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+Project Gutenberg EBook, The Complete Works of John Greenleaf Whittier
+#45 in our series by John Greenleaf Whittier
+
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+Title: The Complete Works of Whittier
+       
+Author: John Greenleaf Whittier
+
+Release Date: January 2006  [EBook #9600]
+[This file was first posted on October 25, 2003]
+[Last updated on February 9, 2007]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, WHITTIER, COMPLETE ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+            THE COMPLETE WORKS OF JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
+
+
+                               VOLUME I.
+
+                        NARRATIVE AND LEGENDARY
+
+                                 POEMS
+
+                                   BY
+                        JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
+
+
+
+PUBLISHERS' ADVERTISEMENT
+
+The Standard Library Edition of Mr. Whittier's  writings comprises his
+poetical and prose works as re-arranged and thoroughly revised by
+himself or with his cooperation.  Mr. Whittier has supplied  such
+additional information regarding the subject and occasion of certain
+poems as may be stated in brief head-notes, and this edition has been
+much enriched by the poet's personal comment. So far as practicable the
+dates of publication of the various articles have been given, and since
+these were  originally published soon after composition, the dates of
+their first appearance have been taken as  determining the time at which
+they were written. At the request of the Publishers, Mr. Whittier  has
+allowed his early poems, discarded from previous collections, to be
+placed, in the general order  of their appearance, in an appendix to the
+final volume of poems. By this means the present edition is made so
+complete and retrospective that students of the poet's career will
+always find the most abundant material for their purpose. The Publishers
+congratulate themselves and the public that the careful attention which
+Mr. Whittier has been able to give to this revision of his works has
+resulted in so comprehensive and well-adjusted a collection.
+
+The portraits prefixed to the several volumes have been chosen with a
+view to illustrating successive periods in the poet's life.  The
+original sources and dates are indicated in each case.
+
+
+
+
+NARRATIVE AND LEGENDARY POEMS.
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+THE VAUDOIS TEACHER
+THE FEMALE MARTYR
+EXTRACT FROM "A NEW ENGLAND LEGEND"
+THE DEMON OF THE STUDY
+THE FOUNTAIN
+PENTUCKET
+THE NORSEMEN
+FUNERAL TREE OF THE SOKOKIS
+ST JOHN
+THE CYPRESS-TREE OF CEYLON
+THE EXILES
+THE KNIGHT OF ST JOHN
+CASSANDRA SOUTHWICK
+THE NEW WIFE AND THE OLD
+
+THE BRIDAL OF PENNACOOK
+     I.    THE MERRIMAC
+     II.   THE BASHABA
+     III.  THE DAUGHTER
+     IV.   THE WEDDING
+     V.    THE NEW HOME
+     VI.   AT PENNACOOK
+     VII.  THE DEPARTURE
+     VIII. SONG OF INDIAN WOMEN
+
+BARCLAY OF URY
+THE ANGELS OF BUENA VISTA
+THE LEGEND OF ST MARK
+KATHLEEN
+THE WELL OF LOCH MAREE
+THE CHAPEL OF THE HERMITS
+TAULER
+THE HERMIT OF THE THEBAID
+THE GARRISON OF CAPE ANN
+THE GIFT OF TRITEMIUS
+SKIPPER IRESON'S RIDE
+THE SYCAMORES
+THE PIPES AT LUCKNOW
+TELLING THE BEES
+THE SWAN SONG OF PARSON AVERY
+THE DOUBLE-HEADED SNAKE OF NEWBURY
+
+MABEL MARTIN: A HARVEST IDYL
+     PROEM
+     I.    THE RIVER VALLEY
+     II.   THE HUSKING
+     III.  THE WITCH'S DAUGHTER
+     IV.   THE CHAMPION
+     V.    IN THE SHADOW
+     VI.   THE BETROTHAL
+
+THE PROPHECY OF SAMUEL SEWALL
+THE RED RIVER VOYAGEUR
+THE PREACHER
+THE TRUCE OF PISCATAQUA
+MY PLAYMATE
+COBBLER KEEZAR'S VISION
+AMY WENTWORTH
+THE COUNTESS
+
+AMONG THE HILLS
+     PRELUDE
+     AMONG THE HILLS
+
+THE DOLE OF JARL THORKELL
+THE TWO RABBINS
+NOREMBEGA
+MIRIAM
+MAUD MULLER
+MARY GARVIN
+THE RANGER
+NAUHAUGHT, THE DEACON
+THE SISTERS
+MARGUERITE
+THE ROBIN
+
+THE PENNSYLVANIA PILGRIM
+     INTRODUCTORY NOTE
+     PRELUDE
+     THE PENNSYLVANIA PILGRIM
+
+KING VOLMER AND ELSIE
+THE THREE BELLS
+JOHN UNDERHILL
+CONDUCTOR BRADLEY
+THE WITCH OF WENHAM
+KING SOLOMON AND THE ANTS
+IN THE "OLD SOUTH"
+THE HENCHMAN
+THE DEAD FEAST OF THE KOL-FOLK
+THE KHAN'S DEVIL
+THE KING'S MISSIVE
+VALUATION
+RABBI ISHMAEL
+THE ROCK-TOMB OF BRADORE
+
+THE BAY OF SEVEN ISLANDS
+     To H P S
+     THE BAY OF SEVEN ISLANDS
+
+THE WISHING BRIDGE
+HOW THE WOMEN WENT FROM DOVER
+ST GREGORY'S GUEST
+CONTENTS
+BIRCHBROOK MILL
+THE TWO ELIZABETHS
+REQUITAL
+THE HOMESTEAD
+HOW THE ROBIN CAME
+BANISHED FROM MASSACHUSETTS
+THE BROWN DWARF OF RUGEN
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.-The portrait prefixed to this volume was etched by
+S. A. Schoff, in 1888, after a painting by Bass Otis, a pupil of
+Gilbert Stuart, made in the winter of 1836-1837.
+
+
+
+
+PROEM
+
+I LOVE the old melodious lays
+Which softly melt the ages through,
+The songs of Spenser's golden days,
+Arcadian Sidney's silvery phrase,
+Sprinkling our noon of time with freshest morning dew.
+
+Yet, vainly in my quiet hours
+To breathe their marvellous notes I try;
+I feel them, as the leaves and flowers
+In silence feel the dewy showers,
+And drink with glad, still lips the blessing of the sky.
+
+The rigor of a frozen clime,
+The harshness of an untaught ear,
+The jarring words of one whose rhyme
+Beat often Labor's hurried time,
+Or Duty's rugged march through storm and strife, are here.
+
+Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,
+No rounded art the lack supplies;
+Unskilled the subtle lines to trace,
+Or softer shades of Nature's face,
+I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.
+
+Nor mine the seer-like power to show
+The secrets of the heart and mind;
+To drop the plummet-line below
+Our common world of joy and woe,
+A more intense despair or brighter hope to find.
+
+Yet here at least an earnest sense
+Of human right and weal is shown;
+A hate of tyranny intense,
+And hearty in its vehemence,
+As if my brother's pain and sorrow were my own.
+
+O Freedom! if to me belong
+Nor mighty Milton's gift divine,
+Nor Marvell's wit and graceful song,
+Still with a love as deep and strong
+As theirs, I lay, like them, my best gifts on thy shrine.
+
+AMESBURY, 11th mo., 1847.
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+The edition of my poems published in 1857 contained the following note
+by way of preface:--
+
+"In these volumes, for the first time, a complete collection of my
+poetical writings has been made. While it is satisfactory to know that
+these scattered children of my brain have found a home, I cannot but
+regret that I have been unable, by reason of illness, to give that
+attention to their revision and arrangement, which respect for the
+opinions of others and my own afterthought and experience demand.
+
+"That there are pieces in this collection which I would 'willingly let
+die,' I am free to confess. But it is now too late to disown them, and I
+must submit to the inevitable penalty of poetical as well as other sins.
+There are others, intimately connected with the author's life and times,
+which owe their tenacity of vitality to the circumstances under which
+they were written, and the events by which they were suggested.
+
+"The long poem of Mogg Megone was in a great measure composed in early
+life; and it is scarcely necessary to say that its subject is not such
+as the writer would have chosen at any subsequent period."
+
+After a lapse of thirty years since the above was written, I have been
+requested by my publishers to make some preparation for a new and
+revised edition of my poems. I cannot flatter myself that I have added
+much to the interest of the work beyond the correction of my own errors
+and those of the press, with the addition of a few heretofore
+unpublished pieces, and occasional notes of explanation which seemed
+necessary. I have made an attempt to classify the poems under a few
+general heads, and have transferred the long poem of Mogg Megone to the
+Appendix, with other specimens of my earlier writings. I have endeavored
+to affix the dates of composition or publication as far as possible.
+
+In looking over these poems I have not been unmindful of occasional
+prosaic lines and verbal infelicities, but at this late day I have
+neither strength nor patience to undertake their correction.
+
+Perhaps a word of explanation may be needed in regard to a class of
+poems written between the years 1832 and 1865. Of their defects from an
+artistic point of view it is not necessary to speak. They were the
+earnest and often vehement expression of the writer's thought and
+feeling at critical periods in the great conflict between Freedom and
+Slavery. They were written with no expectation that they would survive
+the occasions which called them forth: they were protests, alarm
+signals, trumpet-calls to action, words wrung from the writer's heart,
+forged at white heat, and of course lacking the finish and careful
+word-selection which reflection and patient brooding over them might
+have given. Such as they are, they belong to the history of the
+Anti-Slavery movement, and may serve as way-marks of its progress. If
+their language at times seems severe and harsh, the monstrous wrong of
+Slavery which provoked it must be its excuse, if any is needed. In
+attacking it, we did not measure our words. "It is," said Garrison,
+"a waste of politeness to be courteous to the devil." But in truth the
+contest was, in a great measure, an impersonal one,--hatred of slavery
+and not of slave-masters.
+
+                    "No common wrong provoked our zeal,
+                    The silken gauntlet which is thrown
+                    In such a quarrel rings like steel."
+
+Even Thomas Jefferson, in his terrible denunciation of Slavery in the
+Notes on Virginia, says "It is impossible to be temperate and pursue the
+subject of Slavery." After the great contest was over, no class of the
+American people were more ready, with kind words and deprecation of
+harsh retaliation, to welcome back the revolted States than the
+Abolitionists; and none have since more heartily rejoiced at the fast
+increasing prosperity of the South.
+
+Grateful for the measure of favor which has been accorded to my
+writings, I leave this edition with the public. It contains all that I
+care to re-publish, and some things which, had the matter of choice been
+left solely to myself, I should have omitted.
+                                               J. G. W.
+
+
+
+
+
+NARRATIVE AND LEGENDARY POEMS
+
+THE VAUDOIS TEACHER.
+
+This poem was suggested by the account given of the manner which the
+Waldenses disseminated their principles among the Catholic gentry. They
+gained access to the house through their occupation as peddlers of
+silks, jewels, and trinkets. "Having disposed of some of their goods,"
+it is said by a writer who quotes the inquisitor Rainerus Sacco, "they
+cautiously intimated that they had commodities far more valuable than
+these, inestimable jewels, which they would show if they could be
+protected from the clergy. They would then give their purchasers a Bible
+or Testament; and thereby many were deluded into heresy." The poem,
+under the title Le Colporteur Vaudois, was translated into French by
+Professor G. de Felice, of Montauban, and further naturalized by
+Professor Alexandre Rodolphe Vinet, who quoted it in his lectures on
+French literature, afterwards published. It became familiar in this form
+to the Waldenses, who adopted it as a household poem. An American
+clergyman, J. C. Fletcher, frequently heard it when he was a student,
+about the year 1850, in the theological seminary at Geneva, Switzerland,
+but the authorship of the poem was unknown to those who used it.
+Twenty-five years later, Mr. Fletcher, learning the name of the author,
+wrote to the moderator of the Waldensian synod at La Tour, giving the
+information. At the banquet which closed the meeting of the synod, the
+moderator announced the fact, and was instructed in the name of the
+Waldensian church to write to me a letter of thanks. My letter, written
+in reply, was translated into Italian and printed throughout Italy.
+
+"O LADY fair, these silks of mine
+     are beautiful and rare,--
+The richest web of the Indian loom, which beauty's
+     queen might wear;
+And my pearls are pure as thy own fair neck, with whose
+     radiant light they vie;
+I have brought them with me a weary way,--will my
+     gentle lady buy?"
+
+The lady smiled on the worn old man through the
+     dark and clustering curls
+Which veiled her brow, as she bent to view his
+     silks and glittering pearls;
+And she placed their price in the old man's hand
+     and lightly turned away,
+But she paused at the wanderer's earnest call,--
+     "My gentle lady, stay!
+
+"O lady fair, I have yet a gem which a purer
+     lustre flings,
+Than the diamond flash of the jewelled crown on
+     the lofty brow of kings;
+A wonderful pearl of exceeding price, whose virtue
+     shall not decay,
+Whose light shall be as a spell to thee and a
+     blessing on thy way!"
+
+The lady glanced at the mirroring steel where her
+     form of grace was seen,
+Where her eye shone clear, and her dark locks
+     waved their clasping pearls between;
+"Bring forth thy pearl of exceeding worth, thou
+     traveller gray and old,
+And name the price of thy precious gem, and my
+     page shall count thy gold."
+
+The cloud went off from the pilgrim's brow, as a
+     small and meagre book,
+Unchased with gold or gem of cost, from his
+     folding robe he took!
+"Here, lady fair, is the pearl of price, may it prove
+     as such to thee
+Nay, keep thy gold--I ask it not, for the word of
+     God is free!"
+
+The hoary traveller went his way, but the gift he
+     left behind
+Hath had its pure and perfect work on that high-
+     born maiden's mind,
+And she hath turned from the pride of sin to the
+     lowliness of truth,
+And given her human heart to God in its beautiful
+     hour of youth
+
+And she hath left the gray old halls, where an evil
+     faith had power,
+The courtly knights of her father's train, and the
+     maidens of her bower;
+And she hath gone to the Vaudois vales by lordly
+     feet untrod,
+Where the poor and needy of earth are rich in the
+     perfect love of God!
+1830.
+
+
+
+
+THE FEMALE MARTYR.
+
+Mary G-----, aged eighteen, a "Sister of Charity," died in one  of our
+Atlantic cities, during the prevalence of the Indian cholera, while
+in voluntary attendance upon the sick.
+
+
+"BRING out your dead!" The midnight street
+Heard and gave back the hoarse, low call;
+Harsh fell the tread of hasty feet,
+Glanced through the dark the coarse white sheet,
+Her coffin and her pall.
+"What--only one!" the brutal hack-man said,
+As, with an oath, he spurned away the dead.
+
+How sunk the inmost hearts of all,
+As rolled that dead-cart slowly by,
+With creaking wheel and harsh hoof-fall!
+The dying turned him to the wall,
+To hear it and to die!
+Onward it rolled; while oft its driver stayed,
+And hoarsely clamored, "Ho! bring out your dead."
+
+It paused beside the burial-place;
+"Toss in your load!" and it was done.
+With quick hand and averted face,
+Hastily to the grave's embrace
+They cast them, one by one,
+Stranger and friend, the evil and the just,
+Together trodden in the churchyard dust.
+
+And thou, young martyr! thou wast there;
+No white-robed sisters round thee trod,
+Nor holy hymn, nor funeral prayer
+Rose through the damp and noisome air,
+Giving thee to thy God;
+Nor flower, nor cross, nor hallowed taper gave
+Grace to the dead, and beauty to the grave!
+
+Yet, gentle sufferer! there shall be,
+In every heart of kindly feeling,
+A rite as holy paid to thee
+As if beneath the convent-tree
+Thy sisterhood were kneeling,
+At vesper hours, like sorrowing angels, keeping
+Their tearful watch around thy place of sleeping.
+
+For thou wast one in whom the light
+Of Heaven's own love was kindled well;
+Enduring with a martyr's might,
+Through weary day and wakeful night,
+Far more than words may tell
+Gentle, and meek, and lowly, and unknown,
+Thy mercies measured by thy God alone!
+
+Where manly hearts were failing, where
+The throngful street grew foul with death,
+O high-souled martyr! thou wast there,
+Inhaling, from the loathsome air,
+Poison with every breath.
+Yet shrinking not from offices of dread
+For the wrung dying, and the unconscious dead.
+
+And, where the sickly taper shed
+Its light through vapors, damp, confined,
+Hushed as a seraph's fell thy tread,
+A new Electra by the bed
+Of suffering human-kind!
+Pointing the spirit, in its dark dismay,
+To that pure hope which fadeth not away.
+
+Innocent teacher of the high
+And holy mysteries of Heaven!
+How turned to thee each glazing eye,
+In mute and awful sympathy,
+As thy low prayers were given;
+And the o'er-hovering Spoiler wore, the while,
+An angel's features, a deliverer's smile!
+
+A blessed task! and worthy one
+Who, turning from the world, as thou,
+Before life's pathway had begun
+To leave its spring-time flower and sun,
+Had sealed her early vow;
+Giving to God her beauty and her youth,
+Her pure affections and her guileless truth.
+
+Earth may not claim thee. Nothing here
+Could be for thee a meet reward;
+Thine is a treasure far more dear
+Eye hath not seen it, nor the ear
+Of living mortal heard
+The joys prepared, the promised bliss above,
+The holy presence of Eternal Love!
+
+Sleep on in peace. The earth has not
+A nobler name than thine shall be.
+The deeds by martial manhood wrought,
+The lofty energies of thought,
+The fire of poesy,
+These have but frail and fading honors; thine
+Shall Time unto Eternity consign.
+
+Yea, and when thrones shall crumble down,
+And human pride and grandeur fall,
+The herald's line of long renown,
+The mitre and the kingly crown,--
+Perishing glories all!
+The pure devotion of thy generous heart
+Shall live in Heaven, of which it was a part.
+1833.
+
+
+
+
+EXTRACT FROM "A NEW ENGLAND LEGEND."
+(Originally a part of the author's Moll Pitcher.)
+
+How has New England's romance fled,
+Even as a vision of the morning!
+Its rites foredone, its guardians dead,
+Its priestesses, bereft of dread,
+Waking the veriest urchin's scorning!
+Gone like the Indian wizard's yell
+And fire-dance round the magic rock,
+Forgotten like the Druid's spell
+At moonrise by his holy oak!
+No more along the shadowy glen
+Glide the dim ghosts of murdered men;
+No more the unquiet churchyard dead
+Glimpse upward from their turfy bed,
+Startling the traveller, late and lone;
+As, on some night of starless weather,
+They silently commune together,
+Each sitting on his own head-stone
+The roofless house, decayed, deserted,
+Its living tenants all departed,
+No longer rings with midnight revel
+Of witch, or ghost, or goblin evil;
+No pale blue flame sends out its flashes
+Through creviced roof and shattered sashes!
+The witch-grass round the hazel spring
+May sharply to the night-air sing,
+But there no more shall withered hags
+Refresh at ease their broomstick nags,
+Or taste those hazel-shadowed waters
+As beverage meet for Satan's daughters;
+No more their mimic tones be heard,
+The mew of cat, the chirp of bird,
+Shrill blending with the hoarser laughter
+Of the fell demon following after!
+The cautious goodman nails no more
+A horseshoe on his outer door,
+Lest some unseemly hag should fit
+To his own mouth her bridle-bit;
+The goodwife's churn no more refuses
+Its wonted culinary uses
+Until, with heated needle burned,
+The witch has to her place returned!
+Our witches are no longer old
+And wrinkled beldames, Satan-sold,
+But young and gay and laughing creatures,
+With the heart's sunshine on their features;
+Their sorcery--the light which dances
+Where the raised lid unveils its glances;
+Or that low-breathed and gentle tone,
+The music of Love's twilight hours,
+Soft, dream-like, as a fairy's moan
+Above her nightly closing flowers,
+Sweeter than that which sighed of yore
+Along the charmed Ausonian shore!
+Even she, our own weird heroine,
+Sole Pythoness of ancient Lynn,'
+Sleeps calmly where the living laid her;
+And the wide realm of sorcery,
+Left by its latest mistress free,
+Hath found no gray and skilled invader.
+So--perished Albion's "glammarye,"
+With him in Melrose Abbey sleeping,
+His charmed torch beside his knee,
+That even the dead himself might see
+The magic scroll within his keeping.
+And now our modern Yankee sees
+Nor omens, spells, nor mysteries;
+And naught above, below, around,
+Of life or death, of sight or sound,
+Whate'er its nature, form, or look,
+Excites his terror or surprise,
+All seeming to his knowing eyes
+Familiar as his "catechise,"
+Or "Webster's Spelling-Book."
+1833.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEMON OF THE STUDY.
+
+THE Brownie sits in the Scotchman's room,
+And eats his meat and drinks his ale,
+And beats the maid with her unused broom,
+And the lazy lout with his idle flail;
+But he sweeps the floor and threshes the corn,
+And hies him away ere the break of dawn.
+
+The shade of Denmark fled from the sun,
+And the Cocklane ghost from the barn-loft cheer,
+The fiend of Faust was a faithful one,
+Agrippa's demon wrought in fear,
+And the devil of Martin Luther sat
+By the stout monk's side in social chat.
+
+The Old Man of the Sea, on the neck of him
+Who seven times crossed the deep,
+Twined closely each lean and withered limb,
+Like the nightmare in one's sleep.
+But he drank of the wine, and Sindbad cast
+The evil weight from his back at last.
+
+But the demon that cometh day by day
+To my quiet room and fireside nook,
+Where the casement light falls dim and gray
+On faded painting and ancient book,
+Is a sorrier one than any whose names
+Are chronicled well by good King James.
+
+No bearer of burdens like Caliban,
+No runner of errands like Ariel,
+He comes in the shape of a fat old man,
+Without rap of knuckle or pull of bell;
+And whence he comes, or whither he goes,
+I know as I do of the wind which blows.
+
+A stout old man with a greasy hat
+Slouched heavily down to his dark, red nose,
+And two gray eyes enveloped in fat,
+Looking through glasses with iron bows.
+Read ye, and heed ye, and ye who can,
+Guard well your doors from that old man!
+
+He comes with a careless "How d' ye do?"
+And seats himself in my elbow-chair;
+And my morning paper and pamphlet new
+Fall forthwith under his special care,
+And he wipes his glasses and clears his throat,
+And, button by button, unfolds his coat.
+
+And then he reads from paper and book,
+In a low and husky asthmatic tone,
+With the stolid sameness of posture and look
+Of one who reads to himself alone;
+And hour after hour on my senses come
+That husky wheeze and that dolorous hum.
+
+The price of stocks, the auction sales,
+The poet's song and the lover's glee,
+The horrible murders, the seaboard gales,
+The marriage list, and the jeu d'esprit,
+All reach my ear in the self-same tone,--
+I shudder at each, but the fiend reads on!
+
+Oh, sweet as the lapse of water at noon
+O'er the mossy roots of some forest tree,
+The sigh of the wind in the woods of June,
+Or sound of flutes o'er a moonlight sea,
+Or the low soft music, perchance, which seems
+To float through the slumbering singer's dreams,
+
+So sweet, so dear is the silvery tone,
+Of her in whose features I sometimes look,
+As I sit at eve by her side alone,
+And we read by turns, from the self-same book,
+Some tale perhaps of the olden time,
+Some lover's romance or quaint old rhyme.
+
+Then when the story is one of woe,--
+Some prisoner's plaint through his dungeon-bar,
+Her blue eye glistens with tears, and low
+Her voice sinks down like a moan afar;
+And I seem to hear that prisoner's wail,
+And his face looks on me worn and pale.
+
+And when she reads some merrier song,
+Her voice is glad as an April bird's,
+And when the tale is of war and wrong,
+A trumpet's summons is in her words,
+And the rush of the hosts I seem to hear,
+And see the tossing of plume and spear!
+
+Oh, pity me then, when, day by day,
+The stout fiend darkens my parlor door;
+And reads me perchance the self-same lay
+Which melted in music, the night before,
+From lips as the lips of Hylas sweet,
+And moved like twin roses which zephyrs meet!
+
+I cross my floor with a nervous tread,
+I whistle and laugh and sing and shout,
+I flourish my cane above his head,
+And stir up the fire to roast him out;
+I topple the chairs, and drum on the pane,
+And press my hands on my ears, in vain!
+
+I've studied Glanville and James the wise,
+And wizard black-letter tomes which treat
+Of demons of every name and size
+Which a Christian man is presumed to meet,
+But never a hint and never a line
+Can I find of a reading fiend like mine.
+
+I've crossed the Psalter with Brady and Tate,
+And laid the Primer above them all,
+I've nailed a horseshoe over the grate,
+And hung a wig to my parlor wall
+Once worn by a learned Judge, they say,
+At Salem court in the witchcraft day!
+
+"Conjuro te, sceleratissime,
+Abire ad tuum locum!"--still
+Like a visible nightmare he sits by me,--
+The exorcism has lost its skill;
+And I hear again in my haunted room
+The husky wheeze and the dolorous hum!
+
+Ah! commend me to Mary Magdalen
+With her sevenfold plagues, to the wandering Jew,
+To the terrors which haunted Orestes when
+The furies his midnight curtains drew,
+But charm him off, ye who charm him can,
+That reading demon, that fat old man!
+1835.
+
+
+
+
+THE FOUNTAIN.
+
+On the declivity of a hill in Salisbury, Essex County, is a fountain of
+clear water, gushing from the very roots of a venerable oak. It is about
+two miles from the junction of the Powow River with the Merrimac.
+
+TRAVELLER! on thy journey toiling
+By the swift Powow,
+With the summer sunshine falling
+On thy heated brow,
+Listen, while all else is still,
+To the brooklet from the hill.
+
+Wild and sweet the flowers are blowing
+By that streamlet's side,
+And a greener verdure showing
+Where its waters glide,
+Down the hill-slope murmuring on,
+Over root and mossy stone.
+
+Where yon oak his broad arms flingeth
+O'er the sloping hill,
+Beautiful and freshly springeth
+That soft-flowing rill,
+Through its dark roots wreathed and bare,
+Gushing up to sun and air.
+
+Brighter waters sparkled never
+In that magic well,
+Of whose gift of life forever
+Ancient legends tell,
+In the lonely desert wasted,
+And by mortal lip untasted.
+
+Waters which the proud Castilian
+Sought with longing eyes,
+Underneath the bright pavilion
+Of the Indian skies,
+Where his forest pathway lay
+Through the blooms of Florida.
+
+Years ago a lonely stranger,
+With the dusky brow
+Of the outcast forest-ranger,
+Crossed the swift Powow,
+And betook him to the rill
+And the oak upon the hill.
+
+O'er his face of moody sadness
+For an instant shone
+Something like a gleam of gladness,
+As he stooped him down
+To the fountain's grassy side,
+And his eager thirst supplied.
+
+With the oak its shadow throwing
+O'er his mossy seat,
+And the cool, sweet waters flowing
+Softly at his feet,
+Closely by the fountain's rim
+That lone Indian seated him.
+
+Autumn's earliest frost had given
+To the woods below
+Hues of beauty, such as heaven
+Lendeth to its bow;
+And the soft breeze from the west
+Scarcely broke their dreamy rest.
+
+Far behind was Ocean striving
+With his chains of sand;
+Southward, sunny glimpses giving,
+'Twixt the swells of land,
+Of its calm and silvery track,
+Rolled the tranquil Merrimac.
+
+Over village, wood, and meadow
+Gazed that stranger man,
+Sadly, till the twilight shadow
+Over all things ran,
+Save where spire and westward pane
+Flashed the sunset back again.
+
+Gazing thus upon the dwelling
+Of his warrior sires,
+Where no lingering trace was telling
+Of their wigwam fires,
+Who the gloomy thoughts might know
+Of that wandering child of woe?
+
+Naked lay, in sunshine glowing,
+Hills that once had stood
+Down their sides the shadows throwing
+Of a mighty wood,
+Where the deer his covert kept,
+And the eagle's pinion swept!
+
+Where the birch canoe had glided
+Down the swift Powow,
+Dark and gloomy bridges strided
+Those clear waters now;
+And where once the beaver swam,
+Jarred the wheel and frowned the dam.
+
+For the wood-bird's merry singing,
+And the hunter's cheer,
+Iron clang and hammer's ringing
+Smote upon his ear;
+And the thick and sullen smoke
+From the blackened forges broke.
+
+Could it be his fathers ever
+Loved to linger here?
+These bare hills, this conquered river,--
+Could they hold them dear,
+With their native loveliness
+Tamed and tortured into this?
+
+Sadly, as the shades of even
+Gathered o'er the hill,
+While the western half of heaven
+Blushed with sunset still,
+From the fountain's mossy seat
+Turned the Indian's weary feet.
+
+Year on year hath flown forever,
+But he came no more
+To the hillside on the river
+Where he came before.
+But the villager can tell
+Of that strange man's visit well.
+
+And the merry children, laden
+With their fruits or flowers,
+Roving boy and laughing maiden,
+In their school-day hours,
+Love the simple tale to tell
+Of the Indian and his well.
+1837
+
+
+
+
+PENTUCKET.
+
+The village of Haverhill, on the Merrimac, called by the Indians
+Pentucket, was for nearly seventeen years a frontier town, and during
+thirty years endured all the horrors of savage warfare. In the year
+1708, a combined body of French and Indians, under the command of De
+Chaillons, and Hertel de Rouville, the famous and bloody sacker of
+Deerfield, made an attack upon the village, which at that time contained
+only thirty houses. Sixteen of the villagers were massacred, and a still
+larger number made prisoners. About thirty of the enemy also fell, among
+them Hertel de Rouville. The minister of the place, Benjamin Rolfe, was
+killed by a shot through his own door. In a paper entitled The Border
+War of 1708, published in my collection of Recreations and Miscellanies,
+I have given a prose narrative of the surprise of Haverhill.
+
+
+How sweetly on the wood-girt town
+The mellow light of sunset shone!
+Each small, bright lake, whose waters still
+Mirror the forest and the hill,
+Reflected from its waveless breast
+The beauty of a cloudless west,
+Glorious as if a glimpse were given
+Within the western gates of heaven,
+Left, by the spirit of the star
+Of sunset's holy hour, ajar!
+
+Beside the river's tranquil flood
+The dark and low-walled dwellings stood,
+Where many a rood of open land
+Stretched up and down on either hand,
+With corn-leaves waving freshly green
+The thick and blackened stumps between.
+Behind, unbroken, deep and dread,
+The wild, untravelled forest spread,
+Back to those mountains, white and cold,
+Of which the Indian trapper told,
+Upon whose summits never yet
+Was mortal foot in safety set.
+
+Quiet and calm without a fear,
+Of danger darkly lurking near,
+The weary laborer left his plough,
+The milkmaid carolled by her cow;
+From cottage door and household hearth
+Rose songs of praise, or tones of mirth.
+
+At length the murmur died away,
+And silence on that village lay.
+--So slept Pompeii, tower and hall,
+Ere the quick earthquake swallowed all,
+Undreaming of the fiery fate
+Which made its dwellings desolate.
+
+Hours passed away. By moonlight sped
+The Merrimac along his bed.
+Bathed in the pallid lustre, stood
+Dark cottage-wall and rock and wood,
+Silent, beneath that tranquil beam,
+As the hushed grouping of a dream.
+Yet on the still air crept a sound,
+No bark of fox, nor rabbit's bound,
+Nor stir of wings, nor waters flowing,
+Nor leaves in midnight breezes blowing.
+
+Was that the tread of many feet,
+Which downward from the hillside beat?
+What forms were those which darkly stood
+Just on the margin of the wood?--
+Charred tree-stumps in the moonlight dim,
+Or paling rude, or leafless limb?
+No,--through the trees fierce eyeballs glowed,
+Dark human forms in moonshine showed,
+Wild from their native wilderness,
+With painted limbs and battle-dress.
+
+A yell the dead might wake to hear
+Swelled on the night air, far and clear;
+Then smote the Indian tomahawk
+On crashing door and shattering lock;
+
+Then rang the rifle-shot, and then
+The shrill death-scream of stricken men,--
+Sank the red axe in woman's brain,
+And childhood's cry arose in vain.
+Bursting through roof and window came,
+Red, fast, and fierce, the kindled flame,
+And blended fire and moonlight glared
+On still dead men and scalp-knives bared.
+
+The morning sun looked brightly through
+The river willows, wet with dew.
+No sound of combat filled the air,
+No shout was heard, nor gunshot there;
+Yet still the thick and sullen smoke
+From smouldering ruins slowly broke;
+And on the greensward many a stain,
+And, here and there, the mangled slain,
+Told how that midnight bolt had sped
+Pentucket, on thy fated head.
+
+Even now the villager can tell
+Where Rolfe beside his hearthstone fell,
+Still show the door of wasting oak,
+Through which the fatal death-shot broke,
+And point the curious stranger where
+De Rouville's corse lay grim and bare;
+Whose hideous head, in death still feared,
+Bore not a trace of hair or beard;
+And still, within the churchyard ground,
+Heaves darkly up the ancient mound,
+Whose grass-grown surface overlies
+The victims of that sacrifice.
+1838.
+
+
+
+
+THE NORSEMEN.
+
+In the early part of the present century, a fragment of a statue, rudely
+chiselled from dark gray stone, was found in the town of Bradford, on
+the Merrimac. Its origin must be left entirely to conjecture. The fact
+that the ancient Northmen visited the north-east coast of North America
+and probably New England, some centuries before the discovery of the
+western world by Columbus, is very generally admitted.
+
+GIFT from the cold and silent Past!
+A relic to the present cast,
+Left on the ever-changing strand
+Of shifting and unstable sand,
+Which wastes beneath the steady chime
+And beating of the waves of Time!
+Who from its bed of primal rock
+First wrenched thy dark, unshapely block?
+Whose hand, of curious skill untaught,
+Thy rude and savage outline wrought?
+
+The waters of my native stream
+Are glancing in the sun's warm beam;
+From sail-urged keel and flashing oar
+The circles widen to its shore;
+And cultured field and peopled town
+Slope to its willowed margin down.
+Yet, while this morning breeze is bringing
+The home-life sound of school-bells ringing,
+And rolling wheel, and rapid jar
+Of the fire-winged and steedless car,
+And voices from the wayside near
+Come quick and blended on my ear,--
+A spell is in this old gray stone,
+My thoughts are with the Past alone!
+
+A change!--The steepled town no more
+Stretches along the sail-thronged shore;
+Like palace-domes in sunset's cloud,
+Fade sun-gilt spire and mansion proud
+Spectrally rising where they stood,
+I see the old, primeval wood;
+Dark, shadow-like, on either hand
+I see its solemn waste expand;
+It climbs the green and cultured hill,
+It arches o'er the valley's rill,
+And leans from cliff and crag to throw
+Its wild arms o'er the stream below.
+Unchanged, alone, the same bright river
+Flows on, as it will flow forever
+I listen, and I hear the low
+Soft ripple where its waters go;
+I hear behind the panther's cry,
+The wild-bird's scream goes thrilling by,
+And shyly on the river's brink
+The deer is stooping down to drink.
+
+But hark!--from wood and rock flung back,
+What sound comes up the Merrimac?
+What sea-worn barks are those which throw
+The light spray from each rushing prow?
+Have they not in the North Sea's blast
+Bowed to the waves the straining mast?
+Their frozen sails the low, pale sun
+Of Thule's night has shone upon;
+Flapped by the sea-wind's gusty sweep
+Round icy drift, and headland steep.
+Wild Jutland's wives and Lochlin's daughters
+Have watched them fading o'er the waters,
+Lessening through driving mist and spray,
+Like white-winged sea-birds on their way!
+
+Onward they glide,--and now I view
+Their iron-armed and stalwart crew;
+Joy glistens in each wild blue eye,
+Turned to green earth and summer sky.
+Each broad, seamed breast has cast aside
+Its cumbering vest of shaggy hide;
+Bared to the sun and soft warm air,
+Streams back the Norsemen's yellow hair.
+I see the gleam of axe and spear,
+The sound of smitten shields I hear,
+Keeping a harsh and fitting time
+To Saga's chant, and Runic rhyme;
+Such lays as Zetland's Scald has sung,
+His gray and naked isles among;
+Or muttered low at midnight hour
+Round Odin's mossy stone of power.
+The wolf beneath the Arctic moon
+Has answered to that startling rune;
+The Gael has heard its stormy swell,
+The light Frank knows its summons well;
+Iona's sable-stoled Culdee
+Has heard it sounding o'er the sea,
+And swept, with hoary beard and hair,
+His altar's foot in trembling prayer.
+
+'T is past,--the 'wildering vision dies
+In darkness on my dreaming eyes
+The forest vanishes in air,
+Hill-slope and vale lie starkly bare;
+I hear the common tread of men,
+And hum of work-day life again;
+
+The mystic relic seems alone
+A broken mass of common stone;
+And if it be the chiselled limb
+Of Berserker or idol grim,
+A fragment of Valhalla's Thor,
+The stormy Viking's god of War,
+Or Praga of the Runic lay,
+Or love-awakening Siona,
+I know not,--for no graven line,
+Nor Druid mark, nor Runic sign,
+Is left me here, by which to trace
+Its name, or origin, or place.
+Yet, for this vision of the Past,
+This glance upon its darkness cast,
+My spirit bows in gratitude
+Before the Giver of all good,
+Who fashioned so the human mind,
+That, from the waste of Time behind,
+A simple stone, or mound of earth,
+Can summon the departed forth;
+Quicken the Past to life again,
+The Present lose in what hath been,
+And in their primal freshness show
+The buried forms of long ago.
+As if a portion of that Thought
+By which the Eternal will is wrought,
+Whose impulse fills anew with breath
+The frozen solitude of Death,
+To mortal mind were sometimes lent,
+To mortal musings sometimes sent,
+To whisper-even when it seems
+But Memory's fantasy of dreams--
+Through the mind's waste of woe and sin,
+Of an immortal origin!
+1841.
+
+
+
+
+FUNERAL TREE OF THE SOKOKIS.
+
+Polan, chief of the Sokokis Indians of the country between Agamenticus
+and Casco Bay, was killed at Windham on Sebago Lake in the spring of
+1756. After the whites had retired, the surviving Indians "swayed" or
+bent down a young tree until its roots were upturned, placed the body of
+their chief beneath it, then released the tree, which, in springing back
+to its old position, covered the grave. The Sokokis were early converts
+to the Catholic faith. Most of them, prior to the year 1756, had removed
+to the French settlements on the St. Francois.
+
+AROUND Sebago's lonely lake
+There lingers not a breeze to break
+The mirror which its waters make.
+
+The solemn pines along its shore,
+The firs which hang its gray rocks o'er,
+Are painted on its glassy floor.
+
+The sun looks o'er, with hazy eye,
+The snowy mountain-tops which lie
+Piled coldly up against the sky.
+
+Dazzling and white! save where the bleak,
+Wild winds have bared some splintering peak,
+Or snow-slide left its dusky streak.
+
+Yet green are Saco's banks below,
+And belts of spruce and cedar show,
+Dark fringing round those cones of snow.
+
+The earth hath felt the breath of spring,
+Though yet on her deliverer's wing
+The lingering frosts of winter cling.
+
+Fresh grasses fringe the meadow-brooks,
+And mildly from its sunny nooks
+The blue eye of the violet looks.
+
+And odors from the springing grass,
+The sweet birch and the sassafras,
+Upon the scarce-felt breezes pass.
+
+Her tokens of renewing care
+Hath Nature scattered everywhere,
+In bud and flower, and warmer air.
+
+But in their hour of bitterness,
+What reek the broken Sokokis,
+Beside their slaughtered chief, of this?
+
+The turf's red stain is yet undried,
+Scarce have the death-shot echoes died
+Along Sebago's wooded side;
+
+And silent now the hunters stand,
+Grouped darkly, where a swell of land
+Slopes upward from the lake's white sand.
+
+Fire and the axe have swept it bare,
+Save one lone beech, unclosing there
+Its light leaves in the vernal air.
+
+With grave, cold looks, all sternly mute,
+They break the damp turf at its foot,
+And bare its coiled and twisted root.
+
+They heave the stubborn trunk aside,
+The firm roots from the earth divide,--
+The rent beneath yawns dark and wide.
+
+And there the fallen chief is laid,
+In tasselled garb of skins arrayed,
+And girded with his wampum-braid.
+
+The silver cross he loved is pressed
+Beneath the heavy arms, which rest
+Upon his scarred and naked breast.
+
+'T is done: the roots are backward sent,
+The beechen-tree stands up unbent,
+The Indian's fitting monument!
+
+When of that sleeper's broken race
+Their green and pleasant dwelling-place,
+Which knew them once, retains no trace;
+
+Oh, long may sunset's light be shed
+As now upon that beech's head,
+A green memorial of the dead!
+
+There shall his fitting requiem be,
+In northern winds, that, cold and free,
+Howl nightly in that funeral tree.
+
+To their wild wail the waves which break
+Forever round that lonely lake
+A solemn undertone shall make!
+
+And who shall deem the spot unblest,
+Where Nature's younger children rest,
+Lulled on their sorrowing mother's breast?
+
+Deem ye that mother loveth less
+These bronzed forms of the wilderness
+She foldeth in her long caress?
+
+As sweet o'er them her wild-flowers blow,
+As if with fairer hair and brow
+The blue-eyed Saxon slept below.
+
+What though the places of their rest
+No priestly knee hath ever pressed,--
+No funeral rite nor prayer hath blessed?
+
+What though the bigot's ban be there,
+And thoughts of wailing and despair,
+And cursing in the place of prayer.
+
+Yet Heaven hath angels watching round
+The Indian's lowliest forest-mound,--
+And they have made it holy ground.
+
+There ceases man's frail judgment; all
+His powerless bolts of cursing fall
+Unheeded on that grassy pall.
+
+O peeled and hunted and reviled,
+Sleep on, dark tenant of the wild!
+Great Nature owns her simple child!
+
+And Nature's God, to whom alone
+The secret of the heart is known,--
+The hidden language traced thereon;
+
+Who from its many cumberings
+Of form and creed, and outward things,
+To light the naked spirit brings;
+
+Not with our partial eye shall scan,
+Not with our pride and scorn shall ban,
+The spirit of our brother man!
+1841.
+
+
+
+
+ST. JOHN.
+
+The fierce rivalry between Charles de La Tour, a Protestant, and
+D'Aulnay Charnasy, a Catholic, for the possession of Acadia, forms one
+of the most romantic passages in the history of the New World. La Tour
+received aid in several instances from the Puritan colony of
+Massachusetts. During one of his voyages for the purpose of obtaining
+arms and provisions for his establishment at St. John, his castle was
+attacked by D'Aulnay, and successfully defended by its high-spirited
+mistress. A second attack however followed in the fourth month, 1647,
+when D'Aulnay was successful, and the garrison was put to the sword.
+Lady La Tour languished a few days in the hands of her enemy, and then
+died of grief.
+
+"To the winds give our banner!
+Bear homeward again!"
+Cried the Lord of Acadia,
+Cried Charles of Estienne;
+From the prow of his shallop
+He gazed, as the sun,
+From its bed in the ocean,
+Streamed up the St. John.
+
+O'er the blue western waters
+That shallop had passed,
+Where the mists of Penobscot
+Clung damp on her mast.
+St. Saviour had looked
+On the heretic sail,
+As the songs of the Huguenot
+Rose on the gale.
+
+The pale, ghostly fathers
+Remembered her well,
+And had cursed her while passing,
+With taper and bell;
+But the men of Monhegan,
+Of Papists abhorred,
+Had welcomed and feasted
+The heretic Lord.
+
+They had loaded his shallop
+With dun-fish and ball,
+With stores for his larder,
+And steel for his wall.
+Pemaquid, from her bastions
+And turrets of stone,
+Had welcomed his coming
+With banner and gun.
+
+And the prayers of the elders
+Had followed his way,
+As homeward he glided,
+Down Pentecost Bay.
+Oh, well sped La Tour
+For, in peril and pain,
+His lady kept watch,
+For his coming again.
+
+O'er the Isle of the Pheasant
+The morning sun shone,
+On the plane-trees which shaded
+The shores of St. John.
+"Now, why from yon battlements
+Speaks not my love!
+Why waves there no banner
+My fortress above?"
+
+Dark and wild, from his deck
+St. Estienne gazed about,
+On fire-wasted dwellings,
+And silent redoubt;
+From the low, shattered walls
+Which the flame had o'errun,
+There floated no banner,
+There thundered no gun!
+
+But beneath the low arch
+Of its doorway there stood
+A pale priest of Rome,
+In his cloak and his hood.
+With the bound of a lion,
+La Tour sprang to land,
+On the throat of the Papist
+He fastened his hand.
+
+"Speak, son of the Woman
+Of scarlet and sin!
+What wolf has been prowling
+My castle within?"
+From the grasp of the soldier
+The Jesuit broke,
+Half in scorn, half in sorrow,
+He smiled as he spoke:
+
+"No wolf, Lord of Estienne,
+Has ravaged thy hall,
+But thy red-handed rival,
+With fire, steel, and ball!
+On an errand of mercy
+I hitherward came,
+While the walls of thy castle
+Yet spouted with flame.
+
+"Pentagoet's dark vessels
+Were moored in the bay,
+Grim sea-lions, roaring
+Aloud for their prey."
+"But what of my lady?"
+Cried Charles of Estienne.
+"On the shot-crumbled turret
+Thy lady was seen:
+
+"Half-veiled in the smoke-cloud,
+Her hand grasped thy pennon,
+While her dark tresses swayed
+In the hot breath of cannon!
+But woe to the heretic,
+Evermore woe!
+When the son of the church
+And the cross is his foe!
+
+"In the track of the shell,
+In the path of the ball,
+Pentagoet swept over
+The breach of the wall!
+Steel to steel, gun to gun,
+One moment,--and then
+Alone stood the victor,
+Alone with his men!
+
+"Of its sturdy defenders,
+Thy lady alone
+Saw the cross-blazoned banner
+Float over St. John."
+"Let the dastard look to it!"
+Cried fiery Estienne,
+"Were D'Aulnay King Louis,
+I'd free her again!"
+
+"Alas for thy lady!
+No service from thee
+Is needed by her
+Whom the Lord hath set free;
+Nine days, in stern silence,
+Her thraldom she bore,
+But the tenth morning came,
+And Death opened her door!"
+
+As if suddenly smitten
+La Tour staggered back;
+His hand grasped his sword-hilt,
+His forehead grew black.
+He sprang on the deck
+Of his shallop again.
+"We cruise now for vengeance!
+Give way!" cried Estienne.
+
+"Massachusetts shall hear
+Of the Huguenot's wrong,
+And from island and creekside
+Her fishers shall throng!
+Pentagoet shall rue
+What his Papists have done,
+When his palisades echo
+The Puritan's gun!"
+
+Oh, the loveliest of heavens
+Hung tenderly o'er him,
+There were waves in the sunshine,
+And green isles before him:
+But a pale hand was beckoning
+The Huguenot on;
+And in blackness and ashes
+Behind was St. John!
+1841
+
+
+
+
+THE CYPRESS-TREE OF CEYLON.
+
+Ibn Batuta, the celebrated Mussulman traveller of the fourteenth
+century, speaks of a cypress-tree in Ceylon, universally held sacred by
+the natives, the leaves of which were said to fall only at certain
+intervals, and he who had the happiness to find and eat one of them was
+restored, at once, to youth and vigor. The traveller saw several
+venerable Jogees, or saints, sitting silent and motionless under the
+tree, patiently awaiting the falling of a leaf.
+
+THEY sat in silent watchfulness
+The sacred cypress-tree about,
+And, from beneath old wrinkled brows,
+Their failing eyes looked out.
+
+Gray Age and Sickness waiting there
+Through weary night and lingering day,--
+Grim as the idols at their side,
+And motionless as they.
+
+Unheeded in the boughs above
+The song of Ceylon's birds was sweet;
+Unseen of them the island flowers
+Bloomed brightly at their feet.
+
+O'er them the tropic night-storm swept,
+The thunder crashed on rock and hill;
+The cloud-fire on their eyeballs blazed,
+Yet there they waited still!
+
+What was the world without to them?
+The Moslem's sunset-call, the dance
+Of Ceylon's maids, the passing gleam
+Of battle-flag and lance?
+
+They waited for that falling leaf
+Of which the wandering Jogees sing:
+Which lends once more to wintry age
+The greenness of its spring.
+
+Oh, if these poor and blinded ones
+In trustful patience wait to feel
+O'er torpid pulse and failing limb
+A youthful freshness steal;
+
+Shall we, who sit beneath that Tree
+Whose healing leaves of life are shed,
+In answer to the breath of prayer,
+Upon the waiting head;
+
+Not to restore our failing forms,
+And build the spirit's broken shrine,
+But on the fainting soul to shed
+A light and life divine--
+
+Shall we grow weary in our watch,
+And murmur at the long delay?
+Impatient of our Father's time
+And His appointed way?
+
+Or shall the stir of outward things
+Allure and claim the Christian's eye,
+When on the heathen watcher's ear
+Their powerless murmurs die?
+
+Alas! a deeper test of faith
+Than prison cell or martyr's stake,
+The self-abasing watchfulness
+Of silent prayer may make.
+
+We gird us bravely to rebuke
+Our erring brother in the wrong,--
+And in the ear of Pride and Power
+Our warning voice is strong.
+
+Easier to smite with Peter's sword
+Than "watch one hour" in humbling prayer.
+Life's "great things," like the Syrian lord,
+Our hearts can do and dare.
+
+But oh! we shrink from Jordan's side,
+From waters which alone can save;
+
+And murmur for Abana's banks
+And Pharpar's brighter wave.
+
+O Thou, who in the garden's shade
+Didst wake Thy weary ones again,
+Who slumbered at that fearful hour
+Forgetful of Thy pain;
+
+Bend o'er us now, as over them,
+And set our sleep-bound spirits free,
+Nor leave us slumbering in the watch
+Our souls should keep with Thee!
+1841
+
+
+
+
+THE EXILES.
+
+The incidents upon which the following ballad has its foundation
+about the year 1660. Thomas Macy was one of the first, if not the first
+white settler of Nantucket. The career of Macy is briefly but carefully
+outlined in James S. Pike's The New Puritan.
+
+THE goodman sat beside his door
+One sultry afternoon,
+With his young wife singing at his side
+An old and goodly tune.
+
+A glimmer of heat was in the air,--
+The dark green woods were still;
+And the skirts of a heavy thunder-cloud
+Hung over the western hill.
+
+Black, thick, and vast arose that cloud
+Above the wilderness,
+
+As some dark world from upper air
+Were stooping over this.
+
+At times the solemn thunder pealed,
+And all was still again,
+Save a low murmur in the air
+Of coming wind and rain.
+
+Just as the first big rain-drop fell,
+A weary stranger came,
+And stood before the farmer's door,
+With travel soiled and lame.
+
+Sad seemed he, yet sustaining hope
+Was in his quiet glance,
+And peace, like autumn's moonlight, clothed
+His tranquil countenance,--
+
+A look, like that his Master wore
+In Pilate's council-hall:
+It told of wrongs, but of a love
+Meekly forgiving all.
+
+"Friend! wilt thou give me shelter here?"
+The stranger meekly said;
+And, leaning on his oaken staff,
+The goodman's features read.
+
+"My life is hunted,--evil men
+Are following in my track;
+The traces of the torturer's whip
+Are on my aged back;
+
+"And much, I fear, 't will peril thee
+Within thy doors to take
+A hunted seeker of the Truth,
+Oppressed for conscience' sake."
+
+Oh, kindly spoke the goodman's wife,
+"Come in, old man!" quoth she,
+"We will not leave thee to the storm,
+Whoever thou mayst be."
+
+Then came the aged wanderer in,
+And silent sat him down;
+While all within grew dark as night
+Beneath the storm-cloud's frown.
+
+But while the sudden lightning's blaze
+Filled every cottage nook,
+And with the jarring thunder-roll
+The loosened casements shook,
+
+A heavy tramp of horses' feet
+Came sounding up the lane,
+And half a score of horse, or more,
+Came plunging through the rain.
+
+"Now, Goodman Macy, ope thy door,--
+We would not be house-breakers;
+A rueful deed thou'st done this day,
+In harboring banished Quakers."
+
+Out looked the cautious goodman then,
+With much of fear and awe,
+For there, with broad wig drenched with rain
+The parish priest he saw.
+
+Open thy door, thou wicked man,
+And let thy pastor in,
+And give God thanks, if forty stripes
+Repay thy deadly sin."
+
+"What seek ye?" quoth the goodman;
+"The stranger is my guest;
+He is worn with toil and grievous wrong,--
+Pray let the old man rest."
+
+"Now, out upon thee, canting knave!"
+And strong hands shook the door.
+"Believe me, Macy," quoth the priest,
+"Thou 'lt rue thy conduct sore."
+
+Then kindled Macy's eye of fire
+"No priest who walks the earth,
+Shall pluck away the stranger-guest
+Made welcome to my hearth."
+
+Down from his cottage wall he caught
+The matchlock, hotly tried
+At Preston-pans and Marston-moor,
+By fiery Ireton's side;
+
+Where Puritan, and Cavalier,
+With shout and psalm contended;
+And Rupert's oath, and Cromwell's prayer,
+With battle-thunder blended.
+
+Up rose the ancient stranger then
+"My spirit is not free
+To bring the wrath and violence
+Of evil men on thee;
+
+"And for thyself, I pray forbear,
+Bethink thee of thy Lord,
+Who healed again the smitten ear,
+And sheathed His follower's sword.
+
+"I go, as to the slaughter led.
+Friends of the poor, farewell!"
+Beneath his hand the oaken door
+Back on its hinges fell.
+
+"Come forth, old graybeard, yea and nay,"
+The reckless scoffers cried,
+As to a horseman's saddle-bow
+The old man's arms were tied.
+
+And of his bondage hard and long
+In Boston's crowded jail,
+Where suffering woman's prayer was heard,
+With sickening childhood's wail,
+
+It suits not with our tale to tell;
+Those scenes have passed away;
+Let the dim shadows of the past
+Brood o'er that evil day.
+
+"Ho, sheriff!" quoth the ardent priest,
+"Take Goodman Macy too;
+The sin of this day's heresy
+His back or purse shall rue."
+
+"Now, goodwife, haste thee!" Macy cried.
+She caught his manly arm;
+Behind, the parson urged pursuit,
+With outcry and alarm.
+
+Ho! speed the Macys, neck or naught,--
+The river-course was near;
+The plashing on its pebbled shore
+Was music to their ear.
+
+A gray rock, tasselled o'er with birch,
+Above the waters hung,
+And at its base, with every wave,
+A small light wherry swung.
+
+A leap--they gain the boat--and there
+The goodman wields his oar;
+"Ill luck betide them all," he cried,
+"The laggards on the shore."
+
+Down through the crashing underwood,
+The burly sheriff came:--
+"Stand, Goodman Macy, yield thyself;
+Yield in the King's own name."
+
+"Now out upon thy hangman's face!"
+Bold Macy answered then,--
+"Whip women, on the village green,
+But meddle not with men."
+
+The priest came panting to the shore,
+His grave cocked hat was gone;
+Behind him, like some owl's nest, hung
+His wig upon a thorn.
+
+"Come back,--come back!" the parson cried,
+"The church's curse beware."
+"Curse, an' thou wilt," said Macy, "but
+Thy blessing prithee spare."
+
+"Vile scoffer!" cried the baffled priest,
+"Thou 'lt yet the gallows see."
+"Who's born to be hanged will not be drowned,"
+Quoth Macy, merrily;
+
+"And so, sir sheriff and priest, good-by!"
+He bent him to his oar,
+And the small boat glided quietly
+From the twain upon the shore.
+
+Now in the west, the heavy clouds
+Scattered and fell asunder,
+While feebler came the rush of rain,
+And fainter growled the thunder.
+
+And through the broken clouds, the sun
+Looked out serene and warm,
+Painting its holy symbol-light
+Upon the passing storm.
+
+Oh, beautiful! that rainbow span,
+O'er dim Crane-neck was bended;
+One bright foot touched the eastern hills,
+And one with ocean blended.
+
+By green Pentucket's southern'slope
+The small boat glided fast;
+The watchers of the Block-house saw
+The strangers as they passed.
+
+That night a stalwart garrison
+Sat shaking in their shoes,
+To hear the dip of Indian oars,
+The glide of birch canoes.
+
+The fisher-wives of Salisbury--
+The men were all away--
+Looked out to see the stranger oar
+Upon their waters play.
+
+Deer-Island's rocks and fir-trees threw
+Their sunset-shadows o'er them,
+And Newbury's spire and weathercock
+Peered o'er the pines before them.
+
+Around the Black Rocks, on their left,
+The marsh lay broad and green;
+And on their right, with dwarf shrubs crowned,
+Plum Island's hills were seen.
+
+With skilful hand and wary eye
+The harbor-bar was crossed;
+A plaything of the restless wave,
+The boat on ocean tossed.
+
+The glory of the sunset heaven
+On land and water lay;
+On the steep hills of Agawam,
+On cape, and bluff, and bay.
+
+They passed the gray rocks of Cape Ann,
+And Gloucester's harbor-bar;
+The watch-fire of the garrison
+Shone like a setting star.
+
+How brightly broke the morning
+On Massachusetts Bay!
+Blue wave, and bright green island,
+Rejoicing in the day.
+
+On passed the bark in safety
+Round isle and headland steep;
+No tempest broke above them,
+No fog-cloud veiled the deep.
+
+Far round the bleak and stormy Cape
+The venturous Macy passed,
+And on Nantucket's naked isle
+Drew up his boat at last.
+
+And how, in log-built cabin,
+They braved the rough sea-weather;
+And there, in peace and quietness,
+Went down life's vale together;
+
+How others drew around them,
+And how their fishing sped,
+Until to every wind of heaven
+Nantucket's sails were spread;
+
+How pale Want alternated
+With Plenty's golden smile;
+Behold, is it not written
+In the annals of the isle?
+
+And yet that isle remaineth
+A refuge of the free,
+As when true-hearted Macy
+Beheld it from the sea.
+
+Free as the winds that winnow
+Her shrubless hills of sand,
+Free as the waves that batter
+Along her yielding land.
+
+Than hers, at duty's summons,
+No loftier spirit stirs,
+Nor falls o'er human suffering
+A readier tear then hers.
+
+God bless the sea-beat island!
+And grant forevermore,
+That charity and freedom dwell
+As now upon her shore!
+1841.
+
+
+
+
+THE KNIGHT OF ST. JOHN.
+
+ERE down yon blue Carpathian hills
+The sun shall sink again,
+Farewell to life and all its ills,
+Farewell to cell and chain!
+
+These prison shades are dark and cold,
+But, darker far than they,
+The shadow of a sorrow old
+Is on my heart alway.
+
+For since the day when Warkworth wood
+Closed o'er my steed, and I,
+An alien from my name and blood,
+A weed cast out to die,--
+
+When, looking back in sunset light,
+I saw her turret gleam,
+And from its casement, far and white,
+Her sign of farewell stream,
+
+Like one who, from some desert shore,
+Doth home's green isles descry,
+And, vainly longing, gazes o'er
+The waste of wave and sky;
+
+So from the desert of my fate
+I gaze across the past;
+Forever on life's dial-plate
+The shade is backward cast!
+
+I've wandered wide from shore to shore,
+I've knelt at many a shrine;
+And bowed me to the rocky floor
+Where Bethlehem's tapers shine;
+
+And by the Holy Sepulchre
+I've pledged my knightly sword
+To Christ, His blessed Church, and her,
+The Mother of our Lord.
+
+Oh, vain the vow, and vain the strife!
+How vain do all things seem!
+My soul is in the past, and life
+To-day is but a dream.
+
+In vain the penance strange and long,
+And hard for flesh to bear;
+The prayer, the fasting, and the thong,
+And sackcloth shirt of hair.
+
+The eyes of memory will not sleep,
+Its ears are open still;
+And vigils with the past they keep
+Against my feeble will.
+
+And still the loves and joys of old
+Do evermore uprise;
+I see the flow of locks of gold,
+The shine of loving eyes!
+
+Ah me! upon another's breast
+Those golden locks recline;
+I see upon another rest
+The glance that once was mine.
+
+"O faithless priest!  O perjured knight!"
+I hear the Master cry;
+"Shut out the vision from thy sight,
+Let Earth and Nature die.
+
+"The Church of God is now thy spouse,
+And thou the bridegroom art;
+Then let the burden of thy vows
+Crush down thy human heart!"
+
+In vain! This heart its grief must know,
+Till life itself hath ceased,
+And falls beneath the self-same blow
+The lover and the priest!
+
+O pitying Mother! souls of light,
+And saints and martyrs old!
+Pray for a weak and sinful knight,
+A suffering man uphold.
+
+Then let the Paynim work his will,
+And death unbind my chain,
+Ere down yon blue Carpathian hill
+The sun shall fall again.
+1843
+
+
+
+CASSANDRA SOUTHWICK.
+In 1658 two young persons, son and daughter of Lawrence Smithwick of
+Salem, who had himself been imprisoned and deprived of nearly all his
+property for having entertained Quakers at his house, were fined for
+non-attendance at church. They being unable to pay the fine, the General
+Court issued an order empowering "the Treasurer of the County to sell
+the said persons to any of the English nation of Virginia or Barbadoes,
+to answer said fines." An attempt was made to carry this order into
+execution, but no shipmaster was found willing to convey them to the
+West Indies.
+
+To the God of all sure mercies let my blessing rise
+to-day,
+From the scoffer and the cruel He hath plucked
+the spoil away;
+Yea, He who cooled the furnace around the faithful
+three,
+And tamed the Chaldean lions, hath set His hand-
+maid free!
+Last night I saw the sunset melt through my prison
+bars,
+Last night across my damp earth-floor fell the pale
+gleam of stars;
+In the coldness and the darkness all through the
+long night-time,
+My grated casement whitened with autumn's early
+rime.
+Alone, in that dark sorrow, hour after hour crept
+by;
+Star after star looked palely in and sank adown
+the sky;
+No sound amid night's stillness, save that which
+seemed to be
+The dull and heavy beating of the pulses of the sea;
+
+All night I sat unsleeping, for I knew that on the
+morrow
+The ruler and the cruel priest would mock me in
+my sorrow,
+Dragged to their place of market, and bargained
+for and sold,
+Like a lamb before the shambles, like a heifer
+from the fold!
+
+Oh, the weakness of the flesh was there, the
+shrinking and the shame;
+And the low voice of the Tempter like whispers to
+me came:
+"Why sit'st thou thus forlornly," the wicked
+murmur said,
+"Damp walls thy bower of beauty, cold earth thy
+maiden bed?
+
+"Where be the smiling faces, and voices soft and
+sweet,
+Seen in thy father's dwelling, heard in the pleasant
+street?
+Where be the youths whose glances, the summer
+Sabbath through,
+Turned tenderly and timidly unto thy father's pew?
+
+
+"Why sit'st thou here, Cassandra?-Bethink
+thee with what mirth
+Thy happy schoolmates gather around the warm
+bright hearth;
+How the crimson shadows tremble on foreheads
+white and fair,
+On eyes of merry girlhood, half hid in golden hair.
+
+"Not for thee the hearth-fire brightens, not for
+thee kind words are spoken,
+Not for thee the nuts of Wenham woods by laughing
+boys are broken;
+No first-fruits of the orchard within thy lap are
+laid,
+For thee no flowers of autumn the youthful hunters
+braid.
+
+"O weak, deluded maiden!--by crazy fancies
+led,
+With wild and raving railers an evil path to tread;
+To leave a wholesome worship, and teaching pure
+and sound,
+And mate with maniac women, loose-haired and
+sackcloth bound,--
+
+"Mad scoffers of the priesthood; who mock at
+things divine,
+Who rail against the pulpit, and holy bread and
+wine;
+Sore from their cart-tail scourgings, and from the
+pillory lame,
+Rejoicing in their wretchedness, and glorying in
+their shame.
+
+"And what a fate awaits thee!--a sadly toiling
+slave,
+Dragging the slowly lengthening chain of bondage
+to the grave!
+Think of thy woman's nature, subdued in hopeless
+thrall,
+The easy prey of any, the scoff and scorn of all!"
+
+Oh, ever as the Tempter spoke, and feeble Nature's
+fears
+Wrung drop by drop the scalding flow of unavailing
+tears,
+I wrestled down the evil thoughts, and strove in
+silent prayer,
+To feel, O Helper of the weak! that Thou indeed
+wert there!
+
+I thought of Paul and Silas, within Philippi's cell,
+And how from Peter's sleeping limbs the prison
+shackles fell,
+Till I seemed to hear the trailing of an angel's
+robe of white,
+And to feel a blessed presence invisible to sight.
+
+Bless the Lord for all his mercies!--for the peace
+and love I felt,
+Like dew of Hermon's holy hill, upon my spirit
+melt;
+When "Get behind me, Satan!" was the language
+of my heart,
+And I felt the Evil Tempter with all his doubts
+depart.
+
+Slow broke the gray cold morning; again the sunshine
+fell,
+Flecked with the shade of bar and grate within
+my lonely cell;
+The hoar-frost melted on the wall, and upward
+from the street
+Came careless laugh and idle word, and tread of
+passing feet.
+
+At length the heavy bolts fell back, my door was
+open cast,
+And slowly at the sheriff's side, up the long street
+I passed;
+I heard the murmur round me, and felt, but dared
+not see,
+How, from every door and window, the people
+gazed on me.
+
+And doubt and fear fell on me, shame burned upon
+my cheek,
+Swam earth and sky around me, my trembling
+limbs grew weak:
+"O Lord! support thy handmaid; and from her
+soul cast out
+The fear of man, which brings a snare, the weakness
+and the doubt."
+
+Then the dreary shadows scattered, like a cloud in
+morning's breeze,
+And a low deep voice within me seemed whispering
+words like these:
+"Though thy earth be as the iron, and thy heaven
+a brazen wall,
+Trust still His loving-kindness whose power is over
+all."
+
+We paused at length, where at my feet the sunlit
+waters broke
+On glaring reach of shining beach, and shingly
+wall of rock;
+The merchant-ships lay idly there, in hard clear
+lines on high,
+Tracing with rope and slender spar their network
+on the sky.
+
+And there were ancient citizens, cloak-wrapped
+and grave and cold,
+And grim and stout sea-captains with faces bronzed
+and old,
+And on his horse, with Rawson, his cruel clerk at
+hand,
+Sat dark and haughty Endicott, the ruler of the
+land.
+
+And poisoning with his evil words the ruler's ready
+ear,
+The priest leaned o'er his saddle, with laugh and
+scoff and jeer;
+It stirred my soul, and from my lips the seal of
+silence broke,
+As if through woman's weakness a warning spirit
+spoke.
+
+I cried, "The Lord rebuke thee, thou smiter of the
+meek,
+Thou robber of the righteous, thou trampler of
+the weak!
+Go light the dark, cold hearth-stones,--go turn
+the prison lock
+Of the poor hearts thou hast hunted, thou wolf
+amid the flock!"
+
+Dark lowered the brows of Endicott, and with a
+deeper red
+O'er Rawson's wine-empurpled cheek the flush of
+anger spread;
+"Good people," quoth the white-lipped priest,
+"heed not her words so wild,
+Her Master speaks within her,--the Devil owns
+his child!"
+
+But gray heads shook, and young brows knit, the
+while the sheriff read
+That law the wicked rulers against the poor have
+made,
+Who to their house of Rimmon and idol priesthood
+bring
+No bended knee of worship, nor gainful offering.
+
+Then to the stout sea-captains the sheriff, turning,
+said,--
+"Which of ye, worthy seamen, will take this
+Quaker maid?
+In the Isle of fair Barbadoes, or on Virginia's
+shore,
+You may hold her at a higher price than Indian
+girl or Moor."
+
+Grim and silent stood the captains; and when
+again he cried,
+"Speak out, my worthy seamen!"--no voice, no
+sign replied;
+But I felt a hard hand press my own, and kind
+words met my ear,--
+"God bless thee, and preserve thee, my gentle girl
+and dear!"
+
+A weight seemed lifted from my heart, a pitying
+friend was nigh,--
+I felt it in his hard, rough hand, and saw it in his
+eye;
+And when again the sheriff spoke, that voice, so
+kind to me,
+Growled back its stormy answer like the roaring
+of the sea,--
+
+"Pile my ship with bars of silver, pack with coins
+of Spanish gold,
+From keel-piece up to deck-plank, the roomage of
+her hold,
+By the living God who made me!--I would sooner
+in your bay
+Sink ship and crew and cargo, than bear this child
+away!"
+
+"Well answered, worthy captain, shame on their
+cruel laws!"
+Ran through the crowd in murmurs loud the people's
+just applause.
+"Like the herdsman of Tekoa, in Israel of old,
+Shall we see the poor and righteous again for
+silver sold?"
+
+I looked on haughty Endicott; with weapon half-
+way drawn,
+Swept round the throng his lion glare of bitter hate
+and scorn;
+Fiercely he drew his bridle-rein, and turned in
+silence back,
+And sneering priest and baffled clerk rode
+murmuring in his track.
+
+Hard after them the sheriff looked, in bitterness of
+soul;
+Thrice smote his staff upon the ground, and
+crushed his parchment roll.
+"Good friends," he said, "since both have fled,
+the ruler and the priest,
+Judge ye, if from their further work I be not well
+released."
+
+Loud was the cheer which, full and clear, swept
+round the silent bay,
+As, with kind words and kinder looks, he bade me
+go my way;
+For He who turns the courses of the streamlet of
+the glen,
+And the river of great waters, had turned the
+hearts of men.
+
+Oh, at that hour the very earth seemed changed
+beneath my eye,
+A holier wonder round me rose the blue walls of
+the sky,
+A lovelier light on rock and hill and stream and
+woodland lay,
+And softer lapsed on sunnier sands the waters of
+the bay.
+
+Thanksgiving to the Lord of life! to Him all
+praises be,
+Who from the hands of evil men hath set his hand-
+maid free;
+All praise to Him before whose power the mighty
+are afraid,
+Who takes the crafty in the snare which for the
+poor is laid!
+
+Sing, O my soul, rejoicingly, on evening's twilight
+calm
+Uplift the loud thanksgiving, pour forth the grateful
+psalm;
+Let all dear hearts with me rejoice, as did the
+saints of old,
+When of the Lord's good angel the rescued Peter
+told.
+
+And weep and howl, ye evil priests and mighty
+men of wrong,
+The Lord shall smite the proud, and lay His hand
+upon the strong.
+Woe to the wicked rulers in His avenging hour!
+Woe to the wolves who seek the flocks to raven
+and devour!
+
+But let the humble ones arise, the poor in heart
+be glad,
+And let the mourning ones again with robes of
+praise be clad.
+For He who cooled the furnace, and smoothed the
+stormy wave,
+And tamed the Chaldean lions, is mighty still to
+save!
+1843.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW WIFE AND THE OLD.
+
+The following ballad is founded upon one of the marvellous legends
+connected with the famous General ----, of Hampton, New Hampshire,
+who was regarded by his neighbors as a Yankee Faust, in league with
+the adversary. I give the story, as I heard it when a child, from a
+venerable family visitant.
+
+
+DARK the halls, and cold the feast,
+Gone the bridemaids, gone the priest.
+All is over, all is done,
+Twain of yesterday are one!
+Blooming girl and manhood gray,
+Autumn in the arms of May!
+
+Hushed within and hushed without,
+Dancing feet and wrestlers' shout;
+Dies the bonfire on the hill;
+All is dark and all is still,
+Save the starlight, save the breeze
+Moaning through the graveyard trees,
+And the great sea-waves below,
+Pulse of the midnight beating slow.
+
+From the brief dream of a bride
+She hath wakened, at his side.
+With half-uttered shriek and start,--
+Feels she not his beating heart?
+And the pressure of his arm,
+And his breathing near and warm?
+
+Lightly from the bridal bed
+Springs that fair dishevelled head,
+And a feeling, new, intense,
+Half of shame, half innocence,
+Maiden fear and wonder speaks
+Through her lips and changing cheeks.
+
+From the oaken mantel glowing,
+Faintest light the lamp is throwing
+On the mirror's antique mould,
+High-backed chair, and wainscot old,
+And, through faded curtains stealing,
+His dark sleeping face revealing.
+
+Listless lies the strong man there,
+Silver-streaked his careless hair;
+Lips of love have left no trace
+On that hard and haughty face;
+And that forehead's knitted thought
+Love's soft hand hath not unwrought.
+
+"Yet," she sighs, "he loves me well,
+More than these calm lips will tell.
+Stooping to my lowly state,
+He hath made me rich and great,
+And I bless him, though he be
+Hard and stern to all save me!"
+
+While she speaketh, falls the light
+O'er her fingers small and white;
+Gold and gem, and costly ring
+Back the timid lustre fling,--
+Love's selectest gifts, and rare,
+His proud hand had fastened there.
+
+Gratefully she marks the glow
+From those tapering lines of snow;
+Fondly o'er the sleeper bending
+His black hair with golden blending,
+In her soft and light caress,
+Cheek and lip together press.
+
+Ha!--that start of horror! why
+That wild stare and wilder cry,
+Full of terror, full of pain?
+Is there madness in her brain?
+Hark! that gasping, hoarse and low,
+"Spare me,--spare me,--let me go!"
+
+God have mercy!--icy cold
+Spectral hands her own enfold,
+Drawing silently from them
+Love's fair gifts of gold and gem.
+"Waken! save me!" still as death
+At her side he slumbereth.
+
+Ring and bracelet all are gone,
+And that ice-cold hand withdrawn;
+But she hears a murmur low,
+Full of sweetness, full of woe,
+Half a sigh and half a moan
+"Fear not! give the dead her own!"
+
+Ah!--the dead wife's voice she knows!
+That cold hand whose pressure froze,
+Once in warmest life had borne
+Gem and band her own hath worn.
+"Wake thee! wake thee!" Lo, his eyes
+Open with a dull surprise.
+
+In his arms the strong man folds her,
+Closer to his breast he holds her;
+Trembling limbs his own are meeting,
+And he feels her heart's quick beating
+"Nay, my dearest, why this fear?"
+"Hush!" she saith, "the dead is here!"
+
+"Nay, a dream,--an idle dream."
+But before the lamp's pale gleam
+Tremblingly her hand she raises.
+There no more the diamond blazes,
+Clasp of pearl, or ring of gold,--
+"Ah!" she sighs, "her hand was cold!"
+
+Broken words of cheer he saith,
+But his dark lip quivereth,
+And as o'er the past he thinketh,
+From his young wife's arms he shrinketh;
+Can those soft arms round him lie,
+Underneath his dead wife's eye?
+
+She her fair young head can rest
+Soothed and childlike on his breast,
+And in trustful innocence
+Draw new strength and courage thence;
+He, the proud man, feels within
+But the cowardice of sin!
+
+She can murmur in her thought
+Simple prayers her mother taught,
+And His blessed angels call,
+Whose great love is over all;
+He, alone, in prayerless pride,
+Meets the dark Past at her side!
+
+One, who living shrank with dread
+From his look, or word, or tread,
+Unto whom her early grave
+Was as freedom to the slave,
+Moves him at this midnight hour,
+With the dead's unconscious power!
+
+Ah, the dead, the unforgot!
+From their solemn homes of thought,
+Where the cypress shadows blend
+Darkly over foe and friend,
+Or in love or sad rebuke,
+Back upon the living look.
+
+And the tenderest ones and weakest,
+Who their wrongs have borne the meekest,
+Lifting from those dark, still places,
+Sweet and sad-remembered faces,
+O'er the guilty hearts behind
+An unwitting triumph find.
+1843
+
+
+
+
+THE BRIDAL OF PENNACOOK.
+
+
+Winnepurkit, otherwise called George, Sachem of Saugus, married a
+daughter of Passaconaway, the great Pennacook chieftain, in 1662. The
+wedding took place at Pennacook (now Concord, N. H.), and the ceremonies
+closed with a great feast. According to the usages of the chiefs,
+Passaconaway ordered a select number of his men to accompany the
+newly-married couple to the dwelling of the husband, where in turn there
+was another great feast. Some time after, the wife of Winnepurkit
+expressing a desire to visit her father's house was permitted to go,
+accompanied by a brave escort of her husband's chief men. But when she
+wished to return, her father sent a messenger to Saugus, informing her
+husband, and asking him to come and take her away. He returned for
+answer that he had escorted his wife to her father's house in a style
+that became a chief, and that now if she wished to return, her father
+must send her back, in the same way. This Passaconaway refused to do,
+and it is said that here terminated the connection of his daughter with
+the Saugus chief.--Vide MORTON'S New Canaan.
+
+
+WE had been wandering for many days
+Through the rough northern country. We had seen
+The sunset, with its bars of purple cloud,
+Like a new heaven, shine upward from the lake
+Of Winnepiseogee; and had felt
+The sunrise breezes, midst the leafy isles
+Which stoop their summer beauty to the lips
+Of the bright waters. We had checked our steeds,
+Silent with wonder, where the mountain wall
+Is piled to heaven; and, through the narrow rift
+Of the vast rocks, against whose rugged feet
+Beats the mad torrent with perpetual roar,
+Where noonday is as twilight, and the wind
+Comes burdened with the everlasting moan
+Of forests and of far-off waterfalls,
+We had looked upward where the summer sky,
+Tasselled with clouds light-woven by the sun,
+Sprung its blue arch above the abutting crags
+O'er-roofing the vast portal of the land
+Beyond the wall of mountains. We had passed
+The high source of the Saco; and bewildered
+In the dwarf spruce-belts of the Crystal Hills,
+Had heard above us, like a voice in the cloud,
+The horn of Fabyan sounding; and atop
+Of old Agioochook had seen the mountains'
+Piled to the northward, shagged with wood, and thick
+As meadow mole-hills,--the far sea of Casco,
+A white gleam on the horizon of the east;
+Fair lakes, embosomed in the woods and hills;
+Moosehillock's mountain range, and Kearsarge
+Lifting his granite forehead to the sun!
+
+And we had rested underneath the oaks
+Shadowing the bank, whose grassy spires are shaken
+By the perpetual beating of the falls
+Of the wild Ammonoosuc. We had tracked
+The winding Pemigewasset, overhung
+By beechen shadows, whitening down its rocks,
+Or lazily gliding through its intervals,
+From waving rye-fields sending up the gleam
+Of sunlit waters. We had seen the moon
+Rising behind Umbagog's eastern pines,
+Like a great Indian camp-fire; and its beams
+At midnight spanning with a bridge of silver
+The Merrimac by Uncanoonuc's falls.
+
+There were five souls of us whom travel's chance
+Had thrown together in these wild north hills
+A city lawyer, for a month escaping
+From his dull office, where the weary eye
+Saw only hot brick walls and close thronged streets;
+Briefless as yet, but with an eye to see
+Life's sunniest side, and with a heart to take
+Its chances all as godsends; and his brother,
+Pale from long pulpit studies, yet retaining
+The warmth and freshness of a genial heart,
+Whose mirror of the beautiful and true,
+In Man and Nature, was as yet undimmed
+By dust of theologic strife, or breath
+Of sect, or cobwebs of scholastic lore;
+Like a clear crystal calm of water, taking
+The hue and image of o'erleaning flowers,
+Sweet human faces, white clouds of the noon,
+Slant starlight glimpses through the dewy leaves,
+And tenderest moonrise. 'T was, in truth, a study,
+To mark his spirit, alternating between
+A decent and professional gravity
+And an irreverent mirthfulness, which often
+Laughed in the face of his divinity,
+Plucked off the sacred ephod, quite unshrined
+The oracle, and for the pattern priest
+Left us the man. A shrewd, sagacious merchant,
+To whom the soiled sheet found in Crawford's inn,
+Giving the latest news of city stocks
+And sales of cotton, had a deeper meaning
+Than the great presence of the awful mountains
+Glorified by the sunset; and his daughter,
+A delicate flower on whom had blown too long
+Those evil winds, which, sweeping from the ice
+And winnowing the fogs of Labrador,
+Shed their cold blight round Massachusetts Bay,
+With the same breath which stirs Spring's opening leaves
+And lifts her half-formed flower-bell on its stem,
+Poisoning our seaside atmosphere.
+
+It chanced that as we turned upon our homeward way,
+A drear northeastern storm came howling up
+The valley of the Saco; and that girl
+Who had stood with us upon Mount Washington,
+Her brown locks ruffled by the wind which whirled
+In gusts around its sharp, cold pinnacle,
+Who had joined our gay trout-fishing in the streams
+Which lave that giant's feet; whose laugh was heard
+Like a bird's carol on the sunrise breeze
+Which swelled our sail amidst the lake's green islands,
+Shrank from its harsh, chill breath, and visibly drooped
+Like a flower in the frost. So, in that quiet inn
+Which looks from Conway on the mountains piled
+Heavily against the horizon of the north,
+Like summer thunder-clouds, we made our home
+And while the mist hung over dripping hills,
+And the cold wind-driven rain-drops all day long
+Beat their sad music upon roof and pane,
+We strove to cheer our gentle invalid.
+
+The lawyer in the pauses of the storm
+Went angling down the Saco, and, returning,
+Recounted his adventures and mishaps;
+Gave us the history of his scaly clients,
+Mingling with ludicrous yet apt citations
+Of barbarous law Latin, passages
+From Izaak Walton's Angler, sweet and fresh
+As the flower-skirted streams of Staffordshire,
+Where, under aged trees, the southwest wind
+Of soft June mornings fanned the thin, white hair
+Of the sage fisher. And, if truth be told,
+Our youthful candidate forsook his sermons,
+His commentaries, articles and creeds,
+For the fair page of human loveliness,
+The missal of young hearts, whose sacred text
+Is music, its illumining, sweet smiles.
+He sang the songs she loved; and in his low,
+Deep, earnest voice, recited many a page
+Of poetry, the holiest, tenderest lines
+Of the sad bard of Olney, the sweet songs,
+Simple and beautiful as Truth and Nature,
+Of him whose whitened locks on Rydal Mount
+Are lifted yet by morning breezes blowing
+From the green hills, immortal in his lays.
+And for myself, obedient to her wish,
+I searched our landlord's proffered library,--
+A well-thumbed Bunyan, with its nice wood pictures
+Of scaly fiends and angels not unlike them;
+Watts' unmelodious psalms; Astrology's
+Last home, a musty pile of almanacs,
+And an old chronicle of border wars
+And Indian history. And, as I read
+A story of the marriage of the Chief
+Of Saugus to the dusky Weetamoo,
+Daughter of Passaconaway, who dwelt
+In the old time upon the Merrimac,
+Our fair one, in the playful exercise
+Of her prerogative,--the right divine
+Of youth and beauty,--bade us versify
+The legend, and with ready pencil sketched
+Its plan and outlines, laughingly assigning
+To each his part, and barring our excuses
+With absolute will. So, like the cavaliers
+Whose voices still are heard in the Romance
+Of silver-tongued Boccaccio, on the banks
+Of Arno, with soft tales of love beguiling
+The ear of languid beauty, plague-exiled
+From stately Florence, we rehearsed our rhymes
+To their fair auditor, and shared by turns
+Her kind approval and her playful censure.
+
+It may be that these fragments owe alone
+To the fair setting of their circumstances,--
+The associations of time, scene, and audience,--
+Their place amid the pictures which fill up
+The chambers of my memory. Yet I trust
+That some, who sigh, while wandering in thought,
+Pilgrims of Romance o'er the olden world,
+That our broad land,--our sea-like lakes and mountains
+Piled to the clouds, our rivers overhung
+By forests which have known no other change
+For ages than the budding and the fall
+Of leaves, our valleys lovelier than those
+Which the old poets sang of,--should but figure
+On the apocryphal chart of speculation
+As pastures, wood-lots, mill-sites, with the privileges,
+Rights, and appurtenances, which make up
+A Yankee Paradise, unsung, unknown,
+To beautiful tradition; even their names,
+Whose melody yet lingers like the last
+Vibration of the red man's requiem,
+Exchanged for syllables significant,
+Of cotton-mill and rail-car, will look kindly
+Upon this effort to call up the ghost
+Of our dim Past, and listen with pleased ear
+To the responses of the questioned Shade.
+
+I. THE MERRIMAC.
+O child of that white-crested mountain whose
+springs
+Gush forth in the shade of the cliff-eagle's
+wings,
+Down whose slopes to the lowlands thy wild waters
+shine,
+Leaping gray walls of rock, flashing through the
+dwarf pine;
+From that cloud-curtained cradle so cold and so
+lone,
+From the arms of that wintry-locked mother of
+stone,
+By hills hung with forests, through vales wide and
+free,
+Thy mountain-born brightness glanced down to the
+sea.
+
+No bridge arched thy waters save that where the
+trees
+Stretched their long arms above thee and kissed in
+the breeze:
+No sound save the lapse of the waves on thy
+shores,
+The plunging of otters, the light dip of oars.
+
+Green-tufted, oak-shaded, by Amoskeag's fall
+Thy twin Uncanoonucs rose stately and tall,
+Thy Nashua meadows lay green and unshorn,
+And the hills of Pentucket were tasselled with
+corn.
+But thy Pennacook valley was fairer than these,
+And greener its grasses and taller its trees,
+Ere the sound of an axe in the forest had rung,
+Or the mower his scythe in the meadows had
+swung.
+
+In their sheltered repose looking out from the
+wood
+The bark-builded wigwams of Pennacook stood;
+There glided the corn-dance, the council-fire shone,
+And against the red war-post the hatchet was
+thrown.
+
+There the old smoked in silence their pipes, and
+the young
+To the pike and the white-perch their baited lines
+flung;
+There the boy shaped his arrows, and there the
+shy maid
+Wove her many-hued baskets and bright wampum
+braid.
+
+O Stream of the Mountains! if answer of thine
+Could rise from thy waters to question of mine,
+Methinks through the din of thy thronged banks
+a moan
+Of sorrow would swell for the days which have
+gone.
+
+Not for thee the dull jar of the loom and the wheel,
+The gliding of shuttles, the ringing of steel;
+But that old voice of waters, of bird and of breeze,
+The dip of the wild-fowl, the rustling of trees.
+
+
+II. THE BASHABA.
+Lift we the twilight curtains of the Past,
+And, turning from familiar sight and sound,
+Sadly and full of reverence let us cast
+A glance upon Tradition's shadowy ground,
+Led by the few pale lights which, glimmering round
+That dim, strange land of Eld, seem dying fast;
+And that which history gives not to the eye,
+The faded coloring of Time's tapestry,
+Let Fancy, with her dream-dipped brush, supply.
+
+Roof of bark and walls of pine,
+Through whose chinks the sunbeams shine,
+Tracing many a golden line
+On the ample floor within;
+Where, upon that earth-floor stark,
+Lay the gaudy mats of bark,
+With the bear's hide, rough and dark,
+And the red-deer's skin.
+
+Window-tracery, small and slight,
+Woven of the willow white,
+Lent a dimly checkered light;
+And the night-stars glimmered down,
+Where the lodge-fire's heavy smoke,
+Slowly through an opening broke,
+In the low roof, ribbed with oak,
+Sheathed with hemlock brown.
+
+Gloomed behind the changeless shade
+By the solemn pine-wood made;
+Through the rugged palisade,
+In the open foreground planted,
+Glimpses came of rowers rowing,
+Stir of leaves and wild-flowers blowing,
+Steel-like gleams of water flowing,
+In the sunlight slanted.
+
+Here the mighty Bashaba
+Held his long-unquestioned sway,
+From the White Hills, far away,
+To the great sea's sounding shore;
+Chief of chiefs, his regal word
+All the river Sachems heard,
+At his call the war-dance stirred,
+Or was still once more.
+
+There his spoils of chase and war,
+Jaw of wolf and black bear's paw,
+Panther's skin and eagle's claw,
+Lay beside his axe and bow;
+And, adown the roof-pole hung,
+Loosely on a snake-skin strung,
+In the smoke his scalp-locks swung
+Grimly to and fro.
+
+Nightly down the river going,
+Swifter was the hunter's rowing,
+When he saw that lodge-fire, glowing
+O'er the waters still and red;
+And the squaw's dark eye burned brighter,
+And she drew her blanket tighter,
+As, with quicker step and lighter,
+From that door she fled.
+
+For that chief had magic skill,
+And a Panisee's dark will,
+Over powers of good and ill,
+Powers which bless and powers which ban;
+Wizard lord of Pennacook,
+Chiefs upon their war-path shook,
+When they met the steady look
+Of that wise dark man.
+
+Tales of him the gray squaw told,
+When the winter night-wind cold
+Pierced her blanket's thickest fold,
+And her fire burned low and small,
+Till the very child abed,
+Drew its bear-skin over bead,
+Shrinking from the pale lights shed
+On the trembling wall.
+
+All the subtle spirits hiding
+Under earth or wave, abiding
+In the caverned rock, or riding
+Misty clouds or morning breeze;
+Every dark intelligence,
+Secret soul, and influence
+Of all things which outward sense
+Feels, or bears, or sees,--
+
+These the wizard's skill confessed,
+At his bidding banned or blessed,
+Stormful woke or lulled to rest
+Wind and cloud, and fire and flood;
+Burned for him the drifted snow,
+Bade through ice fresh lilies blow,
+And the leaves of summer grow
+Over winter's wood!
+
+Not untrue that tale of old!
+Now, as then, the wise and bold
+All the powers of Nature hold
+Subject to their kingly will;
+From the wondering crowds ashore,
+Treading life's wild waters o'er,
+As upon a marble floor,
+Moves the strong man still.
+
+Still, to such, life's elements
+With their sterner laws dispense,
+And the chain of consequence
+Broken in their pathway lies;
+Time and change their vassals making,
+Flowers from icy pillows waking,
+Tresses of the sunrise shaking
+Over midnight skies.
+Still, to th' earnest soul, the sun
+Rests on towered Gibeon,
+And the moon of Ajalon
+Lights the battle-grounds of life;
+To his aid the strong reverses
+Hidden powers and giant forces,
+And the high stars, in their courses,
+Mingle in his strife!
+
+
+III. THE DAUGHTER.
+The soot-black brows of men, the yell
+Of women thronging round the bed,
+The tinkling charm of ring and shell,
+The Powah whispering o'er the dead!
+
+All these the Sachem's home had known,
+When, on her journey long and wild
+To the dim World of Souls, alone,
+In her young beauty passed the mother of his child.
+
+Three bow-shots from the Sachem's dwelling
+They laid her in the walnut shade,
+Where a green hillock gently swelling
+Her fitting mound of burial made.
+There trailed the vine in summer hours,
+The tree-perched squirrel dropped his shell,--
+On velvet moss and pale-hued flowers,
+Woven with leaf and spray, the softened sunshine fell!
+
+The Indian's heart is hard and cold,
+It closes darkly o'er its care,
+And formed in Nature's sternest mould,
+Is slow to feel, and strong to bear.
+The war-paint on the Sachem's face,
+Unwet with tears, shone fierce and red,
+And still, in battle or in chase,
+Dry leaf and snow-rime crisped beneath his
+foremost tread.
+
+Yet when her name was heard no more,
+And when the robe her mother gave,
+And small, light moccasin she wore,
+Had slowly wasted on her grave,
+Unmarked of him the dark maids sped
+Their sunset dance and moonlit play;
+No other shared his lonely bed,
+No other fair young head upon his bosom lay.
+
+A lone, stern man. Yet, as sometimes
+The tempest-smitten tree receives
+From one small root the sap which climbs
+Its topmost spray and crowning leaves,
+So from his child the Sachem drew
+A life of Love and Hope, and felt
+His cold and rugged nature through
+The softness and the warmth of her young
+being melt.
+
+A laugh which in the woodland rang
+Bemocking April's gladdest bird,--
+A light and graceful form which sprang
+To meet him when his step was heard,--
+Eyes by his lodge-fire flashing dark,
+Small fingers stringing bead and shell
+Or weaving mats of bright-hued bark,--
+With these the household-god [3] had graced
+his wigwam well.
+
+Child of the forest! strong and free,
+Slight-robed, with loosely flowing hair,
+She swam the lake or climbed the tree,
+Or struck the flying bird in air.
+O'er the heaped drifts of winter's moon
+Her snow-shoes tracked the hunter's way;
+And dazzling in the summer noon
+The blade of her light oar threw off its shower
+of spray!
+
+Unknown to her the rigid rule,
+The dull restraint, the chiding frown,
+The weary torture of the school,
+The taming of wild nature down.
+Her only lore, the legends told
+Around the hunter's fire at night;
+Stars rose and set, and seasons rolled,
+Flowers bloomed and snow-flakes fell, unquestioned
+in her sight.
+
+Unknown to her the subtle skill
+With which the artist-eye can trace
+In rock and tree and lake and hill
+The outlines of divinest grace;
+Unknown the fine soul's keen unrest,
+Which sees, admires, yet yearns alway;
+Too closely on her mother's breast
+To note her smiles of love the child of Nature lay!
+
+It is enough for such to be
+Of common, natural things a part,
+To feel, with bird and stream and tree,
+The pulses of the same great heart;
+But we, from Nature long exiled,
+In our cold homes of Art and Thought
+Grieve like the stranger-tended child,
+Which seeks its mother's arms, and sees but feels
+them not.
+
+The garden rose may richly bloom
+In cultured soil and genial air,
+To cloud the light of Fashion's room
+Or droop in Beauty's midnight hair;
+In lonelier grace, to sun and dew
+The sweetbrier on the hillside shows
+Its single leaf and fainter hue,
+Untrained and wildly free, yet still a sister rose!
+
+Thus o'er the heart of Weetamoo
+Their mingling shades of joy and ill
+The instincts of her nature threw;
+The savage was a woman still.
+Midst outlines dim of maiden schemes,
+Heart-colored prophecies of life,
+Rose on the ground of her young dreams
+The light of a new home, the lover and the wife.
+
+
+IV. THE WEDDING.
+Cool and dark fell the autumn night,
+But the Bashaba's wigwam glowed with light,
+For down from its roof, by green withes hung,
+Flaring and smoking the pine-knots swung.
+
+And along the river great wood-fires
+Shot into the night their long, red spires,
+Showing behind the tall, dark wood,
+Flashing before on the sweeping flood.
+
+In the changeful wind, with shimmer and shade,
+Now high, now low, that firelight played,
+On tree-leaves wet with evening dews,
+On gliding water and still canoes.
+
+The trapper that night on Turee's brook,
+And the weary fisher on Contoocook,
+Saw over the marshes, and through the pine,
+And down on the river, the dance-lights shine.
+For the Saugus Sachem had come to woo
+The Bashaba's daughter Weetamoo,
+And laid at her father's feet that night
+His softest furs and wampum white.
+
+From the Crystal Hills to the far southeast
+The river Sagamores came to the feast;
+And chiefs whose homes the sea-winds shook
+Sat down on the mats of Pennacook.
+
+They came from Sunapee's shore of rock,
+From the snowy sources of Snooganock,
+And from rough Coos whose thick woods shake
+Their pine-cones in Umbagog Lake.
+
+From Ammonoosuc's mountain pass,
+Wild as his home, came Chepewass;
+And the Keenomps of the bills which throw
+Their shade on the Smile of Manito.
+
+With pipes of peace and bows unstrung,
+Glowing with paint came old and young,
+In wampum and furs and feathers arrayed,
+To the dance and feast the Bashaba made.
+
+Bird of the air and beast of the field,
+All which the woods and the waters yield,
+On dishes of birch and hemlock piled,
+Garnished and graced that banquet wild.
+
+Steaks of the brown bear fat and large
+From the rocky slopes of the Kearsarge;
+Delicate trout from Babboosuck brook,
+And salmon speared in the Contoocook;
+
+Squirrels which fed where nuts fell thick
+in the gravelly bed of the Otternic;
+And small wild-hens in reed-snares caught
+from the banks of Sondagardee brought;
+
+Pike and perch from the Suncook taken,
+Nuts from the trees of the Black Hills shaken,
+Cranberries picked in the Squamscot bog,
+And grapes from the vines of Piscataquog:
+
+And, drawn from that great stone vase which stands
+In the river scooped by a spirit's hands,[4]
+Garnished with spoons of shell and horn,
+Stood the birchen dishes of smoking corn.
+
+Thus bird of the air and beast of the field,
+All which the woods and the waters yield,
+Furnished in that olden day
+The bridal feast of the Bashaba.
+
+And merrily when that feast was done
+On the fire-lit green the dance begun,
+With squaws' shrill stave, and deeper hum
+Of old men beating the Indian drum.
+
+Painted and plumed, with scalp-locks flowing,
+And red arms tossing and black eyes glowing,
+Now in the light and now in the shade
+Around the fires the dancers played.
+
+The step was quicker, the song more shrill,
+And the beat of the small drums louder still
+Whenever within the circle drew
+The Saugus Sachem and Weetamoo.
+
+The moons of forty winters had shed
+Their snow upon that chieftain's head,
+And toil and care and battle's chance
+Had seamed his hard, dark countenance.
+
+A fawn beside the bison grim,--
+Why turns the bride's fond eye on him,
+In whose cold look is naught beside
+The triumph of a sullen pride?
+
+Ask why the graceful grape entwines
+The rough oak with her arm of vines;
+And why the gray rock's rugged cheek
+The soft lips of the mosses seek.
+
+Why, with wise instinct, Nature seems
+To harmonize her wide extremes,
+Linking the stronger with the weak,
+The haughty with the soft and meek!
+
+
+V. THE NEW HOME.
+A wild and broken landscape, spiked with firs,
+Roughening the bleak horizon's northern edge;
+Steep, cavernous hillsides, where black hemlock
+spurs
+And sharp, gray splinters of the wind-swept
+ledge
+Pierced the thin-glazed ice, or bristling rose,
+Where the cold rim of the sky sunk down upon
+the snows.
+
+And eastward cold, wide marshes stretched away,
+Dull, dreary flats without a bush or tree,
+O'er-crossed by icy creeks, where twice a day
+Gurgled the waters of the moon-struck sea;
+And faint with distance came the stifled roar,
+The melancholy lapse of waves on that low shore.
+
+No cheerful village with its mingling smokes,
+No laugh of children wrestling in the snow,
+No camp-fire blazing through the hillside oaks,
+No fishers kneeling on the ice below;
+Yet midst all desolate things of sound and view,
+Through the long winter moons smiled dark-eyed
+Weetamoo.
+
+Her heart had found a home; and freshly all
+Its beautiful affections overgrew
+Their rugged prop. As o'er some granite wall
+Soft vine-leaves open to the moistening dew
+And warm bright sun, the love of that young wife
+Found on a hard cold breast the dew and warmth
+of life.
+
+The steep, bleak hills, the melancholy shore,
+The long, dead level of the marsh between,
+A coloring of unreal beauty wore
+Through the soft golden mist of young love seen.
+For o'er those hills and from that dreary plain,
+Nightly she welcomed home her hunter chief again.
+
+No warmth of heart, no passionate burst of feeling,
+Repaid her welcoming smile and parting kiss,
+No fond and playful dalliance half concealing,
+Under the guise of mirth, its tenderness;
+
+But, in their stead, the warrior's settled pride,
+And vanity's pleased smile with homage satisfied.
+
+Enough for Weetamoo, that she alone
+Sat on his mat and slumbered at his side;
+That he whose fame to her young ear had flown
+Now looked upon her proudly as his bride;
+That he whose name the Mohawk trembling heard
+Vouchsafed to her at times a kindly look or word.
+
+For she had learned the maxims of her race,
+Which teach the woman to become a slave,
+And feel herself the pardonless disgrace
+Of love's fond weakness in the wise and brave,--
+The scandal and the shame which they incur,
+Who give to woman all which man requires of her.
+
+So passed the winter moons. The sun at last
+Broke link by link the frost chain of the rills,
+And the warm breathings of the southwest passed
+Over the hoar rime of the Saugus hills;
+The gray and desolate marsh grew green once more,
+And the birch-tree's tremulous shade fell round the
+Sachem's door.
+
+Then from far Pennacook swift runners came,
+With gift and greeting for the Saugus chief;
+Beseeching him in the great Sachem's name,
+That, with the coming of the flower and leaf,
+The song of birds, the warm breeze and the rain,
+Young Weetamoo might greet her lonely sire again.
+
+And Winnepurkit called his chiefs together,
+And a grave council in his wigwam met,
+Solemn and brief in words, considering whether
+The rigid rules of forest etiquette
+Permitted Weetamoo once more to look
+Upon her father's face and green-banked
+Pennacook.
+
+With interludes of pipe-smoke and strong water,
+The forest sages pondered, and at length,
+Concluded in a body to escort her
+Up to her father's home of pride and strength,
+Impressing thus on Pennacook a sense
+Of Winnepurkit's power and regal consequence.
+
+So through old woods which Aukeetamit's[5] hand,
+A soft and many-shaded greenness lent,
+Over high breezy hills, and meadow land
+Yellow with flowers, the wild procession went,
+Till, rolling down its wooded banks between,
+A broad, clear, mountain stream, the Merrimac
+was seen.
+
+The hunter leaning on his bow undrawn,
+The fisher lounging on the pebbled shores,
+Squaws in the clearing dropping the seed-corn,
+Young children peering through the wigwam doors,
+Saw with delight, surrounded by her train
+Of painted Saugus braves, their Weetamoo again.
+
+
+VI. AT PENNACOOK.
+The hills are dearest which our childish feet
+Have climbed the earliest; and the streams most sweet
+Are ever those at which our young lips drank,
+Stooped to their waters o'er the grassy bank.
+
+Midst the cold dreary sea-watch, Home's hearth-light
+Shines round the helmsman plunging through the night;
+And still, with inward eye, the traveller sees
+In close, dark, stranger streets his native trees.
+
+The home-sick dreamer's brow is nightly fanned
+By breezes whispering of his native land,
+And on the stranger's dim and dying eye
+The soft, sweet pictures of his childhood lie.
+
+Joy then for Weetamoo, to sit once more
+A child upon her father's wigwam floor!
+Once more with her old fondness to beguile
+From his cold eye the strange light of a smile.
+
+The long, bright days of summer swiftly passed,
+The dry leaves whirled in autumn's rising blast,
+And evening cloud and whitening sunrise rime
+Told of the coming of the winter-time.
+
+But vainly looked, the while, young Weetamoo,
+Down the dark river for her chief's canoe;
+No dusky messenger from Saugus brought
+The grateful tidings which the young wife sought.
+
+At length a runner from her father sent,
+To Winnepurkit's sea-cooled wigwam went
+"Eagle of Saugus,--in the woods the dove
+Mourns for the shelter of thy wings of love."
+
+But the dark chief of Saugus turned aside
+In the grim anger of hard-hearted pride;
+"I bore her as became a chieftain's daughter,
+Up to her home beside the gliding water.
+
+If now no more a mat for her is found
+Of all which line her father's wigwam round,
+Let Pennacook call out his warrior train,
+And send her back with wampum gifts again."
+
+The baffled runner turned upon his track,
+Bearing the words of Winnepurkit back.
+"Dog of the Marsh," cried Pennacook, "no more
+Shall child of mine sit on his wigwam floor.
+
+"Go, let him seek some meaner squaw to spread
+The stolen bear-skin of his beggar's bed;
+Son of a fish-hawk! let him dig his clams
+For some vile daughter of the Agawams,
+
+"Or coward Nipmucks! may his scalp dry black
+In Mohawk smoke, before I send her back."
+He shook his clenched hand towards the ocean wave,
+While hoarse assent his listening council gave.
+
+Alas poor bride! can thy grim sire impart
+His iron hardness to thy woman's heart?
+Or cold self-torturing pride like his atone
+For love denied and life's warm beauty flown?
+
+On Autumn's gray and mournful grave the snow
+Hung its white wreaths; with stifled voice and low
+The river crept, by one vast bridge o'er-crossed,
+Built by the boar-locked artisan of Frost.
+
+And many a moon in beauty newly born
+Pierced the red sunset with her silver horn,
+Or, from the east, across her azure field
+Rolled the wide brightness of her full-orbed shield.
+
+Yet Winnepurkit came not,--on the mat
+Of the scorned wife her dusky rival sat;
+And he, the while, in Western woods afar,
+Urged the long chase, or trod the path of war.
+
+Dry up thy tears, young daughter of a chief!
+Waste not on him the sacredness of grief;
+Be the fierce spirit of thy sire thine own,
+His lips of scorning, and his heart of stone.
+
+What heeds the warrior of a hundred fights,
+The storm-worn watcher through long hunting nights,
+Cold, crafty, proud of woman's weak distress,
+Her home-bound grief and pining loneliness?
+
+
+VII. THE DEPARTURE.
+The wild March rains had fallen fast and long
+The snowy mountains of the North among,
+Making each vale a watercourse, each hill
+Bright with the cascade of some new-made rill.
+
+Gnawed by the sunbeams, softened by the rain,
+Heaved underneath by the swollen current's strain,
+The ice-bridge yielded, and the Merrimac
+Bore the huge ruin crashing down its track.
+
+On that strong turbid water, a small boat
+Guided by one weak hand was seen to float;
+Evil the fate which loosed it from the shore,
+Too early voyager with too frail an oar!
+
+Down the vexed centre of that rushing tide,
+The thick huge ice-blocks threatening either side,
+The foam-white rocks of Amoskeag in view,
+With arrowy swiftness sped that light canoe.
+
+The trapper, moistening his moose's meat
+On the wet bank by Uncanoonuc's feet,
+Saw the swift boat flash down the troubled stream;
+Slept he, or waked he? was it truth or dream?
+
+The straining eye bent fearfully before,
+The small hand clenching on the useless oar,
+The bead-wrought blanket trailing o'er the water--
+He knew them all--woe for the Sachem's daughter!
+
+Sick and aweary of her lonely life,
+Heedless of peril, the still faithful wife
+Had left her mother's grave, her father's door,
+To seek the wigwam of her chief once more.
+
+Down the white rapids like a sear leaf whirled,
+On the sharp rocks and piled-up ices hurled,
+Empty and broken, circled the canoe
+In the vexed pool below--but where was Weetamoo.
+
+
+VIII. SONG OF INDIAN WOMEN.
+The Dark eye has left us,
+The Spring-bird has flown;
+On the pathway of spirits
+She wanders alone.
+The song of the wood-dove has died on our shore
+Mat wonck kunna-monee![6] We hear it no more!
+
+O dark water Spirit
+We cast on thy wave
+These furs which may never
+Hang over her grave;
+Bear down to the lost one the robes that she wore
+Mat wonck kunna-monee! We see her no more!
+
+Of the strange land she walks in
+No Powah has told:
+It may burn with the sunshine,
+Or freeze with the cold.
+Let us give to our lost one the robes that she wore:
+Mat wonck kunna-monee! We see her no more!
+
+The path she is treading
+Shall soon be our own;
+Each gliding in shadow
+Unseen and alone!
+In vain shall we call on the souls gone before:
+Mat wonck kunna-monee! They hear us no more!
+
+O mighty Sowanna![7]
+Thy gateways unfold,
+From thy wigwam of sunset
+Lift curtains of gold!
+
+Take home the poor Spirit whose journey is o'er
+Mat wonck kunna-monee! We see her no more!
+
+So sang the Children of the Leaves beside
+The broad, dark river's coldly flowing tide;
+Now low, now harsh, with sob-like pause and swell,
+On the high wind their voices rose and fell.
+Nature's wild music,--sounds of wind-swept trees,
+The scream of birds, the wailing of the breeze,
+The roar of waters, steady, deep, and strong,--
+Mingled and murmured in that farewell song.
+1844.
+
+
+
+
+BARCLAY OF URY.
+
+Among the earliest converts to the doctrines of Friends in Scotland was
+Barclay of Ury, an old and distinguished soldier, who had fought under
+Gustavus Adolphus, in Germany. As a Quaker, he became the object of
+persecution and abuse at the hands of the magistrates and the populace.
+None bore the indignities of the mob with greater patience and nobleness
+of soul than this once proud gentleman and soldier. One of his friends,
+on an occasion of uncommon rudeness, lamented that he should be treated
+so harshly in his old age who had been so honored before. "I find more
+satisfaction," said Barclay, "as well as honor, in being thus insulted
+for my religious principles, than when, a few years ago, it was usual
+for the magistrates, as I passed the city of Aberdeen, to meet me on the
+road and conduct me to public entertainment in their hall, and then
+escort me out again, to gain my favor."
+
+Up the streets of Aberdeen,
+By the kirk and college green,
+Rode the Laird of Ury;
+Close behind him, close beside,
+Foul of mouth and evil-eyed,
+Pressed the mob in fury.
+
+Flouted him the drunken churl,
+Jeered at him the serving-girl,
+Prompt to please her master;
+And the begging carlin, late
+Fed and clothed at Ury's gate,
+Cursed him as he passed her.
+
+Yet, with calm and stately mien,
+Up the streets of Aberdeen
+Came he slowly riding;
+And, to all he saw and heard,
+Answering not with bitter word,
+Turning not for chiding.
+
+Came a troop with broadswords swinging,
+Bits and bridles sharply ringing,
+Loose and free and froward;
+Quoth the foremost, "Ride him down!
+Push him! prick him! through the town
+Drive the Quaker coward!"
+
+But from out the thickening crowd
+Cried a sudden voice and loud
+"Barclay! Ho! a Barclay!"
+And the old man at his side
+Saw a comrade, battle tried,
+Scarred and sunburned darkly;
+
+Who with ready weapon bare,
+Fronting to the troopers there,
+Cried aloud: "God save us,
+Call ye coward him who stood
+Ankle deep in Lutzen's blood,
+With the brave Gustavus?"
+
+"Nay, I do not need thy sword,
+Comrade mine," said Ury's lord;
+"Put it up, I pray thee
+Passive to His holy will,
+Trust I in my Master still,
+Even though He slay me.
+
+"Pledges of thy love and faith,
+Proved on many a field of death,
+Not by me are needed."
+Marvelled much that henchman bold,
+That his laird, so stout of old,
+Now so meekly pleaded.
+
+"Woe's the day!" he sadly said,
+With a slowly shaking head,
+And a look of pity;
+"Ury's honest lord reviled,
+Mock of knave and sport of child,
+In his own good city.
+
+"Speak the word, and, master mine,
+As we charged on Tilly's[8] line,
+And his Walloon lancers,
+Smiting through their midst we'll teach
+Civil look and decent speech
+To these boyish prancers!"
+
+"Marvel not, mine ancient friend,
+Like beginning, like the end:"
+Quoth the Laird of Ury;
+"Is the sinful servant more
+Than his gracious Lord who bore
+Bonds and stripes in Jewry?
+
+"Give me joy that in His name
+I can bear, with patient frame,
+All these vain ones offer;
+While for them He suffereth long,
+Shall I answer wrong with wrong,
+Scoffing with the scoffer?
+
+"Happier I, with loss of all,
+Hunted, outlawed, held in thrall,
+With few friends to greet me,
+Than when reeve and squire were seen,
+Riding out from Aberdeen,
+With bared heads to meet me.
+
+"When each goodwife, o'er and o'er,
+Blessed me as I passed her door;
+And the snooded daughter,
+Through her casement glancing down,
+Smiled on him who bore renown
+From red fields of slaughter.
+
+"Hard to feel the stranger's scoff,
+Hard the old friend's falling off,
+Hard to learn forgiving;
+But the Lord His own rewards,
+And His love with theirs accords,
+Warm and fresh and living.
+
+"Through this dark and stormy night
+Faith beholds a feeble light
+Up the blackness streaking;
+Knowing God's own time is best,
+In a patient hope I rest
+For the full day-breaking!"
+
+So the Laird of Ury said,
+Turning slow his horse's head
+Towards the Tolbooth prison,
+Where, through iron gates, he heard
+Poor disciples of the Word
+Preach of Christ arisen!
+
+Not in vain, Confessor old,
+Unto us the tale is told
+Of thy day of trial;
+Every age on him who strays
+From its broad and beaten ways
+Pours its seven-fold vial.
+
+Happy he whose inward ear
+Angel comfortings can hear,
+O'er the rabble's laughter;
+And while Hatred's fagots burn,
+Glimpses through the smoke discern
+Of the good hereafter.
+
+Knowing this, that never yet
+Share of Truth was vainly set
+In the world's wide fallow;
+After hands shall sow the seed,
+After hands from hill and mead
+Reap the harvests yellow.
+
+Thus, with somewhat of the Seer,
+Must the moral pioneer
+From the Future borrow;
+Clothe the waste with dreams of grain,
+And, on midnight's sky of rain,
+Paint the golden morrow!
+
+
+
+
+THE ANGELS OF BUENA VISTA.
+
+A letter-writer from Mexico during the Mexican war, when detailing some
+of the incidents at the terrible fight of Buena Vista, mentioned that
+Mexican women were seen hovering near the field of death, for the
+purpose of giving aid and succor to the wounded. One poor woman was
+found surrounded by the maimed and suffering of both armies, ministering
+to the wants of Americans as well as Mexicans, with impartial
+tenderness.
+
+SPEAK and tell us, our Ximena, looking northward
+far away,
+O'er the camp of the invaders, o'er the Mexican
+array,
+Who is losing? who is winning? are they far or
+come they near?
+Look abroad, and tell us, sister, whither rolls the
+storm we hear.
+Down the hills of Angostura still the storm of
+battle rolls;
+Blood is flowing, men are dying; God have mercy
+on their souls!
+"Who is losing? who is winning?" Over hill
+and over plain,
+I see but smoke of cannon clouding through the
+mountain rain.
+
+Holy Mother! keep our brothers! Look, Ximena,
+look once more.
+"Still I see the fearful whirlwind rolling darkly
+as before,
+Bearing on, in strange confusion, friend and foeman,
+foot and horse,
+Like some wild and troubled torrent sweeping
+down its mountain course."
+
+Look forth once more, Ximena! "Ah! the smoke
+has rolled away;
+And I see the Northern rifles gleaming down the
+ranks of gray.
+Hark! that sudden blast of bugles! there the troop
+of Minon wheels;
+There the Northern horses thunder, with the cannon
+at their heels.
+
+"Jesu, pity I how it thickens I now retreat and
+now advance!
+Bight against the blazing cannon shivers Puebla's
+charging lance!
+Down they go, the brave young riders; horse and
+foot together fall;
+Like a ploughshare in the fallow, through them
+ploughs the Northern ball."
+
+Nearer came the storm and nearer, rolling fast and
+frightful on!
+Speak, Ximena, speak and tell us, who has lost,
+and who has won?
+Alas! alas! I know not; friend and foe together
+fall,
+O'er the dying rush the living: pray, my sisters,
+for them all!
+
+"Lo! the wind the smoke is lifting. Blessed
+Mother, save my brain!
+I can see the wounded crawling slowly out from
+heaps of slain.
+Now they stagger, blind and bleeding; now they
+fall, and strive to rise;
+Hasten, sisters, haste and save them, lest they die
+before our eyes!
+
+"O my hearts love! O my dear one! lay thy
+poor head on my knee;
+Dost thou know the lips that kiss thee? Canst
+thou hear me? canst thou see?
+O my husband, brave and gentle! O my Bernal,
+look once more
+On the blessed cross before thee! Mercy!
+all is o'er!"
+
+Dry thy tears, my poor Ximena; lay thy dear one
+down to rest;
+Let his hands be meekly folded, lay the cross upon
+his breast;
+Let his dirge be sung hereafter, and his funeral
+masses said;
+To-day, thou poor bereaved one, the living ask thy
+aid.
+
+Close beside her, faintly moaning, fair and young,
+a soldier lay,
+Torn with shot and pierced with lances, bleeding
+slow his life away;
+But, as tenderly before him the lorn Ximena knelt,
+She saw the Northern eagle shining on his pistol-
+belt.
+
+With a stifled cry of horror straight she turned
+away her head;
+With a sad and bitter feeling looked she back upon
+her dead;
+But she heard the youth's low moaning, and his
+struggling breath of pain,
+And she raised the cooling water to his parching
+lips again.
+
+Whispered low the dying soldier, pressed her hand
+and faintly smiled;
+Was that pitying face his mother's? did she watch
+beside her child?
+All his stranger words with meaning her woman's
+heart supplied;
+With her kiss upon his forehead, "Mother!"
+murmured he, and died!
+
+"A bitter curse upon them, poor boy, who led thee
+forth,
+From some gentle, sad-eyed mother, weeping, lonely,
+in the North!"
+Spake the mournful Mexic woman, as she laid him
+with her dead,
+And turned to soothe the living, and bind the
+wounds which bled.
+
+"Look forth once more, Ximena!" Like a cloud
+before the wind
+Rolls the battle down the mountains, leaving blood
+and death behind;
+Ah! they plead in vain for mercy; in the dust the
+wounded strive;
+"Hide your faces, holy angels! O thou Christ of
+God, forgive!"
+
+Sink, O Night, among thy mountains! let the cool,
+gray shadows fall;
+Dying brothers, fighting demons, drop thy curtain
+over all!
+Through the thickening winter twilight, wide apart
+the battle rolled,
+In its sheath the sabre rested, and the cannon's
+lips grew cold.
+
+But the noble Mexic women still their holy task
+pursued,
+Through that long, dark night of sorrow, worn and
+faint and lacking food.
+Over weak and suffering brothers, with a tender
+care they hung,
+And the dying foeman blessed them in a strange
+and Northern tongue.
+
+Not wholly lost, O Father! is this evil world of
+ours;
+Upward, through its blood and ashes, spring afresh
+the Eden flowers;
+From its smoking hell of battle, Love and Pity
+send their prayer,
+And still thy white-winged angels hover dimly in
+our air!
+1847.
+
+
+
+
+THE LEGEND OF ST. MARK.
+
+"This legend [to which my attention was called by my friend Charles
+Sumner], is the subject of a celebrated picture by Tintoretto, of which
+Mr. Rogers possesses the original sketch. The slave lies on the ground,
+amid a crowd of spectators, who look on, animated by all the various
+emotions of sympathy, rage, terror; a woman, in front, with a child in
+her arms, has always been admired for the lifelike vivacity of her
+attitude and expression. The executioner holds up the broken implements;
+St. Mark, with a headlong movement, seems to rush down from heaven in
+haste to save his worshipper. The dramatic grouping in this picture is
+wonderful; the coloring, in its gorgeous depth and harmony, is, in Mr.
+Rogers's sketch, finer than in the picture."--MRS. JAMESON'S Sacred and
+Legendary Art, I. 154.
+
+THE day is closing dark and cold,
+With roaring blast and sleety showers;
+And through the dusk the lilacs wear
+The bloom of snow, instead of flowers.
+
+I turn me from the gloom without,
+To ponder o'er a tale of old;
+A legend of the age of Faith,
+By dreaming monk or abbess told.
+
+On Tintoretto's canvas lives
+That fancy of a loving heart,
+In graceful lines and shapes of power,
+And hues immortal as his art.
+
+In Provence (so the story runs)
+There lived a lord, to whom, as slave,
+A peasant-boy of tender years
+The chance of trade or conquest gave.
+
+Forth-looking from the castle tower,
+Beyond the hills with almonds dark,
+The straining eye could scarce discern
+The chapel of the good St. Mark.
+
+And there, when bitter word or fare
+The service of the youth repaid,
+By stealth, before that holy shrine,
+For grace to bear his wrong, he prayed.
+
+The steed stamped at the castle gate,
+The boar-hunt sounded on the hill;
+Why stayed the Baron from the chase,
+With looks so stern, and words so ill?
+
+"Go, bind yon slave! and let him learn,
+By scath of fire and strain of cord,
+How ill they speed who give dead saints
+The homage due their living lord!"
+
+They bound him on the fearful rack,
+When, through the dungeon's vaulted dark,
+He saw the light of shining robes,
+And knew the face of good St. Mark.
+
+Then sank the iron rack apart,
+The cords released their cruel clasp,
+The pincers, with their teeth of fire,
+Fell broken from the torturer's grasp.
+
+And lo! before the Youth and Saint,
+Barred door and wall of stone gave way;
+And up from bondage and the night
+They passed to freedom and the day!
+
+O dreaming monk! thy tale is true;
+O painter! true thy pencil's art;
+in tones of hope and prophecy,
+Ye whisper to my listening heart!
+
+Unheard no burdened heart's appeal
+Moans up to God's inclining ear;
+Unheeded by his tender eye,
+Falls to the earth no sufferer's tear.
+
+For still the Lord alone is God
+The pomp and power of tyrant man
+Are scattered at his lightest breath,
+Like chaff before the winnower's fan.
+
+Not always shall the slave uplift
+His heavy hands to Heaven in vain.
+God's angel, like the good St. Mark,
+Comes shining down to break his chain!
+
+O weary ones! ye may not see
+Your helpers in their downward flight;
+Nor hear the sound of silver wings
+Slow beating through the hush of night!
+
+But not the less gray Dothan shone,
+With sunbright watchers bending low,
+That Fear's dim eye beheld alone
+The spear-heads of the Syrian foe.
+
+There are, who, like the Seer of old,
+Can see the helpers God has sent,
+And how life's rugged mountain-side
+Is white with many an angel tent!
+
+They hear the heralds whom our Lord
+Sends down his pathway to prepare;
+And light, from others hidden, shines
+On their high place of faith and prayer.
+
+Let such, for earth's despairing ones,
+Hopeless, yet longing to be free,
+Breathe once again the Prophet's prayer
+"Lord, ope their eyes, that they may see!"
+1849.
+
+
+
+
+KATHLEEN.
+
+This ballad was originally published in my prose work, Leaves from
+Margaret Smith's Journal, as the song of a wandering Milesian
+schoolmaster. In the seventeenth century, slavery in the New World was
+by no means confined to the natives of Africa. Political offenders and
+criminals were transported by the British government to the plantations
+of Barbadoes and Virginia, where they were sold like cattle in the
+market. Kidnapping of free and innocent white persons was practised to a
+considerable extent in the seaports of the United Kingdom.
+
+O NORAH, lay your basket down,
+And rest your weary hand,
+And come and hear me sing a song
+Of our old Ireland.
+
+There was a lord of Galaway,
+A mighty lord was he;
+And he did wed a second wife,
+A maid of low degree.
+
+But he was old, and she was young,
+And so, in evil spite,
+She baked the black bread for his kin,
+And fed her own with white.
+
+She whipped the maids and starved the kern,
+And drove away the poor;
+"Ah, woe is me!" the old lord said,
+"I rue my bargain sore!"
+
+This lord he had a daughter fair,
+Beloved of old and young,
+And nightly round the shealing-fires
+Of her the gleeman sung.
+
+"As sweet and good is young Kathleen
+As Eve before her fall;"
+So sang the harper at the fair,
+So harped he in the hall.
+
+"Oh, come to me, my daughter dear!
+Come sit upon my knee,
+For looking in your face, Kathleen,
+Your mother's own I see!"
+
+He smoothed and smoothed her hair away,
+He kissed her forehead fair;
+"It is my darling Mary's brow,
+It is my darling's hair!"
+
+Oh, then spake up the angry dame,
+"Get up, get up," quoth she,
+"I'll sell ye over Ireland,
+I'll sell ye o'er the sea!"
+
+She clipped her glossy hair away,
+That none her rank might know;
+She took away her gown of silk,
+And gave her one of tow,
+
+And sent her down to Limerick town
+And to a seaman sold
+This daughter of an Irish lord
+For ten good pounds in gold.
+
+The lord he smote upon his breast,
+And tore his beard so gray;
+But he was old, and she was young,
+And so she had her way.
+
+Sure that same night the Banshee howled
+To fright the evil dame,
+And fairy folks, who loved Kathleen,
+With funeral torches came.
+
+She watched them glancing through the trees,
+And glimmering down the hill;
+They crept before the dead-vault door,
+And there they all stood still!
+
+"Get up, old man! the wake-lights shine!"
+"Ye murthering witch," quoth he,
+"So I'm rid of your tongue, I little care
+If they shine for you or me."
+
+"Oh, whoso brings my daughter back,
+My gold and land shall have!"
+Oh, then spake up his handsome page,
+"No gold nor land I crave!
+
+"But give to me your daughter dear,
+Give sweet Kathleen to me,
+Be she on sea or be she on land,
+I'll bring her back to thee."
+
+"My daughter is a lady born,
+And you of low degree,
+But she shall be your bride the day
+You bring her back to me."
+
+He sailed east, he sailed west,
+And far and long sailed he,
+Until he came to Boston town,
+Across the great salt sea.
+
+"Oh, have ye seen the young Kathleen,
+The flower of Ireland?
+Ye'll know her by her eyes so blue,
+And by her snow-white hand!"
+
+Out spake an ancient man, "I know
+The maiden whom ye mean;
+I bought her of a Limerick man,
+And she is called Kathleen.
+
+"No skill hath she in household work,
+Her hands are soft and white,
+Yet well by loving looks and ways
+She doth her cost requite."
+
+So up they walked through Boston town,
+And met a maiden fair,
+A little basket on her arm
+So snowy-white and bare.
+
+"Come hither, child, and say hast thou
+This young man ever seen?"
+They wept within each other's arms,
+The page and young Kathleen.
+
+"Oh give to me this darling child,
+And take my purse of gold."
+"Nay, not by me," her master said,
+"Shall sweet Kathleen be sold.
+
+"We loved her in the place of one
+The Lord hath early ta'en;
+But, since her heart's in Ireland,
+We give her back again!"
+
+Oh, for that same the saints in heaven
+For his poor soul shall pray,
+And Mary Mother wash with tears
+His heresies away.
+
+Sure now they dwell in Ireland;
+As you go up Claremore
+Ye'll see their castle looking down
+The pleasant Galway shore.
+
+And the old lord's wife is dead and gone,
+And a happy man is he,
+For he sits beside his own Kathleen,
+With her darling on his knee.
+1849.
+
+
+
+
+THE WELL OF LOCH MAREE
+
+Pennant, in his Voyage to the Hebrides, describes the holy well of Loch
+Maree, the waters of which were supposed to effect a miraculous cure of
+melancholy, trouble, and insanity.
+
+CALM on the breast of Loch Maree
+A little isle reposes;
+A shadow woven of the oak
+And willow o'er it closes.
+
+Within, a Druid's mound is seen,
+Set round with stony warders;
+A fountain, gushing through the turf,
+Flows o'er its grassy borders.
+
+And whoso bathes therein his brow,
+With care or madness burning,
+Feels once again his healthful thought
+And sense of peace returning.
+
+O restless heart and fevered brain,
+Unquiet and unstable,
+That holy well of Loch Maree
+Is more than idle fable!
+
+Life's changes vex, its discords stun,
+Its glaring sunshine blindeth,
+And blest is he who on his way
+That fount of healing findeth!
+
+The shadows of a humbled will
+And contrite heart are o'er it;
+Go read its legend, "TRUST IN GOD,"
+On Faith's white stones before it.
+1850.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHAPEL OF THE HERMITS.
+
+The incident upon which this poem is based is related in a note to
+Bernardin Henri Saint Pierre's Etudes de la Nature. "We arrived at the
+habitation of the Hermits a little before they sat down to their table,
+and while they were still at church. J. J. Rousseau proposed to me to
+offer up our devotions. The hermits were reciting the Litanies of
+Providence, which are remarkably beautiful. After we had addressed our
+prayers to God, and the hermits were proceeding to the refectory,
+Rousseau said to me, with his heart overflowing, 'At this moment I
+experience what is said in the gospel: Where two or three are gathered
+together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. There is here a
+feeling of peace and happiness which penetrates the soul.' I said, 'If
+Finelon had lived, you would have been a Catholic.' He exclaimed, with
+tears in his eyes, 'Oh, if Finelon were alive, I would struggle to get
+into his service, even as a lackey!'" In my sketch of Saint Pierre, it
+will be seen that I have somewhat antedated the period of his old age.
+At that time he was not probably more than fifty. In describing him, I
+have by no means exaggerated his own history of his mental condition at
+the period of the story. In the fragmentary Sequel to his Studies of
+Nature, he thus speaks of himself: "The ingratitude of those of whom I
+had deserved kindness, unexpected family misfortunes, the total loss of
+my small patrimony through enterprises solely undertaken for the benefit
+of my country, the debts under which I lay oppressed, the blasting of
+all my hopes,--these combined calamities made dreadful inroads upon my
+health and reason. . . . I found it impossible to continue in a room
+where there was company, especially if the doors were shut. I could not
+even cross an alley in a public garden, if several persons had got
+together in it. When alone, my malady subsided. I felt myself likewise
+at ease in places where I saw children only. At the sight of any one
+walking up to the place where I was, I felt my whole frame agitated, and
+retired. I often said to myself, 'My sole study has been to merit well
+of mankind; why do I fear them?'"
+
+He attributes his improved health of mind and body to the counsels of
+his friend, J. J. Rousseau. "I renounced," says he, "my books. I threw
+my eyes upon the works of nature, which spake to all my senses a
+language which neither time nor nations have it in their power to alter.
+Thenceforth my histories and my journals were the herbage of the fields
+and meadows. My thoughts did not go forth painfully after them, as in
+the case of human systems; but their thoughts, under a thousand engaging
+forms, quietly sought me. In these I studied, without effort, the laws
+of that Universal Wisdom which had surrounded me from the cradle, but on
+which heretofore I had bestowed little attention."
+
+Speaking of Rousseau, he says: "I derived inexpressible satisfaction
+from his society. What I prized still more than his genius was his
+probity. He was one of the few literary characters, tried in the furnace
+of affliction, to whom you could, with perfect security, confide your
+most secret thoughts. . . . Even when he deviated, and became the victim
+of himself or of others, he could forget his own misery in devotion to
+the welfare of mankind. He was uniformly the advocate of the miserable.
+There might be inscribed on his tomb these affecting words from that
+Book of which he carried always about him some select passages, during
+the last years of his life: 'His sins, which are many, are forgiven, for
+he loved much.'"
+
+"I DO believe, and yet, in grief,
+I pray for help to unbelief;
+For needful strength aside to lay
+The daily cumberings of my way.
+
+"I 'm sick at heart of craft and cant,
+Sick of the crazed enthusiast's rant,
+Profession's smooth hypocrisies,
+And creeds of iron, and lives of ease.
+
+"I ponder o'er the sacred word,
+I read the record of our Lord;
+And, weak and troubled, envy them
+Who touched His seamless garment's hem;
+
+"Who saw the tears of love He wept
+Above the grave where Lazarus slept;
+And heard, amidst the shadows dim
+Of Olivet, His evening hymn.
+
+"How blessed the swineherd's low estate,
+The beggar crouching at the gate,
+The leper loathly and abhorred,
+Whose eyes of flesh beheld the Lord!
+
+"O sacred soil His sandals pressed!
+Sweet fountains of His noonday rest!
+O light and air of Palestine,
+Impregnate with His life divine!
+
+"Oh, bear me thither! Let me look
+On Siloa's pool, and Kedron's brook;
+Kneel at Gethsemane, and by
+Gennesaret walk, before I die!
+
+"Methinks this cold and northern night
+Would melt before that Orient light;
+And, wet by Hermon's dew and rain,
+My childhood's faith revive again!"
+
+So spake my friend, one autumn day,
+Where the still river slid away
+Beneath us, and above the brown
+Red curtains of the woods shut down.
+
+Then said I,--for I could not brook
+The mute appealing of his look,--
+"I, too, am weak, and faith is small,
+And blindness happeneth unto all.
+
+"Yet, sometimes glimpses on my sight,
+Through present wrong, the eternal right;
+And, step by step, since time began,
+I see the steady gain of man;
+
+"That all of good the past hath had
+Remains to make our own time glad,
+Our common daily life divine,
+And every land a Palestine.
+
+"Thou weariest of thy present state;
+What gain to thee time's holiest date?
+The doubter now perchance had been
+As High Priest or as Pilate then!
+
+"What thought Chorazin's scribes? What faith
+In Him had Nain and Nazareth?
+Of the few followers whom He led
+One sold Him,--all forsook and fled.
+
+"O friend! we need nor rock nor sand,
+Nor storied stream of Morning-Land;
+The heavens are glassed in Merrimac,--
+What more could Jordan render back?
+
+"We lack but open eye and ear
+To find the Orient's marvels here;
+The still small voice in autumn's hush,
+Yon maple wood the burning bush.
+
+"For still the new transcends the old,
+In signs and tokens manifold;
+Slaves rise up men; the olive waves,
+With roots deep set in battle graves!
+
+"Through the harsh noises of our day
+A low, sweet prelude finds its way;
+Through clouds of doubt, and creeds of fear,
+A light is breaking, calm and clear.
+
+"That song of Love, now low and far,
+Erelong shall swell from star to star!
+That light, the breaking day, which tips
+The golden-spired Apocalypse!"
+
+Then, when my good friend shook his head,
+And, sighing, sadly smiled, I said:
+"Thou mind'st me of a story told
+In rare Bernardin's leaves of gold."
+
+And while the slanted sunbeams wove
+The shadows of the frost-stained grove,
+And, picturing all, the river ran
+O'er cloud and wood, I thus began:--
+
+ . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+In Mount Valerien's chestnut wood
+The Chapel of the Hermits stood;
+And thither, at the close of day,
+Came two old pilgrims, worn and gray.
+
+One, whose impetuous youth defied
+The storms of Baikal's wintry side,
+And mused and dreamed where tropic day
+Flamed o'er his lost Virginia's bay.
+
+His simple tale of love and woe
+All hearts had melted, high or low;--
+A blissful pain, a sweet distress,
+Immortal in its tenderness.
+
+Yet, while above his charmed page
+Beat quick the young heart of his age,
+He walked amidst the crowd unknown,
+A sorrowing old man, strange and lone.
+
+A homeless, troubled age,--the gray
+Pale setting of a weary day;
+Too dull his ear for voice of praise,
+Too sadly worn his brow for bays.
+
+Pride, lust of power and glory, slept;
+Yet still his heart its young dream kept,
+And, wandering like the deluge-dove,
+Still sought the resting-place of love.
+
+And, mateless, childless, envied more
+The peasant's welcome from his door
+By smiling eyes at eventide,
+Than kingly gifts or lettered pride.
+
+Until, in place of wife and child,
+All-pitying Nature on him smiled,
+And gave to him the golden keys
+To all her inmost sanctities.
+
+Mild Druid of her wood-paths dim!
+She laid her great heart bare to him,
+Its loves and sweet accords;--he saw
+The beauty of her perfect law.
+
+The language of her signs lie knew,
+What notes her cloudy clarion blew;
+The rhythm of autumn's forest dyes,
+The hymn of sunset's painted skies.
+
+And thus he seemed to hear the song
+Which swept, of old, the stars along;
+And to his eyes the earth once more
+Its fresh and primal beauty wore.
+
+Who sought with him, from summer air,
+And field and wood, a balm for care;
+And bathed in light of sunset skies
+His tortured nerves and weary eyes?
+
+His fame on all the winds had flown;
+His words had shaken crypt and throne;
+Like fire, on camp and court and cell
+They dropped, and kindled as they fell.
+
+Beneath the pomps of state, below
+The mitred juggler's masque and show,
+A prophecy, a vague hope, ran
+His burning thought from man to man.
+
+For peace or rest too well he saw
+The fraud of priests, the wrong of law,
+And felt how hard, between the two,
+Their breath of pain the millions drew.
+
+A prophet-utterance, strong and wild,
+The weakness of an unweaned child,
+A sun-bright hope for human-kind,
+And self-despair, in him combined.
+
+He loathed the false, yet lived not true
+To half the glorious truths he knew;
+The doubt, the discord, and the sin,
+He mourned without, he felt within.
+
+Untrod by him the path he showed,
+Sweet pictures on his easel glowed
+Of simple faith, and loves of home,
+And virtue's golden days to come.
+
+But weakness, shame, and folly made
+The foil to all his pen portrayed;
+Still, where his dreamy splendors shone,
+The shadow of himself was thrown.
+
+Lord, what is man, whose thought, at times,
+Up to Thy sevenfold brightness climbs,
+While still his grosser instinct clings
+To earth, like other creeping things!
+
+So rich in words, in acts so mean;
+So high, so low; chance-swung between
+The foulness of the penal pit
+And Truth's clear sky, millennium-lit!
+
+Vain, pride of star-lent genius!--vain,
+Quick fancy and creative brain,
+Unblest by prayerful sacrifice,
+Absurdly great, or weakly wise!
+
+Midst yearnings for a truer life,
+Without were fears, within was strife;
+And still his wayward act denied
+The perfect good for which he sighed.
+
+The love he sent forth void returned;
+The fame that crowned him scorched and burned,
+Burning, yet cold and drear and lone,--
+A fire-mount in a frozen zone!
+
+Like that the gray-haired sea-king passed,[9]
+Seen southward from his sleety mast,
+About whose brows of changeless frost
+A wreath of flame the wild winds tossed.
+
+Far round the mournful beauty played
+Of lambent light and purple shade,
+Lost on the fixed and dumb despair
+Of frozen earth and sea and air!
+
+A man apart, unknown, unloved
+By those whose wrongs his soul had moved,
+He bore the ban of Church and State,
+The good man's fear, the bigot's hate!
+
+Forth from the city's noise and throng,
+Its pomp and shame, its sin and wrong,
+The twain that summer day had strayed
+To Mount Valerien's chestnut shade.
+
+To them the green fields and the wood
+Lent something of their quietude,
+And golden-tinted sunset seemed
+Prophetical of all they dreamed.
+
+The hermits from their simple cares
+The bell was calling home to prayers,
+And, listening to its sound, the twain
+Seemed lapped in childhood's trust again.
+
+Wide open stood the chapel door;
+A sweet old music, swelling o'er
+Low prayerful murmurs, issued thence,--
+The Litanies of Providence!
+
+Then Rousseau spake: "Where two or three
+In His name meet, He there will be!"
+And then, in silence, on their knees
+They sank beneath the chestnut-trees.
+
+As to the blind returning light,
+As daybreak to the Arctic night,
+Old faith revived; the doubts of years
+Dissolved in reverential tears.
+
+That gush of feeling overpast,
+"Ah me!" Bernardin sighed at last,
+I would thy bitterest foes could see
+Thy heart as it is seen of me!
+
+"No church of God hast thou denied;
+Thou hast but spurned in scorn aside
+A bare and hollow counterfeit,
+Profaning the pure name of it!
+
+"With dry dead moss and marish weeds
+His fire the western herdsman feeds,
+And greener from the ashen plain
+The sweet spring grasses rise again.
+
+"Nor thunder-peal nor mighty wind
+Disturb the solid sky behind;
+And through the cloud the red bolt rends
+The calm, still smile of Heaven descends.
+
+"Thus through the world, like bolt and blast,
+And scourging fire, thy words have passed.
+Clouds break,--the steadfast heavens remain;
+Weeds burn,--the ashes feed the grain!
+
+"But whoso strives with wrong may find
+Its touch pollute, its darkness blind;
+And learn, as latent fraud is shown
+In others' faith, to doubt his own.
+
+"With dream and falsehood, simple trust
+And pious hope we tread in dust;
+Lost the calm faith in goodness,--lost
+The baptism of the Pentecost!
+
+"Alas!--the blows for error meant
+Too oft on truth itself are spent,
+As through the false and vile and base
+Looks forth her sad, rebuking face.
+
+"Not ours the Theban's charmed life;
+We come not scathless from the strife!
+The Python's coil about us clings,
+The trampled Hydra bites and stings!
+
+"Meanwhile, the sport of seeming chance,
+The plastic shapes of circumstance,
+What might have been we fondly guess,
+If earlier born, or tempted less.
+
+"And thou, in these wild, troubled days,
+Misjudged alike in blame and praise,
+Unsought and undeserved the same
+The skeptic's praise, the bigot's blame;--
+
+"I cannot doubt, if thou hadst been
+Among the highly favored men
+Who walked on earth with Fenelon,
+He would have owned thee as his son;
+
+"And, bright with wings of cherubim
+Visibly waving over him,
+Seen through his life, the Church had seemed
+All that its old confessors dreamed."
+
+"I would have been," Jean Jaques replied,
+"The humblest servant at his side,
+Obscure, unknown, content to see
+How beautiful man's life may be!
+
+"Oh, more than thrice-blest relic, more
+Than solemn rite or sacred lore,
+The holy life of one who trod
+The foot-marks of the Christ of God!
