Geraldine Author:Martin Farquhar Tupper Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE SONG OF AN ALPINE ELF. Ha ha ha! My coy Jungfra Is tall and robed in snow, Yet at a leap to the cloudy steep I bound from the glen below; On ... more »her dizziest peak I sit and shriek To the winds that around me blow, And heard from afar is my ha ha ha! The wild laugh echoes so. In the forest dun round Lauterbrunn That line each dark ravine, I hide me away from the garish day Till the howling winter's e'en ; Then I jump on high through the coal-black sky, And light on some cliff of snow That nods to its fall like a tottering wall, And I rock it to and fro'! My summer's home is the cataract's foam As it floats in a frothing heap, My winter's rest is the weasel's nest, Or deep with the mole I sleep: I ride for a freak on the lightning-streak, And mingle among the clouds My swarthy form with the thunder-storm, Wrapped in its sable shrouds. Often I launch the huge avalanche, And make it my milk-white sledge When unappall'd to the Grindlewald I slide from the Shrikehorn's edge: Silent and soft to the ibex oft I have stolen, and hurried him o'er The precipice to the bristling ice That smokes with his scarlet gore. But my greatest joy is to lure and decoy To the chasm's slippery brink The hunter bold, when he's weary and old, And there let him suddenly sink, A thousand feet dead! he dropped like lead, Ha, he could n't leap like me; With broken back, as a felon on rack, He hangs in a split pine-tree. And there mid his bones, that echoed with groans, I make me a nest of his hair; The ribs dry and white rattle loud as in spite When I rock in my cradle there : Hurrah, hurrah, and ha, ha, ha ! I 'm in a merry mood, For I 'm all alone in my palace of bone, That's tapestried fair with the old ...« less