Thy golden sunshine comes
From the round heaven, and on their dwellings lies,
    And lights their inner homes;
For them thou fill’st with air the unbounded skies,
    And givest them the stores
Of ocean, and the harvests of its shores.

    Thy Spirit is around,
Quickening the restless mass that sweeps along;
    And this eternal sound—­
Voices and footfalls of the numberless throng—­
    Like the resounding sea,
Or like the rainy tempest, speaks of thee.

    And when the hours of rest
Come, like a calm upon the mid-sea brine,
    Hushing its billowy breast—­
The quiet of that moment too is thine,
    It breathes of Him who keeps
The vast and helpless city while it sleeps.

The prairies. deg.

These are the gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name—­
The Prairies.  I behold them for the first,
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight
Takes in the encircling vastness.  Lo! they stretch
In airy undulations, far away,
As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,
Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,
And motionless for ever.—­Motionless?—­
No—­they are all unchained again.  The clouds
Sweep over with their shadows, and, beneath,
The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye;
Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase
The sunny ridges.  Breezes of the South! 
Who toss the golden and the flame-like flowers,
And pass the prairie-hawk that, poised on high,
Flaps his broad wings, yet moves not—­ye have played
Among the palms of Mexico and vines
Of Texas, and have crisped the limpid brooks
That from the fountains of Sonora glide
Into the calm Pacific—­have ye fanned
A nobler or a lovelier scene than this? 
Man hath no part in all this glorious work: 
The hand that built the firmament hath heaved
And smoothed these verdant swells, and sown their slopes
With herbage, planted them with island groves,
And hedged them round with forests.  Fitting floor
For this magnificent temple of the sky—­
With flowers whose glory and whose multitude
Rival the constellations!  The great heavens
Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love,—­
A nearer vault, and of a tenderer blue,
Than that which bends above the eastern hills.

As o’er the verdant waste I guide my steed,
Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides
The hollow beating of his footstep seems
A sacrilegious sound.  I think of those
Upon whose rest he tramples.  Are they here—­
The dead of other days?—­and did the dust
Of these fair solitudes once stir with life
And burn with passion?  Let the mighty mounds
That overlook the rivers, or that rise
In the dim forest crowded with old oaks,
Answer.  A race, that long has passed away,
Built them;—­a disciplined and populous