Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/452

Rh A weirdly beautiful view opened on us as our canoes shot under the outer leaves of the Feeder's bridge, and we floated at last within the marvellous ring of the lake of the Dismal Swamp.

Vividly came to our minds the picture in Moore's touching ballad.

Here, we thought, is the very scene, water, wood, and sky, that the poet saw generations ago. These trees growing out of the dark flood; this weeping moss hanging from the sad queenliness of the elegant cypress; these "deadly vines" with their purple trumpet flowers that poison the very water into which they pour their tears; these "beds of reed" and "tangled juniper"; these white roots round the border of the lake, where glide and coil "the copper snake" and the fearful red-bellied moccasin.

And here let the lapse of time be forgotten and the association be renewed. There is no age in art. The song of a true poet is as unrelated as the song of a bird or a brook. This is my excuse, if it be needed, for repeating here Moore's ballad of "The Lake of the Dismal Swamp," written at Norfolk, in Virginia, in 1803.

"They tell of a young man who lost his mind on the death of the girl he loved, and who, suddenly disappearing from his friends, was never