 | Specimens of American poetry |  |
The war-whoop's boding sound
Rose fearfully and shrill:
By echo's thousand voices, round,
Wide wafted over dale and hill,
It volley'd through the distant plain,
That peal'd its thunders back again.
The wolf aroused him from his den,
Far northward, in the wildest glen
On Simcoe's dreary shore;
And, high o'er Alleghany's peak,
The vulture heard, and trimm'd his beak
To feast on human gore.
The runners, by their Chief's command,
The war-club, tinged with fearful red,
Rear'd high in air, a signal dread,
And waved it through the land.
It glanced amid the pathless wood
That shadow'd Susquehannah's flood;
And down Ontario's wilds, afar,
Told proudly of the coming war:
On dark Missouri's turbid stream
The countless tribes beheld it gleam,
And blithely, for the field array'd,
Obedience to its summons paid.
By its own gallant chieftains led on to the fight,
Each tribe musters proudly its numbers and might,
And—like mountain streams rushing to mingle their foam
In the dell's troubled bosom—all darkly they come;
Rose fearfully and shrill:
By echo's thousand voices, round,
Wide wafted over dale and hill,
It volley'd through the distant plain,
That peal'd its thunders back again.
The wolf aroused him from his den,
Far northward, in the wildest glen
On Simcoe's dreary shore;
And, high o'er Alleghany's peak,
The vulture heard, and trimm'd his beak
To feast on human gore.
The runners, by their Chief's command,
The war-club, tinged with fearful red,
Rear'd high in air, a signal dread,
And waved it through the land.
It glanced amid the pathless wood
That shadow'd Susquehannah's flood;
And down Ontario's wilds, afar,
Told proudly of the coming war:
On dark Missouri's turbid stream
The countless tribes beheld it gleam,
And blithely, for the field array'd,
Obedience to its summons paid.
By its own gallant chieftains led on to the fight,
Each tribe musters proudly its numbers and might,
And—like mountain streams rushing to mingle their foam
In the dell's troubled bosom—all darkly they come;
| Specimens of American poetry | |