| |
| FAMED Maltby yews, with trunks like stone! | |
| Are you or these gray rocks the older? | |
| Like “death-in-life,” ye strangely grow, | |
| And, dead alive, they sternly moulder. | |
| Memorials grand of death and life, | 5 |
| That seem from time new life to borrow! | |
| Full many a race have ye outlived | |
| Of men whose lives were crime and sorrow. | |
| |
| Age after age, while Time grew old, | |
| Your writhen boughs here slowly lengthened; | 10 |
| Storm-stricken trees! your stormy strength | |
| Five hundred years have darkly strengthened. | |
| Yet safe beneath your mighty roots | |
| The busy bee hath made its dwelling; | |
| And, at your feet, the little mouse, | 15 |
| With lifted hands, its joy is telling. | |
| |
| And high above the full-voiced lark | |
| The sun, that loves to see you, beameth | |
| On lonely rock or mossy trunk, | |
| That with the rock coeval seemeth; | 20 |
| While, all around, the desert flowers, | |
| Where breezes drink their freshness, gather, | |
| As children come to kneel and bend | |
| In prayer around their father’s father. | |
| |
| O, could I write upon your gloom | 25 |
| A solemn verse that would not perish, | |
| My written thoughts should warn and bless, | |
| And nations saved the precept cherish; | |
| For I would bid the dark and strong | |
| Be greatly good, and daily stronger, | 30 |
| That power to wrong, and will to wrong, | |
| Like fiends divorced, might pair no longer. | |
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