The dappled fawn is close at hand, And on the larch's lowest bough Rut checks the note Within its throat, As choked with sudden fear! With sudden fear her wormy quest Through thistle, bent, and tangled fern And on the larch's lowest bough No more the ousel sits. With sudden fear, The dappled deer Effect a swift escape; But well might bolder creatures start And fly, or stand agape, With rising hair, and curdled blood, The very sky turns pale above, The earth grows dark beneath; The human Terror thrills with cold, And draws a shorter breath— An universal panic owns The dread approach of DEATH! With silent pace, as shadows come, The grisly Phantom takes his stand And scans it with his gloomy eyes, And laughs with horrid glee THE ELM TREE. A dreary laugh and desolate, Within the hollow skull: The human arm and human tool When elm or oak Have felt the stroke, No passive unregarded tree, A senseless thing of wood, Wherein the sluggish sap ascends To swell the vernal bud But conscious, moving, breathing trunks That throb with living blood! Ah! little recks the Royal mind, While tapers shine, and music breathes, Ah! little dreams the haughty Peer, The while his falcon fliesOr on the blood-bedabbled turf The antler'd quarry dies— That in his own ancestral Park The narrow dwelling lies! But haughty Peer and mighty King One doom shall overwhelm ! The oaken cell Shall lodge him well Whose sceptre ruled a realm— While he who never knew a home Shall find it in the Elm! The tall abounding Elm that grows And well th' abounding Elm may grow In forest, copse, and wooded park, The Phantom ends: the shade is gone; And bounding through the golden fern The thrush's mate beside her sits, And on the larch's spray The fly-bird flutters up and down, THE ELM TREE. The gentle hind and dappled fawn Each harmless furr'd and feather'd thing A secret, vague, prophetic gloom, This warm and living frame shall find That mystic Tree which breathed to me A sad and solemn sound, That sometimes murmur'd overhead, And sometimes underground Within that shady Avenue, Where lofty Elms abound. |