Oh pass not, pass not heedless by ;
Perhaps thou canst redeem
The breaking heart from misery—
Go, share thy lot with him.
Ay; gloriously thou standest there,
Beautiful, boundless firmament!
That, swelling wide o'er earth and air,
And round the horizon bent,
With that bright vault and sapphire wall,
Dost overhang and circle all.
Far, far below thee, tall gray trees
Arise, and piles built up of old,
And hills, whose ancient summits freeze
In the fierce light and cold.
The eagle soars his utmost height;
Yet far thou stretchest o'er his flight.
Thou hast thy frowns: with thee, on high,
The storm has made his airy seat;
Beyond thy soft blue curtain lie
His stores of hail and sleet:
Thence the consuming lightnings break;
There the strong hurricanes awake.
Yet art thou prodigal of smiles
Smiles sweeter than thy frowns are stern:
Earth sends, from all her thousand isles,
A song at their return;
The glory that comes down from thee
Bathes in deep joy the land and sea.
The sun, the gorgeous sun, is thine,
The pomp that brings and shuts the day, The clouds that round him change and shine, The airs that fan his way.
Thence look the thoughtful stars, and there
The meek moon walks the silent air.
The sunny Italy may boast
The beauteous tints that flush her skies;
And lovely, round the Grecian coast,
May thy blue pillars rise:
I only know how fair they stand
About my own beloved land.
And they are fair: a charm is theirs,
That earth-the proud, green earth-has not,
With all the hues, and forms, and airs
That haunt her sweetest spot.
We gaze upon thy calm, pure sphere,
And read of Heaven's eternal year.
Oh when, amid the throng of men,
The heart grows sick of hollow mirth,
How willingly we turn us then
Away from this cold earth,
And look into thy azure breast
For seats of innocence and rest!
Alone may man commune with Heaven, or see
Only in savage wood
And sunny vale the present Deity;
Or only hear His voice
Where the winds whisper and the waves rejoice.
Thy steps, Almighty!-here, amidst the crowd
Through the great city rolled,
With everlasting murmur deep and loud-
Choking the ways that wind
'Mongst the proud piles, the work of humankind.
Thy golden sunshine comes
From the round heaven, and on their dwellings lies,
And lights their inner homes;
For them thou fill'st with air the unbounded skies,
And givest them the stores
Of ocean, and the harvests of its shores.
Thy spirit is around,
Quickening the restless mass that sweeps along;
And this eternal sound-
Voices and footfalls of the numberless throng-
Like the resounding sea,
Or like the rainy tempests, speaks of Thee.
And when the hours of rest
Come, like a calm upon the mid-sea brine,
Hushing its billowy breast,
The quiet of that moment too is thine ;
It breathes of Him who keeps
The vast and helpless city while it sleeps.
EARTH'S children cleave to earth-her frail,
Decaying children dread decay:
Yon mist that rises from the vale,
And lessens in the morning ray—
Look, how by mountain rivulet
It lingers as it upward creeps,
And clings to fern and copsewood set
Along the green and dewy steeps;
Clings to the flowery kalmia, clings
To precipices fringed with grass,
Dark maples, where the woodthrush sings,
And bowers of fragrant sassafras.
Yet, all in vain-it passes still
From hold to hold-it cannot stay;
And in the very beams that fill
The world with gladness, wastes away;
Till, parting from the mountain's brow,
It vanishes from human eye,
And that which sprung of earth is now
A portion of the glorious sky.
THESE are the gardens of the desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name-
The Prairies. I behold them for the first,
And my heart swells while the dilated sight
Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch,
In airy undulations, far away,
As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,
Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,
And motionless for ever. Motionless?-
No-they are all unchained again. The clouds
Sweep over with their shadows, and, beneath,
The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye;
Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase
The sunny ridges. Breezes of the South!
Who toss the golden and the flame-like flowers,
And pass the prairie hawk, that, poised on high,
Flaps his broad wings, yet moves not―ye have played
Among the palms of Mexico and vines
Of Texas, and have crisped the limpid brooks
That from the fountains of Senora glide
Into the calm Pacific-have ye fanned
A nobler or a lovelier scene than this?
Man hath no part in all this glorious work:
The Hand that built the firmament hath heaved
And smoothed these verdant swells, and sown their slopes
With herbage, planted them with island groves,
And hedged them round with forests. Fitting floor
For this magnificent temple of the sky-
With flowers whose glory and whose multitude
Rival the constellations! The great heavens
Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love—
A nearer vault, and of a tenderer blue
Than that which bends above the eastern hills.
As o'er the verdant waste I guide my steed,
Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides,
The hollow beating of his footstep seems
A sacrilegious sound. I think of those
Upon whose rest he tramples. Are they here,
The dead of other days?—and did the dust
Of these fair solitudes once stir with life
And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds
That overlook the rivers, or that rise
In the dim forest crowded with old oaks,
Answer. A race, that long has passed away,
Built them-a disciplined and populous race
Heaped with long toil the earth, while yet the Greek
Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms
Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock
The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields
Nourished their harvests; here their herds were fed,
When haply by their stalls the bison lowed,
And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke.
All day this desert murmured with their toils,
Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed
In a forgotten language; and old tunes,
From instruments of unremembered form,
Gave the soft winds a voice.
The red man came-
The roaming hunter-tribes, warlike and fierce,
And the mound-builders vanished from the earth-
The solitude of centuries untold
Has settled where they dwelt. The prairie wolf
Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh dug den
Yawns by my path. The gopher mines the ground
Where stood their swarming cities. All is gone-
All, save the piles of earth that hold their bones-
The platforms where they worshipped unknown gods-
The barriers which they builded from the soil
To keep the foe at bay-till o'er the walls
The wild beleaguerer broke, and one by one
The strongholds of the plain were forced, and heaped
With corpses. The brown vultures of the wood
Flocked to those vast uncovered sepulchres,
And sat, unscared and silent, at their feast.
Haply some solitary fugitive,
Lurking in marsh and forest till the sense
Of desolation and of fear became
Bitterer than death, yielded himself to die.
Man's better nature triumphed. Kindly words
Welcomed and soothed him; the rude conquerors
Seated the captive with their chiefs; he chose
A bride among their maidens, and at length
Seemed to forget-yet ne'er forgot the wife
Of his first love, and her sweet little ones
Butchered, amid their shrieks, with all his race.
Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise
Races of living things, glorious in strength,
And perish, as the quickening breath of God
Fills them, or is withdrawn. The red man, too,
Has left the blooming wilds he ranged so long,
And, nearer to the Rocky Mountains, sought
A wider hunting-ground. The beaver builds
No longer by these streams, but far away,
On waters whose blue surface ne'er gave back
The white man's face. Among Missouri's springs,
And pools whose issues swell the Oregon,
He rears his little Venice. In these plains
The bison feeds no more. Twice twenty leagues
Beyond remotest smoke of hunter's camp
Roams the majestic brute, in herds that shake
The earth with thundering steps-yet here I meet
His ancient footprints stamped beside the pool.
Still this great solitude is quick with life.
Myriads of insects, gaudy as the flowers
They flutter over, gentle quadrupeds,
And birds that scarce have learned the fear of man,
Are here, and sliding reptiles of the ground,
Startingly beautiful. The graceful deer
Bounds to the wood at my approach. The bee,
A more adventurous colonist than man,
With whom he came across the eastern deep,
Fills the savannas with his murmurings,
And hides his sweets, as in the golden age,
Within the hollow oak. I listen long
To his domestic hum, and think I hear
The sound of that advancing multitude
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