Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.
Ode to Jamestown
By James Kirke Paulding (1779–1860)O
In which a nestling empire lay,
Struggling awhile, ere she unfurled
Her gallant wing and soared away;
All hail! thou birthplace of the glowing west,
Thou seem’st the towering eagle’s ruined nest!
What touching visions rise,
As, wandering these old stones among,
I backward turn mine eyes,
And see the shadows of the dead flit round,
Like spirits, when the last dread trump shall sound.
In one short moment memory supplies;
They throng upon my wakened mind,
As time’s dark curtains rise.
The volume of a hundred buried years,
Condensed in one bright sheet, appears.
I see the lonely little bark
Scudding along the crested wave,
Freighted like old Noah’s ark,
As o’er the drownéd earth ’t was hurled,
With the forefathers of another world.
Amid the desert, desolate,
The fathers of my native land,
The daring pioneers of fate,
Who braved the perils of the sea and earth,
And gave a boundless empire birth.
His woodland empire, free as air;
I see the gloomy forest change,
The shadowy earth laid bare;
And, where the red man chased the bounding deer,
The smiling labors of the white appear.
In wonder or in scorn,
As the pale faces sweat to raise
Their scanty fields of corn,
While he, the monarch of the boundless wood,
By sport, or hair-brained rapine, wins his food.
The red men are no more;
The pale-faced strangers stand alone
Upon the river’s shore;
And the proud wood-king, who their arts disdained,
Finds but a bloody grave where once he reigned.
Of sturdy woodman’s axe;
The earth receives the white man’s yoke,
And pays her willing tax
Of fruits, and flowers, and golden harvest fields,
And all that nature to blithe labor yields.
And gathering crowds expand,
Far as my fancy’s vision spreads,
O’er many a boundless land,
Till what was once a world of savage strife
Teems with the richest gifts of social life.
Each happy, great, and free;
One empire still another breeds,
A giant progeny.
Destined their daring race to run,
Each to the regions of yon setting sun.
The fount whence these rich waters sprung,
I glance towards this lonely place,
And find it, these rude stones among.
Here rest the sires of millions, sleeping round,
The Argonauts, the golden fleece that found.
The stone, but not a word, remains;
They cannot live in deathless song,
Nor breathe in pious strains.
Yet this sublime obscurity to me
More touching is than poet’s rhapsody.
They live in millions yet unborn,
And pious gratitude shall wreathe
As bright a crown as ere was worn,
And hang it on the green-leaved bough,
That whispers to the nameless dead below.
No one that loves his native land;
No one that reasons, feels, or thinks,
Can mid these lonely ruins stand,
Without a moistened eye, a grateful tear
Of reverent gratitude to those that moulder here.
Of him whose strange, yet bright career
Is written on this sacred ground
In letters that no time shall sere;
Who in the Old World smote the turbaned crew,
And founded Christian empires in the New.
The tutelary of this land,
The angel of the woodland shade,
The miracle of God’s own hand,
Who joined man’s heart to woman’s softest grace,
And thrice redeemed the scourges of her race.
Whose life-blood was soft Pity’s tide,
Dear goddess of the sylvan grove,
Flower of the forest, nature’s pride,
He is no man who does not bend the knee,
And she no woman who is not like thee!
To me shall ever sacred be,—
I care not who my themes may mock,
Or sneer at them and me.
I envy not the brute who here can stand
Without a thrill for his own native land.
Or breathe Virginia’s air,
Or in New England claim his birth,
From the old pilgrims there,
He is a bastard, if he dare to mock
Old Jamestown’s shrine or Plymouth’s famous rock.