No mighty bard, with consecrating touch,
Hath made the scene a nobler mood inspire;
The sullen Puritan, the sensual Dutch,
Proved but a barren fosterage for the lyre.
Beauty should speak: however fair the shore,
With balmy groves which all the coast perfume,
Until his eloquence the minstrel pour
Over the landscape, vainly must it bloom.
E'en thy dear Italy, whose ashes now,
Albeit feebly, warm our Saxon strains,
Was once, ere yet her vallies felt the plough,
Fameless and voiceless as Iowa's plains.
Imagine old Œnotria as she stood
In Saturn's reign, before the stranger came;
Ere yet the stillness of the trackless wood
Had heard the echoes of a Trojan's name.
Young Latium then, as now Missouri's waste,
Was dumb in story, soulless and unsung:
Whatever deeds her savage annals graced
Died soon, as lacking some harmonious tongue.
Up her dark streams the first explorers found
Only one dim, interminable shade;
Cliffs with the growth of awful ages crowned,
Amid whose gloom the wolf and wild-boar preyed.
Afar, perchance, on some sky-piercing height,
Nigh the last limit of the eagle's road,
Some stray Pelasgians had assumed a site
To pitch their proud, impregnable abode.
Pent in their airy dens, the builders reared
Turrets, fanes, altars fed with daily flame;
But with their walls their memory disappeared:
Their meanest implements outlive their name.
What race of giants piled yon rocks so high?
Who cut those hidden channels for the rills?
Drained the deep lake, and sucked the marshes dry,
Or hollowed into sepulchres the hills?
These, in the time of Romulus, were old;
Even then as now conjecture could but err;
In prose or verse no chronicler hath told
Whence the tribes came, and who their heroes were.