They wear enormous heads upon their shoulders
They build their pigmy booths in dim recesses
Of some impenetrable forest world!
Two travellers4 lately came upon their traces.
Here are no mouldering monuments of glory,
Confused dim ruin of long centuries;
As though ashamed of human purposes,
Suffering slow conversion to the ways
Of soft-outlined harmonious natural things,
Flower and herb, and weatherhued worn stone.
Yet here Napoleons and Tamerlanes
Have temper'd to a life-devouring sword
The drossy coarseness of humanity:
Only their mighty Mother in more scorn
Spurns in an hour the poor fantastic toil!
A millstone, lost in verdure or black ooze;
Cairns upon hillsides; fragments of rude jars;
Obsidian implements with fossil bones,
Buried in bowels of unquarried rock;
These are the memories Earth retains of man.
And yet the dead are in the forest mould,
Page:Livingstone in Africa.djvu/48
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26
LIVINGSTONE IN AFRICA.
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