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(Excerpt)
NATURE’S lover, pause to see, | |
| Where Kanawha wanders free; | |
| Nature in her wildest mood, | |
| Mid her grandest solitude; | |
| With her mountains thronged around, | 5 |
| Listening to the torrent’s sound; | |
| Hill and valley, rock and floods, | |
| Waving with eternal woods: | |
| Here the earth-cloud lowly creeping, | |
| There along the summit sleeping; | 10 |
| Here the cliff uplifting high | |
| Its bold forehead to the sky, | |
| There, like a gigantic lover, | |
| Bending with devotion over | |
| The coy river, swift and clear,— | 15 |
| A gay, bounding mountaineer. | |
| Now it winds away, away, | |
| Sporting with its jewelled spray; | |
| Now it seems to woo your feet, | |
| But, ah! trust not the deceit; | 20 |
| Shrub and pebble though they seem, | |
| Rock and forest guard the stream. | |
| E’en the Grecian lover’s leap | |
| Never tempted such a steep, | |
| Where the hawkling far below | 25 |
| Nestles ’neath the beetling brow; | |
| While along yon craggy bed | |
| Lurks the vengeful copperhead, | |
| And the avalanche of rock | |
| Poises for an earthquake-shock. | 30 |
| All is fresh, sublime, and wild, | |
| As when first by Nature piled, | |
| Ere the white-man wandered here, | |
| Or the red-man chased the deer,— | |
| Naming, ere he fled forever, | 35 |
| This, his own Romantic River. * * * * * | |
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