The bright magnolia spreads its bloom
And loads the air with sweet perfume,
And gives a thousand charms unknown
To any but its native zone;
The olive and the fig tree stand
Along the slopes of that fair land,
Wherein, of old, the Jewish maids
Were wooed and won; their ample shades
Have fallen round kings and prophets old,
With silent blessings manifold.
But though we yield the blissful powers
Of olive shades, magnolia bowers,
And where the vine and fig tree grow,
See plenty smile on all below,
No better, fairer trees are they,
When decked in summer's glad array,
And when the ripening autumn time
Bequeathes its wonders to the clime,
They ne'er present such canopy
Of waving leaves and brilliant dies,
In myriad optic harmonies,
To contrast with the sober skies,
As our own sugar maple tree.
What though for Afric's sons the palm
May yield its shade, the hermit's psalm
Of old Armenian origin,
Be heard its sunny bowers within,
Or birds of strange and gorgeous plume
Fresh from the tropic lande that bloom
With countless flowers of loveliest dies,
Pipe from its crest their harmonies,
Yet no superior shall it be
To our own sugar maple tree,
Whereon the blackbird tunes its lay,
The mocking bird and speckled jay
Grow garrulously loud and gay.
The rugged pine, the mountain fir,
The cypress sad, and juniper,
The orange, with its fruit of gold,
And the Libanian cedars old;
The banyan tree whose livnig dome
And shaft and pillar form the home
Wherein, reclined at lazy ease,
The Asian views his summer seas;
All these are lovely, all are fair,
But none the coronet may wear;
No stately monarch of the wood,
That lords it o'er the solitude;
No giant oak whose sinews form
The ship that rides the ocean storm,
No stately tulip waving high
His cups, against the summer sky,
Shall bear the crown nor honored be
Beyond our sugar maple tree.
When first the sun begins to warm
The sleeping earth's long frozen form,
And bearing on his northern way,
To melt the icicles by day
Which winter, still with equal might,
Congeals and forms again at night;
O! who shall name in scornful mood
That sweet, delicious, glorious flood,
That perfect saccharinean sea,
That floweth from the maple tree?
Not he, who nurtured in the west
Of memories that he deems the best,
Reveres the sweet unselfish joys
Of rustic girls and hardy boys,
Where fell in fleecy clouds the damp
Evaporations from the camp,
And where the work was cheered along
With mingled jollity and song,
And when the sugaring off was done,
Such sweets were known and heights of fun
As are but rightly understood
By him, who, in some northern wood,
Has scooped the primal sugar trough,
Presided at the stirring off,
Known every labor, every joy
That waited for the rustic boy,
Through all the year, till March should bring
The sugar-making and the spring.
Let not the puny despot boast
His vaunted sweets, that are the cost
Of labor driven by the lash,
Red with the gore from many a gash,
Where human chattels toil in pain
To rear the sugar-yielding cane;
When by the cheerful work of hands
That never felt the hissing brands
That mark the currency of hell,
Where planters buy and traders sell,
Here, in this northern bower, is wrought
A more luxurious sweet than aught
The world had ever known until—
A good return for many an ill—
The Indian skilled in savage ways
By rude example taught the free
Forefathers in the forest days,
While yet the May Flower sped the sea,
The merits of the maple tree.
To grace thy trunk, as I have seen
Glad children on the wooded green
Round some favorite tree entwine
Flowers and grass, and bits of vine,—
So with little skill I've wrought
This, my wreath of rhyme, and brought
Leaf and bud and branch to thee,
Glorious Sugar Maple Tree.