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Sequoia Gigantea
BROWN foundling of the Western wood, | |
| Babe of primeval wildernesses! | |
| Long on my table thou hast stood | |
| Encounters strange and rude caresses; | |
| Perchance contented with thy lot, | 5 |
| Surroundings new and curious faces, | |
| As though ten centuries were not | |
| Imprisoned in thy shining cases! | |
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| Thou bring’st me back the halcyon days | |
| Of grateful rest; the week of leisure, | 10 |
| The journey lapped in autumn haze, | |
| The sweet fatigue that seemed a pleasure, | |
| The morning ride, the noonday halt, | |
| The blazing slopes, the red dust rising, | |
| And then—the dim, brown, columned vault, | 15 |
| With its cool, damp, sepulchral spicing. | |
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| Once more I see the rocking masts | |
| That scrape the sky, their only tenant | |
| The jay-bird that in frolic casts | |
| From some high yard his broad blue pennant. | 20 |
| I see the Indian files that keep | |
| Their places in the dusty heather, | |
| Their red trunks standing ankle deep | |
| In moccasins of rusty leather. | |
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| I see all this, and marvel much | 25 |
| That thou, sweet woodland waif, art able | |
| To keep the company of such | |
| As throng thy friend’s—the poet’s—table: | |
| The latest spawn the press hath cast,— | |
| The “modern Pope’s,” “the later Byron’s,”— | 30 |
| Why e’en the best may not outlast | |
| Thy poor relation,—Sempervirens. | |
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| Thy sire saw the light that shone | |
| On Mohammed’s uplifted crescent, | |
| On many a royal gilded throne | 35 |
| And deed forgotten in the present; | |
| He saw the age of sacred trees | |
| And Druid groves and mystic larches; | |
| And saw from forest domes like these | |
| The builder bring his Gothic arches. | 40 |
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| And must thou, foundling, still forego | |
| Thy heritage and high ambition, | |
| To lie full lowly and full low, | |
| Adjusted to thy new condition? | |
| Not hidden in the drifted snows, | 45 |
| But under ink-drops idly spattered, | |
| And leaves ephemeral as those | |
| That on thy woodland tomb were scattered. | |
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| Yet lie thou there, O friend! and speak | |
| The moral of thy simple story: | 50 |
| Though life is all that thou dost seek, | |
| And age alone thy crown of glory,— | |
| Not thine the only germs that fail | |
| The purpose of their high creation, | |
| If their poor tenements avail | 55 |
| For worldly show and ostentation. | |
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