+
+"Amidst a blinded world he saw
+The oneness of the Dual law;
+That Heaven's sweet peace on Earth began,
+And God was loved through love of man.
+
+"He lived the Truth which reconciled
+The strong man Reason, Faith the child;
+In him belief and act were one,
+The homilies of duty done!"
+
+So speaking, through the twilight gray
+The two old pilgrims went their way.
+What seeds of life that day were sown,
+The heavenly watchers knew alone.
+
+Time passed, and Autumn came to fold
+Green Summer in her brown and gold;
+Time passed, and Winter's tears of snow
+Dropped on the grave-mound of Rousseau.
+
+"The tree remaineth where it fell,
+The pained on earth is pained in hell!"
+So priestcraft from its altars cursed
+The mournful doubts its falsehood nursed.
+
+Ah! well of old the Psalmist prayed,
+"Thy hand, not man's, on me be laid!"
+Earth frowns below, Heaven weeps above,
+And man is hate, but God is love!
+
+No Hermits now the wanderer sees,
+Nor chapel with its chestnut-trees;
+A morning dream, a tale that's told,
+The wave of change o'er all has rolled.
+
+Yet lives the lesson of that day;
+And from its twilight cool and gray
+Comes up a low, sad whisper, "Make
+The truth thine own, for truth's own sake.
+
+"Why wait to see in thy brief span
+Its perfect flower and fruit in man?
+No saintly touch can save; no balm
+Of healing hath the martyr's palm.
+
+"Midst soulless forms, and false pretence
+Of spiritual pride and pampered sense,
+A voice saith, 'What is that to thee?
+Be true thyself, and follow Me!
+
+"In days when throne and altar heard
+The wanton's wish, the bigot's word,
+And pomp of state and ritual show
+Scarce hid the loathsome death below,--
+
+"Midst fawning priests and courtiers foul,
+The losel swarm of crown and cowl,
+White-robed walked Francois Fenelon,
+Stainless as Uriel in the sun!
+
+"Yet in his time the stake blazed red,
+The poor were eaten up like bread
+Men knew him not; his garment's hem
+No healing virtue had for them.
+
+"Alas! no present saint we find;
+The white cymar gleams far behind,
+Revealed in outline vague, sublime,
+Through telescopic mists of time!
+
+"Trust not in man with passing breath,
+But in the Lord, old Scripture saith;
+The truth which saves thou mayst not blend
+With false professor, faithless friend.
+
+"Search thine own heart. What paineth thee
+In others in thyself may be;
+All dust is frail, all flesh is weak;
+Be thou the true man thou dost seek!
+
+"Where now with pain thou treadest, trod
+The whitest of the saints of God!
+To show thee where their feet were set,
+the light which led them shineth yet.
+
+"The footprints of the life divine,
+Which marked their path, remain in thine;
+And that great Life, transfused in theirs,
+Awaits thy faith, thy love, thy prayers!"
+
+A lesson which I well may heed,
+A word of fitness to my need;
+So from that twilight cool and gray
+Still saith a voice, or seems to say.
+
+We rose, and slowly homeward turned,
+While down the west the sunset burned;
+And, in its light, hill, wood, and tide,
+And human forms seemed glorified.
+
+The village homes transfigured stood,
+And purple bluffs, whose belting wood
+Across the waters leaned to hold
+The yellow leaves like lamps of hold.
+
+Then spake my friend: "Thy words are true;
+Forever old, forever new,
+These home-seen splendors are the same
+Which over Eden's sunsets came.
+
+"To these bowed heavens let wood and hill
+Lift voiceless praise and anthem still;
+Fall, warm with blessing, over them,
+Light of the New Jerusalem!
+
+"Flow on, sweet river, like the stream
+Of John's Apocalyptic dream
+This mapled ridge shall Horeb be,
+Yon green-banked lake our Galilee!
+
+"Henceforth my heart shall sigh no more
+For olden time and holier shore;
+God's love and blessing, then and there,
+Are now and here and everywhere."
+1851.
+
+
+
+
+TAULER.
+
+TAULER, the preacher, walked, one autumn day,
+Without the walls of Strasburg, by the Rhine,
+Pondering the solemn Miracle of Life;
+As one who, wandering in a starless night,
+Feels momently the jar of unseen waves,
+And hears the thunder of an unknown sea,
+Breaking along an unimagined shore.
+
+And as he walked he prayed. Even the same
+Old prayer with which, for half a score of years,
+Morning, and noon, and evening, lip and heart
+Had groaned: "Have pity upon me, Lord!
+Thou seest, while teaching others, I am blind.
+Send me a man who can direct my steps!"
+
+Then, as he mused, he heard along his path
+A sound as of an old man's staff among
+The dry, dead linden-leaves; and, looking up,
+He saw a stranger, weak, and poor, and old.
+
+"Peace be unto thee, father!" Tauler said,
+"God give thee a good day!" The old man raised
+Slowly his calm blue eyes. "I thank thee, son;
+But all my days are good, and none are ill."
+
+Wondering thereat, the preacher spake again,
+"God give thee happy life." The old man smiled,
+"I never am unhappy."
+
+                          Tauler laid
+His hand upon the stranger's coarse gray sleeve
+"Tell me, O father, what thy strange words mean.
+Surely man's days are evil, and his life
+Sad as the grave it leads to."  "Nay, my son,
+Our times are in God's hands, and all our days
+Are as our needs; for shadow as for sun,
+For cold as heat, for want as wealth, alike
+Our thanks are due, since that is best which is;
+And that which is not, sharing not His life,
+Is evil only as devoid of good.
+And for the happiness of which I spake,
+I find it in submission to his will,
+And calm trust in the holy Trinity
+Of Knowledge, Goodness, and Almighty Power."
+
+Silently wondering, for a little space,
+Stood the great preacher; then he spake as one
+Who, suddenly grappling with a haunting thought
+Which long has followed, whispering through the dark
+Strange terrors, drags it, shrieking, into light
+"What if God's will consign thee hence to Hell?"
+
+"Then," said the stranger, cheerily, "be it so.
+What Hell may be I know not; this I know,--
+I cannot lose the presence of the Lord.
+One arm, Humility, takes hold upon
+His dear Humanity; the other, Love,
+Clasps his Divinity. So where I go
+He goes; and better fire-walled Hell with Him
+Than golden-gated Paradise without."
+
+Tears sprang in Tauler's eyes. A sudden light,
+Like the first ray which fell on chaos, clove
+Apart the shadow wherein he had walked
+Darkly at noon. And, as the strange old man
+Went his slow way, until his silver hair
+Set like the white moon where the hills of vine
+Slope to the Rhine, he bowed his head and said
+"My prayer is answered. God hath sent the man
+Long sought, to teach me, by his simple trust,
+Wisdom the weary schoolmen never knew."
+
+So, entering with a changed and cheerful step
+The city gates, he saw, far down the street,
+A mighty shadow break the light of noon,
+Which tracing backward till its airy lines
+Hardened to stony plinths, he raised his eyes
+O'er broad facade and lofty pediment,
+O'er architrave and frieze and sainted niche,
+Up the stone lace-work chiselled by the wise
+Erwin of Steinbach, dizzily up to where
+In the noon-brightness the great Minster's tower,
+Jewelled with sunbeams on its mural crown,
+Rose like a visible prayer. "Behold!" he said,
+"The stranger's faith made plain before mine eyes.
+As yonder tower outstretches to the earth
+The dark triangle of its shade alone
+When the clear day is shining on its top,
+So, darkness in the pathway of Man's life
+Is but the shadow of God's providence,
+By the great Sun of Wisdom cast thereon;
+And what is dark below is light in Heaven."
+1853.
+
+
+
+
+THE HERMIT OF THE THEBAID.
+
+O STRONG, upwelling prayers of faith,
+From inmost founts of life ye start,--
+The spirit's pulse, the vital breath
+Of soul and heart!
+
+From pastoral toil, from traffic's din,
+Alone, in crowds, at home, abroad,
+Unheard of man, ye enter in
+The ear of God.
+
+Ye brook no forced and measured tasks,
+Nor weary rote, nor formal chains;
+The simple heart, that freely asks
+In love, obtains.
+
+For man the living temple is
+The mercy-seat and cherubim,
+And all the holy mysteries,
+He bears with him.
+
+And most avails the prayer of love,
+Which, wordless, shapes itself in needs,
+And wearies Heaven for naught above
+Our common needs.
+
+Which brings to God's all-perfect will
+That trust of His undoubting child
+Whereby all seeming good and ill
+Are reconciled.
+
+And, seeking not for special signs
+Of favor, is content to fall
+Within the providence which shines
+And rains on all.
+
+Alone, the Thebaid hermit leaned
+At noontime o'er the sacred word.
+Was it an angel or a fiend
+Whose voice be heard?
+
+It broke the desert's hush of awe,
+A human utterance, sweet and mild;
+And, looking up, the hermit saw
+A little child.
+
+A child, with wonder-widened eyes,
+O'erawed and troubled by the sight
+Of hot, red sands, and brazen skies,
+And anchorite.
+
+"'What dost thou here, poor man? No shade
+Of cool, green palms, nor grass, nor well,
+Nor corn, nor vines." The hermit said
+"With God I dwell.
+
+"Alone with Him in this great calm,
+I live not by the outward sense;
+My Nile his love, my sheltering palm
+His providence."
+
+The child gazed round him. "Does God live
+Here only?--where the desert's rim
+Is green with corn, at morn and eve,
+We pray to Him.
+
+"My brother tills beside the Nile
+His little field; beneath the leaves
+My sisters sit and spin, the while
+My mother weaves.
+
+"And when the millet's ripe heads fall,
+And all the bean-field hangs in pod,
+My mother smiles, and, says that all
+Are gifts from God."
+
+Adown the hermit's wasted cheeks
+Glistened the flow of human tears;
+"Dear Lord!" he said, "Thy angel speaks,
+Thy servant hears."
+
+Within his arms the child he took,
+And thought of home and life with men;
+And all his pilgrim feet forsook
+Returned again.
+
+The palmy shadows cool and long,
+The eyes that smiled through lavish locks,
+Home's cradle-hymn and harvest-song,
+And bleat of flocks.
+
+"O child!" he said, "thou teachest me
+There is no place where God is not;
+That love will make, where'er it be,
+A holy spot."
+
+He rose from off the desert sand,
+And, leaning on his staff of thorn,
+Went with the young child hand in hand,
+Like night with morn.
+
+They crossed the desert's burning line,
+And heard the palm-tree's rustling fan,
+The Nile-bird's cry, the low of kine,
+And voice of man.
+
+Unquestioning, his childish guide
+He followed, as the small hand led
+To where a woman, gentle-eyed,
+Her distaff fed.
+
+She rose, she clasped her truant boy,
+She thanked the stranger with her eyes;
+The hermit gazed in doubt and joy
+And dumb surprise.
+
+And to!--with sudden warmth and light
+A tender memory thrilled his frame;
+New-born, the world-lost anchorite
+A man became.
+
+"O sister of El Zara's race,
+Behold me!--had we not one mother?"
+She gazed into the stranger's face
+"Thou art my brother!"
+
+"And when to share our evening meal,
+She calls the stranger at the door,
+She says God fills the hands that deal
+Food to the poor."
+
+"O kin of blood! Thy life of use
+And patient trust is more than mine;
+And wiser than the gray recluse
+This child of thine.
+
+"For, taught of him whom God hath sent,
+That toil is praise, and love is prayer,
+I come, life's cares and pains content
+With thee to share."
+
+Even as his foot the threshold crossed,
+The hermit's better life began;
+Its holiest saint the Thebaid lost,
+And found a man!
+1854.
+
+
+
+
+MAUD MULLER.
+
+The recollection of some descendants of a Hessian deserter in the
+Revolutionary war bearing the name of Muller doubtless suggested the
+somewhat infelicitous title of a New England idyl. The poem had no real
+foundation in fact, though a hint of it may have been found in recalling
+an incident, trivial in itself, of a journey on the picturesque Maine
+seaboard with my sister some years before it was written. We had stopped
+to rest our tired horse under the shade of an apple-tree, and refresh
+him with water from a little brook which rippled through the stone wall
+across the road. A very beautiful young girl in scantest summer attire
+was at work in the hay-field, and as we talked with her we noticed that
+she strove to hide her bare feet by raking hay over them, blushing as
+she did so, through the tan of her cheek and neck.
+
+MAUD MULLER on a summer's day,
+Raked the meadow sweet with hay.
+
+Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
+Of simple beauty and rustic-health.
+
+Singing, she wrought, and her merry glee
+The mock-bird echoed from his tree.
+
+But when she glanced to the far-off town,
+White from its hill-slope looking down,
+
+The sweet song died, and a vague unrest
+And a nameless longing filled her breast,--
+
+A wish, that she hardly dared to own,
+For something better than she had known.
+
+The Judge rode slowly down the lane,
+Smoothing his horse's chestnut mane.
+
+He drew his bridle in the shade
+Of the apple-trees, to greet the maid,
+
+And asked a draught from the spring that flowed
+Through the meadow across the road.
+
+She stooped where the cool spring bubbled up,
+And filled for him her small tin cup,
+
+And blushed as she gave it, looking down
+On her feet so bare, and her tattered gown.
+
+"Thanks!" said the Judge; "a sweeter draught
+From a fairer hand was never quaffed."
+
+He spoke of the grass and flowers and trees,
+Of the singing birds and the humming bees;
+
+Then talked of the haying, and wondered whether
+The cloud in the west would bring foul weather.
+
+And Maud forgot her brier-torn gown,
+And her graceful ankles bare and brown;
+
+And listened, while a pleased surprise
+Looked from her long-lashed hazel eyes.
+
+At last, like one who for delay
+Seeks a vain excuse, he rode away.
+
+Maud Muller looked and sighed: "Ah me!
+That I the Judge's bride might be!
+
+"He would dress me up in silks so fine,
+And praise and toast me at his wine.
+
+"My father should wear a broadcloth coat;
+My brother should sail a painted boat.
+
+"I'd dress my mother so grand and gay,
+And the baby should have a new toy each day.
+
+"And I 'd feed the hungry and clothe the poor,
+And all should bless me who left our door."
+
+The Judge looked back as he climbed the hill,
+And saw Maud Muller standing still.
+
+A form more fair, a face more sweet,
+Ne'er hath it been my lot to meet.
+
+"And her modest answer and graceful air
+Show her wise and good as she is fair.
+
+"Would she were mine, and I to-day,
+Like her, a harvester of hay;
+
+"No doubtful balance of rights and wrongs,
+Nor weary lawyers with endless tongues,
+
+"But low of cattle and song of birds,
+And health and quiet and loving words."
+
+But he thought of his sisters, proud and cold,
+And his mother, vain of her rank and gold.
+
+So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,
+And Maud was left in the field alone.
+
+But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,
+When he hummed in court an old love-tune;
+
+And the young girl mused beside the well
+Till the rain on the unraked clover fell.
+
+He wedded a wife of richest dower,
+Who lived for fashion, as he for power.
+
+Yet oft, in his marble hearth's bright glow,
+He watched a picture come and go;
+
+And sweet Maud Muller's hazel eyes
+Looked out in their innocent surprise.
+
+Oft, when the wine in his glass was red,
+He longed for the wayside well instead;
+
+And closed his eyes on his garnished rooms
+To dream of meadows and clover-blooms.
+
+And the proud man sighed, with a secret pain,
+"Ah, that I were free again!
+
+"Free as when I rode that day,
+Where the barefoot maiden raked her hay."
+
+She wedded a man unlearned and poor,
+And many children played round her door.
+
+But care and sorrow, and childbirth pain,
+Left their traces on heart and brain.
+
+And oft, when the summer sun shone hot
+On the new-mown hay in the meadow lot,
+
+And she heard the little spring brook fall
+Over the roadside, through the wall,
+
+In the shade of the apple-tree again
+She saw a rider draw his rein.
+
+And, gazing down with timid grace,
+She felt his pleased eyes read her face.
+
+Sometimes her narrow kitchen walls
+Stretched away into stately halls;
+
+The weary wheel to a spinnet turned,
+The tallow candle an astral burned,
+
+And for him who sat by the chimney lug,
+Dozing and grumbling o'er pipe and mug,
+
+A manly form at her side she saw,
+And joy was duty and love was law.
+
+Then she took up her burden of life again,
+Saying only, "It might have been."
+
+Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
+For rich repiner and household drudge!
+
+God pity them both! and pity us all,
+Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.
+
+For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
+The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
+
+Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies
+Deeply buried from human eyes;
+
+And, in the hereafter, angels may
+Roll the stone from its grave away!
+1854.
+
+
+
+
+MARY GARVIN.
+FROM the heart of Waumbek Methna, from the
+lake that never fails,
+Falls the Saco in the green lap of Conway's
+intervales;
+There, in wild and virgin freshness, its waters
+foam and flow,
+As when Darby Field first saw them, two hundred
+years ago.
+
+But, vexed in all its seaward course with bridges,
+dams, and mills,
+How changed is Saco's stream, how lost its freedom
+of the hills,
+Since travelled Jocelyn, factor Vines, and stately
+Champernoon
+Heard on its banks the gray wolf's howl, the trumpet
+of the loon!
+
+With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of
+fire and steam,
+Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him
+like a dream.
+Still, from the hurrying train of Life, fly backward
+far and fast
+The milestones of the fathers, the landmarks of
+the past.
+
+But human hearts remain unchanged: the sorrow
+and the sin,
+The loves and hopes and fears of old, are to our
+own akin;
+
+And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our
+mothers sung,
+Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always
+young.
+
+O sharp-lined man of traffic, on Saco's banks today!
+O mill-girl watching late and long the shuttle's
+restless play!
+Let, for the once, a listening ear the working hand
+beguile,
+And lend my old Provincial tale, as suits, a tear or
+smile!
+
+         . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+The evening gun had sounded from gray Fort
+Mary's walls;
+Through the forest, like a wild beast, roared and
+plunged the Saco's' falls.
+
+And westward on the sea-wind, that damp and
+gusty grew,
+Over cedars darkening inland the smokes of Spurwink
+blew.
+
+On the hearth of Farmer Garvin, blazed the crackling
+walnut log;
+Right and left sat dame and goodman, and between
+them lay the dog,
+
+Head on paws, and tail slow wagging, and beside
+him on her mat,
+Sitting drowsy in the firelight, winked and purred
+the mottled cat.
+
+"Twenty years!" said Goodman Garvin, speaking
+sadly, under breath,
+And his gray head slowly shaking, as one who
+speaks of death.
+
+The goodwife dropped her needles: "It is twenty
+years to-day,
+Since the Indians fell on Saco, and stole our child
+away."
+
+Then they sank into the silence, for each knew
+the other's thought,
+Of a great and common sorrow, and words were,
+needed not.
+
+"Who knocks?" cried Goodman Garvin. The
+door was open thrown;
+On two strangers, man and maiden, cloaked and
+furred, the fire-light shone.
+
+One with courteous gesture lifted the bear-skin
+from his head;
+"Lives here Elkanah Garvin?"  "I am he," the
+goodman said.
+
+"Sit ye down, and dry and warm ye, for the night
+is chill with rain."
+And the goodwife drew the settle, and stirred the
+fire amain.
+
+The maid unclasped her cloak-hood, the firelight
+glistened fair
+In her large, moist eyes, and over soft folds of
+dark brown hair.
+
+Dame Garvin looked upon her: "It is Mary's self
+I see!"
+"Dear heart!" she cried, "now tell me, has my
+child come back to me?"
+
+"My name indeed is Mary," said the stranger sobbing
+wild;
+"Will you be to me a mother? I am Mary Garvin's child!"
+
+"She sleeps by wooded Simcoe, but on her dying
+day
+She bade my father take me to her kinsfolk far
+away.
+
+"And when the priest besought her to do me no
+such wrong,
+She said, 'May God forgive me! I have closed
+my heart too long.'
+
+"'When I hid me from my father, and shut out
+my mother's call,
+I sinned against those dear ones, and the Father
+of us all.
+
+"'Christ's love rebukes no home-love, breaks no
+tie of kin apart;
+Better heresy in doctrine, than heresy of heart.
+
+"'Tell me not the Church must censure: she who
+wept the Cross beside
+Never made her own flesh strangers, nor the claims
+of blood denied;
+
+"'And if she who wronged her parents, with her
+child atones to them,
+Earthly daughter, Heavenly Mother! thou at least
+wilt not condemn!'
+
+"So, upon her death-bed lying, my blessed mother
+spake;
+As we come to do her bidding, So receive us for her
+sake."
+
+"God be praised!" said Goodwife Garvin, "He taketh,
+and He gives;
+He woundeth, but He healeth; in her child our
+daughter lives!"
+
+"Amen!" the old man answered, as he brushed a
+tear away,
+And, kneeling by his hearthstone, said, with reverence,
+"Let us pray."
+
+All its Oriental symbols, and its Hebrew pararphrase,
+Warm with earnest life and feeling, rose his prayer
+of love and praise.
+
+But he started at beholding, as he rose from off
+his knee,
+The stranger cross his forehead with the sign of
+Papistrie.
+
+"What is this?" cried Farmer Garvin. "Is an English
+Christian's home
+A chapel or a mass-house, that you make the sign
+of Rome?"
+
+Then the young girl knelt beside him, kissed his
+trembling hand, and cried:
+Oh, forbear to chide my father; in that faith my
+mother died!
+
+"On her wooden cross at Simcoe the dews and
+sunshine fall,
+As they fall on Spurwink's graveyard; and the
+dear God watches all!"
+
+The old man stroked the fair head that rested on
+his knee;
+"Your words, dear child," he answered, "are God's
+rebuke to me.
+
+"Creed and rite perchance may differ, yet our
+faith and hope be one.
+Let me be your father's father, let him be to me
+a son."
+
+When the horn, on Sabbath morning, through the
+still and frosty air,
+From Spurwink, Pool, and Black Point, called to
+sermon and to prayer,
+
+To the goodly house of worship, where, in order
+due and fit,
+As by public vote directed, classed and ranked the
+people sit;
+
+Mistress first and goodwife after, clerkly squire
+before the clown,
+"From the brave coat, lace-embroidered, to the gray
+frock, shading down;"
+
+From the pulpit read the preacher, "Goodman
+Garvin and his wife
+Fain would thank the Lord, whose kindness has
+followed them through life,
+
+"For the great and crowning mercy, that their
+daughter, from the wild,
+Where she rests (they hope in God's peace), has
+sent to them her child;
+
+"And the prayers of all God's people they ask,
+that they may prove
+Not unworthy, through their weakness, of such
+special proof of love."
+
+As the preacher prayed, uprising, the aged couple
+stood,
+And the fair Canadian also, in her modest maiden-
+hood.
+
+Thought the elders, grave and doubting, "She is
+Papist born and bred;"
+Thought the young men, "'T is an angel in Mary
+Garvin's stead!"
+
+
+
+
+THE RANGER.
+
+Originally published as Martha Mason; a Song of the Old
+French War.
+
+ROBERT RAWLIN!--Frosts were falling
+When the ranger's horn was calling
+Through the woods to Canada.
+
+Gone the winter's sleet and snowing,
+Gone the spring-time's bud and blowing,
+Gone the summer's harvest mowing,
+And again the fields are gray.
+Yet away, he's away!
+Faint and fainter hope is growing
+In the hearts that mourn his stay.
+
+Where the lion, crouching high on
+Abraham's rock with teeth of iron,
+Glares o'er wood and wave away,
+Faintly thence, as pines far sighing,
+Or as thunder spent and dying,
+Come the challenge and replying,
+Come the sounds of flight and fray.
+Well-a-day! Hope and pray!
+Some are living, some are lying
+In their red graves far away.
+
+Straggling rangers, worn with dangers,
+Homeward faring, weary strangers
+Pass the farm-gate on their way;
+Tidings of the dead and living,
+Forest march and ambush, giving,
+Till the maidens leave their weaving,
+And the lads forget their play.
+"Still away, still away!"
+Sighs a sad one, sick with grieving,
+"Why does Robert still delay!"
+
+Nowhere fairer, sweeter, rarer,
+Does the golden-locked fruit bearer
+Through his painted woodlands stray,
+Than where hillside oaks and beeches
+Overlook the long, blue reaches,
+Silver coves and pebbled beaches,
+And green isles of Casco Bay;
+Nowhere day, for delay,
+With a tenderer look beseeches,
+"Let me with my charmed earth stay."
+
+On the grain-lands of the mainlands
+Stands the serried corn like train-bands,
+Plume and pennon rustling gay;
+Out at sea, the islands wooded,
+Silver birches, golden-hooded,
+Set with maples, crimson-blooded,
+White sea-foam and sand-hills gray,
+Stretch away, far away.
+Dim and dreamy, over-brooded
+By the hazy autumn day.
+
+Gayly chattering to the clattering
+Of the brown nuts downward pattering,
+Leap the squirrels, red and gray.
+On the grass-land, on the fallow,
+Drop the apples, red and yellow;
+Drop the russet pears and mellow,
+Drop the red leaves all the day.
+And away, swift away,
+Sun and cloud, o'er hill and hollow
+Chasing, weave their web of play.
+
+"Martha Mason, Martha Mason,
+Prithee tell us of the reason
+Why you mope at home to-day
+Surely smiling is not sinning;
+Leave, your quilling, leave your spinning;
+What is all your store of linen,
+If your heart is never gay?
+Come away, come away!
+Never yet did sad beginning
+Make the task of life a play."
+
+Overbending, till she's blending
+With the flaxen skein she's tending
+Pale brown tresses smoothed away
+From her face of patient sorrow,
+Sits she, seeking but to borrow,
+From the trembling hope of morrow,
+Solace for the weary day.
+"Go your way, laugh and play;
+Unto Him who heeds the sparrow
+And the lily, let me pray."
+
+"With our rally, rings the valley,--
+Join us!" cried the blue-eyed Nelly;
+"Join us!" cried the laughing May,
+"To the beach we all are going,
+And, to save the task of rowing,
+West by north the wind is blowing,
+Blowing briskly down the bay
+Come away, come away!
+Time and tide are swiftly flowing,
+Let us take them while we may!
+
+"Never tell us that you'll fail us,
+Where the purple beach-plum mellows
+On the bluffs so wild and gray.
+Hasten, for the oars are falling;
+Hark, our merry mates are calling;
+Time it is that we were all in,
+Singing tideward down the bay!"
+"Nay, nay, let me stay;
+Sore and sad for Robert Rawlin
+Is my heart," she said, "to-day."
+
+"Vain your calling for Rob Rawlin
+Some red squaw his moose-meat's broiling,
+Or some French lass, singing gay;
+Just forget as he's forgetting;
+What avails a life of fretting?
+If some stars must needs be setting,
+Others rise as good as they."
+"Cease, I pray; go your way!"
+Martha cries, her eyelids wetting;
+"Foul and false the words you say!"
+
+"Martha Mason, hear to reason!--
+Prithee, put a kinder face on!"
+"Cease to vex me," did she say;
+"Better at his side be lying,
+With the mournful pine-trees sighing,
+And the wild birds o'er us crying,
+Than to doubt like mine a prey;
+While away, far away,
+Turns my heart, forever trying
+Some new hope for each new day.
+
+"When the shadows veil the meadows,
+And the sunset's golden ladders
+Sink from twilight's walls of gray,--
+From the window of my dreaming,
+I can see his sickle gleaming,
+Cheery-voiced, can hear him teaming
+Down the locust-shaded way;
+But away, swift away,
+Fades the fond, delusive seeming,
+And I kneel again to pray.
+
+"When the growing dawn is showing,
+And the barn-yard cock is crowing,
+And the horned moon pales away
+From a dream of him awaking,
+Every sound my heart is making
+Seems a footstep of his taking;
+Then I hush the thought, and say,
+'Nay, nay, he's away!'
+Ah! my heart, my heart is breaking
+For the dear one far away."
+
+Look up, Martha! worn and swarthy,
+Glows a face of manhood worthy
+"Robert!"  "Martha!" all they say.
+O'er went wheel and reel together,
+Little cared the owner whither;
+Heart of lead is heart of feather,
+Noon of night is noon of day!
+Come away, come away!
+When such lovers meet each other,
+Why should prying idlers stay?
+
+Quench the timber's fallen embers,
+Quench the recd leaves in December's
+Hoary rime and chilly spray.
+
+But the hearth shall kindle clearer,
+Household welcomes sound sincerer,
+Heart to loving heart draw nearer,
+When the bridal bells shall say:
+"Hope and pray, trust alway;
+Life is sweeter, love is dearer,
+For the trial and delay!"
+1856.
+
+
+
+
+THE GARRISON OF CAPE ANN.
+
+FROM the hills of home forth looking, far beneath
+the tent-like span
+Of the sky, I see the white gleam of the headland
+of Cape Ann.
+Well I know its coves and beaches to the ebb-tide
+glimmering down,
+And the white-walled hamlet children of its ancient
+fishing town.
+
+Long has passed the summer morning, and its
+memory waxes old,
+When along yon breezy headlands with a pleasant
+friend I strolled.
+Ah! the autumn sun is shining, and the ocean
+wind blows cool,
+And the golden-rod and aster bloom around thy
+grave, Rantoul!
+
+With the memory of that morning by the summer
+sea I blend
+A wild and wondrous story, by the younger Mather
+penned,
+In that quaint Magnalia Christi, with all strange
+and marvellous things,
+Heaped up huge and undigested, like the chaos
+Ovid sings.
+
+Dear to me these far, faint glimpses of the dual
+life of old,
+Inward, grand with awe and reverence; outward,
+mean and coarse and cold;
+Gleams of mystic beauty playing over dull and
+vulgar clay,
+Golden-threaded fancies weaving in a web of
+hodden gray.
+
+The great eventful Present hides the Past; but
+through the din
+Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life
+behind steal in;
+And the lore of homeland fireside, and the legendary
+rhyme,
+Make the task of duty lighter which the true man
+owes his time.
+
+So, with something of the feeling which the Covenanter
+knew,
+When with pious chisel wandering Scotland's
+moorland graveyards through,
+From the graves of old traditions I part the black-
+berry-vines,
+Wipe the moss from off the headstones, and retouch
+the faded lines.
+
+Where the sea-waves back and forward, hoarse
+with rolling pebbles, ran,
+The garrison-house stood watching on the gray
+rocks of Cape Ann;
+On its windy site uplifting gabled roof and palisade,
+And rough walls of unhewn timber with the moonlight
+overlaid.
+
+On his slow round walked the sentry, south and
+eastward looking forth
+O'er a rude and broken coast-line, white with
+breakers stretching north,--
+Wood and rock and gleaming sand-drift, jagged
+capes, with bush and tree,
+Leaning inland from the smiting of the wild and
+gusty sea.
+
+Before the deep-mouthed chimney, dimly lit by
+dying brands,
+Twenty soldiers sat and waited, with their muskets
+in their hands;
+On the rough-hewn oaken table the venison haunch
+was shared,
+And the pewter tankard circled slowly round from
+beard to beard.
+
+Long they sat and talked together,--talked of
+wizards Satan-sold;
+Of all ghostly sights and noises,--signs and wonders
+manifold;
+Of the spectre-ship of Salem, with the dead men
+in her shrouds,
+Sailing sheer above the water, in the loom of morning
+clouds;
+
+Of the marvellous valley hidden in the depths of
+Gloucester woods,
+Full of plants that love the summer,--blooms of
+warmer latitudes;
+Where the Arctic birch is braided by the tropic's
+flowery vines,
+And the white magnolia-blossoms star the twilight
+of the pines!
+
+But their voices sank yet lower, sank to husky
+tones of fear,
+As they spake of present tokens of the powers of
+evil near;
+Of a spectral host, defying stroke of steel and aim
+of gun;
+Never yet was ball to slay them in the mould of
+mortals run.
+
+Thrice, with plumes and flowing scalp-locks, from
+the midnight wood they came,--
+Thrice around the block-house marching, met, unharmed,
+its volleyed flame;
+Then, with mocking laugh and gesture, sunk in
+earth or lost in air,
+All the ghostly wonder vanished, and the moonlit
+sands lay bare.
+
+Midnight came; from out the forest moved a
+dusky mass that soon
+Grew to warriors, plumed and painted, grimly
+marching in the moon.
+"Ghosts or witches," said the captain, "thus I foil
+the Evil One!"
+And he rammed a silver button, from his doublet,
+down his gun.
+
+Once again the spectral horror moved the guarded
+wall about;
+Once again the levelled muskets through the palisades
+flashed out,
+With that deadly aim the squirrel on his tree-top
+might not shun,
+Nor the beach-bird seaward flying with his slant
+wing to the sun.
+
+Like the idle rain of summer sped the harmless
+shower of lead.
+With a laugh of fierce derision, once again the
+phantoms fled;
+Once again, without a shadow on the sands the
+moonlight lay,
+And the white smoke curling through it drifted
+slowly down the bay!
+
+"God preserve us!" said the captain; "never
+mortal foes were there;
+They have vanished with their leader, Prince and
+Power of the air!
+Lay aside your useless weapons; skill and prowess
+naught avail;
+They who do the Devil's service wear their master's
+coat of mail!"
+
+So the night grew near to cock-crow, when again
+a warning call
+Roused the score of weary soldiers watching round
+the dusky hall
+And they looked to flint and priming, and they
+longed for break of day;
+But the captain closed his Bible: "Let us cease
+from man, and pray!"
+
+To the men who went before us, all the unseen
+powers seemed near,
+And their steadfast strength of courage struck its
+roots in holy fear.
+Every hand forsook the musket, every head was
+bowed and bare,
+Every stout knee pressed the flag-stones, as the
+captain led in prayer.
+
+Ceased thereat the mystic marching of the spectres
+round the wall,
+But a sound abhorred, unearthly, smote the ears
+and hearts of all,--
+Howls of rage and shrieks of anguish! Never
+after mortal man
+Saw the ghostly leaguers marching round the
+block-house of Cape Ann.
+
+So to us who walk in summer through the cool and
+sea-blown town,
+From the childhood of its people comes the solemn
+legend down.
+Not in vain the ancient fiction, in whose moral
+lives the youth
+And the fitness and the freshness of an undecaying
+truth.
+
+Soon or late to all our dwellings come the spectres
+of the mind,
+Doubts and fears and dread forebodings, in the
+darkness undefined;
+Round us throng the grim projections of the heart
+and of the brain,
+And our pride of strength is weakness, and the
+cunning hand is vain.
+
+In the dark we cry like children; and no answer
+from on high
+Breaks the crystal spheres of silence, and no white
+wings downward fly;
+But the heavenly help we pray for comes to faith,
+and not to sight,
+And our prayers themselves drive backward all the
+spirits of the night!
+1857.
+
+
+
+
+THE GIFT OF TRITEMIUS.
+
+TRITEMIUS of Herbipolis, one day,
+While kneeling at the altar's foot to pray,
+Alone with God, as was his pious choice,
+Heard from without a miserable voice,
+A sound which seemed of all sad things to tell,
+As of a lost soul crying out of hell.
+
+Thereat the Abbot paused; the chain whereby
+His thoughts went upward broken by that cry;
+And, looking from the casement, saw below
+A wretched woman, with gray hair a-flow,
+And withered hands held up to him, who cried
+For alms as one who might not be denied.
+
+She cried, "For the dear love of Him who gave
+His life for ours, my child from bondage save,--
+My beautiful, brave first-born, chained with slaves
+In the Moor's galley, where the sun-smit waves
+Lap the white walls of Tunis!"--"What I can
+I give," Tritemius said, "my prayers."--"O man
+Of God!" she cried, for grief had made her bold,
+"Mock me not thus; I ask not prayers, but gold.
+Words will not serve me, alms alone suffice;
+Even while I speak perchance my first-born dies."
+
+"Woman!" Tritemius answered, "from our door
+None go unfed, hence are we always poor;
+A single soldo is our only store.
+Thou hast our prayers;--what can we give thee
+more?"
+
+"Give me," she said, "the silver candlesticks
+On either side of the great crucifix.
+God well may spare them on His errands sped,
+Or He can give you golden ones instead."
+
+Then spake Tritemius, "Even as thy word,
+Woman, so be it! (Our most gracious Lord,
+Who loveth mercy more than sacrifice,
+Pardon me if a human soul I prize
+Above the gifts upon his altar piled!
+Take what thou askest, and redeem thy child."
+
+But his hand trembled as the holy alms
+He placed within the beggar's eager palms;
+And as she vanished down the linden shade,
+He bowed his head and for forgiveness prayed.
+So the day passed, and when the twilight came
+He woke to find the chapel all aflame,
+And, dumb with grateful wonder, to behold
+Upon the altar candlesticks of gold!
+1857.
+
+
+
+
+SKIPPER IRESON'S RIDE.
+
+In the valuable and carefully prepared History of Marblehead, published
+in 1879 by Samuel Roads, Jr., it is stated that the crew of Captain
+Ireson, rather than himself, were responsible for the abandonment of the
+disabled vessel. To screen themselves they charged their captain with
+the crime. In view of this the writer of the ballad addressed the
+following letter to the historian:--
+
+OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, 5 mo. 18, 1880.
+MY DEAR FRIEND: I heartily thank thee for a copy of thy History of
+Marblehead. I have read it with great interest and think good use has
+been made of the abundant material. No town in Essex County has a record
+more honorable than Marblehead; no one has done more to develop the
+industrial interests of our New England seaboard, and certainly none
+have given such evidence of self-sacrificing patriotism. I am glad the
+story of it has been at last told, and told so well. I have now no doubt
+that thy version of Skipper Ireson's ride is the correct one. My verse
+was founded solely on a fragment of rhyme which I heard from one of my
+early schoolmates, a native of Marblehead. I supposed the story to which
+it referred dated back at least a century. I knew nothing of the
+participators, and the narrative of the ballad was pure fancy. I am glad
+for the sake of truth and justice that the real facts are given in thy
+book. I certainly would not knowingly do injustice to any one, dead or
+living.
+
+I am very truly thy friend,
+JOHN G. WHITTIER.
+
+
+OF all the rides since, the birth of time,
+Told in story or sung in rhyme,--
+On Apuleius's Golden Ass,
+Or one-eyed Calendar's horse of brass;
+Witch astride of a human back,
+Islam's prophet on Al-Borak,--
+The strangest ride that ever was sped
+Was Ireson's, out from Marblehead!
+Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
+Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
+By the women of Marblehead!
+Body of turkey, head of owl,
+Wings a-droop like a rained-on fowl,
+Feathered and ruffled in every part,
+Skipper Ireson stood in the cart.
+Scores of women, old and young,
+Strong of muscle, and glib of tongue,
+Pushed and pulled up the rocky lane,
+Shouting and singing the shrill refrain
+"Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,
+Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt
+By the women o' Morble'ead!"
+
+Wrinkled scolds with hands on hips,
+Girls in bloom of cheek and lips,
+Wild-eyed, free-limbed, such as chase
+Bacchus round some antique vase,
+Brief of skirt, with ankles bare,
+Loose of kerchief and loose of hair,
+With conch-shells blowing and fish-horns' twang,
+Over and over the Manads sang
+"Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,
+Torr'd an' futherr'd an dorr'd in a corrt
+By the women o' Morble'ead!"
+
+Small pity for him!--He sailed away
+From a leaking ship, in Chaleur Bay,--
+Sailed away from a sinking wreck,
+With his own town's-people on her deck!
+"Lay by! lay by!" they called to him.
+Back he answered, "Sink or swim!
+Brag of your catch of fish again!"
+And off he sailed through the fog and rain!
+Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
+Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
+By the women of Marblehead!
+
+Fathoms deep in dark Chaleur
+That wreck shall lie forevermore.
+Mother and sister, wife and maid,
+Looked from the rocks of Marblehead
+Over the moaning and rainy sea,--
+Looked for the coming that might not be!
+What did the winds and the sea-birds say
+Of the cruel captain who sailed away?--
+Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
+Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
+By the women of Marblehead!
+
+Through the street, on either side,
+Up flew windows, doors swung wide;
+Sharp-tongued spinsters, old wives gray,
+Treble lent the fish-horn's bray.
+Sea-worn grandsires, cripple-bound,
+Hulks of old sailors run aground,
+Shook head, and fist, and hat, and cane,
+And cracked with curses the hoarse refrain
+"Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,
+Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt
+By the women o''Morble'ead!"
+
+Sweetly along the Salem road
+Bloom of orchard and lilac showed.
+Little the wicked skipper knew
+Of the fields so green and the sky so blue.
+Riding there in his sorry trim,
+Like to Indian idol glum and grim,
+Scarcely he seemed the sound to hear
+Of voices shouting, far and near
+"Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,
+Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt
+By the women o' Morble'ead!"
+
+"Hear me, neighbors!" at last he cried,--
+"What to me is this noisy ride?
+What is the shame that clothes the skin
+To the nameless horror that lives within?
+Waking or sleeping, I see a wreck,
+And hear a cry from a reeling deck!
+Hate me and curse me,--I only dread
+The hand of God and the face of the dead!"
+Said old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
+Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
+By the women of Marblehead!
+
+Then the wife of the skipper lost at sea
+Said, "God has touched him! why should we?"
+Said an old wife mourning her only son,
+"Cut the rogue's tether and let him run!"
+So with soft relentings and rude excuse,
+Half scorn, half pity, they cut him loose,
+And gave him a cloak to hide him in,
+And left him alone with his shame and sin.
+Poor Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
+Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
+By the women of Marblehead!
+1857.
+
+
+
+
+THE SYCAMORES.
+
+Hugh Tallant was the first Irish resident of Haverhill, Mass. He planted
+the button-wood trees on the bank of the river below the village in the
+early part of the seventeenth century. Unfortunately this noble avenue
+is now nearly destroyed.
+
+IN the outskirts of the village,
+On the river's winding shores,
+Stand the Occidental plane-trees,
+Stand the ancient sycamores.
+
+One long century hath been numbered,
+And another half-way told,
+Since the rustic Irish gleeman
+Broke for them the virgin mould.
+
+Deftly set to Celtic music,
+At his violin's sound they grew,
+Through the moonlit eves of summer,
+Making Amphion's fable true.
+
+Rise again, then poor Hugh Tallant
+Pass in jerkin green along,
+With thy eyes brimful of laughter,
+And thy mouth as full of song.
+
+Pioneer of Erin's outcasts,
+With his fiddle and his pack;
+Little dreamed the village Saxons
+Of the myriads at his back.
+
+How he wrought with spade and fiddle,
+Delved by day and sang by night,
+With a hand that never wearied,
+And a heart forever light,--
+
+Still the gay tradition mingles
+With a record grave and drear,
+Like the rollic air of Cluny,
+With the solemn march of Mear.
+
+When the box-tree, white with blossoms,
+Made the sweet May woodlands glad,
+And the Aronia by the river
+Lighted up the swarming shad,
+
+And the bulging nets swept shoreward,
+With their silver-sided haul,
+Midst the shouts of dripping fishers,
+He was merriest of them all.
+
+When, among the jovial huskers,
+Love stole in at Labor's side,
+With the lusty airs of England,
+Soft his Celtic measures vied.
+
+Songs of love and wailing lyke--wake,
+And the merry fair's carouse;
+Of the wild Red Fox of Erin
+And the Woman of Three Cows,
+
+By the blazing hearths of winter,
+Pleasant seemed his simple tales,
+Midst the grimmer Yorkshire legends
+And the mountain myths of Wales.
+
+How the souls in Purgatory
+Scrambled up from fate forlorn,
+On St. Eleven's sackcloth ladder,
+Slyly hitched to Satan's horn.
+
+Of the fiddler who at Tara
+Played all night to ghosts of kings;
+Of the brown dwarfs, and the fairies
+Dancing in their moorland rings.
+
+Jolliest of our birds of singing,
+Best he loved the Bob-o-link.
+"Hush!" he 'd say, "the tipsy fairies
+Hear the little folks in drink!"
+
+Merry-faced, with spade and fiddle,
+Singing through the ancient town,
+Only this, of poor Hugh Tallant,
+Hath Tradition handed down.
+
+Not a stone his grave discloses;
+But if yet his spirit walks,
+'T is beneath the trees he planted,
+And when Bob-o-Lincoln talks;
+
+Green memorials of the gleeman I
+Linking still the river-shores,
+With their shadows cast by sunset,
+Stand Hugh Tallant's sycamores!
+
+When the Father of his Country
+Through the north-land riding came,
+And the roofs were starred with banners,
+And the steeples rang acclaim,--
+
+When each war-scarred Continental,
+Leaving smithy, mill, and farm,
+Waved his rusted sword in welcome,
+And shot off his old king's arm,--
+
+Slowly passed that August Presence
+Down the thronged and shouting street;
+Village girls as white as angels,
+Scattering flowers around his feet.
+
+Midway, where the plane-tree's shadow
+Deepest fell, his rein he drew
+On his stately head, uncovered,
+Cool and soft the west-wind blew.
+
+And he stood up in his stirrups,
+Looking up and looking down
+On the hills of Gold and Silver
+Rimming round the little town,--
+
+On the river, full of sunshine,
+To the lap of greenest vales
+Winding down from wooded headlands,
+Willow-skirted, white with sails.
+
+And he said, the landscape sweeping
+Slowly with his ungloved hand,
+"I have seen no prospect fairer
+In this goodly Eastern land."
+
+Then the bugles of his escort
+Stirred to life the cavalcade
+And that head, so bare and stately,
+Vanished down the depths of shade.
+
+Ever since, in town and farm-house,
+Life has had its ebb and flow;
+Thrice hath passed the human harvest
+To its garner green and low.
+
+But the trees the gleeman planted,
+Through the changes, changeless stand;
+As the marble calm of Tadmor
+Mocks the desert's shifting sand.
+
+Still the level moon at rising
+Silvers o'er each stately shaft;
+Still beneath them, half in shadow,
+Singing, glides the pleasure craft;
+
+Still beneath them, arm-enfolded,
+Love and Youth together stray;
+While, as heart to heart beats faster,
+More and more their feet delay.
+
+Where the ancient cobbler, Keezar,
+On the open hillside wrought,
+Singing, as he drew his stitches,
+Songs his German masters taught,
+
+Singing, with his gray hair floating
+Round his rosy ample face,--
+Now a thousand Saxon craftsmen
+Stitch and hammer in his place.
+
+All the pastoral lanes so grassy
+Now are Traffic's dusty streets;
+From the village, grown a city,
+Fast the rural grace retreats.
+
+But, still green, and tall, and stately,
+On the river's winding shores,
+Stand the Occidental plane-trees,
+Stand, Hugh Taliant's sycamores.
+1857.
+
+
+
+
+THE PIPES AT LUCKNOW.
+
+An incident of the Sepoy mutiny.
+
+PIPES of the misty moorlands,
+Voice of the glens and hills;
+The droning of the torrents,
+The treble of the rills!
+Not the braes of broom and heather,
+Nor the mountains dark with rain,
+Nor maiden bower, nor border tower,
+Have heard your sweetest strain!
+
+Dear to the Lowland reaper,
+And plaided mountaineer,--
+To the cottage and the castle
+The Scottish pipes are dear;--
+Sweet sounds the ancient pibroch
+O'er mountain, loch, and glade;
+But the sweetest of all music
+The pipes at Lucknow played.
+
+Day by day the Indian tiger
+Louder yelled, and nearer crept;
+Round and round the jungle-serpent
+Near and nearer circles swept.
+"Pray for rescue, wives and mothers,--
+Pray to-day!" the soldier said;
+"To-morrow, death's between us
+And the wrong and shame we dread."
+
+Oh, they listened, looked, and waited,
+Till their hope became despair;
+And the sobs of low bewailing
+Filled the pauses of their prayer.
+Then up spake a Scottish maiden,
+With her ear unto the ground
+"Dinna ye hear it?--dinna ye hear it?
+The pipes o' Havelock sound!"
+
+Hushed the wounded man his groaning;
+Hushed the wife her little ones;
+Alone they heard the drum-roll
+And the roar of Sepoy guns.
+But to sounds of home and childhood
+The Highland ear was true;--
+As her mother's cradle-crooning
+The mountain pipes she knew.
+
+Like the march of soundless music
+Through the vision of the seer,
+More of feeling than of hearing,
+Of the heart than of the ear,
+She knew the droning pibroch,
+She knew the Campbell's call
+"Hark! hear ye no' MacGregor's,
+The grandest o' them all!"
+
+Oh, they listened, dumb and breathless,
+And they caught the sound at last;
+Faint and far beyond the Goomtee
+Rose and fell the piper's blast
+Then a burst of wild thanksgiving
+Mingled woman's voice and man's;
+"God be praised!--the march of Havelock!
+The piping of the clans!"
+
+Louder, nearer, fierce as vengeance,
+Sharp and shrill as swords at strife,
+Came the wild MacGregor's clan-call,
+Stinging all the air to life.
+But when the far-off dust-cloud
+To plaided legions grew,
+Full tenderly and blithesomely
+The pipes of rescue blew!
+
+Round the silver domes of Lucknow,
+Moslem mosque and Pagan shrine,
+Breathed the air to Britons dearest,
+The air of Auld Lang Syne.
+O'er the cruel roll of war-drums
+Rose that sweet and homelike strain;
+And the tartan clove the turban,
+As the Goomtee cleaves the plain.
+
+Dear to the corn-land reaper
+And plaided mountaineer,--
+To the cottage and the castle
+The piper's song is dear.
+Sweet sounds the Gaelic pibroch
+O'er mountain, glen, and glade;
+But the sweetest of all music
+The Pipes at Lucknow played!
+1858.
+
+
+
+
+TELLING THE BEES.
+
+A remarkable custom, brought from the Old Country, formerly prevailed
+in the rural districts of New England. On the death of a member of the
+family, the bees were at once informed of the event, and their hives
+dressed in mourning. This ceremonial was supposed to be necessary to
+prevent the swarms from leaving their hives and seeking a new home.
+
+HERE is the place; right over the hill
+Runs the path I took;
+You can see the gap in the old wall still,
+And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.
+
+There is the house, with the gate red-barred,
+And the poplars tall;
+And the barn's brown length, and the cattle-yard,
+And the white horns tossing above the wall.
+
+There are the beehives ranged in the sun;
+And down by the brink
+Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o'errun,
+Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.
+
+A year has gone, as the tortoise goes,
+Heavy and slow;
+And the same rose blooms, and the same sun glows,
+And the same brook sings of a year ago.
+
+There's the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze;
+And the June sun warm
+Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,
+Setting, as then, over Fernside farm.
+
+I mind me how with a lover's care
+From my Sunday coat
+I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair,
+And cooled at the brookside my brow and
+throat.
+
+Since we parted, a month had passed,--
+To love, a year;
+Down through the beeches I looked at last
+On the little red gate and the well-sweep near.
+
+I can see it all now,--the slantwise rain
+Of light through the leaves,
+The sundown's blaze on her window-pane,
+The bloom of her roses under the eaves.
+
+Just the same as a month before,--
+The house and the trees,
+The barn's brown gable, the vine by the door,--
+Nothing changed but the hives of bees.
+
+Before them, under the garden wall,
+Forward and back,
+Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
+Draping each hive with a shred of black.
+
+Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
+Had the chill of snow;
+For I knew she was telling the bees of one
+Gone on the journey we all must go.
+
+Then I said to myself, "My Mary weeps
+For the dead to-day;
+Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps
+The fret and the pain of his age away."
+
+But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,
+With his cane to his chin,
+The old man sat; and the chore-girl still
+Sung to the bees stealing out and in.
+
+And the song she was singing ever since
+In my ear sounds on:--
+"Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!
+Mistress Mary is dead and gone!"
+1858.
+
+
+
+
+THE SWAN SONG OF PARSON AVERY.
+
+In Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts Bay front 1623 to 1636 may be
+found Anthony Thacher's Narrative of his Shipwreck. Thacher was Avery's
+companion and survived to tell the tale. Mather's Magnalia, III. 2,
+gives further Particulars of Parson Avery's End, and suggests the title
+of the poem.
+
+WHEN the reaper's task was ended, and the
+summer wearing late,
+Parson Avery sailed from Newbury, with his wife
+and children eight,
+Dropping down the river-harbor in the shallop
+"Watch and Wait."
+
+Pleasantly lay the clearings in the mellow summer-
+morn,
+With the newly planted orchards dropping their
+fruits first-born,
+And the home-roofs like brown islands amid a sea
+of corn.
+
+Broad meadows reached out 'seaward the tided
+creeks between,
+And hills rolled wave-like inland, with oaks and
+walnuts green;--
+A fairer home, a--goodlier land, his eyes had never
+seen.
+
+Yet away sailed Parson Avery, away where duty led,
+And the voice of God seemed calling, to break the
+living bread
+To the souls of fishers starving on the rocks of
+Marblehead.
+
+All day they sailed: at nightfall the pleasant land-
+breeze died,
+The blackening sky, at midnight, its starry lights
+denied,
+And far and low the thunder of tempest prophesied.
+
+Blotted out were all the coast-lines, gone were rock,
+and wood, and sand;
+Grimly anxious stood the skipper with the rudder
+in his hand,
+And questioned of the darkness what was sea and
+what was land.
+
+And the preacher heard his dear ones, nestled
+round him, weeping sore,
+"Never heed, my little children! Christ is walking
+on before;
+To the pleasant land of heaven, where the sea shall
+be no more."
+
+All at once the great cloud parted, like a curtain
+drawn aside,
+To let down the torch of lightning on the terror
+far and wide;
+And the thunder and the whirlwind together smote
+the tide.
+
+There was wailing in the shallop, woman's wail
+and man's despair,
+A crash of breaking timbers on the rocks so sharp
+and bare,
+And, through it all, the murmur of Father Avery's
+prayer.
+
+From his struggle in the darkness with the wild
+waves and the blast,
+On a rock, where every billow broke above him as
+it passed,
+Alone, of all his household, the man of God was
+cast.
+
+There a comrade heard him praying, in the pause
+of wave and wind
+"All my own have gone before me, and I linger
+just behind;
+Not for life I ask, but only for the rest Thy
+ransomed find!
+
+"In this night of death I challenge the promise of
+Thy word!--
+Let me see the great salvation of which mine ears
+have heard!--
+Let me pass from hence forgiven, through the
+grace of Christ, our Lord!
+
+"In the baptism of these waters wash white my
+every sin,
+And let me follow up to Thee my household and
+my kin!
+Open the sea-gate of Thy heaven, and let me enter
+in!"
+
+When the Christian sings his death-song, all the
+listening heavens draw near,
+And the angels, leaning over the walls of crystal,
+hear
+How the notes so faint and broken swell to music
+in God's ear.
+
+The ear of God was open to His servant's last
+request;
+As the strong wave swept him downward the sweet
+hymn upward pressed,
+And the soul of Father Avery went, singing, to its
+rest.
+
+There was wailing on the mainland, from the rocks
+of Marblehead;
+In the stricken church of Newbury the notes of
+prayer were read;
+And long, by board and hearthstone, the living
+mourned the dead.
+
+And still the fishers outbound, or scudding from
+the squall,
+With grave and reverent faces, the ancient tale
+recall,
+When they see the white waves breaking on the
+Rock of Avery's Fall!
+1808.
+
+
+
+
+THE DOUBLE-HEADED SNAKE OF NEWBURY.
+
+"Concerning ye Amphisbaena, as soon as I received your commands, I made
+diligent inquiry: . . . he assures me yt it had really two heads, one
+at each end; two mouths, two stings or tongues."--REV. CHRISTOPHER
+TOPPAN to COTTON MATHER.
+
+FAR away in the twilight time
+Of every people, in every clime,
+Dragons and griffins and monsters dire,
+Born of water, and air, and fire,
+Or nursed, like the Python, in the mud
+And ooze of the old Deucalion flood,
+Crawl and wriggle and foam with rage,
+Through dusk tradition and ballad age.
+So from the childhood of Newbury town
+And its time of fable the tale comes down
+Of a terror which haunted bush and brake,
+The Amphisbaena, the Double Snake!
+
+Thou who makest the tale thy mirth,
+Consider that strip of Christian earth
+On the desolate shore of a sailless sea,
+Full of terror and mystery,
+Half redeemed from the evil hold
+Of the wood so dreary, and dark, and old,
+Which drank with its lips of leaves the dew
+When Time was young, and the world was new,
+And wove its shadows with sun and moon,
+Ere the stones of Cheops were squared and hewn.
+Think of the sea's dread monotone,
+Of the mournful wail from the pine-wood blown,
+Of the strange, vast splendors that lit the North,
+Of the troubled throes of the quaking earth,
+And the dismal tales the Indian told,
+Till the settler's heart at his hearth grew cold,
+And he shrank from the tawny wizard boasts,
+And the hovering shadows seemed full of ghosts,
+And above, below, and on every side,
+The fear of his creed seemed verified;--
+And think, if his lot were now thine own,
+To grope with terrors nor named nor known,
+How laxer muscle and weaker nerve
+And a feebler faith thy need might serve;
+And own to thyself the wonder more
+That the snake had two heads, and not a score!
+
+Whether he lurked in the Oldtown fen
+Or the gray earth-flax of the Devil's Den,
+Or swam in the wooded Artichoke,
+Or coiled by the Northman's Written Rock,
+Nothing on record is left to show;
+Only the fact that he lived, we know,
+And left the cast of a double head
+In the scaly mask which he yearly shed.
+For he carried a head where his tail should be,
+And the two, of course, could never agree,
+But wriggled about with main and might,
+Now to the left and now to the right;
+Pulling and twisting this way and that,
+Neither knew what the other was at.
+
+A snake with two beads, lurking so near!
+Judge of the wonder, guess at the fear!
+Think what ancient gossips might say,
+Shaking their heads in their dreary way,
+Between the meetings on Sabbath-day!
+How urchins, searching at day's decline
+The Common Pasture for sheep or kine,
+The terrible double-ganger heard
+In leafy rustle or whir of bird!
+Think what a zest it gave to the sport,
+In berry-time, of the younger sort,
+As over pastures blackberry-twined,
+Reuben and Dorothy lagged behind,
+And closer and closer, for fear of harm,
+The maiden clung to her lover's arm;
+And how the spark, who was forced to stay,
+By his sweetheart's fears, till the break of day,
+Thanked the snake for the fond delay.
+
+Far and wide the tale was told,
+Like a snowball growing while it rolled.
+The nurse hushed with it the baby's cry;
+And it served, in the worthy minister's eye,
+To paint the primitive serpent by.
+Cotton Mather came galloping down
+All the way to Newbury town,
+With his eyes agog and his ears set wide,
+And his marvellous inkhorn at his side;
+Stirring the while in the shallow pool
+Of his brains for the lore he learned at school,
+To garnish the story, with here a streak
+Of Latin, and there another of Greek
+And the tales he heard and the notes he took,
+Behold! are they not in his Wonder-Book?
+
+Stories, like dragons, are hard to kill.
+If the snake does not, the tale runs still
+In Byfield Meadows, on Pipestave Hill.
+And still, whenever husband and wife
+Publish the shame of their daily strife,
+And, with mad cross-purpose, tug and strain
+At either end of the marriage-chain,
+The gossips say, with a knowing shake
+Of their gray heads, "Look at the Double Snake
+One in body and two in will,
+The Amphisbaena is living still!"
+1859.
+
+
+
+
+MABEL MARTIN.
+
+A HARVEST IDYL.
+
+Susanna Martin, an aged woman of Amesbury, Mass., was tried and executed
+for the alleged crime of witchcraft. Her home was in what is now known
+as Pleasant Valley on the Merrimac, a little above the old Ferry way,
+where, tradition says, an attempt was made to assassinate Sir Edmund
+Andros on his way to Falmouth (afterward Portland) and Pemaquid, which
+was frustrated by a warning timely given. Goody Martin was the only
+woman hanged on the north side of the Merrimac during the dreadful
+delusion. The aged wife of Judge Bradbury who lived on the other side of
+the Powow River was imprisoned and would have been put to death but for
+the collapse of the hideous persecution.
+
+The substance of the poem which follows was published under the name of
+The Witch's Daughter, in The National Era in 1857. In 1875 my publishers
+desired to issue it with illustrations, and I then enlarged it and
+otherwise altered it to its present form. The principal addition was in
+the verses which constitute Part I.
+
+
+PROEM.
+I CALL the old time back: I bring my lay
+in tender memory of the summer day
+When, where our native river lapsed away,
+
+We dreamed it over, while the thrushes made
+Songs of their own, and the great pine-trees laid
+On warm noonlights the masses of their shade.
+
+And she was with us, living o'er again
+Her life in ours, despite of years and pain,--
+The Autumn's brightness after latter rain.
+
+Beautiful in her holy peace as one
+Who stands, at evening, when the work is done,
+Glorified in the setting of the sun!
+
+Her memory makes our common landscape seem
+Fairer than any of which painters dream;
+Lights the brown hills and sings in every stream;
+
+For she whose speech was always truth's pure gold
+Heard, not unpleased, its simple legends told,
+And loved with us the beautiful and old.
+
+
+I. THE RIVER VALLEY.
+Across the level tableland,
+A grassy, rarely trodden way,
+With thinnest skirt of birchen spray
+
+And stunted growth of cedar, leads
+To where you see the dull plain fall
+Sheer off, steep-slanted, ploughed by all
+
+The seasons' rainfalls. On its brink
+The over-leaning harebells swing,
+With roots half bare the pine-trees cling;
+
+And, through the shadow looking west,
+You see the wavering river flow
+Along a vale, that far below
+
+Holds to the sun, the sheltering hills
+And glimmering water-line between,
+Broad fields of corn and meadows green,
+
+And fruit-bent orchards grouped around
+The low brown roofs and painted eaves,
+And chimney-tops half hid in leaves.
+
+No warmer valley hides behind
+Yon wind-scourged sand-dunes, cold and bleak;
+No fairer river comes to seek
+
+The wave-sung welcome of the sea,
+Or mark the northmost border line
+Of sun-loved growths of nut and vine.
+
+Here, ground-fast in their native fields,
+Untempted by the city's gain,
+The quiet farmer folk remain
+
+Who bear the pleasant name of Friends,
+And keep their fathers' gentle ways
+And simple speech of Bible days;
+
+In whose neat homesteads woman holds
+With modest ease her equal place,
+And wears upon her tranquil face
+
+The look of one who, merging not
+Her self-hood in another's will,
+Is love's and duty's handmaid still.
+
+Pass with me down the path that winds
+Through birches to the open land,
+Where, close upon the river strand
+
+You mark a cellar, vine o'errun,
+Above whose wall of loosened stones
+The sumach lifts its reddening cones,
+
+And the black nightshade's berries shine,
+And broad, unsightly burdocks fold
+The household ruin, century-old.
+
+Here, in the dim colonial time
+Of sterner lives and gloomier faith,
+A woman lived, tradition saith,
+
+Who wrought her neighbors foul annoy,
+And witched and plagued the country-side,
+Till at the hangman's hand she died.
+
+Sit with me while the westering day
+Falls slantwise down the quiet vale,
+And, haply ere yon loitering sail,
+
+That rounds the upper headland, falls
+Below Deer Island's pines, or sees
+Behind it Hawkswood's belt of trees
+
+Rise black against the sinking sun,
+My idyl of its days of old,
+The valley's legend, shall be told.
+
+
+II. THE HUSKING.
+It was the pleasant harvest-time,
+When cellar-bins are closely stowed,
+And garrets bend beneath their load,
+
+And the old swallow-haunted barns,--
+Brown-gabled, long, and full of seams
+Through which the rooted sunlight streams,
+
+And winds blow freshly in, to shake
+The red plumes of the roosted cocks,
+And the loose hay-mow's scented locks,
+
+Are filled with summer's ripened stores,
+Its odorous grass and barley sheaves,
+From their low scaffolds to their eaves.
+
+On Esek Harden's oaken floor,
+With many an autumn threshing worn,
+Lay the heaped ears of unhusked corn.
+
+And thither came young men and maids,
+Beneath a moon that, large and low,
+Lit that sweet eve of long ago.
+
+They took their places; some by chance,
+And others by a merry voice
+Or sweet smile guided to their choice.
+
+How pleasantly the rising moon,
+Between the shadow of the mows,
+Looked on them through the great elm-boughs!
+
+On sturdy boyhood, sun-embrowned,
+On girlhood with its solid curves
+Of healthful strength and painless nerves!
+
+And jests went round, and laughs that made
+The house-dog answer with his howl,
+And kept astir the barn-yard fowl;
+
+And quaint old songs their fathers sung
+In Derby dales and Yorkshire moors,
+Ere Norman William trod their shores;
+
+And tales, whose merry license shook
+The fat sides of the Saxon thane,
+Forgetful of the hovering Dane,--
+
+Rude plays to Celt and Cimbri known,
+The charms and riddles that beguiled
+On Oxus' banks the young world's child,--
+
+That primal picture-speech wherein
+Have youth and maid the story told,
+So new in each, so dateless old,
+
+Recalling pastoral Ruth in her
+Who waited, blushing and demure,
+The red-ear's kiss of forfeiture.
+
+But still the sweetest voice was mute
+That river-valley ever heard
+From lips of maid or throat of bird;
+
+For Mabel Martin sat apart,
+And let the hay-mow's shadow fall
+Upon the loveliest face of all.
+
+She sat apart, as one forbid,
+Who knew that none would condescend
+To own the Witch-wife's child a friend.
+
+The seasons scarce had gone their round,
+Since curious thousands thronged to see
+Her mother at the gallows-tree;
+
+And mocked the prison-palsied limbs
+That faltered on the fatal stairs,
+And wan lip trembling with its prayers!
+
+Few questioned of the sorrowing child,
+Or, when they saw the mother die;
+Dreamed of the daughter's agony.
+
+They went up to their homes that day,
+As men and Christians justified
+God willed it, and the wretch had died!
+
+Dear God and Father of us all,
+Forgive our faith in cruel lies,--
+Forgive the blindness that denies!
+
+Forgive thy creature when he takes,
+For the all-perfect love Thou art,
+Some grim creation of his heart.
+
+Cast down our idols, overturn
+Our bloody altars; let us see
+Thyself in Thy humanity!
+
+Young Mabel from her mother's grave
+Crept to her desolate hearth-stone,
+And wrestled with her fate alone;
+
+With love, and anger, and despair,
+The phantoms of disordered sense,
+The awful doubts of Providence!
+
+Oh, dreary broke the winter days,
+And dreary fell the winter nights
+When, one by one, the neighboring lights
+
+Went out, and human sounds grew still,
+And all the phantom-peopled dark
+Closed round her hearth-fire's dying spark.
+
+And summer days were sad and long,
+And sad the uncompanioned eyes,
+And sadder sunset-tinted leaves,
+
+And Indian Summer's airs of balm;
+She scarcely felt the soft caress,
+The beauty died of loneliness!
+
+The school-boys jeered her as they passed,
+And, when she sought the house of prayer,
+Her mother's curse pursued her there.
+
+And still o'er many a neighboring door
+She saw the horseshoe's curved charm,
+To guard against her mother's harm!
+
+That mother, poor and sick and lame,
+Who daily, by the old arm-chair,
+Folded her withered hands in prayer;--
+
+Who turned, in Salem's dreary jail,
+Her worn old Bible o'er and o'er,
+When her dim eyes could read no more!
+
+Sore tried and pained, the poor girl kept
+Her faith, and trusted that her way,
+So dark, would somewhere meet the day.
+
+And still her weary wheel went round
+Day after day, with no relief
+Small leisure have the poor for grief.
+
+
+IV. THE CHAMPION.
+So in the shadow Mabel sits;
+Untouched by mirth she sees and hears,
+Her smile is sadder than her tears.
+
+But cruel eyes have found her out,
+And cruel lips repeat her name,
+And taunt her with her mother's shame.
+
+She answered not with railing words,
+But drew her apron o'er her face,
+And, sobbing, glided from the place.
+
+And only pausing at the door,
+Her sad eyes met the troubled gaze
+Of one who, in her better days,
+
+Had been her warm and steady friend,
+Ere yet her mother's doom had made
+Even Esek Harden half afraid.
+
+He felt that mute appeal of tears,
+And, starting, with an angry frown,
+Hushed all the wicked murmurs down.
+
+"Good neighbors mine," he sternly said,
+"This passes harmless mirth or jest;
+I brook no insult to my guest.
+
+"She is indeed her mother's child;
+But God's sweet pity ministers
+Unto no whiter soul than hers.
+
+"Let Goody Martin rest in peace;
+I never knew her harm a fly,
+And witch or not, God knows--not I.
+
+"I know who swore her life away;
+And as God lives, I'd not condemn
+An Indian dog on word of them."
+
+The broadest lands in all the town,
+The skill to guide, the power to awe,
+Were Harden's; and his word was law.
+
+None dared withstand him to his face,
+But one sly maiden spake aside
+"The little witch is evil-eyed!
+
+"Her mother only killed a cow,
+Or witched a churn or dairy-pan;
+But she, forsooth, must charm a man!"
+
+
+V. IN THE SHADOW.
+Poor Mabel, homeward turning, passed
+The nameless terrors of the wood,
+And saw, as if a ghost pursued,
+
+Her shadow gliding in the moon;
+The soft breath of the west-wind gave
+A chill as from her mother's grave.
+
+How dreary seemed the silent house!
+Wide in the moonbeams' ghastly glare
+Its windows had a dead man's stare!
+
+And, like a gaunt and spectral hand,
+The tremulous shadow of a birch
+Reached out and touched the door's low porch,
+
+As if to lift its latch; hard by,
+A sudden warning call she beard,
+The night-cry of a boding bird.
+
+She leaned against the door; her face,
+So fair, so young, so full of pain,
+White in the moonlight's silver rain.
+
+The river, on its pebbled rim,
+Made music such as childhood knew;
+The door-yard tree was whispered through
+
+By voices such as childhood's ear
+Had heard in moonlights long ago;
+And through the willow-boughs below.
+
+She saw the rippled waters shine;
+Beyond, in waves of shade and light,
+The hills rolled off into the night.
+
+She saw and heard, but over all
+A sense of some transforming spell,
+The shadow of her sick heart fell.
+
+And still across the wooded space
+The harvest lights of Harden shone,
+And song and jest and laugh went on.
+
+And he, so gentle, true, and strong,
+Of men the bravest and the best,
+Had he, too, scorned her with the rest?
+
+She strove to drown her sense of wrong,
+And, in her old and simple way,
+To teach her bitter heart to pray.
+
+Poor child! the prayer, begun in faith,
+Grew to a low, despairing cry
+Of utter misery: "Let me die!
+
+"Oh! take me from the scornful eyes,
+And hide me where the cruel speech
+And mocking finger may not reach!
+
+"I dare not breathe my mother's name
+A daughter's right I dare not crave
+To weep above her unblest grave!
+
+"Let me not live until my heart,
+With few to pity, and with none
+To love me, hardens into stone.
+
+"O God! have mercy on Thy child,
+Whose faith in Thee grows weak and small,
+And take me ere I lose it all!"
+
+A shadow on the moonlight fell,
+And murmuring wind and wave became
+A voice whose burden was her name.
+
+
+VI. THE BETROTHAL.
+Had then God heard her? Had He sent
+His angel down? In flesh and blood,
+Before her Esek Harden stood!
+
+He laid his hand upon her arm
+"Dear Mabel, this no more shall be;
+Who scoffs at you must scoff at me.
+
+"You know rough Esek Harden well;
+And if he seems no suitor gay,
+And if his hair is touched with gray,
+
+"The maiden grown shall never find
+His heart less warm than when she smiled,
+Upon his knees, a little child!"
+
+Her tears of grief were tears of joy,
+As, folded in his strong embrace,
+She looked in Esek Harden's face.
+
+"O truest friend of all'" she said,
+"God bless you for your kindly thought,
+And make me worthy of my lot!"
+
+He led her forth, and, blent in one,
+Beside their happy pathway ran
+The shadows of the maid and man.
+
+He led her through his dewy fields,
+To where the swinging lanterns glowed,
+And through the doors the huskers showed.
+
+"Good friends and neighbors!" Esek said,
+"I'm weary of this lonely life;
+In Mabel see my chosen wife!
+
+"She greets you kindly, one and all;
+The past is past, and all offence
+Falls harmless from her innocence.
+
+"Henceforth she stands no more alone;
+You know what Esek Harden is;--
+He brooks no wrong to him or his.
+
+"Now let the merriest tales be told,
+And let the sweetest songs be sung
+That ever made the old heart young!
+
+"For now the lost has found a home;
+And a lone hearth shall brighter burn,
+As all the household joys return!"
+
+Oh, pleasantly the harvest-moon,
+Between the shadow of the mows,
+Looked on them through the great elm--boughs!
+
+On Mabel's curls of golden hair,
+On Esek's shaggy strength it fell;
+And the wind whispered, "It is well!"
+
+
+
+
+THE PROPHECY OF SAMUEL SEWALL.
+
+The prose version of this prophecy is to be found in Sewall's The New
+Heaven upon the New Earth, 1697, quoted in Joshua Coffin's History of
+Newbury. Judge Sewall's father, Henry Sewall, was one of the pioneers
+of Newbury.
+
+UP and down the village streets
+Strange are the forms my fancy meets,
+For the thoughts and things of to-day are hid,
+And through the veil of a closed lid
+The ancient worthies I see again
+I hear the tap of the elder's cane,
+And his awful periwig I see,
+And the silver buckles of shoe and knee.
+Stately and slow, with thoughtful air,
+His black cap hiding his whitened hair,
+Walks the Judge of the great Assize,
+Samuel Sewall the good and wise.
+His face with lines of firmness wrought,
+He wears the look of a man unbought,
+Who swears to his hurt and changes not;
+Yet, touched and softened nevertheless
+With the grace of Christian gentleness,
+The face that a child would climb to kiss!
+True and tender and brave and just,
+That man might honor and woman trust.
+
+Touching and sad, a tale is told,
+Like a penitent hymn of the Psalmist old,
+Of the fast which the good man lifelong kept to
+With a haunting sorrow that never slept,
+As the circling year brought round the time
+Of an error that left the sting of crime,
+When he sat on the bench of the witchcraft courts,
+With the laws of Moses and Hale's Reports,
+And spake, in the name of both, the word
+That gave the witch's neck to the cord,
+And piled the oaken planks that pressed
+The feeble life from the warlock's breast!
+All the day long, from dawn to dawn,
+His door was bolted, his curtain drawn;
+No foot on his silent threshold trod,
+No eye looked on him save that of God,
+As he baffled the ghosts of the dead with charms
+Of penitent tears, and prayers, and psalms,
+And, with precious proofs from the sacred word
+Of the boundless pity and love of the Lord,
+His faith confirmed and his trust renewed
+That the sin of his ignorance, sorely rued,
+Might be washed away in the mingled flood
+Of his human sorrow and Christ's dear blood!
+
+Green forever the memory be
+Of the Judge of the old Theocracy,
+Whom even his errors glorified,
+Like a far-seen, sunlit mountain-side
+By the cloudy shadows which o'er it glide I
+Honor and praise to the Puritan
+Who the halting step of his age outran,
+And, seeing the infinite worth of man
+In the priceless gift the Father gave,
+In the infinite love that stooped to save,
+Dared not brand his brother a slave
+"Who doth such wrong," he was wont to say,
+In his own quaint, picture-loving way,
+"Flings up to Heaven a hand-grenade
+Which God shall cast down upon his head!"
+
+Widely as heaven and hell, contrast
+That brave old jurist of the past
+And the cunning trickster and knave of courts
+Who the holy features of Truth distorts,
+Ruling as right the will of the strong,
+Poverty, crime, and weakness wrong;
+Wide-eared to power, to the wronged and weak
+Deaf as Egypt's gods of leek;
+Scoffing aside at party's nod
+Order of nature and law of God;
+For whose dabbled ermine respect were waste,
+Reverence folly, and awe misplaced;
+Justice of whom 't were vain to seek
+As from Koordish robber or Syrian Sheik!
+Oh, leave the wretch to his bribes and sins;
+Let him rot in the web of lies he spins!
+To the saintly soul of the early day,
+To the Christian judge, let us turn and say
+"Praise and thanks for an honest man!--
+Glory to God for the Puritan!"
+
+I see, far southward, this quiet day,
+The hills of Newbury rolling away,
+With the many tints of the season gay,
+Dreamily blending in autumn mist
+Crimson, and gold, and amethyst.
+Long and low, with dwarf trees crowned,
+Plum Island lies, like a whale aground,
+A stone's toss over the narrow sound.
+Inland, as far as the eye can go,
+The hills curve round like a bended bow;
+A silver arrow from out them sprung,
+I see the shine of the Quasycung;
+And, round and round, over valley and hill,
+Old roads winding, as old roads will,
+Here to a ferry, and there to a mill;
+And glimpses of chimneys and gabled eaves,
+Through green elm arches and maple leaves,--
+Old homesteads sacred to all that can
+Gladden or sadden the heart of man,
+Over whose thresholds of oak and stone
+Life and Death have come and gone
+There pictured tiles in the fireplace show,
+Great beams sag from the ceiling low,
+The dresser glitters with polished wares,
+The long clock ticks on the foot-worn stairs,
+And the low, broad chimney shows the crack
+By the earthquake made a century back.
+Up from their midst springs the village spire
+With the crest of its cock in the sun afire;
+Beyond are orchards and planting lands,
+And great salt marshes and glimmering sands,
+And, where north and south the coast-lines run,
+The blink of the sea in breeze and sun!
+
+I see it all like a chart unrolled,
+But my thoughts are full of the past and old,
+I hear the tales of my boyhood told;
+And the shadows and shapes of early days
+Flit dimly by in the veiling haze,
+With measured movement and rhythmic chime
+Weaving like shuttles my web of rhyme.
+I think of the old man wise and good
+Who once on yon misty hillsides stood,
+(A poet who never measured rhyme,
+A seer unknown to his dull-eared time,)
+And, propped on his staff of age, looked down,
+With his boyhood's love, on his native town,
+Where, written, as if on its hills and plains,
+His burden of prophecy yet remains,
+For the voices of wood, and wave, and wind
+To read in the ear of the musing mind:--
+
+"As long as Plum Island, to guard the coast
+As God appointed, shall keep its post;
+As long as a salmon shall haunt the deep
+Of Merrimac River, or sturgeon leap;
+As long as pickerel swift and slim,
+Or red-backed perch, in Crane Pond swim;
+As long as the annual sea-fowl know
+Their time to come and their time to go;
+As long as cattle shall roam at will
+The green, grass meadows by Turkey Hill;
+As long as sheep shall look from the side
+Of Oldtown Hill on marishes wide,
+And Parker River, and salt-sea tide;
+As long as a wandering pigeon shall search
+The fields below from his white-oak perch,
+When the barley-harvest is ripe and shorn,
+And the dry husks fall from the standing corn;
+As long as Nature shall not grow old,
+Nor drop her work from her doting hold,
+And her care for the Indian corn forget,
+And the yellow rows in pairs to set;--
+So long shall Christians here be born,
+Grow up and ripen as God's sweet corn!--
+By the beak of bird, by the breath of frost,
+Shall never a holy ear be lost,
+But, husked by Death in the Planter's sight,
+Be sown again in the fields of light!"
+
+The Island still is purple with plums,
+Up the river the salmon comes,
+The sturgeon leaps, and the wild-fowl feeds
+On hillside berries and marish seeds,--
+All the beautiful signs remain,
+From spring-time sowing to autumn rain
+The good man's vision returns again!
+And let us hope, as well we can,
+That the Silent Angel who garners man
+May find some grain as of old lie found
+In the human cornfield ripe and sound,
+And the Lord of the Harvest deign to own
+The precious seed by the fathers sown!
+1859.
+
+
+
+
+THE RED RIPER VOYAGEUR.
+
+OUT and in the river is winding
+The links of its long, red chain,
+Through belts of dusky pine-land
+And gusty leagues of plain.
+
+Only, at times, a smoke-wreath
+With the drifting cloud-rack joins,--
+The smoke of the hunting-lodges
+Of the wild Assiniboins.
+
+Drearily blows the north-wind
+From the land of ice and snow;
+The eyes that look are weary,
+And heavy the hands that row.
+
+And with one foot on the water,
+And one upon the shore,
+The Angel of Shadow gives warning
+That day shall be no more.
+
+Is it the clang of wild-geese?
+Is it the Indian's yell,
+That lends to the voice of the north-wind
+The tones of a far-off bell?
+
+The voyageur smiles as he listens
+To the sound that grows apace;
+Well he knows the vesper ringing
+Of the bells of St. Boniface.
+
+The bells of the Roman Mission,
+That call from their turrets twain,
+To the boatman on the river,
+To the hunter on the plain!
+
+Even so in our mortal journey
+The bitter north-winds blow,
+And thus upon life's Red River
+Our hearts, as oarsmen, row.
+
+And when the Angel of Shadow
+Rests his feet on wave and shore,
+And our eyes grow dim with watching
+And our hearts faint at the oar,
+
+Happy is he who heareth
+The signal of his release
+In the bells of the Holy City,
+The chimes of eternal peace!
+1859
+
+
+
+
+THE PREACHER.
+
+George Whitefield, the celebrated preacher, died at Newburyport in 1770,
+and was buried under the church which has since borne his name.
+
+ITS windows flashing to the sky,
+Beneath a thousand roofs of brown,
+Far down the vale, my friend and I
+Beheld the old and quiet town;
+The ghostly sails that out at sea
+Flapped their white wings of mystery;
+The beaches glimmering in the sun,
+And the low wooded capes that run
+Into the sea-mist north and south;
+The sand-bluffs at the river's mouth;
+The swinging chain-bridge, and, afar,
+The foam-line of the harbor-bar.
+
+Over the woods and meadow-lands
+A crimson-tinted shadow lay,
+Of clouds through which the setting day
+Flung a slant glory far away.
+It glittered on the wet sea-sands,
+It flamed upon the city's panes,
+Smote the white sails of ships that wore
+Outward or in, and glided o'er
+The steeples with their veering vanes!
+
+Awhile my friend with rapid search
+O'erran the landscape. "Yonder spire
+Over gray roofs, a shaft of fire;
+What is it, pray?"--"The Whitefield Church!
+Walled about by its basement stones,
+There rest the marvellous prophet's bones."
+Then as our homeward way we walked,
+Of the great preacher's life we talked;
+And through the mystery of our theme
+The outward glory seemed to stream,
+And Nature's self interpreted
+The doubtful record of the dead;
+And every level beam that smote
+The sails upon the dark afloat
+A symbol of the light became,
+Which touched the shadows of our blame,
+With tongues of Pentecostal flame.
+
+Over the roofs of the pioneers
+Gathers the moss of a hundred years;
+On man and his works has passed the change
+Which needs must be in a century's range.
+The land lies open and warm in the sun,
+Anvils clamor and mill-wheels run,--
+Flocks on the hillsides, herds on the plain,
+The wilderness gladdened with fruit and grain!
+But the living faith of the settlers old
+A dead profession their children hold;
+To the lust of office and greed of trade
+A stepping-stone is the altar made.
+
+The church, to place and power the door,
+Rebukes the sin of the world no more,
+Nor sees its Lord in the homeless poor.
+Everywhere is the grasping hand,
+And eager adding of land to land;
+And earth, which seemed to the fathers meant
+But as a pilgrim's wayside tent,--
+A nightly shelter to fold away
+When the Lord should call at the break of day,--
+Solid and steadfast seems to be,
+And Time has forgotten Eternity!
+
+But fresh and green from the rotting roots
+Of primal forests the young growth shoots;
+From the death of the old the new proceeds,
+And the life of truth from the rot of creeds
+On the ladder of God, which upward leads,
+The steps of progress are human needs.
+For His judgments still are a mighty deep,
+And the eyes of His providence never sleep
+When the night is darkest He gives the morn;
+When the famine is sorest, the wine and corn!
+
+In the church of the wilderness Edwards wrought,
+Shaping his creed at the forge of thought;
+And with Thor's own hammer welded and bent
+The iron links of his argument,
+Which strove to grasp in its mighty span
+The purpose of God and the fate of man
+Yet faithful still, in his daily round
+To the weak, and the poor, and sin-sick found,
+The schoolman's lore and the casuist's art
+Drew warmth and life from his fervent heart.
+
+Had he not seen in the solitudes
+Of his deep and dark Northampton woods
+A vision of love about him fall?
+Not the blinding splendor which fell on Saul,
+But the tenderer glory that rests on them
+Who walk in the New Jerusalem,
+Where never the sun nor moon are known,
+But the Lord and His love are the light alone
+And watching the sweet, still countenance
+Of the wife of his bosom rapt in trance,
+Had he not treasured each broken word
+Of the mystical wonder seen and heard;
+And loved the beautiful dreamer more
+That thus to the desert of earth she bore
+Clusters of Eshcol from Canaan's shore?
+
+As the barley-winnower, holding with pain
+Aloft in waiting his chaff and grain,
+Joyfully welcomes the far-off breeze
+Sounding the pine-tree's slender keys,
+So he who had waited long to hear
+The sound of the Spirit drawing near,
+Like that which the son of Iddo heard
+When the feet of angels the myrtles stirred,
+Felt the answer of prayer, at last,
+As over his church the afflatus passed,
+Breaking its sleep as breezes break
+To sun-bright ripples a stagnant lake.
+
+At first a tremor of silent fear,
+The creep of the flesh at danger near,
+A vague foreboding and discontent,
+Over the hearts of the people went.
+All nature warned in sounds and signs
+The wind in the tops of the forest pines
+In the name of the Highest called to prayer,
+As the muezzin calls from the minaret stair.
+Through ceiled chambers of secret sin
+Sudden and strong the light shone in;
+A guilty sense of his neighbor's needs
+Startled the man of title-deeds;
+The trembling hand of the worldling shook
+The dust of years from the Holy Book;
+And the psalms of David, forgotten long,
+Took the place of the scoffer's song.
+
+The impulse spread like the outward course
+Of waters moved by a central force;
+The tide of spiritual life rolled down
+From inland mountains to seaboard town.
+
+Prepared and ready the altar stands
+Waiting the prophet's outstretched hands
+And prayer availing, to downward call
+The fiery answer in view of all.
+Hearts are like wax in the furnace; who
+Shall mould, and shape, and cast them anew?
+Lo! by the Merrimac Whitefield stands
+In the temple that never was made by hands,--
+Curtains of azure, and crystal wall,
+And dome of the sunshine over all--
+A homeless pilgrim, with dubious name
+Blown about on the winds of fame;
+Now as an angel of blessing classed,
+And now as a mad enthusiast.
+Called in his youth to sound and gauge
+The moral lapse of his race and age,
+And, sharp as truth, the contrast draw
+Of human frailty and perfect law;
+Possessed by the one dread thought that lent
+Its goad to his fiery temperament,
+Up and down the world he went,
+A John the Baptist crying, Repent!
+
+No perfect whole can our nature make;
+Here or there the circle will break;
+The orb of life as it takes the light
+On one side leaves the other in night.
+Never was saint so good and great
+As to give no chance at St. Peter's gate
+For the plea of the Devil's advocate.
+So, incomplete by his being's law,
+The marvellous preacher had his flaw;
+With step unequal, and lame with faults,
+His shade on the path of History halts.
+
+Wisely and well said the Eastern bard
+Fear is easy, but love is hard,--
+Easy to glow with the Santon's rage,
+And walk on the Meccan pilgrimage;
+But he is greatest and best who can
+Worship Allah by loving man.
+Thus he,--to whom, in the painful stress
+Of zeal on fire from its own excess,
+Heaven seemed so vast and earth so small
+That man was nothing, since God was all,--
+Forgot, as the best at times have done,
+That the love of the Lord and of man are one.
+Little to him whose feet unshod
+The thorny path of the desert trod,
+Careless of pain, so it led to God,
+Seemed the hunger-pang and the poor man's wrong,
+The weak ones trodden beneath the strong.
+Should the worm be chooser?--the clay withstand
+The shaping will of the potter's hand?
+
+In the Indian fable Arjoon hears
+The scorn of a god rebuke his fears
+"Spare thy pity!" Krishna saith;
+"Not in thy sword is the power of death!
+All is illusion,--loss but seems;
+Pleasure and pain are only dreams;
+Who deems he slayeth doth not kill;
+Who counts as slain is living still.
+Strike, nor fear thy blow is crime;
+Nothing dies but the cheats of time;
+Slain or slayer, small the odds
+To each, immortal as Indra's gods!"
+
+So by Savannah's banks of shade,
+The stones of his mission the preacher laid
+On the heart of the negro crushed and rent,
+And made of his blood the wall's cement;
+Bade the slave-ship speed from coast to coast,
+Fanned by the wings of the Holy Ghost;
+And begged, for the love of Christ, the gold
+Coined from the hearts in its groaning hold.
+What could it matter, more or less
+Of stripes, and hunger, and weariness?
+Living or dying, bond or free,
+What was time to eternity?
+
+Alas for the preacher's cherished schemes!
+Mission and church are now but dreams;
+Nor prayer nor fasting availed the plan
+To honor God through the wrong of man.
+Of all his labors no trace remains
+Save the bondman lifting his hands in chains.
+The woof he wove in the righteous warp
+Of freedom-loving Oglethorpe,
+Clothes with curses the goodly land,
+Changes its greenness and bloom to sand;
+And a century's lapse reveals once more
+The slave-ship stealing to Georgia's shore.
+Father of Light! how blind is he
+Who sprinkles the altar he rears to Thee
+With the blood and tears of humanity!
+
+He erred: shall we count His gifts as naught?
+Was the work of God in him unwrought?
+The servant may through his deafness err,
+And blind may be God's messenger;
+But the Errand is sure they go upon,--
+The word is spoken, the deed is done.
+Was the Hebrew temple less fair and good
+That Solomon bowed to gods of wood?
+For his tempted heart and wandering feet,
+Were the songs of David less pure and sweet?
+So in light and shadow the preacher went,
+God's erring and human instrument;
+And the hearts of the people where he passed
+Swayed as the reeds sway in the blast,
+Under the spell of a voice which took
+In its compass the flow of Siloa's brook,
+And the mystical chime of the bells of gold
+On the ephod's hem of the priest of old,--
+Now the roll of thunder, and now the awe
+Of the trumpet heard in the Mount of Law.
+
+A solemn fear on the listening crowd
+Fell like the shadow of a cloud.
+The sailor reeling from out the ships
+Whose masts stood thick in the river-slips
+Felt the jest and the curse die on his lips.
+Listened the fisherman rude and hard,
+The calker rough from the builder's yard;
+The man of the market left his load,
+The teamster leaned on his bending goad,
+The maiden, and youth beside her, felt
+Their hearts in a closer union melt,
+And saw the flowers of their love in bloom
+Down the endless vistas of life to come.
+Old age sat feebly brushing away
+From his ears the scanty locks of gray;
+And careless boyhood, living the free
+Unconscious life of bird and tree,
+Suddenly wakened to a sense
+Of sin and its guilty consequence.
+It was as if an angel's voice
+Called the listeners up for their final choice;
+As if a strong hand rent apart
+The veils of sense from soul and heart,
+Showing in light ineffable
+The joys of heaven and woes of hell
+All about in the misty air
+The hills seemed kneeling in silent prayer;
+The rustle of leaves, the moaning sedge,
+The water's lap on its gravelled edge,
+The wailing pines, and, far and faint,
+The wood-dove's note of sad complaint,--
+To the solemn voice of the preacher lent
+An undertone as of low lament;
+And the note of the sea from its sand coast,
+On the easterly wind, now heard, now lost,
+Seemed the murmurous sound of the judgment host.
+
+Yet wise men doubted, and good men wept,
+As that storm of passion above them swept,
+And, comet-like, adding flame to flame,
+The priests of the new Evangel came,--
+Davenport, flashing upon the crowd,
+Charged like summer's electric cloud,
+Now holding the listener still as death
+With terrible warnings under breath,
+Now shouting for joy, as if he viewed
+The vision of Heaven's beatitude!
+And Celtic Tennant, his long coat bound
+Like a monk's with leathern girdle round,
+Wild with the toss of unshorn hair,
+And wringing of hands, and, eyes aglare,
+Groaning under the world's despair!
+Grave pastors, grieving their flocks to lose,
+Prophesied to the empty pews
+That gourds would wither, and mushrooms die,
+And noisiest fountains run soonest dry,
+Like the spring that gushed in Newbury Street,
+Under the tramp of the earthquake's feet,
+A silver shaft in the air and light,
+For a single day, then lost in night,
+Leaving only, its place to tell,
+Sandy fissure and sulphurous smell.
+With zeal wing-clipped and white-heat cool,
+Moved by the spirit in grooves of rule,
+No longer harried, and cropped, and fleeced,
+Flogged by sheriff and cursed by priest,
+But by wiser counsels left at ease
+To settle quietly on his lees,
+And, self-concentred, to count as done
+The work which his fathers well begun,
+In silent protest of letting alone,
+The Quaker kept the way of his own,--
+A non-conductor among the wires,
+With coat of asbestos proof to fires.
+And quite unable to mend his pace
+To catch the falling manna of grace,
+He hugged the closer his little store
+Of faith, and silently prayed for more.
+And vague of creed and barren of rite,
+But holding, as in his Master's sight,
+Act and thought to the inner light,
+The round of his simple duties walked,
+And strove to live what the others talked.
+
+And who shall marvel if evil went
+Step by step with the good intent,
+And with love and meekness, side by side,
+Lust of the flesh and spiritual pride?--
+That passionate longings and fancies vain
+Set the heart on fire and crazed the brain?
+That over the holy oracles
+Folly sported with cap and bells?
+That goodly women and learned men
+Marvelling told with tongue and pen
+How unweaned children chirped like birds
+Texts of Scripture and solemn words,
+Like the infant seers of the rocky glens
+In the Puy de Dome of wild Cevennes
+Or baby Lamas who pray and preach
+From Tartir cradles in Buddha's speech?
+
+In the war which Truth or Freedom wages
+With impious fraud and the wrong of ages,
+Hate and malice and self-love mar
+The notes of triumph with painful jar,
+And the helping angels turn aside
+Their sorrowing faces the shame to bide.
+Never on custom's oiled grooves
+The world to a higher level moves,
+But grates and grinds with friction hard
+On granite boulder and flinty shard.
+The heart must bleed before it feels,
+The pool be troubled before it heals;
+Ever by losses the right must gain,
+Every good have its birth of pain;
+The active Virtues blush to find
+The Vices wearing their badge behind,
+And Graces and Charities feel the fire
+Wherein the sins of the age expire;
+The fiend still rends as of old he rent
+The tortured body from which he went.
+
+But Time tests all. In the over-drift
+And flow of the Nile, with its annual gift,
+Who cares for the Hadji's relics sunk?
+Who thinks of the drowned-out Coptic monk?
+The tide that loosens the temple's stones,
+And scatters the sacred ibis-bones,
+Drives away from the valley-land
+That Arab robber, the wandering sand,
+Moistens the fields that know no rain,
+Fringes the desert with belts of grain,
+And bread to the sower brings again.
+So the flood of emotion deep and strong
+Troubled the land as it swept along,
+But left a result of holier lives,
+Tenderer-mothers and worthier wives.
+The husband and father whose children fled
+And sad wife wept when his drunken tread
+Frightened peace from his roof-tree's shade,
+And a rock of offence his hearthstone made,
+In a strength that was not his own began
+To rise from the brute's to the plane of man.
+Old friends embraced, long held apart
+By evil counsel and pride of heart;
+And penitence saw through misty tears,
+In the bow of hope on its cloud of fears,
+The promise of Heaven's eternal years,--
+The peace of God for the world's annoy,--
+Beauty for ashes, and oil of joy
+Under the church of Federal Street,
+Under the tread of its Sabbath feet,
+Walled about by its basement stones,
+Lie the marvellous preacher's bones.
+No saintly honors to them are shown,
+No sign nor miracle have they known;
+But he who passes the ancient church
+Stops in the shade of its belfry-porch,
+And ponders the wonderful life of him
+Who lies at rest in that charnel dim.
+Long shall the traveller strain his eye
+From the railroad car, as it plunges by,
+And the vanishing town behind him search
+For the slender spire of the Whitefield Church;
+And feel for one moment the ghosts of trade,
+And fashion, and folly, and pleasure laid,
+By the thought of that life of pure intent,
+That voice of warning yet eloquent,
+Of one on the errands of angels sent.
+And if where he labored the flood of sin
+Like a tide from the harbor-bar sets in,
+And over a life of tune and sense
+The church-spires lift their vain defence,
+As if to scatter the bolts of God
+With the points of Calvin's thunder-rod,--
+Still, as the gem of its civic crown,
+Precious beyond the world's renown,
+His memory hallows the ancient town!
+1859.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRUCE OF PISCATAQUA.
+
+In the winter of 1675-76, the Eastern Indians, who had been making war
+upon the New Hampshire settlements, were so reduced in numbers by
+fighting and famine that they agreed to a  peace with Major Waldron at
+Dover, but the peace was broken in the fall of 1676. The famous chief,
+Squando, was the principal negotiator on the part of the savages. He had
+taken up the  hatchet to revenge the brutal treatment of his child by
+drunken white sailors, which caused its death.
+
+It not unfrequently happened during the Border wars that young white
+children were adopted by their Indian captors, and so kindly treated
+that they were unwilling to leave the free, wild life of the woods; and
+in some instances they utterly refused to go back with their parents to
+their old homes and civilization.
+
+RAZE these long blocks of brick and stone,
+These huge mill-monsters overgrown;
+Blot out the humbler piles as well,
+Where, moved like living shuttles, dwell
+The weaving genii of the bell;
+Tear from the wild Cocheco's track
+The dams that hold its torrents back;
+And let the loud-rejoicing fall
+Plunge, roaring, down its rocky wall;
+And let the Indian's paddle play
+On the unbridged Piscataqua!
+Wide over hill and valley spread
+Once more the forest, dusk and dread,
+With here and there a clearing cut
+From the walled shadows round it shut;
+Each with its farm-house builded rude,
+By English yeoman squared and hewed,
+And the grim, flankered block-house bound
+With bristling palisades around.
+So, haply shall before thine eyes
+The dusty veil of centuries rise,
+The old, strange scenery overlay
+The tamer pictures of to-day,
+While, like the actors in a play,
+Pass in their ancient guise along
+The figures of my border song
+What time beside Cocheco's flood
+The white man and the red man stood,
+With words of peace and brotherhood;
+When passed the sacred calumet
+From lip to lip with fire-draught wet,
+And, puffed in scorn, the peace-pipe's smoke
+Through the gray beard of Waldron broke,
+And Squando's voice, in suppliant plea
+For mercy, struck the haughty key
+Of one who held, in any fate,
+His native pride inviolate!
+
+"Let your ears be opened wide!
+He who speaks has never lied.
+Waldron of Piscataqua,
+Hear what Squando has to say!
+
+"Squando shuts his eyes and sees,
+Far off, Saco's hemlock-trees.
+In his wigwam, still as stone,
+Sits a woman all alone,
+
+"Wampum beads and birchen strands
+Dropping from her careless hands,
+Listening ever for the fleet
+Patter of a dead child's feet!
+
+"When the moon a year ago
+Told the flowers the time to blow,
+In that lonely wigwam smiled
+Menewee, our little child.
+
+"Ere that moon grew thin and old,
+He was lying still and cold;
+Sent before us, weak and small,
+When the Master did not call!
+
+"On his little grave I lay;
+Three times went and came the day,
+Thrice above me blazed the noon,
+Thrice upon me wept the moon.
+
+"In the third night-watch I heard,
+Far and low, a spirit-bird;
+Very mournful, very wild,
+Sang the totem of my child.
+
+"'Menewee, poor Menewee,
+Walks a path he cannot see
+Let the white man's wigwam light
+With its blaze his steps aright.
+
+"'All-uncalled, he dares not show
+Empty hands to Manito
+Better gifts he cannot bear
+Than the scalps his slayers wear.'
+
+"All the while the totem sang,
+Lightning blazed and thunder rang;
+And a black cloud, reaching high,
+Pulled the white moon from the sky.
+
+"I, the medicine-man, whose ear
+All that spirits bear can hear,--
+I, whose eyes are wide to see
+All the things that are to be,--
+
+"Well I knew the dreadful signs
+In the whispers of the pines,
+In the river roaring loud,
+In the mutter of the cloud.
+
+"At the breaking of the day,
+From the grave I passed away;
+Flowers bloomed round me, birds sang glad,
+But my heart was hot and mad.
+
+"There is rust on Squando's knife,
+From the warm, red springs of life;
+On the funeral hemlock-trees
+Many a scalp the totem sees.
+
+"Blood for blood! But evermore
+Squando's heart is sad and sore;
+And his poor squaw waits at home
+For the feet that never come!
+
+"Waldron of Cocheco, hear!
+Squando speaks, who laughs at fear;
+Take the captives he has ta'en;
+Let the land have peace again!"
+
+As the words died on his tongue,
+Wide apart his warriors swung;
+Parted, at the sign he gave,
+Right and left, like Egypt's wave.
+
+And, like Israel passing free
+Through the prophet-charmed sea,
+Captive mother, wife, and child
+Through the dusky terror filed.
+
+One alone, a little maid,
+Middleway her steps delayed,
+Glancing, with quick, troubled sight,
+Round about from red to white.
+
+Then his hand the Indian laid
+On the little maiden's head,
+Lightly from her forehead fair
+Smoothing back her yellow hair.
+
+"Gift or favor ask I none;
+What I have is all my own
+Never yet the birds have sung,
+Squando hath a beggar's tongue.'
+
+"Yet for her who waits at home,
+For the dead who cannot come,
+Let the little Gold-hair be
+In the place of Menewee!
+
+"Mishanock, my little star!
+Come to Saco's pines afar;
+Where the sad one waits at home,
+Wequashim, my moonlight, come!"
+
+"What!" quoth Waldron, "leave a child
+Christian-born to heathens wild?
+As God lives, from Satan's hand
+I will pluck her as a brand!"
+
+"Hear me, white man!" Squando cried;
+"Let the little one decide.
+Wequashim, my moonlight, say,
+Wilt thou go with me, or stay?"
+
+Slowly, sadly, half afraid,
+Half regretfully, the maid
+Owned the ties of blood and race,--
+Turned from Squando's pleading face.
+
+Not a word the Indian spoke,
+But his wampum chain he broke,
+And the beaded wonder hung
+On that neck so fair and young.
+
+Silence-shod, as phantoms seem
+In the marches of a dream,
+Single-filed, the grim array
+Through the pine-trees wound away.
+
+Doubting, trembling, sore amazed,
+Through her tears the young child gazed.
+"God preserve her!" Waldron said;
+"Satan hath bewitched the maid!"
+
+Years went and came. At close of day
+Singing came a child from play,
+Tossing from her loose-locked head
+Gold in sunshine, brown in shade.
+
+Pride was in the mother's look,
+But her head she gravely shook,
+And with lips that fondly smiled
+Feigned to chide her truant child.
+
+Unabashed, the maid began
+"Up and down the brook I ran,
+Where, beneath the bank so steep,
+Lie the spotted trout asleep.
+
+"'Chip!' went squirrel on the wall,
+After me I heard him call,
+And the cat-bird on the tree
+Tried his best to mimic me.
+
+"Where the hemlocks grew so dark
+That I stopped to look and hark,
+On a log, with feather-hat,
+By the path, an Indian sat.
+
+"Then I cried, and ran away;
+But he called, and bade me stay;
+And his voice was good and mild
+As my mother's to her child.
+
+"And he took my wampum chain,
+Looked and looked it o'er again;
+Gave me berries, and, beside,
+On my neck a plaything tied."
+
+Straight the mother stooped to see
+What the Indian's gift might be.
+On the braid of wampum hung,
+Lo! a cross of silver swung.
+
+Well she knew its graven sign,
+Squando's bird and totem pine;
+And, a mirage of the brain,
+Flowed her childhood back again.
+
+Flashed the roof the sunshine through,
+Into space the walls outgrew;
+On the Indian's wigwam-mat,
+Blossom-crowned, again she sat.
+
+Cool she felt the west-wind blow,
+In her ear the pines sang low,
+And, like links from out a chain,
+Dropped the years of care and pain.
+From the outward toil and din,
+From the griefs that gnaw within,
+To the freedom of the woods
+Called the birds, and winds, and floods.
+
+Well, O painful minister!
+Watch thy flock, but blame not her,
+If her ear grew sharp to hear
+All their voices whispering near.
+
+Blame her not, as to her soul
+All the desert's glamour stole,
+That a tear for childhood's loss
+Dropped upon the Indian's cross.
+
+When, that night, the Book was read,
+And she bowed her widowed head,
+And a prayer for each loved name
+Rose like incense from a flame,
+
+With a hope the creeds forbid
+In her pitying bosom hid,
+To the listening ear of Heaven
+Lo! the Indian's name was given.
+1860.
+
+
+
+
+MY PLAYMATE.
+
+THE pines were dark on Ramoth hill,
+Their song was soft and low;
+The blossoms in the sweet May wind
+Were falling like the snow.
+
+The blossoms drifted at our feet,
+The orchard birds sang clear;
+The sweetest and the saddest day
+It seemed of all the year.
+
+For, more to me than birds or flowers,
+My playmate left her home,
+And took with her the laughing spring,
+The music and the bloom.
+
+She kissed the lips of kith and kin,
+She laid her hand in mine
+What more could ask the bashful boy
+Who fed her father's kine?
+
+She left us in the bloom of May
+The constant years told o'er
+Their seasons with as sweet May morns,
+But she came back no more.
+
+I walk, with noiseless feet, the round
+Of uneventful years;
+Still o'er and o'er I sow the spring
+And reap the autumn ears.
+
+She lives where all the golden year
+Her summer roses blow;
+The dusky children of the sun
+Before her come and go.
+
+There haply with her jewelled hands
+She smooths her silken gown,--
+No more the homespun lap wherein
+I shook the walnuts down.
+
+The wild grapes wait us by the brook,
+The brown nuts on the hill,
+And still the May-day flowers make sweet
+The woods of Follymill.
+
+The lilies blossom in the pond,
+The bird builds in the tree,
+The dark pines sing on Ramoth hill
+The slow song of the sea.
+
+I wonder if she thinks of them,
+And how the old time seems,--
+If ever the pines of Ramoth wood
+Are sounding in her dreams.
+
+I see her face, I hear her voice;
+Does she remember mine?
+And what to her is now the boy
+Who fed her father's kine?
+
+What cares she that the orioles build
+For other eyes than ours,--
+That other hands with nuts are filled,
+And other laps with flowers?
+
+O playmate in the golden time!
+Our mossy seat is green,
+Its fringing violets blossom yet,
+The old trees o'er it lean.
+
+The winds so sweet with birch and fern
+A sweeter memory blow;
+And there in spring the veeries sing
+The song of long ago.
+
+And still the pines of Ramoth wood
+Are moaning like the sea,--
+
+The moaning of the sea of change
+Between myself and thee!
+1860.
+
+
+
+
+COBBLER KEEZAR'S VISION.
+
+This ballad was written on the occasion of a Horticultural Festival.
+Cobbler Keezar was a noted character among the first settlers in the
+valley of the Merrimac.
+
+THE beaver cut his timber
+With patient teeth that day,
+The minks were fish-wards, and the crows
+Surveyors of highway,--
+
+When Keezar sat on the hillside
+Upon his cobbler's form,
+With a pan of coals on either hand
+To keep his waxed-ends warm.
+
+And there, in the golden weather,
+He stitched and hammered and sung;
+In the brook he moistened his leather,
+In the pewter mug his tongue.
+
+Well knew the tough old Teuton
+Who brewed the stoutest ale,
+And he paid the goodwife's reckoning
+In the coin of song and tale.
+
+The songs they still are singing
+Who dress the hills of vine,
+The tales that haunt the Brocken
+And whisper down the Rhine.
+
+Woodsy and wild and lonesome,
+The swift stream wound away,
+Through birches and scarlet maples
+Flashing in foam and spray,--
+
+Down on the sharp-horned ledges
+Plunging in steep cascade,
+Tossing its white-maned waters
+Against the hemlock's shade.
+
+Woodsy and wild and lonesome,
+East and west and north and south;
+Only the village of fishers
+Down at the river's mouth;
+
+Only here and there a clearing,
+With its farm-house rude and new,
+And tree-stumps, swart as Indians,
+Where the scanty harvest grew.
+
+No shout of home-bound reapers,
+No vintage-song he heard,
+And on the green no dancing feet
+The merry violin stirred.
+
+"Why should folk be glum," said Keezar,
+"When Nature herself is glad,
+And the painted woods are laughing
+At the faces so sour and sad?"
+
+Small heed had the careless cobbler
+What sorrow of heart was theirs
+Who travailed in pain with the births of God,
+And planted a state with prayers,--
+
+Hunting of witches and warlocks,
+Smiting the heathen horde,--
+One hand on the mason's trowel,
+And one on the soldier's sword.
+
+But give him his ale and cider,
+Give him his pipe and song,
+Little he cared for Church or State,
+Or the balance of right and wrong.
+
+"T is work, work, work," he muttered,--
+"And for rest a snuffle of psalms!"
+He smote on his leathern apron
+With his brown and waxen palms.
+
+"Oh for the purple harvests
+Of the days when I was young
+For the merry grape-stained maidens,
+And the pleasant songs they sung!
+
+"Oh for the breath of vineyards,
+Of apples and nuts and wine
+For an oar to row and a breeze to blow
+Down the grand old river Rhine!"
+
+A tear in his blue eye glistened,
+And dropped on his beard so gray.
+"Old, old am I," said Keezar,
+"And the Rhine flows far away!"
+
+But a cunning man was the cobbler;
+He could call the birds from the trees,
+Charm the black snake out of the ledges,
+And bring back the swarming bees.
+
+All the virtues of herbs and metals,
+All the lore of the woods, he knew,
+And the arts of the Old World mingle
+With the marvels of the New.
+
+Well he knew the tricks of magic,
+And the lapstone on his knee
+Had the gift of the Mormon's goggles
+Or the stone of Doctor Dee.[11]
+
+For the mighty master Agrippa
+Wrought it with spell and rhyme
+From a fragment of mystic moonstone
+In the tower of Nettesheim.
+
+To a cobbler Minnesinger
+The marvellous stone gave he,--
+And he gave it, in turn, to Keezar,
+Who brought it over the sea.
+
+He held up that mystic lapstone,
+He held it up like a lens,
+And he counted the long years coming
+Ey twenties and by tens.
+
+"One hundred years," quoth Keezar,
+"And fifty have I told
+Now open the new before me,
+And shut me out the old!"
+
+Like a cloud of mist, the blackness
+Rolled from the magic stone,
+And a marvellous picture mingled
+The unknown and the known.
+
+Still ran the stream to the river,
+And river and ocean joined;
+And there were the bluffs and the blue sea-line,
+And cold north hills behind.
+
+But--the mighty forest was broken
+By many a steepled town,
+By many a white-walled farm-house,
+And many a garner brown.
+
+Turning a score of mill-wheels,
+The stream no more ran free;
+White sails on the winding river,
+White sails on the far-off sea.
+
+Below in the noisy village
+The flags were floating gay,
+And shone on a thousand faces
+The light of a holiday.
+
+Swiftly the rival ploughmen
+Turned the brown earth from their shares;
+Here were the farmer's treasures,
+There were the craftsman's wares.
+
+Golden the goodwife's butter,
+Ruby her currant-wine;
+Grand were the strutting turkeys,
+Fat were the beeves and swine.
+
+Yellow and red were the apples,
+And the ripe pears russet-brown,
+And the peaches had stolen blushes
+From the girls who shook them down.
+
+And with blooms of hill and wildwood,
+That shame the toil of art,
+Mingled the gorgeous blossoms
+Of the garden's tropic heart.
+
+"What is it I see?" said Keezar
+"Am I here, or ant I there?
+Is it a fete at Bingen?
+Do I look on Frankfort fair?
+
+"But where are the clowns and puppets,
+And imps with horns and tail?
+And where are the Rhenish flagons?
+And where is the foaming ale?
+
+"Strange things, I know, will happen,--
+Strange things the Lord permits;
+But that droughty folk should be jolly
+Puzzles my poor old wits.
+
+"Here are smiling manly faces,
+And the maiden's step is gay;
+Nor sad by thinking, nor mad by drinking,
+Nor mopes, nor fools, are they.
+
+"Here's pleasure without regretting,
+And good without abuse,
+The holiday and the bridal
+Of beauty and of use.
+
+"Here's a priest and there is a Quaker,
+Do the cat and dog agree?
+Have they burned the stocks for ovenwood?
+Have they cut down the gallows-tree?
+
+"Would the old folk know their children?
+Would they own the graceless town,
+With never a ranter to worry
+And never a witch to drown?"
+
+
+Loud laughed the cobbler Keezar,
+Laughed like a school-boy gay;
+Tossing his arms above him,
+The lapstone rolled away.
+
+It rolled down the rugged hillside,
+It spun like a wheel bewitched,
+It plunged through the leaning willows,
+And into the river pitched.
+
+There, in the deep, dark water,
+The magic stone lies still,
+Under the leaning willows
+In the shadow of the hill.
+
+But oft the idle fisher
+Sits on the shadowy bank,
+And his dreams make marvellous pictures
+Where the wizard's lapstone sank.
+
+And still, in the summer twilights,
+When the river seems to run
+Out from the inner glory,
+Warm with the melted sun,
+
+The weary mill-girl lingers
+Beside the charmed stream,
+And the sky and the golden water
+Shape and color her dream.
+
+Air wave the sunset gardens,
+The rosy signals fly;
+Her homestead beckons from the cloud,
+And love goes sailing by.
+1861.
+
+
+
+
+AMY WENTWORTH
+
+TO WILLIAM BRADFORD.
+
+As they who watch by sick-beds find relief
+Unwittingly from the great stress of grief
+And anxious care, in fantasies outwrought
+From the hearth's embers flickering low, or caught
+From whispering wind, or tread of passing feet,
+Or vagrant memory calling up some sweet
+Snatch of old song or romance, whence or why
+They scarcely know or ask,--so, thou and I,
+Nursed in the faith that Truth alone is strong
+In the endurance which outwearies Wrong,
+With meek persistence baffling brutal force,
+And trusting God against the universe,--
+We, doomed to watch a strife we may not share
+With other weapons than the patriot's prayer,
+Yet owning, with full hearts and moistened eyes,
+The awful beauty of self-sacrifice,
+And wrung by keenest sympathy for all
+Who give their loved ones for the living wall
+'Twixt law and treason,--in this evil day
+May haply find, through automatic play
+Of pen and pencil, solace to our pain,
+And hearten others with the strength we gain.
+I know it has been said our times require
+No play of art, nor dalliance with the lyre,
+No weak essay with Fancy's chloroform
+To calm the hot, mad pulses of the storm,
+But the stern war-blast rather, such as sets
+The battle's teeth of serried bayonets,
+And pictures grim as Vernet's. Yet with these
+Some softer tints may blend, and milder keys
+Relieve the storm-stunned ear. Let us keep sweet,
+If so we may, our hearts, even while we eat
+The bitter harvest of our own device
+And half a century's moral cowardice.
+As Nurnberg sang while Wittenberg defied,
+And Kranach painted by his Luther's side,
+And through the war-march of the Puritan
+The silver stream of Marvell's music ran,
+So let the household melodies be sung,
+The pleasant pictures on the wall be hung--
+So let us hold against the hosts of night
+And slavery all our vantage-ground of light.
+Let Treason boast its savagery, and shake
+From its flag-folds its symbol rattlesnake,
+Nurse its fine arts, lay human skins in tan,
+And carve its pipe-bowls from the bones of man,
+And make the tale of Fijian banquets dull
+By drinking whiskey from a loyal skull,--
+But let us guard, till this sad war shall cease,
+(God grant it soon!) the graceful arts of peace
+No foes are conquered who the victors teach
+Their vandal manners and barbaric speech.
+
+And while, with hearts of thankfulness, we bear
+Of the great common burden our full share,
+Let none upbraid us that the waves entice
+Thy sea-dipped pencil, or some quaint device,
+Rhythmic, and sweet, beguiles my pen away
+From the sharp strifes and sorrows of to-day.
+Thus, while the east-wind keen from Labrador
+Sings it the leafless elms, and from the shore
+Of the great sea comes the monotonous roar
+Of the long-breaking surf, and all the sky
+Is gray with cloud, home-bound and dull, I try
+To time a simple legend to the sounds
+Of winds in the woods, and waves on pebbled bounds,--
+A song for oars to chime with, such as might
+Be sung by tired sea-painters, who at night
+Look from their hemlock camps, by quiet cove
+Or beach, moon-lighted, on the waves they love.
+(So hast thou looked, when level sunset lay
+On the calm bosom of some Eastern bay,
+And all the spray-moist rocks and waves that rolled
+Up the white sand-slopes flashed with ruddy gold.)
+Something it has--a flavor of the sea,
+And the sea's freedom--which reminds of thee.
+Its faded picture, dimly smiling down
+From the blurred fresco of the ancient town,
+I have not touched with warmer tints in vain,
+If, in this dark, sad year, it steals one thought
+from pain.
+
+         . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+Her fingers shame the ivory keys
+They dance so light along;
+The bloom upon her parted lips
+Is sweeter than the song.
+
+O perfumed suitor, spare thy smiles!
+Her thoughts are not of thee;
+She better loves the salted wind,
+The voices of the sea.
+
+Her heart is like an outbound ship
+That at its anchor swings;
+The murmur of the stranded shell
+Is in the song she sings.
+
+She sings, and, smiling, hears her praise,
+But dreams the while of one
+Who watches from his sea-blown deck
+The icebergs in the sun.
+
+She questions all the winds that blow,
+And every fog-wreath dim,
+And bids the sea-birds flying north
+Bear messages to him.
+
+She speeds them with the thanks of men
+He perilled life to save,
+And grateful prayers like holy oil
+To smooth for him the wave.
+
+Brown Viking of the fishing-smack!
+Fair toast of all the town!--
+The skipper's jerkin ill beseems
+The lady's silken gown!
+
+But ne'er shall Amy Wentworth wear
+For him the blush of shame
+Who dares to set his manly gifts
+Against her ancient name.
+
+The stream is brightest at its spring,
+And blood is not like wine;
+Nor honored less than he who heirs
+Is he who founds a line.
+
+Full lightly shall the prize be won,
+If love be Fortune's spur;
+And never maiden stoops to him
+Who lifts himself to her.
+
+Her home is brave in Jaffrey Street,
+With stately stairways worn
+By feet of old Colonial knights
+And ladies gentle-born.
+
+Still green about its ample porch
+The English ivy twines,
+Trained back to show in English oak
+The herald's carven signs.
+
+And on her, from the wainscot old,
+Ancestral faces frown,--
+And this has worn the soldier's sword,
+And that the judge's gown.
+
+But, strong of will and proud as they,
+She walks the gallery floor
+As if she trod her sailor's deck
+By stormy Labrador.
+
+The sweetbrier blooms on Kittery-side,
+And green are Elliot's bowers;
+Her garden is the pebbled beach,
+The mosses are her flowers.
+
+She looks across the harbor-bar
+To see the white gulls fly;
+His greeting from the Northern sea
+Is in their clanging cry.
+
+She hums a song, and dreams that he,
+As in its romance old,
+Shall homeward ride with silken sails
+And masts of beaten gold!
+
+Oh, rank is good, and gold is fair,
+And high and low mate ill;
+But love has never known a law
+Beyond its own sweet will!
+1862.
+
+
+
+
+THE COUNTESS.
+TO E. W.
+
+I inscribed this poem to Dr. Elias Weld of Haverhill, Massachusetts,
+to whose kindness I was much indebted in my boyhood. He was the one
+cultivated man in the neighborhood. His small but well-chosen library
+was placed at my disposal. He is the "wise old doctor" of Snow-Bound.
+Count Francois de Vipart with his cousin Joseph Rochemont de Poyen came
+to the United States in the early part of the present century. They took
+up their residence at Rocks Village on the Merrimac, where they both
+married. The wife of Count Vipart was Mary Ingalls, who as my father
+remembered her was a very lovely young girl. Her wedding dress, as
+described by a lady still living, was "pink satin with an overdress of
+white lace, and white satin slippers." She died in less than a year
+after her marriage. Her husband returned to his native country. He lies
+buried in the family tomb of the Viparts at Bordeaux.
+
+I KNOW not, Time and Space so intervene,
+Whether, still waiting with a trust serene,
+Thou bearest up thy fourscore years and ten,
+Or, called at last, art now Heaven's citizen;
+But, here or there, a pleasant thought of thee,
+Like an old friend, all day has been with me.
+The shy, still boy, for whom thy kindly hand
+Smoothed his hard pathway to the wonder-land
+Of thought and fancy, in gray manhood yet
+Keeps green the memory of his early debt.
+To-day, when truth and falsehood speak their words
+Through hot-lipped cannon and the teeth of swords,
+Listening with quickened heart and ear intent
+To each sharp clause of that stern argument,
+I still can hear at times a softer note
+Of the old pastoral music round me float,
+While through the hot gleam of our civil strife
+Looms the green mirage of a simpler life.
+As, at his alien post, the sentinel
+Drops the old bucket in the homestead well,
+And hears old voices in the winds that toss
+Above his head the live-oak's beard of moss,
+So, in our trial-time, and under skies
+Shadowed by swords like Islam's paradise,
+I wait and watch, and let my fancy stray
+To milder scenes and youth's Arcadian day;
+And howsoe'er the pencil dipped in dreams
+Shades the brown woods or tints the sunset streams,
+The country doctor in the foreground seems,
+Whose ancient sulky down the village lanes
+Dragged, like a war-car, captive ills and pains.
+I could not paint the scenery of my song,
+Mindless of one who looked thereon so long;
+Who, night and day, on duty's lonely round,
+Made friends o' the woods and rocks, and knew the sound
+Of each small brook, and what the hillside trees
+Said to the winds that touched their leafy keys;
+Who saw so keenly and so well could paint
+The village-folk, with all their humors quaint,
+The parson ambling on his wall-eyed roan.
+Grave and erect, with white hair backward blown;
+The tough old boatman, half amphibious grown;
+The muttering witch-wife of the gossip's tale,
+And the loud straggler levying his blackmail,--
+Old customs, habits, superstitions, fears,
+All that lies buried under fifty years.
+To thee, as is most fit, I bring my lay,
+And, grateful, own the debt I cannot pay.
+
+         . . . . . . . . . .
+
+Over the wooded northern ridge,
+Between its houses brown,
+To the dark tunnel of the bridge
+The street comes straggling down.
+
+You catch a glimpse, through birch and pine,
+Of gable, roof, and porch,
+The tavern with its swinging sign,
+The sharp horn of the church.
+
+The river's steel-blue crescent curves
+To meet, in ebb and flow,
+The single broken wharf that serves
+For sloop and gundelow.
+
+With salt sea-scents along its shores
+The heavy hay-boats crawl,
+The long antennae of their oars
+In lazy rise and fall.
+
+Along the gray abutment's wall
+The idle shad-net dries;
+The toll-man in his cobbler's stall
+Sits smoking with closed eyes.
+
+You hear the pier's low undertone
+Of waves that chafe and gnaw;
+You start,--a skipper's horn is blown
+To raise the creaking draw.
+
+At times a blacksmith's anvil sounds
+With slow and sluggard beat,
+Or stage-coach on its dusty rounds
+Fakes up the staring street.
+
+A place for idle eyes and ears,
+A cobwebbed nook of dreams;
+Left by the stream whose waves are years
+The stranded village seems.
+
+And there, like other moss and rust,
+The native dweller clings,
+And keeps, in uninquiring trust,
+The old, dull round of things.
+
+The fisher drops his patient lines,
+The farmer sows his grain,
+Content to hear the murmuring pines
+Instead of railroad-train.
+
+Go where, along the tangled steep
+That slopes against the west,
+The hamlet's buried idlers sleep
+In still profounder rest.
+
+Throw back the locust's flowery plume,
+The birch's pale-green scarf,
+And break the web of brier and bloom
+From name and epitaph.
+
+A simple muster-roll of death,
+Of pomp and romance shorn,
+The dry, old names that common breath
+Has cheapened and outworn.
+
+Yet pause by one low mound, and part
+The wild vines o'er it laced,
+And read the words by rustic art
+Upon its headstone traced.
+
+Haply yon white-haired villager
+Of fourscore years can say
+What means the noble name of her
+Who sleeps with common clay.
+
+An exile from the Gascon land
+Found refuge here and rest,
+And loved, of all the village band,
+Its fairest and its best.
+
+He knelt with her on Sabbath morns,
+He worshipped through her eyes,
+And on the pride that doubts and scorns
+Stole in her faith's surprise.
+
+Her simple daily life he saw
+By homeliest duties tried,
+In all things by an untaught law
+Of fitness justified.
+
+For her his rank aside he laid;
+He took the hue and tone
+Of lowly life and toil, and made
+Her simple ways his own.
+
+Yet still, in gay and careless ease,
+To harvest-field or dance
+He brought the gentle courtesies,
+The nameless grace of France.
+
+And she who taught him love not less
+From him she loved in turn
+Caught in her sweet unconsciousness
+What love is quick to learn.
+
+Each grew to each in pleased accord,
+Nor knew the gazing town
+If she looked upward to her lord
+Or he to her looked down.
+
+How sweet, when summer's day was o'er,
+His violin's mirth and wail,
+The walk on pleasant Newbury's shore,
+The river's moonlit sail!
+
+Ah! life is brief, though love be long;
+The altar and the bier,
+The burial hymn and bridal song,
+Were both in one short year!
+
+Her rest is quiet on the hill,
+Beneath the locust's bloom
+Far off her lover sleeps as still
+Within his scutcheoned tomb.
+
+The Gascon lord, the village maid,
+In death still clasp their hands;
+The love that levels rank and grade
+Unites their severed lands.
+
+What matter whose the hillside grave,
+Or whose the blazoned stone?
+Forever to her western wave
+Shall whisper blue Garonne!
+
+O Love!--so hallowing every soil
+That gives thy sweet flower room,
+Wherever, nursed by ease or toil,
+The human heart takes bloom!--
+
+Plant of lost Eden, from the sod
+Of sinful earth unriven,
+White blossom of the trees of God
+Dropped down to us from heaven!
+
+This tangled waste of mound and stone
+Is holy for thy sale;
+A sweetness which is all thy own
+Breathes out from fern and brake.
+
+And while ancestral pride shall twine
+The Gascon's tomb with flowers,
+Fall sweetly here, O song of mine,
+With summer's bloom and showers!
+
+And let the lines that severed seem
+Unite again in thee,
+As western wave and Gallic stream
+Are mingled in one sea!
+1863.
+
+
+
+
+AMONG THE HILLS
+
+This poem, when originally published, was dedicated to Annie Fields,
+wife of the distinguished publisher, James T. Fields, of Boston, in
+grateful acknowledgment of the strength and inspiration I have found in
+her friendship and sympathy. The poem in its first form was entitled The
+Wife: an Idyl of Bearcamp Water, and appeared in The Atlantic Monthly
+for January, 1868. When I published the volume Among the Hills, in
+December of the same year, I expanded the Prelude and filled out also
+the outlines of the story.
+
+
+PRELUDE.
+
+ALONG the roadside, like the flowers of gold
+That tawny Incas for their gardens wrought,
+Heavy with sunshine droops the golden-rod,
+And the red pennons of the cardinal-flowers
+Hang motionless upon their upright staves.
+The sky is hot and hazy, and the wind,
+Vying-weary with its long flight from the south,
+Unfelt; yet, closely scanned, yon maple leaf
+With faintest motion, as one stirs in dreams,
+Confesses it. The locust by the wall
+Stabs the noon-silence with his sharp alarm.
+A single hay-cart down the dusty road
+Creaks slowly, with its driver fast asleep
+On the load's top. Against the neighboring hill,
+Huddled along the stone wall's shady side,
+The sheep show white, as if a snowdrift still
+Defied the dog-star. Through the open door
+A drowsy smell of flowers-gray heliotrope,
+And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette--
+Comes faintly in, and silent chorus lends
+To the pervading symphony of peace.
+No time is this for hands long over-worn
+To task their strength; and (unto Him be praise
+Who giveth quietness!) the stress and strain
+Of years that did the work of centuries
+Have ceased, and we can draw our breath once more
+Freely and full. So, as yon harvesters
+Make glad their nooning underneath the elms
+With tale and riddle and old snatch of song,
+I lay aside grave themes, and idly turn
+The leaves of memory's sketch-book, dreaming o'er
+Old summer pictures of the quiet hills,
+And human life, as quiet, at their feet.
+
+And yet not idly all. A farmer's son,
+Proud of field-lore and harvest craft, and feeling
+All their fine possibilities, how rich
+And restful even poverty and toil
+Become when beauty, harmony, and love
+Sit at their humble hearth as angels sat
+At evening in the patriarch's tent, when man
+Makes labor noble, and his farmer's frock
+The symbol of a Christian chivalry
+Tender and just and generous to her
+Who clothes with grace all duty; still, I know
+Too well the picture has another side,--
+How wearily the grind of toil goes on
+Where love is wanting, how the eye and ear
+And heart are starved amidst the plenitude
+Of nature, and how hard and colorless
+Is life without an atmosphere. I look
+Across the lapse of half a century,
+And call to mind old homesteads, where no flower
+Told that the spring had come, but evil weeds,
+Nightshade and rough-leaved burdock in the place
+Of the sweet doorway greeting of the rose
+And honeysuckle, where the house walls seemed
+Blistering in sun, without a tree or vine
+To cast the tremulous shadow of its leaves
+Across the curtainless windows, from whose panes
+Fluttered the signal rags of shiftlessness.
+Within, the cluttered kitchen-floor, unwashed
+(Broom-clean I think they called it); the best room
+Stifling with cellar damp, shut from the air
+In hot midsummer, bookless, pictureless,
+Save the inevitable sampler hung
+Over the fireplace, or a mourning piece,
+A green-haired woman, peony-cheeked, beneath
+Impossible willows; the wide-throated hearth
+Bristling with faded pine-boughs half concealing
+The piled-up rubbish at the chimney's back;
+And, in sad keeping with all things about them,
+Shrill, querulous-women, sour and sullen men,
+Untidy, loveless, old before their time,
+With scarce a human interest save their own
+Monotonous round of small economies,
+Or the poor scandal of the neighborhood;
+Blind to the beauty everywhere revealed,
+Treading the May-flowers with regardless feet;
+For them the song-sparrow and the bobolink
+Sang not, nor winds made music in the leaves;
+For them in vain October's holocaust
+Burned, gold and crimson, over all the hills,
+The sacramental mystery of the woods.
+Church-goers, fearful of the unseen Powers,
+But grumbling over pulpit-tax and pew-rent,
+Saving, as shrewd economists, their souls
+And winter pork with the least possible outlay
+Of salt and sanctity; in daily life
+Showing as little actual comprehension
+Of Christian charity and love and duty,
+As if the Sermon on the Mount had been
+Outdated like a last year's almanac
+Rich in broad woodlands and in half-tilled fields,
+And yet so pinched and bare and comfortless,
+The veriest straggler limping on his rounds,
+The sun and air his sole inheritance,
+Laughed at a poverty that paid its taxes,
+And hugged his rags in self-complacency!
+
+Not such should be the homesteads of a land
+Where whoso wisely wills and acts may dwell
+As king and lawgiver, in broad-acred state,
+With beauty, art, taste, culture, books, to make
+His hour of leisure richer than a life
+Of fourscore to the barons of old time,
+Our yeoman should be equal to his home
+Set in the fair, green valleys, purple walled,
+A man to match his mountains, not to creep
+Dwarfed and abased below them. I would fain
+In this light way (of which I needs must own
+With the knife-grinder of whom Canning sings,
+"Story, God bless you! I have none to tell you!")
+Invite the eye to see and heart to feel
+The beauty and the joy within their reach,--
+Home, and home loves, and the beatitudes
+Of nature free to all. Haply in years
+That wait to take the places of our own,
+Heard where some breezy balcony looks down
+On happy homes, or where the lake in the moon
+Sleeps dreaming of the mountains, fair as Ruth,
+In the old Hebrew pastoral, at the feet
+Of Boaz, even this simple lay of mine
+May seem the burden of a prophecy,
+Finding its late fulfilment in a change
+Slow as the oak's growth, lifting manhood up
+Through broader culture, finer manners, love,
+And reverence, to the level of the hills.
+
+O Golden Age, whose light is of the dawn,
+And not of sunset, forward, not behind,
+Flood the new heavens and earth, and with thee bring
+All the old virtues, whatsoever things
+Are pure and honest and of good repute,
+But add thereto whatever bard has sung
+Or seer has told of when in trance and dream
+They saw the Happy Isles of prophecy
+Let Justice hold her scale, and Truth divide
+Between the right and wrong; but give the heart
+The freedom of its fair inheritance;
+Let the poor prisoner, cramped and starved so long,
+At Nature's table feast his ear and eye
+With joy and wonder; let all harmonies
+Of sound, form, color, motion, wait upon
+The princely guest, whether in soft attire
+Of leisure clad, or the coarse frock of toil,
+And, lending life to the dead form of faith,
+Give human nature reverence for the sake
+Of One who bore it, making it divine
+With the ineffable tenderness of God;
+Let common need, the brotherhood of prayer,
+The heirship of an unknown destiny,
+The unsolved mystery round about us, make
+A man more precious than the gold of Ophir.
+Sacred, inviolate, unto whom all things
+Should minister, as outward types and signs
+Of the eternal beauty which fulfils
+The one great purpose of creation, Love,
+The sole necessity of Earth and Heaven!
+
+         . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+For weeks the clouds had raked the hills
+And vexed the vales with raining,
+And all the woods were sad with mist,
+And all the brooks complaining.
+
+At last, a sudden night-storm tore
+The mountain veils asunder,
+And swept the valleys clean before
+The besom of the thunder.
+
+Through Sandwich notch the west-wind sang
+Good morrow to the cotter;
+And once again Chocorua's horn
+Of shadow pierced the water.
+
+Above his broad lake Ossipee,
+Once more the sunshine wearing,
+Stooped, tracing on that silver shield
+His grim armorial bearing.
+
+Clear drawn against the hard blue sky,
+The peaks had winter's keenness;
+And, close on autumn's frost, the vales
+Had more than June's fresh greenness.
+
+Again the sodden forest floors
+With golden lights were checkered,
+Once more rejoicing leaves in wind
+And sunshine danced and flickered.
+
+It was as if the summer's late
+Atoning for it's sadness
+Had borrowed every season's charm
+To end its days in gladness.
+
+Rivers of gold-mist flowing down
+From far celestial fountains,--
+The great sun flaming through the rifts
+Beyond the wall of mountains.
+
+We paused at last where home-bound cows
+Brought down the pasture's treasure,
+And in the barn the rhythmic flails
+Beat out a harvest measure.
+
+We heard the night-hawk's sullen plunge,
+The crow his tree-mates calling
+The shadows lengthening down the slopes
+About our feet were falling.
+
+And through them smote the level sun
+In broken lines of splendor,
+Touched the gray rocks and made the green
+Of the shorn grass more tender.
+
+The maples bending o'er the gate,
+Their arch of leaves just tinted
+With yellow warmth, the golden glow
+Of coming autumn hinted.
+
+Keen white between the farm-house showed,
+And smiled on porch and trellis,
+The fair democracy of flowers
+That equals cot and palace.
+
+And weaving garlands for her dog,
+'Twixt chidings and caresses,
+A human flower of childhood shook
+The sunshine from her tresses.
+
+Clear drawn against the hard blue sky,
+The peaks had winter's keenness;
+And, close on autumn's frost, the vales
+Had more than June's fresh greenness.
+
+Again the sodden forest floors
+With golden lights were checkered,
+Once more rejoicing leaves in wind
+And sunshine danced and flickered.
+
+It was as if the summer's late
+Atoning for it's sadness
+Had borrowed every season's charm
+To end its days in gladness.
+
+I call to mind those banded vales
+Of shadow and of shining,
+Through which, my hostess at my side,
+I drove in day's declining.
+
+We held our sideling way above
+The river's whitening shallows,
+By homesteads old, with wide-flung barns
+Swept through and through by swallows;
+
+By maple orchards, belts of pine
+And larches climbing darkly
+The mountain slopes, and, over all,
+The great peaks rising starkly.
+
+You should have seen that long hill-range
+With gaps of brightness riven,--
+How through each pass and hollow streamed
+The purpling lights of heaven,--
+
+On either hand we saw the signs
+Of fancy and of shrewdness,
+Where taste had wound its arms of vines
+Round thrift's uncomely rudeness.
+
+The sun-brown farmer in his frock
+Shook hands, and called to Mary
+Bare-armed, as Juno might, she came,
+White-aproned from her dairy.
+
+Her air, her smile, her motions, told
+Of womanly completeness;
+A music as of household songs
+Was in her voice of sweetness.
+
+Not fair alone in curve and line,
+But something more and better,
+The secret charm eluding art,
+Its spirit, not its letter;--
+
+An inborn grace that nothing lacked
+Of culture or appliance,
+The warmth of genial courtesy,
+The calm of self-reliance.
+
+Before her queenly womanhood
+How dared our hostess utter
+The paltry errand of her need
+To buy her fresh-churned butter?
+
+She led the way with housewife pride,
+Her goodly store disclosing,
+Full tenderly the golden balls
+With practised hands disposing.
+
+Then, while along the western hills
+We watched the changeful glory
+Of sunset, on our homeward way,
+I heard her simple story.
+
+The early crickets sang; the stream
+Plashed through my friend's narration
+Her rustic patois of the hills
+Lost in my free-translation.
+
+"More wise," she said, "than those who swarm
+Our hills in middle summer,
+She came, when June's first roses blow,
+To greet the early comer.
+
+"From school and ball and rout she came,
+The city's fair, pale daughter,
+To drink the wine of mountain air
+Beside the Bearcamp Water.
+
+"Her step grew firmer on the hills
+That watch our homesteads over;
+On cheek and lip, from summer fields,
+She caught the bloom of clover.
+
+"For health comes sparkling in the streams
+From cool Chocorua stealing
+There's iron in our Northern winds;
+Our pines are trees of healing.
+
+"She sat beneath the broad-armed elms
+That skirt the mowing-meadow,
+And watched the gentle west-wind weave
+The grass with shine and shadow.
+
+"Beside her, from the summer heat
+To share her grateful screening,
+With forehead bared, the farmer stood,
+Upon his pitchfork leaning.
+
+"Framed in its damp, dark locks, his face
+Had nothing mean or common,--
+Strong, manly, true, the tenderness
+And pride beloved of woman.
+
+"She looked up, glowing with the health
+The country air had brought her,
+And, laughing, said: 'You lack a wife,
+Your mother lacks a daughter.
+
+"'To mend your frock and bake your bread
+You do not need a lady
+Be sure among these brown old homes
+Is some one waiting ready,--
+
+"'Some fair, sweet girl with skilful hand
+And cheerful heart for treasure,
+Who never played with ivory keys,
+Or danced the polka's measure.'
+
+"He bent his black brows to a frown,
+He set his white teeth tightly.
+''T is well,' he said, 'for one like you
+To choose for me so lightly.
+
+"You think, because my life is rude
+I take no note of sweetness
+I tell you love has naught to do
+With meetness or unmeetness.
+
+"'Itself its best excuse, it asks
+No leave of pride or fashion
+When silken zone or homespun frock
+It stirs with throbs of passion.
+
+"'You think me deaf and blind: you bring
+Your winning graces hither
+As free as if from cradle-time
+We two had played together.
+
+"'You tempt me with your laughing eyes,
+Your cheek of sundown's blushes,
+A motion as of waving grain,
+A music as of thrushes.
+
+"'The plaything of your summer sport,
+The spells you weave around me
+You cannot at your will undo,
+Nor leave me as you found me.
+
+"'You go as lightly as you came,
+Your life is well without me;
+What care you that these hills will close
+Like prison-walls about me?
+
+"'No mood is mine to seek a wife,
+Or daughter for my mother
+Who loves you loses in that love
+All power to love another!
+
+"'I dare your pity or your scorn,
+With pride your own exceeding;
+I fling my heart into your lap
+Without a word of pleading.'
