Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.
Wyoming
By Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867)T
“On Susquehanna’s side, fair Wyoming!”
Image of many a dream, in hours long past,
When life was in its bud and blossoming,
And waters, gushing from the fountain spring
Of pure enthusiast thought, dimmed my young eyes,
As by the poet borne, on unseen wing,
I breathed, in fancy, ’neath thy cloudless skies,
The summer’s air, and heard her echoed harmonies.
In life, a vision of the brain no more.
I ’ve stood upon the wooded mountain’s brow,
That beetles high thy lovely valley o’er;
And now, where winds thy river’s greenest shore,
Within a bower of sycamores am laid;
And winds, as soft and sweet as ever bore
The fragrance of wild-flowers through sun and shade,
Are singing in the trees, whose low boughs press my head.
Even of Campbell’s pen hath pictured: he
Had woven, had he gazed one sunny hour
Upon thy smiling vale, its scenery
With more of truth, and made each rock and tree
Known like old friends, and greeted from afar:
And there are tales of sad reality,
In the dark legends of thy border war,
With woes of deeper tint than his own Gertrude’s are.
The bard’s creations, moulded not of clay,
Hearts to strange bliss and suffering assigned,—
Young Gertrude, Albert, Waldegrave,—where are they?
We need not ask. The people of to-day
Appear good, honest, quiet men enough,
And hospitable too,—for ready pay;
With manners like their roads, a little rough,
And hands whose grasp is warm and welcoming, though tough.
There is a woman, widowed, gray, and old,
Who tells you where the foot of Battle stepped
Upon their day of massacre. She told
Its tale, and pointed to the spot, and wept,
Whereon her father and five brothers slept
Shroudless, the bright-dreamed slumbers of the brave,
When all the land a funeral mourning kept.
And there wild laurels, planted on the grave
By Nature’s hand, in air their pale red blossoms wave.
Are marks where timeworn battlements have been,
And in the tall grass traces linger still
Of “arrowy frieze and wedged ravelin.”
Five hundred of her brave that valley green
Trod on the morn in soldier-spirit gay;
But twenty lived to tell the noonday scene,—
And where are now the twenty? Passed away.
Has Death no triumph-hours, save on the battle-day?