her flag has unfurled?
Or think'st thou, that e'en in the regions of bliss,
There's a landscape more truly Elysian than this?

Behold the dark sumac in crimson arrayed,
Whose veins with the deadliest poison are rife!
And, side by her side, on the edge of the glade,
The sassafras laurel, restorer of life!
Behold the tall maples turned red in their hue,
And the muscadine vine, with its clusters of blue;
And the lotus, whose leaves have scarce time to unfold,
Ere they drop, to discover its berries of gold;
And the bay-tree, perfumed, never changing its sheen,
And for ever enrobed in its mantle of green!

And list to the music borne over the trees!
It falls on the ear, giving pleasure ecstatic--
The song of the birds and the hum of the bees
Commingling their tones with the ripples erratic.
Hark! hear you the red-crested cardinal's call
From the groves of annona?--from tulip-tree tall
The mock-bird responding?--below, in the glade,
The dove softly cooing in mellower shade--
While the oriole answers in accents of mirth?
Oh, where is there melody sweeter on earth?

In infamy now the bold slanderer slumbers,
Who falsely declared 'twas a land without song!
Had he listened, as I, to those musical numbers
That liven its woods through the summer-day long--
Had he slept in the shade of its blossoming trees,
Or inhaled their sweet balm ever loading the breeze,
He would scarcely have ventured on statement so wrong--
"Her plants without perfume, her birds without song."
Ah! closet-philosopher, sure, in that hour,
You had never beheld the magnolia's flower?

Surely here the Hesperian gardens were found--
For how could such land to the gods be unknown?
And where is there spot upon African ground
So like to a garden a goddess would own?
And the dragon so carelessly guarding the tree,
Which the hero, whose guide was a god of the sea,
Destroyed before plucking the apples of gold--
Was nought but that monster--the mammoth of old.
If earth ever owned spot so divinely caressed,
Sure that region of eld was the Land of the West!

The memory of that scene attunes my soul to song, awaking any muse from
the silence in which she has long slumbered. But the voice of the coy
maiden is less melodious than of yore: she shies _me_ for my neglect:
and despite the gentlest courting, refusing to breathe her divine spirit
over