From the Travel Notes of a Celebrated Novelist (1842)

Dawn Potter

At night our river-trail wound through a gorge, cold and pale,

Shining like a Highland pass under the gleam of a narrow moon.

So hemmed in we were by the hills all round that we saw no egress

Save through the path of shadow-ripples we ourselves had made,

Until a cliff seemed to open and our barge, like a witless Jonah,

Floated forward into gaping jaws that snapped shut upon us,

Closing out the moonlight, wrapping our new course in shade.

Dawn brought relief but also sorrow, for our roving eyes were loath

To rest upon the stumps that loomed like rough-hewn graves, stark

And chill among the greening corn. A thousand rotting branches

Clotted every swamp, steeped in every wet crevasse. We marked

Great wastes where settlers had been burning, and even, like an omen,

glimpsed a twisted, withered tree-king, arms reared high aloft, railing

at the slaughter of his thanes, laying curses on the blackened works of men.

[from Chestnut Ridge, a verse-history of southwestern Pennsylvania]