The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Complete (part 4 of 9)

The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Complete (part 4 of 9)

A holy gathering! peaceful all No threat of war, no savage call For vengeance on an erring brother! But in their stead the godlike plan To teach the brotherhood of man To love and reverence one another, As sharers of a common blood, The children of a common God Yet, even at its lightest word, Shall Slavery's darkest depths be stirred: Spain, watching from her Moro's keep Her slave-ships traversing the deep, And Rio, in her strength and pride, Lifting, along her mountain-side, Her snowy battlements and towers, Her lemon-groves and tropic bowers, With bitter hate and sullen fear Its freedom-giving voice shall hear; And where my country's flag is flowing, On breezes from Mount Vernon blowing, Above the Nation's council halls, Where Freedom's praise is loud and long, While close beneath the outward walls The driver plies his reeking thong; The hammer of the man-thief falls, O'er hypocritic cheek and brow The crimson flush of shame shall glow And all who for their native land Are pledging life and heart and hand, Worn watchers o'er her changing weal, Who fog her tarnished honor feel, Through cottage door and council-hall Shall thunder an awakening call. The pen along its page shall burn With all intolerable scorn; An eloquent rebuke shall go On all the winds that Southward blow; From priestly lips, now sealed and dumb, Warning and dread appeal shall come, Like those which Israel heard from him, The Prophet of the Cherubim; Or those which sad Esaias hurled Against a sin-accursed world! Its wizard leaves the Press shall fling Unceasing from its iron wing, With characters inscribed thereon, As fearful in the despot's ball As to the pomp of Babylon The fire-sign on the palace wall!

And, from her dark iniquities, Methinks I see my country rise Not challenging the nations round To note her tardy justice done; Her captives from their chains unbound; Her prisons opening to the sun But tearfully her arms extending Over the poor and unoffending; Her regal emblem now no longer

A bird of prey, with talons reeking, Above the dying captive shrieking, But, spreading out her ample wing, A broad, impartial covering, The weaker sheltered by the stronger Oh, then to Faith's anointed eyes The promised token shall be given; And on a nation's sacrifice, Atoning for the sin of years, And wet with penitential tears, The fire shall fall from Heaven!

1839.

MASSACHUSETTS TO VIRGINIA.

Written on reading an account of the proceedings of the citizens of Norfolk, Va., in reference to George Latimer, the alleged fugitive slave, who was seized in Boston without warrant at the request of James B. Grey, of Norfolk, claiming to be his master. The case caused great excitement North and South, and led to the presentation of a petition to Congress, signed by more than fifty thousand citizens of Massachusetts, calling for such laws and proposed amendments to the Constitution as should relieve the Commonwealth from all further participation in the crime of oppression. George Latimer himself was finally given free papers for the sum of four hundred dollars.

THE blast from Freedom's Northern hills, upon its Southern way, Bears greeting to Virginia from Massachusetts Bay. No word of haughty challenging, nor battle bugle's peal, Nor steady tread of marching files, nor clang of horsemen's steel.

No trains of deep-mouthed cannon along our highways go; Around our silent arsenals untrodden lies the snow; And to the land-breeze of our ports, upon their errands far, A thousand sails of commerce swell, but none are spread for war.

We hear thy threats, Virginia! thy stormy words and high, Swell harshly on the Southern winds which melt along our sky; Yet, not one brown, hard hand foregoes its honest labor here, No hewer of our mountain oaks suspends his axe in fear.

Wild are the waves which lash the reefs along St. George's bank; Cold on the shore of Labrador the fog lies white and dank; Through storm, and wave, and blinding mist, stout are the hearts which man The fishing-smacks of Marblehead, the sea-boats of Cape Ann.

The cold north light and wintry sun glare on their icy forms, Bent grimly o'er their straining lines or wrestling with the storms; Free as the winds they drive before, rough as the waves they roam, They laugh to scorn the slaver's threat against their rocky home.

What means the Old Dominion? Hath she forgot the day When o'er her conquered valleys swept the Briton's steel array? How side by side, with sons of hers, the Massachusetts men Encountered Tarleton's charge of fire, and stout Cornwallis, then?

Forgets she how the Bay State, in answer to the call Of her old House of Burgesses, spoke out from Faneuil Hall? When, echoing back her Henry's cry, came pulsing on each breath Of Northern winds, the thrilling sounds of "Liberty or Death!"

What asks the Old Dominion? If now her sons have proved False to their fathers' memory, false to the faith they loved; If she can scoff at Freedom, and its great charter spurn, Must we of Massachusetts from truth and duty turn?

We hunt your bondmen, flying from Slavery's hateful hell; Our voices, at your bidding, take up the bloodhound's yell; We gather, at your summons, above our fathers' graves, From Freedom's holy altar-horns to tear your wretched slaves!

Thank God! not yet so vilely can Massachusetts bow; The spirit of her early time is with her even now; Dream not because her Pilgrim blood moves slow and calm and cool, She thus can stoop her chainless neck, a sister's slave and tool!

All that a sister State should do, all that a free State may, Heart, hand, and purse we proffer, as in our early day; But that one dark loathsome burden ye must stagger with alone, And reap the bitter harvest which ye yourselves have sown!

Hold, while ye may, your struggling slaves, and burden God's free air With woman's shriek beneath the lash, and manhood's wild despair; Cling closer to the "cleaving curse" that writes upon your plains The blasting of Almighty wrath against a land of chains.

Still shame your gallant ancestry, the cavaliers of old, By watching round the shambles where human flesh is sold; Gloat o'er the new-born child, and count his market value, when The maddened mother's cry of woe shall pierce the slaver's den!

Lower than plummet soundeth, sink the Virginia name; Plant, if ye will, your fathers' graves with rankest weeds of shame; Be, if ye will, the scandal of God's fair universe; We wash our hands forever of your sin and shame and curse.

A voice from lips whereon the coal from Freedom's shrine hath been, Thrilled, as but yesterday, the hearts of Berkshire's mountain men: The echoes of that solemn voice are sadly lingering still In all our sunny valleys, on every wind-swept hill.

And when the prowling man-thief came hunting for his prey Beneath the very shadow of Bunker's shaft of gray, How, through the free lips of the son, the father's warning spoke; How, from its bonds of trade and sect, the Pilgrim city broke!

A hundred thousand right arms were lifted up on high, A hundred thousand voices sent back their loud reply; Through the thronged towns of Essex the startling summons rang, And up from bench and loom and wheel her young mechanics sprang!

The voice of free, broad Middlesex, of thousands as of one, The shaft of Bunker calling to that of Lexington; From Norfolk's ancient villages, from Plymouth's rocky bound To where Nantucket feels the arms of ocean close her round;

From rich and rural Worcester, where through the calm repose Of cultured vales and fringing woods the gentle Nashua flows, To where Wachuset's wintry blasts the mountain larches stir, Swelled up to Heaven the thrilling cry of "God save Latimer!"

And sandy Barnstable rose up, wet with the salt sea spray; And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narragansett Bay Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill, And the cheer of Hampshire's woodmen swept down from Holyoke Hill.

The voice of Massachusetts! Of her free sons and daughters, Deep calling unto deep aloud, the sound of many waters! Against the burden of that voice what tyrant power shall stand? No fetters in the Bay State! No slave upon her land!

Look to it well, Virginians! In calmness we have borne, In answer to our faith and trust, your insult and your scorn; You've spurned our kindest counsels; you've hunted for our lives; And shaken round our hearths and homes your manacles and gyves!

We wage no war, we lift no arm, we fling no torch within The fire-clamps of the quaking mine beneath your soil of sin; We leave ye with your bondmen, to wrestle, while ye can, With the strong upward tendencies and godlike soul of man!

But for us and for our children, the vow which we have given For freedom and humanity is registered in heaven; No slave-hunt in our borders,--no pirate on our strand! No fetters in the Bay State,--no slave upon our land!

1843.

THE CHRISTIAN SLAVE.

In a publication of L. F. Tasistro--Random Shots and Southern Breezes-- is a description of a slave auction at New Orleans, at which the auctioneer recommended the woman on the stand as "A GOOD CHRISTIAN!" It was not uncommon to see advertisements of slaves for sale, in which they were described as pious or as members of the church. In one advertisement a slave was noted as "a Baptist preacher."

A CHRISTIAN! going, gone! Who bids for God's own image? for his grace, Which that poor victim of the market-place Hath in her suffering won?

My God! can such things be? Hast Thou not said that whatsoe'er is done Unto Thy weakest and Thy humblest one Is even done to Thee?

In that sad victim, then, Child of Thy pitying love, I see Thee stand; Once more the jest-word of a mocking band, Bound, sold, and scourged again!

A Christian up for sale! Wet with her blood your whips, o'ertask her frame, Make her life loathsome with your wrong and shame, Her patience shall not fail!

A heathen hand might deal Back on your heads the gathered wrong of years: But her low, broken prayer and nightly tears, Ye neither heed nor feel.

Con well thy lesson o'er, Thou prudent teacher, tell the toiling slave No dangerous tale of Him who came to save The outcast and the poor.

But wisely shut the ray Of God's free Gospel from her simple heart, And to her darkened mind alone impart One stern command, Obey! (3)

So shalt thou deftly raise The market price of human flesh; and while On thee, their pampered guest, the planters smile, Thy church shall praise.

Grave, reverend men shall tell From Northern pulpits how thy work was blest, While in that vile South Sodom first and best, Thy poor disciples sell.

Oh, shame! the Moslem thrall, Who, with his master, to the Prophet kneels, While turning to the sacred Kebla feels His fetters break and fall.

Cheers for the turbaned Bey Of robber-peopled Tunis! he hath torn The dark slave-dungeons open, and hath borne Their inmates into day:

But our poor slave in vain Turns to the Christian shrine his aching eyes; Its rites will only swell his market price, And rivet on his chain.

God of all right! how long Shall priestly robbers at Thine altar stand, Lifting in prayer to Thee, the bloody hand And haughty brow of wrong?

1843

THE SENTENCE OF JOHN L. BROWN

Oh, from the fields of cane, From the low rice-swamp, from the trader's cell; From the black slave-ship's foul and loathsome hell, And coffle's weary chain; Hoarse, horrible, and strong, Rises to Heaven that agonizing cry, Filling the arches of the hollow sky, How long, O God, how long?

THE SENTENCE OF JOHN L. BROWN.

John L. Brown, a young white man of South Carolina, was in 1844 sentenced to death for aiding a young slave woman, whom he loved and had married, to escape from slavery. In pronouncing the sentence Judge O'Neale addressed to the prisoner these words of appalling blasphemy:

You are to die! To die an ignominious death--the death on the gallows! This announcement is, to you, I know, most appalling. Little did you dream of it when you stepped into the bar with an air as if you thought it was a fine frolic. But the consequences of crime are just such as you are realizing. Punishment often comes when it is least expected. Let me entreat you to take the present opportunity to commence the work of reformation. Time will be furnished you to prepare for the great change just before you. Of your past life I know nothing, except what your trial furnished. That told me that the crime for which you are to suffer was the consequence of a want of attention on your part to the duties of life. The strange woman snared you. She flattered you with her word; and you became her victim. The consequence was, that, led on by a desire to serve her, you committed the offence of aid in a slave to run away and depart from her master's service; and now, for it you are to die! You are a young man, and I fear you have been dissolute; and if so, these kindred vices have contributed a full measure to your ruin. Reflect on your past life, and make the only useful devotion of the remnant of your days in preparing for death. Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth is the language of inspired wisdom. This comes home appropriately to you in this trying moment. You are young; quite too young to be where you are. If you had remembered your Creator in your past days, you would not now be in a felon's place, to receive a felon's judgment. Still, it is not too late to remember your Creator. He calls early, and He calls late. He stretches out the arms of a Father's love to you--to the vilest sinner--and says: "Come unto me and be saved." You can perhaps read. If so, read the Scriptures; read them without note, and without comment; and pray to God for His assistance; and you will be able to say when you pass from prison to execution, as a poor slave said under similar circumstances: "I am glad my Friday has come." If you cannot read the Scriptures, the ministers of our holy religion will be ready to aid you. They will read and explain to you until you will be able to understand; and understanding, to call upon the only One who can help you and save you--Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world. To Him I commend you. And through Him may you have that opening of the Day-Spring of mercy from on high, which shall bless you here, and crown you as a saint in an everlasting world, forever and ever. The sentence of the law is that you be taken hence to the place from whence you came last; thence to the jail of Fairfield District; and that there you be closely and securely confined until Friday, the 26th day of April next; on which day, between the hours of ten in the forenoon and two in the afternoon, you will be taken to the place of public execution, and there be hanged by the neck till your body be dead. And may God have mercy on your soul!

No event in the history of the anti-slavery struggle so stirred the two hemispheres as did this dreadful sentence. A cry of horror was heard from Europe. In the British House of Lords, Brougham and Denman spoke of it with mingled pathos and indignation. Thirteen hundred clergymen and church officers in Great Britain addressed a memorial to the churches of South Carolina against the atrocity. Indeed, so strong was the pressure of the sentiment of abhorrence and disgust that South Carolina yielded to it, and the sentence was commuted to scourging and banishment.

Ho! thou who seekest late and long A License from the Holy Book For brutal lust and fiendish wrong, Man of the Pulpit, look! Lift up those cold and atheist eyes, This ripe fruit of thy teaching see; And tell us how to heaven will rise The incense of this sacrifice-- This blossom of the gallows tree!

Search out for slavery's hour of need Some fitting text of sacred writ; Give heaven the credit of a deed Which shames the nether pit. Kneel, smooth blasphemer, unto Him Whose truth is on thy lips a lie; Ask that His bright winged cherubim May bend around that scaffold grim To guard and bless and sanctify.

O champion of the people's cause Suspend thy loud and vain rebuke Of foreign wrong and Old World's laws, Man of the Senate, look! Was this the promise of the free, The great hope of our early time, That slavery's poison vine should be Upborne by Freedom's prayer-nursed tree O'erclustered with such fruits of crime?

Send out the summons East and West, And South and North, let all be there Where he who pitied the oppressed Swings out in sun and air. Let not a Democratic hand The grisly hangman's task refuse; There let each loyal patriot stand, Awaiting slavery's command, To twist the rope and draw the noose!

But vain is irony--unmeet Its cold rebuke for deeds which start In fiery and indignant beat The pulses of the heart. Leave studied wit and guarded phrase For those who think but do not feel; Let men speak out in words which raise Where'er they fall, an answering blaze Like flints which strike the fire from steel.

Still let a mousing priesthood ply Their garbled text and gloss of sin, And make the lettered scroll deny Its living soul within: Still let the place-fed, titled knave Plead robbery's right with purchased lips, And tell us that our fathers gave For Freedom's pedestal, a slave, The frieze and moulding, chains and whips!

But ye who own that Higher Law Whose tablets in the heart are set, Speak out in words of power and awe That God is living yet! Breathe forth once more those tones sublime Which thrilled the burdened prophet's lyre, And in a dark and evil time Smote down on Israel's fast of crime And gift of blood, a rain of fire!

Oh, not for us the graceful lay To whose soft measures lightly move The footsteps of the faun and fay, O'er-locked by mirth and love! But such a stern and startling strain As Britain's hunted bards flung down From Snowden to the conquered plain, Where harshly clanked the Saxon chain, On trampled field and smoking town.

By Liberty's dishonored name, By man's lost hope and failing trust, By words and deeds which bow with shame Our foreheads to the dust, By the exulting strangers' sneer, Borne to us from the Old World's thrones, And by their victims' grief who hear, In sunless mines and dungeons drear, How Freedom's land her faith disowns!

Speak out in acts. The time for words Has passed, and deeds suffice alone; In vain against the clang of swords The wailing pipe is blown! Act, act in God's name, while ye may! Smite from the church her leprous limb! Throw open to the light of day The bondman's cell, and break away The chains the state has bound on him!

Ho! every true and living soul, To Freedom's perilled altar bear The Freeman's and the Christian's whole Tongue, pen, and vote, and prayer! One last, great battle for the right-- One short, sharp struggle to be free! To do is to succeed--our fight Is waged in Heaven's approving sight; The smile of God is Victory.

1844.

TEXAS

VOICE OF NEW ENGLAND.

The five poems immediately following indicate the intense feeling of the friends of freedom in view of the annexation of Texas, with its vast territory sufficient, as was boasted, for six new slave States.

Up the hillside, down the glen, Rouse the sleeping citizen; Summon out the might of men!

Like a lion growling low, Like a night-storm rising slow, Like the tread of unseen foe;

It is coming, it is nigh! Stand your homes and altars by; On your own free thresholds die.

Clang the bells in all your spires; On the gray hills of your sires Fling to heaven your signal-fires.

From Wachuset, lone and bleak, Unto Berkshire's tallest peak, Let the flame-tongued heralds speak.

Oh, for God and duty stand, Heart to heart and hand to hand, Round the old graves of the land.

Whoso shrinks or falters now, Whoso to the yoke would bow, Brand the craven on his brow!

Freedom's soil hath only place For a free and fearless race, None for traitors false and base.

Perish party, perish clan; Strike together while ye can, Like the arm of one strong man.

Like that angel's voice sublime, Heard above a world of crime, Crying of the end of time;

With one heart and with one mouth, Let the North unto the South Speak the word befitting both.

"What though Issachar be strong Ye may load his back with wrong Overmuch and over long:

"Patience with her cup o'errun, With her weary thread outspun, Murmurs that her work is done.

"Make our Union-bond a chain, Weak as tow in Freedom's strain Link by link shall snap in twain.

"Vainly shall your sand-wrought rope Bind the starry cluster up, Shattered over heaven's blue cope!

"Give us bright though broken rays, Rather than eternal haze, Clouding o'er the full-orbed blaze.

"Take your land of sun and bloom; Only leave to Freedom room For her plough, and forge, and loom;

"Take your slavery-blackened vales; Leave us but our own free gales, Blowing on our thousand sails.

"Boldly, or with treacherous art, Strike the blood-wrought chain apart; Break the Union's mighty heart;

"Work the ruin, if ye will; Pluck upon your heads an ill Which shall grow and deepen still.

"With your bondman's right arm bare, With his heart of black despair, Stand alone, if stand ye dare!

"Onward with your fell design; Dig the gulf and draw the line Fire beneath your feet the mine!

"Deeply, when the wide abyss Yawns between your land and this, Shall ye feel your helplessness.

"By the hearth, and in the bed, Shaken by a look or tread, Ye shall own a guilty dread.

"And the curse of unpaid toil, Downward through your generous soil Like a fire shall burn and spoil.

"Our bleak hills shall bud and blow, Vines our rocks shall overgrow, Plenty in our valleys flow;--

"And when vengeance clouds your skies, Hither shall ye turn your eyes, As the lost on Paradise!

"We but ask our rocky strand, Freedom's true and brother band, Freedom's strong and honest hand;

"Valleys by the slave untrod, And the Pilgrim's mountain sod, Blessed of our fathers' God!"

1844.

TO FANEUIL HALL.

Written in 1844, on reading a call by "a Massachusetts Freeman" for a meeting in Faneuil Hall of the citizens of Massachusetts, without distinction of party, opposed to the annexation of Texas, and the aggressions of South Carolina, and in favor of decisive action against slavery.

MEN! if manhood still ye claim, If the Northern pulse can thrill, Roused by wrong or stung by shame, Freely, strongly still; Let the sounds of traffic die Shut the mill-gate, leave the stall, Fling the axe and hammer by; Throng to Faneuil Hall!

Wrongs which freemen never brooked, Dangers grim and fierce as they, Which, like couching lions, looked On your fathers' way; These your instant zeal demand, Shaking with their earthquake-call Every rood of Pilgrim land, Ho, to Faneuil Hall!

From your capes and sandy bars, From your mountain-ridges cold, Through whose pines the westering stars Stoop their crowns of gold; Come, and with your footsteps wake Echoes from that holy wall; Once again, for Freedom's sake, Rock your fathers' hall!

Up, and tread beneath your feet Every cord by party spun: Let your hearts together beat As the heart of one. Banks and tariffs, stocks and trade, Let them rise or let them fall: Freedom asks your common aid,-- Up, to Faneuil Hall!

Up, and let each voice that speaks Ring from thence to Southern plains, Sharply as the blow which breaks Prison-bolts and chains! Speak as well becomes the free Dreaded more than steel or ball, Shall your calmest utterance be, Heard from Faneuil Hall!

Have they wronged us? Let us then Render back nor threats nor prayers; Have they chained our free-born men? Let us unchain theirs! Up, your banner leads the van, Blazoned, "Liberty for all!"

Finish what your sires began! Up, to Faneuil Hall!

TO MASSACHUSETTS.

WHAT though around thee blazes No fiery rallying sign? From all thy own high places, Give heaven the light of thine! What though unthrilled, unmoving, The statesman stand apart, And comes no warm approving From Mammon's crowded mart?

Still, let the land be shaken By a summons of thine own! By all save truth forsaken, Stand fast with that alone! Shrink not from strife unequal! With the best is always hope; And ever in the sequel God holds the right side up!

But when, with thine uniting, Come voices long and loud, And far-off hills are writing Thy fire-words on the cloud; When from Penobscot's fountains A deep response is heard, And across the Western mountains Rolls back thy rallying word;

Shall thy line of battle falter, With its allies just in view? Oh, by hearth and holy altar, My fatherland, be true! Fling abroad thy scrolls of Freedom Speed them onward far and fast Over hill and valley speed them, Like the sibyl's on the blast!

Lo! the Empire State is shaking The shackles from her hand; With the rugged North is waking The level sunset land! On they come, the free battalions East and West and North they come, And the heart-beat of the millions Is the beat of Freedom's drum.

"To the tyrant's plot no favor No heed to place-fed knaves! Bar and bolt the door forever Against the land of slaves!" Hear it, mother Earth, and hear it, The heavens above us spread! The land is roused,--its spirit Was sleeping, but not dead!

1844.

NEW HAMPSHIRE.

GOD bless New Hampshire! from her granite peaks Once more the voice of Stark and Langdon speaks. The long-bound vassal of the exulting South For very shame her self-forged chain has broken; Torn the black seal of slavery from her mouth, And in the clear tones of her old time spoken! Oh, all undreamed-of, all unhoped-for changes The tyrant's ally proves his sternest foe; To all his biddings, from her mountain ranges, New Hampshire thunders an indignant No! Who is it now despairs? Oh, faint of heart, Look upward to those Northern mountains cold, Flouted by Freedom's victor-flag unrolled, And gather strength to bear a manlier part All is not lost. The angel of God's blessing Encamps with Freedom on the field of fight; Still to her banner, day by day, are pressing, Unlooked-for allies, striking for the right Courage, then, Northern hearts! Be firm, be true: What one brave State hath done, can ye not also do?

1845.

THE PINE-TREE.

Written on hearing that the Anti-Slavery Resolves of Stephen C. Phillips had been rejected by the Whig Convention in Faneuil Hall, in 1846.

LIFT again the stately emblem on the Bay State's rusted shield, Give to Northern winds the Pine-Tree on our banner's tattered field. Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board, Answering England's royal missive with a firm, "Thus saith the Lord!" Rise again for home and freedom! set the battle in array! What the fathers did of old time we their sons must do to-day.

Tell us not of banks and tariffs, cease your paltry pedler cries; Shall the good State sink her honor that your gambling stocks may rise? Would ye barter man for cotton? That your gains may sum up higher, Must we kiss the feet of Moloch, pass our children through the fire? Is the dollar only real? God and truth and right a dream? Weighed against your lying ledgers must our manhood kick the beam?

O my God! for that free spirit, which of old in Boston town Smote the Province House with terror, struck the crest of Andros down! For another strong-voiced Adams in the city's streets to cry, "Up for God and Massachusetts! Set your feet on Mammon's lie! Perish banks and perish traffic, spin your cotton's latest pound, But in Heaven's name keep your honor, keep the heart o' the Bay State sound!" Where's the man for Massachusetts! Where's the voice to speak her free? Where's the hand to light up bonfires from her mountains to the sea? Beats her Pilgrim pulse no longer? Sits she dumb in her despair? Has she none to break the silence? Has she none to do and dare? O my God! for one right worthy to lift up her rusted shield, And to plant again the Pine-Tree in her banner's tattered field

1840.

