The Stone Age man learned first the ford, by hammer stones his footing taught;
The bison next, which dammed the flood and with his dusty nostril, thought;
The Indian from his moccasins their deer foot crossing instinct caught.

The wild goose had it in his blood and squawked the trail the panther dyed,
The wild crane stalked the ford for pike and stood a guide post, man to guide,
The river in more shallow tones expressed the shallows it might hide.

So, when the hunted outlaw came, he saw the trodden ramparts slant,
The trail go down and reappear like ends of rainbows consonant;
He told the peltry hunter where to guide the woods-lost emigrant.

From Rhenish plains where feudal fields minions of barons taxed upon,
And Baltic coasts and Holland swamps, some wilderness in right to own,
A living river found the ford while planets brooded Washington.

The Golden Horseshoe picnic knights from one blue Gap had looked afar,
Then, sank in tideland like the orb that is both morn and evening star,
Before the Germans flanked the sun, slow as their Georgian calendar.

Behind the mountain lines they slid along the crystal drains of snows,
And found the Tuscarora's gaps he ambushed for Catawba foes,
And passed the ford at dusk's red hour while sunset's vizor masks and glows.

Potomac's flowing cools their lives and in the ripples cattle bend;
The packhorse feels his burden fall, the smith's fire smokes the kit to mend;
Their white knees laving, as they pray, the songs of pilgrim maids ascend:

Stout Luther's hymns and Baptist staves from John of Leyden's choral tongue,
And Simon Memmo's madrigals, the Dunker lovers tuned among;
They stood upon Virginia's rim and every hope was virgin young.

The katydids the hollow night with their resounding snoring fill,
The Switzer whistler calls to him the country-wondering whippoorwill,
Leaps in the moonbeam gleaming trout and into Echo sounds distil.

Yost Hite and Jan Van Meter led the Teutons to their grants of space;
Above the ford New Mecklenburg glassed in the river lake its face,—
Lord Fairfax measured all within his patent tied with royal lace.

At Greenway court his banished life in As You Like It joys were sinned,
Young Washington invaded there for Liberty, his Rosalind,
And stretched Virginia's sandal foot far as the Ganges of our Ind.

The men of Morgan crossed the ford nor stopped till Boston's siege they swelled,
They drowned the fame of Gates and Lee who past the Packhorse crossing dwelled,
And greeting them, his old chainmen, the great Surveyor's eyes o'er welled.

To Rumsey's steamboat screamed reply the fierce bald eagle o'er the ford,
As the experimental trip the Cincinnati's chiefs record:
A thousand years are but a day to Evolution and the Lord.

The bridges o'er Potomac span, and still the old ford had its loves;
Josephs and Maries came this way, untaxed amidst the thirsty droves
That panted down the cool ravines and lapped the pools by willow coves.

Then, closed the vine its vestibules and river travelers knew it not;
The Packhorse Ford in slumber lay like some old ferry right forgot
Till on its bank, Armies appeared, roused by an angry nation's shot.

The natural route of savage times the savage issues had restored
And like the loadstone to its star, Northward revolved the gleaming sword;
Redder than sunsets was the blood that swelled the moan o'er Packhorse Ford.

As, hereabout, the ridges cease, in countermarches parallel,
South Mountain in the Short Hills lost, the Blue Ridge in Elk Mountain's swell,
Reverberated on the ford the Northern cheer, the Southern yell.

Antietam, Gettysburg respond to Strasburg's roar and Winchesters;
The armies, like the bisons, dam the waters that the guns immerse;
Then, swiftly, peace grew like the corn and Freemen's was the universe.

The armies paused as, on the Rhine, the German host and German France
Held truce in times of Charlemagne and perished every dissonance,
Except the finished German tongue and the soft parley of Romance.

A blended race one destiny swelled like Potomac's current down,
Each old ingredient making rhyme in the American renown;
The old ford still its beauty held, like lovely girls of Shepherdstown.

The raccoon ogled with the doves that cooed above in sycamores,
The fisher cast his fly for bass, wading upon the pebbled floors,
And grounded on the hidden path the skiff with its suspended oars.

How lovely everything appears, as if composed it ever stood!
We do not see the prints of time beneath the riffles and the flood.
The ford that our forefathers crossed is in the river of our blood.