Page:Oregon, her history, her great men, her literature.djvu/348

Pours the silv'ry dream of Aidenn
From her lily wreathen horn,
Earth has fallen as of old,
In the dying baron's wassail,
Fell the wine-flushed cup of gold.
Round about the dripping shrouds
Of the weary dreary clouds
In the charnel of the deep,
Where the toiling globe of ocean
Swings in dark, mysterious motion
Round a misty realm of sleep;
And a silence, dim, eternal,
Hushes all the march of time—
Only ever and forever,
Like the wail of some lone river,
Fraught with sorrow strange, supernal,
Mourn the clouds, in ceaseless rhyme,
As they ever weep and weep;
Fallen world of wrong and sorrow,
Never hope for brighter morrow—
Doom has met thee at the tryst!
In the glamour of thy dreaming
Thro' the ivory-gated East;
With the red and purple feast
Of the roses he has kissed!
For the gold-browed stars bave faced them
Off to other loves and wars,
And the sparkling crest of Venus
That so often flashed between us
Turns along the trail of Mars,
O, the years shall wane and sicken,
And the turbid clouds shall thicken,
In the lonely lapse of time,
Till the cavern gloom of sea
Fills, anon, with massy waters,
And Willamette's sons and daughters
Rise to other lives sublime
In an ocean broad and free!
O the changes, slow, dramatic,
Of the gloomy world terrene—
Merging still to shapes aquatic
As the ages shift the scene,
Till the rustling woods that quiver

Sweet with every sigh and sound,