'Tis brave and good through the broad pine-wood,
As through a sea, to steer,
Cheering the heart and warming the blood,
In chase of the gallant deer;
Up o'er the hill, and down the hollow,
Still through a wood to go,
With some antique pine in the distance ever
Echoing your loud hillo.
Hillo! hillo!
In opening May, what a grand array
Of flowers is spread around!
Solemn, aloft, are the tree-tops gray,
But a garden on the ground;
With the pleasant wild-pink, goatsbeard, and brier,
And the wild-rose here and there,
Smelling so sweet in the desert woods,
And making them so fair.
Hillo! hillo!
Your dogs they rest on the ridgy crest,
When evening darkens o'er,
The trumpeter[1] creeps to her high perched nest,
The hawk he screams no more.
Down with a pine—how the light-wood catches!
And soon 'tis in a glow:
A merry fine time in the pines one passes,
When we camp—Now, my dogs, hillo!
Hillo! Hillo!
Just at your ear, all night you hear
The wailing whippoorwill;
The turkey tramps through the hollow near,
The owl hoots from the hill;
The katydid, too, if the summer wake her,
Pipes out from the flame-bush nigh:
Sure, the song of the midnight woods is sweeter
Than mortal minstrelsy!
Hillo! hillo!
And hark! the sound that swells around!
How mournfully it gush'd!
A groan of air in the tree-trops drown'd,
A voice, half-heard, then hush'd;
The ghostly whisper, the sob, and sigh,
The dirge of the piny breeze,
As spirits were clustering over-head,
Like birds, upon the trees.
Hillo! Hillo!
Then Memory wakes from her silent cell,—
Perhaps a tear is shed
For the few we love, or loved, so well,
The distant, or the dead.
But a truce to sorrow—the night is waxing,
The fire is burning low:
We sleep as well in the dry pine-wood
As ever in sheets of snow.
Hillo! Hillo!
[Footnote 1: The greater wood-pecker.]