Page:Livingstone in Africa.djvu/48

26 They wear enormous heads upon their shoulders They build their pigmy booths in dim recesses Of some impenetrable forest world! Two travellers$4$ lately came upon their traces.

Here are no mouldering monuments of glory, Confused dim ruin of long centuries; As though ashamed of human purposes, Suffering slow conversion to the ways Of soft-outlined harmonious natural things, Flower and herb, and weatherhued worn stone. Yet here Napoleons and Tamerlanes Have temper'd to a life-devouring sword The drossy coarseness of humanity: Only their mighty Mother in more scorn Spurns in an hour the poor fantastic toil! A millstone, lost in verdure or black ooze; Cairns upon hillsides; fragments of rude jars; Obsidian implements with fossil bones, Buried in bowels of unquarried rock; These are the memories Earth retains of man. And yet the dead are in the forest mould,