THE MORNING SONG OF THE MOUND BUILDERS.
Once more do we turn on thy face our glad eyes,
Great god of the Summer! and sing,
With the lark and the linnet we gladly arise
To welcome the smile of our King.
Our hearts are made glad when we feel thee advance
On thy mission of mercy and might,
For we know that the stroke of thy conquering lance,
Has shattered the bulwarks of night.
We look on thy face, and our doubts are dispelled
By the glance of thy mellowing eye;
For we feel that the rains by our Master are held,
And we fear not to do or to die.
We felt thy embrace, many long weary years,
Yet the scales were not torn from our eyes;
We sought for a father, with prayers and with tears
Till we woke with a welcome surprise.
And beheld from thy face, all the fatherhood shine,
And thy great glowing heart all ablaze
With the love, that had lingered and grown more divine,
In the yearn of our wandering days.
How we leaped to thy arms, when we saw them extend!
How we drank of thy fervent embrace!
With its love like thyself, glowing on without end,
In the gold of thy deified face.
For our eyes were unscaled, and our hearts were unsealed;
We were melted to tears at the thought,
Of the blessings so near, that had stood unrevealed,
Of the Providence waiting unsought.
How could we have lost the firm grasp of thy hand,
With its daily improvise of love,
With its unsounded depths, like the count of the sand,
As an index, to point us above?
And now hover o'er us, great god of the day!
Let us never escape from thy wing,
For ever and ever, drive famine away,
Give wealth to our Summer and Spring.
Give us harvests of fruit, give us Winters of rest—
Let thy Provident hand never cease;
Grant the aged a home, on thy great shining breast,
When their labors shall purchase release.
Be more than we ask, give us more than our prayer—
All our wants, let thy wisdom disclose,
Till our souls shall be ripe with thy fostering care,
And made white for our future repose.
EVENING THANKSGIVING AND PRAYER.
Sinking down to thy rest,
In the deep crimson West,
Great God! thou hast taught us repose;
With thy promised return,
Without doubting, we learn,
To wait for thy further disclose.
In thy tenement high,
Blazing over the sky,
Are thy sentinels, pledge of the night;
And we know by their shine,
That thy care is divine,
And we rest without fear, till the light
Springs again from the East
With its glory increased
By the wakening pulse of the day;
And we never will doubt,
That thy naked arm, stout,
Will drive all the shadows away.
Yet we cannot forebear,
To lift up our prayer,
For we know we are wanton and weak;
And if once thou shouldst fail,
Or thy face shouldst grow pale,
Where else in the world should we seek?
For a father so kind,
To a people so blind,
In our weakness, thy strength we may trace.
Then fail not to return,
Leave us never to mourn,
The wealth of thy daily embrace.
O continue, we pray,
To bring back the glad day;
Give us always, to look on thy face!
The trembling lisp of every human soul,
Of names more potent, then their own can be,
Breathes the same lesson through, from pole to pole
To prove the certitude of Deity.
Not every eye turned upward can behold
The face that faith alone shapes into form;
Not every hand can touch the gates of gold
That outward swing in welcome from the storm.
Yet is the "Abba Father" pendant from each tongue,
And every soul a furnace for its fires;
And sacred is each song in earnest sung,
When creature to Creator thus aspires.
We blindly grope in this, our broad of day,
The two eternities to thus unite;
The silk of infancy is turned to gray
Ere we have learned to tread the path aright.
We force our providences out of reach,
Throw back the hand our Father doth extend,
And shut our ears that he may vainly teach,
And all the wealth of heaven may expend
To warm us to reliance,—shall we dare
To sneer at those who grope? We grapple air
When it is all refulgent with our God,
And we may touch his garment's hem in prayer.
THE PROPHET'S DEATH.
Groping in undiscovered realms their way,
The Prophet and his people give the day
To finding safest lodgement, till they press
Well down the grand old river, to the mouth
Of the great Western confluent—the south
Seems to add Summer to the wilderness.
They cross the river, and then settle down
To love and labor on its grassy banks;
And fortune seems to have forgot its frown.
