed by anger. "Who dares to insult us with this blasphemous mockery?" he demanded hoarsely of the nearby courtiers. "Seize him and unmask him so we can hang him from the battlements at sunrise!" His words rang clearly through the seven rooms as he stood in the eastern room, the blue one. He was a bold and robust man, and the music had stopped at the wave of his hand.

The prince stood in the blue room with a group of pale courtiers by his side. As he spoke, the group began to move towards the intruder, who approached the prince with stately steps. But no one put forth a hand to seize him, out of fear of the madman's assumptions, and he passed within a yard of the prince's person. He made his way through the blue room to the purple, then to the green, orange, white, and violet, before anyone moved to stop him. The prince, filled with rage and shame at his own cowardice, rushed through the six rooms with a drawn dagger, pursuing the figure. He approached within a few feet of the retreating figure, but as he reached the end of the violet room, the figure turned and faced him. The prince let out a sharp cry and dropped the dagger as he fell to the ground, dead. The other revelers summoned the courage of despair and rushed into the black room, seizing the tall, motionless figure in the shadow of the ebony clock. But they were horrified to find the grave clothes and corpse-like mask were empty, with no tangible form inside.

The Red Death had arrived like a thief in the night, and one by one, the revelers fell to the ground, covered in blood, and died in despair. The life of the ebony clock went out with the last of the revelers, and the flames of the tripods extinguished. Darkness, decay, and the Red Death held sway over all.

Virginia Woolf's The Waves with Stable Diffusion 2.0

Virginia Woolf’s writing is not only poetic, but also wonderfully visual. At times her masterly fusion of language and visual imagery transcends mere language to become an alchemy of ideas. Take this example in The Waves when Bernard has a sudden epiphany about time:
 

'And time,' said Bernard, 'lets fall its drop. The drop that has formed on the roof of the soul falls. On the roof of my mind time, forming, lets fall its drop. Last week, as I stood shaving, the drop fell. I, standing with my razor in my hand, became suddenly aware of the merely habitual nature of my action (this is the drop forming) and congratulated my hands, ironically, for keeping at it. Shave, shave, shave, I said. Go on shaving. The drop fell. All through the day's work, at intervals, my mind went to an empty place, saying, "What is lost? What is over?" And "Over and done with," I muttered, "over and done with," solacing myself with words. People noticed the vacuity of my face and the aimlessness of my conversation. The last words of my sentence tailed away. And as I buttoned on my coat to go home I said more dramatically, "I have lost my youth."

'It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue--the penalty of living in an old civilization with a notebook. This drop falling has nothing to do with losing my youth. This drop falling is time tapering to a point. Time, which is a sunny pasture covered with a dancing light, time, which is widespread as a field at midday, becomes pendant. Time tapers to a point. As a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment, time falls. These are the true cycles, these are the true events. Then as if all the luminosity of the atmosphere were withdrawn I see to the bare bottom. I see what habit covers. - p. 157

The merest of notes has furnished Bernard with this image, enabling him to give voice to the realisation that his youth has passed. By stretching time beyond the “old civilisation” he finds himself in, all the way to geological time, the sense of loss in his own life becomes palpable “as a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment”.

The Waves is divided into sections that mark the passing of time. At the beginning of each section a short passage describes the movement of the sun at that time of day, with the first starting just before sunrise. It is written in beautiful, painterly language, and I wondered how a text-to-image AI like Stable Diffusion would fare with this language.

Below is my attempt to create accompanying visuals for the first section using Stable Diffusion 2.0. Some were cherry picked after multiple rounds, while others were generated on the first or second attempt, The exact prompts I used are at the end.

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. 

 

Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

 

 

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. 

 

Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. 

 

Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.

 

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. 

 

The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

 

Prompts

1.

As the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky, by John Constable

2.

As the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky.
Monet, Ken Bushe, John Kensett

3.

Before dawn, As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously.
Monet, Ken Bushe, John Kensett

4.

At sunrise by the sea, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher.
Byron Pickering, Albert Bierstadt, Turner, Henry Moore

5.

The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out.
Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible;
an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.
Monet, Byron Pickering, Albert Bierstadt, Turner

6.

At sunrise, the light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another.
One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down.
The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind.
Edward Hopper, Claude Monet

7.

