Joaquin Miller

“ Through wold of snows, through wood of flame, 46
Through golden Indian-summer days,
Hung round in soft September haze,
And no man cross'd or question'd him.
Nay, there was that in his stern air
That held e'en these rude men aloof:
None came to share the broad-built roof
That rose so fortress-like beside
The angry, rushing, sullen tide,
And only black men gather'd there,
The old man's slaves, in dull content,
Black, silent, and obedient.
Then men push'd westward through his wood,
His wild beasts fled, and now he stood
Confronting men. ”

“ Beyond the tawny desert-tomb 126
Of Time; beyond tradition, loom
And lift ghostlike from out the gloom
Her thousand cities, battle-torn
And gray with story and with time.
Her very ruins are sublime,
Her thrones with mosses overborne
Make velvets for the feet of Time.
She points a hand and cries: "Go read
The letter'd obelisks that lord
Old Rome, and know my name and deed.
My archives these, and plunder'd when
I had grown weary of all men."
We turn to these; we cry: "Abhorr'd
Old Sphinx, behold, we cannot read!" ”

“ The dark, the desert lay behind;
The tawny Ishmaelite was gone;
But something sombre as death is ...
Tut, tut! the tale is not of this. 17
A mountaineer, storm-stained and brown,
From farthest desert touched the town,
And, striding through the crowd, held up
Above his head a jewell'd cup. ”

“ How shoreless lie the distances,
Before you come to question this
Or dare to dream what grandeur is.
The solemn silence of that plain,
Where unmanned tempests ride and reign,
It awes and it possesses you. ”

“ A grand old Neptune in the prow,
Gray-hair'd, and white with touch of time, 22
Yet strong as in his middle prime;
A grizzled king, I see him now,
With beard as blown by wind of seas,
And wild and white as white sea-storm,
Stand up, turn suddenly, look back
Along the low boat's wrinkled track,
Then fold his mantle round a form
Broad-built as any Hercules,
And so sit silently. ”

“ How dark and deep, how sullen, strong, and lion-like the mighty Missouri rolled between his walls of untracked wood and cleft the unknown domain of the middle world before us!
Then the frail and buffeted rafts on the river, the women and children huddled together, the shouts of the brawny men as they swam with the bellowing cattle; the cows in the stormy stream, eddying, whirling, spinning about, calling to their young, their bright horns shining in the sun.... ”

“ They lord the land; they come, they go
At will; they laugh at man; they blow
A cloud of black steeds o'er the plain.
Thy monuments lie buried now,
The ashes whiten on thy brow,
The winds, the waves, have drawn away,
The very wild man dreads to stay. ”

“ Turn'd sharp and savage to his men;
And silent then led down the way
To night that knows not night nor day.
114
XXII.
Like some great serpent black and still,
Old Morgan's men stole down the hill.
Far down the steep they wound and wound
Until the black line touched that land
Of gleaming white and silver sand
That knows not human sight or sound.
How broken plunged the steep descent;
How barren! Desolate, and rent
By earthquake's shock, the land lay dead,
With dust and ashes on its head. ”

“ He holds it sacred unto those
Who bravely fell before their foes,
And rarely dares its desert wall.
Here breaks nor sound of strife or sign;
Rare times a red man comes this way,
Alone, and battle-scarred and gray,
And then he bends devout before
The maid who keeps the cabin door,
And deems her sacred and divine.
Within the island's heart, 'tis said,
Tall trees are bending down with bread,
And that a fountain pure as truth,
And deep and mossy bound and fair,
Is bubbling from the forest there,—
Perchance the fabled fount of youth! 202
An isle where never cares betide ”

“ Say, let their unploughed ashes sleep,
Untouched by man, by plain or steep.
The bearded, sunbrown'd men who bore
The burthen of that frightful year,
Who toil'd, but did not gather store,
They shall not be forgotten.
Drear
And white, the plains of Shoshonee
Shall point us to that farther shore,
And long white shining lines of bones,
Make needless sign or white mile-stones. 80
The wild man's yell, the groaning wheel ”

“ Far away,
From mountain brow to desert base
Lay chaos, space, unbounded space,
In one vast belt of purple bound.
The black men cried, "The sea!" They bow'd
Their black heads in their hard black hands. ”

“ Men sing of savage Saxon kings
New-born and known but yesterday,
And Norman blood presumes to say....
Nay, ye who boast ancestral name
And vaunt deeds dignified by time
Must not despise her. 125
Who hath worn
Since time began a face that is
So all-enduring, old like this—
A face like Africa's?
Behold!
The Sphinx is Africa. The bond
Of silence is upon her. ”

“ They wound below a savage bluff
That lifted, from its sea-mark'd base,
Great walls with characters cut rough 116
And deep by some long-perish'd race;
And lo! strange beasts unnamed, unknown,
Stood hewn and limn'd upon the stone.
The iron hoofs sank here and there,
Plough'd deep in ashes, broke anew
Old broken idols, and laid bare
Old bits of vessels that had grown,
As countless ages cycled through,
Imbedded with the common stone.
A mournful land as land can be
Beneath their feet in ashes lay,
Beside that dread and dried-up sea ”

“ Three times now I have ranged the great West in fancy, as I did in fact for twenty years, and gathered unknown and unnamed blossoms from mountain-top, from desert level, where man never ranged before, and asked the world to receive my weeds, my grasses, and blue-eyed blossoms. ”