Years of repletion fill their shattered ranks,
And youth and vigor take the place of age;
The story of their journey is retold
By only few in number; and the sage,
Who turned their faces on their god of gold,
Was bent with the plethoric weight of years,
And summoned them to worship 'mid the tears
Of many, who misgave his failing strength;
He saw their apprehensions and at length
Called them together for a final word:
"Sons of the Summer God! it is but wise
That we look out beyond the brace of years,
And question of the future. All the way
The shining surface of our god has led
Our toilsome footsteps; we must not forget
His daily nurture, nor the cloth of gold
With which he covers us—wakeful with the day,
How has he touched our eyelids with his hands,
And warmed us with his hovering! The night
Has never failed his promise of the morn.
How has his parenthood outwatched the stars;
How has the Winter melted at his glance;
How has his armor battled with the snows!
With what a tenderness he decks the fields,
And wooes the grasses from the dormant earth,
And clothes the forest with its robes of green,
As covert for the bison and the deer,
That we may find replenishment of food!
His providence has never failed our steps,
Our homage cannot cancel his regard.
"Our father! in this failing cup of years,
Help us to be re-sanctified to thee—
Thou hast not measured to our helplessness,
But with unstinted hand filled up our lives
With blessings. Fill thou alike our hearts,
That we may have no room to cherish doubt,
But answer thy embraces, as the fields
Leap up to kiss thy first recumbent rays!
Let all our dross become thy burnished gold,
Shine through each crevice of our stubbornness,
Till in transparent purity, we reach
The very essence of thy godliness!
"Brethren of the Sun!
This altar is my last: You see the fire
Leap as an answer to my late request,
And it shall bear my spirit to the sun,
And cursed the hand that stays its homeward flight!"
Fresh nerved he reached the altar with a bound,
And sank without a murmur in the flame;
His followers an instant gather round,
But he had passed out almost as he came.
They did not dare to drag him from the pile,
His life and effort had together ceased,
He passed into the future with a smile—
A smile, that he had been so quick released.
Yet, there was one (clear-sighted from the rest),
Who said she saw the essence of his form,
In brighter effigy, more richly dressed,
Fly out into the sunset; and the charm
Of her enchanted parable found faith
In many of the multitude; his death,
So like his life, had challenged all their thought
And they were ready to quiesce his fate, and sought
Some shadowed miracle to wrap his shade.
They gathered up the ashes, and forbade
Unsanctioned hands to touch them; and they reared
A rugged mound above the garnered dust,
And left him (one whom they loved less than feared).
To that sole arbiter, whose name is Just,
Our common parent, Time, whose busy hands
Rear many a sacred fane above our faults,
Flings over our excressences his sands,
And leaves no human stain to blot the sacred marble of our vaults.
How grand is the economy of time and death!
We whet the knife for deep incision on the name
Of some misguided leader, but he fails his breath,
And all our better angels give him back to fame;
Death carries off the husk, we keep the ripened wheat,
And Time refines the kernel into choicest flour;
The atmosphere of anger is at last made sweet;
Our charity immortal glows; our passion, but an hour.
God keep us always so! It is the chosen link
That binds us to the race, and bids the Christ come in;
That holds our hands to near the eternal brink;
It saves us from ourselves, and breaks the tooth of sin.
The whitened garments at the eternal gate,
Must cover those, who have not stained another,
Or there will come that awful sentence: "Wait!
"Blood crieth from the ground! where is thy brother?"
If thus upon the living God doth set the seal
Of condemnation for the false witnessing
How will he smite the lips of those who steal
His covering from the dead, and fill the sacred spring
Of memory, with the debris of their lives;
Mixing, what God has kindly torn apart,
And making null, the severence he strives,
Between the naked soul, and sin encumbered heart!
The gem was melted, and his life went out
In unobtrusive secrecy, and all
That he brought with him, passed the silent way
Into eternity, beyond recall.
He chose no sponsor to renew his place
But gave them back to Nature, as he found;
Yet was his impress fastened on the race,
And every morn they gathered at the mound,
For many after years, till they had grown
A nation strong in numbers, and had thrown
The seeds of generation far and wide,
And found the latent valleys without guide.
The lakes are made a tribute to their spoil,
And all the riches of the virgin soil
Were tested by those hardy argonauts of old;
And though they sought no fleece of shining gold,
They penetrated all the wilderness
That lay unclaimed before them to possess.