TO A SOUTHERN STATESMAN.

John C. Calhoun, who had strongly urged the extension of slave territory by the annexation of Texas, even if it should involve a war with England, was unwilling to promote the acquisition of Oregon, which would enlarge the Northern domain of freedom, and pleaded as an excuse the peril of foreign complications which he had defied when the interests of slavery were involved.

Is this thy voice whose treble notes of fear Wail in the wind? And dost thou shake to hear, Actieon-like, the bay of thine own hounds, Spurning the leash, and leaping o'er their bounds? Sore-baffled statesman! when thy eager hand, With game afoot, unslipped the hungry pack, To hunt down Freedom in her chosen land, Hadst thou no fear, that, erelong, doubling back, These dogs of thine might snuff on Slavery's track? Where's now the boast, which even thy guarded tongue, Cold, calm, and proud, in the teeth o' the Senate flung,

O'er the fulfilment of thy baleful plan, Like Satan's triumph at the fall of man? How stood'st thou then, thy feet on Freedom planting, And pointing to the lurid heaven afar, Whence all could see, through the south windows slanting, Crimson as blood, the beams of that Lone Star! The Fates are just; they give us but our own; Nemesis ripens what our hands have sown. There is an Eastern story, not unknown, Doubtless, to thee, of one whose magic skill Called demons up his water-jars to fill; Deftly and silently, they did his will, But, when the task was done, kept pouring still. In vain with spell and charm the wizard wrought, Faster and faster were the buckets brought, Higher and higher rose the flood around, Till the fiends clapped their hands above their master drowned So, Carolinian, it may prove with thee, For God still overrules man's schemes, and takes Craftiness in its self-set snare, and makes The wrath of man to praise Him. It may be, That the roused spirits of Democracy May leave to freer States the same wide door Through which thy slave-cursed Texas entered in, From out the blood and fire, the wrong and sin, Of the stormed-city and the ghastly plain, Beat by hot hail, and wet with bloody rain, The myriad-handed pioneer may pour, And the wild West with the roused North combine And heave the engineer of evil with his mine.

1846.

AT WASHINGTON.

Suggested by a visit to the city of Washington, in the 12th month of 1845.

WITH a cold and wintry noon-light On its roofs and steeples shed, Shadows weaving with the sunlight From the gray sky overhead, Broadly, vaguely, all around me, lies the half-built town outspread.

Through this broad street, restless ever, Ebbs and flows a human tide, Wave on wave a living river; Wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.

Underneath yon dome, whose coping Springs above them, vast and tall, Grave men in the dust are groping For the largess, base and small, Which the hand of Power is scattering, crumbs which from its table fall.

Base of heart! They vilely barter Honor's wealth for party's place; Step by step on Freedom's charter Leaving footprints of disgrace; For to-day's poor pittance turning from the great hope of their race.

Yet, where festal lamps are throwing Glory round the dancer's hair, Gold-tressed, like an angel's, flowing Backward on the sunset air; And the low quick pulse of music beats its measure sweet and rare.

There to-night shall woman's glances, Star-like, welcome give to them; Fawning fools with shy advances Seek to touch their garments' hem, With the tongue of flattery glozing deeds which God and Truth condemn.

From this glittering lie my vision Takes a broader, sadder range, Full before me have arisen Other pictures dark and strange; From the parlor to the prison must the scene and witness change.

Hark! the heavy gate is swinging On its hinges, harsh and slow; One pale prison lamp is flinging On a fearful group below Such a light as leaves to terror whatsoe'er it does not show.

Pitying God! Is that a woman On whose wrist the shackles clash? Is that shriek she utters human, Underneath the stinging lash? Are they men whose eyes of madness from that sad procession flash?

Still the dance goes gayly onward What is it to Wealth and Pride That without the stars are looking On a scene which earth should hide? That the slave-ship lies in waiting, rocking on Potomac's tide!

Vainly to that mean Ambition Which, upon a rival's fall, Winds above its old condition, With a reptile's slimy crawl, Shall the pleading voice of sorrow, shall the slave in anguish call.

Vainly to the child of Fashion, Giving to ideal woe Graceful luxury of compassion, Shall the stricken mourner go; Hateful seems the earnest sorrow, beautiful the hollow show!

Nay, my words are all too sweeping: In this crowded human mart, Feeling is not dead, but sleeping; Man's strong will and woman's heart, In the coming strife for Freedom, yet shall bear their generous part.

And from yonder sunny valleys, Southward in the distance lost, Freedom yet shall summon allies Worthier than the North can boast, With the Evil by their hearth-stones grappling at severer cost.

Now, the soul alone is willing Faint the heart and weak the knee; And as yet no lip is thrilling With the mighty words, "Be Free!" Tarrieth long the land's Good Angel, but his advent is to be!

Meanwhile, turning from the revel To the prison-cell my sight, For intenser hate of evil, For a keener sense of right, Shaking off thy dust, I thank thee, City of the Slaves, to-night!

"To thy duty now and ever! Dream no more of rest or stay Give to Freedom's great endeavor All thou art and hast to-day:" Thus, above the city's murmur, saith a Voice, or seems to say.

Ye with heart and vision gifted To discern and love the right,

Whose worn faces have been lifted To the slowly-growing light, Where from Freedom's sunrise drifted slowly back the murk of night

Ye who through long years of trial Still have held your purpose fast, While a lengthening shade the dial from the westering sunshine cast, And of hope each hour's denial seemed an echo of the last!

O my brothers! O my sisters Would to God that ye were near, Gazing with me down the vistas Of a sorrow strange and drear; Would to God that ye were listeners to the Voice I seem to hear!

With the storm above us driving, With the false earth mined below, Who shall marvel if thus striving We have counted friend as foe; Unto one another giving in the darkness blow for blow.

Well it may be that our natures Have grown sterner and more hard, And the freshness of their features Somewhat harsh and battle-scarred, And their harmonies of feeling overtasked and rudely jarred.

Be it so. It should not swerve us From a purpose true and brave; Dearer Freedom's rugged service Than the pastime of the slave; Better is the storm above it than the quiet of the grave.

Let us then, uniting, bury All our idle feuds in dust, And to future conflicts carry Mutual faith and common trust; Always he who most forgiveth in his brother is most just.

From the eternal shadow rounding All our sun and starlight here, Voices of our lost ones sounding Bid us be of heart and cheer, Through the silence, down the spaces, falling on the inward ear.

Know we not our dead are looking Downward with a sad surprise, All our strife of words rebuking With their mild and loving eyes? Shall we grieve the holy angels? Shall we cloud their blessed skies?

Let us draw their mantles o'er us Which have fallen in our way; Let us do the work before us, Cheerly, bravely, while we may, Ere the long night-silence cometh, and with us it is not day!

THE BRANDED HAND.

Captain Jonathan Walker, of Harwich, Mass., was solicited by several fugitive slaves at Pensacola, Florida, to carry them in his vessel to the British West Indies. Although well aware of the great hazard of the enterprise he attempted to comply with the request, but was seized at sea by an American vessel, consigned to the authorities at Key West, and thence sent back to Pensacola, where, after a long and rigorous confinement in prison, he was tried and sentenced to be branded on his right hand with the letters "S.S." (slave-stealer) and amerced in a heavy fine.

WELCOME home again, brave seaman! with thy thoughtful brow and gray, And the old heroic spirit of our earlier, better day; With that front of calm endurance, on whose steady nerve in vain Pressed the iron of the prison, smote the fiery shafts of pain.

Is the tyrant's brand upon thee? Did the brutal cravens aim To make God's truth thy falsehood, His holiest work thy shame? When, all blood-quenched, from the torture the iron was withdrawn, How laughed their evil angel the baffled fools to scorn!

They change to wrong the duty which God hath written out On the great heart of humanity, too legible for doubt! They, the loathsome moral lepers, blotched from footsole up to crown, Give to shame what God hath given unto honor and renown!

Why, that brand is highest honor! than its traces never yet Upon old armorial hatchments was a prouder blazon set; And thy unborn generations, as they tread our rocky strand, Shall tell with pride the story of their father's branded hand!

As the Templar home was welcome, bearing back- from Syrian wars The scars of Arab lances and of Paynim scimitars, The pallor of the prison, and the shackle's crimson span, So we meet thee, so we greet thee, truest friend of God and man.

He suffered for the ransom of the dear Redeemer's grave, Thou for His living presence in the bound and bleeding slave; He for a soil no longer by the feet of angels trod, Thou for the true Shechinah, the present home of God.

For, while the jurist, sitting with the slave-whip o'er him swung, From the tortured truths of freedom the lie of slavery wrung, And the solemn priest to Moloch, on each God- deserted shrine, Broke the bondman's heart for bread, poured the bondman's blood for wine;

While the multitude in blindness to a far-off Saviour knelt, And spurned, the while, the temple where a present Saviour dwelt; Thou beheld'st Him in the task-field, in the prison shadows dim, And thy mercy to the bondman, it was mercy unto Him!

In thy lone and long night-watches, sky above and wave below, Thou didst learn a higher wisdom than the babbling schoolmen know; God's stars and silence taught thee, as His angels only can, That the one sole sacred thing beneath the cope of heaven is Man!

That he who treads profanely on the scrolls of law and creed, In the depth of God's great goodness may find mercy in his need; But woe to him who crushes the soul with chain and rod, And herds with lower natures the awful form of God!

Then lift that manly right-hand, bold ploughman of the wave! Its branded palm shall prophesy, "Salvation to the Slave!" Hold up its fire-wrought language, that whoso reads may feel His heart swell strong within him, his sinews change to steel.

Hold it up before our sunshine, up against our Northern air; Ho! men of Massachusetts, for the love of God, look there! Take it henceforth for your standard, like the Bruce's heart of yore, In the dark strife closing round ye, let that hand be seen before!

And the masters of the slave-land shall tremble at that sign, When it points its finger Southward along the Puritan line Can the craft of State avail them? Can a Christless church withstand, In the van of Freedom's onset, the coming of that band?

1846.

THE FREED ISLANDS.

Written for the anniversary celebration of the first of August, at Milton, 7846.

A FEW brief years have passed away Since Britain drove her million slaves Beneath the tropic's fiery ray God willed their freedom; and to-day Life blooms above those island graves!

He spoke! across the Carib Sea, We heard the clash of breaking chains, And felt the heart-throb of the free, The first, strong pulse of liberty Which thrilled along the bondman's veins.

Though long delayed, and far, and slow, The Briton's triumph shall be ours Wears slavery here a prouder brow Than that which twelve short years ago Scowled darkly from her island bowers?

Mighty alike for good or ill With mother-land, we fully share The Saxon strength, the nerve of steel, The tireless energy of will, The power to do, the pride to dare.

What she has done can we not do? Our hour and men are both at hand; The blast which Freedom's angel blew O'er her green islands, echoes through Each valley of our forest land.

Hear it, old Europe! we have sworn The death of slavery. When it falls, Look to your vassals in their turn, Your poor dumb millions, crushed and worn, Your prisons and your palace walls!

O kingly mockers! scoffing show What deeds in Freedom's name we do; Yet know that every taunt ye throw Across the waters, goads our slow Progression towards the right and true.

Not always shall your outraged poor, Appalled by democratic crime, Grind as their fathers ground before; The hour which sees our prison door Swing wide shall be their triumph time.

On then, my brothers! every blow Ye deal is felt the wide earth through; Whatever here uplifts the low Or humbles Freedom's hateful foe, Blesses the Old World through the New.

Take heart! The promised hour draws near; I hear the downward beat of wings, And Freedom's trumpet sounding clear "Joy to the people! woe and fear To new-world tyrants, old-world kings!"

A LETTER.

Supposed to be written by the chairman of the "Central Clique" at Concord, N. H., to the Hon. M. N., Jr., at Washington, giving the result of the election. The following verses were published in the Boston Chronotype in 1846. They refer to the contest in New Hampshire, which resulted in the defeat of the pro-slavery Democracy, and in the election of John P. Hale to the United States Senate. Although their authorship was not acknowledged, it was strongly suspected. They furnish a specimen of the way, on the whole rather good-natured, in which the liberty-lovers of half a century ago answered the social and political outlawry and mob violence to which they were subjected.

'T is over, Moses! All is lost I hear the bells a-ringing; Of Pharaoh and his Red Sea host I hear the Free-Wills singing (4) We're routed, Moses, horse and foot, If there be truth in figures, With Federal Whigs in hot pursuit, And Hale, and all the "niggers."

Alack! alas! this month or more We've felt a sad foreboding; Our very dreams the burden bore Of central cliques exploding; Before our eyes a furnace shone, Where heads of dough were roasting, And one we took to be your own The traitor Hale was toasting!

Our Belknap brother (5) heard with awe The Congo minstrels playing; At Pittsfield Reuben Leavitt (6) saw The ghost of Storrs a-praying; And Calroll's woods were sad to see, With black-winged crows a-darting; And Black Snout looked on Ossipee, New-glossed with Day and Martin.

We thought the "Old Man of the Notch" His face seemed changing wholly-- His lips seemed thick; his nose seemed flat; His misty hair looked woolly; And Coos teamsters, shrieking, fled From the metamorphosed figure. "Look there!" they said, "the Old Stone Head Himself is turning nigger!"

The schoolhouse, out of Canaan hauled Seemed turning on its track again, And like a great swamp-turtle crawled To Canaan village back again, Shook off the mud and settled flat Upon its underpinning; A nigger on its ridge-pole sat, From ear to ear a-grinning.

Gray H----d heard o' nights the sound Of rail-cars onward faring; Right over Democratic ground The iron horse came tearing. A flag waved o'er that spectral train, As high as Pittsfield steeple; Its emblem was a broken chain; Its motto: "To the people!"

I dreamed that Charley took his bed, With Hale for his physician; His daily dose an old "unread And unreferred" petition. (8) There Hayes and Tuck as nurses sat, As near as near could be, man; They leeched him with the "Democrat;" They blistered with the "Freeman."

Ah! grisly portents! What avail Your terrors of forewarning? We wake to find the nightmare Hale Astride our breasts at morning! From Portsmouth lights to Indian stream Our foes their throats are trying; The very factory-spindles seem To mock us while they're flying.

The hills have bonfires; in our streets Flags flout us in our faces; The newsboys, peddling off their sheets, Are hoarse with our disgraces. In vain we turn, for gibing wit And shoutings follow after, As if old Kearsarge had split His granite sides with laughter.

What boots it that we pelted out The anti-slavery women, (9) And bravely strewed their hall about With tattered lace and trimming? Was it for such a sad reverse Our mobs became peacemakers, And kept their tar and wooden horse For Englishmen and Quakers?

For this did shifty Atherton Make gag rules for the Great House? Wiped we for this our feet upon Petitions in our State House? Plied we for this our axe of doom, No stubborn traitor sparing, Who scoffed at our opinion loom, And took to homespun wearing?

Ah, Moses! hard it is to scan These crooked providences, Deducing from the wisest plan The saddest consequences! Strange that, in trampling as was meet The nigger-men's petition, We sprang a mine beneath our feet Which opened up perdition.

How goodly, Moses, was the game In which we've long been actors, Supplying freedom with the name And slavery with the practice Our smooth words fed the people's mouth, Their ears our party rattle; We kept them headed to the South, As drovers do their cattle.

But now our game of politics The world at large is learning; And men grown gray in all our tricks State's evidence are turning. Votes and preambles subtly spun They cram with meanings louder, And load the Democratic gun With abolition powder.

The ides of June! Woe worth the day When, turning all things over, The traitor Hale shall make his hay From Democratic clover! Who then shall take him in the law, Who punish crime so flagrant? Whose hand shall serve, whose pen shall draw, A writ against that "vagrant"?

Alas! no hope is left us here, And one can only pine for The envied place of overseer Of slaves in Carolina! Pray, Moses, give Calhoun the wink, And see what pay he's giving! We've practised long enough, we think, To know the art of driving.

And for the faithful rank and file, Who know their proper stations, Perhaps it may be worth their while To try the rice plantations. Let Hale exult, let Wilson scoff, To see us southward scamper; The slaves, we know, are "better off Than laborers in New Hampshire!"

LINES FROM A LETTER TO A YOUNG CLERICAL FRIEND.

A STRENGTH Thy service cannot tire, A faith which doubt can never dim, A heart of love, a lip of fire, O Freedom's God! be Thou to him!

Speak through him words of power and fear, As through Thy prophet bards of old, And let a scornful people hear Once more Thy Sinai-thunders rolled.

For lying lips Thy blessing seek, And hands of blood are raised to Thee, And On Thy children, crushed and weak, The oppressor plants his kneeling knee.

Let then, O God! Thy servant dare Thy truth in all its power to tell, Unmask the priestly thieves, and tear The Bible from the grasp of hell!

From hollow rite and narrow span Of law and sect by Thee released, Oh, teach him that the Christian man Is holier than the Jewish priest.

Chase back the shadows, gray and old, Of the dead ages, from his way, And let his hopeful eyes behold The dawn of Thy millennial day;

That day when fettered limb and mind Shall know the truth which maketh free, And he alone who loves his kind Shall, childlike, claim the love of Thee!

DANIEL NEALL.

Dr. Neall, a worthy disciple of that venerated philanthropist, Warner Mifflin, whom the Girondist statesman, Jean Pierre Brissot, pronounced "an angel of mercy, the best man he ever knew," was one of the noble band of Pennsylvania abolitionists, whose bravery was equalled only by their gentleness and tenderness. He presided at the great anti-slavery meeting in Pennsylvania Hall, May 17, 1838, when the Hall was surrounded by a furious mob. I was standing near him while the glass of the windows broken by missiles showered over him, and a deputation from the rioters forced its way to the platform, and demanded that the meeting should be closed at once. Dr. Neall drew up his tall form to its utmost height. "I am here," he said, "the president of this meeting, and I will be torn in pieces before I leave my place at your dictation. Go back to those who sent you. I shall do my duty." Some years after, while visiting his relatives in his native State of Delaware, he was dragged from the house of his friends by a mob of slave-holders and brutally maltreated. He bore it like a martyr of the old times; and when released, told his persecutors that he forgave them, for it was not they but Slavery which had done the wrong. If they should ever be in Philadelphia and needed hospitality or aid, let them call on him.

I. FRIEND of the Slave, and yet the friend of all; Lover of peace, yet ever foremost when The need of battling Freedom called for men To plant the banner on the outer wall; Gentle and kindly, ever at distress Melted to more than woman's tenderness, Yet firm and steadfast, at his duty's post Fronting the violence of a maddened host, Like some gray rock from which the waves are tossed! Knowing his deeds of love, men questioned not The faith of one whose walk and word were right; Who tranquilly in Life's great task-field wrought, And, side by side with evil, scarcely caught A stain upon his pilgrim garb of white Prompt to redress another's wrong, his own Leaving to Time and Truth and Penitence alone.

II. Such was our friend. Formed on the good old plan, A true and brave and downright honest man He blew no trumpet in the market-place, Nor in the church with hypocritic face Supplied with cant the lack of Christian grace; Loathing pretence, he did with cheerful will What others talked of while their hands were still; And, while "Lord, Lord!" the pious tyrants cried, Who, in the poor, their Master crucified, His daily prayer, far better understood In acts than words, was simply doing good. So calm, so constant was his rectitude, That by his loss alone we know its worth, And feel how true a man has walked with us on earth.

6th, 6th month, 1846.

SONG OF SLAVES IN THE DESERT.

"Sebah, Oasis of Fezzan, 10th March, 1846.--This evening the female slaves were unusually excited in singing, and I had the curiosity to ask my negro servant, Said, what they were singing about. As many of them were natives of his own country, he had no difficulty in translating the Mandara or Bornou language. I had often asked the Moors to translate their songs for me, but got no satisfactory account from them. Said at first said, 'Oh, they sing of Rubee' (God). 'What do you mean?' I replied, impatiently. 'Oh, don't you know?' he continued, 'they asked God to give them their Atka?' (certificate of freedom). I inquired, 'Is that all?' Said: 'No; they say, "Where are we going? The world is large. O God! Where are we going? O God!"' I inquired, 'What else?' Said: 'They remember their country, Bornou, and say, "Bornou was a pleasant country, full of all good things; but this is a bad country, and we are miserable!"' 'Do they say anything else?' Said: 'No; they repeat these words over and over again, and add, "O God! give us our Atka, and let us return again to our dear home."'

"I am not surprised I got little satisfaction when I asked the Moors about the songs of their slaves. Who will say that the above words are not a very appropriate song? What could have been more congenially adapted to their then woful condition? It is not to be wondered at that these poor bondwomen cheer up their hearts, in their long, lonely, and painful wanderings over the desert, with words and sentiments like these; but I have often observed that their fatigue and sufferings were too great for them to strike up this melancholy dirge, and many days their plaintive strains never broke over the silence of the desert."-- Richardson's Journal in Africa.

WHERE are we going? where are we going, Where are we going, Rubee? Lord of peoples, lord of lands, Look across these shining sands, Through the furnace of the noon, Through the white light of the moon. Strong the Ghiblee wind is blowing, Strange and large the world is growing! Speak and tell us where we are going, Where are we going, Rubee?

Bornou land was rich and good, Wells of water, fields of food, Dourra fields, and bloom of bean, And the palm-tree cool and green Bornou land we see no longer, Here we thirst and here we hunger, Here the Moor-man smites in anger Where are we going, Rubee?

When we went from Bornou land, We were like the leaves and sand, We were many, we are few; Life has one, and death has two Whitened bones our path are showing, Thou All-seeing, thou All-knowing Hear us, tell us, where are we going, Where are we going, Rubee?

Moons of marches from our eyes Bornou land behind us lies; Stranger round us day by day Bends the desert circle gray; Wild the waves of sand are flowing, Hot the winds above them blowing,-- Lord of all things! where are we going? Where are we going, Rubee?

We are weak, but Thou art strong; Short our lives, but Thine is long; We are blind, but Thou hast eyes; We are fools, but Thou art wise! Thou, our morrow's pathway knowing Through the strange world round us growing, Hear us, tell us where are we going, Where are we going, Rubee?

1847.

TO DELAWARE.

Written during the discussion in the Legislature of that State, in the winter of 1846-47, of a bill for the abolition of slavery.

THRICE welcome to thy sisters of the East, To the strong tillers of a rugged home, With spray-wet locks to Northern winds released, And hardy feet o'erswept by ocean's foam; And to the young nymphs of the golden West, Whose harvest mantles, fringed with prairie bloom, Trail in the sunset,--O redeemed and blest, To the warm welcome of thy sisters come! Broad Pennsylvania, down her sail-white bay Shall give thee joy, and Jersey from her plains, And the great lakes, where echo, free alway, Moaned never shoreward with the clank of chains, Shall weave new sun-bows in their tossing spray, And all their waves keep grateful holiday. And, smiling on thee through her mountain rains, Vermont shall bless thee; and the granite peaks, And vast Katahdin o'er his woods, shall wear Their snow-crowns brighter in the cold, keen air; And Massachusetts, with her rugged cheeks O'errun with grateful tears, shall turn to thee, When, at thy bidding, the electric wire Shall tremble northward with its words of fire; Glory and praise to God! another State is free!

1847.

YORKTOWN.

Dr. Thacher, surgeon in Scammel's regiment, in his description of the siege of Yorktown, says: "The labor on the Virginia plantations is performed altogether by a species of the human race cruelly wrested from their native country, and doomed to perpetual bondage, while their masters are manfully contending for freedom and the natural rights of man. Such is the inconsistency of human nature." Eighteen hundred slaves were found at Yorktown, after its surrender, and restored to their masters. Well was it said by Dr. Barnes, in his late work on Slavery: "No slave was any nearer his freedom after the surrender of Yorktown than when Patrick Henry first taught the notes of liberty to echo among the hills and vales of Virginia."

