Eliot's Oak by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — Read

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