God drops no nobler anchorage on earth,
Than those who mold a nation, and a name;
Whose travail in the wilderness gives birth
To some great epoch, without thought of fame.
The pioneers of empire, for all time,
Are gold-dust, from the placers of our homes—
The surface croppings from a nation's prime,
The mellow acre of the richest loams.
They overgrow the boundaries of life,
And push the horizon far out in space.
With lethargy they wage a ceaseless strife,
And with the whirling earth, they keep their pace.
All honor to the soul who sets his stake
Where human kind have never trenched before;
Where only God his thunders o'er it shake,
And solitude shall murmur, "nevermore."
Such men are sovereigns, though they grasp no crown,
And raise no jewelled scepter in the hand;
Yet are they Princes, in their bronze and brown,
And demonstrate their fitness to command.
The Norsemen, on the North Atlantic wave;
Columbus, passing out in unknown seas;
De Soto, gaining but an unknown grave;
The hardy Pilgrims, on their bended knees;
The Argonauts, upon the Western slope—
These are the souls no human praise can reach.
Each, in their turn, gave empire back to hope,
And all are greater than the gift of speech.
No pen can lustre their unfading claim;
No cenotaph do honor to their dust—
These are crown jewels on the brow of Fame;
Their conquest is supreme, their laurels ever just.
Yet, in the van of empire, still is left
The noiseless print of ancestry more grand;
Indentures chiseled in the highest cleft,
By giants of a long forgotten land,—
The nameless graves of centuries untold;
The ashes of the prehistoric age;
The self-forgetting litany of gold—
How vast their monuments, how broad their page!
In what a grand democracy of death
They lift their silent fingers to our years,
Melt our memorials with a single breath
In mute companionship of life and tears!
We are but pygmies to the almighty past,
The names we honor but the surface-mould;
Beneath must lie an empire far more vast,
Whose fundaments alone deserve the name of "old."
Not many years, till they had found the bed
Of copper ore upon Superior's rim;
And hither many of the hardy ones were led
By Orchas, quick in architrave, and fleet of limb;
And many the fantastic implements he shaped
For husbandry; no want of theirs escaped
His eager scrutiny—the axe and blade,
The rough-made pick, and the encumbered spade,
The vessels for the housewife, and the spear,
And other weaponry for bison and for deer.
All these were fashioned in an uncouth way,
And yet they filled the purpose of the day.
They had not reached the iron age of thought,
And what they made, necessity had taught;
But riper years must ope the "Sampson Mine,"
And wake the rugged giant, in the shine
Of a meridian sunlight; they little thought
Of what a Hercules remained unsought,
So near Missouri's border; yet, not strange
Is their indicted ignorance—their range
Was circumscribed; and iron was left to rest,
Till man had long been cradled on the breast
Of patient Mother Earth—not all at once
Did she give up her treasures; and the dunce
Must grow into philosopher with years.
Experience with its battlehood of tears,
Is Nature's great interpreter; we learn
But slowly, till the lessons fervid burn
Their impress into action; then awakes
The slow-taught pupil into higher life—
Invention is the furnace-spark of strife;
Necessity, the hand that wields the sledge
Upon the patient anvil of our needs,
And Providence makes good its wakeful pledge
With plenteous harvest; from the dormant seeds
That lie unconed beneath our very feet
We stumble on to marvels, and awake
To find some giant force, in what we meet;
And in the insects of our path, leviathans, we greet.
Time's wheels, though shaken, never fail to track
The rut of empire, without turning back;
They, ceaseless whirl, with lubricate of blood,
Drawn from a thousand channels on the way,
Unrusting, through the oxydizing flood,
To measure centuries, or mark a day.
And thus, the primal pioneers move on
To unaccustomed progress, on the banks
Of the confluent streams that scar the face
Of the great Western basin; and their ranks
Are filled with happy husbandry; the land
Gives back its tillage, with a lavish hand.
