| |
| THE MEADOW 1 may boast of its thousand dyes, | |
| For their varied splendors are far before thee; | |
| But still more fair in the patriot’s eyes | |
| Is the humblest branch from the trunk that bore thee; | |
| For the place where it grows is a sacred spot, | 5 |
| With remembrance of high achievements fraught. | |
| |
| Thou didst not thrive on the blood of the slave, | |
| Whom the reeking sword of oppression slaughter’d; | |
| But the grateful tears of the good and brave, | |
| With a purer stream thy roots have water’d— | 10 |
| And green didst thou grow o’er the hero’s bed, | |
| When the tears of his patriot son 2 were shed. | |
| |
| Say, where wert thou half an age ago, | |
| When terrors were thronging around our nation— | |
| Where our land, by the word of its haughty foe, | 15 |
| Was mark’d with the sentence of desolation— | |
| When the banner of freedom was wide unfurl’d | |
| On the natal day of this western world— | |
| |
| When our fathers spared no pain nor toil, | |
| To purchase the blessing for their descendants, | 20 |
| And seal’d with their blood on their native soil | |
| Their claim to the glory of Independence— | |
| When Life, Wealth, Honor, were all at stake | |
| That the holy cause they would not forsake. | |
| |
| Perhaps thou wast by the side of thy sire, | 25 |
| Whose branch to the breeze had for ages trembled, | |
| Where gather’d around the council-fire | |
| The chiefs of the tawny tribes assembled,— | |
| Or it might have shaded the hunter’s track | |
| On the lonely banks of the Potomac. | 30 |
| |
| And long on the place of the hero’s sleep | |
| May flourish the trunk, whence thou wert taken, | |
| But a grateful nation his name shall keep, | |
| When lifeless and bare, of its leaves forsaken, | |
| The trunk and the branch to the earth are cast | 35 |
| Before the might of the rushing blast. | |
| |
| For in distant ages the day shall come, | |
| When the vengeance of time its pride shall humble— | |
| And the arch of the proud mausoleum | |
| O’er the mouldering urn of the dead shall crumble— | 40 |
| But till the last moment of time hath run | |
| Shall live the remembrance of Washington. | |
| |
| Ah! soon must branches like thine be spread | |
| O’er another’s tomb—and o’er yet another’s— | |
| For now from the sorrows of earth have fled, | 45 |
| As with one accord, two patriot brothers, 3 | |
| Whom heaven in mercy hath given to see | |
| The day of their nation’s Jubilee. | |
| |
| O! sadly, in tears sunk down, that day, | |
| The sun, in the distant west declining— | 50 |
| But still in a holier splendor they | |
| With their latest beams on earth were shining, | |
| When they were call’d from earth to remove, | |
| And shine in the realms of the blest above. | |
