Winter-Solitude

I saw the city's towers on a luminous pale-gray sky; Beyond them a hill of the softest mistiest green, With naught but frost and the coming of night between, And a long thin cloud above the colour of August rye. I sat in the midst of a plain on my snowshoes with bended knee Where the thin wind stung my cheeks, And the hard snow ran in little ripples and peaks, Like the fretted floor of a white and petrified sea. And a strange peace gathered about my soul and shone, As I sat reflecting there, In a world so mystically fair, So deathly silent--I so utterly alone.