THE PROPHET'S DEATH.

Groping in undiscovered realms their way,

The Prophet and his people give the day

To finding safest lodgement, till they press

Well down the grand old river, to the mouth

Of the great Western confluent — the south

Seems to add Summer to the wilderness.

They cross the river, and then settle down

To love and labor on its grassy banks;

And fortune seems to have forgot its frown.

Years of repletion fill their shattered ranks,

And youth and vigor take the place of age;

The story of their journey is retold

By only few in number; and the sage,

Who turned their faces on their god of gold,

Was bent with the plethoric weight of years,

And summoned them to worship‘ mid the tears

Of many, who misgave his failing strength;

He saw their apprehensions and at length

Called them together for a final word:

“Sons of the Summer God! it is but wise

That we look out beyond the brace of years,

And question of the future. All the way

The shining surface of our god has led

Our toilsome footsteps; we must not forget

His daily nurture, nor the cloth of gold

With which he covers us — wakeful with the day,

How has he touched our eyelids with his hands,

And warmed us with his hovering! The night

Has never failed his promise of the morn.

How has his parenthood outwatched the stars;

How has the Winter melted at his glance;

How has his armor battled with the snows!

With what a tenderness he decks the fields,

And wooes the grasses from the dormant earth,

And clothes the forest with its robes of green,

As covert for the bison and the deer,

That we may find replenishment of food!

His providence has never failed our steps,

Our homage cannot cancel his regard.

“Our father! in this failing cup of years,

Help us to be re-sanctified to thee —

Thou hast not measured to our helplessness,

But with unstinted hand filled up our lives

With blessings. Fill thou alike our hearts,

That we may have no room to cherish doubt,

But answer thy embraces, as the fields

Leap up to kiss thy first recumbent rays!

Let all our dross become thy burnished gold,

Shine through each crevice of our stubbornness,

Till in transparent purity, we reach

The very essence of thy godliness!

“Brethren of the Sun!

This altar is my last: You see the fire

Leap as an answer to my late request,

And it shall bear my spirit to the sun,

And cursed the hand that stays its homeward flight!”

Fresh nerved he reached the altar with a bound,

And sank without a murmur in the flame;

His followers an instant gather round,

But he had passed out almost as he came.

They did not dare to drag him from the pile,

His life and effort had together ceased,

He passed into the future with a smile —

A smile, that he had been so quick released.

Yet, there was one ( clear-sighted from the rest ),

Who said she saw the essence of his form,

In brighter effigy, more richly dressed,

Fly out into the sunset; and the charm

Of her enchanted parable found faith

In many of the multitude; his death,

So like his life, had challenged all their thought

And they were ready to quiesce his fate, and sought

Some shadowed miracle to wrap his shade.

They gathered up the ashes, and forbade

Unsanctioned hands to touch them; and they reared

A rugged mound above the garnered dust,

And left him ( one whom they loved less than feared ).

To that sole arbiter, whose name is Just,

Our common parent, Time, whose busy hands

Rear many a sacred fane above our faults,

Flings over our excressences his sands,

And leaves no human stain to blot the sacred marble of our vaults.

How grand is the economy of time and death!

We whet the knife for deep incision on the name

Of some misguided leader, but he fails his breath,

And all our better angels give him back to fame;

Death carries off the husk, we keep the ripened wheat,

And Time refines the kernel into choicest flour;

The atmosphere of anger is at last made sweet;

Our charity immortal glows; our passion, but an hour.

God keep us always so! It is the chosen link

That binds us to the race, and bids the Christ come in;

That holds our hands to near the eternal brink;

It saves us from ourselves, and breaks the tooth of sin.

The whitened garments at the eternal gate,

Must cover those, who have not stained another,

Or there will come that awful sentence: “Wait!

“Blood crieth from the ground! where is thy brother?”

If thus upon the living God doth set the seal

Of condemnation for the false witnessing

How will he smite the lips of those who steal

His covering from the dead, and fill the sacred spring

Of memory, with the debris of their lives;

Mixing, what God has kindly torn apart,

And making null, the severence he strives,

Between the naked soul, and sin encumbered heart!

The gem was melted, and his life went out

In unobtrusive secrecy, and all

That he brought with him, passed the silent way

Into eternity, beyond recall.

He chose no sponsor to renew his place

But gave them back to Nature, as he found;

Yet was his impress fastened on the race,

And every morn they gathered at the mound,

For many after years, till they had grown

A nation strong in numbers, and had thrown

The seeds of generation far and wide,

And found the latent valleys without guide.

