race
Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek
Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms
Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock
The glittering Parthenon.  These ample fields
Nourished their harvests, here their herds were fed,
When haply by their stalls the bison lowed,
And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke. 
All day this desert murmured with their toils,
Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed
In a forgotten language, and old tunes,
From instruments of unremembered form,
Gave the soft winds a voice.  The red man came—­
The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,
And the mound-builders vanished from the earth. 
The solitude of centuries untold
Has settled where they dwelt.  The prairie-wolf
Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh-dug den
Yawns by my path.  The gopher mines the ground
Where stood their swarming cities.  All is gone—­
All—­save the piles of earth that hold their bones—­
The platforms where they worshipped unknown gods—­
The barriers which they builded from the soil
To keep the foe at bay—­till o’er the walls
The wild beleaguerers broke, and, one by one,
The strongholds of the plain were forced, and heaped
With corpses.  The brown vultures of the wood
Flocked to those vast uncovered sepulchres,
And sat, unscared and silent, at their feast. 
Haply some solitary fugitive,
Lurking in marsh and forest, till the sense
Of desolation and of fear became
Bitterer than death, yielded himself to die. 
Man’s better nature triumphed then.  Kind words
Welcomed and soothed him; the rude conquerors
Seated the captive with their chiefs; he chose
A bride among their maidens, and at length
Seemed to forget,—­yet ne’er forgot,—­the wife
Of his first love, and her sweet little ones,
Butchered, amid their shrieks, with all his race.

Thus change the forms of being.  Thus arise
Races of living things, glorious in strength,
And perish, as the quickening breath of God
Fills them, or is withdrawn.  The red man, too,
Has left the blooming wilds he ranged so long,
And, nearer to the Rocky Mountains, sought
A wilder hunting-ground.  The beaver builds
No longer by these streams, but far away,
On waters whose blue surface ne’er gave back
The white man’s face—­among Missouri’s springs,
And pools whose issues swell the Oregan,
He rears his little Venice.  In these plains
The bison feeds no more.  Twice twenty leagues
Beyond remotest smoke of hunter’s camp,
Roams the majestic brute, in herds that shake
The earth with thundering steps—­yet here I meet
His ancient footprints stamped beside the pool.