But well might bolder creatures start,
And fly, or stand agape,
With rising hair, and curdled blood,
To see so grim a Shape!

The very sky turns pale above;
The earth grows dark beneath;
The human Terror thrills with cold
And draws a shorter breath--
An universal panic owns
The dread approach of DEATH!

With silent pace, as shadows come,
And dark as shadows be,
The grisly Phantom takes his stand
Beside the fallen Tree,
And scans it with his gloomy eyes,
And laughs with horrid glee--

A dreary laugh and desolate,
Where mirth is void and null,
As hollow as its echo sounds
Within the hollow skull--
"Whoever laid this tree along,
His hatchet was not dull!

"The human arm and human tool
Have done their duty well!
But after sound of ringing axe
Must sound the ringing knell;
When Elm or Oak
Have felt the stroke,
My turn it is to fell!

"No passive unregarded tree,
A senseless thing of wood,
Wherein the sluggish sap ascends
To swell the vernal bud--
But conscious, moving, breathing trunks
That throb with living blood!

"No forest Monarch yearly clad
In mantle green or brown;
That unrecorded lives, and falls
By hand of rustic clown--
But Kings who don the purple robe,
And wear the jewell'd crown.

"Ah! little recks the Royal mind,
Within his Banquet Hall,
While tapers shine and Music breathes
And Beauty leads the Ball,--
He little recks the oaken plank
Shall be his palace wall!

"Ah, little dreams the haughty Peer,
The while his Falcon flies--
Or on the blood-bedabbled turf
The antler'd quarry dies--
That in his own ancestral Park
The narrow dwelling lies!

"But haughty Peer and mighty King
One doom shall overwhelm!
The oaken cell
Shall lodge him well
Whose sceptre ruled a realm--
While he, who never knew a home,
Shall find it in the Elm!

"The tatter'd, lean, dejected wretch,
Who begs from door to door,
And dies within the cressy ditch,
Or on the barren moor,
The friendly Elm shall lodge and clothe
That houseless man and poor!

"Yea, this recumbent rugged trunk,
That lies so long and prone,
With many a fallen acorn-cup,
And mast, and furry cone--
This rugged trunk shall hold its share
Of mortal flesh and bone!

"A Miser hoarding heaps of gold,
But pale with ague-fears--
A Wife lamenting love's decay,
With secret cruel tears,
Distilling bitter, bitter drops
From sweets of former years--