The lakes are made a tribute to their spoil,

And all the riches of the virgin soil

Were tested by those hardy argonauts of old;

And though they sought no fleece of shining gold,

They penetrated all the wilderness

That lay unclaimed before them to possess.

God drops no nobler anchorage on earth,

Than those who mold a nation, and a name;

Whose travail in the wilderness gives birth

To some great epoch, without thought of fame.

The pioneers of empire, for all time,

Are gold-dust, from the placers of our homes —

The surface croppings from a nation's prime,

The mellow acre of the richest loams.

They overgrow the boundaries of life,

And push the horizon far out in space.

With lethargy they wage a ceaseless strife,

And with the whirling earth, they keep their pace.

All honor to the soul who sets his stake

Where human kind have never trenched before;

Where only God his thunders o'er it shake,

And solitude shall murmur, “nevermore.”

Such men are sovereigns, though they grasp no crown,

And raise no jewelled scepter in the hand;

Yet are they Princes, in their bronze and brown,

And demonstrate their fitness to command.

The Norsemen, on the North Atlantic wave;

Columbus, passing out in unknown seas;

De Soto, gaining but an unknown grave;

The hardy Pilgrims, on their bended knees;

The Argonauts, upon the Western slope —

These are the souls no human praise can reach.

Each, in their turn, gave empire back to hope,

And all are greater than the gift of speech.

No pen can lustre their unfading claim;

No cenotaph do honor to their dust —

These are crown jewels on the brow of Fame;

Their conquest is supreme, their laurels ever just.

Yet, in the van of empire, still is left

The noiseless print of ancestry more grand;

Indentures chiseled in the highest cleft,

By giants of a long forgotten land,—

The nameless graves of centuries untold;

The ashes of the prehistoric age;

The self-forgetting litany of gold —

How vast their monuments, how broad their page!

In what a grand democracy of death

They lift their silent fingers to our years,

Melt our memorials with a single breath

In mute companionship of life and tears!

We are but pygmies to the almighty past,

The names we honor but the surface-mould;

Beneath must lie an empire far more vast,

Whose fundaments alone deserve the name of “old.”

Not many years, till they had found the bed

Of copper ore upon Superior's rim;

And hither many of the hardy ones were led

By Orchas, quick in architrave, and fleet of limb;

And many the fantastic implements he shaped

For husbandry; no want of theirs escaped

His eager scrutiny — the axe and blade,

The rough-made pick, and the encumbered spade,

The vessels for the housewife, and the spear,

And other weaponry for bison and for deer.

All these were fashioned in an uncouth way,

And yet they filled the purpose of the day.

They had not reached the iron age of thought,

And what they made, necessity had taught;

But riper years must ope the “Sampson Mine,”

And wake the rugged giant, in the shine

Of a meridian sunlight; they little thought

Of what a Hercules remained unsought,

So near Missouri's border; yet, not strange

Is their indicted ignorance — their range

Was circumscribed; and iron was left to rest,

Till man had long been cradled on the breast

Of patient Mother Earth — not all at once

Did she give up her treasures; and the dunce

Must grow into philosopher with years.

Experience with its battlehood of tears,

Is Nature's great interpreter; we learn

But slowly, till the lessons fervid burn

Their impress into action; then awakes

The slow-taught pupil into higher life —

Invention is the furnace-spark of strife;

Necessity, the hand that wields the sledge

Upon the patient anvil of our needs,

And Providence makes good its wakeful pledge

With plenteous harvest; from the dormant seeds

That lie unconed beneath our very feet

We stumble on to marvels, and awake

To find some giant force, in what we meet;

And in the insects of our path, leviathans, we greet.

Time's wheels, though shaken, never fail to track

The rut of empire, without turning back;

They, ceaseless whirl, with lubricate of blood,

Drawn from a thousand channels on the way,

Unrusting, through the oxydizing flood,

To measure centuries, or mark a day.

And thus, the primal pioneers move on

To unaccustomed progress, on the banks

Of the confluent streams that scar the face

Of the great Western basin; and their ranks

Are filled with happy husbandry; the land

Gives back its tillage, with a lavish hand.

The forests and the streams were over-full

With fish, and flesh to feed them, and they pass

One conquest, to another, in the lull

Of untamed nature. Garnered as a mass

To fill their open hands, the native corn

Soon covered the rich valleys, and the plant,

So dalliant to the race, was early born,

Tobacco. They were not adamant

Against the weaknesses so close allied

To human nature; and there was excess,

And envy, emulence, and pride,

And all the ills that left their first impress;

And yet God gave them peace. No brother's hand

Was raised against a brother, and the years

Spread fruit and plenty over a fair land

Destined to futurehood of bitter, bitter tears.