FROM Yorktown's ruins, ranked and still, Two lines stretch far o'er vale and hill Who curbs his steed at head of one? Hark! the low murmur: Washington! Who bends his keen, approving glance, Where down the gorgeous line of France Shine knightly star and plume of snow? Thou too art victor, Rochambeau! The earth which bears this calm array Shook with the war-charge yesterday,

Ploughed deep with hurrying hoof and wheel, Shot-sown and bladed thick with steel; October's clear and noonday sun Paled in the breath-smoke of the gun, And down night's double blackness fell, Like a dropped star, the blazing shell.

Now all is hushed: the gleaming lines Stand moveless as the neighboring pines; While through them, sullen, grim, and slow, The conquered hosts of England go O'Hara's brow belies his dress, Gay Tarleton's troop rides bannerless: Shout, from thy fired and wasted homes, Thy scourge, Virginia, captive comes!

Nor thou alone; with one glad voice Let all thy sister States rejoice; Let Freedom, in whatever clime She waits with sleepless eye her time, Shouting from cave and mountain wood Make glad her desert solitude, While they who hunt her quail with fear; The New World's chain lies broken here!

But who are they, who, cowering, wait Within the shattered fortress gate? Dark tillers of Virginia's soil, Classed with the battle's common spoil, With household stuffs, and fowl, and swine, With Indian weed and planters' wine, With stolen beeves, and foraged corn,-- Are they not men, Virginian born?

Oh, veil your faces, young and brave! Sleep, Scammel, in thy soldier grave Sons of the Northland, ye who set Stout hearts against the bayonet, And pressed with steady footfall near The moated battery's blazing tier, Turn your scarred faces from the sight, Let shame do homage to the right!

Lo! fourscore years have passed; and where The Gallic bugles stirred the air, And, through breached batteries, side by side, To victory stormed the hosts allied, And brave foes grounded, pale with pain, The arms they might not lift again, As abject as in that old day The slave still toils his life away.

Oh, fields still green and fresh in story, Old days of pride, old names of glory, Old marvels of the tongue and pen, Old thoughts which stirred the hearts of men, Ye spared the wrong; and over all Behold the avenging shadow fall! Your world-wide honor stained with shame,-- Your freedom's self a hollow name!

Where's now the flag of that old war? Where flows its stripe? Where burns its star? Bear witness, Palo Alto's day, Dark Vale of Palms, red Monterey, Where Mexic Freedom, young and weak, Fleshes the Northern eagle's beak; Symbol of terror and despair, Of chains and slaves, go seek it there!

Laugh, Prussia, midst thy iron ranks Laugh, Russia, from thy Neva's banks! Brave sport to see the fledgling born Of Freedom by its parent torn! Safe now is Speilberg's dungeon cell, Safe drear Siberia's frozen hell With Slavery's flag o'er both unrolled, What of the New World fears the Old?

1847.

RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE.

O MOTHER EARTH! upon thy lap Thy weary ones receiving, And o'er them, silent as a dream, Thy grassy mantle weaving, Fold softly in thy long embrace That heart so worn and broken, And cool its pulse of fire beneath Thy shadows old and oaken.

Shut out from him the bitter word And serpent hiss of scorning; Nor let the storms of yesterday Disturb his quiet morning. Breathe over him forgetfulness Of all save deeds of kindness, And, save to smiles of grateful eyes, Press down his lids in blindness.

There, where with living ear and eye He heard Potomac's flowing, And, through his tall ancestral trees, Saw autumn's sunset glowing, He sleeps, still looking to the west, Beneath the dark wood shadow, As if he still would see the sun Sink down on wave and meadow.

Bard, Sage, and Tribune! in himself All moods of mind contrasting,-- The tenderest wail of human woe, The scorn like lightning blasting; The pathos which from rival eyes Unwilling tears could summon, The stinging taunt, the fiery burst Of hatred scarcely human!

Mirth, sparkling like a diamond shower, From lips of life-long sadness; Clear picturings of majestic thought Upon a ground of madness; And over all Romance and Song A classic beauty throwing, And laurelled Clio at his side Her storied pages showing.

All parties feared him: each in turn Beheld its schemes disjointed, As right or left his fatal glance And spectral finger pointed. Sworn foe of Cant, he smote it down With trenchant wit unsparing, And, mocking, rent with ruthless hand The robe Pretence was wearing.

Too honest or too proud to feign A love he never cherished, Beyond Virginia's border line His patriotism perished. While others hailed in distant skies Our eagle's dusky pinion, He only saw the mountain bird Stoop o'er his Old Dominion!

Still through each change of fortune strange, Racked nerve, and brain all burning, His loving faith in Mother-land Knew never shade of turning; By Britain's lakes, by Neva's tide, Whatever sky was o'er him, He heard her rivers' rushing sound, Her blue peaks rose before him.

He held his slaves, yet made withal No false and vain pretences, Nor paid a lying priest to seek For Scriptural defences. His harshest words of proud rebuke, His bitterest taunt and scorning, Fell fire-like on the Northern brow That bent to him in fawning.

He held his slaves; yet kept the while His reverence for the Human; In the dark vassals of his will He saw but Man and Woman! No hunter of God's outraged poor His Roanoke valley entered; No trader in the souls of men Across his threshold ventured.

And when the old and wearied man Lay down for his last sleeping, And at his side, a slave no more, His brother-man stood weeping, His latest thought, his latest breath, To Freedom's duty giving, With failing tengue and trembling hand The dying blest the living.

Oh, never bore his ancient State A truer son or braver None trampling with a calmer scorn On foreign hate or favor. He knew her faults, yet never stooped His proud and manly feeling To poor excuses of the wrong Or meanness of concealing.

But none beheld with clearer eye The plague-spot o'er her spreading, None heard more sure the steps of Doom Along her future treading. For her as for himself he spake, When, his gaunt frame upbracing, He traced with dying hand "Remorse!" And perished in the tracing.

As from the grave where Henry sleeps, From Vernon's weeping willow, And from the grassy pall which hides The Sage of Monticello, So from the leaf-strewn burial-stone Of Randolph's lowly dwelling, Virginia! o'er thy land of slaves A warning voice is swelling!

And hark! from thy deserted fields Are sadder warnings spoken, From quenched hearths, where thy exiled sons Their household gods have broken. The curse is on thee,--wolves for men, And briers for corn-sheaves giving Oh, more than all thy dead renown Were now one hero living

1847.

THE LOST STATESMAN.

Written on hearing of the death of Silas Wright of New York.

As they who, tossing midst the storm at night, While turning shoreward, where a beacon shone, Meet the walled blackness of the heaven alone, So, on the turbulent waves of party tossed, In gloom and tempest, men have seen thy light Quenched in the darkness. At thy hour of noon, While life was pleasant to thy undimmed sight, And, day by day, within thy spirit grew A holier hope than young Ambition knew, As through thy rural quiet, not in vain, Pierced the sharp thrill of Freedom's cry of pain, Man of the millions, thou art lost too soon Portents at which the bravest stand aghast,-- The birth-throes of a Future, strange and vast, Alarm the land; yet thou, so wise and strong, Suddenly summoned to the burial bed, Lapped in its slumbers deep and ever long, Hear'st not the tumult surging overhead. Who now shall rally Freedom's scattering host? Who wear the mantle of the leader lost? Who stay the march of slavery? He whose voice Hath called thee from thy task-field shall not lack Yet bolder champions, to beat bravely back The wrong which, through his poor ones, reaches Him: Yet firmer hands shall Freedom's torchlights trim, And wave them high across the abysmal black, Till bound, dumb millions there shall see them and rejoice.

10th mo., 1847.

THE SLAVES OF MARTINIQUE.

Suggested by a daguerreotype taken from a small French engraving of two negro figures, sent to the writer by Oliver Johnson.

BEAMS of noon, like burning lances, through the tree-tops flash and glisten, As she stands before her lover, with raised face to look and listen.

Dark, but comely, like the maiden in the ancient Jewish song Scarcely has the toil of task-fields done her graceful beauty wrong.

He, the strong one and the manly, with the vassal's garb and hue, Holding still his spirit's birthright, to his higher nature true;

Hiding deep the strengthening purpose of a freeman in his heart, As the gregree holds his Fetich from the white man's gaze apart.

Ever foremost of his comrades, when the driver's morning horn Calls away to stifling mill-house, to the fields of cane and corn.

Fall the keen and burning lashes never on his back or limb; Scarce with look or word of censure, turns the driver unto him.

Yet, his brow is always thoughtful, and his eye is hard and stern; Slavery's last and humblest lesson he has never deigned to learn.

And, at evening, when his comrades dance before their master's door, Folding arms and knitting forehead, stands he silent evermore.

God be praised for every instinct which rebels against a lot Where the brute survives the human, and man's upright form is not!

As the serpent-like bejuco winds his spiral fold on fold Round the tall and stately ceiba, till it withers in his hold;

Slow decays the forest monarch, closer girds the fell embrace, Till the tree is seen no longer, and the vine is in its place;

So a base and bestial nature round the vassal's manhood twines, And the spirit wastes beneath it, like the ceiba choked with vines.

God is Love, saith the Evangel; and our world of woe and sin Is made light and happy only when a Love is shining in.

Ye whose lives are free as sunshine, finding, where- soe'er ye roam, Smiles of welcome, looks of kindness, making all the world like home;

In the veins of whose affections kindred blood is but a part., Of one kindly current throbbing from the universal heart;

Can ye know the deeper meaning of a love in Slavery nursed, Last flower of a lost Eden, blooming in that Soil accursed?

Love of Home, and Love of Woman!--dear to all, but doubly dear To the heart whose pulses elsewhere measure only hate and fear.

All around the desert circles, underneath a brazen sky, Only one green spot remaining where the dew is never dry!

From the horror of that desert, from its atmosphere of hell, Turns the fainting spirit thither, as the diver seeks his bell.

'T is the fervid tropic noontime; faint and low the sea-waves beat; Hazy rise the inland mountains through the glimmer of the heat,--

Where, through mingled leaves and blossoms, arrowy sunbeams flash and glisten, Speaks her lover to the slave-girl, and she lifts her head to listen:--

"We shall live as slaves no longer! Freedom's hour is close at hand! Rocks her bark upon the waters, rests the boat upon the strand!

"I have seen the Haytien Captain; I have seen his swarthy crew, Haters of the pallid faces, to their race and color true.

"They have sworn to wait our coming till the night has passed its noon, And the gray and darkening waters roll above the sunken moon!"

Oh, the blessed hope of freedom! how with joy and glad surprise, For an instant throbs her bosom, for an instant beam her eyes!

But she looks across the valley, where her mother's hut is seen, Through the snowy bloom of coffee, and the lemon- leaves so green.

And she answers, sad and earnest: "It were wrong for thee to stay; God hath heard thy prayer for freedom, and his finger points the way.

"Well I know with what endurance, for the sake of me and mine, Thou hast borne too long a burden never meant for souls like thine.

"Go; and at the hour of midnight, when our last farewell is o'er, Kneeling on our place of parting, I will bless thee from the shore.

"But for me, my mother, lying on her sick-bed all the day, Lifts her weary head to watch me, coming through the twilight gray.

"Should I leave her sick and helpless, even freedom, shared with thee, Would be sadder far than bondage, lonely toil, and stripes to me.

"For my heart would die within me, and my brain would soon be wild; I should hear my mother calling through the twilight for her child!"

Blazing upward from the ocean, shines the sun of morning-time, Through the coffee-trees in blossom, and green hedges of the lime.

Side by side, amidst the slave-gang, toil the lover and the maid; Wherefore looks he o'er the waters, leaning forward on his spade?

Sadly looks he, deeply sighs he: 't is the Haytien's sail he sees, Like a white cloud of the mountains, driven seaward by the breeze.

But his arm a light hand presses, and he hears a low voice call Hate of Slavery, hope of Freedom, Love is mightier than all.

1848.

THE CURSE OF THE CHARTER-BREAKERS.

The rights and liberties affirmed by Magna Charta were deemed of such importance, in the thirteenth century, that the Bishops, twice a year, with tapers burning, and in their pontifical robes, pronounced, in the presence of the king and the representatives of the estates of England, the greater excommunication against the infringer of that instrument. The imposing ceremony took place in the great Hall of Westminster. A copy of the curse, as pronounced in 1253, declares that, "by the authority of Almighty God, and the blessed Apostles and Martyrs, and all the saints in heaven, all those who violate the English liberties, and secretly or openly, by deed, word, or counsel, do make statutes, or observe then being made, against said liberties, are accursed and sequestered from the company of heaven and the sacraments of the Holy Church."

William Penn, in his admirable political pamphlet, England's Present Interest Considered, alluding to the curse of the Charter- breakers, says: "I am no Roman Catholic, and little value their other curses; yet I declare I would not for the world incur this curse, as every man deservedly doth, who offers violence to the fundamental freedom thereby repeated and confirmed."

IN Westminster's royal halls, Robed in their pontificals, England's ancient prelates stood For the people's right and good. Closed around the waiting crowd, Dark and still, like winter's cloud; King and council, lord and knight, Squire and yeoman, stood in sight; Stood to hear the priest rehearse, In God's name, the Church's curse, By the tapers round them lit, Slowly, sternly uttering it.

"Right of voice in framing laws, Right of peers to try each cause; Peasant homestead, mean and small, Sacred as the monarch's hall,--

"Whoso lays his hand on these, England's ancient liberties; Whoso breaks, by word or deed, England's vow at Runnymede;

"Be he Prince or belted knight, Whatsoe'er his rank or might, If the highest, then the worst, Let him live and die accursed.

"Thou, who to Thy Church hast given Keys alike, of hell and heaven, Make our word and witness sure, Let the curse we speak endure!"

Silent, while that curse was said, Every bare and listening head Bowed in reverent awe, and then All the people said, Amen!

Seven times the bells have tolled, For the centuries gray and old, Since that stoled and mitred band Cursed the tyrants of their land.

Since the priesthood, like a tower, Stood between the poor and power; And the wronged and trodden down Blessed the abbot's shaven crown.

Gone, thank God, their wizard spell, Lost, their keys of heaven and hell; Yet I sigh for men as bold As those bearded priests of old.

Now, too oft the priesthood wait At the threshold of the state; Waiting for the beck and nod Of its power as law and God.

Fraud exults, while solemn words Sanctify his stolen hoards; Slavery laughs, while ghostly lips Bless his manacles and whips.

Not on them the poor rely, Not to them looks liberty, Who with fawning falsehood cower To the wrong, when clothed with power.

Oh, to see them meanly cling, Round the master, round the king, Sported with, and sold and bought,-- Pitifuller sight is not!

Tell me not that this must be God's true priest is always free; Free, the needed truth to speak, Right the wronged, and raise the weak.

Not to fawn on wealth and state, Leaving Lazarus at the gate; Not to peddle creeds like wares; Not to mutter hireling prayers;

Nor to paint the new life's bliss On the sable ground of this; Golden streets for idle knave, Sabbath rest for weary slave!

Not for words and works like these, Priest of God, thy mission is; But to make earth's desert glad, In its Eden greenness clad;

And to level manhood bring Lord and peasant, serf and king; And the Christ of God to find In the humblest of thy kind!

Thine to work as well as pray, Clearing thorny wrongs away; Plucking up the weeds of sin, Letting heaven's warm sunshine in;

Watching on the hills of Faith; Listening what the spirit saith, Of the dim-seen light afar, Growing like a nearing star.

God's interpreter art thou, To the waiting ones below; 'Twixt them and its light midway Heralding the better day;

Catching gleams of temple spires, Hearing notes of angel choirs, Where, as yet unseen of them, Comes the New Jerusalem!

Like the seer of Patmos gazing, On the glory downward blazing; Till upon Earth's grateful sod Rests the City of our God!

1848.

PAEAN.

This poem indicates the exultation of the anti-slavery party in view of the revolt of the friends of Martin Van Buren in New York, from the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1848.

Now, joy and thanks forevermore! The dreary night has wellnigh passed, The slumbers of the North are o'er, The Giant stands erect at last!

More than we hoped in that dark time When, faint with watching, few and worn, We saw no welcome day-star climb The cold gray pathway of the morn!

O weary hours! O night of years! What storms our darkling pathway swept, Where, beating back our thronging fears, By Faith alone our march we kept.

How jeered the scoffing crowd behind, How mocked before the tyrant train, As, one by one, the true and kind Fell fainting in our path of pain!

They died, their brave hearts breaking slow, But, self-forgetful to the last, In words of cheer and bugle blow Their breath upon the darkness passed.

A mighty host, on either hand, Stood waiting for the dawn of day To crush like reeds our feeble band; The morn has come, and where are they?

Troop after troop their line forsakes; With peace-white banners waving free, And from our own the glad shout breaks, Of Freedom and Fraternity!

Like mist before the growing light, The hostile cohorts melt away; Our frowning foemen of the night Are brothers at the dawn of day.

As unto these repentant ones We open wide our toil-worn ranks, Along our line a murmur runs Of song, and praise, and grateful thanks.

Sound for the onset! Blast on blast! Till Slavery's minions cower and quail; One charge of fire shall drive them fast Like chaff before our Northern gale!

O prisoners in your house of pain, Dumb, toiling millions, bound and sold, Look! stretched o'er Southern vale and plain, The Lord's delivering hand behold!

Above the tyrant's pride of power, His iron gates and guarded wall, The bolts which shattered Shinar's tower Hang, smoking, for a fiercer fall.

Awake! awake! my Fatherland! It is thy Northern light that shines; This stirring march of Freedom's band The storm-song of thy mountain pines.

Wake, dwellers where the day expires! And hear, in winds that sweep your lakes And fan your prairies' roaring fires, The signal-call that Freedom makes!

1848.

THE CRISIS.

Written on learning the terms of the treaty with Mexico.

ACROSS the Stony Mountains, o'er the desert's drouth and sand, The circles of our empire touch the western ocean's strand; From slumberous Timpanogos, to Gila, wild and free, Flowing down from Nuevo-Leon to California's sea; And from the mountains of the east, to Santa Rosa's shore, The eagles of Mexitli shall beat the air no more.

O Vale of Rio Bravo! Let thy simple children weep; Close watch about their holy fire let maids of Pecos keep; Let Taos send her cry across Sierra Madre's pines, And Santa Barbara toll her bells amidst her corn and vines; For lo! the pale land-seekers come, with eager eyes of gain, Wide scattering, like the bison herds on broad Salada's plain.

Let Sacramento's herdsmen heed what sound the winds bring down Of footsteps on the crisping snow, from cold Nevada's crown! Full hot and fast the Saxon rides, with rein of travel slack, And, bending o'er his saddle, leaves the sunrise at his back; By many a lonely river, and gorge of fir and pine, On many a wintry hill-top, his nightly camp-fires shine.

O countrymen and brothers! that land of lake and plain, Of salt wastes alternating with valleys fat with grain; Of mountains white with winter, looking downward, cold, serene, On their feet with spring-vines tangled and lapped in softest green; Swift through whose black volcanic gates, o'er many a sunny vale, Wind-like the Arapahoe sweeps the bison's dusty trail!

Great spaces yet untravelled, great lakes whose mystic shores The Saxon rifle never heard, nor dip of Saxon oars; Great herds that wander all unwatched, wild steeds that none have tamed, Strange fish in unknown streams, and birds the Saxon never named; Deep mines, dark mountain crucibles, where Nature's chemic powers Work out the Great Designer's will; all these ye say are ours!

Forever ours! for good or ill, on us the burden lies; God's balance, watched by angels, is hung across the skies. Shall Justice, Truth, and Freedom turn the poised and trembling scale? Or shall the Evil triumph, and robber Wrong prevail? Shall the broad land o'er which our flag in starry splendor waves, Forego through us its freedom, and bear the tread of slaves?

The day is breaking in the East of which the prophets told, And brightens up the sky of Time the Christian Age of Gold; Old Might to Right is yielding, battle blade to clerkly pen, Earth's monarchs are her peoples, and her serfs stand up as men;

The isles rejoice together, in a day are nations born, And the slave walks free in Tunis, and by Stamboul's Golden Horn!

Is this, O countrymen of mine! a day for us to sow The soil of new-gained empire with slavery's seeds of woe? To feed with our fresh life-blood the Old World's cast-off crime, Dropped, like some monstrous early birth, from the tired lap of Time? To run anew the evil race the old lost nations ran, And die like them of unbelief of God, and wrong of man?

Great Heaven! Is this our mission? End in this the prayers and tears, The toil, the strife, the watchings of our younger, better years? Still as the Old World rolls in light, shall ours in shadow turn, A beamless Chaos, cursed of God, through outer darkness borne? Where the far nations looked for light, a black- ness in the air? Where for words of hope they listened, the long wail of despair?

The Crisis presses on us; face to face with us it stands, With solemn lips of question, like the Sphinx in Egypt's sands! This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin; This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin; Even now from starry Gerizim, or Ebal's cloudy crown, We call the dews of blessing or the bolts of cursing down!

By all for which the martyrs bore their agony and shame; By all the warning words of truth with which the prophets came; By the Future which awaits us; by all the hopes which cast Their faint and trembling beams across the black- ness of the Past; And by the blessed thought of Him who for Earth's freedom died, O my people! O my brothers! let us choose the righteous side.

So shall the Northern pioneer go joyful on his way; To wed Penobseot's waters to San Francisco's bay; To make the rugged places smooth, and sow the vales with grain; And bear, with Liberty and Law, the Bible in his train The mighty West shall bless the East, and sea shall answer sea, And mountain unto mountain call, Praise God, for we are free

1845.

LINES ON THE PORTRAIT OF A CELEBRATED PUBLISHER.

A pleasant print to peddle out In lands of rice and cotton; The model of that face in dough Would make the artist's fortune. For Fame to thee has come unsought, While others vainly woo her, In proof how mean a thing can make A great man of its doer.

To whom shall men thyself compare, Since common models fail 'em, Save classic goose of ancient Rome, Or sacred ass of Balaam? The gabble of that wakeful goose Saved Rome from sack of Brennus; The braying of the prophet's ass Betrayed the angel's menace!

So when Guy Fawkes, in petticoats, And azure-tinted hose oil, Was twisting from thy love-lorn sheets The slow-match of explosion-- An earthquake blast that would have tossed The Union as a feather, Thy instinct saved a perilled land And perilled purse together.

Just think of Carolina's sage Sent whirling like a Dervis, Of Quattlebum in middle air Performing strange drill-service! Doomed like Assyria's lord of old, Who fell before the Jewess, Or sad Abimelech, to sigh, "Alas! a woman slew us!"

Thou saw'st beneath a fair disguise The danger darkly lurking, And maiden bodice dreaded more Than warrior's steel-wrought jerkin. How keen to scent the hidden plot! How prompt wert thou to balk it, With patriot zeal and pedler thrift, For country and for pocket!

Thy likeness here is doubtless well, But higher honor's due it; On auction-block and negro-jail Admiring eyes should view it. Or, hung aloft, it well might grace The nation's senate-chamber-- A greedy Northern bottle-fly Preserved in Slavery's amber!

1850.

DERNE.

The storming of the city of Derne, in 1805, by General Eaton, at the head of nine Americans, forty Greeks, and a motley array of Turks and Arabs, was one of those feats of hardihood and daring which have in all ages attracted the admiration of the multitude. The higher and holier heroism of Christian self-denial and sacrifice, in the humble walks of private duty, is seldom so well appreciated.

NIGHT on the city of the Moor! On mosque and tomb, and white-walled shore, On sea-waves, to whose ceaseless knock The narrow harbor-gates unlock, On corsair's galley, carack tall, And plundered Christian caraval! The sounds of Moslem life are still; No mule-bell tinkles down the hill; Stretched in the broad court of the khan, The dusty Bornou caravan Lies heaped in slumber, beast and man; The Sheik is dreaming in his tent, His noisy Arab tongue o'erspent; The kiosk's glimmering lights are gone, The merchant with his wares withdrawn; Rough pillowed on some pirate breast, The dancing-girl has sunk to rest; And, save where measured footsteps fall Along the Bashaw's guarded wall, Or where, like some bad dream, the Jew Creeps stealthily his quarter through, Or counts with fear his golden heaps, The City of the Corsair sleeps.

But where yon prison long and low Stands black against the pale star-glow, Chafed by the ceaseless wash of waves, There watch and pine the Christian slaves; Rough-bearded men, whose far-off wives Wear out with grief their lonely lives; And youth, still flashing from his eyes The clear blue of New England skies, A treasured lock of whose soft hair Now wakes some sorrowing mother's prayer; Or, worn upon some maiden breast, Stirs with the loving heart's unrest.

A bitter cup each life must drain, The groaning earth is cursed with pain, And, like the scroll the angel bore The shuddering Hebrew seer before, O'erwrit alike, without, within, With all the woes which follow sin; But, bitterest of the ills beneath Whose load man totters down to death, Is that which plucks the regal crown Of Freedom from his forehead down, And snatches from his powerless hand The sceptred sign of self-command, Effacing with the chain and rod The image and the seal of God; Till from his nature, day by day, The manly virtues fall away, And leave him naked, blind and mute, The godlike merging in the brute!

Why mourn the quiet ones who die Beneath affection's tender eye, Unto their household and their kin Like ripened corn-sheaves gathered in? O weeper, from that tranquil sod, That holy harvest-home of God, Turn to the quick and suffering, shed Thy tears upon the living dead Thank God above thy dear ones' graves, They sleep with Him, they are not slaves.

What dark mass, down the mountain-sides Swift-pouring, like a stream divides? A long, loose, straggling caravan, Camel and horse and armed man. The moon's low crescent, glimmering o'er Its grave of waters to the shore, Lights tip that mountain cavalcade, And gleams from gun and spear and blade Near and more near! now o'er them falls The shadow of the city walls. Hark to the sentry's challenge, drowned In the fierce trumpet's charging sound! The rush of men, the musket's peal, The short, sharp clang of meeting steel!

Vain, Moslem, vain thy lifeblood poured So freely on thy foeman's sword! Not to the swift nor to the strong The battles of the right belong; For he who strikes for Freedom wears The armor of the captive's prayers, And Nature proffers to his cause The strength of her eternal laws; While he whose arm essays to bind And herd with common brutes his kind Strives evermore at fearful odds With Nature and the jealous gods, And dares the dread recoil which late Or soon their right shall vindicate.

'T is done, the horned crescent falls The star-flag flouts the broken walls Joy to the captive husband! joy To thy sick heart, O brown-locked boy! In sullen wrath the conquered Moor Wide open flings your dungeon-door, And leaves ye free from cell and chain, The owners of yourselves again. Dark as his allies desert-born, Soiled with the battle's stain, and worn With the long marches of his band Through hottest wastes of rock and sand, Scorched by the sun and furnace-breath Of the red desert's wind of death, With welcome words and grasping hands, The victor and deliverer stands!

The tale is one of distant skies; The dust of half a century lies Upon it; yet its hero's name Still lingers on the lips of Fame. Men speak the praise of him who gave Deliverance to the Moorman's slave, Yet dare to brand with shame and crime The heroes of our land and time,-- The self-forgetful ones, who stake Home, name, and life for Freedom's sake. God mend his heart who cannot feel The impulse of a holy zeal, And sees not, with his sordid eyes, The beauty of self-sacrifice Though in the sacred place he stands, Uplifting consecrated hands, Unworthy are his lips to tell Of Jesus' martyr-miracle, Or name aright that dread embrace Of suffering for a fallen race!

1850.

A SABBATH SCENE.

This poem finds its justification in the readiness with which, even in the North, clergymen urged the prompt execution of the Fugitive Slave Law as a Christian duty, and defended the system of slavery as a Bible institution.

SCARCE had the solemn Sabbath-bell Ceased quivering in the steeple, Scarce had the parson to his desk Walked stately through his people, When down the summer-shaded street A wasted female figure, With dusky brow and naked feet,

Came rushing wild and eager. She saw the white spire through the trees, She heard the sweet hymn swelling O pitying Christ! a refuge give That poor one in Thy dwelling!

Like a scared fawn before the hounds, Right up the aisle she glided, While close behind her, whip in hand, A lank-haired hunter strided.

She raised a keen and bitter cry, To Heaven and Earth appealing; Were manhood's generous pulses dead? Had woman's heart no feeling?

A score of stout hands rose between The hunter and the flying: Age clenched his staff, and maiden eyes Flashed tearful, yet defying.

"Who dares profane this house and day?" Cried out the angry pastor. "Why, bless your soul, the wench's a slave, And I'm her lord and master!

"I've law and gospel on my side, And who shall dare refuse me?" Down came the parson, bowing low, "My good sir, pray excuse me!

"Of course I know your right divine To own and work and whip her; Quick, deacon, throw that Polyglott Before the wench, and trip her!"

Plump dropped the holy tome, and o'er Its sacred pages stumbling, Bound hand and foot, a slave once more, The hapless wretch lay trembling.

I saw the parson tie the knots, The while his flock addressing, The Scriptural claims of slavery With text on text impressing.

"Although," said he, "on Sabbath day All secular occupations Are deadly sins, we must fulfil Our moral obligations:

"And this commends itself as one To every conscience tender; As Paul sent back Onesimus, My Christian friends, we send her!"

Shriek rose on shriek,--the Sabbath air Her wild cries tore asunder; I listened, with hushed breath, to hear God answering with his thunder!

All still! the very altar's cloth Had smothered down her shrieking, And, dumb, she turned from face to face, For human pity seeking!

I saw her dragged along the aisle, Her shackles harshly clanking; I heard the parson, over all, The Lord devoutly thanking!

My brain took fire: "Is this," I cried, "The end of prayer and preaching? Then down with pulpit, down with priest, And give us Nature's teaching!

"Foul shame and scorn be on ye all Who turn the good to evil, And steal the Bible, from the Lord, To give it to the Devil!

"Than garbled text or parchment law I own a statute higher; And God is true, though every book And every man's a liar!"

Just then I felt the deacon's hand In wrath my coattail seize on; I heard the priest cry, "Infidel!" The lawyer mutter, "Treason!"

I started up,--where now were church, Slave, master, priest, and people? I only heard the supper-bell, Instead of clanging steeple.

But, on the open window's sill, O'er which the white blooms drifted, The pages of a good old Book The wind of summer lifted,

And flower and vine, like angel wings Around the Holy Mother, Waved softly there, as if God's truth And Mercy kissed each other.

And freely from the cherry-bough Above the casement swinging, With golden bosom to the sun, The oriole was singing.

As bird and flower made plain of old The lesson of the Teacher, So now I heard the written Word Interpreted by Nature.

For to my ear methought the breeze Bore Freedom's blessed word on; Thus saith the Lord: Break every yoke, Undo the heavy burden

1850.

IN THE EVIL DAYS.

This and the four following poems have special reference to that darkest hour in the aggression of slavery which preceded the dawn of a better day, when the conscience of the people was roused to action.

THE evil days have come, the poor Are made a prey; Bar up the hospitable door, Put out the fire-lights, point no more The wanderer's way.

For Pity now is crime; the chain Which binds our States Is melted at her hearth in twain, Is rusted by her tears' soft rain Close up her gates.

Our Union, like a glacier stirred By voice below, Or bell of kine, or wing of bird, A beggar's crust, a kindly word May overthrow!

Poor, whispering tremblers! yet we boast Our blood and name; Bursting its century-bolted frost, Each gray cairn on the Northman's coast Cries out for shame!

Oh for the open firmament, The prairie free, The desert hillside, cavern-rent, The Pawnee's lodge, the Arab's tent, The Bushman's tree!

Than web of Persian loom most rare, Or soft divan, Better the rough rock, bleak and bare, Or hollow tree, which man may share With suffering man.

I hear a voice: "Thus saith the Law, Let Love be dumb; Clasping her liberal hands in awe, Let sweet-lipped Charity withdraw From hearth and home."

I hear another voice: "The poor Are thine to feed; Turn not the outcast from thy door, Nor give to bonds and wrong once more Whom God hath freed."

Dear Lord! between that law and Thee No choice remains; Yet not untrue to man's decree, Though spurning its rewards, is he Who bears its pains.

Not mine Sedition's trumpet-blast And threatening word; I read the lesson of the Past, That firm endurance wins at last More than the sword.

O clear-eyed Faith, and Patience thou So calm and strong! Lend strength to weakness, teach us how The sleepless eyes of God look through This night of wrong.

1850.

MOLOCH IN STATE STREET.

In a foot-note of the Report of the Senate of Massachusetts on the case of the arrest and return to bondage of the fugitive slave Thomas Sims it is stated that--"It would have been impossible for the U. S. marshal thus successfully to have resisted the law of the State, without the assistance of the municipal authorities of Boston, and the countenance and support of a numerous, wealthy, and powerful body of citizens. It was in evidence that 1500 of the most wealthy and respectable citizens-merchants, bankers, and others--volunteered their services to aid the marshal on this occasion. . . . No watch was kept upon the doings of the marshal, and while the State officers slept, after the moon had gone down, in the darkest hour before daybreak, the accused was taken out of our jurisdiction by the armed police of the city of Boston."

THE moon has set: while yet the dawn Breaks cold and gray, Between the midnight and the morn Bear off your prey!

On, swift and still! the conscious street Is panged and stirred; Tread light! that fall of serried feet The dead have heard!

The first drawn blood of Freedom's veins Gushed where ye tread; Lo! through the dusk the martyr-stains Blush darkly red!

Beneath the slowly waning stars And whitening day, What stern and awful presence bars That sacred way?

What faces frown upon ye, dark With shame and pain? Come these from Plymouth's Pilgrim bark? Is that young Vane?

Who, dimly beckoning, speed ye on With mocking cheer? Lo! spectral Andros, Hutchinson, And Gage are here!

For ready mart or favoring blast Through Moloch's fire, Flesh of his flesh, unsparing, passed The Tyrian sire.

Ye make that ancient sacrifice Of Mail to Gain, Your traffic thrives, where Freedom dies, Beneath the chain.

Ye sow to-day; your harvest, scorn And hate, is near; How think ye freemen, mountain-born, The tale will hear?

Thank God! our mother State can yet Her fame retrieve; To you and to your children let The scandal cleave.

Chain Hall and Pulpit, Court and Press, Make gods of gold; Let honor, truth, and manliness Like wares be sold.

Your hoards are great, your walls are strong, But God is just; The gilded chambers built by wrong Invite the rust.

What! know ye not the gains of Crime Are dust and dross; Its ventures on the waves of time Foredoomed to loss!

And still the Pilgrim State remains What she hath been; Her inland hills, her seaward plains, Still nurture men!

Nor wholly lost the fallen mart; Her olden blood Through many a free and generous heart Still pours its flood.

That brave old blood, quick-flowing yet, Shall know no check, Till a free people's foot is set On Slavery's neck.

Even now, the peal of bell and gun, And hills aflame, Tell of the first great triumph won In Freedom's name. (10)

The long night dies: the welcome gray Of dawn we see; Speed up the heavens thy perfect day, God of the free!

1851.

OFFICIAL PIETY.

Suggested by reading a state paper, wherein the higher law is invoked to sustain the lower one.

A Pious magistrate! sound his praise throughout The wondering churches. Who shall henceforth doubt That the long-wished millennium draweth nigh? Sin in high places has become devout, Tithes mint, goes painful-faced, and prays its lie Straight up to Heaven, and calls it piety! The pirate, watching from his bloody deck The weltering galleon, heavy with the gold Of Acapulco, holding death in check While prayers are said, brows crossed, and beads are told; The robber, kneeling where the wayside cross On dark Abruzzo tells of life's dread loss From his own carbine, glancing still abroad For some new victim, offering thanks to God! Rome, listening at her altars to the cry Of midnight Murder, while her hounds of hell Scour France, from baptized cannon and holy bell And thousand-throated priesthood, loud and high, Pealing Te Deums to the shuddering sky, "Thanks to the Lord, who giveth victory!" What prove these, but that crime was ne'er so black As ghostly cheer and pious thanks to lack? Satan is modest. At Heaven's door he lays His evil offspring, and, in Scriptural phrase And saintly posture, gives to God the praise And honor of the monstrous progeny. What marvel, then, in our own time to see His old devices, smoothly acted o'er,-- Official piety, locking fast the door Of Hope against three million soups of men,-- Brothers, God's children, Christ's redeemed,--and then, With uprolled eyeballs and on bended knee, Whining a prayer for help to hide the key!

1853.

THE RENDITION.

On the 2d of June, 1854, Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave from Virginia, after being under arrest for ten days in the Boston Court House, was remanded to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act, and taken down State Street to a steamer chartered by the United States Government, under guard of United States troops and artillery, Massachusetts militia and Boston police. Public excitement ran high, a futile attempt to rescue Burns having been made during his confinement, and the streets were crowded with tens of thousands of people, of whom many came from other towns and cities of the State to witness the humiliating spectacle.

I HEARD the train's shrill whistle call, I saw an earnest look beseech, And rather by that look than speech My neighbor told me all.

And, as I thought of Liberty Marched handcuffed down that sworded street, The solid earth beneath my feet Reeled fluid as the sea.

I felt a sense of bitter loss,-- Shame, tearless grief, and stifling wrath, And loathing fear, as if my path A serpent stretched across.

All love of home, all pride of place, All generous confidence and trust, Sank smothering in that deep disgust And anguish of disgrace.

Down on my native hills of June, And home's green quiet, hiding all, Fell sudden darkness like the fall Of midnight upon noon.

And Law, an unloosed maniac, strong, Blood-drunken, through the blackness trod, Hoarse-shouting in the ear of God The blasphemy of wrong.

"O Mother, from thy memories proud, Thy old renown, dear Commonwealth, Lend this dead air a breeze of health, And smite with stars this cloud.

"Mother of Freedom, wise and brave, Rise awful in thy strength," I said; Ah me! I spake but to the dead; I stood upon her grave!

6th mo., 1854.

ARISEN AT LAST.

On the passage of the bill to protect the rights and liberties of the people of the State against the Fugitive Slave Act.

I SAID I stood upon thy grave, My Mother State, when last the moon Of blossoms clomb the skies of June.

And, scattering ashes on my head, I wore, undreaming of relief, The sackcloth of thy shame and grief.

Again that moon of blossoms shines On leaf and flower and folded wing, And thou hast risen with the spring!

Once more thy strong maternal arms Are round about thy children flung,-- A lioness that guards her young!

No threat is on thy closed lips, But in thine eye a power to smite The mad wolf backward from its light.

Southward the baffled robber's track Henceforth runs only; hereaway, The fell lycanthrope finds no prey.

Henceforth, within thy sacred gates, His first low howl shall downward draw The thunder of thy righteous law.

Not mindless of thy trade and gain, But, acting on the wiser plan, Thou'rt grown conservative of man.

So shalt thou clothe with life the hope, Dream-painted on the sightless eyes Of him who sang of Paradise,--

The vision of a Christian man, In virtue, as in stature great Embodied in a Christian State.

And thou, amidst thy sisterhood Forbearing long, yet standing fast, Shalt win their grateful thanks at last;

When North and South shall strive no more, And all their feuds and fears be lost In Freedom's holy Pentecost.

6th mo., 1855.

THE HASCHISH.

OF all that Orient lands can vaunt Of marvels with our own competing, The strangest is the Haschish plant, And what will follow on its eating.

What pictures to the taster rise, Of Dervish or of Almeh dances! Of Eblis, or of Paradise, Set all aglow with Houri glances!

The poppy visions of Cathay, The heavy beer-trance of the Suabian; The wizard lights and demon play Of nights Walpurgis and Arabian!

The Mollah and the Christian dog Change place in mad metempsychosis; The Muezzin climbs the synagogue, The Rabbi shakes his beard at Moses!

The Arab by his desert well Sits choosing from some Caliph's daughters, And hears his single camel's bell Sound welcome to his regal quarters.

The Koran's reader makes complaint Of Shitan dancing on and off it; The robber offers alms, the saint Drinks Tokay and blasphemes the Prophet.

Such scenes that Eastern plant awakes; But we have one ordained to beat it, The Haschish of the West, which makes Or fools or knaves of all who eat it.

The preacher eats, and straight appears His Bible in a new translation; Its angels negro overseers, And Heaven itself a snug plantation!

The man of peace, about whose dreams The sweet millennial angels cluster, Tastes the mad weed, and plots and schemes, A raving Cuban filibuster!

The noisiest Democrat, with ease, It turns to Slavery's parish beadle; The shrewdest statesman eats and sees Due southward point the polar needle.

The Judge partakes, and sits erelong Upon his bench a railing blackguard; Decides off-hand that right is wrong, And reads the ten commandments backward.

O potent plant! so rare a taste Has never Turk or Gentoo gotten; The hempen Haschish of the East Is powerless to our Western Cotton!

1854.

FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS' SAKE.

Inscribed to friends under arrest for treason against the slave power.

THE age is dull and mean. Men creep, Not walk; with blood too pale and tame To pay the debt they owe to shame; Buy cheap, sell dear; eat, drink, and sleep Down-pillowed, deaf to moaning want; Pay tithes for soul-insurance; keep Six days to Mammon, one to Cant.

In such a time, give thanks to God, That somewhat of the holy rage With which the prophets in their age On all its decent seemings trod, Has set your feet upon the lie, That man and ox and soul and clod Are market stock to sell and buy!

The hot words from your lips, my own, To caution trained, might not repeat; But if some tares among the wheat Of generous thought and deed were sown, No common wrong provoked your zeal; The silken gauntlet that is thrown In such a quarrel rings like steel.

The brave old strife the fathers saw For Freedom calls for men again Like those who battled not in vain For England's Charter, Alfred's law; And right of speech and trial just Wage in your name their ancient war With venal courts and perjured trust.

God's ways seem dark, but, soon or late, They touch the shining hills of day; The evil cannot brook delay, The good can well afford to wait. Give ermined knaves their hour of crime; Ye have the future grand and great, The safe appeal of Truth to Time!

1855.

THE KANSAS EMIGRANTS.

This poem and the three following were called out by the popular movement of Free State men to occupy the territory of Kansas, and by the use of the great democratic weapon--an over-powering majority--to settle the conflict on that ground between Freedom and Slavery. The opponents of the movement used another kind of weapon.

WE cross the prairie as of old The pilgrims crossed the sea, To make the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free!

We go to rear a wall of men On Freedom's southern line, And plant beside the cotton-tree The rugged Northern pine!

We're flowing from our native hills As our free rivers flow; The blessing of our Mother-land Is on us as we go.

We go to plant her common schools, On distant prairie swells, And give the Sabbaths of the wild The music of her bells.

Upbearing, like the Ark of old, The Bible in our van, We go to test the truth of God Against the fraud of man.

No pause, nor rest, save where the streams That feed the Kansas run, Save where our Pilgrim gonfalon Shall flout the setting sun.

We'll tread the prairie as of old Our fathers sailed the sea, And make the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free!

1854.

LETTER FROM A MISSIONARY OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH SOUTH,

IN KANSAS, TO A DISTINGUISHED POLITICIAN.

DOUGLAS MISSION, August, 1854,

LAST week--the Lord be praised for all His mercies To His unworthy servant!--I arrived Safe at the Mission, via Westport; where I tarried over night, to aid in forming A Vigilance Committee, to send back, In shirts of tar, and feather-doublets quilted With forty stripes save one, all Yankee comers, Uncircumcised and Gentile, aliens from The Commonwealth of Israel, who despise The prize of the high calling of the saints, Who plant amidst this heathen wilderness Pure gospel institutions, sanctified By patriarchal use. The meeting opened With prayer, as was most fitting. Half an hour, Or thereaway, I groaned, and strove, and wrestled, As Jacob did at Penuel, till the power Fell on the people, and they cried 'Amen!' "Glory to God!" and stamped and clapped their hands; And the rough river boatmen wiped their eyes; "Go it, old hoss!" they cried, and cursed the niggers-- Fulfilling thus the word of prophecy, "Cursed be Cannan." After prayer, the meeting Chose a committee--good and pious men-- A Presbyterian Elder, Baptist deacon, A local preacher, three or four class-leaders, Anxious inquirers, and renewed backsliders, A score in all--to watch the river ferry, (As they of old did watch the fords of Jordan,) And cut off all whose Yankee tongues refuse The Shibboleth of the Nebraska bill. And then, in answer to repeated calls, I gave a brief account of what I saw In Washington; and truly many hearts Rejoiced to know the President, and you And all the Cabinet regularly hear The gospel message of a Sunday morning, Drinking with thirsty souls of the sincere Milk of the Word. Glory! Amen, and Selah!

Here, at the Mission, all things have gone well The brother who, throughout my absence, acted As overseer, assures me that the crops Never were better. I have lost one negro, A first-rate hand, but obstinate and sullen. He ran away some time last spring, and hid In the river timber. There my Indian converts Found him, and treed and shot him. For the rest, The heathens round about begin to feel The influence of our pious ministrations And works of love; and some of them already Have purchased negroes, and are settling down As sober Christians! Bless the Lord for this! I know it will rejoice you. You, I hear, Are on the eve of visiting Chicago, To fight with the wild beasts of Ephesus, Long John, and Dutch Free-Soilers. May your arm Be clothed with strength, and on your tongue be found The sweet oil of persuasion. So desires Your brother and co-laborer. Amen!

P.S. All's lost. Even while I write these lines, The Yankee abolitionists are coming Upon us like a flood--grim, stalwart men, Each face set like a flint of Plymouth Rock Against our institutions--staking out Their farm lots on the wooded Wakarusa, Or squatting by the mellow-bottomed Kansas; The pioneers of mightier multitudes, The small rain-patter, ere the thunder shower Drowns the dry prairies. Hope from man is not. Oh, for a quiet berth at Washington, Snug naval chaplaincy, or clerkship, where These rumors of free labor and free soil Might never meet me more. Better to be Door-keeper in the White House, than to dwell Amidst these Yankee tents, that, whitening, show On the green prairie like a fleet becalmed. Methinks I hear a voice come up the river From those far bayous, where the alligators Mount guard around the camping filibusters "Shake off the dust of Kansas. Turn to Cuba-- (That golden orange just about to fall, O'er-ripe, into the Democratic lap;) Keep pace with Providence, or, as we say, Manifest destiny. Go forth and follow The message of our gospel, thither borne Upon the point of Quitman's bowie-knife, And the persuasive lips of Colt's revolvers. There may'st thou, underneath thy vine and figtree, Watch thy increase of sugar cane and negroes, Calm as a patriarch in his eastern tent!" Amen: So mote it be. So prays your friend.

BURIAL OF BARBER.

Thomas Barber was shot December 6, 1855, near Lawrence, Kansas.

BEAR him, comrades, to his grave; Never over one more brave Shall the prairie grasses weep, In the ages yet to come, When the millions in our room, What we sow in tears, shall reap.

Bear him up the icy hill, With the Kansas, frozen still As his noble heart, below, And the land he came to till With a freeman's thews and will, And his poor hut roofed with snow.

One more look of that dead face, Of his murder's ghastly trace! One more kiss, O widowed one Lay your left hands on his brow, Lift your right hands up, and vow That his work shall yet be done.

Patience, friends! The eye of God Every path by Murder trod Watches, lidless, day and night; And the dead man in his shroud, And his widow weeping loud, And our hearts, are in His sight.

Every deadly threat that swells With the roar of gambling hells, Every brutal jest and jeer, Every wicked thought and plan Of the cruel heart of man, Though but whispered, He can hear!

We in suffering, they in crime, Wait the just award of time, Wait the vengeance that is due; Not in vain a heart shall break, Not a tear for Freedom's sake Fall unheeded: God is true.

While the flag with stars bedecked Threatens where it should protect, And the Law shakes Hands with Crime, What is left us but to wait, Match our patience to our fate, And abide the better time?

Patience, friends! The human heart Everywhere shall take our part, Everywhere for us shall pray; On our side are nature's laws, And God's life is in the cause That we suffer for to-day.

Well to suffer is divine; Pass the watchword down the line, Pass the countersign: "Endure." Not to him who rashly dares, But to him who nobly bears, Is the victor's garland sure.

Frozen earth to frozen breast, Lay our slain one down to rest; Lay him down in hope and faith, And above the broken sod, Once again, to Freedom's God, Pledge ourselves for life or death,

That the State whose walls we lay, In our blood and tears, to-day, Shall be free from bonds of shame, And our goodly land untrod By the feet of Slavery, shod With cursing as with flame!

Plant the Buckeye on his grave, For the hunter of the slave In its shadow cannot rest; I And let martyr mound and tree Be our pledge and guaranty Of the freedom of the West!

1856.

TO PENNSYLVANIA.

O STATE prayer-founded! never hung Such choice upon a people's tongue, Such power to bless or ban, As that which makes thy whisper Fate, For which on thee the centuries wait, And destinies of man!

Across thy Alleghanian chain, With groanings from a land in pain, The west-wind finds its way: Wild-wailing from Missouri's flood The crying of thy children's blood Is in thy ears to-day!

And unto thee in Freedom's hour Of sorest need God gives the power To ruin or to save; To wound or heal, to blight or bless With fertile field or wilderness, A free home or a grave!

Then let thy virtue match the crime, Rise to a level with the time; And, if a son of thine Betray or tempt thee, Brutus-like For Fatherland and Freedom strike As Justice gives the sign.

Wake, sleeper, from thy dream of ease, The great occasion's forelock seize; And let the north-wind strong, And golden leaves of autumn, be Thy coronal of Victory And thy triumphal song.

10th me., 1856.

LE MARAIS DU CYGNE.

The massacre of unarmed and unoffending men, in Southern Kansas, in May, 1858, took place near the Marais du Cygne of the French voyageurs.

A BLUSH as of roses Where rose never grew! Great drops on the bunch-grass, But not of the dew! A taint in the sweet air For wild bees to shun! A stain that shall never Bleach out in the sun.

Back, steed of the prairies Sweet song-bird, fly back! Wheel hither, bald vulture! Gray wolf, call thy pack! The foul human vultures Have feasted and fled; The wolves of the Border Have crept from the dead.

From the hearths of their cabins, The fields of their corn, Unwarned and unweaponed, The victims were torn,-- By the whirlwind of murder Swooped up and swept on To the low, reedy fen-lands, The Marsh of the Swan.

With a vain plea for mercy No stout knee was crooked; In the mouths of the rifles Right manly they looked. How paled the May sunshine, O Marais du Cygne! On death for the strong life, On red grass for green!

In the homes of their rearing, Yet warm with their lives, Ye wait the dead only, Poor children and wives! Put out the red forge-fire, The smith shall not come; Unyoke the brown oxen, The ploughman lies dumb.

Wind slow from the Swan's Marsh, O dreary death-train, With pressed lips as bloodless As lips of the slain! Kiss down the young eyelids, Smooth down the gray hairs; Let tears quench the curses That burn through your prayers.

Strong man of the prairies, Mourn bitter and wild! Wail, desolate woman! Weep, fatherless child! But the grain of God springs up From ashes beneath, And the crown of his harvest Is life out of death.

Not in vain on the dial The shade moves along, To point the great contrasts Of right and of wrong: Free homes and free altars, Free prairie and flood,-- The reeds of the Swan's Marsh, Whose bloom is of blood!

On the lintels of Kansas That blood shall not dry; Henceforth the Bad Angel Shall harmless go by; Henceforth to the sunset, Unchecked on her way, Shall Liberty follow The march of the day.

THE PASS OF THE SIERRA.

ALL night above their rocky bed They saw the stars march slow; The wild Sierra overhead, The desert's death below.

The Indian from his lodge of bark, The gray bear from his den, Beyond their camp-fire's wall of dark, Glared on the mountain men.

Still upward turned, with anxious strain, Their leader's sleepless eye, Where splinters of the mountain chain Stood black against the sky.

The night waned slow: at last, a glow, A gleam of sudden fire, Shot up behind the walls of snow, And tipped each icy spire.

"Up, men!" he cried, "yon rocky cone, To-day, please God, we'll pass, And look from Winter's frozen throne On Summer's flowers and grass!"

They set their faces to the blast, They trod the eternal snow, And faint, worn, bleeding, hailed at last The promised land below.

Behind, they saw the snow-cloud tossed By many an icy horn; Before, warm valleys, wood-embossed, And green with vines and corn.

They left the Winter at their backs To flap his baffled wing, And downward, with the cataracts, Leaped to the lap of Spring.

Strong leader of that mountain band, Another task remains, To break from Slavery's desert land A path to Freedom's plains.

The winds are wild, the way is drear, Yet, flashing through the night, Lo! icy ridge and rocky spear Blaze out in morning light!

Rise up, Fremont! and go before; The hour must have its Man; Put on the hunting-shirt once more, And lead in Freedom's van! 8th mo., 1856.

A SONG FOR THE TIME.

Written in the summer of 1856, during the political campaign of the Free Soil party under the candidacy of John C. Fremont.

Up, laggards of Freedom!--our free flag is cast To the blaze of the sun and the wings of the blast; Will ye turn from a struggle so bravely begun, From a foe that is breaking, a field that's half won?

Whoso loves not his kind, and who fears not the Lord, Let him join that foe's service, accursed and abhorred Let him do his base will, as the slave only can,-- Let him put on the bloodhound, and put off the Man!

Let him go where the cold blood that creeps in his veins Shall stiffen the slave-whip, and rust on his chains; Where the black slave shall laugh in his bonds, to behold The White Slave beside him, self-fettered and sold!

But ye, who still boast of hearts beating and warm, Rise, from lake shore and ocean's, like waves in a storm, Come, throng round our banner in Liberty's name, Like winds from your mountains, like prairies aflame!

Our foe, hidden long in his ambush of night, Now, forced from his covert, stands black in the light. Oh, the cruel to Man, and the hateful to God, Smite him down to the earth, that is cursed where he trod!

For deeper than thunder of summer's loud shower, On the dome of the sky God is striking the hour! Shall we falter before what we've prayed for so long, When the Wrong is so weak, and the Right is so strong?

Come forth all together! come old and come young, Freedom's vote in each hand, and her song on each tongue; Truth naked is stronger than Falsehood in mail; The Wrong cannot prosper, the Right cannot fail.

Like leaves of the summer once numbered the foe, But the hoar-frost is falling, the northern winds blow; Like leaves of November erelong shall they fall, For earth wearies of them, and God's over all!

WHAT OF THE DAY?

Written during the stirring weeks when the great political battle for Freedom under Fremont's leadership was permitting strong hope of success,--a hope overshadowed and solemnized by a sense of the magnitude of the barbaric evil, and a forecast of the unscrupulous and desperate use of all its powers in the last and decisive struggle.

A SOUND of tumult troubles all the air, Like the low thunders of a sultry sky Far-rolling ere the downright lightnings glare; The hills blaze red with warnings; foes draw nigh, Treading the dark with challenge and reply. Behold the burden of the prophet's vision; The gathering hosts,--the Valley of Decision, Dusk with the wings of eagles wheeling o'er. Day of the Lord, of darkness and not light! It breaks in thunder and the whirlwind's roar Even so, Father! Let Thy will be done; Turn and o'erturn, end what Thou bast begun In judgment or in mercy: as for me, If but the least and frailest, let me be Evermore numbered with the truly free Who find Thy service perfect liberty! I fain would thank Thee that my mortal life Has reached the hour (albeit through care and pain) When Good and Evil, as for final strife, Close dim and vast on Armageddon's plain; And Michael and his angels once again Drive howling back the Spirits of the Night. Oh for the faith to read the signs aright And, from the angle of Thy perfect sight, See Truth's white banner floating on before; And the Good Cause, despite of venal friends, And base expedients, move to noble ends; See Peace with Freedom make to Time amends, And, through its cloud of dust, the threshing-floor, Flailed by the thunder, heaped with chaffless grain.

1856.

A SONG, INSCRIBED TO THE FREMONT CLUBS.

Written after the election in 1586, which showed the immense gains of the Free Soil party, and insured its success in 1860.

BENEATH thy skies, November! Thy skies of cloud and rain, Around our blazing camp-fires We close our ranks again. Then sound again the bugles, Call the muster-roll anew; If months have well-nigh won the field, What may not four years do?

For God be praised! New England Takes once more her ancient place; Again the Pilgrim's banner Leads the vanguard of the race. Then sound again the bugles, etc.

Along the lordly Hudson, A shout of triumph breaks; The Empire State is speaking, From the ocean to the lakes. Then sound again the bugles, etc.

The Northern hills are blazing, The Northern skies are bright; And the fair young West is turning Her forehead to the light! Then sound again the bugles, etc.

Push every outpost nearer, Press hard the hostile towers! Another Balaklava, And the Malakoff is ours! Then sound again the bugles, Call the muster-roll anew; If months have well-nigh won the field, What may not four years do?

THE PANORAMA.

"A! fredome is a nobill thing! Fredome mayse man to haif liking. Fredome all solace to man giffis; He levys at ese that frely levys A nobil hart may haif nane ese Na ellvs nocht that may him plese Gyff Fredome failythe." ARCHDEACON BARBOUR.

THROUGH the long hall the shuttered windows shed A dubious light on every upturned head; On locks like those of Absalom the fair, On the bald apex ringed with scanty hair, On blank indifference and on curious stare; On the pale Showman reading from his stage The hieroglyphics of that facial page; Half sad, half scornful, listening to the bruit Of restless cane-tap and impatient foot, And the shrill call, across the general din, "Roll up your curtain! Let the show begin!"

At length a murmur like the winds that break Into green waves the prairie's grassy lake, Deepened and swelled to music clear and loud, And, as the west-wind lifts a summer cloud, The curtain rose, disclosing wide and far A green land stretching to the evening star, Fair rivers, skirted by primeval trees And flowers hummed over by the desert bees, Marked by tall bluffs whose slopes of greenness show Fantastic outcrops of the rock below; The slow result of patient Nature's pains, And plastic fingering of her sun and rains; Arch, tower, and gate, grotesquely windowed hall, And long escarpment of half-crumbled wall, Huger than those which, from steep hills of vine, Stare through their loopholes on the travelled Rhine; Suggesting vaguely to the gazer's mind A fancy, idle as the prairie wind, Of the land's dwellers in an age unguessed; The unsung Jotuns of the mystic West.

Beyond, the prairie's sea-like swells surpass The Tartar's marvels of his Land of Grass, Vast as the sky against whose sunset shores Wave after wave the billowy greenness pours; And, onward still, like islands in that main Loom the rough peaks of many a mountain chain, Whence east and west a thousand waters run From winter lingering under summer's sun. And, still beyond, long lines of foam and sand Tell where Pacific rolls his waves a-land, From many a wide-lapped port and land-locked bay, Opening with thunderous pomp the world's highway To Indian isles of spice, and marts of far Cathay.

"Such," said the Showman, as the curtain fell, "Is the new Canaan of our Israel; The land of promise to the swarming North, Which, hive-like, sends its annual surplus forth, To the poor Southron on his worn-out soil, Scathed by the curses of unnatural toil; To Europe's exiles seeking home and rest, And the lank nomads of the wandering West, Who, asking neither, in their love of change And the free bison's amplitude of range, Rear the log-hut, for present shelter meant, Not future comfort, like an Arab's tent."

Then spake a shrewd on-looker, "Sir," said he, "I like your picture, but I fain would see A sketch of what your promised land will be When, with electric nerve, and fiery-brained, With Nature's forces to its chariot chained, The future grasping, by the past obeyed, The twentieth century rounds a new decade."

Then said the Showman, sadly: "He who grieves Over the scattering of the sibyl's leaves Unwisely mourns. Suffice it, that we know What needs must ripen from the seed we sow; That present time is but the mould wherein We cast the shapes of holiness and sin. A painful watcher of the passing hour, Its lust of gold, its strife for place and power; Its lack of manhood, honor, reverence, truth, Wise-thoughted age, and generous-hearted youth; Nor yet unmindful of each better sign, The low, far lights, which on th' horizon shine, Like those which sometimes tremble on the rim Of clouded skies when day is closing dim, Flashing athwart the purple spears of rain The hope of sunshine on the hills again I need no prophet's word, nor shapes that pass Like clouding shadows o'er a magic glass; For now, as ever, passionless and cold, Doth the dread angel of the future hold Evil and good before us, with no voice Or warning look to guide us in our choice; With spectral hands outreaching through the gloom The shadowy contrasts of the coming doom. Transferred from these, it now remains to give The sun and shade of Fate's alternative."

Then, with a burst of music, touching all The keys of thrifty life,--the mill-stream's fall, The engine's pant along its quivering rails, The anvil's ring, the measured beat of flails, The sweep of scythes, the reaper's whistled tune, Answering the summons of the bells of noon, The woodman's hail along the river shores, The steamboat's signal, and the dip of oars Slowly the curtain rose from off a land Fair as God's garden. Broad on either hand The golden wheat-fields glimmered in the sun, And the tall maize its yellow tassels spun. Smooth highways set with hedge-rows living green, With steepled towns through shaded vistas seen, The school-house murmuring with its hive-like swarm, The brook-bank whitening in the grist-mill's storm, The painted farm-house shining through the leaves Of fruited orchards bending at its eaves, Where live again, around the Western hearth, The homely old-time virtues of the North; Where the blithe housewife rises with the day, And well-paid labor counts his task a play. And, grateful tokens of a Bible free, And the free Gospel of Humanity, Of diverse-sects and differing names the shrines, One in their faith, whate'er their outward signs, Like varying strophes of the same sweet hymn From many a prairie's swell and river's brim, A thousand church-spires sanctify the air Of the calm Sabbath, with their sign of prayer.

Like sudden nightfall over bloom and green The curtain dropped: and, momently, between The clank of fetter and the crack of thong, Half sob, half laughter, music swept along; A strange refrain, whose idle words and low, Like drunken mourners, kept the time of woe; As if the revellers at a masquerade Heard in the distance funeral marches played. Such music, dashing all his smiles with tears, The thoughtful voyager on Ponchartrain hears, Where, through the noonday dusk of wooded shores The negro boatman, singing to his oars, With a wild pathos borrowed of his wrong Redeems the jargon of his senseless song. "Look," said the Showman, sternly, as he rolled His curtain upward. "Fate's reverse behold!"

A village straggling in loose disarray Of vulgar newness, premature decay; A tavern, crazy with its whiskey brawls, With "Slaves at Auction!" garnishing its walls; Without, surrounded by a motley crowd, The shrewd-eyed salesman, garrulous and loud, A squire or colonel in his pride of place, Known at free fights, the caucus, and the race, Prompt to proclaim his honor without blot, And silence doubters with a ten-pace shot, Mingling the negro-driving bully's rant With pious phrase and democratic cant, Yet never scrupling, with a filthy jest, To sell the infant from its mother's breast, Break through all ties of wedlock, home, and kin, Yield shrinking girlhood up to graybeard sin; Sell all the virtues with his human stock, The Christian graces on his auction-block, And coolly count on shrewdest bargains driven In hearts regenerate, and in souls forgiven!

Look once again! The moving canvas shows A slave plantation's slovenly repose, Where, in rude cabins rotting midst their weeds, The human chattel eats, and sleeps, and breeds; And, held a brute, in practice, as in law, Becomes in fact the thing he's taken for. There, early summoned to the hemp and corn, The nursing mother leaves her child new-born; There haggard sickness, weak and deathly faint, Crawls to his task, and fears to make complaint; And sad-eyed Rachels, childless in decay, Weep for their lost ones sold and torn away! Of ampler size the master's dwelling stands, In shabby keeping with his half-tilled lands; The gates unhinged, the yard with weeds unclean, The cracked veranda with a tipsy lean. Without, loose-scattered like a wreck adrift, Signs of misrule and tokens of unthrift; Within, profusion to discomfort joined, The listless body and the vacant mind; The fear, the hate, the theft and falsehood, born In menial hearts of toil, and stripes, and scorn There, all the vices, which, like birds obscene, Batten on slavery loathsome and unclean, From the foul kitchen to the parlor rise, Pollute the nursery where the child-heir lies, Taint infant lips beyond all after cure, With the fell poison of a breast impure; Touch boyhood's passions with the breath of flame, From girlhood's instincts steal the blush of shame. So swells, from low to high, from weak to strong, The tragic chorus of the baleful wrong; Guilty or guiltless, all within its range Feel the blind justice of its sure revenge.

Still scenes like these the moving chart reveals. Up the long western steppes the blighting steals; Down the Pacific slope the evil Fate Glides like a shadow to the Golden Gate From sea to sea the drear eclipse is thrown, From sea to sea the Mauvaises Terres have grown, A belt of curses on the New World's zone!

The curtain fell. All drew a freer breath, As men are wont to do when mournful death Is covered from their sight. The Showman stood With drooping brow in sorrow's attitude One moment, then with sudden gesture shook His loose hair back, and with the air and look Of one who felt, beyond the narrow stage And listening group, the presence of the age, And heard the footsteps of the things to be, Poured out his soul in earnest words and free.

"O friends!" he said, "in this poor trick of paint You see the semblance, incomplete and faint, Of the two-fronted Future, which, to-day, Stands dim and silent, waiting in your way. To-day, your servant, subject to your will; To-morrow, master, or for good or ill. If the dark face of Slavery on you turns, If the mad curse its paper barrier spurns, If the world granary of the West is made The last foul market of the slaver's trade, Why rail at fate? The mischief is your own. Why hate your neighbor? Blame yourselves alone!

"Men of the North! The South you charge with wrong Is weak and poor, while you are rich and strong. If questions,--idle and absurd as those The old-time monks and Paduan doctors chose,-- Mere ghosts of questions, tariffs, and dead banks, And scarecrow pontiffs, never broke your ranks, Your thews united could, at once, roll back The jostled nation to its primal track. Nay, were you simply steadfast, manly, just, True to the faith your fathers left in trust, If stainless honor outweighed in your scale A codfish quintal or a factory bale, Full many a noble heart, (and such remain In all the South, like Lot in Siddim's plain, Who watch and wait, and from the wrong's control Keep white and pure their chastity of soul,) Now sick to loathing of your weak complaints, Your tricks as sinners, and your prayers as saints, Would half-way meet the frankness of your tone, And feel their pulses beating with your own.

"The North! the South! no geographic line Can fix the boundary or the point define, Since each with each so closely interblends, Where Slavery rises, and where Freedom ends. Beneath your rocks the roots, far-reaching, hide Of the fell Upas on the Southern side; The tree whose branches in your northwinds wave Dropped its young blossoms on Mount Vernon's grave; The nursling growth of Monticello's crest Is now the glory of the free Northwest; To the wise maxims of her olden school Virginia listened from thy lips, Rantoul; Seward's words of power, and Sumner's fresh renown, Flow from the pen that Jefferson laid down! And when, at length, her years of madness o'er, Like the crowned grazer on Euphrates' shore, From her long lapse to savagery, her mouth Bitter with baneful herbage, turns the South, Resumes her old attire, and seeks to smooth Her unkempt tresses at the glass of truth, Her early faith shall find a tongue again, New Wythes and Pinckneys swell that old refrain, Her sons with yours renew the ancient pact, The myth of Union prove at last a fact! Then, if one murmur mars the wide content, Some Northern lip will drawl the last dissent, Some Union-saving patriot of your own Lament to find his occupation gone.

"Grant that the North 's insulted, scorned, betrayed, O'erreached in bargains with her neighbor made, When selfish thrift and party held the scales For peddling dicker, not for honest sales,-- Whom shall we strike? Who most deserves our blame? The braggart Southron, open in his aim, And bold as wicked, crashing straight through all That bars his purpose, like a cannon-ball? Or the mean traitor, breathing northern air, With nasal speech and puritanic hair, Whose cant the loss of principle survives, As the mud-turtle e'en its head outlives; Who, caught, chin-buried in some foul offence, Puts on a look of injured innocence, And consecrates his baseness to the cause Of constitution, union, and the laws?

"Praise to the place-man who can hold aloof His still unpurchased manhood, office-proof; Who on his round of duty walks erect, And leaves it only rich in self-respect; As More maintained his virtue's lofty port In the Eighth Henry's base and bloody court. But, if exceptions here and there are found, Who tread thus safely on enchanted ground, The normal type, the fitting symbol still Of those who fatten at the public mill, Is the chained dog beside his master's door, Or Circe's victim, feeding on all four!

"Give me the heroes who, at tuck of drum, Salute thy staff, immortal Quattlebum! Or they who, doubly armed with vote and gun, Following thy lead, illustrious Atchison, Their drunken franchise shift from scene to scene, As tile-beard Jourdan did his guillotine! Rather than him who, born beneath our skies, To Slavery's hand its supplest tool supplies; The party felon whose unblushing face Looks from the pillory of his bribe of place, And coolly makes a merit of disgrace, Points to the footmarks of indignant scorn, Shows the deep scars of satire's tossing horn; And passes to his credit side the sum Of all that makes a scoundrel's martyrdom!

"Bane of the North, its canker and its moth! These modern Esaus, bartering rights for broth! Taxing our justice, with their double claim, As fools for pity, and as knaves for blame; Who, urged by party, sect, or trade, within The fell embrace of Slavery's sphere of sin, Part at the outset with their moral sense, The watchful angel set for Truth's defence; Confound all contrasts, good and ill; reverse The poles of life, its blessing and its curse; And lose thenceforth from their perverted sight The eternal difference 'twixt the wrong and right; To them the Law is but the iron span That girds the ankles of imbruted man; To them the Gospel has no higher aim Than simple sanction of the master's claim, Dragged in the slime of Slavery's loathsome trail, Like Chalier's Bible at his ass's tail!

"Such are the men who, with instinctive dread, Whenever Freedom lifts her drooping head, Make prophet-tripods of their office-stools, And scare the nurseries and the village schools With dire presage of ruin grim and great, A broken Union and a foundered State! Such are the patriots, self-bound to the stake Of office, martyrs for their country's sake Who fill themselves the hungry jaws of Fate; And by their loss of manhood save the State. In the wide gulf themselves like Cortius throw, And test the virtues of cohesive dough; As tropic monkeys, linking heads and tails, Bridge o'er some torrent of Ecuador's vales!

"Such are the men who in your churches rave To swearing-point, at mention of the slave! When some poor parson, haply unawares, Stammers of freedom in his timid prayers; Who, if some foot-sore negro through the town Steals northward, volunteer to hunt him down. Or, if some neighbor, flying from disease, Courts the mild balsam of the Southern breeze, With hue and cry pursue him on his track, And write Free-soiler on the poor man's back. Such are the men who leave the pedler's cart, While faring South, to learn the driver's art, Or, in white neckcloth, soothe with pious aim The graceful sorrows of some languid dame, Who, from the wreck of her bereavement, saves The double charm of widowhood and slaves Pliant and apt, they lose no chance to show To what base depths apostasy can go; Outdo the natives in their readiness To roast a negro, or to mob a press; Poise a tarred schoolmate on the lyncher's rail, Or make a bonfire of their birthplace mail!

"So some poor wretch, whose lips no longer bear The sacred burden of his mother's prayer, By fear impelled, or lust of gold enticed, Turns to the Crescent from the Cross of Christ, And, over-acting in superfluous zeal, Crawls prostrate where the faithful only kneel, Out-howls the Dervish, hugs his rags to court The squalid Santon's sanctity of dirt; And, when beneath the city gateway's span Files slow and long the Meccan caravan, And through its midst, pursued by Islam's prayers, The prophet's Word some favored camel bears, The marked apostate has his place assigned The Koran-bearer's sacred rump behind, With brush and pitcher following, grave and mute, In meek attendance on the holy brute!

