 | The poetical works of William H. C. Hosmer |  |
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THE PLACE OF BONES.
“Ye mouldering relics of departed years,
Your names have perished.”—
Flint.
Your names have perished.”—
Flint.
Delightful Avon overlooks the place
Where, mingled rudely with the upturned soil,
The bones of some forgotten nation lie,
In mournful disregard. The solemn groves
Inweave no more their tossing boughs above
These violated sepulchres: the hand
Of busy industry long since cut down
The dark, old sylvan giants, and let in
The golden sunshine.
When the Genesee
Is swollen roughly by the vernal rain,
Or equinoctial storm, his surging tide
Invades the level mead, and even lifts
Above this populated home of death
The voice of wild rebellion—sound, alas!
That ill befits the dwellings of the dead.
The crowded public thoroughfare, that leads
To the young city of our inland seas
Through the bright Eden of the “Empire State,”
Bounds on the south this melancholy spot.
Trees of a second growth in beauty stand,
And greet the northwardly directed gaze
With smooth and glossy trunks, and roots that draw
Refreshment from the dust of woodland sires:
And eastwardly the sloping upland makes
Exposure of its side to westering suns,
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And painted habitations of vain man—
Ay, selfish too!—for piously around
The dreamless couches of his own pale race,
To shut out brute intrusion, he has built
A strong, protecting wall, and planted round
The funeral hillock flowers that breathe of love,
And willows frail, that rub their yellow boughs
Against the pompous, monumental stone;
While spurningly his desecrating foot
Falls on the bleaching remnants of the past—
Of haughty Indian king, or swarthy maid,
At whose rude sepulchres, long, long ago,
The children of interminable groves
Were mourning visitants.
The tribe that laid
Beneath the turf their chieftain, unlike us
Who sorrow only for a season, came,
And tearful homage paid to dust of kin,
When the loud warring elements and time
Had worn away all sign of burial.
That deathless Bard, whose name is linked to Hope,
And whose rich instrument has many strings,
Was faulty in his music when he sang
Of the red sagamore “without a tear.”
The wilderness, with all its wealth of shade,
Sepulchral dells, and wingèd choristers;
The mossy floor of solitary glades
Whereon his moccasin faint impress left;
The wooded mountain, where the howling wolf
And screaming panther made their dreaded lairs;
The voice of streams, and melody of winds,
Woke in his heart poetic sympathy,
And spoke in tones majestically grand
Of one unclouded source of life and light.
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And wrong could rouse him to demoniac rage,
Or kindness lull him to a summer calm.
When war, or mortal malady, cut down
His wife or offspring to the shaded earth
He gave, with tears, the bark-infolded corse,
And guarded well the consecrated spot
From the gaunt beast of prey; then laid choice food,
And the dry gourd, his vegetable cup,
Brimming with water from the crystal spring,
Upon the hiding mould, through fear the dead
Might faint in passing to the spirit land.
In the blue smoke of settlements, the lord
Of the lithe bow and slender arrow saw
The cloud that would obscure his race and name;
And in the fall of oaks before the axe,
Heard the sharp knell of his own glory rung.
Then deeds of fell atrocity ensued
In his vain efforts to resist the tide
Of stern improvement, whose huge surges swept
All traces of his pomp and power away.
His patriot zeal and disregard of self,
Resemblance to that spurning hate of bonds
That roused a Sydney and a Hampden bore,
And should have won the plaudits of his foe.
In happy childhood it was oft my wont,
Freed from the birchen terrors of the school,
Yon place of Indian burial to seek,
And watch the disinterring plough, and scan
The fertilized and newly-parted clod
For beads of beauty rare, tooth-worn by time,
And crumbling fragments of the dagger haft,
Constructed by some artisan of eld
From the broad antlers of the whistling moose,
And branching honors of the stag or elk;
Or raise, with reverential hand, the skull
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With thought akin to wonderment and awe;
Then, throwing down the wreck, spy out amid
The dark, embracing furrows arrow-heads,
And broken implements of grotesque form,
Used by the painted warrior in the chase,
Or on the path that led him to his foe.
Some, who delight in hoar antiquity,
The nation deem that sleep in yonder field
The primal stock whose shoots in after years
Uniting in a league of brotherhood,
The dreaded name of Iroquois made known
From the dark hemlock groves of hilly Maine
To the proud father of our mighty lakes.
But this is idle speculation all,
And red men, hanging on our frontier skirts,
No light can throw upon their history.
A few, stray pebbles only, hand of bard
Hath gathered on Tradition's shadowy beach
Washed darkly ever by erasing waves.
One by the Indian loved, and who can well
Warble his dialect in silvery tones,
Told me that mighty conquerors reposed,
Their names forgotten, in yon olden plain.
Long with the Canisteo tribe they warred,
And south, eight leagues away, may yet be seen
Memorials of conflict, and a tomb
That once was honored with heroic bones.
When the first settler came, it bore the shape
Of a man lying with extended arms.
Long before the Revolution, according to tradition, a battle took place on a hill, a few miles distant, between the Canisteo Indians and those living in the vicinity, during which a chief of the latter was killed. When the whites first settled here, the spot where he fell was marked by a large hole dug in the shape of a man, with arms extended. An Indian trail led by the place, and the Indians, on passing, were always accustomed to clear away the leaves and brush which had blown in. The chief was buried in an old Indian burying-ground which stood on the present site of the Lutheran Church, and was thickly covered with graves to the extent of two or three acres. His monument consisted of a large pile of small stones, gathered from time to time by the nations from a hill a mile distant, who, in passing, were accustomed to take one in the hand, and add to the heap. His bones were afterwards disinterred by the settlers, and judging from them, and the length of the hole on the hill, he must have been seven feet, or more, in height.—See Historical Collections of New York.
A trail wound near the place, and passing by,
The feathered hunter from his route diverged
To clear away the brush, and wind-blown leaves
From off its hallowed mould, and cast a stone
On a gray pile that rose pyramidal
To tell the story of a champion's fall
To other times.
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Pay annual visit to their Place of Graves.
Would that the moon of falling leaves could fling
Again a rustling pall of many hues
Above the dust of slumberers unknown!
For if the spirits of the lost and dead—
And some believe so—linger round the streams,
And haunts of beauty that they loved in life,
Perchance the spectral visitants that flit
About these desecrated tombs, might feel
Ecstatic joy in viewing olden scenes
Dark with the presence of tall groves again.
| The poetical works of William H. C. Hosmer | |