+
+"She looked up in his face of pain
+So archly, yet so tender
+'And if I lend you mine,' she said,
+'Will you forgive the lender?
+
+"'Nor frock nor tan can hide the man;
+And see you not, my farmer,
+How weak and fond a woman waits
+Behind this silken armor?
+
+"'I love you: on that love alone,
+And not my worth, presuming,
+Will you not trust for summer fruit
+The tree in May-day blooming?'
+
+"Alone the hangbird overhead,
+His hair-swung cradle straining,
+Looked down to see love's miracle,--
+The giving that is gaining.
+
+"And so the farmer found a wife,
+His mother found a daughter
+There looks no happier home than hers
+On pleasant Bearcamp Water.
+
+"Flowers spring to blossom where she walks
+The careful ways of duty;
+Our hard, stiff lines of life with her
+Are flowing curves of beauty.
+
+"Our homes are cheerier for her sake,
+Our door-yards brighter blooming,
+And all about the social air
+Is sweeter for her coming.
+
+"Unspoken homilies of peace
+Her daily life is preaching;
+The still refreshment of the dew
+Is her unconscious teaching.
+
+"And never tenderer hand than hers
+Unknits the brow of ailing;
+Her garments to the sick man's ear
+Have music in their trailing.
+
+"And when, in pleasant harvest moons,
+The youthful huskers gather,
+Or sleigh-drives on the mountain ways
+Defy the winter weather,--
+
+"In sugar-camps, when south and warm
+The winds of March are blowing,
+And sweetly from its thawing veins
+The maple's blood is flowing,--
+
+"In summer, where some lilied pond
+Its virgin zone is baring,
+Or where the ruddy autumn fire
+Lights up the apple-paring,--
+
+"The coarseness of a ruder time
+Her finer mirth displaces,
+A subtler sense of pleasure fills
+Each rustic sport she graces.
+
+"Her presence lends its warmth and health
+To all who come before it.
+If woman lost us Eden, such
+As she alone restore it.
+
+"For larger life and wiser aims
+The farmer is her debtor;
+Who holds to his another's heart
+Must needs be worse or better.
+
+"Through her his civic service shows
+A purer-toned ambition;
+No double consciousness divides
+The man and politician.
+
+"In party's doubtful ways he trusts
+Her instincts to determine;
+At the loud polls, the thought of her
+Recalls Christ's Mountain Sermon.
+
+"He owns her logic of the heart,
+And wisdom of unreason,
+Supplying, while he doubts and weighs,
+The needed word in season.
+
+"He sees with pride her richer thought,
+Her fancy's freer ranges;
+And love thus deepened to respect
+Is proof against all changes.
+
+"And if she walks at ease in ways
+His feet are slow to travel,
+And if she reads with cultured eyes
+What his may scarce unravel,
+
+"Still clearer, for her keener sight
+Of beauty and of wonder,
+He learns the meaning of the hills
+He dwelt from childhood under.
+
+"And higher, warmed with summer lights,
+Or winter-crowned and hoary,
+The ridged horizon lifts for him
+Its inner veils of glory.
+
+"He has his own free, bookless lore,
+The lessons nature taught him,
+The wisdom which the woods and hills
+And toiling men have brought him:
+
+"The steady force of will whereby
+Her flexile grace seems sweeter;
+The sturdy counterpoise which makes
+Her woman's life completer.
+
+"A latent fire of soul which lacks
+No breath of love to fan it;
+And wit, that, like his native brooks,
+Plays over solid granite.
+
+"How dwarfed against his manliness
+She sees the poor pretension,
+The wants, the aims, the follies, born
+Of fashion and convention.
+
+"How life behind its accidents
+Stands strong and self-sustaining,
+The human fact transcending all
+The losing and the gaining.
+
+"And so in grateful interchange
+Of teacher and of hearer,
+Their lives their true distinctness keep
+While daily drawing nearer.
+
+"And if the husband or the wife
+In home's strong light discovers
+Such slight defaults as failed to meet
+The blinded eyes of lovers,
+
+"Why need we care to ask?--who dreams
+Without their thorns of roses,
+Or wonders that the truest steel
+The readiest spark discloses?
+
+"For still in mutual sufferance lies
+The secret of true living;
+Love scarce is love that never knows
+The sweetness of forgiving.
+
+"We send the Squire to General Court,
+He takes his young wife thither;
+No prouder man election day
+Rides through the sweet June weather.
+
+"He sees with eyes of manly trust
+All hearts to her inclining;
+Not less for him his household light
+That others share its shining."
+
+Thus, while my hostess spake, there grew
+Before me, warmer tinted
+And outlined with a tenderer grace,
+The picture that she hinted.
+
+The sunset smouldered as we drove
+Beneath the deep hill-shadows.
+Below us wreaths of white fog walked
+Like ghosts the haunted meadows.
+
+Sounding the summer night, the stars
+Dropped down their golden plummets;
+The pale arc of the Northern lights
+Rose o'er the mountain summits,
+
+Until, at last, beneath its bridge,
+We heard the Bearcamp flowing,
+And saw across the mapled lawn
+The welcome home lights glowing.
+
+And, musing on the tale I heard,
+'T were well, thought I, if often
+To rugged farm-life came the gift
+To harmonize and soften;
+
+If more and more we found the troth
+Of fact and fancy plighted,
+And culture's charm and labor's strength
+In rural homes united,--
+
+The simple life, the homely hearth,
+With beauty's sphere surrounding,
+And blessing toil where toil abounds
+With graces more abounding.
+1868.
+
+
+
+
+THE DOLE OF JARL THORKELL.
+
+THE land was pale with famine
+And racked with fever-pain;
+The frozen fiords were fishless,
+The earth withheld her grain.
+
+Men saw the boding Fylgja
+Before them come and go,
+And, through their dreams, the Urdarmoon
+From west to east sailed slow.
+
+Jarl Thorkell of Thevera
+At Yule-time made his vow;
+On Rykdal's holy Doom-stone
+He slew to Frey his cow.
+
+To bounteous Frey he slew her;
+To Skuld, the younger Norn,
+Who watches over birth and death,
+He gave her calf unborn.
+
+And his little gold-haired daughter
+Took up the sprinkling-rod,
+And smeared with blood the temple
+And the wide lips of the god.
+
+Hoarse below, the winter water
+Ground its ice-blocks o'er and o'er;
+Jets of foam, like ghosts of dead waves,
+Rose and fell along the shore.
+
+The red torch of the Jokul,
+Aloft in icy space,
+Shone down on the bloody Horg-stones
+And the statue's carven face.
+
+And closer round and grimmer
+Beneath its baleful light
+The Jotun shapes of mountains
+Came crowding through the night.
+
+The gray-haired Hersir trembled
+As a flame by wind is blown;
+A weird power moved his white lips,
+And their voice was not his own.
+
+"The AEsir thirst!" he muttered;
+"The gods must have more blood
+Before the tun shall blossom
+Or fish shall fill the flood.
+
+"The AEsir thirst and hunger,
+And hence our blight and ban;
+The mouths of the strong gods water
+For the flesh and blood of man!
+
+"Whom shall we give the strong ones?
+Not warriors, sword on thigh;
+But let the nursling infant
+And bedrid old man die."
+
+"So be it!" cried the young men,
+"There needs nor doubt nor parle."
+But, knitting hard his red brows,
+In silence stood the Jarl.
+
+A sound of woman's weeping
+At the temple door was heard,
+But the old men bowed their white heads,
+And answered not a word.
+
+Then the Dream-wife of Thingvalla,
+A Vala young and fair,
+Sang softly, stirring with her breath
+The veil of her loose hair.
+
+She sang: "The winds from Alfheim
+Bring never sound of strife;
+The gifts for Frey the meetest
+Are not of death, but life.
+
+"He loves the grass-green meadows,
+The grazing kine's sweet breath;
+He loathes your bloody Horg-stones,
+Your gifts that smell of death.
+
+"No wrong by wrong is righted,
+No pain is cured by pain;
+The blood that smokes from Doom-rings
+Falls back in redder rain.
+
+"The gods are what you make them,
+As earth shall Asgard prove;
+And hate will come of hating,
+And love will come of love.
+
+"Make dole of skyr and black bread
+That old and young may live;
+And look to Frey for favor
+When first like Frey you give.
+
+"Even now o'er Njord's sea-meadows
+The summer dawn begins
+The tun shall have its harvest,
+The fiord its glancing fins."
+
+Then up and swore Jarl Thorkell
+"By Gimli and by Hel,
+O Vala of Thingvalla,
+Thou singest wise and well!
+
+"Too dear the AEsir's favors
+Bought with our children's lives;
+Better die than shame in living
+Our mothers and our wives.
+
+"The full shall give his portion
+To him who hath most need;
+Of curdled skyr and black bread,
+Be daily dole decreed."
+
+He broke from off his neck-chain
+Three links of beaten gold;
+And each man, at his bidding,
+Brought gifts for young and old.
+
+Then mothers nursed their children,
+And daughters fed their sires,
+And Health sat down with Plenty
+Before the next Yule fires.
+
+The Horg-stones stand in Rykdal;
+The Doom-ring still remains;
+But the snows of a thousand winters
+Have washed away the stains.
+
+Christ ruleth now; the Asir
+Have found their twilight dim;
+And, wiser than she dreamed, of old
+The Vala sang of Him
+1868.
+
+
+
+
+THE TWO RABBINS.
+
+THE Rabbi Nathan two-score years and ten
+Walked blameless through the evil world, and then,
+Just as the almond blossomed in his hair,
+Met a temptation all too strong to bear,
+And miserably sinned. So, adding not
+Falsehood to guilt, he left his seat, and taught
+No more among the elders, but went out
+From the great congregation girt about
+With sackcloth, and with ashes on his head,
+Making his gray locks grayer. Long he prayed,
+Smiting his breast; then, as the Book he laid
+Open before him for the Bath-Col's choice,
+Pausing to hear that Daughter of a Voice,
+Behold the royal preacher's words: "A friend
+Loveth at all times, yea, unto the end;
+And for the evil day thy brother lives."
+Marvelling, he said: "It is the Lord who gives
+Counsel in need. At Ecbatana dwells
+Rabbi Ben Isaac, who all men excels
+In righteousness and wisdom, as the trees
+Of Lebanon the small weeds that the bees
+Bow with their weight. I will arise, and lay
+My sins before him."
+
+                        And he went his way
+Barefooted, fasting long, with many prayers;
+But even as one who, followed unawares,
+Suddenly in the darkness feels a hand
+Thrill with its touch his own, and his cheek fanned
+By odors subtly sweet, and whispers near
+Of words he loathes, yet cannot choose but hear,
+So, while the Rabbi journeyed, chanting low
+The wail of David's penitential woe,
+Before him still the old temptation came,
+And mocked him with the motion and the shame
+Of such desires that, shuddering, he abhorred
+Himself; and, crying mightily to the Lord
+To free his soul and cast the demon out,
+Smote with his staff the blankness round about.
+
+At length, in the low light of a spent day,
+The towers of Ecbatana far away
+Rose on the desert's rim; and Nathan, faint
+And footsore, pausing where for some dead saint
+The faith of Islam reared a domed tomb,
+Saw some one kneeling in the shadow, whom
+He greeted kindly: "May the Holy One
+Answer thy prayers, O stranger!" Whereupon
+The shape stood up with a loud cry, and then,
+Clasped in each other's arms, the two gray men
+Wept, praising Him whose gracious providence
+Made their paths one. But straightway, as the sense
+Of his transgression smote him, Nathan tore
+Himself away: "O friend beloved, no more
+Worthy am I to touch thee, for I came,
+Foul from my sins, to tell thee all my shame.
+Haply thy prayers, since naught availeth mine,
+May purge my soul, and make it white like thine.
+Pity me, O Ben Isaac, I have sinned!"
+
+Awestruck Ben Isaac stood. The desert wind
+Blew his long mantle backward, laying bare
+The mournful secret of his shirt of hair.
+"I too, O friend, if not in act," he said,
+"In thought have verily sinned. Hast thou not read,
+'Better the eye should see than that desire
+Should wander?' Burning with a hidden fire
+That tears and prayers quench not, I come to thee
+For pity and for help, as thou to me.
+Pray for me, O my friend!" But Nathan cried,
+"Pray thou for me, Ben Isaac!"
+
+                                Side by side
+In the low sunshine by the turban stone
+They knelt; each made his brother's woe his own,
+Forgetting, in the agony and stress
+Of pitying love, his claim of selfishness;
+Peace, for his friend besought, his own became;
+His prayers were answered in another's name;
+And, when at last they rose up to embrace,
+Each saw God's pardon in his brother's face!
+
+Long after, when his headstone gathered moss,
+Traced on the targum-marge of Onkelos
+In Rabbi Nathan's hand these words were read:
+"_Hope not the cure of sin till Self is dead;
+Forget it in love's service, and the debt
+Thou, canst not pay the angels shall forget;
+Heaven's gate is shut to him who comes alone;
+Save thou a soul, and it shall save thy own!_"
+1868.
+
+
+
+
+NOREMBEGA.
+
+Norembega, or Norimbegue, is the name given by early French fishermen
+and explorers to a fabulous country south of Cape Breton, first
+discovered by Verrazzani in 1524. It was supposed to have a magnificent
+city of the same name on a great river, probably the Penobscot. The site
+of this barbaric city is laid down on a map published at Antwerp in
+1570. In 1604 Champlain sailed in search of the Northern Eldorado,
+twenty-two leagues up the Penobscot from the Isle Haute. He supposed the
+river to be that of Norembega, but wisely came to the conclusion that
+those travellers who told of the great city had never seen it. He saw no
+evidences of anything like civilization, but mentions the finding of a
+cross, very old and mossy, in the woods.
+
+THE winding way the serpent takes
+The mystic water took,
+From where, to count its beaded lakes,
+The forest sped its brook.
+
+A narrow space 'twixt shore and shore,
+For sun or stars to fall,
+While evermore, behind, before,
+Closed in the forest wall.
+
+The dim wood hiding underneath
+Wan flowers without a name;
+Life tangled with decay and death,
+League after league the same.
+
+Unbroken over swamp and hill
+The rounding shadow lay,
+Save where the river cut at will
+A pathway to the day.
+
+Beside that track of air and light,
+Weak as a child unweaned,
+At shut of day a Christian knight
+Upon his henchman leaned.
+
+The embers of the sunset's fires
+Along the clouds burned down;
+"I see," he said, "the domes and spires
+Of Norembega town."
+
+"Alack! the domes, O master mine,
+Are golden clouds on high;
+Yon spire is but the branchless pine
+That cuts the evening sky."
+
+"Oh, hush and hark! What sounds are these
+But chants and holy hymns?"
+"Thou hear'st the breeze that stirs the trees
+Though all their leafy limbs."
+
+"Is it a chapel bell that fills
+The air with its low tone?"
+"Thou hear'st the tinkle of the rills,
+The insect's vesper drone."
+
+"The Christ be praised!--He sets for me
+A blessed cross in sight!"
+"Now, nay, 't is but yon blasted tree
+With two gaunt arms outright!"
+
+"Be it wind so sad or tree so stark,
+It mattereth not, my knave;
+Methinks to funeral hymns I hark,
+The cross is for my grave!
+
+"My life is sped; I shall not see
+My home-set sails again;
+The sweetest eyes of Normandie
+Shall watch for me in vain.
+
+"Yet onward still to ear and eye
+The baffling marvel calls;
+I fain would look before I die
+On Norembega's walls.
+
+"So, haply, it shall be thy part
+At Christian feet to lay
+The mystery of the desert's heart
+My dead hand plucked away.
+
+"Leave me an hour of rest; go thou
+And look from yonder heights;
+Perchance the valley even now
+Is starred with city lights."
+
+The henchman climbed the nearest hill,
+He saw nor tower nor town,
+But, through the drear woods, lone and still,
+The river rolling down.
+
+He heard the stealthy feet of things
+Whose shapes he could not see,
+A flutter as of evil wings,
+The fall of a dead tree.
+
+The pines stood black against the moon,
+A sword of fire beyond;
+He heard the wolf howl, and the loon
+Laugh from his reedy pond.
+
+He turned him back: "O master dear,
+We are but men misled;
+And thou hast sought a city here
+To find a grave instead."
+
+"As God shall will! what matters where
+A true man's cross may stand,
+So Heaven be o'er it here as there
+In pleasant Norman land?
+
+"These woods, perchance, no secret hide
+Of lordly tower and hall;
+Yon river in its wanderings wide
+Has washed no city wall;
+
+"Yet mirrored in the sullen stream
+The holy stars are given
+Is Norembega, then, a dream
+Whose waking is in Heaven?
+
+"No builded wonder of these lands
+My weary eyes shall see;
+A city never made with hands
+Alone awaiteth me--
+
+"'_Urbs Syon mystica_;' I see
+Its mansions passing fair,
+'_Condita caelo_;' let me be,
+Dear Lord, a dweller there!"
+
+Above the dying exile hung
+The vision of the bard,
+As faltered on his failing tongue
+The song of good Bernard.
+
+The henchman dug at dawn a grave
+Beneath the hemlocks brown,
+And to the desert's keeping gave
+The lord of fief and town.
+
+Years after, when the Sieur Champlain
+Sailed up the unknown stream,
+And Norembega proved again
+A shadow and a dream,
+
+He found the Norman's nameless grave
+Within the hemlock's shade,
+And, stretching wide its arms to save,
+The sign that God had made,
+
+The cross-boughed tree that marked the spot
+And made it holy ground
+He needs the earthly city not
+Who hath the heavenly found.
+1869.
+
+
+
+
+MIRIAM.
+
+TO FREDERICK A. P. BARNARD.
+
+THE years are many since, in youth and hope,
+Under the Charter Oak, our horoscope
+We drew thick-studded with all favoring stars.
+Now, with gray beards, and faces seamed with scars
+From life's hard battle, meeting once again,
+We smile, half sadly, over dreams so vain;
+Knowing, at last, that it is not in man
+Who walketh to direct his steps, or plan
+His permanent house of life. Alike we loved
+The muses' haunts, and all our fancies moved
+To measures of old song. How since that day
+Our feet have parted from the path that lay
+So fair before us! Rich, from lifelong search
+Of truth, within thy Academic porch
+Thou sittest now, lord of a realm of fact,
+Thy servitors the sciences exact;
+Still listening with thy hand on Nature's keys,
+To hear the Samian's spheral harmonies
+And rhythm of law. I called from dream and song,
+Thank God! so early to a strife so long,
+That, ere it closed, the black, abundant hair
+Of boyhood rested silver-sown and spare
+On manhood's temples, now at sunset-chime
+Tread with fond feet the path of morning time.
+And if perchance too late I linger where
+The flowers have ceased to blow, and trees are bare,
+Thou, wiser in thy choice, wilt scarcely blame
+The friend who shields his folly with thy name.
+AMESBURY, 10th mo., 1870.
+
+      . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+One Sabbath day my friend and I
+After the meeting, quietly
+Passed from the crowded village lanes,
+White with dry dust for lack of rains,
+And climbed the neighboring slope, with feet
+Slackened and heavy from the heat,
+Although the day was wellnigh done,
+And the low angle of the sun
+Along the naked hillside cast
+Our shadows as of giants vast.
+We reached, at length, the topmost swell,
+Whence, either way, the green turf fell
+In terraces of nature down
+To fruit-hung orchards, and the town
+With white, pretenceless houses, tall
+Church-steeples, and, o'ershadowing all,
+Huge mills whose windows had the look
+Of eager eyes that ill could brook
+The Sabbath rest. We traced the track
+Of the sea-seeking river back,
+Glistening for miles above its mouth,
+Through the long valley to the south,
+And, looking eastward, cool to view,
+Stretched the illimitable blue
+Of ocean, from its curved coast-line;
+Sombred and still, the warm sunshine
+Filled with pale gold-dust all the reach
+Of slumberous woods from hill to beach,--
+Slanted on walls of thronged retreats
+From city toil and dusty streets,
+On grassy bluff, and dune of sand,
+And rocky islands miles from land;
+Touched the far-glancing sails, and showed
+White lines of foam where long waves flowed
+Dumb in the distance. In the north,
+Dim through their misty hair, looked forth
+The space-dwarfed mountains to the sea,
+From mystery to mystery!
+
+So, sitting on that green hill-slope,
+We talked of human life, its hope
+And fear, and unsolved doubts, and what
+It might have been, and yet was not.
+And, when at last the evening air
+Grew sweeter for the bells of prayer
+Ringing in steeples far below,
+We watched the people churchward go,
+Each to his place, as if thereon
+The true shekinah only shone;
+And my friend queried how it came
+To pass that they who owned the same
+Great Master still could not agree
+To worship Him in company.
+Then, broadening in his thought, he ran
+Over the whole vast field of man,--
+The varying forms of faith and creed
+That somehow served the holders' need;
+In which, unquestioned, undenied,
+Uncounted millions lived and died;
+The bibles of the ancient folk,
+Through which the heart of nations spoke;
+The old moralities which lent
+To home its sweetness and content,
+And rendered possible to bear
+The life of peoples everywhere
+And asked if we, who boast of light,
+Claim not a too exclusive right
+To truths which must for all be meant,
+Like rain and sunshine freely sent.
+In bondage to the letter still,
+We give it power to cramp and kill,--
+To tax God's fulness with a scheme
+Narrower than Peter's house-top dream,
+His wisdom and his love with plans
+Poor and inadequate as man's.
+It must be that He witnesses
+Somehow to all men that He is
+That something of His saving grace
+Reaches the lowest of the race,
+Who, through strange creed and rite, may draw
+The hints of a diviner law.
+We walk in clearer light;--but then,
+Is He not God?--are they not men?
+Are His responsibilities
+For us alone and not for these?
+
+And I made answer: "Truth is one;
+And, in all lands beneath the sun,
+Whoso hath eyes to see may see
+The tokens of its unity.
+No scroll of creed its fulness wraps,
+We trace it not by school-boy maps,
+Free as the sun and air it is
+Of latitudes and boundaries.
+In Vedic verse, in dull Koran,
+Are messages of good to man;
+The angels to our Aryan sires
+Talked by the earliest household fires;
+The prophets of the elder day,
+The slant-eyed sages of Cathay,
+Read not the riddle all amiss
+Of higher life evolved from this.
+
+"Nor doth it lessen what He taught,
+Or make the gospel Jesus brought
+Less precious, that His lips retold
+Some portion of that truth of old;
+Denying not the proven seers,
+The tested wisdom of the years;
+Confirming with his own impress
+The common law of righteousness.
+We search the world for truth; we cull
+The good, the pure, the beautiful,
+From graven stone and written scroll,
+From all old flower-fields of the soul;
+And, weary seekers of the best,
+We come back laden from our quest,
+To find that all the sages said
+Is in the Book our mothers read,
+And all our treasure of old thought
+In His harmonious fulness wrought
+Who gathers in one sheaf complete
+The scattered blades of God's sown wheat,
+The common growth that maketh good
+His all-embracing Fatherhood.
+
+"Wherever through the ages rise
+The altars of self-sacrifice,
+Where love its arms has opened wide,
+Or man for man has calmly died,
+I see the same white wings outspread
+That hovered o'er the Master's head!
+Up from undated time they come,
+The martyr souls of heathendom,
+And to His cross and passion bring
+Their fellowship of suffering.
+I trace His presence in the blind
+Pathetic gropings of my kind,--
+In prayers from sin and sorrow wrung,
+In cradle-hymns of life they sung,
+Each, in its measure, but a part
+Of the unmeasured Over-Heart;
+And with a stronger faith confess
+The greater that it owns the less.
+Good cause it is for thankfulness
+That the world-blessing of His life
+With the long past is not at strife;
+That the great marvel of His death
+To the one order witnesseth,
+No doubt of changeless goodness wakes,
+No link of cause and sequence breaks,
+But, one with nature, rooted is
+In the eternal verities;
+Whereby, while differing in degree
+As finite from infinity,
+The pain and loss for others borne,
+Love's crown of suffering meekly worn,
+The life man giveth for his friend
+Become vicarious in the end;
+Their healing place in nature take,
+And make life sweeter for their sake.
+
+"So welcome I from every source
+The tokens of that primal Force,
+Older than heaven itself, yet new
+As the young heart it reaches to,
+Beneath whose steady impulse rolls
+The tidal wave of human souls;
+Guide, comforter, and inward word,
+The eternal spirit of the Lord
+Nor fear I aught that science brings
+From searching through material things;
+Content to let its glasses prove,
+Not by the letter's oldness move,
+The myriad worlds on worlds that course
+The spaces of the universe;
+Since everywhere the Spirit walks
+The garden of the heart, and talks
+With man, as under Eden's trees,
+In all his varied languages.
+Why mourn above some hopeless flaw
+In the stone tables of the law,
+When scripture every day afresh
+Is traced on tablets of the flesh?
+By inward sense, by outward signs,
+God's presence still the heart divines;
+Through deepest joy of Him we learn,
+In sorest grief to Him we turn,
+And reason stoops its pride to share
+The child-like instinct of a prayer."
+
+And then, as is my wont, I told
+A story of the days of old,
+Not found in printed books,--in sooth,
+A fancy, with slight hint of truth,
+Showing how differing faiths agree
+In one sweet law of charity.
+Meanwhile the sky had golden grown,
+Our faces in its glory shone;
+But shadows down the valley swept,
+And gray below the ocean slept,
+As time and space I wandered o'er
+To tread the Mogul's marble floor,
+And see a fairer sunset fall
+On Jumna's wave and Agra's wall.
+
+The good Shah Akbar (peace be his alway!)
+Came forth from the Divan at close of day
+Bowed with the burden of his many cares,
+Worn with the hearing of unnumbered prayers,--
+Wild cries for justice, the importunate
+Appeals of greed and jealousy and hate,
+And all the strife of sect and creed and rite,
+Santon and Gouroo waging holy fight
+For the wise monarch, claiming not to be
+Allah's avenger, left his people free,
+With a faint hope, his Book scarce justified,
+That all the paths of faith, though severed wide,
+O'er which the feet of prayerful reverence passed,
+Met at the gate of Paradise at last.
+
+He sought an alcove of his cool hareem,
+Where, far beneath, he heard the Jumna's stream
+Lapse soft and low along his palace wall,
+And all about the cool sound of the fall
+Of fountains, and of water circling free
+Through marble ducts along the balcony;
+The voice of women in the distance sweet,
+And, sweeter still, of one who, at his feet,
+Soothed his tired ear with songs of a far land
+Where Tagus shatters on the salt sea-sand
+The mirror of its cork-grown hills of drouth
+And vales of vine, at Lisbon's harbor-mouth.
+
+The date-palms rustled not; the peepul laid
+Its topmost boughs against the balustrade,
+Motionless as the mimic leaves and vines
+That, light and graceful as the shawl-designs
+Of Delhi or Umritsir, twined in stone;
+And the tired monarch, who aside had thrown
+The day's hard burden, sat from care apart,
+And let the quiet steal into his heart
+From the still hour. Below him Agra slept,
+By the long light of sunset overswept
+The river flowing through a level land,
+By mango-groves and banks of yellow sand,
+Skirted with lime and orange, gay kiosks,
+Fountains at play, tall minarets of mosques,
+Fair pleasure-gardens, with their flowering trees
+Relieved against the mournful cypresses;
+And, air-poised lightly as the blown sea-foam,
+The marble wonder of some holy dome
+Hung a white moonrise over the still wood,
+Glassing its beauty in a stiller flood.
+
+Silent the monarch gazed, until the night
+Swift-falling hid the city from his sight;
+Then to the woman at his feet he said
+"Tell me, O Miriam, something thou hast read
+In childhood of the Master of thy faith,
+Whom Islam also owns. Our Prophet saith
+'He was a true apostle, yea, a Word
+And Spirit sent before me from the Lord.'
+Thus the Book witnesseth; and well I know
+By what thou art, O dearest, it is so.
+As the lute's tone the maker's hand betrays,
+The sweet disciple speaks her Master's praise."
+
+Then Miriam, glad of heart, (for in some sort
+She cherished in the Moslem's liberal court
+The sweet traditions of a Christian child;
+And, through her life of sense, the undefiled
+And chaste ideal of the sinless One
+Gazed on her with an eye she might not shun,--
+The sad, reproachful look of pity, born
+Of love that hath no part in wrath or scorn,)
+Began, with low voice and moist eyes, to tell
+Of the all-loving Christ, and what befell
+When the fierce zealots, thirsting for her blood,
+Dragged to his feet a shame of womanhood.
+How, when his searching answer pierced within
+Each heart, and touched the secret of its sin,
+And her accusers fled his face before,
+He bade the poor one go and sin no more.
+And Akbar said, after a moment's thought,
+"Wise is the lesson by thy prophet taught;
+Woe unto him who judges and forgets
+What hidden evil his own heart besets!
+Something of this large charity I find
+In all the sects that sever human kind;
+I would to Allah that their lives agreed
+More nearly with the lesson of their creed!
+Those yellow Lamas who at Meerut pray
+By wind and water power, and love to say
+'He who forgiveth not shall, unforgiven,
+Fail of the rest of Buddha,' and who even
+Spare the black gnat that stings them, vex my ears
+With the poor hates and jealousies and fears
+Nursed in their human hives. That lean, fierce priest
+Of thy own people, (be his heart increased
+By Allah's love!) his black robes smelling yet
+Of Goa's roasted Jews, have I not met
+Meek-faced, barefooted, crying in the street
+The saying of his prophet true and sweet,--
+'He who is merciful shall mercy meet!'"
+
+But, next day, so it chanced, as night began
+To fall, a murmur through the hareem ran
+That one, recalling in her dusky face
+The full-lipped, mild-eyed beauty of a race
+Known as the blameless Ethiops of Greek song,
+Plotting to do her royal master wrong,
+Watching, reproachful of the lingering light,
+The evening shadows deepen for her flight,
+Love-guided, to her home in a far land,
+Now waited death at the great Shah's command.
+Shapely as that dark princess for whose smile
+A world was bartered, daughter of the Nile
+Herself, and veiling in her large, soft eyes
+The passion and the languor of her skies,
+The Abyssinian knelt low at the feet
+Of her stern lord: "O king, if it be meet,
+And for thy honor's sake," she said, "that I,
+Who am the humblest of thy slaves, should die,
+I will not tax thy mercy to forgive.
+Easier it is to die than to outlive
+All that life gave me,--him whose wrong of thee
+Was but the outcome of his love for me,
+Cherished from childhood, when, beneath the shade
+Of templed Axum, side by side we played.
+Stolen from his arms, my lover followed me
+Through weary seasons over land and sea;
+And two days since, sitting disconsolate
+Within the shadow of the hareem gate,
+Suddenly, as if dropping from the sky,
+Down from the lattice of the balcony
+Fell the sweet song by Tigre's cowherds sung
+In the old music of his native tongue.
+He knew my voice, for love is quick of ear,
+Answering in song.
+
+                     This night he waited near
+To fly with me. The fault was mine alone
+He knew thee not, he did but seek his own;
+Who, in the very shadow of thy throne,
+Sharing thy bounty, knowing all thou art,
+Greatest and best of men, and in her heart
+Grateful to tears for favor undeserved,
+Turned ever homeward, nor one moment swerved
+From her young love. He looked into my eyes,
+He heard my voice, and could not otherwise
+Than he hath done; yet, save one wild embrace
+When first we stood together face to face,
+And all that fate had done since last we met
+Seemed but a dream that left us children yet,
+He hath not wronged thee nor thy royal bed;
+Spare him, O king! and slay me in his stead!"
+
+But over Akbar's brows the frown hung black,
+And, turning to the eunuch at his back,
+"Take them," he said, "and let the Jumna's waves
+Hide both my shame and these accursed slaves!"
+His loathly length the unsexed bondman bowed
+"On my head be it!"
+
+                      Straightway from a cloud
+Of dainty shawls and veils of woven mist
+The Christian Miriam rose, and, stooping, kissed
+The monarch's hand. Loose down her shoulders bare
+Swept all the rippled darkness of her hair,
+Veiling the bosom that, with high, quick swell
+Of fear and pity, through it rose and fell.
+
+"Alas!" she cried, "hast thou forgotten quite
+The words of Him we spake of yesternight?
+Or thy own prophet's, 'Whoso doth endure
+And pardon, of eternal life is sure'?
+O great and good! be thy revenge alone
+Felt in thy mercy to the erring shown;
+Let thwarted love and youth their pardon plead,
+Who sinned but in intent, and not in deed!"
+
+One moment the strong frame of Akbar shook
+With the great storm of passion. Then his look
+Softened to her uplifted face, that still
+Pleaded more strongly than all words, until
+Its pride and anger seemed like overblown,
+Spent clouds of thunder left to tell alone
+Of strife and overcoming. With bowed head,
+And smiting on his bosom: "God," he said,
+"Alone is great, and let His holy name
+Be honored, even to His servant's shame!
+Well spake thy prophet, Miriam,--he alone
+Who hath not sinned is meet to cast a stone
+At such as these, who here their doom await,
+Held like myself in the strong grasp of fate.
+They sinned through love, as I through love forgive;
+Take them beyond my realm, but let them live!"
+
+And, like a chorus to the words of grace,
+The ancient Fakir, sitting in his place,
+Motionless as an idol and as grim,
+In the pavilion Akbar built for him
+Under the court-yard trees, (for he was wise,
+Knew Menu's laws, and through his close-shut eyes
+Saw things far off, and as an open book
+Into the thoughts of other men could look,)
+Began, half chant, half howling, to rehearse
+The fragment of a holy Vedic verse;
+And thus it ran: "He who all things forgives
+Conquers himself and all things else, and lives
+Above the reach of wrong or hate or fear,
+Calm as the gods, to whom he is most dear."
+
+Two leagues from Agra still the traveller sees
+The tomb of Akbar through its cypress-trees;
+And, near at hand, the marble walls that hide
+The Christian Begum sleeping at his side.
+And o'er her vault of burial (who shall tell
+If it be chance alone or miracle?)
+The Mission press with tireless hand unrolls
+The words of Jesus on its lettered scrolls,--
+Tells, in all tongues, the tale of mercy o'er,
+And bids the guilty, "Go and sin no more!"
+
+        . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+It now was dew-fall; very still
+The night lay on the lonely hill,
+Down which our homeward steps we bent,
+And, silent, through great silence went,
+Save that the tireless crickets played
+Their long, monotonous serenade.
+A young moon, at its narrowest,
+Curved sharp against the darkening west;
+And, momently, the beacon's star,
+Slow wheeling o'er its rock afar,
+From out the level darkness shot
+One instant and again was not.
+And then my friend spake quietly
+The thought of both: "Yon crescent see!
+Like Islam's symbol-moon it gives
+Hints of the light whereby it lives
+Somewhat of goodness, something true
+From sun and spirit shining through
+All faiths, all worlds, as through the dark
+Of ocean shines the lighthouse spark,
+Attests the presence everywhere
+Of love and providential care.
+The faith the old Norse heart confessed
+In one dear name,--the hopefulest
+And tenderest heard from mortal lips
+In pangs of birth or death, from ships
+Ice-bitten in the winter sea,
+Or lisped beside a mother's knee,--
+The wiser world hath not outgrown,
+And the All-Father is our own!"
+
+
+
+
+NAUHAUGHT, THE DEACON.
+
+NAUHAUGHT, the Indian deacon, who of old
+Dwelt, poor but blameless, where his narrowing Cape
+Stretches its shrunk arm out to all the winds
+And the relentless smiting of the waves,
+Awoke one morning from a pleasant dream
+Of a good angel dropping in his hand
+A fair, broad gold-piece, in the name of God.
+
+He rose and went forth with the early day
+Far inland, where the voices of the waves
+Mellowed and Mingled with the whispering leaves,
+As, through the tangle of the low, thick woods,
+He searched his traps. Therein nor beast nor bird
+He found; though meanwhile in the reedy pools
+The otter plashed, and underneath the pines
+The partridge drummed: and as his thoughts went back
+To the sick wife and little child at home,
+What marvel that the poor man felt his faith
+Too weak to bear its burden,--like a rope
+That, strand by strand uncoiling, breaks above
+The hand that grasps it. "Even now, O Lord!
+Send me," he prayed, "the angel of my dream!
+Nauhaught is very poor; he cannot wait."
+
+Even as he spake he heard at his bare feet
+A low, metallic clink, and, looking down,
+He saw a dainty purse with disks of gold
+Crowding its silken net. Awhile he held
+The treasure up before his eyes, alone
+With his great need, feeling the wondrous coins
+Slide through his eager fingers, one by one.
+So then the dream was true. The angel brought
+One broad piece only; should he take all these?
+Who would be wiser, in the blind, dumb woods?
+The loser, doubtless rich, would scarcely miss
+This dropped crumb from a table always full.
+Still, while he mused, he seemed to hear the cry
+Of a starved child; the sick face of his wife
+Tempted him. Heart and flesh in fierce revolt
+Urged the wild license of his savage youth
+Against his later scruples. Bitter toil,
+Prayer, fasting, dread of blame, and pitiless eyes
+To watch his halting,--had he lost for these
+The freedom of the woods;--the hunting-grounds
+Of happy spirits for a walled-in heaven
+Of everlasting psalms? One healed the sick
+Very far off thousands of moons ago
+Had he not prayed him night and day to come
+And cure his bed-bound wife? Was there a hell?
+Were all his fathers' people writhing there--
+Like the poor shell-fish set to boil alive--
+Forever, dying never? If he kept
+This gold, so needed, would the dreadful God
+Torment him like a Mohawk's captive stuck
+With slow-consuming splinters? Would the saints
+And the white angels dance and laugh to see him
+Burn like a pitch-pine torch? His Christian garb
+Seemed falling from him; with the fear and shame
+Of Adam naked at the cool of day,
+He gazed around. A black snake lay in coil
+On the hot sand, a crow with sidelong eye
+Watched from a dead bough. All his Indian lore
+Of evil blending with a convert's faith
+In the supernal terrors of the Book,
+He saw the Tempter in the coiling snake
+And ominous, black-winged bird; and all the while
+The low rebuking of the distant waves
+Stole in upon him like the voice of God
+Among the trees of Eden. Girding up
+His soul's loins with a resolute hand, he thrust
+The base thought from him: "Nauhaught, be a man
+Starve, if need be; but, while you live, look out
+From honest eyes on all men, unashamed.
+God help me! I am deacon of the church,
+A baptized, praying Indian! Should I do
+This secret meanness, even the barken knots
+Of the old trees would turn to eyes to see it,
+The birds would tell of it, and all the leaves
+Whisper above me: 'Nauhaught is a thief!'
+The sun would know it, and the stars that hide
+Behind his light would watch me, and at night
+Follow me with their sharp, accusing eyes.
+Yea, thou, God, seest me!" Then Nauhaught drew
+Closer his belt of leather, dulling thus
+The pain of hunger, and walked bravely back
+To the brown fishing-hamlet by the sea;
+And, pausing at the inn-door, cheerily asked
+"Who hath lost aught to-day?"
+"I," said a voice;
+"Ten golden pieces, in a silken purse,
+My daughter's handiwork." He looked, and to
+One stood before him in a coat of frieze,
+And the glazed hat of a seafaring man,
+Shrewd-faced, broad-shouldered, with no trace of wings.
+Marvelling, he dropped within the stranger's hand
+The silken web, and turned to go his way.
+But the man said: "A tithe at least is yours;
+Take it in God's name as an honest man."
+And as the deacon's dusky fingers closed
+Over the golden gift, "Yea, in God's name
+I take it, with a poor man's thanks," he said.
+So down the street that, like a river of sand,
+Ran, white in sunshine, to the summer sea,
+He sought his home singing and praising God;
+And when his neighbors in their careless way
+Spoke of the owner of the silken purse--
+A Wellfleet skipper, known in every port
+That the Cape opens in its sandy wall--
+He answered, with a wise smile, to himself
+"I saw the angel where they see a man."
+1870.
+
+
+
+THE SISTERS.
+
+ANNIE and Rhoda, sisters twain,
+Woke in the night to the sound of rain,
+
+The rush of wind, the ramp and roar
+Of great waves climbing a rocky shore.
+
+Annie rose up in her bed-gown white,
+And looked out into the storm and night.
+
+"Hush, and hearken!" she cried in fear,
+"Hearest thou nothing, sister dear?"
+
+"I hear the sea, and the plash of rain,
+And roar of the northeast hurricane.
+
+"Get thee back to the bed so warm,
+No good comes of watching a storm.
+
+"What is it to thee, I fain would know,
+That waves are roaring and wild winds blow?
+
+"No lover of thine's afloat to miss
+The harbor-lights on a night like this."
+
+"But I heard a voice cry out my name,
+Up from the sea on the wind it came.
+
+"Twice and thrice have I heard it call,
+And the voice is the voice of Estwick Hall!"
+
+On her pillow the sister tossed her head.
+"Hall of the Heron is safe," she said.
+
+"In the tautest schooner that ever swam
+He rides at anchor in Anisquam.
+
+"And, if in peril from swamping sea
+Or lee shore rocks, would he call on thee?"
+
+But the girl heard only the wind and tide,
+And wringing her small white hands she cried,
+
+"O sister Rhoda, there's something wrong;
+I hear it again, so loud and long.
+
+"'Annie! Annie!' I hear it call,
+And the voice is the voice of Estwick Hall!"
+
+Up sprang the elder, with eyes aflame,
+"Thou liest! He never would call thy name!
+
+"If he did, I would pray the wind and sea
+To keep him forever from thee and me!"
+
+Then out of the sea blew a dreadful blast;
+Like the cry of a dying man it passed.
+
+The young girl hushed on her lips a groan,
+But through her tears a strange light shone,--
+
+The solemn joy of her heart's release
+To own and cherish its love in peace.
+
+"Dearest!" she whispered, under breath,
+"Life was a lie, but true is death.
+
+"The love I hid from myself away
+Shall crown me now in the light of day.
+
+"My ears shall never to wooer list,
+Never by lover my lips be kissed.
+
+"Sacred to thee am I henceforth,
+Thou in heaven and I on earth!"
+
+She came and stood by her sister's bed
+"Hall of the Heron is dead!" she said.
+
+"The wind and the waves their work have done,
+We shall see him no more beneath the sun.
+
+"Little will reek that heart of thine,
+It loved him not with a love like mine.
+
+"I, for his sake, were he but here,
+Could hem and 'broider thy bridal gear,
+
+"Though hands should tremble and eyes be wet,
+And stitch for stitch in my heart be set.
+
+"But now my soul with his soul I wed;
+Thine the living, and mine the dead!"
+1871.
+
+
+
+
+MARGUERITE.
+
+MASSACHUSETTS BAY, 1760.
+
+Upwards of one thousand of the Acadian peasants forcibly taken from
+their homes on the Gaspereau and Basin of Minas were assigned to the
+several towns of the Massachusetts colony, the children being bound by
+the authorities to service or labor.
+
+THE robins sang in the orchard, the buds into
+blossoms grew;
+Little of human sorrow the buds and the robins
+knew!
+Sick, in an alien household, the poor French
+neutral lay;
+Into her lonesome garret fell the light of the April
+day,
+Through the dusty window, curtained by the spider's
+warp and woof,
+On the loose-laid floor of hemlock, on oaken ribs
+of roof,
+The bedquilt's faded patchwork, the teacups on the
+stand,
+The wheel with flaxen tangle, as it dropped from
+her sick hand.
+
+What to her was the song of the robin, or warm
+morning light,
+As she lay in the trance of the dying, heedless of
+sound or sight?
+
+Done was the work of her bands, she had eaten her
+bitter bread;
+The world of the alien people lay behind her dim
+and dead.
+
+But her soul went back to its child-time; she saw
+the sun o'erflow
+With gold the Basin of Minas, and set over
+Gaspereau;
+
+The low, bare flats at ebb-tide, the rush of the sea
+at flood,
+Through inlet and creek and river, from dike to
+upland wood;
+
+The gulls in the red of morning, the fish-hawk's
+rise and fall,
+The drift of the fog in moonshine, over the dark
+coast-wall.
+
+She saw the face of her mother, she heard the song
+she sang;
+And far off, faintly, slowly, the bell for vespers
+rang.
+
+By her bed the hard-faced mistress sat, smoothing
+the wrinkled sheet,
+Peering into the face, so helpless, and feeling the
+ice-cold feet.
+
+With a vague remorse atoning for her greed and
+long abuse,
+By care no longer heeded and pity too late for use.
+
+Up the stairs of the garret softly the son of the
+mistress stepped,
+Leaned over the head-board, covering his face with
+his hands, and wept.
+
+Outspake the mother, who watched him sharply,
+with brow a-frown
+"What! love you the Papist, the beggar, the
+charge of the town?"
+
+Be she Papist or beggar who lies here, I know
+and God knows
+I love her, and fain would go with her wherever
+she goes!
+
+"O mother! that sweet face came pleading, for
+love so athirst.
+You saw but the town-charge; I knew her God's
+angel at first."
+
+Shaking her gray head, the mistress hushed down
+a bitter cry;
+And awed by the silence and shadow of death
+drawing nigh,
+
+She murmured a psalm of the Bible; but closer
+the young girl pressed,
+With the last of her life in her fingers, the cross
+to her breast.
+
+"My son, come away," cried the mother, her voice
+cruel grown.
+"She is joined to her idols, like Ephraim; let her
+alone!"
+
+But he knelt with his hand on her forehead, his
+lips to her ear,
+And he called back the soul that was passing
+"Marguerite, do you hear?"
+
+She paused on the threshold of Heaven; love, pity,
+surprise,
+Wistful, tender, lit up for an instant the cloud of
+her eyes.
+
+With his heart on his lips he kissed her, but never
+her cheek grew red,
+And the words the living long for he spake in the
+ear of the dead.
+
+And the robins sang in the orchard, where buds to
+blossoms grew;
+Of the folded hands and the still face never the
+robins knew!
+1871.
+
+
+
+
+THE ROBIN.
+MY old Welsh neighbor over the way
+Crept slowly out in the sun of spring,
+Pushed from her ears the locks of gray,
+And listened to hear the robin sing.
+
+Her grandson, playing at marbles, stopped,
+And, cruel in sport as boys will be,
+Tossed a stone at the bird, who hopped
+From bough to bough in the apple-tree.
+
+"Nay!" said the grandmother; "have you not heard,
+My poor, bad boy! of the fiery pit,
+And how, drop by drop, this merciful bird
+Carries the water that quenches it?
+
+"He brings cool dew in his little bill,
+And lets it fall on the souls of sin
+You can see the mark on his red breast still
+Of fires that scorch as he drops it in.
+
+"My poor Bron rhuddyn! my breast-burned bird,
+Singing so sweetly from limb to limb,
+Very dear to the heart of Our Lord
+Is he who pities the lost like Him!"
+
+"Amen!" I said to the beautiful myth;
+"Sing, bird of God, in my heart as well:
+Each good thought is a drop wherewith
+To cool and lessen the fires of hell.
+
+"Prayers of love like rain-drops fall,
+Tears of pity are cooling dew,
+And dear to the heart of Our Lord are all
+Who suffer like Him in the good they do!"
+1871.
+
+
+
+
+THE PENNSYLVANIA PILGRIM.
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE.
+
+THE beginning of German emigration to America may be traced to the
+personal influence of William Penn, who in 1677 visited the Continent,
+and made the acquaintance of an intelligent and highly cultivated circle
+of Pietists, or Mystics, who, reviving in the seventeenth century the
+spiritual faith and worship of Tauler and the "Friends of God" in the
+fourteenth, gathered about the pastor Spener, and the young and
+beautiful Eleonora Johanna Von Merlau. In this circle originated the
+Frankfort Land Company, which bought of William Penn, the Governor of
+Pennsylvania, a tract of land near the new city of Philadelphia. The
+company's agent in the New World was a rising young lawyer, Francis
+Daniel Pastorius, son of Judge Pastorius, of Windsheim, who, at the age
+of seventeen, entered the University of Altorf. He studied law at,
+Strasburg, Basle, and Jena, and at Ratisbon, the seat of the Imperial
+Government, obtained a practical knowledge of international polity.
+Successful in all his examinations and disputations, he received the
+degree of Doctor of Law at Nuremberg in 1676. In 1679 he was a
+law-lecturer at Frankfort, where he became deeply interested in the
+teachings of Dr. Spener. In 1680-81 he travelled in France, England,
+Ireland, and Italy with his friend Herr Von Rodeck. "I was," he says,
+"glad to enjoy again the company of my Christian friends, rather than be
+with Von Rodeck feasting and dancing." In 1683, in company with a small
+number of German Friends, he emigrated to America, settling upon the
+Frankfort Company's tract between the Schuylkill and the Delaware
+rivers. The township was divided into four hamlets, namely, Germantown,
+Krisheim, Crefield, and Sommerhausen. Soon after his arrival he united
+himself with the Society of Friends, and became one of its most able and
+devoted members, as well as the recognized head and lawgiver of the
+settlement. He married, two years after his arrival, Anneke (Anna),
+daughter of Dr. Klosterman, of Muhlheim. In the year 1688 he drew up a
+memorial against slaveholding, which was adopted by the Germantown
+Friends and sent up to the Monthly Meeting, and thence to the Yearly
+Meeting at Philadelphia. It is noteworthy as the first protest made by
+a religious body against Negro Slavery. The original document was
+discovered in 1844 by the Philadelphia antiquarian, Nathan Kite, and
+published in The Friend (Vol. XVIII. No. 16). It is a bold and direct
+appeal to the best instincts of the heart. "Have not," he asks, "these
+negroes as much right to fight for their freedom as you have to keep
+them slaves?" Under the wise direction of Pastorius, the German-town
+settlement grew and prospered. The inhabitants planted orchards and
+vineyards, and surrounded themselves with souvenirs of their old home.
+A large number of them were linen-weavers, as well as small farmers.
+The Quakers were the principal sect, but men of all religions were
+tolerated, and lived together in harmony. In 1692 Richard Frame
+published, in what he called verse, a Description of Pennsylvania, in
+which he alludes to the settlement:--
+
+      "The German town of which I spoke before,
+      Which is at least in length one mile or more,
+      Where lives High German people and Low Dutch,
+      Whose trade in weaving linen cloth is much,
+      --There grows the flax, as also you may know
+      That from the same they do divide the tow.
+      Their trade suits well their habitation,
+      We find convenience for their occupation."
+
+Pastorius seems to have been on intimate terms with William Penn, Thomas
+Lloyd, Chief Justice Logan, Thomas Story, and other leading men in the
+Province belonging to his own religious society, as also with Kelpius,
+the learned Mystic of the Wissahickon, with the pastor of the Swedes'
+church, and the leaders of the Mennonites. He wrote a description of
+Pennsylvania, which was published at Frankfort and Leipsic in 1700 and
+1701. His Lives of the Saints, etc., written in German and dedicated to
+Professor Schurmberg, his old teacher, was published in 1690. He left
+behind him many unpublished manuscripts covering a very wide range of
+subjects, most of which are now lost. One huge manuscript folio,
+entitled Hive Beestock, Melliotropheum Alucar, or Rusca Apium, still
+remains, containing one thousand pages with about one hundred lines to a
+page. It is a medley of knowledge and fancy, history, philosophy, and
+poetry, written in seven languages. A large portion of his poetry is
+devoted to the pleasures of gardening, the description of flowers, and
+the care of bees. The following specimen of his punning Latin is
+addressed to an orchard-pilferer:--
+
+      "Quisquis in haec furtim reptas viridaria nostra
+      Tangere fallaci poma caveto mane,
+      Si non obsequeris faxit Deus omne quod opto,
+      Cum malis nostris ut mala cuncta feras."
+
+Professor Oswald Seidensticker, to whose papers in Der Deutsche Pioneer
+and that able periodical the Penn Monthly, of Philadelphia, I am
+indebted for many of the foregoing facts in regard to the German
+pilgrims of the New World, thus closes his notice of Pastorius:--
+"No tombstone, not even a record of burial, indicates where his remains
+have found their last resting-place, and the pardonable desire to
+associate the homage due to this distinguished man with some visible
+memento can not be gratified. There is no reason to suppose that he was
+interred in any other place than the Friends' old burying-ground in
+Germantown, though the fact is not attested by any definite source of
+information. After all, this obliteration of the last trace of his
+earthly existence is but typical of what has overtaken the times which
+he represents; that Germantown which he founded, which saw him live and
+move, is at present but a quaint idyl of the past, almost a myth, barely
+remembered and little cared for by the keener race that has succeeded.
+The Pilgrims of Plymouth have not lacked historian and poet. Justice has
+been done to their faith, courage, and self-sacrifice, and to the mighty
+influence of their endeavors to establish righteousness on the earth.
+The Quaker pilgrims of Pennsylvania, seeking the same object by
+different means, have not been equally fortunate. The power of their
+testimony for truth and holiness, peace and freedom, enforced only by
+what Milton calls "the unresistible might of meekness," has been felt
+through two centuries in the amelioration of penal severities, the
+abolition of slavery, the reform of the erring, the relief of the poor
+and suffering,--felt, in brief, in every step of human progress. But of
+the men themselves, with the single exception of William Penn, scarcely
+anything is known. Contrasted, from the outset, with the stern,
+aggressive Puritans of New England, they have come to be regarded as
+"a feeble folk," with a personality as doubtful as their unrecorded
+graves. They were not soldiers, like Miles Standish; they had no figure
+so picturesque as Vane, no leader so rashly brave and haughty as
+Endicott. No Cotton Mather wrote their Magnalia; they had no awful drama
+of supernaturalism in which Satan and his angels were actors; and the
+only witch mentioned in their simple annals was a poor old Swedish
+woman, who, on complaint of her countrywomen, was tried and acquitted
+of everything but imbecility and folly. Nothing but common-place offices
+of civility came to pass between them and the Indians; indeed, their
+enemies taunted them with the fact that the savages did not regard them
+as Christians, but just such men as themselves. Yet it must be apparent
+to every careful observer of the progress of American civilization that
+its two principal currents had their sources in the entirely opposite
+directions of the Puritan and Quaker colonies. To use the words of a
+late writer: [1] "The historical forces, with which no others may be
+compared in their influence on the people, have been those of the
+Puritan and the Quaker. The strength of the one was in the confession of
+an invisible Presence, a righteous, eternal Will, which would establish
+righteousness on earth; and thence arose the conviction of a direct
+personal responsibility, which could be tempted by no external splendor
+and could be shaken by no internal agitation, and could not be evaded or
+transferred. The strength of the other was the witness in the human
+spirit to an eternal Word, an Inner Voice which spoke to each alone,
+while yet it spoke to every man; a Light which each was to follow, and
+which yet was the light of the world; and all other voices were silent
+before this, and the solitary path whither it led was more sacred than
+the worn ways of cathedral-aisles." It will be sufficiently apparent to
+the reader that, in the poem which follows, I have attempted nothing
+beyond a study of the life and times of the Pennsylvania colonist,--a
+simple picture of a noteworthy man and his locality. The colors of my
+sketch are all very sober, toned down to the quiet and dreamy atmosphere
+through which its subject is visible. Whether, in the glare and tumult
+of the present time, such a picture will find favor may well be
+questioned. I only know that it has beguiled for me some hours of
+weariness, and that, whatever may be its measure of public appreciation,
+it has been to me its own reward."
+                                               J. G. W.
+AMESBURY, 5th mo., 1872.
+
+
+HAIL to posterity!
+Hail, future men of Germanopolis!
+Let the young generations yet to be
+Look kindly upon this.
+Think how your fathers left their native land,--
+Dear German-land! O sacred hearths and homes!--
+
+And, where the wild beast roams,
+In patience planned
+New forest-homes beyond the mighty sea,
+There undisturbed and free
+To live as brothers of one family.
+What pains and cares befell,
+What trials and what fears,
+Remember, and wherein we have done well
+Follow our footsteps, men of coming years!
+Where we have failed to do
+Aright, or wisely live,
+Be warned by us, the better way pursue,
+And, knowing we were human, even as you,
+Pity us and forgive!
+Farewell, Posterity!
+Farewell, dear Germany
+Forevermore farewell!
+
+[From the Latin of Francis DANIEL PASTORIUS in
+the Germantown Records. 1688.]
+
+
+
+
+PRELUDE.
+I SING the Pilgrim of a softer clime
+And milder speech than those brave men's who brought
+To the ice and iron of our winter time
+A will as firm, a creed as stern, and wrought
+With one mailed hand, and with the other fought.
+Simply, as fits my theme, in homely rhyme
+I sing the blue-eyed German Spener taught,
+Through whose veiled, mystic faith the Inward Light,
+Steady and still, an easy brightness, shone,
+Transfiguring all things in its radiance white.
+The garland which his meekness never sought
+I bring him; over fields of harvest sown
+With seeds of blessing, now to ripeness grown,
+I bid the sower pass before the reapers' sight.
+
+              . . . . . . . . . .
+
+Never in tenderer quiet lapsed the day
+From Pennsylvania's vales of spring away,
+Where, forest-walled, the scattered hamlets lay
+
+Along the wedded rivers. One long bar
+Of purple cloud, on which the evening star
+Shone like a jewel on a scimitar,
+
+Held the sky's golden gateway. Through the deep
+Hush of the woods a murmur seemed to creep,
+The Schuylkill whispering in a voice of sleep.
+
+All else was still. The oxen from their ploughs
+Rested at last, and from their long day's browse
+Came the dun files of Krisheim's home-bound cows.
+
+And the young city, round whose virgin zone
+The rivers like two mighty arms were thrown,
+Marked by the smoke of evening fires alone,
+
+Lay in the distance, lovely even then
+With its fair women and its stately men
+Gracing the forest court of William Penn,
+
+Urban yet sylvan; in its rough-hewn frames
+Of oak and pine the dryads held their claims,
+And lent its streets their pleasant woodland names.
+
+Anna Pastorius down the leafy lane
+Looked city-ward, then stooped to prune again
+Her vines and simples, with a sigh of pain.
+
+For fast the streaks of ruddy sunset paled
+In the oak clearing, and, as daylight failed,
+Slow, overhead, the dusky night-birds sailed.
+
+Again she looked: between green walls of shade,
+With low-bent head as if with sorrow weighed,
+Daniel Pastorius slowly came and said,
+
+"God's peace be with thee, Anna!" Then he stood
+Silent before her, wrestling with the mood
+Of one who sees the evil and not good.
+
+"What is it, my Pastorius?" As she spoke,
+A slow, faint smile across his features broke,
+Sadder than tears. "Dear heart," he said, "our folk
+
+"Are even as others. Yea, our goodliest Friends
+Are frail; our elders have their selfish ends,
+And few dare trust the Lord to make amends
+
+"For duty's loss. So even our feeble word
+For the dumb slaves the startled meeting heard
+As if a stone its quiet waters stirred;
+
+"And, as the clerk ceased reading, there began
+A ripple of dissent which downward ran
+In widening circles, as from man to man.
+
+"Somewhat was said of running before sent,
+Of tender fear that some their guide outwent,
+Troublers of Israel. I was scarce intent
+
+"On hearing, for behind the reverend row
+Of gallery Friends, in dumb and piteous show,
+I saw, methought, dark faces full of woe.
+
+"And, in the spirit, I was taken where
+They toiled and suffered; I was made aware
+Of shame and wrath and anguish and despair!
+
+"And while the meeting smothered our poor plea
+With cautious phrase, a Voice there seemed to be,
+As ye have done to these ye do to me!'
+
+"So it all passed; and the old tithe went on
+Of anise, mint, and cumin, till the sun
+Set, leaving still the weightier work undone.
+
+"Help, for the good man faileth! Who is strong,
+If these be weak? Who shall rebuke the wrong,
+If these consent? How long, O Lord! how long!"
+
+He ceased; and, bound in spirit with the bound,
+With folded arms, and eyes that sought the ground,
+Walked musingly his little garden round.
+
+About him, beaded with the falling dew,
+Rare plants of power and herbs of healing grew,
+Such as Van Helmont and Agrippa knew.
+
+For, by the lore of Gorlitz' gentle sage,
+With the mild mystics of his dreamy age
+He read the herbal signs of nature's page,
+
+As once he heard in sweet Von Merlau's' bowers
+Fair as herself, in boyhood's happy hours,
+The pious Spener read his creed in flowers.
+
+"The dear Lord give us patience!" said his wife,
+Touching with finger-tip an aloe, rife
+With leaves sharp-pointed like an Aztec knife
+
+Or Carib spear, a gift to William Penn
+From the rare gardens of John Evelyn,
+Brought from the Spanish Main by merchantmen.
+
+"See this strange plant its steady purpose hold,
+And, year by year, its patient leaves unfold,
+Till the young eyes that watched it first are old.
+
+"But some time, thou hast told me, there shall come
+A sudden beauty, brightness, and perfume,
+The century-moulded bud shall burst in bloom.
+
+"So may the seed which hath been sown to-day
+Grow with the years, and, after long delay,
+Break into bloom, and God's eternal Yea!
+
+"Answer at last the patient prayers of them
+Who now, by faith alone, behold its stem
+Crowned with the flowers of Freedom's diadem.
+
+"Meanwhile, to feel and suffer, work and wait,
+Remains for us. The wrong indeed is great,
+But love and patience conquer soon or late."
+
+"Well hast thou said, my Anna!" Tenderer
+Than youth's caress upon the head of her
+Pastorius laid his hand. "Shall we demur
+
+"Because the vision tarrieth? In an hour
+We dream not of, the slow-grown bud may flower,
+And what was sown in weakness rise in power!"
+
+Then through the vine-draped door whose legend read,
+"Procul este profani!" Anna led
+To where their child upon his little bed
+
+Looked up and smiled. "Dear heart," she said, "if we
+Must bearers of a heavy burden be,
+Our boy, God willing, yet the day shall see
+
+"When from the gallery to the farthest seat,
+Slave and slave-owner shall no longer meet,
+But all sit equal at the Master's feet."
+
+On the stone hearth the blazing walnut block
+Set the low walls a-glimmer, showed the cock
+Rebuking Peter on the Van Wyck clock,
+
+Shone on old tomes of law and physic, side
+By side with Fox and Belimen, played at hide
+And seek with Anna, midst her household pride
+
+Of flaxen webs, and on the table, bare
+Of costly cloth or silver cup, but where,
+Tasting the fat shads of the Delaware,
+
+The courtly Penn had praised the goodwife's cheer,
+And quoted Horace o'er her home brewed beer,
+Till even grave Pastorius smiled to hear.
+
+In such a home, beside the Schuylkill's wave,
+He dwelt in peace with God and man, and gave
+Food to the poor and shelter to the slave.
+
+For all too soon the New World's scandal shamed
+The righteous code by Penn and Sidney framed,
+And men withheld the human rights they claimed.
+
+And slowly wealth and station sanction lent,
+And hardened avarice, on its gains intent,
+Stifled the inward whisper of dissent.
+
+Yet all the while the burden rested sore
+On tender hearts. At last Pastorius bore
+Their warning message to the Church's door
+
+In God's name; and the leaven of the word
+Wrought ever after in the souls who heard,
+And a dead conscience in its grave-clothes stirred
+
+To troubled life, and urged the vain excuse
+Of Hebrew custom, patriarchal use,
+Good in itself if evil in abuse.
+
+Gravely Pastorius listened, not the less
+Discerning through the decent fig-leaf dress
+Of the poor plea its shame of selfishness.
+
+One Scripture rule, at least, was unforgot;
+He hid the outcast, and betrayed him not;
+And, when his prey the human hunter sought,
+
+He scrupled not, while Anna's wise delay
+And proffered cheer prolonged the master's stay,
+To speed the black guest safely on his way.
+
+Yet, who shall guess his bitter grief who lends
+His life to some great cause, and finds his friends
+Shame or betray it for their private ends?
+
+How felt the Master when his chosen strove
+In childish folly for their seats above;
+And that fond mother, blinded by her love,
+
+Besought him that her sons, beside his throne,
+Might sit on either hand? Amidst his own
+A stranger oft, companionless and lone,
+
+God's priest and prophet stands. The martyr's pain
+Is not alone from scourge and cell and chain;
+Sharper the pang when, shouting in his train,
+
+His weak disciples by their lives deny
+The loud hosannas of their daily cry,
+And make their echo of his truth a lie.
+
+His forest home no hermit's cell he found,
+Guests, motley-minded, drew his hearth around,
+And held armed truce upon its neutral ground.
+
+There Indian chiefs with battle-bows unstrung,
+Strong, hero-limbed, like those whom Homer sung,
+Pastorius fancied, when the world was young,
+
+Came with their tawny women, lithe and tall,
+Like bronzes in his friend Von Rodeck's hall,
+Comely, if black, and not unpleasing all.
+
+There hungry folk in homespun drab and gray
+Drew round his board on Monthly Meeting day,
+Genial, half merry in their friendly way.
+
+Or, haply, pilgrims from the Fatherland,
+Weak, timid, homesick, slow to understand
+The New World's promise, sought his helping hand.
+
+Or painful Kelpius [13] from his hermit den
+By Wissahickon, maddest of good men,
+Dreamed o'er the Chiliast dreams of Petersen.
+
+Deep in the woods, where the small river slid
+Snake-like in shade, the Helmstadt Mystic hid,
+Weird as a wizard, over arts forbid,
+
+Reading the books of Daniel and of John,
+And Behmen's Morning-Redness, through the Stone
+Of Wisdom, vouchsafed to his eyes alone,
+
+Whereby he read what man ne'er read before,
+And saw the visions man shall see no more,
+Till the great angel, striding sea and shore,
+
+Shall bid all flesh await, on land or ships,
+The warning trump of the Apocalypse,
+Shattering the heavens before the dread eclipse.
+
+Or meek-eyed Mennonist his bearded chin
+Leaned o'er the gate; or Ranter, pure within,
+Aired his perfection in a world of sin.
+
+Or, talking of old home scenes, Op der Graaf
+Teased the low back-log with his shodden staff,
+Till the red embers broke into a laugh
+
+And dance of flame, as if they fain would cheer
+The rugged face, half tender, half austere,
+Touched with the pathos of a homesick tear!
+
+Or Sluyter, [14] saintly familist, whose word
+As law the Brethren of the Manor heard,
+Announced the speedy terrors of the Lord,
+
+And turned, like Lot at Sodom, from his race,
+Above a wrecked world with complacent face
+Riding secure upon his plank of grace!
+
+Haply, from Finland's birchen groves exiled,
+Manly in thought, in simple ways a child,
+His white hair floating round his visage mild,
+
+The Swedish pastor sought the Quaker's door,
+Pleased from his neighbor's lips to hear once more
+His long-disused and half-forgotten lore.
+
+For both could baffle Babel's lingual curse,
+And speak in Bion's Doric, and rehearse
+Cleanthes' hymn or Virgil's sounding verse.
+
+And oft Pastorius and the meek old man
+Argued as Quaker and as Lutheran,
+Ending in Christian love, as they began.
+
+With lettered Lloyd on pleasant morns he strayed
+Where Sommerhausen over vales of shade
+Looked miles away, by every flower delayed,
+
+Or song of bird, happy and free with one
+Who loved, like him, to let his memory run
+Over old fields of learning, and to sun
+
+Himself in Plato's wise philosophies,
+And dream with Philo over mysteries
+Whereof the dreamer never finds the keys;
+
+To touch all themes of thought, nor weakly stop
+For doubt of truth, but let the buckets drop
+Deep down and bring the hidden waters up [15]
+
+For there was freedom in that wakening time
+Of tender souls; to differ was not crime;
+The varying bells made up the perfect chime.
+
+On lips unlike was laid the altar's coal,
+The white, clear light, tradition-colored, stole
+Through the stained oriel of each human soul.
+
+Gathered from many sects, the Quaker brought
+His old beliefs, adjusting to the thought
+That moved his soul the creed his fathers taught.
+
+One faith alone, so broad that all mankind
+Within themselves its secret witness find,
+The soul's communion with the Eternal Mind,
+
+The Spirit's law, the Inward Rule and Guide,
+Scholar and peasant, lord and serf, allied,
+The polished Penn and Cromwell's Ironside.
+
+As still in Hemskerck's Quaker Meeting, [16] face
+By face in Flemish detail, we may trace
+How loose-mouthed boor and fine ancestral grace
+
+Sat in close contrast,--the clipt-headed churl,
+Broad market-dame, and simple serving-girl
+By skirt of silk and periwig in curl
+
+For soul touched soul; the spiritual treasure-trove
+Made all men equal, none could rise above
+Nor sink below that level of God's love.
+
+So, with his rustic neighbors sitting down,
+The homespun frock beside the scholar's gown,
+Pastorius to the manners of the town
+
+Added the freedom of the woods, and sought
+The bookless wisdom by experience taught,
+And learned to love his new-found home, while not
+
+Forgetful of the old; the seasons went
+Their rounds, and somewhat to his spirit lent
+Of their own calm and measureless content.
+
+Glad even to tears, he heard the robin sing
+His song of welcome to the Western spring,
+And bluebird borrowing from the sky his wing.
+
+And when the miracle of autumn came,
+And all the woods with many-colored flame
+Of splendor, making summer's greenness tame,
+
+Burned, unconsumed, a voice without a sound
+Spake to him from each kindled bush around,
+And made the strange, new landscape holy ground
+
+And when the bitter north-wind, keen and swift,
+Swept the white street and piled the dooryard drift,
+He exercised, as Friends might say, his gift
+
+Of verse, Dutch, English, Latin, like the hash
+Of corn and beans in Indian succotash;
+Dull, doubtless, but with here and there a flash
+
+Of wit and fine conceit,--the good man's play
+Of quiet fancies, meet to while away
+The slow hours measuring off an idle day.
+
+At evening, while his wife put on her look
+Of love's endurance, from its niche he took
+The written pages of his ponderous book.
+
+And read, in half the languages of man,
+His "Rusca Apium," which with bees began,
+And through the gamut of creation ran.
+
+Or, now and then, the missive of some friend
+In gray Altorf or storied Nurnberg penned
+Dropped in upon him like a guest to spend
+
+The night beneath his roof-tree. Mystical
+The fair Von Merlau spake as waters fall
+And voices sound in dreams, and yet withal
+
+Human and sweet, as if each far, low tone,
+Over the roses of her gardens blown
+Brought the warm sense of beauty all her own.
+
+Wise Spener questioned what his friend could trace
+Of spiritual influx or of saving grace
+In the wild natures of the Indian race.
+
+And learned Schurmberg, fain, at times, to look
+From Talmud, Koran, Veds, and Pentateuch,
+Sought out his pupil in his far-off nook,
+
+To query with him of climatic change,
+Of bird, beast, reptile, in his forest range,
+Of flowers and fruits and simples new and strange.
+
+And thus the Old and New World reached their hands
+Across the water, and the friendly lands
+Talked with each other from their severed strands.
+
+Pastorius answered all: while seed and root
+Sent from his new home grew to flower and fruit
+Along the Rhine and at the Spessart's foot;
+
+And, in return, the flowers his boyhood knew
+Smiled at his door, the same in form and hue,
+And on his vines the Rhenish clusters grew.
+
+No idler he; whoever else might shirk,
+He set his hand to every honest work,--
+Farmer and teacher, court and meeting clerk.
+
+Still on the town seal his device is found,
+Grapes, flax, and thread-spool on a trefoil ground,
+With "Vinum, Linum et Textrinum" wound.
+
+One house sufficed for gospel and for law,
+Where Paul and Grotius, Scripture text and saw,
+Assured the good, and held the rest in awe.
+
+Whatever legal maze he wandered through,
+He kept the Sermon on the Mount in view,
+And justice always into mercy grew.
+
+No whipping-post he needed, stocks, nor jail,
+Nor ducking-stool; the orchard-thief grew pale
+At his rebuke, the vixen ceased to rail,
+
+The usurer's grasp released the forfeit land;
+The slanderer faltered at the witness-stand,
+And all men took his counsel for command.
+
+Was it caressing air, the brooding love
+Of tenderer skies than German land knew of,
+Green calm below, blue quietness above,
+
+Still flow of water, deep repose of wood
+That, with a sense of loving Fatherhood
+And childlike trust in the Eternal Good,
+
+Softened all hearts, and dulled the edge of hate,
+Hushed strife, and taught impatient zeal to wait
+The slow assurance of the better state?
+
+Who knows what goadings in their sterner way
+O'er jagged ice, relieved by granite gray,
+Blew round the men of Massachusetts Bay?
+
+What hate of heresy the east-wind woke?
+What hints of pitiless power and terror spoke
+In waves that on their iron coast-line broke?
+
+Be it as it may: within the Land of Penn
+The sectary yielded to the citizen,
+And peaceful dwelt the many-creeded men.
+
+Peace brooded over all. No trumpet stung
+The air to madness, and no steeple flung
+Alarums down from bells at midnight rung.
+
+The land slept well. The Indian from his face
+Washed all his war-paint off, and in the place
+Of battle-marches sped the peaceful chase,
+
+Or wrought for wages at the white man's side,--
+Giving to kindness what his native pride
+And lazy freedom to all else denied.
+
+And well the curious scholar loved the old
+Traditions that his swarthy neighbors told
+By wigwam-fires when nights were growing cold,
+
+Discerned the fact round which their fancy drew
+Its dreams, and held their childish faith more true
+To God and man than half the creeds he knew.
+
+The desert blossomed round him; wheat-fields rolled
+Beneath the warm wind waves of green and gold;
+The planted ear returned its hundred-fold.
+
+Great clusters ripened in a warmer sun
+Than that which by the Rhine stream shines upon
+The purpling hillsides with low vines o'errun.
+
+About each rustic porch the humming-bird
+Tried with light bill, that scarce a petal stirred,
+The Old World flowers to virgin soil transferred;
+
+And the first-fruits of pear and apple, bending
+The young boughs down, their gold and russet blending,
+Made glad his heart, familiar odors lending
+
+To the fresh fragrance of the birch and pine,
+Life-everlasting, bay, and eglantine,
+And all the subtle scents the woods combine.
+
+Fair First-Day mornings, steeped in summer calm,
+Warm, tender, restful, sweet with woodland balm,
+Came to him, like some mother-hallowed psalm
+
+To the tired grinder at the noisy wheel
+Of labor, winding off from memory's reel
+A golden thread of music. With no peal
+
+Of bells to call them to the house of praise,
+The scattered settlers through green forest-ways
+Walked meeting-ward. In reverent amaze
+
+The Indian trapper saw them, from the dim
+Shade of the alders on the rivulet's rim,
+Seek the Great Spirit's house to talk with Him.
+
+There, through the gathered stillness multiplied
+And made intense by sympathy, outside
+The sparrows sang, and the gold-robin cried,
+
+A-swing upon his elm. A faint perfume
+Breathed through the open windows of the room
+From locust-trees, heavy with clustered bloom.
+
+Thither, perchance, sore-tried confessors came,
+Whose fervor jail nor pillory could tame,
+Proud of the cropped ears meant to be their shame,
+
+Men who had eaten slavery's bitter bread
+In Indian isles; pale women who had bled
+Under the hangman's lash, and bravely said
+
+God's message through their prison's iron bars;
+And gray old soldier-converts, seamed with scars
+From every stricken field of England's wars.
+
+Lowly before the Unseen Presence knelt
+Each waiting heart, till haply some one felt
+On his moved lips the seal of silence melt.
+
+Or, without spoken words, low breathings stole
+Of a diviner life from soul to soul,
+Baptizing in one tender thought the whole.
+
+When shaken hands announced the meeting o'er,
+The friendly group still lingered at the door,
+Greeting, inquiring, sharing all the store
+
+Of weekly tidings. Meanwhile youth and maid
+Down the green vistas of the woodland strayed,
+Whispered and smiled and oft their feet delayed.
+
+Did the boy's whistle answer back the thrushes?
+Did light girl laughter ripple through the bushes,
+As brooks make merry over roots and rushes?
+
+Unvexed the sweet air seemed. Without a wound
+The ear of silence heard, and every sound
+Its place in nature's fine accordance found.
+
+And solemn meeting, summer sky and wood,
+Old kindly faces, youth and maidenhood
+Seemed, like God's new creation, very good!
+
+And, greeting all with quiet smile and word,
+Pastorius went his way. The unscared bird
+Sang at his side; scarcely the squirrel stirred
+
+At his hushed footstep on the mossy sod;
+And, wheresoe'er the good man looked or trod,
+He felt the peace of nature and of God.
+
+His social life wore no ascetic form,
+He loved all beauty, without fear of harm,
+And in his veins his Teuton blood ran warm.
+
+Strict to himself, of other men no spy,
+He made his own no circuit-judge to try
+The freer conscience of his neighbors by.
+
+With love rebuking, by his life alone,
+Gracious and sweet, the better way was shown,
+The joy of one, who, seeking not his own,
+
+And faithful to all scruples, finds at last
+The thorns and shards of duty overpast,
+And daily life, beyond his hope's forecast,
+
+Pleasant and beautiful with sight and sound,
+And flowers upspringing in its narrow round,
+And all his days with quiet gladness crowned.
+
+He sang not; but, if sometimes tempted strong,
+He hummed what seemed like Altorf's Burschen-song;
+His good wife smiled, and did not count it wrong.
+
+For well he loved his boyhood's brother band;
+His Memory, while he trod the New World's strand,
+A double-ganger walked the Fatherland
+
+If, when on frosty Christmas eves the light
+Shone on his quiet hearth, he missed the sight
+Of Yule-log, Tree, and Christ-child all in white;
+
+And closed his eyes, and listened to the sweet
+Old wait-songs sounding down his native street,
+And watched again the dancers' mingling feet;
+
+Yet not the less, when once the vision passed,
+He held the plain and sober maxims fast
+Of the dear Friends with whom his lot was cast.
+
+Still all attuned to nature's melodies,
+He loved the bird's song in his dooryard trees,
+And the low hum of home-returning bees;
+
+The blossomed flax, the tulip-trees in bloom
+Down the long street, the beauty and perfume
+Of apple-boughs, the mingling light and gloom
+
+Of Sommerhausen's woodlands, woven through
+With sun--threads; and the music the wind drew,
+Mournful and sweet, from leaves it overblew.
+
+And evermore, beneath this outward sense,
+And through the common sequence of events,
+He felt the guiding hand of Providence
+
+Reach out of space. A Voice spake in his ear,
+And to all other voices far and near
+Died at that whisper, full of meanings clear.
+
+The Light of Life shone round him; one by one
+The wandering lights, that all-misleading run,
+Went out like candles paling in the sun.
+
+That Light he followed, step by step, where'er
+It led, as in the vision of the seer
+The wheels moved as the spirit in the clear
+
+And terrible crystal moved, with all their eyes
+Watching the living splendor sink or rise,
+Its will their will, knowing no otherwise.
+
+Within himself he found the law of right,
+He walked by faith and not the letter's sight,
+And read his Bible by the Inward Light.
+
+And if sometimes the slaves of form and rule,
+Frozen in their creeds like fish in winter's pool,
+Tried the large tolerance of his liberal school,
+
+His door was free to men of every name,
+He welcomed all the seeking souls who came,
+And no man's faith he made a cause of blame.
+
+But best he loved in leisure hours to see
+His own dear Friends sit by him knee to knee,
+In social converse, genial, frank, and free.
+
+There sometimes silence (it were hard to tell
+Who owned it first) upon the circle fell,
+Hushed Anna's busy wheel, and laid its spell
+
+On the black boy who grimaced by the hearth,
+To solemnize his shining face of mirth;
+Only the old clock ticked amidst the dearth
+
+Of sound; nor eye was raised nor hand was stirred
+In that soul-sabbath, till at last some word
+Of tender counsel or low prayer was heard.
+
+Then guests, who lingered but farewell to say
+And take love's message, went their homeward way;
+So passed in peace the guileless Quaker's day.
+
+His was the Christian's unsung Age of Gold,
+A truer idyl than the bards have told
+Of Arno's banks or Arcady of old.
+
+Where still the Friends their place of burial keep,
+And century-rooted mosses o'er it creep,
+The Nurnberg scholar and his helpmeet sleep.
+
+And Anna's aloe? If it flowered at last
+In Bartram's garden, did John Woolman cast
+A glance upon it as he meekly passed?
+
+And did a secret sympathy possess
+That tender soul, and for the slave's redress
+Lend hope, strength, patience? It were vain to
+guess.
+
+Nay, were the plant itself but mythical,
+Set in the fresco of tradition's wall
+Like Jotham's bramble, mattereth not at all.
+
+Enough to know that, through the winter's frost
+And summer's heat, no seed of truth is lost,
+And every duty pays at last its cost.
+
+For, ere Pastorius left the sun and air,
+God sent the answer to his life-long prayer;
+The child was born beside the Delaware,
+
+Who, in the power a holy purpose lends,
+Guided his people unto nobler ends,
+And left them worthier of the name of Friends.
+
+And to! the fulness of the time has come,
+And over all the exile's Western home,
+From sea to sea the flowers of freedom bloom!
+
+And joy-bells ring, and silver trumpets blow;
+But not for thee, Pastorius! Even so
+The world forgets, but the wise angels know.
+
+
+
+
+KING VOLMER AND ELSIE.
+AFTER THE DANISH OF CHRISTIAN WINTER.
+
+WHERE, over heathen doom-rings and gray stones
+of the Horg,
+In its little Christian city stands the church of
+Vordingborg,
+In merry mood King Volmer sat, forgetful of his
+power,
+As idle as the Goose of Gold that brooded on his
+tower.
+
+Out spake the King to Henrik, his young and faithful
+squire
+"Dar'st trust thy little Elsie, the maid of thy
+desire?"
+"Of all the men in Denmark she loveth only me
+As true to me is Elsie as thy Lily is to thee."
+
+Loud laughed the king: "To-morrow shall bring
+another day, [18]
+When I myself will test her; she will not say me
+nay."
+Thereat the lords and gallants, that round about
+him stood,
+Wagged all their heads in concert and smiled as
+courtiers should.
+
+The gray lark sings o'er Vordingborg, and on the
+ancient town
+From the tall tower of Valdemar the Golden Goose
+looks down;
+The yellow grain is waving in the pleasant wind of
+morn,
+The wood resounds with cry of hounds and blare
+of hunter's horn.
+
+In the garden of her father little Elsie sits and
+spins,
+And, singing with the early birds, her daily task,
+begins.
+Gay tulips bloom and sweet mint curls around her
+garden-bower,
+But she is sweeter than the mint and fairer than
+the flower.
+
+About her form her kirtle blue clings lovingly, and,
+white
+As snow, her loose sleeves only leave her small,
+round wrists in sight;
+Below, the modest petticoat can only half conceal
+The motion of the lightest foot that ever turned a
+wheel.
+
+The cat sits purring at her side, bees hum in
+sunshine warm;
+But, look! she starts, she lifts her face, she shades
+it with her arm.
+And, hark! a train of horsemen, with sound of
+dog and horn,
+Come leaping o'er the ditches, come trampling
+down the corn!
+
+Merrily rang the bridle-reins, and scarf and plume
+streamed gay,
+As fast beside her father's gate the riders held
+their way;
+And one was brave in scarlet cloak, with golden
+spur on heel,
+And, as he checked his foaming steed, the maiden
+checked her wheel.
+
+"All hail among thy roses, the fairest rose to me!
+For weary months in secret my heart has longed for
+thee!"
+What noble knight was this? What words for
+modest maiden's ear?
+She dropped a lowly courtesy of bashfulness and
+fear.
+
+She lifted up her spinning-wheel; she fain would
+seek the door,
+Trembling in every limb, her cheek with blushes
+crimsoned o'er.
+"Nay, fear me not," the rider said, "I offer heart
+and hand,
+Bear witness these good Danish knights who round
+about me stand.
+
+"I grant you time to think of this, to answer as
+you may,
+For to-morrow, little Elsie, shall bring another day."
+He spake the old phrase slyly as, glancing round
+his train,
+He saw his merry followers seek to hide their
+smiles in vain.
+
+"The snow of pearls I'll scatter in your curls of
+golden hair,
+I'll line with furs the velvet of the kirtle that you
+wear;
+All precious gems shall twine your neck; and in
+a chariot gay
+You shall ride, my little Elsie, behind four steeds
+of gray.
+
+"And harps shall sound, and flutes shall play, and
+brazen lamps shall glow;
+On marble floors your feet shall weave the dances
+to and fro.
+At frosty eventide for us the blazing hearth shall
+shine,
+While, at our ease, we play at draughts, and drink
+the blood-red wine."
+
+Then Elsie raised her head and met her wooer face
+to face;
+A roguish smile shone in her eye and on her lip
+found place.
+Back from her low white forehead the curls of
+gold she threw,
+And lifted up her eyes to his, steady and clear and
+blue.
+
+"I am a lowly peasant, and you a gallant knight;
+I will not trust a love that soon may cool and turn
+to slight.
+If you would wed me henceforth be a peasant, not
+a lord;
+I bid you hang upon the wall your tried and trusty
+sword."
+
+"To please you, Elsie, I will lay keen Dynadel
+away,
+And in its place will swing the scythe and mow
+your father's hay."
+"Nay, but your gallant scarlet cloak my eyes can
+never bear;
+A Vadmal coat, so plain and gray, is all that you
+must wear."
+
+"Well, Vadmal will I wear for you," the rider
+gayly spoke,
+"And on the Lord's high altar I'll lay my scarlet
+cloak."
+"But mark," she said, "no stately horse my peasant
+love must ride,
+A yoke of steers before the plough is all that he
+must guide."
+
+The knight looked down upon his steed: "Well,
+let him wander free
+No other man must ride the horse that has been
+backed by me.
+Henceforth I'll tread the furrow and to my oxen
+talk,
+If only little Elsie beside my plough will walk."
+
+"You must take from out your cellar cask of wine
+and flask and can;
+The homely mead I brew you may serve a peasant.
+man."
+"Most willingly, fair Elsie, I'll drink that mead
+of thine,
+And leave my minstrel's thirsty throat to drain
+my generous wine."
+
+"Now break your shield asunder, and shatter sign
+and boss,
+Unmeet for peasant-wedded arms, your knightly
+knee across.
+And pull me down your castle from top to basement
+wall,
+And let your plough trace furrows in the ruins of
+your hall!"
+
+Then smiled he with a lofty pride; right well at
+last he knew
+The maiden of the spinning-wheel was to her troth.
+plight true.
+"Ah, roguish little Elsie! you act your part full
+well
+You know that I must bear my shield and in my
+castle dwell!
+
+"The lions ramping on that shield between the
+hearts aflame
+Keep watch o'er Denmark's honor, and guard her
+ancient name.
+
+"For know that I am Volmer; I dwell in yonder
+towers,
+Who ploughs them ploughs up Denmark, this
+goodly home of ours'.
+
+"I tempt no more, fair Elsie! your heart I know
+is true;
+Would God that all our maidens were good and
+pure as you!
+Well have you pleased your monarch, and he shall
+well repay;
+God's peace! Farewell! To-morrow will bring
+another day!"
+
+He lifted up his bridle hand, he spurred his good
+steed then,
+And like a whirl-blast swept away with all his
+gallant men.
+The steel hoofs beat the rocky path; again on
+winds of morn
+The wood resounds with cry of hounds and blare
+of hunter's horn.
+
+"Thou true and ever faithful!" the listening
+Henrik cried;
+And, leaping o'er the green hedge, he stood by
+Elsie's side.
+None saw the fond embracing, save, shining from
+afar,
+The Golden Goose that watched them from the
+tower of Valdemar.
+
+O darling girls of Denmark! of all the flowers
+that throng
+Her vales of spring the fairest, I sing for you my
+song.
+No praise as yours so bravely rewards the singer's
+skill;
+Thank God! of maids like Elsie the land has
+plenty still!
+1872.
+
+
+
+
+THE THREE BELLS.
+
+BENEATH the low-hung night cloud
+That raked her splintering mast
+The good ship settled slowly,
+The cruel leak gained fast.
+
+Over the awful ocean
+Her signal guns pealed out.
+Dear God! was that Thy answer
+From the horror round about?
+
+A voice came down the wild wind,
+"Ho! ship ahoy!" its cry
+"Our stout Three Bells of Glasgow
+Shall lay till daylight by!"
+
+Hour after hour crept slowly,
+Yet on the heaving swells
+Tossed up and down the ship-lights,
+The lights of the Three Bells!
+
+And ship to ship made signals,
+Man answered back to man,
+While oft, to cheer and hearten,
+The Three Bells nearer ran;
+
+And the captain from her taffrail
+Sent down his hopeful cry
+"Take heart! Hold on!" he shouted;
+"The Three Bells shall lay by!"
+
+All night across the waters
+The tossing lights shone clear;
+All night from reeling taffrail
+The Three Bells sent her cheer.
+
+And when the dreary watches
+Of storm and darkness passed,
+Just as the wreck lurched under,
+All souls were saved at last.
+
+Sail on, Three Bells, forever,
+In grateful memory sail!
+Ring on, Three Bells of rescue,
+Above the wave and gale!
+
+Type of the Love eternal,
+Repeat the Master's cry,
+As tossing through our darkness
+The lights of God draw nigh!
+1872.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN UNDERHILL.
+
+A SCORE of years had come and gone
+Since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth stone,
+When Captain Underhill, bearing scars
+From Indian ambush and Flemish wars,
+Left three-hilled Boston and wandered down,
+East by north, to Cocheco town.
+
+With Vane the younger, in counsel sweet,
+He had sat at Anna Hutchinson's feet,
+And, when the bolt of banishment fell
+On the head of his saintly oracle,
+He had shared her ill as her good report,
+And braved the wrath of the General Court.
+
+He shook from his feet as he rode away
+The dust of the Massachusetts Bay.
+The world might bless and the world might ban,
+What did it matter the perfect man,
+To whom the freedom of earth was given,
+Proof against sin, and sure of heaven?
+
+He cheered his heart as he rode along
+With screed of Scripture and holy song,
+Or thought how he rode with his lances free
+By the Lower Rhine and the Zuyder-Zee,
+Till his wood-path grew to a trodden road,
+And Hilton Point in the distance showed.
+
+He saw the church with the block-house nigh,
+The two fair rivers, the flakes thereby,
+And, tacking to windward, low and crank,
+The little shallop from Strawberry Bank;
+And he rose in his stirrups and looked abroad
+Over land and water, and praised the Lord.
+
+Goodly and stately and grave to see,
+Into the clearing's space rode he,
+With the sun on the hilt of his sword in sheath,
+And his silver buckles and spurs beneath,
+And the settlers welcomed him, one and all,
+From swift Quampeagan to Gonic Fall.
+
+And he said to the elders: "Lo, I come
+As the way seemed open to seek a home.
+Somewhat the Lord hath wrought by my hands
+In the Narragansett and Netherlands,
+And if here ye have work for a Christian man,
+I will tarry, and serve ye as best I can.
+
+"I boast not of gifts, but fain would own
+The wonderful favor God hath shown,
+The special mercy vouchsafed one day
+On the shore of Narragansett Bay,
+As I sat, with my pipe, from the camp aside,
+And mused like Isaac at eventide.
+
+"A sudden sweetness of peace I found,
+A garment of gladness wrapped me round;
+I felt from the law of works released,
+The strife of the flesh and spirit ceased,
+My faith to a full assurance grew,
+And all I had hoped for myself I knew.
+
+"Now, as God appointeth, I keep my way,
+I shall not stumble, I shall not stray;
+He hath taken away my fig-leaf dress,
+I wear the robe of His righteousness;
+And the shafts of Satan no more avail
+Than Pequot arrows on Christian mail."
+
+"Tarry with us," the settlers cried,
+"Thou man of God, as our ruler and guide."
+And Captain Underhill bowed his head.
+"The will of the Lord be done!" he said.
+And the morrow beheld him sitting down
+In the ruler's seat in Cocheco town.
+
+And he judged therein as a just man should;
+His words were wise and his rule was good;
+He coveted not his neighbor's land,
+From the holding of bribes he shook his hand;
+And through the camps of the heathen ran
+A wholesome fear of the valiant man.
+
+But the heart is deceitful, the good Book saith,
+And life hath ever a savor of death.
+Through hymns of triumph the tempter calls,
+And whoso thinketh he standeth falls.
+Alas! ere their round the seasons ran,
+There was grief in the soul of the saintly man.
+
+The tempter's arrows that rarely fail
+Had found the joints of his spiritual mail;
+And men took note of his gloomy air,
+The shame in his eye, the halt in his prayer,
+The signs of a battle lost within,
+The pain of a soul in the coils of sin.
+
+Then a whisper of scandal linked his name
+With broken vows and a life of blame;
+And the people looked askance on him
+As he walked among them sullen and grim,
+Ill at ease, and bitter of word,
+And prompt of quarrel with hand or sword.
+
+None knew how, with prayer and fasting still,
+He strove in the bonds of his evil will;
+But he shook himself like Samson at length,
+And girded anew his loins of strength,
+And bade the crier go up and down
+And call together the wondering town.
+
+Jeer and murmur and shaking of head
+Ceased as he rose in his place and said
+"Men, brethren, and fathers, well ye know
+How I came among you a year ago,
+Strong in the faith that my soul was freed
+From sin of feeling, or thought, or deed.
+
+"I have sinned, I own it with grief and shame,
+But not with a lie on my lips I came.
+In my blindness I verily thought my heart
+Swept and garnished in every part.
+He chargeth His angels with folly; He sees
+The heavens unclean. Was I more than these?
+
+"I urge no plea. At your feet I lay
+The trust you gave me, and go my way.
+Hate me or pity me, as you will,
+The Lord will have mercy on sinners still;
+And I, who am chiefest, say to all,
+Watch and pray, lest ye also fall."
+
+No voice made answer: a sob so low
+That only his quickened ear could know
+Smote his heart with a bitter pain,
+As into the forest he rode again,
+And the veil of its oaken leaves shut down
+On his latest glimpse of Cocheco town.
+
+Crystal-clear on the man of sin
+The streams flashed up, and the sky shone in;
+On his cheek of fever the cool wind blew,
+The leaves dropped on him their tears of dew,
+And angels of God, in the pure, sweet guise
+Of flowers, looked on him with sad surprise.
+
+Was his ear at fault that brook and breeze
+Sang in their saddest of minor keys?
+What was it the mournful wood-thrush said?
+What whispered the pine-trees overhead?
+Did he hear the Voice on his lonely way
+That Adam heard in the cool of day?
+
+Into the desert alone rode he,
+Alone with the Infinite Purity;
+And, bowing his soul to its tender rebuke,
+As Peter did to the Master's look,
+He measured his path with prayers of pain
+For peace with God and nature again.
+
+And in after years to Cocheco came
+The bruit of a once familiar name;
+How among the Dutch of New Netherlands,
+From wild Danskamer to Haarlem sands,
+A penitent soldier preached the Word,
+And smote the heathen with Gideon's sword!
+
+And the heart of Boston was glad to hear
+How he harried the foe on the long frontier,
+And heaped on the land against him barred
+The coals of his generous watch and ward.
+Frailest and bravest! the Bay State still
+Counts with her worthies John Underhill.
+1873.
+
+
+
+
+CONDUCTOR BRADLEY.
+
+A railway conductor who lost his life in an accident on a Connecticut
+railway, May 9, 1873.
+
+
+CONDUCTOR BRADLEY, (always may his name
+Be said with reverence!) as the swift doom came,
+Smitten to death, a crushed and mangled frame,
+
+Sank, with the brake he grasped just where he stood
+To do the utmost that a brave man could,
+And die, if needful, as a true man should.
+
+Men stooped above him; women dropped their tears
+On that poor wreck beyond all hopes or fears,
+Lost in the strength and glory of his years.
+
+What heard they? Lo! the ghastly lips of pain,
+Dead to all thought save duty's, moved again
+"Put out the signals for the other train!"
+
+No nobler utterance since the world began
+From lips of saint or martyr ever ran,
+Electric, through the sympathies of man.
+
+Ah me! how poor and noteless seem to this
+The sick-bed dramas of self-consciousness,
+Our sensual fears of pain and hopes of bliss!
+
+Oh, grand, supreme endeavor! Not in vain
+That last brave act of failing tongue and brain
+Freighted with life the downward rushing train,
+
+Following the wrecked one, as wave follows wave,
+Obeyed the warning which the dead lips gave.
+Others he saved, himself he could not save.
+
+Nay, the lost life was saved. He is not dead
+Who in his record still the earth shall tread
+With God's clear aureole shining round his head.
+
+We bow as in the dust, with all our pride
+Of virtue dwarfed the noble deed beside.
+God give us grace to live as Bradley died!
+1873.
+
+
+
+
+THE WITCH OF WENHAM.
+
+The house is still standing in Danvers, Mass., where, it is said, a
+suspected witch was confined overnight in the attic, which was bolted
+fast. In the morning when the constable came to take her to Salem for
+trial she was missing, although the door was still bolted. Her escape
+was doubtless aided by her friends, but at the time it was attributed
+to Satanic interference.
+
+
+I.
+
+ALONG Crane River's sunny slopes
+Blew warm the winds of May,
+And over Naumkeag's ancient oaks
+The green outgrew the gray.
+
+The grass was green on Rial-side,
+The early birds at will
+Waked up the violet in its dell,
+The wind-flower on its hill.
+
+"Where go you, in your Sunday coat,
+Son Andrew, tell me, pray."
+For striped perch in Wenham Lake
+I go to fish to-day."
+
+"Unharmed of thee in Wenham Lake
+The mottled perch shall be
+A blue-eyed witch sits on the bank
+And weaves her net for thee.
+
+"She weaves her golden hair; she sings
+Her spell-song low and faint;
+The wickedest witch in Salem jail
+Is to that girl a saint."
+
+"Nay, mother, hold thy cruel tongue;
+God knows," the young man cried,
+"He never made a whiter soul
+Than hers by Wenham side.
+
+"She tends her mother sick and blind,
+And every want supplies;
+To her above the blessed Book
+She lends her soft blue eyes.
+
+"Her voice is glad with holy songs,
+Her lips are sweet with prayer;
+Go where you will, in ten miles round
+Is none more good and fair."
+
+"Son Andrew, for the love of God
+And of thy mother, stay!"
+She clasped her hands, she wept aloud,
+But Andrew rode away.
+
+"O reverend sir, my Andrew's soul
+The Wenham witch has caught;
+She holds him with the curled gold
+Whereof her snare is wrought.
+
+"She charms him with her great blue eyes,
+She binds him with her hair;
+Oh, break the spell with holy words,
+Unbind him with a prayer!"
+
+"Take heart," the painful preacher said,
+"This mischief shall not be;
+The witch shall perish in her sins
+And Andrew shall go free.
+
+"Our poor Ann Putnam testifies
+She saw her weave a spell,
+Bare-armed, loose-haired, at full of moon,
+Around a dried-up well.
+
+"'Spring up, O well!' she softly sang
+The Hebrew's old refrain
+(For Satan uses Bible words),
+Till water flowed a-main.
+
+"And many a goodwife heard her speak
+By Wenham water words
+That made the buttercups take wings
+And turn to yellow birds.
+
+"They say that swarming wild bees seek
+The hive at her command;
+And fishes swim to take their food
+From out her dainty hand.
+
+"Meek as she sits in meeting-time,
+The godly minister
+Notes well the spell that doth compel
+The young men's eyes to her.
+
+"The mole upon her dimpled chin
+Is Satan's seal and sign;
+Her lips are red with evil bread
+And stain of unblest wine.
+
+"For Tituba, my Indian, saith
+At Quasycung she took
+The Black Man's godless sacrament
+And signed his dreadful book.
+
+"Last night my sore-afflicted child
+Against the young witch cried.
+To take her Marshal Herrick rides
+Even now to Wenham side."
+
+The marshal in his saddle sat,
+His daughter at his knee;
+"I go to fetch that arrant witch,
+Thy fair playmate," quoth he.
+
+"Her spectre walks the parsonage,
+And haunts both hall and stair;
+They know her by the great blue eyes
+And floating gold of hair."
+
+"They lie, they lie, my father dear!
+No foul old witch is she,
+But sweet and good and crystal-pure
+As Wenham waters be."
+
+"I tell thee, child, the Lord hath set
+Before us good and ill,
+And woe to all whose carnal loves
+Oppose His righteous will.
+
+"Between Him and the powers of hell
+Choose thou, my child, to-day
+No sparing hand, no pitying eye,
+When God commands to slay!"
+
+He went his way; the old wives shook
+With fear as he drew nigh;
+The children in the dooryards held
+Their breath as he passed by.
+
+Too well they knew the gaunt gray horse
+The grim witch-hunter rode
+The pale Apocalyptic beast
+By grisly Death bestrode.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Oh, fair the face of Wenham Lake
+Upon the young girl's shone,
+Her tender mouth, her dreaming eyes,
+Her yellow hair outblown.
+
+By happy youth and love attuned
+To natural harmonies,
+The singing birds, the whispering wind,
+She sat beneath the trees.
+
+Sat shaping for her bridal dress
+Her mother's wedding gown,
+When lo! the marshal, writ in hand,
+From Alford hill rode down.
+
+His face was hard with cruel fear,
+He grasped the maiden's hands
+"Come with me unto Salem town,
+For so the law commands!"
+
+"Oh, let me to my mother say
+Farewell before I go!"
+He closer tied her little hands
+Unto his saddle bow.
+
+"Unhand me," cried she piteously,
+"For thy sweet daughter's sake."
+"I'll keep my daughter safe," he said,
+"From the witch of Wenham Lake."
+
+"Oh, leave me for my mother's sake,
+She needs my eyes to see."
+"Those eyes, young witch, the crows shall peck
+From off the gallows-tree."
+
+He bore her to a farm-house old,
+And up its stairway long,
+And closed on her the garret-door
+With iron bolted strong.
+
+The day died out, the night came down
+Her evening prayer she said,
+While, through the dark, strange faces seemed
+To mock her as she prayed.
+
+The present horror deepened all
+The fears her childhood knew;
+The awe wherewith the air was filled
+With every breath she drew.
+
+And could it be, she trembling asked,
+Some secret thought or sin
+Had shut good angels from her heart
+And let the bad ones in?
+
+Had she in some forgotten dream
+Let go her hold on Heaven,
+And sold herself unwittingly
+To spirits unforgiven?
+
+Oh, weird and still the dark hours passed;
+No human sound she heard,
+But up and down the chimney stack
+The swallows moaned and stirred.
+
+And o'er her, with a dread surmise
+Of evil sight and sound,
+The blind bats on their leathern wings
+Went wheeling round and round.
+
+Low hanging in the midnight sky
+Looked in a half-faced moon.
+Was it a dream, or did she hear
+Her lover's whistled tune?
+
+She forced the oaken scuttle back;
+A whisper reached her ear
+"Slide down the roof to me," it said,
+"So softly none may hear."
+
+She slid along the sloping roof
+Till from its eaves she hung,
+And felt the loosened shingles yield
+To which her fingers clung.
+
+Below, her lover stretched his hands
+And touched her feet so small;
+"Drop down to me, dear heart," he said,
+"My arms shall break the fall."
+
+He set her on his pillion soft,
+Her arms about him twined;
+And, noiseless as if velvet-shod,
+They left the house behind.
+
+But when they reached the open way,
+Full free the rein he cast;
+Oh, never through the mirk midnight
+Rode man and maid more fast.
+
+Along the wild wood-paths they sped,
+The bridgeless streams they swam;
+At set of moon they passed the Bass,
+At sunrise Agawam.
+
+At high noon on the Merrimac
+The ancient ferryman
+Forgot, at times, his idle oars,
+So fair a freight to scan.
+
+And when from off his grounded boat
+He saw them mount and ride,
+"God keep her from the evil eye,
+And harm of witch!" he cried.
+
+The maiden laughed, as youth will laugh
+At all its fears gone by;
+"He does not know," she whispered low,
+"A little witch am I."
+
+All day he urged his weary horse,
+And, in the red sundown,
+Drew rein before a friendly door
+In distant Berwick town.
+
+A fellow-feeling for the wronged
+The Quaker people felt;
+And safe beside their kindly hearths
+The hunted maiden dwelt,
+
+Until from off its breast the land
+The haunting horror threw,
+And hatred, born of ghastly dreams,
+To shame and pity grew.
+
+Sad were the year's spring morns, and sad
+Its golden summer day,
+But blithe and glad its withered fields,
+And skies of ashen gray;
+
+For spell and charm had power no more,
+The spectres ceased to roam,
+And scattered households knelt again
+Around the hearths of home.
+
+And when once more by Beaver Dam
+The meadow-lark outsang,
+And once again on all the hills
+The early violets sprang,
+
+And all the windy pasture slopes
+Lay green within the arms
+Of creeks that bore the salted sea
+To pleasant inland farms,
+
+The smith filed off the chains he forged,
+The jail-bolts backward fell;
+And youth and hoary age came forth
+Like souls escaped from hell.
+1877
+
+
+
+
+KING SOLOMON AND THE ANTS
+
+OUT from Jerusalem
+The king rode with his great
+War chiefs and lords of state,
+And Sheba's queen with them;
+
+Comely, but black withal,
+To whom, perchance, belongs
+That wondrous Song of songs,
+Sensuous and mystical,
+
+Whereto devout souls turn
+In fond, ecstatic dream,
+And through its earth-born theme
+The Love of loves discern.
+
+Proud in the Syrian sun,
+In gold and purple sheen,
+The dusky Ethiop queen
+Smiled on King Solomon.
+
+Wisest of men, he knew
+The languages of all
+The creatures great or small
+That trod the earth or flew.
+
+Across an ant-hill led
+The king's path, and he heard
+Its small folk, and their word
+He thus interpreted:
+
+"Here comes the king men greet
+As wise and good and just,
+To crush us in the dust
+Under his heedless feet."
+
+The great king bowed his head,
+And saw the wide surprise
+Of the Queen of Sheba's eyes
+As he told her what they said.
+
+"O king!" she whispered sweet,
+"Too happy fate have they
+Who perish in thy way
+Beneath thy gracious feet!
+
+"Thou of the God-lent crown,
+Shall these vile creatures dare
+Murmur against thee where
+The knees of kings kneel down?"
+
+"Nay," Solomon replied,
+"The wise and strong should seek
+The welfare of the weak,"
+And turned his horse aside.
+
+His train, with quick alarm,
+Curved with their leader round
+The ant-hill's peopled mound,
+And left it free from harm.
+
+The jewelled head bent low;
+"O king!" she said, "henceforth
+The secret of thy worth
+And wisdom well I know.
+
+"Happy must be the State
+Whose ruler heedeth more
+The murmurs of the poor
+Than flatteries of the great."
+1877.
+
+
+
+
+
+IN THE "OLD SOUTH."
+
+On the 8th of July, 1677, Margaret Brewster with four other Friends
+went into the South Church in time of meeting, "in sack-cloth, with
+ashes upon her head, barefoot, and her face blackened," and delivered
+"a warning from the great God of Heaven and Earth to the Rulers and
+Magistrates of Boston." For the offence she was sentenced to be "whipped
+at a cart's tail up and down the Town, with twenty lashes."
+
+SHE came and stood in the Old South Church,
+A wonder and a sign,
+With a look the old-time sibyls wore,
+Half-crazed and half-divine.
+
+Save the mournful sackcloth about her wound,
+Unclothed as the primal mother,
+With limbs that trembled and eyes that blazed
+With a fire she dare not smother.
+
+Loose on her shoulders fell her hair,
+With sprinkled ashes gray;
+She stood in the broad aisle strange and weird
+As a soul at the judgment day.
+
+And the minister paused in his sermon's midst,
+And the people held their breath,
+For these were the words the maiden spoke
+Through lips as the lips of death:
+
+"Thus saith the Lord, with equal feet
+All men my courts shall tread,
+And priest and ruler no more shall eat
+My people up like bread!
+
+"Repent! repent! ere the Lord shall speak
+In thunder and breaking seals
+Let all souls worship Him in the way
+His light within reveals."
+
+She shook the dust from her naked feet,
+And her sackcloth closer drew,
+And into the porch of the awe-hushed church
+She passed like a ghost from view.
+
+They whipped her away at the tail o' the cart
+Through half the streets of the town,
+But the words she uttered that day nor fire
+Could burn nor water drown.
+
+And now the aisles of the ancient church
+By equal feet are trod,
+And the bell that swings in its belfry rings
+Freedom to worship God!
+
+And now whenever a wrong is done
+It thrills the conscious walls;
+The stone from the basement cries aloud
+And the beam from the timber calls.
+
+There are steeple-houses on every hand,
+And pulpits that bless and ban,
+And the Lord will not grudge the single church
+That is set apart for man.
+
+For in two commandments are all the law
+And the prophets under the sun,
+And the first is last and the last is first,
+And the twain are verily one.
+
+So, long as Boston shall Boston be,
+And her bay-tides rise and fall,
+Shall freedom stand in the Old South Church
+And plead for the rights of all!
+1877.
+
+
+
+
+THE HENCHMAN.
+
+MY lady walks her morning round,
+My lady's page her fleet greyhound,
+My lady's hair the fond winds stir,
+And all the birds make songs for her.
+
+Her thrushes sing in Rathburn bowers,
+And Rathburn side is gay with flowers;
+But ne'er like hers, in flower or bird,
+Was beauty seen or music heard.
+
+The distance of the stars is hers;
+The least of all her worshippers,
+The dust beneath her dainty heel,
+She knows not that I see or feel.
+
+Oh, proud and calm!--she cannot know
+Where'er she goes with her I go;
+Oh, cold and fair!--she cannot guess
+I kneel to share her hound's caress!
+
+Gay knights beside her hunt and hawk,
+I rob their ears of her sweet talk;
+Her suitors come from east and west,
+I steal her smiles from every guest.
+
+Unheard of her, in loving words,
+I greet her with the song of birds;
+I reach her with her green-armed bowers,
+I kiss her with the lips of flowers.
+
+The hound and I are on her trail,
+The wind and I uplift her veil;
+As if the calm, cold moon she were,
+And I the tide, I follow her.
+
+As unrebuked as they, I share
+The license of the sun and air,
+And in a common homage hide
+My worship from her scorn and pride.
+
+World-wide apart, and yet so near,
+I breathe her charmed atmosphere,
+Wherein to her my service brings
+The reverence due to holy things.
+
+Her maiden pride, her haughty name,
+My dumb devotion shall not shame;
+The love that no return doth crave
+To knightly levels lifts the slave,
+
+No lance have I, in joust or fight,
+To splinter in my lady's sight
+But, at her feet, how blest were I
+For any need of hers to die!
+1877.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEAD FEAST OF THE KOL-FOLK.
+
+E. B. Tylor in his Primitive Culture, chapter xii., gives an account of
+the reverence paid the dead by the Kol tribes of Chota Nagpur, Assam.
+"When a Ho or Munda," he says, "has been burned on the funeral pile,
+collected morsels of his bones are carried in procession with a solemn,
+ghostly, sliding step, keeping time to the deep-sounding drum, and when
+the old woman who carries the bones on her bamboo tray lowers it from
+time to time, then girls who carry pitchers and brass vessels mournfully
+reverse them to show that they are empty; thus the remains are taken to
+visit every house in the village, and every dwelling of a friend or
+relative for miles, and the inmates come out to mourn and praise the
+goodness of the departed; the bones are carried to all the dead man's
+favorite haunts, to the fields he cultivated, to the grove he planted,
+to the threshing-floor where he worked, to the village dance-room where
+he made merry. At last they are taken to the grave, and buried in an
+earthen vase upon a store of food, covered with one of those huge stone
+slabs which European visitors wonder at in the districts of the
+aborigines of India." In the Journal of the Asiatic Society, Bengal,
+vol. ix., p. 795, is a Ho dirge.
+
+
+WE have opened the door,
+Once, twice, thrice!
+We have swept the floor,
+We have boiled the rice.
+Come hither, come hither!
+Come from the far lands,
+Come from the star lands,
+Come as before!
+We lived long together,
+We loved one another;
+Come back to our life.
+Come father, come mother,
+Come sister and brother,
+Child, husband, and wife,
+For you we are sighing.
+Come take your old places,
+Come look in our faces,
+The dead on the dying,
+Come home!
+
+We have opened the door,
+Once, twice, thrice!
+We have kindled the coals,
+And we boil the rice
+For the feast of souls.
+Come hither, come hither!
+Think not we fear you,
+Whose hearts are so near you.
+Come tenderly thought on,
+Come all unforgotten,
+Come from the shadow-lands,
+From the dim meadow-lands
+Where the pale grasses bend
+Low to our sighing.
+Come father, come mother,
+Come sister and brother,
+Come husband and friend,
+The dead to the dying,
+Come home!
+
+We have opened the door
+You entered so oft;
+For the feast of souls
+We have kindled the coals,
+And we boil the rice soft.
+Come you who are dearest
+To us who are nearest,
+Come hither, come hither,
+From out the wild weather;
+The storm clouds are flying,
+The peepul is sighing;
+Come in from the rain.
+Come father, come mother,
+Come sister and brother,
+Come husband and lover,
+Beneath our roof-cover.
+Look on us again,
+The dead on the dying,
+Come home!
+
+We have opened the door!
+For the feast of souls
+We have kindled the coals
+We may kindle no more!
+Snake, fever, and famine,
+The curse of the Brahmin,
+The sun and the dew,
+They burn us, they bite us,
+They waste us and smite us;
+Our days are but few
+In strange lands far yonder
+To wonder and wander
+We hasten to you.
+List then to our sighing,
+While yet we are here
+Nor seeing nor hearing,
+We wait without fearing,
+To feel you draw near.
+O dead, to the dying
+Come home!
+1879.
+
+
+
+
+THE KHAN'S DEVIL.
+THE Khan came from Bokhara town
+To Hamza, santon of renown.
+
+"My head is sick, my hands are weak;
+Thy help, O holy man, I seek."
+
+In silence marking for a space
+The Khan's red eyes and purple face,
+
+Thick voice, and loose, uncertain tread,
+"Thou hast a devil!" Hamza said.
+
+"Allah forbid!" exclaimed the Khan.
+Rid me of him at once, O man!"
+
+"Nay," Hamza said, "no spell of mine
+Can slay that cursed thing of thine.
+
+"Leave feast and wine, go forth and drink
+Water of healing on the brink
+
+"Where clear and cold from mountain snows,
+The Nahr el Zeben downward flows.
+
+"Six moons remain, then come to me;
+May Allah's pity go with thee!"
+
+Awestruck, from feast and wine the Khan
+Went forth where Nahr el Zeben ran.
+
+Roots were his food, the desert dust
+His bed, the water quenched his thirst;
+
+And when the sixth moon's scimetar
+Curved sharp above the evening star,
+
+He sought again the santon's door,
+Not weak and trembling as before,
+
+But strong of limb and clear of brain;
+"Behold," he said, "the fiend is slain."
+
+"Nay," Hamza answered, "starved and drowned,
+The curst one lies in death-like swound.
+
+"But evil breaks the strongest gyves,
+And jins like him have charmed lives.
+
+"One beaker of the juice of grape
+May call him up in living shape.
+
+"When the red wine of Badakshan
+Sparkles for thee, beware, O Khan,
+
+"With water quench the fire within,
+And drown each day thy devilkin!"
+
+Thenceforth the great Khan shunned the cup
+As Shitan's own, though offered up,
+
+With laughing eyes and jewelled hands,
+By Yarkand's maids and Samarcand's.
+
+And, in the lofty vestibule
+Of the medress of Kaush Kodul,
+
+The students of the holy law
+A golden-lettered tablet saw,
+
+With these words, by a cunning hand,
+Graved on it at the Khan's command:
+
+"In Allah's name, to him who hath
+A devil, Khan el Hamed saith,
+
+"Wisely our Prophet cursed the vine
+The fiend that loves the breath of wine,
+
+"No prayer can slay, no marabout
+Nor Meccan dervis can drive out.
+
+"I, Khan el Hamed, know the charm
+That robs him of his power to harm.
+
+"Drown him, O Islam's child! the spell
+To save thee lies in tank and well!"
+1879.
+
+
+
+
+THE KING'S MISSIVE.
+1661.
+
+This ballad, originally written for The Memorial History of Boston,
+describes, with pardonable poetic license, a memorable incident in the
+annals of the city. The interview between Shattuck and the Governor took
+place, I have since learned, in the residence of the latter, and not
+in the Council Chamber. The publication of the ballad led to some
+discussion as to the historical truthfulness of the picture, but I have
+seen no reason to rub out any of the figures or alter the lines and
+colors.
+
+
+UNDER the great hill sloping bare
+To cove and meadow and Common lot,
+In his council chamber and oaken chair,
+Sat the worshipful Governor Endicott.
+A grave, strong man, who knew no peer
+In the pilgrim land, where he ruled in fear
+Of God, not man, and for good or ill
+Held his trust with an iron will.
+
+He had shorn with his sword the cross from out
+The flag, and cloven the May-pole down,
+Harried the heathen round about,
+And whipped the Quakers from town to town.
+Earnest and honest, a man at need
+To burn like a torch for his own harsh creed,
+He kept with the flaming brand of his zeal
+The gate of the holy common weal.
+
+His brow was clouded, his eye was stern,
+With a look of mingled sorrow and wrath;
+"Woe's me!" he murmured: "at every turn
+The pestilent Quakers are in my path!
+Some we have scourged, and banished some,
+Some hanged, more doomed, and still they come,
+Fast as the tide of yon bay sets in,
+Sowing their heresy's seed of sin.
+
+"Did we count on this? Did we leave behind
+The graves of our kin, the comfort and ease
+Of our English hearths and homes, to find
+Troublers of Israel such as these?
+Shall I spare? Shall I pity them? God forbid!
+I will do as the prophet to Agag did
+They come to poison the wells of the Word,
+I will hew them in pieces before the Lord!"
+
+The door swung open, and Rawson the clerk
+Entered, and whispered under breath,
+"There waits below for the hangman's work
+A fellow banished on pain of death--
+Shattuck, of Salem, unhealed of the whip,
+Brought over in Master Goldsmith's ship
+At anchor here in a Christian port,
+With freight of the devil and all his sort!"
+
+Twice and thrice on the chamber floor
+Striding fiercely from wall to wall,
+"The Lord do so to me and more,"
+The Governor cried, "if I hang not all!
+Bring hither the Quaker." Calm, sedate,
+With the look of a man at ease with fate,
+Into that presence grim and dread
+Came Samuel Shattuck, with hat on head.
+
+"Off with the knave's hat!" An angry hand
+Smote down the offence; but the wearer said,
+With a quiet smile, "By the king's command
+I bear his message and stand in his stead."
+In the Governor's hand a missive he laid
+With the royal arms on its seal displayed,
+And the proud man spake as he gazed thereat,
+Uncovering, "Give Mr. Shattuck his hat."
+
+He turned to the Quaker, bowing low,--
+"The king commandeth your friends' release;
+Doubt not he shall be obeyed, although
+To his subjects' sorrow and sin's increase.
+What he here enjoineth, John Endicott,
+His loyal servant, questioneth not.
+You are free! God grant the spirit you own
+May take you from us to parts unknown."
+
+So the door of the jail was open cast,
+And, like Daniel, out of the lion's den
+Tender youth and girlhood passed,
+With age-bowed women and gray-locked men.
+And the voice of one appointed to die
+Was lifted in praise and thanks on high,
+And the little maid from New Netherlands
+Kissed, in her joy, the doomed man's hands.
+
+And one, whose call was to minister
+To the souls in prison, beside him went,
+An ancient woman, bearing with her
+The linen shroud for his burial meant.
+For she, not counting her own life dear,
+In the strength of a love that cast out fear,
+Had watched and served where her brethren died,
+Like those who waited the cross beside.
+
+One moment they paused on their way to look
+On the martyr graves by the Common side,
+And much scourged Wharton of Salem took
+His burden of prophecy up and cried
+"Rest, souls of the valiant! Not in vain
+Have ye borne the Master's cross of pain;
+Ye have fought the fight, ye are victors crowned,
+With a fourfold chain ye have Satan bound!"
+
+The autumn haze lay soft and still
+On wood and meadow and upland farms;
+On the brow of Snow Hill the great windmill
+Slowly and lazily swung its arms;
+Broad in the sunshine stretched away,
+With its capes and islands, the turquoise bay;
+And over water and dusk of pines
+Blue hills lifted their faint outlines.
+
+The topaz leaves of the walnut glowed,
+The sumach added its crimson fleck,
+And double in air and water showed
+The tinted maples along the Neck;
+Through frost flower clusters of pale star-mist,
+And gentian fringes of amethyst,
+And royal plumes of golden-rod,
+The grazing cattle on Centry trod.
+
+But as they who see not, the Quakers saw
+The world about them; they only thought
+With deep thanksgiving and pious awe
+On the great deliverance God had wrought.
+Through lane and alley the gazing town
+Noisily followed them up and down;
+Some with scoffing and brutal jeer,
+Some with pity and words of cheer.
+
+One brave voice rose above the din.
+Upsall, gray with his length of days,
+Cried from the door of his Red Lion Inn
+"Men of Boston, give God the praise
+No more shall innocent blood call down
+The bolts of wrath on your guilty town.
+The freedom of worship, dear to you,
+Is dear to all, and to all is due.
+
+"I see the vision of days to come,
+When your beautiful City of the Bay
+Shall be Christian liberty's chosen home,
+And none shall his neighbor's rights gainsay.
+The varying notes of worship shall blend
+And as one great prayer to God ascend,
+And hands of mutual charity raise
+Walls of salvation and gates of praise."
+
+So passed the Quakers through Boston town,
+Whose painful ministers sighed to see
+The walls of their sheep-fold falling down,
+And wolves of heresy prowling free.
+But the years went on, and brought no wrong;
+With milder counsels the State grew strong,
+As outward Letter and inward Light
+Kept the balance of truth aright.
+
+The Puritan spirit perishing not,
+To Concord's yeomen the signal sent,
+And spake in the voice of the cannon-shot
+That severed the chains of a continent.
+With its gentler mission of peace and good-will
+The thought of the Quaker is living still,
+And the freedom of soul he prophesied
+Is gospel and law where the martyrs died.
+1880.
+
+
+
+
+VALUATION.
+
+THE old Squire said, as he stood by his gate,
+And his neighbor, the Deacon, went by,
+"In spite of my bank stock and real estate,
+You are better off, Deacon, than I.
+
+"We're both growing old, and the end's drawing near,
+You have less of this world to resign,
+But in Heaven's appraisal your assets, I fear,
+Will reckon up greater than mine.
+
+"They say I am rich, but I'm feeling so poor,
+I wish I could swap with you even
+The pounds I have lived for and laid up in store
+For the shillings and pence you have given."
+
+"Well, Squire," said the Deacon, with shrewd
+common sense,
+While his eye had a twinkle of fun,
+"Let your pounds take the way of my shillings
+and pence,
+And the thing can be easily done!"
+1880.
+
+
+
+
+RABBI ISHMAEL.
+
+"Rabbi Ishmael Ben Elisha said, Once, I entered into the Holy of Holies
+[as High Priest] to burn incense, when I saw Aktriel [the Divine Crown]
+Jah, Lord of Hosts, sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, who said
+unto me, 'Ishmael, my son, bless me.' I answered, 'May it please Thee to
+make Thy compassion prevail over Thine anger; may it be revealed above
+Thy other attributes; mayest Thou deal with Thy children according to
+it, and not according to the strict measure of judgment.' It seemed to
+me that He bowed His head, as though to answer Amen to my blessing."--
+Talmud (Beraehoth, I. f. 6. b.)
+
+
+THE Rabbi Ishmael, with the woe and sin
+Of the world heavy upon him, entering in
+The Holy of Holies, saw an awful Face
+With terrible splendor filling all the place.
+"O Ishmael Ben Elisha!" said a voice,
+"What seekest thou? What blessing is thy choice?"
+And, knowing that he stood before the Lord,
+Within the shadow of the cherubim,
+Wide-winged between the blinding light and him,
+He bowed himself, and uttered not a word,
+But in the silence of his soul was prayer
+"O Thou Eternal! I am one of all,
+And nothing ask that others may not share.
+Thou art almighty; we are weak and small,
+And yet Thy children: let Thy mercy spare!"
+Trembling, he raised his eyes, and in the place
+Of the insufferable glory, lo! a face
+Of more than mortal tenderness, that bent
+Graciously down in token of assent,
+And, smiling, vanished! With strange joy elate,
+The wondering Rabbi sought the temple's gate.
+Radiant as Moses from the Mount, he stood
+And cried aloud unto the multitude
+"O Israel, hear! The Lord our God is good!
+Mine eyes have seen his glory and his grace;
+Beyond his judgments shall his love endure;
+The mercy of the All Merciful is sure!"
+1881.
+
+
+
+
+THE ROCK-TOMB OF BRADORE.
+
+H. Y. Hind, in Explorations in the Interior of the Labrador Peninsula
+(ii. 166) mentions the finding of a rock tomb near the little fishing
+port of Bradore, with the inscription upon it which is given in the
+poem.
+
+A DREAR and desolate shore!
+Where no tree unfolds its leaves,
+And never the spring wind weaves
+Green grass for the hunter's tread;
+A land forsaken and dead,
+Where the ghostly icebergs go
+And come with the ebb and flow
+Of the waters of Bradore!
+
+A wanderer, from a land
+By summer breezes fanned,
+Looked round him, awed, subdued,
+By the dreadful solitude,
+Hearing alone the cry
+Of sea-birds clanging by,
+The crash and grind of the floe,
+Wail of wind and wash of tide.
+"O wretched land!" he cried,
+"Land of all lands the worst,
+God forsaken and curst!
+Thy gates of rock should show
+The words the Tuscan seer
+Read in the Realm of Woe
+Hope entereth not here!"
+
+Lo! at his feet there stood
+A block of smooth larch wood,
+Waif of some wandering wave,
+Beside a rock-closed cave
+By Nature fashioned for a grave;
+Safe from the ravening bear
+And fierce fowl of the air,
+Wherein to rest was laid
+A twenty summers' maid,
+Whose blood had equal share
+Of the lands of vine and snow,
+Half French, half Eskimo.
+In letters uneffaced,
+Upon the block were traced
+The grief and hope of man,
+And thus the legend ran
+"We loved her!
+Words cannot tell how well!
+We loved her!
+God loved her!
+And called her home to peace and rest.
+We love her."
+
+The stranger paused and read.
+"O winter land!" he said,
+"Thy right to be I own;
+God leaves thee not alone.
+And if thy fierce winds blow
+Over drear wastes of rock and snow,
+And at thy iron gates
+The ghostly iceberg waits,
+Thy homes and hearts are dear.
+Thy sorrow o'er thy sacred dust
+Is sanctified by hope and trust;
+God's love and man's are here.
+And love where'er it goes
+Makes its own atmosphere;
+Its flowers of Paradise
+Take root in the eternal ice,
+And bloom through Polar snows!"
+1881.
+
+
+
+
+THE BAY OF SEVEN ISLANDS.
+
+The volume in which "The Bay of Seven Islands" was published was
+dedicated to the late Edwin Percy Whipple, to whom more than to any
+other person I was indebted for public recognition as one worthy of a
+place in American literature, at a time when it required a great degree
+of courage to urge such a claim for a pro-scribed abolitionist. Although
+younger than I, he had gained the reputation of a brilliant essayist,
+and was regarded as the highest American authority in criticism. His wit
+and wisdom enlivened a small literary circle of young men including
+Thomas Starr King, the eloquent preacher, and Daniel N. Haskell of the
+Daily Transcript, who gathered about our common friend dames T. Fields
+at the Old Corner Bookstore. The poem which gave title to the volume I
+inscribed to my friend and neighbor Harriet Prescott Spofford, whose
+poems have lent a new interest to our beautiful river-valley.
+
+FROM the green Amesbury hill which bears the name
+Of that half mythic ancestor of mine
+Who trod its slopes two hundred years ago,
+Down the long valley of the Merrimac,
+Midway between me and the river's mouth,
+I see thy home, set like an eagle's nest
+Among Deer Island's immemorial pines,
+Crowning the crag on which the sunset breaks
+Its last red arrow. Many a tale and song,
+Which thou bast told or sung, I call to mind,
+Softening with silvery mist the woods and hills,
+The out-thrust headlands and inreaching bays
+Of our northeastern coast-line, trending where
+The Gulf, midsummer, feels the chill blockade
+Of icebergs stranded at its northern gate.
+
+To thee the echoes of the Island Sound
+Answer not vainly, nor in vain the moan
+Of the South Breaker prophesying storm.
+And thou hast listened, like myself, to men
+Sea-periled oft where Anticosti lies
+Like a fell spider in its web of fog,
+Or where the Grand Bank shallows with the wrecks
+Of sunken fishers, and to whom strange isles
+And frost-rimmed bays and trading stations seem
+Familiar as Great Neck and Kettle Cove,
+Nubble and Boon, the common names of home.
+So let me offer thee this lay of mine,
+Simple and homely, lacking much thy play
+Of color and of fancy. If its theme
+And treatment seem to thee befitting youth
+Rather than age, let this be my excuse
+It has beguiled some heavy hours and called
+Some pleasant memories up; and, better still,
+Occasion lent me for a kindly word
+To one who is my neighbor and my friend.
+1883.
+
+           . . . . . . . . . .
+
+The skipper sailed out of the harbor mouth,
+Leaving the apple-bloom of the South
+For the ice of the Eastern seas,
+In his fishing schooner Breeze.
+
+Handsome and brave and young was he,
+And the maids of Newbury sighed to see
+His lessening white sail fall
+Under the sea's blue wall.
+
+Through the Northern Gulf and the misty screen
+Of the isles of Mingan and Madeleine,
+St. Paul's and Blanc Sablon,
+The little Breeze sailed on,
+
+Backward and forward, along the shore
+Of lorn and desolate Labrador,
+And found at last her way
+To the Seven Islands Bay.
+
+The little hamlet, nestling below
+Great hills white with lingering snow,
+With its tin-roofed chapel stood
+Half hid in the dwarf spruce wood;
+
+Green-turfed, flower-sown, the last outpost
+Of summer upon the dreary coast,
+With its gardens small and spare,
+Sad in the frosty air.
+
+Hard by where the skipper's schooner lay,
+A fisherman's cottage looked away
+Over isle and bay, and behind
+On mountains dim-defined.
+
+And there twin sisters, fair and young,
+Laughed with their stranger guest, and sung
+In their native tongue the lays
+Of the old Provencal days.
+
+Alike were they, save the faint outline
+Of a scar on Suzette's forehead fine;
+And both, it so befell,
+Loved the heretic stranger well.
+
+Both were pleasant to look upon,
+But the heart of the skipper clave to one;
+Though less by his eye than heart
+He knew the twain apart.
+
+Despite of alien race and creed,
+Well did his wooing of Marguerite speed;
+And the mother's wrath was vain
+As the sister's jealous pain.
+
+The shrill-tongued mistress her house forbade,
+And solemn warning was sternly said
+By the black-robed priest, whose word
+As law the hamlet heard.
+
+But half by voice and half by signs
+The skipper said, "A warm sun shines
+On the green-banked Merrimac;
+Wait, watch, till I come back.
+
+"And when you see, from my mast head,
+The signal fly of a kerchief red,
+My boat on the shore shall wait;
+Come, when the night is late."
+
+Ah! weighed with childhood's haunts and friends,
+And all that the home sky overbends,
+Did ever young love fail
+To turn the trembling scale?
+
+Under the night, on the wet sea sands,
+Slowly unclasped their plighted hands
+One to the cottage hearth,
+And one to his sailor's berth.
+
+What was it the parting lovers heard?
+Nor leaf, nor ripple, nor wing of bird,
+But a listener's stealthy tread
+On the rock-moss, crisp and dead.
+
+He weighed his anchor, and fished once more
+By the black coast-line of Labrador;
+And by love and the north wind driven,
+Sailed back to the Islands Seven.
+
+In the sunset's glow the sisters twain
+Saw the Breeze come sailing in again;
+Said Suzette, "Mother dear,
+The heretic's sail is here."
+
+"Go, Marguerite, to your room, and hide;
+Your door shall be bolted!" the mother cried:
+While Suzette, ill at ease,
+Watched the red sign of the Breeze.
+
+At midnight, down to the waiting skiff
+She stole in the shadow of the cliff;
+And out of the Bay's mouth ran
+The schooner with maid and man.
+
+And all night long, on a restless bed,
+Her prayers to the Virgin Marguerite said
+And thought of her lover's pain
+Waiting for her in vain.
+
+Did he pace the sands? Did he pause to hear
+The sound of her light step drawing near?
+And, as the slow hours passed,
+Would he doubt her faith at last?
+
+But when she saw through the misty pane,
+The morning break on a sea of rain,
+Could even her love avail
+To follow his vanished sail?
+
+Meantime the Breeze, with favoring wind,
+Left the rugged Moisic hills behind,
+And heard from an unseen shore
+The falls of Manitou roar.
+
+On the morrow's morn, in the thick, gray weather
+They sat on the reeling deck together,
+Lover and counterfeit,
+Of hapless Marguerite.
+
+With a lover's hand, from her forehead fair
+He smoothed away her jet-black hair.
+What was it his fond eyes met?
+The scar of the false Suzette!
+
+Fiercely he shouted: "Bear away
+East by north for Seven Isles Bay!"
+The maiden wept and prayed,
+But the ship her helm obeyed.
+
+Once more the Bay of the Isles they found
+They heard the bell of the chapel sound,
+And the chant of the dying sung
+In the harsh, wild Indian tongue.
+
+A feeling of mystery, change, and awe
+Was in all they heard and all they saw
+Spell-bound the hamlet lay
+In the hush of its lonely bay.
+
+And when they came to the cottage door,
+The mother rose up from her weeping sore,
+And with angry gestures met
+The scared look of Suzette.
+
+"Here is your daughter," the skipper said;
+"Give me the one I love instead."
+But the woman sternly spake;
+"Go, see if the dead will wake!"
+
+He looked. Her sweet face still and white
+And strange in the noonday taper light,
+She lay on her little bed,
+With the cross at her feet and head.
+
+In a passion of grief the strong man bent
+Down to her face, and, kissing it, went
+Back to the waiting Breeze,
+Back to the mournful seas.
+
+Never again to the Merrimac
+And Newbury's homes that bark came back.
+Whether her fate she met
+On the shores of Carraquette,
+
+Miscou, or Tracadie, who can say?
+But even yet at Seven Isles Bay
+Is told the ghostly tale
+Of a weird, unspoken sail,
+
+In the pale, sad light of the Northern day
+Seen by the blanketed Montagnais,
+Or squaw, in her small kyack,
+Crossing the spectre's track.
+
+On the deck a maiden wrings her hands;
+Her likeness kneels on the gray coast sands;
+One in her wild despair,
+And one in the trance of prayer.
+
+She flits before no earthly blast,
+The red sign fluttering from her mast,
+Over the solemn seas,
+The ghost of the schooner Breeze!
+1882.
+
+
+
+
+THE WISHING BRIDGE.
+
+AMONG the legends sung or said
+Along our rocky shore,
+The Wishing Bridge of Marblehead
+May well be sung once more.
+
+An hundred years ago (so ran
+The old-time story) all
+Good wishes said above its span
+Would, soon or late, befall.
+
+If pure and earnest, never failed
+The prayers of man or maid
+For him who on the deep sea sailed,
+For her at home who stayed.
+
+Once thither came two girls from school,
+And wished in childish glee
+And one would be a queen and rule,
+And one the world would see.
+
+Time passed; with change of hopes and fears,
+And in the self-same place,
+Two women, gray with middle years,
+Stood, wondering, face to face.
+
+With wakened memories, as they met,
+They queried what had been
+"A poor man's wife am I, and yet,"
+Said one, "I am a queen.
+
+"My realm a little homestead is,
+Where, lacking crown and throne,
+I rule by loving services
+And patient toil alone."
+
+The other said: "The great world lies
+Beyond me as it lay;
+O'er love's and duty's boundaries
+My feet may never stray.
+
+"I see but common sights of home,
+Its common sounds I hear,
+My widowed mother's sick-bed room
+Sufficeth for my sphere.
+
+"I read to her some pleasant page
+Of travel far and wide,
+And in a dreamy pilgrimage
+We wander side by side.
+
+"And when, at last, she falls asleep,
+My book becomes to me
+A magic glass: my watch I keep,
+But all the world I see.
+
+"A farm-wife queen your place you fill,
+While fancy's privilege
+Is mine to walk the earth at will,
+Thanks to the Wishing Bridge."
+
+"Nay, leave the legend for the truth,"
+The other cried, "and say
+God gives the wishes of our youth,
+But in His own best way!"
+1882.
+
+
+
+
+HOW THE WOMEN WENT FROM DOVER.
+
+The following is a copy of the warrant issued by Major Waldron, of
+Dover, in 1662. The Quakers, as was their wont, prophesied against him,
+and saw, as they supposed, the fulfilment of their prophecy when, many
+years after, he was killed by the Indians.
+
+ To the constables of Dover, Hampton, Salisbury, Newbury, Rowley,
+ Ipswich, Wenham, Lynn, Boston, Roxbury, Dedham, and until these
+ vagabond Quakers are carried out of this jurisdiction. You, and
+ every one of you, are required, in the King's Majesty's name, to
+ take these vagabond Quakers, Anne Colman, Mary Tomkins, and Alice
+ Ambrose, and make them fast to the cart's tail, and driving the
+ cart through your several towns, to whip them upon their naked
+ backs not exceeding ten stripes apiece on each of them, in each
+ town; and so to convey them from constable to constable till they
+ are out of this jurisdiction, as you will answer it at your peril;
+ and this shall be your warrant.
+                                    RICHARD WALDRON.
+ Dated at Dover, December 22, 1662.
+
+This warrant was executed only in Dover and Hampton. At Salisbury the
+constable refused to obey it. He was sustained by the town's people, who
+were under the influence of Major Robert Pike, the leading man in the
+lower valley of the Merrimac, who stood far in advance of his time, as
+an advocate of religious freedom, and an opponent of ecclesiastical
+authority. He had the moral courage to address an able and manly letter
+to the court at Salem, remonstrating against the witchcraft trials.
+
+
+THE tossing spray of Cocheco's fall
+Hardened to ice on its rocky wall,
+As through Dover town in the chill, gray dawn,
+Three women passed, at the cart-tail drawn!
+
+Bared to the waist, for the north wind's grip
+And keener sting of the constable's whip,
+The blood that followed each hissing blow
+Froze as it sprinkled the winter snow.
+
+Priest and ruler, boy and maid
+Followed the dismal cavalcade;
+And from door and window, open thrown,
+Looked and wondered gaffer and crone.
+
+"God is our witness," the victims cried,
+We suffer for Him who for all men died;
+The wrong ye do has been done before,
+We bear the stripes that the Master bore!
+
+And thou, O Richard Waldron, for whom
+We hear the feet of a coming doom,
+On thy cruel heart and thy hand of wrong
+Vengeance is sure, though it tarry long.
+
+"In the light of the Lord, a flame we see
+Climb and kindle a proud roof-tree;
+And beneath it an old man lying dead,
+With stains of blood on his hoary head."
+
+"Smite, Goodman Hate-Evil!--harder still!"
+The magistrate cried, "lay on with a will!
+Drive out of their bodies the Father of Lies,
+Who through them preaches and prophesies!"
+
+So into the forest they held their way,
+By winding river and frost-rimmed bay,
+Over wind-swept hills that felt the beat
+Of the winter sea at their icy feet.
+
+The Indian hunter, searching his traps,
+Peered stealthily through the forest gaps;
+And the outlying settler shook his head,--
+"They're witches going to jail," he said.
+
+At last a meeting-house came in view;
+A blast on his horn the constable blew;
+And the boys of Hampton cried up and down,
+"The Quakers have come!" to the wondering town.
+
+From barn and woodpile the goodman came;
+The goodwife quitted her quilting frame,
+With her child at her breast; and, hobbling slow,
+The grandam followed to see the show.
+
+Once more the torturing whip was swung,
+Once more keen lashes the bare flesh stung.
+"Oh, spare! they are bleeding!"' a little maid cried,
+And covered her face the sight to hide.
+
+A murmur ran round the crowd: "Good folks,"
+Quoth the constable, busy counting the strokes,
+"No pity to wretches like these is due,
+They have beaten the gospel black and blue!"
+
+Then a pallid woman, in wild-eyed fear,
+With her wooden noggin of milk drew near.
+"Drink, poor hearts!" a rude hand smote
+Her draught away from a parching throat.
+
+"Take heed," one whispered, "they'll take your cow
+For fines, as they took your horse and plough,
+And the bed from under you." "Even so,"
+She said; "they are cruel as death, I know."
+
+Then on they passed, in the waning day,
+Through Seabrook woods, a weariful way;
+By great salt meadows and sand-hills bare,
+And glimpses of blue sea here and there.
+
+By the meeting-house in Salisbury town,
+The sufferers stood, in the red sundown,
+Bare for the lash! O pitying Night,
+Drop swift thy curtain and hide the sight.
+
+With shame in his eye and wrath on his lip
+The Salisbury constable dropped his whip.
+"This warrant means murder foul and red;
+Cursed is he who serves it," he said.
+
+"Show me the order, and meanwhile strike
+A blow at your peril!" said Justice Pike.
+Of all the rulers the land possessed,
+Wisest and boldest was he and best.
+
+He scoffed at witchcraft; the priest he met
+As man meets man; his feet he set
+Beyond his dark age, standing upright,
+Soul-free, with his face to the morning light.
+
+He read the warrant: "These convey
+From our precincts; at every town on the way
+Give each ten lashes." "God judge the brute!
+I tread his order under my foot!
+
+"Cut loose these poor ones and let them go;
+Come what will of it, all men shall know
+No warrant is good, though backed by the Crown,
+For whipping women in Salisbury town!"
+
+The hearts of the villagers, half released
+From creed of terror and rule of priest,
+By a primal instinct owned the right
+Of human pity in law's despite.
+
+For ruth and chivalry only slept,
+His Saxon manhood the yeoman kept;
+Quicker or slower, the same blood ran
+In the Cavalier and the Puritan.
+
+The Quakers sank on their knees in praise
+And thanks. A last, low sunset blaze
+Flashed out from under a cloud, and shed
+A golden glory on each bowed head.
+
+The tale is one of an evil time,
+When souls were fettered and thought was crime,
+And heresy's whisper above its breath
+Meant shameful scourging and bonds and death!
+
+What marvel, that hunted and sorely tried,
+Even woman rebuked and prophesied,
+And soft words rarely answered back
+The grim persuasion of whip and rack.
+
+If her cry from the whipping-post and jail
+Pierced sharp as the Kenite's driven nail,
+O woman, at ease in these happier days,
+Forbear to judge of thy sister's ways!
+
+How much thy beautiful life may owe
+To her faith and courage thou canst not know,
+Nor how from the paths of thy calm retreat
+She smoothed the thorns with her bleeding feet.
+1883.
+
+
+
+
+SAINT GREGORY'S GUEST.
+
+A TALE for Roman guides to tell
+To careless, sight-worn travellers still,
+Who pause beside the narrow cell
+Of Gregory on the Caelian Hill.
+
+One day before the monk's door came
+A beggar, stretching empty palms,
+Fainting and fast-sick, in the name
+Of the Most Holy asking alms.
+
+And the monk answered, "All I have
+In this poor cell of mine I give,
+The silver cup my mother gave;
+In Christ's name take thou it, and live."
+
+Years passed; and, called at last to bear
+The pastoral crook and keys of Rome,
+The poor monk, in Saint Peter's chair,
+Sat the crowned lord of Christendom.
+
+"Prepare a feast," Saint Gregory cried,
+"And let twelve beggars sit thereat."
+The beggars came, and one beside,
+An unknown stranger, with them sat.
+
+"I asked thee not," the Pontiff spake,
+"O stranger; but if need be thine,
+I bid thee welcome, for the sake
+Of Him who is thy Lord and mine."
+
+A grave, calm face the stranger raised,
+Like His who on Gennesaret trod,
+Or His on whom the Chaldeans gazed,
+Whose form was as the Son of God.
+
+"Know'st thou," he said, "thy gift of old?"
+And in the hand he lifted up
+The Pontiff marvelled to behold
+Once more his mother's silver cup.
+
+"Thy prayers and alms have risen, and bloom
+Sweetly among the flowers of heaven.
+I am The Wonderful, through whom
+Whate'er thou askest shall be given."
+
+He spake and vanished. Gregory fell
+With his twelve guests in mute accord
+Prone on their faces, knowing well
+Their eyes of flesh had seen the Lord.
+
+The old-time legend is not vain;
+Nor vain thy art, Verona's Paul,
+Telling it o'er and o'er again
+On gray Vicenza's frescoed wall.
+
+Still wheresoever pity shares
+Its bread with sorrow, want, and sin,
+And love the beggar's feast prepares,
+The uninvited Guest comes in.
+
+Unheard, because our ears are dull,
+Unseen, because our eyes are dim,
+He walks our earth, The Wonderful,
+And all good deeds are done to Him.
+1883.
+
+
+
+
+BIRCHBROOK MILL.
+
+A NOTELESS stream, the Birchbrook runs
+Beneath its leaning trees;
+That low, soft ripple is its own,
+That dull roar is the sea's.
+
+Of human signs it sees alone
+The distant church spire's tip,
+And, ghost-like, on a blank of gray,
+The white sail of a ship.
+
+No more a toiler at the wheel,
+It wanders at its will;
+Nor dam nor pond is left to tell
+Where once was Birchbrook mill.
+
+The timbers of that mill have fed
+Long since a farmer's fires;
+His doorsteps are the stones that ground
+The harvest of his sires.
+
+Man trespassed here; but Nature lost
+No right of her domain;
+She waited, and she brought the old
+Wild beauty back again.
+
+By day the sunlight through the leaves
+Falls on its moist, green sod,
+And wakes the violet bloom of spring
+And autumn's golden-rod.
+
+Its birches whisper to the wind,
+The swallow dips her wings
+In the cool spray, and on its banks
+The gray song-sparrow sings.
+
+But from it, when the dark night falls,
+The school-girl shrinks with dread;
+The farmer, home-bound from his fields,
+Goes by with quickened tread.
+
+They dare not pause to hear the grind
+Of shadowy stone on stone;
+The plashing of a water-wheel
+Where wheel there now is none.
+
+Has not a cry of pain been heard
+Above the clattering mill?
+The pawing of an unseen horse,
+Who waits his mistress still?
+
+Yet never to the listener's eye
+Has sight confirmed the sound;
+A wavering birch line marks alone
+The vacant pasture ground.
+
+No ghostly arms fling up to heaven
+The agony of prayer;
+No spectral steed impatient shakes
+His white mane on the air.
+
+The meaning of that common dread
+No tongue has fitly told;
+The secret of the dark surmise
+The brook and birches hold.
+
+What nameless horror of the past
+Broods here forevermore?
+What ghost his unforgiven sin
+Is grinding o'er and o'er?
+
+Does, then, immortal memory play
+The actor's tragic part,
+Rehearsals of a mortal life
+And unveiled human heart?
+
+God's pity spare a guilty soul
+That drama of its ill,
+And let the scenic curtain fall
+On Birchbrook's haunted mill
+1884.
+
+
+
+
+THE TWO ELIZABETHS.
+Read at the unveiling of the bust of Elizabeth Fry at the  Friends'
+School, Providence, R. I.
+
+A. D. 1209.
+
+AMIDST Thuringia's wooded hills she dwelt,
+A high-born princess, servant of the poor,
+Sweetening with gracious words the food she dealt
+To starving throngs at Wartburg's blazoned door.
+
+A blinded zealot held her soul in chains,
+Cramped the sweet nature that he could not kill,
+Scarred her fair body with his penance-pains,
+And gauged her conscience by his narrow will.
+
+God gave her gifts of beauty and of grace,
+With fast and vigil she denied them all;
+Unquestioning, with sad, pathetic face,
+She followed meekly at her stern guide's call.
+
+So drooped and died her home-blown rose of bliss
+In the chill rigor of a discipline
+That turned her fond lips from her children's kiss,
+And made her joy of motherhood a sin.
+
+To their sad level by compassion led,
+One with the low and vile herself she made,
+While thankless misery mocked the hand that fed,
+And laughed to scorn her piteous masquerade.
+
+But still, with patience that outwearied hate,
+She gave her all while yet she had to give;
+And then her empty hands, importunate,
+In prayer she lifted that the poor might live.
+
+Sore pressed by grief, and wrongs more hard to bear,
+And dwarfed and stifled by a harsh control,
+She kept life fragrant with good deeds and prayer,
+And fresh and pure the white flower of her soul.
+
+Death found her busy at her task: one word
+Alone she uttered as she paused to die,
+"Silence!"--then listened even as one who heard
+With song and wing the angels drawing nigh!
+
+Now Fra Angelico's roses fill her hands,
+And, on Murillo's canvas, Want and Pain
+Kneel at her feet. Her marble image stands
+Worshipped and crowned in Marburg's holy fane.
+
+Yea, wheresoe'er her Church its cross uprears,
+Wide as the world her story still is told;
+In manhood's reverence, woman's prayers and tears,
+She lives again whose grave is centuries old.
+
+And still, despite the weakness or the blame
+Of blind submission to the blind, she hath
+A tender place in hearts of every name,
+And more than Rome owns Saint Elizabeth!
+
+
+
+A. D. 1780.
+
+Slow ages passed: and lo! another came,
+An English matron, in whose simple faith
+Nor priestly rule nor ritual had claim,
+A plain, uncanonized Elizabeth.
+
+No sackcloth robe, nor ashen-sprinkled hair,
+Nor wasting fast, nor scourge, nor vigil long,
+Marred her calm presence. God had made her fair,
+And she could do His goodly work no wrong.
+
+Their yoke is easy and their burden light
+Whose sole confessor is the Christ of God;
+Her quiet trust and faith transcending sight
+Smoothed to her feet the difficult paths she trod.
+
+And there she walked, as duty bade her go,
+Safe and unsullied as a cloistered nun,
+Shamed with her plainness Fashion's gaudy show,
+And overcame the world she did not shun.
+
+In Earlham's bowers, in Plashet's liberal hall,
+In the great city's restless crowd and din,
+Her ear was open to the Master's call,
+And knew the summons of His voice within.
+
+Tender as mother, beautiful as wife,
+Amidst the throngs of prisoned crime she stood
+In modest raiment faultless as her life,
+The type of England's worthiest womanhood.
+
+To melt the hearts that harshness turned to stone
+The sweet persuasion of her lips sufficed,
+And guilt, which only hate and fear had known,
+Saw in her own the pitying love of Christ.
+
+So wheresoe'er the guiding Spirit went
+She followed, finding every prison cell
+It opened for her sacred as a tent
+Pitched by Gennesaret or by Jacob's well.
+
+And Pride and Fashion felt her strong appeal,
+And priest and ruler marvelled as they saw
+How hand in hand went wisdom with her zeal,
+And woman's pity kept the bounds of law.
+
+She rests in God's peace; but her memory stirs
+The air of earth as with an angel's wings,
+And warms and moves the hearts of men like hers,
+The sainted daughter of Hungarian kings.
+
+United now, the Briton and the Hun,
+Each, in her own time, faithful unto death,
+Live sister souls! in name and spirit one,
+Thuringia's saint and our Elizabeth!
+1885.
+
+
+
+
+REQUITAL.
+
+As Islam's Prophet, when his last day drew
+Nigh to its close, besought all men to say
+Whom he had wronged, to whom he then should pay
+A debt forgotten, or for pardon sue,
+And, through the silence of his weeping friends,
+A strange voice cried: "Thou owest me a debt,"
+"Allah be praised!" he answered. "Even yet
+He gives me power to make to thee amends.
+O friend! I thank thee for thy timely word."
+So runs the tale. Its lesson all may heed,
+For all have sinned in thought, or word, or deed,
+Or, like the Prophet, through neglect have erred.
+All need forgiveness, all have debts to pay
+Ere the night cometh, while it still is day.
+1885.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOMESTEAD.
+
+AGAINST the wooded hills it stands,
+Ghost of a dead home, staring through
+Its broken lights on wasted lands
+Where old-time harvests grew.
+
+Unploughed, unsown, by scythe unshorn,
+The poor, forsaken farm-fields lie,
+Once rich and rife with golden corn
+And pale green breadths of rye.
+
+Of healthful herb and flower bereft,
+The garden plot no housewife keeps;
+Through weeds and tangle only left,
+The snake, its tenant, creeps.
+
+A lilac spray, still blossom-clad,
+Sways slow before the empty rooms;
+Beside the roofless porch a sad
+Pathetic red rose blooms.
+
+His track, in mould and dust of drouth,
+On floor and hearth the squirrel leaves,
+And in the fireless chimney's mouth
+His web the spider weaves.
+
+The leaning barn, about to fall,
+Resounds no more on husking eves;
+No cattle low in yard or stall,
+No thresher beats his sheaves.
+
+So sad, so drear! It seems almost
+Some haunting Presence makes its sign;
+That down yon shadowy lane some ghost
+Might drive his spectral kine!
+
+O home so desolate and lorn!
+Did all thy memories die with thee?
+Were any wed, were any born,
+Beneath this low roof-tree?
+
+Whose axe the wall of forest broke,
+And let the waiting sunshine through?
+What goodwife sent the earliest smoke
+Up the great chimney flue?
+
+Did rustic lovers hither come?
+Did maidens, swaying back and forth
+In rhythmic grace, at wheel and loom,
+Make light their toil with mirth?
+
+Did child feet patter on the stair?
+Did boyhood frolic in the snow?
+Did gray age, in her elbow chair,
+Knit, rocking to and fro?
+
+The murmuring brook, the sighing breeze,
+The pine's slow whisper, cannot tell;
+Low mounds beneath the hemlock-trees
+Keep the home secrets well.
+
+Cease, mother-land, to fondly boast
+Of sons far off who strive and thrive,
+Forgetful that each swarming host
+Must leave an emptier hive.
+
+O wanderers from ancestral soil,
+Leave noisome mill and chaffering store:
+Gird up your loins for sturdier toil,
+And build the home once more!
+
+Come back to bayberry-scented slopes,
+And fragrant fern, and ground-nut vine;
+Breathe airs blown over holt and copse
+Sweet with black birch and pine.
+
+What matter if the gains are small
+That life's essential wants supply?
+Your homestead's title gives you all
+That idle wealth can buy.
+
+All that the many-dollared crave,
+The brick-walled slaves of 'Change and mart,
+Lawns, trees, fresh air, and flowers, you have,
+More dear for lack of art.
+
+Your own sole masters, freedom-willed,
+With none to bid you go or stay,
+Till the old fields your fathers tilled,
+As manly men as they!
+
+With skill that spares your toiling hands,
+And chemic aid that science brings,
+Reclaim the waste and outworn lands,
+And reign thereon as kings
+1886.
+
+
+
+
+HOW THE ROBIN CAME.
+
+AN ALGONQUIN LEGEND.
+
+HAPPY young friends, sit by me,
+Under May's blown apple-tree,
+While these home-birds in and out
+Through the blossoms flit about.
+Hear a story, strange and old,
+By the wild red Indians told,
+How the robin came to be:
+
+Once a great chief left his son,--
+Well-beloved, his only one,--
+When the boy was well-nigh grown,
+In the trial-lodge alone.
+Left for tortures long and slow
+Youths like him must undergo,
+Who their pride of manhood test,
+Lacking water, food, and rest.
+
+Seven days the fast he kept,
+Seven nights he never slept.
+Then the young boy, wrung with pain,
+Weak from nature's overstrain,
+Faltering, moaned a low complaint
+"Spare me, father, for I faint!"
+But the chieftain, haughty-eyed,
+Hid his pity in his pride.
+"You shall be a hunter good,
+Knowing never lack of food;
+You shall be a warrior great,
+Wise as fox and strong as bear;
+Many scalps your belt shall wear,
+If with patient heart you wait
+Bravely till your task is done.
+Better you should starving die
+Than that boy and squaw should cry
+Shame upon your father's son!"
+
+When next morn the sun's first rays
+Glistened on the hemlock sprays,
+Straight that lodge the old chief sought,
+And boiled sainp and moose meat brought.
+"Rise and eat, my son!" he said.
+Lo, he found the poor boy dead!
+
+As with grief his grave they made,
+And his bow beside him laid,
+Pipe, and knife, and wampum-braid,
+On the lodge-top overhead,
+Preening smooth its breast of red
+And the brown coat that it wore,
+Sat a bird, unknown before.
+And as if with human tongue,
+"Mourn me not," it said, or sung;
+"I, a bird, am still your son,
+Happier than if hunter fleet,
+Or a brave, before your feet
+Laying scalps in battle won.
+Friend of man, my song shall cheer
+Lodge and corn-land; hovering near,
+To each wigwam I shall bring
+Tidings of the corning spring;
+Every child my voice shall know
+In the moon of melting snow,
+When the maple's red bud swells,
+And the wind-flower lifts its bells.
+As their fond companion
+Men shall henceforth own your son,
+And my song shall testify
+That of human kin am I."
+
+Thus the Indian legend saith
+How, at first, the robin came
+With a sweeter life from death,
+Bird for boy, and still the same.
+If my young friends doubt that this
+Is the robin's genesis,
+Not in vain is still the myth
+If a truth be found therewith
+Unto gentleness belong
+Gifts unknown to pride and wrong;
+Happier far than hate is praise,--
+He who sings than he who slays.
+
+
+
+
+BANISHED FROM MASSACHUSETTS.
+
+1660.
+
+On a painting by E. A. Abbey. The General Court of Massachusetts enacted
+Oct. 19, 1658, that "any person or persons of the cursed sect of
+Quakers" should, on conviction of the same, be banished, on pain
+of death, from the jurisdiction of the common-wealth.
+
+
+OVER the threshold of his pleasant home
+Set in green clearings passed the exiled Friend,
+In simple trust, misdoubting not the end.
+"Dear heart of mine!" he said, "the time has come
+To trust the Lord for shelter." One long gaze
+The goodwife turned on each familiar thing,--
+The lowing kine, the orchard blossoming,
+The open door that showed the hearth-fire's blaze,--
+And calmly answered, "Yes, He will provide."
+Silent and slow they crossed the homestead's bound,
+Lingering the longest by their child's grave-mound.
+"Move on, or stay and hang!" the sheriff cried.
+They left behind them more than home or land,
+And set sad faces to an alien strand.
+
+Safer with winds and waves than human wrath,
+With ravening wolves than those whose zeal for God
+Was cruelty to man, the exiles trod
+Drear leagues of forest without guide or path,
+Or launching frail boats on the uncharted sea,
+Round storm-vexed capes, whose teeth of granite ground
+The waves to foam, their perilous way they wound,
+Enduring all things so their souls were free.
+Oh, true confessors, shaming them who did
+Anew the wrong their Pilgrim Fathers bore
+For you the Mayflower spread her sail once more,
+Freighted with souls, to all that duty bid
+Faithful as they who sought an unknown land,
+O'er wintry seas, from Holland's Hook of Sand!
+
+So from his lost home to the darkening main,
+Bodeful of storm, stout Macy held his way,
+And, when the green shore blended with the gray,
+His poor wife moaned: "Let us turn back again."
+"Nay, woman, weak of faith, kneel down," said he,
+And say thy prayers: the Lord himself will steer;
+And led by Him, nor man nor devils I fear!
+So the gray Southwicks, from a rainy sea,
+Saw, far and faint, the loom of land, and gave
+With feeble voices thanks for friendly ground
+Whereon to rest their weary feet, and found
+A peaceful death-bed and a quiet grave
+Where, ocean-walled, and wiser than his age,
+The lord of Shelter scorned the bigot's rage.
+Aquidneck's isle, Nantucket's lonely shores,
+And Indian-haunted Narragansett saw
+The way-worn travellers round their camp-fire draw,
+Or heard the plashing of their weary oars.
+And every place whereon they rested grew
+Happier for pure and gracious womanhood,
+And men whose names for stainless honor stood,
+Founders of States and rulers wise and true.
+The Muse of history yet shall make amends
+To those who freedom, peace, and justice taught,
+Beyond their dark age led the van of thought,
+And left unforfeited the name of Friends.
+O mother State, how foiled was thy design
+The gain was theirs, the loss alone was thine.
+
+
+
+
+THE BROWN DWARF OF RUGEN.
+
+The hint of this ballad is found in Arndt's Miirchen, Berlin, 1816. The
+ballad appeared first in St. Nicholas, whose young readers were advised,
+while smiling at the absurd superstition, to remember that bad
+companionship and evil habits, desires, and passions are more to be
+dreaded now than the Elves and Trolls who frightened the children of
+past ages.
+
+
+THE pleasant isle of Rugen looks the Baltic water o'er,
+To the silver-sanded beaches of the Pomeranian
+shore;
+
+And in the town of Rambin a little boy and maid
+Plucked the meadow-flowers together and in the
+sea-surf played.
+
+Alike were they in beauty if not in their degree
+He was the Amptman's first-born, the miller's
+child was she.
+
+Now of old the isle of Rugen was full of Dwarfs
+and Trolls,
+The brown-faced little Earth-men, the people without
+souls;
+
+And for every man and woman in Rugen's island
+found
+Walking in air and sunshine, a Troll was
+underground.
+
+It chanced the little maiden, one morning, strolled
+away
+Among the haunted Nine Hills, where the elves
+and goblins play.
+
+That day, in barley-fields below, the harvesters had
+known
+Of evil voices in the air, and heard the small horns
+blown.
+
+She came not back; the search for her in field and
+wood was vain
+They cried her east, they cried her west, but she
+came not again.
+
+"She's down among the Brown Dwarfs," said the
+dream-wives wise and old,
+And prayers were made, and masses said, and
+Rambin's church bell tolled.
+
+Five years her father mourned her; and then John
+Deitrich said
+"I will find my little playmate, be she alive or
+dead."
+
+He watched among the Nine Hills, he heard the
+Brown Dwarfs sing,
+And saw them dance by moonlight merrily in a
+ring.
+
+And when their gay-robed leader tossed up his cap
+of red,
+Young Deitrich caught it as it fell, and thrust it
+on his head.
+
+The Troll came crouching at his feet and wept for
+lack of it.
+"Oh, give me back my magic cap, for your great
+head unfit!"
+
+"Nay," Deitrich said; "the Dwarf who throws his
+charmed cap away,
+Must serve its finder at his will, and for his folly
+pay.
+
+"You stole my pretty Lisbeth, and hid her in the
+earth;
+And you shall ope the door of glass and let me
+lead her forth."
+
+"She will not come; she's one of us; she's
+mine!" the Brown Dwarf said;
+The day is set, the cake is baked, to-morrow we
+shall wed."
+
+"The fell fiend fetch thee!" Deitrich cried, "and
+keep thy foul tongue still.
+Quick! open, to thy evil world, the glass door of
+the hill!"
+
+The Dwarf obeyed; and youth and Troll down, the
+long stair-way passed,
+And saw in dim and sunless light a country strange
+and vast.
+
+Weird, rich, and wonderful, he saw the elfin
+under-land,--
+Its palaces of precious stones, its streets of golden
+sand.
+
+He came unto a banquet-hall with tables richly
+spread,
+Where a young maiden served to him the red wine
+and the bread.
+
+How fair she seemed among the Trolls so ugly and
+so wild!
+Yet pale and very sorrowful, like one who never
+smiled!
+
+Her low, sweet voice, her gold-brown hair, her tender
+blue eyes seemed
+Like something he had seen elsewhere or some.
+thing he had dreamed.
+
+He looked; he clasped her in his arms; he knew
+the long-lost one;
+"O Lisbeth! See thy playmate--I am the
+Amptman's son!"
+
+She leaned her fair head on his breast, and through
+her sobs she spoke
+"Oh, take me from this evil place, and from the
+elfin folk,
+
+"And let me tread the grass-green fields and smell
+the flowers again,
+And feel the soft wind on my cheek and hear the
+dropping rain!
+
+"And oh, to hear the singing bird, the rustling of
+the tree,
+The lowing cows, the bleat of sheep, the voices of
+the sea;
+
+"And oh, upon my father's knee to sit beside the
+door,
+And hear the bell of vespers ring in Rambin
+church once more!"
+
+He kissed her cheek, he kissed her lips; the Brown
+Dwarf groaned to see,
+And tore his tangled hair and ground his long
+teeth angrily.
+
+But Deitrich said: "For five long years this tender
+Christian maid
+Has served you in your evil world and well must
+she be paid!
+
+"Haste!--hither bring me precious gems, the
+richest in your store;
+Then when we pass the gate of glass, you'll take
+your cap once more."
+
+No choice was left the baffled Troll, and, murmuring,
+he obeyed,
+And filled the pockets of the youth and apron of
+the maid.
+
+They left the dreadful under-land and passed the
+gate of glass;
+They felt the sunshine's warm caress, they trod the
+soft, green grass.
+
+And when, beneath, they saw the Dwarf stretch up
+to them his brown
+And crooked claw-like fingers, they tossed his red
+cap down.
+
+Oh, never shone so bright a sun, was never sky so
+blue,
+As hand in hand they homeward walked the pleasant
+meadows through!
+
+And never sang the birds so sweet in Rambin's
+woods before,
+And never washed the waves so soft along the Baltic
+shore;
+
+And when beneath his door-yard trees the father
+met his child,
+The bells rung out their merriest peal, the folks
+with joy ran wild.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                               VOLUME II.
+
+
+                            POEMS OF NATURE
+
+                    POEMS SUBJECTIVE AND REMINISCENT
+
+                            RELIGIOUS POEMS
+
+                                   BY
+                        JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+POEMS OF NATURE:
+     THE FROST SPIRIT
+     THE MERRIMAC
+     HAMPTON BEACH
+     A DREAM OF SUMMER
+     THE LAKESIDE
+     AUTUMN THOUGHTS
+     ON RECEIVING AN EAGLE'S QUILL FROM LAKE SUPERIOR
+     APRIL
+     PICTURES
+     SUMMER BY THE LAKESIDE
+     THE FRUIT-GIFT
+     FLOWERS IN WINTER
+     THE MAYFLOWERS
+     THE LAST WALK IN AUTUMN
+     THE FIRST FLOWERS
+     THE OLD BURYING-GROUND
+     THE PALM-TREE
+     THE RIVER PATH
+     MOUNTAIN PICTURES
+          I. FRANCONIA FROM THE PEMIGEWASSET
+          II. MONADNOCK FROM WACHUSET
+     THE VANISHERS
+     THE PAGEANT
+     THE PRESSED GENTIAN
+     A MYSTERY
+     A SEA DREAM
+     HAZEL BLOSSOMS
+     SUNSET ON THE BEARCAMP
+     THE SEEKING OF THE WATERFALL
+     THE TRAILING ARBUTUS
+     ST. MARTINS SUMMER
+     STORM ON LAKE ASQUAM
+     A SUMMER PILGRIMAGE
+     SWEET FERN
+     THE WOOD GIANT
+     A DAY
+
+
+POEMS SUBJECTIVE AND REMINISCENT:
+     MEMORIES
+     RAPHAEL
+     EGO
+     THE PUMPKIN
+     FORGIVENESS
+     TO MY SISTER
+     MY THANKS
+     REMEMBRANCE
+     MY NAMESAKE
+     A MEMORY
+     MY DREAM
+     THE BAREFOOT BOY
+     MY PSALM
+     THE WAITING
+     SNOW-BOUND
+     MY TRIUMPH
+     IN SCHOOL-DAYS
+     MY BIRTHDAY
+     RED RIDING-HOOD
+     RESPONSE
+     AT EVENTIDE
+     VOYAGE OF THE JETTIE
+     MY TRUST
+     A NAME
+     GREETING
+     CONTENTS
+     AN AUTOGRAPH
+     ABRAM MORRISON
+     A LEGACY
+
+RELIGIOUS POEMS:
+     THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM
+     THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN
+     THE CALL OF THE CHRISTIAN
+     THE CRUCIFIXION
+     PALESTINE
+     HYMNS FROM THE FRENCH OF LAMARTINE
+          I. ENCORE UN HYMNE
+          II. LE CRI DE L'AME
+     THE FAMILIST'S HYMN
+     EZEKIEL
+     WHAT THE VOICE SAID
+     THE ANGEL OF PATIENCE
+     THE WIFE OF MANOAH TO HER HUSBAND
+     MY SOUL AND I
+     WORSHIP
+     THE HOLY LAND
+     THE REWARD
+     THE WISH OF TO-DAY
+     ALL'S WELL
+     INVOCATION
+     QUESTIONS OF LIFE
+     FIRST-DAY THOUGHTS
+     TRUST
+     TRINITAS
+     THE SISTERS
+     "THE ROCK" IN EL GHOR
+     THE OVER-HEART
+     THE SHADOW AND THE LIGHT
+     THE CRY OF A LOST SOUL
+     ANDREW RYKMAN'S PRAYER
+     THE ANSWER
+     THE ETERNAL GOODNESS
+     THE COMMON QUESTION
+     OUR MASTER
+     THE MEETING
+     THE CLEAR VISION
+     DIVINE COMPASSION
+     THE PRAYER-SEEKER
+     THE BREWING OF SOMA
+     A WOMAN
+     THE PRAYER OF AGASSIZ
+     IN QUEST
+     THE FRIEND'S BURIAL
+     A CHRISTMAS CARMEN
+     VESTA
+     CHILD-SONGS
+     THE HEALER
+     THE TWO ANGELS
+     OVERRULED
+     HYMN OF THE DUNKERS
+     GIVING AND TAKING
+     THE VISION OF ECHARD
+     INSCRIPTIONS
+     ON A SUN-DIAL
+     ON A FOUNTAIN
+     THE MINISTER'S DAUGHTER
+     BY THEIR WORKS
+     THE WORD
+     THE BOOK
+     REQUIREMENT
+     HELP
+     UTTERANCE
+     ORIENTAL MAXIMS
+     THE INWARD JUDGE
+     LAYING UP TREASURE
+     CONDUCT
+     AN EASTER FLOWER GIFT
+     THE MYSTIC'S CHRISTMAS
+     AT LAST
+     WHAT THE TRAVELLER SAID AT SUNSET
+     THE "STORY OF IDA"
+     THE LIGHT THAT IS FELT
+     THE TWO LOVES
+     ADJUSTMENT
+     HYMNS OF THE BRAHMO SOMAJ
+     REVELATION
+
+
+
+
+                             POEMS OF NATURE
+
+
+THE FROST SPIRIT
+
+He comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes
+     You may trace his footsteps now
+On the naked woods and the blasted fields and the
+     brown hill's withered brow.
+He has smitten the leaves of the gray old trees
+     where their pleasant green came forth,
+And the winds, which follow wherever he goes,
+     have shaken them down to earth.
+
+He comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes!
+     from the frozen Labrador,
+From the icy bridge of the Northern seas, which
+     the white bear wanders o'er,
+Where the fisherman's sail is stiff with ice, and the
+     luckless forms below
+In the sunless cold of the lingering night into
+     marble statues grow
+
+He comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes
+     on the rushing Northern blast,
+And the dark Norwegian pines have bowed as his
+     fearful breath went past.
+With an unscorched wing he has hurried on,
+     where the fires of Hecla glow
+On the darkly beautiful sky above and the ancient
+     ice below.
+
+He comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes
+     and the quiet lake shall feel
+The torpid touch of his glazing breath, and ring to
+     the skater's heel;
+And the streams which danced on the broken
+     rocks, or sang to the leaning grass,
+Shall bow again to their winter chain, and in
+     mournful silence pass.
+He comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes!
+     Let us meet him as we may,
+And turn with the light of the parlor-fire his evil
+     power away;
+And gather closer the circle round, when that
+     fire-light dances high,
+And laugh at the shriek of the baffled Fiend as
+     his sounding wing goes by!
+1830.
+
+
+
+THE MERRIMAC.
+
+     "The Indians speak of a beautiful river, far to the south,
+     which they call Merrimac."--SIEUR. DE MONTS, 1604.
+
+Stream of my fathers! sweetly still
+The sunset rays thy valley fill;
+Poured slantwise down the long defile,
+Wave, wood, and spire beneath them smile.
+I see the winding Powow fold
+The green hill in its belt of gold,
+And following down its wavy line,
+Its sparkling waters blend with thine.
+There 's not a tree upon thy side,
+Nor rock, which thy returning tide
+As yet hath left abrupt and stark
+Above thy evening water-mark;
+No calm cove with its rocky hem,
+No isle whose emerald swells begin
+Thy broad, smooth current; not a sail
+Bowed to the freshening ocean gale;
+No small boat with its busy oars,
+Nor gray wall sloping to thy shores;
+Nor farm-house with its maple shade,
+Or rigid poplar colonnade,
+But lies distinct and full in sight,
+Beneath this gush of sunset light.
+Centuries ago, that harbor-bar,
+Stretching its length of foam afar,
+And Salisbury's beach of shining sand,
+And yonder island's wave-smoothed strand,
+Saw the adventurer's tiny sail,
+Flit, stooping from the eastern gale;
+And o'er these woods and waters broke
+The cheer from Britain's hearts of oak,
+As brightly on the voyager's eye,
+Weary of forest, sea, and sky,
+Breaking the dull continuous wood,
+The Merrimac rolled down his flood;
+Mingling that clear pellucid brook,
+Which channels vast Agioochook
+When spring-time's sun and shower unlock
+The frozen fountains of the rock,
+And more abundant waters given
+From that pure lake, "The Smile of Heaven,"
+Tributes from vale and mountain-side,--
+With ocean's dark, eternal tide!
+
+On yonder rocky cape, which braves
+The stormy challenge of the waves,
+Midst tangled vine and dwarfish wood,
+The hardy Anglo-Saxon stood,
+Planting upon the topmost crag
+The staff of England's battle-flag;
+And, while from out its heavy fold
+Saint George's crimson cross unrolled,
+Midst roll of drum and trumpet blare,
+And weapons brandishing in air,
+He gave to that lone promontory
+The sweetest name in all his story;
+Of her, the flower of Islam's daughters,
+Whose harems look on Stamboul's waters,--
+Who, when the chance of war had bound
+The Moslem chain his limbs around,
+Wreathed o'er with silk that iron chain,
+Soothed with her smiles his hours of pain,
+And fondly to her youthful slave
+A dearer gift than freedom gave.
+
+But look! the yellow light no more
+Streams down on wave and verdant shore;
+And clearly on the calm air swells
+The twilight voice of distant bells.
+From Ocean's bosom, white and thin,
+The mists come slowly rolling in;
+Hills, woods, the river's rocky rim,
+Amidst the sea--like vapor swim,
+While yonder lonely coast-light, set
+Within its wave-washed minaret,
+Half quenched, a beamless star and pale,
+Shines dimly through its cloudy veil!
+
+Home of my fathers!--I have stood
+Where Hudson rolled his lordly flood
+Seen sunrise rest and sunset fade
+Along his frowning Palisade;
+Looked down the Appalachian peak
+On Juniata's silver streak;
+Have seen along his valley gleam
+The Mohawk's softly winding stream;
+The level light of sunset shine
+Through broad Potomac's hem of pine;
+And autumn's rainbow-tinted banner
+Hang lightly o'er the Susquehanna;
+Yet wheresoe'er his step might be,
+Thy wandering child looked back to thee!
+Heard in his dreams thy river's sound
+Of murmuring on its pebbly bound,
+The unforgotten swell and roar
+Of waves on thy familiar shore;
+And saw, amidst the curtained gloom
+And quiet of his lonely room,
+Thy sunset scenes before him pass;
+As, in Agrippa's magic glass,
+The loved and lost arose to view,
+Remembered groves in greenness grew,
+Bathed still in childhood's morning dew,
+Along whose bowers of beauty swept
+Whatever Memory's mourners wept,
+Sweet faces, which the charnel kept,
+Young, gentle eyes, which long had slept;
+And while the gazer leaned to trace,
+More near, some dear familiar face,
+He wept to find the vision flown,--
+A phantom and a dream alone!
+1841.
+
+
+
+HAMPTON BEACH
+
+The sunlight glitters keen and bright,
+Where, miles away,
+Lies stretching to my dazzled sight
+A luminous belt, a misty light,
+Beyond the dark pine bluffs and wastes of sandy gray.
+
+The tremulous shadow of the Sea!
+Against its ground
+Of silvery light, rock, hill, and tree,
+Still as a picture, clear and free,
+With varying outline mark the coast for miles around.
+
+On--on--we tread with loose-flung rein
+Our seaward way,
+Through dark-green fields and blossoming grain,
+Where the wild brier-rose skirts the lane,
+And bends above our heads the flowering locust spray.
+
+Ha! like a kind hand on my brow
+Comes this fresh breeze,
+Cooling its dull and feverish glow,
+While through my being seems to flow
+The breath of a new life, the healing of the seas!
+
+Now rest we, where this grassy mound
+His feet hath set
+In the great waters, which have bound
+His granite ankles greenly round
+With long and tangled moss, and weeds with cool spray wet.
+
+Good-by to Pain and Care! I take
+Mine ease to-day
+Here where these sunny waters break,
+And ripples this keen breeze, I shake
+All burdens from the heart, all weary thoughts away.
+
+I draw a freer breath, I seem
+Like all I see--
+Waves in the sun, the white-winged gleam
+Of sea-birds in the slanting beam,
+And far-off sails which flit before the south-wind free.
+
+So when Time's veil shall fall asunder,
+The soul may know
+No fearful change, nor sudden wonder,
+Nor sink the weight of mystery under,
+But with the upward rise, and with the vastness grow.
+
+And all we shrink from now may seem
+No new revealing;
+Familiar as our childhood's stream,
+Or pleasant memory of a dream
+The loved and cherished Past upon the new life stealing.
+
+Serene and mild the untried light
+May have its dawning;
+And, as in summer's northern night
+The evening and the dawn unite,
+The sunset hues of Time blend with the soul's new morning.
+
+I sit alone; in foam and spray
+Wave after wave
+Breaks on the rocks which, stern and gray,
+Shoulder the broken tide away,
+Or murmurs hoarse and strong through mossy cleft and cave.
+
+What heed I of the dusty land
+And noisy town?
+I see the mighty deep expand
+From its white line of glimmering sand
+To where the blue of heaven on bluer waves shuts down!
+
+In listless quietude of mind,
+I yield to all
+The change of cloud and wave and wind
+And passive on the flood reclined,
+I wander with the waves, and with them rise and fall.
+
+But look, thou dreamer! wave and shore
+In shadow lie;
+The night-wind warns me back once more
+To where, my native hill-tops o'er,
+Bends like an arch of fire the glowing sunset sky.
+
+So then, beach, bluff, and wave, farewell!
+I bear with me
+No token stone nor glittering shell,
+But long and oft shall Memory tell
+Of this brief thoughtful hour of musing by the Sea.
+1843.
+
+
+
+A DREAM OF SUMMER.
+
+Bland as the morning breath of June
+The southwest breezes play;
+And, through its haze, the winter noon
+Seems warm as summer's day.
+The snow-plumed Angel of the North
+Has dropped his icy spear;
+Again the mossy earth looks forth,
+Again the streams gush clear.
+
+The fox his hillside cell forsakes,
+The muskrat leaves his nook,
+The bluebird in the meadow brakes
+Is singing with the brook.
+"Bear up, O Mother Nature!" cry
+Bird, breeze, and streamlet free;
+"Our winter voices prophesy
+Of summer days to thee!"
+
+So, in those winters of the soul,
+By bitter blasts and drear
+O'erswept from Memory's frozen pole,
+Will sunny days appear.
+Reviving Hope and Faith, they show
+The soul its living powers,
+And how beneath the winter's snow
+Lie germs of summer flowers!
+
+The Night is mother of the Day,
+The Winter of the Spring,
+And ever upon old Decay
+The greenest mosses cling.
+Behind the cloud the starlight lurks,
+Through showers the sunbeams fall;
+For God, who loveth all His works,
+Has left His hope with all!
+4th 1st month, 1847.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAKESIDE
+
+The shadows round the inland sea
+Are deepening into night;
+Slow up the slopes of Ossipee
+They chase the lessening light.
+Tired of the long day's blinding heat,
+I rest my languid eye,
+Lake of the Hills! where, cool and sweet,
+Thy sunset waters lie!
+
+Along the sky, in wavy lines,
+O'er isle and reach and bay,
+Green-belted with eternal pines,
+The mountains stretch away.
+Below, the maple masses sleep
+Where shore with water blends,
+While midway on the tranquil deep
+The evening light descends.
+
+So seemed it when yon hill's red crown,
+Of old, the Indian trod,
+And, through the sunset air, looked down
+Upon the Smile of God.
+To him of light and shade the laws
+No forest skeptic taught;
+Their living and eternal Cause
+His truer instinct sought.
+
+He saw these mountains in the light
+Which now across them shines;
+This lake, in summer sunset bright,
+Walled round with sombering pines.
+God near him seemed; from earth and skies
+His loving voice he beard,
+As, face to face, in Paradise,
+Man stood before the Lord.
+
+Thanks, O our Father! that, like him,
+Thy tender love I see,
+In radiant hill and woodland dim,
+And tinted sunset sea.
+For not in mockery dost Thou fill
+Our earth with light and grace;
+Thou hid'st no dark and cruel will
+Behind Thy smiling face!
+1849.
+
+
+
+AUTUMN THOUGHTS
+
+Gone hath the Spring, with all its flowers,
+And gone the Summer's pomp and show,
+And Autumn, in his leafless bowers,
+Is waiting for the Winter's snow.
+
+I said to Earth, so cold and gray,
+"An emblem of myself thou art."
+"Not so," the Earth did seem to say,
+"For Spring shall warm my frozen heart."
+I soothe my wintry sleep with dreams
+Of warmer sun and softer rain,
+And wait to hear the sound of streams
+And songs of merry birds again.
+
+But thou, from whom the Spring hath gone,
+For whom the flowers no longer blow,
+Who standest blighted and forlorn,
+Like Autumn waiting for the snow;
+
+No hope is thine of sunnier hours,
+Thy Winter shall no more depart;
+No Spring revive thy wasted flowers,
+Nor Summer warm thy frozen heart.
+1849.
+
+
+
+ON RECEIVING AN EAGLE'S QUILL FROM LAKE SUPERIOR.
+
+All day the darkness and the cold
+Upon my heart have lain,
+Like shadows on the winter sky,
+Like frost upon the pane;
+
+But now my torpid fancy wakes,
+And, on thy Eagle's plume,
+Rides forth, like Sindbad on his bird,
+Or witch upon her broom!
+
+Below me roar the rocking pines,
+Before me spreads the lake
+Whose long and solemn-sounding waves
+Against the sunset break.
+
+I hear the wild Rice-Eater thresh
+The grain he has not sown;
+I see, with flashing scythe of fire,
+The prairie harvest mown!
+
+I hear the far-off voyager's horn;
+I see the Yankee's trail,--
+His foot on every mountain-pass,
+On every stream his sail.
+
+By forest, lake, and waterfall,
+I see his pedler show;
+The mighty mingling with the mean,
+The lofty with the low.
+
+He's whittling by St. Mary's Falls,
+Upon his loaded wain;
+He's measuring o'er the Pictured Rocks,
+With eager eyes of gain.
+
+I hear the mattock in the mine,
+The axe-stroke in the dell,
+The clamor from the Indian lodge,
+The Jesuit chapel bell!
+
+I see the swarthy trappers come
+From Mississippi's springs;
+And war-chiefs with their painted brows,
+And crests of eagle wings.
+
+Behind the scared squaw's birch canoe,
+The steamer smokes and raves;
+And city lots are staked for sale
+Above old Indian graves.
+
+I hear the tread of pioneers
+Of nations yet to be;
+The first low wash of waves, where soon
+Shall roll a human sea.
+
+The rudiments of empire here
+Are plastic yet and warm;
+The chaos of a mighty world
+Is rounding into form!
+
+Each rude and jostling fragment soon
+Its fitting place shall find,--
+The raw material of a State,
+Its muscle and its mind!
+
+And, westering still, the star which leads
+The New World in its train
+Has tipped with fire the icy spears
+Of many a mountain chain.
+
+The snowy cones of Oregon
+Are kindling on its way;
+And California's golden sands
+Gleam brighter in its ray!
+
+Then blessings on thy eagle quill,
+As, wandering far and wide,
+I thank thee for this twilight dream
+And Fancy's airy ride!
+
+Yet, welcomer than regal plumes,
+Which Western trappers find,
+Thy free and pleasant thoughts, chance sown,
+Like feathers on the wind.
+
+Thy symbol be the mountain-bird,
+Whose glistening quill I hold;
+Thy home the ample air of hope,
+And memory's sunset gold!
+
+In thee, let joy with duty join,
+And strength unite with love,
+The eagle's pinions folding round
+The warm heart of the dove!
+
+So, when in darkness sleeps the vale
+Where still the blind bird clings
+The sunshine of the upper sky
+Shall glitter on thy wings!
+1849.
+
+
+
+APRIL.
+
+     "The spring comes slowly up this way."
+                                Christabel.
+
+'T is the noon of the spring-time, yet never a bird
+In the wind-shaken elm or the maple is heard;
+For green meadow-grasses wide levels of snow,
+And blowing of drifts where the crocus should blow;
+Where wind-flower and violet, amber and white,
+On south-sloping brooksides should smile in the light,
+O'er the cold winter-beds of their late-waking roots
+The frosty flake eddies, the ice-crystal shoots;
+And, longing for light, under wind-driven heaps,
+Round the boles of the pine-wood the ground-laurel creeps,
+Unkissed of the sunshine, unbaptized of showers,
+With buds scarcely swelled, which should burst into flowers
+We wait for thy coming, sweet wind of the south!
+For the touch of thy light wings, the kiss of thy mouth;
+For the yearly evangel thou bearest from God,
+Resurrection and life to the graves of the sod!
+Up our long river-valley, for days, have not ceased
+The wail and the shriek of the bitter northeast,
+Raw and chill, as if winnowed through ices and snow,
+All the way from the land of the wild Esquimau,
+Until all our dreams of the land of the blest,
+Like that red hunter's, turn to the sunny southwest.
+O soul of the spring-time, its light and its breath,
+Bring warmth to this coldness, bring life to this death;
+Renew the great miracle; let us behold
+The stone from the mouth of the sepulchre rolled,
+And Nature, like Lazarus, rise, as of old!
+Let our faith, which in darkness and coldness has lain,
+Revive with the warmth and the brightness again,
+And in blooming of flower and budding of tree
+The symbols and types of our destiny see;
+The life of the spring-time, the life of the whole,
+And, as sun to the sleeping earth, love to the soul!
+1852.
+
+
+
+PICTURES
+
+I.
+Light, warmth, and sprouting greenness, and o'er all
+Blue, stainless, steel-bright ether, raining down
+Tranquillity upon the deep-hushed town,
+The freshening meadows, and the hillsides brown;
+Voice of the west-wind from the hills of pine,
+And the brimmed river from its distant fall,
+Low hum of bees, and joyous interlude
+Of bird-songs in the streamlet-skirting wood,--
+Heralds and prophecies of sound and sight,
+Blessed forerunners of the warmth and light,
+Attendant angels to the house of prayer,
+With reverent footsteps keeping pace with mine,--
+Once more, through God's great love, with you I share
+A morn of resurrection sweet and fair
+As that which saw, of old, in Palestine,
+Immortal Love uprising in fresh bloom
+From the dark night and winter of the tomb!
+2d, 5th mo., 1852.
+
+II.
+White with its sun-bleached dust, the pathway winds
+Before me; dust is on the shrunken grass,
+And on the trees beneath whose boughs I pass;
+Frail screen against the Hunter of the sky,
+Who, glaring on me with his lidless eye,
+While mounting with his dog-star high and higher
+Ambushed in light intolerable, unbinds
+The burnished quiver of his shafts of fire.
+Between me and the hot fields of his South
+A tremulous glow, as from a furnace-mouth,
+Glimmers and swims before my dazzled sight,
+As if the burning arrows of his ire
+Broke as they fell, and shattered into light;
+Yet on my cheek I feel the western wind,
+And hear it telling to the orchard trees,
+And to the faint and flower-forsaken bees,
+Tales of fair meadows, green with constant streams,
+And mountains rising blue and cool behind,
+Where in moist dells the purple orchis gleams,
+And starred with white the virgin's bower is twined.
+So the o'erwearied pilgrim, as he fares
+Along life's summer waste, at times is fanned,
+Even at noontide, by the cool, sweet airs
+Of a serener and a holier land,
+Fresh as the morn, and as the dewfall bland.
+Breath of the blessed Heaven for which we pray,
+Blow from the eternal hills! make glad our earthly way!
+8th mo., 1852.
+
+
+
+SUMMER BY THE LAKESIDE
+
+LAKE WINNIPESAUKEE.
+
+I. NOON.
+White clouds, whose shadows haunt the deep,
+Light mists, whose soft embraces keep
+The sunshine on the hills asleep!
+
+O isles of calm! O dark, still wood!
+And stiller skies that overbrood
+Your rest with deeper quietude!
+
+O shapes and hues, dim beckoning, through
+Yon mountain gaps, my longing view
+Beyond the purple and the blue,
+
+To stiller sea and greener land,
+And softer lights and airs more bland,
+And skies,--the hollow of God's hand!
+
+Transfused through you, O mountain friends!
+With mine your solemn spirit blends,
+And life no more hath separate ends.
+
+I read each misty mountain sign,
+I know the voice of wave and pine,
+And I am yours, and ye are mine.
+
+Life's burdens fall, its discords cease,
+I lapse into the glad release
+Of Nature's own exceeding peace.
+
+O welcome calm of heart and mind!
+As falls yon fir-tree's loosened rind
+To leave a tenderer growth behind,
+
+So fall the weary years away;
+A child again, my head I lay
+Upon the lap of this sweet day.
+
+This western wind hath Lethean powers,
+Yon noonday cloud nepenthe showers,
+The lake is white with lotus-flowers!
+
+Even Duty's voice is faint and low,
+And slumberous Conscience, waking slow,
+Forgets her blotted scroll to show.
+
+The Shadow which pursues us all,
+Whose ever-nearing steps appall,
+Whose voice we hear behind us call,--
+
+That Shadow blends with mountain gray,
+It speaks but what the light waves say,--
+Death walks apart from Fear to-day!
+
+Rocked on her breast, these pines and I
+Alike on Nature's love rely;
+And equal seems to live or die.
+
+Assured that He whose presence fills
+With light the spaces of these hills
+No evil to His creatures wills,
+
+The simple faith remains, that He
+Will do, whatever that may be,
+The best alike for man and tree.
+
+What mosses over one shall grow,
+What light and life the other know,
+Unanxious, leaving Him to show.
+
+
+II. EVENING.
+Yon mountain's side is black with night,
+While, broad-orhed, o'er its gleaming crown
+The moon, slow-rounding into sight,
+On the hushed inland sea looks down.
+
+How start to light the clustering isles,
+Each silver-hemmed! How sharply show
+The shadows of their rocky piles,
+And tree-tops in the wave below!
+
+How far and strange the mountains seem,
+Dim-looming through the pale, still light
+The vague, vast grouping of a dream,
+They stretch into the solemn night.
+
+Beneath, lake, wood, and peopled vale,
+Hushed by that presence grand and grave,
+Are silent, save the cricket's wail,
+And low response of leaf and wave.
+
+Fair scenes! whereto the Day and Night
+Make rival love, I leave ye soon,
+What time before the eastern light
+The pale ghost of the setting moon
+
+Shall hide behind yon rocky spines,
+And the young archer, Morn, shall break
+His arrows on the mountain pines,
+And, golden-sandalled, walk the lake!
+
+Farewell! around this smiling bay
+Gay-hearted Health, and Life in bloom,
+With lighter steps than mine, may stray
+In radiant summers yet to come.
+
+But none shall more regretful leave
+These waters and these hills than I
+Or, distant, fonder dream how eve
+Or dawn is painting wave and sky;
+
+How rising moons shine sad and mild
+On wooded isle and silvering bay;
+Or setting suns beyond the piled
+And purple mountains lead the day;
+
+Nor laughing girl, nor bearding boy,
+Nor full-pulsed manhood, lingering here,
+Shall add, to life's abounding joy,
+The charmed repose to suffering dear.
+
+Still waits kind Nature to impart
+Her choicest gifts to such as gain
+An entrance to her loving heart
+Through the sharp discipline of pain.
+
+Forever from the Hand that takes
+One blessing from us others fall;
+And, soon or late, our Father makes
+His perfect recompense to all!
+
+Oh, watched by Silence and the Night,
+And folded in the strong embrace
+Of the great mountains, with the light
+Of the sweet heavens upon thy face,
+
+Lake of the Northland! keep thy dower
+Of beauty still, and while above
+Thy solemn mountains speak of power,
+Be thou the mirror of God's love.
+1853.
+
+
+
+THE FRUIT-GIFT.
+
+Last night, just as the tints of autumn's sky
+Of sunset faded from our hills and streams,
+I sat, vague listening, lapped in twilight dreams,
+To the leaf's rustle, and the cricket's cry.
+
+Then, like that basket, flush with summer fruit,
+Dropped by the angels at the Prophet's foot,
+Came, unannounced, a gift of clustered sweetness,
+Full-orbed, and glowing with the prisoned beams
+Of summery suns, and rounded to completeness
+By kisses of the south-wind and the dew.
+Thrilled with a glad surprise, methought I knew
+The pleasure of the homeward-turning Jew,
+When Eshcol's clusters on his shoulders lay,
+Dropping their sweetness on his desert way.
+
+I said, "This fruit beseems no world of sin.
+Its parent vine, rooted in Paradise,
+O'ercrept the wall, and never paid the price
+Of the great mischief,--an ambrosial tree,
+Eden's exotic, somehow smuggled in,
+To keep the thorns and thistles company."
+Perchance our frail, sad mother plucked in haste
+A single vine-slip as she passed the gate,
+Where the dread sword alternate paled and burned,
+And the stern angel, pitying her fate,
+Forgave the lovely trespasser, and turned
+Aside his face of fire; and thus the waste
+And fallen world hath yet its annual taste
+Of primal good, to prove of sin the cost,
+And show by one gleaned ear the mighty harvest lost.
+1854.
+
+
+
+FLOWERS IN WINTER
+
+PAINTED UPON A PORTE LIVRE.
+
+How strange to greet, this frosty morn,
+In graceful counterfeit of flowers,
+These children of the meadows, born
+Of sunshine and of showers!
+
+How well the conscious wood retains
+The pictures of its flower-sown home,
+The lights and shades, the purple stains,
+And golden hues of bloom!
+
+It was a happy thought to bring
+To the dark season's frost and rime
+This painted memory of spring,
+This dream of summer-time.
+
+Our hearts are lighter for its sake,
+Our fancy's age renews its youth,
+And dim-remembered fictions take
+The guise of--present truth.
+
+A wizard of the Merrimac,--
+So old ancestral legends say,
+Could call green leaf and blossom back
+To frosted stem and spray.
+
+The dry logs of the cottage wall,
+Beneath his touch, put out their leaves
+The clay-bound swallow, at his call,
+Played round the icy eaves.
+
+The settler saw his oaken flail
+Take bud, and bloom before his eyes;
+From frozen pools he saw the pale,
+Sweet summer lilies rise.
+
+To their old homes, by man profaned,
+Came the sad dryads, exiled long,
+And through their leafy tongues complained
+Of household use and wrong.
+
+The beechen platter sprouted wild,
+The pipkin wore its old-time green
+The cradle o'er the sleeping child
+Became a leafy screen.
+
+Haply our gentle friend hath met,
+While wandering in her sylvan quest,
+Haunting his native woodlands yet,
+That Druid of the West;
+
+And, while the dew on leaf and flower
+Glistened in moonlight clear and still,
+Learned the dusk wizard's spell of power,
+And caught his trick of skill.
+
+But welcome, be it new or old,
+The gift which makes the day more bright,
+And paints, upon the ground of cold
+And darkness, warmth and light.
+
+Without is neither gold nor green;
+Within, for birds, the birch-logs sing;
+Yet, summer-like, we sit between
+The autumn and the spring.
+
+The one, with bridal blush of rose,
+And sweetest breath of woodland balm,
+And one whose matron lips unclose
+In smiles of saintly calm.
+
+Fill soft and deep, O winter snow!
+The sweet azalea's oaken dells,
+And hide the bank where roses blow,
+And swing the azure bells!
+
+O'erlay the amber violet's leaves,
+The purple aster's brookside home,
+Guard all the flowers her pencil gives
+A life beyond their bloom.
+
+And she, when spring comes round again,
+By greening slope and singing flood
+Shall wander, seeking, not in vain,
+Her darlings of the wood.
+1855.
+
+
+
+THE MAYFLOWERS
+
+     The trailing arbutus, or mayflower, grows abundantly in the
+     vicinity of Plymouth, and was the first flower that greeted the
+     Pilgrims after their fearful winter. The name mayflower was
+     familiar in England, as the application of it to the historic
+     vessel shows, but it was applied by the English, and still is, to
+     the hawthorn. Its use in New England in connection with _Epigma
+     repens _dates from a very early day, some claiming that the first
+     Pilgrims so used it, in affectionate memory of the vessel and its
+     English flower association.
+
+Sad Mayflower! watched by winter stars,
+And nursed by winter gales,
+With petals of the sleeted spars,
+And leaves of frozen sails!
+
+What had she in those dreary hours,
+Within her ice-rimmed bay,
+In common with the wild-wood flowers,
+The first sweet smiles of May?
+
+Yet, "God be praised!" the Pilgrim said,
+Who saw the blossoms peer
+Above the brown leaves, dry and dead,
+"Behold our Mayflower here!"
+
+"God wills it: here our rest shall be,
+Our years of wandering o'er;
+For us the Mayflower of the sea
+Shall spread her sails no more."
+
+O sacred flowers of faith and hope,
+As sweetly now as then
+Ye bloom on many a birchen slope,
+In many a pine-dark glen.
+
+Behind the sea-wall's rugged length,
+Unchanged, your leaves unfold,
+Like love behind the manly strength
+Of the brave hearts of old.
+
+So live the fathers in their sons,
+Their sturdy faith be ours,
+And ours the love that overruns
+Its rocky strength with flowers!
+
+The Pilgrim's wild and wintry day
+Its shadow round us draws;
+The Mayflower of his stormy bay,
+Our Freedom's struggling cause.
+
+But warmer suns erelong shall bring
+To life the frozen sod;
+And through dead leaves of hope shall spring
+Afresh the flowers of God!
+1856.
+
+
+
+THE LAST WALK IN AUTUMN.
+
+I.
+O'er the bare woods, whose outstretched hands
+Plead with the leaden heavens in vain,
+I see, beyond the valley lands,
+The sea's long level dim with rain.
+Around me all things, stark and dumb,
+Seem praying for the snows to come,
+And, for the summer bloom and greenness gone,
+With winter's sunset lights and dazzling morn atone.
+
+II.
+Along the river's summer walk,
+The withered tufts of asters nod;
+And trembles on its arid stalk
+The boar plume of the golden-rod.
+And on a ground of sombre fir,
+And azure-studded juniper,
+The silver birch its buds of purple shows,
+And scarlet berries tell where bloomed the sweet wild-rose!
+
+III.
+With mingled sound of horns and bells,
+A far-heard clang, the wild geese fly,
+Storm-sent, from Arctic moors and fells,
+Like a great arrow through the sky,
+Two dusky lines converged in one,
+Chasing the southward-flying sun;
+While the brave snow-bird and the hardy jay
+Call to them from the pines, as if to bid them stay.
+
+IV.
+I passed this way a year ago
+The wind blew south; the noon of day
+Was warm as June's; and save that snow
+Flecked the low mountains far away,
+And that the vernal-seeming breeze
+Mocked faded grass and leafless trees,
+I might have dreamed of summer as I lay,
+Watching the fallen leaves with the soft wind at play.
+
+V.
+Since then, the winter blasts have piled
+The white pagodas of the snow
+On these rough slopes, and, strong and wild,
+Yon river, in its overflow
+Of spring-time rain and sun, set free,
+Crashed with its ices to the sea;
+And over these gray fields, then green and gold,
+The summer corn has waved, the thunder's organ rolled.
+
+VI.
+Rich gift of God! A year of time
+What pomp of rise and shut of day,
+What hues wherewith our Northern clime
+Makes autumn's dropping woodlands gay,
+What airs outblown from ferny dells,
+And clover-bloom and sweetbrier smells,
+What songs of brooks and birds, what fruits and flowers,
+Green woods and moonlit snows, have in its round been ours!
+
+VII.
+I know not how, in other lands,
+The changing seasons come and go;
+What splendors fall on Syrian sands,
+What purple lights on Alpine snow!
+Nor how the pomp of sunrise waits
+On Venice at her watery gates;
+A dream alone to me is Arno's vale,
+And the Alhambra's halls are but a traveller's tale.
+
+VIII.
+Yet, on life's current, he who drifts
+Is one with him who rows or sails
+And he who wanders widest lifts
+No more of beauty's jealous veils
+Than he who from his doorway sees
+The miracle of flowers and trees,
+Feels the warm Orient in the noonday air,
+And from cloud minarets hears the sunset call to prayer!
+
+IX.
+The eye may well be glad that looks
+Where Pharpar's fountains rise and fall;
+But he who sees his native brooks
+Laugh in the sun, has seen them all.
+The marble palaces of Ind
+Rise round him in the snow and wind;
+From his lone sweetbrier Persian Hafiz smiles,
+And Rome's cathedral awe is in his woodland aisles.
+
+X.
+And thus it is my fancy blends
+The near at hand and far and rare;
+And while the same horizon bends
+Above the silver-sprinkled hair
+Which flashed the light of morning skies
+On childhood's wonder-lifted eyes,
+Within its round of sea and sky and field,
+Earth wheels with all her zones, the Kosmos stands revealed.
+
+XI.
+And thus the sick man on his bed,
+The toiler to his task-work bound,
+Behold their prison-walls outspread,
+Their clipped horizon widen round!
+While freedom-giving fancy waits,
+Like Peter's angel at the gates,
+The power is theirs to baffle care and pain,
+To bring the lost world back, and make it theirs again!
+
+XII.
+What lack of goodly company,
+When masters of the ancient lyre
+Obey my call, and trace for me
+Their words of mingled tears and fire!
+I talk with Bacon, grave and wise,
+I read the world with Pascal's eyes;
+And priest and sage, with solemn brows austere,
+And poets, garland-bound, the Lords of Thought, draw near.
+
+XIII.
+Methinks, O friend, I hear thee say,
+   "In vain the human heart we mock;
+Bring living guests who love the day,
+Not ghosts who fly at crow of cock!
+The herbs we share with flesh and blood
+Are better than ambrosial food
+With laurelled shades." I grant it, nothing loath,
+But doubly blest is he who can partake of both.
+
+XIV.
+He who might Plato's banquet grace,
+Have I not seen before me sit,
+And watched his puritanic face,
+With more than Eastern wisdom lit?
+Shrewd mystic! who, upon the back
+Of his Poor Richard's Almanac,
+Writing the Sufi's song, the Gentoo's dream,
+Links Manu's age of thought to Fulton's age of steam!
+
+XV.
+Here too, of answering love secure,
+Have I not welcomed to my hearth
+The gentle pilgrim troubadour,
+Whose songs have girdled half the earth;
+Whose pages, like the magic mat
+Whereon the Eastern lover sat,
+Have borne me over Rhine-land's purple vines,
+And Nubia's tawny sands, and Phrygia's mountain pines!
+
+XVI.
+And he, who to the lettered wealth
+Of ages adds the lore unpriced,
+The wisdom and the moral health,
+The ethics of the school of Christ;
+The statesman to his holy trust,
+As the Athenian archon, just,
+Struck down, exiled like him for truth alone,
+Has he not graced my home with beauty all his own?
+
+XVII.
+What greetings smile, what farewells wave,
+What loved ones enter and depart!
+The good, the beautiful, the brave,
+The Heaven-lent treasures of the heart!
+How conscious seems the frozen sod
+And beechen slope whereon they trod
+The oak-leaves rustle, and the dry grass bends
+Beneath the shadowy feet of lost or absent friends.
+
+XVIII.
+Then ask not why to these bleak hills
+I cling, as clings the tufted moss,
+To bear the winter's lingering chills,
+The mocking spring's perpetual loss.
+I dream of lands where summer smiles,
+And soft winds blow from spicy isles,
+But scarce would Ceylon's breath of flowers be sweet,
+Could I not feel thy soil, New England, at my feet!
+
+XIX.
+At times I long for gentler skies,
+And bathe in dreams of softer air,
+But homesick tears would fill the eyes
+That saw the Cross without the Bear.
+The pine must whisper to the palm,
+The north-wind break the tropic calm;
+And with the dreamy languor of the Line,
+The North's keen virtue blend, and strength to beauty join.
+
+XX.
+Better to stem with heart and hand
+The roaring tide of life, than lie,
+Unmindful, on its flowery strand,
+Of God's occasions drifting by
+Better with naked nerve to bear
+The needles of this goading air,
+Than, in the lap of sensual ease, forego
+The godlike power to do, the godlike aim to know.
+
+XXI.
+Home of my heart! to me more fair
+Than gay Versailles or Windsor's halls,
+The painted, shingly town-house where
+The freeman's vote for Freedom falls!
+The simple roof where prayer is made,
+Than Gothic groin and colonnade;
+The living temple of the heart of man,
+Than Rome's sky-mocking vault, or many-spired Milan!
+
+XXII.
+More dear thy equal village schools,
+Where rich and poor the Bible read,
+Than classic halls where Priestcraft rules,
+And Learning wears the chains of Creed;
+Thy glad Thanksgiving, gathering in
+The scattered sheaves of home and kin,
+Than the mad license ushering Lenten pains,
+Or holidays of slaves who laugh and dance in chains.
+
+XXIII.
+And sweet homes nestle in these dales,
+And perch along these wooded swells;
+And, blest beyond Arcadian vales,
+They hear the sound of Sabbath bells!
+Here dwells no perfect man sublime,
+Nor woman winged before her time,
+But with the faults and follies of the race,
+Old home-bred virtues hold their not unhonored place.
+
+XXIV.
+Here manhood struggles for the sake
+Of mother, sister, daughter, wife,
+The graces and the loves which make
+The music of the march of life;
+And woman, in her daily round
+Of duty, walks on holy ground.
+No unpaid menial tills the soil, nor here
+Is the bad lesson learned at human rights to sneer.
+
+XXV.
+Then let the icy north-wind blow
+The trumpets of the coming storm,
+To arrowy sleet and blinding snow
+Yon slanting lines of rain transform.
+Young hearts shall hail the drifted cold,
+As gayly as I did of old;
+And I, who watch them through the frosty pane,
+Unenvious, live in them my boyhood o'er again.
+
+XXVI.
+And I will trust that He who heeds
+The life that hides in mead and wold,
+Who hangs yon alder's crimson beads,
+And stains these mosses green and gold,
+Will still, as He hath done, incline
+His gracious care to me and mine;
+Grant what we ask aright, from wrong debar,
+And, as the earth grows dark, make brighter every star!
+
+XXVII.
+I have not seen, I may not see,
+My hopes for man take form in fact,
+But God will give the victory
+In due time; in that faith I act.
+And lie who sees the future sure,
+The baffling present may endure,
+And bless, meanwhile, the unseen Hand that leads
+The heart's desires beyond the halting step of deeds.
+
+XXVIII.
+And thou, my song, I send thee forth,
+Where harsher songs of mine have flown;
+Go, find a place at home and hearth
+Where'er thy singer's name is known;
+Revive for him the kindly thought
+Of friends; and they who love him not,
+Touched by some strain of thine, perchance may take
+The hand he proffers all, and thank him for thy sake.
+1857.
+
+
+
+THE FIRST FLOWERS
+
+For ages on our river borders,
+These tassels in their tawny bloom,
+And willowy studs of downy silver,
+Have prophesied of Spring to come.
+
+For ages have the unbound waters
+Smiled on them from their pebbly hem,
+And the clear carol of the robin
+And song of bluebird welcomed them.
+
+But never yet from smiling river,
+Or song of early bird, have they
+Been greeted with a gladder welcome
+Than whispers from my heart to-day.
+
+They break the spell of cold and darkness,
+The weary watch of sleepless pain;
+And from my heart, as from the river,
+The ice of winter melts again.
+
+Thanks, Mary! for this wild-wood token
+Of Freya's footsteps drawing near;
+Almost, as in the rune of Asgard,
+The growing of the grass I hear.
+
+It is as if the pine-trees called me
+From ceiled room and silent books,
+To see the dance of woodland shadows,
+And hear the song of April brooks!
+
+As in the old Teutonic ballad
+Of Odenwald live bird and tree,
+Together live in bloom and music,
+I blend in song thy flowers and thee.
+
+Earth's rocky tablets bear forever
+The dint of rain and small bird's track
+Who knows but that my idle verses
+May leave some trace by Merrimac!
+
+The bird that trod the mellow layers
+Of the young earth is sought in vain;
+The cloud is gone that wove the sandstone,
+From God's design, with threads of rain!
+
+So, when this fluid age we live in
+Shall stiffen round my careless rhyme,
+Who made the vagrant tracks may puzzle
+The savants of the coming time;
+
+And, following out their dim suggestions,
+Some idly-curious hand may draw
+My doubtful portraiture, as Cuvier
+Drew fish and bird from fin and claw.
+
+And maidens in the far-off twilights,
+Singing my words to breeze and stream,
+Shall wonder if the old-time Mary
+Were real, or the rhymer's dream!
+1st 3d mo., 1857.
+
+
+
+THE OLD BURYING-GROUND.
+
+Our vales are sweet with fern and rose,
+Our hills are maple-crowned;
+But not from them our fathers chose
+The village burying-ground.
+
+The dreariest spot in all the land
+To Death they set apart;
+With scanty grace from Nature's hand,
+And none from that of Art.
+
+A winding wall of mossy stone,
+Frost-flung and broken, lines
+A lonesome acre thinly grown
+With grass and wandering vines.
+
+Without the wall a birch-tree shows
+Its drooped and tasselled head;
+Within, a stag-horned sumach grows,
+Fern-leafed, with spikes of red.
+
+There, sheep that graze the neighboring plain
+Like white ghosts come and go,
+The farm-horse drags his fetlock chain,
+The cow-bell tinkles slow.
+
+Low moans the river from its bed,
+The distant pines reply;
+Like mourners shrinking from the dead,
+They stand apart and sigh.
+
+Unshaded smites the summer sun,
+Unchecked the winter blast;
+The school-girl learns the place to shun,
+With glances backward cast.
+
+For thus our fathers testified,
+That he might read who ran,
+The emptiness of human pride,
+The nothingness of man.
+
+They dared not plant the grave with flowers,
+Nor dress the funeral sod,
+Where, with a love as deep as ours,
+They left their dead with God.
+
+The hard and thorny path they kept
+From beauty turned aside;
+Nor missed they over those who slept
+The grace to life denied.
+
+Yet still the wilding flowers would blow,
+The golden leaves would fall,
+The seasons come, the seasons go,
+And God be good to all.
+
+Above the graves the' blackberry hung
+In bloom and green its wreath,
+And harebells swung as if they rung
+The chimes of peace beneath.
+
+The beauty Nature loves to share,
+The gifts she hath for all,
+The common light, the common air,
+O'ercrept the graveyard's wall.
+
+It knew the glow of eventide,
+The sunrise and the noon,
+And glorified and sanctified
+It slept beneath the moon.
+
+With flowers or snow-flakes for its sod,
+Around the seasons ran,
+And evermore the love of God
+Rebuked the fear of man.
+
+We dwell with fears on either hand,
+Within a daily strife,
+And spectral problems waiting stand
+Before the gates of life.
+
+The doubts we vainly seek to solve,
+The truths we know, are one;
+The known and nameless stars revolve
+Around the Central Sun.
+
+And if we reap as we have sown,
+And take the dole we deal,
+The law of pain is love alone,
+The wounding is to heal.
+
+Unharmed from change to change we glide,
+We fall as in our dreams;
+The far-off terror at our side
+A smiling angel seems.
+
+Secure on God's all-tender heart
+Alike rest great and small;
+Why fear to lose our little part,
+When He is pledged for all?
+
+O fearful heart and troubled brain
+Take hope and strength from this,--
+That Nature never hints in vain,
+Nor prophesies amiss.
+
+Her wild birds sing the same sweet stave,
+Her lights and airs are given
+Alike to playground and the grave;
+And over both is Heaven.
+1858
+
+
+
+THE PALM-TREE.
+
+Is it the palm, the cocoa-palm,
+On the Indian Sea, by the isles of balm?
+Or is it a ship in the breezeless calm?
+
+A ship whose keel is of palm beneath,
+Whose ribs of palm have a palm-bark sheath,
+And a rudder of palm it steereth with.
+
+Branches of palm are its spars and rails,
+Fibres of palm are its woven sails,
+And the rope is of palm that idly trails!
+
+What does the good ship bear so well?
+The cocoa-nut with its stony shell,
+And the milky sap of its inner cell.
+
+What are its jars, so smooth and fine,
+But hollowed nuts, filled with oil and wine,
+And the cabbage that ripens under the Line?
+
+Who smokes his nargileh, cool and calm?
+The master, whose cunning and skill could charm
+Cargo and ship from the bounteous palm.
+
+In the cabin he sits on a palm-mat soft,
+From a beaker of palm his drink is quaffed,
+And a palm-thatch shields from the sun aloft!
+
+His dress is woven of palmy strands,
+And he holds a palm-leaf scroll in his hands,
+Traced with the Prophet's wise commands!
+
+The turban folded about his head
+Was daintily wrought of the palm-leaf braid,
+And the fan that cools him of palm was made.
+
+Of threads of palm was the carpet spun
+Whereon he kneels when the day is done,
+And the foreheads of Islam are bowed as one!
+
+To him the palm is a gift divine,
+Wherein all uses of man combine,--
+House, and raiment, and food, and wine!
+
+And, in the hour of his great release,
+His need of the palm shall only cease
+With the shroud wherein he lieth in peace.
+
+"Allah il Allah!" he sings his psalm,
+On the Indian Sea, by the isles of balm;
+"Thanks to Allah who gives the palm!"
+1858.
+
+
+
+THE RIVER PATH.
+
+No bird-song floated down the hill,
+The tangled bank below was still;
+
+No rustle from the birchen stem,
+No ripple from the water's hem.
+
+The dusk of twilight round us grew,
+We felt the falling of the dew;
+
+For, from us, ere the day was done,
+The wooded hills shut out the sun.
+
+But on the river's farther side
+We saw the hill-tops glorified,--
+
+A tender glow, exceeding fair,
+A dream of day without its glare.
+
+With us the damp, the chill, the gloom
+With them the sunset's rosy bloom;
+
+While dark, through willowy vistas seen,
+The river rolled in shade between.
+
+From out the darkness where we trod,
+We gazed upon those bills of God,
+
+Whose light seemed not of moon or sun.
+We spake not, but our thought was one.
+
+We paused, as if from that bright shore
+Beckoned our dear ones gone before;
+
+And stilled our beating hearts to hear
+The voices lost to mortal ear!
+
+Sudden our pathway turned from night;
+The hills swung open to the light;
+
+Through their green gates the sunshine showed,
+A long, slant splendor downward flowed.
+
+Down glade and glen and bank it rolled;
+It bridged the shaded stream with gold;
+
+And, borne on piers of mist, allied
+The shadowy with the sunlit side!
+
+"So," prayed we, "when our feet draw near
+The river dark, with mortal fear,
+
+"And the night cometh chill with dew,
+O Father! let Thy light break through!
+
+"So let the hills of doubt divide,
+So bridge with faith the sunless tide!
+
+"So let the eyes that fail on earth
+On Thy eternal hills look forth;
+
+"And in Thy beckoning angels know
+The dear ones whom we loved below!"
+1880.
+
+
+
+MOUNTAIN PICTURES.
+
+I. FRANCONIA FROM THE PEMIGEWASSET
+Once more, O Mountains of the North, unveil
+Your brows, and lay your cloudy mantles by
+And once more, ere the eyes that seek ye fail,
+Uplift against the blue walls of the sky
+Your mighty shapes, and let the sunshine weave
+Its golden net-work in your belting woods,
+Smile down in rainbows from your falling floods,
+And on your kingly brows at morn and eve
+Set crowns of fire! So shall my soul receive
+Haply the secret of your calm and strength,
+Your unforgotten beauty interfuse
+My common life, your glorious shapes and hues
+And sun-dropped splendors at my bidding come,
+Loom vast through dreams, and stretch in billowy length
+From the sea-level of my lowland home!
+
+They rise before me! Last night's thunder-gust
+Roared not in vain: for where its lightnings thrust
+Their tongues of fire, the great peaks seem so near,
+Burned clean of mist, so starkly bold and clear,
+I almost pause the wind in the pines to hear,
+The loose rock's fall, the steps of browsing deer.
+The clouds that shattered on yon slide-worn walls
+And splintered on the rocks their spears of rain
+Have set in play a thousand waterfalls,
+Making the dusk and silence of the woods
+Glad with the laughter of the chasing floods,
+And luminous with blown spray and silver gleams,
+While, in the vales below, the dry-lipped streams
+Sing to the freshened meadow-lands again.
+So, let me hope, the battle-storm that beats
+The land with hail and fire may pass away
+With its spent thunders at the break of day,
+Like last night's clouds, and leave, as it retreats,
+A greener earth and fairer sky behind,
+Blown crystal-clear by Freedom's Northern wind!
+
+II. MONADNOCK FROM WACHUSET.
+I would I were a painter, for the sake
+Of a sweet picture, and of her who led,
+A fitting guide, with reverential tread,
+Into that mountain mystery. First a lake
+Tinted with sunset; next the wavy lines
+Of far receding hills; and yet more far,
+Monadnock lifting from his night of pines
+His rosy forehead to the evening star.
+Beside us, purple-zoned, Wachuset laid
+His head against the West, whose warm light made
+His aureole; and o'er him, sharp and clear,
+Like a shaft of lightning in mid-launching stayed,
+A single level cloud-line, shone upon
+By the fierce glances of the sunken sun,
+Menaced the darkness with its golden spear!
+
+So twilight deepened round us. Still and black
+The great woods climbed the mountain at our back;
+And on their skirts, where yet the lingering day
+On the shorn greenness of the clearing lay,
+The brown old farm-house like a bird's-nest hung.
+With home-life sounds the desert air was stirred
+The bleat of sheep along the hill we heard,
+The bucket plashing in the cool, sweet well,
+The pasture-bars that clattered as they fell;
+Dogs barked, fowls fluttered, cattle lowed; the gate
+Of the barn-yard creaked beneath the merry weight
+Of sun-brown children, listening, while they swung,
+The welcome sound of supper-call to hear;
+And down the shadowy lane, in tinklings clear,
+The pastoral curfew of the cow-bell rung.
+Thus soothed and pleased, our backward path we took,
+Praising the farmer's home. He only spake,
+Looking into the sunset o'er the lake,
+Like one to whom the far-off is most near:
+"Yes, most folks think it has a pleasant look;
+I love it for my good old mother's sake,
+Who lived and died here in the peace of God!"
+The lesson of his words we pondered o'er,
+As silently we turned the eastern flank
+Of the mountain, where its shadow deepest sank,
+Doubling the night along our rugged road:
+We felt that man was more than his abode,--
+The inward life than Nature's raiment more;
+And the warm sky, the sundown-tinted hill,
+The forest and the lake, seemed dwarfed and dim
+Before the saintly soul, whose human will
+Meekly in the Eternal footsteps trod,
+Making her homely toil and household ways
+An earthly echo of the song of praise
+Swelling from angel lips and harps of seraphim.
+1862.
+
+
+
+THE VANISHERS.
+
+Sweetest of all childlike dreams
+In the simple Indian lore
+Still to me the legend seems
+Of the shapes who flit before.
+
+Flitting, passing, seen and gone,
+Never reached nor found at rest,
+Baffling search, but beckoning on
+To the Sunset of the Blest.
+
+From the clefts of mountain rocks,
+Through the dark of lowland firs,
+Flash the eyes and flow the locks
+Of the mystic Vanishers!
+
+And the fisher in his skiff,
+And the hunter on the moss,
+Hear their call from cape and cliff,
+See their hands the birch-leaves toss.
+
+Wistful, longing, through the green
+Twilight of the clustered pines,
+In their faces rarely seen
+Beauty more than mortal shines.
+
+Fringed with gold their mantles flow
+On the slopes of westering knolls;
+In the wind they whisper low
+Of the Sunset Land of Souls.
+
+Doubt who may, O friend of mine!
+Thou and I have seen them too;
+On before with beck and sign
+Still they glide, and we pursue.
+
+More than clouds of purple trail
+In the gold of setting day;
+More than gleams of wing or sail
+Beckon from the sea-mist gray.
+
+Glimpses of immortal youth,
+Gleams and glories seen and flown,
+Far-heard voices sweet with truth,
+Airs from viewless Eden blown;
+
+Beauty that eludes our grasp,
+Sweetness that transcends our taste,
+Loving hands we may not clasp,
+Shining feet that mock our haste;
+
+Gentle eyes we closed below,
+Tender voices heard once more,
+Smile and call us, as they go
+On and onward, still before.
+
+Guided thus, O friend of mine
+Let us walk our little way,
+Knowing by each beckoning sign
+That we are not quite astray.
+
+Chase we still, with baffled feet,
+Smiling eye and waving hand,
+Sought and seeker soon shall meet,
+Lost and found, in Sunset Land
+1864.
+
+
+
+THE PAGEANT.
+
+A sound as if from bells of silver,
+Or elfin cymbals smitten clear,
+Through the frost-pictured panes I hear.
+
+A brightness which outshines the morning,
+A splendor brooking no delay,
+Beckons and tempts my feet away.
+
+I leave the trodden village highway
+For virgin snow-paths glimmering through
+A jewelled elm-tree avenue;
+
+Where, keen against the walls of sapphire,
+The gleaming tree-bolls, ice-embossed,
+Hold up their chandeliers of frost.
+
+I tread in Orient halls enchanted,
+I dream the Saga's dream of caves
+Gem-lit beneath the North Sea waves!
+
+I walk the land of Eldorado,
+I touch its mimic garden bowers,
+Its silver leaves and diamond flowers!
+
+The flora of the mystic mine-world
+Around me lifts on crystal stems
+The petals of its clustered gems!
+
+What miracle of weird transforming
+In this wild work of frost and light,
+This glimpse of glory infinite!
+
+This foregleam of the Holy City
+Like that to him of Patmos given,
+The white bride coming down from heaven!
+
+How flash the ranked and mail-clad alders,
+Through what sharp-glancing spears of reeds
+The brook its muffled water leads!
+
+Yon maple, like the bush of Horeb,
+Burns unconsumed: a white, cold fire
+Rays out from every grassy spire.
+
+Each slender rush and spike of mullein,
+Low laurel shrub and drooping fern,
+Transfigured, blaze where'er I turn.
+
+How yonder Ethiopian hemlock
+Crowned with his glistening circlet stands!
+What jewels light his swarthy hands!
+
+Here, where the forest opens southward,
+Between its hospitable pines,
+As through a door, the warm sun shines.
+
+The jewels loosen on the branches,
+And lightly, as the soft winds blow,
+Fall, tinkling, on the ice below.
+
+And through the clashing of their cymbals
+I hear the old familiar fall
+Of water down the rocky wall,
+
+Where, from its wintry prison breaking,
+In dark and silence hidden long,
+The brook repeats its summer song.
+
+One instant flashing in the sunshine,
+Keen as a sabre from its sheath,
+Then lost again the ice beneath.
+
+I hear the rabbit lightly leaping,
+The foolish screaming of the jay,
+The chopper's axe-stroke far away;
+
+The clamor of some neighboring barn-yard,
+The lazy cock's belated crow,
+Or cattle-tramp in crispy snow.
+
+And, as in some enchanted forest
+The lost knight hears his comrades sing,
+And, near at hand, their bridles ring,--
+
+So welcome I these sounds and voices,
+These airs from far-off summer blown,
+This life that leaves me not alone.
+
+For the white glory overawes me;
+The crystal terror of the seer
+Of Chebar's vision blinds me here.
+
+Rebuke me not, O sapphire heaven!
+Thou stainless earth, lay not on me,
+Thy keen reproach of purity,
+
+If, in this August presence-chamber,
+I sigh for summer's leaf-green gloom
+And warm airs thick with odorous bloom!
+
+Let the strange frost-work sink and crumble,
+And let the loosened tree-boughs swing,
+Till all their bells of silver ring.
+
+Shine warmly down, thou sun of noontime,
+On this chill pageant, melt and move
+The winter's frozen heart with love.
+
+And, soft and low, thou wind south-blowing,
+Breathe through a veil of tenderest haze
+Thy prophecy of summer days.
+
+Come with thy green relief of promise,
+And to this dead, cold splendor bring
+The living jewels of the spring!
+1869.
+
+
+
+THE PRESSED GENTIAN.
+
+The time of gifts has come again,
+And, on my northern window-pane,
+Outlined against the day's brief light,
+A Christmas token hangs in sight.
+
+The wayside travellers, as they pass,
+Mark the gray disk of clouded glass;
+And the dull blankness seems, perchance,
+Folly to their wise ignorance.
+
+They cannot from their outlook see
+The perfect grace it hath for me;
+For there the flower, whose fringes through
+The frosty breath of autumn blew,
+Turns from without its face of bloom
+To the warm tropic of my room,
+As fair as when beside its brook
+The hue of bending skies it took.
+
+So from the trodden ways of earth,
+Seem some sweet souls who veil their worth,
+And offer to the careless glance
+The clouding gray of circumstance.
+They blossom best where hearth-fires burn,
+To loving eyes alone they turn
+The flowers of inward grace, that hide
+Their beauty from the world outside.
+
+But deeper meanings come to me,
+My half-immortal flower, from thee!
+Man judges from a partial view,
+None ever yet his brother knew;
+The Eternal Eye that sees the whole
+May better read the darkened soul,
+And find, to outward sense denied,
+The flower upon its inmost side
+1872.
+
+
+
+A MYSTERY.
+
+The river hemmed with leaning trees
+Wound through its meadows green;
+A low, blue line of mountains showed
+The open pines between.
+
+One sharp, tall peak above them all
+Clear into sunlight sprang
+I saw the river of my dreams,
+The mountains that I sang!
+
+No clue of memory led me on,
+But well the ways I knew;
+A feeling of familiar things
+With every footstep grew.
+
+Not otherwise above its crag
+Could lean the blasted pine;
+Not otherwise the maple hold
+Aloft its red ensign.
+
+So up the long and shorn foot-hills
+The mountain road should creep;
+So, green and low, the meadow fold
+Its red-haired kine asleep.
+
+The river wound as it should wind;
+Their place the mountains took;
+The white torn fringes of their clouds
+Wore no unwonted look.
+
+Yet ne'er before that river's rim
+Was pressed by feet of mine,
+Never before mine eyes had crossed
+That broken mountain line.
+
+A presence, strange at once and known,
+Walked with me as my guide;
+The skirts of some forgotten life
+Trailed noiseless at my side.
+
+Was it a dim-remembered dream?
+Or glimpse through ions old?
+The secret which the mountains kept
+The river never told.
+
+But from the vision ere it passed
+A tender hope I drew,
+And, pleasant as a dawn of spring,
+The thought within me grew,
+
+That love would temper every change,
+And soften all surprise,
+And, misty with the dreams of earth,
+The hills of Heaven arise.
+1873.
+
+
+
+A SEA DREAM.
+
+We saw the slow tides go and come,
+The curving surf-lines lightly drawn,
+The gray rocks touched with tender bloom
+Beneath the fresh-blown rose of dawn.
+
+We saw in richer sunsets lost
+The sombre pomp of showery noons;
+And signalled spectral sails that crossed
+The weird, low light of rising moons.
+
+On stormy eves from cliff and head
+We saw the white spray tossed and spurned;
+While over all, in gold and red,
+Its face of fire the lighthouse turned.
+
+The rail-car brought its daily crowds,
+Half curious, half indifferent,
+Like passing sails or floating clouds,
+We saw them as they came and went.
+
+But, one calm morning, as we lay
+And watched the mirage-lifted wall
+Of coast, across the dreamy bay,
+And heard afar the curlew call,
+
+And nearer voices, wild or tame,
+Of airy flock and childish throng,
+Up from the water's edge there came
+Faint snatches of familiar song.
+
+Careless we heard the singer's choice
+Of old and common airs; at last
+The tender pathos of his voice
+In one low chanson held us fast.
+
+A song that mingled joy and pain,
+And memories old and sadly sweet;
+While, timing to its minor strain,
+The waves in lapsing cadence beat.
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+The waves are glad in breeze and sun;
+The rocks are fringed with foam;
+I walk once more a haunted shore,
+A stranger, yet at home,
+A land of dreams I roam.
+
+Is this the wind, the soft sea wind
+That stirred thy locks of brown?
+Are these the rocks whose mosses knew
+The trail of thy light gown,
+Where boy and girl sat down?
+
+I see the gray fort's broken wall,
+The boats that rock below;
+And, out at sea, the passing sails
+We saw so long ago
+Rose-red in morning's glow.
+
+The freshness of the early time
+On every breeze is blown;
+As glad the sea, as blue the sky,--
+The change is ours alone;
+The saddest is my own.
+
+A stranger now, a world-worn man,
+Is he who bears my name;
+But thou, methinks, whose mortal life
+Immortal youth became,
+Art evermore the same.
+
+Thou art not here, thou art not there,
+Thy place I cannot see;
+I only know that where thou art
+The blessed angels be,
+And heaven is glad for thee.
+
+Forgive me if the evil years
+Have left on me their sign;
+Wash out, O soul so beautiful,
+The many stains of mine
+In tears of love divine!
+
+I could not look on thee and live,
+If thou wert by my side;
+The vision of a shining one,
+The white and heavenly bride,
+Is well to me denied.
+
+But turn to me thy dear girl-face
+Without the angel's crown,
+The wedded roses of thy lips,
+Thy loose hair rippling down
+In waves of golden brown.
+
+Look forth once more through space and time,
+And let thy sweet shade fall
+In tenderest grace of soul and form
+On memory's frescoed wall,
+A shadow, and yet all!
+
+Draw near, more near, forever dear!
+Where'er I rest or roam,
+Or in the city's crowded streets,
+Or by the blown sea foam,
+The thought of thee is home!
+
+       .     .     .    .    .
+
+At breakfast hour the singer read
+The city news, with comment wise,
+Like one who felt the pulse of trade
+Beneath his finger fall and rise.
+
+His look, his air, his curt speech, told
+The man of action, not of books,
+To whom the corners made in gold
+And stocks were more than seaside nooks.
+
+Of life beneath the life confessed
+His song had hinted unawares;
+Of flowers in traffic's ledgers pressed,
+Of human hearts in bulls and bears.
+
+But eyes in vain were turned to watch
+That face so hard and shrewd and strong;
+And ears in vain grew sharp to catch
+The meaning of that morning song.
+
+In vain some sweet-voiced querist sought
+To sound him, leaving as she came;
+Her baited album only caught
+A common, unromantic name.
+
+No word betrayed the mystery fine,
+That trembled on the singer's tongue;
+He came and went, and left no sign
+Behind him save the song he sung.
+1874.
+
+
+
+HAZEL BLOSSOMS.
+
+The summer warmth has left the sky,
+The summer songs have died away;
+And, withered, in the footpaths lie
+The fallen leaves, but yesterday
+With ruby and with topaz gay.
+
+The grass is browning on the hills;
+No pale, belated flowers recall
+The astral fringes of the rills,
+And drearily the dead vines fall,
+Frost-blackened, from the roadside wall.
+
+Yet through the gray and sombre wood,
+Against the dusk of fir and pine,
+Last of their floral sisterhood,
+The hazel's yellow blossoms shine,
+The tawny gold of Afric's mine!
+
+Small beauty hath my unsung flower,
+For spring to own or summer hail;
+But, in the season's saddest hour,
+To skies that weep and winds that wail
+Its glad surprisals never fail.
+
+O days grown cold! O life grown old
+No rose of June may bloom again;
+But, like the hazel's twisted gold,
+Through early frost and latter rain
+Shall hints of summer-time remain.
+
+And as within the hazel's bough
+A gift of mystic virtue dwells,
+That points to golden ores below,
+And in dry desert places tells
+Where flow unseen the cool, sweet wells,
+
+So, in the wise Diviner's hand,
+Be mine the hazel's grateful part
+To feel, beneath a thirsty land,
+The living waters thrill and start,
+The beating of the rivulet's heart!
+
+Sufficeth me the gift to light
+With latest bloom the dark, cold days;
+To call some hidden spring to sight
+That, in these dry and dusty ways,
+Shall sing its pleasant song of praise.
+
+O Love! the hazel-wand may fail,
+But thou canst lend the surer spell,
+That, passing over Baca's vale,
+Repeats the old-time miracle,
+And makes the desert-land a well.
+1874.
+
+
+
+SUNSET ON THE BEARCAMP.
+
+A gold fringe on the purpling hem
+Of hills the river runs,
+As down its long, green valley falls
+The last of summer's suns.
+
+Along its tawny gravel-bed
+Broad-flowing, swift, and still,
+As if its meadow levels felt
+The hurry of the hill,
+Noiseless between its banks of green
+From curve to curve it slips;
+The drowsy maple-shadows rest
+Like fingers on its lips.
+
+A waif from Carroll's wildest hills,
+Unstoried and unknown;
+The ursine legend of its name
+Prowls on its banks alone.
+Yet flowers as fair its slopes adorn
+As ever Yarrow knew,
+Or, under rainy Irish skies,
+By Spenser's Mulla grew;
+And through the gaps of leaning trees
+Its mountain cradle shows
+The gold against the amethyst,
+The green against the rose.
+
+Touched by a light that hath no name,
+A glory never sung,
+Aloft on sky and mountain wall
+Are God's great pictures hung.
+How changed the summits vast and old!
+No longer granite-browed,
+They melt in rosy mist; the rock
+Is softer than the cloud;
+The valley holds its breath; no leaf
+Of all its elms is twirled
+The silence of eternity
+Seems falling on the world.
+
+The pause before the breaking seals
+Of mystery is this;
+Yon miracle-play of night and day
+Makes dumb its witnesses.
+What unseen altar crowns the hills
+That reach up stair on stair?
+What eyes look through, what white wings fan
+These purple veils of air?
+What Presence from the heavenly heights
+To those of earth stoops down?
+Not vainly Hellas dreamed of gods
+On Ida's snowy crown!
+
+Slow fades the vision of the sky,
+The golden water pales,
+And over all the valley-land
+A gray-winged vapor sails.
+I go the common way of all;
+The sunset fires will burn,
+The flowers will blow, the river flow,
+When I no more return.
+No whisper from the mountain pine
+Nor lapsing stream shall tell
+The stranger, treading where I tread,
+Of him who loved them well.
+
+But beauty seen is never lost,
+God's colors all are fast;
+The glory of this sunset heaven
+Into my soul has passed,
+A sense of gladness unconfined
+To mortal date or clime;
+As the soul liveth, it shall live
+Beyond the years of time.
+Beside the mystic asphodels
+Shall bloom the home-born flowers,
+And new horizons flush and glow
+With sunset hues of ours.
+
+Farewell! these smiling hills must wear
+Too soon their wintry frown,
+And snow-cold winds from off them shake
+The maple's red leaves down.
+But I shall see a summer sun
+Still setting broad and low;
+The mountain slopes shall blush and bloom,
+The golden water flow.
+A lover's claim is mine on all
+I see to have and hold,--
+The rose-light of perpetual hills,
+And sunsets never cold!
+1876
+
+
+
+THE SEEKING OF THE WATERFALL.
+
+They left their home of summer ease
+Beneath the lowland's sheltering trees,
+To seek, by ways unknown to all,
+The promise of the waterfall.
+
+Some vague, faint rumor to the vale
+Had crept--perchance a hunter's tale--
+Of its wild mirth of waters lost
+On the dark woods through which it tossed.
+
+Somewhere it laughed and sang; somewhere
+Whirled in mad dance its misty hair;
+But who had raised its veil, or seen
+The rainbow skirts of that Undine?
+
+They sought it where the mountain brook
+Its swift way to the valley took;
+Along the rugged slope they clomb,
+Their guide a thread of sound and foam.
+
+Height after height they slowly won;
+The fiery javelins of the sun
+Smote the bare ledge; the tangled shade
+With rock and vine their steps delayed.
+
+But, through leaf-openings, now and then
+They saw the cheerful homes of men,
+And the great mountains with their wall
+Of misty purple girdling all.
+
+The leaves through which the glad winds blew
+Shared the wild dance the waters knew;
+And where the shadows deepest fell
+The wood-thrush rang his silver bell.
+
+Fringing the stream, at every turn
+Swung low the waving fronds of fern;
+From stony cleft and mossy sod
+Pale asters sprang, and golden-rod.
+
+And still the water sang the sweet,
+Glad song that stirred its gliding feet,
+And found in rock and root the keys
+Of its beguiling melodies.
+
+Beyond, above, its signals flew
+Of tossing foam the birch-trees through;
+Now seen, now lost, but baffling still
+The weary seekers' slackening will.
+
+Each called to each: "Lo here! Lo there!
+Its white scarf flutters in the air!"
+They climbed anew; the vision fled,
+To beckon higher overhead.
+
+So toiled they up the mountain-slope
+With faint and ever fainter hope;
+With faint and fainter voice the brook
+Still bade them listen, pause, and look.
+
+Meanwhile below the day was done;
+Above the tall peaks saw the sun
+Sink, beam-shorn, to its misty set
+Behind the hills of violet.
+
+"Here ends our quest!" the seekers cried,
+"The brook and rumor both have lied!
+The phantom of a waterfall
+Has led us at its beck and call."
+
+But one, with years grown wiser, said
+"So, always baffled, not misled,
+We follow where before us runs
+The vision of the shining ones.
+
+"Not where they seem their signals fly,
+Their voices while we listen die;
+We cannot keep, however fleet,
+The quick time of their winged feet.
+
+"From youth to age unresting stray
+These kindly mockers in our way;
+Yet lead they not, the baffling elves,
+To something better than themselves?
+
+"Here, though unreached the goal we sought,
+Its own reward our toil has brought:
+The winding water's sounding rush,
+The long note of the hermit thrush,
+
+"The turquoise lakes, the glimpse of pond
+And river track, and, vast, beyond
+Broad meadows belted round with pines,
+The grand uplift of mountain lines!
+
+"What matter though we seek with pain
+The garden of the gods in vain,
+If lured thereby we climb to greet
+Some wayside blossom Eden-sweet?
+
+"To seek is better than to gain,
+The fond hope dies as we attain;
+Life's fairest things are those which seem,
+The best is that of which we dream.
+
+"Then let us trust our waterfall
+Still flashes down its rocky wall,
+With rainbow crescent curved across
+Its sunlit spray from moss to moss.
+
+"And we, forgetful of our pain,
+In thought shall seek it oft again;
+Shall see this aster-blossomed sod,
+This sunshine of the golden-rod,
+
+"And haply gain, through parting boughs,
+Grand glimpses of great mountain brows
+Cloud-turbaned, and the sharp steel sheen
+Of lakes deep set in valleys green.
+
+"So failure wins; the consequence
+Of loss becomes its recompense;
+And evermore the end shall tell
+The unreached ideal guided well.
+
+"Our sweet illusions only die
+Fulfilling love's sure prophecy;
+And every wish for better things
+An undreamed beauty nearer brings.
+
+"For fate is servitor of love;
+Desire and hope and longing prove
+The secret of immortal youth,
+And Nature cheats us into truth.
+
+"O kind allurers, wisely sent,
+Beguiling with benign intent,
+Still move us, through divine unrest,
+To seek the loveliest and the best!
+
+"Go with us when our souls go free,
+And, in the clear, white light to be,
+Add unto Heaven's beatitude
+The old delight of seeking good!"
+1878.
+
+
+
+THE TRAILING ARBUTUS
+
+I wandered lonely where the pine-trees made
+Against the bitter East their barricade,
+And, guided by its sweet
+Perfume, I found, within a narrow dell,
+The trailing spring flower tinted like a shell
+Amid dry leaves and mosses at my feet.
+
+From under dead boughs, for whose loss the pines
+Moaned ceaseless overhead, the blossoming vines
+Lifted their glad surprise,
+While yet the bluebird smoothed in leafless trees
+His feathers ruffled by the chill sea-breeze,
+And snow-drifts lingered under April skies.
+
+As, pausing, o'er the lonely flower I bent,
+I thought of lives thus lowly, clogged and pent,
+Which yet find room,
+Through care and cumber, coldness and decay,
+To lend a sweetness to the ungenial day
+And make the sad earth happier for their bloom.
+1879.
+
+
+
+ST. MARTIN'S SUMMER.
+
+     This name in some parts of Europe is given to the season we call
+     Indian Summer, in honor of the good St. Martin. The title of the
+     poem was suggested by the fact that the day it refers to was the
+     exact date of that set apart to the Saint, the 11th of November.
+
+Though flowers have perished at the touch
+Of Frost, the early comer,
+I hail the season loved so much,
+The good St. Martin's summer.
+
+O gracious morn, with rose-red dawn,
+And thin moon curving o'er it!
+The old year's darling, latest born,
+More loved than all before it!
+
+How flamed the sunrise through the pines!
+How stretched the birchen shadows,
+Braiding in long, wind-wavered lines
+The westward sloping meadows!
+
+The sweet day, opening as a flower
+Unfolds its petals tender,
+Renews for us at noontide's hour
+The summer's tempered splendor.
+
+The birds are hushed; alone the wind,
+That through the woodland searches,
+The red-oak's lingering leaves can find,
+And yellow plumes of larches.
+
+But still the balsam-breathing pine
+Invites no thought of sorrow,
+No hint of loss from air like wine
+The earth's content can borrow.
+
+The summer and the winter here
+Midway a truce are holding,
+A soft, consenting atmosphere
+Their tents of peace enfolding.
+
+The silent woods, the lonely hills,
+Rise solemn in their gladness;
+The quiet that the valley fills
+Is scarcely joy or sadness.
+
+How strange! The autumn yesterday
+In winter's grasp seemed dying;
+On whirling winds from skies of gray
+The early snow was flying.
+
+And now, while over Nature's mood
+There steals a soft relenting,
+I will not mar the present good,
+Forecasting or lamenting.
+
+My autumn time and Nature's hold
+A dreamy tryst together,
+And, both grown old, about us fold
+The golden-tissued weather.
+
+I lean my heart against the day
+To feel its bland caressing;
+I will not let it pass away
+Before it leaves its blessing.
+
+God's angels come not as of old
+The Syrian shepherds knew them;
+In reddening dawns, in sunset gold,
+And warm noon lights I view them.
+
+Nor need there is, in times like this
+When heaven to earth draws nearer,
+Of wing or song as witnesses
+To make their presence clearer.
+
+O stream of life, whose swifter flow
+Is of the end forewarning,
+Methinks thy sundown afterglow
+Seems less of night than morning!
+
+Old cares grow light; aside I lay
+The doubts and fears that troubled;
+The quiet of the happy day
+Within my soul is doubled.
+
+That clouds must veil this fair sunshine
+Not less a joy I find it;
+Nor less yon warm horizon line
+That winter lurks behind it.
+
+The mystery of the untried days
+I close my eyes from reading;
+His will be done whose darkest ways
+To light and life are leading!
+
+Less drear the winter night shall be,
+If memory cheer and hearten
+Its heavy hours with thoughts of thee,
+Sweet summer of St. Martin!
+1880.
+
+
+
+STORM ON LAKE ASQUAM.
+
+A cloud, like that the old-time Hebrew saw
+On Carmel prophesying rain, began
+To lift itself o'er wooded Cardigan,
+Growing and blackening. Suddenly, a flaw
+
+Of chill wind menaced; then a strong blast beat
+Down the long valley's murmuring pines, and woke
+The noon-dream of the sleeping lake, and broke
+Its smooth steel mirror at the mountains' feet.
+
+Thunderous and vast, a fire-veined darkness swept
+Over the rough pine-bearded Asquam range;
+A wraith of tempest, wonderful and strange,
+From peak to peak the cloudy giant stepped.
+
+One moment, as if challenging the storm,
+Chocorua's tall, defiant sentinel
+Looked from his watch-tower; then the shadow fell,
+And the wild rain-drift blotted out his form.
+
+And over all the still unhidden sun,
+Weaving its light through slant-blown veils of rain,
+Smiled on the trouble, as hope smiles on pain;
+And, when the tumult and the strife were done,
+
+With one foot on the lake and one on land,
+Framing within his crescent's tinted streak
+A far-off picture of the Melvin peak,
+Spent broken clouds the rainbow's angel spanned.
+1882.
+
+
+
+A SUMMER PILGRIMAGE.
+
+To kneel before some saintly shrine,
+To breathe the health of airs divine,
+Or bathe where sacred rivers flow,
+The cowled and turbaned pilgrims go.
+I too, a palmer, take, as they
+With staff and scallop-shell, my way
+To feel, from burdening cares and ills,
+The strong uplifting of the hills.
+
+The years are many since, at first,
+For dreamed-of wonders all athirst,
+I saw on Winnipesaukee fall
+The shadow of the mountain wall.
+Ah! where are they who sailed with me
+The beautiful island-studded sea?
+And am I he whose keen surprise
+Flashed out from such unclouded eyes?
+
+Still, when the sun of summer burns,
+My longing for the hills returns;
+And northward, leaving at my back
+The warm vale of the Merrimac,
+I go to meet the winds of morn,
+Blown down the hill-gaps, mountain-born,
+Breathe scent of pines, and satisfy
+The hunger of a lowland eye.
+
+Again I see the day decline
+Along a ridged horizon line;
+Touching the hill-tops, as a nun
+Her beaded rosary, sinks the sun.
+One lake lies golden, which shall soon
+Be silver in the rising moon;
+And one, the crimson of the skies
+And mountain purple multiplies.
+
+With the untroubled quiet blends
+The distance-softened voice of friends;
+The girl's light laugh no discord brings
+To the low song the pine-tree sings;
+And, not unwelcome, comes the hail
+Of boyhood from his nearing sail.
+The human presence breaks no spell,
+And sunset still is miracle!
+
+Calm as the hour, methinks I feel
+A sense of worship o'er me steal;
+Not that of satyr-charming Pan,
+No cult of Nature shaming man,
+Not Beauty's self, but that which lives
+And shines through all the veils it weaves,--
+Soul of the mountain, lake, and wood,
+Their witness to the Eternal Good!
+
+And if, by fond illusion, here
+The earth to heaven seems drawing near,
+And yon outlying range invites
+To other and serener heights,
+Scarce hid behind its topmost swell,
+The shining Mounts Delectable
+A dream may hint of truth no less
+Than the sharp light of wakefulness.
+
+As through her vale of incense smoke.
+Of old the spell-rapt priestess spoke,
+More than her heathen oracle,
+May not this trance of sunset tell
+That Nature's forms of loveliness
+Their heavenly archetypes confess,
+Fashioned like Israel's ark alone
+From patterns in the Mount made known?
+
+A holier beauty overbroods
+These fair and faint similitudes;
+Yet not unblest is he who sees
+Shadows of God's realities,
+And knows beyond this masquerade
+Of shape and color, light and shade,
+And dawn and set, and wax and wane,
+Eternal verities remain.
+
+O gems of sapphire, granite set!
+O hills that charmed horizons fret
+I know how fair your morns can break,
+In rosy light on isle and lake;
+How over wooded slopes can run
+The noonday play of cloud and sun,
+And evening droop her oriflamme
+Of gold and red in still Asquam.
+
+The summer moons may round again,
+And careless feet these hills profane;
+These sunsets waste on vacant eyes
+The lavish splendor of the skies;
+Fashion and folly, misplaced here,
+Sigh for their natural atmosphere,
+And travelled pride the outlook scorn
+Of lesser heights than Matterhorn.
+
+But let me dream that hill and sky
+Of unseen beauty prophesy;
+And in these tinted lakes behold
+The trailing of the raiment fold
+Of that which, still eluding gaze,
+Allures to upward-tending ways,
+Whose footprints make, wherever found,
+Our common earth a holy ground.
+1883.
+
+
+
+SWEET FERN.
+
+The subtle power in perfume found
+Nor priest nor sibyl vainly learned;
+On Grecian shrine or Aztec mound
+No censer idly burned.
+
+That power the old-time worships knew,
+The Corybantes' frenzied dance,
+The Pythian priestess swooning through
+The wonderland of trance.
+
+And Nature holds, in wood and field,
+Her thousand sunlit censers still;
+To spells of flower and shrub we yield
+Against or with our will.
+
+I climbed a hill path strange and new
+With slow feet, pausing at each turn;
+A sudden waft of west wind blew
+The breath of the sweet fern.
+
+That fragrance from my vision swept
+The alien landscape; in its stead,
+Up fairer hills of youth I stepped,
+As light of heart as tread.
+
+I saw my boyhood's lakelet shine
+Once more through rifts of woodland shade;
+I knew my river's winding line
+By morning mist betrayed.
+
+With me June's freshness, lapsing brook,
+Murmurs of leaf and bee, the call
+Of birds, and one in voice and look
+In keeping with them all.
+
+A fern beside the way we went
+She plucked, and, smiling, held it up,
+While from her hand the wild, sweet scent
+I drank as from a cup.
+
+O potent witchery of smell!
+The dust-dry leaves to life return,
+And she who plucked them owns the spell
+And lifts her ghostly fern.
+
+Or sense or spirit? Who shall say
+What touch the chord of memory thrills?
+It passed, and left the August day
+Ablaze on lonely hills.
+
+
+
+THE WOOD GIANT
+
+From Alton Bay to Sandwich Dome,
+From Mad to Saco river,
+For patriarchs of the primal wood
+We sought with vain endeavor.
+
+And then we said: "The giants old
+Are lost beyond retrieval;
+This pygmy growth the axe has spared
+Is not the wood primeval.
+
+"Look where we will o'er vale and hill,
+How idle are our searches
+For broad-girthed maples, wide-limbed oaks,
+Centennial pines and birches.
+
+"Their tortured limbs the axe and saw
+Have changed to beams and trestles;
+They rest in walls, they float on seas,
+They rot in sunken vessels.
+
+"This shorn and wasted mountain land
+Of underbrush and boulder,--
+Who thinks to see its full-grown tree
+Must live a century older."
+
+At last to us a woodland path,
+To open sunset leading,
+Revealed the Anakim of pines
+Our wildest wish exceeding.
+
+Alone, the level sun before;
+Below, the lake's green islands;
+Beyond, in misty distance dim,
+The rugged Northern Highlands.
+
+Dark Titan on his Sunset Hill
+Of time and change defiant
+How dwarfed the common woodland seemed,
+Before the old-time giant!
+
+What marvel that, in simpler days
+Of the world's early childhood,
+Men crowned with garlands, gifts, and praise
+Such monarchs of the wild-wood?
+
+That Tyrian maids with flower and song
+Danced through the hill grove's spaces,
+And hoary-bearded Druids found
+In woods their holy places?
+
+With somewhat of that Pagan awe
+With Christian reverence blending,
+We saw our pine-tree's mighty arms
+Above our heads extending.
+
+We heard his needles' mystic rune,
+Now rising, and now dying,
+As erst Dodona's priestess heard
+The oak leaves prophesying.
+
+Was it the half-unconscious moan
+Of one apart and mateless,
+The weariness of unshared power,
+The loneliness of greatness?
+
+O dawns and sunsets, lend to him
+Your beauty and your wonder!
+Blithe sparrow, sing thy summer song
+His solemn shadow under!
+
+Play lightly on his slender keys,
+O wind of summer, waking
+For hills like these the sound of seas
+On far-off beaches breaking,
+
+And let the eagle and the crow
+Find shelter in his branches,
+When winds shake down his winter snow
+In silver avalanches.
+
+The brave are braver for their cheer,
+The strongest need assurance,
+The sigh of longing makes not less
+The lesson of endurance.
+1885.
+
+
+
+A DAY.
+Talk not of sad November, when a day
+Of warm, glad sunshine fills the sky of noon,
+And a wind, borrowed from some morn of June,
+Stirs the brown grasses and the leafless spray.
+
+On the unfrosted pool the pillared pines
+Lay their long shafts of shadow: the small rill,
+Singing a pleasant song of summer still,
+A line of silver, down the hill-slope shines.
+
+Hushed the bird-voices and the hum of bees,
+In the thin grass the crickets pipe no more;
+But still the squirrel hoards his winter store,
+And drops his nut-shells from the shag-bark trees.
+
+Softly the dark green hemlocks whisper: high
+Above, the spires of yellowing larches show,
+Where the woodpecker and home-loving crow
+And jay and nut-hatch winter's threat defy.
+
+O gracious beauty, ever new and old!
+O sights and sounds of nature, doubly dear
+When the low sunshine warns the closing year
+Of snow-blown fields and waves of Arctic cold!
+
+Close to my heart I fold each lovely thing
+The sweet day yields; and, not disconsolate,
+With the calm patience of the woods I wait
+For leaf and blossom when God gives us Spring!
+29th, Eleventh Month, 1886.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                POEMS SUBJECTIVE AND REMINISCENT MEMORIES
+
+A beautiful and happy girl,
+With step as light as summer air,
+Eyes glad with smiles, and brow of pearl,
+Shadowed by many a careless curl
+Of unconfined and flowing hair;
+A seeming child in everything,
+Save thoughtful brow and ripening charms,
+As Nature wears the smile of Spring
+When sinking into Summer's arms.
+
+A mind rejoicing in the light
+Which melted through its graceful bower,
+Leaf after leaf, dew-moist and bright,
+And stainless in its holy white,
+Unfolding like a morning flower
+A heart, which, like a fine-toned lute,
+With every breath of feeling woke,
+And, even when the tongue was mute,
+From eye and lip in music spoke.
+
+How thrills once more the lengthening chain
+Of memory, at the thought of thee!
+Old hopes which long in dust have lain
+Old dreams, come thronging back again,
+And boyhood lives again in me;
+I feel its glow upon my cheek,
+Its fulness of the heart is mine,
+As when I leaned to hear thee speak,
+Or raised my doubtful eye to thine.
+
+I hear again thy low replies,
+I feel thy arm within my own,
+And timidly again uprise
+The fringed lids of hazel eyes,
+With soft brown tresses overblown.
+Ah! memories of sweet summer eves,
+Of moonlit wave and willowy way,
+Of stars and flowers, and dewy leaves,
+And smiles and tones more dear than they!
+
+Ere this, thy quiet eye hath smiled
+My picture of thy youth to see,
+When, half a woman, half a child,
+Thy very artlessness beguiled,
+And folly's self seemed wise in thee;
+I too can smile, when o'er that hour
+The lights of memory backward stream,
+Yet feel the while that manhood's power
+Is vainer than my boyhood's dream.
+
+Years have passed on, and left their trace,
+Of graver care and deeper thought;
+And unto me the calm, cold face
+Of manhood, and to thee the grace
+Of woman's pensive beauty brought.
+More wide, perchance, for blame than praise,
+The school-boy's humble name has flown;
+Thine, in the green and quiet ways
+Of unobtrusive goodness known.
+
+And wider yet in thought and deed
+Diverge our pathways, one in youth;
+Thine the Genevan's sternest creed,
+While answers to my spirit's need
+The Derby dalesman's simple truth.
+For thee, the priestly rite and prayer,
+And holy day, and solemn psalm;
+For me, the silent reverence where
+My brethren gather, slow and calm.
+
+Yet hath thy spirit left on me
+An impress Time has worn not out,
+And something of myself in thee,
+A shadow from the past, I see,
+Lingering, even yet, thy way about;
+Not wholly can the heart unlearn
+That lesson of its better hours,
+Not yet has Time's dull footstep worn
+To common dust that path of flowers.
+
+Thus, while at times before our eyes
+The shadows melt, and fall apart,
+And, smiling through them, round us lies
+The warm light of our morning skies,--
+The Indian Summer of the heart!
+In secret sympathies of mind,
+In founts of feeling which retain
+Their pure, fresh flow, we yet may find
+Our early dreams not wholly vain
+1841.
+
+
+
+RAPHAEL.
+
+Suggested by the portrait of Raphael, at the age of fifteen.
+
+I shall not soon forget that sight
+The glow of Autumn's westering day,
+A hazy warmth, a dreamy light,
+On Raphael's picture lay.
+
+It was a simple print I saw,
+The fair face of a musing boy;
+Yet, while I gazed, a sense of awe
+Seemed blending with my joy.
+
+A simple print,--the graceful flow
+Of boyhood's soft and wavy hair,
+And fresh young lip and cheek, and brow
+Unmarked and clear, were there.
+
+Yet through its sweet and calm repose
+I saw the inward spirit shine;
+It was as if before me rose
+The white veil of a shrine.
+
+As if, as Gothland's sage has told,
+The hidden life, the man within,
+Dissevered from its frame and mould,
+By mortal eye were seen.
+
+Was it the lifting of that eye,
+The waving of that pictured hand?
+Loose as a cloud-wreath on the sky,
+I saw the walls expand.
+
+The narrow room had vanished,--space,
+Broad, luminous, remained alone,
+Through which all hues and shapes of grace
+And beauty looked or shone.
+
+Around the mighty master came
+The marvels which his pencil wrought,
+Those miracles of power whose fame
+Is wide as human thought.
+
+There drooped thy more than mortal face,
+O Mother, beautiful and mild
+Enfolding in one dear embrace
+Thy Saviour and thy Child!
+
+The rapt brow of the Desert John;
+The awful glory of that day
+When all the Father's brightness shone
+Through manhood's veil of clay.
+
+And, midst gray prophet forms, and wild
+Dark visions of the days of old,
+How sweetly woman's beauty smiled
+Through locks of brown and gold!
+
+There Fornarina's fair young face
+Once more upon her lover shone,
+Whose model of an angel's grace
+He borrowed from her own.
+
+Slow passed that vision from my view,
+But not the lesson which it taught;
+The soft, calm shadows which it threw
+Still rested on my thought:
+
+The truth, that painter, bard, and sage,
+Even in Earth's cold and changeful clime,
+Plant for their deathless heritage
+The fruits and flowers of time.
+
+We shape ourselves the joy or fear
+Of which the coming life is made,
+And fill our Future's atmosphere
+With sunshine or with shade.
+
+The tissue of the Life to be
+We weave with colors all our own,
+And in the field of Destiny
+We reap as we have sown.
+
+Still shall the soul around it call
+The shadows which it gathered here,
+And, painted on the eternal wall,
+The Past shall reappear.
+
+Think ye the notes of holy song
+On Milton's tuneful ear have died?
+Think ye that Raphael's angel throng
+Has vanished from his side?
+
+Oh no!--We live our life again;
+Or warmly touched, or coldly dim,
+The pictures of the Past remain,---
+Man's works shall follow him!
+1842.
+
+
+
+EGO.
+
+WRITTEN IN THE ALBUM OF A FRIEND.
+
+On page of thine I cannot trace
+The cold and heartless commonplace,
+A statue's fixed and marble grace.
+
+For ever as these lines I penned,
+Still with the thought of thee will blend
+That of some loved and common friend,
+
+Who in life's desert track has made
+His pilgrim tent with mine, or strayed
+Beneath the same remembered shade.
+
+And hence my pen unfettered moves
+In freedom which the heart approves,
+The negligence which friendship loves.
+
+And wilt thou prize my poor gift less
+For simple air and rustic dress,
+And sign of haste and carelessness?
+
+Oh, more than specious counterfeit
+Of sentiment or studied wit,
+A heart like thine should value it.
+
+Yet half I fear my gift will be
+Unto thy book, if not to thee,
+Of more than doubtful courtesy.
+
+A banished name from Fashion's sphere,
+A lay unheard of Beauty's ear,
+Forbid, disowned,--what do they here?
+
+Upon my ear not all in vain
+Came the sad captive's clanking chain,
+The groaning from his bed of pain.
+
+And sadder still, I saw the woe
+Which only wounded spirits know
+When Pride's strong footsteps o'er them go.
+
+Spurned not alone in walks abroad,
+But from the temples of the Lord
+Thrust out apart, like things abhorred.
+
+Deep as I felt, and stern and strong,
+In words which Prudence smothered long,
+My soul spoke out against the wrong;
+
+Not mine alone the task to speak
+Of comfort to the poor and weak,
+And dry the tear on Sorrow's cheek;
+
+But, mingled in the conflict warm,
+To pour the fiery breath of storm
+Through the harsh trumpet of Reform;
+
+To brave Opinion's settled frown,
+From ermined robe and saintly gown,
+While wrestling reverenced Error down.
+
+Founts gushed beside my pilgrim way,
+Cool shadows on the greensward lay,
+Flowers swung upon the bending spray.
+
+And, broad and bright, on either hand,
+Stretched the green slopes of Fairy-land,
+With Hope's eternal sunbow spanned;
+
+Whence voices called me like the flow,
+Which on the listener's ear will grow,
+Of forest streamlets soft and low.
+
+And gentle eyes, which still retain
+Their picture on the heart and brain,
+Smiled, beckoning from that path of pain.
+
+In vain! nor dream, nor rest, nor pause
+Remain for him who round him draws
+The battered mail of Freedom's cause.
+
+From youthful hopes, from each green spot
+Of young Romance, and gentle Thought,
+Where storm and tumult enter not;
+
+From each fair altar, where belong
+The offerings Love requires of Song
+In homage to her bright-eyed throng;
+
+With soul and strength, with heart and hand,
+I turned to Freedom's struggling band,
+To the sad Helots of our land.
+
+What marvel then that Fame should turn
+Her notes of praise to those of scorn;
+Her gifts reclaimed, her smiles withdrawn?
+
+What matters it? a few years more,
+Life's surge so restless heretofore
+Shall break upon the unknown shore!
+
+In that far land shall disappear
+The shadows which we follow here,
+The mist-wreaths of our atmosphere!
+
+Before no work of mortal hand,
+Of human will or strength expand
+The pearl gates of the Better Land;
+
+Alone in that great love which gave
+Life to the sleeper of the grave,
+Resteth the power to seek and save.
+
+Yet, if the spirit gazing through
+The vista of the past can view
+One deed to Heaven and virtue true;
+
+If through the wreck of wasted powers,
+Of garlands wreathed from Folly's bowers,
+Of idle aims and misspent hours,
+
+The eye can note one sacred spot
+By Pride and Self profaned not,
+A green place in the waste of thought,
+
+Where deed or word hath rendered less
+The sum of human wretchedness,
+And Gratitude looks forth to bless;
+
+The simple burst of tenderest feeling
+From sad hearts worn by evil-dealing,
+For blessing on the hand of healing;
+
+Better than Glory's pomp will be
+That green and blessed spot to me,
+A palm-shade in Eternity!
+
+Something of Time which may invite
+The purified and spiritual sight
+To rest on with a calm delight.
+
+And when the summer winds shall sweep
+With their light wings my place of sleep,
+And mosses round my headstone creep;
+
+If still, as Freedom's rallying sign,
+Upon the young heart's altars shine
+The very fires they caught from mine;
+
+If words my lips once uttered still,
+In the calm faith and steadfast will
+Of other hearts, their work fulfil;
+
+Perchance with joy the soul may learn
+These tokens, and its eye discern
+The fires which on those altars burn;
+
+A marvellous joy that even then,
+The spirit hath its life again,
+In the strong hearts of mortal men.
+
+Take, lady, then, the gift I bring,
+No gay and graceful offering,
+No flower-smile of the laughing spring.
+
+Midst the green buds of Youth's fresh May,
+With Fancy's leaf-enwoven bay,
+My sad and sombre gift I lay.
+
+And if it deepens in thy mind
+A sense of suffering human-kind,--
+The outcast and the spirit-blind;
+
+Oppressed and spoiled on every side,
+By Prejudice, and Scorn, and Pride,
+Life's common courtesies denied;
+
+Sad mothers mourning o'er their trust,
+Children by want and misery nursed,
+Tasting life's bitter cup at first;
+
+If to their strong appeals which come
+From fireless hearth, and crowded room,
+And the close alley's noisome gloom,--
+
+Though dark the hands upraised to thee
+In mute beseeching agony,
+Thou lend'st thy woman's sympathy;
+
+Not vainly on thy gentle shrine,
+Where Love, and Mirth, and Friendship twine
+Their varied gifts, I offer mine.
+1843.
+
+
+
+THE PUMPKIN.
+
+Oh, greenly and fair in the lands of the sun,
+The vines of the gourd and the rich melon run,
+And the rock and the tree and the cottage enfold,
+With broad leaves all greenness and blossoms all gold,
+Like that which o'er Nineveh's prophet once grew,
+While he waited to know that his warning was true,
+And longed for the storm-cloud, and listened in vain
+For the rush of the whirlwind and red fire-rain.
+
+On the banks of the Xenil the dark Spanish maiden
+Comes up with the fruit of the tangled vine laden;
+And the Creole of Cuba laughs out to behold
+Through orange-leaves shining the broad spheres of gold;
+Yet with dearer delight from his home in the North,
+On the fields of his harvest the Yankee looks forth,
+Where crook-necks are coiling and yellow fruit shines,
+And the sun of September melts down on his vines.
+
+Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West,
+From North and from South come the pilgrim and guest,
+When the gray-haired New-Englander sees round his board
+The old broken links of affection restored,
+When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,
+And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled  before,
+What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye?
+What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?
+
+Oh, fruit loved of boyhood! the old days recalling,
+When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!
+When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,
+Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!
+When we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune,
+Our chair a broad pumpkin,--our lantern the moon,
+Telling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam,
+In a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team
+Then thanks for thy present! none sweeter or better
+E'er smoked from an oven or circled a platter!
+Fairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine,
+Brighter eyes never watched o'er its baking, than thine!
+And the prayer, which my mouth is too full to express,
+Swells my heart that thy shadow may never be less,
+That the days of thy lot may be lengthened below,
+And the fame of thy worth like a pumpkin-vine grow,
+And thy life be as sweet, and its last sunset sky
+Golden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin pie!
+1844.
+
+
+
+FORGIVENESS.
+
+My heart was heavy, for its trust had been
+Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong;
+So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men,
+One summer Sabbath day I strolled among
+The green mounds of the village burial-place;
+Where, pondering how all human love and hate
+Find one sad level; and how, soon or late,
+Wronged and wrongdoer, each with meekened face,
+And cold hands folded over a still heart,
+Pass the green threshold of our common grave,
+Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart,
+Awed for myself, and pitying my race,
+Our common sorrow, like a nighty wave,
+Swept all my pride away, and trembling I forgave!
+1846.
+
+
+
+TO MY SISTER,
+
+WITH A COPY OF "THE SUPERNATURALISM OF NEW ENGLAND."
+
+     The work referred to was a series of papers under this title,
+     contributed to the Democratic Review and afterward collected into a
+     volume, in which I noted some of the superstitions and folklore
+     prevalent in New England. The volume has not been kept in print,
+     but most of its contents are distributed in my Literary Recreations
+     and Miscellanies.
+
+Dear Sister! while the wise and sage
+Turn coldly from my playful page,
+And count it strange that ripened age
+Should stoop to boyhood's folly;
+I know that thou wilt judge aright
+Of all which makes the heart more light,
+Or lends one star-gleam to the night
+Of clouded Melancholy.
+
+Away with weary cares and themes!
+Swing wide the moonlit gate of dreams!
+Leave free once more the land which teems
+With wonders and romances
+Where thou, with clear discerning eyes,
+Shalt rightly read the truth which lies
+Beneath the quaintly masking guise
+Of wild and wizard fancies.
+
+Lo! once again our feet we set
+On still green wood-paths, twilight wet,
+By lonely brooks, whose waters fret
+The roots of spectral beeches;
+Again the hearth-fire glimmers o'er
+Home's whitewashed wall and painted floor,
+And young eyes widening to the lore
+Of faery-folks and witches.
+
+Dear heart! the legend is not vain
+Which lights that holy hearth again,
+And calling back from care and pain,
+And death's funereal sadness,
+Draws round its old familiar blaze
+The clustering groups of happier days,
+And lends to sober manhood's gaze
+A glimpse of childish gladness.
+
+And, knowing how my life hath been
+A weary work of tongue and pen,
+A long, harsh strife with strong-willed men,
+Thou wilt not chide my turning
+To con, at times, an idle rhyme,
+To pluck a flower from childhood's clime,
+Or listen, at Life's noonday chime,
+For the sweet bells of Morning!
+1847.
+
+
+
+MY THANKS,
+
+ACCOMPANYING MANUSCRIPTS PRESENTED TO A FRIEND.
+
+'T is said that in the Holy Land
+The angels of the place have blessed
+The pilgrim's bed of desert sand,
+Like Jacob's stone of rest.
+
+That down the hush of Syrian skies
+Some sweet-voiced saint at twilight sings
+The song whose holy symphonies
+Are beat by unseen wings;
+
+Till starting from his sandy bed,
+The wayworn wanderer looks to see
+The halo of an angel's head
+Shine through the tamarisk-tree.
+
+So through the shadows of my way
+Thy smile hath fallen soft and clear,
+So at the weary close of day
+Hath seemed thy voice of cheer.
+
+That pilgrim pressing to his goal
+May pause not for the vision's sake,
+Yet all fair things within his soul
+The thought of it shall wake:
+
+The graceful palm-tree by the well,
+Seen on the far horizon's rim;
+The dark eyes of the fleet gazelle,
+Bent timidly on him;
+
+Each pictured saint, whose golden hair
+Streams sunlike through the convent's gloom;
+Pale shrines of martyrs young and fair,
+And loving Mary's tomb;
+
+And thus each tint or shade which falls,
+From sunset cloud or waving tree,
+Along my pilgrim path, recalls
+The pleasant thought of thee.
+
+Of one in sun and shade the same,
+In weal and woe my steady friend,
+Whatever by that holy name
+The angels comprehend.
+
+Not blind to faults and follies, thou
+Hast never failed the good to see,
+Nor judged by one unseemly bough
+The upward-struggling tree.
+
+These light leaves at thy feet I lay,--
+Poor common thoughts on common things,
+Which time is shaking, day by day,
+Like feathers from his wings;
+
+Chance shootings from a frail life-tree,
+To nurturing care but little known,
+Their good was partly learned of thee,
+Their folly is my own.
+
+That tree still clasps the kindly mould,
+Its leaves still drink the twilight dew,
+And weaving its pale green with gold,
+Still shines the sunlight through.
+
+There still the morning zephyrs play,
+And there at times the spring bird sings,
+And mossy trunk and fading spray
+Are flowered with glossy wings.
+
+Yet, even in genial sun and rain,
+Root, branch, and leaflet fail and fade;
+The wanderer on its lonely plain
+Erelong shall miss its shade.
+
+O friend beloved, whose curious skill
+Keeps bright the last year's leaves and flowers,
+With warm, glad, summer thoughts to fill
+The cold, dark, winter hours
+
+Pressed on thy heart, the leaves I bring
+May well defy the wintry cold,
+Until, in Heaven's eternal spring,
+Life's fairer ones unfold.
+1847.
+
+
+
+REMEMBRANCE
+
+WITH COPIES OF THE AUTHOR'S WRITINGS.
+
+Friend of mine! whose lot was cast
+With me in the distant past;
+Where, like shadows flitting fast,
+
+Fact and fancy, thought and theme,
+Word and work, begin to seem
+Like a half-remembered dream!
+
+Touched by change have all things been,
+Yet I think of thee as when
+We had speech of lip and pen.
+
+For the calm thy kindness lent
+To a path of discontent,
+Rough with trial and dissent;
+
+Gentle words where such were few,
+Softening blame where blame was true,
+Praising where small praise was due;
+
+For a waking dream made good,
+For an ideal understood,
+For thy Christian womanhood;
+
+For thy marvellous gift to cull
+From our common life and dull
+Whatsoe'er is beautiful;
+
+Thoughts and fancies, Hybla's bees
+Dropping sweetness; true heart's-ease
+Of congenial sympathies;--
+
+Still for these I own my debt;
+Memory, with her eyelids wet,
+Fain would thank thee even yet!
+
+And as one who scatters flowers
+Where the Queen of May's sweet hours
+Sits, o'ertwined with blossomed bowers,
+
+In superfluous zeal bestowing
+Gifts where gifts are overflowing,
+So I pay the debt I'm owing.
+
+To thy full thoughts, gay or sad,
+Sunny-hued or sober clad,
+Something of my own I add;
+
+Well assured that thou wilt take
+Even the offering which I make
+Kindly for the giver's sake.
+1851.
+
+
+
+MY NAMESAKE.
+
+Addressed to Francis Greenleaf Allison of Burlington, New Jersey.
+
+You scarcely need my tardy thanks,
+Who, self-rewarded, nurse and tend--
+A green leaf on your own Green Banks--
+The memory of your friend.
+
+For me, no wreath, bloom-woven, hides
+The sobered brow and lessening hair
+For aught I know, the myrtled sides
+Of Helicon are bare.
+
+Their scallop-shells so many bring
+The fabled founts of song to try,
+They've drained, for aught I know, the spring
+Of Aganippe dry.
+
+Ah well!--The wreath the Muses braid
+Proves often Folly's cap and bell;
+Methinks, my ample beaver's shade
+May serve my turn as well.
+
+Let Love's and Friendship's tender debt
+Be paid by those I love in life.
+Why should the unborn critic whet
+For me his scalping-knife?
+
+Why should the stranger peer and pry
+One's vacant house of life about,
+And drag for curious ear and eye
+His faults and follies out?--
+
+Why stuff, for fools to gaze upon,
+With chaff of words, the garb he wore,
+As corn-husks when the ear is gone
+Are rustled all the more?
+
+Let kindly Silence close again,
+The picture vanish from the eye,
+And on the dim and misty main
+Let the small ripple die.
+
+Yet not the less I own your claim
+To grateful thanks, dear friends of mine.
+Hang, if it please you so, my name
+Upon your household line.
+
+Let Fame from brazen lips blow wide
+Her chosen names, I envy none
+A mother's love, a father's pride,
+Shall keep alive my own!
+
+Still shall that name as now recall
+The young leaf wet with morning dew,
+The glory where the sunbeams fall
+The breezy woodlands through.
+
+That name shall be a household word,
+A spell to waken smile or sigh;
+In many an evening prayer be heard
+And cradle lullaby.
+
+And thou, dear child, in riper days
+When asked the reason of thy name,
+Shalt answer: One 't were vain to praise
+Or censure bore the same.
+
+"Some blamed him, some believed him good,
+The truth lay doubtless 'twixt the two;
+He reconciled as best he could
+Old faith and fancies new.
+
+"In him the grave and playful mixed,
+And wisdom held with folly truce,
+And Nature compromised betwixt
+Good fellow and recluse.
+
+"He loved his friends, forgave his foes;
+And, if his words were harsh at times,
+He spared his fellow-men,--his blows
+Fell only on their crimes.
+
+"He loved the good and wise, but found
+His human heart to all akin
+Who met him on the common ground
+Of suffering and of sin.
+
+"Whate'er his neighbors might endure
+Of pain or grief his own became;
+For all the ills he could not cure
+He held himself to blame.
+
+"His good was mainly an intent,
+His evil not of forethought done;
+The work he wrought was rarely meant
+Or finished as begun.
+
+"Ill served his tides of feeling strong
+To turn the common mills of use;
+And, over restless wings of song,
+His birthright garb hung loose!
+
+"His eye was beauty's powerless slave,
+And his the ear which discord pains;
+Few guessed beneath his aspect grave
+What passions strove in chains.
+
+"He had his share of care and pain,
+No holiday was life to him;
+Still in the heirloom cup we drain
+The bitter drop will swim.
+
+"Yet Heaven was kind, and here a bird
+And there a flower beguiled his way;
+And, cool, in summer noons, he heard
+The fountains plash and play.
+
+"On all his sad or restless moods
+The patient peace of Nature stole;
+The quiet of the fields and woods
+Sank deep into his soul.
+
+"He worshipped as his fathers did,
+And kept the faith of childish days,
+And, howsoe'er he strayed or slid,
+He loved the good old ways.
+
+"The simple tastes, the kindly traits,
+The tranquil air, and gentle speech,
+The silence of the soul that waits
+For more than man to teach.
+
+"The cant of party, school, and sect,
+Provoked at times his honest scorn,
+And Folly, in its gray respect,
+He tossed on satire's horn.
+
+"But still his heart was full of awe
+And reverence for all sacred things;
+And, brooding over form and law,'
+He saw the Spirit's wings!
+
+"Life's mystery wrapt him like a cloud;
+He heard far voices mock his own,
+The sweep of wings unseen, the loud,
+Long roll of waves unknown.
+
+"The arrows of his straining sight
+Fell quenched in darkness; priest and sage,
+Like lost guides calling left and right,
+Perplexed his doubtful age.
+
+"Like childhood, listening for the sound
+Of its dropped pebbles in the well,
+All vainly down the dark profound
+His brief-lined plummet fell.
+
+"So, scattering flowers with pious pains
+On old beliefs, of later creeds,
+Which claimed a place in Truth's domains,
+He asked the title-deeds.
+
+"He saw the old-time's groves and shrines
+In the long distance fair and dim;
+And heard, like sound of far-off pines,
+The century-mellowed hymn!
+
+"He dared not mock the Dervish whirl,
+The Brahmin's rite, the Lama's spell;
+God knew the heart; Devotion's pearl
+Might sanctify the shell.
+
+"While others trod the altar stairs
+He faltered like the publican;
+And, while they praised as saints, his prayers
+Were those of sinful man.
+
+"For, awed by Sinai's Mount of Law,
+The trembling faith alone sufficed,
+That, through its cloud and flame, he saw
+The sweet, sad face of Christ!
+
+"And listening, with his forehead bowed,
+Heard the Divine compassion fill
+The pauses of the trump and cloud
+With whispers small and still.
+
+"The words he spake, the thoughts he penned,
+Are mortal as his hand and brain,
+But, if they served the Master's end,
+He has not lived in vain!"
+
+Heaven make thee better than thy name,
+Child of my friends!--For thee I crave
+What riches never bought, nor fame
+To mortal longing gave.
+
+I pray the prayer of Plato old:
+God make thee beautiful within,
+And let thine eyes the good behold
+In everything save sin!
+
+Imagination held in check
+To serve, not rule, thy poised mind;
+Thy Reason, at the frown or beck
+Of Conscience, loose or bind.
+
+No dreamer thou, but real all,--
+Strong manhood crowning vigorous youth;
+Life made by duty epical
+And rhythmic with the truth.
+
+So shall that life the fruitage yield
+Which trees of healing only give,
+And green-leafed in the Eternal field
+Of God, forever live!
+1853.
+
+
+
+A MEMORY
+
+Here, while the loom of Winter weaves
+The shroud of flowers and fountains,
+I think of thee and summer eves
+Among the Northern mountains.
+
+When thunder tolled the twilight's close,
+And winds the lake were rude on,
+And thou wert singing, _Ca' the Yowes_,
+The bonny yowes of Cluden!
+
+When, close and closer, hushing breath,
+Our circle narrowed round thee,
+And smiles and tears made up the wreath
+Wherewith our silence crowned thee;
+
+And, strangers all, we felt the ties
+Of sisters and of brothers;
+Ah! whose of all those kindly eyes
+Now smile upon another's?
+
+The sport of Time, who still apart
+The waifs of life is flinging;
+Oh, nevermore shall heart to heart
+Draw nearer for that singing!
+
+Yet when the panes are frosty-starred,
+And twilight's fire is gleaming,
+I hear the songs of Scotland's bard
+Sound softly through my dreaming!
+
+A song that lends to winter snows
+The glow of summer weather,--
+Again I hear thee ca' the yowes
+To Cluden's hills of heather
+1854.
+
+
+
+MY DREAM.
+
+In my dream, methought I trod,
+Yesternight, a mountain road;
+Narrow as Al Sirat's span,
+High as eagle's flight, it ran.
+
+Overhead, a roof of cloud
+With its weight of thunder bowed;
+Underneath, to left and right,
+Blankness and abysmal night.
+
+Here and there a wild-flower blushed,
+Now and then a bird-song gushed;
+Now and then, through rifts of shade,
+Stars shone out, and sunbeams played.
+
+But the goodly company,
+Walking in that path with me,
+One by one the brink o'erslid,
+One by one the darkness hid.
+
+Some with wailing and lament,
+Some with cheerful courage went;
+But, of all who smiled or mourned,
+Never one to us returned.
+
+Anxiously, with eye and ear,
+Questioning that shadow drear,
+Never hand in token stirred,
+Never answering voice I heard!
+
+Steeper, darker!--lo! I felt
+From my feet the pathway melt.
+Swallowed by the black despair,
+And the hungry jaws of air,
+
+Past the stony-throated caves,
+Strangled by the wash of waves,
+Past the splintered crags, I sank
+On a green and flowery bank,--
+
+Soft as fall of thistle-down,
+Lightly as a cloud is blown,
+Soothingly as childhood pressed
+To the bosom of its rest.
+
+Of the sharp-horned rocks instead,
+Green the grassy meadows spread,
+Bright with waters singing by
+Trees that propped a golden sky.
+
+Painless, trustful, sorrow-free,
+Old lost faces welcomed me,
+With whose sweetness of content
+Still expectant hope was blent.
+
+Waking while the dawning gray
+Slowly brightened into day,
+Pondering that vision fled,
+Thus unto myself I said:--
+
+"Steep and hung with clouds of strife
+Is our narrow path of life;
+And our death the dreaded fall
+Through the dark, awaiting all.
+
+"So, with painful steps we climb
+Up the dizzy ways of time,
+Ever in the shadow shed
+By the forecast of our dread.
+
+"Dread of mystery solved alone,
+Of the untried and unknown;
+Yet the end thereof may seem
+Like the falling of my dream.
+
+"And this heart-consuming care,
+All our fears of here or there,
+Change and absence, loss and death,
+Prove but simple lack of faith."
+
+Thou, O Most Compassionate!
+Who didst stoop to our estate,
+Drinking of the cup we drain,
+Treading in our path of pain,--
+
+Through the doubt and mystery,
+Grant to us thy steps to see,
+And the grace to draw from thence
+Larger hope and confidence.
+
+Show thy vacant tomb, and let,
+As of old, the angels sit,
+Whispering, by its open door
+"Fear not! He hath gone before!"
+1855.
+
+
+
+THE BAREFOOT BOY.
+
+Blessings on thee, little man,
+Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan
+With thy turned-up pantaloons,
+And thy merry whistled tunes;
+With thy red lip, redder still
+Kissed by strawberries on the hill;
+With the sunshine on thy face,
+Through thy torn brim's jaunty grace;
+From my heart I give thee joy,--
+I was once a barefoot boy!
+
+Prince thou art,--the grown-up man
+Only is republican.
+Let the million-dollared ride!
+Barefoot, trudging at his side,
+Thou hast more than he can buy
+In the reach of ear and eye,--
+Outward sunshine, inward joy
+Blessings on thee, barefoot boy!
+
+Oh for boyhood's painless play,
+Sleep that wakes in laughing day,
+Health that mocks the doctor's rules,
+Knowledge never learned of schools,
+Of the wild bee's morning chase,
+Of the wild-flower's time and place,
+Flight of fowl and habitude
+Of the tenants of the wood;
+How the tortoise bears his shell,
+How the woodchuck digs his cell,
+And the ground-mole sinks his well;
+How the robin feeds her young,
+How the oriole's nest is hung;
+Where the whitest lilies blow,
+Where the freshest berries grow,
+Where the ground-nut trails its vine,
+Where the wood-grape's clusters shine;
+Of the black wasp's cunning way,
+Mason of his walls of clay,
+And the architectural plans
+Of gray hornet artisans!
+For, eschewing books and tasks,
+Nature answers all he asks,
+Hand in hand with her he walks,
+Face to face with her he talks,
+Part and parcel of her joy,--
+Blessings on the barefoot boy!
+
+Oh for boyhood's time of June,
+Crowding years in one brief moon,
+When all things I heard or saw,
+Me, their master, waited for.
+I was rich in flowers and trees,
+Humming-birds and honey-bees;
+For my sport the squirrel played,
+Plied the snouted mole his spade;
+For my taste the blackberry cone
+Purpled over hedge and stone;
+Laughed the brook for my delight
+Through the day and through the night,
+Whispering at the garden wall,
+Talked with me from fall to fall;
+Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond,
+Mine the walnut slopes beyond,
+Mine, on bending orchard trees,
+Apples of Hesperides!
+Still as my horizon grew,
+Larger grew my riches too;
+All the world I saw or knew
+Seemed a complex Chinese toy,
+Fashioned for a barefoot boy!
+
+Oh for festal dainties spread,
+Like my bowl of milk and bread;
+Pewter spoon and bowl of wood,
+On the door-stone, gray and rude!
+O'er me, like a regal tent,
+Cloudy-ribbed, the sunset bent,
+Purple-curtained, fringed with gold,
+Looped in many a wind-swung fold;
+While for music came the play
+Of the pied frogs' orchestra;
+And, to light the noisy choir,
+Lit the fly his lamp of fire.
+I was monarch: pomp and joy
+Waited on the barefoot boy!
+
+Cheerily, then, my little man,
+Live and laugh, as boyhood can
+Though the flinty slopes be hard,
+Stubble-speared the new-mown sward,
+Every morn shall lead thee through
+Fresh baptisms of the dew;
+Every evening from thy feet
+Shall the cool wind kiss the heat
+All too soon these feet must hide
+In the prison cells of pride,
+Lose the freedom of the sod,
+Like a colt's for work be shod,
+Made to tread the mills of toil,
+Up and down in ceaseless moil
+Happy if their track be found
+Never on forbidden ground;
+Happy if they sink not in
+Quick and treacherous sands of sin.
+Ah! that thou couldst know thy joy,
+Ere it passes, barefoot boy!
+1855.
+
+
+MY PSALM.
+
+I mourn no more my vanished years
+Beneath a tender rain,
+An April rain of smiles and tears,
+My heart is young again.
+
+The west-winds blow, and, singing low,
+I hear the glad streams run;
+The windows of my soul I throw
+Wide open to the sun.
+
+No longer forward nor behind
+I look in hope or fear;
+But, grateful, take the good I find,
+The best of now and here.
+
+I plough no more a desert land,
+To harvest weed and tare;
+The manna dropping from God's hand
+Rebukes my painful care.
+
+I break my pilgrim staff, I lay
+Aside the toiling oar;
+The angel sought so far away
+I welcome at my door.
+
+The airs of spring may never play
+Among the ripening corn,
+Nor freshness of the flowers of May
+Blow through the autumn morn.
+
+Yet shall the blue-eyed gentian look
+Through fringed lids to heaven,
+And the pale aster in the brook
+Shall see its image given;--
+
+The woods shall wear their robes of praise,
+The south-wind softly sigh,
+And sweet, calm days in golden haze
+Melt down the amber sky.
+
+Not less shall manly deed and word
+Rebuke an age of wrong;
+The graven flowers that wreathe the sword
+Make not the blade less strong.
+
+But smiting hands shall learn to heal,--
+To build as to destroy;
+Nor less my heart for others feel
+That I the more enjoy.
+
+All as God wills, who wisely heeds
+To give or to withhold,
+And knoweth more of all my needs
+Than all my prayers have told.
+
+Enough that blessings undeserved
+Have marked my erring track;
+That wheresoe'er my feet have swerved,
+His chastening turned me back;
+
+That more and more a Providence
+Of love is understood,
+Making the springs of time and sense
+Sweet with eternal good;--
+
+That death seems but a covered way
+Which opens into light,
+Wherein no blinded child can stray
+Beyond the Father's sight;
+
+That care and trial seem at last,
+Through Memory's sunset air,
+Like mountain-ranges overpast,
+In purple distance fair;
+
+That all the jarring notes of life
+Seem blending in a psalm,
+And all the angles of its strife
+Slow rounding into calm.
+
+And so the shadows fall apart,
+And so the west-winds play;
+And all the windows of my heart
+I open to the day.
+1859.
+
+
+
+THE WAITING.
+
+I wait and watch: before my eyes
+Methinks the night grows thin and gray;
+I wait and watch the eastern skies
+To see the golden spears uprise
+Beneath the oriflamme of day!
+
+Like one whose limbs are bound in trance
+I hear the day-sounds swell and grow,
+And see across the twilight glance,
+Troop after troop, in swift advance,
+The shining ones with plumes of snow!
+
+I know the errand of their feet,
+I know what mighty work is theirs;
+I can but lift up hands unmeet,
+The threshing-floors of God to beat,
+And speed them with unworthy prayers.
+
+I will not dream in vain despair
+The steps of progress wait for me
+The puny leverage of a hair
+The planet's impulse well may spare,
+A drop of dew the tided sea.
+
+The loss, if loss there be, is mine,
+And yet not mine if understood;
+For one shall grasp and one resign,
+One drink life's rue, and one its wine,
+And God shall make the balance good.
+
+Oh power to do! Oh baffled will!
+Oh prayer and action! ye are one.
+Who may not strive, may yet fulfil
+The harder task of standing still,
+And good but wished with God is done!
+1862.
+
+
+
+                              SNOW-BOUND.
+
+                            A WINTER IDYL.
+
+                             TO THE MEMORY
+
+                                   OF
+
+                      THE HOUSEHOLD IT DESCRIBES,
+
+                 THIS POEM IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR.
+
+     The inmates of the family at the Whittier homestead who are
+     referred to in the poem were my father, mother, my brother and two
+     sisters, and my uncle and aunt both unmarried. In addition, there
+     was the district school-master who boarded with us. The "not
+     unfeared, half-welcome guest" was Harriet Livermore, daughter of
+     Judge Livermore, of New Hampshire, a young woman of fine natural
+     ability, enthusiastic, eccentric, with slight control over her
+     violent temper, which sometimes made her religious profession
+     doubtful. She was equally ready to exhort in school-house
+     prayer-meetings and dance in a Washington ball-room, while her
+     father was a member of Congress. She early embraced the doctrine of
+     the Second Advent, and felt it her duty to proclaim the Lord's
+     speedy coming. With this message she crossed the Atlantic and spent
+     the greater part of a long life in travelling over Europe and Asia.
+     She lived some time with Lady Hester Stanhope, a woman as fantastic
+     and mentally strained as herself, on the slope of Mt. Lebanon, but
+     finally quarrelled with her in regard to two white horses with red
+     marks on their backs which suggested the idea of saddles, on which
+     her titled hostess expected to ride into Jerusalem with the Lord. A
+     friend of mine found her, when quite an old woman, wandering in
+     Syria with a tribe of Arabs, who with the Oriental notion that
+     madness is inspiration, accepted her as their prophetess and
+     leader. At the time referred to in Snow-Bound she was boarding at
+     the Rocks Village about two miles from us.
+
+     In my boyhood, in our lonely farm-house, we had scanty sources of
+     information; few books and only a small weekly newspaper. Our only
+     annual was the Almanac. Under such circumstances story-telling was
+     a necessary resource in the long winter evenings. My father when a
+     young man had traversed the wilderness to Canada, and could tell us
+     of his adventures with Indians and wild beasts, and of his sojourn
+     in the French villages. My uncle was ready with his record of
+     hunting and fishing and, it must be confessed, with stories which
+     he at least half believed, of witchcraft and apparitions. My
+     mother, who was born in the Indian-haunted region of Somersworth,
+     New Hampshire, between Dover and Portsmouth, told us of the inroads
+     of the savages, and the narrow escape of her ancestors. She
+     described strange people who lived on the Piscataqua and Cocheco,
+     among whom was Bantam the sorcerer. I have in my possession the
+     wizard's "conjuring book," which he solemnly opened when consulted.
+     It is a copy of Cornelius Agrippa's Magic printed in 1651,
+     dedicated to Dr. Robert Child, who, like Michael Scott, had
+     learned "the art of glammorie In Padua beyond the sea," and who is
+     famous in the annals of Massachusetts, where he was at one time a
+     resident, as the first man who dared petition the General Court for
+     liberty of conscience. The full title of the book is Three Books of
+     Occult Philosophy, by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Knight, Doctor of
+     both Laws, Counsellor to Caesar's Sacred Majesty and Judge of the
+     Prerogative Court.
+
+     "As the Spirits of Darkness be stronger in the dark, so Good
+     Spirits, which be Angels of Light, are augmented not only by the
+     Divine light of the Sun, but also by our common Wood Fire: and as
+     the Celestial Fire drives away dark spirits, so also this our Fire
+     of Wood doth the same."--Cor. AGRIPPA, Occult Philosophy, Book I.
+     ch. v.
+
+          "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
+          Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
+          Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
+          Hides hills and woods, the rivet and the heaven,
+          And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.
+          The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
+          Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
+          Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
+          In a tumultuous privacy of storm."
+                               Emerson. The Snow Storm.
+
+
+The sun that brief December day
+Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
+And, darkly circled, gave at noon
+A sadder light than waning moon.
+Slow tracing down the thickening sky
+Its mute and ominous prophecy,
+A portent seeming less than threat,
+It sank from sight before it set.
+A chill no coat, however stout,
+Of homespun stuff could quite, shut out,
+A hard, dull bitterness of cold,
+That checked, mid-vein, the circling race
+Of life-blood in the sharpened face,
+The coming of the snow-storm told.
+The wind blew east; we heard the roar
+Of Ocean on his wintry shore,
+And felt the strong pulse throbbing there
+Beat with low rhythm our inland air.
+
+Meanwhile we did our nightly chores,--
+Brought in the wood from out of doors,
+Littered the stalls, and from the mows
+Raked down the herd's-grass for the cows
+Heard the horse whinnying for his corn;
+And, sharply clashing horn on horn,
+Impatient down the stanchion rows
+The cattle shake their walnut bows;
+While, peering from his early perch
+Upon the scaffold's pole of birch,
+The cock his crested helmet bent
+And down his querulous challenge sent.
+
+Unwarmed by any sunset light
+The gray day darkened into night,
+A night made hoary with the swarm,
+And whirl-dance of the blinding storm,
+As zigzag, wavering to and fro,
+Crossed and recrossed the winged snow
+And ere the early bedtime came
+The white drift piled the window-frame,
+And through the glass the clothes-line posts
+Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.
+
+So all night long the storm roared on
+The morning broke without a sun;
+In tiny spherule traced with lines
+Of Nature's geometric signs,
+In starry flake, and pellicle,
+All day the hoary meteor fell;
+And, when the second morning shone,
+We looked upon a world unknown,
+On nothing we could call our own.
+Around the glistening wonder bent
+The blue walls of the firmament,
+No cloud above, no earth below,--
+A universe of sky and snow
+The old familiar sights of ours
+Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers
+Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood,
+Or garden-wall, or belt of wood;
+A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed,
+A fenceless drift what once was road;
+The bridle-post an old man sat
+With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat;
+The well-curb had a Chinese roof;
+And even the long sweep, high aloof,
+In its slant splendor, seemed to tell
+Of Pisa's leaning miracle.
+
+A prompt, decisive man, no breath
+Our father wasted: "Boys, a path!"
+Well pleased, (for when did farmer boy
+Count such a summons less than joy?)
+Our buskins on our feet we drew;
+With mittened hands, and caps drawn low,
+To guard our necks and ears from snow,
+We cut the solid whiteness through.
+And, where the drift was deepest, made
+A tunnel walled and overlaid
+With dazzling crystal: we had read
+Of rare Aladdin's wondrous cave,
+And to our own his name we gave,
+With many a wish the luck were ours
+To test his lamp's supernal powers.
+We reached the barn with merry din,
+And roused the prisoned brutes within.
+The old horse thrust his long head out,
+And grave with wonder gazed about;
+The cock his lusty greeting said,
+And forth his speckled harem led;
+The oxen lashed their tails, and hooked,
+And mild reproach of hunger looked;
+The horned patriarch of the sheep,
+Like Egypt's Amun roused from sleep,
+Shook his sage head with gesture mute,
+And emphasized with stamp of foot.
+
+All day the gusty north-wind bore
+The loosening drift its breath before;
+Low circling round its southern zone,
+The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone.
+No church-bell lent its Christian tone
+To the savage air, no social smoke
+Curled over woods of snow-hung oak.
+A solitude made more intense
+By dreary-voiced elements,
+The shrieking of the mindless wind,
+The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind,
+And on the glass the unmeaning beat
+Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet.
+Beyond the circle of our hearth
+No welcome sound of toil or mirth
+Unbound the spell, and testified
+Of human life and thought outside.
+We minded that the sharpest ear
+The buried brooklet could not hear,
+The music of whose liquid lip
+Had been to us companionship,
+And, in our lonely life, had grown
+To have an almost human tone.
+
+As night drew on, and, from the crest
+Of wooded knolls that ridged the west,
+The sun, a snow-blown traveller, sank
+From sight beneath the smothering bank,
+We piled, with care, our nightly stack
+Of wood against the chimney-back,--
+The oaken log, green, huge, and thick,
+And on its top the stout back-stick;
+The knotty forestick laid apart,
+And filled between with curious art
+The ragged brush; then, hovering near,
+We watched the first red blaze appear,
+Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam
+On whitewashed wall and sagging beam,
+Until the old, rude-furnished room
+Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom;
+While radiant with a mimic flame
+Outside the sparkling drift became,
+And through the bare-boughed lilac-tree
+Our own warm hearth seemed blazing free.
+The crane and pendent trammels showed,
+The Turks' heads on the andirons glowed;
+While childish fancy, prompt to tell
+The meaning of the miracle,
+Whispered the old rhyme: "_Under the tree,
+When fire outdoors burns merrily,
+There the witches are making tea_."
+
+The moon above the eastern wood
+Shone at its full; the hill-range stood
+Transfigured in the silver flood,
+Its blown snows flashing cold and keen,
+Dead white, save where some sharp ravine
+Took shadow, or the sombre green
+Of hemlocks turned to pitchy black
+Against the whiteness at their back.
+For such a world and such a night
+Most fitting that unwarming light,
+Which only seemed where'er it fell
+To make the coldness visible.
+
+Shut in from all the world without,
+We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
+Content to let the north-wind roar
+In baffled rage at pane and door,
+While the red logs before us beat
+The frost-line back with tropic heat;
+And ever, when a louder blast
+Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
+The merrier up its roaring draught
+The great throat of the chimney laughed;
+The house-dog on his paws outspread
+Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
+The cat's dark silhouette on the wall
+A couchant tiger's seemed to fall;
+And, for the winter fireside meet,
+Between the andirons' straddling feet,
+The mug of cider simmered slow,
+The apples sputtered in a row,
+And, close at hand, the basket stood
+With nuts from brown October's wood.
+
+What matter how the night behaved?
+What matter how the north-wind raved?
+Blow high, blow low, not all its snow
+Could quench our hearth-fire's ruddy glow.
+O Time and Change!--with hair as gray
+As was my sire's that winter day,
+How strange it seems, with so much gone
+Of life and love, to still live on!
+Ah, brother! only I and thou
+Are left of all that circle now,--
+The dear home faces whereupon
+That fitful firelight paled and shone.
+Henceforward, listen as we will,
+The voices of that hearth are still;
+Look where we may, the wide earth o'er
+Those lighted faces smile no more.
+We tread the paths their feet have worn,
+We sit beneath their orchard trees,
+We hear, like them, the hum of bees
+And rustle of the bladed corn;
+We turn the pages that they read,
+Their written words we linger o'er,
+But in the sun they cast no shade,
+No voice is heard, no sign is made,
+No step is on the conscious floor!
+Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust,
+(Since He who knows our need is just,)
+That somehow, somewhere, meet we must.
+Alas for him who never sees
+The stars shine through his cypress-trees
+Who, hopeless, lays his dead away,
+Nor looks to see the breaking day
+Across the mournful marbles play!
+Who hath not learned, in hours of faith,
+The truth to flesh and sense unknown,
+That Life is ever lord of Death,
+And Love can never lose its own!
+
+We sped the time with stories old,
+Wrought puzzles out, and riddles told,
+Or stammered from our school-book lore
+The Chief of Gambia's "golden shore."
+How often since, when all the land
+Was clay in Slavery's shaping hand,
+As if a far-blown trumpet stirred
+The languorous sin-sick air, I heard
+"_Does not the voice of reason cry,
+Claim the first right which Nature gave,
+From the red scourge of bondage fly,
+Nor deign to live a burdened slave_!"
+Our father rode again his ride
+On Memphremagog's wooded side;
+Sat down again to moose and samp
+In trapper's hut and Indian camp;
+Lived o'er the old idyllic ease
+Beneath St. Francois' hemlock-trees;
+Again for him the moonlight shone
+On Norman cap and bodiced zone;
+Again he heard the violin play
+Which led the village dance away,
+And mingled in its merry whirl
+The grandam and the laughing girl.
+Or, nearer home, our steps he led
+Where Salisbury's level marshes spread
+Mile-wide as flies the laden bee;
+Where merry mowers, hale and strong,
+Swept, scythe on scythe, their swaths along
+The low green prairies of the sea.
+We shared the fishing off Boar's Head,
+And round the rocky Isles of Shoals
+The hake-broil on the drift-wood coals;
+The chowder on the sand-beach made,
+Dipped by the hungry, steaming hot,
+With spoons of clam-shell from the pot.
+We heard the tales of witchcraft old,
+And dream and sign and marvel told
+To sleepy listeners as they lay
+Stretched idly on the salted hay,
+Adrift along the winding shores,
+When favoring breezes deigned to blow
+The square sail of the gundelow
+And idle lay the useless oars.
+
+Our mother, while she turned her wheel
+Or run the new-knit stocking-heel,
+Told how the Indian hordes came down
+At midnight on Cocheco town,
+And how her own great-uncle bore
+His cruel scalp-mark to fourscore.
+Recalling, in her fitting phrase,
+So rich and picturesque and free,
+(The common unrhymed poetry
+Of simple life and country ways,)
+The story of her early days,--
+She made us welcome to her home;
+Old hearths grew wide to give us room;
+We stole with her a frightened look
+At the gray wizard's conjuring-book,
+The fame whereof went far and wide
+Through all the simple country side;
+We heard the hawks at twilight play,
+The boat-horn on Piscataqua,
+The loon's weird laughter far away;
+We fished her little trout-brook, knew
+What flowers in wood and meadow grew,
+What sunny hillsides autumn-brown
+She climbed to shake the ripe nuts down,
+Saw where in sheltered cove and bay
+The ducks' black squadron anchored lay,
+And heard the wild-geese calling loud
+Beneath the gray November cloud.
+
+Then, haply, with a look more grave,
+And soberer tone, some tale she gave
+From painful Sewell's ancient tome,
+Beloved in every Quaker home,
+Of faith fire-winged by martyrdom,
+Or Chalkley's Journal, old and quaint,--
+Gentlest of skippers, rare sea-saint!--
+Who, when the dreary calms prevailed,
+And water-butt and bread-cask failed,
+And cruel, hungry eyes pursued
+His portly presence mad for food,
+With dark hints muttered under breath
+Of casting lots for life or death,
+Offered, if Heaven withheld supplies,
+To be himself the sacrifice.
+Then, suddenly, as if to save
+The good man from his living grave,
+A ripple on the water grew,
+A school of porpoise flashed in view.
+"Take, eat," he said, "and be content;
+These fishes in my stead are sent
+By Him who gave the tangled ram
+To spare the child of Abraham."
+
+Our uncle, innocent of books,
+Was rich in lore of fields and brooks,
+The ancient teachers never dumb
+Of Nature's unhoused lyceum.
+In moons and tides and weather wise,
+He read the clouds as prophecies,
+And foul or fair could well divine,
+By many an occult hint and sign,
+Holding the cunning-warded keys
+To all the woodcraft mysteries;
+Himself to Nature's heart so near
+That all her voices in his ear
+Of beast or bird had meanings clear,
+Like Apollonius of old,
+Who knew the tales the sparrows told,
+Or Hermes who interpreted
+What the sage cranes of Nilus said;
+
+Content to live where life began;
+A simple, guileless, childlike man,
+Strong only on his native grounds,
+The little world of sights and sounds
+Whose girdle was the parish bounds,
+Whereof his fondly partial pride
+The common features magnified,
+As Surrey hills to mountains grew
+In White of Selborne's loving view,--
+He told how teal and loon he shot,
+And how the eagle's eggs he got,
+The feats on pond and river done,
+The prodigies of rod and gun;
+Till, warming with the tales he told,
+Forgotten was the outside cold,
+The bitter wind unheeded blew,
+From ripening corn the pigeons flew,
+The partridge drummed I' the wood, the mink
+Went fishing down the river-brink.
+In fields with bean or clover gay,
+The woodchuck, like a hermit gray,
+Peered from the doorway of his cell;
+The muskrat plied the mason's trade,
+And tier by tier his mud-walls laid;
+And from the shagbark overhead
+The grizzled squirrel dropped his shell.
+
+Next, the dear aunt, whose smile of cheer
+And voice in dreams I see and hear,--
+The sweetest woman ever Fate
+Perverse denied a household mate,
+Who, lonely, homeless, not the less
+Found peace in love's unselfishness,
+And welcome wheresoe'er she went,
+A calm and gracious element,--
+Whose presence seemed the sweet income
+And womanly atmosphere of home,--
+Called up her girlhood memories,
+The huskings and the apple-bees,
+The sleigh-rides and the summer sails,
+Weaving through all the poor details
+And homespun warp of circumstance
+A golden woof-thread of romance.
+For well she kept her genial mood
+And simple faith of maidenhood;
+Before her still a cloud-land lay,
+The mirage loomed across her way;
+The morning dew, that dries so soon
+With others, glistened at her noon;
+Through years of toil and soil and care,
+From glossy tress to thin gray hair,
+All unprofaned she held apart
+The virgin fancies of the heart.
+Be shame to him of woman born
+Who hath for such but thought of scorn.
+
+There, too, our elder sister plied
+Her evening task the stand beside;
+A full, rich nature, free to trust,
+Truthful and almost sternly just,
+Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act,
+And make her generous thought a fact,
+Keeping with many a light disguise
+The secret of self-sacrifice.
+O heart sore-tried! thou hast the best
+That Heaven itself could give thee,--rest,
+
+Rest from all bitter thoughts and things!
+How many a poor one's blessing went
+With thee beneath the low green tent
+Whose curtain never outward swings!
+
+As one who held herself a part
+Of all she saw, and let her heart
+Against the household bosom lean,
+Upon the motley-braided mat
+Our youngest and our dearest sat,
+Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,
+Now bathed in the unfading green
+And holy peace of Paradise.
+Oh, looking from some heavenly hill,
+Or from the shade of saintly palms,
+Or silver reach of river calms,
+Do those large eyes behold me still?
+With me one little year ago:--
+The chill weight of the winter snow
+For months upon her grave has lain;
+And now, when summer south-winds blow
+And brier and harebell bloom again,
+I tread the pleasant paths we trod,
+I see the violet-sprinkled sod
+Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak
+The hillside flowers she loved to seek,
+Yet following me where'er I went
+With dark eyes full of love's content.
+The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills
+The air with sweetness; all the hills
+Stretch green to June's unclouded sky;
+But still I wait with ear and eye
+For something gone which should be nigh,
+A loss in all familiar things,
+In flower that blooms, and bird that sings.
+And yet, dear heart' remembering thee,
+Am I not richer than of old?
+Safe in thy immortality,
+What change can reach the wealth I hold?
+What chance can mar the pearl and gold
+Thy love hath left in trust with me?
+And while in life's late afternoon,
+Where cool and long the shadows grow,
+I walk to meet the night that soon
+Shall shape and shadow overflow,
+I cannot feel that thou art far,
+Since near at need the angels are;
+And when the sunset gates unbar,
+Shall I not see thee waiting stand,
+And, white against the evening star,
+The welcome of thy beckoning hand?
+
+Brisk wielder of the birch and rule,
+The master of the district school
+Held at the fire his favored place,
+Its warm glow lit a laughing face
+Fresh-hued and fair, where scarce appeared
+The uncertain prophecy of beard.
+He teased the mitten-blinded cat,
+Played cross-pins on my uncle's hat,
+Sang songs, and told us what befalls
+In classic Dartmouth's college halls.
+Born the wild Northern hills among,
+From whence his yeoman father wrung
+By patient toil subsistence scant,
+Not competence and yet not want,
+
+He early gained the power to pay
+His cheerful, self-reliant way;
+Could doff at ease his scholar's gown
+To peddle wares from town to town;
+Or through the long vacation's reach
+In lonely lowland districts teach,
+Where all the droll experience found
+At stranger hearths in boarding round,
+The moonlit skater's keen delight,
+The sleigh-drive through the frosty night,
+The rustic party, with its rough
+Accompaniment of blind-man's-buff,
+And whirling plate, and forfeits paid,
+His winter task a pastime made.
+Happy the snow-locked homes wherein
+He tuned his merry violin,
+Or played the athlete in the barn,
+Or held the good dame's winding-yarn,
+Or mirth-provoking versions told
+Of classic legends rare and old,
+Wherein the scenes of Greece and Rome
+Had all the commonplace of home,
+And little seemed at best the odds
+'Twixt Yankee pedlers and old gods;
+Where Pindus-born Arachthus took
+The guise of any grist-mill brook,
+And dread Olympus at his will
+Became a huckleberry hill.
+
+A careless boy that night he seemed;
+But at his desk he had the look
+And air of one who wisely schemed,
+And hostage from the future took
+In trained thought and lore of book.
+Large-brained, clear-eyed, of such as he
+Shall Freedom's young apostles be,
+Who, following in War's bloody trail,
+Shall every lingering wrong assail;
+All chains from limb and spirit strike,
+Uplift the black and white alike;
+Scatter before their swift advance
+The darkness and the ignorance,
+The pride, the lust, the squalid sloth,
+Which nurtured Treason's monstrous growth,
+Made murder pastime, and the hell
+Of prison-torture possible;
+The cruel lie of caste refute,
+Old forms remould, and substitute
+For Slavery's lash the freeman's will,
+For blind routine, wise-handed skill;
+A school-house plant on every hill,
+Stretching in radiate nerve-lines thence
+The quick wires of intelligence;
+Till North and South together brought
+Shall own the same electric thought,
+In peace a common flag salute,
+And, side by side in labor's free
+And unresentful rivalry,
+Harvest the fields wherein they fought.
+
+Another guest that winter night
+Flashed back from lustrous eyes the light.
+Unmarked by time, and yet not young,
+The honeyed music of her tongue
+And words of meekness scarcely told
+A nature passionate and bold,
+Strong, self-concentred, spurning guide,
+Its milder features dwarfed beside
+Her unbent will's majestic pride.
+She sat among us, at the best,
+A not unfeared, half-welcome guest,
+Rebuking with her cultured phrase
+Our homeliness of words and ways.
+A certain pard-like, treacherous grace
+Swayed the lithe limbs and dropped the lash,
+Lent the white teeth their dazzling flash;
+And under low brows, black with night,
+Rayed out at times a dangerous light;
+The sharp heat-lightnings of her face
+Presaging ill to him whom Fate
+Condemned to share her love or hate.
+A woman tropical, intense
+In thought and act, in soul and sense,
+She blended in a like degree
+The vixen and the devotee,
+Revealing with each freak or feint
+The temper of Petruchio's Kate,
+The raptures of Siena's saint.
+Her tapering hand and rounded wrist
+Had facile power to form a fist;
+The warm, dark languish of her eyes
+Was never safe from wrath's surprise.
+Brows saintly calm and lips devout
+Knew every change of scowl and pout;
+And the sweet voice had notes more high
+And shrill for social battle-cry.
+
+Since then what old cathedral town
+Has missed her pilgrim staff and gown,
+What convent-gate has held its lock
+Against the challenge of her knock!
+Through Smyrna's plague-hushed thoroughfares,
+Up sea-set Malta's rocky stairs,
+Gray olive slopes of hills that hem
+Thy tombs and shrines, Jerusalem,
+Or startling on her desert throne
+The crazy Queen of Lebanon s
+With claims fantastic as her own,
+Her tireless feet have held their way;
+And still, unrestful, bowed, and gray,
+She watches under Eastern skies,
+With hope each day renewed and fresh,
+The Lord's quick coming in the flesh,
+Whereof she dreams and prophesies!
+
+Where'er her troubled path may be,
+The Lord's sweet pity with her go!
+The outward wayward life we see,
+The hidden springs we may not know.
+Nor is it given us to discern
+What threads the fatal sisters spun,
+Through what ancestral years has run
+The sorrow with the woman born,
+What forged her cruel chain of moods,
+What set her feet in solitudes,
+And held the love within her mute,
+What mingled madness in the blood,
+A life-long discord and annoy,
+Water of tears with oil of joy,
+And hid within the folded bud
+Perversities of flower and fruit.
+It is not ours to separate
+The tangled skein of will and fate,
+To show what metes and bounds should stand
+Upon the soul's debatable land,
+And between choice and Providence
+Divide the circle of events;
+But lie who knows our frame is just,
+Merciful and compassionate,
+And full of sweet assurances
+And hope for all the language is,
+That He remembereth we are dust!
+
+At last the great logs, crumbling low,
+Sent out a dull and duller glow,
+The bull's-eye watch that hung in view,
+Ticking its weary circuit through,
+Pointed with mutely warning sign
+Its black hand to the hour of nine.
+That sign the pleasant circle broke
+My uncle ceased his pipe to smoke,
+Knocked from its bowl the refuse gray,
+And laid it tenderly away,
+Then roused himself to safely cover
+The dull red brands with ashes over.
+And while, with care, our mother laid
+The work aside, her steps she stayed
+One moment, seeking to express
+Her grateful sense of happiness
+For food and shelter, warmth and health,
+And love's contentment more than wealth,
+With simple wishes (not the weak,
+Vain prayers which no fulfilment seek,
+But such as warm the generous heart,
+O'er-prompt to do with Heaven its part)
+That none might lack, that bitter night,
+For bread and clothing, warmth and light.
+
+Within our beds awhile we heard
+The wind that round the gables roared,
+With now and then a ruder shock,
+Which made our very bedsteads rock.
+We heard the loosened clapboards tost,
+The board-nails snapping in the frost;
+And on us, through the unplastered wall,
+Felt the light sifted snow-flakes fall.
+But sleep stole on, as sleep will do
+When hearts are light and life is new;
+Faint and more faint the murmurs grew,
+Till in the summer-land of dreams
+They softened to the sound of streams,
+Low stir of leaves, and dip of oars,
+And lapsing waves on quiet shores.
+
+Next morn we wakened with the shout
+Of merry voices high and clear;
+And saw the teamsters drawing near
+To break the drifted highways out.
+Down the long hillside treading slow
+We saw the half-buried oxen' go,
+Shaking the snow from heads uptost,
+Their straining nostrils white with frost.
+Before our door the straggling train
+Drew up, an added team to gain.
+The elders threshed their hands a-cold,
+Passed, with the cider-mug, their jokes
+From lip to lip; the younger folks
+Down the loose snow-banks, wrestling, rolled,
+Then toiled again the cavalcade
+O'er windy hill, through clogged ravine,
+And woodland paths that wound between
+Low drooping pine-boughs winter-weighed.
+From every barn a team afoot,
+At every house a new recruit,
+Where, drawn by Nature's subtlest law
+Haply the watchful young men saw
+Sweet doorway pictures of the curls
+And curious eyes of merry girls,
+Lifting their hands in mock defence
+Against the snow-ball's compliments,
+And reading in each missive tost
+The charm with Eden never lost.
+
+We heard once more the sleigh-bells' sound;
+And, following where the teamsters led,
+The wise old Doctor went his round,
+Just pausing at our door to say,
+In the brief autocratic way
+Of one who, prompt at Duty's call,
+Was free to urge her claim on all,
+That some poor neighbor sick abed
+At night our mother's aid would need.
+For, one in generous thought and deed,
+What mattered in the sufferer's sight
+The Quaker matron's inward light,
+The Doctor's mail of Calvin's creed?
+All hearts confess the saints elect
+Who, twain in faith, in love agree,
+And melt not in an acid sect
+The Christian pearl of charity!
+
+So days went on: a week had passed
+Since the great world was heard from last.
+The Almanac we studied o'er,
+Read and reread our little store,
+Of books and pamphlets, scarce a score;
+One harmless novel, mostly hid
+From younger eyes, a book forbid,
+And poetry, (or good or bad,
+A single book was all we had,)
+Where Ellwood's meek, drab-skirted Muse,
+A stranger to the heathen Nine,
+Sang, with a somewhat nasal whine,
+The wars of David and the Jews.
+At last the floundering carrier bore
+The village paper to our door.
+Lo! broadening outward as we read,
+To warmer zones the horizon spread;
+In panoramic length unrolled
+We saw the marvels that it told.
+Before us passed the painted Creeks,
+And daft McGregor on his raids
+In Costa Rica's everglades.
+And up Taygetos winding slow
+Rode Ypsilanti's Mainote Greeks,
+A Turk's head at each saddle-bow
+Welcome to us its week-old news,
+Its corner for the rustic Muse,
+Its monthly gauge of snow and rain,
+Its record, mingling in a breath
+The wedding bell and dirge of death;
+Jest, anecdote, and love-lorn tale,
+The latest culprit sent to jail;
+Its hue and cry of stolen and lost,
+Its vendue sales and goods at cost,
+And traffic calling loud for gain.
+We felt the stir of hall and street,
+The pulse of life that round us beat;
+The chill embargo of the snow
+Was melted in the genial glow;
+Wide swung again our ice-locked door,
+And all the world was ours once more!
+
+Clasp, Angel of the backward look
+And folded wings of ashen gray
+And voice of echoes far away,
+The brazen covers of thy book;
+The weird palimpsest old and vast,
+Wherein thou hid'st the spectral past;
+Where, closely mingling, pale and glow
+The characters of joy and woe;
+The monographs of outlived years,
+Or smile-illumed or dim with tears,
+Green hills of life that slope to death,
+And haunts of home, whose vistaed trees
+Shade off to mournful cypresses
+With the white amaranths underneath.
+Even while I look, I can but heed
+The restless sands' incessant fall,
+Importunate hours that hours succeed,
+Each clamorous with its own sharp need,
+And duty keeping pace with all.
+Shut down and clasp the heavy lids;
+I hear again the voice that bids
+The dreamer leave his dream midway
+For larger hopes and graver fears
+Life greatens in these later years,
+The century's aloe flowers to-day!
+
+Yet, haply, in some lull of life,
+Some Truce of God which breaks its strife,
+The worldling's eyes shall gather dew,
+Dreaming in throngful city ways
+Of winter joys his boyhood knew;
+And dear and early friends--the few
+Who yet remain--shall pause to view
+These Flemish pictures of old days;
+Sit with me by the homestead hearth,
+And stretch the hands of memory forth
+To warm them at the wood-fire's blaze!
+And thanks untraced to lips unknown
+Shall greet me like the odors blown
+From unseen meadows newly mown,
+Or lilies floating in some pond,
+Wood-fringed, the wayside gaze beyond;
+The traveller owns the grateful sense
+Of sweetness near, he knows not whence,
+And, pausing, takes with forehead bare
+The benediction of the air.
+1866.
+
+
+
+MY TRIUMPH.
+
+The autumn-time has come;
+On woods that dream of bloom,
+And over purpling vines,
+The low sun fainter shines.
+
+The aster-flower is failing,
+The hazel's gold is paling;
+Yet overhead more near
+The eternal stars appear!
+
+And present gratitude
+Insures the future's good,
+And for the things I see
+I trust the things to be;
+
+That in the paths untrod,
+And the long days of God,
+My feet shall still be led,
+My heart be comforted.
+
+O living friends who love me!
+O dear ones gone above me!
+Careless of other fame,
+I leave to you my name.
+
+Hide it from idle praises,
+Save it from evil phrases
+Why, when dear lips that spake it
+Are dumb, should strangers wake it?
+
+Let the thick curtain fall;
+I better know than all
+How little I have gained,
+How vast the unattained.
+
+Not by the page word-painted
+Let life be banned or sainted
+Deeper than written scroll
+The colors of the soul.
+
+Sweeter than any sung
+My songs that found no tongue;
+Nobler than any fact
+My wish that failed of act.
+
+Others shall sing the song,
+Others shall right the wrong,--
+Finish what I begin,
+And all I fail of win.
+
+What matter, I or they?
+Mine or another's day,
+So the right word be said
+And life the sweeter made?
+
+Hail to the coming singers
+Hail to the brave light-bringers!
+Forward I reach and share
+All that they sing and dare.
+
+The airs of heaven blow o'er me;
+A glory shines before me
+Of what mankind shall be,--
+Pure, generous, brave, and free.
+
+A dream of man and woman
+Diviner but still human,
+Solving the riddle old,
+Shaping the Age of Gold.
+
+The love of God and neighbor;
+An equal-handed labor;
+The richer life, where beauty
+Walks hand in hand with duty.
+
+Ring, bells in unreared steeples,
+The joy of unborn peoples!
+Sound, trumpets far off blown,
+Your triumph is my own!
+
+Parcel and part of all,
+I keep the festival,
+Fore-reach the good to be,
+And share the victory.
+
+I feel the earth move sunward,
+I join the great march onward,
+And take, by faith, while living,
+My freehold of thanksgiving.
+1870.
+
+
+
+IN SCHOOL-DAYS.
+
+Still sits the school-house by the road,
+A ragged beggar sleeping;
+Around it still the sumachs grow,
+And blackberry-vines are creeping.
+
+Within, the master's desk is seen,
+Deep scarred by raps official;
+The warping floor, the battered seats,
+The jack-knife's carved initial;
+
+The charcoal frescos on its wall;
+Its door's worn sill, betraying
+The feet that, creeping slow to school,
+Went storming out to playing!
+
+Long years ago a winter sun
+Shone over it at setting;
+Lit up its western window-panes,
+And low eaves' icy fretting.
+
+It touched the tangled golden curls,
+And brown eyes full of grieving,
+Of one who still her steps delayed
+When all the school were leaving.
+
+For near her stood the little boy
+Her childish favor singled:
+His cap pulled low upon a face
+Where pride and shame were mingled.
+
+Pushing with restless feet the snow
+To right and left, he lingered;--
+As restlessly her tiny hands
+The blue-checked apron fingered.
+
+He saw her lift her eyes; he felt
+The soft hand's light caressing,
+And heard the tremble of her voice,
+As if a fault confessing.
+
+"I 'm sorry that I spelt the word
+I hate to go above you,
+Because,"--the brown eyes lower fell,--
+"Because you see, I love you!"
+
+Still memory to a gray-haired man
+That sweet child-face is showing.
+Dear girl! the grasses on her grave
+Have forty years been growing!
+
+He lives to learn, in life's hard school,
+How few who pass above him
+Lament their triumph and his loss,
+Like her,--because they love him.
+
+
+
+MY BIRTHDAY.
+
+Beneath the moonlight and the snow
+Lies dead my latest year;
+The winter winds are wailing low
+Its dirges in my ear.
+
+I grieve not with the moaning wind
+As if a loss befell;
+Before me, even as behind,
+God is, and all is well!
+
+His light shines on me from above,
+His low voice speaks within,--
+The patience of immortal love
+Outwearying mortal sin.
+
+Not mindless of the growing years
+Of care and loss and pain,
+My eyes are wet with thankful tears
+For blessings which remain.
+
+If dim the gold of life has grown,
+I will not count it dross,
+Nor turn from treasures still my own
+To sigh for lack and loss.
+
+The years no charm from Nature take;
+As sweet her voices call,
+As beautiful her mornings break,
+As fair her evenings fall.
+
+Love watches o'er my quiet ways,
+Kind voices speak my name,
+And lips that find it hard to praise
+Are slow, at least, to blame.
+
+How softly ebb the tides of will!
+How fields, once lost or won,
+Now lie behind me green and still
+Beneath a level sun.
+
+How hushed the hiss of party hate,
+The clamor of the throng!
+How old, harsh voices of debate
+Flow into rhythmic song!
+
+Methinks the spirit's temper grows
+Too soft in this still air;
+Somewhat the restful heart foregoes
+Of needed watch and prayer.
+
+The bark by tempest vainly tossed
+May founder in the calm,
+And he who braved the polar frost
+Faint by the isles of balm.
+
+Better than self-indulgent years
+The outflung heart of youth,
+Than pleasant songs in idle ears
+The tumult of the truth.
+
+Rest for the weary hands is good,
+And love for hearts that pine,
+But let the manly habitude
+Of upright souls be mine.
+
+Let winds that blow from heaven refresh,
+Dear Lord, the languid air;
+And let the weakness of the flesh
+Thy strength of spirit share.
+
+And, if the eye must fail of light,
+The ear forget to hear,
+Make clearer still the spirit's sight,
+More fine the inward ear!
+
+Be near me in mine hours of need
+To soothe, or cheer, or warn,
+And down these slopes of sunset lead
+As up the hills of morn!
+1871.
+
+
+
+RED RIDING-HOOD.
+
+On the wide lawn the snow lay deep,
+Ridged o'er with many a drifted heap;
+The wind that through the pine-trees sung
+The naked elm-boughs tossed and swung;
+While, through the window, frosty-starred,
+Against the sunset purple barred,
+We saw the sombre crow flap by,
+The hawk's gray fleck along the sky,
+The crested blue-jay flitting swift,
+The squirrel poising on the drift,
+Erect, alert, his broad gray tail
+Set to the north wind like a sail.
+
+It came to pass, our little lass,
+With flattened face against the glass,
+And eyes in which the tender dew
+Of pity shone, stood gazing through
+The narrow space her rosy lips
+Had melted from the frost's eclipse
+"Oh, see," she cried, "the poor blue-jays!
+What is it that the black crow says?
+The squirrel lifts his little legs
+Because he has no hands, and begs;
+He's asking for my nuts, I know
+May I not feed them on the snow?"
+
+Half lost within her boots, her head
+Warm-sheltered in her hood of red,
+Her plaid skirt close about her drawn,
+She floundered down the wintry lawn;
+Now struggling through the misty veil
+Blown round her by the shrieking gale;
+Now sinking in a drift so low
+Her scarlet hood could scarcely show
+Its dash of color on the snow.
+
+She dropped for bird and beast forlorn
+Her little store of nuts and corn,
+And thus her timid guests bespoke
+"Come, squirrel, from your hollow oak,--
+Come, black old crow,--come, poor blue-jay,
+Before your supper's blown away
+Don't be afraid, we all are good;
+And I'm mamma's Red Riding-Hood!"
+
+O Thou whose care is over all,
+Who heedest even the sparrow's fall,
+Keep in the little maiden's breast
+The pity which is now its guest!
+Let not her cultured years make less
+The childhood charm of tenderness,
+But let her feel as well as know,
+Nor harder with her polish grow!
+Unmoved by sentimental grief
+That wails along some printed leaf,
+But, prompt with kindly word and deed
+To own the claims of all who need,
+Let the grown woman's self make good
+The promise of Red Riding-Hood
+1877.
+
+
+
+RESPONSE.
+
+     On the occasion of my seventieth birthday in 1877, I was the
+     recipient of many tokens of esteem. The publishers of the _Atlantic
+     Monthly_ gave a dinner in my name, and the editor of _The Literary
+     World_ gathered in his paper many affectionate messages from my
+     associates in literature and the cause of human progress. The lines
+     which follow were written in acknowledgment.
+
+Beside that milestone where the level sun,
+Nigh unto setting, sheds his last, low rays
+On word and work irrevocably done,
+Life's blending threads of good and ill outspun,
+I hear, O friends! your words of cheer and praise,
+Half doubtful if myself or otherwise.
+Like him who, in the old Arabian joke,
+A beggar slept and crowned Caliph woke.
+Thanks not the less. With not unglad surprise
+I see my life-work through your partial eyes;
+Assured, in giving to my home-taught songs
+A higher value than of right belongs,
+You do but read between the written lines
+The finer grace of unfulfilled designs.
+
+
+
+AT EVENTIDE.
+
+Poor and inadequate the shadow-play
+Of gain and loss, of waking and of dream,
+Against life's solemn background needs must seem
+At this late hour. Yet, not unthankfully,
+I call to mind the fountains by the way,
+The breath of flowers, the bird-song on the spray,
+Dear friends, sweet human loves, the joy of giving
+And of receiving, the great boon of living
+In grand historic years when Liberty
+Had need of word and work, quick sympathies
+For all who fail and suffer, song's relief,
+Nature's uncloying loveliness; and chief,
+The kind restraining hand of Providence,
+The inward witness, the assuring sense
+Of an Eternal Good which overlies
+The sorrow of the world, Love which outlives
+All sin and wrong, Compassion which forgives
+To the uttermost, and Justice whose clear eyes
+Through lapse and failure look to the intent,
+And judge our frailty by the life we meant.
+1878.
+
+
+
+VOYAGE OF THE JETTIE.
+
+     The picturesquely situated Wayside Inn at West Ossipee, N. H., is
+     now in ashes; and to its former guests these somewhat careless
+     rhymes may be a not unwelcome reminder of pleasant summers and
+     autumns on the banks of the Bearcamp and Chocorua. To the author
+     himself they have a special interest from the fact that they were
+     written, or improvised, under the eye and for the amusement of a
+     beloved invalid friend whose last earthly sunsets faded from the
+     mountain ranges of Ossipee and Sandwich.
+
+A shallow stream, from fountains
+Deep in the Sandwich mountains,
+Ran lake ward Bearcamp River;
+And, between its flood-torn shores,
+Sped by sail or urged by oars
+No keel had vexed it ever.
+
+Alone the dead trees yielding
+To the dull axe Time is wielding,
+The shy mink and the otter,
+And golden leaves and red,
+By countless autumns shed,
+Had floated down its water.
+
+From the gray rocks of Cape Ann,
+Came a skilled seafaring man,
+With his dory, to the right place;
+Over hill and plain he brought her,
+Where the boatless Beareamp water
+Comes winding down from White-Face.
+
+Quoth the skipper: "Ere she floats forth;
+I'm sure my pretty boat's worth,
+At least, a name as pretty."
+On her painted side he wrote it,
+And the flag that o'er her floated
+Bore aloft the name of Jettie.
+
+On a radiant morn of summer,
+Elder guest and latest comer
+Saw her wed the Bearcamp water;
+Heard the name the skipper gave her,
+And the answer to the favor
+From the Bay State's graceful daughter.
+
+Then, a singer, richly gifted,
+Her charmed voice uplifted;
+And the wood-thrush and song-sparrow
+Listened, dumb with envious pain,
+To the clear and sweet refrain
+Whose notes they could not borrow.
+
+Then the skipper plied his oar,
+And from off the shelving shore,
+Glided out the strange explorer;
+Floating on, she knew not whither,--
+The tawny sands beneath her,
+The great hills watching o'er her.
+
+On, where the stream flows quiet
+As the meadows' margins by it,
+Or widens out to borrow a
+New life from that wild water,
+The mountain giant's daughter,
+The pine-besung Chocorua.
+
+Or, mid the tangling cumber
+And pack of mountain lumber
+That spring floods downward force,
+Over sunken snag, and bar
+Where the grating shallows are,
+The good boat held her course.
+
+Under the pine-dark highlands,
+Around the vine-hung islands,
+She ploughed her crooked furrow
+And her rippling and her lurches
+Scared the river eels and perches,
+And the musk-rat in his burrow.
+
+Every sober clam below her,
+Every sage and grave pearl-grower,
+Shut his rusty valves the tighter;
+Crow called to crow complaining,
+And old tortoises sat craning
+Their leathern necks to sight her.
+
+So, to where the still lake glasses
+The misty mountain masses
+Rising dim and distant northward,
+And, with faint-drawn shadow pictures,
+Low shores, and dead pine spectres,
+Blends the skyward and the earthward,
+
+On she glided, overladen,
+With merry man and maiden
+Sending back their song and laughter,--
+While, perchance, a phantom crew,
+In a ghostly birch canoe,
+Paddled dumb and swiftly after!
+
+And the bear on Ossipee
+Climbed the topmost crag to see
+The strange thing drifting under;
+And, through the haze of August,
+Passaconaway and Paugus
+Looked down in sleepy wonder.
+
+All the pines that o'er her hung
+In mimic sea-tones sung
+The song familiar to her;
+And the maples leaned to screen her,
+And the meadow-grass seemed greener,
+And the breeze more soft to woo her.
+
+The lone stream mystery-haunted,
+To her the freedom granted
+To scan its every feature,
+Till new and old were blended,
+And round them both extended
+The loving arms of Nature.
+
+Of these hills the little vessel
+Henceforth is part and parcel;
+And on Bearcamp shall her log
+Be kept, as if by George's
+Or Grand Menan, the surges
+Tossed her skipper through the fog.
+
+And I, who, half in sadness,
+Recall the morning gladness
+Of life, at evening time,
+By chance, onlooking idly,
+Apart from all so widely,
+Have set her voyage to rhyme.
+
+Dies now the gay persistence
+Of song and laugh, in distance;
+Alone with me remaining
+The stream, the quiet meadow,
+The hills in shine and shadow,
+The sombre pines complaining.
+
+And, musing here, I dream
+Of voyagers on a stream
+From whence is no returning,
+Under sealed orders going,
+Looking forward little knowing,
+Looking back with idle yearning.
+
+And I pray that every venture
+The port of peace may enter,
+That, safe from snag and fall
+And siren-haunted islet,
+And rock, the Unseen Pilot
+May guide us one and all.
+1880.
+
+
+
+MY TRUST.
+
+A picture memory brings to me
+I look across the years and see
+Myself beside my mother's knee.
+
+I feel her gentle hand restrain
+My selfish moods, and know again
+A child's blind sense of wrong and pain.
+
+But wiser now, a man gray grown,
+My childhood's needs are better known,
+My mother's chastening love I own.
+
+Gray grown, but in our Father's sight
+A child still groping for the light
+To read His works and ways aright.
+
+I wait, in His good time to see
+That as my mother dealt with me
+So with His children dealeth He.
+
+I bow myself beneath His hand
+That pain itself was wisely planned
+I feel, and partly understand.
+
+The joy that comes in sorrow's guise,
+The sweet pains of self-sacrifice,
+I would not have them otherwise.
+
+And what were life and death if sin
+Knew not the dread rebuke within,
+The pang of merciful discipline?
+
+Not with thy proud despair of old,
+Crowned stoic of Rome's noblest mould!
+Pleasure and pain alike I hold.
+
+I suffer with no vain pretence
+Of triumph over flesh and sense,
+Yet trust the grievous providence,
+
+How dark soe'er it seems, may tend,
+By ways I cannot comprehend,
+To some unguessed benignant end;
+
+That every loss and lapse may gain
+The clear-aired heights by steps of pain,
+And never cross is borne in vain.
+1880.
+
+
+
+A NAME
+
+     Addressed to my grand-nephew, Greenleaf Whittier Pickard. Jonathan
+     Greenleaf, in A Genealogy of the Greenleaf Family, says briefly:
+     "From all that can be gathered, it is believed that the ancestors
+     of the Greenleaf family were Huguenots, who left France on account
+     of their religious principles some time in the course of the
+     sixteenth century, and settled in England. The name was probably
+     translated from the French Feuillevert."
+
+The name the Gallic exile bore,
+St. Malo! from thy ancient mart,
+Became upon our Western shore
+Greenleaf for Feuillevert.
+
+A name to hear in soft accord
+Of leaves by light winds overrun,
+Or read, upon the greening sward
+Of May, in shade and sun.
+
+The name my infant ear first heard
+Breathed softly with a mother's kiss;
+His mother's own, no tenderer word
+My father spake than this.
+
+No child have I to bear it on;
+Be thou its keeper; let it take
+From gifts well used and duty done
+New beauty for thy sake.
+
+The fair ideals that outran
+My halting footsteps seek and find--
+The flawless symmetry of man,
+The poise of heart and mind.
+
+Stand firmly where I felt the sway
+Of every wing that fancy flew,
+See clearly where I groped my way,
+Nor real from seeming knew.
+
+And wisely choose, and bravely hold
+Thy faith unswerved by cross or crown,
+Like the stout Huguenot of old
+Whose name to thee comes down.
+
+As Marot's songs made glad the heart
+Of that lone exile, haply mine
+May in life's heavy hours impart
+Some strength and hope to thine.
+
+Yet when did Age transfer to Youth
+The hard-gained lessons of its day?
+Each lip must learn the taste of truth,
+Each foot must feel its way.
+
+We cannot hold the hands of choice
+That touch or shun life's fateful keys;
+The whisper of the inward voice
+Is more than homilies.
+
+Dear boy! for whom the flowers are born,
+Stars shine, and happy song-birds sing,
+What can my evening give to morn,
+My winter to thy spring!
+
+A life not void of pure intent,
+With small desert of praise or blame,
+The love I felt, the good I meant,
+I leave thee with my name.
+1880.
+
+
+
+GREETING.
+
+     Originally prefixed to the volume, The King's Missive and other
+     Poems.
+
+I spread a scanty board too late;
+The old-time guests for whom I wait
+Come few and slow, methinks, to-day.
+Ah! who could hear my messages
+Across the dim unsounded seas
+On which so many have sailed away!
+
+Come, then, old friends, who linger yet,
+And let us meet, as we have met,
+Once more beneath this low sunshine;
+And grateful for the good we 've known,
+The riddles solved, the ills outgrown,
+Shake bands upon the border line.
+
+The favor, asked too oft before,
+From your indulgent ears, once more
+I crave, and, if belated lays
+To slower, feebler measures move,
+The silent, sympathy of love
+To me is dearer now than praise.
+
+And ye, O younger friends, for whom
+My hearth and heart keep open room,
+Come smiling through the shadows long,
+Be with me while the sun goes down,
+And with your cheerful voices drown
+The minor of my even-song.
+
+For, equal through the day and night,
+The wise Eternal oversight
+And love and power and righteous will
+Remain: the law of destiny
+The best for each and all must be,
+And life its promise shall fulfil.
+1881.
+
+
+
+AN AUTOGRAPH.
+
+I write my name as one,
+On sands by waves o'errun
+Or winter's frosted pane,
+Traces a record vain.
+
+Oblivion's blankness claims
+Wiser and better names,
+And well my own may pass
+As from the strand or glass.
+
+Wash on, O waves of time!
+Melt, noons, the frosty rime!
+Welcome the shadow vast,
+The silence that shall last.
+
+When I and all who know
+And love me vanish so,
+What harm to them or me
+Will the lost memory be?
+
+If any words of mine,
+Through right of life divine,
+Remain, what matters it
+Whose hand the message writ?
+
+Why should the "crowner's quest"
+Sit on my worst or best?
+Why should the showman claim
+The poor ghost of my name?
+
+Yet, as when dies a sound
+Its spectre lingers round,
+Haply my spent life will
+Leave some faint echo still.
+
+A whisper giving breath
+Of praise or blame to death,
+Soothing or saddening such
+As loved the living much.
+
+Therefore with yearnings vain
+And fond I still would fain
+A kindly judgment seek,
+A tender thought bespeak.
+
+And, while my words are read,
+Let this at least be said
+"Whate'er his life's defeatures,
+He loved his fellow-creatures.
+
+"If, of the Law's stone table,
+To hold he scarce was able
+The first great precept fast,
+He kept for man the last.
+
+"Through mortal lapse and dulness
+What lacks the Eternal Fulness,
+If still our weakness can
+Love Him in loving man?
+
+"Age brought him no despairing
+Of the world's future faring;
+In human nature still
+He found more good than ill.
+
+"To all who dumbly suffered,
+His tongue and pen he offered;
+His life was not his own,
+Nor lived for self alone.
+
+"Hater of din and riot
+He lived in days unquiet;
+And, lover of all beauty,
+Trod the hard ways of duty.
+
+"He meant no wrong to any
+He sought the good of many,
+Yet knew both sin and folly,--
+May God forgive him wholly!"
+1882.
+
+
+
+ABRAM MORRISON.
+
+'Midst the men and things which will
+Haunt an old man's memory still,
+Drollest, quaintest of them all,
+With a boy's laugh I recall
+Good old Abram Morrison.
+
+When the Grist and Rolling Mill
+Ground and rumbled by Po Hill,
+And the old red school-house stood
+Midway in the Powow's flood,
+Here dwelt Abram Morrison.
+
+From the Beach to far beyond
+Bear-Hill, Lion's Mouth and Pond,
+Marvellous to our tough old stock,
+Chips o' the Anglo-Saxon block,
+Seemed the Celtic Morrison.
+
+Mudknock, Balmawhistle, all
+Only knew the Yankee drawl,
+Never brogue was heard till when,
+Foremost of his countrymen,
+Hither came Friend Morrison;
+
+Yankee born, of alien blood,
+Kin of his had well withstood
+Pope and King with pike and ball
+Under Derry's leaguered wall,
+As became the Morrisons.
+
+Wandering down from Nutfield woods
+With his household and his goods,
+Never was it clearly told
+How within our quiet fold
+Came to be a Morrison.
+
+Once a soldier, blame him not
+That the Quaker he forgot,
+When, to think of battles won,
+And the red-coats on the run,
+Laughed aloud Friend Morrison.
+
+From gray Lewis over sea
+Bore his sires their family tree,
+On the rugged boughs of it
+Grafting Irish mirth and wit,
+And the brogue of Morrison.
+
+Half a genius, quick to plan,
+Blundering like an Irishman,
+But with canny shrewdness lent
+By his far-off Scotch descent,
+Such was Abram Morrison.
+
+Back and forth to daily meals,
+Rode his cherished pig on wheels,
+And to all who came to see
+"Aisier for the pig an' me,
+Sure it is," said Morrison.
+
+Simple-hearted, boy o'er-grown,
+With a humor quite his own,
+Of our sober-stepping ways,
+Speech and look and cautious phrase,
+Slow to learn was Morrison.
+
+Much we loved his stories told
+Of a country strange and old,
+Where the fairies danced till dawn,
+And the goblin Leprecaun
+Looked, we thought, like Morrison.
+
+Or wild tales of feud and fight,
+Witch and troll and second sight
+Whispered still where Stornoway
+Looks across its stormy bay,
+Once the home of Morrisons.
+
+First was he to sing the praise
+Of the Powow's winding ways;
+And our straggling village took
+City grandeur to the look
+Of its poet Morrison.
+
+All his words have perished. Shame
+On the saddle-bags of Fame,
+That they bring not to our time
+One poor couplet of the rhyme
+Made by Abram Morrison!
+
+When, on calm and fair First Days,
+Rattled down our one-horse chaise,
+Through the blossomed apple-boughs
+To the old, brown meeting-house,
+There was Abram Morrison.
+
+Underneath his hat's broad brim
+Peered the queer old face of him;
+And with Irish jauntiness
+Swung the coat-tails of the dress
+Worn by Abram Morrison.
+
+Still, in memory, on his feet,
+Leaning o'er the elders' seat,
+Mingling with a solemn drone,
+Celtic accents all his own,
+Rises Abram Morrison.
+
+"Don't," he's pleading, "don't ye go,
+Dear young friends, to sight and show,
+Don't run after elephants,
+Learned pigs and presidents
+And the likes!" said Morrison.
+
+On his well-worn theme intent,
+Simple, child-like, innocent,
+Heaven forgive the half-checked smile
+Of our careless boyhood, while
+Listening to Friend Morrison!
+
+We have learned in later days
+Truth may speak in simplest phrase;
+That the man is not the less
+For quaint ways and home-spun dress,
+Thanks to Abram Morrison!
+
+Not to pander nor to please
+Come the needed homilies,
+With no lofty argument
+Is the fitting message sent,
+Through such lips as Morrison's.
+
+Dead and gone! But while its track
+Powow keeps to Merrimac,
+While Po Hill is still on guard,
+Looking land and ocean ward,
+They shall tell of Morrison!
+
+After half a century's lapse,
+We are wiser now, perhaps,
+But we miss our streets amid
+Something which the past has hid,
+Lost with Abram Morrison.
+
+Gone forever with the queer
+Characters of that old year
+Now the many are as one;
+Broken is the mould that run
+Men like Abram Morrison.
+1884.
+
+
+
+A LEGACY
+
+Friend of my many years
+When the great silence falls, at last, on me,
+Let me not leave, to pain and sadden thee,
+A memory of tears,
+
+But pleasant thoughts alone
+Of one who was thy friendship's honored guest
+And drank the wine of consolation pressed
+From sorrows of thy own.
+
+I leave with thee a sense
+Of hands upheld and trials rendered less--
+The unselfish joy which is to helpfulness
+Its own great recompense;
+
+The knowledge that from thine,
+As from the garments of the Master, stole
+Calmness and strength, the virtue which makes whole
+And heals without a sign;
+
+Yea more, the assurance strong
+That love, which fails of perfect utterance here,
+Lives on to fill the heavenly atmosphere
+With its immortal song.
+1887.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             RELIGIOUS POEMS
+
+
+THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM
+
+Where Time the measure of his hours
+By changeful bud and blossom keeps,
+And, like a young bride crowned with flowers,
+Fair Shiraz in her garden sleeps;
+
+Where, to her poet's turban stone,
+The Spring her gift of flowers imparts,
+Less sweet than those his thoughts have sown
+In the warm soil of Persian hearts:
+
+There sat the stranger, where the shade
+Of scattered date-trees thinly lay,
+While in the hot clear heaven delayed
+The long and still and weary day.
+
+Strange trees and fruits above him hung,
+Strange odors filled the sultry air,
+Strange birds upon the branches swung,
+Strange insect voices murmured there.
+
+And strange bright blossoms shone around,
+Turned sunward from the shadowy bowers,
+As if the Gheber's soul had found
+A fitting home in Iran's flowers.
+
+Whate'er he saw, whate'er he heard,
+Awakened feelings new and sad,--
+No Christian garb, nor Christian word,
+Nor church with Sabbath-bell chimes glad,
+
+But Moslem graves, with turban stones,
+And mosque-spires gleaming white, in view,
+And graybeard Mollahs in low tones
+Chanting their Koran service through.
+
+The flowers which smiled on either hand,
+Like tempting fiends, were such as they
+Which once, o'er all that Eastern land,
+As gifts on demon altars lay.
+
+As if the burning eye of Baal
+The servant of his Conqueror knew,
+From skies which knew no cloudy veil,
+The Sun's hot glances smote him through.
+
+"Ah me!" the lonely stranger said,
+"The hope which led my footsteps on,
+And light from heaven around them shed,
+O'er weary wave and waste, is gone!
+
+"Where are the harvest fields all white,
+For Truth to thrust her sickle in?
+Where flock the souls, like doves in flight,
+From the dark hiding-place of sin?
+
+"A silent-horror broods o'er all,--
+The burden of a hateful spell,--
+The very flowers around recall
+The hoary magi's rites of hell!
+
+"And what am I, o'er such a land
+The banner of the Cross to bear?
+Dear Lord, uphold me with Thy hand,
+Thy strength with human weakness share!"
+
+He ceased; for at his very feet
+In mild rebuke a floweret smiled;
+How thrilled his sinking heart to greet
+The Star-flower of the Virgin's child!
+
+Sown by some wandering Frank, it drew
+Its life from alien air and earth,
+And told to Paynim sun and dew
+The story of the Saviour's birth.
+
+From scorching beams, in kindly mood,
+The Persian plants its beauty screened,
+And on its pagan sisterhood,
+In love, the Christian floweret leaned.
+
+With tears of joy the wanderer felt
+The darkness of his long despair
+Before that hallowed symbol melt,
+Which God's dear love had nurtured there.
+
+From Nature's face, that simple flower
+The lines of sin and sadness swept;
+And Magian pile and Paynim bower
+In peace like that of Eden slept.
+
+Each Moslem tomb, and cypress old,
+Looked holy through the sunset air;
+And, angel-like, the Muezzin told
+From tower and mosque the hour of prayer.
+
+With cheerful steps, the morrow's dawn
+From Shiraz saw the stranger part;
+The Star-flower of the Virgin-Born
+Still blooming in his hopeful heart!
+1830.
+
+
+
+THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN
+
+"Get ye up from the wrath of God's terrible day!
+Ungirded, unsandalled, arise and away!
+'T is the vintage of blood, 't is the fulness of time,
+And vengeance shall gather the harvest of crime!"
+
+The warning was spoken--the righteous had gone,
+And the proud ones of Sodom were feasting alone;
+All gay was the banquet--the revel was long,
+With the pouring of wine and the breathing of song.
+
+'T was an evening of beauty; the air was perfume,
+The earth was all greenness, the trees were all bloom;
+And softly the delicate viol was heard,
+Like the murmur of love or the notes of a bird.
+
+And beautiful maidens moved down in the dance,
+With the magic of motion and sunshine of glance
+And white arms wreathed lightly, and tresses fell free
+As the plumage of birds in some tropical tree.
+
+Where the shrines of foul idols were lighted on high,
+And wantonness tempted the lust of the eye;
+Midst rites of obsceneness, strange, loathsome, abhorred,
+The blasphemer scoffed at the name of the Lord.
+
+Hark! the growl of the thunder,--the quaking of earth!
+Woe, woe to the worship, and woe to the mirth!
+The black sky has opened; there's flame in the air;
+The red arm of vengeance is lifted and bare!
+
+Then the shriek of the dying rose wild where the song
+And the low tone of love had been whispered along;
+For the fierce flames went lightly o'er palace and bower,
+Like the red tongues of demons, to blast and devour!
+
+Down, down on the fallen the red ruin rained,
+And the reveller sank with his wine-cup undrained;
+The foot of the dancer, the music's loved thrill,
+And the shout and the laughter grew suddenly still.
+
+The last throb of anguish was fearfully given;
+The last eye glared forth in its madness on Heaven!
+The last groan of horror rose wildly and vain,
+And death brooded over the pride of the Plain!
+1831.
+
+
+
+THE CALL OF THE CHRISTIAN
+
+Not always as the whirlwind's rush
+On Horeb's mount of fear,
+Not always as the burning bush
+To Midian's shepherd seer,
+Nor as the awful voice which came
+To Israel's prophet bards,
+Nor as the tongues of cloven flame,
+Nor gift of fearful words,--
+
+Not always thus, with outward sign
+Of fire or voice from Heaven,
+The message of a truth divine,
+The call of God is given!
+Awaking in the human heart
+Love for the true and right,--
+Zeal for the Christian's better part,
+Strength for the Christian's fight.
+
+Nor unto manhood's heart alone
+The holy influence steals
+Warm with a rapture not its own,
+The heart of woman feels!
+As she who by Samaria's wall
+The Saviour's errand sought,--
+As those who with the fervent Paul
+And meek Aquila wrought:
+
+Or those meek ones whose martyrdom
+Rome's gathered grandeur saw
+Or those who in their Alpine home
+Braved the Crusader's war,
+When the green Vaudois, trembling, heard,
+Through all its vales of death,
+The martyr's song of triumph poured
+From woman's failing breath.
+
+And gently, by a thousand things
+Which o'er our spirits pass,
+Like breezes o'er the harp's fine strings,
+Or vapors o'er a glass,
+Leaving their token strange and new
+Of music or of shade,
+The summons to the right and true
+And merciful is made.
+
+Oh, then, if gleams of truth and light
+Flash o'er thy waiting mind,
+Unfolding to thy mental sight
+The wants of human-kind;
+If, brooding over human grief,
+The earnest wish is known
+To soothe and gladden with relief
+An anguish not thine own;
+
+Though heralded with naught of fear,
+Or outward sign or show;
+Though only to the inward ear
+It whispers soft and low;
+Though dropping, as the manna fell,
+Unseen, yet from above,
+Noiseless as dew-fall, heed it well,---
+Thy Father's call of love!
+
+
+
+THE CRUCIFIXION.
+
+Sunlight upon Judha's hills!
+And on the waves of Galilee;
+On Jordan's stream, and on the rills
+That feed the dead and sleeping sea!
+Most freshly from the green wood springs
+The light breeze on its scented wings;
+And gayly quiver in the sun
+The cedar tops of Lebanon!
+
+A few more hours,--a change hath come!
+The sky is dark without a cloud!
+The shouts of wrath and joy are dumb,
+And proud knees unto earth are bowed.
+A change is on the hill of Death,
+The helmed watchers pant for breath,
+And turn with wild and maniac eyes
+From the dark scene of sacrifice!
+
+That Sacrifice!--the death of Him,--
+The Christ of God, the holy One!
+Well may the conscious Heaven grow dim,
+And blacken the beholding, Sun.
+The wonted light hath fled away,
+Night settles on the middle day,
+And earthquake from his caverned bed
+Is waking with a thrill of dread!
+
+The dead are waking underneath!
+Their prison door is rent away!
+And, ghastly with the seal of death,
+They wander in the eye of day!
+The temple of the Cherubim,
+The House of God is cold and dim;
+A curse is on its trembling walls,
+Its mighty veil asunder falls!
+
+Well may the cavern-depths of Earth
+Be shaken, and her mountains nod;
+Well may the sheeted dead come forth
+To see the suffering son of God!
+Well may the temple-shrine grow dim,
+And shadows veil the Cherubim,
+When He, the chosen one of Heaven,
+A sacrifice for guilt is given!
+
+And shall the sinful heart, alone,
+Behold unmoved the fearful hour,
+When Nature trembled on her throne,
+And Death resigned his iron power?
+Oh, shall the heart--whose sinfulness
+Gave keenness to His sore distress,
+And added to His tears of blood--
+Refuse its trembling gratitude!
+1834.
+
+
+
+PALESTINE
+
+Blest land of Judaea! thrice hallowed of song,
+Where the holiest of memories pilgrim-like throng;
+In the shade of thy palms, by the shores of thy sea,
+On the hills of thy beauty, my heart is with thee.
+
+With the eye of a spirit I look on that shore
+Where pilgrim and prophet have lingered before;
+With the glide of a spirit I traverse the sod
+Made bright by the steps of the angels of God.
+
+Blue sea of the hills! in my spirit I hear
+Thy waters, Gennesaret, chime on my ear;
+Where the Lowly and Just with the people sat down,
+And thy spray on the dust of His sandals was thrown.
+
+Beyond are Bethulia's mountains of green,
+And the desolate hills of the wild Gadarene;
+And I pause on the goat-crags of Tabor to see
+The gleam of thy waters, O dark Galilee!
+
+Hark, a sound in the valley! where, swollen and strong,
+Thy river, O Kishon, is sweeping along;
+Where the Canaanite strove with Jehovah in vain,
+And thy torrent grew dark with the blood of the slain.
+
+There down from his mountains stern Zebulon came,
+And Naphthali's stag, with his eyeballs of flame,
+And the chariots of Jabin rolled harmlessly on,
+For the arm of the Lord was Abinoam's son!
+
+There sleep the still rocks and the caverns which rang
+To the song which the beautiful prophetess sang,
+When the princes of Issachar stood by her side,
+And the shout of a host in its triumph replied.
+
+Lo, Bethlehem's hill-site before me is seen,
+With the mountains around, and the valleys between;
+There rested the shepherds of Judah, and there
+The song of the angels rose sweet on the air.
+
+And Bethany's palm-trees in beauty still throw
+Their shadows at noon on the ruins below;
+But where are the sisters who hastened to greet
+The lowly Redeemer, and sit at His feet?
+
+I tread where the twelve in their wayfaring trod;
+I stand where they stood with the chosen of God--
+Where His blessing was heard and His lessons were taught,
+Where the blind were restored and the healing was wrought.
+
+Oh, here with His flock the sad Wanderer came;
+These hills He toiled over in grief are the same;
+The founts where He drank by the wayside still flow,
+And the same airs are blowing which breathed on His brow!
+
+And throned on her hills sits Jerusalem yet,
+But with dust on her forehead, and chains on her feet;
+For the crown of her pride to the mocker hath gone,
+And the holy Shechinah is dark where it shone.
+
+But wherefore this dream of the earthly abode
+Of Humanity clothed in the brightness of God?
+Were my spirit but turned from the outward and dim,
+It could gaze, even now, on the presence of Him!
+
+Not in clouds and in terrors, but gentle as when,
+In love and in meekness, He moved among men;
+And the voice which breathed peace to the waves of the sea
+In the hush of my spirit would whisper to me!
+
+And what if my feet may not tread where He stood,
+Nor my ears hear the dashing of Galilee's flood,
+Nor my eyes see the cross which he bowed Him to bear,
+Nor my knees press Gethsemane's garden of prayer.
+
+Yet, Loved of the Father, Thy Spirit is near
+To the meek, and the lowly, and penitent here;
+And the voice of Thy love is the same even now
+As at Bethany's tomb or on Olivet's brow.
+
+Oh, the outward hath gone! but in glory and power.
+The spirit surviveth the things of an hour;
+Unchanged, undecaying, its Pentecost flame
+On the heart's secret altar is burning the same
+1837.
+
+
+
+HYMNS.
+
+FROM THE FRENCH OF LAMARTINE
+
+     I.
+     "Encore un hymne, O ma lyre
+     Un hymn pour le Seigneur,
+     Un hymne dans mon delire,
+     Un hymne dans mon bonheur."
+
+
+     One hymn more, O my lyre!
+     Praise to the God above,
+     Of joy and life and love,
+     Sweeping its strings of fire!
+
+Oh, who the speed of bird and wind
+And sunbeam's glance will lend to me,
+That, soaring upward, I may find
+My resting-place and home in Thee?
+Thou, whom my soul, midst doubt and gloom,
+Adoreth with a fervent flame,--
+Mysterious spirit! unto whom
+Pertain nor sign nor name!
+
+Swiftly my lyre's soft murmurs go,
+Up from the cold and joyless earth,
+Back to the God who bade them flow,
+Whose moving spirit sent them forth.
+But as for me, O God! for me,
+The lowly creature of Thy will,
+Lingering and sad, I sigh to Thee,
+An earth-bound pilgrim still!
+
+Was not my spirit born to shine
+Where yonder stars and suns are glowing?
+To breathe with them the light divine
+From God's own holy altar flowing?
+To be, indeed, whate'er the soul
+In dreams hath thirsted for so long,--
+A portion of heaven's glorious whole
+Of loveliness and song?
+
+Oh, watchers of the stars at night,
+Who breathe their fire, as we the air,--
+Suns, thunders, stars, and rays of light,
+Oh, say, is He, the Eternal, there?
+Bend there around His awful throne
+The seraph's glance, the angel's knee?
+Or are thy inmost depths His own,
+O wild and mighty sea?
+
+Thoughts of my soul, how swift ye go!
+Swift as the eagle's glance of fire,
+Or arrows from the archer's bow,
+To the far aim of your desire!
+Thought after thought, ye thronging rise,
+Like spring-doves from the startled wood,
+Bearing like them your sacrifice
+Of music unto God!
+
+And shall these thoughts of joy and love
+Come back again no more to me?
+Returning like the patriarch's dove
+Wing-weary from the eternal sea,
+To bear within my longing arms
+The promise-bough of kindlier skies,
+Plucked from the green, immortal palms
+Which shadow Paradise?
+
+All-moving spirit! freely forth
+At Thy command the strong wind goes
+Its errand to the passive earth,
+Nor art can stay, nor strength oppose,
+Until it folds its weary wing
+Once more within the hand divine;
+So, weary from its wandering,
+My spirit turns to Thine!
+
+Child of the sea, the mountain stream,
+From its dark caverns, hurries on,
+Ceaseless, by night and morning's beam,
+By evening's star and noontide's sun,
+Until at last it sinks to rest,
+O'erwearied, in the waiting sea,
+And moans upon its mother's breast,--
+So turns my soul to Thee!
+
+O Thou who bidst the torrent flow,
+Who lendest wings unto the wind,--
+Mover of all things! where art Thou?
+Oh, whither shall I go to find
+The secret of Thy resting-place?
+Is there no holy wing for me,
+That, soaring, I may search the space
+Of highest heaven for Thee?
+
+Oh, would I were as free to rise
+As leaves on autumn's whirlwind borne,--
+The arrowy light of sunset skies,
+Or sound, or ray, or star of morn,
+Which melts in heaven at twilight's close,
+Or aught which soars unchecked and free
+Through earth and heaven; that I might lose
+Myself in finding Thee!
+
+
+     II.
+     LE CRI DE L'AME.
+
+     "Quand le souffle divin qui flotte sur le monde."
+
+When the breath divine is flowing,
+Zephyr-like o'er all things going,
+And, as the touch of viewless fingers,
+Softly on my soul it lingers,
+Open to a breath the lightest,
+Conscious of a touch the slightest,--
+As some calm, still lake, whereon
+Sinks the snowy-bosomed swan,
+And the glistening water-rings
+Circle round her moving wings
+When my upward gaze is turning
+Where the stars of heaven are burning
+Through the deep and dark abyss,
+Flowers of midnight's wilderness,
+Blowing with the evening's breath
+Sweetly in their Maker's path
+When the breaking day is flushing
+All the east, and light is gushing
+Upward through the horizon's haze,
+Sheaf-like, with its thousand rays,
+Spreading, until all above
+Overflows with joy and love,
+And below, on earth's green bosom,
+All is changed to light and blossom:
+
+When my waking fancies over
+Forms of brightness flit and hover
+Holy as the seraphs are,
+Who by Zion's fountains wear
+On their foreheads, white and broad,
+"Holiness unto the Lord!"
+When, inspired with rapture high,
+It would seem a single sigh
+Could a world of love create;
+That my life could know no date,
+And my eager thoughts could fill
+Heaven and Earth, o'erflowing still!
+
+Then, O Father! Thou alone,
+From the shadow of Thy throne,
+To the sighing of my breast
+And its rapture answerest.
+All my thoughts, which, upward winging,
+Bathe where Thy own light is springing,--
+All my yearnings to be free
+Are at echoes answering Thee!
+
+Seldom upon lips of mine,
+Father! rests that name of Thine;
+Deep within my inmost breast,
+In the secret place of mind,
+Like an awful presence shrined,
+Doth the dread idea rest
+Hushed and holy dwells it there,
+Prompter of the silent prayer,
+Lifting up my spirit's eye
+And its faint, but earnest cry,
+From its dark and cold abode,
+Unto Thee, my Guide and God!
+1837
+
+
+
+THE FAMILIST'S HYMN.
+
+     The Puritans of New England, even in their wilderness home, were
+     not exempted from the sectarian contentions which agitated the
+     mother country after the downfall of Charles the First, and of the
+     established Episcopacy. The Quakers, Baptists, and Catholics were
+     banished, on pain of death, from the Massachusetts Colony. One
+     Samuel Gorton, a bold and eloquent declaimer, after preaching for a
+     time in Boston against the doctrines of the Puritans, and declaring
+     that their churches were mere human devices, and their sacrament
+     and baptism an abomination, was driven out of the jurisdiction of
+     the colony, and compelled to seek a residence among the savages. He
+     gathered round him a considerable number of converts, who, like the
+     primitive Christians, shared all things in common. His opinions,
+     however, were so troublesome to the leading clergy of the colony,
+     that they instigated an attack upon his "Family" by an armed force,
+     which seized upon the principal men in it, and brought them into
+     Massachusetts, where they were sentenced to be kept at hard labor
+     in several towns (one only in each town), during the pleasure of
+     the General Court, they being forbidden, under severe penalties, to
+     utter any of their religious sentiments, except to such ministers
+     as might labor for their conversion. They were unquestionably
+     sincere in their opinions, and, whatever may have been their
+     errors, deserve to be ranked among those who have in all ages
+     suffered for the freedom of conscience.
+
+Father! to Thy suffering poor
+Strength and grace and faith impart,
+And with Thy own love restore
+Comfort to the broken heart!
+Oh, the failing ones confirm
+With a holier strength of zeal!
+Give Thou not the feeble worm
+Helpless to the spoiler's heel!
+
+Father! for Thy holy sake
+We are spoiled and hunted thus;
+Joyful, for Thy truth we take
+Bonds and burthens unto us
+Poor, and weak, and robbed of all,
+Weary with our daily task,
+That Thy truth may never fall
+Through our weakness, Lord, we ask.
+
+Round our fired and wasted homes
+Flits the forest-bird unscared,
+And at noon the wild beast comes
+Where our frugal meal was shared;
+For the song of praises there
+Shrieks the crow the livelong day;
+For the sound of evening prayer
+Howls the evil beast of prey!
+
+Sweet the songs we loved to sing
+Underneath Thy holy sky;
+Words and tones that used to bring
+Tears of joy in every eye;
+Dear the wrestling hours of prayer,
+When we gathered knee to knee,
+Blameless youth and hoary hair,
+Bowed, O God, alone to Thee.
+
+As Thine early children, Lord,
+Shared their wealth and daily bread,
+Even so, with one accord,
+We, in love, each other fed.
+Not with us the miser's hoard,
+Not with us his grasping hand;
+Equal round a common board,
+Drew our meek and brother band!
+
+Safe our quiet Eden lay
+When the war-whoop stirred the land
+And the Indian turned away
+From our home his bloody hand.
+Well that forest-ranger saw,
+That the burthen and the curse
+Of the white man's cruel law
+Rested also upon us.
+
+Torn apart, and driven forth
+To our toiling hard and long,
+Father! from the dust of earth
+Lift we still our grateful song!
+Grateful, that in bonds we share
+In Thy love which maketh free;
+Joyful, that the wrongs we bear,
+Draw us nearer, Lord, to Thee!
+
+Grateful! that where'er we toil,--
+By Wachuset's wooded side,
+On Nantucket's sea-worn isle,
+Or by wild Neponset's tide,--
+Still, in spirit, we are near,
+And our evening hymns, which rise
+Separate and discordant here,
+Meet and mingle in the skies!
+
+Let the scoffer scorn and mock,
+Let the proud and evil priest
+Rob the needy of his flock,
+For his wine-cup and his feast,--
+Redden not Thy bolts in store
+Through the blackness of Thy skies?
+For the sighing of the poor
+Wilt Thou not, at length, arise?
+
+Worn and wasted, oh! how long
+Shall thy trodden poor complain?
+In Thy name they bear the wrong,
+In Thy cause the bonds of pain!
+Melt oppression's heart of steel,
+Let the haughty priesthood see,
+And their blinded followers feel,
+That in us they mock at Thee!
+
+In Thy time, O Lord of hosts,
+Stretch abroad that hand to save
+Which of old, on Egypt's coasts,
+Smote apart the Red Sea's wave
+Lead us from this evil land,
+From the spoiler set us free,
+And once more our gathered band,
+Heart to heart, shall worship Thee!
+1838.
+
+
+
+EZEKIEL
+
+     Also, thou son of man, the children of thy people still are talking
+     against thee by the walls and in the doors of the houses, and speak
+     one to another, every one to his brother, saying, Come, I pray you,
+     and hear what is the word that cometh forth from the Lord. And they
+     come unto thee as the people cometh, and they sit before thee as my
+     people, and they hear thy words, but they will not do them: for
+     with their mouth they skew much love, but their heart goeth after
+     their covetousness. And, lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely
+     song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an
+     instrument: for they hear thy words, but they do them not. And when
+     this cometh to pass, (lo, it will come,) then shall they know that
+     a prophet hath been among them.--EZEKIEL, xxxiii. 30-33.
+
+They hear Thee not, O God! nor see;
+Beneath Thy rod they mock at Thee;
+The princes of our ancient line
+Lie drunken with Assyrian wine;
+The priests around Thy altar speak
+The false words which their hearers seek;
+And hymns which Chaldea's wanton maids
+Have sung in Dura's idol-shades
+Are with the Levites' chant ascending,
+With Zion's holiest anthems blending!
+
+On Israel's bleeding bosom set,
+The heathen heel is crushing yet;
+The towers upon our holy hill
+Echo Chaldean footsteps still.
+Our wasted shrines,--who weeps for them?
+Who mourneth for Jerusalem?
+Who turneth from his gains away?
+Whose knee with mine is bowed to pray?
+Who, leaving feast and purpling cup,
+Takes Zion's lamentation up?
+
+A sad and thoughtful youth, I went
+With Israel's early banishment;
+And where the sullen Chebar crept,
+The ritual of my fathers kept.
+The water for the trench I drew,
+The firstling of the flock I slew,
+And, standing at the altar's side,
+I shared the Levites' lingering pride,
+That still, amidst her mocking foes,
+The smoke of Zion's offering rose.
+
+In sudden whirlwind, cloud and flame,
+The Spirit of the Highest came!
+Before mine eyes a vision passed,
+A glory terrible and vast;
+With dreadful eyes of living things,
+And sounding sweep of angel wings,
+With circling light and sapphire throne,
+And flame-like form of One thereon,
+And voice of that dread Likeness sent
+Down from the crystal firmament!
+
+The burden of a prophet's power
+Fell on me in that fearful hour;
+From off unutterable woes
+The curtain of the future rose;
+I saw far down the coming time
+The fiery chastisement of crime;
+With noise of mingling hosts, and jar
+Of falling towers and shouts of war,
+I saw the nations rise and fall,
+Like fire-gleams on my tent's white wall.
+
+In dream and trance, I--saw the slain
+Of Egypt heaped like harvest grain.
+I saw the walls of sea-born Tyre
+Swept over by the spoiler's fire;
+And heard the low, expiring moan
+Of Edom on his rocky throne;
+And, woe is me! the wild lament
+From Zion's desolation sent;
+And felt within my heart each blow
+Which laid her holy places low.
+
+In bonds and sorrow, day by day,
+Before the pictured tile I lay;
+And there, as in a mirror, saw
+The coming of Assyria's war;
+Her swarthy lines of spearmen pass
+Like locusts through Bethhoron's grass;
+I saw them draw their stormy hem
+Of battle round Jerusalem;
+And, listening, heard the Hebrew wail!
+
+Blend with the victor-trump of Baal!
+Who trembled at my warning word?
+Who owned the prophet of the Lord?
+How mocked the rude, how scoffed the vile,
+How stung the Levites' scornful smile,
+As o'er my spirit, dark and slow,
+The shadow crept of Israel's woe
+As if the angel's mournful roll
+Had left its record on my soul,
+And traced in lines of darkness there
+The picture of its great despair!
+
+Yet ever at the hour I feel
+My lips in prophecy unseal.
+Prince, priest, and Levite gather near,
+And Salem's daughters haste to hear,
+On Chebar's waste and alien shore,
+The harp of Judah swept once more.
+They listen, as in Babel's throng
+The Chaldeans to the dancer's song,
+Or wild sabbeka's nightly play,--
+As careless and as vain as they.
+
+     .     .     .     .     .
+
+And thus, O Prophet-bard of old,
+Hast thou thy tale of sorrow told
+The same which earth's unwelcome seers
+Have felt in all succeeding years.
+Sport of the changeful multitude,
+Nor calmly heard nor understood,
+Their song has seemed a trick of art,
+Their warnings but, the actor's part.
+With bonds, and scorn, and evil will,
+The world requites its prophets still.
+
+So was it when the Holy One
+The garments of the flesh put on
+Men followed where the Highest led
+For common gifts of daily bread,
+And gross of ear, of vision dim,
+Owned not the Godlike power of Him.
+Vain as a dreamer's words to them
+His wail above Jerusalem,
+And meaningless the watch He kept
+Through which His weak disciples slept.
+
+Yet shrink not thou, whoe'er thou art,
+For God's great purpose set apart,
+Before whose far-discerning eyes,
+The Future as the Present lies!
+Beyond a narrow-bounded age
+Stretches thy prophet-heritage,
+Through Heaven's vast spaces angel-trod,
+And through the eternal years of God
+Thy audience, worlds!--all things to be
+The witness of the Truth in thee!
+1844.
+
+
+
+WHAT THE VOICE SAID
+
+MADDENED by Earth's wrong and evil,
+"Lord!" I cried in sudden ire,
+"From Thy right hand, clothed with thunder,
+Shake the bolted fire!
+
+"Love is lost, and Faith is dying;
+With the brute the man is sold;
+And the dropping blood of labor
+Hardens into gold.
+
+"Here the dying wail of Famine,
+There the battle's groan of pain;
+And, in silence, smooth-faced Mammon
+Reaping men like grain.
+
+"'Where is God, that we should fear Him?'
+Thus the earth-born Titans say
+'God! if Thou art living, hear us!'
+Thus the weak ones pray."
+
+"Thou, the patient Heaven upbraiding,"
+Spake a solemn Voice within;
+"Weary of our Lord's forbearance,
+Art thou free from sin?
+
+"Fearless brow to Him uplifting,
+Canst thou for His thunders call,
+Knowing that to guilt's attraction
+Evermore they fall?
+
+"Know'st thou not all germs of evil
+In thy heart await their time?
+Not thyself, but God's restraining,
+Stays their growth of crime.
+
+"Couldst thou boast, O child of weakness!
+O'er the sons of wrong and strife,
+Were their strong temptations planted
+In thy path of life?
+
+"Thou hast seen two streamlets gushing
+From one fountain, clear and free,
+But by widely varying channels
+Searching for the sea.
+
+"Glideth one through greenest valleys,
+Kissing them with lips still sweet;
+One, mad roaring down the mountains,
+Stagnates at their feet.
+
+"Is it choice whereby the Parsee
+Kneels before his mother's fire?
+In his black tent did the Tartar
+Choose his wandering sire?
+
+"He alone, whose hand is bounding
+Human power and human will,
+Looking through each soul's surrounding,
+Knows its good or ill.
+
+"For thyself, while wrong and sorrow
+Make to thee their strong appeal,
+Coward wert thou not to utter
+What the heart must feel.
+
+"Earnest words must needs be spoken
+When the warm heart bleeds or burns
+With its scorn of wrong, or pity
+For the wronged, by turns.
+
+"But, by all thy nature's weakness,
+Hidden faults and follies known,
+Be thou, in rebuking evil,
+Conscious of thine own.
+
+"Not the less shall stern-eyed Duty
+To thy lips her trumpet set,
+But with harsher blasts shall mingle
+Wailings of regret."
+
+Cease not, Voice of holy speaking,
+Teacher sent of God, be near,
+Whispering through the day's cool silence,
+Let my spirit hear!
+
+So, when thoughts of evil-doers
+Waken scorn, or hatred move,
+Shall a mournful fellow-feeling
+Temper all with love.
+1847.
+
+
+
+THE ANGEL OF PATIENCE.
+
+A FREE PARAPHRASE OF THE GERMAN.
+
+To weary hearts, to mourning homes,
+God's meekest Angel gently comes
+No power has he to banish pain,
+Or give us back our lost again;
+And yet in tenderest love, our dear
+And Heavenly Father sends him here.
+
+There's quiet in that Angel's glance,
+There 's rest in his still countenance!
+He mocks no grief with idle cheer,
+Nor wounds with words the mourner's ear;
+But ills and woes he may not cure
+He kindly trains us to endure.
+
+Angel of Patience! sent to calm
+Our feverish brows with cooling palm;
+To lay the storms of hope and fear,
+And reconcile life's smile and tear;
+The throbs of wounded pride to still,
+And make our own our Father's will.
+
+O thou who mournest on thy way,
+With longings for the close of day;
+He walks with thee, that Angel kind,
+And gently whispers, "Be resigned
+Bear up, bear on, the end shall tell
+The dear Lord ordereth all things well!"
+1847.
+
+
+
+THE WIFE OF MANOAH TO HER HUSBAND.
+
+Against the sunset's glowing wall
+The city towers rise black and tall,
+Where Zorah, on its rocky height,
+Stands like an armed man in the light.
+
+Down Eshtaol's vales of ripened grain
+Falls like a cloud the night amain,
+And up the hillsides climbing slow
+The barley reapers homeward go.
+
+Look, dearest! how our fair child's head
+The sunset light hath hallowed,
+Where at this olive's foot he lies,
+Uplooking to the tranquil skies.
+
+Oh, while beneath the fervent heat
+Thy sickle swept the bearded wheat,
+I've watched, with mingled joy and dread,
+Our child upon his grassy bed.
+
+Joy, which the mother feels alone
+Whose morning hope like mine had flown,
+When to her bosom, over-blessed,
+A dearer life than hers is pressed.
+
+Dread, for the future dark and still,
+Which shapes our dear one to its will;
+Forever in his large calm eyes,
+I read a tale of sacrifice.
+
+The same foreboding awe I felt
+When at the altar's side we knelt,
+And he, who as a pilgrim came,
+Rose, winged and glorious, through the flame.
+
+I slept not, though the wild bees made
+A dreamlike murmuring in the shade,
+And on me the warm-fingered hours
+Pressed with the drowsy smell of flowers.
+
+Before me, in a vision, rose
+The hosts of Israel's scornful foes,--
+Rank over rank, helm, shield, and spear,
+Glittered in noon's hot atmosphere.
+
+I heard their boast, and bitter word,
+Their mockery of the Hebrew's Lord,
+I saw their hands His ark assail,
+Their feet profane His holy veil.
+
+No angel down the blue space spoke,
+No thunder from the still sky broke;
+But in their midst, in power and awe,
+Like God's waked wrath, our child I saw!
+
+A child no more!--harsh-browed and strong,
+He towered a giant in the throng,
+And down his shoulders, broad and bare,
+Swept the black terror of his hair.
+
+He raised his arm--he smote amain;
+As round the reaper falls the grain,
+So the dark host around him fell,
+So sank the foes of Israel!
+
+Again I looked. In sunlight shone
+The towers and domes of Askelon;
+Priest, warrior, slave, a mighty crowd
+Within her idol temple bowed.
+
+Yet one knelt not; stark, gaunt, and blind,
+His arms the massive pillars twined,--
+An eyeless captive, strong with hate,
+He stood there like an evil Fate.
+
+The red shrines smoked,--the trumpets pealed
+He stooped,--the giant columns reeled;
+Reeled tower and fane, sank arch and wall,
+And the thick dust-cloud closed o'er all!
+
+Above the shriek, the crash, the groan
+Of the fallen pride of Askelon,
+I heard, sheer down the echoing sky,
+A voice as of an angel cry,--
+
+The voice of him, who at our side
+Sat through the golden eventide;
+Of him who, on thy altar's blaze,
+Rose fire-winged, with his song of praise.
+
+"Rejoice o'er Israel's broken chain,
+Gray mother of the mighty slain!
+Rejoice!" it cried, "he vanquisheth!
+The strong in life is strong in death!
+
+"To him shall Zorah's daughters raise
+Through coming years their hymns of praise,
+And gray old men at evening tell
+Of all he wrought for Israel.
+
+"And they who sing and they who hear
+Alike shall hold thy memory dear,
+And pour their blessings on thy head,
+O mother of the mighty dead!"
+
+It ceased; and though a sound I heard
+As if great wings the still air stirred,
+I only saw the barley sheaves
+And hills half hid by olive leaves.
+
+I bowed my face, in awe and fear,
+On the dear child who slumbered near;
+"With me, as with my only son,
+O God," I said, "Thy will be done!"
+1847.
+
+
+
+MY SOUL AND I
+
+Stand still, my soul, in the silent dark
+I would question thee,
+Alone in the shadow drear and stark
+With God and me!
+
+What, my soul, was thy errand here?
+Was it mirth or ease,
+Or heaping up dust from year to year?
+"Nay, none of these!"
+
+Speak, soul, aright in His holy sight
+Whose eye looks still
+And steadily on thee through the night
+"To do His will!"
+
+What hast thou done, O soul of mine,
+That thou tremblest so?
+Hast thou wrought His task, and kept the line
+He bade thee go?
+
+Aha! thou tremblest!--well I see
+Thou 'rt craven grown.
+Is it so hard with God and me
+To stand alone?
+
+Summon thy sunshine bravery back,
+O wretched sprite!
+Let me hear thy voice through this deep and black
+Abysmal night.
+
+What hast thou wrought for Right and Truth,
+For God and Man,
+From the golden hours of bright-eyed youth
+To life's mid span?
+
+What, silent all! art sad of cheer?
+Art fearful now?
+When God seemed far and men were near,
+How brave wert thou!
+
+Ah, soul of mine, thy tones I hear,
+But weak and low,
+Like far sad murmurs on my ear
+They come and go.
+
+I have wrestled stoutly with the Wrong,
+And borne the Right
+From beneath the footfall of the throng
+To life and light.
+
+"Wherever Freedom shivered a chain,
+God speed, quoth I;
+To Error amidst her shouting train
+I gave the lie."
+
+Ah, soul of mine! ah, soul of mine!
+Thy deeds are well:
+Were they wrought for Truth's sake or for thine?
+My soul, pray tell.
+
+"Of all the work my hand hath wrought
+Beneath the sky,
+Save a place in kindly human thought,
+No gain have I."
+
+Go to, go to! for thy very self
+Thy deeds were done
+Thou for fame, the miser for pelf,
+Your end is one!
+
+And where art thou going, soul of mine?
+Canst see the end?
+And whither this troubled life of thine
+Evermore doth tend?
+
+What daunts thee now? what shakes thee so?
+My sad soul say.
+"I see a cloud like a curtain low
+Hang o'er my way.
+
+"Whither I go I cannot tell
+That cloud hangs black,
+High as the heaven and deep as hell
+Across my track.
+
+"I see its shadow coldly enwrap
+The souls before.
+Sadly they enter it, step by step,
+To return no more.
+
+"They shrink, they shudder, dear God! they kneel
+To Thee in prayer.
+They shut their eyes on the cloud, but feel
+That it still is there.
+
+"In vain they turn from the dread Before
+To the Known and Gone;
+For while gazing behind them evermore
+Their feet glide on.
+
+"Yet, at times, I see upon sweet pale faces
+A light begin
+To tremble, as if from holy places
+And shrines within.
+
+"And at times methinks their cold lips move
+With hymn and prayer,
+As if somewhat of awe, but more of love
+And hope were there.
+
+"I call on the souls who have left the light
+To reveal their lot;
+I bend mine ear to that wall of night,
+And they answer not.
+
+"But I hear around me sighs of pain
+And the cry of fear,
+And a sound like the slow sad dropping of rain,
+Each drop a tear!
+
+"Ah, the cloud is dark, and day by day
+I am moving thither
+I must pass beneath it on my way--
+God pity me!--whither?"
+
+Ah, soul of mine! so brave and wise
+In the life-storm loud,
+Fronting so calmly all human eyes
+In the sunlit crowd!
+
+Now standing apart with God and me
+Thou art weakness all,
+Gazing vainly after the things to be
+Through Death's dread wall.
+
+But never for this, never for this
+Was thy being lent;
+For the craven's fear is but selfishness,
+Like his merriment.
+
+Folly and Fear are sisters twain
+One closing her eyes.
+The other peopling the dark inane
+With spectral lies.
+
+Know well, my soul, God's hand controls
+Whate'er thou fearest;
+Round Him in calmest music rolls
+Whate'er thou Nearest.
+
+What to thee is shadow, to Him is day,
+And the end He knoweth,
+And not on a blind and aimless way
+The spirit goeth.
+
+Man sees no future,--a phantom show
+Is alone before him;
+Past Time is dead, and the grasses grow,
+And flowers bloom o'er him.
+
+Nothing before, nothing behind;
+The steps of Faith
+Fall on the seeming void, and find
+The rock beneath.
+
+The Present, the Present is all thou hast
+For thy sure possessing;
+Like the patriarch's angel hold it fast
+Till it gives its blessing.
+
+Why fear the night? why shrink from Death;
+That phantom wan?
+There is nothing in heaven or earth beneath
+Save God and man.
+
+Peopling the shadows we turn from Him
+And from one another;
+All is spectral and vague and dim
+Save God and our brother!
+
+Like warp and woof all destinies
+Are woven fast,
+Linked in sympathy like the keys
+Of an organ vast.
+
+Pluck one thread, and the web ye mar;
+Break but one
+Of a thousand keys, and the paining jar
+Through all will run.
+
+O restless spirit! wherefore strain
+Beyond thy sphere?
+Heaven and hell, with their joy and pain,
+Are now and here.
+
+Back to thyself is measured well
+All thou hast given;
+Thy neighbor's wrong is thy present hell,
+His bliss, thy heaven.
+
+And in life, in death, in dark and light,
+All are in God's care
+Sound the black abyss, pierce the deep of night,
+And He is there!
+
+All which is real now remaineth,
+And fadeth never
+The hand which upholds it now sustaineth
+The soul forever.
+
+Leaning on Him, make with reverent meekness
+His own thy will,
+And with strength from Him shall thy utter weakness
+Life's task fulfil;
+
+And that cloud itself, which now before thee
+Lies dark in view,
+Shall with beams of light from the inner glory
+Be stricken through.
+
+And like meadow mist through autumn's dawn
+Uprolling thin,
+Its thickest folds when about thee drawn
+Let sunlight in.
+
+Then of what is to be, and of what is done,
+Why queriest thou?
+The past and the time to be are one,
+And both are now!
+1847.
+
+
+
+WORSHIP.
+
+     "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this. To
+     visit the fatherless and widows in, their affliction, and to keep
+     himself unspotted from the world."--JAMES I. 27.
+
+The Pagan's myths through marble lips are spoken,
+And ghosts of old Beliefs still flit and moan
+Round fane and altar overthrown and broken,
+O'er tree-grown barrow and gray ring of stone.
+
+Blind Faith had martyrs in those old high places,
+The Syrian hill grove and the Druid's wood,
+With mother's offering, to the Fiend's embraces,
+Bone of their bone, and blood of their own blood.
+
+Red altars, kindling through that night of error,
+Smoked with warm blood beneath the cruel eye
+Of lawless Power and sanguinary Terror,
+Throned on the circle of a pitiless sky;
+
+Beneath whose baleful shadow, overcasting
+All heaven above, and blighting earth below,
+The scourge grew red, the lip grew pale with fasting,
+And man's oblation was his fear and woe!
+
+Then through great temples swelled the dismal moaning
+Of dirge-like music and sepulchral prayer;
+Pale wizard priests, o'er occult symbols droning,
+Swung their white censers in the burdened air
+
+As if the pomp of rituals, and the savor
+Of gums and spices could the Unseen One please;
+As if His ear could bend, with childish favor,
+To the poor flattery of the organ keys!
+
+Feet red from war-fields trod the church aisles holy,
+With trembling reverence: and the oppressor there,
+Kneeling before his priest, abased and lowly,
+Crushed human hearts beneath his knee of prayer.
+
+Not such the service the benignant Father
+Requireth at His earthly children's hands
+Not the poor offering of vain rites, but rather
+The simple duty man from man demands.
+
+For Earth He asks it: the full joy of heaven
+Knoweth no change of waning or increase;
+The great heart of the Infinite beats even,
+Untroubled flows the river of His peace.
+
+He asks no taper lights, on high surrounding
+The priestly altar and the saintly grave,
+No dolorous chant nor organ music sounding,
+Nor incense clouding tip the twilight nave.
+
+For he whom Jesus loved hath truly spoken
+The holier worship which he deigns to bless
+Restores the lost, and binds the spirit broken,
+And feeds the widow and the fatherless!
+
+Types of our human weakness and our sorrow!
+Who lives unhaunted by his loved ones dead?
+Who, with vain longing, seeketh not to borrow
+From stranger eyes the home lights which have fled?
+
+O brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;
+Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;
+To worship rightly is to love each other,
+Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.
+
+Follow with reverent steps the great example
+Of Him whose holy work was "doing good;"
+So shall the wide earth seem our Father's temple,
+Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.
+
+Then shall all shackles fall; the stormy clangor
+Of wild war music o'er the earth shall cease;
+Love shall tread out the baleful fire of anger,
+And in its ashes plant the tree of peace!
+1848.
+
+
+
+THE HOLY LAND
+
+     Paraphrased from the lines in Lamartine's _Adieu to Marseilles_,
+     beginning
+
+          "Je n'ai pas navigue sur l'ocean de sable."
+
+I have not felt, o'er seas of sand,
+The rocking of the desert bark;
+Nor laved at Hebron's fount my hand,
+By Hebron's palm-trees cool and dark;
+Nor pitched my tent at even-fall,
+On dust where Job of old has lain,
+Nor dreamed beneath its canvas wall,
+The dream of Jacob o'er again.
+
+One vast world-page remains unread;
+How shine the stars in Chaldea's sky,
+How sounds the reverent pilgrim's tread,
+How beats the heart with God so nigh
+How round gray arch and column lone
+The spirit of the old time broods,
+And sighs in all the winds that moan
+Along the sandy solitudes!
+
+In thy tall cedars, Lebanon,
+I have not heard the nations' cries,
+Nor seen thy eagles stooping down
+Where buried Tyre in ruin lies.
+The Christian's prayer I have not said
+In Tadmor's temples of decay,
+Nor startled, with my dreary tread,
+The waste where Memnon's empire lay.
+
+Nor have I, from thy hallowed tide,
+O Jordan! heard the low lament,
+Like that sad wail along thy side
+Which Israel's mournful prophet sent!
+Nor thrilled within that grotto lone
+Where, deep in night, the Bard of Kings
+Felt hands of fire direct his own,
+And sweep for God the conscious strings.
+
+I have not climbed to Olivet,
+Nor laid me where my Saviour lay,
+And left His trace of tears as yet
+By angel eyes unwept away;
+Nor watched, at midnight's solemn time,
+The garden where His prayer and groan,
+Wrung by His sorrow and our crime,
+Rose to One listening ear alone.
+
+I have not kissed the rock-hewn grot
+Where in His mother's arms He lay,
+Nor knelt upon the sacred spot
+Where last His footsteps pressed the clay;
+Nor looked on that sad mountain head,
+Nor smote my sinful breast, where wide
+His arms to fold the world He spread,
+And bowed His head to bless--and died!
+1848.
+
+
+
+THE REWARD
+
+Who, looking backward from his manhood's prime,
+Sees not the spectre of his misspent time?
+And, through the shade
+Of funeral cypress planted thick behind,
+Hears no reproachful whisper on the wind
+From his loved dead?
+
+Who bears no trace of passion's evil force?
+Who shuns thy sting, O terrible Remorse?
+Who does not cast
+On the thronged pages of his memory's book,
+At times, a sad and half-reluctant look,
+Regretful of the past?
+
+Alas! the evil which we fain would shun
+We do, and leave the wished-for good undone
+Our strength to-day
+Is but to-morrow's weakness, prone to fall;
+Poor, blind, unprofitable servants all
+Are we alway.
+
+Yet who, thus looking backward o'er his years,
+Feels not his eyelids wet with grateful tears,
+If he hath been
+Permitted, weak and sinful as he was,
+To cheer and aid, in some ennobling cause,
+His fellow-men?
+
+If he hath hidden the outcast, or let in
+A ray of sunshine to the cell of sin;
+If he hath lent
+Strength to the weak, and, in an hour of need,
+Over the suffering, mindless of his creed
+Or home, hath bent;
+
+He has not lived in vain, and while he gives
+The praise to Him, in whom he moves and lives,
+With thankful heart;
+He gazes backward, and with hope before,
+Knowing that from his works he nevermore
+Can henceforth part.
+1848.
+
+
+
+THE WISH OF TO-DAY.
+
+I ask not now for gold to gild
+With mocking shine a weary frame;
+The yearning of the mind is stilled,
+I ask not now for Fame.
+
+A rose-cloud, dimly seen above,
+Melting in heaven's blue depths away;
+Oh, sweet, fond dream of human Love
+For thee I may not pray.
+
+But, bowed in lowliness of mind,
+I make my humble wishes known;
+I only ask a will resigned,
+O Father, to Thine own!
+
+To-day, beneath Thy chastening eye
+I crave alone for peace and rest,
+Submissive in Thy hand to lie,
+And feel that it is best.
+
+A marvel seems the Universe,
+A miracle our Life and Death;
+A mystery which I cannot pierce,
+Around, above, beneath.
+
+In vain I task my aching brain,
+In vain the sage's thought I scan,
+I only feel how weak and vain,
+How poor and blind, is man.
+
+And now my spirit sighs for home,
+And longs for light whereby to see,
+And, like a weary child, would come,
+O Father, unto Thee!
+
+Though oft, like letters traced on sand,
+My weak resolves have passed away,
+In mercy lend Thy helping hand
+Unto my prayer to-day!
+1848.
+
+
+
+ALL'S WELL
+
+The clouds, which rise with thunder, slake
+Our thirsty souls with rain;
+The blow most dreaded falls to break
+From off our limbs a chain;
+And wrongs of man to man but make
+The love of God more plain.
+As through the shadowy lens of even
+The eye looks farthest into heaven
+On gleams of star and depths of blue
+The glaring sunshine never knew!
+1850.
+
+
+
+INVOCATION
+
+Through Thy clear spaces, Lord, of old,
+Formless and void the dead earth rolled;
+Deaf to Thy heaven's sweet music, blind
+To the great lights which o'er it shined;
+No sound, no ray, no warmth, no breath,--
+A dumb despair, a wandering death.
+
+To that dark, weltering horror came
+Thy spirit, like a subtle flame,--
+A breath of life electrical,
+Awakening and transforming all,
+Till beat and thrilled in every part
+The pulses of a living heart.
+
+Then knew their bounds the land and sea;
+Then smiled the bloom of mead and tree;
+From flower to moth, from beast to man,
+The quick creative impulse ran;
+And earth, with life from thee renewed,
+Was in thy holy eyesight good.
+
+As lost and void, as dark and cold
+And formless as that earth of old;
+A wandering waste of storm and night,
+Midst spheres of song and realms of light;
+A blot upon thy holy sky,
+Untouched, unwarned of thee, am I.
+
+O Thou who movest on the deep
+Of spirits, wake my own from sleep
+Its darkness melt, its coldness warm,
+The lost restore, the ill transform,
+That flower and fruit henceforth may be
+Its grateful offering, worthy Thee.
+1851.
+
+
+
+QUESTIONS OF LIFE
+
+     And the angel that was sent unto me, whose name was Uriel,
+     gave me an answer and said,
+     "Thy heart hath gone too far in this world, and thinkest thou
+     to comprehend the way of the Most High?"
+     Then said I, "Yea, my Lord."
+     Then said he unto me, "Go thy way, weigh me the weight of
+     the fire or measure me the blast of the wind, or call me again the
+     day that is past."--2 ESDRAS, chap. iv.
+
+A bending staff I would not break,
+A feeble faith I would not shake,
+Nor even rashly pluck away
+The error which some truth may stay,
+Whose loss might leave the soul without
+A shield against the shafts of doubt.
+
+And yet, at times, when over all
+A darker mystery seems to fall,
+(May God forgive the child of dust,
+Who seeks to know, where Faith should trust!)
+I raise the questions, old and dark,
+Of Uzdom's tempted patriarch,
+And, speech-confounded, build again
+The baffled tower of Shinar's plain.
+
+I am: how little more I know!
+Whence came I? Whither do I go?
+A centred self, which feels and is;
+A cry between the silences;
+A shadow-birth of clouds at strife
+With sunshine on the hills of life;
+A shaft from Nature's quiver cast
+Into the Future from the Past;
+Between the cradle and the shroud,
+A meteor's flight from cloud to cloud.
+
+Thorough the vastness, arching all,
+I see the great stars rise and fall,
+The rounding seasons come and go,
+The tided oceans ebb and flow;
+The tokens of a central force,
+Whose circles, in their widening course,
+O'erlap and move the universe;
+The workings of the law whence springs
+The rhythmic harmony of things,
+Which shapes in earth the darkling spar,
+And orbs in heaven the morning star.
+Of all I see, in earth and sky,--
+Star, flower, beast, bird,--what part have I?
+This conscious life,--is it the same
+Which thrills the universal frame,
+Whereby the caverned crystal shoots,
+And mounts the sap from forest roots,
+Whereby the exiled wood-bird tells
+When Spring makes green her native dells?
+How feels the stone the pang of birth,
+Which brings its sparkling prism forth?
+The forest-tree the throb which gives
+The life-blood to its new-born leaves?
+Do bird and blossom feel, like me,
+Life's many-folded mystery,--
+The wonder which it is to be?
+Or stand I severed and distinct,
+From Nature's "chain of life" unlinked?
+Allied to all, yet not the less
+Prisoned in separate consciousness,
+Alone o'erburdened with a sense
+Of life, and cause, and consequence?
+
+In vain to me the Sphinx propounds
+The riddle of her sights and sounds;
+Back still the vaulted mystery gives
+The echoed question it receives.
+What sings the brook? What oracle
+Is in the pine-tree's organ swell?
+What may the wind's low burden be?
+The meaning of the moaning sea?
+The hieroglyphics of the stars?
+Or clouded sunset's crimson bars?
+I vainly ask, for mocks my skill
+The trick of Nature's cipher still.
+
+I turn from Nature unto men,
+I ask the stylus and the pen;
+What sang the bards of old? What meant
+The prophets of the Orient?
+The rolls of buried Egypt, hid
+In painted tomb and pyramid?
+What mean Idumea's arrowy lines,
+Or dusk Elora's monstrous signs?
+How speaks the primal thought of man
+From the grim carvings of Copan?
+
+Where rests the secret? Where the keys
+Of the old death-bolted mysteries?
+Alas! the dead retain their trust;
+Dust hath no answer from the dust.
+
+The great enigma still unguessed,
+Unanswered the eternal quest;
+I gather up the scattered rays
+Of wisdom in the early days,
+Faint gleams and broken, like the light
+Of meteors in a northern night,
+Betraying to the darkling earth
+The unseen sun which gave them birth;
+I listen to the sibyl's chant,
+The voice of priest and hierophant;
+I know what Indian Kreeshna saith,
+And what of life and what of death
+The demon taught to Socrates;
+And what, beneath his garden-trees
+Slow pacing, with a dream-like tread,--
+The solemn-thoughted Plato said;
+Nor lack I tokens, great or small,
+Of God's clear light in each and all,
+While holding with more dear regard
+The scroll of Hebrew seer and bard,
+The starry pages promise-lit
+With Christ's Evangel over-writ,
+Thy miracle of life and death,
+O Holy One of Nazareth!
+
+On Aztec ruins, gray and lone,
+The circling serpent coils in stone,--
+Type of the endless and unknown;
+Whereof we seek the clue to find,
+With groping fingers of the blind!
+Forever sought, and never found,
+We trace that serpent-symbol round
+Our resting-place, our starting bound
+Oh, thriftlessness of dream and guess!
+Oh, wisdom which is foolishness!
+Why idly seek from outward things
+The answer inward silence brings?
+Why stretch beyond our proper sphere
+And age, for that which lies so near?
+Why climb the far-off hills with pain,
+A nearer view of heaven to gain?
+In lowliest depths of bosky dells
+The hermit Contemplation dwells.
+A fountain's pine-hung slope his seat,
+And lotus-twined his silent feet,
+Whence, piercing heaven, with screened sight,
+He sees at noon the stars, whose light
+Shall glorify the coining night.
+
+Here let me pause, my quest forego;
+Enough for me to feel and know
+That He in whom the cause and end,
+The past and future, meet and blend,--
+Who, girt with his Immensities,
+Our vast and star-hung system sees,
+Small as the clustered Pleiades,--
+Moves not alone the heavenly quires,
+But waves the spring-time's grassy spires,
+Guards not archangel feet alone,
+But deigns to guide and keep my own;
+Speaks not alone the words of fate
+Which worlds destroy, and worlds create,
+But whispers in my spirit's ear,
+In tones of love, or warning fear,
+A language none beside may hear.
+
+To Him, from wanderings long and wild,
+I come, an over-wearied child,
+In cool and shade His peace to find,
+Lice dew-fall settling on my mind.
+Assured that all I know is best,
+And humbly trusting for the rest,
+I turn from Fancy's cloud-built scheme,
+Dark creed, and mournful eastern dream
+Of power, impersonal and cold,
+Controlling all, itself controlled,
+Maker and slave of iron laws,
+Alike the subject and the cause;
+From vain philosophies, that try
+The sevenfold gates of mystery,
+And, baffled ever, babble still,
+Word-prodigal of fate and will;
+From Nature, and her mockery, Art;
+And book and speech of men apart,
+To the still witness in my heart;
+With reverence waiting to behold
+His Avatar of love untold,
+The Eternal Beauty new and old!
+1862.
+
+
+
+FIRST-DAY THOUGHTS.
+
+In calm and cool and silence, once again
+I find my old accustomed place among
+My brethren, where, perchance, no human tongue
+Shall utter words; where never hymn is sung,
+Nor deep-toned organ blown, nor censer swung,
+Nor dim light falling through the pictured pane!
+There, syllabled by silence, let me hear
+The still small voice which reached the prophet's ear;
+Read in my heart a still diviner law
+Than Israel's leader on his tables saw!
+There let me strive with each besetting sin,
+Recall my wandering fancies, and restrain
+The sore disquiet of a restless brain;
+And, as the path of duty is made plain,
+May grace be given that I may walk therein,
+Not like the hireling, for his selfish gain,
+With backward glances and reluctant tread,
+Making a merit of his coward dread,
+But, cheerful, in the light around me thrown,
+Walking as one to pleasant service led;
+Doing God's will as if it were my own,
+Yet trusting not in mine, but in His strength alone!
+1852.
+
+
+
+TRUST.
+
+The same old baffling questions! O my friend,
+I cannot answer them. In vain I send
+My soul into the dark, where never burn
+The lamps of science, nor the natural light
+Of Reason's sun and stars! I cannot learn
+Their great and solemn meanings, nor discern
+The awful secrets of the eyes which turn
+Evermore on us through the day and night
+With silent challenge and a dumb demand,
+Proffering the riddles of the dread unknown,
+Like the calm Sphinxes, with their eyes of stone,
+Questioning the centuries from their veils of sand!
+I have no answer for myself or thee,
+Save that I learned beside my mother's knee;
+"All is of God that is, and is to be;
+And God is good." Let this suffice us still,
+Resting in childlike trust upon His will
+Who moves to His great ends unthwarted by the ill.
+1853.
+
+
+
+TRINITAS.
+
+At morn I prayed, "I fain would see
+How Three are One, and One is Three;
+Read the dark riddle unto me."
+
+I wandered forth, the sun and air
+I saw bestowed with equal care
+On good and evil, foul and fair.
+
+No partial favor dropped the rain;
+Alike the righteous and profane
+Rejoiced above their heading grain.
+
+And my heart murmured, "Is it meet
+That blindfold Nature thus should treat
+With equal hand the tares and wheat?"
+
+A presence melted through my mood,--
+A warmth, a light, a sense of good,
+Like sunshine through a winter wood.
+
+I saw that presence, mailed complete
+In her white innocence, pause to greet
+A fallen sister of the street.
+
+Upon her bosom snowy pure
+The lost one clung, as if secure
+From inward guilt or outward lure.
+
+"Beware!" I said; "in this I see
+No gain to her, but loss to thee
+Who touches pitch defiled must be."
+
+I passed the haunts of shame and sin,
+And a voice whispered, "Who therein
+Shall these lost souls to Heaven's peace win?
+
+"Who there shall hope and health dispense,
+And lift the ladder up from thence
+Whose rounds are prayers of penitence?"
+
+I said, "No higher life they know;
+These earth-worms love to have it so.
+Who stoops to raise them sinks as low."
+
+That night with painful care I read
+What Hippo's saint and Calvin said;
+The living seeking to the dead!
+
+In vain I turned, in weary quest,
+Old pages, where (God give them rest!)
+The poor creed-mongers dreamed and guessed.
+
+And still I prayed, "Lord, let me see
+How Three are One, and One is Three;
+Read the dark riddle unto me!"
+
+Then something whispered, "Dost thou pray
+For what thou hast? This very day
+The Holy Three have crossed thy way.
+
+"Did not the gifts of sun and air
+To good and ill alike declare
+The all-compassionate Father's care?
+
+"In the white soul that stooped to raise
+The lost one from her evil ways,
+Thou saw'st the Christ, whom angels praise!
+
+"A bodiless Divinity,
+The still small Voice that spake to thee
+Was the Holy Spirit's mystery!
+
+"O blind of sight, of faith how small!
+Father, and Son, and Holy Call
+This day thou hast denied them all!
+
+"Revealed in love and sacrifice,
+The Holiest passed before thine eyes,
+One and the same, in threefold guise.
+
+"The equal Father in rain and sun,
+His Christ in the good to evil done,
+His Voice in thy soul;--and the Three are One!"
+
+I shut my grave Aquinas fast;
+The monkish gloss of ages past,
+The schoolman's creed aside I cast.
+
+And my heart answered, "Lord, I see
+How Three are One, and One is Three;
+Thy riddle hath been read to me!"
+1858.
+
+
+
+THE SISTERS
+
+A PICTURE BY BARRY
+
+The shade for me, but over thee
+The lingering sunshine still;
+As, smiling, to the silent stream
+Comes down the singing rill.
+
+So come to me, my little one,--
+My years with thee I share,
+And mingle with a sister's love
+A mother's tender care.
+
+But keep the smile upon thy lip,
+The trust upon thy brow;
+Since for the dear one God hath called
+We have an angel now.
+
+Our mother from the fields of heaven
+Shall still her ear incline;
+Nor need we fear her human love
+Is less for love divine.
+
+The songs are sweet they sing beneath
+The trees of life so fair,
+But sweetest of the songs of heaven
+Shall be her children's prayer.
+
+Then, darling, rest upon my breast,
+And teach my heart to lean
+With thy sweet trust upon the arm
+Which folds us both unseen!
+1858
+
+
+
+"THE ROCK" IN EL GHOR.
+
+Dead Petra in her hill-tomb sleeps,
+Her stones of emptiness remain;
+Around her sculptured mystery sweeps
+The lonely waste of Edom's plain.
+
+From the doomed dwellers in the cleft
+The bow of vengeance turns not back;
+Of all her myriads none are left
+Along the Wady Mousa's track.
+
+Clear in the hot Arabian day
+Her arches spring, her statues climb;
+Unchanged, the graven wonders pay
+No tribute to the spoiler, Time!
+
+Unchanged the awful lithograph
+Of power and glory undertrod;
+Of nations scattered like the chaff
+Blown from the threshing-floor of God.
+
+Yet shall the thoughtful stranger turn
+From Petra's gates with deeper awe,
+To mark afar the burial urn
+Of Aaron on the cliffs of Hor;
+
+And where upon its ancient guard
+Thy Rock, El Ghor, is standing yet,--
+Looks from its turrets desertward,
+And keeps the watch that God has set.
+
+The same as when in thunders loud
+It heard the voice of God to man,
+As when it saw in fire and cloud
+The angels walk in Israel's van,
+
+Or when from Ezion-Geber's way
+It saw the long procession file,
+And heard the Hebrew timbrels play
+The music of the lordly Nile;
+
+Or saw the tabernacle pause,
+Cloud-bound, by Kadesh Barnea's wells,
+While Moses graved the sacred laws,
+And Aaron swung his golden bells.
+
+Rock of the desert, prophet-sung!
+How grew its shadowing pile at length,
+A symbol, in the Hebrew tongue,
+Of God's eternal love and strength.
+
+On lip of bard and scroll of seer,
+From age to age went down the name,
+Until the Shiloh's promised year,
+And Christ, the Rock of Ages, came!
+
+The path of life we walk to-day
+Is strange as that the Hebrews trod;
+We need the shadowing rock, as they,--
+We need, like them, the guides of God.
+
+God send His angels, Cloud and Fire,
+To lead us o'er the desert sand!
+God give our hearts their long desire,
+His shadow in a weary land!
+1859.
+
+
+
+THE OVER-HEART.
+
+     "For of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things,
+     to whom be glory forever! "--PAUL.
+
+Above, below, in sky and sod,
+In leaf and spar, in star and man,
+Well might the wise Athenian scan
+The geometric signs of God,
+The measured order of His plan.
+
+And India's mystics sang aright
+Of the One Life pervading all,--
+One Being's tidal rise and fall
+In soul and form, in sound and sight,--
+Eternal outflow and recall.
+
+God is: and man in guilt and fear
+The central fact of Nature owns;
+Kneels, trembling, by his altar-stones,
+And darkly dreams the ghastly smear
+Of blood appeases and atones.
+
+Guilt shapes the Terror: deep within
+The human heart the secret lies
+Of all the hideous deities;
+And, painted on a ground of sin,
+The fabled gods of torment rise!
+
+And what is He? The ripe grain nods,
+The sweet dews fall, the sweet flowers blow;
+But darker signs His presence show
+The earthquake and the storm are God's,
+And good and evil interflow.
+
+O hearts of love! O souls that turn
+Like sunflowers to the pure and best!
+To you the truth is manifest:
+For they the mind of Christ discern
+Who lean like John upon His breast!
+
+In him of whom the sibyl told,
+For whom the prophet's harp was toned,
+Whose need the sage and magian owned,
+The loving heart of God behold,
+The hope for which the ages groaned!
+
+Fade, pomp of dreadful imagery
+Wherewith mankind have deified
+Their hate, and selfishness, and pride!
+Let the scared dreamer wake to see
+The Christ of Nazareth at his side!
+
+What doth that holy Guide require?
+No rite of pain, nor gift of blood,
+But man a kindly brotherhood,
+Looking, where duty is desire,
+To Him, the beautiful and good.
+
+Gone be the faithlessness of fear,
+And let the pitying heaven's sweet rain
+Wash out the altar's bloody stain;
+The law of Hatred disappear,
+The law of Love alone remain.
+
+How fall the idols false and grim!
+And to! their hideous wreck above
+The emblems of the Lamb and Dove!
+Man turns from God, not God from him;
+And guilt, in suffering, whispers Love!
+
+The world sits at the feet of Christ,
+Unknowing, blind, and unconsoled;
+It yet shall touch His garment's fold,
+And feel the heavenly Alchemist
+Transform its very dust to gold.
+
+The theme befitting angel tongues
+Beyond a mortal's scope has grown.
+O heart of mine! with reverence own
+The fulness which to it belongs,
+And trust the unknown for the known.
+1859.
+
+
+
+THE SHADOW AND THE LIGHT.
+
+     "And I sought, whence is Evil: I set before the eye of my spirit
+     the whole creation; whatsoever we see therein,--sea, earth, air,
+     stars, trees, moral creatures,--yea, whatsoever there is we do not
+     see,--angels and spiritual powers. Where is evil, and whence comes
+     it, since God the Good hath created all things? Why made He
+     anything at all of evil, and not rather by His Almightiness cause
+     it not to be? These thoughts I turned in my miserable heart,
+     overcharged with most gnawing cares." "And, admonished to return to
+     myself, I entered even into my inmost soul, Thou being my guide,
+     and beheld even beyond my soul and mind the Light unchangeable. He
+     who knows the Truth knows what that Light is, and he that knows it
+     knows Eternity! O--Truth, who art Eternity! Love, who art Truth!
+     Eternity, who art Love! And I beheld that Thou madest all things
+     good, and to Thee is nothing whatsoever evil. From the angel to the
+     worm, from the first motion to the last, Thou settest each in its
+     place, and everything is good in its kind. Woe is me!--how high art
+     Thou in the highest, how deep in the deepest! and Thou never
+     departest from us and we scarcely return to Thee."
+     --AUGUSTINE'S Soliloquies, Book VII.
+
+The fourteen centuries fall away
+Between us and the Afric saint,
+And at his side we urge, to-day,
+The immemorial quest and old complaint.
+
+No outward sign to us is given,--
+From sea or earth comes no reply;
+Hushed as the warm Numidian heaven
+He vainly questioned bends our frozen sky.
+
+No victory comes of all our strife,--
+From all we grasp the meaning slips;
+The Sphinx sits at the gate of life,
+With the old question on her awful lips.
+
+In paths unknown we hear the feet
+Of fear before, and guilt behind;
+We pluck the wayside fruit, and eat
+Ashes and dust beneath its golden rind.
+
+From age to age descends unchecked
+The sad bequest of sire to son,
+The body's taint, the mind's defect;
+Through every web of life the dark threads run.
+
+Oh, why and whither? God knows all;
+I only know that He is good,
+And that whatever may befall
+Or here or there, must be the best that could.
+
+Between the dreadful cherubim
+A Father's face I still discern,
+As Moses looked of old on Him,
+And saw His glory into goodness turn!
+
+For He is merciful as just;
+And so, by faith correcting sight,
+I bow before His will, and trust
+Howe'er they seem He doeth all things right.
+
+And dare to hope that Tie will make
+The rugged smooth, the doubtful plain;
+His mercy never quite forsake;
+His healing visit every realm of pain;
+
+That suffering is not His revenge
+Upon His creatures weak and frail,
+Sent on a pathway new and strange
+With feet that wander and with eyes that fail;
+
+That, o'er the crucible of pain,
+Watches the tender eye of Love
+The slow transmuting of the chain
+Whose links are iron below to gold above!
+
+Ah me! we doubt the shining skies,
+Seen through our shadows of offence,
+And drown with our poor childish cries
+The cradle-hymn of kindly Providence.
+
+And still we love the evil cause,
+And of the just effect complain
+We tread upon life's broken laws,
+And murmur at our self-inflicted pain;
+
+We turn us from the light, and find
+Our spectral shapes before us thrown,
+As they who leave the sun behind
+Walk in the shadows of themselves alone.
+
+And scarce by will or strength of ours
+We set our faces to the day;
+Weak, wavering, blind, the Eternal Powers
+Alone can turn us from ourselves away.
+
+Our weakness is the strength of sin,
+But love must needs be stronger far,
+Outreaching all and gathering in
+The erring spirit and the wandering star.
+
+A Voice grows with the growing years;
+Earth, hushing down her bitter cry,
+Looks upward from her graves, and hears,
+"The Resurrection and the Life am I."
+
+O Love Divine!--whose constant beam
+Shines on the eyes that will not see,
+And waits to bless us, while we dream
+Thou leavest us because we turn from thee!
+
+All souls that struggle and aspire,
+All hearts of prayer by thee are lit;
+And, dim or clear, thy tongues of fire
+On dusky tribes and twilight centuries sit.
+
+Nor bounds, nor clime, nor creed thou know'st,
+Wide as our need thy favors fall;
+The white wings of the Holy Ghost
+Stoop, seen or unseen, o'er the heads of all.
+
+O Beauty, old yet ever new!
+Eternal Voice, and Inward Word,
+The Logos of the Greek and Jew,
+The old sphere-music which the Samian heard!
+
+Truth, which the sage and prophet saw,
+Long sought without, but found within,
+The Law of Love beyond all law,
+The Life o'erflooding mortal death and sin!
+
+Shine on us with the light which glowed
+Upon the trance-bound shepherd's way.
+Who saw the Darkness overflowed
+And drowned by tides of everlasting Day.
+
+Shine, light of God!--make broad thy scope
+To all who sin and suffer; more
+And better than we dare to hope
+With Heaven's compassion make our longings poor!
+1860.
+
+
+
+THE CRY OF A LOST SOUL.
+
+     Lieutenant Herndon's Report of the Exploration of the Amazon has a
+     striking description of the peculiar and melancholy notes of a
+     bird heard by night on the shores of the river. The Indian guides
+     called it "The Cry of a Lost Soul"! Among the numerous translations
+     of this poem is one by the Emperor of Brazil.
+
+In that black forest, where, when day is done,
+With a snake's stillness glides the Amazon
+Darkly from sunset to the rising sun,
+
+A cry, as of the pained heart of the wood,
+The long, despairing moan of solitude
+And darkness and the absence of all good,
+
+Startles the traveller, with a sound so drear,
+So full of hopeless agony and fear,
+His heart stands still and listens like his ear.
+
+The guide, as if he heard a dead-bell toll,
+Starts, drops his oar against the gunwale's thole,
+Crosses himself, and whispers, "A lost soul!"
+
+"No, Senor, not a bird. I know it well,--
+It is the pained soul of some infidel
+Or cursed heretic that cries from hell.
+
+"Poor fool! with hope still mocking his despair,
+He wanders, shrieking on the midnight air
+For human pity and for Christian prayer.
+
+"Saints strike him dumb! Our Holy Mother hath
+No prayer for him who, sinning unto death,
+Burns always in the furnace of God's wrath!"
+
+Thus to the baptized pagan's cruel lie,
+Lending new horror to that mournful cry,
+The voyager listens, making no reply.
+
+Dim burns the boat-lamp: shadows deepen round,
+From giant trees with snake-like creepers wound,
+And the black water glides without a sound.
+
+But in the traveller's heart a secret sense
+Of nature plastic to benign intents,
+And an eternal good in Providence,
+
+Lifts to the starry calm of heaven his eyes;
+And to! rebuking all earth's ominous cries,
+The Cross of pardon lights the tropic skies!
+
+"Father of all!" he urges his strong plea,
+"Thou lovest all: Thy erring child may be
+Lost to himself, but never lost to Thee!
+
+"All souls are Thine; the wings of morning bear
+None from that Presence which is everywhere,
+Nor hell itself can hide, for Thou art there.
+
+"Through sins of sense, perversities of will,
+Through doubt and pain, through guilt and shame  and ill,
+Thy pitying eye is on Thy creature still.
+
+"Wilt thou not make, Eternal Source and Goal!
+In Thy long years, life's broken circle whole,
+And change to praise the cry of a lost soul?"
+1862.
+
+
+
+ANDREW RYKMAN'S PRAYER
+
+Andrew Rykman's dead and gone;
+You can see his leaning slate
+In the graveyard, and thereon
+Read his name and date.
+
+"_Trust is truer than our fears_,"
+Runs the legend through the moss,
+"_Gain is not in added years,
+Nor in death is loss_."
+
+Still the feet that thither trod,
+All the friendly eyes are dim;
+Only Nature, now, and God
+Have a care for him.
+
+There the dews of quiet fall,
+Singing birds and soft winds stray:
+Shall the tender Heart of all
+Be less kind than they?
+
+What he was and what he is
+They who ask may haply find,
+If they read this prayer of his
+Which he left behind.
+
+
+       .    .    .    .
+
+Pardon, Lord, the lips that dare
+Shape in words a mortal's prayer!
+Prayer, that, when my day is done,
+And I see its setting sun,
+Shorn and beamless, cold and dim,
+Sink beneath the horizon's rim,--
+When this ball of rock and clay
+Crumbles from my feet away,
+And the solid shores of sense
+Melt into the vague immense,
+Father! I may come to Thee
+Even with the beggar's plea,
+As the poorest of Thy poor,
+With my needs, and nothing more.
+
+Not as one who seeks his home
+With a step assured I come;
+Still behind the tread I hear
+Of my life-companion, Fear;
+Still a shadow deep and vast
+From my westering feet is cast,
+Wavering, doubtful, undefined,
+Never shapen nor outlined
+From myself the fear has grown,
+And the shadow is my own.
+
+Yet, O Lord, through all a sense
+Of Thy tender providence
+Stays my failing heart on Thee,
+And confirms the feeble knee;
+And, at times, my worn feet press
+Spaces of cool quietness,
+Lilied whiteness shone upon
+Not by light of moon or sun.
+Hours there be of inmost calm,
+Broken but by grateful psalm,
+When I love Thee more than fear Thee,
+And Thy blessed Christ seems near me,
+With forgiving look, as when
+He beheld the Magdalen.
+Well I know that all things move
+To the spheral rhythm of love,--
+That to Thee, O Lord of all!
+Nothing can of chance befall
+Child and seraph, mote and star,
+Well Thou knowest what we are
+Through Thy vast creative plan
+Looking, from the worm to man,
+There is pity in Thine eyes,
+But no hatred nor surprise.
+Not in blind caprice of will,
+Not in cunning sleight of skill,
+Not for show of power, was wrought
+Nature's marvel in Thy thought.
+Never careless hand and vain
+Smites these chords of joy and pain;
+No immortal selfishness
+Plays the game of curse and bless
+Heaven and earth are witnesses
+That Thy glory goodness is.
+
+Not for sport of mind and force
+Hast Thou made Thy universe,
+But as atmosphere and zone
+Of Thy loving heart alone.
+Man, who walketh in a show,
+Sees before him, to and fro,
+Shadow and illusion go;
+All things flow and fluctuate,
+Now contract and now dilate.
+In the welter of this sea,
+Nothing stable is but Thee;
+In this whirl of swooning trance,
+Thou alone art permanence;
+All without Thee only seems,
+All beside is choice of dreams.
+Never yet in darkest mood
+Doubted I that Thou wast good,
+Nor mistook my will for fate,
+Pain of sin for heavenly hate,--
+Never dreamed the gates of pearl
+Rise from out the burning marl,
+Or that good can only live
+Of the bad conservative,
+And through counterpoise of hell
+Heaven alone be possible.
+
+For myself alone I doubt;
+All is well, I know, without;
+I alone the beauty mar,
+I alone the music jar.
