Classic Poem

Across the Prairie's silent waste I stray,
A fertile, verdant, woodless, boundless plain;
Shadeless it lies beneath the glare of day,
But gentle breezes sweep the grassy main,
Over whose surface, as they rest or play,
The waving billows sink or rise again;
While some far distant lonely hut or tree
Looms like a solitary sail at sea!

What is yon rude and overhanging steep
That frowns on Illinois' unmurmuring tide,—
Fortress, or cliff, or Pharos of the deep?
Stern Nature's monument of savage pride,
The Sioux's tower of hunger!—Pisa's keep,
Amid whose horrors Ugolino died,
Before that rock of famine well might quail,
Did but an Indian Dante tell its tale.

Wouldst thou receive of Superstition's power
And man's credulity astounding proof,
Behold the modern saint and prophet's bower,
The city of Nauvoo. All grave reproof
Were lost upon such folly:—hour by hour,
Wall upon wall ascends, and roof on roof,
And soon the Impostor's temple will arise,
As if to flout the lightning of the skies.

This in the nineteenth century!—So blind
Are they who deem the mighty triumph wrought,
And point us boldly to “the march of mind,”
As though the world were near perfection brought,
And the Millennium reached, or left behind,
Because scarce worthy of a second thought:
Sages, Philosophers, and Sophists, you
Who praise all things as good, laud great Nauvoo !

Savage Leucadia! to thy steep repair
The pilgrims of a faith,—the bleeding heart;
Sacred thy shrine to Love and to Despair,
And wanting only Sappho's lyric art
To give imprisoned echoes to the air,
Till Oolaïtha's gentle ghost should start,
Wondering to see a pale-face at her grave,
Calling her name and spirit from the wave!

Hast thou forgot our Indian friend's abode,
Our welcome, and the scenes we witnessed there?
The wigwam floor with robes and peltry strewed,—
The calumet of Peace that all must share,—
The council-fire,—the conjurer's tricks it showed,—
The Medicine dance,—the wolf,—the moose,—the bear,—
And the great ball-play, with the dawn begun,
And hardly finished by the set of sun.

How keen, how active is the mimic strife!
What grace of form and motion they display!
Hundred of Grecian statues sprung to life
Would not have seemed of more immortal clay,
Or more Apollo-like. The angry knife
Is laid aside,—or sport might turn to fray,
So fierce the struggle between bands that watch
To stop or urge the ball, or turn, or catch.

Not Angelo's nor Donatello's skill
In folds more graceful human form could twine;
Nor his—my countryman—who, if he will,
May rival yet the artist called “Divine.”
Sinews and muscles twist and swell,—veins fill,—
Hither and thither waving groups incline,
Till the live mass crashes confused to earth,
And the ball springs like Discord's apple forth!

Sons of the Forest!—yet not wholly rude,
Children of Nature, eloquent are they,
By their Great Spirit taught in solitude,
To boast o'er pain a more than stoic sway;
Their pastime war affords, the chase their food;
No foe they pardon, and no friend betray;
Admiring nothing,—men without a tear,—
Strangers to falsehood, pity, mirth, and fear.

Here Chastellux and Chateaubriand found
Matter to point a moral or a tale;
This was Atala's consecrated ground,
Ample the canvas—if the colors fail.
Yet should a trump of more exalted sound
The Christian genius and the Martyr hail:
To the fallen monarchs of the vainly free,
“Faithful among the faithless,” only he!

Behold the sinking mountain! year by year,
Lower and lower still, the boatman thinks,
Its rudely castellated cliffs appear,
And he is sure that in the stream it sinks.
Gazing in wonder, not unmixed with fear
To see how fast its rocky basis shrinks,
He murmurs to himself in lower tone,
“What does the Devil do with all this stone?”

Superior! shall I call thee lake or sea?
Thou broad Atlantic of the Western waters,
Whose ocean-depths and spring-like purity,
Unstained by civilized or savage slaughters,
Proclaim thee worthiest of streams to be
The bath and mirror of Hesperia's daughters,
Their Caspian thou! alike to freeze or shine,
And every Caspian beauty matched by thine!

Beside thy beach stern Nature's tablets rise,
Her pictured rocks, eternal and sublime,
Mountains her canvass, framed in sea and skies,—
Her colors air and water, earth and time.
Fata Morgana's magic landscape flies,
Even with the mists that o'er Messina climb;
But this endures,—traced on creation's youth,
It will outlive all earthly things save Truth !

Colossal wall and column, arch and dome,
O'erhanging cliff and cavern, and cascade,
Ruins like those of Egypt, Greece, or Rome,
And towers that seem as if by giants made;
Surpassing beauty—overwhelming gloom—
Masses of dazzling light and blinding shade,—
All that can awe, delight, o'erpower, amaze,
Rises for leagues on leagues to our bewildered gaze!

Ozolapaida! Helen of the West,
Whose fatal beauty and adulterous joy
Two nations with the scourge of war opprest
Twice tenfold longer than the siege of Troy:
Assiniboin and Sioux both confessed
Such prize well worth the struggle to destroy
A kindred people; but no Homer kept
The memory of thy charms, and so they slept.