| |
| WHENCE, and why art thou here, mysterious mound? | |
| Are questions which man asks, but asks in vain; | |
| For o’er thy destinies a night profound, | |
| All rayless and all echoless, doth reign. | |
| A thousand years have passed like yesterday, | 5 |
| Since wintry snows first on thy bosom slept, | |
| And much of mortal grandeur passed away, | |
| Since thou hast here thy voiceless vigils kept. | |
| |
| While standing thus upon thy oak-crowned head, | |
| The shadows of dim ages long since gone | 10 |
| Reel on my mind, like spectres of the dead, | |
| While dirge-like music haunts the wind’s low moan. | |
| From out the bosom of the boundless Past | |
| There rises up no voice of thee to tell: | |
| Eternal silence, like a shadow vast, | 15 |
| Broods on thy breast, and shrouds thine annals well. | |
| |
| Didst thou not antedate the rise of Rome, | |
| Egyptia’s pyramids, and Grecian arts? | |
| Did not the wild deer here for shelter come | |
| Before the Tyrrhene sea had ships or marts? | 20 |
| Through shadows deep and dark the mind must pierce, | |
| Which glances backward to that ancient time; | |
| Nations before it fall in struggles fierce, | |
| Where human glory fades in human crime. | |
| |
| Upon the world’s wide stage full many a scene | 25 |
| Of grandeur and of gloom, of blood and blight, | |
| Hath been enacted since thy forests green | |
| Sighed in the breeze and smiled in morning’s light. | |
| Thou didst not hear the woe, nor heed the crime, | |
| Which darkened earth through ages of distress; | 30 |
| Unknowing and unknown, thou stood’st sublime, | |
| And calmly looked upon the wilderness. | |
| |
| The red man oft hath laid his aching head, | |
| When weary of the chase, upon thy breast; | |
| And as the slumberous hours fast o’er him fled, | 35 |
| Has dreamed of hunting-grounds in climes most blest. | |
| Perhaps his thoughts ranged through the long past time, | |
| Striving to solve the problem of thy birth, | |
| Till wearied out with dreams, dim though sublime, | |
| His fancy fluttered back to him and earth. | 40 |
| |
| The eagle soaring through the upper air | |
| Checks his proud flight, and glances on thy crest, | |
| As though his destiny were pictured there | |
| In the deep solitude that wraps thy breast. | |
| Thy reign must soon be o’er,—the human tide | 45 |
| Is surging round thee like a restless sea; | |
| And thou must yield thy empire and thy pride, | |
| And, like thy builders, soon forgotten be. | |
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