+Yet, with hands by evil stained,
+And an ear by discord pained,
+I am groping for the keys
+Of the heavenly harmonies;
+Still within my heart I bear
+Love for all things good and fair.
+Hands of want or souls in pain
+Have not sought my door in vain;
+I have kept my fealty good
+To the human brotherhood;
+Scarcely have I asked in prayer
+That which others might not share.
+I, who hear with secret shame
+Praise that paineth more than blame,
+Rich alone in favors lent,
+Virtuous by accident,
+Doubtful where I fain would rest,
+Frailest where I seem the best,
+Only strong for lack of test,--
+What am I, that I should press
+Special pleas of selfishness,
+Coolly mounting into heaven
+On my neighbor unforgiven?
+Ne'er to me, howe'er disguised,
+Comes a saint unrecognized;
+Never fails my heart to greet
+Noble deed with warmer beat;
+Halt and maimed, I own not less
+All the grace of holiness;
+Nor, through shame or self-distrust,
+Less I love the pure and just.
+Lord, forgive these words of mine
+What have I that is not Thine?
+Whatsoe'er I fain would boast
+Needs Thy pitying pardon most.
+Thou, O Elder Brother! who
+In Thy flesh our trial knew,
+Thou, who hast been touched by these
+Our most sad infirmities,
+Thou alone the gulf canst span
+In the dual heart of man,
+And between the soul and sense
+Reconcile all difference,
+Change the dream of me and mine
+For the truth of Thee and Thine,
+And, through chaos, doubt, and strife,
+Interfuse Thy calm of life.
+Haply, thus by Thee renewed,
+In Thy borrowed goodness good,
+Some sweet morning yet in God's
+Dim, veonian periods,
+Joyful I shall wake to see
+Those I love who rest in Thee,
+And to them in Thee allied
+Shall my soul be satisfied.
+
+Scarcely Hope hath shaped for me
+What the future life may be.
+Other lips may well be bold;
+Like the publican of old,
+I can only urge the plea,
+"Lord, be merciful to me!"
+Nothing of desert I claim,
+Unto me belongeth shame.
+Not for me the crowns of gold,
+Palms, and harpings manifold;
+Not for erring eye and feet
+Jasper wall and golden street.
+What thou wilt, O Father, give I
+All is gain that I receive.
+
+If my voice I may not raise
+In the elders' song of praise,
+If I may not, sin-defiled,
+Claim my birthright as a child,
+Suffer it that I to Thee
+As an hired servant be;
+Let the lowliest task be mine,
+Grateful, so the work be Thine;
+Let me find the humblest place
+In the shadow of Thy grace
+Blest to me were any spot
+Where temptation whispers not.
+If there be some weaker one,
+Give me strength to help him on
+If a blinder soul there be,
+Let me guide him nearer Thee.
+Make my mortal dreams come true
+With the work I fain would do;
+Clothe with life the weak intent,
+Let me be the thing I meant;
+Let me find in Thy employ
+Peace that dearer is than joy;
+Out of self to love be led
+And to heaven acclimated,
+Until all things sweet and good
+Seem my natural habitude.
+
+     .    .    .    .
+
+So we read the prayer of him
+Who, with John of Labadie,
+Trod, of old, the oozy rim
+Of the Zuyder Zee.
+
+Thus did Andrew Rykman pray.
+Are we wiser, better grown,
+That we may not, in our day,
+Make his prayer our own?
+
+
+
+THE ANSWER.
+
+Spare me, dread angel of reproof,
+And let the sunshine weave to-day
+Its gold-threads in the warp and woof
+Of life so poor and gray.
+
+Spare me awhile; the flesh is weak.
+These lingering feet, that fain would stray
+Among the flowers, shall some day seek
+The strait and narrow way.
+
+Take off thy ever-watchful eye,
+The awe of thy rebuking frown;
+The dullest slave at times must sigh
+To fling his burdens down;
+
+To drop his galley's straining oar,
+And press, in summer warmth and calm,
+The lap of some enchanted shore
+Of blossom and of balm.
+
+Grudge not my life its hour of bloom,
+My heart its taste of long desire;
+This day be mine: be those to come
+As duty shall require.
+
+The deep voice answered to my own,
+Smiting my selfish prayers away;
+"To-morrow is with God alone,
+And man hath but to-day.
+
+"Say not, thy fond, vain heart within,
+The Father's arm shall still be wide,
+When from these pleasant ways of sin
+Thou turn'st at eventide.
+
+"'Cast thyself down,' the tempter saith,
+'And angels shall thy feet upbear.'
+He bids thee make a lie of faith,
+And blasphemy of prayer.
+
+"Though God be good and free be heaven,
+No force divine can love compel;
+And, though the song of sins forgiven
+May sound through lowest hell,
+
+"The sweet persuasion of His voice
+Respects thy sanctity of will.
+He giveth day: thou hast thy choice
+To walk in darkness still;
+
+"As one who, turning from the light,
+Watches his own gray shadow fall,
+Doubting, upon his path of night,
+If there be day at all!
+
+"No word of doom may shut thee out,
+No wind of wrath may downward whirl,
+No swords of fire keep watch about
+The open gates of pearl;
+
+"A tenderer light than moon or sun,
+Than song of earth a sweeter hymn,
+May shine and sound forever on,
+And thou be deaf and dim.
+
+"Forever round the Mercy-seat
+The guiding lights of Love shall burn;
+But what if, habit-bound, thy feet
+Shall lack the will to turn?
+
+"What if thine eye refuse to see,
+Thine ear of Heaven's free welcome fail,
+And thou a willing captive be,
+Thyself thy own dark jail?
+
+"Oh, doom beyond the saddest guess,
+As the long years of God unroll,
+To make thy dreary selfishness
+The prison of a soul!
+
+"To doubt the love that fain would break
+The fetters from thy self-bound limb;
+And dream that God can thee forsake
+As thou forsakest Him!"
+1863.
+
+
+
+THE ETERNAL GOODNESS.
+
+O friends! with whom my feet have trod
+The quiet aisles of prayer,
+Glad witness to your zeal for God
+And love of man I bear.
+
+I trace your lines of argument;
+Your logic linked and strong
+I weigh as one who dreads dissent,
+And fears a doubt as wrong.
+
+But still my human hands are weak
+To hold your iron creeds
+Against the words ye bid me speak
+My heart within me pleads.
+
+Who fathoms the Eternal Thought?
+Who talks of scheme and plan?
+The Lord is God! He needeth not
+The poor device of man.
+
+I walk with bare, hushed feet the ground
+Ye tread with boldness shod;
+I dare not fix with mete and bound
+The love and power of God.
+
+Ye praise His justice; even such
+His pitying love I deem
+Ye seek a king; I fain would touch
+The robe that hath no seam.
+
+Ye see the curse which overbroods
+A world of pain and loss;
+I hear our Lord's beatitudes
+And prayer upon the cross.
+
+More than your schoolmen teach, within
+Myself, alas! I know
+Too dark ye cannot paint the sin,
+Too small the merit show.
+
+I bow my forehead to the dust,
+I veil mine eyes for shame,
+And urge, in trembling self-distrust,
+A prayer without a claim.
+
+I see the wrong that round me lies,
+I feel the guilt within;
+I hear, with groan and travail-cries,
+The world confess its sin.
+
+Yet, in the maddening maze of things,
+And tossed by storm and flood,
+To one fixed trust my spirit clings;
+I know that God is good!
+
+Not mine to look where cherubim
+And seraphs may not see,
+But nothing can be good in Him
+Which evil is in me.
+
+The wrong that pains my soul below
+I dare not throne above,
+I know not of His hate,--I know
+His goodness and His love.
+
+I dimly guess from blessings known
+Of greater out of sight,
+And, with the chastened Psalmist, own
+His judgments too are right.
+
+I long for household voices gone,
+For vanished smiles I long,
+But God hath led my dear ones on,
+And He can do no wrong.
+
+I know not what the future hath
+Of marvel or surprise,
+Assured alone that life and death
+His mercy underlies.
+
+And if my heart and flesh are weak
+To bear an untried pain,
+The bruised reed He will not break,
+But strengthen and sustain.
+
+No offering of my own I have,
+Nor works my faith to prove;
+I can but give the gifts He gave,
+And plead His love for love.
+
+And so beside the Silent Sea
+I wait the muffled oar;
+No harm from Him can come to me
+On ocean or on shore.
+
+I know not where His islands lift
+Their fronded palms in air;
+I only know I cannot drift
+Beyond His love and care.
+
+O brothers! if my faith is vain,
+If hopes like these betray,
+Pray for me that my feet may gain
+The sure and safer way.
+
+And Thou, O Lord! by whom are seen
+Thy creatures as they be,
+Forgive me if too close I lean
+My human heart on Thee!
+1865.
+
+
+
+THE COMMON QUESTION.
+
+Behind us at our evening meal
+The gray bird ate his fill,
+Swung downward by a single claw,
+And wiped his hooked bill.
+
+He shook his wings and crimson tail,
+And set his head aslant,
+And, in his sharp, impatient way,
+Asked, "What does Charlie want?"
+
+"Fie, silly bird!" I answered, "tuck
+Your head beneath your wing,
+And go to sleep;"--but o'er and o'er
+He asked the self-same thing.
+
+Then, smiling, to myself I said
+How like are men and birds!
+We all are saying what he says,
+In action or in words.
+
+The boy with whip and top and drum,
+The girl with hoop and doll,
+And men with lands and houses, ask
+The question of Poor Poll.
+
+However full, with something more
+We fain the bag would cram;
+We sigh above our crowded nets
+For fish that never swam.
+
+No bounty of indulgent Heaven
+The vague desire can stay;
+Self-love is still a Tartar mill
+For grinding prayers alway.
+
+The dear God hears and pities all;
+He knoweth all our wants;
+And what we blindly ask of Him
+His love withholds or grants.
+
+And so I sometimes think our prayers
+Might well be merged in one;
+And nest and perch and hearth and church
+Repeat, "Thy will be done."
+
+
+
+OUR MASTER.
+
+Immortal Love, forever full,
+Forever flowing free,
+Forever shared, forever whole,
+A never-ebbing sea!
+
+Our outward lips confess the name
+All other names above;
+Love only knoweth whence it came
+And comprehendeth love.
+
+Blow, winds of God, awake and blow
+The mists of earth away!
+Shine out, O Light Divine, and show
+How wide and far we stray!
+
+Hush every lip, close every book,
+The strife of tongues forbear;
+Why forward reach, or backward look,
+For love that clasps like air?
+
+We may not climb the heavenly steeps
+To bring the Lord Christ down
+In vain we search the lowest deeps,
+For Him no depths can drown.
+
+Nor holy bread, nor blood of grape,
+The lineaments restore
+Of Him we know in outward shape
+And in the flesh no more.
+
+He cometh not a king to reign;
+The world's long hope is dim;
+The weary centuries watch in vain
+The clouds of heaven for Him.
+
+Death comes, life goes; the asking eye
+And ear are answerless;
+The grave is dumb, the hollow sky
+Is sad with silentness.
+
+The letter fails, and systems fall,
+And every symbol wanes;
+The Spirit over-brooding all
+Eternal Love remains.
+
+And not for signs in heaven above
+Or earth below they look,
+Who know with John His smile of love,
+With Peter His rebuke.
+
+In joy of inward peace, or sense
+Of sorrow over sin,
+He is His own best evidence,
+His witness is within.
+
+No fable old, nor mythic lore,
+Nor dream of bards and seers,
+No dead fact stranded on the shore
+Of the oblivious years;--
+
+But warm, sweet, tender, even yet
+A present help is He;
+And faith has still its Olivet,
+And love its Galilee.
+
+The healing of His seamless dress
+Is by our beds of pain;
+We touch Him in life's throng and press,
+And we are whole again.
+
+Through Him the first fond prayers are said
+Our lips of childhood frame,
+The last low whispers of our dead
+Are burdened with His name.
+
+Our Lord and Master of us all!
+Whate'er our name or sign,
+We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,
+We test our lives by Thine.
+
+Thou judgest us; Thy purity
+Doth all our lusts condemn;
+The love that draws us nearer Thee
+Is hot with wrath to them.
+
+Our thoughts lie open to Thy sight;
+And, naked to Thy glance,
+Our secret sins are in the light
+Of Thy pure countenance.
+
+Thy healing pains, a keen distress
+Thy tender light shines in;
+Thy sweetness is the bitterness,
+Thy grace the pang of sin.
+
+Yet, weak and blinded though we be,
+Thou dost our service own;
+We bring our varying gifts to Thee,
+And Thou rejectest none.
+
+To Thee our full humanity,
+Its joys and pains, belong;
+The wrong of man to man on Thee
+Inflicts a deeper wrong.
+
+Who hates, hates Thee, who loves becomes
+Therein to Thee allied;
+All sweet accords of hearts and homes
+In Thee are multiplied.
+
+Deep strike Thy roots, O heavenly Vine,
+Within our earthly sod,
+Most human and yet most divine,
+The flower of man and God!
+
+O Love! O Life! Our faith and sight
+Thy presence maketh one
+As through transfigured clouds of white
+We trace the noon-day sun.
+
+So, to our mortal eyes subdued,
+Flesh-veiled, but not concealed,
+We know in Thee the fatherhood
+And heart of God revealed.
+
+We faintly hear, we dimly see,
+In differing phrase we pray;
+But, dim or clear, we own in Thee
+The Light, the Truth, the Way!
+
+The homage that we render Thee
+Is still our Father's own;
+No jealous claim or rivalry
+Divides the Cross and Throne.
+
+To do Thy will is more than praise,
+As words are less than deeds,
+And simple trust can find Thy ways
+We miss with chart of creeds.
+
+No pride of self Thy service hath,
+No place for me and mine;
+Our human strength is weakness, death
+Our life, apart from Thine.
+
+Apart from Thee all gain is loss,
+All labor vainly done;
+The solemn shadow of Thy Cross
+Is better than the sun.
+
+Alone, O Love ineffable!
+Thy saving name is given;
+To turn aside from Thee is hell,
+To walk with Thee is heaven!
+
+How vain, secure in all Thou art,
+Our noisy championship
+The sighing of the contrite heart
+Is more than flattering lip.
+
+Not Thine the bigot's partial plea,
+Nor Thine the zealot's ban;
+Thou well canst spare a love of Thee
+Which ends in hate of man.
+
+Our Friend, our Brother, and our Lord,
+What may Thy service be?--
+Nor name, nor form, nor ritual word,
+But simply following Thee.
+
+We bring no ghastly holocaust,
+We pile no graven stone;
+He serves thee best who loveth most
+His brothers and Thy own.
+
+Thy litanies, sweet offices
+Of love and gratitude;
+Thy sacramental liturgies,
+The joy of doing good.
+
+In vain shall waves of incense drift
+The vaulted nave around,
+In vain the minster turret lift
+Its brazen weights of sound.
+
+The heart must ring Thy Christmas bells,
+Thy inward altars raise;
+Its faith and hope Thy canticles,
+And its obedience praise!
+1866.
+
+
+
+THE MEETING.
+
+     The two speakers in the meeting referred to in this poem were Avis
+     Keene, whose very presence was a benediction, a woman lovely in
+     spirit and person, whose words seemed a message of love and tender
+     concern to her hearers; and Sibyl Jones, whose inspired eloquence
+     and rare spirituality impressed all who knew her. In obedience to
+     her apprehended duty she made visits of Christian love to various
+     parts of Europe, and to the West Coast of Africa and Palestine.
+
+The elder folks shook hands at last,
+Down seat by seat the signal passed.
+To simple ways like ours unused,
+Half solemnized and half amused,
+With long-drawn breath and shrug, my guest
+His sense of glad relief expressed.
+Outside, the hills lay warm in sun;
+The cattle in the meadow-run
+Stood half-leg deep; a single bird
+The green repose above us stirred.
+"What part or lot have you," he said,
+"In these dull rites of drowsy-head?
+Is silence worship? Seek it where
+It soothes with dreams the summer air,
+Not in this close and rude-benched hall,
+But where soft lights and shadows fall,
+And all the slow, sleep-walking hours
+Glide soundless over grass and flowers!
+From time and place and form apart,
+Its holy ground the human heart,
+Nor ritual-bound nor templeward
+Walks the free spirit of the Lord!
+Our common Master did not pen
+His followers up from other men;
+His service liberty indeed,
+He built no church, He framed no creed;
+But while the saintly Pharisee
+Made broader his phylactery,
+As from the synagogue was seen
+The dusty-sandalled Nazarene
+Through ripening cornfields lead the way
+Upon the awful Sabbath day,
+His sermons were the healthful talk
+That shorter made the mountain-walk,
+His wayside texts were flowers and birds,
+Where mingled with His gracious words
+The rustle of the tamarisk-tree
+And ripple-wash of Galilee."
+
+"Thy words are well, O friend," I said;
+"Unmeasured and unlimited,
+With noiseless slide of stone to stone,
+The mystic Church of God has grown.
+Invisible and silent stands
+The temple never made with hands,
+Unheard the voices still and small
+Of its unseen confessional.
+He needs no special place of prayer
+Whose hearing ear is everywhere;
+He brings not back the childish days
+That ringed the earth with stones of praise,
+Roofed Karnak's hall of gods, and laid
+The plinths of Phil e's colonnade.
+Still less He owns the selfish good
+And sickly growth of solitude,--
+The worthless grace that, out of sight,
+Flowers in the desert anchorite;
+Dissevered from the suffering whole,
+Love hath no power to save a soul.
+Not out of Self, the origin
+And native air and soil of sin,
+The living waters spring and flow,
+The trees with leaves of healing grow.
+
+"Dream not, O friend, because I seek
+This quiet shelter twice a week,
+I better deem its pine-laid floor
+Than breezy hill or sea-sung shore;
+But nature is not solitude
+She crowds us with her thronging wood;
+Her many hands reach out to us,
+Her many tongues are garrulous;
+Perpetual riddles of surprise
+She offers to our ears and eyes;
+She will not leave our senses still,
+But drags them captive at her will
+And, making earth too great for heaven,
+She hides the Giver in the given.
+
+"And so, I find it well to come
+For deeper rest to this still room,
+For here the habit of the soul
+Feels less the outer world's control;
+The strength of mutual purpose pleads
+More earnestly our common needs;
+And from the silence multiplied
+By these still forms on either side,
+The world that time and sense have known
+Falls off and leaves us God alone.
+
+"Yet rarely through the charmed repose
+Unmixed the stream of motive flows,
+A flavor of its many springs,
+The tints of earth and sky it brings;
+In the still waters needs must be
+Some shade of human sympathy;
+And here, in its accustomed place,
+I look on memory's dearest face;
+The blind by-sitter guesseth not
+What shadow haunts that vacant spot;
+No eyes save mine alone can see
+The love wherewith it welcomes me!
+And still, with those alone my kin,
+In doubt and weakness, want and sin,
+I bow my head, my heart I bare
+As when that face was living there,
+And strive (too oft, alas! in vain)
+The peace of simple trust to gain,
+Fold fancy's restless wings, and lay
+The idols of my heart away.
+
+"Welcome the silence all unbroken,
+Nor less the words of fitness spoken,--
+Such golden words as hers for whom
+Our autumn flowers have just made room;
+Whose hopeful utterance through and through
+The freshness of the morning blew;
+Who loved not less the earth that light
+Fell on it from the heavens in sight,
+But saw in all fair forms more fair
+The Eternal beauty mirrored there.
+Whose eighty years but added grace
+And saintlier meaning to her face,--
+The look of one who bore away
+Glad tidings from the hills of day,
+While all our hearts went forth to meet
+The coming of her beautiful feet!
+Or haply hers, whose pilgrim tread
+Is in the paths where Jesus led;
+Who dreams her childhood's Sabbath dream
+By Jordan's willow-shaded stream,
+And, of the hymns of hope and faith,
+Sung by the monks of Nazareth,
+Hears pious echoes, in the call
+To prayer, from Moslem minarets fall,
+Repeating where His works were wrought
+The lesson that her Master taught,
+Of whom an elder Sibyl gave,
+The prophecies of Cuma 's cave.
+
+"I ask no organ's soulless breath
+To drone the themes of life and death,
+No altar candle-lit by day,
+No ornate wordsman's rhetoric-play,
+No cool philosophy to teach
+Its bland audacities of speech
+To double-tasked idolaters
+Themselves their gods and worshippers,
+No pulpit hammered by the fist
+Of loud-asserting dogmatist,
+Who borrows for the Hand of love
+The smoking thunderbolts of Jove.
+I know how well the fathers taught,
+What work the later schoolmen wrought;
+I reverence old-time faith and men,
+But God is near us now as then;
+His force of love is still unspent,
+His hate of sin as imminent;
+And still the measure of our needs
+Outgrows the cramping bounds of creeds;
+The manna gathered yesterday
+Already savors of decay;
+Doubts to the world's child-heart unknown
+Question us now from star and stone;
+Too little or too much we know,
+And sight is swift and faith is slow;
+The power is lost to self-deceive
+With shallow forms of make-believe.
+W e walk at high noon, and the bells
+Call to a thousand oracles,
+But the sound deafens, and the light
+Is stronger than our dazzled sight;
+The letters of the sacred Book
+Glimmer and swim beneath our look;
+Still struggles in the Age's breast
+With deepening agony of quest
+The old entreaty: 'Art thou He,
+Or look we for the Christ to be?'
+
+"God should be most where man is least
+So, where is neither church nor priest,
+And never rag of form or creed
+To clothe the nakedness of need,--
+Where farmer-folk in silence meet,--
+I turn my bell-unsummoned feet;'
+I lay the critic's glass aside,
+I tread upon my lettered pride,
+And, lowest-seated, testify
+To the oneness of humanity;
+Confess the universal want,
+And share whatever Heaven may grant.
+He findeth not who seeks his own,
+The soul is lost that's saved alone.
+Not on one favored forehead fell
+Of old the fire-tongued miracle,
+But flamed o'er all the thronging host
+The baptism of the Holy Ghost;
+Heart answers heart: in one desire
+The blending lines of prayer aspire;
+'Where, in my name, meet two or three,'
+Our Lord hath said, 'I there will be!'
+
+"So sometimes comes to soul and sense
+The feeling which is evidence
+That very near about us lies
+The realm of spiritual mysteries.
+The sphere of the supernal powers
+Impinges on this world of ours.
+The low and dark horizon lifts,
+To light the scenic terror shifts;
+The breath of a diviner air
+Blows down the answer of a prayer
+That all our sorrow, pain, and doubt
+A great compassion clasps about,
+And law and goodness, love and force,
+Are wedded fast beyond divorce.
+Then duty leaves to love its task,
+The beggar Self forgets to ask;
+With smile of trust and folded hands,
+The passive soul in waiting stands
+To feel, as flowers the sun and dew,
+The One true Life its own renew.
+
+"So, to the calmly gathered thought
+The innermost of truth is taught,
+The mystery dimly understood,
+That love of God is love of good,
+And, chiefly, its divinest trace
+In Him of Nazareth's holy face;
+That to be saved is only this,--
+Salvation from our selfishness,
+From more than elemental fire,
+The soul's unsanetified desire,
+From sin itself, and not the pain
+That warns us of its chafing chain;
+That worship's deeper meaning lies
+In mercy, and not sacrifice,
+Not proud humilities of sense
+And posturing of penitence,
+But love's unforced obedience;
+That Book and Church and Day are given
+For man, not God,--for earth, not heaven,--
+The blessed means to holiest ends,
+Not masters, but benignant friends;
+That the dear Christ dwells not afar,
+The king of some remoter star,
+Listening, at times, with flattered ear
+To homage wrung from selfish fear,
+But here, amidst the poor and blind,
+The bound and suffering of our kind,
+In works we do, in prayers we pray,
+Life of our life, He lives to-day."
+1868.
+
+
+
+THE CLEAR VISION.
+
+I did but dream. I never knew
+What charms our sternest season wore.
+Was never yet the sky so blue,
+Was never earth so white before.
+Till now I never saw the glow
+Of sunset on yon hills of snow,
+And never learned the bough's designs
+Of beauty in its leafless lines.
+
+Did ever such a morning break
+As that my eastern windows see?
+Did ever such a moonlight take
+Weird photographs of shrub and tree?
+Rang ever bells so wild and fleet
+The music of the winter street?
+Was ever yet a sound by half
+So merry as you school-boy's laugh?
+
+O Earth! with gladness overfraught,
+No added charm thy face hath found;
+Within my heart the change is wrought,
+My footsteps make enchanted ground.
+From couch of pain and curtained room
+Forth to thy light and air I come,
+To find in all that meets my eyes
+The freshness of a glad surprise.
+
+Fair seem these winter days, and soon
+Shall blow the warm west-winds of spring,
+To set the unbound rills in tune
+And hither urge the bluebird's wing.
+The vales shall laugh in flowers, the woods
+Grow misty green with leafing buds,
+And violets and wind-flowers sway
+Against the throbbing heart of May.
+
+Break forth, my lips, in praise, and own
+The wiser love severely kind;
+Since, richer for its chastening grown,
+I see, whereas I once was blind.
+The world, O Father! hath not wronged
+With loss the life by Thee prolonged;
+But still, with every added year,
+More beautiful Thy works appear!
+
+As Thou hast made thy world without,
+Make Thou more fair my world within;
+Shine through its lingering clouds of doubt;
+Rebuke its haunting shapes of sin;
+Fill, brief or long, my granted span
+Of life with love to thee and man;
+Strike when thou wilt the hour of rest,
+But let my last days be my best!
+2d mo., 1868.
+
+
+
+DIVINE COMPASSION.
+
+Long since, a dream of heaven I had,
+And still the vision haunts me oft;
+I see the saints in white robes clad,
+The martyrs with their palms aloft;
+But hearing still, in middle song,
+The ceaseless dissonance of wrong;
+And shrinking, with hid faces, from the strain
+Of sad, beseeching eyes, full of remorse and pain.
+
+The glad song falters to a wail,
+The harping sinks to low lament;
+Before the still unlifted veil
+I see the crowned foreheads bent,
+Making more sweet the heavenly air,
+With breathings of unselfish prayer;
+And a Voice saith: "O Pity which is pain,
+O Love that weeps, fill up my sufferings which remain!
+
+"Shall souls redeemed by me refuse
+To share my sorrow in their turn?
+Or, sin-forgiven, my gift abuse
+Of peace with selfish unconcern?
+Has saintly ease no pitying care?
+Has faith no work, and love no prayer?
+While sin remains, and souls in darkness dwell,
+Can heaven itself be heaven, and look unmoved on hell?"
+
+Then through the Gates of Pain, I dream,
+A wind of heaven blows coolly in;
+Fainter the awful discords seem,
+The smoke of torment grows more thin,
+Tears quench the burning soil, and thence
+Spring sweet, pale flowers of penitence
+And through the dreary realm of man's despair,
+Star-crowned an angel walks, and to! God's hope is there!
+
+Is it a dream? Is heaven so high
+That pity cannot breathe its air?
+Its happy eyes forever dry,
+Its holy lips without a prayer!
+My God! my God! if thither led
+By Thy free grace unmerited,
+No crown nor palm be mine, but let me keep
+A heart that still can feel, and eyes that still can weep.
+1868.
+
+
+
+THE PRAYER-SEEKER.
+
+Along the aisle where prayer was made,
+A woman, all in black arrayed,
+Close-veiled, between the kneeling host,
+With gliding motion of a ghost,
+Passed to the desk, and laid thereon
+A scroll which bore these words alone,
+_Pray for me_!
+
+Back from the place of worshipping
+She glided like a guilty thing
+The rustle of her draperies, stirred
+By hurrying feet, alone was heard;
+While, full of awe, the preacher read,
+As out into the dark she sped:
+"_Pray for me_!"
+
+Back to the night from whence she came,
+To unimagined grief or shame!
+Across the threshold of that door
+None knew the burden that she bore;
+Alone she left the written scroll,
+The legend of a troubled soul,--
+_Pray for me_!
+
+Glide on, poor ghost of woe or sin!
+Thou leav'st a common need within;
+Each bears, like thee, some nameless weight,
+Some misery inarticulate,
+Some secret sin, some shrouded dread,
+Some household sorrow all unsaid.
+_Pray for us_!
+
+Pass on! The type of all thou art,
+Sad witness to the common heart!
+With face in veil and seal on lip,
+In mute and strange companionship,
+Like thee we wander to and fro,
+Dumbly imploring as we go
+_Pray for us_!
+
+Ah, who shall pray, since he who pleads
+Our want perchance hath greater needs?
+Yet they who make their loss the gain
+Of others shall not ask in vain,
+And Heaven bends low to hear the prayer
+Of love from lips of self-despair
+_Pray for us_!
+
+In vain remorse and fear and hate
+Beat with bruised bands against a fate
+Whose walls of iron only move
+And open to the touch of love.
+He only feels his burdens fall
+Who, taught by suffering, pities all.
+_Pray for us_!
+
+He prayeth best who leaves unguessed
+The mystery of another's breast.
+Why cheeks grow pale, why eyes o'erflow,
+Or heads are white, thou need'st not know.
+Enough to note by many a sign
+That every heart hath needs like thine.
+_Pray for us_!
+1870
+
+
+
+THE BREWING OF SOMA.
+
+     "These libations mixed with milk have been prepared for Indra:
+     offer Soma to the drinker of Soma."
+     --Vashista, translated by MAX MULLER.
+
+The fagots blazed, the caldron's smoke
+Up through the green wood curled;
+"Bring honey from the hollow oak,
+Bring milky sap," the brewers spoke,
+In the childhood of the world.
+
+And brewed they well or brewed they ill,
+The priests thrust in their rods,
+First tasted, and then drank their fill,
+And shouted, with one voice and will,
+"Behold the drink of gods!"
+
+They drank, and to! in heart and brain
+A new, glad life began;
+The gray of hair grew young again,
+The sick man laughed away his pain,
+The cripple leaped and ran.
+
+"Drink, mortals, what the gods have sent,
+Forget your long annoy."
+So sang the priests. From tent to tent
+The Soma's sacred madness went,
+A storm of drunken joy.
+
+Then knew each rapt inebriate
+A winged and glorious birth,
+Soared upward, with strange joy elate,
+Beat, with dazed head, Varuna's gate,
+And, sobered, sank to earth.
+
+The land with Soma's praises rang;
+On Gihon's banks of shade
+Its hymns the dusky maidens sang;
+In joy of life or mortal pang
+All men to Soma prayed.
+
+The morning twilight of the race
+Sends down these matin psalms;
+And still with wondering eyes we trace
+The simple prayers to Soma's grace,
+That Vedic verse embalms.
+
+As in that child-world's early year,
+Each after age has striven
+By music, incense, vigils drear,
+And trance, to bring the skies more near,
+Or lift men up to heaven!
+
+Some fever of the blood and brain,
+Some self-exalting spell,
+The scourger's keen delight of pain,
+The Dervish dance, the Orphic strain,
+The wild-haired Bacchant's yell,--
+
+The desert's hair-grown hermit sunk
+The saner brute below;
+The naked Santon, hashish-drunk,
+The cloister madness of the monk,
+The fakir's torture-show!
+
+And yet the past comes round again,
+And new doth old fulfil;
+In sensual transports wild as vain
+We brew in many a Christian fane
+The heathen Soma still!
+
+Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
+Forgive our foolish ways!
+Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
+In purer lives Thy service find,
+In deeper reverence, praise.
+
+In simple trust like theirs who heard
+Beside the Syrian sea
+The gracious calling of the Lord,
+Let us, like them, without a word,
+Rise up and follow Thee.
+
+O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
+O calm of hills above,
+Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee
+The silence of eternity
+Interpreted by love!
+
+With that deep hush subduing all
+Our words and works that drown
+The tender whisper of Thy call,
+As noiseless let Thy blessing fall
+As fell Thy manna down.
+
+Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
+Till all our strivings cease;
+Take from our souls the strain and stress,
+And let our ordered lives confess
+The beauty of Thy peace.
+
+Breathe through the heats of our desire
+Thy coolness and Thy balm;
+Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
+Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
+O still, small voice of calm!
+1872.
+
+
+
+A WOMAN.
+
+Oh, dwarfed and wronged, and stained with ill,
+Behold! thou art a woman still!
+And, by that sacred name and dear,
+I bid thy better self appear.
+Still, through thy foul disguise, I see
+The rudimental purity,
+That, spite of change and loss, makes good
+Thy birthright-claim of womanhood;
+An inward loathing, deep, intense;
+A shame that is half innocence.
+Cast off the grave-clothes of thy sin!
+Rise from the dust thou liest in,
+As Mary rose at Jesus' word,
+Redeemed and white before the Lord!
+Reclairn thy lost soul! In His name,
+Rise up, and break thy bonds of shame.
+Art weak? He 's strong. Art fearful? Hear
+The world's O'ercomer: "Be of cheer!"
+What lip shall judge when He approves?
+Who dare to scorn the child He loves?
+
+
+
+THE PRAYER OF AGASSIZ.
+
+     The island of Penikese in Buzzard's Bay was given by Mr. John
+     Anderson to Agassiz for the uses of a summer school of natural
+     history. A large barn was cleared and improvised as a lecture-room.
+     Here, on the first morning of the school, all the company was
+     gathered. "Agassiz had arranged no programme of exercises," says
+     Mrs. Agassiz, in Louis Agassiz; his Life and Correspondence,
+     "trusting to the interest of the occasion to suggest what might best
+     be said or done. But, as he looked upon his pupils gathered there
+     to study nature with him, by an impulse as natural as it was
+     unpremeditated, he called upon then to join in silently asking
+     God's blessing on their work together. The pause was broken by the
+     first words of an address no less fervent than its unspoken
+     prelude." This was in the summer of 1873, and Agassiz died the
+     December following.
+
+On the isle of Penikese,
+Ringed about by sapphire seas,
+Fanned by breezes salt and cool,
+Stood the Master with his school.
+Over sails that not in vain
+Wooed the west-wind's steady strain,
+Line of coast that low and far
+Stretched its undulating bar,
+Wings aslant along the rim
+Of the waves they stooped to skim,
+Rock and isle and glistening bay,
+Fell the beautiful white day.
+
+Said the Master to the youth
+"We have come in search of truth,
+Trying with uncertain key
+Door by door of mystery;
+We are reaching, through His laws,
+To the garment-hem of Cause,
+Him, the endless, unbegun,
+The Unnamable, the One
+Light of all our light the Source,
+Life of life, and Force of force.
+As with fingers of the blind,
+We are groping here to find
+What the hieroglyphics mean
+Of the Unseen in the seen,
+What the Thought which underlies
+Nature's masking and disguise,
+What it is that hides beneath
+Blight and bloom and birth and death.
+By past efforts unavailing,
+Doubt and error, loss and failing,
+Of our weakness made aware,
+On the threshold of our task
+Let us light and guidance ask,
+Let us pause in silent prayer!"
+
+Then the Master in his place
+Bowed his head a little space,
+And the leaves by soft airs stirred,
+Lapse of wave and cry of bird,
+Left the solemn hush unbroken
+Of that wordless prayer unspoken,
+While its wish, on earth unsaid,
+Rose to heaven interpreted.
+As, in life's best hours, we hear
+By the spirit's finer ear
+His low voice within us, thus
+The All-Father heareth us;
+And His holy ear we pain
+With our noisy words and vain.
+Not for Him our violence
+Storming at the gates of sense,
+His the primal language, His
+The eternal silences!
+
+Even the careless heart was moved,
+And the doubting gave assent,
+With a gesture reverent,
+To the Master well-beloved.
+As thin mists are glorified
+By the light they cannot hide,
+All who gazed upon him saw,
+Through its veil of tender awe,
+How his face was still uplit
+By the old sweet look of it.
+Hopeful, trustful, full of cheer,
+And the love that casts out fear.
+Who the secret may declare
+Of that brief, unuttered prayer?
+Did the shade before him come
+Of th' inevitable doom,
+Of the end of earth so near,
+And Eternity's new year?
+
+In the lap of sheltering seas
+Rests the isle of Penikese;
+But the lord of the domain
+Comes not to his own again
+Where the eyes that follow fail,
+On a vaster sea his sail
+Drifts beyond our beck and hail.
+Other lips within its bound
+Shall the laws of life expound;
+Other eyes from rock and shell
+Read the world's old riddles well
+But when breezes light and bland
+Blow from Summer's blossomed land,
+When the air is glad with wings,
+And the blithe song-sparrow sings,
+Many an eye with his still face
+Shall the living ones displace,
+Many an ear the word shall seek
+He alone could fitly speak.
+And one name forevermore
+Shall be uttered o'er and o'er
+By the waves that kiss the shore,
+By the curlew's whistle sent
+Down the cool, sea-scented air;
+In all voices known to her,
+Nature owns her worshipper,
+Half in triumph, half lament.
+Thither Love shall tearful turn,
+Friendship pause uncovered there,
+And the wisest reverence learn
+From the Master's silent prayer.
+1873.
+
+
+
+IN QUEST
+
+Have I not voyaged, friend beloved, with thee
+On the great waters of the unsounded sea,
+Momently listening with suspended oar
+For the low rote of waves upon a shore
+Changeless as heaven, where never fog-cloud drifts
+Over its windless wood, nor mirage lifts
+The steadfast hills; where never birds of doubt
+Sing to mislead, and every dream dies out,
+And the dark riddles which perplex us here
+In the sharp solvent of its light are clear?
+Thou knowest how vain our quest; how, soon or late,
+The baffling tides and circles of debate
+Swept back our bark unto its starting-place,
+Where, looking forth upon the blank, gray space,
+And round about us seeing, with sad eyes,
+The same old difficult hills and cloud-cold skies,
+We said: "This outward search availeth not
+To find Him. He is farther than we thought,
+Or, haply, nearer. To this very spot
+Whereon we wait, this commonplace of home,
+As to the well of Jacob, He may come
+And tell us all things." As I listened there,
+Through the expectant silences of prayer,
+Somewhat I seemed to hear, which hath to me
+Been hope, strength, comfort, and I give it thee.
+
+"The riddle of the world is understood
+Only by him who feels that God is good,
+As only he can feel who makes his love
+The ladder of his faith, and climbs above
+On th' rounds of his best instincts; draws no line
+Between mere human goodness and divine,
+But, judging God by what in him is best,
+With a child's trust leans on a Father's breast,
+And hears unmoved the old creeds babble still
+Of kingly power and dread caprice of will,
+Chary of blessing, prodigal of curse,
+The pitiless doomsman of the universe.
+Can Hatred ask for love? Can Selfishness
+Invite to self-denial? Is He less
+Than man in kindly dealing? Can He break
+His own great law of fatherhood, forsake
+And curse His children? Not for earth and heaven
+Can separate tables of the law be given.
+No rule can bind which He himself denies;
+The truths of time are not eternal lies."
+
+So heard I; and the chaos round me spread
+To light and order grew; and, "Lord," I said,
+"Our sins are our tormentors, worst of all
+Felt in distrustful shame that dares not call
+Upon Thee as our Father. We have set
+A strange god up, but Thou remainest yet.
+All that I feel of pity Thou hast known
+Before I was; my best is all Thy own.
+From Thy great heart of goodness mine but drew
+Wishes and prayers; but Thou, O Lord, wilt do,
+In Thy own time, by ways I cannot see,
+All that I feel when I am nearest Thee!"
+1873.
+
+
+
+THE FRIEND'S BURIAL.
+
+My thoughts are all in yonder town,
+Where, wept by many tears,
+To-day my mother's friend lays down
+The burden of her years.
+
+True as in life, no poor disguise
+Of death with her is seen,
+And on her simple casket lies
+No wreath of bloom and green.
+
+Oh, not for her the florist's art,
+The mocking weeds of woe;
+Dear memories in each mourner's heart
+Like heaven's white lilies blow.
+
+And all about the softening air
+Of new-born sweetness tells,
+And the ungathered May-flowers wear
+The tints of ocean shells.
+
+The old, assuring miracle
+Is fresh as heretofore;
+And earth takes up its parable
+Of life from death once more.
+
+Here organ-swell and church-bell toll
+Methinks but discord were;
+The prayerful silence of the soul
+Is best befitting her.
+
+No sound should break the quietude
+Alike of earth and sky
+O wandering wind in Seabrook wood,
+Breathe but a half-heard sigh!
+
+Sing softly, spring-bird, for her sake;
+And thou not distant sea,
+Lapse lightly as if Jesus spake,
+And thou wert Galilee!
+
+For all her quiet life flowed on
+As meadow streamlets flow,
+Where fresher green reveals alone
+The noiseless ways they go.
+
+From her loved place of prayer I see
+The plain-robed mourners pass,
+With slow feet treading reverently
+The graveyard's springing grass.
+
+Make room, O mourning ones, for me,
+Where, like the friends of Paul,
+That you no more her face shall see
+You sorrow most of all.
+
+Her path shall brighten more and more
+Unto the perfect day;
+She cannot fail of peace who bore
+Such peace with her away.
+
+O sweet, calm face that seemed to wear
+The look of sins forgiven!
+O voice of prayer that seemed to bear
+Our own needs up to heaven!
+
+How reverent in our midst she stood,
+Or knelt in grateful praise!
+What grace of Christian womanhood
+Was in her household ways!
+
+For still her holy living meant
+No duty left undone;
+The heavenly and the human blent
+Their kindred loves in one.
+
+And if her life small leisure found
+For feasting ear and eye,
+And Pleasure, on her daily round,
+She passed unpausing by,
+
+Yet with her went a secret sense
+Of all things sweet and fair,
+And Beauty's gracious providence
+Refreshed her unaware.
+
+She kept her line of rectitude
+With love's unconscious ease;
+Her kindly instincts understood
+All gentle courtesies.
+
+An inborn charm of graciousness
+Made sweet her smile and tone,
+And glorified her farm-wife dress
+With beauty not its own.
+
+The dear Lord's best interpreters
+Are humble human souls;
+The Gospel of a life like hers
+Is more than books or scrolls.
+
+From scheme and creed the light goes out,
+The saintly fact survives;
+The blessed Master none can doubt
+Revealed in holy lives.
+1873.
+
+
+
+A CHRISTMAS CARMEN.
+
+I.
+Sound over all waters, reach out from all lands,
+The chorus of voices, the clasping of hands;
+Sing hymns that were sung by the stars of the morn,
+Sing songs of the angels when Jesus was born!
+With glad jubilations
+Bring hope to the nations
+The dark night is ending and dawn has begun
+Rise, hope of the ages, arise like the sun,
+All speech flow to music, all hearts beat as one!
+
+II.
+Sing the bridal of nations! with chorals of love
+Sing out the war-vulture and sing in the dove,
+Till the hearts of the peoples keep time in accord,
+And the voice of the world is the voice of the Lord!
+Clasp hands of the nations
+In strong gratulations:
+The dark night is ending and dawn has begun;
+Rise, hope of the ages, arise like the sun,
+All speech flow to music, all hearts beat as one!
+
+III.
+Blow, bugles of battle, the marches of peace;
+East, west, north, and south let the long quarrel cease
+Sing the song of great joy that the angels began,
+Sing of glory to God and of good-will to man!
+Hark! joining in chorus
+The heavens bend o'er us'
+The dark night is ending and dawn has begun;
+Rise, hope of the ages, arise like the sun,
+All speech flow to music, all hearts beat as one!
+1873.
+
+
+
+VESTA.
+
+O Christ of God! whose life and death
+Our own have reconciled,
+Most quietly, most tenderly
+Take home Thy star-named child!
+
+Thy grace is in her patient eyes,
+Thy words are on her tongue;
+The very silence round her seems
+As if the angels sung.
+
+Her smile is as a listening child's
+Who hears its mother call;
+The lilies of Thy perfect peace
+About her pillow fall.
+
+She leans from out our clinging arms
+To rest herself in Thine;
+Alone to Thee, dear Lord, can we
+Our well-beloved resign!
+
+Oh, less for her than for ourselves
+We bow our heads and pray;
+Her setting star, like Bethlehem's,
+To Thee shall point the way!
+1874.
+
+
+
+CHILD-SONGS.
+
+Still linger in our noon of time
+And on our Saxon tongue
+The echoes of the home-born hymns
+The Aryan mothers sung.
+
+And childhood had its litanies
+In every age and clime;
+The earliest cradles of the race
+Were rocked to poet's rhyme.
+
+Nor sky, nor wave, nor tree, nor flower,
+Nor green earth's virgin sod,
+So moved the singer's heart of old
+As these small ones of God.
+
+The mystery of unfolding life
+Was more than dawning morn,
+Than opening flower or crescent moon
+The human soul new-born.
+
+And still to childhood's sweet appeal
+The heart of genius turns,
+And more than all the sages teach
+From lisping voices learns,--
+
+The voices loved of him who sang,
+Where Tweed and Teviot glide,
+That sound to-day on all the winds
+That blow from Rydal-side,--
+
+Heard in the Teuton's household songs,
+And folk-lore of the Finn,
+Where'er to holy Christmas hearths
+The Christ-child enters in!
+
+Before life's sweetest mystery still
+The heart in reverence kneels;
+The wonder of the primal birth
+The latest mother feels.
+
+We need love's tender lessons taught
+As only weakness can;
+God hath His small interpreters;
+The child must teach the man.
+
+We wander wide through evil years,
+Our eyes of faith grow dim;
+But he is freshest from His hands
+And nearest unto Him!
+
+And haply, pleading long with Him
+For sin-sick hearts and cold,
+The angels of our childhood still
+The Father's face behold.
+
+Of such the kingdom!--Teach Thou us,
+O-Master most divine,
+To feel the deep significance
+Of these wise words of Thine!
+
+The haughty eye shall seek in vain
+What innocence beholds;
+No cunning finds the key of heaven,
+No strength its gate unfolds.
+
+Alone to guilelessness and love
+That gate shall open fall;
+The mind of pride is nothingness,
+The childlike heart is all!
+1875.
+
+
+
+THE HEALER.
+
+     TO A YOUNG PHYSICIAN, WITH DORE'S PICTURE OF CHRIST
+     HEALING THE SICK.
+
+So stood of old the holy Christ
+Amidst the suffering throng;
+With whom His lightest touch sufficed
+To make the weakest strong.
+
+That healing gift He lends to them
+Who use it in His name;
+The power that filled His garment's hem
+Is evermore the same.
+
+For lo! in human hearts unseen
+The Healer dwelleth still,
+And they who make His temples clean
+The best subserve His will.
+
+The holiest task by Heaven decreed,
+An errand all divine,
+The burden of our common need
+To render less is thine.
+
+The paths of pain are thine. Go forth
+With patience, trust, and hope;
+The sufferings of a sin-sick earth
+Shall give thee ample scope.
+
+Beside the unveiled mysteries
+Of life and death go stand,
+With guarded lips and reverent eyes
+And pure of heart and hand.
+
+So shalt thou be with power endued
+From Him who went about
+The Syrian hillsides doing good,
+And casting demons out.
+
+That Good Physician liveth yet
+Thy friend and guide to be;
+The Healer by Gennesaret
+Shall walk the rounds with thee.
+
+
+
+THE TWO ANGELS.
+
+God called the nearest angels who dwell with Him above:
+The tenderest one was Pity, the dearest one was Love.
+
+"Arise," He said, "my angels! a wail of woe and sin
+Steals through the gates of heaven, and saddens all within.
+
+"My harps take up the mournful strain that from a lost world swells,
+The smoke of torment clouds the light and blights the asphodels.
+
+"Fly downward to that under world, and on its souls of pain
+Let Love drop smiles like sunshine, and Pity tears like rain!"
+
+Two faces bowed before the Throne, veiled in their golden hair;
+Four white wings lessened swiftly down the dark abyss of air.
+
+The way was strange, the flight was long; at last the angels came
+Where swung the lost and nether world, red-wrapped in rayless flame.
+
+There Pity, shuddering, wept; but Love, with faith too strong for fear,
+Took heart from God's almightiness and smiled a smile of cheer.
+
+And lo! that tear of Pity quenched the flame whereon it fell,
+And, with the sunshine of that smile, hope entered into hell!
+
+Two unveiled faces full of joy looked upward to the Throne,
+Four white wings folded at the feet of Him who sat thereon!
+
+And deeper than the sound of seas, more soft than falling flake,
+Amidst the hush of wing and song the Voice Eternal spake:
+
+"Welcome, my angels! ye have brought a holier joy to heaven;
+Henceforth its sweetest song shall be the song of sin forgiven!"
+1875.
+
+
+
+OVERRULED.
+
+The threads our hands in blindness spin
+No self-determined plan weaves in;
+The shuttle of the unseen powers
+Works out a pattern not as ours.
+
+Ah! small the choice of him who sings
+What sound shall leave the smitten strings;
+Fate holds and guides the hand of art;
+The singer's is the servant's part.
+
+The wind-harp chooses not the tone
+That through its trembling threads is blown;
+The patient organ cannot guess
+What hand its passive keys shall press.
+
+Through wish, resolve, and act, our will
+Is moved by undreamed forces still;
+And no man measures in advance
+His strength with untried circumstance.
+
+As streams take hue from shade and sun,
+As runs the life the song must run;
+But, glad or sad, to His good end
+God grant the varying notes may tend!
+1877.
+
+
+
+HYMN OF THE DUNKERS
+
+KLOSTER KEDAR, EPHRATA, PENNSYLVANIA (1738)
+
+SISTER MARIA CHRISTINA sings
+
+Wake, sisters, wake! the day-star shines;
+Above Ephrata's eastern pines
+The dawn is breaking, cool and calm.
+Wake, sisters, wake to prayer and psalm!
+
+Praised be the Lord for shade and light,
+For toil by day, for rest by night!
+Praised be His name who deigns to bless
+Our Kedar of the wilderness!
+
+Our refuge when the spoiler's hand
+Was heavy on our native land;
+And freedom, to her children due,
+The wolf and vulture only knew.
+
+We praised Him when to prison led,
+We owned Him when the stake blazed red;
+We knew, whatever might befall,
+His love and power were over all.
+
+He heard our prayers; with outstretched arm
+He led us forth from cruel harm;
+Still, wheresoe'er our steps were bent,
+His cloud and fire before us went!
+
+The watch of faith and prayer He set,
+We kept it then, we keep it yet.
+At midnight, crow of cock, or noon,
+He cometh sure, He cometh soon.
+
+He comes to chasten, not destroy,
+To purge the earth from sin's alloy.
+At last, at last shall all confess
+His mercy as His righteousness.
+
+The dead shall live, the sick be whole,
+The scarlet sin be white as wool;
+No discord mar below, above,
+The music of eternal love!
+
+Sound, welcome trump, the last alarm!
+Lord God of hosts, make bare thine arm,
+Fulfil this day our long desire,
+Make sweet and clean the world with fire!
+
+Sweep, flaming besom, sweep from sight
+The lies of time; be swift to smite,
+Sharp sword of God, all idols down,
+Genevan creed and Roman crown.
+
+Quake, earth, through all thy zones, till all
+The fanes of pride and priesteraft fall;
+And lift thou up in place of them
+Thy gates of pearl, Jerusalem!
+
+Lo! rising from baptismal flame,
+Transfigured, glorious, yet the same,
+Within the heavenly city's bound
+Our Kloster Kedar shall be found.
+
+He cometh soon! at dawn or noon
+Or set of sun, He cometh soon.
+Our prayers shall meet Him on His way;
+Wake, sisters, wake! arise and pray!
+1877.
+
+
+
+GIVING AND TAKING.
+
+     I have attempted to put in English verse a prose translation of a
+     poem by Tinnevaluva, a Hindoo poet of the third century of our era.
+
+Who gives and hides the giving hand,
+Nor counts on favor, fame, or praise,
+Shall find his smallest gift outweighs
+The burden of the sea and land.
+
+Who gives to whom hath naught been given,
+His gift in need, though small indeed
+As is the grass-blade's wind-blown seed,
+Is large as earth and rich as heaven.
+
+Forget it not, O man, to whom
+A gift shall fall, while yet on earth;
+Yea, even to thy seven-fold birth
+Recall it in the lives to come.
+
+Who broods above a wrong in thought
+Sins much; but greater sin is his
+Who, fed and clothed with kindnesses,
+Shall count the holy alms as nought.
+
+Who dares to curse the hands that bless
+Shall know of sin the deadliest cost;
+The patience of the heavens is lost
+Beholding man's unthankfulness.
+
+For he who breaks all laws may still
+In Sivam's mercy be forgiven;
+But none can save, in earth or heaven,
+The wretch who answers good with ill.
+1877.
+
+
+
+THE VISION OF ECHARD.
+
+The Benedictine Echard
+Sat by the wayside well,
+Where Marsberg sees the bridal
+Of the Sarre and the Moselle.
+
+Fair with its sloping vineyards
+And tawny chestnut bloom,
+The happy vale Ausonius sunk
+For holy Treves made room.
+
+On the shrine Helena builded
+To keep the Christ coat well,
+On minster tower and kloster cross,
+The westering sunshine fell.
+
+There, where the rock-hewn circles
+O'erlooked the Roman's game,
+The veil of sleep fell on him,
+And his thought a dream became.
+
+He felt the heart of silence
+Throb with a soundless word,
+And by the inward ear alone
+A spirit's voice he heard.
+
+And the spoken word seemed written
+On air and wave and sod,
+And the bending walls of sapphire
+Blazed with the thought of God.
+
+"What lack I, O my children?
+All things are in my band;
+The vast earth and the awful stars
+I hold as grains of sand.
+
+"Need I your alms? The silver
+And gold are mine alone;
+The gifts ye bring before me
+Were evermore my own.
+
+"Heed I the noise of viols,
+Your pomp of masque and show?
+Have I not dawns and sunsets
+Have I not winds that blow?
+
+"Do I smell your gums of incense?
+Is my ear with chantings fed?
+Taste I your wine of worship,
+Or eat your holy bread?
+
+"Of rank and name and honors
+Am I vain as ye are vain?
+What can Eternal Fulness
+From your lip-service gain?
+
+"Ye make me not your debtor
+Who serve yourselves alone;
+Ye boast to me of homage
+Whose gain is all your own.
+
+"For you I gave the prophets,
+For you the Psalmist's lay
+For you the law's stone tables,
+And holy book and day.
+
+"Ye change to weary burdens
+The helps that should uplift;
+Ye lose in form the spirit,
+The Giver in the gift.
+
+"Who called ye to self-torment,
+To fast and penance vain?
+Dream ye Eternal Goodness
+Has joy in mortal pain?
+
+"For the death in life of Nitria,
+For your Chartreuse ever dumb,
+What better is the neighbor,
+Or happier the home?
+
+"Who counts his brother's welfare
+As sacred as his own,
+And loves, forgives, and pities,
+He serveth me alone.
+
+"I note each gracious purpose,
+Each kindly word and deed;
+Are ye not all my children?
+Shall not the Father heed?
+
+"No prayer for light and guidance
+Is lost upon mine ear
+The child's cry in the darkness
+Shall not the Father hear?
+
+"I loathe your wrangling councils,
+I tread upon your creeds;
+Who made ye mine avengers,
+Or told ye of my needs;
+
+"I bless men and ye curse them,
+I love them and ye hate;
+Ye bite and tear each other,
+I suffer long and wait.
+
+"Ye bow to ghastly symbols,
+To cross and scourge and thorn;
+Ye seek his Syrian manger
+Who in the heart is born.
+
+"For the dead Christ, not the living,
+Ye watch His empty grave,
+Whose life alone within you
+Has power to bless and save.
+
+"O blind ones, outward groping,
+The idle quest forego;
+Who listens to His inward voice
+Alone of Him shall know.
+
+"His love all love exceeding
+The heart must needs recall,
+Its self-surrendering freedom,
+Its loss that gaineth all.
+
+"Climb not the holy mountains,
+Their eagles know not me;
+Seek not the Blessed Islands,
+I dwell not in the sea.
+
+"Gone is the mount of Meru,
+The triple gods are gone,
+And, deaf to all the lama's prayers,
+The Buddha slumbers on.
+
+"No more from rocky Horeb
+The smitten waters gush;
+Fallen is Bethel's ladder,
+Quenched is the burning bush.
+
+"The jewels of the Urim
+And Thurnmim all are dim;
+The fire has left the altar,
+The sign the teraphim.
+
+"No more in ark or hill grove
+The Holiest abides;
+Not in the scroll's dead letter
+The eternal secret hides.
+
+"The eye shall fail that searches
+For me the hollow sky;
+The far is even as the near,
+The low is as the high.
+
+"What if the earth is hiding
+Her old faiths, long outworn?
+What is it to the changeless truth
+That yours shall fail in turn?
+
+"What if the o'erturned altar
+Lays bare the ancient lie?
+What if the dreams and legends
+Of the world's childhood die?
+
+"Have ye not still my witness
+Within yourselves alway,
+My hand that on the keys of life
+For bliss or bale I lay?
+
+"Still, in perpetual judgment,
+I hold assize within,
+With sure reward of holiness,
+And dread rebuke of sin.
+
+"A light, a guide, a warning,
+A presence ever near,
+Through the deep silence of the flesh
+I reach the inward ear.
+
+"My Gerizim and Ebal
+Are in each human soul,
+The still, small voice of blessing,
+And Sinai's thunder-roll.
+
+"The stern behest of duty,
+The doom-book open thrown,
+The heaven ye seek, the hell ye fear,
+Are with yourselves alone."
+
+     .    .    .    .    .
+
+A gold and purple sunset
+Flowed down the broad Moselle;
+On hills of vine and meadow lands
+The peace of twilight fell.
+
+A slow, cool wind of evening
+Blew over leaf and bloom;
+And, faint and far, the Angelus
+Rang from Saint Matthew's tomb.
+
+Then up rose Master Echard,
+And marvelled: "Can it be
+That here, in dream and vision,
+The Lord hath talked with me?"
+
+He went his way; behind him
+The shrines of saintly dead,
+The holy coat and nail of cross,
+He left unvisited.
+
+He sought the vale of Eltzbach
+His burdened soul to free,
+Where the foot-hills of the Eifel
+Are glassed in Laachersee.
+
+And, in his Order's kloster,
+He sat, in night-long parle,
+With Tauler of the Friends of God,
+And Nicolas of Basle.
+
+And lo! the twain made answer
+"Yea, brother, even thus
+The Voice above all voices
+Hath spoken unto us.
+
+"The world will have its idols,
+And flesh and sense their sign
+But the blinded eyes shall open,
+And the gross ear be fine.
+
+"What if the vision tarry?
+God's time is always best;
+The true Light shall be witnessed,
+The Christ within confessed.
+
+"In mercy or in judgment
+He shall turn and overturn,
+Till the heart shall be His temple
+Where all of Him shall learn."
+
+
+
+INSCRIPTIONS.
+
+ON A SUN-DIAL.
+
+FOR DR. HENRY I. BOWDITCH.
+
+With warning hand I mark Time's rapid flight
+From life's glad morning to its solemn night;
+Yet, through the dear God's love, I also show
+There's Light above me by the Shade below.
+1879.
+
+
+
+ON A FOUNTAIN.
+
+FOR DOROTHEA L. DIX.
+
+Stranger and traveller,
+Drink freely and bestow
+A kindly thought on her
+Who bade this fountain flow,
+Yet hath no other claim
+Than as the minister
+Of blessing in God's name.
+Drink, and in His peace go
+1879
+
+
+THE MINISTER'S DAUGHTER.
+
+In the minister's morning sermon
+He had told of the primal fall,
+And how thenceforth the wrath of God
+Rested on each and all.
+
+And how of His will and pleasure,
+All souls, save a chosen few,
+Were doomed to the quenchless burning,
+And held in the way thereto.
+
+Yet never by faith's unreason
+A saintlier soul was tried,
+And never the harsh old lesson
+A tenderer heart belied.
+
+And, after the painful service
+On that pleasant Sabbath day,
+He walked with his little daughter
+Through the apple-bloom of May.
+
+Sweet in the fresh green meadows
+Sparrow and blackbird sung;
+Above him their tinted petals
+The blossoming orchards hung.
+
+Around on the wonderful glory
+The minister looked and smiled;
+"How good is the Lord who gives us
+These gifts from His hand, my child.
+
+"Behold in the bloom of apples
+And the violets in the sward
+A hint of the old, lost beauty
+Of the Garden of the Lord!"
+
+Then up spake the little maiden,
+Treading on snow and pink
+"O father! these pretty blossoms
+Are very wicked, I think.
+
+"Had there been no Garden of Eden
+There never had been a fall;
+And if never a tree had blossomed
+God would have loved us all."
+
+"Hush, child!" the father answered,
+"By His decree man fell;
+His ways are in clouds and darkness,
+But He doeth all things well.
+
+"And whether by His ordaining
+To us cometh good or ill,
+Joy or pain, or light or shadow,
+We must fear and love Him still."
+
+"Oh, I fear Him!" said the daughter,
+"And I try to love Him, too;
+But I wish He was good and gentle,
+Kind and loving as you."
+
+The minister groaned in spirit
+As the tremulous lips of pain
+And wide, wet eyes uplifted
+Questioned his own in vain.
+
+Bowing his head he pondered
+The words of the little one;
+Had he erred in his life-long teaching?
+Had he wrong to his Master done?
+
+To what grim and dreadful idol
+Had he lent the holiest name?
+Did his own heart, loving and human,
+The God of his worship shame?
+
+And lo! from the bloom and greenness,
+From the tender skies above,
+And the face of his little daughter,
+He read a lesson of love.
+
+No more as the cloudy terror
+Of Sinai's mount of law,
+But as Christ in the Syrian lilies
+The vision of God he saw.
+
+And, as when, in the clefts of Horeb,
+Of old was His presence known,
+The dread Ineffable Glory
+Was Infinite Goodness alone.
+
+Thereafter his hearers noted
+In his prayers a tenderer strain,
+And never the gospel of hatred
+Burned on his lips again.
+
+And the scoffing tongue was prayerful,
+And the blinded eyes found sight,
+And hearts, as flint aforetime,
+Grew soft in his warmth and light.
+1880.
+
+
+
+BY THEIR WORKS.
+
+Call him not heretic whose works attest
+His faith in goodness by no creed confessed.
+Whatever in love's name is truly done
+To free the bound and lift the fallen one
+Is done to Christ. Whoso in deed and word
+Is not against Him labors for our Lord.
+When He, who, sad and weary, longing sore
+For love's sweet service, sought the sisters' door,
+One saw the heavenly, one the human guest,
+But who shall say which loved the Master best?
+1881.
+
+
+
+THE WORD.
+
+Voice of the Holy Spirit, making known
+Man to himself, a witness swift and sure,
+Warning, approving, true and wise and pure,
+Counsel and guidance that misleadeth none!
+By thee the mystery of life is read;
+The picture-writing of the world's gray seers,
+The myths and parables of the primal years,
+Whose letter kills, by thee interpreted
+Take healthful meanings fitted to our needs,
+And in the soul's vernacular express
+The common law of simple righteousness.
+Hatred of cant and doubt of human creeds
+May well be felt: the unpardonable sin
+Is to deny the Word of God within!
+1881.
+
+
+
+THE BOOK.
+
+Gallery of sacred pictures manifold,
+A minster rich in holy effigies,
+And bearing on entablature and frieze
+The hieroglyphic oracles of old.
+Along its transept aureoled martyrs sit;
+And the low chancel side-lights half acquaint
+The eye with shrines of prophet, bard, and saint,
+Their age-dimmed tablets traced in doubtful writ!
+But only when on form and word obscure
+Falls from above the white supernal light
+We read the mystic characters aright,
+And life informs the silent portraiture,
+Until we pause at last, awe-held, before
+The One ineffable Face, love, wonder, and adore.
+1881
+
+
+
+REQUIREMENT.
+
+We live by Faith; but Faith is not the slave
+Of text and legend. Reason's voice and God's,
+Nature's and Duty's, never are at odds.
+What asks our Father of His children, save
+Justice and mercy and humility,
+A reasonable service of good deeds,
+Pure living, tenderness to human needs,
+Reverence and trust, and prayer for light to see
+The Master's footprints in our daily ways?
+No knotted scourge nor sacrificial knife,
+But the calm beauty of an ordered life
+Whose very breathing is unworded praise!--
+A life that stands as all true lives have stood,
+Firm-rooted in the faith that God is Good.
+1881.
+
+
+
+HELP.
+
+Dream not, O Soul, that easy is the task
+Thus set before thee. If it proves at length,
+As well it may, beyond thy natural strength,
+Faint not, despair not. As a child may ask
+A father, pray the Everlasting Good
+For light and guidance midst the subtle snares
+Of sin thick planted in life's thoroughfares,
+For spiritual strength and moral hardihood;
+Still listening, through the noise of time and sense,
+To the still whisper of the Inward Word;
+Bitter in blame, sweet in approval heard,
+Itself its own confirming evidence
+To health of soul a voice to cheer and please,
+To guilt the wrath of the Eumenides.
+1881.
+
+
+
+UTTERANCE.
+But what avail inadequate words to reach
+The innermost of Truth? Who shall essay,
+Blinded and weak, to point and lead the way,
+Or solve the mystery in familiar speech?
+Yet, if it be that something not thy own,
+Some shadow of the Thought to which our schemes,
+Creeds, cult, and ritual are at best but dreams,
+Is even to thy unworthiness made known,
+Thou mayst not hide what yet thou shouldst not dare
+To utter lightly, lest on lips of thine
+The real seem false, the beauty undivine.
+So, weighing duty in the scale of prayer,
+Give what seems given thee. It may prove a seed
+Of goodness dropped in fallow-grounds of need.
+1881.
+
+
+
+ORIENTAL MAXIMS.
+
+PARAPHRASE OF SANSCRIT TRANSLATIONS.
+
+THE INWARD JUDGE.
+
+From Institutes of Manu.
+
+The soul itself its awful witness is.
+Say not in evil doing, "No one sees,"
+And so offend the conscious One within,
+Whose ear can hear the silences of sin.
+
+Ere they find voice, whose eyes unsleeping see
+The secret motions of iniquity.
+Nor in thy folly say, "I am alone."
+For, seated in thy heart, as on a throne,
+The ancient Judge and Witness liveth still,
+To note thy act and thought; and as thy ill
+Or good goes from thee, far beyond thy reach,
+The solemn Doomsman's seal is set on each.
+1878.
+
+
+
+LAYING UP TREASURE
+
+From the Mahabharata.
+
+Before the Ender comes, whose charioteer
+Is swift or slow Disease, lay up each year
+Thy harvests of well-doing, wealth that kings
+Nor thieves can take away. When all the things
+Thou tallest thine, goods, pleasures, honors fall,
+Thou in thy virtue shalt survive them all.
+1881.
+
+
+
+CONDUCT
+
+From the Mahabharata.
+
+Heed how thou livest. Do no act by day
+Which from the night shall drive thy peace away.
+In months of sun so live that months of rain
+Shall still be happy. Evermore restrain
+Evil and cherish good, so shall there be
+Another and a happier life for thee.
+1881.
+
+
+
+AN EASTER FLOWER GIFT.
+
+O dearest bloom the seasons know,
+Flowers of the Resurrection blow,
+Our hope and faith restore;
+And through the bitterness of death
+And loss and sorrow, breathe a breath
+Of life forevermore!
+
+The thought of Love Immortal blends
+With fond remembrances of friends;
+In you, O sacred flowers,
+By human love made doubly sweet,
+The heavenly and the earthly meet,
+The heart of Christ and ours!
+1882.
+
+
+
+THE MYSTIC'S CHRISTMAS.
+
+"All hail!" the bells of Christmas rang,
+"All hail!" the monks at Christmas sang,
+The merry monks who kept with cheer
+The gladdest day of all their year.
+
+But still apart, unmoved thereat,
+A pious elder brother sat
+Silent, in his accustomed place,
+With God's sweet peace upon his face.
+
+"Why sitt'st thou thus?" his brethren cried.
+"It is the blessed Christmas-tide;
+The Christmas lights are all aglow,
+The sacred lilies bud and blow.
+
+"Above our heads the joy-bells ring,
+Without the happy children sing,
+And all God's creatures hail the morn
+On which the holy Christ was born!
+
+"Rejoice with us; no more rebuke
+Our gladness with thy quiet look."
+The gray monk answered: "Keep, I pray,
+Even as ye list, the Lord's birthday.
+
+"Let heathen Yule fires flicker red
+Where thronged refectory feasts are spread;
+With mystery-play and masque and mime
+And wait-songs speed the holy time!
+
+"The blindest faith may haply save;
+The Lord accepts the things we have;
+And reverence, howsoe'er it strays,
+May find at last the shining ways.
+
+"They needs must grope who cannot see,
+The blade before the ear must be;
+As ye are feeling I have felt,
+And where ye dwell I too have dwelt.
+
+"But now, beyond the things of sense,
+Beyond occasions and events,
+I know, through God's exceeding grace,
+Release from form and time and place.
+
+"I listen, from no mortal tongue,
+To hear the song the angels sung;
+And wait within myself to know
+The Christmas lilies bud and blow.
+
+"The outward symbols disappear
+From him whose inward sight is clear;
+And small must be the choice of clays
+To him who fills them all with praise!
+
+"Keep while you need it, brothers mine,
+With honest zeal your Christmas sign,
+But judge not him who every morn
+Feels in his heart the Lord Christ born!"
+1882.
+
+
+
+AT LAST.
+
+When on my day of life the night is falling,
+And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown,
+I hear far voices out of darkness calling
+My feet to paths unknown,
+
+Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant,
+Leave not its tenant when its walls decay;
+O Love Divine, O Helper ever present,
+Be Thou my strength and stay!
+
+Be near me when all else is from me drifting
+Earth, sky, home's pictures, days of shade and shine,
+And kindly faces to my own uplifting
+The love which answers mine.
+
+I have but Thee, my Father! let Thy spirit
+Be with me then to comfort and uphold;
+No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit,
+Nor street of shining gold.
+
+Suffice it if--my good and ill unreckoned,
+And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace--
+I find myself by hands familiar beckoned
+Unto my fitting place.
+
+Some humble door among Thy many mansions,
+Some sheltering shade where sin and striving cease,
+And flows forever through heaven's green expansions
+The river of Thy peace.
+
+There, from the music round about me stealing,
+I fain would learn the new and holy song,
+And find at last, beneath Thy trees of healing,
+The life for which I long.
+1882
+
+
+
+WHAT THE TRAVELLER SAID AT SUNSET.
+
+The shadows grow and deepen round me,
+I feel the deffall in the air;
+The muezzin of the darkening thicket,
+I hear the night-thrush call to prayer.
+
+The evening wind is sad with farewells,
+And loving hands unclasp from mine;
+Alone I go to meet the darkness
+Across an awful boundary-line.
+
+As from the lighted hearths behind me
+I pass with slow, reluctant feet,
+What waits me in the land of strangeness?
+What face shall smile, what voice shall greet?
+
+What space shall awe, what brightness blind me?
+What thunder-roll of music stun?
+What vast processions sweep before me
+Of shapes unknown beneath the sun?
+
+I shrink from unaccustomed glory,
+I dread the myriad-voiced strain;
+Give me the unforgotten faces,
+And let my lost ones speak again.
+
+He will not chide my mortal yearning
+Who is our Brother and our Friend;
+In whose full life, divine and human,
+The heavenly and the earthly blend.
+
+Mine be the joy of soul-communion,
+The sense of spiritual strength renewed,
+The reverence for the pure and holy,
+The dear delight of doing good.
+
+No fitting ear is mine to listen
+An endless anthem's rise and fall;
+No curious eye is mine to measure
+The pearl gate and the jasper wall.
+
+For love must needs be more than knowledge:
+What matter if I never know
+Why Aldebaran's star is ruddy,
+Or warmer Sirius white as snow!
+
+Forgive my human words, O Father!
+I go Thy larger truth to prove;
+Thy mercy shall transcend my longing
+I seek but love, and Thou art Love!
+
+I go to find my lost and mourned for
+Safe in Thy sheltering goodness still,
+And all that hope and faith foreshadow
+Made perfect in Thy holy will!
+1883.
+
+
+
+THE "STORY OF IDA."
+
+     Francesca Alexander, whose pen and pencil have so reverently
+     transcribed the simple faith and life of the Italian peasantry,
+     wrote the narrative published with John Ruskin's introduction under
+     the title, _The Story of Ida_.
+
+Weary of jangling noises never stilled,
+The skeptic's sneer, the bigot's hate, the din
+Of clashing texts, the webs of creed men spin
+Round simple truth, the children grown who build
+With gilded cards their new Jerusalem,
+Busy, with sacerdotal tailorings
+And tinsel gauds, bedizening holy things,
+I turn, with glad and grateful heart, from them
+To the sweet story of the Florentine
+Immortal in her blameless maidenhood,
+Beautiful as God's angels and as good;
+Feeling that life, even now, may be divine
+With love no wrong can ever change to hate,
+No sin make less than all-compassionate!
+1884.
+
+
+
+THE LIGHT THAT IS FELT.
+
+A tender child of summers three,
+Seeking her little bed at night,
+Paused on the dark stair timidly.
+"Oh, mother! Take my hand," said she,
+"And then the dark will all be light."
+
+We older children grope our way
+From dark behind to dark before;
+And only when our hands we lay,
+Dear Lord, in Thine, the night is day,
+And there is darkness nevermore.
+
+Reach downward to the sunless days
+Wherein our guides are blind as we,
+And faith is small and hope delays;
+Take Thou the hands of prayer we raise,
+And let us feel the light of Thee!
+1884.
+
+
+
+THE TWO LOVES
+
+Smoothing soft the nestling head
+Of a maiden fancy-led,
+Thus a grave-eyed woman said:
+
+"Richest gifts are those we make,
+Dearer than the love we take
+That we give for love's own sake.
+
+"Well I know the heart's unrest;
+Mine has been the common quest,
+To be loved and therefore blest.
+
+"Favors undeserved were mine;
+At my feet as on a shrine
+Love has laid its gifts divine.
+
+"Sweet the offerings seemed, and yet
+With their sweetness came regret,
+And a sense of unpaid debt.
+
+"Heart of mine unsatisfied,
+Was it vanity or pride
+That a deeper joy denied?
+
+"Hands that ope but to receive
+Empty close; they only live
+Richly who can richly give.
+
+"Still," she sighed, with moistening eyes,
+"Love is sweet in any guise;
+But its best is sacrifice!
+
+"He who, giving, does not crave
+Likest is to Him who gave
+Life itself the loved to save.
+
+"Love, that self-forgetful gives,
+Sows surprise of ripened sheaves,
+Late or soon its own receives."
+1884.
+
+
+
+ADJUSTMENT.
+
+The tree of Faith its bare, dry boughs must shed
+That nearer heaven the living ones may climb;
+The false must fail, though from our shores of time
+The old lament be heard, "Great Pan is dead!"
+That wail is Error's, from his high place hurled;
+This sharp recoil is Evil undertrod;
+Our time's unrest, an angel sent of God
+Troubling with life the waters of the world.
+Even as they list the winds of the Spirit blow
+To turn or break our century-rusted vanes;
+Sands shift and waste; the rock alone remains
+Where, led of Heaven, the strong tides come and go,
+And storm-clouds, rent by thunderbolt and wind,
+Leave, free of mist, the permanent stars behind.
+
+Therefore I trust, although to outward sense
+Both true and false seem shaken; I will hold
+With newer light my reverence for the old,
+And calmly wait the births of Providence.
+No gain is lost; the clear-eyed saints look down
+Untroubled on the wreck of schemes and creeds;
+Love yet remains, its rosary of good deeds
+Counting in task-field and o'erpeopled town;
+Truth has charmed life; the Inward Word survives,
+And, day by day, its revelation brings;
+Faith, hope, and charity, whatsoever things
+Which cannot be shaken, stand. Still holy lives
+Reveal the Christ of whom the letter told,
+And the new gospel verifies the old.
+1885.
+
+
+
+HYMNS OF THE BRAHMO SOMAJ.
+
+     I have attempted this paraphrase of the Hymns of the Brahmo Somaj
+     of India, as I find them in Mozoomdar's account of the devotional
+     exercises of that remarkable religious development which has
+     attracted far less attention and sympathy from the Christian world
+     than it deserves, as a fresh revelation of the direct action of the
+     Divine Spirit upon the human heart.
+
+I.
+The mercy, O Eternal One!
+By man unmeasured yet,
+In joy or grief, in shade or sun,
+I never will forget.
+I give the whole, and not a part,
+Of all Thou gayest me;
+My goods, my life, my soul and heart,
+I yield them all to Thee!
+
+II.
+We fast and plead, we weep and pray,
+From morning until even;
+We feel to find the holy way,
+We knock at the gate of heaven
+And when in silent awe we wait,
+And word and sign forbear,
+The hinges of the golden gate
+Move, soundless, to our prayer!
+Who hears the eternal harmonies
+Can heed no outward word;
+Blind to all else is he who sees
+The vision of the Lord!
+
+III.
+O soul, be patient, restrain thy tears,
+Have hope, and not despair;
+As a tender mother heareth her child
+God hears the penitent prayer.
+And not forever shall grief be thine;
+On the Heavenly Mother's breast,
+Washed clean and white in the waters of joy
+Shall His seeking child find rest.
+Console thyself with His word of grace,
+And cease thy wail of woe,
+For His mercy never an equal hath,
+And His love no bounds can know.
+Lean close unto Him in faith and hope;
+How many like thee have found
+In Him a shelter and home of peace,
+By His mercy compassed round!
+There, safe from sin and the sorrow it brings,
+They sing their grateful psalms,
+And rest, at noon, by the wells of God,
+In the shade of His holy palms!
+1885.
+
+
+
+REVELATION.
+
+     "And I went into the Vale of Beavor, and as I went I preached
+     repentance to the people. And one morning, sitting by the fire, a
+     great cloud came over me, and a temptation beset me. And it was
+     said: All things come by Nature; and the Elements and the Stars
+     came over me. And as I sat still and let it alone, a living hope
+     arose in me, and a true Voice which said: There is a living God who
+     made all things. And immediately the cloud and the temptation
+     vanished, and Life rose over all, and my heart was glad and I
+     praised the Living God."--Journal of George Fox,
+     1690.
+
+Still, as of old, in Beavor's Vale,
+O man of God! our hope and faith
+The Elements and Stars assail,
+And the awed spirit holds its breath,
+Blown over by a wind of death.
+
+Takes Nature thought for such as we,
+What place her human atom fills,
+The weed-drift of her careless sea,
+The mist on her unheeding hills?
+What reeks she of our helpless wills?
+
+Strange god of Force, with fear, not love,
+Its trembling worshipper! Can prayer
+Reach the shut ear of Fate, or move
+Unpitying Energy to spare?
+What doth the cosmic Vastness care?
+
+In vain to this dread Unconcern
+For the All-Father's love we look;
+In vain, in quest of it, we turn
+The storied leaves of Nature's book,
+The prints her rocky tablets took.
+
+I pray for faith, I long to trust;
+I listen with my heart, and hear
+A Voice without a sound: "Be just,
+Be true, be merciful, revere
+The Word within thee: God is near!
+
+"A light to sky and earth unknown
+Pales all their lights: a mightier force
+Than theirs the powers of Nature own,
+And, to its goal as at its source,
+His Spirit moves the Universe.
+
+"Believe and trust. Through stars and suns,
+Through life and death, through soul and sense,
+His wise, paternal purpose runs;
+The darkness of His providence
+Is star-lit with benign intents."
+
+O joy supreme! I know the Voice,
+Like none beside on earth or sea;
+Yea, more, O soul of mine, rejoice,
+By all that He requires of me,
+I know what God himself must be.
+
+No picture to my aid I call,
+I shape no image in my prayer;
+I only know in Him is all
+Of life, light, beauty, everywhere,
+Eternal Goodness here and there!
+
+I know He is, and what He is,
+Whose one great purpose is the good
+Of all. I rest my soul on His
+Immortal Love and Fatherhood;
+And trust Him, as His children should.
+
+I fear no more. The clouded face
+Of Nature smiles; through all her things
+Of time and space and sense I trace
+The moving of the Spirit's wings,
+And hear the song of hope she sings.
+1886
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                              VOLUME III.
+
+
+                           ANTI-SLAVERY POEMS
+
+                       SONGS OF LABOR AND REFORM
+
+
+                                   BY
+
+                        JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+
+ANTI-SLAVERY POEMS:
+
+TO WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
+TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE
+THE SLAVE-SHIPS
+EXPOSTULATION
+HYMN: "THOU, WHOSE PRESENCE WENT BEFORE"
+THE YANKEE GIRL
+THE HUNTERS OF MEN
+STANZAS FOR THE TIMES
+CLERICAL OPPRESSORS
+A SUMMONS
+TO THE MEMORY OF THOMAS
+THE MORAL WARFARE
+RITNER
+THE PASTORAL LETTER
+HYMN: "O HOLY FATHER! JUST AND TRUE"
+THE FAREWELL OF A VIRGINIA SLAVE MOTHER
+PENNSYLVANIA HALL
+THE NEW YEAR
+THE RELIC
+THE WORLD'S CONVENTION
+MASSACHUSETTS TO VIRGINIA
+THE CHRISTIAN SLAVE
+THE SENTENCE OF JOHN L. BROWN
+TEXAS
+     VOICE OF NEW ENGLAND
+     TO FANEUIL HALL
+     TO MASSACHUSETTS
+     NEW HAMPSHIRE
+     THE PINE-TREE
+TO A SOUTHERN STATESMAN
+AT WASHINGTON
+THE BRANDED HAND
+THE FREED ISLANDS
+A LETTER
+LINES FROM A LETTER TO A YOUNG CLERICAL FRIEND
+DANIEL NEALL
+SONG OF SLAVES IN THE DESERT
+To DELAWARE
+YORKTOWN
+RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE
+THE LOST STATESMAN
+THE SLAVES OF MARTINIQUE
+THE CURSE OF THE CHARTER-BREAKERS
+PAEAN
+THE CRISIS
+LINES ON THE PORTRAIT OF A CELEBRATED PUBLISHER
+DERNE
+A SABBATH SCENE
+IN THE EVIL DAY
+MOLOCH IN STATE STREET
+OFFICIAL PIETY
+THE RENDITION
+ARISEN AT LAST
+THE HASCHISH
+FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS' SAKE
+THE KANSAS EMIGRANTS
+LETTER FROM A MISSIONARY OF THE METHODIST
+     EPISCOPAL CHURCH SOUTH, IN KANSAS, TO A
+     DISTINGUISHED POLITICIAN
+BURIAL OF BARBER
+TO PENNSYLVANIA
+LE MARAIS DU CYGNE.
+THE PASS OF THE SIERRA
+A SONG FOR THE TIME
+WHAT OF THE DAY?
+A SONG, INSCRIBED TO THE FREMONT CLUBS
+THE PANORAMA
+ON A PRAYER-BOOK
+THE SUMMONS
+TO WILLIAM H. SEWARD
+IN WAR TIME.
+     TO SAMUEL E. SEWALL AND HARRIET W. SEWALL
+     THY WILL BE DONE
+     A WORD FOR THE HOUR
+     "EIN FESTE BURG IST UNSER GOTT"
+     TO JOHN C. FREMONT
+     THE WATCHERS
+     TO ENGLISHMEN
+     MITHRIDATES AT CHIOS
+     AT PORT ROYAL
+     ASTRAEA AT THE CAPITOL
+     THE BATTLE AUTUMN OF 1862
+     OF ST. HELENA'S ISLAND, S. C.
+     THE PROCLAMATION
+     ANNIVERSARY POEM
+     BARBARA FRIETCHIE
+     HAT THE BIRDS SAID
+     THE MANTLE OF ST. JOHN DE MATRA
+     LADS DEO!
+     HYMN FOR THE CELEBRATION OF EMANCIPATION
+          AT NEWBURYPORT
+
+AFTER THE WAR.
+     THE PEACE AUTUMN
+     TO THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS
+     THE HIVE AT GETTYSBURG
+     HOWARD AT ATLANTA
+     THE EMANCIPATION GROUP
+     THE JUBILEE SINGERS
+     GARRISON
+
+
+
+SONGS OF LABOR AND REFORM:
+
+THE QUAKER OF THE OLDEN TIME
+DEMOCRACY
+THE GALLOWS
+SEED-TIME AND HARVEST
+TO THE REFORMERS OF ENGLAND
+THE HUMAN SACRIFICE
+SONGS OF LABOR
+     DEDICATION
+     THE SHOEMAKERS
+     THE FISHERMEN
+     THE LUMBERMEN
+     THE SHIP-BUILDERS
+     THE DROVERS
+     THE HUSKERS
+THE REFORMER
+THE PEACE CONVENTION AT BRUSSELS
+THE PRISONER FOR DEBT
+THE CHRISTIAN TOURISTS
+THE MEN OF OLD
+TO PIUS IX.
+CALEF IN BOSTON
+OUR STATE
+THE PRISONERS OF NAPLES
+THE PEACE OF EUROPE
+ASTRAEA
+THE DISENTHRALLED
+THE POOR VOTER ON ELECTION DAY
+THE DREAM OF PIO NONO
+THE VOICES
+THE NEW EXODUS
+THE CONQUEST OF FINLAND
+THE EVE OF ELECTION
+FROM PERUGIA
+ITALY
+FREEDOM IN BRAZIL
+AFTER ELECTION
+DISARMAMENT
+THE PROBLEM
+OUR COUNTRY
+ON THE BIG HORN
+
+NOTES
+
+
+
+
+ANTI-SLAVERY POEMS
+
+    ..........
+
+TO WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
+
+CHAMPION of those who groan beneath
+Oppression's iron hand
+In view of penury, hate, and death,
+I see thee fearless stand.
+Still bearing up thy lofty brow,
+In the steadfast strength of truth,
+In manhood sealing well the vow
+And promise of thy youth.
+
+Go on, for thou hast chosen well;
+On in the strength of God!
+Long as one human heart shall swell
+Beneath the tyrant's rod.
+Speak in a slumbering nation's ear,
+As thou hast ever spoken,
+Until the dead in sin shall hear,
+The fetter's link be broken!
+
+I love thee with a brother's love,
+I feel my pulses thrill,
+To mark thy spirit soar above
+The cloud of human ill.
+My heart hath leaped to answer thine,
+And echo back thy words,
+As leaps the warrior's at the shine
+And flash of kindred swords!
+
+They tell me thou art rash and vain,
+A searcher after fame;
+That thou art striving but to gain
+A long-enduring name;
+That thou hast nerved the Afric's hand
+And steeled the Afric's heart,
+To shake aloft his vengeful brand,
+And rend his chain apart.
+
+Have I not known thee well, and read
+Thy mighty purpose long?
+And watched the trials which have made
+Thy human spirit strong?
+And shall the slanderer's demon breath
+Avail with one like me,
+To dim the sunshine of my faith
+And earnest trust in thee?
+
+Go on, the dagger's point may glare
+Amid thy pathway's gloom;
+The fate which sternly threatens there
+Is glorious martyrdom
+Then onward with a martyr's zeal;
+And wait thy sure reward
+When man to man no more shall kneel,
+And God alone be Lord!
+1832.
+
+
+
+
+TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE.
+
+Toussaint L'Ouverture, the black chieftain of Hayti, was a slave on the
+plantation "de Libertas," belonging to M. Bayou. When the rising of the
+negroes took place, in 1791, Toussaint refused to join them until he had
+aided M. Bayou and his family to escape to Baltimore. The white man had
+discovered in Toussaint many noble qualities, and had instructed him in
+some of the first branches of education; and the preservation of his
+life was owing to the negro's gratitude for this kindness.  In 1797,
+Toussaint L'Ouverture was appointed, by the French government,
+General-in-Chief of the armies of St. Domingo, and, as such, signed the
+Convention with General Maitland for the evacuation of the island by the
+British. From this period, until 1801, the island, under the government
+of Toussaint, was happy, tranquil, and prosperous.  The miserable
+attempt of Napoleon to re-establish slavery in St. Domingo, although it
+failed of its intended object, proved fatal to the negro chieftain.
+Treacherously seized by Leclerc, he was hurried on board a vessel by
+night, and conveyed to France, where he was confined in a cold
+subterranean dungeon, at Besancon, where, in April, 1803, he died. The
+treatment of Toussaint finds a parallel only in the murder of the Duke
+D'Enghien. It was the remark of Godwin, in his Lectures, that the West
+India Islands, since their first discovery by Columbus, could not boast
+of a single name which deserves comparison with that of Toussaint
+L'Ouverture.
+
+'T WAS night. The tranquil moonlight smile
+With which Heaven dreams of Earth, shed down
+Its beauty on the Indian isle,--
+On broad green field and white-walled town;
+And inland waste of rock and wood,
+In searching sunshine, wild and rude,
+Rose, mellowed through the silver gleam,
+Soft as the landscape of a dream.
+All motionless and dewy wet,
+Tree, vine, and flower in shadow met
+The myrtle with its snowy bloom,
+Crossing the nightshade's solemn gloom,--
+The white cecropia's silver rind
+Relieved by deeper green behind,
+The orange with its fruit of gold,
+The lithe paullinia's verdant fold,
+The passion-flower, with symbol holy,
+Twining its tendrils long and lowly,
+The rhexias dark, and cassia tall,
+And proudly rising over all,
+The kingly palm's imperial stem,
+Crowned with its leafy diadem,
+Star-like, beneath whose sombre shade,
+The fiery-winged cucullo played!
+
+How lovely was thine aspect, then,
+Fair island of the Western Sea
+Lavish of beauty, even when
+Thy brutes were happier than thy men,
+For they, at least, were free!
+Regardless of thy glorious clime,
+Unmindful of thy soil of flowers,
+The toiling negro sighed, that Time
+No faster sped his hours.
+For, by the dewy moonlight still,
+He fed the weary-turning mill,
+Or bent him in the chill morass,
+To pluck the long and tangled grass,
+And hear above his scar-worn back
+The heavy slave-whip's frequent crack
+While in his heart one evil thought
+In solitary madness wrought,
+One baleful fire surviving still
+The quenching of the immortal mind,
+One sterner passion of his kind,
+Which even fetters could not kill,
+The savage hope, to deal, erelong,
+A vengeance bitterer than his wrong!
+
+Hark to that cry! long, loud, and shrill,
+From field and forest, rock and hill,
+Thrilling and horrible it rang,
+Around, beneath, above;
+The wild beast from his cavern sprang,
+The wild bird from her grove!
+Nor fear, nor joy, nor agony
+Were mingled in that midnight cry;
+But like the lion's growl of wrath,
+When falls that hunter in his path
+Whose barbed arrow, deeply set,
+Is rankling in his bosom yet,
+It told of hate, full, deep, and strong,
+Of vengeance kindling out of wrong;
+It was as if the crimes of years--
+The unrequited toil, the tears,
+The shame and hate, which liken well
+Earth's garden to the nether hell--
+Had found in nature's self a tongue,
+On which the gathered horror hung;
+As if from cliff, and stream, and glen
+Burst on the' startled ears of men
+That voice which rises unto God,
+Solemn and stern,--the cry of blood!
+It ceased, and all was still once more,
+Save ocean chafing on his shore,
+The sighing of the wind between
+The broad banana's leaves of green,
+Or bough by restless plumage shook,
+Or murmuring voice of mountain brook.
+Brief was the silence. Once again
+Pealed to the skies that frantic yell,
+Glowed on the heavens a fiery stain,
+And flashes rose and fell;
+And painted on the blood-red sky,
+Dark, naked arms were tossed on high;
+And, round the white man's lordly hall,
+Trod, fierce and free, the brute he made;
+And those who crept along the wall,
+And answered to his lightest call
+With more than spaniel dread,
+The creatures of his lawless beck,
+Were trampling on his very neck
+And on the night-air, wild and clear,
+Rose woman's shriek of more than fear;
+For bloodied arms were round her thrown,
+And dark cheeks pressed against her own!
+Where then was he whose fiery zeal
+Had taught the trampled heart to feel,
+Until despair itself grew strong,
+And vengeance fed its torch from wrong?
+Now, when the thunderbolt is speeding;
+Now, when oppression's heart is bleeding;
+Now, when the latent curse of Time
+Is raining down in fire and blood,
+That curse which, through long years of crime,
+Has gathered, drop by drop, its flood,--
+Why strikes he not, the foremost one,
+Where murder's sternest deeds are done?
+
+He stood the aged palms beneath,
+That shadowed o'er his humble door,
+Listening, with half-suspended breath,
+To the wild sounds of fear and death,
+Toussaint L'Ouverture!
+What marvel that his heart beat high!
+The blow for freedom had been given,
+And blood had answered to the cry
+Which Earth sent up to Heaven!
+What marvel that a fierce delight
+Smiled grimly o'er his brow of night,
+As groan and shout and bursting flame
+Told where the midnight tempest came,
+With blood and fire along its van,
+And death behind! he was a Man!
+
+Yes, dark-souled chieftain! if the light
+Of mild Religion's heavenly ray
+Unveiled not to thy mental sight
+The lowlier and the purer way,
+In which the Holy Sufferer trod,
+Meekly amidst the sons of crime;
+That calm reliance upon God
+For justice in His own good time;
+That gentleness to which belongs
+Forgiveness for its many wrongs,
+Even as the primal martyr, kneeling
+For mercy on the evil-dealing;
+Let not the favored white man name
+Thy stern appeal, with words of blame.
+Then, injured Afric! for the shame
+Of thy own daughters, vengeance came
+Full on the scornful hearts of those,
+Who mocked thee in thy nameless woes,
+And to thy hapless children gave
+One choice,--pollution or the grave!
+
+Has he not, with the light of heaven
+Broadly around him, made the same?
+Yea, on his thousand war-fields striven,
+And gloried in his ghastly shame?
+Kneeling amidst his brother's blood,
+To offer mockery unto God,
+As if the High and Holy One
+Could smile on deeds of murder done!
+As if a human sacrifice
+Were purer in His holy eyes,
+Though offered up by Christian hands,
+Than the foul rites of Pagan lands!
+
+      . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+Sternly, amidst his household band,
+His carbine grasped within his hand,
+The white man stood, prepared and still,
+Waiting the shock of maddened men,
+Unchained, and fierce as tigers, when
+The horn winds through their caverned hill.
+And one was weeping in his sight,
+The sweetest flower of all the isle,
+The bride who seemed but yesternight
+Love's fair embodied smile.
+And, clinging to her trembling knee,
+Looked up the form of infancy,
+With tearful glance in either face
+The secret of its fear to trace.
+
+"Ha! stand or die!" The white man's eye
+His steady musket gleamed along,
+As a tall Negro hastened nigh,
+With fearless step and strong.
+"What, ho, Toussaint!" A moment more,
+His shadow crossed the lighted floor.
+"Away!" he shouted; "fly with me,
+The white man's bark is on the sea;
+Her sails must catch the seaward wind,
+For sudden vengeance sweeps behind.
+Our brethren from their graves have spoken,
+The yoke is spurned, the chain is broken;
+On all the bills our fires are glowing,
+Through all the vales red blood is flowing
+No more the mocking White shall rest
+His foot upon the Negro's breast;
+No more, at morn or eve, shall drip
+The warm blood from the driver's whip
+Yet, though Toussaint has vengeance sworn
+For all the wrongs his race have borne,
+Though for each drop of Negro blood
+The white man's veins shall pour a flood;
+Not all alone the sense of ill
+Around his heart is lingering still,
+Nor deeper can the white man feel
+The generous warmth of grateful zeal.
+Friends of the Negro! fly with me,
+The path is open to the sea:
+Away, for life!" He spoke, and pressed
+The young child to his manly breast,
+As, headlong, through the cracking cane,
+Down swept the dark insurgent train,
+Drunken and grim, with shout and yell
+Howled through the dark, like sounds from hell.
+
+Far out, in peace, the white man's sail
+Swayed free before the sunrise gale.
+Cloud-like that island hung afar,
+Along the bright horizon's verge,
+O'er which the curse of servile war
+Rolled its red torrent, surge on surge;
+And he, the Negro champion, where
+In the fierce tumult struggled he?
+Go trace him by the fiery glare
+Of dwellings in the midnight air,
+The yells of triumph and despair,
+The streams that crimson to the sea!
+
+Sleep calmly in thy dungeon-tomb,
+Beneath Besancon's alien sky,
+Dark Haytien! for the time shall come,
+Yea, even now is nigh,
+When, everywhere, thy name shall be
+Redeemed from color's infamy;
+And men shall learn to speak of thee
+As one of earth's great spirits, born
+In servitude, and nursed in scorn,
+Casting aside the weary weight
+And fetters of its low estate,
+In that strong majesty of soul
+Which knows no color, tongue, or clime,
+Which still hath spurned the base control
+Of tyrants through all time!
+Far other hands than mine may wreathe
+The laurel round thy brow of death,
+And speak thy praise, as one whose word
+A thousand fiery spirits stirred,
+Who crushed his foeman as a worm,
+Whose step on human hearts fell firm:
+
+Be mine the better task to find
+A tribute for thy lofty mind,
+Amidst whose gloomy vengeance shone
+Some milder virtues all thine own,
+Some gleams of feeling pure and warm,
+Like sunshine on a sky of storm,
+Proofs that the Negro's heart retains
+Some nobleness amid its chains,--
+That kindness to the wronged is never
+Without its excellent reward,
+Holy to human-kind and ever
+Acceptable to God.
+1833.
+
+
+
+
+THE SLAVE-SHIPS.
+
+"That fatal, that perfidious bark,
+Built I' the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark."
+                          MILTON'S Lycidas.
+
+"The French ship Le Rodeur, with a crew of twenty-two men, and with one
+hundred and sixty negro slaves, sailed from Bonny, in Africa, April,
+1819. On approaching the line, a terrible malady broke out,--an
+obstinate disease of the eyes,--contagious, and altogether beyond the
+resources of medicine. It was aggravated by the scarcity of water among
+the slaves (only half a wine-glass per day being allowed to an
+individual), and by the extreme impurity of the air in which they
+breathed. By the advice of the physician, they were brought upon deck
+occasionally; but some of the poor wretches, locking themselves in each
+other's arms, leaped overboard, in the hope, which so universally
+prevails among them, of being swiftly transported to their own homes in
+Africa. To check this, the captain ordered several who were stopped in
+the attempt to be shot, or hanged, before their companions. The disease
+extended to the crew; and one after another were smitten with it, until
+only one remained unaffected. Yet even this dreadful condition did not
+preclude calculation: to save the expense of supporting slaves rendered
+unsalable, and to obtain grounds for a claim against the underwriters,
+thirty-six of the negroes, having become blind, were thrown into the sea
+and drowned!" Speech of M. Benjamin Constant, in the French Chamber of
+Deputies, June 17, 1820.
+
+In the midst of their dreadful fears lest the solitary individual, whose
+sight remained unaffected, should also be seized with the malady, a sail
+was discovered. It was the Spanish slaver, Leon. The same disease had
+been there; and, horrible to tell, all the crew had become blind! Unable
+to assist each other, the vessels parted. The Spanish ship has never
+since been heard of. The Rodeur reached Guadaloupe on the 21st of June;
+the only man who had escaped the disease, and had thus been enabled to
+steer the slaver into port, caught it in three days after its arrival.--
+Bibliotheque Ophthalmologique for November, 1819.
+
+"ALL ready?" cried the captain;
+"Ay, ay!" the seamen said;
+"Heave up the worthless lubbers,--
+The dying and the dead."
+Up from the slave-ship's prison
+Fierce, bearded heads were thrust:
+"Now let the sharks look to it,--
+Toss up the dead ones first!"
+
+Corpse after corpse came up,
+Death had been busy there;
+Where every blow is mercy,
+Why should the spoiler spare?
+Corpse after corpse they cast
+Sullenly from the ship,
+Yet bloody with the traces
+Of fetter-link and whip.
+
+Gloomily stood the captain,
+With his arms upon his breast,
+With his cold brow sternly knotted,
+And his iron lip compressed.
+
+"Are all the dead dogs over?"
+Growled through that matted lip;
+"The blind ones are no better,
+Let's lighten the good ship."
+
+Hark! from the ship's dark bosom,
+The very sounds of hell!
+The ringing clank of iron,
+The maniac's short, sharp yell!
+The hoarse, low curse, throat-stifled;
+The starving infant's moan,
+The horror of a breaking heart
+Poured through a mother's groan.
+
+Up from that loathsome prison
+The stricken blind ones cane
+Below, had all been darkness,
+Above, was still the same.
+Yet the holy breath of heaven
+Was sweetly breathing there,
+And the heated brow of fever
+Cooled in the soft sea air.
+
+"Overboard with them, shipmates!"
+Cutlass and dirk were plied;
+Fettered and blind, one after one,
+Plunged down the vessel's side.
+The sabre smote above,
+Beneath, the lean shark lay,
+Waiting with wide and bloody jaw
+His quick and human prey.
+
+God of the earth! what cries
+Rang upward unto thee?
+Voices of agony and blood,
+From ship-deck and from sea.
+The last dull plunge was heard,
+The last wave caught its stain,
+And the unsated shark looked up
+For human hearts in vain.
+
+   . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+Red glowed the western waters,
+The setting sun was there,
+Scattering alike on wave and cloud
+His fiery mesh of hair.
+Amidst a group in blindness,
+A solitary eye
+Gazed, from the burdened slaver's deck,
+Into that burning sky.
+
+"A storm," spoke out the gazer,
+"Is gathering and at hand;
+Curse on 't, I'd give my other eye
+For one firm rood of land."
+And then he laughed, but only
+His echoed laugh replied,
+For the blinded and the suffering
+Alone were at his side.
+
+Night settled on the waters,
+And on a stormy heaven,
+While fiercely on that lone ship's track
+The thunder-gust was driven.
+"A sail!--thank God, a sail!"
+And as the helmsman spoke,
+Up through the stormy murmur
+A shout of gladness broke.
+
+
+Down came the stranger vessel,
+Unheeding on her way,
+So near that on the slaver's deck
+Fell off her driven spray.
+"Ho! for the love of mercy,
+We're perishing and blind!"
+A wail of utter agony
+Came back upon the wind.
+
+"Help us! for we are stricken
+With blindness every one;
+Ten days we've floated fearfully,
+Unnoting star or sun.
+Our ship 's the slaver Leon,--
+We've but a score on board;
+Our slaves are all gone over,--
+Help, for the love of God!"
+
+On livid brows of agony
+The broad red lightning shone;
+But the roar of wind and thunder
+Stifled the answering groan;
+Wailed from the broken waters
+A last despairing cry,
+As, kindling in the stormy' light,
+The stranger ship went by.
+
+       . . . . . . . . .
+
+In the sunny Guadaloupe
+A dark-hulled vessel lay,
+With a crew who noted never
+The nightfall or the day.
+The blossom of the orange
+Was white by every stream,
+And tropic leaf, and flower, and bird
+Were in the warns sunbeam.
+
+And the sky was bright as ever,
+And the moonlight slept as well,
+On the palm-trees by the hillside,
+And the streamlet of the dell:
+And the glances of the Creole
+Were still as archly deep,
+And her smiles as full as ever
+Of passion and of sleep.
+
+But vain were bird and blossom,
+The green earth and the sky,
+And the smile of human faces,
+To the slaver's darkened eye;
+At the breaking of the morning,
+At the star-lit evening time,
+O'er a world of light and beauty
+Fell the blackness of his crime.
+1834.
+
+
+
+
+EXPOSTULATION.
+
+Dr. Charles Follen, a German patriot, who had come to America for the
+freedom which was denied him in his native land, allied himself with the
+abolitionists, and at a convention of delegates from all the anti-
+slavery organizations in New England, held at Boston in May, 1834, was
+chairman of a committee to prepare an address to the people of New
+England. Toward the close of the address occurred the passage which
+suggested these lines. "The despotism which our fathers could not bear
+in their native country is expiring, and the sword of justice in her
+reformed hands has applied its exterminating edge to slavery. Shall the
+United States--the free United States, which could not bear the bonds of
+a king--cradle the bondage which a king is abolishing? Shall a Republic
+be less free than a Monarchy? Shall we, in the vigor and buoyancy of our
+manhood, be less energetic in righteousness than a kingdom in its age?"
+--Dr. Follen's Address.
+
+"Genius of America!--Spirit of our free institutions!--where art thou?
+How art thou fallen, O Lucifer! son of the morning,--how art thou fallen
+from Heaven! Hell from beneath is moved for thee, to meet thee at thy
+coming! The kings of the earth cry out to thee, Aha! Aha! Art thou
+become like unto us?"--Speech of Samuel J. May.
+
+OUR fellow-countrymen in chains!
+Slaves, in a land of light and law!
+Slaves, crouching on the very plains
+Where rolled the storm of Freedom's war!
+A groan from Eutaw's haunted wood,
+A. wail where Camden's martyrs fell,
+By every shrine of patriot blood,
+From Moultrie's wall and Jasper's well!
+
+By storied hill and hallowed grot,
+By mossy wood and marshy glen,
+Whence rang of old the rifle-shot,
+And hurrying shout of Marion's men!
+The groan of breaking hearts is there,
+The falling lash, the fetter's clank!
+Slaves, slaves are breathing in that air
+Which old De Kalb and Sumter drank!
+
+What, ho! our countrymen in chains!
+The whip on woman's shrinking flesh!
+Our soil yet reddening with the stains
+Caught from her scourging, warm and fresh!
+What! mothers from their children riven!
+What! God's own image bought and sold!
+Americans to market driven,
+And bartered as the brute for gold!
+
+Speak! shall their agony of prayer
+Come thrilling to our hearts in vain?
+To us whose fathers scorned to bear
+The paltry menace of a chain;
+To us, whose boast is loud and long
+Of holy Liberty and Light;
+Say, shall these writhing slaves of Wrong
+Plead vainly for their plundered Right?
+
+What! shall we send, with lavish breath,
+Our sympathies across the wave,
+Where Manhood, on the field of death,
+Strikes for his freedom or a grave?
+Shall prayers go up, and hymns be sung
+For Greece, the Moslem fetter spurning,
+And millions hail with pen and tongue
+Our light on all her altars burning?
+
+Shall Belgium feel, and gallant France,
+By Vendome's pile and Schoenbrun's wall,
+And Poland, gasping on her lance,
+The impulse of our cheering call?
+And shall the slave, beneath our eye,
+Clank o'er our fields his hateful chain?
+And toss his fettered arms on high,
+And groan for Freedom's gift, in vain?
+
+Oh, say, shall Prussia's banner be
+A refuge for the stricken slave?
+And shall the Russian serf go free
+By Baikal's lake and Neva's wave?
+And shall the wintry-bosomed Dane
+Relax the iron hand of pride,
+And bid his bondmen cast the chain
+From fettered soul and limb aside?
+
+Shall every flap of England's flag
+Proclaim that all around are free,
+From farthest Ind to each blue crag
+That beetles o'er the Western Sea?
+And shall we scoff at Europe's kings,
+When Freedom's fire is dim with us,
+And round our country's altar clings
+The damning shade of Slavery's curse?
+
+Go, let us ask of Constantine
+To loose his grasp on Poland's throat;
+And beg the lord of Mahmoud's line
+To spare the struggling Suliote;
+Will not the scorching answer come
+From turbaned Turk, and scornful Russ
+"Go, loose your fettered slaves at home,
+Then turn, and ask the like of us!"
+
+Just God! and shall we calmly rest,
+The Christian's scorn, the heathen's mirth,
+Content to live the lingering jest
+And by-word of a mocking Earth?
+Shall our own glorious land retain
+That curse which Europe scorns to bear?
+Shall our own brethren drag the chain
+Which not even Russia's menials wear?
+
+Up, then, in Freedom's manly part,
+From graybeard eld to fiery youth,
+And on the nation's naked heart
+Scatter the living coals of Truth!
+Up! while ye slumber, deeper yet
+The shadow of our fame is growing!
+Up! while ye pause, our sun may set
+In blood, around our altars flowing!
+
+Oh! rouse ye, ere the storm comes forth,
+The gathered wrath of God and man,
+Like that which wasted Egypt's earth,
+When hail and fire above it ran.
+Hear ye no warnings in the air?
+Feel ye no earthquake underneath?
+Up, up! why will ye slumber where
+The sleeper only wakes in death?
+
+Rise now for Freedom! not in strife
+Like that your sterner fathers saw,
+The awful waste of human life,
+The glory and the guilt of war:'
+But break the chain, the yoke remove,
+And smite to earth Oppression's rod,
+With those mild arms of Truth and Love,
+Made mighty through the living God!
+
+Down let the shrine of Moloch sink,
+And leave no traces where it stood;
+Nor longer let its idol drink
+His daily cup of human blood;
+But rear another altar there,
+To Truth and Love and Mercy given,
+And Freedom's gift, and Freedom's prayer,
+Shall call an answer down from Heaven!
+1834
+
+
+
+
+HYMN.
+
+Written for the meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, at Chatham Street
+Chapel, New York, held on the 4th of the seventh month, 1834.
+
+
+O THOU, whose presence went before
+Our fathers in their weary way,
+As with Thy chosen moved of yore
+The fire by night, the cloud by day!
+
+When from each temple of the free,
+A nation's song ascends to Heaven,
+Most Holy Father! unto Thee
+May not our humble prayer be given?
+
+Thy children all, though hue and form
+Are varied in Thine own good will,
+With Thy own holy breathings warm,
+And fashioned in Thine image still.
+
+We thank Thee, Father! hill and plain
+Around us wave their fruits once more,
+And clustered vine, and blossomed grain,
+Are bending round each cottage door.
+
+And peace is here; and hope and love
+Are round us as a mantle thrown,
+And unto Thee, supreme above,
+The knee of prayer is bowed alone.
+
+But oh, for those this day can bring,
+As unto us, no joyful thrill;
+For those who, under Freedom's wing,
+Are bound in Slavery's fetters still:
+
+For those to whom Thy written word
+Of light and love is never given;
+For those whose ears have never heard
+The promise and the hope of heaven!
+
+For broken heart, and clouded mind,
+Whereon no human mercies fall;
+Oh, be Thy gracious love inclined,
+Who, as a Father, pitiest all!
+
+And grant, O Father! that the time
+Of Earth's deliverance may be near,
+When every land and tongue and clime
+The message of Thy love shall hear;
+
+When, smitten as with fire from heaven,
+The captive's chain shall sink in dust,
+And to his fettered soul be given
+The glorious freedom of the just,
+
+
+
+
+THE YANKEE GIRL.
+
+SHE sings by her wheel at that low cottage-door,
+Which the long evening shadow is stretching before,
+With a music as sweet as the music which seems
+Breathed softly and faint in the ear of our dreams!
+
+How brilliant and mirthful the light of her eye,
+Like a star glancing out from the blue of the sky!
+And lightly and freely her dark tresses play
+O'er a brow and a bosom as lovely as they!
+
+Who comes in his pride to that low cottage-door,
+The haughty and rich to the humble and poor?
+'T is the great Southern planter, the master who waves
+His whip of dominion o'er hundreds of slaves.
+
+"Nay, Ellen, for shame! Let those Yankee fools spin,
+Who would pass for our slaves with a change of their skin;
+Let them toil as they will at the loom or the wheel,
+Too stupid for shame, and too vulgar to feel!
+
+"But thou art too lovely and precious a gem
+To be bound to their burdens and sullied by them;
+For shame, Ellen, shame, cast thy bondage aside,
+And away to the South, as my blessing and pride.
+
+"Oh, come where no winter thy footsteps can wrong,
+But where flowers are blossoming all the year long,
+Where the shade of the palm-tree is over my home,
+And the lemon and orange are white in their bloom!
+
+"Oh, come to my home, where my servants shall all
+Depart at thy bidding and come at thy call;
+They shall heed thee as mistress with trembling and awe,
+And each wish of thy heart shall be felt as a law."
+
+"Oh, could ye have seen her--that pride of our girls--
+Arise and cast back the dark wealth of her curls,
+With a scorn in her eye which the gazer could feel,
+And a glance like the sunshine that flashes on steel!
+
+"Go back, haughty Southron! thy treasures of gold
+Are dim with the blood of the hearts thou halt sold;
+Thy home may be lovely, but round it I hear
+The crack of the whip and the footsteps of fear!
+
+"And the sky of thy South may be brighter than ours,
+And greener thy landscapes, and fairer thy' flowers;
+But dearer the blast round our mountains which raves,
+Than the sweet summer zephyr which breathes over slaves!
+
+"Full low at thy bidding thy negroes may kneel,
+With the iron of bondage on spirit and heel;
+Yet know that the Yankee girl sooner would be
+In fetters with them, than in freedom with thee!"
+1835.
+
+
+
+
+THE HUNTERS OF MEN.
+
+These lines were written when the orators of the American Colonization
+Society were demanding that the free blacks should be sent to Africa,
+and opposing Emancipation unless expatriation followed. See the report
+of the proceedings of the society at its annual meeting in 1834.
+
+HAVE ye heard of our hunting, o'er mountain and glen,
+Through cane-brake and forest,--the hunting of men?
+The lords of our land to this hunting have gone,
+As the fox-hunter follows the sound of the horn;
+Hark! the cheer and the hallo! the crack of the whip,
+And the yell of the hound as he fastens his grip!
+All blithe are our hunters, and noble their match,
+Though hundreds are caught, there are millions to catch.
+So speed to their hunting, o'er mountain and glen,
+Through cane-brake and forest,--the hunting of men!
+
+Gay luck to our hunters! how nobly they ride
+In the glow of their zeal, and the strength of their pride!
+The priest with his cassock flung back on the wind,
+Just screening the politic statesman behind;
+The saint and the sinner, with cursing and prayer,
+The drunk and the sober, ride merrily there.
+And woman, kind woman, wife, widow, and maid,
+For the good of the hunted, is lending her aid
+Her foot's in the stirrup, her hand on the rein,
+How blithely she rides to the hunting of men!
+
+Oh, goodly and grand is our hunting to see,
+In this "land of the brave and this home of the free."
+Priest, warrior, and statesman, from Georgia to Maine,
+All mounting the saddle, all grasping the rein;
+Right merrily hunting the black man, whose sin
+Is the curl of his hair and the hue of his skin!
+Woe, now, to the hunted who turns him at bay
+Will our hunters be turned from their purpose and prey?
+Will their hearts fail within them? their nerves tremble, when
+All roughly they ride to the hunting of men?
+
+Ho! alms for our hunters! all weary and faint,
+Wax the curse of the sinner and prayer of the saint.
+The horn is wound faintly, the echoes are still,
+Over cane-brake and river, and forest and hill.
+Haste, alms for our hunters! the hunted once more
+Have turned from their flight with their backs to the shore
+What right have they here in the home of the white,
+Shadowed o'er by our banner of Freedom and Right?
+Ho! alms for the hunters! or never again
+Will they ride in their pomp to the hunting of men!
+
+Alms, alms for our hunters! why will ye delay,
+When their pride and their glory are melting away?
+The parson has turned; for, on charge of his own,
+Who goeth a warfare, or hunting, alone?
+The politic statesman looks back with a sigh,
+There is doubt in his heart, there is fear in his eye.
+Oh, haste, lest that doubting and fear shall prevail,
+And the head of his steed take the place of the tail.
+Oh, haste, ere he leave us! for who will ride then,
+For pleasure or gain, to the hunting of men?
+1835.
+
+
+
+
+STANZAS FOR THE TIMES.
+
+The "Times" referred to were those evil times of the pro-slavery meeting
+in Faneuil Hall, August 21, 1835, in which a demand was made for the
+suppression of free speech, lest it should endanger the foundation of
+commercial society.
+
+Is this the land our fathers loved,
+The freedom which they toiled to win?
+Is this the soil whereon they moved?
+Are these the graves they slumber in?
+Are we the sons by whom are borne
+The mantles which the dead have worn?
+
+And shall we crouch above these graves,
+With craven soul and fettered lip?
+Yoke in with marked and branded slaves,
+And tremble at the driver's whip?
+Bend to the earth our pliant knees,
+And speak but as our masters please.
+
+Shall outraged Nature cease to feel?
+Shall Mercy's tears no longer flow?
+Shall ruffian threats of cord and steel,
+The dungeon's gloom, the assassin's blow,
+Turn back the spirit roused to save
+The Truth, our Country, and the Slave?
+
+Of human skulls that shrine was made,
+Round which the priests of Mexico
+Before their loathsome idol prayed;
+Is Freedom's altar fashioned so?
+And must we yield to Freedom's God,
+As offering meet, the negro's blood?
+
+Shall tongues be mute, when deeds are wrought
+Which well might shame extremest hell?
+Shall freemen lock the indignant thought?
+Shall Pity's bosom cease to swell?
+Shall Honor bleed?--shall Truth succumb?
+Shall pen, and press, and soul be dumb?
+
+No; by each spot of haunted ground,
+Where Freedom weeps her children's fall;
+By Plymouth's rock, and Bunker's mound;
+By Griswold's stained and shattered wall;
+By Warren's ghost, by Langdon's shade;
+By all the memories of our dead.
+
+By their enlarging souls, which burst
+The bands and fetters round them set;
+By the free Pilgrim spirit nursed
+Within our inmost bosoms, yet,
+By all above, around, below,
+Be ours the indignant answer,--No!
+
+No; guided by our country's laws,
+For truth, and right, and suffering man,
+Be ours to strive in Freedom's cause,
+As Christians may, as freemen can!
+Still pouring on unwilling ears
+That truth oppression only fears.
+
+What! shall we guard our neighbor still,
+While woman shrieks beneath his rod,
+And while he tramples down at will
+The image of a common God?
+Shall watch and ward be round him set,
+Of Northern nerve and bayonet?
+
+And shall we know and share with him
+The danger and the growing shame?
+And see our Freedom's light grow dim,
+Which should have filled the world with flame?
+And, writhing, feel, where'er we turn,
+A world's reproach around us burn?
+
+Is 't not enough that this is borne?
+And asks our haughty neighbor more?
+Must fetters which his slaves have worn
+Clank round the Yankee farmer's door?
+Must he be told, beside his plough,
+What he must speak, and when, and how?
+
+Must he be told his freedom stands
+On Slavery's dark foundations strong;
+On breaking hearts and fettered hands,
+On robbery, and crime, and wrong?
+That all his fathers taught is vain,--
+That Freedom's emblem is the chain?
+
+Its life, its soul, from slavery drawn!
+False, foul, profane! Go, teach as well
+Of holy Truth from Falsehood born!
+Of Heaven refreshed by airs from Hell!
+Of Virtue in the arms of Vice!
+Of Demons planting Paradise!
+
+Rail on, then, brethren of the South,
+Ye shall not hear the truth the less;
+No seal is on the Yankee's mouth,
+No fetter on the Yankee's press!
+From our Green Mountains to the sea,
+One voice shall thunder, We are free!
+
+
+
+
+CLERICAL OPPRESSORS.
+
+In the report of the celebrated pro-slavery meeting in Charleston, S.C.,
+on the 4th of the ninth month, 1835, published in the Courier of that
+city, it is stated: "The clergy of all denominations attended in a body,
+lending their sanction to the proceedings, and adding by their presence
+to the impressive character of the scene!"
+
+JUST God! and these are they
+Who minister at thine altar, God of Right!
+Men who their hands with prayer and blessing lay
+On Israel's Ark of light!
+
+What! preach, and kidnap men?
+Give thanks, and rob thy own afflicted poor?
+Talk of thy glorious liberty, and then
+Bolt hard the captive's door?
+
+What! servants of thy own
+Merciful Son, who came to seek and save
+The homeless and the outcast, fettering down
+The tasked and plundered slave!
+
+Pilate and Herod, friends!
+Chief priests and rulers, as of old, combine!
+Just God and holy! is that church, which lends
+Strength to the spoiler, thine?
+
+Paid hypocrites, who turn
+Judgment aside, and rob the Holy Book
+Of those high words of truth which search and burn
+In warning and rebuke;
+
+Feed fat, ye locusts, feed!
+And, in your tasselled pulpits, thank the Lord
+That, from the toiling bondman's utter need,
+Ye pile your own full board.
+
+How long, O Lord! how long
+Shall such a priesthood barter truth away,
+And in Thy name, for robbery and wrong
+At Thy own altars pray?
+
+Is not Thy hand stretched forth
+Visibly in the heavens, to awe and smite?
+Shall not the living God of all the earth,
+And heaven above, do right?
+
+Woe, then, to all who grind
+Their brethren of a common Father down!
+To all who plunder from the immortal mind
+Its bright and glorious crown!
+
+Woe to the priesthood! woe
+To those whose hire is with the price of blood;
+Perverting, darkening, changing, as they go,
+The searching truths of God!
+
+Their glory and their might
+Shall perish; and their very names shall be
+Vile before all the people, in the light
+Of a world's liberty.
+
+Oh, speed the moment on
+When Wrong shall cease, and Liberty and Love
+And Truth and Right throughout the earth be known
+As in their home above.
+1836.
+
+
+
+
+A SUMMONS
+
+Written on the adoption of Pinckney's Resolutions in the House of
+Representatives, and the passage of Calhoun's "Bill for excluding Papers
+written or printed, touching the subject of Slavery, from the U. S.
+Post-office," in the Senate of the United States. Mr. Pinckney's
+resolutions were in brief that Congress had no authority to interfere in
+any way with slavery in the States; that it ought not to interfere with
+it in the District of Columbia, and that all resolutions to that end
+should be laid on the table without printing. Mr. Calhoun's bill made it
+a penal offence for post-masters in any State, District, or Territory
+"knowingly to deliver, to any person whatever, any pamphlet, newspaper,
+handbill, or other printed paper or pictorial representation, touching
+the subject of slavery, where, by the laws of the said State, District,
+or Territory, their circulation was prohibited."
+
+MEN of the North-land! where's the manly spirit
+Of the true-hearted and the unshackled gone?
+Sons of old freemen, do we but inherit
+Their names alone?
+
+Is the old Pilgrim spirit quenched within us,
+Stoops the strong manhood of our souls so low,
+That Mammon's lure or Party's wile can win us
+To silence now?
+
+Now, when our land to ruin's brink is verging,
+In God's name, let us speak while there is time!
+Now, when the padlocks for our lips are forging,
+Silence is crime!
+
+What! shall we henceforth humbly ask as favors
+Rights all our own? In madness shall we barter,
+For treacherous peace, the freedom Nature gave us,
+God and our charter?
+
+Here shall the statesman forge his human fetters,
+Here the false jurist human rights deny,
+And in the church, their proud and skilled abettors
+Make truth a lie?
+
+Torture the pages of the hallowed Bible,
+To sanction crime, and robbery, and blood?
+And, in Oppression's hateful service, libel
+Both man and God?
+
+Shall our New England stand erect no longer,
+But stoop in chains upon her downward way,
+Thicker to gather on her limbs and stronger
+Day after day?
+
+Oh no; methinks from all her wild, green mountains;
+From valleys where her slumbering fathers lie;
+From her blue rivers and her welling fountains,
+And clear, cold sky;
+
+From her rough coast, and isles, which hungry Ocean
+Gnaws with his surges; from the fisher's skiff,
+With white sail swaying to the billows' motion
+Round rock and cliff;
+
+From the free fireside of her untought farmer;
+From her free laborer at his loom and wheel;
+From the brown smith-shop, where, beneath the hammer,
+Rings the red steel;
+
+From each and all, if God hath not forsaken
+Our land, and left us to an evil choice,
+Loud as the summer thunderbolt shall waken
+A People's voice.
+
+Startling and stern! the Northern winds shall bear it
+Over Potomac's to St. Mary's wave;
+And buried Freedom shall awake to hear it
+Within her grave.
+
+Oh, let that voice go forth! The bondman sighing
+By Santee's wave, in Mississippi's cane,
+Shall feel the hope, within his bosom dying,
+Revive again.
+
+Let it go forth! The millions who are gazing
+Sadly upon us from afar shall smile,
+And unto God devout thanksgiving raising
+Bless us the while.
+
+Oh for your ancient freedom, pure and holy,
+For the deliverance of a groaning earth,
+For the wronged captive, bleeding, crushed, and lowly,
+Let it go forth!
+
+Sons of the best of fathers! will ye falter
+With all they left ye perilled and at stake?
+Ho! once again on Freedom's holy altar
+The fire awake.
+
+Prayer-strenthened for the trial, come together,
+Put on the harness for the moral fight,
+And, with the blessing of your Heavenly Father,
+Maintain the right
+1836.
+
+
+
+
+TO THE MEMORY OF THOMAS SHIPLEY.
+
+Thomas Shipley of Philadelphia was a lifelong Christian philanthropist,
+and advocate of emancipation. At his funeral thousands of colored people
+came to take their last look at their friend and protector. He died
+September 17, 1836.
+
+GONE to thy Heavenly Father's rest!
+The flowers of Eden round thee blowing,
+And on thine ear the murmurs blest
+Of Siloa's waters softly flowing!
+
+Beneath that Tree of Life which gives
+To all the earth its healing leaves
+In the white robe of angels clad,
+And wandering by that sacred river,
+Whose streams of holiness make glad
+The city of our God forever!
+
+Gentlest of spirits! not for thee
+Our tears are shed, our sighs are given;
+Why mourn to know thou art a free
+Partaker of the joys of heaven?
+Finished thy work, and kept thy faith
+In Christian firmness unto death;
+And beautiful as sky and earth,
+When autumn's sun is downward going,
+The blessed memory of thy worth
+Around thy place of slumber glowing!
+
+But woe for us! who linger still
+With feebler strength and hearts less lowly,
+And minds less steadfast to the will
+Of Him whose every work is holy.
+For not like thine, is crucified
+The spirit of our human pride
+And at the bondman's tale of woe,
+And for the outcast and forsaken,
+Not warm like thine, but cold and slow,
+Our weaker sympathies awaken.
+
+Darkly upon our struggling way
+The storm of human hate is sweeping;
+Hunted and branded, and a prey,
+Our watch amidst the darkness keeping,
+Oh, for that hidden strength which can
+Nerve unto death the inner man
+Oh, for thy spirit, tried and true,
+And constant in the hour of trial,
+Prepared to suffer, or to do,
+In meekness and in self-denial.
+
+Oh, for that spirit, meek and mild,
+Derided, spurned, yet uncomplaining;
+By man deserted and reviled,
+Yet faithful to its trust remaining.
+Still prompt and resolute to save
+From scourge and chain the hunted slave;
+Unwavering in the Truth's defence,
+Even where the fires of Hate were burning,
+The unquailing eye of innocence
+Alone upon the oppressor turning!
+
+O loved of thousands! to thy grave,
+Sorrowing of heart, thy brethren bore thee.
+The poor man and the rescued slave
+Wept as the broken earth closed o'er thee;
+And grateful tears, like summer rain,
+Quickened its dying grass again!
+And there, as to some pilgrim-shrine,
+Shall cone the outcast and the lowly,
+Of gentle deeds and words of thine
+Recalling memories sweet and holy!
+
+Oh, for the death the righteous die!
+An end, like autumn's day declining,
+On human hearts, as on the sky,
+With holier, tenderer beauty shining;
+As to the parting soul were given
+The radiance of an opening heaven!
+As if that pure and blessed light,
+From off the Eternal altar flowing,
+Were bathing, in its upward flight,
+The spirit to its worship going!
+1836.
+
+
+
+
+THE MORAL WARFARE.
+
+WHEN Freedom, on her natal day,
+Within her war-rocked cradle lay,
+An iron race around her stood,
+Baptized her infant brow in blood;
+And, through the storm which round her swept,
+Their constant ward and watching kept.
+
+Then, where our quiet herds repose,
+The roar of baleful battle rose,
+And brethren of a common tongue
+To mortal strife as tigers sprung,
+And every gift on Freedom's shrine
+Was man for beast, and blood for wine!
+
+Our fathers to their graves have gone;
+Their strife is past, their triumph won;
+But sterner trials wait the race
+Which rises in their honored place;
+A moral warfare with the crime
+And folly of an evil time.
+
+So let it be. In God's own might
+We gird us for the coming fight,
+And, strong in Him whose cause is ours
+In conflict with unholy powers,
+We grasp the weapons He has given,--
+The Light, and Truth, and Love of Heaven.
+1836.
+
+
+
+
+RITNER.
+
+Written on reading the Message of Governor Ritner, of Pennsylvania,
+1836. The fact redounds to the credit and serves to perpetuate the
+memory of the independent farmer and high-souled statesman, that he
+alone of all the Governors of the Union in 1836 met the insulting
+demands and menaces of the South in a manner becoming a freeman and
+hater of Slavery, in his message to the Legislature of Pennsylvania.
+
+THANK God for the token! one lip is still free,
+One spirit untrammelled, unbending one knee!
+Like the oak of the mountain, deep-rooted and firm,
+Erect, when the multitude bends to the storm;
+When traitors to Freedom, and Honor, and God,
+Are bowed at an Idol polluted with blood;
+When the recreant North has forgotten her trust,
+And the lip of her honor is low in the dust,--
+Thank God, that one arm from the shackle has broken!
+Thank God, that one man as a freeman has spoken!
+
+O'er thy crags, Alleghany, a blast has been blown!
+Down thy tide, Susquehanna, the murmur has gone!
+To the land of the South, of the charter and chain,
+Of Liberty sweetened with Slavery's pain;
+Where the cant of Democracy dwells on the lips
+Of the forgers of fetters, and wielders of whips!
+Where "chivalric" honor means really no more
+Than scourging of women, and robbing the poor!
+Where the Moloch of Slavery sitteth on high,
+And the words which he utters, are--Worship, or die!
+
+Right onward, oh, speed it! Wherever the blood
+Of the wronged and the guiltless is crying to God;
+Wherever a slave in his fetters is pining;
+Wherever the lash of the driver is twining;
+Wherever from kindred, torn rudely apart,
+Comes the sorrowful wail of the broken of heart;
+Wherever the shackles of tyranny bind,
+In silence and darkness, the God-given mind;
+There, God speed it onward! its truth will be felt,
+The bonds shall be loosened, the iron shall melt.
+
+And oh, will the land where the free soul of Penn
+Still lingers and breathes over mountain and glen;
+Will the land where a Benezet's spirit went forth
+To the peeled and the meted, and outcast of Earth;
+Where the words of the Charter of Liberty first
+From the soul of the sage and the patriot burst;
+Where first for the wronged and the weak of their kind,
+The Christian and statesman their efforts combined;
+Will that land of the free and the good wear a chain?
+Will the call to the rescue of Freedom be vain?
+
+No, Ritner! her "Friends" at thy warning shall stand
+Erect for the truth, like their ancestral band;
+Forgetting the feuds and the strife of past time,
+Counting coldness injustice, and silence a crime;
+Turning back front the cavil of creeds, to unite
+Once again for the poor in defence of the Right;
+Breasting calmly, but firmly, the full tide of Wrong,
+Overwhelmed, but not borne on its surges along;
+Unappalled by the danger, the shame, and the pain,
+And counting each trial for Truth as their gain!
+
+And that bold-hearted yeomanry, honest and true,
+Who, haters of fraud, give to labor its due;
+Whose fathers, of old, sang in concert with thine,
+On the banks of Swetara, the songs of the Rhine,--
+The German-born pilgrims, who first dared to brave
+The scorn of the proud in the cause of the slave;
+Will the sons of such men yield the lords of the South
+One brow for the brand, for the padlock one mouth?
+They cater to tyrants? They rivet the chain,
+Which their fathers smote off, on the negro again?
+
+No, never! one voice, like the sound in the cloud,
+When the roar of the storm waxes loud and more loud,
+Wherever the foot of the freeman hath pressed
+From the Delaware's marge to the Lake of the West,
+On the South-going breezes shall deepen and grow
+Till the land it sweeps over shall tremble below!
+The voice of a people, uprisen, awake,
+Pennsylvania's watchword, with Freedom at stake,
+Thrilling up from each valley, flung down from each height,
+"Our Country and Liberty! God for the Right!"
+
+
+
+
+THE PASTORAL LETTER
+
+The General Association of Congregational ministers in Massachusetts met
+at Brookfield, June 27, 1837, and issued a Pastoral Letter to the
+churches under its care. The immediate occasion of it was the profound
+sensation produced by the recent public lecture in Massachusetts by
+Angelina and Sarah Grimke, two noble women from South Carolina, who bore
+their testimony against slavery. The Letter demanded that "the perplexed
+and agitating subjects which are now common amongst us... should not be
+forced upon any church as matters for debate, at the hazard of
+alienation and division," and called attention to the dangers now
+seeming "to threaten the female character with widespread and permanent
+injury."
+
+So, this is all,--the utmost reach
+Of priestly power the mind to fetter!
+When laymen think, when women preach,
+A war of words, a "Pastoral Letter!"
+Now, shame upon ye, parish Popes!
+Was it thus with those, your predecessors,
+Who sealed with racks, and fire, and ropes
+Their loving-kindness to transgressors?
+
+A "Pastoral Letter," grave and dull;
+Alas! in hoof and horns and features,
+How different is your Brookfield bull
+From him who bellows from St. Peter's
+Your pastoral rights and powers from harm,
+Think ye, can words alone preserve them?
+Your wiser fathers taught the arm
+And sword of temporal power to serve them.
+
+Oh, glorious days, when Church and State
+Were wedded by your spiritual fathers!
+And on submissive shoulders sat
+Your Wilsons and your Cotton Mathers.
+No vile "itinerant" then could mar
+The beauty of your tranquil Zion,
+But at his peril of the scar
+Of hangman's whip and branding-iron.
+
+Then, wholesome laws relieved the Church
+Of heretic and mischief-maker,
+And priest and bailiff joined in search,
+By turns, of Papist, witch, and Quaker
+The stocks were at each church's door,
+The gallows stood on Boston Common,
+A Papist's ears the pillory bore,--
+The gallows-rope, a Quaker woman!
+
+Your fathers dealt not as ye deal
+With "non-professing" frantic teachers;
+They bored the tongue with red-hot steel,
+And flayed the backs of "female preachers."
+Old Hampton, had her fields a tongue,
+And Salem's streets could tell their story,
+Of fainting woman dragged along,
+Gashed by the whip accursed and gory!
+
+And will ye ask me, why this taunt
+Of memories sacred from the scorner?
+And why with reckless hand I plant
+A nettle on the graves ye honor?
+Not to reproach New England's dead
+This record from the past I summon,
+Of manhood to the scaffold led,
+And suffering and heroic woman.
+
+No, for yourselves alone, I turn
+The pages of intolerance over,
+That, in their spirit, dark and stern,
+Ye haply may your own discover!
+For, if ye claim the "pastoral right"
+To silence Freedom's voice of warning,
+And from your precincts shut the light
+Of Freedom's day around ye dawning;
+
+If when an earthquake voice of power
+And signs in earth and heaven are showing
+That forth, in its appointed hour,
+The Spirit of the Lord is going
+And, with that Spirit, Freedom's light
+On kindred, tongue, and people breaking,
+Whose slumbering millions, at the sight,
+In glory and in strength are waking!
+
+When for the sighing of the poor,
+And for the needy, God bath risen,
+And chains are breaking, and a door
+Is opening for the souls in prison!
+If then ye would, with puny hands,
+Arrest the very work of Heaven,
+And bind anew the evil bands
+Which God's right arm of power hath riven;
+
+What marvel that, in many a mind,
+Those darker deeds of bigot madness
+Are closely with your own combined,
+Yet "less in anger than in sadness"?
+What marvel, if the people learn
+To claim the right of free opinion?
+What marvel, if at times they spurn
+The ancient yoke of your dominion?
+
+A glorious remnant linger yet,
+Whose lips are wet at Freedom's fountains,
+The coming of whose welcome feet
+Is beautiful upon our mountains!
+Men, who the gospel tidings bring
+Of Liberty and Love forever,
+Whose joy is an abiding spring,
+Whose peace is as a gentle river!
+
+But ye, who scorn the thrilling tale
+Of Carolina's high-souled daughters,
+Which echoes here the mournful wail
+Of sorrow from Edisto's waters,
+Close while ye may the public ear,
+With malice vex, with slander wound them,
+The pure and good shall throng to hear,
+And tried and manly hearts surround them.
+
+Oh, ever may the power which led
+Their way to such a fiery trial,
+And strengthened womanhood to tread
+The wine-press of such self-denial,
+Be round them in an evil land,
+With wisdom and with strength from Heaven,
+With Miriam's voice, and Judith's hand,
+And Deborah's song, for triumph given!
+
+And what are ye who strive with God
+Against the ark of His salvation,
+Moved by the breath of prayer abroad,
+With blessings for a dying nation?
+What, but the stubble and the hay
+To perish, even as flax consuming,
+With all that bars His glorious way,
+Before the brightness of His coming?
+
+And thou, sad Angel, who so long
+Hast waited for the glorious token,
+That Earth from all her bonds of wrong
+To liberty and light has broken,--
+
+Angel of Freedom! soon to thee
+The sounding trumpet shall be given,
+And over Earth's full jubilee
+Shall deeper joy be felt in Heaven!
+1837.
+
+
+
+
+HYMN
+As children of Thy gracious care,
+We veil the eye, we bend the knee,
+With broken words of praise and prayer,
+Father and God, we come to Thee.
+
+For Thou hast heard, O God of Right,
+The sighing of the island slave;
+And stretched for him the arm of might,
+Not shortened that it could not save.
+The laborer sits beneath his vine,
+The shackled soul and hand are free;
+Thanksgiving! for the work is Thine!
+Praise! for the blessing is of Thee!
+
+And oh, we feel Thy presence here,
+Thy awful arm in judgment bare!
+Thine eye bath seen the bondman's tear;
+Thine ear hath heard the bondman's prayer.
+Praise! for the pride of man is low,
+The counsels of the wise are naught,
+The fountains of repentance flow;
+What hath our God in mercy wrought?
+
+
+HYMN
+
+Written for the celebration of the third anniversary of British
+emancipation at the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, first of August,
+1837.
+
+O HOLY FATHER! just and true
+Are all Thy works and words and ways,
+And unto Thee alone are due
+Thanksgiving and eternal praise!
+
+As children of Thy gracious care,
+We veil the eye, we bend the knee,
+With broken words of praise and prayer,
+Father and God, we come to Thee.
+
+For Thou hast heard, O God of Right,
+The sighing of the island slave;
+And stretched for him the arm of might,
+Not shortened that it could not save.
+The laborer sits beneath his vine,
+The shackled soul and hand are free;
+Thanksgiving! for the work is Thine!
+Praise! for the blessing is of Thee!
+
+And oh, we feel Thy presence here,
+Thy awful arm in judgment bare!
+Thine eye hath seen the bondman's tear;
+Thine ear hath heard the bondman's prayer.
+Praise! for the pride of man is low,
+The counsels of the wise are naught,
+The fountains of repentance flow;
+What hath our God in mercy wrought?
+
+Speed on Thy work, Lord God of Hosts
+And when the bondman's chain is riven,
+And swells from all our guilty coasts
+The anthem of the free to Heaven,
+Oh, not to those whom Thou hast led,
+As with Thy cloud and fire before,
+But unto Thee, in fear and dread,
+Be praise and glory evermore.
+
+
+
+
+THE FAREWELL OF A VIRGINIA SLAVE MOTHER TO
+HER DAUGHTERS SOLD INTO SOUTHERN BONDAGE.
+
+GONE, gone,--sold and gone,
+To the rice-swamp dank and lone.
+Where the slave-whip ceaseless swings,
+Where the noisome insect stings,
+Where the fever demon strews
+Poison with the falling dews,
+Where the sickly sunbeams glare
+Through the hot and misty air;
+Gone, gone,--sold and gone,
+To the rice-swamp dank and lone,
+From Virginia's hills and waters;
+Woe is me, my stolen daughters!
+
+Gone, gone,--sold and gone,
+To the rice-swamp dank and lone.
+There no mother's eye is near them,
+There no mother's ear can hear them;
+Never, when the torturing lash
+Seams their back with many a gash,
+Shall a mother's kindness bless them,
+Or a mother's arms caress them.
+Gone, gone,--sold and gone,
+To the rice-swamp dank and lone,
+From Virginia's hills and waters;
+Woe is me, my stolen daughters!
+
+Gone, gone,--sold and gone,
+To the rice-swamp dank and lone.
+Oh, when weary, sad, and slow,
+From the fields at night they go,
+Faint with toil, and racked with pain,
+To their cheerless homes again,
+There no brother's voice shall greet them;
+There no father's welcome meet them.
+Gone, gone,--sold and gone,
+To the rice-swamp dank and lone,
+From Virginia's hills and waters;
+Woe is me, my stolen daughters!
+
+Gone, gone,--sold and gone,
+To the rice-swamp dank and lone.
+From the tree whose shadow lay
+On their childhood's place of play;
+From the cool spring where they drank;
+Rock, and hill, and rivulet bank;
+From the solemn house of prayer,
+And the holy counsels there;
+Gone, gone,--sold and gone,
+To the rice-swamp dank and lone,
+From Virginia's hills and waters;
+Woe is me, my stolen daughters!
+
+Gone, gone,--sold and gone,
+To the rice-swamp dank and lone;
+Toiling through the weary day,
+And at night the spoiler's prey.
+Oh, that they had earlier died,
+Sleeping calmly, side by side,
+Where the tyrant's power is o'er,
+And the fetter galls no more
+Gone, gone,--sold and gone,
+To the rice-swamp dank and lone,
+From Virginia's hills and waters;
+Woe is me, my stolen daughters!
+
+Gone, gone,--sold and gone,
+To the rice-swamp dank and lone.
+By the holy love He beareth;
+By the bruised reed He spareth;
+Oh, may He, to whom alone
+All their cruel wrongs are known,
+Still their hope and refuge prove,
+With a more than mother's love.
+Gone, gone,--sold and gone,
+To the rice-swamp dank and lone,
+From Virginia's hills and waters;
+Woe is me, my stolen daughters!
+1838.
+
+
+
+
+PENNSYLVANIA HALL.
+
+Read at the dedication of Pennsylvania Hall, Philadelphia, May 15, 1838.
+The building was erected by an association of gentlemen, irrespective of
+sect or party, "that the citizens of Philadelphia should possess a room
+wherein the principles of Liberty, and Equality of Civil Rights, could
+be freely discussed, and the evils of slavery fearlessly portrayed." On
+the evening of the 17th it was burned by a mob, destroying the office of
+the Pennsylvania Freeman, of which I was editor, and with it my books
+and papers.
+
+
+NOT with the splendors of the days of old,
+The spoil of nations, and barbaric gold;
+No weapons wrested from the fields of blood,
+Where dark and stern the unyielding Roman stood,
+And the proud eagles of his cohorts saw
+A world, war-wasted, crouching to his law;
+
+Nor blazoned car, nor banners floating gay,
+Like those which swept along the Appian Way,
+When, to the welcome of imperial Rome,
+The victor warrior came in triumph home,
+And trumpet peal, and shoutings wild and high,
+Stirred the blue quiet of the Italian sky;
+But calm and grateful, prayerful and sincere,
+As Christian freemen only, gathering here,
+We dedicate our fair and lofty Hall,
+Pillar and arch, entablature and wall,
+As Virtue's shrine, as Liberty's abode,
+Sacred to Freedom, and to Freedom's God
+Far statelier Halls, 'neath brighter skies than these,
+Stood darkly mirrored in the AEgean seas,
+Pillar and shrine, and life-like statues seen,
+Graceful and pure, the marble shafts between;
+Where glorious Athens from her rocky hill
+Saw Art and Beauty subject to her will;
+And the chaste temple, and the classic grove,
+The hall of sages, and the bowers of love,
+Arch, fane, and column, graced the shores, and gave
+Their shadows to the blue Saronic wave;
+And statelier rose, on Tiber's winding side,
+The Pantheon's dome, the Coliseum's pride,
+The Capitol, whose arches backward flung
+The deep, clear cadence of the Roman tongue,
+Whence stern decrees, like words of fate, went forth
+To the awed nations of a conquered earth,
+Where the proud Caesars in their glory came,
+And Brutus lightened from his lips of flame!
+Yet in the porches of Athena's halls,
+And in the shadow of her stately walls,
+Lurked the sad bondman, and his tears of woe
+Wet the cold marble with unheeded flow;
+And fetters clanked beneath the silver dome
+Of the proud Pantheon of imperious Rome.
+Oh, not for hint, the chained and stricken slave,
+By Tiber's shore, or blue AEgina's wave,
+In the thronged forum, or the sages' seat,
+The bold lip pleaded, and the warm heart beat;
+No soul of sorrow melted at his pain,
+No tear of pity rusted on his chain!
+
+But this fair Hall to Truth and Freedom given,
+Pledged to the Right before all Earth and Heaven,
+A free arena for the strife of mind,
+To caste, or sect, or color unconfined,
+Shall thrill with echoes such as ne'er of old
+From Roman hall or Grecian temple rolled;
+Thoughts shall find utterance such as never yet
+The Propylea or the Forum met.
+Beneath its roof no gladiator's strife
+Shall win applauses with the waste of life;
+No lordly lictor urge the barbarous game,
+No wanton Lais glory in her shame.
+But here the tear of sympathy shall flow,
+As the ear listens to the tale of woe;
+Here in stern judgment of the oppressor's wrong
+Shall strong rebukings thrill on Freedom's tongue,
+No partial justice hold th' unequal scale,
+No pride of caste a brother's rights assail,
+No tyrant's mandates echo from this wall,
+Holy to Freedom and the Rights of All!
+But a fair field, where mind may close with mind,
+Free as the sunshine and the chainless wind;
+Where the high trust is fixed on Truth alone,
+And bonds and fetters from the soul are thrown;
+Where wealth, and rank, and worldly pomp, and might,
+Yield to the presence of the True and Right.
+
+And fitting is it that this Hall should stand
+Where Pennsylvania's Founder led his band,
+From thy blue waters, Delaware!--to press
+The virgin verdure of the wilderness.
+Here, where all Europe with amazement saw
+The soul's high freedom trammelled by no law;
+Here, where the fierce and warlike forest-men
+Gathered, in peace, around the home of Penn,
+Awed by the weapons Love alone had given
+Drawn from the holy armory of Heaven;
+Where Nature's voice against the bondman's wrong
+First found an earnest and indignant tongue;
+Where Lay's bold message to the proud was borne;
+And Keith's rebuke, and Franklin's manly scorn!
+Fitting it is that here, where Freedom first
+From her fair feet shook off the Old World's dust,
+Spread her white pinions to our Western blast,
+And her free tresses to our sunshine cast,
+One Hall should rise redeemed from Slavery's ban,
+One Temple sacred to the Rights of Man!
+
+Oh! if the spirits of the parted come,
+Visiting angels, to their olden home
+If the dead fathers of the land look forth
+From their fair dwellings, to the things of earth,
+Is it a dream, that with their eyes of love,
+They gaze now on us from the bowers above?
+Lay's ardent soul, and Benezet the mild,
+Steadfast in faith, yet gentle as a child,
+Meek-hearted Woolman, and that brother-band,
+The sorrowing exiles from their "Father land,"
+Leaving their homes in Krieshiem's bowers of vine,
+And the blue beauty of their glorious Rhine,
+To seek amidst our solemn depths of wood
+Freedom from man, and holy peace with God;
+Who first of all their testimonial gave
+Against the oppressor, for the outcast slave,
+Is it a dream that such as these look down,
+And with their blessing our rejoicings crown?
+Let us rejoice, that while the pulpit's door
+Is barred against the pleaders for the poor;
+While the Church, wrangling upon points of faith,
+Forgets her bondmen suffering unto death;
+While crafty Traffic and the lust of Gain
+Unite to forge Oppression's triple chain,
+One door is open, and one Temple free,
+As a resting-place for hunted Liberty!
+Where men may speak, unshackled and unawed,
+High words of Truth, for Freedom and for God.
+And when that truth its perfect work hath done,
+And rich with blessings o'er our land hath gone;
+When not a slave beneath his yoke shall pine,
+From broad Potomac to the far Sabine
+When unto angel lips at last is given
+The silver trump of Jubilee in Heaven;
+And from Virginia's plains, Kentucky's shades,
+And through the dim Floridian everglades,
+Rises, to meet that angel-trumpet's sound,
+The voice of millions from their chains unbound;
+Then, though this Hall be crumbling in decay,
+Its strong walls blending with the common clay,
+Yet, round the ruins of its strength shall stand
+The best and noblest of a ransomed land--
+Pilgrims, like these who throng around the shrine
+Of Mecca, or of holy Palestine!
+A prouder glory shall that ruin own
+Than that which lingers round the Parthenon.
+Here shall the child of after years be taught
+The works of Freedom which his fathers wrought;
+Told of the trials of the present hour,
+Our weary strife with prejudice and power;
+How the high errand quickened woman's soul,
+And touched her lip as with a living coal;
+How Freedom's martyrs kept their lofty faith
+True and unwavering, unto bonds and death;
+The pencil's art shall sketch the ruined Hall,
+The Muses' garland crown its aged wall,
+And History's pen for after times record
+Its consecration unto Freedom's God!
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW YEAR.
+
+Addressed to the Patrons of the Pennsylvania Freeman.
+
+THE wave is breaking on the shore,
+The echo fading from the chime
+Again the shadow moveth o'er
+The dial-plate of time!
+
+O seer-seen Angel! waiting now
+With weary feet on sea and shore,
+Impatient for the last dread vow
+That time shall be no more!
+
+Once more across thy sleepless eye
+The semblance of a smile has passed:
+The year departing leaves more nigh
+Time's fearfullest and last.
+
+Oh, in that dying year hath been
+The sum of all since time began;
+The birth and death, the joy and pain,
+Of Nature and of Man.
+
+Spring, with her change of sun and shower,
+And streams released from Winter's chain,
+And bursting bud, and opening flower,
+And greenly growing grain;
+
+And Summer's shade, and sunshine warm,
+And rainbows o'er her hill-tops bowed,
+And voices in her rising storm;
+God speaking from His cloud!
+
+And Autumn's fruits and clustering sheaves,
+And soft, warm days of golden light,
+The glory of her forest leaves,
+And harvest-moon at night;
+
+And Winter with her leafless grove,
+And prisoned stream, and drifting snow,
+The brilliance of her heaven above
+And of her earth below;
+
+And man, in whom an angel's mind
+With earth's low instincts finds abode,
+The highest of the links which bind
+Brute nature to her God;
+
+His infant eye bath seen the light,
+His childhood's merriest laughter rung,
+And active sports to manlier might
+The nerves of boyhood strung!
+
+And quiet love, and passion's fires,
+Have soothed or burned in manhood's breast,
+And lofty aims and low desires
+By turns disturbed his rest.
+
+The wailing of the newly-born
+Has mingled with the funeral knell;
+And o'er the dying's ear has gone
+The merry marriage-bell.
+
+And Wealth has filled his halls with mirth,
+While Want, in many a humble shed,
+Toiled, shivering by her cheerless hearth,
+The live-long night for bread.
+
+And worse than all, the human slave,
+The sport of lust, and pride, and scorn!
+Plucked off the crown his Maker gave,
+His regal manhood gone!
+
+Oh, still, my country! o'er thy plains,
+Blackened with slavery's blight and ban,
+That human chattel drags his chains,
+An uncreated man!
+
+And still, where'er to sun and breeze,
+My country, is thy flag unrolled,
+With scorn, the gazing stranger sees
+A stain on every fold.
+
+Oh, tear the gorgeous emblem down!
+It gathers scorn from every eye,
+And despots smile and good men frown
+Whene'er it passes by.
+
+Shame! shame! its starry splendors glow
+Above the slaver's loathsome jail;
+Its folds are ruffling even now
+His crimson flag of sale.
+
+Still round our country's proudest hall
+The trade in human flesh is driven,
+And at each careless hammer-fall
+A human heart is riven.
+
+And this, too, sanctioned by the men
+Vested with power to shield the right,
+And throw each vile and robber den
+Wide open to the light.
+
+Yet, shame upon them! there they sit,
+Men of the North, subdued and still;
+Meek, pliant poltroons, only fit
+To work a master's will.
+
+Sold, bargained off for Southern votes,
+A passive herd of Northern mules,
+Just braying through their purchased throats
+Whate'er their owner rules.
+
+And he, [2] the basest of the base,
+The vilest of the vile, whose name,
+Embalmed in infinite disgrace,
+Is deathless in its shame!
+
+A tool, to bolt the people's door
+Against the people clamoring there,
+An ass, to trample on their floor
+A people's right of prayer!
+
+Nailed to his self-made gibbet fast,
+Self-pilloried to the public view,
+A mark for every passing blast
+Of scorn to whistle through;
+
+There let him hang, and hear the boast
+Of Southrons o'er their pliant tool,--
+A new Stylites on his post,
+"Sacred to ridicule!"
+
+Look we at home! our noble hall,
+To Freedom's holy purpose given,
+Now rears its black and ruined wall,
+Beneath the wintry heaven,
+
+Telling the story of its doom,
+The fiendish mob, the prostrate law,
+The fiery jet through midnight's gloom,
+Our gazing thousands saw.
+
+Look to our State! the poor man's right
+Torn from him: and the sons of those
+Whose blood in Freedom's sternest fight
+Sprinkled the Jersey snows,
+
+Outlawed within the land of Penn,
+That Slavery's guilty fears might cease,
+And those whom God created men
+Toil on as brutes in peace.
+
+Yet o'er the blackness of the storm
+A bow of promise bends on high,
+And gleams of sunshine, soft and warm,
+Break through our clouded sky.
+
+East, West, and North, the shout is heard,
+Of freemen rising for the right
+Each valley hath its rallying word,
+Each hill its signal light.
+
+O'er Massachusetts' rocks of gray,
+The strengthening light of freedom shines,
+Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay,
+And Vermont's snow-hung pines!
+
+From Hudson's frowning palisades
+To Alleghany's laurelled crest,
+O'er lakes and prairies, streams and glades,
+It shines upon the West.
+
+Speed on the light to those who dwell
+In Slavery's land of woe and sin,
+And through the blackness of that bell,
+Let Heaven's own light break in.
+
+So shall the Southern conscience quake
+Before that light poured full and strong,
+So shall the Southern heart awake
+To all the bondman's wrong.
+
+And from that rich and sunny land
+The song of grateful millions rise,
+Like that of Israel's ransomed band
+Beneath Arabia's skies:
+
+And all who now are bound beneath
+Our banner's shade, our eagle's wing,
+From Slavery's night of moral death
+To light and life shall spring.
+
+Broken the bondman's chain, and gone
+The master's guilt, and hate, and fear,
+And unto both alike shall dawn
+A New and Happy Year.
+1839.
+
+
+
+
+THE RELIC.
+Written on receiving a cane wrought from a fragment of the  wood-work
+of Pennsylvania Hall which the fire had spared.
+
+TOKEN of friendship true and tried,
+From one whose fiery heart of youth
+With mine has beaten, side by side,
+For Liberty and Truth;
+With honest pride the gift I take,
+And prize it for the giver's sake.
+
+But not alone because it tells
+Of generous hand and heart sincere;
+Around that gift of friendship dwells
+A memory doubly dear;
+Earth's noblest aim, man's holiest thought,
+With that memorial frail in wrought!
+
+Pure thoughts and sweet like flowers unfold,
+And precious memories round it cling,
+Even as the Prophet's rod of old
+In beauty blossoming:
+And buds of feeling, pure and good,
+Spring from its cold unconscious wood.
+
+Relic of Freedom's shrine! a brand
+Plucked from its burning! let it be
+Dear as a jewel from the hand
+Of a lost friend to me!
+Flower of a perished garland left,
+Of life and beauty unbereft!
+
+Oh, if the young enthusiast bears,
+O'er weary waste and sea, the stone
+Which crumbled from the Forum's stairs,
+Or round the Parthenon;
+Or olive-bough from some wild tree
+Hung over old Thermopylae:
+
+If leaflets from some hero's tomb,
+Or moss-wreath torn from ruins hoary;
+Or faded flowers whose sisters bloom
+On fields renowned in story;
+Or fragment from the Alhambra's crest,
+Or the gray rock by Druids blessed;
+
+Sad Erin's shamrock greenly growing
+Where Freedom led her stalwart kern,
+Or Scotia's "rough bur thistle" blowing
+On Bruce's Bannockburn;
+Or Runnymede's wild English rose,
+Or lichen plucked from Sempach's snows!
+
+If it be true that things like these
+To heart and eye bright visions bring,
+Shall not far holier memories
+To this memorial cling
+Which needs no mellowing mist of time
+To hide the crimson stains of crime!
+
+Wreck of a temple, unprofaned;
+Of courts where Peace with Freedom trod,
+Lifting on high, with hands unstained,
+Thanksgiving unto God;
+Where Mercy's voice of love was pleading
+For human hearts in bondage bleeding;
+
+Where, midst the sound of rushing feet
+And curses on the night-air flung,
+That pleading voice rose calm and sweet
+From woman's earnest tongue;
+And Riot turned his scowling glance,
+Awed, from her tranquil countenance!
+
+That temple now in ruin lies!
+The fire-stain on its shattered wall,
+And open to the changing skies
+Its black and roofless hall,
+It stands before a nation's sight,
+A gravestone over buried Right!
+
+But from that ruin, as of old,
+The fire-scorched stones themselves are crying,
+And from their ashes white and cold
+Its timbers are replying!
+A voice which slavery cannot kill
+Speaks from the crumbling arches still!
+
+And even this relic from thy shrine,
+O holy Freedom! Hath to me
+A potent power, a voice and sign
+To testify of thee;
+And, grasping it, methinks I feel
+A deeper faith, a stronger zeal.
+
+And not unlike that mystic rod,
+Of old stretched o'er the Egyptian wave,
+Which opened, in the strength of God,
+A pathway for the slave,
+It yet may point the bondman's way,
+And turn the spoiler from his prey.
+1839.
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLD'S CONVENTION
+
+OF THE FRIENDS OF EMANCIPATION,
+HELD IN LONDON IN 1840.
+
+Joseph Sturge, the founder of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery
+Society, proposed the calling of a world's anti-slavery convention, and
+the proposal was promptly seconded by the American Anti-Slavery Society.
+The call was addressed to "friends of the slave of every nation and of
+every clime."
+
+YES, let them gather! Summon forth
+The pledged philanthropy of Earth.
+From every land, whose hills have heard
+The bugle blast of Freedom waking;
+Or shrieking of her symbol-bird
+From out his cloudy eyrie breaking
+Where Justice hath one worshipper,
+Or truth one altar built to her;
+
+Where'er a human eye is weeping
+O'er wrongs which Earth's sad children know;
+Where'er a single heart is keeping
+Its prayerful watch with human woe
+Thence let them come, and greet each other,
+And know in each a friend and brother!
+
+Yes, let them come! from each green vale
+Where England's old baronial halls
+Still bear upon their storied walls
+The grim crusader's rusted mail,
+Battered by Paynim spear and brand
+On Malta's rock or Syria's sand!
+And mouldering pennon-staves once set
+Within the soil of Palestine,
+By Jordan and Gennesaret;
+Or, borne with England's battle line,
+O'er Acre's shattered turrets stooping,
+Or, midst the camp their banners drooping,
+With dews from hallowed Hermon wet,
+A holier summons now is given
+Than that gray hermit's voice of old,
+Which unto all the winds of heaven
+The banners of the Cross unrolled!
+Not for the long-deserted shrine;
+Not for the dull unconscious sod,
+Which tells not by one lingering sign
+That there the hope of Israel trod;
+But for that truth, for which alone
+In pilgrim eyes are sanctified
+The garden moss, the mountain stone,
+Whereon His holy sandals pressed,--
+The fountain which His lip hath blessed,--
+
+Whate'er hath touched His garment's hem
+At Bethany or Bethlehem,
+Or Jordan's river-side.
+For Freedom in the name of Him
+Who came to raise Earth's drooping poor,
+To break the chain from every limb,
+The bolt from every prison door!
+For these, o'er all the earth hath passed
+An ever-deepening trumpet blast,
+As if an angel's breath had lent
+Its vigor to the instrument.
+
+And Wales, from Snowden's mountain wall,
+Shall startle at that thrilling call,
+As if she heard her bards again;
+And Erin's "harp on Tara's wall"
+Give out its ancient strain,
+Mirthful and sweet, yet sad withal,--
+The melody which Erin loves,
+When o'er that harp, 'mid bursts of gladness
+And slogan cries and lyke-wake sadness,
+The hand of her O'Connell moves!
+Scotland, from lake and tarn and rill,
+And mountain hold, and heathery bill,
+Shall catch and echo back the note,
+As if she heard upon the air
+Once more her Cameronian's prayer
+And song of Freedom float.
+And cheering echoes shall reply
+From each remote dependency,
+Where Britain's mighty sway is known,
+In tropic sea or frozen zone;
+Where'er her sunset flag is furling,
+Or morning gun-fire's smoke is curling;
+From Indian Bengal's groves of palm
+And rosy fields and gales of balm,
+Where Eastern pomp and power are rolled
+Through regal Ava's gates of gold;
+And from the lakes and ancient woods
+And dim Canadian solitudes,
+Whence, sternly from her rocky throne,
+Queen of the North, Quebec looks down;
+And from those bright and ransomed Isles
+Where all unwonted Freedom smiles,
+And the dark laborer still retains
+The scar of slavery's broken chains!
+
+From the hoar Alps, which sentinel
+The gateways of the land of Tell,
+Where morning's keen and earliest glance
+On Jura's rocky wall is thrown,
+And from the olive bowers of France
+And vine groves garlanding the Rhone,--
+"Friends of the Blacks," as true and tried
+As those who stood by Oge's side,
+And heard the Haytien's tale of wrong,
+Shall gather at that summons strong;
+Broglie, Passy, and he whose song
+Breathed over Syria's holy sod,
+And, in the paths which Jesus trod,
+And murmured midst the hills which hem
+Crownless and sad Jerusalem,
+Hath echoes whereso'er the tone
+Of Israel's prophet-lyre is known.
+
+Still let them come; from Quito's walls,
+And from the Orinoco's tide,
+From Lima's Inca-haunted halls,
+From Santa Fe and Yucatan,--
+Men who by swart Guerrero's side
+Proclaimed the deathless rights of man,
+Broke every bond and fetter off,
+And hailed in every sable serf
+A free and brother Mexican!
+Chiefs who across the Andes' chain
+Have followed Freedom's flowing pennon,
+And seen on Junin's fearful plain,
+Glare o'er the broken ranks of Spain
+The fire-burst of Bolivar's cannon!
+And Hayti, from her mountain land,
+Shall send the sons of those who hurled
+Defiance from her blazing strand,
+The war-gage from her Petion's hand,
+Alone against a hostile world.
+
+Nor all unmindful, thou, the while,
+Land of the dark and mystic Nile!
+Thy Moslem mercy yet may shame
+All tyrants of a Christian name,
+When in the shade of Gizeh's pile,
+Or, where, from Abyssinian hills
+El Gerek's upper fountain fills,
+Or where from Mountains of the Moon
+El Abiad bears his watery boon,
+Where'er thy lotus blossoms swim
+Within their ancient hallowed waters;
+Where'er is beard the Coptic hymn,
+Or song of Nubia's sable daughters;
+The curse of slavery and the crime,
+Thy bequest from remotest time,
+At thy dark Mehemet's decree
+Forevermore shall pass from thee;
+And chains forsake each captive's limb
+Of all those tribes, whose hills around
+Have echoed back the cymbal sound
+And victor horn of Ibrahim.
+
+And thou whose glory and whose crime
+To earth's remotest bound and clime,
+In mingled tones of awe and scorn,
+The echoes of a world have borne,
+My country! glorious at thy birth,
+A day-star flashing brightly forth,
+The herald-sign of Freedom's dawn!
+Oh, who could dream that saw thee then,
+And watched thy rising from afar,
+That vapors from oppression's fen
+Would cloud the upward tending star?
+Or, that earth's tyrant powers, which heard,
+Awe-struck, the shout which hailed thy dawning,
+Would rise so soon, prince, peer, and king,
+To mock thee with their welcoming,
+Like Hades when her thrones were stirred
+To greet the down-cast Star of Morning!
+"Aha! and art thou fallen thus?
+Art thou become as one of us?"
+
+Land of my fathers! there will stand,
+Amidst that world-assembled band,
+Those owning thy maternal claim
+Unweakened by thy, crime and shame;
+The sad reprovers of thy wrong;
+The children thou hast spurned so long.
+
+Still with affection's fondest yearning
+To their unnatural mother turning.
+No traitors they! but tried and leal,
+Whose own is but thy general weal,
+Still blending with the patriot's zeal
+The Christian's love for human kind,
+To caste and climate unconfined.
+
+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 1565 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.
+
+DEDICATION.
+
+Prefixed to the volume of which the group of six poems following this
+prelude constituted the first portion.
+
+I WOULD the gift I offer here
+Might graces from thy favor take,
+And, seen through Friendship's atmosphere,
+On softened lines and coloring, wear
+The unaccustomed light of beauty, for thy sake.
+
+Few leaves of Fancy's spring remain
+But what I have I give to thee,
+The o'er-sunned bloom of summer's plain,
+And paler flowers, the latter rain
+Calls from the westering slope of life's autumnal lea.
+
+Above the fallen groves of green,
+Where youth's enchanted forest stood,
+Dry root and mossed trunk between,
+A sober after-growth is seen,
+As springs the pine where falls the gay-leafed maple wood!
+
+Yet birds will sing, and breezes play
+Their leaf-harps in the sombre tree;
+And through the bleak and wintry day
+It keeps its steady green alway,--
+So, even my after-thoughts may have a charm for thee.
+
+Art's perfect forms no moral need,
+And beauty is its own excuse;
+But for the dull and flowerless weed
+Some healing virtue still must plead,
+And the rough ore must find its honors in its use.
+
+So haply these, my simple lays
+Of homely toil, may serve to show
+The orchard bloom and tasselled maize
+That skirt and gladden duty's ways,
+The unsung beauty hid life's common things below.
+
+Haply from them the toiler, bent
+Above his forge or plough, may gain,
+A manlier spirit of content,
+And feel that life is wisest spent
+Where the strong working hand makes strong the
+working brain.
+
+The doom which to the guilty pair
+Without the walls of Eden came,
+Transforming sinless ease to care
+And rugged toil, no more shall bear
+The burden of old crime, or mark of primal shame.
+
+A blessing now, a curse no more;
+Since He, whose name we breathe with awe,
+The coarse mechanic vesture wore,
+A poor man toiling with the poor,
+In labor, as in prayer, fulfilling the same law.
+1850.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHOEMAKERS.
+
+Ho! workers of the old time styled
+The Gentle Craft of Leather
+Young brothers of the ancient guild,
+Stand forth once more together!
+Call out again your long array,
+In the olden merry manner
+Once more, on gay St. Crispin's day,
+Fling out your blazoned banner!
+
+Rap, rap! upon the well-worn stone
+How falls the polished hammer
+Rap, rap I the measured sound has grown
+A quick and merry clamor.
+Now shape the sole! now deftly curl
+The glossy vamp around it,
+And bless the while the bright-eyed girl
+Whose gentle fingers bound it!
+
+For you, along the Spanish main
+A hundred keels are ploughing;
+For you, the Indian on the plain
+His lasso-coil is throwing;
+For you, deep glens with hemlock dark
+The woodman's fire is lighting;
+For you, upon the oak's gray bark,
+The woodman's axe is smiting.
+
+For you, from Carolina's pine
+The rosin-gum is stealing;
+For you, the dark-eyed Florentine
+Her silken skein is reeling;
+For you, the dizzy goatherd roams
+His rugged Alpine ledges;
+For you, round all her shepherd homes,
+Bloom England's thorny hedges.
+
+The foremost still, by day or night,
+On moated mound or heather,
+Where'er the need of trampled right
+Brought toiling men together;
+Where the free burghers from the wall
+Defied the mail-clad master,
+Than yours, at Freedom's trumpet-call,
+No craftsmen rallied faster.
+
+Let foplings sneer, let fools deride,
+Ye heed no idle scorner;
+Free hands and hearts are still your pride,
+And duty done, your honor.
+Ye dare to trust, for honest fame,
+The jury Time empanels,
+And leave to truth each noble name
+Which glorifies your annals.
+
+Thy songs, Hans Sachs, are living yet,
+In strong and hearty German;
+And Bloomfield's lay, and Gifford's wit,
+And patriot fame of Sherman;
+Still from his book, a mystic seer,
+The soul of Behmen teaches,
+And England's priestcraft shakes to hear
+Of Fox's leathern breeches.
+
+The foot is yours; where'er it falls,
+It treads your well-wrought leather,
+On earthen floor, in marble halls,
+On carpet, or on heather.
+Still there the sweetest charm is found
+Of matron grace or vestal's,
+As Hebe's foot bore nectar round
+Among the old celestials.
+
+Rap, rap!--your stout and bluff brogan,
+With footsteps slow and weary,
+May wander where the sky's blue span
+Shuts down upon the prairie.
+On Beauty's foot your slippers glance,
+By Saratoga's fountains,
+Or twinkle down the summer dance
+Beneath the Crystal Mountains!
+
+The red brick to the mason's hand,
+The brown earth to the tiller's,
+The shoe in yours shall wealth command,
+Like fairy Cinderella's!
+As they who shunned the household maid
+Beheld the crown upon her,
+So all shall see your toil repaid
+With hearth and home and honor.
+
+Then let the toast be freely quaffed,
+In water cool and brimming,--
+"All honor to the good old Craft,
+Its merry men and women!"
+Call out again your long array,
+In the old time's pleasant manner
+Once more, on gay St. Crispin's day,
+Fling out his blazoned banner!
+1845.
+
+
+
+
+THE FISHERMEN.
+
+HURRAH! the seaward breezes
+Sweep down the bay amain;
+Heave up, my lads, the anchor!
+Run up the sail again
+Leave to the lubber landsmen
+The rail-car and the steed;
+The stars of heaven shall guide us,
+The breath of heaven shall speed.
+
+From the hill-top looks the steeple,
+And the lighthouse from the sand;
+And the scattered pines are waving
+Their farewell from the land.
+One glance, my lads, behind us,
+For the homes we leave one sigh,
+Ere we take the change and chances
+Of the ocean and the sky.
+
+Now, brothers, for the icebergs
+Of frozen Labrador,
+Floating spectral in the moonshine,
+Along the low, black shore!
+Where like snow the gannet's feathers
+On Brador's rocks are shed,
+And the noisy murr are flying,
+Like black scuds, overhead;
+
+Where in mist tie rock is hiding,
+And the sharp reef lurks below,
+And the white squall smites in summer,
+And the autumn tempests blow;
+Where, through gray and rolling vapor,
+From evening unto morn,
+A thousand boats are hailing,
+Horn answering unto horn.
+
+Hurrah! for the Red Island,
+With the white cross on its crown
+Hurrah! for Meccatina,
+And its mountains bare and brown!
+Where the Caribou's tall antlers
+O'er the dwarf-wood freely toss,
+And the footstep of the Mickmack
+Has no sound upon the moss.
+
+There we'll drop our lines, and gather
+Old Ocean's treasures in,
+Where'er the mottled mackerel
+Turns up a steel-dark fin.
+The sea's our field of harvest,
+Its scaly tribes our grain;
+We'll reap the teeming waters
+As at home they reap the plain.
+
+Our wet hands spread the carpet,
+And light the hearth of home;
+From our fish, as in the old time,
+The silver coin shall come.
+As the demon fled the chamber
+Where the fish of Tobit lay,
+So ours from all our dwellings
+Shall frighten Want away.
+
+Though the mist upon our jackets
+In the bitter air congeals,
+And our lines wind stiff and slowly
+From off the frozen reels;
+Though the fog be dark around us,
+And the storm blow high and loud,
+We will whistle down the wild wind,
+And laugh beneath the cloud!
+
+In the darkness as in daylight,
+On the water as on land,
+God's eye is looking on us,
+And beneath us is His hand!
+Death will find us soon or later,
+On the deck or in the cot;
+And we cannot meet him better
+Than in working out our lot.
+
+Hurrah! hurrah! the west-wind
+Comes freshening down the bay,
+The rising sails are filling;
+Give way, my lads, give way!
+Leave the coward landsman clinging
+To the dull earth, like a weed;
+The stars of heaven shall guide us,
+The breath of heaven shall speed!
+1845.
+
+
+
+
+THE LUMBERMEN.
+
+WILDLY round our woodland quarters
+Sad-voiced Autumn grieves;
+Thickly down these swelling waters
+Float his fallen leaves.
+Through the tall and naked timber,
+Column-like and old,
+Gleam the sunsets of November,
+From their skies of gold.
+
+O'er us, to the southland heading,
+Screams the gray wild-goose;
+On the night-frost sounds the treading
+Of the brindled moose.
+Noiseless creeping, while we're sleeping,
+Frost his task-work plies;
+Soon, his icy bridges heaping,
+Shall our log-piles rise.
+
+When, with sounds of smothered thunder,
+On some night of rain,
+Lake and river break asunder
+Winter's weakened chain,
+Down the wild March flood shall bear them
+To the saw-mill's wheel,
+Or where Steam, the slave, shall tear them
+With his teeth of steel.
+
+Be it starlight, be it moonlight,
+In these vales below,
+When the earliest beams of sunlight
+Streak the mountain's snow,
+Crisps the boar-frost, keen and early,
+To our hurrying feet,
+And the forest echoes clearly
+All our blows repeat.
+
+Where the crystal Ambijejis
+Stretches broad and clear,
+And Millnoket's pine-black ridges
+Hide the browsing deer
+Where, through lakes and wide morasses,
+Or through rocky walls,
+Swift and strong, Penobscot passes
+White with foamy falls;
+
+Where, through clouds, are glimpses given
+Of Katahdin's sides,--
+Rock and forest piled to heaven,
+Torn and ploughed by slides!
+Far below, the Indian trapping,
+In the sunshine warm;
+Far above, the snow-cloud wrapping
+Half the peak in storm!
+
+Where are mossy carpets better
+Than the Persian weaves,
+And than Eastern perfumes sweeter
+Seem the fading leaves;
+And a music wild and solemn,
+From the pine-tree's height,
+Rolls its vast and sea-like volume
+On the wind of night;
+
+Make we here our camp of winter;
+And, through sleet and snow,
+Pitchy knot and beechen splinter
+On our hearth shall glow.
+Here, with mirth to lighten duty,
+We shall lack alone
+Woman's smile and girlhood's beauty,
+Childhood's lisping tone.
+
+But their hearth is brighter burning
+For our toil to-day;
+And the welcome of returning
+Shall our loss repay,
+When, like seamen from the waters,
+From the woods we come,
+Greeting sisters, wives, and daughters,
+Angels of our home!
+
+Not for us the measured ringing
+From the village spire,
+Not for us the Sabbath singing
+Of the sweet-voiced choir,
+Ours the old, majestic temple,
+Where God's brightness shines
+Down the dome so grand and ample,
+Propped by lofty pines!
+
+Through each branch-enwoven skylight,
+Speaks He in the breeze,
+As of old beneath the twilight
+Of lost Eden's trees!
+For His ear, the inward feeling
+Needs no outward tongue;
+He can see the spirit kneeling
+While the axe is swung.
+
+Heeding truth alone, and turning
+From the false and dim,
+Lamp of toil or altar burning
+Are alike to Him.
+Strike, then, comrades! Trade is waiting
+On our rugged toil;
+Far ships waiting for the freighting
+Of our woodland spoil.
+
+Ships, whose traffic links these highlands,
+Bleak and cold, of ours,
+With the citron-planted islands
+Of a clime of flowers;
+To our frosts the tribute bringing
+Of eternal heats;
+In our lap of winter flinging
+Tropic fruits and sweets.
+
+Cheerly, on the axe of labor,
+Let the sunbeams dance,
+Better than the flash of sabre
+Or the gleam of lance!
+Strike! With every blow is given
+Freer sun and sky,
+And the long-hid earth to heaven
+Looks, with wondering eye!
+
+Loud behind us grow the murmurs
+Of the age to come;
+Clang of smiths, and tread of farmers,
+Bearing harvest home!
+Here her virgin lap with treasures
+Shall the green earth fill;
+Waving wheat and golden maize-ears
+Crown each beechen hill.
+
+Keep who will the city's alleys
+Take the smooth-shorn plain';
+Give to us the cedarn valleys,
+Rocks and hills of Maine!
+In our North-land, wild and woody,
+Let us still have part
+Rugged nurse and mother sturdy,
+Hold us to thy heart!
+
+Oh, our free hearts beat the warmer
+For thy breath of snow;
+And our tread is all the firmer
+For thy rocks below.
+Freedom, hand in hand with labor,
+Walketh strong and brave;
+On the forehead of his neighbor
+No man writeth Slave!
+
+Lo, the day breaks! old Katahdin's
+Pine-trees show its fires,
+While from these dim forest gardens
+Rise their blackened spires.
+Up, my comrades! up and doing!
+Manhood's rugged play
+Still renewing, bravely hewing
+Through the world our way!
+1845.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHIP-BUILDERS
+
+THE sky is ruddy in the east,
+The earth is gray below,
+And, spectral in the river-mist,
+The ship's white timbers show.
+Then let the sounds of measured stroke
+And grating saw begin;
+The broad-axe to the gnarled oak,
+The mallet to the pin!
+
+Hark! roars the bellows, blast on blast,
+The sooty smithy jars,
+And fire-sparks, rising far and fast,
+Are fading with the stars.
+All day for us the smith shall stand
+Beside that flashing forge;
+All day for us his heavy hand
+The groaning anvil scourge.
+
+From far-off hills, the panting team
+For us is toiling near;
+For us the raftsmen down the stream
+Their island barges steer.
+Rings out for us the axe-man's stroke
+In forests old and still;
+For us the century-circled oak
+Falls crashing down his hill.
+
+Up! up! in nobler toil than ours
+No craftsmen bear a part
+We make of Nature's giant powers
+The slaves of human Art.
+Lay rib to rib and beam to beam,
+And drive the treenails free;
+Nor faithless joint nor yawning seam
+Shall tempt the searching sea.
+
+Where'er the keel of our good ship
+The sea's rough field shall plough;
+Where'er her tossing spars shall drip
+With salt-spray caught below;
+That ship must heed her master's beck,
+Her helm obey his hand,
+And seamen tread her reeling deck
+As if they trod the land.
+
+Her oaken ribs the vulture-beak
+Of Northern ice may peel;
+The sunken rock and coral peak
+May grate along her keel;
+And know we well the painted shell
+We give to wind and wave,
+Must float, the sailor's citadel,
+Or sink, the sailor's grave.
+
+Ho! strike away the bars and blocks,
+And set the good ship free!
+Why lingers on these dusty rocks
+The young bride of the sea?
+Look! how she moves adown the grooves,
+In graceful beauty now!
+How lowly on the breast she loves
+Sinks down her virgin prow.
+
+God bless her! wheresoe'er the breeze
+Her snowy wing shall fan,
+Aside the frozen Hebrides,
+Or sultry Hindostan!
+Where'er, in mart or on the main,
+With peaceful flag unfurled,
+She helps to wind the silken chain
+Of commerce round the world!
+
+Speed on the ship! But let her bear
+No merchandise of sin,
+No groaning cargo of despair
+Her roomy hold within;
+No Lethean drug for Eastern lands,
+Nor poison-draught for ours;
+But honest fruits of toiling hands
+And Nature's sun and showers.
+
+Be hers the Prairie's golden grain,
+The Desert's golden sand,
+The clustered fruits of sunny Spain,
+The spice of Morning-land!
+Her pathway on the open main
+May blessings follow free,
+And glad hearts welcome back again
+Her white sails from the sea
+1846.
+
+
+
+
+THE DROVERS.
+
+THROUGH heat and cold, and shower and sun,
+Still onward cheerly driving
+There's life alone in duty done,
+And rest alone in striving.
+But see! the day is closing cool,
+The woods are dim before us;
+The white fog of the wayside pool
+Is creeping slowly o'er us.
+
+The night is falling, comrades mine,
+Our footsore beasts are weary,
+And through yon elms the tavern sign
+Looks out upon us cheery.
+The landlord beckons from his door,
+His beechen fire is glowing;
+These ample barns, with feed in store,
+Are filled to overflowing.
+
+From many a valley frowned across
+By brows of rugged mountains;
+From hillsides where, through spongy moss,
+Gush out the river fountains;
+From quiet farm-fields, green and low,
+And bright with blooming clover;
+From vales of corn the wandering crow
+No richer hovers over;
+
+Day after day our way has been
+O'er many a hill and hollow;
+By lake and stream, by wood and glen,
+Our stately drove we follow.
+Through dust-clouds rising thick and dun,
+As smoke of battle o'er us,
+Their white horns glisten in the sun,
+Like plumes and crests before us.
+
+We see them slowly climb the hill,
+As slow behind it sinking;
+Or, thronging close, from roadside rill,
+Or sunny lakelet, drinking.
+Now crowding in the narrow road,
+In thick and struggling masses,
+They glare upon the teamster's load,
+Or rattling coach that passes.
+
+Anon, with toss of horn and tail,
+And paw of hoof, and bellow,
+They leap some farmer's broken pale,
+O'er meadow-close or fallow.
+Forth comes the startled goodman; forth
+Wife, children, house-dog, sally,
+Till once more on their dusty path
+The baffled truants rally.
+
+We drive no starvelings, scraggy grown,
+Loose-legged, and ribbed and bony,
+Like those who grind their noses down
+On pastures bare and stony,--
+Lank oxen, rough as Indian dogs,
+And cows too lean for shadows,
+Disputing feebly with the frogs
+The crop of saw-grass meadows!
+
+In our good drove, so sleek and fair,
+No bones of leanness rattle;
+No tottering hide-bound ghosts are there,
+Or Pharaoh's evil cattle.
+Each stately beeve bespeaks the hand
+That fed him unrepining;
+The fatness of a goodly land
+In each dun hide is shining.
+
+We've sought them where, in warmest nooks,
+The freshest feed is growing,
+By sweetest springs and clearest brooks
+Through honeysuckle flowing;
+Wherever hillsides, sloping south,
+Are bright with early grasses,
+Or, tracking green the lowland's drouth,
+The mountain streamlet passes.
+
+But now the day is closing cool,
+The woods are dim before us,
+The white fog of the wayside pool
+Is creeping slowly o'er us.
+The cricket to the frog's bassoon
+His shrillest time is keeping;
+The sickle of yon setting moon
+The meadow-mist is reaping.
+
+The night is falling, comrades mine,
+Our footsore beasts are weary,
+And through yon elms the tavern sign
+Looks out upon us cheery.
+To-morrow, eastward with our charge
+We'll go to meet the dawning,
+Ere yet the pines of Kearsarge
+Have seen the sun of morning.
+
+When snow-flakes o'er the frozen earth,
+Instead of birds, are flitting;
+When children throng the glowing hearth,
+And quiet wives are knitting;
+While in the fire-light strong and clear
+Young eyes of pleasure glisten,
+To tales of all we see and hear
+The ears of home shall listen.
+
+By many a Northern lake and bill,
+From many a mountain pasture,
+Shall Fancy play the Drover still,
+And speed the long night faster.
+Then let us on, through shower and sun,
+And heat and cold, be driving;
+There 's life alone in duty done,
+And rest alone in striving.
+1847.
+
+
+
+
+THE HUSKERS.
+
+IT was late in mild October, and the long autumnal rain
+Had left the summer harvest-fields all green with grass again;
+The first sharp frosts had fallen, leaving all the woodlands gay
+With the hues of summer's rainbow, or the meadow-flowers of May.
+
+Through a thin, dry mist, that morning, the sun rose broad and red,
+At first a rayless disk of fire, he brightened as he sped;
+Yet, even his noontide glory fell chastened and subdued,
+On the cornfields and the orchards, and softly pictured wood.
+
+And all that quiet afternoon, slow sloping to the night,
+He wove with golden shuttle the haze with yellow light;
+Slanting through the painted beeches, he glorified the hill;
+And, beneath it, pond and meadow lay brighter, greener still.
+
+And shouting boys in woodland haunts caught glimpses of that sky,
+Flecked by the many-tinted leaves, and laughed, they knew not why;
+And school-girls, gay with aster-flowers, beside the meadow brooks,
+Mingled the glow of autumn with the sunshine of sweet looks.
+
+From spire and barn looked westerly the patient weathercocks;
+But even the birches on the hill stood motionless as rocks.
+No sound was in the woodlands, save the squirrel's dropping shell,
+And the yellow leaves among the boughs, low rustling as they fell.
+
+The summer grains were harvested; the stubble-fields lay dry,
+Where June winds rolled, in light and shade, the pale green waves of rye;
+But still, on gentle hill-slopes, in valleys fringed with wood,
+Ungathered, bleaching in the sun, the heavy corn crop stood.
+
+Bent low, by autumn's wind and rain, through husks that, dry and sere,
+Unfolded from their ripened charge, shone out the yellow ear;
+Beneath, the turnip lay concealed, in many a verdant fold,
+And glistened in the slanting light the pumpkin's sphere of gold.
+
+There wrought the busy harvesters; and many a creaking wain
+Bore slowly to the long barn-floor its load of husk and grain;
+Till broad and red, as when he rose, the sun sank down, at last,
+And like a merry guest's farewell, the day in brightness passed.
+
+And to! as through the western pines, on meadow, stream, and pond,
+Flamed the red radiance of a sky, set all afire beyond,
+Slowly o'er the eastern sea-bluffs a milder glory shone,
+And the sunset and the moonrise were mingled into one!
+
+As thus into the quiet night the twilight lapsed away,
+And deeper in the brightening moon the tranquil shadows lay;
+From many a brown old farm-house, and hamlet without name,
+Their milking and their home-tasks done, the  merry huskers came.
+
+Swung o'er the heaped-up harvest, from pitchforks in the mow,
+Shone dimly down the lanterns on the pleasant scene below;
+The growing pile of husks behind, the golden ears before,
+And laughing eyes and busy hands and brown cheeks glimmering o'er.
+
+Half hidden, in a quiet nook, serene of look and heart,
+Talking their old times over, the old men sat apart;
+While up and down the unhusked pile, or nestling in its shade,
+At hide-and-seek, with laugh and shout, the happy children played.
+
+Urged by the good host's daughter, a maiden young and fair,
+Lifting to light her sweet blue eyes and pride of soft brown hair,
+The master of the village school, sleek of hair and smooth of tongue,
+To the quaint tune of some old psalm, a husking ballad sung.
+
+THE CORN-SONG.
+Heap high the farmer's wintry hoard
+Heap high the golden corn
+No richer gift has Autumn poured
+From out her lavish horn!
+
+Let other lands, exulting, glean
+The apple from the pine,
+The orange from its glossy green,
+The cluster from the vine;
+
+We better love the hardy gift
+Our rugged vales bestow,
+To cheer us when the storm shall drift
+Our harvest-fields with snow.
+
+Through vales of grass and mends of flowers
+Our ploughs their furrows made,
+While on the hills the sun and showers
+Of changeful April played.
+
+We dropped the seed o'er hill and plain
+Beneath the sun of May,
+And frightened from our sprouting grain
+The robber crows away.
+
+All through the long, bright days of June
+Its leaves grew green and fair,
+And waved in hot midsummer's noon
+Its soft and yellow hair.
+
+And now, with autumn's moonlit eves,
+Its harvest-time has come,
+We pluck away the frosted leaves,
+And bear the treasure home.
+
+There, when the snows about us drift,
+And winter winds are cold,
+Fair hands the broken grain shall sift,
+And knead its meal of gold.
+
+Let vapid idlers loll in silk
+Around their costly board;
+Give us the bowl of samp and milk,
+By homespun beauty poured!
+
+Where'er the wide old kitchen hearth
+Sends up its smoky curls,
+Who will not thank the kindly earth,
+And bless our farmer girls!
+
+Then shame on all the proud and vain,
+Whose folly laughs to scorn
+The blessing of our hardy grain,
+Our wealth of golden corn.
+
+Let earth withhold her goodly root,
+Let mildew blight the rye,
+Give to the worm the orchard's fruit,
+The wheat-field to the fly.
+
+But let the good old crop adorn
+The hills our fathers trod;
+Still let us, for his golden corn,
+Send up our thanks to God!
+1847.
+
+
+
+
+THE REFORMER.
+
+ALL grim and soiled and brown with tan,
+I saw a Strong One, in his wrath,
+Smiting the godless shrines of man
+Along his path.
+
+The Church, beneath her trembling dome,
+Essayed in vain her ghostly charm
+Wealth shook within his gilded home
+With strange alarm.
+
+Fraud from his secret chambers fled
+Before the sunlight bursting in
+Sloth drew her pillow o'er her head
+To drown the din.
+
+"Spare," Art implored, "yon holy pile;
+That grand, old, time-worn turret spare;"
+Meek Reverence, kneeling in the aisle,
+Cried out, "Forbear!"
+
+Gray-bearded Use, who, deaf and blind,
+Groped for his old accustomed stone,
+Leaned on his staff, and wept to find
+His seat o'erthrown.
+
+Young Romance raised his dreamy eyes,
+O'erhung with paly locks of gold,--
+"Why smite," he asked in sad surprise,
+"The fair, the old?"
+
+Yet louder rang the Strong One's stroke,
+Yet nearer flashed his axe's gleam;
+Shuddering and sick of heart I woke,
+As from a dream.
+
+I looked: aside the dust-cloud rolled,
+The Waster seemed the Builder too;
+Upspringing from the ruined Old
+I saw the New.
+
+'T was but the ruin of the bad,--
+The wasting of the wrong and ill;
+Whate'er of good the old time had
+Was living still.
+
+Calm grew the brows of him I feared;
+The frown which awed me passed away,
+And left behind a smile which cheered
+Like breaking day.
+
+The grain grew green on battle-plains,
+O'er swarded war-mounds grazed the cow;
+The slave stood forging from his chains
+The spade and plough.
+
+Where frowned the fort, pavilions gay
+And cottage windows, flower-entwined,
+Looked out upon the peaceful bay
+And hills behind.
+
+Through vine-wreathed cups with wine once red,
+The lights on brimming crystal fell,
+Drawn, sparkling, from the rivulet head
+And mossy well.
+
+Through prison walls, like Heaven-sent hope,
+Fresh breezes blew, and sunbeams strayed,
+And with the idle gallows-rope
+The young child played.
+
+Where the doomed victim in his cell
+Had counted o'er the weary hours,
+Glad school-girls, answering to the bell,
+Came crowned with flowers.
+
+Grown wiser for the lesson given,
+I fear no longer, for I know
+That, where the share is deepest driven,
+The best fruits grow.
+
+The outworn rite, the old abuse,
+The pious fraud transparent grown,
+The good held captive in the use
+Of wrong alone,--
+
+These wait their doom, from that great law
+Which makes the past time serve to-day;
+And fresher life the world shall draw
+From their decay.
+
+Oh, backward-looking son of time!
+The new is old, the old is new,
+The cycle of a change sublime
+Still sweeping through.
+
+So wisely taught the Indian seer;
+Destroying Seva, forming Brahm,
+Who wake by turns Earth's love and fear,
+Are one, the same.
+
+Idly as thou, in that old day
+Thou mournest, did thy sire repine;
+So, in his time, thy child grown gray
+Shall sigh for thine.
+
+But life shall on and upward go;
+Th' eternal step of Progress beats
+To that great anthem, calm and slow,
+Which God repeats.
+
+Take heart! the Waster builds again,
+A charmed life old Goodness bath;
+The tares may perish, but the grain
+Is not for death.
+
+God works in all things; all obey
+His first propulsion from the night
+Wake thou and watch! the world is gray
+With morning light!
+1848.
+
+
+
+
+THE PEACE CONVENTION AT BRUSSELS.
+
+STILL in thy streets, O Paris! doth the stain
+Of blood defy the cleansing autumn rain;
+Still breaks the smoke Messina's ruins through,
+And Naples mourns that new Bartholomew,
+When squalid beggary, for a dole of bread,
+At a crowned murderer's beck of license, fed
+The yawning trenches with her noble dead;
+Still, doomed Vienna, through thy stately halls
+The shell goes crashing and the red shot falls,
+And, leagued to crush thee, on the Danube's side,
+The bearded Croat and Bosniak spearman ride;
+Still in that vale where Himalaya's snow
+Melts round the cornfields and the vines below,
+The Sikh's hot cannon, answering ball for ball,
+Flames in the breach of Moultan's shattered wall;
+On Chenab's side the vulture seeks the slain,
+And Sutlej paints with blood its banks again.
+
+"What folly, then," the faithless critic cries,
+With sneering lip, and wise world-knowing eyes,
+"While fort to fort, and post to post, repeat
+The ceaseless challenge of the war-drum's beat,
+And round the green earth, to the church-bell's chime,
+The morning drum-roll of the camp keeps time,
+To dream of peace amidst a world in arms,
+Of swords to ploughshares changed by Scriptural charms,
+Of nations, drunken with the wine of blood,
+Staggering to take the Pledge of Brotherhood,
+Like tipplers answering Father Matthew's call;
+The sullen Spaniard, and the mad-cap Gaul,
+The bull-dog Briton, yielding but with life,
+The Yankee swaggering with his bowie-knife,
+The Russ, from banquets with the vulture shared,
+The blood still dripping from his amber beard,
+Quitting their mad Berserker dance to hear
+The dull, meek droning of a drab-coat seer;
+Leaving the sport of Presidents and Kings,
+Where men for dice each titled gambler flings,
+To meet alternate on the Seine and Thames,
+For tea and gossip, like old country dames
+No! let the cravens plead the weakling's cant,
+Let Cobden cipher, and let Vincent rant,
+Let Sturge preach peace to democratic throngs,
+And Burritt, stammering through his hundred tongues,
+Repeat, in all, his ghostly lessons o'er,
+Timed to the pauses of the battery's roar;
+Check Ban or Kaiser with the barricade
+Of "Olive-leaves" and Resolutions made,
+Spike guns with pointed Scripture-texts, and hope
+To capsize navies with a windy trope;
+Still shall the glory and the pomp of War
+Along their train the shouting millions draw;
+Still dusty Labor to the passing Brave
+His cap shall doff, and Beauty's kerchief wave;
+Still shall the bard to Valor tune his song,
+Still Hero-worship kneel before the Strong;
+Rosy and sleek, the sable-gowned divine,
+O'er his third bottle of suggestive wine,
+To plumed and sworded auditors, shall prove
+Their trade accordant with the Law of Love;
+And Church for State, and State for Church, shall fight,
+And both agree, that "Might alone is Right!"
+Despite of sneers like these, O faithful few,
+Who dare to hold God's word and witness true,
+Whose clear-eyed faith transcends our evil time,
+And o'er the present wilderness of crime
+Sees the calm future, with its robes of green,
+Its fleece-flecked mountains, and soft streams between,--
+Still keep the path which duty bids ye tread,
+Though worldly wisdom shake the cautious head;
+No truth from Heaven descends upon our sphere,
+Without the greeting of the skeptic's sneer;
+Denied and mocked at, till its blessings fall,
+Common as dew and sunshine, over all."
+
+Then, o'er Earth's war-field, till the strife shall cease,
+Like Morven's harpers, sing your song of peace;
+As in old fable rang the Thracian's lyre,
+Midst howl of fiends and roar of penal fire,
+Till the fierce din to pleasing murmurs fell,
+And love subdued the maddened heart of hell.
+Lend, once again, that holy song a tongue,
+Which the glad angels of the Advent sung,
+Their cradle-anthem for the Saviour's birth,
+Glory to God, and peace unto the earth
+Through the mad discord send that calming word
+Which wind and wave on wild Genesareth heard,
+Lift in Christ's name his Cross against the Sword!
+Not vain the vision which the prophets saw,
+Skirting with green the fiery waste of war,
+Through the hot sand-gleam, looming soft and calm
+On the sky's rim, the fountain-shading palm.
+Still lives for Earth, which fiends so long have trod,
+The great hope resting on the truth of God,--
+Evil shall cease and Violence pass away,
+And the tired world breathe free through a long
+Sabbath day.
+11th mo., 1848.
+
+
+
+
+THE PRISONER FOR DEBT.
+
+Before the law authorizing imprisonment for debt had been abolished in
+Massachusetts, a revolutionary pensioner was confined in Charlestown
+jail for a debt of fourteen dollars, and on the fourth of July was seen
+waving a handkerchief from the bars of his cell in honor of the day.
+
+Look on him! through his dungeon grate,
+Feebly and cold, the morning light
+Comes stealing round him, dim and late,
+As if it loathed the sight.
+Reclining on his strawy bed,
+His hand upholds his drooping head;
+His bloodless cheek is seamed and hard,
+Unshorn his gray, neglected beard;
+And o'er his bony fingers flow
+His long, dishevelled locks of snow.
+No grateful fire before him glows,
+And yet the winter's breath is chill;
+And o'er his half-clad person goes
+The frequent ague thrill!
+Silent, save ever and anon,
+A sound, half murmur and half groan,
+Forces apart the painful grip
+Of the old sufferer's bearded lip;
+Oh, sad and crushing is the fate
+Of old age chained and desolate!
+
+Just God! why lies that old man there?
+A murderer shares his prison bed,
+Whose eyeballs, through his horrid hair,
+Gleam on him, fierce and red;
+And the rude oath and heartless jeer
+Fall ever on his loathing ear,
+And, or in wakefulness or sleep,
+Nerve, flesh, and pulses thrill and creep
+Whene'er that ruffian's tossing limb,
+Crimson with murder, touches him!
+
+What has the gray-haired prisoner done?
+Has murder stained his hands with gore?
+Not so; his crime's a fouler one;
+God made the old man poor!
+For this he shares a felon's cell,
+The fittest earthly type of hell
+For this, the boon for which he poured
+His young blood on the invader's sword,
+And counted light the fearful cost;
+His blood-gained liberty is lost!
+
+And so, for such a place of rest,
+Old prisoner, dropped thy blood as rain
+On Concord's field, and Bunker's crest,
+And Saratoga's plain?
+Look forth, thou man of many scars,
+Through thy dim dungeon's iron bars;
+It must be joy, in sooth, to see
+Yon monument upreared to thee;
+Piled granite and a prison cell,
+The land repays thy service well!
+
+Go, ring the bells and fire the guns,
+And fling the starry banner out;
+Shout "Freedom!" till your lisping ones
+Give back their cradle-shout;
+Let boastful eloquence declaim
+Of honor, liberty, and fame;
+Still let the poet's strain be heard,
+With glory for each second word,
+And everything with breath agree
+To praise "our glorious liberty!"
+
+But when the patron cannon jars
+That prison's cold and gloomy wall,
+And through its grates the stripes and stars
+Rise on the wind, and fall,
+Think ye that prisoner's aged ear
+Rejoices in the general cheer?
+Think ye his dim and failing eye
+Is kindled at your pageantry?
+Sorrowing of soul, and chained of limb,
+What is your carnival to him?
+
+Down with the law that binds him thus!
+Unworthy freemen, let it find
+No refuge from the withering curse
+Of God and human-kind
+Open the prison's living tomb,
+And usher from its brooding gloom
+The victims of your savage code
+To the free sun and air of God;
+No longer dare as crime to brand
+The chastening of the Almighty's hand.
+1849.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHRISTIAN TOURISTS.
+
+The reader of the biography of William Allen, the philanthropic
+associate of Clarkson and Romilly, cannot fail to admire his simple and
+beautiful record of a tour through Europe, in the years 1818 and 1819,
+in the company of his American friend, Stephen Grellett.
+
+No aimless wanderers, by the fiend Unrest
+Goaded from shore to shore;
+No schoolmen, turning, in their classic quest,
+The leaves of empire o'er.
+Simple of faith, and bearing in their hearts
+The love of man and God,
+Isles of old song, the Moslem's ancient marts,
+And Scythia's steppes, they trod.
+
+Where the long shadows of the fir and pine
+In the night sun are cast,
+And the deep heart of many a Norland mine
+Quakes at each riving blast;
+Where, in barbaric grandeur, Moskwa stands,
+A baptized Scythian queen,
+With Europe's arts and Asia's jewelled hands,
+The North and East between!
+
+Where still, through vales of Grecian fable, stray
+The classic forms of yore,
+And beauty smiles, new risen from the spray,
+And Dian weeps once more;
+Where every tongue in Smyrna's mart resounds;
+And Stamboul from the sea
+Lifts her tall minarets over burial-grounds
+Black with the cypress-tree.
+
+From Malta's temples to the gates of Rome,
+Following the track of Paul,
+And where the Alps gird round the Switzer's home
+Their vast, eternal wall;
+They paused not by the ruins of old time,
+They scanned no pictures rare,
+Nor lingered where the snow-locked mountains
+climb
+The cold abyss of air!
+
+But unto prisons, where men lay in chains,
+To haunts where Hunger pined,
+To kings and courts forgetful of the pains
+And wants of human-kind,
+Scattering sweet words, and quiet deeds of good,
+Along their way, like flowers,
+Or pleading, as Christ's freemen only could,
+With princes and with powers;
+
+Their single aim the purpose to fulfil
+Of Truth, from day to day,
+Simply obedient to its guiding will,
+They held their pilgrim way.
+Yet dream not, hence, the beautiful and old
+Were wasted on their sight,
+Who in the school of Christ had learned to hold
+All outward things aright.
+
+Not less to them the breath of vineyards blown
+From off the Cyprian shore,
+Not less for them the Alps in sunset shone,
+That man they valued more.
+A life of beauty lends to all it sees
+The beauty of its thought;
+And fairest forms and sweetest harmonies
+Make glad its way, unsought.
+
+In sweet accordancy of praise and love,
+The singing waters run;
+And sunset mountains wear in light above
+The smile of duty done;
+Sure stands the promise,--ever to the meek
+A heritage is given;
+Nor lose they Earth who, single-hearted, seek
+The righteousness of Heaven!
+1849.
+
+
+
+
+THE MEN OF OLD.
+
+"WELL speed thy mission, bold Iconoclast!
+Yet all unworthy of its trust thou art,
+If, with dry eye, and cold, unloving heart,
+Thou tread'st the solemn Pantheon of the Past,
+By the great Future's dazzling hope made blind
+To all the beauty, power, and truth behind.
+Not without reverent awe shouldst thou put by
+The cypress branches and the amaranth blooms,
+Where, with clasped hands of prayer, upon their tombs
+The effigies of old confessors lie,
+God's witnesses; the voices of His will,
+Heard in the slow march of the centuries still
+Such were the men at whose rebuking frown,
+Dark with God's wrath, the tyrant's knee went down;
+Such from the terrors of the guilty drew
+The vassal's freedom and the poor man's due."
+
+St. Anselm (may he rest forevermore
+In Heaven's sweet peace!) forbade, of old, the sale
+Of men as slaves, and from the sacred pale
+Hurled the Northumbrian buyers of the poor.
+To ransom souls from bonds and evil fate
+St. Ambrose melted down the sacred plate,--
+Image of saint, the chalice, and the pix,
+Crosses of gold, and silver candlesticks.
+"Man is worth more than temples!" he replied
+To such as came his holy work to chide.
+And brave Cesarius, stripping altars bare,
+And coining from the Abbey's golden hoard
+The captive's freedom, answered to the prayer
+Or threat of those whose fierce zeal for the Lord
+Stifled their love of man,--"An earthen dish
+The last sad supper of the Master bore
+Most miserable sinners! do ye wish
+More than your Lord, and grudge His dying poor
+What your own pride and not His need requires?
+Souls, than these shining gauds, He values more
+Mercy, not sacrifice, His heart desires!"
+O faithful worthies! resting far behind
+In your dark ages, since ye fell asleep,
+Much has been done for truth and human-kind;
+Shadows are scattered wherein ye groped blind;
+Man claims his birthright, freer pulses leap
+Through peoples driven in your day like sheep;
+Yet, like your own, our age's sphere of light,
+Though widening still, is walled around by night;
+With slow, reluctant eye, the Church has read,
+Skeptic at heart, the lessons of its Head;
+Counting, too oft, its living members less
+Than the wall's garnish and the pulpit's dress;
+World-moving zeal, with power to bless and feed
+Life's fainting pilgrims, to their utter need,
+Instead of bread, holds out the stone of creed;
+Sect builds and worships where its wealth and
+pride
+And vanity stand shrined and deified,
+Careless that in the shadow of its walls
+God's living temple into ruin falls.
+We need, methinks, the prophet-hero still,
+Saints true of life, and martyrs strong of will,
+To tread the land, even now, as Xavier trod
+The streets of Goa, barefoot, with his bell,
+Proclaiming freedom in the name of God,
+And startling tyrants with the fear of hell
+Soft words, smooth prophecies, are doubtless well;
+But to rebuke the age's popular crime,
+We need the souls of fire, the hearts of that old
+time!
+1849.
+
+
+
+
+TO PIUS IX.
+
+The writer of these lines is no enemy of Catholics. He has, on more than
+one occasion, exposed himself to the censures of his Protestant
+brethren, by his strenuous endeavors to procure indemnification for the
+owners of the convent destroyed near Boston. He defended the cause of
+the Irish patriots long before it had become popular in this country;
+and he was one of the first to urge the most liberal aid to the
+suffering and starving population of the Catholic island. The severity
+of his language finds its ample apology in the reluctant confession of
+one of the most eminent Romish priests, the eloquent and devoted Father
+Ventura.
+
+THE cannon's brazen lips are cold;
+No red shell blazes down the air;
+And street and tower, and temple old,
+Are silent as despair.
+
+The Lombard stands no more at bay,
+Rome's fresh young life has bled in vain;
+The ravens scattered by the day
+Come back with night again.
+
+Now, while the fratricides of France
+Are treading on the neck of Rome,
+Hider at Gaeta, seize thy chance!
+Coward and cruel, come!
+
+Creep now from Naples' bloody skirt;
+Thy mummer's part was acted well,
+While Rome, with steel and fire begirt,
+Before thy crusade fell!
+
+Her death-groans answered to thy prayer;
+Thy chant, the drum and bugle-call;
+Thy lights, the burning villa's glare;
+Thy beads, the shell and ball!
+
+Let Austria clear thy way, with hands
+Foul from Ancona's cruel sack,
+And Naples, with his dastard bands
+Of murderers, lead thee back!
+
+Rome's lips are dumb; the orphan's wail,
+The mother's shriek, thou mayst not hear
+Above the faithless Frenchman's hail,
+The unsexed shaveling's cheer!
+
+Go, bind on Rome her cast-off weight,
+The double curse of crook and crown,
+Though woman's scorn and manhood's hate
+From wall and roof flash down!
+
+Nor heed those blood-stains on the wall,
+Not Tiber's flood can wash away,
+Where, in thy stately Quirinal,
+Thy mangled victims lay!
+
+Let the world murmur; let its cry
+Of horror and disgust be heard;
+Truth stands alone; thy coward lie
+Is backed by lance and sword!
+
+The cannon of St. Angelo,
+And chanting priest and clanging bell,
+And beat of drum and bugle blow,
+Shall greet thy coming well!
+
+Let lips of iron and tongues of slaves
+Fit welcome give thee; for her part,
+Rome, frowning o'er her new-made graves,
+Shall curse thee from her heart!
+
+No wreaths of sad Campagna's flowers
+Shall childhood in thy pathway fling;
+No garlands from their ravaged bowers
+Shall Terni's maidens bring;
+
+But, hateful as that tyrant old,
+The mocking witness of his crime,
+In thee shall loathing eyes behold
+The Nero of our time!
+
+Stand where Rome's blood was freest shed,
+Mock Heaven with impious thanks, and call
+Its curses on the patriot dead,
+Its blessings on the Gaul!
+
+Or sit upon thy throne of lies,
+A poor, mean idol, blood-besmeared,
+Whom even its worshippers despise,
+Unhonored, unrevered!
+
+Yet, Scandal of the World! from thee
+One needful truth mankind shall learn
+That kings and priests to Liberty
+And God are false in turn.
+
+Earth wearies of them; and the long
+Meek sufferance of the Heavens doth fail;
+Woe for weak tyrants, when the strong
+Wake, struggle, and prevail!
+
+Not vainly Roman hearts have bled
+To feed the Crosier and the Crown,
+If, roused thereby, the world shall tread
+The twin-born vampires down
+1849.
+
+
+
+
+CALEF IN BOSTON.
+
+1692.
+
+IN the solemn days of old,
+Two men met in Boston town,
+One a tradesman frank and bold,
+One a preacher of renown.
+
+Cried the last, in bitter tone:
+"Poisoner of the wells of truth
+Satan's hireling, thou hast sown
+With his tares the heart of youth!"
+
+Spake the simple tradesman then,
+"God be judge 'twixt thee and me;
+All thou knowed of truth hath been
+Once a lie to men like thee.
+
+"Falsehoods which we spurn to-day
+Were the truths of long ago;
+Let the dead boughs fall away,
+Fresher shall the living grow.
+
+"God is good and God is light,
+In this faith I rest secure;
+Evil can but serve the right,
+Over all shall love endure.
+
+"Of your spectral puppet play
+I have traced the cunning wires;
+Come what will, I needs must say,
+God is true, and ye are liars."
+
+When the thought of man is free,
+Error fears its lightest tones;
+So the priest cried, "Sadducee!"
+And the people took up stones.
+
+In the ancient burying-ground,
+Side by side the twain now lie;
+One with humble grassy mound,
+One with marbles pale and high.
+
+But the Lord hath blest the seed
+Which that tradesman scattered then,
+And the preacher's spectral creed
+Chills no more the blood of men.
+
+Let us trust, to one is known
+Perfect love which casts out fear,
+While the other's joys atone
+For the wrong he suffered here.
+1849.
+
+
+
+
+OUR STATE.
+
+THE South-land boasts its teeming cane,
+The prairied West its heavy grain,
+And sunset's radiant gates unfold
+On rising marts and sands of gold.
+
+Rough, bleak, and hard, our little State
+Is scant of soil, of limits strait;
+Her yellow sands are sands alone,
+Her only mines are ice and stone!
+
+From Autumn frost to April rain,
+Too long her winter woods complain;
+From budding flower to falling leaf,
+Her summer time is all too brief.
+
+Yet, on her rocks, and on her sands,
+And wintry hills, the school-house stands,
+And what her rugged soil denies,
+The harvest of the mind supplies.
+
+The riches of the Commonwealth
+Are free, strong minds, and hearts of health;
+And more to her than gold or grain,
+The cunning hand and cultured brain.
+
+For well she keeps her ancient stock,
+The stubborn strength of Pilgrim Rock;
+And still maintains, with milder laws,
+And clearer light, the Good Old Cause.
+
+Nor heeds the skeptic's puny hands,
+While near her school the church-spire stands;
+Nor fears the blinded bigot's rule,
+While near her church-spire stands the school.
+1549.
+
+
+
+
+THE PRISONERS OF NAPLES.
+
+I HAVE been thinking of the victims bound
+In Naples, dying for the lack of air
+And sunshine, in their close, damp cells of pain,
+Where hope is not, and innocence in vain
+Appeals against the torture and the chain!
+Unfortunates! whose crime it was to share
+Our common love of freedom, and to dare,
+In its behalf, Rome's harlot triple-crowned,
+And her base pander, the most hateful thing
+Who upon Christian or on Pagan ground
+Makes vile the old heroic name of king.
+O God most merciful! Father just and kind
+Whom man hath bound let thy right hand unbind.
+Or, if thy purposes of good behind
+Their ills lie hidden, let the sufferers find
+Strong consolations; leave them not to doubt
+Thy providential care, nor yet without
+The hope which all thy attributes inspire,
+That not in vain the martyr's robe of fire
+Is worn, nor the sad prisoner's fretting chain;
+Since all who suffer for thy truth send forth,
+Electrical, with every throb of pain,
+Unquenchable sparks, thy own baptismal rain
+Of fire and spirit over all the earth,
+Making the dead in slavery live again.
+Let this great hope be with them, as they lie
+Shut from the light, the greenness, and the sky;
+From the cool waters and the pleasant breeze,
+The smell of flowers, and shade of summer trees;
+Bound with the felon lepers, whom disease
+And sins abhorred make loathsome; let them share
+Pellico's faith, Foresti's strength to bear
+Years of unutterable torment, stern and still,
+As the chained Titan victor through his will!
+Comfort them with thy future; let them see
+The day-dawn of Italian liberty;
+For that, with all good things, is hid with Thee,
+And, perfect in thy thought, awaits its time to be.
+
+I, who have spoken for freedom at the cost
+Of some weak friendships, or some paltry prize
+Of name or place, and more than I have lost
+Have gained in wider reach of sympathies,
+And free communion with the good and wise;
+May God forbid that I should ever boast
+Such easy self-denial, or repine
+That the strong pulse of health no more is mine;
+That, overworn at noonday, I must yield
+To other hands the gleaning of the field;
+A tired on-looker through the day's decline.
+For blest beyond deserving still, and knowing
+That kindly Providence its care is showing
+In the withdrawal as in the bestowing,
+Scarcely I dare for more or less to pray.
+Beautiful yet for me this autumn day
+Melts on its sunset hills; and, far away,
+For me the Ocean lifts its solemn psalm,
+To me the pine-woods whisper; and for me
+Yon river, winding through its vales of calm,
+By greenest banks, with asters purple-starred,
+And gentian bloom and golden-rod made gay,
+Flows down in silent gladness to the sea,
+Like a pure spirit to its great reward!
+
+Nor lack I friends, long-tried and near and dear,
+Whose love is round me like this atmosphere,
+Warm, soft, and golden. For such gifts to me
+What shall I render, O my God, to thee?
+Let me not dwell upon my lighter share
+Of pain and ill that human life must bear;
+Save me from selfish pining; let my heart,
+Drawn from itself in sympathy, forget
+The bitter longings of a vain regret,
+The anguish of its own peculiar smart.
+Remembering others, as I have to-day,
+In their great sorrows, let me live alway
+Not for myself alone, but have a part,
+Such as a frail and erring spirit may,
+In love which is of Thee, and which indeed Thou art!
+1851.
+
+
+
+
+THE PEACE OF EUROPE.
+
+"GREAT peace in Europe! Order reigns
+From Tiber's hills to Danube's plains!"
+So say her kings and priests; so say
+The lying prophets of our day.
+
+Go lay to earth a listening ear;
+The tramp of measured marches hear;
+The rolling of the cannon's wheel,
+The shotted musket's murderous peal,
+The night alarm, the sentry's call,
+The quick-eared spy in hut and hall!
+From Polar sea and tropic fen
+The dying-groans of exiled men!
+The bolted cell, the galley's chains,
+The scaffold smoking with its stains!
+Order, the hush of brooding slaves
+Peace, in the dungeon-vaults and graves!
+
+O Fisher! of the world-wide net,
+With meshes in all waters set,
+Whose fabled keys of heaven and hell
+Bolt hard the patriot's prison-cell,
+And open wide the banquet-hall,
+Where kings and priests hold carnival!
+Weak vassal tricked in royal guise,
+Boy Kaiser with thy lip of lies;
+Base gambler for Napoleon's crown,
+Barnacle on his dead renown!
+Thou, Bourbon Neapolitan,
+Crowned scandal, loathed of God and man
+And thou, fell Spider of the North!
+Stretching thy giant feelers forth,
+Within whose web the freedom dies
+Of nations eaten up like flies!
+Speak, Prince and Kaiser, Priest and Czar I
+If this be Peace, pray what is War?
+
+White Angel of the Lord! unmeet
+That soil accursed for thy pure feet.
+Never in Slavery's desert flows
+The fountain of thy charmed repose;
+No tyrant's hand thy chaplet weaves
+Of lilies and of olive-leaves;
+Not with the wicked shalt thou dwell,
+Thus saith the Eternal Oracle;
+Thy home is with the pure and free!
+Stern herald of thy better day,
+Before thee, to prepare thy way,
+The Baptist Shade of Liberty,
+Gray, scarred and hairy-robed, must press
+With bleeding feet the wilderness!
+Oh that its voice might pierces the ear
+Of princes, trembling while they hear
+A cry as of the Hebrew seer
+Repent! God's kingdom draweth near!
+1852.
+
+
+
+
+ASTRAEA.
+
+"Jove means to settle
+Astraea in her seat again,
+And let down from his golden chain
+An age of better metal."
+            BEN JONSON, 1615.
+
+O POET rare and old!
+Thy words are prophecies;
+Forward the age of gold,
+The new Saturnian lies.
+
+The universal prayer
+And hope are not in vain;
+Rise, brothers! and prepare
+The way for Saturn's reign.
+
+Perish shall all which takes
+From labor's board and can;
+Perish shall all which makes
+A spaniel of the man!
+
+Free from its bonds the mind,
+The body from the rod;
+Broken all chains that bind
+The image of our God.
+
+Just men no longer pine
+Behind their prison-bars;
+Through the rent dungeon shine
+The free sun and the stars.
+
+Earth own, at last, untrod
+By sect, or caste, or clan,
+The fatherhood of God,
+The brotherhood of man!
+
+Fraud fail, craft perish, forth
+The money-changers driven,
+And God's will done on earth,
+As now in heaven;
+1852.
+
+
+
+
+THE DISENTHRALLED.
+
+HE had bowed down to drunkenness,
+An abject worshipper
+The pride of manhood's pulse had grown
+Too faint and cold to stir;
+And he had given his spirit up
+To the unblessed thrall,
+And bowing to the poison cup,
+He gloried in his fall!
+
+There came a change--the cloud rolled off,
+And light fell on his brain--
+And like the passing of a dream
+That cometh not again,
+The shadow of the spirit fled.
+He saw the gulf before,
+He shuddered at the waste behind,
+And was a man once more.
+
+He shook the serpent folds away,
+That gathered round his heart,
+As shakes the swaying forest-oak
+Its poison vine apart;
+He stood erect; returning pride
+Grew terrible within,
+And conscience sat in judgment, on
+His most familiar sin.
+
+The light of Intellect again
+Along his pathway shone;
+And Reason like a monarch sat
+Upon his olden throne.
+The honored and the wise once more
+Within his presence came;
+And lingered oft on lovely lips
+His once forbidden name.
+
+There may be glory in the might,
+That treadeth nations down;
+Wreaths for the crimson conqueror,
+Pride for the kingly crown;
+But nobler is that triumph hour,
+The disenthralled shall find,
+When evil passion boweth down,
+Unto the Godlike mind.
+
+
+
+
+THE POOR VOTER ON ELECTION DAY.
+
+THE proudest now is but my peer,
+The highest not more high;
+To-day, of all the weary year,
+A king of men am I.
+To-day, alike are great and small,
+The nameless and the known;
+My palace is the people's hall,
+The ballot-box my throne!
+
+Who serves to-day upon the list
+Beside the served shall stand;
+Alike the brown and wrinkled fist,
+The gloved and dainty hand!
+The rich is level with the poor,
+The weak is strong to-day;
+And sleekest broadcloth counts no more
+Than homespun frock of gray.
+
+To-day let pomp and vain pretence
+My stubborn right abide;
+I set a plain man's common sense
+Against the pedant's pride.
+To-day shall simple manhood try
+The strength of gold and land;
+The wide world has not wealth to buy
+The power in my right hand!
+
+While there's a grief to seek redress,
+Or balance to adjust,
+Where weighs our living manhood less
+Than Mammon's vilest dust,--
+While there's a right to need my vote,
+A wrong to sweep away,
+Up! clouted knee and ragged coat
+A man's a man to-day
+1848.
+
+
+
+
+THE DREAM OF PIO NONO.
+
+IT chanced that while the pious troops of France
+Fought in the crusade Pio Nono preached,
+What time the holy Bourbons stayed his hands
+(The Hun and Aaron meet for such a Moses),
+Stretched forth from Naples towards rebellious Rome
+To bless the ministry of Oudinot,
+And sanctify his iron homilies
+And sharp persuasions of the bayonet,
+That the great pontiff fell asleep, and dreamed.
+
+He stood by Lake Tiberias, in the sun
+Of the bight Orient; and beheld the lame,
+The sick, and blind, kneel at the Master's feet,
+And rise up whole. And, sweetly over all,
+Dropping the ladder of their hymn of praise
+From heaven to earth, in silver rounds of song,
+He heard the blessed angels sing of peace,
+Good-will to man, and glory to the Lord.
+
+Then one, with feet unshod, and leathern face
+Hardened and darkened by fierce summer suns
+And hot winds of the desert, closer drew
+His fisher's haick, and girded up his loins,
+And spake, as one who had authority
+"Come thou with me."
+
+Lakeside and eastern sky
+And the sweet song of angels passed away,
+And, with a dream's alacrity of change,
+The priest, and the swart fisher by his side,
+Beheld the Eternal City lift its domes
+And solemn fanes and monumental pomp
+Above the waste Campagna. On the hills
+The blaze of burning villas rose and fell,
+And momently the mortar's iron throat
+Roared from the trenches; and, within the walls,
+Sharp crash of shells, low groans of human pain,
+Shout, drum beat, and the clanging larum-bell,
+And tramp of hosts, sent up a mingled sound,
+Half wail and half defiance. As they passed
+The gate of San Pancrazio, human blood
+Flowed ankle-high about them, and dead men
+Choked the long street with gashed and gory piles,--
+A ghastly barricade of mangled flesh,
+From which at times, quivered a living hand,
+And white lips moved and moaned. A father tore
+His gray hairs, by the body of his son,
+In frenzy; and his fair young daughter wept
+On his old bosom. Suddenly a flash
+Clove the thick sulphurous air, and man and maid
+Sank, crushed and mangled by the shattering shell.
+
+Then spake the Galilean: "Thou hast seen
+The blessed Master and His works of love;
+Look now on thine! Hear'st thou the angels sing
+Above this open hell? Thou God's high-priest!
+Thou the Vicegerent of the Prince of Peace!
+Thou the successor of His chosen ones!
+I, Peter, fisherman of Galilee,
+In the dear Master's name, and for the love
+Of His true Church, proclaim thee Antichrist,
+Alien and separate from His holy faith,
+Wide as the difference between death and life,
+The hate of man and the great love of God!
+Hence, and repent!"
+
+Thereat the pontiff woke,
+Trembling, and muttering o'er his fearful dream.
+"What means he?" cried the Bourbon, "Nothing more
+Than that your majesty hath all too well
+Catered for your poor guests, and that, in sooth,
+The Holy Father's supper troubleth him,"
+Said Cardinal Antonelli, with a smile.
+1853.
+
+
+
+
+THE VOICES.
+WHY urge the long, unequal fight,
+Since Truth has fallen in the street,
+Or lift anew the trampled light,
+Quenched by the heedless million's feet?
+
+"Give o'er the thankless task; forsake
+The fools who know not ill from good
+Eat, drink, enjoy thy own, and take
+Thine ease among the multitude.
+
+"Live out thyself; with others share
+Thy proper life no more; assume
+The unconcern of sun and air,
+For life or death, or blight or bloom.
+
+"The mountain pine looks calmly on
+The fires that scourge the plains below,
+Nor heeds the eagle in the sun
+The small birds piping in the snow!
+
+"The world is God's, not thine; let Him
+Work out a change, if change must be
+The hand that planted best can trim
+And nurse the old unfruitful tree."
+
+So spake the Tempter, when the light
+Of sun and stars had left the sky;
+I listened, through the cloud and night,
+And beard, methought, a voice reply:
+
+"Thy task may well seem over-hard,
+Who scatterest in a thankless soil
+Thy life as seed, with no reward
+Save that which Duty gives to Toil.
+
+"Not wholly is thy heart resigned
+To Heaven's benign and just decree,
+Which, linking thee with all thy kind,
+Transmits their joys and griefs to thee.
+
+"Break off that sacred chain, and turn
+Back on thyself thy love and care;
+Be thou thine own mean idol, burn
+Faith, Hope, and Trust, thy children, there.
+
+"Released from that fraternal law
+Which shares the common bale and bliss,
+No sadder lot could Folly draw,
+Or Sin provoke from Fate, than this.
+
+"The meal unshared is food unblest
+Thou hoard'st in vain what love should spend;
+Self-ease is pain; thy only rest
+Is labor for a worthy end;
+
+"A toil that gains with what it yields,
+And scatters to its own increase,
+And hears, while sowing outward fields,
+The harvest-song of inward peace.
+
+"Free-lipped the liberal streamlets run,
+Free shines for all the healthful ray;
+The still pool stagnates in the sun,
+The lurid earth-fire haunts decay.
+
+"What is it that the crowd requite
+Thy love with hate, thy truth with lies?
+And but to faith, and not to sight,
+The walls of Freedom's temple rise?
+
+"Yet do thy work; it shall succeed
+In thine or in another's day;
+And, if denied the victor's meed,
+Thou shalt not lack the toiler's pay.
+
+"Faith shares the future's promise; Love's
+Self-offering is a triumph won;
+And each good thought or action moves
+The dark world nearer to the sun.
+
+"Then faint not, falter not, nor plead
+Thy weakness; truth itself is strong;
+The lion's strength, the eagle's speed,
+Are not alone vouchsafed to wrong.
+
+"Thy nature, which, through fire and flood,
+To place or gain finds out its way,
+Hath power to seek the highest good,
+And duty's holiest call obey!
+
+"Strivest thou in darkness?--Foes without
+In league with traitor thoughts within;
+Thy night-watch kept with trembling Doubt
+And pale Remorse the ghost of Sin?
+
+"Hast thou not, on some week of storm,
+Seen the sweet Sabbath breaking fair,
+And cloud and shadow, sunlit, form
+The curtains of its tent of prayer?
+
+"So, haply, when thy task shall end,
+The wrong shall lose itself in right,
+And all thy week-day darkness blend
+With the long Sabbath of the light!"
+1854.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW EXODUS.
+
+Written upon hearing that slavery had been formally abolished in Egypt.
+Unhappily, the professions and pledges of the vacillating government of
+Egypt proved unreliable.
+
+BY fire and cloud, across the desert sand,
+And through the parted waves,
+From their long bondage, with an outstretched hand,
+God led the Hebrew slaves!
+
+Dead as the letter of the Pentateuch,
+As Egypt's statues cold,
+In the adytum of the sacred book
+Now stands that marvel old.
+
+"Lo, God is great!" the simple Moslem says.
+We seek the ancient date,
+Turn the dry scroll, and make that living phrase
+A dead one: "God was great!"
+
+And, like the Coptic monks by Mousa's wells,
+We dream of wonders past,
+Vague as the tales the wandering Arab tells,
+Each drowsier than the last.
+
+O fools and blind! Above the Pyramids
+Stretches once more that hand,
+And tranced Egypt, from her stony lids,
+Flings back her veil of sand.
+
+And morning-smitten Memnon, singing, wakes;
+And, listening by his Nile,
+O'er Ammon's grave and awful visage breaks
+A sweet and human smile.
+
+Not, as before, with hail and fire, and call
+Of death for midnight graves,
+But in the stillness of the noonday, fall
+The fetters of the slaves.
+
+No longer through the Red Sea, as of old,
+The bondmen walk dry shod;
+Through human hearts, by love of Him controlled,
+Runs now that path of God
+1856.
+
+
+
+
+THE CONQUEST OF FINLAND.
+
+"Joseph Sturge, with a companion, Thomas Harvey, has been visiting the
+shores of Finland, to ascertain the amount of mischief and loss to poor
+and peaceable sufferers, occasioned by the gun-boats of the allied
+squadrons in the late war, with a view to obtaining relief for them."--
+Friends' Review.
+
+ACROSS the frozen marshes
+The winds of autumn blow,
+And the fen-lands of the Wetter
+Are white with early snow.
+
+But where the low, gray headlands
+Look o'er the Baltic brine,
+A bark is sailing in the track
+Of England's battle-line.
+
+No wares hath she to barter
+For Bothnia's fish and grain;
+She saileth not for pleasure,
+She saileth not for gain.
+
+But still by isle or mainland
+She drops her anchor down,
+Where'er the British cannon
+Rained fire on tower and town.
+
+Outspake the ancient Amtman,
+At the gate of Helsingfors
+"Why comes this ship a-spying
+In the track of England's wars?"
+
+"God bless her," said the coast-guard,--
+"God bless the ship, I say.
+The holy angels trim the sails
+That speed her on her way!
+
+"Where'er she drops her anchor,
+The peasant's heart is glad;
+Where'er she spreads her parting sail,
+The peasant's heart is sad.
+
+"Each wasted town and hamlet
+She visits to restore;
+To roof the shattered cabin,
+And feed the starving poor.
+
+"The sunken boats of fishers,
+The foraged beeves and grain,
+The spoil of flake and storehouse,
+The good ship brings again.
+
+"And so to Finland's sorrow
+The sweet amend is made,
+As if the healing hand of Christ
+Upon her wounds were laid!"
+
+Then said the gray old Amtman,
+"The will of God be done!
+The battle lost by England's hate,
+By England's love is won!
+
+"We braved the iron tempest
+That thundered on our shore;
+But when did kindness fail to find
+The key to Finland's door?
+
+"No more from Aland's ramparts
+Shall warning signal come,
+Nor startled Sweaborg hear again
+The roll of midnight drum.
+
+"Beside our fierce Black Eagle
+The Dove of Peace shall rest;
+And in the mouths of cannon
+The sea-bird make her nest.
+
+"For Finland, looking seaward,
+No coming foe shall scan;
+And the holy bells of Abo
+Shall ring, 'Good-will to man!'
+
+"Then row thy boat, O fisher!
+In peace on lake and bay;
+And thou, young maiden, dance again
+Around the poles of May!
+
+"Sit down, old men, together,
+Old wives, in quiet spin;
+Henceforth the Anglo-Saxon
+Is the brother of the Finn!"
+1856.
+
+
+
+
+THE EVE OF ELECTION.
+
+FROM gold to gray
+Our mild sweet day
+Of Indian Summer fades too soon;
+But tenderly
+Above the sea
+Hangs, white and calm, the hunter's moon.
+
+In its pale fire,
+The village spire
+Shows like the zodiac's spectral lance;
+The painted walls
+Whereon it falls
+Transfigured stand in marble trance!
+
+O'er fallen leaves
+The west-wind grieves,
+Yet comes a seed-time round again;
+And morn shall see
+The State sown free
+With baleful tares or healthful grain.
+
+Along the street
+The shadows meet
+Of Destiny, whose hands conceal
+The moulds of fate
+That shape the State,
+And make or mar the common weal.
+
+Around I see
+The powers that be;
+I stand by Empire's primal springs;
+And princes meet,
+In every street,
+And hear the tread of uncrowned kings!
+
+Hark! through the crowd
+The laugh runs loud,
+Beneath the sad, rebuking moon.
+God save the land
+A careless hand
+May shake or swerve ere morrow's noon!
+
+No jest is this;
+One cast amiss
+May blast the hope of Freedom's year.
+Oh, take me where
+Are hearts of prayer,
+And foreheads bowed in reverent fear!
+
+Not lightly fall
+Beyond recall
+The written scrolls a breath can float;
+The crowning fact
+The kingliest act
+Of Freedom is the freeman's vote!
+
+For pearls that gem
+A diadem
+The diver in the deep sea dies;
+The regal right
+We boast to-night
+Is ours through costlier sacrifice;
+
+The blood of Vane,
+His prison pain
+Who traced the path the Pilgrim trod,
+And hers whose faith
+Drew strength from death,
+And prayed her Russell up to God!
+
+Our hearts grow cold,
+We lightly hold
+A right which brave men died to gain;
+The stake, the cord,
+The axe, the sword,
+Grim nurses at its birth of pain.
+
+The shadow rend,
+And o'er us bend,
+O martyrs, with your crowns and palms;
+Breathe through these throngs
+Your battle songs,
+Your scaffold prayers, and dungeon psalms.
+
+Look from the sky,
+Like God's great eye,
+Thou solemn moon, with searching beam,
+Till in the sight
+Of thy pure light
+Our mean self-seekings meaner seem.
+
+Shame from our hearts
+Unworthy arts,
+The fraud designed, the purpose dark;
+And smite away
+The hands we lay
+Profanely on the sacred ark.
+
+To party claims
+And private aims,
+Reveal that august face of Truth,
+Whereto are given
+The age of heaven,
+The beauty of immortal youth.
+
+So shall our voice
+Of sovereign choice
+Swell the deep bass of duty done,
+And strike the key
+Of time to be,
+When God and man shall speak as one!
+1858.
+
+
+
+
+FROM PERUGIA.
+
+"The thing which has the most dissevered the people from the Pope,--the
+unforgivable thing,--the breaking point between him and them,--has been
+the encouragement and promotion he gave to the officer under whom were
+executed the slaughters of Perugia. That made the breaking point in many
+honest hearts that had clung to him before."--HARRIET BEECHER STOWE'S
+Letters from Italy.
+
+The tall, sallow guardsmen their horsetails have spread,
+Flaming out in their violet, yellow, and red;
+And behind go the lackeys in crimson and buff,
+And the chamberlains gorgeous in velvet and ruff;
+Next, in red-legged pomp, come the cardinals forth,
+Each a lord of the church and a prince of the earth.
+
+What's this squeak of the fife, and this batter of drum
+Lo! the Swiss of the Church from Perugia come;
+The militant angels, whose sabres drive home
+To the hearts of the malcontents, cursed and abhorred,
+The good Father's missives, and "Thus saith the Lord!"
+And lend to his logic the point of the sword!
+
+O maids of Etruria, gazing forlorn
+O'er dark Thrasymenus, dishevelled and torn!
+O fathers, who pluck at your gray beards for shame!
+O mothers, struck dumb by a woe without name!
+Well ye know how the Holy Church hireling behaves,
+And his tender compassion of prisons and graves!
+
+There they stand, the hired stabbers, the blood-stains yet fresh,
+That splashed like red wine from the vintage of flesh;
+Grim instruments, careless as pincers and rack
+How the joints tear apart, and the strained sinews crack;
+But the hate that glares on them is sharp as their swords,
+And the sneer and the scowl print the air with fierce words!
+
+Off with hats, down with knees, shout your vivas like mad!
+Here's the Pope in his holiday righteousness clad,
+From shorn crown to toe-nail, kiss-worn to the quick,
+Of sainthood in purple the pattern and pick,
+Who the role of the priest and the soldier unites,
+And, praying like Aaron, like Joshua fights!
+
+Is this Pio Nono the gracious, for whom
+We sang our hosannas and lighted all Rome;
+With whose advent we dreamed the new era began
+When the priest should be human, the monk be a man?
+Ah, the wolf's with the sheep, and the fox with the fowl,
+When freedom we trust to the crosier and cowl!
+
+Stand aside, men of Rome! Here's a hangman-faced Swiss--
+(A blessing for him surely can't go amiss)--
+Would kneel down the sanctified slipper to kiss.
+Short shrift will suffice him,--he's blest beyond doubt;
+But there 's blood on his hands which would scarcely wash out,
+Though Peter himself held the baptismal spout!
+
+Make way for the next! Here's another sweet son
+What's this mastiff-jawed rascal in epaulets done?
+He did, whispers rumor, (its truth God forbid!)
+At Perugia what Herod at Bethlehem did.
+And the mothers? Don't name them! these humors of war
+They who keep him in service must pardon him for.
+
+Hist! here's the arch-knave in a cardinal's hat,
+With the heart of a wolf, and the stealth of a cat
+(As if Judas and Herod together were rolled),
+Who keeps, all as one, the Pope's conscience and gold,
+Mounts guard on the altar, and pilfers from thence,
+And flatters St. Peter while stealing his pence!
+
+
+Who doubts Antonelli? Have miracles ceased
+When robbers say mass, and Barabbas is priest?
+When the Church eats and drinks, at its mystical board,
+The true flesh and blood carved and shed by its sword,
+When its martyr, unsinged, claps the crown on his head,
+And roasts, as his proxy, his neighbor instead!
+
+There! the bells jow and jangle the same blessed way
+That they did when they rang for Bartholomew's day.
+Hark! the tallow-faced monsters, nor women nor boys,
+Vex the air with a shrill, sexless horror of noise.
+Te Deum laudamus! All round without stint
+The incense-pot swings with a taint of blood in 't!
+
+And now for the blessing! Of little account,
+You know, is the old one they heard on the Mount.
+Its giver was landless, His raiment was poor,
+No jewelled tiara His fishermen wore;
+No incense, no lackeys, no riches, no home,
+No Swiss guards!  We order things better at Rome.
+
+So bless us the strong hand, and curse us the weak;
+Let Austria's vulture have food for her beak;
+Let the wolf-whelp of Naples play Bomba again,
+With his death-cap of silence, and halter, and chain;
+Put reason, and justice, and truth under ban;
+For the sin unforgiven is freedom for man!
+1858.
+
+
+
+
+ITALY.
+
+ACROSS the sea I heard the groans
+Of nations in the intervals
+Of wind and wave. Their blood and bones
+Cried out in torture, crushed by thrones,
+And sucked by priestly cannibals.
+
+I dreamed of Freedom slowly gained
+By martyr meekness, patience, faith,
+And lo! an athlete grimly stained,
+With corded muscles battle-strained,
+Shouting it from the fields of death!
+
+I turn me, awe-struck, from the sight,
+Among the clamoring thousands mute,
+I only know that God is right,
+And that the children of the light
+Shall tread the darkness under foot.
+
+I know the pent fire heaves its crust,
+That sultry skies the bolt will form
+To smite them clear; that Nature must
+The balance of her powers adjust,
+Though with the earthquake and the storm.
+
+God reigns, and let the earth rejoice!
+I bow before His sterner plan.
+Dumb are the organs of my choice;
+He speaks in battle's stormy voice,
+His praise is in the wrath of man!
+
+Yet, surely as He lives, the day
+Of peace He promised shall be ours,
+To fold the flags of war, and lay
+Its sword and spear to rust away,
+And sow its ghastly fields with flowers!
+1860.
+
+
+
+
+FREEDOM IN BRAZIL.
+
+WITH clearer light, Cross of the South, shine forth
+In blue Brazilian skies;
+And thou, O river, cleaving half the earth
+From sunset to sunrise,
+
+From the great mountains to the Atlantic waves
+Thy joy's long anthem pour.
+Yet a few years (God make them less!) and slaves
+Shall shame thy pride no more.
+No fettered feet thy shaded margins press;
+But all men shall walk free
+Where thou, the high-priest of the wilderness,
+Hast wedded sea to sea.
+
+And thou, great-hearted ruler, through whose mouth
+The word of God is said,
+Once more, "Let there be light!"--Son of the South,
+Lift up thy honored head,
+Wear unashamed a crown by thy desert
+More than by birth thy own,
+Careless of watch and ward; thou art begirt
+By grateful hearts alone.
+The moated wall and battle-ship may fail,
+But safe shall justice prove;
+Stronger than greaves of brass or iron mail
+The panoply of love.
+
+Crowned doubly by man's blessing and God's grace,
+Thy future is secure;
+Who frees a people makes his statue's place
+In Time's Valhalla sure.
+Lo! from his Neva's banks the Scythian Czar
+Stretches to thee his hand,
+Who, with the pencil of the Northern star,
+Wrote freedom on his land.
+And he whose grave is holy by our calm
+And prairied Sangamon,
+From his gaunt hand shall drop the martyr's palm
+To greet thee with "Well done!"
+
+And thou, O Earth, with smiles thy face make sweet,
+And let thy wail be stilled,
+To hear the Muse of prophecy repeat
+Her promise half fulfilled.
+The Voice that spake at Nazareth speaks still,
+No sound thereof hath died;
+Alike thy hope and Heaven's eternal will
+Shall yet be satisfied.
+The years are slow, the vision tarrieth long,
+And far the end may be;
+But, one by one, the fiends of ancient wrong
+Go out and leave thee free.
+1867.
+
+
+
+
+AFTER ELECTION.
+
+THE day's sharp strife is ended now,
+Our work is done, God knoweth how!
+As on the thronged, unrestful town
+The patience of the moon looks down,
+I wait to hear, beside the wire,
+The voices of its tongues of fire.
+
+Slow, doubtful, faint, they seem at first
+Be strong, my heart, to know the worst!
+Hark! there the Alleghanies spoke;
+That sound from lake and prairie broke,
+That sunset-gun of triumph rent
+The silence of a continent!
+
+That signal from Nebraska sprung,
+This, from Nevada's mountain tongue!
+Is that thy answer, strong and free,
+O loyal heart of Tennessee?
+What strange, glad voice is that which calls
+From Wagner's grave and Sumter's walls?
+
+From Mississippi's fountain-head
+A sound as of the bison's tread!
+There rustled freedom's Charter Oak
+In that wild burst the Ozarks spoke!
+Cheer answers cheer from rise to set
+Of sun. We have a country yet!
+
+The praise, O God, be thine alone!
+Thou givest not for bread a stone;
+Thou hast not led us through the night
+To blind us with returning light;
+Not through the furnace have we passed,
+To perish at its mouth at last.
+
+O night of peace, thy flight restrain!
+November's moon, be slow to wane!
+Shine on the freedman's cabin floor,
+On brows of prayer a blessing pour;
+And give, with full assurance blest,
+The weary heart of Freedom rest!
+1868.
+
+
+
+
+DISARMAMENT.
+
+"PUT up the sword!" The voice of Christ once more
+Speaks, in the pauses of the cannon's roar,
+O'er fields of corn by fiery sickles reaped
+And left dry ashes; over trenches heaped
+With nameless dead; o'er cities starving slow
+Under a rain of fire; through wards of woe
+Down which a groaning diapason runs
+From tortured brothers, husbands, lovers, sons
+Of desolate women in their far-off homes,
+Waiting to hear the step that never comes!
+O men and brothers! let that voice be heard.
+War fails, try peace; put up the useless sword!
+
+Fear not the end. There is a story told
+In Eastern tents, when autumn nights grow cold,
+And round the fire the Mongol shepherds sit
+With grave responses listening unto it
+Once, on the errands of his mercy bent,
+Buddha, the holy and benevolent,
+Met a fell monster, huge and fierce of look,
+Whose awful voice the hills and forests shook.
+"O son of peace!" the giant cried, "thy fate
+Is sealed at last, and love shall yield to hate."
+The unarmed Buddha looking, with no trace
+Of fear or anger, in the monster's face,
+In pity said: "Poor fiend, even thee I love."
+Lo! as he spake the sky-tall terror sank
+To hand-breadth size; the huge abhorrence shrank
+Into the form and fashion of a dove;
+And where the thunder of its rage was heard,
+Circling above him sweetly sang the bird
+"Hate hath no harm for love," so ran the song;
+"And peace unweaponed conquers every wrong!"
+1871.
+
+
+
+
+THE PROBLEM.
+
+I.
+NOT without envy Wealth at times must look
+On their brown strength who wield the reaping-hook
+And scythe, or at the forge-fire shape the plough
+Or the steel harness of the steeds of steam;
+All who, by skill and patience, anyhow
+Make service noble, and the earth redeem
+From savageness. By kingly accolade
+Than theirs was never worthier knighthood made.
+Well for them, if, while demagogues their vain
+And evil counsels proffer, they maintain
+Their honest manhood unseduced, and wage
+No war with Labor's right to Labor's gain
+Of sweet home-comfort, rest of hand and brain,
+And softer pillow for the head of Age.
+
+II.
+And well for Gain if it ungrudging yields
+Labor its just demand; and well for Ease
+If in the uses of its own, it sees
+No wrong to him who tills its pleasant fields
+And spreads the table of its luxuries.
+The interests of the rich man and the poor
+Are one and same, inseparable evermore;
+And, when scant wage or labor fail to give
+Food, shelter, raiment, wherewithal to live,
+Need has its rights, necessity its claim.
+Yea, even self-wrought misery and shame
+Test well the charity suffering long and kind.
+The home-pressed question of the age can find
+No answer in the catch-words of the blind
+Leaders of blind. Solution there is none
+Save in the Golden Rule of Christ alone.
+1877.
+
+
+
+
+OUR COUNTRY.
+
+Read at Woodstock, Conn., July 4,1883.
+
+WE give thy natal day to hope,
+O Country of our love and prayer I
+Thy way is down no fatal slope,
+But up to freer sun and air.
+
+Tried as by furnace-fires, and yet
+By God's grace only stronger made,
+In future tasks before thee set
+Thou shalt not lack the old-time aid.
+
+The fathers sleep, but men remain
+As wise, as true, and brave as they;
+Why count the loss and not the gain?
+The best is that we have to-day.
+
+Whate'er of folly, shame, or crime,
+Within thy mighty bounds transpires,
+With speed defying space and time
+Comes to us on the accusing wires;
+
+While of thy wealth of noble deeds,
+Thy homes of peace, thy votes unsold,
+The love that pleads for human needs,
+The wrong redressed, but half is told!
+
+We read each felon's chronicle,
+His acts, his words, his gallows-mood;
+We know the single sinner well
+And not the nine and ninety good.
+
+Yet if, on daily scandals fed,
+We seem at times to doubt thy worth,
+We know thee still, when all is said,
+The best and dearest spot on earth.
+
+From the warm Mexic Gulf, or where
+Belted with flowers Los Angeles
+Basks in the semi-tropic air,
+To where Katahdin's cedar trees
+
+Are dwarfed and bent by Northern winds,
+Thy plenty's horn is yearly filled;
+Alone, the rounding century finds
+Thy liberal soil by free hands tilled.
+
+A refuge for the wronged and poor,
+Thy generous heart has borne the blame
+That, with them, through thy open door,
+The old world's evil outcasts came.
+
+But, with thy just and equal rule,
+And labor's need and breadth of lands,
+Free press and rostrum, church and school,
+Thy sure, if slow, transforming hands
+
+Shall mould even them to thy design,
+Making a blessing of the ban;
+And Freedom's chemistry combine
+The alien elements of man.
+
+The power that broke their prison bar
+And set the dusky millions free,
+And welded in the flame of war
+The Union fast to Liberty,
+
+Shall it not deal with other ills,
+Redress the red man's grievance, break
+The Circean cup which shames and kills,
+And Labor full requital make?
+
+Alone to such as fitly bear
+Thy civic honors bid them fall?
+And call thy daughters forth to share
+The rights and duties pledged to all?
+
+Give every child his right of school,
+Merge private greed in public good,
+And spare a treasury overfull
+The tax upon a poor man's food?
+
+No lack was in thy primal stock,
+No weakling founders builded here;
+Thine were the men of Plymouth Rock,
+The Huguenot and Cavalier;
+
+And they whose firm endurance gained
+The freedom of the souls of men,
+Whose hands, unstained with blood, maintained
+The swordless commonwealth of Penn.
+
+And thine shall be the power of all
+To do the work which duty bids,
+And make the people's council hall
+As lasting as the Pyramids!
+
+Well have thy later years made good
+Thy brave-said word a century back,
+The pledge of human brotherhood,
+The equal claim of white and black.
+
+That word still echoes round the world,
+And all who hear it turn to thee,
+And read upon thy flag unfurled
+The prophecies of destiny.
+
+Thy great world-lesson all shall learn,
+The nations in thy school shall sit,
+Earth's farthest mountain-tops shall burn
+With watch-fires from thy own uplit.
+
+Great without seeking to be great
+By fraud or conquest, rich in gold,
+But richer in the large estate
+Of virtue which thy children hold,
+
+With peace that comes of purity
+And strength to simple justice due,
+So runs our loyal dream of thee;
+God of our fathers! make it true.
+
+O Land of lands! to thee we give
+Our prayers, our hopes, our service free;
+For thee thy sons shall nobly live,
+And at thy need shall die for thee!
+
+
+
+
+ON THE BIG HORN.
+
+In the disastrous battle on the Big Horn River, in which General Custer
+and his entire force were slain, the chief Rain-in-the-Face was one of
+the fiercest leaders of the Indians. In Longfellow's poem on the
+massacre, these lines will be remembered:--
+
+          "Revenge!" cried Rain-in-the-Face,
+          "Revenge upon all the race
+          Of the White Chief with yellow hair!"
+          And the mountains dark and high
+          From their crags reechoed the cry
+          Of his anger and despair.
+
+He is now a man of peace; and the agent at Standing Rock, Dakota,
+writes, September 28, 1886: "Rain-in-the-Face is very anxious to go to
+Hampton. I fear he is too old, but he desires very much to go." The
+Southern Workman, the organ of General Armstrong's Industrial School at
+Hampton, Va., says in a late number:--
+
+"Rain-in-the-Face has applied before to come to Hampton, but his age
+would exclude him from the school as an ordinary student. He has shown
+himself very much in earnest about it, and is anxious, all say, to learn
+the better ways of life. It is as unusual as it is striking to see a man
+of his age, and one who has had such an experience, willing to give up
+the old way, and put himself in the position of a boy and a student."
+
+THE years are but half a score,
+And the war-whoop sounds no more
+With the blast of bugles, where
+Straight into a slaughter pen,
+With his doomed three hundred men,
+Rode the chief with the yellow hair.
+
+O Hampton, down by the sea!
+What voice is beseeching thee
+For the scholar's lowliest place?
+Can this be the voice of him
+Who fought on the Big Horn's rim?
+Can this be Rain-in-the-Face?
+
+His war-paint is washed away,
+His hands have forgotten to slay;
+He seeks for himself and his race
+The arts of peace and the lore
+That give to the skilled hand more
+Than the spoils of war and chase.
+
+O chief of the Christ-like school!
+Can the zeal of thy heart grow cool
+When the victor scarred with fight
+Like a child for thy guidance craves,
+And the faces of hunters and braves
+Are turning to thee for light?
+
+The hatchet lies overgrown
+With grass by the Yellowstone,
+Wind River and Paw of Bear;
+And, in sign that foes are friends,
+Each lodge like a peace-pipe sends
+Its smoke in the quiet air.
+
+The hands that have done the wrong
+To right the wronged are strong,
+And the voice of a nation saith
+"Enough of the war of swords,
+Enough of the lying words
+And shame of a broken faith!"
+
+The hills that have watched afar
+The valleys ablaze with war
+Shall look on the tasselled corn;
+And the dust of the grinded grain,
+Instead of the blood of the slain,
+Shall sprinkle thy banks, Big Horn!
+
+The Ute and the wandering Crow
+Shall know as the white men know,
+And fare as the white men fare;
+The pale and the red shall be brothers,
+One's rights shall be as another's,
+Home, School, and House of Prayer!
+
+O mountains that climb to snow,
+O river winding below,
+Through meadows by war once trod,
+O wild, waste lands that await
+The harvest exceeding great,
+Break forth into praise of God!
+1887.
+
+
+
+
+                                  NOTES
+
+Note 1, page 18. The reader may, perhaps, call to mind the beautiful
+sonnet of William Wordsworth, addressed to Toussaint L'Ouverture, during
+his confinement in France.
+
+"Toussaint!--thou most unhappy man of men
+Whether the whistling rustic tends his plough
+Within thy hearing, or thou liest now
+Buried in some deep dungeon's earless den;
+O miserable chieftain!--where and when
+Wilt thou find patience?--Yet, die not, do thou
+Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow;
+Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
+Live and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
+Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies,--
+There's not a breathing of the common wind
+That will forget thee; thou hast great allies.
+Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
+And love, and man's unconquerable mind."
+
+
+Note 2, page 67. The Northern author of the Congressional rule against
+receiving petitions of the people on the subject of Slavery.
+
+
+Note 3, page 88. There was at the time when this poem was written an
+Association in Liberty County, Georgia, for the religious instruction of
+negroes. One of their annual reports contains an address by the Rev.
+Josiah Spry Law, in which the following passage occurs: "There is a
+growing interest in this community in the religious instruction of
+negroes. There is a conviction that religious instruction promotes the
+quiet and order of the people, and the pecuniary interest of the
+owners."
+
+
+Note 4, page 117. The book-establishment of the Free-Will Baptists in
+Dover was refused the act of incorporation by the New Hampshire
+Legislature, for the reason that the newspaper organ of that sect and
+its leading preachers favored abolition.
+
+
+Note 5, page 118. The senatorial editor of the Belknap Gazette all along
+manifested a peculiar horror of "niggers" and "nigger parties."
+
+
+Note 6, page 118. The justice before whom Elder Storrs was brought for
+preaching abolition on a writ drawn by Hon. M. N., Jr., of Pittsfield.
+The sheriff served the writ while the elder was praying.
+
+
+Note 7, page 118. The academy at Canaan, N. H., received one or two
+colored scholars, and was in consequence dragged off into a swamp by
+Democratic teams.
+
+
+Note 8, page 119. "Papers and memorials touching the subject of slavery
+shall be laid on the table without reading, debate, or reference."  So
+read the gag-law, as it was called, introduced in the House by Mr.
+Atherton.
+
+
+Note 9, page 120. The Female Anti-Slavery Society, at its first meeting
+in Concord, was assailed with stones and brickbats.
+
+
+Note 10, page 168. The election of Charles Sumner to the United States
+Senate "followed bard upon" the rendition of the fugitive Sims by the
+United States officials and the armed police of Boston.
+
+
+Note 11, page 290. For the idea of this line, I am indebted to Emerson,
+in his inimitable sonnet to the Rhodora,--
+
+"If eyes were made for seeing,
+Then Beauty is its own excuse for being."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                           VOLUME IV.
+
+
+                         PERSONAL POEMS
+
+                               BY
+
+                     JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PERSONAL POEMS
+     A LAMENT
+     TO THE MEMORY OF CHARLES B. STORRS
+     LINES ON THE DEATH OF S. OLIVER TORREY
+     TO ----, WITH A COPY OF WOOLMAN'S JOURNAL
+     LEGGETT'S MONUMENT
+     TO A FRIEND, ON HER RETURN FROM EUROPE
+     LUCY HOOPER
+     FOLLEN
+     TO J. P.
+     CHALKLEY HALL
+     GONE
+     TO RONGE
+     CHANNING
+     TO MY FRIEND ON THE DEATH OF HIS SISTER
+     DANIEL WHEELER
+     TO FREDRIKA BREMER
+     TO AVIS KEENE
+     THE HILL-TOP
+     ELLIOTT
+     ICHABOD
+     THE LOST OCCASION
+     WORDSWORTH
+     TO ---- LINES WRITTEN AFTER A SUMMER DAY'S EXCURSION
+     IN PEACE
+     BENEDICITE
+     KOSSUTH
+     TO MY OLD SCHOOLMASTER
+     THE CROSS
+     THE HERO
+     RANTOUL
+     WILLIAM FORSTER
+     TO CHARLES SUMNER
+     BURNS
+     TO GEORGE B. CHEEVER
+     TO JAMES T. FIELDS
+     THE MEMORY OF BURNS
+     IN REMEMBRANCE OF JOSEPH STURGER
+     BROWN OF OSSAWATOMIE
+     NAPLES
+     A MEMORIAL
+     BRYANT ON HIS BIRTHDAY
+     THOMAS STARR KING
+     LINES ON A FLY-LEAF
+     GEORGE L. STEARNS
+     GARIBALDI
+     TO LYDIA MARIA CHILD
+     THE SINGER
+     HOW MARY GREW
+     SUMNER
+     THIERS
+     FITZ-GREENE HALLECK
+     WILLIAM FRANCIS BARTLETT
+     BAYARD TAYLOR
+     OUR AUTOCRAT
+     WITHIN THE GATE
+     IN MEMORY: JAMES T. FIELDS
+     WILSON
+     THE POET AND THE CHILDREN
+     A WELCOME TO LOWELL
+     AN ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL
+     MULFORD
+     TO A CAPE ANN SCHOONER
+     SAMUEL J. TILDEN
+
+OCCASIONAL POEMS.
+     EVA
+     A LAY OF OLD TIME
+     A SONG OF HARVEST
+     KENOZA LAKE
+     FOR AN AUTUMN FESTIVAL
+     THE QUAKER ALUMNI
+     OUR RIVER
+     REVISITED
+     "THE LAURELS"
+     JUNE ON THE MERRIMAC
+     HYMN FOR THE OPENING OF THOMAS STARR KING'S HOUSE OF WORSHIP
+     HYMN FOR THE HOUSE OF WORSHIP AT GEORGETOWN, ERECTED IN MEMORY
+          OF A MOTHER
+     A SPIRITUAL MANIFESTATION
+     CHICAGO
+     KINSMAN
+     THE GOLDEN WEDDING OF LONGWOOD
+     HYMN FOR THE OPENING OF PLYMOUTH CHURCH, ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA
+     LEXINGTON
+     THE LIBRARY
+     "I WAS A STRANGER, AND YE TOOK ME IN"
+     CENTENNIAL HYMN
+     AT SCHOOL-CLOSE
+     HYMN OF THE CHILDREN
+     THE LANDMARKS
+     GARDEN
+     A GREETING
+     GODSPEED
+     WINTER ROSES
+     THE REUNION
+     NORUMBEGA HALL
+     THE BARTHOLDI STATUE
+     ONE OF THE SIGNERS
+
+THE TENT ON THE BEACH.
+     PRELUDE
+     THE TENT ON THE BEACH
+     THE WRECK OF RIVERMOUTH
+     THE GRAVE BY THE LAKE
+     THE BROTHER OF MERCY
+     THE CHANGELING
+     THE MAIDS OF ATTITASH
+     KALLUNDBORG CHURCH
+     THE CABLE HYMN
+     THE DEAD SHIP OF HARPSWELL
+     THE PALATINE
+     ABRAHAM DAVENPORT
+     THE WORSHIP OF NATURE
+
+AT SUNDOWN.
+     TO E. C. S.
+     THE CHRISTMAS OF 1888.
+     THE Vow OF WASHINGTON
+     THE CAPTAIN'S WELL
+     AN OUTDOOR RECEPTION
+     R. S. S., AT DEER ISLAND ON THE MERRIMAC
+     BURNING DRIFT-WOOD.
+     O. W. HOLMES ON HIS EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY
+     JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
+     HAVERHILL. 1640-1890
+     To G. G.
+     PRESTON POWERS, INSCRIPTION FOR BASS-RELIEF
+     LYDIA H. SIGOURNEY, INSCRIPTION ON TABLET
+     MILTON, ON MEMORIAL WINDOW
+     THE BIRTHDAY WREATH
+     THE WIND OF MARCH
+     BETWEEN THE GATES
+     THE LAST EVE OF SUMMER
+     TO OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 8TH Mo. 29TH, 1892
+
+
+
+NOTE. The portrait prefacing this volume is from an engraving on steel
+by J. A. J. WILCOX in 1888, after a photograph taken by Miss ISA E. GRAY
+in July, 1885.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+               PERSONAL POEMS
+
+
+A LAMENT
+
+     "The parted spirit,
+     Knoweth it not our sorrow? Answereth not
+     Its blessing to our tears?"
+
+The circle is broken, one seat is forsaken,
+One bud from the tree of our friendship is shaken;
+One heart from among us no longer shall thrill
+With joy in our gladness, or grief in our ill.
+
+Weep! lonely and lowly are slumbering now
+The light of her glances, the pride of her brow;
+Weep! sadly and long shall we listen in vain
+To hear the soft tones of her welcome again.
+
+Give our tears to the dead! For humanity's claim
+From its silence and darkness is ever the same;
+The hope of that world whose existence is bliss
+May not stifle the tears of the mourners of this.
+
+For, oh! if one glance the freed spirit can throw
+On the scene of its troubled probation below,
+Than the pride of the marble, the pomp of the dead,
+To that glance will be dearer the tears which we shed.
+
+Oh, who can forget the mild light of her smile,
+Over lips moved with music and feeling the while,
+The eye's deep enchantment, dark, dream-like, and clear,
+In the glow of its gladness, the shade of its tear.
+
+And the charm of her features, while over the whole
+Played the hues of the heart and the sunshine of soul;
+And the tones of her voice, like the music which seems
+Murmured low in our ears by the Angel of dreams!
+
+But holier and dearer our memories hold
+Those treasures of feeling, more precious than gold,
+The love and the kindness and pity which gave
+Fresh flowers for the bridal, green wreaths for the grave!
+
+The heart ever open to Charity's claim,
+Unmoved from its purpose by censure and blame,
+While vainly alike on her eye and her ear
+Fell the scorn of the heartless, the jesting and jeer.
+
+How true to our hearts was that beautiful sleeper
+With smiles for the joyful, with tears for the weeper,
+Yet, evermore prompt, whether mournful or gay,
+With warnings in love to the passing astray.
+
+For, though spotless herself, she could sorrow for them
+Who sullied with evil the spirit's pure gem;
+And a sigh or a tear could the erring reprove,
+And the sting of reproof was still tempered by love.
+
+As a cloud of the sunset, slow melting in heaven,
+As a star that is lost when the daylight is given,
+As a glad dream of slumber, which wakens in bliss,
+She hath passed to the world of the holy from this.
+1834.
+
+
+
+TO THE MEMORY OF CHARLES B. STORRS,
+
+     Late President of Western Reserve College, who died at his post of
+     duty, overworn by his strenuous labors with tongue and  pen in the
+     cause of Human Freedom.
+
+Thou hast fallen in thine armor,
+Thou martyr of the Lord
+With thy last breath crying "Onward!"
+And thy hand upon the sword.
+The haughty heart derideth,
+And the sinful lip reviles,
+But the blessing of the perishing
+Around thy pillow smiles!
+
+When to our cup of trembling
+The added drop is given,
+And the long-suspended thunder
+Falls terribly from Heaven,--
+When a new and fearful freedom
+Is proffered of the Lord
+To the slow-consuming Famine,
+The Pestilence and Sword!
+
+When the refuges of Falsehood
+Shall be swept away in wrath,
+And the temple shall be shaken,
+With its idol, to the earth,
+Shall not thy words of warning
+Be all remembered then?
+And thy now unheeded message
+Burn in the hearts of men?
+
+Oppression's hand may scatter
+Its nettles on thy tomb,
+And even Christian bosoms
+Deny thy memory room;
+For lying lips shall torture
+Thy mercy into crime,
+And the slanderer shall flourish
+As the bay-tree for a time.
+
+But where the south-wind lingers
+On Carolina's pines,
+Or falls the careless sunbeam
+Down Georgia's golden mines;
+Where now beneath his burthen
+The toiling slave is driven;
+Where now a tyrant's mockery
+Is offered unto Heaven;
+
+Where Mammon hath its altars
+Wet o'er with human blood,
+And pride and lust debases
+The workmanship of God,--
+There shall thy praise be spoken,
+Redeemed from Falsehood's ban,
+When the fetters shall be broken,
+And the slave shall be a man!
+
+Joy to thy spirit, brother!
+A thousand hearts are warm,
+A thousand kindred bosoms
+Are baring to the storm.
+What though red-handed Violence
+With secret Fraud combine?
+The wall of fire is round us,
+Our Present Help was thine.
+
+Lo, the waking up of nations,
+From Slavery's fatal sleep;
+The murmur of a Universe,
+Deep calling unto Deep!
+Joy to thy spirit, brother!
+On every wind of heaven
+The onward cheer and summons
+Of Freedom's voice is given!
+
+Glory to God forever!
+Beyond the despot's will
+The soul of Freedom liveth
+Imperishable still.
+The words which thou hast uttered
+Are of that soul a part,
+And the good seed thou hast scattered
+Is springing from the heart.
+
+In the evil days before us,
+And the trials yet to come,
+In the shadow of the prison,
+Or the cruel martyrdom,--
+We will think of thee, O brother!
+And thy sainted name shall be
+In the blessing of the captive,
+And the anthem of the free.
+1834
+
+
+
+LINES
+
+     ON THE DEATH OF S. OLIVER TORREY, SECRETARY OF THE BOSTON YOUNG
+     MEN'S ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY.
+
+Gone before us, O our brother,
+To the spirit-land!
+Vainly look we for another
+In thy place to stand.
+Who shall offer youth and beauty
+On the wasting shrine
+Of a stern and lofty duty,
+With a faith like thine?
+
+Oh, thy gentle smile of greeting
+Who again shall see?
+Who amidst the solemn meeting
+Gaze again on thee?
+Who when peril gathers o'er us,
+Wear so calm a brow?
+Who, with evil men before us,
+So serene as thou?
+
+Early hath the spoiler found thee,
+Brother of our love!
+Autumn's faded earth around thee,
+And its storms above!
+Evermore that turf lie lightly,
+And, with future showers,
+O'er thy slumbers fresh and brightly
+Blow the summer flowers
+
+In the locks thy forehead gracing,
+Not a silvery streak;
+Nor a line of sorrow's tracing
+On thy fair young cheek;
+Eyes of light and lips of roses,
+Such as Hylas wore,--
+Over all that curtain closes,
+Which shall rise no more!
+
+Will the vigil Love is keeping
+Round that grave of thine,
+Mournfully, like Jazer weeping
+Over Sibmah's vine;
+Will the pleasant memories, swelling
+Gentle hearts, of thee,
+In the spirit's distant dwelling
+All unheeded be?
+
+If the spirit ever gazes,
+From its journeyings, back;
+If the immortal ever traces
+O'er its mortal track;
+Wilt thou not, O brother, meet us
+Sometimes on our way,
+And, in hours of sadness, greet us
+As a spirit may?
+
+Peace be with thee, O our brother,
+In the spirit-land
+Vainly look we for another
+In thy place to stand.
+Unto Truth and Freedom giving
+All thy early powers,
+Be thy virtues with the living,
+And thy spirit ours!
+1837.
+
+
+
+TO ------,
+
+     WITH A COPY OF WOOLMAN'S JOURNAL.
+
+     "Get the writings of John Woolman by heart."--Essays of Elia.
+
+Maiden! with the fair brown tresses
+Shading o'er thy dreamy eye,
+Floating on thy thoughtful forehead
+Cloud wreaths of its sky.
+
+Youthful years and maiden beauty,
+Joy with them should still abide,--
+Instinct take the place of Duty,
+Love, not Reason, guide.
+
+Ever in the New rejoicing,
+Kindly beckoning back the Old,
+Turning, with the gift of Midas,
+All things into gold.
+
+And the passing shades of sadness
+Wearing even a welcome guise,
+As, when some bright lake lies open
+To the sunny skies,
+
+Every wing of bird above it,
+Every light cloud floating on,
+Glitters like that flashing mirror
+In the self-same sun.
+
+But upon thy youthful forehead
+Something like a shadow lies;
+And a serious soul is looking
+From thy earnest eyes.
+
+With an early introversion,
+Through the forms of outward things,
+Seeking for the subtle essence,
+And the bidden springs.
+
+Deeper than the gilded surface
+Hath thy wakeful vision seen,
+Farther than the narrow present
+Have thy journeyings been.
+
+Thou hast midst Life's empty noises
+Heard the solemn steps of Time,
+And the low mysterious voices
+Of another clime.
+
+All the mystery of Being
+Hath upon thy spirit pressed,--
+Thoughts which, like the Deluge wanderer,
+Find no place of rest:
+
+That which mystic Plato pondered,
+That which Zeno heard with awe,
+And the star-rapt Zoroaster
+In his night-watch saw.
+
+From the doubt and darkness springing
+Of the dim, uncertain Past,
+Moving to the dark still shadows
+O'er the Future cast,
+
+Early hath Life's mighty question
+Thrilled within thy heart of youth,
+With a deep and strong beseeching
+What and where is Truth?
+
+Hollow creed and ceremonial,
+Whence the ancient life hath fled,
+Idle faith unknown to action,
+Dull and cold and dead.
+
+Oracles, whose wire-worked meanings
+Only wake a quiet scorn,--
+Not from these thy seeking spirit
+Hath its answer drawn.
+
+But, like some tired child at even,
+On thy mother Nature's breast,
+Thou, methinks, art vainly seeking
+Truth, and peace, and rest.
+
+O'er that mother's rugged features
+Thou art throwing Fancy's veil,
+Light and soft as woven moonbeams,
+Beautiful and frail
+
+O'er the rough chart of Existence,
+Rocks of sin and wastes of woe,
+Soft airs breathe, and green leaves tremble,
+And cool fountains flow.
+
+And to thee an answer cometh
+From the earth and from the sky,
+And to thee the hills and waters
+And the stars reply.
+
+But a soul-sufficing answer
+Hath no outward origin;
+More than Nature's many voices
+May be heard within.
+
+Even as the great Augustine
+Questioned earth and sea and sky,
+And the dusty tomes of learning
+And old poesy.
+
+But his earnest spirit needed
+More than outward Nature taught;
+More than blest the poet's vision
+Or the sage's thought.
+
+Only in the gathered silence
+Of a calm and waiting frame,
+Light and wisdom as from Heaven
+To the seeker came.
+
+Not to ease and aimless quiet
+Doth that inward answer tend,
+But to works of love and duty
+As our being's end;
+
+Not to idle dreams and trances,
+Length of face, and solemn tone,
+But to Faith, in daily striving
+And performance shown.
+
+Earnest toil and strong endeavor
+Of a spirit which within
+Wrestles with familiar evil
+And besetting sin;
+
+And without, with tireless vigor,
+Steady heart, and weapon strong,
+In the power of truth assailing
+Every form of wrong.
+
+Guided thus, how passing lovely
+Is the track of Woolman's feet!
+And his brief and simple record
+How serenely sweet!
+
+O'er life's humblest duties throwing
+Light the earthling never knew,
+Freshening all its dark waste places
+As with Hermon's dew.
+
+All which glows in Pascal's pages,
+All which sainted Guion sought,
+Or the blue-eyed German Rahel
+Half-unconscious taught
+
+Beauty, such as Goethe pictured,
+Such as Shelley dreamed of, shed
+Living warmth and starry brightness
+Round that poor man's head.
+
+Not a vain and cold ideal,
+Not a poet's dream alone,
+But a presence warm and real,
+Seen and felt and known.
+
+When the red right-hand of slaughter
+Moulders with the steel it swung,
+When the name of seer and poet
+Dies on Memory's tongue,
+
+All bright thoughts and pure shall gather
+Round that meek and suffering one,--
+Glorious, like the seer-seen angel
+Standing in the sun!
+
+Take the good man's book and ponder
+What its pages say to thee;
+Blessed as the hand of healing
+May its lesson be.
+
+If it only serves to strengthen
+Yearnings for a higher good,
+For the fount of living waters
+And diviner food;
+
+If the pride of human reason
+Feels its meek and still rebuke,
+Quailing like the eye of Peter
+From the Just One's look!
+
+If with readier ear thou heedest
+What the Inward Teacher saith,
+Listening with a willing spirit
+And a childlike faith,--
+
+Thou mayst live to bless the giver,
+Who, himself but frail and weak,
+Would at least the highest welfare
+Of another seek;
+
+And his gift, though poor and lowly
+It may seem to other eyes,
+Yet may prove an angel holy
+In a pilgrim's guise.
+1840.
+
+
+
+LEGGETT'S MONUMENT.
+
+     William Leggett, who died in 1839 at the age of thirty-seven, was
+     the intrepid editor of the New York Evening Post and afterward of
+     The Plain Dealer. His vigorous assault upon the system of slavery
+     brought down upon him the enmity of political defenders of the
+     system.
+
+"Ye build the tombs of the prophets."--Holy Writ.
+
+Yes, pile the marble o'er him! It is well
+That ye who mocked him in his long stern strife,
+And planted in the pathway of his life
+The ploughshares of your hatred hot from hell,
+Who clamored down the bold reformer when
+He pleaded for his captive fellow-men,
+Who spurned him in the market-place, and sought
+Within thy walls, St. Tammany, to bind
+In party chains the free and honest thought,
+The angel utterance of an upright mind,
+Well is it now that o'er his grave ye raise
+The stony tribute of your tardy praise,
+For not alone that pile shall tell to Fame
+Of the brave heart beneath, but of the builders' shame!
+1841.
+
+
+
+TO A FRIEND,
+
+ON HER RETURN FROM EUROPE.
+
+How smiled the land of France
+Under thy blue eye's glance,
+Light-hearted rover
+Old walls of chateaux gray,
+Towers of an early day,
+Which the Three Colors play
+Flauntingly over.
+
+Now midst the brilliant train
+Thronging the banks of Seine
+Now midst the splendor
+Of the wild Alpine range,
+Waking with change on change
+Thoughts in thy young heart strange,
+Lovely, and tender.
+
+Vales, soft Elysian,
+Like those in the vision
+Of Mirza, when, dreaming,
+He saw the long hollow dell,
+Touched by the prophet's spell,
+Into an ocean swell
+With its isles teeming.
+
+Cliffs wrapped in snows of years,
+Splintering with icy spears
+Autumn's blue heaven
+Loose rock and frozen slide,
+Hung on the mountain-side,
+Waiting their hour to glide
+Downward, storm-driven!
+
+Rhine-stream, by castle old,
+Baron's and robber's hold,
+Peacefully flowing;
+Sweeping through vineyards green,
+Or where the cliffs are seen
+O'er the broad wave between
+Grim shadows throwing.
+
+Or, where St. Peter's dome
+Swells o'er eternal Rome,
+Vast, dim, and solemn;
+Hymns ever chanting low,
+Censers swung to and fro,
+Sable stoles sweeping slow
+Cornice and column!
+
+Oh, as from each and all
+Will there not voices call
+Evermore back again?
+In the mind's gallery
+Wilt thou not always see
+Dim phantoms beckon thee
+O'er that old track again?
+
+New forms thy presence haunt,
+New voices softly chant,
+New faces greet thee!
+Pilgrims from many a shrine
+Hallowed by poet's line,
+At memory's magic sign,
+Rising to meet thee.
+
+And when such visions come
+Unto thy olden home,
+Will they not waken
+Deep thoughts of Him whose hand
+Led thee o'er sea and land
+Back to the household band
+Whence thou wast taken?
+
+While, at the sunset time,
+Swells the cathedral's chime,
+Yet, in thy dreaming,
+While to thy spirit's eye
+Yet the vast mountains lie
+Piled in the Switzer's sky,
+Icy and gleaming:
+
+Prompter of silent prayer,
+Be the wild picture there
+In the mind's chamber,
+And, through each coming day
+Him who, as staff and stay,
+Watched o'er thy wandering way,
+Freshly remember.
+
+So, when the call shall be
+Soon or late unto thee,
+As to all given,
+Still may that picture live,
+All its fair forms survive,
+And to thy spirit give
+Gladness in Heaven!
+1841
+
+
+
+LUCY HOOPER.
+
+     Lucy Hooper died at Brooklyn, L. I., on the 1st of 8th mo., 1841,
+     aged twenty-four years.
+
+They tell me, Lucy, thou art dead,
+That all of thee we loved and cherished
+Has with thy summer roses perished;
+And left, as its young beauty fled,
+An ashen memory in its stead,
+The twilight of a parted day
+Whose fading light is cold and vain,
+The heart's faint echo of a strain
+Of low, sweet music passed away.
+That true and loving heart, that gift
+Of a mind, earnest, clear, profound,
+Bestowing, with a glad unthrift,
+Its sunny light on all around,
+Affinities which only could
+Cleave to the pure, the true, and good;
+And sympathies which found no rest,
+Save with the loveliest and best.
+Of them--of thee--remains there naught
+But sorrow in the mourner's breast?
+A shadow in the land of thought?
+No! Even my weak and trembling faith
+Can lift for thee the veil which doubt
+And human fear have drawn about
+The all-awaiting scene of death.
+
+Even as thou wast I see thee still;
+And, save the absence of all ill
+And pain and weariness, which here
+Summoned the sigh or wrung the tear,
+The same as when, two summers back,
+Beside our childhood's Merrimac,
+I saw thy dark eye wander o'er
+Stream, sunny upland, rocky shore,
+And heard thy low, soft voice alone
+Midst lapse of waters, and the tone
+Of pine-leaves by the west-wind blown,
+There's not a charm of soul or brow,
+Of all we knew and loved in thee,
+But lives in holier beauty now,
+Baptized in immortality!
+Not mine the sad and freezing dream
+Of souls that, with their earthly mould,
+Cast off the loves and joys of old,
+Unbodied, like a pale moonbeam,
+As pure, as passionless, and cold;
+Nor mine the hope of Indra's son,
+Of slumbering in oblivion's rest,
+Life's myriads blending into one,
+In blank annihilation blest;
+Dust-atoms of the infinite,
+Sparks scattered from the central light,
+And winning back through mortal pain
+Their old unconsciousness again.
+No! I have friends in Spirit Land,
+Not shadows in a shadowy band,
+Not others, but themselves are they.
+And still I think of them the same
+As when the Master's summons came;
+Their change,--the holy morn-light breaking
+Upon the dream-worn sleeper, waking,--
+A change from twilight into day.
+
+They 've laid thee midst the household graves,
+Where father, brother, sister lie;
+Below thee sweep the dark blue waves,
+Above thee bends the summer sky.
+Thy own loved church in sadness read
+Her solemn ritual o'er thy head,
+And blessed and hallowed with her prayer
+The turf laid lightly o'er thee there.
+That church, whose rites and liturgy,
+Sublime and old, were truth to thee,
+Undoubted to thy bosom taken,
+As symbols of a faith unshaken.
+Even I, of simpler views, could feel
+The beauty of thy trust and zeal;
+And, owning not thy creed, could see
+How deep a truth it seemed to thee,
+And how thy fervent heart had thrown
+O'er all, a coloring of its own,
+And kindled up, intense and warm,
+A life in every rite and form,
+As. when on Chebar's banks of old,
+The Hebrew's gorgeous vision rolled,
+A spirit filled the vast machine,
+A life, "within the wheels" was seen.
+
+Farewell! A little time, and we
+Who knew thee well, and loved thee here,
+One after one shall follow thee
+As pilgrims through the gate of fear,
+Which opens on eternity.
+Yet shall we cherish not the less
+All that is left our hearts meanwhile;
+The memory of thy loveliness
+Shall round our weary pathway smile,
+Like moonlight when the sun has set,
+A sweet and tender radiance yet.
+Thoughts of thy clear-eyed sense of duty,
+Thy generous scorn of all things wrong,
+The truth, the strength, the graceful beauty
+Which blended in thy song.
+All lovely things, by thee beloved,
+Shall whisper to our hearts of thee;
+These green hills, where thy childhood roved,
+Yon river winding to the sea,
+The sunset light of autumn eves
+Reflecting on the deep, still floods,
+Cloud, crimson sky, and trembling leaves
+Of rainbow-tinted woods,
+These, in our view, shall henceforth take
+A tenderer meaning for thy sake;
+And all thou lovedst of earth and sky,
+Seem sacred to thy memory.
+1841.
+
+
+
+FOLLEN.
+
+ON READING HIS ESSAY ON THE "FUTURE STATE."
+
+     Charles Follen, one of the noblest contributions of Germany to
+     American citizenship, was at an early age driven from his
+     professorship in the University of Jena, and compelled to seek
+     shelter from official prosecution in Switzerland, on account of his
+     liberal political opinions. He became Professor of Civil Law in the
+     University of Basle. The governments of Prussia, Austria, and
+     Russia united in demanding his delivery as a political offender;
+     and, in consequence, he left Switzerland, and came to the United
+     States. At the time of the formation of the American Anti-Slavery
+     Society he was a Professor in Harvard University, honored for his
+     genius, learning, and estimable character. His love of liberty and
+     hatred of oppression led him to seek an interview with Garrison and
+     express his sympathy with him. Soon after, he attended a meeting of
+     the New England Anti-Slavery Society. An able speech was made by
+     Rev. A. A. Phelps, and a letter of mine addressed to the Secretary
+     of the Society was read. Whereupon he rose and stated that his
+     views were in unison with those of the Society, and that after
+     hearing the speech and the letter, he was ready to join it, and
+     abide the probable consequences of such an unpopular act. He lost
+     by so doing his professorship. He was an able member of the
+     Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He
+     perished in the ill-fated steamer Lexington, which was burned on
+     its passage from New York, January 13, 1840. The few writings left
+     behind him show him to have been a profound thinker of rare
+     spiritual insight.
+
+Friend of my soul! as with moist eye
+I look up from this page of thine,
+Is it a dream that thou art nigh,
+Thy mild face gazing into mine?
+
+That presence seems before me now,
+A placid heaven of sweet moonrise,
+When, dew-like, on the earth below
+Descends the quiet of the skies.
+
+The calm brow through the parted hair,
+The gentle lips which knew no guile,
+Softening the blue eye's thoughtful care
+With the bland beauty of their smile.
+
+Ah me! at times that last dread scene
+Of Frost and Fire and moaning Sea
+Will cast its shade of doubt between
+The failing eyes of Faith and thee.
