Pocahontas and Other Poems (New York)/Native Scenery

by Lydia Huntley Sigourney

NATIVE SCENERY.

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                     Sweetly wild! sweetly wild!
Were the scenes that charm'd me when a child.
Rocks, gray rocks, with their tracery dark,
Leaping rills, like the diamond spark,
Torrent voices, thundering by,
When the pride of the vernal floods swell'd high;
And quiet roofs, like the hanging nest,
Mid cliffs by the feathery foliage dress'd.

    —Beyond, in these woods, did the wild rose grow,
And the lily gleam white, where the lakelets flow,
And the trailing arbutus shroud its grace,
Till fragrance bewrayed its hiding-place,
And the woodbine hold to the dews its cup,
And the vine, with its clustering grapes, go up,
Up to the crest of the tallest trees;
And so, mid the humming-birds and bees,
On a seat of turf, embroidered fair
With the violet blue and the columbine rare,
It was sweet to sit, till the sun laid down,
At the gate of the west, his golden crown:
                    Sweetly wild! sweetly wild!
Were the scenes that charm'd me when a child.