| |
| LET 1 the tall oak the bolts of heaven deride, | |
| Or deal his mimic thunder on the tide; | |
| Be this the theme for Albion’s lofty muse, | |
| An humbler task, my fameless pen pursues. | |
| Shall roses bloom in verse from age to age, | 5 |
| Shrubs spread their foliage on the poet’s page; | |
| The willow, poplar, fir and cedar throng | |
| Alike the rustic and the classic song; | |
| Pines wave in Milton, and no bard be found, | |
| To plant the maple on poetic ground? | 10 |
| Columbia’s muse forbids, in simple strain, | |
| She sings the maple and the hardy swain, | |
| Who draws the nectar from her silver pores, | |
| Nor envies India all its pamper’d stores. | |
| What though the cane, our colder clime denies; | 15 |
| The cultured plant a native tree supplies; | |
| A tree, the fairest of the forest kind, | |
| Alike for use and ornament design’d. | |
| For use to those, who first essay the wood, | |
| To form the table and supply its food; | 20 |
| To warm the laborer by its bounty fed; | |
| And rear the lowly cottage o’er his head: | |
| For ornament, to grace the winding rill, | |
| Shade the green vale or wave upon the hill; | |
| Or leave the forest, where it useless grows, | 25 |
| Rise in the cultured field in stately rows, | |
| Spread o’er the rocky waste a shady grove, | |
| The haunt for sportive mirth and pensive love. | |
| Ere jarring seasons rest in equal scales; | |
| While winter now, and now the spring prevails; | 30 |
| Sol’s milder beams around the maple play, | |
| Frost chills by night, a thrilling warmth by day, | |
| Dilates each tube; the tube, by mystic laws, | |
| The sap nutritious from earth’s bosom draws; | |
| As higher still the swelling tube distends, | 35 |
| The circling sap to every branch ascends; | |
| Now each young bud the rich donation shares, | |
| For laurel’d spring his earliest wreath prepares. | |
| Great universal cause, mysterious power! | |
| That clothes the forest, and that paints the flower; | 40 |
| Bids the fell poison in the Upas grow, | |
| And sweet nutrition in the maple flow; | |
| Let Berkeley’s pupil dream in endless trance; | |
| The wilder’d athiest form his world by chance, | |
| By this, his reason, that his sense belied, | 45 |
| A world discarded, and a God denied; | |
| In spite of these, the impartial eye must see | |
| Each leaf a volume—its great author, thee; | |
| Nor less in every twig than Aaron’s rod, | |
| Behold the agency of nature’s God! | 50 |
