WYOMING. 5 "Dites si la Nature n'a pas fait ce beau pays pour une Julie, pour une Claire, et pour un St. Preux, mais ne les y cherchez pas." THOU Com'st, in beauty, on my gaze at last, And waters, gushing from the fountain spring 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, And winds, as soft and sweet as ever bore The 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 power Had woven, had he gazed one sunny hour With more of truth, and made each rock and tree 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, With manners like their roads, a little rough, And hands whose grasp is warm and welcoming, tho' tough. Judge Hallenbach, who keeps the toll-bridge gate, And the town records, is the Albert now Of Wyoming like him, in church and state, Her Doric column; and upon his brow The thin hairs, white with seventy winters' snow, To frighten flocks of crows and blackbirds from the grain. For he would look particularly droll In his "Iberian boot" and "Spanish plume," And be the wonder of each Christian soul As of the birds that scare-crow and his broom. To be o'er-praised even by her worshipper-Poesy. There's one in the next field-of sweet sixteen- The maiden knows no more than Cobbett or Voltaire. There is a woman, widowed, gray, and old, By Nature's hand, in air their pale red blossoms wave. And on the margin of yon orchard hill Are marks where time-worn battlements have been, Five hundred of her brave that Valley green But twenty lived to tell the noon-day scene- Has Death no triumph-hours, save on the battle day? |