“ For man has lived and gone away,
And left but little heaps of stone,
And all seems some long yesterday.
Lo! here you learn how more than fit
And dignified is silence, when
You hear the petty jeers of men
Who point, and show their pointless wit.
The vastness of that voiceless plain,
Its awful solitudes remain
Thenceforth for aye a part of you, 104
And you are of the favored few,
For you have learn'd your littleness,
And heed not names that name you less.
Some silent red men cross your track ”

“ You, my dear parents, will pardon the thread of fiction on which I have strung these scenes and descriptions of a mighty land of mystery, and wild and savage grandeur, for the world will have its way, and, like a spoiled child, demands a tale.
"Yea,
We who toil and earn our bread
Still have our masters...." x
A ragged and broken story it is, with long deserts, with alkali and ashes, yet it may, like the land it deals of, have some green places, and woods, and running waters, where you can rest.... ”

“ all things moving must go by.
The sea lies dead. Behold, this land
Sits desolate in dust beside
His snow-white, seamless shroud of sand;
The very clouds have wept and died,
And only God is in the sky. ”

“ He seem'd as lithe and free and tall
And restless as the boughs that stir
Perpetual topt poplar trees.
And one, that one, had eyes to teach
The art of love, and tongue to preach
Life's hard and sober homilies;
And yet his eager hands, his speech,
All spoke the bold adventurer;
While zoned about the belt of each
There swung a girt of steel, till all
Did seem a walking arsenal. ”

“ I only saw her as she pass'd— 26
A great, sad beauty, in whose eyes
Lay all the loves of Paradise....
You shall not know her—she who sat
Unconscious in my heart all time
I dreamed and wove this wayward rhyme,
And loved and did not blush thereat. ”

“ The savage prowling by the spring,
Then sudden passing swift and still,
And bended as a bow is bent.
The arrow sent; the arrow spent
And buried in its bloody place,
The dead man lying on his face!
The clouds of dust, their cloud by day;
Their pillar of unfailing fire
The far North star. And high, and higher.... 75
They climb'd so high it seem'd eftsoon
That they must face the falling moon,
That like some flame-lit ruin lay
Thrown down before their weary way. ”

“ I have done my work to show to the world her vastness, her riches, her resources, her valor and her dignity, her poetry and her grandeur. Yet while I was going on, working so in silence, what were the things she said of xi me? But let that pass, my dear parents. Others will come after us. Possibly I have blazed out the trail for great minds over this field, as you did across the deserts and plains for great men a quarter of a century ago. ”

“ No law for them! For they have stood
With steel, and writ their rights in blood;
And now, whatever 'tis they seek,
Whatever be their dark demand,
Why, they will make it, hand to hand,
Take time and patience: Greek to Greek.
58
XI.
Like blown and snowy wintry pine,
Old Morgan stoop'd his head and pass'd
Within his cabin door. He cast
A great arm out to men, made sign,
Then turned to Ina; stood beside
A time, then turn'd and strode the floor,
Stopp'd short, breathed sharp, threw wide the door,
Then gazed beyond the murky tide,
Toward where the forky peaks divide. ”

“ And plunging to the desert plain,
Threw back his white beard like a cloud,
And looking back did shout aloud
Defiance like a stormy flood,
And shouted, "Vasques!" called his name,
And dared him to the desert flame.
97
XIX.
A cloud of dust adown the steep,
Where scarce a whirling hawk would sweep,
The cloud his foes had follow'd fast,
And Morgan like a cloud had pass'd,
Yet passed like some proud king of old ”

“ The wild men waiting on the other side, painted savages leaning silent on their bows, despising our weakness, opening a way, letting us pass on ix to the unknown distances, where they said the sun and moon lay down together and brought forth the stars.... ”

“ I dared not dream she loved me. Nay,
Her love was proud; and pride is loth
To look with favor, own it fond
Of one the world loves not to-day....
No matter if she loved or no,
God knows I loved enough for both,
And knew her as you shall not know
Till you have known sweet death, and you
Have cross'd the dark; gone over to
The great majority beyond. ”

“ O you had loved her sitting there,
Half hidden in her loosen'd hair:
Why, you had loved her for her eyes,
Their large and melancholy look 28
Of tenderness, and well mistook
Their love for light of Paradise. ”

“ This creature comes from out the dim
Far centuries, beyond the rim
Of time's remotest reach or stir. ”

“ Was roses gather'd from the south,
The warm south side of Paradise,
And breathed upon and handed down,
By angels on a stair of stars. ”

“ No bat went whirling overhead,
No star fell out of Ethiope....
The dead man lay between them there,
The two men glared as tigers glare,
The black man held him by the beard. 196
He wound his hand, he held him fast,
And tighter held, as if he fear'd
The man might 'scape him at the last. ”

“ He rode as rides the hurricane;
He seem'd to swallow up the plain;
He rode as never man did ride,
He rode, for ghosts rode at his side,
And on his right a grizzled grim—
No, no, this tale is not of him. ”

“ This awful vastness, dead and gray.
And now at last brought well at bay
They stood,—but each stood to his post;
Each man an unencompassed host.
Then one dismounted, waved a hand,
'Twas Morgan's stern and still command.
There fell a clash, like loosen'd chain,
And men dismounting loosed the rein. 144
Then every steed stood loosed and free ”

“ And Nimrod's hunting-fields unknown.
Some serpents slid from out the grass
That grew in tufts by shatter'd stone,
Then hid beneath some broken mass
That Time had eaten as a bone
Is eaten by some savage beast ”