Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.
Indiana
By AnonymousL
Slow through forest, farm, and town,
With his tributary streams,
Beautiful in glooms and gleams,
Flows the Wabash! Yonder, see,
Sinking fathoms under ground,
The Lost River, lost and found,
From its grave beneath the plain
Springing into life again.
Land of Rivers! Hail to thee!
Centennial oaks their shadows cast,
In whose gnarled and hollow trunks
Hive the bees, like cloistered monks,
Singing their low litany.
Through the openings far and near
Stalks, as through a park, the deer,
And in autumn fiery red
Glows the foliage overhead.
Land of Forests! Hail to thee!
On their dials count the hours,
And the lowland landscape breaks
Into little sylvan lakes,
Garlanded with shrub and tree;
Where the maize for miles and miles
Lifts its green, cathedral aisles,
And the endless fields of wheat
Ripen in the harvest heat.
Land of Meadows! Hail to thee!
Thy wondrous Cave of Wyandot?
Leagues of chambers glimmering far,
With their fretted roofs of spar.
What, compared with this, are ye,
Grottos of the Illyrian land?
Nature on a scale more grand
Laid the timbers of these floors,
Arched these halls and corridors.
Land of Caverns! Hail to thee!