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.