"Men of the North! beneath your very eyes, By hearth and home, your real danger lies. Still day by day some hold of freedom falls Through home-bred traitors fed within its walls. Men whom yourselves with vote and purse sustain, At posts of honor, influence, and gain; The right of Slavery to your sons to teach, And 'South-side' Gospels in your pulpits preach, Transfix the Law to ancient freedom dear On the sharp point of her subverted spear, And imitate upon her cushion plump The mad Missourian lynching from his stump; Or, in your name, upon the Senate's floor Yield up to Slavery all it asks, and more; And, ere your dull eyes open to the cheat, Sell your old homestead underneath your feet While such as these your loftiest outlooks hold, While truth and conscience with your wares are sold, While grave-browed merchants band themselves to aid An annual man-hunt for their Southern trade, What moral power within your grasp remains To stay the mischief on Nebraska's plains? High as the tides of generous impulse flow, As far rolls back the selfish undertow; And all your brave resolves, though aimed as true As the horse-pistol Balmawhapple drew, To Slavery's bastions lend as slight a shock As the poor trooper's shot to Stirling rock!

"Yet, while the need of Freedom's cause demands The earnest efforts of your hearts and hands, Urged by all motives that can prompt the heart To prayer and toil and manhood's manliest part; Though to the soul's deep tocsin Nature joins The warning whisper of her Orphic pines, The north-wind's anger, and the south-wind's sigh, The midnight sword-dance of the northern sky, And, to the ear that bends above the sod Of the green grave-mounds in the Fields of God, In low, deep murmurs of rebuke or cheer, The land's dead fathers speak their hope or fear, Yet let not Passion wrest from Reason's hand The guiding rein and symbol of command. Blame not the caution proffering to your zeal A well-meant drag upon its hurrying wheel; Nor chide the man whose honest doubt extends To the means only, not the righteous ends; Nor fail to weigh the scruples and the fears Of milder natures and serener years. In the long strife with evil which began With the first lapse of new-created man, Wisely and well has Providence assigned To each his part,--some forward, some behind; And they, too, serve who temper and restrain The o'erwarm heart that sets on fire the brain. True to yourselves, feed Freedom's altar-flame With what you have; let others do the same.

"Spare timid doubters; set like flint your face Against the self-sold knaves of gain and place Pity the weak; but with unsparing hand Cast out the traitors who infest the land; From bar, press, pulpit, cast them everywhere, By dint of fasting, if you fail by prayer. And in their place bring men of antique mould, Like the grave fathers of your Age of Gold; Statesmen like those who sought the primal fount Of righteous law, the Sermon on the Mount; Lawyers who prize, like Quincy, (to our day Still spared, Heaven bless him!) honor more than pay, And Christian jurists, starry-pure, like Jay; Preachers like Woolman, or like them who bore The faith of Wesley to our Western shore, And held no convert genuine till he broke Alike his servants' and the Devil's yoke; And priests like him who Newport's market trod, And o'er its slave-ships shook the bolts of God! So shall your power, with a wise prudence used, Strong but forbearing, firm but not abused, In kindly keeping with the good of all, The nobler maxims of the past recall, Her natural home-born right to Freedom give, And leave her foe his robber-right,--to live. Live, as the snake does in his noisome fen! Live, as the wolf does in his bone-strewn den! Live, clothed with cursing like a robe of flame, The focal point of million-fingered shame! Live, till the Southron, who, with all his faults, Has manly instincts, in his pride revolts, Dashes from off him, midst the glad world's cheers, The hideous nightmare of his dream of years, And lifts, self-prompted, with his own right hand, The vile encumbrance from his glorious land!

"So, wheresoe'er our destiny sends forth Its widening circles to the South or North, Where'er our banner flaunts beneath the stars Its mimic splendors and its cloudlike bars, There shall Free Labor's hardy children stand The equal sovereigns of a slaveless land. And when at last the hunted bison tires, And dies o'ertaken by the squatter's fires; And westward, wave on wave, the living flood Breaks on the snow-line of majestic Hood; And lonely Shasta listening hears the tread Of Europe's fair-haired children, Hesper-led; And, gazing downward through his boar-locks, sees The tawny Asian climb his giant knees, The Eastern sea shall hush his waves to hear Pacific's surf-beat answer Freedom's cheer, And one long rolling fire of triumph run Between the sunrise and the sunset gun!"

. . . . . . . . . .

My task is done. The Showman and his show, Themselves but shadows, into shadows go; And, if no song of idlesse I have sung. Nor tints of beauty on the canvas flung; If the harsh numbers grate on tender ears, And the rough picture overwrought appears, With deeper coloring, with a sterner blast, Before my soul a voice and vision passed, Such as might Milton's jarring trump require, Or glooms of Dante fringed with lurid fire. Oh, not of choice, for themes of public wrong I leave the green and pleasant paths of song, The mild, sweet words which soften and adorn, For sharp rebuke and bitter laugh of scorn. More dear to me some song of private worth, Some homely idyl of my native North, Some summer pastoral of her inland vales, Or, grim and weird, her winter fireside tales Haunted by ghosts of unreturning sails, Lost barks at parting hung from stem to helm With prayers of love like dreams on Virgil's elm. Nor private grief nor malice holds my pen; I owe but kindness to my fellow-men; And, South or North, wherever hearts of prayer Their woes and weakness to our Father bear, Wherever fruits of Christian love are found In holy lives, to me is holy ground. But the time passes. It were vain to crave A late indulgence. What I had I gave. Forget the poet, but his warning heed, And shame his poor word with your nobler deed.

1856.

ON A PRAYER-BOOK,

WITH ITS FRONTISPIECE, ARY SCHEFFER'S "CHRISTUS CONSOLATOR," AMERICANIZED BY THE OMISSION OF THE BLACK MAN.

It is hardly to be credited, yet is true, that in the anxiety of the Northern merchant to conciliate his Southern customer, a publisher was found ready thus to mutilate Scheffer's picture. He intended his edition for use in the Southern States undoubtedly, but copies fell into the hands of those who believed literally in a gospel which was to preach liberty to the captive.

O ARY SCHEFFER! when beneath thine eye, Touched with the light that cometh from above, Grew the sweet picture of the dear Lord's love, No dream hadst thou that Christian hands would tear Therefrom the token of His equal care, And make thy symbol of His truth a lie The poor, dumb slave whose shackles fall away In His compassionate gaze, grubbed smoothly out, To mar no more the exercise devout Of sleek oppression kneeling down to pray Where the great oriel stains the Sabbath day! Let whoso can before such praying-books Kneel on his velvet cushion; I, for one, Would sooner bow, a Parsee, to the sun, Or tend a prayer-wheel in Thibetar brooks, Or beat a drum on Yedo's temple-floor. No falser idol man has bowed before, In Indian groves or islands of the sea, Than that which through the quaint-carved Gothic door Looks forth,--a Church without humanity! Patron of pride, and prejudice, and wrong,-- The rich man's charm and fetich of the strong, The Eternal Fulness meted, clipped, and shorn, The seamless robe of equal mercy torn, The dear Christ hidden from His kindred flesh, And, in His poor ones, crucified afresh! Better the simple Lama scattering wide, Where sweeps the storm Alechan's steppes along, His paper horses for the lost to ride, And wearying Buddha with his prayers to make The figures living for the traveller's sake, Than he who hopes with cheap praise to beguile The ear of God, dishonoring man the while; Who dreams the pearl gate's hinges, rusty grown, Are moved by flattery's oil of tongue alone; That in the scale Eternal Justice bears The generous deed weighs less than selfish prayers, And words intoned with graceful unction move The Eternal Goodness more than lives of truth and love. Alas, the Church! The reverend head of Jay, Enhaloed with its saintly silvered hair, Adorns no more the places of her prayer; And brave young Tyng, too early called away, Troubles the Haman of her courts no more Like the just Hebrew at the Assyrian's door; And her sweet ritual, beautiful but dead As the dry husk from which the grain is shed, And holy hymns from which the life devout Of saints and martyrs has wellnigh gone out, Like candles dying in exhausted air, For Sabbath use in measured grists are ground; And, ever while the spiritual mill goes round, Between the upper and the nether stones, Unseen, unheard, the wretched bondman groans, And urges his vain plea, prayer-smothered, anthem-drowned!

O heart of mine, keep patience! Looking forth, As from the Mount of Vision, I behold, Pure, just, and free, the Church of Christ on earth; The martyr's dream, the golden age foretold! And found, at last, the mystic Graal I see, Brimmed with His blessing, pass from lip to lip In sacred pledge of human fellowship; And over all the songs of angels hear; Songs of the love that casteth out all fear; Songs of the Gospel of Humanity! Lo! in the midst, with the same look He wore, Healing and blessing on Genesaret's shore, Folding together, with the all-tender might Of His great love, the dark bands and the white, Stands the Consoler, soothing every pain, Making all burdens light, and breaking every chain.

1859.

THE SUMMONS.

MY ear is full of summer sounds, Of summer sights my languid eye; Beyond the dusty village bounds I loiter in my daily rounds, And in the noon-time shadows lie.

I hear the wild bee wind his horn, The bird swings on the ripened wheat, The long green lances of the corn Are tilting in the winds of morn, The locust shrills his song of heat.

Another sound my spirit hears, A deeper sound that drowns them all; A voice of pleading choked with tears, The call of human hopes and fears, The Macedonian cry to Paul!

The storm-bell rings, the trumpet blows; I know the word and countersign; Wherever Freedom's vanguard goes, Where stand or fall her friends or foes, I know the place that should be mine.

Shamed be the hands that idly fold, And lips that woo the reed's accord, When laggard Time the hour has tolled For true with false and new with old To fight the battles of the Lord!

O brothers! blest by partial Fate With power to match the will and deed, To him your summons comes too late Who sinks beneath his armor's weight, And has no answer but God-speed! 1860.

TO WILLIAM H. SEWARD.

On the 12th of January, 1861, Mr. Seward delivered in the Senate chamber a speech on The State of the Union, in which he urged the paramount duty of preserving the Union, and went as far as it was possible to go, without surrender of principles, in concessions to the Southern party, concluding his argument with these words: "Having submitted my own opinions on this great crisis, it remains only to say, that I shall cheerfully lend to the government my best support in whatever prudent yet energetic efforts it shall make to preserve the public peace, and to maintain and preserve the Union; advising, only, that it practise, as far as possible, the utmost moderation, forbearance, and conciliation.

"This Union has not yet accomplished what good for mankind was manifestly designed by Him who appoints the seasons and prescribes the duties of states and empires. No; if it were cast down by faction to-day, it would rise again and re-appear in all its majestic proportions to-morrow. It is the only government that can stand here. Woe! woe! to the man that madly lifts his hand against it. It shall continue and endure; and men, in after times, shall declare that this generation, which saved the Union from such sudden and unlooked-for dangers, surpassed in magnanimity even that one which laid its foundations in the eternal principles of liberty, justice, and humanity."

STATESMAN, I thank thee! and, if yet dissent Mingles, reluctant, with my large content, I cannot censure what was nobly meant. But, while constrained to hold even Union less Than Liberty and Truth and Righteousness, I thank thee in the sweet and holy name Of peace, for wise calm words that put to shame Passion and party. Courage may be shown Not in defiance of the wrong alone; He may be bravest who, unweaponed, bears The olive branch, and, strong in justice, spares The rash wrong-doer, giving widest scope, To Christian charity and generous hope. If, without damage to the sacred cause Of Freedom and the safeguard of its laws-- If, without yielding that for which alone We prize the Union, thou canst save it now From a baptism of blood, upon thy brow A wreath whose flowers no earthly soil have known; Woven of the beatitudes, shall rest, And the peacemaker be forever blest!

1861.

IN WAR TIME.

TO SAMUEL E. SEWALL AND HARRIET W. SEWAll, OF MELROSE.

These lines to my old friends stood as dedication in the volume which contained a collection of pieces under the general title of In War Time. The group belonging distinctly under that title I have retained here; the other pieces in the volume are distributed among the appropriate divisions.

OLOR ISCANUS queries: "Why should we Vex at the land's ridiculous miserie?" So on his Usk banks, in the blood-red dawn Of England's civil strife, did careless Vaughan Bemock his times. O friends of many years! Though faith and trust are stronger than our fears, And the signs promise peace with liberty, Not thus we trifle with our country's tears And sweat of agony. The future's gain Is certain as God's truth; but, meanwhile, pain Is bitter and tears are salt: our voices take A sober tone; our very household songs Are heavy with a nation's griefs and wrongs; And innocent mirth is chastened for the sake Of the brave hearts that nevermore shall beat, The eyes that smile no more, the unreturning feet!

1863

THY WILL BE DONE.

WE see not, know not; all our way Is night,--with Thee alone is day From out the torrent's troubled drift, Above the storm our prayers we lift, Thy will be done!

The flesh may fail, the heart may faint, But who are we to make complaint, Or dare to plead, in times like these, The weakness of our love of ease? Thy will be done!

We take with solemn thankfulness Our burden up, nor ask it less, And count it joy that even we May suffer, serve, or wait for Thee, Whose will be done!

Though dim as yet in tint and line, We trace Thy picture's wise design, And thank Thee that our age supplies Its dark relief of sacrifice. Thy will be done!

And if, in our unworthiness, Thy sacrificial wine we press; If from Thy ordeal's heated bars Our feet are seamed with crimson scars, Thy will be done!

If, for the age to come, this hour Of trial hath vicarious power, And, blest by Thee, our present pain, Be Liberty's eternal gain, Thy will be done!

Strike, Thou the Master, we Thy keys, The anthem of the destinies! The minor of Thy loftier strain, Our hearts shall breathe the old refrain, Thy will be done! 1861.

A WORD FOR THE HOUR.

THE firmament breaks up. In black eclipse Light after light goes out. One evil star, Luridly glaring through the smoke of war, As in the dream of the Apocalypse, Drags others down. Let us not weakly weep Nor rashly threaten. Give us grace to keep Our faith and patience; wherefore should we leap On one hand into fratricidal fight, Or, on the other, yield eternal right, Frame lies of law, and good and ill confound? What fear we? Safe on freedom's vantage-ground Our feet are planted: let us there remain In unrevengeful calm, no means untried Which truth can sanction, no just claim denied, The sad spectators of a suicide! They break the links of Union: shall we light The fires of hell to weld anew the chain On that red anvil where each blow is pain? Draw we not even now a freer breath, As from our shoulders falls a load of death Loathsome as that the Tuscan's victim bore When keen with life to a dead horror bound? Why take we up the accursed thing again? Pity, forgive, but urge them back no more Who, drunk with passion, flaunt disunion's rag With its vile reptile-blazon. Let us press The golden cluster on our brave old flag In closer union, and, if numbering less, Brighter shall shine the stars which still remain.

16th First mo., 1861.

"EIN FESTE BURG IST UNSER GOTT."

LUTHER'S HYMN.

WE wait beneath the furnace-blast The pangs of transformation; Not painlessly doth God recast And mould anew the nation. Hot burns the fire Where wrongs expire; Nor spares the hand That from the land Uproots the ancient evil.

The hand-breadth cloud the sages feared Its bloody rain is dropping; The poison plant the fathers spared All else is overtopping. East, West, South, North, It curses the earth; All justice dies, And fraud and lies Live only in its shadow.

What gives the wheat-field blades of steel? What points the rebel cannon? What sets the roaring rabble's heel On the old star-spangled pennon? What breaks the oath Of the men o' the South? What whets the knife For the Union's life?-- Hark to the answer: Slavery!

Then waste no blows on lesser foes In strife unworthy freemen. God lifts to-day the veil, and shows The features of the demon O North and South, Its victims both, Can ye not cry, "Let slavery die!" And union find in freedom?

What though the cast-out spirit tear The nation in his going? We who have shared the guilt must share The pang of his o'erthrowing! Whate'er the loss, Whate'er the cross, Shall they complain Of present pain Who trust in God's hereafter?

For who that leans on His right arm Was ever yet forsaken? What righteous cause can suffer harm If He its part has taken? Though wild and loud, And dark the cloud, Behind its folds His hand upholds The calm sky of to-morrow!

Above the maddening cry for blood, Above the wild war-drumming, Let Freedom's voice be heard, with good The evil overcoming. Give prayer and purse To stay the Curse Whose wrong we share, Whose shame we bear, Whose end shall gladden Heaven!

In vain the bells of war shall ring Of triumphs and revenges, While still is spared the evil thing That severs and estranges. But blest the ear That yet shall hear The jubilant bell That rings the knell Of Slavery forever!

Then let the selfish lip be dumb, And hushed the breath of sighing; Before the joy of peace must come The pains of purifying. God give us grace Each in his place To bear his lot, And, murmuring not, Endure and wait and labor!

1861.

TO JOHN C. FREMONT.

On the 31st of August, 1861, General Fremont, then in charge of the Western Department, issued a proclamation which contained a clause, famous as the first announcement of emancipation: "The property," it declared, "real and personal, of all persons in the State of Missouri, who shall take up arms against the United States, or who shall be directly proven to have taken active part with their enemies in the field, is declared to be confiscated to the public use; and their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared free men." Mr. Lincoln regarded the proclamation as premature and countermanded it, after vainly endeavoring to persuade Fremont of his own motion to revoke it.

THY error, Fremont, simply was to act A brave man's part, without the statesman's tact, And, taking counsel but of common sense, To strike at cause as well as consequence. Oh, never yet since Roland wound his horn At Roncesvalles, has a blast been blown Far-heard, wide-echoed, startling as thine own, Heard from the van of freedom's hope forlorn It had been safer, doubtless, for the time, To flatter treason, and avoid offence To that Dark Power whose underlying crime Heaves upward its perpetual turbulence. But if thine be the fate of all who break The ground for truth's seed, or forerun their years Till lost in distance, or with stout hearts make A lane for freedom through the level spears, Still take thou courage! God has spoken through thee, Irrevocable, the mighty words, Be free! The land shakes with them, and the slave's dull ear Turns from the rice-swamp stealthily to hear. Who would recall them now must first arrest The winds that blow down from the free Northwest, Ruffling the Gulf; or like a scroll roll back The Mississippi to its upper springs. Such words fulfil their prophecy, and lack But the full time to harden into things.

1861.

THE WATCHERS.

BESIDE a stricken field I stood; On the torn turf, on grass and wood, Hung heavily the dew of blood.

Still in their fresh mounds lay the slain, But all the air was quick with pain And gusty sighs and tearful rain.

Two angels, each with drooping head And folded wings and noiseless tread, Watched by that valley of the dead.

The one, with forehead saintly bland And lips of blessing, not command, Leaned, weeping, on her olive wand.

The other's brows were scarred and knit, His restless eyes were watch-fires lit, His hands for battle-gauntlets fit.

"How long!"--I knew the voice of Peace,-- "Is there no respite? no release? When shall the hopeless quarrel cease?

"O Lord, how long!! One human soul Is more than any parchment scroll, Or any flag thy winds unroll.

"What price was Ellsworth's, young and brave? How weigh the gift that Lyon gave, Or count the cost of Winthrop's grave?

"O brother! if thine eye can see, Tell how and when the end shall be, What hope remains for thee and me."

Then Freedom sternly said: "I shun No strife nor pang beneath the sun, When human rights are staked and won.

"I knelt with Ziska's hunted flock, I watched in Toussaint's cell of rock, I walked with Sidney to the block.

"The moor of Marston felt my tread, Through Jersey snows the march I led, My voice Magenta's charges sped.

"But now, through weary day and night, I watch a vague and aimless fight For leave to strike one blow aright.

"On either side my foe they own One guards through love his ghastly throne, And one through fear to reverence grown.

"Why wait we longer, mocked, betrayed, By open foes, or those afraid To speed thy coming through my aid?

"Why watch to see who win or fall? I shake the dust against them all, I leave them to their senseless brawl."

"Nay," Peace implored: "yet longer wait; The doom is near, the stake is great God knoweth if it be too late.

"Still wait and watch; the way prepare Where I with folded wings of prayer May follow, weaponless and bare."

"Too late!" the stern, sad voice replied, "Too late!" its mournful echo sighed, In low lament the answer died.

A rustling as of wings in flight, An upward gleam of lessening white, So passed the vision, sound and sight.

But round me, like a silver bell Rung down the listening sky to tell Of holy help, a sweet voice fell.

"Still hope and trust," it sang; "the rod Must fall, the wine-press must be trod, But all is possible with God!"

1862.

TO ENGLISHMEN.

Written when, in the stress of our terrible war, the English ruling class, with few exceptions, were either coldly indifferent or hostile to the party of freedom. Their attitude was illustrated by caricatures of America, among which was one of a slaveholder and cowhide, with the motto, "Haven't I a right to wallop my nigger?"

You flung your taunt across the wave We bore it as became us, Well knowing that the fettered slave Left friendly lips no option save To pity or to blame us.

You scoffed our plea. "Mere lack of will, Not lack of power," you told us We showed our free-state records; still You mocked, confounding good and ill, Slave-haters and slaveholders.

We struck at Slavery; to the verge Of power and means we checked it; Lo!--presto, change! its claims you urge, Send greetings to it o'er the surge, And comfort and protect it.

But yesterday you scarce could shake, In slave-abhorring rigor, Our Northern palms for conscience' sake To-day you clasp the hands that ache With "walloping the nigger!"

O Englishmen!--in hope and creed, In blood and tongue our brothers! We too are heirs of Runnymede; And Shakespeare's fame and Cromwell's deed Are not alone our mother's.

"Thicker than water," in one rill Through centuries of story Our Saxon blood has flowed, and still We share with you its good and ill, The shadow and the glory.

Joint heirs and kinfolk, leagues of wave Nor length of years can part us Your right is ours to shrine and grave, The common freehold of the brave, The gift of saints and martyrs.

Our very sins and follies teach Our kindred frail and human We carp at faults with bitter speech, The while, for one unshared by each, We have a score in common.

We bowed the heart, if not the knee, To England's Queen, God bless her We praised you when your slaves went free We seek to unchain ours. Will ye Join hands with the oppressor?

And is it Christian England cheers The bruiser, not the bruised? And must she run, despite the tears And prayers of eighteen hundred years, Amuck in Slavery's crusade?

Oh, black disgrace! Oh, shame and loss Too deep for tongue to phrase on Tear from your flag its holy cross, And in your van of battle toss The pirate's skull-bone blazon!

1862.

MITHRIDATES AT CHIOS.

It is recorded that the Chians, when subjugated by Mithridates of Cappadocia, were delivered up to their own slaves, to be carried away captive to Colchis. Athenxus considers this a just punishment for their wickedness in first introducing the slave-trade into Greece. From this ancient villany of the Chians the proverb arose, "The Chian hath bought himself a master."

KNOW'ST thou, O slave-cursed land How, when the Chian's cup of guilt Was full to overflow, there came God's justice in the sword of flame That, red with slaughter to its hilt, Blazed in the Cappadocian victor's hand?

The heavens are still and far; But, not unheard of awful Jove, The sighing of the island slave Was answered, when the AEgean wave The keels of Mithridates clove, And the vines shrivelled in the breath of war.

"Robbers of Chios! hark," The victor cried, "to Heaven's decree! Pluck your last cluster from the vine, Drain your last cup of Chian wine; Slaves of your slaves, your doom shall be, In Colchian mines by Phasis rolling dark."

Then rose the long lament From the hoar sea-god's dusky caves The priestess rent her hair and cried, "Woe! woe! The gods are sleepless-eyed!" And, chained and scourged, the slaves of slaves, The lords of Chios into exile went.

"The gods at last pay well," So Hellas sang her taunting song, "The fisher in his net is caught, The Chian hath his master bought;" And isle from isle, with laughter long, Took up and sped the mocking parable.

Once more the slow, dumb years Bring their avenging cycle round, And, more than Hellas taught of old, Our wiser lesson shall be told, Of slaves uprising, freedom-crowned, To break, not wield, the scourge wet with their blood and tears.

1868.

AT PORT ROYAL.

In November, 1861, a Union force under Commodore Dupont and General Sherman captured Port Royal, and from this point as a basis of operations, the neighboring islands between Charleston and Savannah were taken possession of. The early occupation of this district, where the negro population was greatly in excess of the white, gave an opportunity which was at once seized upon, of practically emancipating the slaves and of beginning that work of civilization which was accepted as the grave responsibility of those who had labored for freedom.

THE tent-lights glimmer on the land, The ship-lights on the sea; The night-wind smooths with drifting sand Our track on lone Tybee.

At last our grating keels outslide, Our good boats forward swing; And while we ride the land-locked tide, Our negroes row and sing.

For dear the bondman holds his gifts Of music and of song The gold that kindly Nature sifts Among his sands of wrong:

The power to make his toiling days And poor home-comforts please; The quaint relief of mirth that plays With sorrow's minor keys.

Another glow than sunset's fire Has filled the west with light, Where field and garner, barn and byre, Are blazing through the night.

The land is wild with fear and hate, The rout runs mad and fast; From hand to hand, from gate to gate The flaming brand is passed.

The lurid glow falls strong across Dark faces broad with smiles Not theirs the terror, hate, and loss That fire yon blazing piles.

With oar-strokes timing to their song, They weave in simple lays The pathos of remembered wrong, The hope of better days,--

The triumph-note that Miriam sung, The joy of uncaged birds Softening with Afric's mellow tongue Their broken Saxon words.

SONG OF THE NEGRO BOATMEN.

Oh, praise an' tanks! De Lord he come To set de people free; An' massa tink it day ob doom, An' we ob jubilee. De Lord dat heap de Red Sea waves He jus' as 'trong as den; He say de word: we las' night slaves; To-day, de Lord's freemen. De yam will grow, de cotton blow, We'll hab de rice an' corn; Oh nebber you fear, if nebber you hear De driver blow his horn!

Ole massa on he trabbels gone; He leaf de land behind De Lord's breff blow him furder on, Like corn-shuck in de wind. We own de hoe, we own de plough, We own de hands dat hold; We sell de pig, we sell de cow, But nebber chile be sold. De yam will grow, de cotton blow, We'll hab de rice an' corn; Oh nebber you fear, if nebber you hear De driver blow his horn!

We pray de Lord: he gib us signs Dat some day we be free; De norf-wind tell it to de pines, De wild-duck to de sea; We tink it when de church-bell ring, We dream it in de dream; De rice-bird mean it when he sing, De eagle when be scream. De yam will grow, de cotton blow, We'll hab de rice an' corn Oh nebber you fear, if nebber you hear De driver blow his horn!

We know de promise nebber fail, An' nebber lie de word; So like de 'postles in de jail, We waited for de Lord An' now he open ebery door, An' trow away de key; He tink we lub him so before, We hub him better free. De yam will grow, de cotton blow, He'll gib de rice an' corn; Oh nebber you fear, if nebber you hear De driver blow his horn!

So sing our dusky gondoliers; And with a secret pain, And smiles that seem akin to tears, We hear the wild refrain.

We dare not share the negro's trust, Nor yet his hope deny; We only know that God is just, And every wrong shall die.

Rude seems the song; each swarthy face, Flame-lighted, ruder still We start to think that hapless race Must shape our good or ill;

That laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with oppressed; And, close as sin and suffering joined, We march to Fate abreast.

Sing on, poor hearts! your chant shall be Our sign of blight or bloom, The Vala-song of Liberty, Or death-rune of our doom!

1862.

ASTRAEA AT THE CAPITOL.

ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, 1862.

WHEN first I saw our banner wave Above the nation's council-hall, I heard beneath its marble wall The clanking fetters of the slave!

In the foul market-place I stood, And saw the Christian mother sold, And childhood with its locks of gold, Blue-eyed and fair with Saxon blood.

I shut my eyes, I held my breath, And, smothering down the wrath and shame That set my Northern blood aflame, Stood silent,--where to speak was death.

Beside me gloomed the prison-cell Where wasted one in slow decline For uttering simple words of mine, And loving freedom all too well.

The flag that floated from the dome Flapped menace in the morning air; I stood a perilled stranger where The human broker made his home.

For crime was virtue: Gown and Sword And Law their threefold sanction gave, And to the quarry of the slave Went hawking with our symbol-bird.

On the oppressor's side was power; And yet I knew that every wrong, However old, however strong, But waited God's avenging hour.

I knew that truth would crush the lie, Somehow, some time, the end would be; Yet scarcely dared I hope to see The triumph with my mortal eye.

But now I see it! In the sun A free flag floats from yonder dome, And at the nation's hearth and home The justice long delayed is done.

Not as we hoped, in calm of prayer, The message of deliverance comes, But heralded by roll of drums On waves of battle-troubled air!

Midst sounds that madden and appall, The song that Bethlehem's shepherds knew! The harp of David melting through The demon-agonies of Saul!

Not as we hoped; but what are we? Above our broken dreams and plans God lays, with wiser hand than man's, The corner-stones of liberty.

I cavil not with Him: the voice That freedom's blessed gospel tells Is sweet to me as silver bells, Rejoicing! yea, I will rejoice!

Dear friends still toiling in the sun; Ye dearer ones who, gone before, Are watching from the eternal shore The slow work by your hands begun,

Rejoice with me! The chastening rod Blossoms with love; the furnace heat Grows cool beneath His blessed feet Whose form is as the Son of God!

Rejoice! Our Marah's bitter springs Are sweetened; on our ground of grief Rise day by day in strong relief The prophecies of better things.

Rejoice in hope! The day and night Are one with God, and one with them Who see by faith the cloudy hem Of Judgment fringed with Mercy's light.

1862.

THE BATTLE AUTUMN OF 1862.

THE flags of war like storm-birds fly, The charging trumpets blow; Yet rolls no thunder in the sky, No earthquake strives below.

And, calm and patient, Nature keeps Her ancient promise well, Though o'er her bloom and greenness sweeps The battle's breath of hell.

And still she walks in golden hours Through harvest-happy farms, And still she wears her fruits and flowers Like jewels on her arms.

What mean the gladness of the plain, This joy of eve and morn, The mirth that shakes the beard of grain And yellow locks of corn?

Ah! eyes may well be full of tears, And hearts with hate are hot; But even-paced come round the years, And Nature changes not.

She meets with smiles our bitter grief, With songs our groans of pain; She mocks with tint of flower and leaf The war-field's crimson stain.

Still, in the cannon's pause, we hear Her sweet thanksgiving-psalm; Too near to God for doubt or fear, She shares the eternal calm.

She knows the seed lies safe below The fires that blast and burn; For all the tears of blood we sow She waits the rich return.

She sees with clearer eve than ours The good of suffering born,-- The hearts that blossom like her flowers, And ripen like her corn.

Oh, give to us, in times like these, The vision of her eyes; And make her fields and fruited trees Our golden prophecies

Oh, give to us her finer ear Above this stormy din, We too would hear the bells of cheer Ring peace and freedom in.

1862.

HYMN,

SUNG AT CHRISTMAS BY THE SCHOLARS OF ST. HELENA'S ISLAND, S. C.

OH, none in all the world before Were ever glad as we! We're free on Carolina's shore, We're all at home and free.

Thou Friend and Helper of the poor, Who suffered for our sake, To open every prison door, And every yoke to break!

Bend low Thy pitying face and mild, And help us sing and pray; The hand that blessed the little child, Upon our foreheads lay.

We hear no more the driver's horn, No more the whip we fear, This holy day that saw Thee born Was never half so dear.

The very oaks are greener clad, The waters brighter smile; Oh, never shone a day so glad On sweet St. Helen's Isle.

We praise Thee in our songs to-day, To Thee in prayer we call, Make swift the feet and straight the way Of freedom unto all.

Come once again, O blessed Lord! Come walking on the sea! And let the mainlands hear the word That sets the islands free!

1863.

THE PROCLAMATION.

President Lincoln's proclamation of emancipation was issued January 1, 1863.

SAINT PATRICK, slave to Milcho of the herds Of Ballymena, wakened with these words "Arise, and flee Out from the land of bondage, and be free!"

Glad as a soul in pain, who hears from heaven The angels singing of his sins forgiven, And, wondering, sees His prison opening to their golden keys,

He rose a man who laid him down a slave, Shook from his locks the ashes of the grave, And outward trod Into the glorious liberty of God.

He cast the symbols of his shame away; And, passing where the sleeping Milcho lay, Though back and limb Smarted with wrong, he prayed, "God pardon him!"

So went he forth; but in God's time he came To light on Uilline's hills a holy flame; And, dying, gave The land a saint that lost him as a slave.

O dark, sad millions, patiently and dumb Waiting for God, your hour at last has come, And freedom's song Breaks the long silence of your night of wrong!

Arise and flee! shake off the vile restraint Of ages; but, like Ballymena's saint, The oppressor spare, Heap only on his head the coals of prayer.

Go forth, like him! like him return again, To bless the land whereon in bitter pain Ye toiled at first, And heal with freedom what your slavery cursed.

1863.

ANNIVERSARY POEM.

Read before the Alumni of the Friends' Yearly Meeting School, at the Annual Meeting at Newport, R. I., 15th 6th mo., 1863.

ONCE more, dear friends, you meet beneath A clouded sky Not yet the sword has found its sheath, And on the sweet spring airs the breath Of war floats by.

Yet trouble springs not from the ground, Nor pain from chance; The Eternal order circles round, And wave and storm find mete and bound In Providence.

Full long our feet the flowery ways Of peace have trod, Content with creed and garb and phrase: A harder path in earlier days Led up to God.

Too cheaply truths, once purchased dear, Are made our own; Too long the world has smiled to hear Our boast of full corn in the ear By others sown;

To see us stir the martyr fires Of long ago, And wrap our satisfied desires In the singed mantles that our sires Have dropped below.

But now the cross our worthies bore On us is laid; Profession's quiet sleep is o'er, And in the scale of truth once more Our faith is weighed.

The cry of innocent blood at last Is calling down An answer in the whirlwind-blast, The thunder and the shadow cast From Heaven's dark frown.

The land is red with judgments. Who Stands guiltless forth? Have we been faithful as we knew, To God and to our brother true, To Heaven and Earth.

How faint, through din of merchandise And count of gain, Have seemed to us the captive's cries! How far away the tears and sighs Of souls in pain!

This day the fearful reckoning comes To each and all; We hear amidst our peaceful homes The summons of the conscript drums, The bugle's call.

Our path is plain; the war-net draws Round us in vain, While, faithful to the Higher Cause, We keep our fealty to the laws Through patient pain.

The levelled gun, the battle-brand, We may not take But, calmly loyal, we can stand And suffer with our suffering land For conscience' sake.

Why ask for ease where all is pain? Shall we alone Be left to add our gain to gain, When over Armageddon's plain The trump is blown?

To suffer well is well to serve; Safe in our Lord The rigid lines of law shall curve To spare us; from our heads shall swerve Its smiting sword.

And light is mingled with the gloom, And joy with grief; Divinest compensations come, Through thorns of judgment mercies bloom In sweet relief.

Thanks for our privilege to bless, By word and deed, The widow in her keen distress, The childless and the fatherless, The hearts that bleed!

For fields of duty, opening wide, Where all our powers Are tasked the eager steps to guide Of millions on a path untried The slave is ours!

Ours by traditions dear and old, Which make the race Our wards to cherish and uphold, And cast their freedom in the mould Of Christian grace.

And we may tread the sick-bed floors Where strong men pine, And, down the groaning corridors, Pour freely from our liberal stores The oil and wine.

Who murmurs that in these dark days His lot is cast? God's hand within the shadow lays The stones whereon His gates of praise Shall rise at last.

Turn and o'erturn, O outstretched Hand Nor stint, nor stay; The years have never dropped their sand On mortal issue vast and grand As ours to-day.

Already, on the sable ground Of man's despair Is Freedom's glorious picture found, With all its dusky hands unbound Upraised in prayer.

Oh, small shall seem all sacrifice And pain and loss, When God shall wipe the weeping eyes, For suffering give the victor's prize, The crown for cross.

BARBARA FRIETCHIE.

This poem was written in strict conformity to the account of the incident as I had it from respectable and trustworthy sources. It has since been the subject of a good deal of conflicting testimony, and the story was probably incorrect in some of its details. It is admitted by all that Barbara Frietchie was no myth, but a worthy and highly esteemed gentlewoman, intensely loyal and a hater of the Slavery Rebellion, holding her Union flag sacred and keeping it with her Bible; that when the Confederates halted before her house, and entered her dooryard, she denounced them in vigorous language, shook her cane in their faces, and drove them out; and when General Burnside's troops followed close upon Jackson's, she waved her flag and cheered them. It is stated that May Qnantrell, a brave and loyal lady in another part of the city, did wave her flag in sight of the Confederates. It is possible that there has been a blending of the two incidents.

Up from the meadows rich with corn, Clear in the cool September morn.

The clustered spires of Frederick stand Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.

Round about them orchards sweep, Apple and peach tree fruited deep,

Fair as the garden of the Lord To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,

On that pleasant morn of the early fall When Lee marched over the mountain-wall;

Over the mountains winding down, Horse and foot, into Frederick town.

Forty flags with their silver stars, Forty flags with their crimson bars,

Flapped in the morning wind: the sun Of noon looked down, and saw not one.

Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then, Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;

Bravest of all in Frederick town, She took up the flag the men hauled down;

In her attic window the staff she set, To show that one heart was loyal yet.

Up the street came the rebel tread, Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.

Under his slouched hat left and right He glanced; the old flag met his sight.

"Halt!"--the dust-brown ranks stood fast. "Fire!"--out blazed the rifle-blast.

It shivered the window, pane and sash; It rent the banner with seam and gash.

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.

She leaned far out on the window-sill, And shook it forth with a royal will.

"Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country's flag," she said.

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame, Over the face of the leader came;

The nobler nature within him stirred To life at that woman's deed and word.

"Who touches a hair of yon gray head Dies like a dog! March on!" he said.

All day long through Frederick street Sounded the tread of marching feet.

All day long that free flag tost Over the heads of the rebel host.

Ever its torn folds rose and fell On the loyal winds that loved it well;

And through the hill-gaps sunset light Shone over it with a warm good-night.

Barbara Frietchie's work is o'er, And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.

Honor to her! and let a tear Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall's bier.

Over Barbara Frietchie's grave, Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!

Peace and order and beauty draw Round thy symbol of light and law;

And ever the stars above look down On thy stars below in Frederick town!

1863.

WHAT THE BIRDS SAID.

THE birds against the April wind Flew northward, singing as they flew; They sang, "The land we leave behind Has swords for corn-blades, blood for dew."

"O wild-birds, flying from the South, What saw and heard ye, gazing down?" "We saw the mortar's upturned mouth, The sickened camp, the blazing town!

"Beneath the bivouac's starry lamps, We saw your march-worn children die; In shrouds of moss, in cypress swamps, We saw your dead uncoffined lie.

"We heard the starving prisoner's sighs, And saw, from line and trench, your sons Follow our flight with home-sick eyes Beyond the battery's smoking guns."

"And heard and saw ye only wrong And pain," I cried, "O wing-worn flocks?" "We heard," they sang, "the freedman's song, The crash of Slavery's broken locks!

"We saw from new, uprising States The treason-nursing mischief spurned, As, crowding Freedom's ample gates, The long estranged and lost returned.

"O'er dusky faces, seamed and old, And hands horn-hard with unpaid toil, With hope in every rustling fold, We saw your star-dropt flag uncoil.

"And struggling up through sounds accursed, A grateful murmur clomb the air; A whisper scarcely heard at first, It filled the listening heavens with prayer.

"And sweet and far, as from a star, Replied a voice which shall not cease, Till, drowning all the noise of war, It sings the blessed song of peace!"

So to me, in a doubtful day Of chill and slowly greening spring, Low stooping from the cloudy gray, The wild-birds sang or seemed to sing.

They vanished in the misty air, The song went with them in their flight; But lo! they left the sunset fair, And in the evening there was light. April, 1864.

THE MANTLE OF ST. JOHN DE MATHA.

A LEGEND OF "THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE," A. D. 1154-1864.

A STRONG and mighty Angel, Calm, terrible, and bright, The cross in blended red and blue Upon his mantle white.

Two captives by him kneeling, Each on his broken chain, Sang praise to God who raiseth The dead to life again!

Dropping his cross-wrought mantle, "Wear this," the Angel said; "Take thou, O Freedom's priest, its sign, The white, the blue, and red."

Then rose up John de Matha In the strength the Lord Christ gave, And begged through all the land of France The ransom of the slave.

The gates of tower and castle Before him open flew, The drawbridge at his coming fell, The door-bolt backward drew.

For all men owned his errand, And paid his righteous tax; And the hearts of lord and peasant Were in his hands as wax.

At last, outbound from Tunis, His bark her anchor weighed, Freighted with seven-score Christian souls Whose ransom he had paid.

But, torn by Paynim hatred, Her sails in tatters hung; And on the wild waves, rudderless, A shattered hulk she swung.

"God save us!" cried the captain, "For naught can man avail; Oh, woe betide the ship that lacks Her rudder and her sail!

"Behind us are the Moormen; At sea we sink or strand There's death upon the water, There's death upon the land!"

Then up spake John de Matha "God's errands never fail! Take thou the mantle which I wear, And make of it a sail."

They raised the cross-wrought mantle, The blue, the white, the red; And straight before the wind off-shore The ship of Freedom sped.

"God help us!" cried the seamen, "For vain is mortal skill The good ship on a stormy sea Is drifting at its will."

Then up spake John de Matha "My mariners, never fear The Lord whose breath has filled her sail May well our vessel steer!"

So on through storm and darkness They drove for weary hours; And lo! the third gray morning shone On Ostia's friendly towers.

And on the walls the watchers The ship of mercy knew, They knew far off its holy cross, The red, the white, and blue.

And the bells in all the steeples Rang out in glad accord, To welcome home to Christian soil The ransomed of the Lord.

So runs the ancient legend By bard and painter told; And lo! the cycle rounds again, The new is as the old!

With rudder foully broken, And sails by traitors torn, Our country on a midnight sea Is waiting for the morn.

Before her, nameless terror; Behind, the pirate foe; The clouds are black above her, The sea is white below.

The hope of all who suffer, The dread of all who wrong, She drifts in darkness and in storm, How long, O Lord I how long?

But courage, O my mariners Ye shall not suffer wreck, While up to God the freedman's prayers Are rising from your deck.

Is not your sail the banner Which God hath blest anew, The mantle that De Matha wore, The red, the white, the blue?

Its hues are all of heaven, The red of sunset's dye, The whiteness of the moon-lit cloud, The blue of morning's sky.

Wait cheerily, then, O mariners, For daylight and for land; The breath of God is in your sail, Your rudder is His hand.

Sail on, sail on, deep-freighted With blessings and with hopes; The saints of old with shadowy hands Are pulling at your ropes.

Behind ye holy martyrs Uplift the palm and crown; Before ye unborn ages send Their benedictions down.

Take heart from John de Matha!-- God's errands never fail! Sweep on through storm and darkness, The thunder and the hail!

Sail on! The morning cometh, The port ye yet shall win; And all the bells of God shall ring The good ship bravely in!

1865.

LAUS DEO!

On hearing the bells ring on the passage of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. The resolution was adopted by Congress, January 31, 1865. The ratification by the requisite number of states was announced December 18, 1865.

IT is done! Clang of bell and roar of gun Send the tidings up and down. How the belfries rock and reel! How the great guns, peal on peal, Fling the joy from town to town!

Ring, O bells! Every stroke exulting tells Of the burial hour of crime. Loud and long, that all may hear, Ring for every listening ear Of Eternity and Time!

Let us kneel God's own voice is in that peal, And this spot is holy ground. Lord, forgive us! What are we, That our eyes this glory see, That our ears have heard the sound!

For the Lord On the whirlwind is abroad; In the earthquake He has spoken; He has smitten with His thunder The iron walls asunder, And the gates of brass are broken.

Loud and long Lift the old exulting song; Sing with Miriam by the sea, He has cast the mighty down; Horse and rider sink and drown; "He hath triumphed gloriously!"

Did we dare, In our agony of prayer, Ask for more than He has done? When was ever His right hand Over any time or land Stretched as now beneath the sun?

How they pale, Ancient myth and song and tale, In this wonder of our days, When the cruel rod of war Blossoms white with righteous law, And the wrath of man is praise!

Blotted out All within and all about Shall a fresher life begin; Freer breathe the universe As it rolls its heavy curse On the dead and buried sin!

It is done! In the circuit of the sun Shall the sound thereof go forth. It shall bid the sad rejoice, It shall give the dumb a voice, It shall belt with joy the earth!

Ring and swing, Bells of joy! On morning's wing Send the song of praise abroad! With a sound of broken chains Tell the nations that He reigns, Who alone is Lord and God!

1865.

HYMN FOR THE CELEBRATION OF EMANCIPATION AT NEWBURYPORT.

NOT unto us who did but seek The word that burned within to speak, Not unto us this day belong The triumph and exultant song.

Upon us fell in early youth The burden of unwelcome truth, And left us, weak and frail and few, The censor's painful work to do.

Thenceforth our life a fight became, The air we breathed was hot with blame; For not with gauged and softened tone We made the bondman's cause our own.

We bore, as Freedom's hope forlorn, The private hate, the public scorn; Yet held through all the paths we trod Our faith in man and trust in God.

We prayed and hoped; but still, with awe, The coming of the sword we saw; We heard the nearing steps of doom, We saw the shade of things to come.

In grief which they alone can feel Who from a mother's wrong appeal, With blended lines of fear and hope We cast our country's horoscope.

For still within her house of life We marked the lurid sign of strife, And, poisoning and imbittering all, We saw the star of Wormwood fall.

Deep as our love for her became Our hate of all that wrought her shame, And if, thereby, with tongue and pen We erred,--we were but mortal men.

We hoped for peace; our eyes survey The blood-red dawn of Freedom's day We prayed for love to loose the chain; 'T is shorn by battle's axe in twain!

Nor skill nor strength nor zeal of ours Has mined and heaved the hostile towers; Not by our hands is turned the key That sets the sighing captives free.

A redder sea than Egypt's wave Is piled and parted for the slave; A darker cloud moves on in light; A fiercer fire is guide by night.

The praise, O Lord! is Thine alone, In Thy own way Thy work is done! Our poor gifts at Thy feet we cast, To whom be glory, first and last!

1865.

AFTER THE WAR.

THE PEACE AUTUMN.

Written for the Fssex County Agricultural Festival, 1865.

THANK God for rest, where none molest, And none can make afraid; For Peace that sits as Plenty's guest Beneath the homestead shade!

Bring pike and gun, the sword's red scourge, The negro's broken chains, And beat them at the blacksmith's forge To ploughshares for our plains.

Alike henceforth our hills of snow, And vales where cotton flowers; All streams that flow, all winds that blow, Are Freedom's motive-powers.

Henceforth to Labor's chivalry Be knightly honors paid; For nobler than the sword's shall be The sickle's accolade.

Build up an altar to the Lord, O grateful hearts of ours And shape it of the greenest sward That ever drank the showers.

Lay all the bloom of gardens there, And there the orchard fruits; Bring golden grain from sun and air, From earth her goodly roots.

There let our banners droop and flow, The stars uprise and fall; Our roll of martyrs, sad and slow, Let sighing breezes call.

Their names let hands of horn and tan And rough-shod feet applaud, Who died to make the slave a man, And link with toil reward.

There let the common heart keep time To such an anthem sung As never swelled on poet's rhyme, Or thrilled on singer's tongue.

Song of our burden and relief, Of peace and long annoy; The passion of our mighty grief And our exceeding joy!

A song of praise to Him who filled The harvests sown in tears, And gave each field a double yield To feed our battle-years.

A song of faith that trusts the end To match the good begun, Nor doubts the power of Love to blend The hearts of men as one!

TO THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS.

The thirty-ninth congress was that which met in 1865 after the close of the war, when it was charged with the great question of reconstruction; the uppermost subject in men's minds was the standing of those who had recently been in arms against the Union and their relations to the freedmen.

O PEOPLE-CHOSEN! are ye not Likewise the chosen of the Lord, To do His will and speak His word?

From the loud thunder-storm of war Not man alone hath called ye forth, But He, the God of all the earth!

The torch of vengeance in your hands He quenches; unto Him belongs The solemn recompense of wrongs.

Enough of blood the land has seen, And not by cell or gallows-stair Shall ye the way of God prepare.

