Sorely distressed I hear a satyr's mocking laugh
As on my laurels resting, on my seat of honor cast
And thanking you for kind attention now your indulgent censure ask.
THE BIRTH OF ARIZONA. (AN ALLEGORICAL TALE.)
On the summit of a mountain I staked my claim; in the shade of a
balsam-spruce I built my hut.
When the south wind that rises on the desert climbs to the mountain's
ridge and rustling among silvery needles, rattles the cones on boughs
and twigs--the tree-giant whispers with resinous breath, bemoaning
the fate of a prehistoric civilization, and lisps of the mystery and
romance of a humanity long extinct, mourning for races forgotten and
vanished.
Alone--unrivaled in her weird, wild grandeur stands Arizona where
spiry rock-ribbed giants stab an emerald, opal-tinted sky, and
terraced mesas of wondrous amber hue form natural stairways, that
grandly wrought were carved step after step, through successive
epochs of erosion, affording thus an easy ascent to the rugged
profile of this land of the Western Hemisphere. All this is of
historic record in stony cypher of geology indelibly engraved by time
on the rocky walls of deepest canyons, as traceable from the
primordial archaean to our present era, the age of man.
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