ver dams long deserted;
Now under shady banks,
Lost in the tangled wood-growths;
Quivering now with, their laughter,
Out in the open meadow,
Flowing, singing and laughing,
Over the weeds and rushes,
Flowing and singing forever!

Plastic and beautiful, and running over
With Schiller's 'play impulse,' was the genius of Greece,
Of which her institutions and civility were the embodiment.
Other autumn times of the nations
Were calm and peaceful,
Symbolized above, as fruit on the branches
Of the life-tree, Igdrasil!
And when their time came,
They dropped down silently,
Like apples from their boughs on the autumn grass;
Silently dropped down, on moonlight plains,
In the presence of the great company of the stars,
And the flaming constellations,
Which evermore keep solemn watch over their graves.
Others were blown off suddenly,
And prematurely--all the elements enraged against them;
And others, like the Dead Sea fruit,
Were rotten at the heart before their prime!

The old mound builder stands at the base of the tree,
At the base of the wonderful tree Igdrasil,
And the mighty branches thereof,
Which hang over his head in flame-shadows,
Germinated, and blossomed with nations,
In other lands, in another hemisphere
Far away, over the measureless brine,
From the mother earth where he was planted,
Where he grew and flourished,
And solved the riddle of life,
And tried death,
And the riddle beyond death.

He thought this passionate America,
With its vast results of physical life,
Its beautiful and sublime portraitures,
Its far-sweeping prairies, rolling in grassy waves
Like the green billows of an inland sea--
Its blue-robed mountains
Piercing the bluer heavens with their peaks--
Its rivers, lakes, and forests--
A roomy, and grand-enough earth to inhabit,
Without thought of anything beyond it.

And yet he is related to all
That was, and is, and shall be!
That idea which was clothed in his flesh
Is fleshed in I know not how many
Infinite forms and varieties