THOU com’ st in beauty on my gaze at last, “On Susquehanna’ s side, fair Wyoming!” Image of many a dream in hours long past, When life was in its bud and blossoming,
And waters, gushing from the fountain spring Of pure enthusiast thought, dimmed my young eyes, As by the poet borne on unseen wing, I breathed in fancy‘ neath thy cloudless skies
The summer’ s air, and heard her echoed harmonies. I then but dreamed: thou art before me now In life, a vision of the brain no more. I’ ve stood upon the wooded mountain’ s brow
That beetles high thy lovely valley o’ er; And now, where winds thy river’ s greenest shore, Within a bower of sycamores am laid; And winds as soft and sweet as ever bore
The fragrance of wild-flowers through sun and shade Are singing in the trees, whose low boughs press my head. Nature hath made thee lovelier than the power Even of Campbell’ s pen hath pictured: he
Had woven, had he gazed one sunny hour Upon thy smiling vale, its scenery With more of truth, and made each rock and tree Known like old friends, and greeted from afar:
And there are tales of sad reality In the dark legends of thy border war, With woes of deeper tint than his own Gertrude’ s are. But where are they, the beings of the mind,
The bard’ s creations, moulded not of clay, Hearts to strange bliss and suffering assigned,— Young Gertrude, Albert, Waldegrave,— where are they? We need not ask. The people of to-day
Appear good, honest, quiet men enough, And hospitable too,— for ready pay; With manners like their roads, a little rough, And hands whose grasp is warm and welcoming, though tough.
There is a woman, widowed, gray, and old, Who tells you where the foot of Battle stepped Upon their day of massacre. She told Its tale, and pointed to the spot, and wept,
Whereon her father and five brothers slept Shroudless, the bright-dreamed slumbers of the brave, When all the land a funeral mourning kept. And there wild laurels, planted on the grave
By Nature’ s hand, in air their pale red blossoms wave. And on the margin of yon orchard hill Are marks where time-worn battlements have been, And in the tall grass traces linger still
Of “arrowy frieze and wedged ravelin.” Five hundred of her brave that valley green Trod on the morn in soldier-spirit gay; But twenty lived to tell the noonday scene,—
And where are now the twenty? Passed away. Has Death no triumph-hours, save on the battle-day?
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