Solitude reigns supreme—silence fills my heart!
High in the solemn heavens God seems near:
Far off the busy world seems far apart!
Here I abide, forgetting that far world—
That anxious world—while I am happy here;
Here solitude teaches peace, that perfect rest,
Where sweeps the wilderness in wild career.
Sin, pride, ambition never enter here.
May human breath ne'er taint this purest air,
But free may forests spread and teach their pure
True lessons of the freedom of the woods,
The perfect liberty, the courage to endure.
Here with long tassels soar majestic pines,
The sombre hemlocks and the cedars green,
Clinging to rocky ledge and granite crag;
Dense cones of spruce arise, a bowery screen.
The beech, the birch, the streaked moose-wood grove,
Rise like tall steeples as they upward soar;
A firmament of foliage high above,
Ferns, mosses, vines, all forming a green floor.
The landscape round is full of stirring life,
The pendant foliage stirr'd by wandering breeze:
Woodpeckers clutching the rough maple bark,
A sable raven floating o'er the trees;
Ground squirrels gambol o'er a mossy log,
And far below the trout leap in the tide.
Ducks rise with splash, herons spread their sail.
Hawks, jays and eagles o'er the woodlands glide.
There is a charm in every woodland sound,
A perfect peace, with solitude profound;
There's not a jar the bosom to distress
In this fair Eden of the wilderness.
Ah, let all lovers of the wilderness,
Lovers of Nature, now in league conspire
To save from devastation these grand works I
Threatened by lawless bands with axe and fire:
Let these great forests spread their leafy arch
To catch the falling rains, the dews, the snows,
That the broad Hudson may maintain its tides,
Fed by each tributary stream that flows,
So that Fee Park, a national domain,
Shall spread in grandeur over mount and plain!