Say to the pardon-seekers: Keep Your manhood, bend no suppliant knees, Nor palter with unworthy pleas.

Above your voices sounds the wail Of starving men; we shut in vain * Our eyes to Pillow's ghastly stain. **

What words can drown that bitter cry? What tears wash out the stain of death? What oaths confirm your broken faith?

From you alone the guaranty Of union, freedom, peace, we claim; We urge no conqueror's terms of shame.

Alas! no victor's pride is ours; We bend above our triumphs won Like David o'er his rebel son.

Be men, not beggars. Cancel all By one brave, generous action; trust Your better instincts, and be just.

Make all men peers before the law, Take hands from off the negro's throat, Give black and white an equal vote.

Keep all your forfeit lives and lands, But give the common law's redress To labor's utter nakedness.

Revive the old heroic will; Be in the right as brave and strong As ye have proved yourselves in wrong.

Defeat shall then be victory, Your loss the wealth of full amends, And hate be love, and foes be friends.

Then buried be the dreadful past, Its common slain be mourned, and let All memories soften to regret.

Then shall the Union's mother-heart Her lost and wandering ones recall, Forgiving and restoring all,--

And Freedom break her marble trance Above the Capitolian dome, Stretch hands, and bid ye welcome home November, 1865.

* Andersonville prison. ** The massacre of Negro troops at Fort Pillow.

THE HIVE AT GETTYSBURG.

IN the old Hebrew myth the lion's frame, So terrible alive, Bleached by the desert's sun and wind, became The wandering wild bees' hive; And he who, lone and naked-handed, tore Those jaws of death apart, In after time drew forth their honeyed store To strengthen his strong heart.

Dead seemed the legend: but it only slept To wake beneath our sky; Just on the spot whence ravening Treason crept Back to its lair to die, Bleeding and torn from Freedom's mountain bounds, A stained and shattered drum Is now the hive where, on their flowery rounds, The wild bees go and come.

Unchallenged by a ghostly sentinel, They wander wide and far, Along green hillsides, sown with shot and shell, Through vales once choked with war. The low reveille of their battle-drum Disturbs no morning prayer; With deeper peace in summer noons their hum Fills all the drowsy air.

And Samson's riddle is our own to-day, Of sweetness from the strong, Of union, peace, and freedom plucked away From the rent jaws of wrong. From Treason's death we draw a purer life, As, from the beast he slew, A sweetness sweeter for his bitter strife The old-time athlete drew! 1868.

HOWARD AT ATLANTA.

RIGHT in the track where Sherman Ploughed his red furrow, Out of the narrow cabin, Up from the cellar's burrow, Gathered the little black people, With freedom newly dowered, Where, beside their Northern teacher, Stood the soldier, Howard.

He listened and heard the children Of the poor and long-enslaved Reading the words of Jesus, Singing the songs of David. Behold!--the dumb lips speaking, The blind eyes seeing! Bones of the Prophet's vision Warmed into being!

Transformed he saw them passing Their new life's portal Almost it seemed the mortal Put on the immortal. No more with the beasts of burden, No more with stone and clod, But crowned with glory and honor In the image of God!

There was the human chattel Its manhood taking; There, in each dark, bronze statue, A soul was waking! The man of many battles, With tears his eyelids pressing, Stretched over those dusky foreheads His one-armed blessing.

And he said: "Who hears can never Fear for or doubt you; What shall I tell the children Up North about you?" Then ran round a whisper, a murmur, Some answer devising: And a little boy stood up: "General, Tell 'em we're rising!"

O black boy of Atlanta! But half was spoken The slave's chain and the master's Alike are broken. The one curse of the races Held both in tether They are rising,--all are rising, The black and white together!

O brave men and fair women! Ill comes of hate and scorning Shall the dark faces only Be turned to mourning?-- Make Time your sole avenger, All-healing, all-redressing; Meet Fate half-way, and make it A joy and blessing!

1869.

THE EMANCIPATION GROUP.

Moses Kimball, a citizen of Boston, presented to the city a duplicate of the Freedman's Memorial statue erected in Lincoln Square, Washington. The group, which stands in Park Square, represents the figure of a slave, from whose limbs the broken fetters have fallen, kneeling in gratitude at the feet of Lincoln. The group was designed by Thomas Ball, and was unveiled December 9, 1879. These verses were written for the occasion.

AMIDST thy sacred effigies Of old renown give place, O city, Freedom-loved! to his Whose hand unchained a race.

Take the worn frame, that rested not Save in a martyr's grave; The care-lined face, that none forgot, Bent to the kneeling slave.

Let man be free! The mighty word He spake was not his own; An impulse from the Highest stirred These chiselled lips alone.

The cloudy sign, the fiery guide, Along his pathway ran, And Nature, through his voice, denied The ownership of man.

We rest in peace where these sad eyes Saw peril, strife, and pain; His was the nation's sacrifice, And ours the priceless gain.

O symbol of God's will on earth As it is done above! Bear witness to the cost and worth Of justice and of love.

Stand in thy place and testify To coming ages long, That truth is stronger than a lie, And righteousness than wrong.

THE JUBILEE SINGERS.

A number of students of Fisk University, under the direction of one of the officers, gave a series of concerts in the Northern States, for the purpose of establishing the college on a firmer financial foundation. Their hymns and songs, mostly in a minor key, touched the hearts of the people, and were received as peculiarly expressive of a race delivered from bondage.

VOICE of a people suffering long, The pathos of their mournful song, The sorrow of their night of wrong!

Their cry like that which Israel gave, A prayer for one to guide and save, Like Moses by the Red Sea's wave!

The stern accord her timbrel lent To Miriam's note of triumph sent O'er Egypt's sunken armament!

The tramp that startled camp and town, And shook the walls of slavery down, The spectral march of old John Brown!

The storm that swept through battle-days, The triumph after long delays, The bondmen giving God the praise!

Voice of a ransomed race, sing on Till Freedom's every right is won, And slavery's every wrong undone

1880.

GARRISON.

The earliest poem in this division was my youthful tribute to the great reformer when himself a young man he was first sounding his trumpet in Essex County. I close with the verses inscribed to him at the end of his earthly career, May 24, 1879. My poetical service in the cause of freedom is thus almost synchronous with his life of devotion to the same cause.

THE storm and peril overpast, The hounding hatred shamed and still, Go, soul of freedom! take at last The place which thou alone canst fill.

Confirm the lesson taught of old-- Life saved for self is lost, while they Who lose it in His service hold The lease of God's eternal day.

Not for thyself, but for the slave Thy words of thunder shook the world; No selfish griefs or hatred gave The strength wherewith thy bolts were hurled.

From lips that Sinai's trumpet blew We heard a tender under song; Thy very wrath from pity grew, From love of man thy hate of wrong.

Now past and present are as one; The life below is life above; Thy mortal years have but begun Thy immortality of love.

With somewhat of thy lofty faith We lay thy outworn garment by, Give death but what belongs to death, And life the life that cannot die!

Not for a soul like thine the calm Of selfish ease and joys of sense; But duty, more than crown or palm, Its own exceeding recompense.

Go up and on thy day well done, Its morning promise well fulfilled, Arise to triumphs yet unwon, To holier tasks that God has willed.

Go, leave behind thee all that mars The work below of man for man; With the white legions of the stars Do service such as angels can.

Wherever wrong shall right deny Or suffering spirits urge their plea, Be thine a voice to smite the lie, A hand to set the captive free!

SONGS OF LABOR AND REFORM

THE QUAKER OF THE OLDEN TIME.

THE Quaker of the olden time! How calm and firm and true, Unspotted by its wrong and crime, He walked the dark earth through. The lust of power, the love of gain, The thousand lures of sin Around him, had no power to stain The purity within.

With that deep insight which detects All great things in the small, And knows how each man's life affects The spiritual life of all, He walked by faith and not by sight, By love and not by law; The presence of the wrong or right He rather felt than saw.

He felt that wrong with wrong partakes, That nothing stands alone, That whoso gives the motive, makes His brother's sin his own. And, pausing not for doubtful choice Of evils great or small, He listened to that inward voice Which called away from all.

O Spirit of that early day, So pure and strong and true, Be with us in the narrow way Our faithful fathers knew. Give strength the evil to forsake, The cross of Truth to bear, And love and reverent fear to make Our daily lives a prayer!

1838.

DEMOCRACY.

All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.--MATTHEW vii. 12.

BEARER of Freedom's holy light, Breaker of Slavery's chain and rod, The foe of all which pains the sight, Or wounds the generous ear of God!

Beautiful yet thy temples rise, Though there profaning gifts are thrown; And fires unkindled of the skies Are glaring round thy altar-stone.

Still sacred, though thy name be breathed By those whose hearts thy truth deride; And garlands, plucked from thee, are wreathed Around the haughty brows of Pride.

Oh, ideal of my boyhood's time! The faith in which my father stood, Even when the sons of Lust and Crime Had stained thy peaceful courts with blood!

Still to those courts my footsteps turn, For through the mists which darken there, I see the flame of Freedom burn,-- The Kebla of the patriot's prayer!

The generous feeling, pure and warm, Which owns the right of all divine; The pitying heart, the helping arm, The prompt self-sacrifice, are thine.

Beneath thy broad, impartial eye, How fade the lines of caste and birth! How equal in their suffering lie The groaning multitudes of earth!

Still to a stricken brother true, Whatever clime hath nurtured him; As stooped to heal the wounded Jew The worshipper of Gerizim.

By misery unrepelled, unawed By pomp or power, thou seest a Man In prince or peasant, slave or lord, Pale priest, or swarthy artisan.

Through all disguise, form, place, or name, Beneath the flaunting robes of sin, Through poverty and squalid shame, Thou lookest on the man within.

On man, as man, retaining yet, Howe'er debased, and soiled, and dim, The crown upon his forehead set, The immortal gift of God to him.

And there is reverence in thy look; For that frail form which mortals wear The Spirit of the Holiest took, And veiled His perfect brightness there.

Not from the shallow babbling fount Of vain philosophy thou art; He who of old on Syria's Mount Thrilled, warmed, by turns, the listener's heart,

In holy words which cannot die, In thoughts which angels leaned to know, Proclaimed thy message from on high, Thy mission to a world of woe.

That voice's echo hath not died! From the blue lake of Galilee, And Tabor's lonely mountain-side, It calls a struggling world to thee.

Thy name and watchword o'er this land I hear in every breeze that stirs, And round a thousand altars stand Thy banded party worshippers.

Not, to these altars of a day, At party's call, my gift I bring; But on thy olden shrine I lay A freeman's dearest offering.

The voiceless utterance of his will,-- His pledge to Freedom and to Truth, That manhood's heart remembers still The homage of his generous youth.

Election Day, 1841

THE GALLOWS.

Written on reading pamphlets published by clergymen against the abolition of the gallows.

I. THE suns of eighteen centuries have shone Since the Redeemer walked with man, and made The fisher's boat, the cavern's floor of stone, And mountain moss, a pillow for His head; And He, who wandered with the peasant Jew, And broke with publicans the bread of shame, And drank with blessings, in His Father's name, The water which Samaria's outcast drew, Hath now His temples upon every shore, Altar and shrine and priest; and incense dim Evermore rising, with low prayer and hymn, From lips which press the temple's marble floor, Or kiss the gilded sign of the dread cross He bore.

II. Yet as of old, when, meekly "doing good," He fed a blind and selfish multitude, And even the poor companions of His lot With their dim earthly vision knew Him not, How ill are His high teachings understood Where He hath spoken Liberty, the priest At His own altar binds the chain anew; Where He hath bidden to Life's equal feast, The starving many wait upon the few; Where He hath spoken Peace, His name hath been The loudest war-cry of contending men; Priests, pale with vigils, in His name have blessed The unsheathed sword, and laid the spear in rest, Wet the war-banner with their sacred wine, And crossed its blazon with the holy sign; Yea, in His name who bade the erring live, And daily taught His lesson, to forgive! Twisted the cord and edged the murderous steel; And, with His words of mercy on their lips, Hung gloating o'er the pincer's burning grips, And the grim horror of the straining wheel; Fed the slow flame which gnawed the victim's limb, Who saw before his searing eyeballs swim The image of their Christ in cruel zeal, Through the black torment-smoke, held mockingly to him!

III. The blood which mingled with the desert sand, And beaded with its red and ghastly dew The vines and olives of the Holy Land; The shrieking curses of the hunted Jew; The white-sown bones of heretics, where'er They sank beneath the Crusade's holy spear; Goa's dark dungeons, Malta's sea-washed cell, Where with the hymns the ghostly fathers sung Mingled the groans by subtle torture wrung, Heaven's anthem blending with the shriek of hell! The midnight of Bartholomew, the stake Of Smithfield, and that thrice-accursed flame Which Calvin kindled by Geneva's lake; New England's scaffold, and the priestly sneer Which mocked its victims in that hour of fear, When guilt itself a human tear might claim,-- Bear witness, O Thou wronged and merciful One! That Earth's most hateful crimes have in Thy name been done!

IV. Thank God! that I have lived to see the time When the great truth begins at last to find An utterance from the deep heart of mankind, Earnest and clear, that all Revenge is Crime, That man is holier than a creed, that all Restraint upon him must consult his good, Hope's sunshine linger on his prison wall, And Love look in upon his solitude. The beautiful lesson which our Saviour taught Through long, dark centuries its way hath wrought Into the common mind and popular thought; And words, to which by Galilee's lake shore The humble fishers listened with hushed oar, Have found an echo in the general heart, And of the public faith become a living part.

V. Who shall arrest this tendency? Bring back The cells of Venice and the bigot's rack? Harden the softening human heart again To cold indifference to a brother's pain? Ye most unhappy men! who, turned away From the mild sunshine of the Gospel day, Grope in the shadows of Man's twilight time, What mean ye, that with ghoul-like zest ye brood, O'er those foul altars streaming with warm blood, Permitted in another age and clime? Why cite that law with which the bigot Jew Rebuked the Pagan's mercy, when he knew No evil in the Just One? Wherefore turn To the dark, cruel past? Can ye not learn From the pure Teacher's life how mildly free Is the great Gospel of Humanity? The Flamen's knife is bloodless, and no more Mexitli's altars soak with human gore, No more the ghastly sacrifices smoke Through the green arches of the Druid's oak; And ye of milder faith, with your high claim Of prophet-utterance in the Holiest name, Will ye become the Druids of our time Set up your scaffold-altars in our land, And, consecrators of Law's darkest crime, Urge to its loathsome work the hangman's hand? Beware, lest human nature, roused at last, From its peeled shoulder your encumbrance cast, And, sick to loathing of your cry for blood, Rank ye with those who led their victims round The Celt's red altar and the Indian's mound, Abhorred of Earth and Heaven, a pagan brotherhood!

1842.

SEED-TIME AND HARVEST.

As o'er his furrowed fields which lie Beneath a coldly dropping sky, Yet chill with winter's melted snow, The husbandman goes forth to sow,

Thus, Freedom, on the bitter blast The ventures of thy seed we cast, And trust to warmer sun and rain To swell the germs and fill the grain.

Who calls thy glorious service hard? Who deems it not its own reward? Who, for its trials, counts it less. A cause of praise and thankfulness?

It may not be our lot to wield The sickle in the ripened field; Nor ours to hear, on summer eves, The reaper's song among the sheaves.

Yet where our duty's task is wrought In unison with God's great thought, The near and future blend in one, And whatsoe'er is willed, is done!

And ours the grateful service whence Comes day by day the recompense; The hope, the trust, the purpose stayed, The fountain and the noonday shade.

And were this life the utmost span, The only end and aim of man, Better the toil of fields like these Than waking dream and slothful ease.

But life, though falling like our grain, Like that revives and springs again; And, early called, how blest are they Who wait in heaven their harvest-day!

1843.

TO THE REFORMERS OF ENGLAND.

This poem was addressed to those who like Richard Cobden and John Bright were seeking the reform of political evils in Great Britain by peaceful and Christian means. It will be remembered that the Anti-Corn Law League was in the midst of its labors at this time.

GOD bless ye, brothers! in the fight Ye 're waging now, ye cannot fail, For better is your sense of right Than king-craft's triple mail.

Than tyrant's law, or bigot's ban, More mighty is your simplest word; The free heart of an honest man Than crosier or the sword.

Go, let your blinded Church rehearse The lesson it has learned so well; It moves not with its prayer or curse The gates of heaven or hell.

Let the State scaffold rise again; Did Freedom die when Russell died? Forget ye how the blood of Vane From earth's green bosom cried?

The great hearts of your olden time Are beating with you, full and strong; All holy memories and sublime And glorious round ye throng.

The bluff, bold men of Runnymede Are with ye still in times like these; The shades of England's mighty dead, Your cloud of witnesses!

The truths ye urge are borne abroad By every wind and every tide; The voice of Nature and of God Speaks out upon your side.

The weapons which your hands have found Are those which Heaven itself has wrought, Light, Truth, and Love; your battle-ground The free, broad field of Thought.

No partial, selfish purpose breaks The simple beauty of your plan, Nor lie from throne or altar shakes Your steady faith in man.

The languid pulse of England starts And bounds beneath your words of power, The beating of her million hearts Is with you at this hour!

O ye who, with undoubting eyes, Through present cloud and gathering storm, Behold the span of Freedom's skies, And sunshine soft and warm;

Press bravely onward! not in vain Your generous trust in human-kind; The good which bloodshed could not gain Your peaceful zeal shall find.

Press on! the triumph shall be won Of common rights and equal laws, The glorious dream of Harrington, And Sidney's good old cause.

Blessing the cotter and the crown, Sweetening worn Labor's bitter cup; And, plucking not the highest down, Lifting the lowest up.

Press on! and we who may not share The toil or glory of your fight May ask, at least, in earnest prayer, God's blessing on the right!

1843.

THE HUMAN SACRIFICE.

Some leading sectarian papers had lately published the letter of a clergyman, giving an account of his attendance upon a criminal (who had committed murder during a fit of intoxication), at the time of his execution, in western New York. The writer describes the agony of the wretched being, his abortive attempts at prayer, his appeal for life, his fear of a violent death; and, after declaring his belief that the poor victim died without hope of salvation, concludes with a warm eulogy upon the gallows, being more than ever convinced of its utility by the awful dread and horror which it inspired.

I. FAR from his close and noisome cell, By grassy lane and sunny stream, Blown clover field and strawberry dell, And green and meadow freshness, fell The footsteps of his dream. Again from careless feet the dew Of summer's misty morn he shook; Again with merry heart he threw His light line in the rippling brook. Back crowded all his school-day joys; He urged the ball and quoit again, And heard the shout of laughing boys Come ringing down the walnut glen. Again he felt the western breeze, With scent of flowers and crisping hay; And down again through wind-stirred trees He saw the quivering sunlight play. An angel in home's vine-hung door, He saw his sister smile once more; Once more the truant's brown-locked head Upon his mother's knees was laid, And sweetly lulled to slumber there, With evening's holy hymn and prayer!

II. He woke. At once on heart and brain The present Terror rushed again; Clanked on his limbs the felon's chain He woke, to hear the church-tower tell Time's footfall on the conscious bell, And, shuddering, feel that clanging din His life's last hour had ushered in; To see within his prison-yard, Through the small window, iron barred, The gallows shadow rising dim Between the sunrise heaven and him; A horror in God's blessed air; A blackness in his morning light; Like some foul devil-altar there Built up by demon hands at night. And, maddened by that evil sight, Dark, horrible, confused, and strange, A chaos of wild, weltering change, All power of check and guidance gone, Dizzy and blind, his mind swept on. In vain he strove to breathe a prayer, In vain he turned the Holy Book, He only heard the gallows-stair Creak as the wind its timbers shook. No dream for him of sin forgiven, While still that baleful spectre stood, With its hoarse murmur, "Blood for Blood!" Between him and the pitying Heaven.

III. Low on his dungeon floor he knelt, And smote his breast, and on his chain, Whose iron clasp he always felt, His hot tears fell like rain; And near him, with the cold, calm look And tone of one whose formal part, Unwarmed, unsoftened of the heart, Is measured out by rule and book, With placid lip and tranquil blood, The hangman's ghostly ally stood, Blessing with solemn text and word The gallows-drop and strangling cord; Lending the sacred Gospel's awe And sanction to the crime of Law.

IV. He saw the victim's tortured brow, The sweat of anguish starting there, The record of a nameless woe In the dim eye's imploring stare, Seen hideous through the long, damp hair,-- Fingers of ghastly skin and bone Working and writhing on the stone! And heard, by mortal terror wrung From heaving breast and stiffened tongue, The choking sob and low hoarse prayer; As o'er his half-crazed fancy came A vision of the eternal flame, Its smoking cloud of agonies, Its demon-worm that never dies, The everlasting rise and fall Of fire-waves round the infernal wall; While high above that dark red flood, Black, giant-like, the gallows stood; Two busy fiends attending there One with cold mocking rite and prayer, The other with impatient grasp, Tightening the death-rope's strangling clasp.

V. The unfelt rite at length was done, The prayer unheard at length was said, An hour had passed: the noonday sun Smote on the features of the dead! And he who stood the doomed beside, Calm gauger of the swelling tide Of mortal agony and fear, Heeding with curious eye and ear Whate'er revealed the keen excess Of man's extremest wretchedness And who in that dark anguish saw An earnest of the victim's fate, The vengeful terrors of God's law, The kindlings of Eternal hate, The first drops of that fiery rain Which beats the dark red realm of pain, Did he uplift his earnest cries Against the crime of Law, which gave His brother to that fearful grave, Whereon Hope's moonlight never lies, And Faith's white blossoms never wave To the soft breath of Memory's sighs; Which sent a spirit marred and stained, By fiends of sin possessed, profaned, In madness and in blindness stark, Into the silent, unknown dark? No, from the wild and shrinking dread, With which he saw the victim led Beneath the dark veil which divides Ever the living from the dead, And Nature's solemn secret hides, The man of prayer can only draw New reasons for his bloody law; New faith in staying Murder's hand By murder at that Law's command; New reverence for the gallows-rope, As human nature's latest hope; Last relic of the good old time, When Power found license for its crime, And held a writhing world in check By that fell cord about its neck; Stifled Sedition's rising shout, Choked the young breath of Freedom out, And timely checked the words which sprung From Heresy's forbidden tongue; While in its noose of terror bound, The Church its cherished union found, Conforming, on the Moslem plan, The motley-colored mind of man, Not by the Koran and the Sword, But by the Bible and the Cord.

VI. O Thou at whose rebuke the grave Back to warm life its sleeper gave, Beneath whose sad and tearful glance The cold and changed countenance Broke the still horror of its trance, And, waking, saw with joy above, A brother's face of tenderest love; Thou, unto whom the blind and lame, The sorrowing and the sin-sick came, And from Thy very garment's hem Drew life and healing unto them, The burden of Thy holy faith Was love and life, not hate and death; Man's demon ministers of pain, The fiends of his revenge, were sent From thy pure Gospel's element To their dark home again. Thy name is Love! What, then, is he, Who in that name the gallows rears, An awful altar built to Thee, With sacrifice of blood and tears? Oh, once again Thy healing lay On the blind eyes which knew Thee not, And let the light of Thy pure day Melt in upon his darkened thought. Soften his hard, cold heart, and show The power which in forbearance lies, And let him feel that mercy now Is better than old sacrifice.

VII. As on the White Sea's charmed shore, The Parsee sees his holy hill (10) With dunnest smoke-clouds curtained o'er, Yet knows beneath them, evermore, The low, pale fire is quivering still; So, underneath its clouds of sin, The heart of man retaineth yet Gleams of its holy origin; And half-quenched stars that never set, Dim colors of its faded bow, And early beauty, linger there, And o'er its wasted desert blow Faint breathings of its morning air. Oh, never yet upon the scroll Of the sin-stained, but priceless soul, Hath Heaven inscribed "Despair!" Cast not the clouded gem away, Quench not the dim but living ray,-- My brother man, Beware! With that deep voice which from the skies Forbade the Patriarch's sacrifice, God's angel cries, Forbear.

1843

SONGS OF LABOR.

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