There’s a warrior race of a hardy form,
Who are fearless in peril, and reckless of storm;
Who are seen on the mountains when wintry winds blow,
And, in midsummer’s blaze, in the valleys below—
Their home is the forest, the earth is their bed,
And the theme of their boast is the blood they have shed;
With a spirit unbroken by famine or toil,
They traverse the rivers and woods for their spoil;
With a soul that no terrors of nature appal,
They dance on the verge of the cataract’s fall;
They chase the huge crocodile home to the fen,
They rob the wild bear of the cubs in her den,
They weary the deer in her rapidest flight,
And they sleep with the wolf on the mountain’s height.

Yet the gentle affections have found an abode
In these wild and dark bosoms, wherever they dwell;
And nature has all the soft passions bestow’d
On her favorite children of mountain and dell.
Though they fall on a foe with a tiger’s fangs,
And joy and exult in his keenest pangs,
The least act of kindness they never forget,
And the sin of ingratitude ne’er stain’d them yet.
They weep o’er the graves of their valiant dead,
And piously reverence the aged head;
Of parent and child feel the tenderest ties,
And the pure light of love glances warm from their eyes.

But the warrior race is fading away;
The day of their prowess and glory is past;
They are scathed like a grove where the lightnings play,
They are scatter’d like leaves by the tempest blast.
They must perish from earth with the deeds they have done;
Already the pall of oblivion descends,
Enshrouding the tribes from our view, one by one,
And time o’er the straggling remnants bends,
And sweeps them away with a hurried pace,
Still sounding the knell of the warrior race.

A vision is passing before me now—
The deeds of their chieftains come full on my sight,
And maidens of mildness and beauty bow,
As they faintly appear in the dim distant light.
That vision is fading—now fainter it seems—
Like a cloud on the wind, it recedes from the view—
And is there no power to rekindle its beams?
No pencil to picture its form and its hue?
O, spirit of poesy, parent of song,
Thou alone canst the light of that vision prolong;
Then let it descend to a distant age,
Embodied forth on thy deathless page.