Of all men, saving Sylla the man-slayer,
Who passes for in life and death most lucky,
Of the great names which in our faces stare,
The General Boone, backwoodsman of Kentucky,
Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere;
For, killing nothing but a bear or buck, he
Enjoyed the lonely, vigorous, harmless days
Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze.
Crime came not near him, she is not the child
Of solitude; health shrank not from him, for
Her home is in the rarely trodden wild,
Where if men seek her not, and death be more
Their choice than life, forgive them, as beguiled
By habit to what their own hearts abhor,
In cities caged. The present case in point I
Cite is, that Boone lived hunting up to ninety;
And, what’s still stranger, left behind a name
For which men vainly decimate the throng,
Not only famous, but of that good fame,
Without which glory’s but a tavern song—
Simple, serene, the antipodes of shame,
Which hate nor envy could e’er tinge with wrong;
An active hermit, even in age the child
Of nature, or the Man of Ross run wild.
’Tis true he shrank from men, even of his nation;
When they built up unto his darling trees,
He moved some hundred miles off, for a station
Where there were fewer houses and more ease;
The inconvenience of civilization
Is that you neither can be pleased nor please;
But where he met the individual man,
He showed himself as kind as mortal can.
