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(Excerpt)
THOU com’st, in beauty, on my gaze at last, | |
| “On Susquehanna’s side, fair Wyoming!” | |
| Image of many a dream, in hours long past, | |
| When life was in its bud and blossoming, | |
| And waters, gushing from the fountain spring | 5 |
| Of pure enthusiast thought, dimmed my young eyes, | |
| As by the poet borne, on unseen wing, | |
| I breathed, in fancy, ’neath thy cloudless skies, | |
| The summer’s air, and heard her echoed harmonies. | |
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| I then but dreamed: thou art before me now, | 10 |
| In life, a vision of the brain no more. | |
| I ’ve stood upon the wooded mountain’s brow, | |
| That beetles high thy lovely valley o’er; | |
| And now, where winds thy river’s greenest shore, | |
| Within a bower of sycamores am laid; | 15 |
| And winds, as soft and sweet as ever bore | |
| The fragrance of wild-flowers through sun and shade, | |
| Are singing in the trees, whose low boughs press my head. | |
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| Nature hath made thee lovelier than the power | |
| Even of Campbell’s pen hath pictured: he | 20 |
| Had woven, had he gazed one sunny hour | |
| Upon thy smiling vale, its scenery | |
| With more of truth, and made each rock and tree | |
| Known like old friends, and greeted from afar: | |
| And there are tales of sad reality, | 25 |
| In the dark legends of thy border war, | |
| With woes of deeper tint than his own Gertrude’s are. | |
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| But where are they, the beings of the mind, | |
| The bard’s creations, moulded not of clay, | |
| Hearts to strange bliss and suffering assigned,— | 30 |
| Young Gertrude, Albert, Waldegrave,—where are they? | |
| We need not ask. The people of to-day | |
| Appear good, honest, quiet men enough, | |
| And hospitable too,—for ready pay; | |
| With manners like their roads, a little rough, | 35 |
| And hands whose grasp is warm and welcoming, though tough. * * * * * | |
| There is a woman, widowed, gray, and old, | |
| Who tells you where the foot of Battle stepped | |
| Upon their day of massacre. She told | |
| Its tale, and pointed to the spot, and wept, | 40 |
| Whereon her father and five brothers slept | |
| Shroudless, the bright-dreamed slumbers of the brave, | |
| When all the land a funeral mourning kept. | |
| And there wild laurels, planted on the grave | |
| By Nature’s hand, in air their pale red blossoms wave. | 45 |
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| And on the margin of yon orchard hill | |
| Are marks where timeworn battlements have been, | |
| And in the tall grass traces linger still | |
| Of “arrowy frieze and wedged ravelin.” | |
| Five hundred of her brave that valley green | 50 |
| Trod on the morn in soldier-spirit gay; | |
| But twenty lived to tell the noonday scene,— | |
| And where are now the twenty? Passed away. | |
Has Death no triumph-hours, save on the battle-day?
THE END. | |
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