As green amid thy current's stress,
Floats the scarce-rooted watercress;
And the brown ground-bird, in thy glen,
Still chirps as merrily as then.

Thou changest not- but I am changed,
Since first thy pleasant banks I ranged;
And the grave stranger, come to see
The play-place of his infancy,
Has scarce a single trace of him
Who sported once upon thy brim.
The visions of my youth are past –
Too bright, too beautiful to last.

I've tried the world it wears no more
The coloring of romance it wore.
Yet well has nature kept the truth
She promised to my earliest youth.
The radiant beauty, shed abroad
On all the glorious works of God,
Shows freshly, to my sobered eye,
Each charm it wore in days gone by.

A few brief years shall pass away,
And I, all trembling, weak, and gray,
Bowed to the earth, which waits to fold
My ashes in the embracing mould
(If haply the dark will of fate

Indulge my life so long a date),

May come for the last time to look
Upon my childhood's favorite brook.
Then dimly on my eye shall gleam
The sparkle of thy dancing stream;
And faintly on my ear shall fall
Thy prattling current's merry call;
Yet shalt thou flow as glad and bright
As when thou met'st my infant sight.

And I shall sleep and on thy side, As ages after ages glide,

Children their early sports shall try,
And pass to hoary age and die.

But thou, unchanged from year to year,
Gayly shalt play and glitter here;
Amid young flowers and tender grass
Thy endless infancy shalt pass;
And, singing down thy narrow glen,

Shalt mock the fading race of men.

THE PRAIRIES.*

THESE are the Gardens of the Desert, these The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name The Prairies. I behold them for the first,

And my heart swells, while the dilated sight Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch In airy undulations, far away,

As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,

Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,

And motionless forever. Motionless?

No- they are all unchained again. The clouds
Sweep over with their shadows, and, beneath,
The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye;
Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase
The sunny ridges. Breezes of the South!
Who toss the golden and the flame-like flowers,
And pass the prairie-hawk that, poised on high,

The prairies of the West with an undulating surface, rolling prairies, as they are called, present to the unaccustomed eye a singular spectacle when the shadows of the clouds are passing rapidly over them. The face of the ground seems to fluctuate and toss like the billows of the sea.

Flaps his broad wings, yet moves not *- ye have

played

Among the palms of Mexico and vines

Of Texas, and have crisped the limpid brooks

That from the fountains of Sonora glide

Into the calm Pacific — have fanned

-

ye

A nobler or a lovelier scene than this?

Man hath no part in all this glorious work:
The hand that built the firmament hath heaved
And smoothed these verdant swells, and sown

their slopes

With herbage, planted them with island groves, And hedged them round with forests. Fitting floor

For this magnificent temple of the sky —

With flowers whose glory and whose multitude
Rival the constellations! The great heavens
Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love,
A nearer vault, and of a tenderer blue,
Than that which bends above the eastern hills.

As o'er the verdant waste I guide my steed, Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides, The hollow beating of his footstep seems

A sacrilegious sound. I think of those

* I have seen the prairie-hawk balancing himself in the air for hours together, apparently over the same spot; probably watching his prey.

Upon whose rest he tramples. Are they here → The dead of other days? — and did the dust

Of these fair solitudes once stir with life

And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds That overlook the rivers, or that rise

In the dim forest crowded with old oaks,

Answer.

A race, that long has passed away,

Built them; a disciplined and populous race

Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek

Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms

Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock

The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields Nourished their harvests,* here their herds were

fed,

When haply by their stalls the bison lowed,
And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke.
All day this desert murmured with their toils,
Till twilight blushed and lovers walked, and
wooed

In a forgotten language, and old tunes,

From instruments of unremembered form,

Gave the soft winds a voice. The red man

came

* The size and extent of the mounds in the valley of the Mississippi, indicate the existence, at a remote period, of a nation at once populous and laborious, and therefore probably subsisting by agriculture,