THE PRAIRIES. THESE are the gardens of the Desert, these And my heart swells, while the dilated sight Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell, Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed, Of Texas, and have crisped the limpid brooks That from the fountains of Sonora glide 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 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- Of these fair solitudes once stir with life And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, 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 When haply by their stalls the bison lowed, All day this desert murmured with their toils, From instruments of unremembered form, Gave the soft winds a voice. The red man came The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce, Has settled where they dwelt. The prairie-wolf Where stood their swarming cities. All is goneAll-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 strongholds of the plain were forced, and heaped And sat, unscared and silent, at their feast. 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 then. Kind words 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Thus arise Races of living things, glorious in strength, And perish, as the quickening breath of God Fills them, or is withdrawn.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 wilder 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 Oregan, 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 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, Startlingly beautiful. The graceful deer Bounds to the wood at my approach. The bee, A more adventurous colonist than man, Fills the savannas with his murmurings, And hides his sweets, as in the golden age, To his domestic hum, and think I hear The sound of that advancing multitude Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground |