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,

1 See the account of Bryant's first visit to the West, in Godwin's Life, vol. i, pp. 282-286. Especially significant is a passage from Bryant's letter to Richard H. Dana: I have seen the great West, where I ate corn and hominy, slept in log houses, with twenty men, women, and children in the same room. . . . At Jacksonville, where my two brothers live, I got on a horse, and travelled about a hundred miles to the northward over the immense prairies, with scattered settlements, on the edges of the groves. These prairies, of a soft, fertile garden soil, and a smooth undulating surface, on which you may put a horse to full speed, covered with high, thinly growing grass, full of weeds and gaudy flowers, and destitute of bushes or trees, perpetually brought to my mind the idea of their having been once cultivated. They looked to me like the fields of a race which had passed away, whose enclosures and habitations had decayed, but on whose vast and rich plains, smoothed and levelled by tillage, the forest had not yet encroached.'

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;

race

- a disciplined and populous

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. These ample fields

50

The earth with thundering steps — yet here I meet

His ancient footprints stamped beside the pool.

Still this great solitude is quick with life. Myriads of insects, gaudy as the flowers They flutter over, gentle quadrupeds, And birds, that scarce have learned the fear of man,

Are here, and sliding reptiles of the ground, Startlingly beautiful. The graceful deer Bounds to the wood at my approach. Th、

bee,

A more adventurous colonist than man. Ic

To tend the quiet flock and watch the stars, And teach the reed to utter simple airs. Thou by his side, amid the tangled wood, Didst war upon the panther and the wolf, His only foes; and thou with him didst draw

The earliest furrow on the mountain-side, Soft with the deluge. Tyranny himself, Thy enemy, although of reverend look, Hoary with many years, and far obeyed, Is later born than thou; and as he meets The grave defiance of thine elder eye, The usurper trembles in his fastnesses.

40

O MOTHER of a mighty race,
Yet lovely in thy youthful grace!
The elder dames, thy haughty peers,
Admire and hate thy blooming years.
With words of shame
And taunts of scorn they join thy name.

For on thy cheeks the glow is spread
That tints thy morning hills with red;
Thy step the wild-deer's rustling feet
Within thy woods are not more fleet;
Thy hopeful eye

Is bright as thine own sunny sky.

There's freedom at thy gates and rest
For Earth's down-trodden and opprest,
A shelter for the hunted head,
For the starved laborer toil and bread.
Power, at thy bounds,
Stops and calls back his baffled hounds.

O fair young mother! on thy brow
Shall sit a nobler grace than now.
Deep in the brightness of the skies
The thronging years in glory rise,
And, as they fleet,
Drop strength and riches at thy feet.

Thine eye, with every coming hour,
Shall brighten, and thy form shall tower;
And when thy sisters, elder born,

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40

Would brand thy name with words of

As, round the sleeping infant's feet,
We softly fold the cradle-sheet;

So plant we the apple-tree.

What plant we in this apple-tree? Buds, which the breath of summer days Shall lengthen into leafy sprays;

1Ο

Boughs where the thrush, with crimson breast,

Shall haunt and sing and hide her nest;
We plant, upon the sunny lea,

A shadow for the noontide hour,
A shelter from the summer shower,
When we plant the apple-tree.

What plant we in this apple-tree?
Sweets for a hundred flowery springs
To load the May-wind's restless wings,
When, from the orchard-row, he pours
Its fragrance through our open doors;

A world of blossoms for the bee,
Flowers for the sick girl's silent room,
For the glad infant sprigs of bloom,
We plant with the apple-tree.

What plant we in this apple-tree?
Fruits that shall swell in sunny June,
And redden in the August noon,
And drop, when gentle airs come by,
That fan the blue September sky,

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30

While children come, with cries of glee, And seek them where the fragrant grass Betrays their bed to those who pass, At the foot of the apple-tree.

And when, above this apple-tree, The winter stars are quivering bright, And winds go howling through the night, Girls, whose young eyes o'erflow with mirth, Shall peel its fruit by cottage-hearth,

And guests in prouder homes shall see, Heaped with the grape of Cintra's vine And golden orange of the line,

The fruit of the apple-tree.

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The fruitage of this apple-tree Winds and our flag of stripe and star Shall bear to coasts that lie afar, Where men shall wonder at the view, And ask in what fair groves they grew; 50 And sojourners beyond the sea Shall think of childhood's careless day, And long, long hours of summer play, In the shade of the apple-tree.