And it wasn't so much the wampumed Braves,
Eagle feathers, jade axes and totems and arrows
That I thought about, for ten minutes later
I was up and away from the Rue de la Paix
In a train for Trêves.
But the word “Sandusky” still hung in my brain
As we went through greeny grey Lorraine
In a jolting train,
And then bargained for rooms with a German waiter.
Or it wasn't even in great concern
For the fate of “Sandusky Bay.”—My friend
Pictured it thronged with American villas,
Dutch Porticos and Ionic pillars.
So that no boy's boat can land on the shores,
For the high-bred owners of dry goods stores
Forbid the practice. The villa lawns,
Pitch-pine canoes with America's daughters
In a sort of a daily Henley regatta
And the bright parasols of Japanese paper
Keep up a ceaseless, endless chatter,
In the endless, ceaseless girl graduate story
Where once there were silence, jack-rabbits and snakes,
And o'er all the gay clatter there floats old Glory—
The flag of the States, from a calico shop.

But stop!
I am not lamenting about the Lakes.

For, as grey dawns roll on to grey dawns,
Some things must surely come to an end,
Even old silences over old waters
Even here in Trêves the Porta Nigra
That isn't so much a gaunt black ruin,
As a great black whole—a Roman gate-way,
As high as a mountain, as black as a jail—
Even here, even here, America's daughters,
Long toothed old maids with a camera
(For even they must know decay,
And the passage of time, hasting, hasting away!)
And the charm of the past grows meagre and meagrer.
Though through it all the Porta Nigra
Keeps its black, hard and grim completeness,
As if no fleet minutes with all their fleetness
Could rub down its surface.
But we've walled it in in a manner of speaking
With electric trams that go sparking and streaking
And filling the night with squeals and jangles
As iron wheels grind on iron angles. . . .

And nobody cares and nobody grieves
And all the spires and towers of Trêves
Shade upwards into the sooty skies,
And you dig up here a sword or a chalice,
Some bones, some teeth and some golden bangles
And several bricks from the Cæsar's Palace.