I found the waters' bed:

I travelled grateful by their side,

Or through their channel dry;

They led me through the thicket damp, Through brake and fern, the beavers' camp,

Through beds of granite cut my road,

And their resistless friendship showed.

The falling waters led me,

The foodful waters fed me,

And brought me to the lowest land,

Unerring to the ocean sand.

The moss upon the forest bark

Was pole-star when the night was dark;

The purple berries in the wood

Supplied me necessary food.

For nature ever faithful is

To such as trust her faithfulness.

When the forest shall mislead me,

When the night and morning lie,
When sea and land refuse to feed me,

"Twill be time enough to die;

Then will yet my mother yield

A pillow in her greenest field,

Nor the June flowers scorn to cover

The clay of their departed lover.

WOOD NOTES.

II.

As sunbeams stream through liberal space, And nothing jostle or displace,

So waved the pine-tree through my thought, And fanned the dreams it never brought.

'Whether is better the gift or the donor?

Come to me,'

Quoth the pine-tree,

'I am the giver of honour.

My garden is the cloven rock,

And my manure the snow,

And drifting sand heaps feed my stock,

In summer's scorching glow.

Ancient or curious,

Who knoweth aught of us?

Old as Jove,

Old as Love,

Who of me

Tells the pedigree?

Only the mountains old,

Only the waters cold,

Only moon and star

My coevals are.

Ere the first fowl sung

My relenting boughs among,

Ere Adam wived,

Ere Adam lived,

Ere the duck dived,

Ere the bees hived,

Ere the lion roared,

Ere the eagle soared,

Light and heat, land and sea

Spake unto the oldest tree.

Glad in the sweet and secret aid
Which matter unto matter paid,

The water flowed, the breezes fanned,

The tree confined the roving sand,

The sunbeam gave me to the sight,

The tree adorned the formless light,

And once again

O'er the grave of men

We shall talk to each other again

Of the old age behind,

Of the time out of mind,

Which shall come again.'

'Whether is better the gift or the donor?

Come to me,'

Quoth the pine-tree,

'I am the giver of honour.

He is great who can live by me;

The rough and bearded forester

Is better than the lord;

God fills the scrip and canister,
Sin piles the loaded board.

The lord is the peasant that was,

The peasant the lord that shall be,

The lord is hay, the peasant grass,
One dry and one the living tree.
Genius with my boughs shall flourish,
Want and cold our roots shall nourish;

Who liveth by the ragged pine,

Foundeth a heroic line;

Who liveth in the palace hall,

Waneth fast and spendeth all :

He

goes to my savage haunts,

With his chariot and his care,

My twilight realm he disenchants,

And finds his prison there.

What prizes the town and the tower?
Only what the pine-tree yields,

Sinew that subdued the fields,

The wild-eyed boy who in the woods
Chaunts his hymn to hill and floods,
Whom the city's poisoning spleen
Made not pale, or fat, or lean,
Whom the rain and the wind purgeth,

Whom the dawn and the day-star urgeth,
In whose cheek the rose leaf blusheth,

In whose feet the lion rusheth,

Iron arms and iron mould,

That know not fear, fatigue, or cold.
I give my rafters to his boat,

My billets to his boiler's throat,

And I will swim the ancient sea

To float my child to victory,

And grant to dwellers with the pine,
Dominion o'er the palm and vine.
Westward I ope the forest gates,

The train along the rail-road skates,

It leaves the land behind, like ages past,

The foreland flows to it in river fast,

Missouri I have made a mart,

I teach Iowa Saxon art.

Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend,