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The Man Who Saw

The master weavers at the enchanted loom
Of Legend, weaving long ago those tales
Through which there wanders the grey thread of truth,
Lost in the gorgeous arras of romance,
Tell how King Vortigern resolved to build
A Tower of Safety, 'mid the solitudes
That are the hem of the great druid robe
Of Snowdon, Mount of Eagles. So each day
The builders laboured, marrying stone to stone;
But ever in the night an adversary
Invisible as malevolent cancelled those
Cold nuptials, and with impish wanton rage
Shattered the walls. And thither, from beyond
That congress of grave mountains, met like seers
And bards august, though in a rivalry
Of silence rather than of song—from where
The vales are not so tranced with awe, nor yet
So far below the hill tops as to feel
Aching estrangement,—fortune one day brought
A youth whoso very brow was a command.
His name of Merlin had not clambered then
To fearsome greatness, like a dusty star;
Yet ev'n thus early his subduing eyes
Seemed to have known all things in life but tears;
And standing where wrecked hopes bestrewed the ground,
He said to them whose toil was shards and dust:
'Search underneath. your tower's foundations; there
Are the Unbuilders, busy while you build;
The Undoers are there.' And every man obeyed.
And digging deep, they found a hollow abysm,
Where waters gnawed the ribs of the Earth, and sapped
Her sinews, till her frame tottered infirm ;
'Where also monsters heaved their tumid bulk
In ancient ambush, and with tremors vast
Palsied those ramparts as they yearned to rise;'
Blind dragon shapes, of blindest, darkness born,
That save in darkness could not live an hour,
And, touched by Light, made their dull moan, and died.

Such is the tale, which one, who chronicled
Old shadowy wars in sanctuaries of peace,
Found amid crumbled pomps, the hushed domain
Of mildew, and the empire of the moth,
Nigh on eight hundred years ago. And now,
Out of that land where Snowdon night by night
Receives the confidences of lonesome stars,
And where Carnarvon's ruthless battlements
Magnificently oppress the daunted tide,
There comes—no fabled Merlin, son of mist,
And brother to the twilight, but a man

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