Classic Poem

Along the hills and by the sleeping stream
A warning falls, and all the glorious trees —
Vestures of gold and grand embroideries —
Stand mute, as in a sad and beautiful dream,
Brooding on death and Nature's vast undoing,
And spring that came an age ago and fled,
And summer's splendour long since drawn to head,
And now the fall and all the slow soft ruin:
And soon some day comes by the pillaging wind,
The winter's wild outrider, with harsh roar,
And leaves the meadows sacked and waste and thinned,
And strips the forest of its golden store;
Till the grim tyrant comes, and then they sow
The silent wreckage, not with salt, but snow.