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(Excerpt)
RIVERS that roll most musical in song | |
| Are often lovely to the mind alone; | |
| The wanderer muses, as he moves along | |
| Their barren banks, on glories not their own. | |
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| When, to give substance to his boyish dreams, | 5 |
| He leaves his own, far countries to survey, | |
| Oft must he think, in greeting foreign streams, | |
| “Their names alone are beautiful, not they.” | |
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| If chance he mark the dwindled Arno pour | |
| A tide more meagre than his native Charles; | 10 |
| Or views the Rhone when summer’s heat is o’er, | |
| Subdued and stagnant in the fen of Aries; | |
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| Or when he sees the slimy Tiber fling | |
| His sullen tribute at the feet of Rome, | |
| Oft to his thought must partial memory bring | 15 |
| More noble waves, without renown, at home; | |
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| Now let him climb the Catskill, to behold | |
| The lordly Hudson, marching to the main, | |
| And say what bard, in any land of old, | |
| Had such a river to inspire his strain. | 20 |
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| Along the Rhine gray battlements and towers | |
| Declare what robbers once the realm possessed; | |
| But here Heaven’s handiwork surpasseth ours, | |
| And man has hardly more than built his nest. | |
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| No storied castle overawes these heights, | 25 |
| Nor antique arches check the current’s play, | |
| Nor mouldering architrave the mind invites | |
| To dream of deities long passed away. | |
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| No Gothic buttress, or decaying shaft | |
| Of marble, yellowed by a thousand years, | 30 |
| Lifts a great landmark to the little craft,— | |
| A summer cloud! that comes and disappears. | |
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| But cliffs, unaltered from their primal form | |
| Since the subsiding of the deluge, rise | |
| And hold their savins to the upper storm, | 35 |
| While far below the skiff securely plies. | |
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| Farms, rich not more in meadows than in men | |
| Of Saxon mould, and strong for every toil, | |
| Spread o’er the plain, or scatter through the glen, | |
| Bœotian plenty on a Spartan soil. | 40 |
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| Then, where the reign of cultivation ends, | |
| Again the charming wilderness begins; | |
| From steep to steep one solemn wood extends, | |
| Till some new hamlet’s rise the boscage thins. | |
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| And these deep groves forever have remained | 45 |
| Touched by no axe,—by no proud owner nursed: | |
| As now they stand they stood when Pharaoh reigned, | |
| Lineal descendants of creation’s first. * * * * * | |
| No tales, we know, are chronicled of thee | |
| In ancient scrolls; no deeds of doubtful claim | 50 |
| Have hung a history on every tree, | |
| And given each rock its fable and a fame. | |
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| But neither here hath any conqueror trod, | |
| Nor grim invaders from barbarian climes; | |
| No horrors feigned of giant or of god | 55 |
| Pollute thy stillness with recorded crimes. | |
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| Here never yet have happy fields laid waste, | |
| The ravished harvest and the blasted fruit, | |
| The cottage ruined, and the shrine defaced, | |
| Tracked the foul passage of the feudal brute. | 60 |
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| “Yet, O Antiquity!” the stranger sighs, | |
| “Scenes wanting thee soon pall upon the view; | |
| The soul’s indifference dulls the sated eyes, | |
| Where all is fair indeed,—but all is new.” | |
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| False thought! is age to crumbling walls confined? | 65 |
| To Grecian fragments and Egyptian bones? | |
| Hath Time no monuments to raise the mind, | |
| More than old fortresses and sculptured stones? | |
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| Call not this new which is the only land | |
| That wears unchanged the same primeval face | 70 |
| Which, when just dawning from its Maker’s hand, | |
| Gladdened the first great grandsire of our race. | |
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| Nor did Euphrates with an earlier birth | |
| Glide past green Eden towards the unknown south, | |
| Than Hudson broke upon the infant earth, | 75 |
| And kissed the ocean with his nameless mouth. | |
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| Twin-born with Jordan, Ganges, and the Nile! | |
| Thebes and the pyramids to thee are young; | |
| O, had thy waters burst from Britain’s isle, | |
| Till now perchance they had not flowed unsung. | 80 |
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