Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/83

 1820-30.] MICAH P. FLINT 67 ON PASSING THE GRAVE OF MY SISTER.* On yonder shore, on yonder shore, Now verdant with its depth of shade, Beneath the white-armed sycamore, There is a little infant laid. Forgive this tear. — A brother weeps. — 'Tis there the faded floweret sleeps. She sleeps alone, she sleeps alone, The summer's forests o'er her wave ; And sighing winds at autumn moan Around the httle stranger's grave. As though they murmured at the fate Of one so lone and desolate. In sounds that seem like sorrow's own. Their funeral dirges faintly creep; Then deep'ning to an organ tone. In all their solemn cadence sweep, And pour, unheard, along the wild, Their desert anthem o'er a child. She came, and passed. Can I forget, How we whose hearts had hailed her birth. Ere three autumnal suns had set. Consigned her to her mother earth ! Joys and their memories pass away ; But griefs are deeper traced than they. We laid her in her narrow cell, We heaped the soft mould on her breast; ing point of heavily timbered bottom just opposite the seci;nd Chickasaw Bluff, a name which is given to one of those peninsulas of high land which jut into the alluvium and approach the river from time to time on its eastern side. In this bottom, at the distance of about two hundred and fifty paces from the bank of the river, there is a little grave, in which are deposited the remains of my youngest sister. She was born on our passage from Arkansas to St. Charles, in the fall of 1819, and survived only three days. At that time, the settlements on the Mississippi were so thin and remote that there were often intervals of unbroken forests, extending from twenty to thirty miles along its shores. It was in the midst of one of these, and in a night of storms, that this little infant was born ; and And parting tears, like rain-drops, fell Upon her lonely place of rest. May angels guard it : — may they bless Her slumbers in the wilderness. She sleeps alone, she sleeps alone: For, all unheard, on yonder shore, The sweeping flood, with torrent moan, At evening hfts its solemn roar, As, in one broad, eternal tide, The rolling waters onward glide. There is no marble monument, There is no stone, with graven lie, To tell of love and virtue blent In one almost too good to die. We needed no such useless trace To point us to her resting-place. She sleeps alone, she sleeps alone ; But, midst the tears of April showers, The genius of the wild hath strown His germs of fruits, his fairest flowers, And cast his robe of vernal bloom In guardian fondness o'er her tomb. She sleeps alone, she sleeps alone; Yet yearly is her grave-turf dress'd. And still the summer vines are thi-own. In annual wreaths, across her breast, And still the sighing autumn grieves, And strews the hallowed spot with leaves. it is there that she was buried. We were ascending the river in a small batteau, and were entirely alone, having been left by our hands a few miles below. Our solitary situation— the circumstances of her birth— the place of her burial— all conspired to make a deep and lasting im- pression on my mind. Some years afterward I passed the same place, in the spring of the year, on my way up the river, in a steamboat. Before we arrived there, I had stolen away from the crowded bustle of the cabin to a more secluded place on the top of the boat, that I might indulge my feeling? without observation or restraint. I shall not attempt to describe them now. I felt a desh's to consecrate the memory of this "desert born" and "desert buried,"' iu the minds of some whose friendship has been, and ever will be, dear to me.
 * Iii descending the Mississippi, there is a long sweep-