Wyoming

hou 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-springOf 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 boreThe 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 powerEven of Campbell’s pen hath pictured: heHad woven, had he gazed one sunny hourUpon thy smiling vale, its sceneryWith more of truth, and made each rock and treeKnown 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-dayAppear 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.

Judge Hallenbach, who keeps the toll-bridge gate,And the town records, is the Albert nowOf Wyoming: like him, in church and state,Her Doric column; and upon his brow

The thin hairs, white with seventy winters’ snow,Look patriarchal. Waldegrave ’twere in vainTo point out here, unless in yon scare-crow,That stands full-uniformed upon the plain,To frighten flocks of crows and blackbirds from the grain.

For he would look particularly drollIn his “Iberian boot” and “Spanish plume,”And be the wonder of each Christian soulAs of the birds that scare-crow and his broom.But Gertrude, in her loveliness and bloom,Hath many a model here; for woman’s eye,In court or cottage, wheresoe’er her home,Hath a heart-spell too holy and too highTo be o’erpraised even by her worshipper—Poesy.

There’s one in the next field—of sweet sixteen—Singing and summoning thoughts of beauty bornIn heaven—with her jacket of light green,“Love-darting eyes, and tresses like the morn,”Without a shoe or stocking—hoeing corn.Whether, like Gertrude, she oft wanders there,With Shakespeare’s volume in her bosom borne,I think is doubtful. Of the poet-playerThe maiden knows no more than Cobbett or Voltaire.

There is a woman, widowed, gray, and old,Who tells you where the foot of Battle steppedUpon their day of massacre. She toldIts tale, and pointed to the spot, and wept,Whereon her father and five brothers sleptShroudless, the bright-dreamed slumbers of the brave,When all the land a funeral mourning kept.And there, wild laurels planted on the graveBy Nature’s hand, in air their pale-red blossoms wave.

And on the margin of yon orchard hillAre marks where timeworn battlements have been,And in the tall grass traces linger stillOf “arrowy frieze and wedgèd ravelin.”Five hundred of her brave that valley greenTrod 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?