Thou ancient oak! whose myriad leaves are loud <br />With sounds of unintelligible speech, <br />Sounds as of surges on a shingly beach, <br />Or multitudinous murmurs of a crowd; <br />With some mysterious gift of tongues endowed, <br />Thou speakest a different dialect to each; <br />To me a language that no man can teach, <br />Of a lost race, long vanished like a cloud. <br />For underneath thy shade, in days remote, <br />Seated like Abraham at eventide <br />Beneath the oaks of Mamre, the unknown <br />Apostle of the Indians, Eliot, wrote <br />His Bible in a language that hath died <br />And is forgotten, save by thee alone.<br /><br />Henry Wadsworth Longfellow<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/elliot-s-oak/