After sunrise in the garden, the sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window.
The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial.
Edouard Manet, John Constable, Henry Woods, Henry John Sylvester Stannard

Colab notebooks

Stable Diffusion 2.0 - Woctezuma

Stable Diffusion 2.0 - God of AI

 

The Creative Practice of Being in Nature

Like so many, lockdown and the pandemic has afforded me new reasons to explore my local environment, the City as well as Nature. It is an activity I loved pursuing when I first arrived, but it fell by the wayside as I pursued career goals and life became, well, busy.

Together with my partner - who is often the first to suggest it! - I soon found myself walking and cycling many miles in and around London, and I also started reading enthusiastically on relevant topics. After a trip to Epping, for example, I read poetry by John Clare and imagined him walking around High Beach while slowly regaining his spirits. Indeed, it is possible to walk in his footsteps.

The Romantic poets offer a rich bounty for ramblers and lovers of Nature everywhere. While London is also associated with William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, I've actually never been to the area of the Lake Poets where the Wordsworths and their ilk spent many years. It probably shouldn't have been, but to me it was a surprise to learn that when they first moved to the area it was still considered a wilderness.

Jack Thurston, referring to Daniel Defoe's travels through the North and Cumbria in the 1720s, puts it thus:

"Fear and loathing was the most common reaction to wild and unruly landscapes in those days. It was not without reason. The condition of roads ranged from terrible to non-existent, and travelling was painfully slow. What's more, the weather could be genuinely life-threatening, as Defoe discovered when he was caught in a snowstorm in the South Pennines in August" (Thurston, Lost Lanes North, p.16).

When the Wordsworths settled there it was no doubt becoming more habitable, but not by much. Their literary legacy is now a part of the establishment, so it is instructive to consider that settling there was in fact a countercultural move, an "act of defiance, a wholehearted rejection of the fashionable, metropolitan way of life". It completely changed my perspective on their practice.

There is no question as to Wordsworth's deep love for Nature and the English countryside. Not only his poetry, but just as importantly, his actions attest to this fact. He is estimated to have walked around 175,000 miles. To put that into perspective, you would have to walk a distance of nine and a half miles every single day for 50 years! It is not hard to imagine William and Dorothy walking silently among the fells, each delighting in or meditating on their surroundings and composing thoughts and words for poetry or diary.

William's dictum that "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity" takes on a unique meaning for writing practice when we consider that this is not recollection in the silent privacy of a room. Wordsworth would have been considering those lines in the open air, while walking!

David Gange mentions the historian G.M. Trevelyan who, not unlike Wordsworth, sought to find an antidote to the "absurdity of the city's speed and steel" in romantic wildness that stimulates the imagination. Of past masters Trevelyan particularly esteemed Thomas Carlyle:

"Carlyle walked large distances, gesticulating his way across the moor as he muttered purple prose. While wandering, he dreamed up vivid portraits of great events, expressed with unique intensity in a style soon christened 'Carlylese'. When walking, his companions wrote, Carlyle became a feature of the landscape: 'a living, not extinct volcano whose lava-torrents of fever-frenzy enveloped all things'" - (Gange, The Frayed Atlantic Edge, p. 148).

Neither Trevelyan nor Carlyle saw history or literature as "a thing to be done at a desk in an urban room without something elemental to ignite the imagination". Writing is merely an extension of walking and meditating, and of being immersed in Nature; or to put it differently, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [...] recollected in tranquillity".

In The Frayed Atlantic Edge David Gange explores by kayak many of the coastal areas where communities once thrived on open farming and crofting as well as various local industries. One of the most serious blows to local communities' way of life came in the form of the Education Act of 1872, which eroded local Gaelic identity by forcing Gaelic-speaking children to learn only in English. It had a deeply demoralising effect. Another serious blow came in the form of the infamous Clearances when landlords at first sought "agricultural improvement", enclosing the open farmlands of their tenants, and then helped them emigrate once they fell into poverty. As with Wordsworth, cultural practitioners who came to these fringes to foreground romantic wildness over mechnanising efficiency were considered radical, making countercultural statements against the centralising, hegemonising tendencies of the South and of London.

The city can also be a place of creative immersion and rambling, of course, as exemplified by the flaneur and psychogeographer. In this case Blake or De Quincey would instead be our guide. Peter Ackroyd, in London: The Biography, observes that William Wordsworth links the City in The Prelude to a prison:

Of bondage, from yon City’s walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured. 

