Pilgrims whose wandering feet have prest
The Switzer's snow, the Arab's sand,
Or trod the piled leaves of the West,
My own green forest-land.

All ask the cottage of his birth,

Gaze on the scenes he loved and sung,

And gather feelings not of earth

His fields and streams among.

They linger by the Doon's low trees,
And pastoral Nith, and wooded Ayr,
And round thy sepulchres, Dumfries!
The Poet's tomb is there.

But what to them the sculptor's art,

His funeral columns, wreaths, and urns?

Wear they not graven on the heart

The name of Robert Burns?

WYOMING. 5

"Dites si la Nature n'a pas fait ce beau pays pour une Julie, pour une Claire, et pour un St. Preux, mais ne les y cherchez pas."

ROUSSEAU.

I.

THOU Com'st, in beauty, on my gaze at last,
"On Susquehannah's side, fair Wyoming!"
Image of many a dream, in hours long past,
When life was in its bud and blossoming,
And waters, gushing from the fountain spring
Of pure enthusiast thought, dimmed my young eyes,
As by the poet borne, on unseen wing,

I breathed, in fancy, 'neath thy cloudless skies, The summer's air, and heard her echoed harmonies.

II.

I then but dreamed: thou art before me now,
In life, a vision of the brain no more.

I've stood upon the wooded mountain's brow,
That beetles high thy lovely valley o'er;

And now, where winds thy river's greenest shore,
Within a bower of sycamores am laid;

And winds, as soft and sweet as ever bore

The fragrance of wild flowers through sun and shade, Are singing in the trees, whose low boughs press my head.

III.

Nature hath made thee lovelier than the power
Even of Campbell's pen hath pictured: he
Had woven, bad he gazed one sunny hour
Upon thy smiling vale, its scenery

With more of truth, and made each rock and tree
Known like old friends, and greeted from afar:
And there are tales of sad reality,

In the dark legends of thy border war,

With woes of deeper tint than his own Gertrude's are.

IV.

But where are they, the beings of the mind,
The bard's creations, moulded not of clay,
Hearts to strange bliss and suffering assigned-
Young Gertrude, Albert, Waldegrave-where
are they?

We need not ask. The people of to-day
Appear good, honest, quiet men enough,
And hospitable too-for ready pay,—

With manners like their roads, a little rough, And hands whose grasp is warm and welcoming, tho' tough.

V.

Judge Hallenbach, who keeps the toll-bridge gate,
And the town records, is the Albert now
Of Wyoming: like him, in church and state,
Her doric column; and upon his brow

The thin hairs, white with seventy winters' snow,
Look patriarchal. Waldegrave 'twere in wain
To point out here, unless in yon scare-erow,
That stands full-uniformed upon the plain,

To frighten flocks of crows and blackbirds from the grain.

VI.

For he would look particularly droll

In his "Iberian boot" and "Spanish plume,"

And be the wonder of each Christian soul

As of the birds that scare-crow and his broom. But Gertrude, in her loveliness and bloom, Hath many a model here,-for Woman's eye, In court or cottage, wheresoe'er her home Hath a heart-spell too holy and too high To be o'er-praised even by her worshipper-Poesy.

VII.

There's one in the next field-of sweet sixteen-
Singing and summoning thoughts of beauty born
In heaven with her jacket of light green,
"Love-darting eyes, and tresses like the morn,'
Without a shoe or stocking,-hoeing corn.
Whether, like Gertrude, she oft wanders there,
With Shakspeare's volume in her bosom borne,
I think is doubtful. Of the poet-player

The maiden knows no more than Cobbett or Voltaire.