The cliffs on the mountain,
    The grand and the gray,
They took the bright creature
    And hurled it away!

I heard the wild downfall,
    And knew it must spill
A passionate heart out
    All over the hill.

Oh! was it a daughter
    Of sorrow and sin,
That they threw it so madly
    Down into the lynn?

“Oh where are the shadows
    So cool and so sweet
And the rocks,” saith the water,
    “With the moss on their feet?

“Oh, where are my playmates
    The wind and the flowers—
The golden and purple—
    Of honey-sweet bowers,

“Mine eyes have been blinded
    Because of the sun;
And moaning and moaning
    I listlessly run.

“These hills are so flinty!—
    Ah! tell me, dark Earth,
What valley leads back to
    The place of my birth?—

“What valley leads up to
    The haunts where a child
Of the caverns I sported,
    The free and the wild?

“There lift me,”—it crieth,
    “I faint from the heat;
With a sob for the shadows
    So cool and so sweet.”

Ye rocks, that look over
    With never a tear,
I yearn for one half of
    The wasted love here!

My sister so wistful,
    You know I believe,
Like a child for the mountains
    This water doth grieve.

Ah! you with the blue eyes
    And golden-brown hair,
Come closer and closer
    And truly declare:—

Supposing a darling
    Once happened to sin,
In a passionate space,
    Would you carry her in—

If your fathers and mothers,
    The grand and the gray,
Had taken the weak one
    And hurled her away?