Poems of Places: America

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
J.R. Osgood and Company, 1880 - English poetry
 

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Page 164 - Of these fair solitudes once stir with life And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds That overlook the rivers, or that rise In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, Answer. A race, that long has passed away, Built them; - a disciplined and populous race Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon.
Page 241 - But the hands that were played By that heathen Chinee, And the points that he made, Were quite frightful to see, — Till at last he put down a right bower, Which the same Nye had dealt unto me. Then I looked up at Nye, And he gazed upon me ; And he rose with a sigh, And said, " Can this be? We are ruined by Chinese cheap labour," — And he went for that heathen Chinee.
Page 166 - And hides his sweets, as in the golden age, Within the hollow oak. I listen long To his domestic hum, and think I hear The sound of that advancing multitude Which soon shall fill these deserts.
Page 72 - Bathe now in the stream before you, Wash the war-paint from your faces, Wash the blood-stains from your fingers, Bury your war-clubs and your weapons, Break the red stone from this quarry, Mould and make it into Peace-Pipes, Take the reeds that grow beside you, Deck them with your brightest feathers, Smoke the calumet together, And as brothers live henceforward...
Page 240 - WHICH I wish to remark — And my language is plain — That for ways that are dark, And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar, Which the same I would rise to explain.
Page 27 - They hunt no more for the possum and the coon On the meadow, the hill, and the shore ; They sing no more by the glimmer of the moon On the bench by the old cabin door.
Page 163 - Pacific — have ye fanned A nobler or a lovelier scene than this ? Man hath no part in all this glorious work : The hand that built the firmament hath heaved And smoothed these verdant swells, and sown their slopes With herbage, planted them with island groves, And hedged them round with forests.
Page 162 - These are the gardens of the Desert, these The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name — The Prairies. I behold them for the first, And my heart swells, while the dilated sight Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch In airy undulations, far away, As if the Ocean, in his gentlest swell, Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed And motionless forever.
Page 71 - I have given you lands to hunt in, I have given you streams to fish in, I have given you bear and bison, I have given you roe and reindeer, I have given you brant and beaver, Filled the marshes full of wild-fowl, Filled the rivers full of fishes: Why then are you not contented?
Page 216 - Of the Brave.' 'But the great Tower?' 'That,' he answered, 'is the way, sir, of the Brave!' "Then a sudden shame came o'er me at his uniform of light; At my own so old and tattered, and at his so new and bright: 'Ah!

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