Page:Zinzendorff and Other Poems.pdf/49

Rh 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 honors, and the blast, Swaying the withered willow, rudely 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. And well I knew how wild and wrecking winds Might take the forest-monarchs by the crown, And lay them with the lowliest vassal-herb; And that the axe, with its sharp ministry, Might, in one hour, such revolution work, As all Earth's boasted power could never hope To re-instate. And I had seen the flame Go crackling up, amid yon verdant boughs, And with a tyrant's insolence dissolve Their interlacing, till I felt that man, For sordid gain would make the forest's pomp Its heaven-raised arch and living tracery, One funeral-pyre. But, yet I did not deem That pale Disease amid those shades would steal As to a sickly maiden's cheek, and waste The power and plenitude of those high ranks, Which in their peerage and nobility, Unrivalled and unchronicled, had reigned. And so I said if in this world of knells