The forests and the streams were over-full
With fish, and flesh to feed them, and they pass
One conquest, to another, in the lull
Of untamed nature. Garnered as a mass
To fill their open hands, the native corn
Soon covered the rich valleys, and the plant,
So dalliant to the race, was early born,
Tobacco. They were not adamant
Against the weaknesses so close allied
To human nature; and there was excess,
And envy, emulence, and pride,
And all the ills that left their first impress;
And yet God gave them peace. No brother's hand
Was raised against a brother, and the years
Spread fruit and plenty over a fair land
Destined to futurehood of bitter, bitter tears.
DEPARTURE OF WABUN.
"Most governed is most wayward." Very true;
Repeating history doth verify
That law from malefaction always grew,
And with its ceasing, rulership must die,
Except the common sway of Deity,
When love and service shall together blend,
And man, from every earthly master free,
Shall recognize his Father and his Friend.
These ancient prairie dwellers, had no need
Of stringent government; a few to lead
In seeding and in harvest; some to guide
In matters of religion, and of form;
The rustic swain, and his compliant bride,
To join in wedlock; and in time of storm,
To smooth the little intricates of life
With counsel, sage, and thus avoiding strife,
To guide their budding nation into bloom.
All claiming unction from the prophet's shade,
Still gave their worship to the god of day,
And their oblations on the altar laid.
Yet, the responsive accident of fire
Could never be recalled—they little knew
The secret of its coming; and they shaped
No other pebbles like the one so true
To Uri's pleadings; still they kept their faith
And reared their shapely mounds to meet the sun
With his first glance, and from the morning's breath
Retain their fervency, till day was done.
From out their number, some were set apart
For game and chase. The buffalo and deer
And wild fowl, all, paid tribute to their skill,
And vale and forest echoed with their cheer.
But one of these, young Wabun, shunned the group,
And wandered by the forest streams alone.
Some called him "dreamer"; others tried to win
His mooding back to mirth; but there was none
That seemed to reach the center of his soul;
He joined not in the worship of his race,
And seemed to be so distant in his thought,
That one might search the Pleiad's in his face.
There shone a star upon the eastern rim—
So suddenly it shot upon their view,
So brilliant and so placid, never dim
Through storm and starlight, always lit anew.
They marveled much, and some were sore dismayed
To seek the portents of this stranger star;
But not so, Wabun; he, all unafraid,
Hailed it as answer from the dim afar,
And showed unwonted pleasure at its sight;
His distance seemed to shorten, and his mind
Seemed mellowed by a new-born love to man—
A quickened tenderness to help his kind.
"I wander in the forest; by the stream";
(They gave earnest audience as he spake)
"And underneath the stars—and they all tell
The story of a great, forgotten God.
I listen to the murmuring of the rain,
And to the mighty thunder of the clouds;
And see the forked lightning, in its gleam,
Strike the great oak to shivers, in its path;
I see the maize upon a thousand fields;
I see the goodly carpet on the earth—
And every grassy thread a miracle—
I see the sun upon his track of light,
The moon upon her pathway in the sky—
And all do tell of this forgotten God.
For God is of the living, not the dead:
The tree, the sun, the moon, the stars, and all,
All fill their places; but are not alive
"As we, with thought, and purpose, and design;
But each doth turn upon a steady crank
Held by a mighty and imperious hand.
The bison, and the deer, and all the birds,
Have life, and voice, and action, such as we;
And yet they have no thought, except to live.
They build no houses, lay no harvests up—
We are their masters, with the right to kill.
"All things pay tribute to our prowent hands;
All things we see are provident of us:
The sun to ripen, and the moon to watch,
The birds and flocks for us to gather flesh,
The forests and the prairies for our use,
The mines for metal, and the streams for fish—
All, all, pay tribute to our wasting hands.
Yet we are not a law unto ourselves:
Though masters, yet not gods, for we all die
And fall back into dust; yet are we great,
And greatest of earth's creatures; but for death,
We might claim highest unction; but our power
Is limited; wherefore, if we are highest type
Of creature earth, then must it surely be
That God is man, but of a higher mold;
Not subject unto death, but Lord of life.
And, if all earthly forces must conserve
Our being (highest born of all the earth),
Then back of us the great Creator stands
"Unseen, as is Eternity unseen,
But felt, as is each ripple of her waves,
Upon the shores of our unstable life.
