The Superior times. [volume] (Superior, Wis.) 1870-1912, 1898-01-08
SCREIVALS.

A thouSa nd acorn- through the mold,
One summer in the days of old.
Burst fort h into the sun and breeze
TIE grow into a thousand trees.
To fight the storm and brave the cold,
And live through many centuries.
There came a keen. untimely frost:
Five hundred infant oaks were lost.
And then the herd that CHANGED that way.
The browsing kline and lambs at play
Among the hillocks greenly messed,
Cropped down four hundred in day.
A hundred oaks were left to grow,
But four score persisted in the snow;
And of the score that still remain
Ten fall before the hurricane;
Ten challenge all the winds that blow
And cast their shade DER all the plain.
But as the years pass on. one oak
Lies shattered by the lightning stroke,
And one is felled. the woodman's prey;
One falls through its own hearts decay:
One in the whrl !. inds fury broke.
Bind two III. torrents swept away.
Four oaks now toward the sun aspire;
One falls before an earthquake dire:
And one is dragged away in chains
A keel to pillow the ocean blains;
One withers in "A forest fire.
And one-one only Oak-remains.
And there it stands. the centuries pride.
The monarch Of the mountain side,
Blessed by FIVE hundred summers bland
By breath of ferny fragments famed;
But no one notes the oak that died
They are forgotten in the land.
Each summer mid the waste and weeds
Doth nature SOW Immortal seeds,
And scatter over field and men.
Through tumbied gorge and powdered
glen,
The seeds of men Of mighty deeds.
Seeds Of Il thousand deathless men;
a thousand men of lofticr strain,
OF ampler soul and subtler brain
BY natures unexhausted hand.
Are sown each year in every land
Strong men, and lowered to attain
The heights where the immOrtalS stand.
But many in sordid age
iielu up their birthright heritage,
And scorched by traffics poison breath
Their germ of grandeur withereth;
For tinsel. tags and equipage
They give their better parts to death.
And some forget their mighty trust
Through weekne mixed with human dust;
They burn with phosp horescent fire
EnGendercd in the slime and nire;
Are torn by tigers Of their lust
And slain by dragons Of desire.
And some from their high path depart
Through Unborn cowardice o: heart;
Some fall unnoted in the stress
OF their unneigh bored loneliness;
Some freely choose the baser part
And greatness leads to littlcness.
And some whose tainted blood is rife
With poison AT the core of life,
Who cry. The faul: is not in u.s.
But fate will not pause To discuss
They perish in the unequal strife
Who fight with beasts at Etfecus
And some send out their branching shoots,
But perish from unwatercd roots;
some. smit by sOrrow's thunder. stone
Go down at midnight and alone;
Some, charmed by pleasure shawms and
flutes,
Play no high music OF their own.
thousand men were Sowr broadcast
Mayhap but one survives at last.
He shapes our thought and rules our
ways,
And lives an endless length OF days.
And mates the mighty of the past.
EnslIrined in Pantheon pomp Of praise.
Immortal are the songs he sings
And deathess is the world he brings;
Aye. dcathless is his very breath,
For, as his long thought journeyeth-
But ah his termless lifc-it springs
From the dark soil Of lnany deaths.
We sec the oak in all It's pride,
But not the thousand oaks that died;
We see the human demigod,
But not his peers beneath the sod
The lost unknown. who fell beside
The path his victor footsteps trod