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(Excerpt)
WILD Tawasentha! in thy brook-laced glen | |
| The doe no longer lists her lost fawn’s bleating, | |
| As panting there, escaped from hunter’s ken, | |
| She hears the chase o’er distant hills retreating; | |
| No more, uprising from the fern around her, | 5 |
| The Indian archer, from his “still-hunt” lair, | |
| Wings the death-shaft which hath that moment found her | |
| When Fate seemed foiled upon her footsteps there. | |
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| Wild Tawasentha! on thy cone-strewed sod, | |
| O’er which yon pine his giant arm is bending, | 10 |
| No more the Mohawk marks its dark crown nod | |
| Against the sun’s broad disk toward night descending, | |
| Then crouching down beside the brands that redden | |
| The columned trunks which rear thy leafy dome, | |
| Forgets his toils in hunter’s slumbers leaden, | 15 |
| Or visions of the red man’s spirit home: | |
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| But where his calumet by that lone fire, | |
| At night beneath these cloistered boughs was lighted, | |
| The Christian orphan will in prayer aspire, | |
| The Christian parent mourn his proud hope blighted; | 20 |
| And in thy shade the mother’s heart will listen | |
| The spirit-cry of babe she clasps no more, | |
| And where thy rills through hemlock-branches glisten, | |
| There many a maid her lover will deplore. | |
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| Here children linked in love and sport together, | 25 |
| Who check their mirth as creaks the slow hearse by, | |
| Will totter lonely in life’s autumn weather, | |
| To ponder where life’s spring-time blossoms lie; | |
| And where the virgin soil was never dinted | |
| By the rude ploughshare since creation’s birth, | 30 |
| Year after year fresh furrows will be printed | |
| Upon the sad cheek of the grieving Earth. | |
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| Yon sun, returning in unwearied stages, | |
| Will gild the cenotaph’s ascending spire, | |
| O’er names on history’s yet unwritten pages | 35 |
| That unborn crowds will, worshipping, admire; | |
| Names that shall brighten through my country’s story | |
| Like meteor hues that fire her autumn woods, | |
| Encircling high her onward course of glory | |
| Like the bright bow which spans her mountain-floods. | 40 |
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| Here where the flowers have bloomed and died for ages,— | |
| Bloomed all unseen and perished all unsung,— | |
| On youth’s green grave, traced out beside the sage’s, | |
| Will garlands now by votive hearts be flung; | |
| And sculptured marble and funereal urn, | 45 |
| O’er which gray birches to the night air wave, | |
| Will whiten through thy glades at every turn, | |
| And woo the moonbeam to some poet’s grave! | |
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| Thus back to Nature, faithful, do we come, | |
| When Art hath taught us all her best beguiling, | 50 |
| Thus blend their ministry around the tomb | |
| Where, pointing upward, still sits Nature smiling! | |
| And never, Nature’s hallowed spots adorning, | |
| Hath Art, with her a sombre garden dressed, | |
| Wild Tawasentha! in this vale of mourning | 55 |
| With more to consecrate their children’s rest. | |
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| And still that stream will hold its winsome way, | |
| Sparkling as now upon the frosty air, | |
| When all in turn shall troop in pale array | |
| To that dim land for which so few prepare. | 60 |
| Still will yon oak, which now a sapling waves, | |
| Each year renewed, with hardy vigor grow, | |
| Expanding still to shade the nameless graves | |
| Of nameless men that haply sleep below. * * * * * | |
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