The monarch rested from his toils, Weary of war, and full of spoils. His hatchet slept; his bow, unstrung And shaftless, in his cabin hung; His tomahawk was in the ground, The wild war-whoop had ceased to sound, And thirty chieftains, tall and proud, To his imperial sceptre bow’d. Far in their mountain lurking-place The Manakins had heard his fame,{1} And Manahocks dared not come down His valleys to pursue their game; And Susquehannah’s giant race,{2} Who feared to meet no other man, Would tremble in their fastnesses To hear the name of Powhatan.[A] From the broad James’s winding side To smooth Potomac’s broader tide, From Chesapeake’s surf-beaten shore To where the mountain torrents roar, His powerful sway had been confess’d, And thirty tribes one monarch bless’d.{3} II. The time-spared oak, that lifts its head In loneliness, where those are dead, Which once stood by it on the plain, Soon sees their places fill’d again-- So stood the monarch, full of years, Amid an undergrowth of men; For since the sceptre first he sway’d, Full two score years ago and ten, Two generations had gone by, And twice he’d seen his people die. Yet from his eye there beam’d a fire, Resistless as the warrior’s lance; And when ’twas lit with vengeful ire, The boldest wither’d at its glance. And still his step was quick and light, And still his arm was nerved with might, And still ’twas death to all, who dare Awake the vengeance slumbering there. But now with joy the monarch view’d His realm in peace, his foes subdued, And calmly turn’d abroad his eyes O’er the wide work of warfare done, And hoped no coming cloud would rise To shroud in gloom his setting sun. III.