- (lines 7-8)

Elsewhere he also suggests that Wordsworth "recoiled from an innate and exuberant theatricality" in the city, observed in the cacophony of advertisements and the anarchic spirit of a place like Bartholomew Fair. Ackroyd on the other hand revels in the elemental and devouring properties of the City, which enables its enduring greatness, and he appears to consider Wordsworth constitutionally unsuitable to appreciate it. Be that as it may, Wordsworth has more in common with the city flaneur than at first meets the eye. In Michael: A Pastoral Poem (1800), the poet writes:

If from the public way you turn your steps
Up the tumultuous brook of Greenhead Ghyll,
You will suppose that with an upright path
Your feet must struggle; in such bold ascent
The pastoral mountains front you, face to face.
But, courage! for around that boisterous brook
The mountains have all opened out themselves,
And made a hidden valley of their own.
No habitation can be seen; but they
Who journey thither find themselves alone
With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites
That overhead are sailing in the sky.
It is in truth an utter solitude;
Nor should I have made mention of this Dell
But for one object which you might pass by,
Might see and notice not. Beside the brook
Appears a struggling heap of unhewn stones!
And to that simple object appertains
A story—unenriched with strange events, 

- (lines 1-19)

Is such a chance encounter with a random pile of rocks with its own unique story not the very stuff of psychogeography? Indeed, Wordsworth's oeuvre might even be considered 'psychogeography of the countryside'! Incidentally, although Wordsworth wrote many poems that take local people as their subject, none of those I've read personally highlights the discrepancy between the romantic pastoral and the metropolitan centre as poignantly as Michael.

Whether it's in the City or in Nature, there is something inherently exhilarating about being out in the open air and among the elements. It is an experience that is difficult to reason about clearly from a sofa indoors, and perhaps an experience that is even a little alien to many citydwellers. Cloud cover, the cold and the rain is rarely enticing from the warm comfort of the living room, and we grudgingly weather it with a brolly until we get to the muddy, slippery floors of the nearest tube station.

But once I get on the bike something strange happens. At first it is uncomfortable, and then within minutes I am suddenly used to it: the bite of the cold and the feeling of rain on my face herald the joy and freedom of moving around as I breathe the air. It is hard to explain. Out in the countryside this experience is further amplified. Jack Thurston describes it as follows:

"On a bicycle you travel at the speed of the land. You don't just see and hear the world and the weather change around you but you smell it and feel it. Physical effort heightens the sense and you feel everything with a greater clarity - the wind in your hair, the sun on your back, a drenching by rain or the chill of a crisp winter's day. You feel each incline in your legs, in your lungs, and the swooping descent in your stomach, the sway as you lean the bike this way and that to climb a hill or round a bend. The bicycle is a total immersion machine." (Lost Lanes North, p. 13).

Another poet who gave himself over to living close to Nature and immersing himself in the setting is W.S. Graham. He is a modernist romantic poet whose works were neglected during his own lifetime, but have grown in importance in recent decades. He moved from his native Greenock in Scotland to Ireland, and later to Cornwall, which is where he wrote much of his work. David Gange notes that he was a "passionate but foolish lover of the outdoors whose jaunts to wild places sometimes flirted with catastrophe" (The Frayed Atlantic Edge, p. 317). He lived by the sea, and wrote about the sea. In The Nightfishing, a highly ambitious landmark of a poem, the poet is so thoroughly engaged in the activity of setting out amidst the waves, it is difficult to separate the poet's self from the boat and the haul and the sea, and the very act of writing:

In those words through which I move, leaving a cry
Formed in exact degree and set dead at
The mingling flood, I am put forward on to
Live water, clad in oil, burnt by salt
To life. Here, braced, announced on to the slow
Heaving seaboards, almost I am now too
Lulled. And my watch is blear. The early grey
Air is blowing.

