Page:Poems of Sentiment and Imagination.djvu/27

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A thousand wild murmurings tremble in air,
And startle my spirit with thrillings of fear;
Yet I love the wild music for breathing the tone
Of ages gone by, and of races long flown.
Old forests! ye stand in your majesty yet,
Bearing proudly the seal by the Deity set;
First temples of God—where His presence still seems
To tremble like visions of angels in dreams;
Would that never thine echoes might wake to repeat
The voice of the white man, the tread of his feet;
For the shades which inhabit shall flee from thy dells,
And the shelter be torn from thy wild-springing wells;
And thy shadowy recesses, dim as the night,
Shall be oped to the glare of the summer-day's light;
And thy soft mossy glades, by the wood-blossom starred,
By the tramp of his footsteps be stricken and marred.
Where the pride of thy bosom now towers to the skies,
Shall a temple of fame in the future arise;
And man in the pride of his strength shall erase
Of the forest's wild grandeur each lingering trace.
Columbia's forests! how proudly ye wave
O'er the white man's domain, and the Indian's grave;
Yet do ye not mourn that the sons of thy shade
Have been driven away from the homes they had made?
Do not the wild spirits in glade, glen, and dell,
Echo mournfully over the Indian's farewell?
Or is it the farewell to man's first abode,
Murmuring still from thy branches, great wind-harp of God?