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| BEAUTIFUL 1 clouds in the quiet sky | |
| Whence come ye, floating so proudly by? | |
| “We come from the land where the forest’s gloom | |
| Frowns darkly around the old warrior’s tomb, | |
| Where the ramparts he rear’d still their strength retain, | 5 |
| Though ye seek their defender’s name in vain. | |
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| “We have cross’d the streams of the boundless west, | |
| We have cluster’d in wreaths round the mountain’s crest, | |
| We have swept the prairie’s lonely green, | |
| O’er buffalo herds we have hung a screen, | 10 |
| We have shadow’d the path that the hunters take, | |
| And obscured the gleam of the sunny lake.” | |
| |
| Clouds that are skirted with golden light, | |
| What have ye seen in your airy flight? | |
| “We have seen stern gloom on the Indian’s brow, | 15 |
| And the grief that stung him, but could not bow, | |
| As he left the shore where his fathers rest, | |
| To seek a new home in the far-off west. | |
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| “We have seen the desert from wildness freed, | |
| And the hardy husbandman scattering seed, | 20 |
| Villages rising by every stream, | |
| And the white sail glancing in morning’s beam; | |
| Yet we saw that woes every scene deprave, | |
| For we look’d on many a fresh-dug grave.” | |
| |
| Say, what is the end of your pilgrimage? | 25 |
| “We have seen the mountain oak scathed by age, | |
| On the shiver’d crag there is writ—decay— | |
| Shall we be more happy and strong than they? | |
| Man’s labors and glories doth time obscure— | |
| And shall we, things of vapor and shade, endure? | 30 |
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| “Beauteous and dense as we seem to you, | |
| We are vanishing fast from your wondering view, | |
| For the sweeping gust and the sunny ray | |
| Are hurrying and melting our fleeces away; | |
| When the morning comes in its glowing sheen, | 35 |
| Not a mist will tell we have ever been.” | |
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| Beautiful clouds, it is ever thus, | |
| Stern time is consuming our works and us; | |
| And ye—though storms in your robe are roll’d, | |
| Though the thunder sleep in your dusky fold, | 40 |
| Though ye boast a heavenly home and birth | |
| Ye must fade away like things of earth. | |