The greater is not seen. We do not see
The very thought that holds us in control.
"Thus have I doled, and pondered on it well,
Until, upon my vision dawned that star;
And as upon some errand quickly sent
(I know not how I went, I felt so light),
I sped upon its rays, o'er vale, and hill,
And o'er a vaster water than the lakes—
A grand expanse of green and surging waves.
And, on, still on, till just before my face
A mother, and an infant at her breast,
And many seeming wise and stately men
Bending in homage and with offerings choice,
Of sweetly-scented vintage; then I sought
To find the wherefore of this sweet emprize;
And I was told this was the Son of God—
The One that was to come, the mighty One,
Redeemer of the world; that man had sinned
And he was come to set at one the race
With the All-Father; that we had been made
In God's own image; that the sun and moon
Were but his handiwork. To Him alone
(Invisible, yet always looking on)
"Should homage be ascribed. All this was short
Yet was it printed on my pliant breast,
And cannot be erased. I seek no name
And claim no higher homage for the gleam
Vouchsafed my vision of the mighty past
And prescience of the future; tis enough
To know my steps directed, and to feel
That in my darkness I have found out God.
No more the unknown God, but evermore
The ripened type of the diviner man;
And as we reap the tokens of his love,
Remember him as Father Man of men—
The Infinite Perfection of our race."
Much more he said which made a deep impress
Upon the hardy hunters, and the less
Were those who gave no sanction to his word;
The greater portion followed him in thought,
And soon in deed. The votaries of the sun
Made most malignant onslaught, and they sought
To drive the thoughtful Wabun from his "dream."
The strife was vain. They in their fervent hope
Turn to the East, into the wilderness—
The grand Druidic of the Eastern slope,
And, hid to all but God, they penetrate
The deep recesses of their broad estate.
The gentle Wabun held for many years
His hand upon the pulses of their thought;
Sometimes upon their love, sometimes their fears,
His fervent purity, its impress wrought.
He led them to the thousand untold charms
That sparkle on the rugged Eastern slope.
He bared to them the great Creator's arms,
And, in God's grandest alphabet, he read their highest hope.
Niagara was but a giant scroll,
Whereon God writ a token of his strength;
The muttering voice of its unceasing roll
Was but a cadence of the mighty length
That measures the eternities of life.
Its grandeur but one glitter of the gold
That played upon his vesture; that the strife
Of waters was the stream so cold,
Down which humanity as rudely rushed;
Without a thought for their eternal good,
With all the semblance of the Father crushed,
They pass down in the surge of death's unceasing flood.
The broad Atlantic lashing at the shore,
Was human passion—with the balance gone;
Endeafening the graces with its roar,
And blindly lashing the Eternal throne.
Into these miniatures, God thrust himself,
That every wave might glitter with his name,
That every rock might hold upon its shelf
Some semblance that their reverence might claim.
The kindlier tokens of paternal care,
On Nature's face, were beaming everywhere.
And yet, how few of us, can truly blend
The creature with Creator, in our sight;
And from the Father, grasp the hand of friend,
Whose stars of providence outshine the night!
Our eyes are fettered with an earthly bound,
Our narrow horizon will not enlarge;
Our gaze, star fixed, will drop back to the ground,
And will not with the infinite surcharge.
Only God's hand can push the barriers back,
And give our vision unimpeded range;
And with each respite, on the weary track,
Fix the unchangeable, where all is change.
RETURN AND STRIFE.
No wonder, that when Wabun passed away,
Their torpid natures should have lost the charm
That held so perfect, with its gentle sway,
Yet slacked so quickly, with the palsied arm.
Infirmities are easy to impart,
And through the generations, they come down;
But God must place his hand upon each heart,
And press each brow where he would drop a crown.
Long brotherhood of forest, storm and flood,
Had schooled them for the turbulence of life.
The wraith of Nature made them men of blood;
The war of elements, the ocean's strife,
The thunder of Niagara now heard,
The lashing of Atlantic on the beach,
The slogan of the forest—in a word
The carnival, at rife, within their reach,
All served to spur their natures into storm.
