RED JACKET.

Written on being presented by a lady with a wild flower that grew on his grave, near Buffalo.

———

BY W. H. C. HOSMER.

———

Thanks to the Genii of the flowers

Who planted on his humble tomb,

And nursed, with sun and pleasant showers,

This herb of faded bloom!

And, lady fair, my thanks to thee

For bringing this frail gift to me,

Although it cannot match in dye

The velvet drapery of the rose,

Or the bright tulip-cup that glows

Like Summer’s evening sky.

It hath a power to wake the dead—

A spell is in its dying leaf

To summon, from his funeral bed,

The mighty forest chief.

Realms that his fathers ruled of yore—

Earth that their children own no more,

His melancholy glance beholds;

And tearless though his falcon eye,

His bosom heaves with agony

Beneath its blanket folds.

Within the council-lodge again

I hear his voice the silence breaking,

Soft as the music of the main,

When not a wind is waking;

With touching pathos in his tone

He mourns for days of glory flown,

When lay in shade both hill and glen,

Ere, panoplied and armed for slaughter,

The big canoes brought pale-browed men

Over the blue salt water;

When deer and buffalo in droves

Ranged through interminable groves,

And the Great Spirit on his race

Smiled ever with unclouded face.

Now, with a burning tale of wrong,

He wakes to rage the painted throng,

And points to violated graves,

While eloquence dilates his form,

And his lip mutters like the storm

When winds unchain the waves;

An hundred scalping-knives are bare—

An hundred hatchets swing in air,

And while the forest Cicero,

Lost power portrays, and present shame,

Old age forgets his palsied frame,

And grasps again the bow.

Thus, sweet, wild-flower of faint perfume!

Thy magic can unlock the tomb,

And forth the gifted sagamore

Call from the shroud with vocal art

To sway the pulses of the heart,

And awe the soul once more;

For on his couch of lowly earth

Thy modest loveliness had birth,

And lightly shook thy blooming head,

When midnight summoned round the place

The kingly spectres of his race

To sorrow for the dead;

And sadly waved thy stem and leaf

When Erie tuned to strains of grief

The hollow voices of the surge,

And for that monarch of the shade,

By whom his shore is classic made,

Raised a low, mournful dirge.

The pilgrim from Ausonian clime,

Rich in remains of olden time,

Brings marble relics o’er the deep—

Memorials of deathless mind,

Of hallowed ground where, grandly shrined,

Sage, bard and warrior sleep;

And precious though such wrecks of yore,

I prize thy gift, fair lady, more,

Plucked with a reverential hand;

For the old chief, above whose tomb

Its bud gave out a faint perfume,

Was son of my own forest land,

And with bright records of her fame

Is linked, immortally, his name.