Page:Zinzendorff and Other Poems.pdf/49

And faintly strews the sere and yellow leaf,
While from its dead arms falls the wedded vine.
The sycamore uplifts a beacon brow,
Denuded of its honors, and the blast,
Swaying the withered willow, rudely asks
For its lost grace, and for its tissued leaf,
With silver lined.
                              I knew that blight might check
The sapling, ere kind Nature's hand could weave
Its first spring-coronal, and that the worm,
Coiling itself amid our garden-plants,
Did make their unborn buds its sepulchre.
And well I knew how wild and wrecking winds
Might take the forest-monarchs by the crown,
And lay them with the lowliest vassal-herb;
And that the axe, with its sharp ministry,
Might, in one hour, such revolution work,
As all Earth's boasted power could never hope
To re-instate. And I had seen the flame
Go crackling up, amid yon verdant boughs,
And with a tyrant's insolence dissolve
Their interlacing, till I felt that man,
For sordid gain would make the forest's pomp
Its heaven-raised arch and living tracery,
One funeral-pyre.
                              But, yet I did not deem
That pale Disease amid those shades would steal
As to a sickly maiden's cheek, and waste
The power and plenitude of those high ranks,
Which in their peerage and nobility,
Unrivalled and unchronicled, had reigned.
    And so I said if in this world of knells