232
THE MISSISSIPPI.
Fainter ringing down the valley till he faded in the blue.
Twice a hundred years are numbered, and the Red man roams no more
Through the green aisles of the forest,—by the reedy, open shore;
With the startled deer and bison he has fled before the bands
That your fleet canoes have followed from the wondering father-lands.
Now a people build its borders; now the great fleets hasten down
With the sheaves of many a prairie, with the wealth of many a town;
Decks piled high from tropic harvest in the warmer realms below,—
Rice and sugar from the cane-fields, and the cotton's downy snow;
Laden sea-craft inland sailing, rafts that find the current's fall,
Smoke of steamer, call of pilot, from the Gulf to high St. Paul;
And the thronged, exultant River is a nation's heart, whose hands
Far to eastward, far to westward, touch the shining ocean sands.
Twice a hundred years are numbered, and the Red man roams no more
Through the green aisles of the forest,—by the reedy, open shore;
With the startled deer and bison he has fled before the bands
That your fleet canoes have followed from the wondering father-lands.
Now a people build its borders; now the great fleets hasten down
With the sheaves of many a prairie, with the wealth of many a town;
Decks piled high from tropic harvest in the warmer realms below,—
Rice and sugar from the cane-fields, and the cotton's downy snow;
Laden sea-craft inland sailing, rafts that find the current's fall,
Smoke of steamer, call of pilot, from the Gulf to high St. Paul;
And the thronged, exultant River is a nation's heart, whose hands
Far to eastward, far to westward, touch the shining ocean sands.
Will ye trust the strange recital,—tale that only fiend should tell?
When the nation's morn was fairest, black the night of Treason fell!
When the nation's morn was fairest, black the night of Treason fell!
