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A CALIFORNIA song! | |
| A prophecy and indirection—a thought impalpable, to breathe, as air; | |
| A chorus of dryads, fading, departing—or hamadryads departing; | |
| A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, | |
| Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense. | 5 |
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| Farewell, my brethren, | |
| Farewell, O earth and sky—farewell, ye neighboring waters; | |
| My time has ended, my term has come. | |
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2
Along the northern coast, | |
| Just back from the rock-bound shore, and the caves, | 10 |
| In the saline air from the sea, in the Mendocino country, | |
| With the surge for bass and accompaniment low and hoarse, | |
| With crackling blows of axes, sounding musically, driven by strong arms, | |
| Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes—there in the Redwood forest dense, | |
| I heard the mighty tree its death-chant chanting. | 15 |
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| The choppers heard not—the camp shanties echoed not; | |
| The quick-ear’d teamsters, and chain and jack-screw men, heard not, | |
| As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain; | |
| But in my soul I plainly heard. | |
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| Murmuring out of its myriad leaves, | 20 |
| Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high, | |
| Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs—out of its foot-thick bark, | |
| That chant of the seasons and time—chant, not of the past only, but the future. | |
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3
You untold life of me, | |
| And all you venerable and innocent joys, | 25 |
| Perennial, hardy life of me, with joys, ’mid rain, and many a summer sun, | |
| And the white snows, and night, and the wild winds; | |
| O the great patient, rugged joys! my soul’s strong joys, unreck’d by man; | |
| (For know I bear the soul befitting me—I too have consciousness, identity, | |
| And all the rocks and mountains have—and all the earth;) | 30 |
| Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine, | |
| Our time, our term has come. | |
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| Nor yield we mournfully, majestic brothers, | |
| We who have grandly fill’d our time; | |
| With Nature’s calm content, and tacit, huge delight, | 35 |
| We welcome what we wrought for through the past, | |
| And leave the field for them. | |
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| For them predicted long, | |
| For a superber Race—they too to grandly fill their time, | |
| For them we abdicate—in them ourselves, ye forest kings! | 40 |
| In them these skies and airs—these mountain peaks—Shasta—Nevadas, | |
| These huge, precipitous cliffs—this amplitude—these valleys grand—Yosemite, | |
| To be in them absorb’d, assimilated. | |
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Then to a loftier strain, | |
| Still prouder, more ecstatic, rose the chant, | 45 |
| As if the heirs, the Deities of the West, | |
| Joining, with master-tongue, bore part. | |
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| Not wan from Asia’s fetishes, | |
| Nor red from Europe’s old dynastic slaughter-house, | |
| (Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left yet of wars and scaffolds every where,) | 50 |
| But come from Nature’s long and harmless throes—peacefully builded thence, | |
| These virgin lands—Lands of the Western Shore, | |
| To the new Culminating Man—to you, the Empire New, | |
| You, promis’d long, we pledge, we dedicate. | |
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| You occult, deep volitions, | 55 |
| You average Spiritual Manhood, purpose of all, pois’d on yourself—giving, not taking law, | |
| You Womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence life and love, and aught that comes from life and love, | |
| You unseen Moral Essence of all the vast materials of America, (age upon age, working in Death the same as Life,) | |
| You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould the New World, adjusting it to Time and Space, | |
| You hidden National Will, lying in your abysms, conceal’d, but ever alert, | 60 |
| You past and present purposes, tenaciously pursued, may-be unconscious of yourselves, | |
| Unswerv’d by all the passing errors, perturbations of the surface; | |
| You vital, universal, deathless germs, beneath all creeds, arts, statutes, literatures, | |
| Here build your homes for good—establish here—These areas entire, Lands of the Western Shore, | |
| We pledge, we dedicate to you. | 65 |
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| For man of you—your characteristic Race, | |
| Here may be hardy, sweet, gigantic grow—here tower, proportionate to Nature, | |
| Here climb the vast, pure spaces, unconfined, uncheck’d by wall or roof, | |
| Here laugh with storm or sun—here joy—here patiently inure, | |
| Here heed himself, unfold himself (not others’ formulas heed)—here fill his time, | 70 |
| To duly fall, to aid, unreck’d at last, | |
| To disappear, to serve. | |
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| Thus, on the northern coast, | |
| In the echo of teamsters’ calls, and the clinking chains, and the music of choppers’ axes, | |
| The falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the groan, | 75 |
| Such words combined from the Redwood-tree—as of wood-spirits’ voices ecstatic, ancient and rustling, | |
| The century-lasting, unseen dryads, singing, withdrawing, | |
| All their recesses of forests and mountains leaving, | |
| From the Cascade range to the Wasatch—or Idaho far, or Utah, | |
| To the deities of the Modern henceforth yielding, | 80 |
| The chorus and indications, the vistas of coming humanity—the settlements, features all, | |
| In the Mendocino woods I caught. | |
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The flashing and golden pageant of California! | |
| The sudden and gorgeous drama—the sunny and ample lands; | |
| The long and varied stretch from Puget Sound to Colorado south; | 85 |
| Lands bathed in sweeter, rarer, healthier air—valleys and mountain cliffs; | |
| The fields of Nature long prepared and fallow—the silent, cyclic chemistry; | |
| The slow and steady ages plodding—the unoccupied surface ripening—the rich ores forming beneath; | |
| At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession, | |
| A swarming and busy race settling and organizing every where; | 90 |
| Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the whole world, | |
| To India and China and Australia, and the thousand island paradises of the Pacific; | |
| Populous cities—the latest inventions—the steamers on the rivers—the railroads—with many a thrifty farm, with machinery, | |
| And wool, and wheat, and the grape—and diggings of yellow gold. | |
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But more in you than these, Lands of the Western Shore! | 95 |
| (These but the means, the implements, the standing-ground,) | |
| I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years, till now deferr’d, | |
| Promis’d, to be fulfill’d, our common kind, the Race. | |
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| The New Society at last, proportionate to Nature, | |
| In Man of you, more than your mountain peaks, or stalwart trees imperial, | 100 |
| In Woman more, far more, than all your gold, or vines, or even vital air. | |
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| Fresh come, to a New World indeed, yet long prepared, | |
| I see the Genius of the Modern, child of the Real and Ideal, | |
| Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand, | |
| To build a grander future. | 105 |
