The Lantern

Book 632

PG

Is full of windy caverns all about;

And many a pool and many a grim abyss

She bears within her bosom, ay, and cliffs

And jagged scarps; and many a river, hid

Beneath her chine, rolls rapidly along

Its billows and plunging boulders. For clear fact

Requires that earth must be in every part

Alike in constitution. Therefore, earth,

With these things underneath affixed and set,

Trembleth above, jarred by big down-tumblings,

When time hath undermined the huge caves,

The subterranean. Yea, whole mountains fall,

And instantly from spot of that big jar

There quiver the tremors far and wide abroad.

And with good reason: since houses on the street

Begin to quake throughout, when jarred by a cart

Of no large weight; and, too, the furniture

Within the house up-bounds, when a paving-block

Gives either iron rim of the wheels a jolt.

It happens, too, when some prodigious bulk

Of age-worn soil is rolled from mountain slopes

Into tremendous pools of water dark,

That the reeling land itself is rocked about

By the water's undulations; as a basin

Sometimes won't come to rest until the fluid