How many catch the key-note of their song
From the surrounding elements, and warm
Their frozen energies, and make them strong
In earth's unceasing alchemy! Much more
The untutored savage; he has lost the key,
And must from Nature's chalice find the door,
Through which to penetrate life's mystery.
And many generations passed away,
Since these stern foresters had dwelt apart
From their ancestral brethren; till the day
When in their higher prowess, from the heart
Of the great forest fastnesses, they spring
As panthers, on their unsuspecting prey.
They have grown strong in weaponry, yet cling
To Deity, in their untutored way.
The "happy hunting ground" to them is Heaven;
And the "Great Spirit" still to them is God;
Yet, from their hearts, all tender passions driven,
They smite their brethren with a heavy rod.
A long and ceaseless struggle, many years,
Alternately, invasion and defense,
Till they are driven southward; and the fears,
That Kohen's prophecy would be fullfilled
And back of this, the agony intense
Of impotence in prayer so deeply chilled
The hearts of these poor children of the sun,
That they gave easy conquest to their foes;
And thus the struggle stubbornly begun,
So unresisting now, was finished without blows.
When man is shorn of strength, and there is left
Only Omnipotence , we kiss the rod—
The very rod that smites us. In the cleft
We would attempt to hide from Deity,
Yet in his anger is an answered prayer—
The consciousness of presence; though we flee,
The wrath of love, is proof of constant care.
But when we beat against the empty air,
And every echo sends us back despair ,
And even superstition, fails to foil
Our souls with the deceptive glow of spoil,
Then are we bittered, and our path made black;
We grope in mists, Cimmerian, on the wrack
Of constant and interminable doubt,
A natural prey, and easy put to rout.
To South, and West, they turn their fateful way
Beyond the Mississippi; and their day
Seemed lighted with a new influx of hope.
The sun embraced them with a warmer smile;
The mellow fragrance of the Southern slope
Added entrancement each succeeding mile.
Not all at once the exodus took place,
For they were many, and had scattered wide;
Yet to the southward all had set their face
To seek in other fields a place to hide
From cruel persecutions. When our kin
Lends its consanguined arder to the dart,
How more intent, with vengeful purposes,
How heavier is the load upon the heart!
They scatter into fragmentary clans,
And in the earnest of their added woe,
Give birth to new religious phantasies.
The unclogged streams of superstition flow,
When down the mountains, and across the moors,
The heavy, swollen torrents sweep along,
Throwing their scattered wrecks upon the shores,
And breaking barriers, however strong.
Baal was great, when Baalbec reared her crest
And column after column gave her grace
And all the East upon her beauty smiled;
But when the "owls and bats" usurped her place,
The god had fallen. In the temple dust,
Where man, with his immortal, had so strove
To make the marble animate (in vain,
Like other myriad phantoms of the brain)
Time fashions into ghostly hands, that sternly point above.
And so, God reaps involuntary praise,
From every fashioning of man's design;
His ways, indeed, cannot be called our ways;
Yet his hozannas, from each crumbling shrine,
Teach us the servitude of all the past;
That human hands but fashion Heavenly aids;
That every sculptured mythmark only fades
Into eternal sunshine, at the last.
Some crossed the mountain ramparts of the West;
Some lingered still upon the Eastern slope;
The empire yet was open to their zest,
And all were buoyant with a new-born hope.
But war, like pestilence, doth warp our lives,
And like contagion, it infects the air.
Peace comes in measure, but it never thrives
Directly after conflict, till grows fair
The flesh so lately scarred. Intestine war
Made ravage of their ranks; they ill could spare
Their bravest, yet the first to fall in fratricidal jar.
The lines, by conflict, soon were closely drawn,
And from the night of struggle nations dawn,
Whose chiefs assume the King's prerogative.
Clans fall, and clansmen perish; nations live
That pass chaotic conflict, and ensphere
Their crude material, as a new-born world,
To individual phalanxes, and rear
Their rude escutcheon. As in ether whirled,
The new born planet tracks its trial course;
So must this human query find its way,
And failure is its fashion; but still worse
Are those who fail to grapple with the day,
But look supinely on while vested rights
Are trampled under foot, and raise no hand
In deprecating gesture; from the heights
Of grim impartial history will stand
Unfading letters, written to the shame
Of those whose scourges fail to make a name.