How changed, fair Minnetonka, is thy face
Since first I saw thee in thy pristine grace.
Electric lights fantastically glow,
Swarming like fire-flies on the shores where long,
Through countless summer nights a vanished throng,
Only the Indian camp-fire flickered low.
The odor of the baleful cigarette
Assails us now, where the mild calumet
Around the circle like a censer swung.
The notes of Strauss intoxicate the air,
And dainty feet in cadence twinkle there,
Where in rude strains the warriors’ deeds were sung,
And where the Indian lover’s plaintive flute
Lured to the trysting-place the dusky maid.
Discreetly hidden in the sylvan shade,
The Anglomaniac comes to press his suit,
And Patrick, too, out for a holiday,
Strolls with his Bridget here en dimanché,
And softly whispers in his charmer’s ear
The same old tale, to lovers ever dear.
The rustling leaves, the waves, the mating bird,
Sing the same songs the Indian maiden heard.
Save a few stately names, the vanished race
Whose dust we daily trample leave no trace
Or monument. None who that race have known
Ere poisoned by the vices of our own,
Deem it ignoble; but the white man’s breath,
To him a besom of consuming death,
Sweeps him like ashes from his natal hearth,
E’en as one day some race of stronger birth
Will sweep our children’s children from the earth.
More noxious than the fabled upas tree,
We blight his virtues first, and then with scorn
Repel the hands extended once to save
Our exiled fathers, fleeing o’er the wave.
Yet in his deepest fall, the warrior, born
Of warrior lineage fetterless and free,
Retains unquenched in his unyielding soul
A secret flame in spite of all control.
He brooks no slavish, ignominious toil,
By scourger driven to till the white man’s soil.
Chained in Plutonian caverns far from day,
His spirit swiftly chafes its bars away;
Or by his own impatient hand released,
With rapture bounds as to a marriage feast.
Wealth, pomp, and power ne’er his soul affect;
Still unabashed he stands, unmoved, erect,
His blanket draped, albeit not too clean,
About him with a Roman consul’s mien,
And in the white light of a throne his eye
Would meet, nor quail, the eye of majesty.
His own war-eagle to the sun that soared,
Gave back with eye undimmed its fiery glare,
And sported with the speaking lightnings where
The Thunder-Birds[1] along the tempest roared;
Or swept the plain, but saw no Indian slave
From the Pacific to Atlantic wave.
Fair Minnetonka, thou art changed, and yet
I know not if ’twere matter for regret.
Thou wast a maid untried, with yielding heart,
With flowing hair, and ample sheltering arms,
And unabashed contours, whose rosy charms
Were all untrammelled by the hand of art,
And eyes of dreamy mystery, wherein
E’en then thy triumphs dimly were foreseen;
A worldly-wise and queenly woman now,
Adorned with spoil of many victories,
And flush of further conquest on thy brow;
Jewels cannot thy native charms enhance,
Nor can thy robes, too tightly laced perchance,
The matchless beauty of thy form disguise.
Through every change, by every tongue confessed,
Peerless amid thy sisters East or West;
Like her of whom the master-singer wrote,
“Age cannot wither her nor custom stale
Her infinite variety.”
Thus float
My wandering thoughts, as on the balcony
I sit alone bathed in the moonlight pale,
And musing thus the scene changed suddenly:
Hotel and cottage vanished; to the shore
The prairie sloped a green unbroken floor.
Eight lustrums back, through rosy summers fled,
Adown a dwindling vista far I sped,
A careless youth; again my hoary head
Bloomed with the sunny wealth of twenty years.
A day came back, a day without compeers,
When with a bright companion long since dead,
In my canoe I flitted o’er the lake,
And our swift paddles scattered pearly tears
Upon the smiling ripples in our wake.
She, my companion, was a little maid
Of somewhat rustic garb, of English speech,
Yet something in her accents quaint and rich,
And the warm tinge upon her cheek, betrayed
The mingling crimson of a darker shade,—
Her kinship to the remnant lingering still,
Whose cone-shaped lodges picturesquely stood,
Dotting the hither base of yonder hill,
Like late leaves clinging, spite of growing chill,
Upon the boughs of a November wood.
Changing our mood, we idly drifted there,
Two happy children in a cradling shell
Poised ’twixt two azure vaults; the mystic spell
Of Indian summer brooded in the air,
Filling with human love and sympathy
E’en things inanimate; the earth and sky
Leaned to each other, and the rocks and trees,
Like brothers, seemed sharing our reveries.
“Tell me some legend of the lake,” I cried,
“For in a spot that breathes on every side
Such air of poesy, whose influence
Subdues with such a charm our every sense,
How many loving hearts have loved and died!
How many souls as lofty and intense
As those whose names throughout the whole world ring,
In the high songs the olden minstrels sing!
Who hears those voices e’en but for a day,
The sound remains a part of him alway:
Penelope the constant; Hero sweet;
Briseis weeping at Achilles’ feet;
Andromeda by wingèd Perseus found—
Bright blossom to the sea-girt rock fast bound;
The Lesbian queen of song, but passion’s slave,
Who quenched her burning torch beneath the wave;
Helen, whose beauty, like a fatal brand,
Lit up the towers of Troy o’er sea and land;
And Juliet, swaying at her window’s height,
What slender lily in the wan moonlight.”
“I do not know,” the little maid replied,
“The names of which you speak, but ere she died
My mother told me many stories old,
Some joyous and some sad, of warriors bold,
And spirits, haunting forest, plain, and stream.
Each had its god, and creatures of strange form,
Half beast, half human; all these figures seem
Mingling away in a fantastic swarm,
Dim as the faces of a last year’s dream,
Or motes that mingle in a slant sunbeam.
The legends vanish too; among them all
This one alone, distinctly I recall.”
The tale she told me then I now rehearse,
Set in a frame of rude, unpolished verse.