- (stanza 20)

If we consider the close relationship between the mind, the self, the body, and the environment, it should be little wonder that the manner in which we occupy and surround ourselves - what we immerse ourselves in - pervades our souls. To put that in perspective, contrast it with Thomas Berardi's observations regarding the incredible economic and capitalist success of South Korea, as quoted by Slavoj Žižek:

"After coloinzation and wars, after dictatorship and starvation, the South Korean mind, liberated by the burden of the natural body, smoothly entered the digital sphere with a lower degree of cultural resistance than virtually any other populations in the world." (Trouble in Paradise, p.6 - my emphasis)

The mind, untethered by the body, adapts more easily to the homogenising and automating demands of virtual and digital acceleration driving capitalism in the 21st century. By contrast, the physical body, when immersed in the slow-moving physical world is naturally at odds with such a fast-paced, fast-changing world.

Language itself performs a linking and cultivating function. Wordsworth may have loved the countryside he wrote about, but the beauty of his works also invited the public to a part of the country that has today become rather more tamed, not least in order to cater to all the tourists. Here we see the structural dissonance of the relationship between the city and the countryside. It is a tension between the demands of modern civilisation and the rhythms of Nature that are nowhere better expressed than in the symptoms of climate change, which looks likely to be humanity's defining struggle during at least the first half of the 21st century.

A city like London, with its rivers, parks, canals, gardens and woodlands, offers many hybrid environments in which we may tune into the outdoor experience. Not all of us are artists or poets like the Wordsworths or W.S. Graham. Most of us are simply trying to earn our keep. But perhaps by being immersed in Nature we, too, can tap into that exhilarating creativity that they accessed and - who knows - learn to fully live in our bodies and rediscover our tether to Mother Nature.

Finally, here is Grasmere (a fragment) by Dorothy Wordsworth:

Peaceful our valley, fair and green,
And beautiful her cottages,
Each in its nook, its sheltered hold,
Or underneath its tuft of trees.
Many and beautiful they are;
But there is one that I love best,
A lowly shed, in truth, it is,
A brother of the rest.
Yet when I sit on rock or hill,
Down looking on the valley fair,
That Cottage with its clustering trees
Summons my heart; it settles there.
Others there are whose small domain
Of fertile fields and hedgerows green
Might more seduce a wanderer's mind
To wish that there his home had been.
Such wish be his! I blame him not,
My fancies they perchance are wild
--I love that house because it is
The very Mountains' child.
Fields hath it of its own, green fields,
But they are rocky steep and bare;
Their fence is of the mountain stone,
And moss and lichen flourish there.
And when the storm comes from the North
It lingers near that pastoral spot,
And, piping through the mossy walls,
It seems delighted with its lot.
And let it take its own delight;
And let it range the pastures bare;
Until it reach that group of trees,
--It may not enter there!
A green unfading grove it is,
Skirted with many a lesser tree,
Hazel and holly, beech and oak,
A bright and flourishing company.
Precious the shelter of those trees;
They screen the cottage that I love;
The sunshine pierces to the roof,
And the tall pine-trees tower above.
When first I saw that dear abode,
It was a lovely winter's day:
After a night of perilous storm
The west wind ruled with gentle sway;
A day so mild, it might have been
The first day of the gladsome spring;
The robins warbled, and I heard
One solitary throstle sing.
A Stranger, Grasmere, in thy Vale,
All faces then to me unknown,
I left my sole companion-friend
To wander out alone.
Lured by a little winding path,
I quitted soon the public road,
A smooth and tempting path it was,
By sheep and shepherds trod.
Eastward, toward the lofty hills,
This pathway led me on
Until I reached a stately Rock,
With velvet moss o'ergrown.
With russet oak and tufts of fern
Its top was richly garlanded;
Its sides adorned with eglantine
Bedropp'd with hips of glossy red.
There, too, in many a sheltered chink
The foxglove's broad leaves flourished fair,
And silver birch whose purple twigs
Bend to the softest breathing air.
Beneath that Rock my course I stayed,
And, looking to its summit high,
"Thou wear'st," said I, "a splendid garb,
Here winter keeps his revelry.
"Full long a dweller on the Plains,
I griev'd when summer days were gone;
No more I'll grieve; for Winter here
Hath pleasure gardens of his own.
"What need of flowers? The splendid moss
Is gayer than an April mead;
More rich its hues of various green,
Orange, and gold, & glittering red."
--Beside that gay and lovely Rock
There came with merry voice
A foaming streamlet glancing by;
It seemed to say "Rejoice!"
My youthful wishes all fulfill'd,
Wishes matured by thoughtful choice,
I stood an Inmate of this vale
How could I but rejoice?