I STROLL through verdant fields to-day, | |
| Through waving woods and pastures sweet, | |
| To the red warrior’s ancient seat | |
| Where liquid voices of the bay | |
| Babble in tropic tongues around its rocky feet. | 5 |
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| I put my lips to Philip’s spring; | |
| I sit in Philip’s granite chair; | |
| And thence I climb up, stair by stair, | |
| And stand where once the savage king | |
| Stood and with eye of hawk cleft the blue round of air. | 10 |
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| On Narragansett’s sunny breast | |
| This necklace of fair islands shone, | |
| And Philip, muttering, “All my own!” | |
| Looked north and south and east and west, | |
| And waved his sceptre from this alabaster throne. | 15 |
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| His beacon on Pocasset hill, | |
| Lighting the hero’s path to fame | |
| Whene’er the crafty Pequot came, | |
| Blazed as the windows of yon mill | |
| Now blaze at set of sun with day’s expiring flame. | 20 |
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| Always, at midnight, from a cloud, | |
| An eagle swoops, and hovering nigh | |
| This peak, utters one piercing cry | |
| Of wrath and anguish, long and loud, | |
| And plunges once again into the silent sky! | 25 |
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| The Wampanoags, long since dead, | |
| Who to these islands used to cling, | |
| Spake of this shrieking midnight thing | |
| With bated breath, and, shuddering, said, | |
| “’T is angry Philip’s voice,—the spectre of the king!” | 30 |
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| All things are changed. Here Bristol sleeps | |
| And dreams within her emerald tent; | |
| Yonder are picnic tables bent | |
| Beneath their burden; up the steeps | |
| The martial strains arise and songs of merriment. | 35 |
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| I pluck an aster on the crest; | |
| It is a child of one, I know, | |
| Plucked here two hundred years ago, | |
| And worn upon the slave-queen’s breast,— | |
| O, that this blossom had a tongue to tell its woe! | 40 |
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