Page:Pocahontas, and Other Poems.djvu/71

 DEATH AMONG THE TREES.

��DEATH walketh in the forest.

The tall pines

Do woo the lightning-flash, and through their veins The fire-shaft, darting, leaves their blackened trunks A tablet, where ambition's sons may read Their destiny. The oak that centuries spared Grows grey at last, and, like some time-worn man Stretching out palsied arms, doth feebly cope With the destroyer, while its gnarled roots Betray their trust. The towering elm turns pale, And faintly strews the sere and yellow leaf, While from its dead arms falls the wedded vine. The sycamore uplifts a beacon brow, Denuded of its honours ; and the blast, Swaying the withered willow, nidely asks For its lost grace, and for its tissued leaf, With silver lined,

I knew that blight might check The sapling, ere kind Nature's hand could weave Its first spring-coronal; and that the worm, Coiling itself amid our garden plants, Did make their unborn buds its sepulchre.

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