+
+Yet, lingering o'er thy charmed page,
+Where through the twilight air of earth,
+Alike enthusiast and sage,
+Prophet and bard, thou gazest forth,
+
+Lifting the Future's solemn veil;
+The reaching of a mortal hand
+To put aside the cold and pale
+Cloud-curtains of the Unseen Land;
+
+Shall these poor elements outlive
+The mind whose kingly will, they wrought?
+Their gross unconsciousness survive
+Thy godlike energy of thought?
+
+In thoughts which answer to my own,
+In words which reach my inward ear,
+Like whispers from the void Unknown,
+I feel thy living presence here.
+
+The waves which lull thy body's rest,
+The dust thy pilgrim footsteps trod,
+Unwasted, through each change, attest
+The fixed economy of God.
+
+Thou livest, Follen! not in vain
+Hath thy fine spirit meekly borne
+The burthen of Life's cross of pain,
+And the thorned crown of suffering worn.
+
+Oh, while Life's solemn mystery glooms
+Around us like a dungeon's wall,
+Silent earth's pale and crowded tombs,
+Silent the heaven which bends o'er all!
+
+While day by day our loved ones glide
+In spectral silence, hushed and lone,
+To the cold shadows which divide
+The living from the dread Unknown;
+
+While even on the closing eye,
+And on the lip which moves in vain,
+The seals of that stern mystery
+Their undiscovered trust retain;
+
+And only midst the gloom of death,
+Its mournful doubts and haunting fears,
+Two pale, sweet angels, Hope and Faith,
+Smile dimly on us through their tears;
+
+'T is something to a heart like mine
+To think of thee as living yet;
+To feel that such a light as thine
+Could not in utter darkness set.
+
+Less dreary seems the untried way
+Since thou hast left thy footprints there,
+And beams of mournful beauty play
+Round the sad Angel's sable hair.
+
+Oh! at this hour when half the sky
+Is glorious with its evening light,
+And fair broad fields of summer lie
+Hung o'er with greenness in my sight;
+
+While through these elm-boughs wet with rain
+The sunset's golden walls are seen,
+With clover-bloom and yellow grain
+And wood-draped hill and stream between;
+
+I long to know if scenes like this
+Are hidden from an angel's eyes;
+If earth's familiar loveliness
+Haunts not thy heaven's serener skies.
+
+For sweetly here upon thee grew
+The lesson which that beauty gave,
+The ideal of the pure and true
+In earth and sky and gliding wave.
+
+And it may be that all which lends
+The soul an upward impulse here,
+With a diviner beauty blends,
+And greets us in a holier sphere.
+
+Through groves where blighting never fell
+The humbler flowers of earth may twine;
+And simple draughts-from childhood's well
+Blend with the angel-tasted wine.
+
+But be the prying vision veiled,
+And let the seeking lips be dumb,
+Where even seraph eyes have failed
+Shall mortal blindness seek to come?
+
+We only know that thou hast gone,
+And that the same returnless tide
+Which bore thee from us still glides on,
+And we who mourn thee with it glide.
+
+On all thou lookest we shall look,
+And to our gaze erelong shall turn
+That page of God's mysterious book
+We so much wish yet dread to learn.
+
+With Him, before whose awful power
+Thy spirit bent its trembling knee;
+Who, in the silent greeting flower,
+And forest leaf, looked out on thee,
+
+We leave thee, with a trust serene,
+Which Time, nor Change, nor Death can move,
+While with thy childlike faith we lean
+On Him whose dearest name is Love!
+1842.
+
+
+
+TO J. P.
+
+     John Pierpont, the eloquent preacher and poet of Boston.
+
+Not as a poor requital of the joy
+With which my childhood heard that lay of thine,
+Which, like an echo of the song divine
+At Bethlehem breathed above the Holy Boy,
+Bore to my ear the Airs of Palestine,--
+Not to the poet, but the man I bring
+In friendship's fearless trust my offering
+How much it lacks I feel, and thou wilt see,
+Yet well I know that thou Last deemed with me
+Life all too earnest, and its time too short
+For dreamy ease and Fancy's graceful sport;
+And girded for thy constant strife with wrong,
+Like Nehemiah fighting while he wrought
+The broken walls of Zion, even thy song
+Hath a rude martial tone, a blow in every thought!
+1843.
+
+
+
+CHALKLEY HALL.
+
+     Chalkley Hall, near Frankford, Pa., was the residence of Thomas
+     Chalkley, an eminent minister of the Friends' denomination. He was
+     one of the early settlers of the Colony, and his Journal, which was
+     published in 1749, presents a quaint but beautiful picture of a
+     life of unostentatious and simple goodness. He was the master of a
+     merchant vessel, and, in his visits to the west Indies and Great
+     Britain, omitted no opportunity to labor for the highest interests
+     of his fellow-men. During a temporary residence in Philadelphia, in
+     the summer of 1838, the quiet and beautiful scenery around the
+     ancient village of Frankford frequently attracted me from the heat
+     and bustle of the city. I have referred to my youthful acquaintance
+     with his writings in Snow-Bound.
+
+How bland and sweet the greeting of this breeze
+To him who flies
+From crowded street and red wall's weary gleam,
+Till far behind him like a hideous dream
+The close dark city lies
+Here, while the market murmurs, while men throng
+The marble floor
+Of Mammon's altar, from the crush and din
+Of the world's madness let me gather in
+My better thoughts once more.
+
+Oh, once again revive, while on my ear
+The cry of Gain
+And low hoarse hum of Traffic die away,
+Ye blessed memories of my early day
+Like sere grass wet with rain!
+
+Once more let God's green earth and sunset air
+Old feelings waken;
+Through weary years of toil and strife and ill,
+Oh, let me feel that my good angel still
+Hath not his trust forsaken.
+
+And well do time and place befit my mood
+Beneath the arms
+Of this embracing wood, a good man made
+His home, like Abraham resting in the shade
+Of Mamre's lonely palms.
+
+Here, rich with autumn gifts of countless years,
+The virgin soil
+Turned from the share he guided, and in rain
+And summer sunshine throve the fruits and grain
+Which blessed his honest toil.
+
+Here, from his voyages on the stormy seas,
+Weary and worn,
+He came to meet his children and to bless
+The Giver of all good in thankfulness
+And praise for his return.
+
+And here his neighbors gathered in to greet
+Their friend again,
+Safe from the wave and the destroying gales,
+Which reap untimely green Bermuda's vales,
+And vex the Carib main.
+
+To hear the good man tell of simple truth,
+Sown in an hour
+Of weakness in some far-off Indian isle,
+From the parched bosom of a barren soil,
+Raised up in life and power.
+
+How at those gatherings in Barbadian vales,
+A tendering love
+Came o'er him, like the gentle rain from heaven,
+And words of fitness to his lips were given,
+And strength as from above.
+
+How the sad captive listened to the Word,
+Until his chain
+Grew lighter, and his wounded spirit felt
+The healing balm of consolation melt
+Upon its life-long pain
+
+How the armed warrior sat him down to hear
+Of Peace and Truth,
+And the proud ruler and his Creole dame,
+Jewelled and gorgeous in her beauty came,
+And fair and bright-eyed youth.
+
+Oh, far away beneath New England's sky,
+Even when a boy,
+Following my plough by Merrimac's green shore,
+His simple record I have pondered o'er
+With deep and quiet joy.
+
+And hence this scene, in sunset glory warm,--
+Its woods around,
+Its still stream winding on in light and shade,
+Its soft, green meadows and its upland glade,--
+To me is holy ground.
+
+And dearer far than haunts where Genius keeps
+His vigils still;
+Than that where Avon's son of song is laid,
+Or Vaucluse hallowed by its Petrarch's shade,
+Or Virgil's laurelled hill.
+
+To the gray walls of fallen Paraclete,
+To Juliet's urn,
+Fair Arno and Sorrento's orange-grove,
+Where Tasso sang, let young Romance and Love
+Like brother pilgrims turn.
+
+But here a deeper and serener charm
+To all is given;
+And blessed memories of the faithful dead
+O'er wood and vale and meadow-stream have shed
+The holy hues of Heaven!
+1843.
+
+
+
+GONE
+
+Another hand is beckoning us,
+Another call is given;
+And glows once more with Angel-steps
+The path which reaches Heaven.
+
+Our young and gentle friend, whose smile
+Made brighter summer hours,
+Amid the frosts of autumn time
+Has left us with the flowers.
+
+No paling of the cheek of bloom
+Forewarned us of decay;
+No shadow from the Silent Land
+Fell round our sister's way.
+
+The light of her young life went down,
+As sinks behind the hill
+The glory of a setting star,
+Clear, suddenly, and still.
+
+As pure and sweet, her fair brow seemed
+Eternal as the sky;
+And like the brook's low song, her voice,--
+A sound which could not die.
+
+And half we deemed she needed not
+The changing of her sphere,
+To give to Heaven a Shining One,
+Who walked an Angel here.
+
+The blessing of her quiet life
+Fell on us like the dew;
+And good thoughts where her footsteps pressed
+Like fairy blossoms grew.
+
+Sweet promptings unto kindest deeds
+Were in her very look;
+We read her face, as one who reads
+A true and holy book,
+
+The measure of a blessed hymn,
+To which our hearts could move;
+The breathing of an inward psalm,
+A canticle of love.
+
+We miss her in the place of prayer,
+And by the hearth-fire's light;
+We pause beside her door to hear
+Once more her sweet "Good-night!"
+
+There seems a shadow on the day,
+Her smile no longer cheers;
+A dimness on the stars of night,
+Like eyes that look through tears.
+
+Alone unto our Father's will
+One thought hath reconciled;
+That He whose love exceedeth ours
+Hath taken home His child.
+
+Fold her, O Father! in Thine arms,
+And let her henceforth be
+A messenger of love between
+Our human hearts and Thee.
+
+Still let her mild rebuking stand
+Between us and the wrong,
+And her dear memory serve to make
+Our faith in Goodness strong.
+
+And grant that she who, trembling, here
+Distrusted all her powers,
+May welcome to her holier home
+The well-beloved of ours.
+1845.
+
+
+TO RONGE.
+
+     This was written after reading the powerful and manly protest of
+     Johannes Ronge against the "pious fraud" of the Bishop of Treves.
+     The bold movement of the young Catholic priest of Prussian Silesia
+     seemed to me full of promise to the cause of political as well as
+     religious liberty in Europe. That it failed was due partly to the
+     faults of the reformer, but mainly to the disagreement of the
+     Liberals of Germany upon a matter of dogma, which prevented them
+     from unity of action. Rouge was born in Silesia in 1813 and died in
+     October, 1887. His autobiography was translated into English and
+     published in London in 1846.
+
+Strike home, strong-hearted man! Down to the root
+Of old oppression sink the Saxon steel.
+Thy work is to hew down. In God's name then
+Put nerve into thy task. Let other men
+Plant, as they may, that better tree whose fruit
+The wounded bosom of the Church shall heal.
+Be thou the image-breaker. Let thy blows
+Fall heavy as the Suabian's iron hand,
+On crown or crosier, which shall interpose
+Between thee and the weal of Fatherland.
+Leave creeds to closet idlers. First of all,
+Shake thou all German dream-land with the fall
+Of that accursed tree, whose evil trunk
+Was spared of old by Erfurt's stalwart monk.
+Fight not with ghosts and shadows. Let us hear
+The snap of chain-links. Let our gladdened ear
+Catch the pale prisoner's welcome, as the light
+Follows thy axe-stroke, through his cell of night.
+Be faithful to both worlds; nor think to feed
+Earth's starving millions with the husks of creed.
+Servant of Him whose mission high and holy
+Was to the wronged, the sorrowing, and the lowly,
+Thrust not his Eden promise from our sphere,
+Distant and dim beyond the blue sky's span;
+Like him of Patmos, see it, now and here,
+The New Jerusalem comes down to man
+Be warned by Luther's error. Nor like him,
+When the roused Teuton dashes from his limb
+The rusted chain of ages, help to bind
+His hands for whom thou claim'st the freedom of
+the mind
+1846.
+
+
+
+CHANNING.
+
+     The last time I saw Dr. Channing was in the summer of 1841, when,
+     in company with my English friend, Joseph Sturge, so well known for
+     his philanthropic labors and liberal political opinions, I visited
+     him in his summer residence in Rhode Island. In recalling the
+     impressions of that visit, it can scarcely be necessary to say,
+     that I have no reference to the peculiar religious opinions of a
+     man whose life, beautifully and truly manifested above the
+     atmosphere of sect, is now the world's common legacy.
+
+Not vainly did old poets tell,
+Nor vainly did old genius paint
+God's great and crowning miracle,
+The hero and the saint!
+
+For even in a faithless day
+Can we our sainted ones discern;
+And feel, while with them on the way,
+Our hearts within us burn.
+
+And thus the common tongue and pen
+Which, world-wide, echo Channing's fame,
+As one of Heaven's anointed men,
+Have sanctified his name.
+
+In vain shall Rome her portals bar,
+And shut from him her saintly prize,
+Whom, in the world's great calendar,
+All men shall canonize.
+
+By Narragansett's sunny bay,
+Beneath his green embowering wood,
+To me it seems but yesterday
+Since at his side I stood.
+
+The slopes lay green with summer rains,
+The western wind blew fresh and free,
+And glimmered down the orchard lanes
+The white surf of the sea.
+
+With us was one, who, calm and true,
+Life's highest purpose understood,
+And, like his blessed Master, knew
+The joy of doing good.
+
+Unlearned, unknown to lettered fame,
+Yet on the lips of England's poor
+And toiling millions dwelt his name,
+With blessings evermore.
+
+Unknown to power or place, yet where
+The sun looks o'er the Carib sea,
+It blended with the freeman's prayer
+And song of jubilee.
+
+He told of England's sin and wrong,
+The ills her suffering children know,
+The squalor of the city's throng,
+The green field's want and woe.
+
+O'er Channing's face the tenderness
+Of sympathetic sorrow stole,
+Like a still shadow, passionless,
+The sorrow of the soul.
+
+But when the generous Briton told
+How hearts were answering to his own,
+And Freedom's rising murmur rolled
+Up to the dull-eared throne,
+
+I saw, methought, a glad surprise
+Thrill through that frail and pain-worn frame,
+And, kindling in those deep, calm eyes,
+A still and earnest flame.
+
+His few, brief words were such as move
+The human heart,--the Faith-sown seeds
+Which ripen in the soil of love
+To high heroic deeds.
+
+No bars of sect or clime were felt,
+The Babel strife of tongues had ceased,
+And at one common altar knelt
+The Quaker and the priest.
+
+And not in vain: with strength renewed,
+And zeal refreshed, and hope less dim,
+For that brief meeting, each pursued
+The path allotted him.
+
+How echoes yet each Western hill
+And vale with Channing's dying word!
+How are the hearts of freemen still
+By that great warning stirred.
+
+The stranger treads his native soil,
+And pleads, with zeal unfelt before,
+The honest right of British toil,
+The claim of England's poor.
+
+Before him time-wrought barriers fall,
+Old fears subside, old hatreds melt,
+And, stretching o'er the sea's blue wall,
+The Saxon greets the Celt.
+
+The yeoman on the Scottish lines,
+The Sheffield grinder, worn and grim,
+The delver in the Cornwall mines,
+Look up with hope to him.
+
+Swart smiters of the glowing steel,
+Dark feeders of the forge's flame,
+Pale watchers at the loom and wheel,
+Repeat his honored name.
+
+And thus the influence of that hour
+Of converse on Rhode Island's strand
+Lives in the calm, resistless power
+Which moves our fatherland.
+
+God blesses still the generous thought,
+And still the fitting word He speeds
+And Truth, at His requiring taught,
+He quickens into deeds.
+
+Where is the victory of the grave?
+What dust upon the spirit lies?
+God keeps the sacred life he gave,--
+The prophet never dies!
+1844.
+
+
+
+TO MY FRIEND ON THE DEATH OF HIS SISTER.
+
+     Sophia Sturge, sister of Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham, the
+     President of the British Complete Suffrage Association, died in the
+     6th month, 1845. She was the colleague, counsellor, and ever-ready
+     helpmate of her brother in all his vast designs of beneficence. The
+     Birmingham Pilot says of her: "Never, perhaps, were the active and
+     passive virtues of the human character more harmoniously and
+     beautifully blended than in this excellent woman."
+
+Thine is a grief, the depth of which another
+May never know;
+Yet, o'er the waters, O my stricken brother!
+To thee I go.
+
+I lean my heart unto thee, sadly folding
+Thy hand in mine;
+With even the weakness of my soul upholding
+The strength of thine.
+
+I never knew, like thee, the dear departed;
+I stood not by
+When, in calm trust, the pure and tranquil-hearted
+Lay down to die.
+
+And on thy ears my words of weak condoling
+Must vainly fall
+The funeral bell which in thy heart is tolling,
+Sounds over all!
+
+I will not mock thee with the poor world's common
+And heartless phrase,
+Nor wrong the memory of a sainted woman
+With idle praise.
+
+With silence only as their benediction,
+God's angels come
+Where, in the shadow of a great affliction,
+The soul sits dumb!
+
+Yet, would I say what thy own heart approveth
+Our Father's will,
+Calling to Him the dear one whom He loveth,
+Is mercy still.
+
+Not upon thee or thine the solemn angel
+Hath evil wrought
+Her funeral anthem is a glad evangel,--
+The good die not!
+
+God calls our loved ones, but we lose not wholly
+What He hath given;
+They live on earth, in thought and deed, as truly
+As in His heaven.
+
+And she is with thee; in thy path of trial
+She walketh yet;
+Still with the baptism of thy self-denial
+Her locks are wet.
+
+Up, then, my brother! Lo, the fields of harvest
+Lie white in view
+She lives and loves thee, and the God thou servest
+To both is true.
+
+Thrust in thy sickle! England's toilworn peasants
+Thy call abide;
+And she thou mourn'st, a pure and holy presence,
+Shall glean beside!
+1845.
+
+
+
+DANIEL WHEELER
+
+     Daniel Wheeler, a minister of the Society of Friends, who had
+     labored in the cause of his Divine Master in Great Britain, Russia,
+     and the islands of the Pacific, died in New York in the spring of
+     1840, while on a religious visit to this country.
+
+O Dearly loved!
+And worthy of our love! No more
+Thy aged form shall rise before
+The bushed and waiting worshiper,
+In meek obedience utterance giving
+To words of truth, so fresh and living,
+That, even to the inward sense,
+They bore unquestioned evidence
+Of an anointed Messenger!
+Or, bowing down thy silver hair
+In reverent awfulness of prayer,
+The world, its time and sense, shut out
+The brightness of Faith's holy trance
+Gathered upon thy countenance,
+As if each lingering cloud of doubt,
+The cold, dark shadows resting here
+In Time's unluminous atmosphere,
+Were lifted by an angel's hand,
+And through them on thy spiritual eye
+Shone down the blessedness on high,
+The glory of the Better Land!
+
+The oak has fallen!
+While, meet for no good work, the vine
+May yet its worthless branches twine,
+Who knoweth not that with thee fell
+A great man in our Israel?
+Fallen, while thy loins were girded still,
+Thy feet with Zion's dews still wet,
+And in thy hand retaining yet
+The pilgrim's staff and scallop-shell
+Unharmed and safe, where, wild and free,
+Across the Neva's cold morass
+The breezes from the Frozen Sea
+With winter's arrowy keenness pass;
+Or where the unwarning tropic gale
+Smote to the waves thy tattered sail,
+Or where the noon-hour's fervid heat
+Against Tahiti's mountains beat;
+The same mysterious Hand which gave
+Deliverance upon land and wave,
+Tempered for thee the blasts which blew
+Ladaga's frozen surface o'er,
+And blessed for thee the baleful dew
+Of evening upon Eimeo's shore,
+Beneath this sunny heaven of ours,
+Midst our soft airs and opening flowers
+Hath given thee a grave!
+
+His will be done,
+Who seeth not as man, whose way
+Is not as ours! 'T is well with thee!
+Nor anxious doubt nor dark dismay
+Disquieted thy closing day,
+But, evermore, thy soul could say,
+"My Father careth still for me!"
+Called from thy hearth and home,--from her,
+The last bud on thy household tree,
+The last dear one to minister
+In duty and in love to thee,
+From all which nature holdeth dear,
+Feeble with years and worn with pain,
+To seek our distant land again,
+Bound in the spirit, yet unknowing
+The things which should befall thee here,
+Whether for labor or for death,
+In childlike trust serenely going
+To that last trial of thy faith!
+Oh, far away,
+Where never shines our Northern star
+On that dark waste which Balboa saw
+From Darien's mountains stretching far,
+So strange, heaven-broad, and lone, that there,
+With forehead to its damp wind bare,
+He bent his mailed knee in awe;
+In many an isle whose coral feet
+The surges of that ocean beat,
+In thy palm shadows, Oahu,
+And Honolulu's silver bay,
+Amidst Owyhee's hills of blue,
+And taro-plains of Tooboonai,
+Are gentle hearts, which long shall be
+Sad as our own at thought of thee,
+Worn sowers of Truth's holy seed,
+Whose souls in weariness and need
+Were strengthened and refreshed by thine.
+For blessed by our Father's hand
+Was thy deep love and tender care,
+Thy ministry and fervent prayer,--
+Grateful as Eshcol's clustered vine
+To Israel in a weary land.
+
+And they who drew
+By thousands round thee, in the hour
+Of prayerful waiting, hushed and deep,
+That He who bade the islands keep
+Silence before Him, might renew
+Their strength with His unslumbering power,
+They too shall mourn that thou art gone,
+That nevermore thy aged lip
+Shall soothe the weak, the erring warn,
+Of those who first, rejoicing, heard
+Through thee the Gospel's glorious word,--
+Seals of thy true apostleship.
+And, if the brightest diadem,
+Whose gems of glory purely burn
+Around the ransomed ones in bliss,
+Be evermore reserved for them
+Who here, through toil and sorrow, turn
+Many to righteousness,
+May we not think of thee as wearing
+That star-like crown of light, and bearing,
+Amidst Heaven's white and blissful band,
+Th' unfading palm-branch in thy hand;
+And joining with a seraph's tongue
+In that new song the elders sung,
+Ascribing to its blessed Giver
+Thanksgiving, love, and praise forever!
+
+Farewell!
+And though the ways of Zion mourn
+When her strong ones are called away,
+Who like thyself have calmly borne
+The heat and burden of the day,
+Yet He who slumbereth not nor sleepeth
+His ancient watch around us keepeth;
+Still, sent from His creating hand,
+New witnesses for Truth shall stand,
+New instruments to sound abroad
+The Gospel of a risen Lord;
+To gather to the fold once more
+The desolate and gone astray,
+The scattered of a cloudy day,
+And Zion's broken walls restore;
+And, through the travail and the toil
+Of true obedience, minister
+Beauty for ashes, and the oil
+Of joy for mourning, unto her!
+So shall her holy bounds increase
+With walls of praise and gates of peace
+So shall the Vine, which martyr tears
+And blood sustained in other years,
+With fresher life be clothed upon;
+And to the world in beauty show
+Like the rose-plant of Jericho,
+And glorious as Lebanon!
+1847
+
+
+
+TO FREDRIKA BREMER.
+
+     It is proper to say that these lines are the joint impromptus of my
+     sister and myself. They are inserted here as an expression of our
+     admiration of the gifted stranger whom we have since learned to
+     love as a friend.
+
+Seeress of the misty Norland,
+Daughter of the Vikings bold,
+Welcome to the sunny Vineland,
+Which thy fathers sought of old!
+
+Soft as flow of Siija's waters,
+When the moon of summer shines,
+Strong as Winter from his mountains
+Roaring through the sleeted pines.
+
+Heart and ear, we long have listened
+To thy saga, rune, and song;
+As a household joy and presence
+We have known and loved thee long.
+
+By the mansion's marble mantel,
+Round the log-walled cabin's hearth,
+Thy sweet thoughts and northern fancies
+Meet and mingle with our mirth.
+
+And o'er weary spirits keeping
+Sorrow's night-watch, long and chill,
+Shine they like thy sun of summer
+Over midnight vale and hill.
+
+We alone to thee are strangers,
+Thou our friend and teacher art;
+Come, and know us as we know thee;
+Let us meet thee heart to heart!
+
+To our homes and household altars
+We, in turn, thy steps would lead,
+As thy loving hand has led us
+O'er the threshold of the Swede.
+1849.
+
+
+
+TO AVIS KEENE
+
+ON RECEIVING A BASKET OF SEA-MOSSES.
+
+Thanks for thy gift
+Of ocean flowers,
+Born where the golden drift
+Of the slant sunshine falls
+Down the green, tremulous walls
+Of water, to the cool, still coral bowers,
+Where, under rainbows of perpetual showers,
+God's gardens of the deep
+His patient angels keep;
+Gladdening the dim, strange solitude
+With fairest forms and hues, and thus
+Forever teaching us
+The lesson which the many-colored skies,
+The flowers, and leaves, and painted butterflies,
+The deer's branched antlers, the gay bird that flings
+The tropic sunshine from its golden wings,
+The brightness of the human countenance,
+Its play of smiles, the magic of a glance,
+Forevermore repeat,
+In varied tones and sweet,
+That beauty, in and of itself, is good.
+
+O kind and generous friend, o'er whom
+The sunset hues of Time are cast,
+Painting, upon the overpast
+And scattered clouds of noonday sorrow
+The promise of a fairer morrow,
+An earnest of the better life to come;
+The binding of the spirit broken,
+The warning to the erring spoken,
+The comfort of the sad,
+The eye to see, the hand to cull
+Of common things the beautiful,
+The absent heart made glad
+By simple gift or graceful token
+Of love it needs as daily food,
+All own one Source, and all are good
+Hence, tracking sunny cove and reach,
+Where spent waves glimmer up the beach,
+And toss their gifts of weed and shell
+From foamy curve and combing swell,
+No unbefitting task was thine
+To weave these flowers so soft and fair
+In unison with His design
+Who loveth beauty everywhere;
+And makes in every zone and clime,
+In ocean and in upper air,
+All things beautiful in their time.
+
+For not alone in tones of awe and power
+He speaks to Inan;
+The cloudy horror of the thunder-shower
+His rainbows span;
+And where the caravan
+Winds o'er the desert, leaving, as in air
+The crane-flock leaves, no trace of passage there,
+He gives the weary eye
+The palm-leaf shadow for the hot noon hours,
+And on its branches dry
+Calls out the acacia's flowers;
+And where the dark shaft pierces down
+Beneath the mountain roots,
+Seen by the miner's lamp alone,
+The star-like crystal shoots;
+So, where, the winds and waves below,
+The coral-branched gardens grow,
+His climbing weeds and mosses show,
+Like foliage, on each stony bough,
+Of varied hues more strangely gay
+Than forest leaves in autumn's day;--
+Thus evermore,
+On sky, and wave, and shore,
+An all-pervading beauty seems to say
+God's love and power are one; and they,
+Who, like the thunder of a sultry day,
+Smite to restore,
+And they, who, like the gentle wind, uplift
+The petals of the dew-wet flowers, and drift
+Their perfume on the air,
+Alike may serve Him, each, with their own gift,
+Making their lives a prayer!
+1850
+
+
+
+THE HILL-TOP
+
+The burly driver at my side,
+We slowly climbed the hill,
+Whose summit, in the hot noontide,
+Seemed rising, rising still.
+At last, our short noon-shadows bid
+The top-stone, bare and brown,
+From whence, like Gizeh's pyramid,
+The rough mass slanted down.
+
+I felt the cool breath of the North;
+Between me and the sun,
+O'er deep, still lake, and ridgy earth,
+I saw the cloud-shades run.
+Before me, stretched for glistening miles,
+Lay mountain-girdled Squam;
+Like green-winged birds, the leafy isles
+Upon its bosom swam.
+
+And, glimmering through the sun-haze warm,
+Far as the eye could roam,
+Dark billows of an earthquake storm
+Beflecked with clouds like foam,
+Their vales in misty shadow deep,
+Their rugged peaks in shine,
+I saw the mountain ranges sweep
+The horizon's northern line.
+
+There towered Chocorua's peak; and west,
+Moosehillock's woods were seem,
+With many a nameless slide-scarred crest
+And pine-dark gorge between.
+Beyond them, like a sun-rimmed cloud,
+The great Notch mountains shone,
+Watched over by the solemn-browed
+And awful face of stone!
+
+"A good look-off!" the driver spake;
+"About this time, last year,
+I drove a party to the Lake,
+And stopped, at evening, here.
+'T was duskish down below; but all
+These hills stood in the sun,
+Till, dipped behind yon purple wall,
+He left them, one by one.
+
+"A lady, who, from Thornton hill,
+Had held her place outside,
+And, as a pleasant woman will,
+Had cheered the long, dull ride,
+Besought me, with so sweet a smile,
+That--though I hate delays--
+I could not choose but rest awhile,--
+(These women have such ways!)
+
+"On yonder mossy ledge she sat,
+Her sketch upon her knees,
+A stray brown lock beneath her hat
+Unrolling in the breeze;
+Her sweet face, in the sunset light
+Upraised and glorified,--
+I never saw a prettier sight
+In all my mountain ride.
+
+"As good as fair; it seemed her joy
+To comfort and to give;
+My poor, sick wife, and cripple boy,
+Will bless her while they live!"
+The tremor in the driver's tone
+His manhood did not shame
+"I dare say, sir, you may have known"--
+He named a well-known name.
+
+Then sank the pyramidal mounds,
+The blue lake fled away;
+For mountain-scope a parlor's bounds,
+A lighted hearth for day!
+From lonely years and weary miles
+The shadows fell apart;
+Kind voices cheered, sweet human smiles
+Shone warm into my heart.
+
+We journeyed on; but earth and sky
+Had power to charm no more;
+Still dreamed my inward-turning eye
+The dream of memory o'er.
+Ah! human kindness, human love,--
+To few who seek denied;
+Too late we learn to prize above
+The whole round world beside!
+1850
+
+
+
+ELLIOTT.
+
+     Ebenezer Elliott was to the artisans of England what Burns was to
+     the peasantry of Scotland. His Corn-law Rhymes contributed not a
+     little to that overwhelming tide of popular opinion and feeling
+     which resulted in the repeal of the tax on bread. Well has the
+     eloquent author of The Reforms and Reformers of Great Britain said
+     of him, "Not corn-law repealers alone, but all Britons who moisten
+     their scanty bread with the sweat of the brow, are largely indebted
+     to his inspiring lay, for the mighty bound which the laboring mind
+     of England has taken in our day."
+
+Hands off! thou tithe-fat plunderer! play
+No trick of priestcraft here!
+Back, puny lordling! darest thou lay
+A hand on Elliott's bier?
+Alive, your rank and pomp, as dust,
+Beneath his feet he trod.
+
+He knew the locust swarm that cursed
+The harvest-fields of God.
+On these pale lips, the smothered thought
+Which England's millions feel,
+A fierce and fearful splendor caught,
+As from his forge the steel.
+Strong-armed as Thor, a shower of fire
+His smitten anvil flung;
+God's curse, Earth's wrong, dumb Hunger's ire,
+He gave them all a tongue!
+
+Then let the poor man's horny hands
+Bear up the mighty dead,
+And labor's swart and stalwart bands
+Behind as mourners tread.
+Leave cant and craft their baptized bounds,
+Leave rank its minster floor;
+Give England's green and daisied grounds
+The poet of the poor!
+
+Lay down upon his Sheaf's green verge
+That brave old heart of oak,
+With fitting dirge from sounding forge,
+And pall of furnace smoke!
+Where whirls the stone its dizzy rounds,
+And axe and sledge are swung,
+And, timing to their stormy sounds,
+His stormy lays are sung.
+
+There let the peasant's step be heard,
+The grinder chant his rhyme,
+Nor patron's praise nor dainty word
+Befits the man or time.
+No soft lament nor dreamer's sigh
+For him whose words were bread;
+The Runic rhyme and spell whereby
+The foodless poor were fed!
+
+Pile up the tombs of rank and pride,
+O England, as thou wilt!
+With pomp to nameless worth denied,
+Emblazon titled guilt!
+No part or lot in these we claim;
+But, o'er the sounding wave,
+A common right to Elliott's name,
+A freehold in his grave!
+1850
+
+
+
+ICHABOD
+
+     This poem was the outcome of the surprise and grief and forecast of
+     evil consequences which I felt on reading the seventh of March
+     speech of Daniel Webster in support of the "compromise," and the
+     Fugitive Slave Law. No partisan or personal enmity dictated it. On
+     the contrary my admiration of the splendid personality and
+     intellectual power of the great Senator was never stronger than
+     when I laid down his speech, and, in one of the saddest moments of
+     my life, penned my protest. I saw, as I wrote, with painful
+     clearness its sure results,--the Slave Power arrogant and defiant,
+     strengthened and encouraged to carry out its scheme for the
+     extension of its baleful system, or the dissolution of the Union,
+     the guaranties of personal liberty in the free States broken down,
+     and the whole country made the hunting-ground of slave-catchers. In
+     the horror of such a vision, so soon fearfully fulfilled, if one
+     spoke at all, he could only speak in tones of stern and sorrowful
+     rebuke. But death softens all resentments, and the consciousness of
+     a common inheritance of frailty and weakness modifies the severity
+     of judgment. Years after, in _The Lost Occasion_ I gave utterance
+     to an almost universal regret that the great statesman did not live
+     to see the flag which he loved trampled under the feet of Slavery,
+     and, in view of this desecration, make his last days glorious in
+     defence of "Liberty and Union, one and inseparable."
+
+So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
+Which once he wore!
+The glory from his gray hairs gone
+Forevermore!
+
+Revile him not, the Tempter hath
+A snare for all;
+And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,
+Befit his fall!
+
+Oh, dumb be passion's stormy rage,
+When he who might
+Have lighted up and led his age,
+Falls back in night.
+
+Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark
+A bright soul driven,
+Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark,
+From hope and heaven!
+
+Let not the land once proud of him
+Insult him now,
+Nor brand with deeper shame his dim,
+Dishonored brow.
+
+But let its humbled sons, instead,
+From sea to lake,
+A long lament, as for the dead,
+In sadness make.
+
+Of all we loved and honored, naught
+Save power remains;
+A fallen angel's pride of thought,
+Still strong in chains.
+
+All else is gone; from those great eyes
+The soul has fled
+When faith is lost, when honor dies,
+The man is dead!
+
+Then, pay the reverence of old days
+To his dead fame;
+Walk backward, with averted gaze,
+And hide the shame!
+1850
+
+
+
+THE LOST OCCASION.
+
+Some die too late and some too soon,
+At early morning, heat of noon,
+Or the chill evening twilight. Thou,
+Whom the rich heavens did so endow
+With eyes of power and Jove's own brow,
+With all the massive strength that fills
+Thy home-horizon's granite hills,
+With rarest gifts of heart and head
+From manliest stock inherited,
+New England's stateliest type of man,
+In port and speech Olympian;
+
+Whom no one met, at first, but took
+A second awed and wondering look
+(As turned, perchance, the eyes of Greece
+On Phidias' unveiled masterpiece);
+Whose words in simplest homespun clad,
+The Saxon strength of Caedmon's had,
+With power reserved at need to reach
+The Roman forum's loftiest speech,
+Sweet with persuasion, eloquent
+In passion, cool in argument,
+Or, ponderous, falling on thy foes
+As fell the Norse god's hammer blows,
+Crushing as if with Talus' flail
+Through Error's logic-woven mail,
+And failing only when they tried
+The adamant of the righteous side,--
+Thou, foiled in aim and hope, bereaved
+Of old friends, by the new deceived,
+Too soon for us, too soon for thee,
+Beside thy lonely Northern sea,
+Where long and low the marsh-lands spread,
+Laid wearily down thy August head.
+
+Thou shouldst have lived to feel below
+Thy feet Disunion's fierce upthrow;
+The late-sprung mine that underlaid
+Thy sad concessions vainly made.
+Thou shouldst have seen from Sumter's wall
+The star-flag of the Union fall,
+And armed rebellion pressing on
+The broken lines of Washington!
+No stronger voice than thine had then
+Called out the utmost might of men,
+To make the Union's charter free
+And strengthen law by liberty.
+How had that stern arbitrament
+To thy gray age youth's vigor lent,
+Shaming ambition's paltry prize
+Before thy disillusioned eyes;
+Breaking the spell about thee wound
+Like the green withes that Samson bound;
+Redeeming in one effort grand,
+Thyself and thy imperilled land!
+Ah, cruel fate, that closed to thee,
+O sleeper by the Northern sea,
+The gates of opportunity!
+God fills the gaps of human need,
+Each crisis brings its word and deed.
+Wise men and strong we did not lack;
+But still, with memory turning back,
+In the dark hours we thought of thee,
+And thy lone grave beside the sea.
+
+Above that grave the east winds blow,
+And from the marsh-lands drifting slow
+The sea-fog comes, with evermore
+The wave-wash of a lonely shore,
+And sea-bird's melancholy cry,
+As Nature fain would typify
+The sadness of a closing scene,
+The loss of that which should have been.
+But, where thy native mountains bare
+Their foreheads to diviner air,
+Fit emblem of enduring fame,
+One lofty summit keeps thy name.
+For thee the cosmic forces did
+The rearing of that pyramid,
+The prescient ages shaping with
+Fire, flood, and frost thy monolith.
+Sunrise and sunset lay thereon
+With hands of light their benison,
+The stars of midnight pause to set
+Their jewels in its coronet.
+And evermore that mountain mass
+Seems climbing from the shadowy pass
+To light, as if to manifest
+Thy nobler self, thy life at best!
+1880
+
+
+
+WORDSWORTH
+
+WRITTEN ON A BLANK LEAF OF HIS MEMOIRS.
+
+Dear friends, who read the world aright,
+And in its common forms discern
+A beauty and a harmony
+The many never learn!
+
+Kindred in soul of him who found
+In simple flower and leaf and stone
+The impulse of the sweetest lays
+Our Saxon tongue has known,--
+
+Accept this record of a life
+As sweet and pure, as calm and good,
+As a long day of blandest June
+In green field and in wood.
+
+How welcome to our ears, long pained
+By strife of sect and party noise,
+The brook-like murmur of his song
+Of nature's simple joys!
+
+The violet' by its mossy stone,
+The primrose by the river's brim,
+And chance-sown daffodil, have found
+Immortal life through him.
+
+The sunrise on his breezy lake,
+The rosy tints his sunset brought,
+World-seen, are gladdening all the vales
+And mountain-peaks of thought.
+
+Art builds on sand; the works of pride
+And human passion change and fall;
+But that which shares the life of God
+With Him surviveth all.
+1851.
+
+
+
+TO ------
+
+LINES WRITTEN AFTER A SUMMER DAY'S EXCURSION.
+
+Fair Nature's priestesses! to whom,
+In hieroglyph of bud and bloom,
+Her mysteries are told;
+Who, wise in lore of wood and mead,
+The seasons' pictured scrolls can read,
+In lessons manifold!
+
+Thanks for the courtesy, and gay
+Good-humor, which on Washing Day
+Our ill-timed visit bore;
+Thanks for your graceful oars, which broke
+The morning dreams of Artichoke,
+Along his wooded shore!
+
+Varied as varying Nature's ways,
+Sprites of the river, woodland fays,
+Or mountain nymphs, ye seem;
+Free-limbed Dianas on the green,
+Loch Katrine's Ellen, or Undine,
+Upon your favorite stream.
+
+The forms of which the poets told,
+The fair benignities of old,
+Were doubtless such as you;
+What more than Artichoke the rill
+Of Helicon? Than Pipe-stave hill
+Arcadia's mountain-view?
+
+No sweeter bowers the bee delayed,
+In wild Hymettus' scented shade,
+Than those you dwell among;
+Snow-flowered azaleas, intertwined
+With roses, over banks inclined
+With trembling harebells hung!
+
+A charmed life unknown to death,
+Immortal freshness Nature hath;
+Her fabled fount and glen
+Are now and here: Dodona's shrine
+Still murmurs in the wind-swept pine,--
+All is that e'er hath been.
+
+The Beauty which old Greece or Rome
+Sung, painted, wrought, lies close at home;
+We need but eye and ear
+In all our daily walks to trace
+The outlines of incarnate grace,
+The hymns of gods to hear!
+1851
+
+
+
+IN PEACE.
+
+A track of moonlight on a quiet lake,
+Whose small waves on a silver-sanded shore
+Whisper of peace, and with the low winds make
+Such harmonies as keep the woods awake,
+And listening all night long for their sweet sake
+A green-waved slope of meadow, hovered o'er
+By angel-troops of lilies, swaying light
+On viewless stems, with folded wings of white;
+A slumberous stretch of mountain-land, far seen
+Where the low westering day, with gold and green,
+Purple and amber, softly blended, fills
+The wooded vales, and melts among the hills;
+A vine-fringed river, winding to its rest
+On the calm bosom of a stormless sea,
+Bearing alike upon its placid breast,
+With earthly flowers and heavenly' stars impressed,
+The hues of time and of eternity
+Such are the pictures which the thought of thee,
+O friend, awakeneth,--charming the keen pain
+Of thy departure, and our sense of loss
+Requiting with the fullness of thy gain.
+Lo! on the quiet grave thy life-borne cross,
+Dropped only at its side, methinks doth shine,
+Of thy beatitude the radiant sign!
+No sob of grief, no wild lament be there,
+To break the Sabbath of the holy air;
+But, in their stead, the silent-breathing prayer
+Of hearts still waiting for a rest like thine.
+O spirit redeemed! Forgive us, if henceforth,
+With sweet and pure similitudes of earth,
+We keep thy pleasant memory freshly green,
+Of love's inheritance a priceless part,
+Which Fancy's self, in reverent awe, is seen
+To paint, forgetful of the tricks of art,
+With pencil dipped alone in colors of the heart.
+1851.
+
+
+
+BENEDICITE.
+
+God's love and peace be with thee, where
+Soe'er this soft autumnal air
+Lifts the dark tresses of thy hair.
+
+Whether through city casements comes
+Its kiss to thee, in crowded rooms,
+Or, out among the woodland blooms,
+
+It freshens o'er thy thoughtful face,
+Imparting, in its glad embrace,
+Beauty to beauty, grace to grace!
+
+Fair Nature's book together read,
+The old wood-paths that knew our tread,
+The maple shadows overhead,--
+
+The hills we climbed, the river seen
+By gleams along its deep ravine,--
+All keep thy memory fresh and green.
+
+Where'er I look, where'er I stray,
+Thy thought goes with me on my way,
+And hence the prayer I breathe to-day;
+
+O'er lapse of time and change of scene,
+The weary waste which lies between
+Thyself and me, my heart I lean.
+
+Thou lack'st not Friendship's spell-word, nor
+The half-unconscious power to draw
+All hearts to thine by Love's sweet law.
+
+With these good gifts of God is cast
+Thy lot, and many a charm thou hast
+To hold the blessed angels fast.
+
+If, then, a fervent wish for thee
+The gracious heavens will heed from me,
+What should, dear heart, its burden be?
+
+The sighing of a shaken reed,--
+What can I more than meekly plead
+The greatness of our common need?
+
+God's love,--unchanging, pure, and true,--
+The Paraclete white-shining through
+His peace,--the fall of Hermon's dew!
+
+With such a prayer, on this sweet day,
+As thou mayst hear and I may say,
+I greet thee, dearest, far away!
+1851.
+
+
+
+KOSSUTH
+
+     It can scarcely be necessary to say that there are elements in the
+     character and passages in the history of the great Hungarian
+     statesman and orator, which necessarily command the admiration of
+     those, even, who believe that no political revolution was ever
+     worth the price of human blood.
+
+Type of two mighty continents!--combining
+The strength of Europe with the warmth and glow
+Of Asian song and prophecy,--the shining
+Of Orient splendors over Northern snow!
+Who shall receive him? Who, unblushing, speak
+Welcome to him, who, while he strove to break
+The Austrian yoke from Magyar necks, smote off
+At the same blow the fetters of the serf,
+Rearing the altar of his Fatherland
+On the firm base of freedom, and thereby
+Lifting to Heaven a patriot's stainless hand,
+Mocked not the God of Justice with a lie!
+Who shall be Freedom's mouthpiece? Who shall give
+Her welcoming cheer to the great fugitive?
+Not he who, all her sacred trusts betraying,
+Is scourging back to slavery's hell of pain
+The swarthy Kossuths of our land again!
+Not he whose utterance now from lips designed
+The bugle-march of Liberty to wind,
+And call her hosts beneath the breaking light,
+The keen reveille of her morn of fight,
+Is but the hoarse note of the blood-hound's baying,
+The wolf's long howl behind the bondman's flight!
+Oh for the tongue of him who lies at rest
+In Quincy's shade of patrimonial trees,
+Last of the Puritan tribunes and the best,
+To lend a voice to Freedom's sympathies,
+And hail the coming of the noblest guest
+The Old World's wrong has given the New World of the West!
+1851.
+
+
+
+TO MY OLD SCHOOLMASTER.
+
+AN EPISTLE NOT AFTER THE MANNER OF HORACE
+
+     These lines were addressed to my worthy friend Joshua Coffin,
+     teacher, historian, and antiquarian. He was one of the twelve
+     persons who with William Lloyd Garrison formed the first
+     anti-slavery society in New England.
+
+Old friend, kind friend! lightly down
+Drop time's snow-flakes on thy crown!
+Never be thy shadow less,
+Never fail thy cheerfulness;
+Care, that kills the cat, may, plough
+Wrinkles in the miser's brow,
+Deepen envy's spiteful frown,
+Draw the mouths of bigots down,
+Plague ambition's dream, and sit
+Heavy on the hypocrite,
+Haunt the rich man's door, and ride
+In the gilded coach of pride;--
+Let the fiend pass!--what can he
+Find to do with such as thee?
+Seldom comes that evil guest
+Where the conscience lies at rest,
+And brown health and quiet wit
+Smiling on the threshold sit.
+
+I, the urchin unto whom,
+In that smoked and dingy room,
+Where the district gave thee rule
+O'er its ragged winter school,
+Thou didst teach the mysteries
+Of those weary A B C's,--
+Where, to fill the every pause
+Of thy wise and learned saws,
+Through the cracked and crazy wall
+Came the cradle-rock and squall,
+And the goodman's voice, at strife
+With his shrill and tipsy wife,
+Luring us by stories old,
+With a comic unction told,
+More than by the eloquence
+Of terse birchen arguments
+(Doubtful gain, I fear), to look
+With complacence on a book!--
+Where the genial pedagogue
+Half forgot his rogues to flog,
+Citing tale or apologue,
+Wise and merry in its drift
+As was Phaedrus' twofold gift,
+Had the little rebels known it,
+Risum et prudentiam monet!
+I,--the man of middle years,
+In whose sable locks appears
+Many a warning fleck of gray,--
+Looking back to that far day,
+And thy primal lessons, feel
+Grateful smiles my lips unseal,
+As, remembering thee, I blend
+Olden teacher, present friend,
+Wise with antiquarian search,
+In the scrolls of State and Church
+Named on history's title-page,
+Parish-clerk and justice sage;
+For the ferule's wholesome awe
+Wielding now the sword of law.
+
+Threshing Time's neglected sheaves,
+Gathering up the scattered leaves
+Which the wrinkled sibyl cast
+Careless from her as she passed,--
+Twofold citizen art thou,
+Freeman of the past and now.
+He who bore thy name of old
+Midway in the heavens did hold
+Over Gibeon moon and sun;
+Thou hast bidden them backward run;
+Of to-day the present ray
+Flinging over yesterday!
+
+Let the busy ones deride
+What I deem of right thy pride
+Let the fools their treadmills grind,
+Look not forward nor behind,
+Shuffle in and wriggle out,
+Veer with every breeze about,
+Turning like a windmill sail,
+Or a dog that seeks his tail;
+Let them laugh to see thee fast
+Tabernacled in the Past,
+Working out with eye and lip,
+Riddles of old penmanship,
+Patient as Belzoni there
+Sorting out, with loving care,
+Mummies of dead questions stripped
+From their sevenfold manuscript.
+
+Dabbling, in their noisy way,
+In the puddles of to-day,
+Little know they of that vast
+Solemn ocean of the past,
+On whose margin, wreck-bespread,
+Thou art walking with the dead,
+Questioning the stranded years,
+Waking smiles, by turns, and tears,
+As thou callest up again
+Shapes the dust has long o'erlain,--
+Fair-haired woman, bearded man,
+Cavalier and Puritan;
+In an age whose eager view
+Seeks but present things, and new,
+Mad for party, sect and gold,
+Teaching reverence for the old.
+
+On that shore, with fowler's tact,
+Coolly bagging fact on fact,
+Naught amiss to thee can float,
+Tale, or song, or anecdote;
+Village gossip, centuries old,
+Scandals by our grandams told,
+What the pilgrim's table spread,
+Where he lived, and whom he wed,
+Long-drawn bill of wine and beer
+For his ordination cheer,
+Or the flip that wellnigh made
+Glad his funeral cavalcade;
+Weary prose, and poet's lines,
+Flavored by their age, like wines,
+Eulogistic of some quaint,
+Doubtful, puritanic saint;
+Lays that quickened husking jigs,
+Jests that shook grave periwigs,
+When the parson had his jokes
+And his glass, like other folks;
+Sermons that, for mortal hours,
+Taxed our fathers' vital powers,
+As the long nineteenthlies poured
+Downward from the sounding-board,
+And, for fire of Pentecost,
+Touched their beards December's frost.
+
+Time is hastening on, and we
+What our fathers are shall be,--
+Shadow-shapes of memory!
+Joined to that vast multitude
+Where the great are but the good,
+And the mind of strength shall prove
+Weaker than the heart of love;
+Pride of graybeard wisdom less
+Than the infant's guilelessness,
+And his song of sorrow more
+Than the crown the Psalmist wore
+Who shall then, with pious zeal,
+At our moss-grown thresholds kneel,
+From a stained and stony page
+Reading to a careless age,
+With a patient eye like thine,
+Prosing tale and limping line,
+Names and words the hoary rime
+Of the Past has made sublime?
+Who shall work for us as well
+The antiquarian's miracle?
+Who to seeming life recall
+Teacher grave and pupil small?
+Who shall give to thee and me
+Freeholds in futurity?
+
+Well, whatever lot be mine,
+Long and happy days be thine,
+Ere thy full and honored age
+Dates of time its latest page!
+Squire for master, State for school,
+Wisely lenient, live and rule;
+Over grown-up knave and rogue
+Play the watchful pedagogue;
+Or, while pleasure smiles on duty,
+At the call of youth and beauty,
+Speak for them the spell of law
+Which shall bar and bolt withdraw,
+And the flaming sword remove
+From the Paradise of Love.
+Still, with undimmed eyesight, pore
+Ancient tome and record o'er;
+Still thy week-day lyrics croon,
+Pitch in church the Sunday tune,
+Showing something, in thy part,
+Of the old Puritanic art,
+Singer after Sternhold's heart
+In thy pew, for many a year,
+Homilies from Oldbug hear,
+Who to wit like that of South,
+And the Syrian's golden mouth,
+Doth the homely pathos add
+Which the pilgrim preachers had;
+Breaking, like a child at play,
+Gilded idols of the day,
+Cant of knave and pomp of fool
+Tossing with his ridicule,
+Yet, in earnest or in jest,
+Ever keeping truth abreast.
+And, when thou art called, at last,
+To thy townsmen of the past,
+Not as stranger shalt thou come;
+Thou shalt find thyself at home
+With the little and the big,
+Woollen cap and periwig,
+Madam in her high-laced ruff,
+Goody in her home-made stuff,--
+Wise and simple, rich and poor,
+Thou hast known them all before!
+1851
+
+
+
+THE CROSS.
+
+     Richard Dillingham, a young member of the Society of Friends, died
+     in the Nashville penitentiary, where he was confined for the act of
+     aiding the escape of fugitive slaves.
+
+"The cross, if rightly borne, shall be
+No burden, but support to thee;"
+So, moved of old time for our sake,
+The holy monk of Kempen spake.
+
+Thou brave and true one! upon whom
+Was laid the cross of martyrdom,
+How didst thou, in thy generous youth,
+Bear witness to this blessed truth!
+
+Thy cross of suffering and of shame
+A staff within thy hands became,
+In paths where faith alone could see
+The Master's steps supporting thee.
+
+Thine was the seed-time; God alone
+Beholds the end of what is sown;
+Beyond our vision, weak and dim,
+The harvest-time is hid with Him.
+
+Yet, unforgotten where it lies,
+That seed of generous sacrifice,
+Though seeming on the desert cast,
+Shall rise with bloom and fruit at last.
+1852.
+
+
+
+THE HERO.
+
+The hero of the incident related in this poem was Dr. Samuel Gridley
+Howe, the well-known philanthropist, who when a young man volunteered
+his aid in the Greek struggle for independence.
+
+"Oh for a knight like Bayard,
+Without reproach or fear;
+My light glove on his casque of steel,
+My love-knot on his spear!
+
+"Oh for the white plume floating
+Sad Zutphen's field above,--
+The lion heart in battle,
+The woman's heart in love!
+
+"Oh that man once more were manly,
+Woman's pride, and not her scorn:
+That once more the pale young mother
+Dared to boast `a man is born'!
+
+"But, now life's slumberous current
+No sun-bowed cascade wakes;
+No tall, heroic manhood
+The level dulness breaks.
+
+"Oh for a knight like Bayard,
+Without reproach or fear!
+My light glove on his casque of steel,
+My love-knot on his spear!"
+
+Then I said, my own heart throbbing
+To the time her proud pulse beat,
+"Life hath its regal natures yet,
+True, tender, brave, and sweet!
+
+"Smile not, fair unbeliever!
+One man, at least, I know,
+Who might wear the crest of Bayard
+Or Sidney's plume of snow.
+
+"Once, when over purple mountains
+Died away the Grecian sun,
+And the far Cyllenian ranges
+Paled and darkened, one by one,--
+
+"Fell the Turk, a bolt of thunder,
+Cleaving all the quiet sky,
+And against his sharp steel lightnings
+Stood the Suliote but to die.
+
+"Woe for the weak and halting!
+The crescent blazed behind
+A curving line of sabres,
+Like fire before the wind!
+
+"Last to fly, and first to rally,
+Rode he of whom I speak,
+When, groaning in his bridle-path,
+Sank down a wounded Greek.
+
+"With the rich Albanian costume
+Wet with many a ghastly stain,
+Gazing on earth and sky as one
+Who might not gaze again.
+
+"He looked forward to the mountains,
+Back on foes that never spare,
+Then flung him from his saddle,
+And placed the stranger there.
+
+"'Allah! hu!' Through flashing sabres,
+Through a stormy hail of lead,
+The good Thessalian charger
+Up the slopes of olives sped.
+
+"Hot spurred the turbaned riders;
+He almost felt their breath,
+Where a mountain stream rolled darkly down
+Between the hills and death.
+
+"One brave and manful struggle,--
+He gained the solid land,
+And the cover of the mountains,
+And the carbines of his band!"
+
+"It was very great and noble,"
+Said the moist-eyed listener then,
+"But one brave deed makes no hero;
+Tell me what he since hath been!"
+
+"Still a brave and generous manhood,
+Still an honor without stain,
+In the prison of the Kaiser,
+By the barricades of Seine.
+
+"But dream not helm and harness
+The sign of valor true;
+Peace hath higher tests of manhood
+Than battle ever knew.
+
+"Wouldst know him now? Behold him,
+The Cadmus of the blind,
+Giving the dumb lip language,
+The idiot-clay a mind.
+
+"Walking his round of duty
+Serenely day by day,
+With the strong man's hand of labor
+And childhood's heart of play.
+
+"True as the knights of story,
+Sir Lancelot and his peers,
+Brave in his calm endurance
+As they in tilt of spears.
+
+"As waves in stillest waters,
+As stars in noonday skies,
+All that wakes to noble action
+In his noon of calmness lies.
+
+"Wherever outraged Nature
+Asks word or action brave,
+Wherever struggles labor,
+Wherever groans a slave,--
+
+"Wherever rise the peoples,
+Wherever sinks a throne,
+The throbbing heart of Freedom finds
+An answer in his own.
+
+"Knight of a better era,
+Without reproach or fear!
+Said I not well that Bayards
+And Sidneys still are here?"
+1853.
+
+
+
+RANTOUL.
+
+     No more fitting inscription could be placed on the tombstone of
+     Robert Rantoul than this: "He died at his post in Congress, and his
+     last words were a protest in the name of Democracy against the
+     Fugitive-Slave Law."
+
+One day, along the electric wire
+His manly word for Freedom sped;
+We came next morn: that tongue of fire
+Said only, "He who spake is dead!"
+
+Dead! while his voice was living yet,
+In echoes round the pillared dome!
+Dead! while his blotted page lay wet
+With themes of state and loves of home!
+
+Dead! in that crowning grace of time,
+That triumph of life's zenith hour!
+Dead! while we watched his manhood's prime
+Break from the slow bud into flower!
+
+Dead! he so great, and strong, and wise,
+While the mean thousands yet drew breath;
+How deepened, through that dread surprise,
+The mystery and the awe of death!
+
+From the high place whereon our votes
+Had borne him, clear, calm, earnest, fell
+His first words, like the prelude notes
+Of some great anthem yet to swell.
+
+We seemed to see our flag unfurled,
+Our champion waiting in his place
+For the last battle of the world,
+The Armageddon of the race.
+
+Through him we hoped to speak the word
+Which wins the freedom of a land;
+And lift, for human right, the sword
+Which dropped from Hampden's dying hand.
+
+For he had sat at Sidney's feet,
+And walked with Pym and Vane apart;
+And, through the centuries, felt the beat
+Of Freedom's march in Cromwell's heart.
+
+He knew the paths the worthies held,
+Where England's best and wisest trod;
+And, lingering, drank the springs that welled
+Beneath the touch of Milton's rod.
+
+No wild enthusiast of the right,
+Self-poised and clear, he showed alway
+The coolness of his northern night,
+The ripe repose of autumn's day.
+
+His steps were slow, yet forward still
+He pressed where others paused or failed;
+The calm star clomb with constant will,
+The restless meteor flashed and paled.
+
+Skilled in its subtlest wile, he knew
+And owned the higher ends of Law;
+Still rose majestic on his view
+The awful Shape the schoolman saw.
+
+Her home the heart of God; her voice
+The choral harmonies whereby
+The stars, through all their spheres, rejoice,
+The rhythmic rule of earth and sky.
+
+We saw his great powers misapplied
+To poor ambitions; yet, through all,
+We saw him take the weaker side,
+And right the wronged, and free the thrall.
+
+Now, looking o'er the frozen North,
+For one like him in word and act,
+To call her old, free spirit forth,
+And give her faith the life of fact,--
+
+To break her party bonds of shame,
+And labor with the zeal of him
+To make the Democratic name
+Of Liberty the synonyme,--
+
+We sweep the land from hill to strand,
+We seek the strong, the wise, the brave,
+And, sad of heart, return to stand
+In silence by a new-made grave!
+
+There, where his breezy hills of home
+Look out upon his sail-white seas,
+The sounds of winds and waters come,
+And shape themselves to words like these.
+
+"Why, murmuring, mourn that he, whose power
+Was lent to Party over-long,
+Heard the still whisper at the hour
+He set his foot on Party wrong?
+
+"The human life that closed so well
+No lapse of folly now can stain
+The lips whence Freedom's protest fell
+No meaner thought can now profane.
+
+"Mightier than living voice his grave
+That lofty protest utters o'er;
+Through roaring wind and smiting wave
+It speaks his hate of wrong once more.
+
+"Men of the North! your weak regret
+Is wasted here; arise and pay
+To freedom and to him your debt,
+By following where he led the way!"
+1853.
+
+
+
+WILLIAM FORSTER.
+
+     William Forster, of Norwich, England, died in East Tennessee, in
+     the 1st month, 1854, while engaged in presenting to the governors
+     of the States of this Union the address of his religious society on
+     the evils of slavery. He was the relative and coadjutor of the
+     Buxtons, Gurneys, and Frys; and his whole life, extending al-most
+     to threescore and ten years, was a pore and beautiful example of
+     Christian benevolence. He had travelled over Europe, and visited
+     most of its sovereigns, to plead against the slave-trade and
+     slavery; and had twice before made visits to this country, under
+     impressions of religious duty. He was the father of the Right Hon.
+     William Edward Forster. He visited my father's house in Haverhill
+     during his first tour in the United States.
+
+The years are many since his hand
+Was laid upon my head,
+Too weak and young to understand
+The serious words he said.
+
+Yet often now the good man's look
+Before me seems to swim,
+As if some inward feeling took
+The outward guise of him.
+
+As if, in passion's heated war,
+Or near temptation's charm,
+Through him the low-voiced monitor
+Forewarned me of the harm.
+
+Stranger and pilgrim! from that day
+Of meeting, first and last,
+Wherever Duty's pathway lay,
+His reverent steps have passed.
+
+The poor to feed, the lost to seek,
+To proffer life to death,
+Hope to the erring,--to the weak
+The strength of his own faith.
+
+To plead the captive's right; remove
+The sting of hate from Law;
+And soften in the fire of love
+The hardened steel of War.
+
+He walked the dark world, in the mild,
+Still guidance of the Light;
+In tearful tenderness a child,
+A strong man in the right.
+
+From what great perils, on his way,
+He found, in prayer, release;
+Through what abysmal shadows lay
+His pathway unto peace,
+
+God knoweth: we could only see
+The tranquil strength he gained;
+The bondage lost in liberty,
+The fear in love unfeigned.
+
+And I,--my youthful fancies grown
+The habit of the man,
+Whose field of life by angels sown
+The wilding vines o'erran,--
+
+Low bowed in silent gratitude,
+My manhood's heart enjoys
+That reverence for the pure and good
+Which blessed the dreaming boy's.
+
+Still shines the light of holy lives
+Like star-beams over doubt;
+Each sainted memory, Christlike, drives
+Some dark possession out.
+
+O friend! O brother I not in vain
+Thy life so calm and true,
+The silver dropping of the rain,
+The fall of summer dew!
+
+How many burdened hearts have prayed
+Their lives like thine might be
+But more shall pray henceforth for aid
+To lay them down like thee.
+
+With weary hand, yet steadfast will,
+In old age as in youth,
+Thy Master found thee sowing still
+The good seed of His truth.
+
+As on thy task-field closed the day
+In golden-skied decline,
+His angel met thee on the way,
+And lent his arm to thine.
+
+Thy latest care for man,--thy last
+Of earthly thought a prayer,--
+Oh, who thy mantle, backward cast,
+Is worthy now to wear?
+
+Methinks the mound which marks thy bed
+Might bless our land and save,
+As rose, of old, to life the dead
+Who touched the prophet's grave
+1854.
+
+
+
+TO CHARLES SUMNER.
+
+If I have seemed more prompt to censure wrong
+Than praise the right; if seldom to thine ear
+My voice hath mingled with the exultant cheer
+Borne upon all our Northern winds along;
+If I have failed to join the fickle throng
+In wide-eyed wonder, that thou standest strong
+In victory, surprised in thee to find
+Brougham's scathing power with Canning's grace combined;
+That he, for whom the ninefold Muses sang,
+From their twined arms a giant athlete sprang,
+Barbing the arrows of his native tongue
+With the spent shafts Latona's archer flung,
+To smite the Python of our land and time,
+Fell as the monster born of Crissa's slime,
+Like the blind bard who in Castalian springs
+Tempered the steel that clove the crest of kings,
+And on the shrine of England's freedom laid
+The gifts of Cumve and of Delphi's' shade,--
+Small need hast thou of words of praise from me.
+Thou knowest my heart, dear friend, and well canst guess
+That, even though silent, I have not the less
+Rejoiced to see thy actual life agree
+With the large future which I shaped for thee,
+When, years ago, beside the summer sea,
+White in the moon, we saw the long waves fall
+Baffled and broken from the rocky wall,
+That, to the menace of the brawling flood,
+Opposed alone its massive quietude,
+Calm as a fate; with not a leaf nor vine
+Nor birch-spray trembling in the still moonshine,
+Crowning it like God's peace. I sometimes think
+That night-scene by the sea prophetical,
+(For Nature speaks in symbols and in signs,
+And through her pictures human fate divines),
+That rock, wherefrom we saw the billows sink
+In murmuring rout, uprising clear and tall
+In the white light of heaven, the type of one
+Who, momently by Error's host assailed,
+Stands strong as Truth, in greaves of granite mailed;
+And, tranquil-fronted, listening over all
+The tumult, hears the angels say, Well done!
+1854.
+
+
+
+BURNS
+
+ON RECEIVING A SPRIG OF HEATHER IN BLOSSOM.
+
+No more these simple flowers belong
+To Scottish maid and lover;
+Sown in the common soil of song,
+They bloom the wide world over.
+
+In smiles and tears, in sun and showers,
+The minstrel and the heather,
+The deathless singer and the flowers
+He sang of live together.
+
+Wild heather-bells and Robert Burns
+The moorland flower and peasant!
+How, at their mention, memory turns
+Her pages old and pleasant!
+
+The gray sky wears again its gold
+And purple of adorning,
+And manhood's noonday shadows hold
+The dews of boyhood's morning.
+
+The dews that washed the dust and soil
+From off the wings of pleasure,
+The sky, that flecked the ground of toil
+With golden threads of leisure.
+
+I call to mind the summer day,
+The early harvest mowing,
+The sky with sun and clouds at play,
+And flowers with breezes blowing.
+
+I hear the blackbird in the corn,
+The locust in the haying;
+And, like the fabled hunter's horn,
+Old tunes my heart is playing.
+
+How oft that day, with fond delay,
+I sought the maple's shadow,
+And sang with Burns the hours away,
+Forgetful of the meadow.
+
+Bees hummed, birds twittered, overhead
+I heard the squirrels leaping,
+The good dog listened while I read,
+And wagged his tail in keeping.
+
+I watched him while in sportive mood
+I read "_The Twa Dogs_" story,
+And half believed he understood
+The poet's allegory.
+
+Sweet day, sweet songs! The golden hours
+Grew brighter for that singing,
+From brook and bird and meadow flowers
+A dearer welcome bringing.
+
+New light on home-seen Nature beamed,
+New glory over Woman;
+And daily life and duty seemed
+No longer poor and common.
+
+I woke to find the simple truth
+Of fact and feeling better
+Than all the dreams that held my youth
+A still repining debtor,
+
+That Nature gives her handmaid, Art,
+The themes of sweet discoursing;
+The tender idyls of the heart
+In every tongue rehearsing.
+
+Why dream of lands of gold and pearl,
+Of loving knight and lady,
+When farmer boy and barefoot girl
+Were wandering there already?
+
+I saw through all familiar things
+The romance underlying;
+The joys and griefs that plume the wings
+Of Fancy skyward flying.
+
+I saw the same blithe day return,
+The same sweet fall of even,
+That rose on wooded Craigie-burn,
+And sank on crystal Devon.
+
+I matched with Scotland's heathery hills
+The sweetbrier and the clover;
+With Ayr and Doon, my native rills,
+Their wood-hymns chanting over.
+
+O'er rank and pomp, as he had seen,
+I saw the Man uprising;
+No longer common or unclean,
+The child of God's baptizing!
+
+With clearer eyes I saw the worth
+Of life among the lowly;
+The Bible at his Cotter's hearth
+Had made my own more holy.
+
+And if at times an evil strain,
+To lawless love appealing,
+Broke in upon the sweet refrain
+Of pure and healthful feeling,
+
+It died upon the eye and ear,
+No inward answer gaining;
+No heart had I to see or hear
+The discord and the staining.
+
+Let those who never erred forget
+His worth, in vain bewailings;
+Sweet Soul of Song! I own my debt
+Uncancelled by his failings!
+
+Lament who will the ribald line
+Which tells his lapse from duty,
+How kissed the maddening lips of wine
+Or wanton ones of beauty;
+
+But think, while falls that shade between
+The erring one and Heaven,
+That he who loved like Magdalen,
+Like her may be forgiven.
+
+Not his the song whose thunderous chime
+Eternal echoes render;
+The mournful Tuscan's haunted rhyme,
+And Milton's starry splendor!
+
+But who his human heart has laid
+To Nature's bosom nearer?
+Who sweetened toil like him, or paid
+To love a tribute dearer?
+
+Through all his tuneful art, how strong
+The human feeling gushes
+The very moonlight of his song
+Is warm with smiles and blushes!
+
+Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time,
+So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry;
+Blot out the Epic's stately rhyme,
+But spare his Highland Mary!
+1854.
+
+
+
+TO GEORGE B. CHEEVER
+
+So spake Esaias: so, in words of flame,
+Tekoa's prophet-herdsman smote with blame
+The traffickers in men, and put to shame,
+All earth and heaven before,
+The sacerdotal robbers of the poor.
+
+All the dread Scripture lives for thee again,
+To smite like lightning on the hands profane
+Lifted to bless the slave-whip and the chain.
+Once more the old Hebrew tongue
+Bends with the shafts of God a bow new-strung!
+
+Take up the mantle which the prophets wore;
+Warn with their warnings, show the Christ once more
+Bound, scourged, and crucified in His blameless poor;
+And shake above our land
+The unquenched bolts that blazed in Hosea's hand!
+
+Not vainly shalt thou cast upon our years
+The solemn burdens of the Orient seers,
+And smite with truth a guilty nation's ears.
+Mightier was Luther's word
+Than Seckingen's mailed arm or Hutton's sword!
+1858.
+
+
+
+TO JAMES T. FIELDS
+
+ON A BLANK LEAF OF "POEMS PRINTED, NOT PUBLISHED."
+
+Well thought! who would not rather hear
+The songs to Love and Friendship sung
+Than those which move the stranger's tongue,
+And feed his unselected ear?
+
+Our social joys are more than fame;
+Life withers in the public look.
+Why mount the pillory of a book,
+Or barter comfort for a name?
+
+Who in a house of glass would dwell,
+With curious eyes at every pane?
+To ring him in and out again,
+Who wants the public crier's bell?
+
+To see the angel in one's way,
+Who wants to play the ass's part,--
+Bear on his back the wizard Art,
+And in his service speak or bray?
+
+And who his manly locks would shave,
+And quench the eyes of common sense,
+To share the noisy recompense
+That mocked the shorn and blinded slave?
+
+The heart has needs beyond the head,
+And, starving in the plenitude
+Of strange gifts, craves its common food,--
+Our human nature's daily bread.
+
+We are but men: no gods are we,
+To sit in mid-heaven, cold and bleak,
+Each separate, on his painful peak,
+Thin-cloaked in self-complacency.
+
+Better his lot whose axe is swung
+In Wartburg woods, or that poor girl's
+Who by the him her spindle whirls
+And sings the songs that Luther sung,
+
+Than his who, old, and cold, and vain,
+At Weimar sat, a demigod,
+And bowed with Jove's imperial nod
+His votaries in and out again!
+
+Ply, Vanity, thy winged feet!
+Ambition, hew thy rocky stair!
+Who envies him who feeds on air
+The icy splendor of his seat?
+
+I see your Alps, above me, cut
+The dark, cold sky; and dim and lone
+I see ye sitting,--stone on stone,--
+With human senses dulled and shut.
+
+I could not reach you, if I would,
+Nor sit among your cloudy shapes;
+And (spare the fable of the grapes
+And fox) I would not if I could.
+
+Keep to your lofty pedestals!
+The safer plain below I choose
+Who never wins can rarely lose,
+Who never climbs as rarely falls.
+
+Let such as love the eagle's scream
+Divide with him his home of ice
+For me shall gentler notes suffice,--
+The valley-song of bird and stream;
+
+The pastoral bleat, the drone of bees,
+The flail-beat chiming far away,
+The cattle-low, at shut of day,
+The voice of God in leaf and breeze;
+
+Then lend thy hand, my wiser friend,
+And help me to the vales below,
+(In truth, I have not far to go,)
+Where sweet with flowers the fields extend.
+1858.
+
+
+
+THE MEMORY OF BURNS.
+
+     Read at the Boston celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the
+     birth of Robert Burns, 25th 1st mo., 1859. In my absence these
+     lines were read by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+How sweetly come the holy psalms
+From saints and martyrs down,
+The waving of triumphal palms
+Above the thorny crown
+The choral praise, the chanted prayers
+From harps by angels strung,
+The hunted Cameron's mountain airs,
+The hymns that Luther sung!
+
+Yet, jarring not the heavenly notes,
+The sounds of earth are heard,
+As through the open minster floats
+The song of breeze and bird
+Not less the wonder of the sky
+That daisies bloom below;
+The brook sings on, though loud and high
+The cloudy organs blow!
+
+And, if the tender ear be jarred
+That, haply, hears by turns
+The saintly harp of Olney's bard,
+The pastoral pipe of Burns,
+No discord mars His perfect plan
+Who gave them both a tongue;
+For he who sings the love of man
+The love of God hath sung!
+
+To-day be every fault forgiven
+Of him in whom we joy
+We take, with thanks, the gold of Heaven
+And leave the earth's alloy.
+Be ours his music as of spring,
+His sweetness as of flowers,
+The songs the bard himself might sing
+In holier ears than ours.
+
+Sweet airs of love and home, the hum
+Of household melodies,
+Come singing, as the robins come
+To sing in door-yard trees.
+And, heart to heart, two nations lean,
+No rival wreaths to twine,
+But blending in eternal green
+The holly and the pine!
+
+
+
+IN REMEMBRANCE OF JOSEPH STURGE.
+
+In the fair land o'erwatched by Ischia's mountains,
+Across the charmed bay
+Whose blue waves keep with Capri's silver fountains
+Perpetual holiday,
+
+A king lies dead, his wafer duly eaten,
+His gold-bought masses given;
+And Rome's great altar smokes with gums to sweeten
+Her foulest gift to Heaven.
+
+And while all Naples thrills with mute thanksgiving,
+The court of England's queen
+For the dead monster so abhorred while living
+In mourning garb is seen.
+
+With a true sorrow God rebukes that feigning;
+By lone Edgbaston's side
+Stands a great city in the sky's sad raining,
+Bareheaded and wet-eyed!
+
+Silent for once the restless hive of labor,
+Save the low funeral tread,
+Or voice of craftsman whispering to his neighbor
+The good deeds of the dead.
+
+For him no minster's chant of the immortals
+Rose from the lips of sin;
+No mitred priest swung back the heavenly portals
+To let the white soul in.
+
+But Age and Sickness framed their tearful faces
+In the low hovel's door,
+And prayers went up from all the dark by-places
+And Ghettos of the poor.
+
+The pallid toiler and the negro chattel,
+The vagrant of the street,
+The human dice wherewith in games of battle
+The lords of earth compete,
+
+Touched with a grief that needs no outward draping,
+All swelled the long lament,
+Of grateful hearts, instead of marble, shaping
+His viewless monument!
+
+For never yet, with ritual pomp and splendor,
+In the long heretofore,
+A heart more loyal, warm, and true, and tender,
+Has England's turf closed o'er.
+
+And if there fell from out her grand old steeples
+No crash of brazen wail,
+The murmurous woe of kindreds, tongues, and peoples
+Swept in on every gale.
+
+It came from Holstein's birchen-belted meadows,
+And from the tropic calms
+Of Indian islands in the sunlit shadows
+Of Occidental palms;
+
+From the locked roadsteads of the Bothniaii peasants,
+And harbors of the Finn,
+Where war's worn victims saw his gentle presence
+Come sailing, Christ-like, in,
+
+To seek the lost, to build the old waste places,
+To link the hostile shores
+Of severing seas, and sow with England's daisies
+The moss of Finland's moors.
+
+Thanks for the good man's beautiful example,
+Who in the vilest saw
+Some sacred crypt or altar of a temple
+Still vocal with God's law;
+
+And heard with tender ear the spirit sighing
+As from its prison cell,
+Praying for pity, like the mournful crying
+Of Jonah out of hell.
+
+Not his the golden pen's or lip's persuasion,
+But a fine sense of right,
+And Truth's directness, meeting each occasion
+Straight as a line of light.
+
+His faith and works, like streams that intermingle,
+In the same channel ran
+The crystal clearness of an eye kept single
+Shamed all the frauds of man.
+
+The very gentlest of all human natures
+He joined to courage strong,
+And love outreaching unto all God's creatures
+With sturdy hate of wrong.
+
+Tender as woman, manliness and meekness
+In him were so allied
+That they who judged him by his strength or weakness
+Saw but a single side.
+
+Men failed, betrayed him, but his zeal seemed nourished
+By failure and by fall;
+Still a large faith in human-kind he cherished,
+And in God's love for all.
+
+And now he rests: his greatness and his sweetness
+No more shall seem at strife,
+And death has moulded into calm completeness
+The statue of his life.
+
+Where the dews glisten and the songbirds warble,
+His dust to dust is laid,
+In Nature's keeping, with no pomp of marble
+To shame his modest shade.
+
+The forges glow, the hammers all are ringing;
+Beneath its smoky vale,
+Hard by, the city of his love is swinging
+Its clamorous iron flail.
+
+
+But round his grave are quietude and beauty,
+And the sweet heaven above,--
+The fitting symbols of a life of duty
+Transfigured into love!
+1859.
+
+
+
+BROWN OF OSSAWATOMIE
+
+John Brown of Ossawatomie spake on his dying day:
+"I will not have to shrive my soul a priest in Slavery's pay.
+But let some poor slave-mother whom I have striven to free,
+With her children, from the gallows-stair put up a prayer for me!"
+
+John Brown of Ossawatomie, they led him out to die;
+And lo! a poor slave-mother with her little child pressed nigh.
+Then the bold, blue eye grew tender, and the old harsh face grew mild,
+As he stooped between the jeering ranks and kissed the negro's child.
+
+The shadows of his stormy life that moment fell apart;
+And they who blamed the bloody hand forgave the loving heart.
+That kiss from all its guilty means redeemed the good intent,
+And round the grisly fighter's hair the martyr's aureole bent!
+
+Perish with him the folly that seeks through evil good
+Long live the generous purpose unstained with human blood!
+Not the raid of midnight terror, but the thought which underlies;
+Not the borderer's pride of daring, but the Christian's sacrifice.
+
+Nevermore may yon Blue Ridges the Northern rifle hear,
+Nor see the light of blazing homes flash on the negro's spear.
+But let the free-winged angel Truth their guarded passes scale,
+To teach that right is more than might, and justice more than mail!
+
+So vainly shall Virginia set her battle in array;
+In vain her trampling squadrons knead the winter snow with clay.
+She may strike the pouncing eagle, but she dares not harm the dove;
+And every gate she bars to Hate shall open wide to Love!
+1859.
+
+
+
+NAPLES
+
+INSCRIBED TO ROBERT C. WATERSTON, OF BOSTON.
+
+     Helen Waterston died at Naples in her eighteenth year, and lies
+     buried in the Protestant cemetery there. The stone over her grave
+     bears the lines,
+
+               Fold her, O Father, in Thine arms,
+               And let her henceforth be
+               A messenger of love between
+               Our human hearts and Thee.
+
+I give thee joy!--I know to thee
+The dearest spot on earth must be
+Where sleeps thy loved one by the summer sea;
+
+
+Where, near her sweetest poet's tomb,
+The land of Virgil gave thee room
+To lay thy flower with her perpetual bloom.
+
+I know that when the sky shut down
+Behind thee on the gleaming town,
+On Baiae's baths and Posilippo's crown;
+
+And, through thy tears, the mocking day
+Burned Ischia's mountain lines away,
+And Capri melted in its sunny bay;
+
+Through thy great farewell sorrow shot
+The sharp pang of a bitter thought
+That slaves must tread around that holy spot.
+
+Thou knewest not the land was blest
+In giving thy beloved rest,
+Holding the fond hope closer to her breast,
+
+That every sweet and saintly grave
+Was freedom's prophecy, and gave
+The pledge of Heaven to sanctify and save.
+
+That pledge is answered. To thy ear
+The unchained city sends its cheer,
+And, tuned to joy, the muffled bells of fear
+
+Ring Victor in. The land sits free
+And happy by the summer sea,
+And Bourbon Naples now is Italy!
+
+She smiles above her broken chain
+The languid smile that follows pain,
+Stretching her cramped limbs to the sun again.
+
+Oh, joy for all, who hear her call
+From gray Camaldoli's convent-wall
+And Elmo's towers to freedom's carnival!
+
+A new life breathes among her vines
+And olives, like the breath of pines
+Blown downward from the breezy Apennines.
+
+Lean, O my friend, to meet that breath,
+Rejoice as one who witnesseth
+Beauty from ashes rise, and life from death!
+
+Thy sorrow shall no more be pain,
+Its tears shall fall in sunlit rain,
+Writing the grave with flowers: "Arisen again!"
+1860.
+
+
+
+A MEMORIAL
+
+     Moses Austin Cartland, a dear friend and relation, who led a
+     faithful life as a teacher and died in the summer of 1863.
+
+Oh, thicker, deeper, darker growing,
+The solemn vista to the tomb
+Must know henceforth another shadow,
+And give another cypress room.
+
+In love surpassing that of brothers,
+We walked, O friend, from childhood's day;
+And, looking back o'er fifty summers,
+Our footprints track a common way.
+
+One in our faith, and one our longing
+To make the world within our reach
+Somewhat the better for our living,
+And gladder for our human speech.
+
+Thou heard'st with me the far-off voices,
+The old beguiling song of fame,
+But life to thee was warm and present,
+And love was better than a name.
+
+To homely joys and loves and friendships
+Thy genial nature fondly clung;
+And so the shadow on the dial
+Ran back and left thee always young.
+
+And who could blame the generous weakness
+Which, only to thyself unjust,
+So overprized the worth of others,
+And dwarfed thy own with self-distrust?
+
+All hearts grew warmer in the presence
+Of one who, seeking not his own,
+Gave freely for the love of giving,
+Nor reaped for self the harvest sown.
+
+Thy greeting smile was pledge and prelude
+Of generous deeds and kindly words;
+In thy large heart were fair guest-chambers,
+Open to sunrise and the birds;
+
+The task was thine to mould and fashion
+Life's plastic newness into grace
+To make the boyish heart heroic,
+And light with thought the maiden's face.
+
+O'er all the land, in town and prairie,
+With bended heads of mourning, stand
+The living forms that owe their beauty
+And fitness to thy shaping hand.
+
+Thy call has come in ripened manhood,
+The noonday calm of heart and mind,
+While I, who dreamed of thy remaining
+To mourn me, linger still behind,
+
+Live on, to own, with self-upbraiding,
+A debt of love still due from me,--
+The vain remembrance of occasions,
+Forever lost, of serving thee.
+
+It was not mine among thy kindred
+To join the silent funeral prayers,
+But all that long sad day of summer
+My tears of mourning dropped with theirs.
+
+All day the sea-waves sobbed with sorrow,
+The birds forgot their merry trills
+All day I heard the pines lamenting
+With thine upon thy homestead hills.
+
+Green be those hillside pines forever,
+And green the meadowy lowlands be,
+And green the old memorial beeches,
+Name-carven in the woods of Lee.
+
+Still let them greet thy life companions
+Who thither turn their pilgrim feet,
+In every mossy line recalling
+A tender memory sadly sweet.
+
+O friend! if thought and sense avail not
+To know thee henceforth as thou art,
+That all is well with thee forever
+I trust the instincts of my heart.
+
+Thine be the quiet habitations,
+Thine the green pastures, blossom-sown,
+And smiles of saintly recognition,
+As sweet and tender as thy own.
+
+Thou com'st not from the hush and shadow
+To meet us, but to thee we come,
+With thee we never can be strangers,
+And where thou art must still be home.
+1863.
+
+
+
+BRYANT ON HIS BIRTHDAY
+
+     Mr. Bryant's seventieth birthday, November 3, 1864, was celebrated
+     by a festival to which these verses were sent.
+
+We praise not now the poet's art,
+The rounded beauty of his song;
+Who weighs him from his life apart
+Must do his nobler nature wrong.
+
+Not for the eye, familiar grown
+With charms to common sight denied,
+The marvellous gift he shares alone
+With him who walked on Rydal-side;
+
+Not for rapt hymn nor woodland lay,
+Too grave for smiles, too sweet for tears;
+We speak his praise who wears to-day
+The glory of his seventy years.
+
+When Peace brings Freedom in her train,
+Let happy lips his songs rehearse;
+His life is now his noblest strain,
+His manhood better than his verse!
+
+Thank God! his hand on Nature's keys
+Its cunning keeps at life's full span;
+But, dimmed and dwarfed, in times like these,
+The poet seems beside the man!
+
+So be it! let the garlands die,
+The singer's wreath, the painter's meed,
+Let our names perish, if thereby
+Our country may be saved and freed!
+1864.
+
+
+
+THOMAS STARR KING
+
+     Published originally as a prelude to the posthumous volume of
+     selections edited by Richard Frothingham.
+
+
+The great work laid upon his twoscore years
+Is done, and well done. If we drop our tears,
+Who loved him as few men were ever loved,
+We mourn no blighted hope nor broken plan
+With him whose life stands rounded and approved
+In the full growth and stature of a man.
+Mingle, O bells, along the Western slope,
+With your deep toll a sound of faith and hope!
+Wave cheerily still, O banner, half-way down,
+From thousand-masted bay and steepled town!
+Let the strong organ with its loftiest swell
+Lift the proud sorrow of the land, and tell
+That the brave sower saw his ripened grain.
+O East and West! O morn and sunset twain
+No more forever!--has he lived in vain
+Who, priest of Freedom, made ye one, and told
+Your bridal service from his lips of gold?
+1864.
+
+
+
+LINES ON A FLY-LEAF.
+
+I need not ask thee, for my sake,
+To read a book which well may make
+Its way by native force of wit
+Without my manual sign to it.
+Its piquant writer needs from me
+No gravely masculine guaranty,
+And well might laugh her merriest laugh
+At broken spears in her behalf;
+Yet, spite of all the critics tell,
+I frankly own I like her well.
+It may be that she wields a pen
+Too sharply nibbed for thin-skinned men,
+That her keen arrows search and try
+The armor joints of dignity,
+And, though alone for error meant,
+Sing through the air irreverent.
+I blame her not, the young athlete
+Who plants her woman's tiny feet,
+And dares the chances of debate
+Where bearded men might hesitate,
+Who, deeply earnest, seeing well
+The ludicrous and laughable,
+Mingling in eloquent excess
+Her anger and her tenderness,
+And, chiding with a half-caress,
+Strives, less for her own sex than ours,
+With principalities and powers,
+And points us upward to the clear
+Sunned heights of her new atmosphere.
+
+Heaven mend her faults!--I will not pause
+To weigh and doubt and peck at flaws,
+Or waste my pity when some fool
+Provokes her measureless ridicule.
+Strong-minded is she? Better so
+Than dulness set for sale or show,
+A household folly, capped and belled
+In fashion's dance of puppets held,
+Or poor pretence of womanhood,
+Whose formal, flavorless platitude
+Is warranted from all offence
+Of robust meaning's violence.
+Give me the wine of thought whose head
+Sparkles along the page I read,--
+Electric words in which I find
+The tonic of the northwest wind;
+The wisdom which itself allies
+To sweet and pure humanities,
+Where scorn of meanness, hate of wrong,
+Are underlaid by love as strong;
+The genial play of mirth that lights
+Grave themes of thought, as when, on nights
+Of summer-time, the harmless blaze
+Of thunderless heat-lightning plays,
+And tree and hill-top resting dim
+And doubtful on the sky's vague rim,
+Touched by that soft and lambent gleam,
+Start sharply outlined from their dream.
+
+Talk not to me of woman's sphere,
+Nor point with Scripture texts a sneer,
+Nor wrong the manliest saint of all
+By doubt, if he were here, that Paul
+Would own the heroines who have lent
+Grace to truth's stern arbitrament,
+Foregone the praise to woman sweet,
+And cast their crowns at Duty's feet;
+Like her, who by her strong Appeal
+Made Fashion weep and Mammon feel,
+Who, earliest summoned to withstand
+The color-madness of the land,
+Counted her life-long losses gain,
+And made her own her sisters' pain;
+Or her who, in her greenwood shade,
+Heard the sharp call that Freedom made,
+And, answering, struck from Sappho's lyre
+Of love the Tyrtman carmen's fire
+Or that young girl,--Domremy's maid
+Revived a nobler cause to aid,--
+Shaking from warning finger-tips
+The doom of her apocalypse;
+Or her, who world-wide entrance gave
+To the log-cabin of the slave,
+Made all his want and sorrow known,
+And all earth's languages his own.
+1866.
+
+
+
+GEORGE L. STEARNS
+
+     No man rendered greater service to the cause of freedom than Major
+     Stearns in the great struggle between invading slave-holders and
+     the free settlers of Kansas.
+
+He has done the work of a true man,--
+Crown him, honor him, love him.
+Weep, over him, tears of woman,
+Stoop manliest brows above him!
+
+O dusky mothers and daughters,
+Vigils of mourning keep for him!
+Up in the mountains, and down by the waters,
+Lift up your voices and weep for him,
+
+For the warmest of hearts is frozen,
+The freest of hands is still;
+And the gap in our picked and chosen
+The long years may not fill.
+
+No duty could overtask him,
+No need his will outrun;
+Or ever our lips could ask him,
+His hands the work had done.
+
+He forgot his own soul for others,
+Himself to his neighbor lending;
+He found the Lord in his suffering brothers,
+And not in the clouds descending.
+
+So the bed was sweet to die on,
+Whence he saw the doors wide swung
+Against whose bolted iron
+The strength of his life was flung.
+
+And he saw ere his eye was darkened
+The sheaves of the harvest-bringing,
+And knew while his ear yet hearkened
+The voice of the reapers singing.
+
+Ah, well! The world is discreet;
+There are plenty to pause and wait;
+But here was a man who set his feet
+Sometimes in advance of fate;
+
+Plucked off the old bark when the inner
+Was slow to renew it,
+And put to the Lord's work the sinner
+When saints failed to do it.
+
+Never rode to the wrong's redressing
+A worthier paladin.
+Shall he not hear the blessing,
+"Good and faithful, enter in!"
+1867
+
+
+
+GARIBALDI
+
+In trance and dream of old, God's prophet saw
+The casting down of thrones. Thou, watching lone
+The hot Sardinian coast-line, hazy-hilled,
+Where, fringing round Caprera's rocky zone
+With foam, the slow waves gather and withdraw,
+Behold'st the vision of the seer fulfilled,
+And hear'st the sea-winds burdened with a sound
+Of falling chains, as, one by one, unbound,
+The nations lift their right hands up and swear
+Their oath of freedom. From the chalk-white wall
+Of England, from the black Carpathian range,
+Along the Danube and the Theiss, through all
+The passes of the Spanish Pyrenees,
+And from the Seine's thronged banks, a murmur strange
+And glad floats to thee o'er thy summer seas
+On the salt wind that stirs thy whitening hair,--
+The song of freedom's bloodless victories!
+Rejoice, O Garibaldi! Though thy sword
+Failed at Rome's gates, and blood seemed vainly poured
+Where, in Christ's name, the crowned infidel
+Of France wrought murder with the arms of hell
+On that sad mountain slope whose ghostly dead,
+Unmindful of the gray exorcist's ban,
+Walk, unappeased, the chambered Vatican,
+And draw the curtains of Napoleon's bed!
+God's providence is not blind, but, full of eyes,
+It searches all the refuges of lies;
+And in His time and way, the accursed things
+Before whose evil feet thy battle-gage
+Has clashed defiance from hot youth to age
+Shall perish. All men shall be priests and kings,
+One royal brotherhood, one church made free
+By love, which is the law of liberty
+1869.
+
+
+
+TO LYDIA MARIA CHILD,
+
+ON READING HER POEM IN "THE STANDARD."
+
+     Mrs. Child wrote her lines, beginning, "Again the trees are clothed
+     in vernal green," May 24, 1859, on the first anniversary of Ellis
+     Gray Loring's death, but did not publish them for some years
+     afterward, when I first read them, or I could not have made the
+     reference which I did to the extinction of slavery.
+
+The sweet spring day is glad with music,
+But through it sounds a sadder strain;
+The worthiest of our narrowing circle
+Sings Loring's dirges o'er again.
+
+O woman greatly loved! I join thee
+In tender memories of our friend;
+With thee across the awful spaces
+The greeting of a soul I send!
+
+What cheer hath he? How is it with him?
+Where lingers he this weary while?
+Over what pleasant fields of Heaven
+Dawns the sweet sunrise of his smile?
+
+Does he not know our feet are treading
+The earth hard down on Slavery's grave?
+That, in our crowning exultations,
+We miss the charm his presence gave?
+
+Why on this spring air comes no whisper
+From him to tell us all is well?
+Why to our flower-time comes no token
+Of lily and of asphodel?
+
+I feel the unutterable longing,
+Thy hunger of the heart is mine;
+I reach and grope for hands in darkness,
+My ear grows sharp for voice or sign.
+
+Still on the lips of all we question
+The finger of God's silence lies;
+Will the lost hands in ours be folded?
+Will the shut eyelids ever rise?
+
+O friend! no proof beyond this yearning,
+This outreach of our hearts, we need;
+God will not mock the hope He giveth,
+No love He prompts shall vainly plead.
+
+Then let us stretch our hands in darkness,
+And call our loved ones o'er and o'er;
+Some day their arms shall close about us,
+And the old voices speak once more.
+
+No dreary splendors wait our coming
+Where rapt ghost sits from ghost apart;
+Homeward we go to Heaven's thanksgiving,
+The harvest-gathering of the heart.
+1870.
+
+
+THE SINGER.
+
+     This poem was written on the death of Alice Cary. Her sister
+     Phoebe, heart-broken by her loss, followed soon after. Noble and
+     richly gifted, lovely in person and character, they left behind
+     them only friends and admirers.
+
+Years since (but names to me before),
+Two sisters sought at eve my door;
+Two song-birds wandering from their nest,
+A gray old farm-house in the West.
+
+How fresh of life the younger one,
+Half smiles, half tears, like rain in sun!
+Her gravest mood could scarce displace
+The dimples of her nut-brown face.
+
+Wit sparkled on her lips not less
+For quick and tremulous tenderness;
+And, following close her merriest glance,
+Dreamed through her eyes the heart's romance.
+
+Timid and still, the elder had
+Even then a smile too sweetly sad;
+The crown of pain that all must wear
+Too early pressed her midnight hair.
+
+Yet ere the summer eve grew long,
+Her modest lips were sweet with song;
+A memory haunted all her words
+Of clover-fields and singing birds.
+
+Her dark, dilating eyes expressed
+The broad horizons of the west;
+Her speech dropped prairie flowers; the gold
+Of harvest wheat about her rolled.
+
+Fore-doomed to song she seemed to me
+I queried not with destiny
+I knew the trial and the need,
+Yet, all the more, I said, God speed?
+
+What could I other than I did?
+Could I a singing-bird forbid?
+Deny the wind-stirred leaf? Rebuke
+The music of the forest brook?
+
+She went with morning from my door,
+But left me richer than before;
+Thenceforth I knew her voice of cheer,
+The welcome of her partial ear.
+
+Years passed: through all the land her name
+A pleasant household word became
+All felt behind the singer stood
+A sweet and gracious womanhood.
+
+Her life was earnest work, not play;
+Her tired feet climbed a weary way;
+And even through her lightest strain
+We heard an undertone of pain.
+
+Unseen of her her fair fame grew,
+The good she did she rarely knew,
+Unguessed of her in life the love
+That rained its tears her grave above.
+
+When last I saw her, full of peace,
+She waited for her great release;
+And that old friend so sage and bland,
+Our later Franklin, held her hand.
+
+For all that patriot bosoms stirs
+Had moved that woman's heart of hers,
+And men who toiled in storm and sun
+Found her their meet companion.
+
+Our converse, from her suffering bed
+To healthful themes of life she led
+The out-door world of bud and bloom
+And light and sweetness filled her room.
+
+Yet evermore an underthought
+Of loss to come within us wrought,
+And all the while we felt the strain
+Of the strong will that conquered pain.
+
+God giveth quietness at last!
+The common way that all have passed
+She went, with mortal yearnings fond,
+To fuller life and love beyond.
+
+Fold the rapt soul in your embrace,
+My dear ones! Give the singer place
+To you, to her,--I know not where,--
+I lift the silence of a prayer.
+
+For only thus our own we find;
+The gone before, the left behind,
+All mortal voices die between;
+The unheard reaches the unseen.
+
+Again the blackbirds sing; the streams
+Wake, laughing, from their winter dreams,
+And tremble in the April showers
+The tassels of the maple flowers.
+
+But not for her has spring renewed
+The sweet surprises of the wood;
+And bird and flower are lost to her
+Who was their best interpreter.
+
+What to shut eyes has God revealed?
+What hear the ears that death has sealed?
+What undreamed beauty passing show
+Requites the loss of all we know?
+
+O silent land, to which we move,
+Enough if there alone be love,
+And mortal need can ne'er outgrow
+What it is waiting to bestow!
+
+O white soul! from that far-off shore
+Float some sweet song the waters o'er.
+Our faith confirm, our fears dispel,
+With the old voice we loved so well!
+1871.
+
+
+
+HOW MARY GREW.
+
+     These lines were in answer to an invitation to hear a lecture of
+     Mary Grew, of Philadelphia, before the Boston Radical Club. The
+     reference in the last stanza is to an essay on Sappho by T. W.
+     Higginson, read at the club the preceding month.
+
+With wisdom far beyond her years,
+And graver than her wondering peers,
+So strong, so mild, combining still
+The tender heart and queenly will,
+To conscience and to duty true,
+So, up from childhood, Mary Grew!
+
+Then in her gracious womanhood
+She gave her days to doing good.
+She dared the scornful laugh of men,
+The hounding mob, the slanderer's pen.
+She did the work she found to do,--
+A Christian heroine, Mary Grew!
+
+The freed slave thanks her; blessing comes
+To her from women's weary homes;
+The wronged and erring find in her
+Their censor mild and comforter.
+The world were safe if but a few
+Could grow in grace as Mary Grew!
+
+So, New Year's Eve, I sit and say,
+By this low wood-fire, ashen gray;
+Just wishing, as the night shuts down,
+That I could hear in Boston town,
+In pleasant Chestnut Avenue,
+From her own lips, how Mary Grew!
+
+And hear her graceful hostess tell
+The silver-voiced oracle
+Who lately through her parlors spoke
+As through Dodona's sacred oak,
+A wiser truth than any told
+By Sappho's lips of ruddy gold,--
+The way to make the world anew,
+Is just to grow--as Mary Grew
+1871.
+
+
+
+SUMNER
+
+     "I am not one who has disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of
+     conduct, or the maxims of a freeman by the actions of a slave; but,
+     by the grace of God, I have kept my life unsullied."
+     --MILTON'S _Defence of the People of England_.
+
+O Mother State! the winds of March
+Blew chill o'er Auburn's Field of God,
+Where, slow, beneath a leaden arch
+Of sky, thy mourning children trod.
+
+And now, with all thy woods in leaf,
+Thy fields in flower, beside thy dead
+Thou sittest, in thy robes of grief,
+A Rachel yet uncomforted!
+
+And once again the organ swells,
+Once more the flag is half-way hung,
+And yet again the mournful bells
+In all thy steeple-towers are rung.
+
+And I, obedient to thy will,
+Have come a simple wreath to lay,
+Superfluous, on a grave that still
+Is sweet with all the flowers of May.
+
+I take, with awe, the task assigned;
+It may be that my friend might miss,
+In his new sphere of heart and mind,
+Some token from my band in this.
+
+By many a tender memory moved,
+Along the past my thought I send;
+The record of the cause he loved
+Is the best record of its friend.
+
+No trumpet sounded in his ear,
+He saw not Sinai's cloud and flame,
+But never yet to Hebrew seer
+A clearer voice of duty came.
+
+God said: "Break thou these yokes; undo
+These heavy burdens. I ordain
+A work to last thy whole life through,
+A ministry of strife and pain.
+
+"Forego thy dreams of lettered ease,
+Put thou the scholar's promise by,
+The rights of man are more than these."
+He heard, and answered: "Here am I!"
+
+He set his face against the blast,
+His feet against the flinty shard,
+Till the hard service grew, at last,
+Its own exceeding great reward.
+
+Lifted like Saul's above the crowd,
+Upon his kingly forehead fell
+The first sharp bolt of Slavery's cloud,
+Launched at the truth he urged so well.
+
+Ah! never yet, at rack or stake,
+Was sorer loss made Freedom's gain,
+Than his, who suffered for her sake
+The beak-torn Titan's lingering pain!
+
+The fixed star of his faith, through all
+Loss, doubt, and peril, shone the same;
+As through a night of storm, some tall,
+Strong lighthouse lifts its steady flame.
+
+Beyond the dust and smoke he saw
+The sheaves of Freedom's large increase,
+The holy fanes of equal law,
+The New Jerusalem of peace.
+
+The weak might fear, the worldling mock,
+The faint and blind of heart regret;
+All knew at last th' eternal rock
+On which his forward feet were set.
+
+The subtlest scheme of compromise
+Was folly to his purpose bold;
+The strongest mesh of party lies
+Weak to the simplest truth he told.
+
+One language held his heart and lip,
+Straight onward to his goal he trod,
+And proved the highest statesmanship
+Obedience to the voice of God.
+
+No wail was in his voice,--none heard,
+When treason's storm-cloud blackest grew,
+The weakness of a doubtful word;
+His duty, and the end, he knew.
+
+The first to smite, the first to spare;
+When once the hostile ensigns fell,
+He stretched out hands of generous care
+To lift the foe he fought so well.
+
+For there was nothing base or small
+Or craven in his soul's broad plan;
+Forgiving all things personal,
+He hated only wrong to man.
+
+The old traditions of his State,
+The memories of her great and good,
+Took from his life a fresher date,
+And in himself embodied stood.
+
+How felt the greed of gold and place,
+The venal crew that schemed and planned,
+The fine scorn of that haughty face,
+The spurning of that bribeless hand!
+
+If than Rome's tribunes statelier
+He wore his senatorial robe,
+His lofty port was all for her,
+The one dear spot on all the globe.
+
+If to the master's plea he gave
+The vast contempt his manhood felt,
+He saw a brother in the slave,--
+With man as equal man he dealt.
+
+Proud was he? If his presence kept
+Its grandeur wheresoe'er he trod,
+As if from Plutarch's gallery stepped
+The hero and the demigod,
+
+None failed, at least, to reach his ear,
+Nor want nor woe appealed in vain;
+The homesick soldier knew his cheer,
+And blessed him from his ward of pain.
+
+Safely his dearest friends may own
+The slight defects he never hid,
+The surface-blemish in the stone
+Of the tall, stately pyramid.
+
+Suffice it that he never brought
+His conscience to the public mart;
+But lived himself the truth he taught,
+White-souled, clean-handed, pure of heart.
+
+What if he felt the natural pride
+Of power in noble use, too true
+With thin humilities to hide
+The work he did, the lore he knew?
+
+Was he not just? Was any wronged
+By that assured self-estimate?
+He took but what to him belonged,
+Unenvious of another's state.
+
+Well might he heed the words he spake,
+And scan with care the written page
+Through which he still shall warm and wake
+The hearts of men from age to age.
+
+Ah! who shall blame him now because
+He solaced thus his hours of pain!
+Should not the o'erworn thresher pause,
+And hold to light his golden grain?
+
+No sense of humor dropped its oil
+On the hard ways his purpose went;
+Small play of fancy lightened toil;
+He spake alone the thing he meant.
+
+He loved his books, the Art that hints
+A beauty veiled behind its own,
+The graver's line, the pencil's tints,
+The chisel's shape evoked from stone.
+
+He cherished, void of selfish ends,
+The social courtesies that bless
+And sweeten life, and loved his friends
+With most unworldly tenderness.
+
+But still his tired eyes rarely learned
+The glad relief by Nature brought;
+Her mountain ranges never turned
+His current of persistent thought.
+
+The sea rolled chorus to his speech
+Three-banked like Latium's' tall trireme,
+With laboring oars; the grove and beach
+Were Forum and the Academe.
+
+The sensuous joy from all things fair
+His strenuous bent of soul repressed,
+And left from youth to silvered hair
+Few hours for pleasure, none for rest.
+
+For all his life was poor without,
+O Nature, make the last amends
+Train all thy flowers his grave about,
+And make thy singing-birds his friends!
+
+Revive again, thou summer rain,
+The broken turf upon his bed
+Breathe, summer wind, thy tenderest strain
+Of low, sweet music overhead!
+
+With calm and beauty symbolize
+The peace which follows long annoy,
+And lend our earth-bent, mourning eyes,
+Some hint of his diviner joy.
+
+For safe with right and truth he is,
+As God lives he must live alway;
+There is no end for souls like his,
+No night for children of the day!
+
+Nor cant nor poor solicitudes
+Made weak his life's great argument;
+Small leisure his for frames and moods
+Who followed Duty where she went.
+
+The broad, fair fields of God he saw
+Beyond the bigot's narrow bound;
+The truths he moulded into law
+In Christ's beatitudes he found.
+
+His state-craft was the Golden Rule,
+His right of vote a sacred trust;
+Clear, over threat and ridicule,
+All heard his challenge: "Is it just?"
+
+And when the hour supreme had come,
+Not for himself a thought he gave;
+In that last pang of martyrdom,
+His care was for the half-freed slave.
+
+Not vainly dusky hands upbore,
+In prayer, the passing soul to heaven
+Whose mercy to His suffering poor
+Was service to the Master given.
+
+Long shall the good State's annals tell,
+Her children's children long be taught,
+How, praised or blamed, he guarded well
+The trust he neither shunned nor sought.
+
+If for one moment turned thy face,
+O Mother, from thy son, not long
+He waited calmly in his place
+The sure remorse which follows wrong.
+
+Forgiven be the State he loved
+The one brief lapse, the single blot;
+Forgotten be the stain removed,
+Her righted record shows it not!
+
+The lifted sword above her shield
+With jealous care shall guard his fame;
+The pine-tree on her ancient field
+To all the winds shall speak his name.
+
+The marble image of her son
+Her loving hands shall yearly crown,
+And from her pictured Pantheon
+His grand, majestic face look down.
+
+O State so passing rich before,
+Who now shall doubt thy highest claim?
+The world that counts thy jewels o'er
+Shall longest pause at Sumner's name!
+1874.
+
+
+
+THEIRS
+
+I.
+Fate summoned, in gray-bearded age, to act
+A history stranger than his written fact,
+Him who portrayed the splendor and the gloom
+Of that great hour when throne and altar fell
+With long death-groan which still is audible.
+He, when around the walls of Paris rung
+The Prussian bugle like the blast of doom,
+And every ill which follows unblest war
+Maddened all France from Finistere to Var,
+The weight of fourscore from his shoulders flung,
+And guided Freedom in the path he saw
+Lead out of chaos into light and law,
+Peace, not imperial, but republican,
+And order pledged to all the Rights of Man.
+
+II.
+Death called him from a need as imminent
+As that from which the Silent William went
+When powers of evil, like the smiting seas
+On Holland's dikes, assailed her liberties.
+Sadly, while yet in doubtful balance hung
+The weal and woe of France, the bells were rung
+For her lost leader. Paralyzed of will,
+Above his bier the hearts of men stood still.
+Then, as if set to his dead lips, the horn
+Of Roland wound once more to rouse and warn,
+The old voice filled the air! His last brave word
+Not vainly France to all her boundaries stirred.
+Strong as in life, he still for Freedom wrought,
+As the dead Cid at red Toloso fought.
+1877.
+
+
+
+FITZ-GREENE HALLECK.
+
+AT THE UNVEILING OF HIS STATUE.
+
+Among their graven shapes to whom
+Thy civic wreaths belong,
+O city of his love, make room
+For one whose gift was song.
+
+Not his the soldier's sword to wield,
+Nor his the helm of state,
+Nor glory of the stricken field,
+Nor triumph of debate.
+
+In common ways, with common men,
+He served his race and time
+As well as if his clerkly pen
+Had never danced to rhyme.
+
+If, in the thronged and noisy mart,
+The Muses found their son,
+Could any say his tuneful art
+A duty left undone?
+
+He toiled and sang; and year by year
+Men found their homes more sweet,
+And through a tenderer atmosphere
+Looked down the brick-walled street.
+
+The Greek's wild onset gall Street knew;
+The Red King walked Broadway;
+And Alnwick Castle's roses blew
+From Palisades to Bay.
+
+Fair City by the Sea! upraise
+His veil with reverent hands;
+And mingle with thy own the praise
+And pride of other lands.
+
+Let Greece his fiery lyric breathe
+Above her hero-urns;
+And Scotland, with her holly, wreathe
+The flower he culled for Burns.
+
+Oh, stately stand thy palace walls,
+Thy tall ships ride the seas;
+To-day thy poet's name recalls
+A prouder thought than these.
+
+Not less thy pulse of trade shall beat,
+Nor less thy tall fleets swim,
+That shaded square and dusty street
+Are classic ground through him.
+
+Alive, he loved, like all who sing,
+The echoes of his song;
+Too late the tardy meed we bring,
+The praise delayed so long.
+
+Too late, alas! Of all who knew
+The living man, to-day
+Before his unveiled face, how few
+Make bare their locks of gray!
+
+Our lips of praise must soon be dumb,
+Our grateful eyes be dim;
+O brothers of the days to come,
+Take tender charge of him!
+
+New hands the wires of song may sweep,
+New voices challenge fame;
+But let no moss of years o'ercreep
+The lines of Halleck's name.
+1877.
+
+
+
+WILLIAM FRANCIS BARTLETT.
+
+Oh, well may Essex sit forlorn
+Beside her sea-blown shore;
+Her well beloved, her noblest born,
+Is hers in life no more!
+
+No lapse of years can render less
+Her memory's sacred claim;
+No fountain of forgetfulness
+Can wet the lips of Fame.
+
+A grief alike to wound and heal,
+A thought to soothe and pain,
+The sad, sweet pride that mothers feel
+To her must still remain.
+
+Good men and true she has not lacked,
+And brave men yet shall be;
+The perfect flower, the crowning fact,
+Of all her years was he!
+
+As Galahad pure, as Merlin sage,
+What worthier knight was found
+To grace in Arthur's golden age
+The fabled Table Round?
+
+A voice, the battle's trumpet-note,
+To welcome and restore;
+A hand, that all unwilling smote,
+To heal and build once more;
+
+A soul of fire, a tender heart
+Too warm for hate, he knew
+The generous victor's graceful part
+To sheathe the sword he drew.
+
+When Earth, as if on evil dreams,
+Looks back upon her wars,
+And the white light of Christ outstreams
+From the red disk of Mars,
+
+His fame who led the stormy van
+Of battle well may cease,
+But never that which crowns the man
+Whose victory was Peace.
+
+Mourn, Essex, on thy sea-blown shore
+Thy beautiful and brave,
+Whose failing hand the olive bore,
+Whose dying lips forgave!
+
+Let age lament the youthful chief,
+And tender eyes be dim;
+The tears are more of joy than grief
+That fall for one like him!
+1878.
+
+
+
+BAYARD TAYLOR.
+
+I.
+"And where now, Bayard, will thy footsteps tend?"
+My sister asked our guest one winter's day.
+Smiling he answered in the Friends' sweet way
+Common to both: "Wherever thou shall send!
+What wouldst thou have me see for thee?" She laughed,
+Her dark eyes dancing in the wood-fire's glow
+"Loffoden isles, the Kilpis, and the low,
+Unsetting sun on Finmark's fishing-craft."
+"All these and more I soon shall see for thee!"
+He answered cheerily: and he kept his pledge
+On Lapland snows, the North Cape's windy wedge,
+And Tromso freezing in its winter sea.
+He went and came. But no man knows the  track
+Of his last journey, and he comes not back!
+
+II.
+He brought us wonders of the new and old;
+We shared all climes with him. The Arab's tent
+To him its story-telling secret lent.
+And, pleased, we listened to the tales he told.
+His task, beguiled with songs that shall endure,
+In manly, honest thoroughness he wrought;
+From humble home-lays to the heights of thought
+Slowly he climbed, but every step was sure.
+How, with the generous pride that friendship hath,
+We, who so loved him, saw at last the crown
+Of civic honor on his brows pressed down,
+Rejoiced, and knew not that the gift was death.
+And now for him, whose praise in deafened ears
+Two nations speak, we answer but with tears!
+
+III.
+O Vale of Chester! trod by him so oft,
+Green as thy June turf keep his memory. Let
+Nor wood, nor dell, nor storied stream forget,
+Nor winds that blow round lonely Cedarcroft;
+Let the home voices greet him in the far,
+Strange land that holds him; let the messages
+Of love pursue him o'er the chartless seas
+And unmapped vastness of his unknown star
+Love's language, heard beyond the loud discourse
+Of perishable fame, in every sphere
+Itself interprets; and its utterance here
+Somewhere in God's unfolding universe
+Shall reach our traveller, softening the surprise
+Of his rapt gaze on unfamiliar skies!
+1879.
+
+
+
+OUR AUTOCRAT.
+
+     Read at the breakfast given in honor of Dr. Holmes by the
+     publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, December 3, 1879.
+
+His laurels fresh from song and lay,
+Romance, art, science, rich in all,
+And young of heart, how dare we say
+We keep his seventieth festival?
+
+No sense is here of loss or lack;
+Before his sweetness and his light
+The dial holds its shadow back,
+The charmed hours delay their flight.
+
+His still the keen analysis
+Of men and moods, electric wit,
+Free play of mirth, and tenderness
+To heal the slightest wound from it.
+
+And his the pathos touching all
+Life's sins and sorrows and regrets,
+Its hopes and fears, its final call
+And rest beneath the violets.
+
+His sparkling surface scarce betrays
+The thoughtful tide beneath it rolled,
+The wisdom of the latter days,
+And tender memories of the old.
+
+What shapes and fancies, grave or gay,
+Before us at his bidding come
+The Treadmill tramp, the One-Horse Shay,
+The dumb despair of Elsie's doom!
+
+The tale of Avis and the Maid,
+The plea for lips that cannot speak,
+The holy kiss that Iris laid
+On Little Boston's pallid cheek!
+
+Long may he live to sing for us
+His sweetest songs at evening time,
+And, like his Chambered Nautilus,
+To holier heights of beauty climb,
+
+Though now unnumbered guests surround
+The table that he rules at will,
+Its Autocrat, however crowned,
+Is but our friend and comrade still.
+
+The world may keep his honored name,
+The wealth of all his varied powers;
+A stronger claim has love than fame,
+And he himself is only ours!
+
+
+
+WITHIN THE GATE.
+
+L. M. C.
+
+     I have more fully expressed my admiration and regard for Lydia
+     Maria Child in the biographical introduction which I wrote for the
+     volume of Letters, published after her death.
+
+We sat together, last May-day, and talked
+Of the dear friends who walked
+Beside us, sharers of the hopes and fears
+Of five and forty years,
+
+Since first we met in Freedom's hope forlorn,
+And heard her battle-horn
+Sound through the valleys of the sleeping North,
+Calling her children forth,
+
+And youth pressed forward with hope-lighted eyes,
+And age, with forecast wise
+Of the long strife before the triumph won,
+Girded his armor on.
+
+Sadly, ass name by name we called the roll,
+We heard the dead-bells toll
+For the unanswering many, and we knew
+The living were the few.
+
+And we, who waited our own call before
+The inevitable door,
+Listened and looked, as all have done, to win
+Some token from within.
+
+No sign we saw, we heard no voices call;
+The impenetrable wall
+Cast down its shadow, like an awful doubt,
+On all who sat without.
+
+Of many a hint of life beyond the veil,
+And many a ghostly tale
+Wherewith the ages spanned the gulf between
+The seen and the unseen,
+
+Seeking from omen, trance, and dream to gain
+Solace to doubtful pain,
+And touch, with groping hands, the garment hem
+Of truth sufficing them,
+
+We talked; and, turning from the sore unrest
+Of an all-baffling quest,
+We thought of holy lives that from us passed
+Hopeful unto the last,
+
+As if they saw beyond the river of death,
+Like Him of Nazareth,
+The many mansions of the Eternal days
+Lift up their gates of praise.
+
+And, hushed to silence by a reverent awe,
+Methought, O friend, I saw
+In thy true life of word, and work, and thought
+The proof of all we sought.
+
+Did we not witness in the life of thee
+Immortal prophecy?
+And feel, when with thee, that thy footsteps trod
+An everlasting road?
+
+Not for brief days thy generous sympathies,
+Thy scorn of selfish ease;
+Not for the poor prize of an earthly goal
+Thy strong uplift of soul.
+
+Than thine was never turned a fonder heart
+To nature and to art
+In fair-formed Hellas in her golden prime,
+Thy Philothea's time.
+
+Yet, loving beauty, thou couldst pass it by,
+And for the poor deny
+Thyself, and see thy fresh, sweet flower of fame
+Wither in blight and blame.
+
+Sharing His love who holds in His embrace
+The lowliest of our race,
+Sure the Divine economy must be
+Conservative of thee!
+
+For truth must live with truth, self-sacrifice
+Seek out its great allies;
+Good must find good by gravitation sure,
+And love with love endure.
+
+And so, since thou hast passed within the gate
+Whereby awhile I wait,
+I give blind grief and blinder sense the lie
+Thou hast not lived to die!
+1881.
+
+
+
+IN MEMORY.
+
+JAMES T. FIELDS.
+
+As a guest who may not stay
+Long and sad farewells to say
+Glides with smiling face away,
+
+Of the sweetness and the zest
+Of thy happy life possessed
+Thou hast left us at thy best.
+
+Warm of heart and clear of brain,
+Of thy sun-bright spirit's wane
+Thou hast spared us all the pain.
+
+Now that thou hast gone away,
+What is left of one to say
+Who was open as the day?
+
+What is there to gloss or shun?
+Save with kindly voices none
+Speak thy name beneath the sun.
+
+Safe thou art on every side,
+Friendship nothing finds to hide,
+Love's demand is satisfied.
+
+Over manly strength and worth,
+At thy desk of toil, or hearth,
+Played the lambent light of mirth,--
+
+Mirth that lit, but never burned;
+All thy blame to pity turned;
+Hatred thou hadst never learned.
+
+Every harsh and vexing thing
+At thy home-fire lost its sting;
+Where thou wast was always spring.
+
+And thy perfect trust in good,
+Faith in man and womanhood,
+Chance and change and time, withstood.
+
+Small respect for cant and whine,
+Bigot's zeal and hate malign,
+Had that sunny soul of thine.
+
+But to thee was duty's claim
+Sacred, and thy lips became
+Reverent with one holy Name.
+
+Therefore, on thy unknown way,
+Go in God's peace! We who stay
+But a little while delay.
+
+Keep for us, O friend, where'er
+Thou art waiting, all that here
+Made thy earthly presence dear;
+
+Something of thy pleasant past
+On a ground of wonder cast,
+In the stiller waters glassed!
+
+Keep the human heart of thee;
+Let the mortal only be
+Clothed in immortality.
+
+And when fall our feet as fell
+Thine upon the asphodel,
+Let thy old smile greet us well;
+
+Proving in a world of bliss
+What we fondly dream in this,--
+Love is one with holiness!
+1881.
+
+
+
+WILSON
+
+     Read at the Massachusetts Club on the seventieth anniversary the
+     birthday of Vice-President Wilson, February 16, 1882.
+
+The lowliest born of all the land,
+He wrung from Fate's reluctant hand
+The gifts which happier boyhood claims;
+And, tasting on a thankless soil
+The bitter bread of unpaid toil,
+He fed his soul with noble aims.
+
+And Nature, kindly provident,
+To him the future's promise lent;
+The powers that shape man's destinies,
+Patience and faith and toil, he knew,
+The close horizon round him grew,
+Broad with great possibilities.
+
+By the low hearth-fire's fitful blaze
+He read of old heroic days,
+The sage's thought, the patriot's speech;
+Unhelped, alone, himself he taught,
+His school the craft at which he wrought,
+His lore the book within his, reach.
+
+He felt his country's need; he knew
+The work her children had to do;
+And when, at last, he heard the call
+In her behalf to serve and dare,
+Beside his senatorial chair
+He stood the unquestioned peer of all.
+
+Beyond the accident of birth
+He proved his simple manhood's worth;
+Ancestral pride and classic grace
+Confessed the large-brained artisan,
+So clear of sight, so wise in plan
+And counsel, equal to his place.
+
+With glance intuitive he saw
+Through all disguise of form and law,
+And read men like an open book;
+Fearless and firm, he never quailed
+Nor turned aside for threats, nor failed
+To do the thing he undertook.
+
+How wise, how brave, he was, how well
+He bore himself, let history tell
+While waves our flag o'er land and sea,
+No black thread in its warp or weft;
+He found dissevered States, he left
+A grateful Nation, strong and free!
+
+
+
+THE POET AND THE CHILDREN.
+
+LONGFELLOW.
+
+WITH a glory of winter sunshine
+Over his locks of gray,
+In the old historic mansion
+He sat on his last birthday;
+
+With his books and his pleasant pictures,
+And his household and his kin,
+While a sound as of myriads singing
+From far and near stole in.
+
+It came from his own fair city,
+From the prairie's boundless plain,
+From the Golden Gate of sunset,
+And the cedarn woods of Maine.
+
+And his heart grew warm within him,
+And his moistening eyes grew dim,
+For he knew that his country's children
+Were singing the songs of him,
+
+The lays of his life's glad morning,
+The psalms of his evening time,
+Whose echoes shall float forever
+On the winds of every clime.
+
+All their beautiful consolations,
+Sent forth like birds of cheer,
+Came flocking back to his windows,
+And sang in the Poet's ear.
+
+Grateful, but solemn and tender,
+The music rose and fell
+With a joy akin to sadness
+And a greeting like farewell.
+
+With a sense of awe he listened
+To the voices sweet and young;
+The last of earth and the first of heaven
+Seemed in the songs they sung.
+
+And waiting a little longer
+For the wonderful change to come,
+He heard the Summoning Angel,
+Who calls God's children home!
+
+And to him in a holier welcome
+Was the mystical meaning given
+Of the words of the blessed Master
+"Of such is the kingdom of heaven!"
+1882
+
+
+
+A WELCOME TO LOWELL
+
+Take our hands, James Russell Lowell,
+Our hearts are all thy own;
+To-day we bid thee welcome
+Not for ourselves alone.
+
+In the long years of thy absence
+Some of us have grown old,
+And some have passed the portals
+Of the Mystery untold;
+
+For the hands that cannot clasp thee,
+For the voices that are dumb,
+For each and all I bid thee
+A grateful welcome home!
+
+For Cedarcroft's sweet singer
+To the nine-fold Muses dear;
+For the Seer the winding Concord
+Paused by his door to hear;
+
+For him, our guide and Nestor,
+Who the march of song began,
+The white locks of his ninety years
+Bared to thy winds, Cape Ann!
+
+For him who, to the music
+Her pines and hemlocks played,
+Set the old and tender story
+Of the lorn Acadian maid;
+
+For him, whose voice for freedom
+Swayed friend and foe at will,
+Hushed is the tongue of silver,
+The golden lips are still!
+
+For her whose life of duty
+At scoff and menace smiled,
+Brave as the wife of Roland,
+Yet gentle as a Child.
+
+And for him the three-hilled city
+Shall hold in memory long,
+Those name is the hint and token
+Of the pleasant Fields of Song!
+
+For the old friends unforgotten,
+For the young thou hast not known,
+I speak their heart-warm greeting;
+Come back and take thy own!
+
+From England's royal farewells,
+And honors fitly paid,
+Come back, dear Russell Lowell,
+To Elmwood's waiting shade!
+
+Come home with all the garlands
+That crown of right thy head.
+I speak for comrades living,
+I speak for comrades dead!
+AMESBURY, 6th mo., 1885.
+
+
+
+AN ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL.
+
+GEORGE FULLER
+
+Haunted of Beauty, like the marvellous youth
+Who sang Saint Agnes' Eve! How passing fair
+Her shapes took color in thy homestead air!
+How on thy canvas even her dreams were truth!
+Magician! who from commonest elements
+Called up divine ideals, clothed upon
+By mystic lights soft blending into one
+Womanly grace and child-like innocence.
+Teacher I thy lesson was not given in vain.
+Beauty is goodness; ugliness is sin;
+Art's place is sacred: nothing foul therein
+May crawl or tread with bestial feet profane.
+If rightly choosing is the painter's test,
+Thy choice, O master, ever was the best.
+1885.
+
+
+
+MULFORD.
+
+Author of The Nation and The Republic of God.
+
+Unnoted as the setting of a star
+He passed; and sect and party scarcely knew
+When from their midst a sage and seer withdrew
+To fitter audience, where the great dead are
+In God's republic of the heart and mind,
+Leaving no purer, nobler soul behind.
+1886.
+
+
+
+TO A CAPE ANN SCHOONER
+
+Luck to the craft that bears this name of mine,
+Good fortune follow with her golden spoon
+The glazed hat and tarry pantaloon;
+And wheresoe'er her keel shall cut the brine,
+Cod, hake and haddock quarrel for her line.
+Shipped with her crew, whatever wind may blow,
+Or tides delay, my wish with her shall go,
+Fishing by proxy. Would that it might show
+At need her course, in lack of sun and star,
+Where icebergs threaten, and the sharp reefs are;
+Lift the blind fog on Anticosti's lee
+And Avalon's rock; make populous the sea
+Round Grand Manan with eager finny swarms,
+Break the long calms, and charm away the storms.
+OAK KNOLL, 23 3rd mo., 1886.
+
+
+
+SAMUEL J. TILDEN.
+
+GREYSTONE, AUG. 4, 1886.
+
+Once more, O all-adjusting Death!
+The nation's Pantheon opens wide;
+Once more a common sorrow saith
+A strong, wise man has died.
+
+Faults doubtless had he. Had we not
+Our own, to question and asperse
+The worth we doubted or forgot
+Until beside his hearse?
+
+Ambitious, cautious, yet the man
+To strike down fraud with resolute hand;
+A patriot, if a partisan,
+He loved his native land.
+
+So let the mourning bells be rung,
+The banner droop its folds half way,
+And while the public pen and tongue
+Their fitting tribute pay,
+
+Shall we not vow above his bier
+To set our feet on party lies,
+And wound no more a living ear
+With words that Death denies?
+1886
+
+
+
+
+
+                             OCCASIONAL POEMS
+
+EVA
+
+     Suggested by Mrs. Stowe's tale of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and written
+     when the characters in the tale were realities by the fireside of
+     countless American homes.
+
+Dry the tears for holy Eva,
+With the blessed angels leave her;
+Of the form so soft and fair
+Give to earth the tender care.
+
+For the golden locks of Eva
+Let the sunny south-land give her
+Flowery pillow of repose,
+Orange-bloom and budding rose.
+
+In the better home of Eva
+Let the shining ones receive her,
+With the welcome-voiced psalm,
+Harp of gold and waving palm,
+
+All is light and peace with Eva;
+There the darkness cometh never;
+Tears are wiped, and fetters fall.
+And the Lord is all in all.
+
+Weep no more for happy Eva,
+Wrong and sin no more shall grieve her;
+Care and pain and weariness
+Lost in love so measureless.
+
+Gentle Eva, loving Eva,
+Child confessor, true believer,
+Listener at the Master's knee,
+"Suffer such to come to me."
+
+Oh, for faith like thine, sweet Eva,
+Lighting all the solemn river,
+And the blessings of the poor
+Wafting to the heavenly shore!
+1852
+
+
+
+A LAY OF OLD TIME.
+
+     Written for the Essex County Agricultural Fair, and sung at the
+     banquet at Newburyport, October 2, 1856.
+
+One morning of the first sad Fall,
+Poor Adam and his bride
+Sat in the shade of Eden's wall--
+But on the outer side.
+
+She, blushing in her fig-leaf suit
+For the chaste garb of old;
+He, sighing o'er his bitter fruit
+For Eden's drupes of gold.
+
+Behind them, smiling in the morn,
+Their forfeit garden lay,
+Before them, wild with rock and thorn,
+The desert stretched away.
+
+They heard the air above them fanned,
+A light step on the sward,
+And lo! they saw before them stand
+The angel of the Lord!
+
+"Arise," he said, "why look behind,
+When hope is all before,
+And patient hand and willing mind,
+Your loss may yet restore?
+
+"I leave with you a spell whose power
+Can make the desert glad,
+And call around you fruit and flower
+As fair as Eden had.
+
+"I clothe your hands with power to lift
+The curse from off your soil;
+Your very doom shall seem a gift,
+Your loss a gain through Toil.
+
+"Go, cheerful as yon humming-bees,
+To labor as to play."
+White glimmering over Eden's trees
+The angel passed away.
+
+The pilgrims of the world went forth
+Obedient to the word,
+And found where'er they tilled the earth
+A garden of the Lord!
+
+The thorn-tree cast its evil fruit
+And blushed with plum and pear,
+And seeded grass and trodden root
+Grew sweet beneath their care.
+
+We share our primal parents' fate,
+And, in our turn and day,
+Look back on Eden's sworded gate
+As sad and lost as they.
+
+But still for us his native skies
+The pitying Angel leaves,
+And leads through Toil to Paradise
+New Adams and new Eves!
+
+
+
+A SONG OF HARVEST
+
+     For the Agricultural and Horticultural Exhibition at Amesbury and
+     Salisbury, September 28, 1858.
+
+This day, two hundred years ago,
+The wild grape by the river's side,
+And tasteless groundnut trailing low,
+The table of the woods supplied.
+
+Unknown the apple's red and gold,
+The blushing tint of peach and pear;
+The mirror of the Powow told
+No tale of orchards ripe and rare.
+
+Wild as the fruits he scorned to till,
+These vales the idle Indian trod;
+Nor knew the glad, creative skill,
+The joy of him who toils with God.
+
+O Painter of the fruits and flowers!
+We thank Thee for thy wise design
+Whereby these human hands of ours
+In Nature's garden work with Thine.
+
+And thanks that from our daily need
+The joy of simple faith is born;
+That he who smites the summer weed,
+May trust Thee for the autumn corn.
+
+Give fools their gold, and knaves their power;
+Let fortune's bubbles rise and fall;
+Who sows a field, or trains a flower,
+Or plants a tree, is more than all.
+
+For he who blesses most is blest;
+And God and man shall own his worth
+Who toils to leave as his bequest
+An added beauty to the earth.
+
+And, soon or late, to all that sow,
+The time of harvest shall be given;
+The flower shall bloom, the fruit shall grow,
+If not on earth, at last in heaven.
+
+
+
+KENOZA LAKE.
+
+     This beautiful lake in East Haverhill was the "Great Pond" the
+     writer's boyhood. In 1859 a movement was made for improving its
+     shores as a public park. At the opening of the park, August 31,
+     1859, the poem which gave it the name of Kenoza (in Indian language
+     signifying Pickerel) was read.
+
+As Adam did in Paradise,
+To-day the primal right we claim
+Fair mirror of the woods and skies,
+We give to thee a name.
+
+Lake of the pickerel!--let no more
+The echoes answer back, "Great Pond,"
+But sweet Kenoza, from thy shore
+And watching hills beyond,
+
+Let Indian ghosts, if such there be
+Who ply unseen their shadowy lines,
+Call back the ancient name to thee,
+As with the voice of pines.
+
+The shores we trod as barefoot boys,
+The nutted woods we wandered through,
+To friendship, love, and social joys
+We consecrate anew.
+
+Here shall the tender song be sung,
+And memory's dirges soft and low,
+And wit shall sparkle on the tongue,
+And mirth shall overflow,
+
+Harmless as summer lightning plays
+From a low, hidden cloud by night,
+A light to set the hills ablaze,
+But not a bolt to smite.
+
+In sunny South and prairied West
+Are exiled hearts remembering still,
+As bees their hive, as birds their nest,
+The homes of Haverhill.
+
+They join us in our rites to-day;
+And, listening, we may hear, erelong,
+From inland lake and ocean bay,
+The echoes of our song.
+
+Kenoza! o'er no sweeter lake
+Shall morning break or noon-cloud sail,--
+No fairer face than thine shall take
+The sunset's golden veil.
+
+Long be it ere the tide of trade
+Shall break with harsh-resounding din
+The quiet of thy banks of shade,
+And hills that fold thee in.
+
+Still let thy woodlands hide the hare,
+The shy loon sound his trumpet-note,
+Wing-weary from his fields of air,
+The wild-goose on thee float.
+
+Thy peace rebuke our feverish stir,
+Thy beauty our deforming strife;
+Thy woods and waters minister
+The healing of their life.
+
+And sinless Mirth, from care released,
+Behold, unawed, thy mirrored sky,
+Smiling as smiled on Cana's feast
+The Master's loving eye.
+
+And when the summer day grows dim,
+And light mists walk thy mimic sea,
+Revive in us the thought of Him
+Who walked on Galilee!
+
+
+
+FOR AN AUTUMN FESTIVAL
+
+The Persian's flowery gifts, the shrine
+Of fruitful Ceres, charm no more;
+The woven wreaths of oak and pine
+Are dust along the Isthmian shore.
+
+But beauty hath its homage still,
+And nature holds us still in debt;
+And woman's grace and household skill,
+And manhood's toil, are honored yet.
+
+And we, to-day, amidst our flowers
+And fruits, have come to own again
+The blessings of the summer hours,
+The early and the latter rain;
+
+To see our Father's hand once more
+Reverse for us the plenteous horn
+Of autumn, filled and running o'er
+With fruit, and flower, and golden corn!
+
+Once more the liberal year laughs out
+O'er richer stores than gems or gold;
+Once more with harvest-song and shout
+Is Nature's bloodless triumph told.
+
+Our common mother rests and sings,
+Like Ruth, among her garnered sheaves;
+Her lap is full of goodly things,
+Her brow is bright with autumn leaves.
+
+Oh, favors every year made new!
+Oh, gifts with rain and sunshine sent
+The bounty overruns our due,
+The fulness shames our discontent.
+
+We shut our eyes, the flowers bloom on;
+We murmur, but the corn-ears fill,
+We choose the shadow, but the sun
+That casts it shines behind us still.
+
+God gives us with our rugged soil
+The power to make it Eden-fair,
+And richer fruits to crown our toil
+Than summer-wedded islands bear.
+
+Who murmurs at his lot to-day?
+Who scorns his native fruit and bloom?
+Or sighs for dainties far away,
+Beside the bounteous board of home?
+
+Thank Heaven, instead, that Freedom's arm
+Can change a rocky soil to gold,--
+That brave and generous lives can warm
+A clime with northern ices cold.
+
+And let these altars, wreathed with flowers
+And piled with fruits, awake again
+Thanksgivings for the golden hours,
+The early and the latter rain!
+1859
+
+
+
+THE QUAKER ALUMNI.
+
+     Read at the Friends' School Anniversary, Providence, R. I.,
+     6th mo., 1860.
+
+From the well-springs of Hudson, the sea-cliffs of Maine,
+Grave men, sober matrons, you gather again;
+And, with hearts warmer grown as your heads grow more cool,
+Play over the old game of going to school.
+
+All your strifes and vexations, your whims and complaints,
+(You were not saints yourselves, if the children of saints!)
+All your petty self-seekings and rivalries done,
+Round the dear Alma Mater your hearts beat as one!
+
+How widely soe'er you have strayed from the fold,
+Though your "thee" has grown "you," and your drab blue and gold,
+To the old friendly speech and the garb's sober form,
+Like the heart of Argyle to the tartan, you warm.
+
+But, the first greetings over, you glance round the hall;
+Your hearts call the roll, but they answer not all
+Through the turf green above them the dead cannot hear;
+Name by name, in the silence, falls sad as a tear!
+
+In love, let us trust, they were summoned so soon
+rom the morning of life, while we toil through its noon;
+They were frail like ourselves, they had needs like our own,
+And they rest as we rest in God's mercy alone.
+
+Unchanged by our changes of spirit and frame,
+Past, now, and henceforward the Lord is the same;
+Though we sink in the darkness, His arms break our fall,
+And in death as in life, He is Father of all!
+
+We are older: our footsteps, so light in the play
+Of the far-away school-time, move slower to-day;--
+Here a beard touched with frost, there a bald, shining crown,
+And beneath the cap's border gray mingles with brown.
+
+But faith should be cheerful, and trust should be glad,
+And our follies and sins, not our years, make us sad.
+Should the heart closer shut as the bonnet grows prim,
+And the face grow in length as the hat grows in brim?
+
+Life is brief, duty grave; but, with rain-folded wings,
+Of yesterday's sunshine the grateful heart sings;
+And we, of all others, have reason to pay
+The tribute of thanks, and rejoice on our way;
+
+For the counsels that turned from the follies of youth;
+For the beauty of patience, the whiteness of truth;
+For the wounds of rebuke, when love tempered its edge;
+For the household's restraint, and the discipline's hedge;
+
+For the lessons of kindness vouchsafed to the least
+Of the creatures of God, whether human or beast,
+Bringing hope to the poor, lending strength to the frail,
+In the lanes of the city, the slave-hut, and jail;
+
+For a womanhood higher and holier, by all
+Her knowledge of good, than was Eve ere her fall,--
+Whose task-work of duty moves lightly as play,
+Serene as the moonlight and warm as the day;
+
+And, yet more, for the faith which embraces the whole,
+Of the creeds of the ages the life and the soul,
+Wherein letter and spirit the same channel run,
+And man has not severed what God has made one!
+
+For a sense of the Goodness revealed everywhere,
+As sunshine impartial, and free as the air;
+For a trust in humanity, Heathen or Jew,
+And a hope for all darkness the Light shineth through.
+
+Who scoffs at our birthright?--the words of the seers,
+And the songs of the bards in the twilight of years,
+All the foregleams of wisdom in santon and sage,
+In prophet and priest, are our true heritage.
+
+The Word which the reason of Plato discerned;
+The truth, as whose symbol the Mithra-fire burned;
+The soul of the world which the Stoic but guessed,
+In the Light Universal the Quaker confessed!
+
+No honors of war to our worthies belong;
+Their plain stem of life never flowered into song;
+But the fountains they opened still gush by the way,
+And the world for their healing is better to-day.
+
+He who lies where the minster's groined arches curve down
+To the tomb-crowded transept of England's renown,
+The glorious essayist, by genius enthroned,
+Whose pen as a sceptre the Muses all owned,--
+
+Who through the world's pantheon walked in his pride,
+Setting new statues up, thrusting old ones aside,
+And in fiction the pencils of history dipped,
+To gild o'er or blacken each saint in his crypt,--
+
+How vainly he labored to sully with blame
+The white bust of Penn, in the niche of his fame!
+Self-will is self-wounding, perversity blind
+On himself fell the stain for the Quaker designed!
+
+For the sake of his true-hearted father before him;
+For the sake of the dear Quaker mother that bore him;
+For the sake of his gifts, and the works that outlive him,
+And his brave words for freedom, we freely forgive him!
+
+There are those who take note that our numbers are small,--
+New Gibbons who write our decline and our fall;
+But the Lord of the seed-field takes care of His own,
+And the world shall yet reap what our sowers have sown.
+
+The last of the sect to his fathers may go,
+Leaving only his coat for some Barnum to show;
+But the truth will outlive him, and broaden with years,
+Till the false dies away, and the wrong disappears.
+
+Nothing fails of its end. Out of sight sinks the stone,
+In the deep sea of time, but the circles sweep on,
+Till the low-rippled murmurs along the shores run,
+And the dark and dead waters leap glad in the sun.
+
+Meanwhile shall we learn, in our ease, to forget
+To the martyrs of Truth and of Freedom our debt?--
+Hide their words out of sight, like the garb that they wore,
+And for Barclay's Apology offer one more?
+
+Shall we fawn round the priestcraft that glutted the shears,
+And festooned the stocks with our grandfathers' ears?
+Talk of Woolman's unsoundness? count Penn heterodox?
+And take Cotton Mather in place of George Fox?
+
+Make our preachers war-chaplains? quote Scripture to take
+The hunted slave back, for Onesimus' sake?
+Go to burning church-candles, and chanting in choir,
+And on the old meeting-house stick up a spire?
+
+No! the old paths we'll keep until better are shown,
+Credit good where we find it, abroad or our own;
+And while "Lo here" and "Lo there" the multitude call,
+Be true to ourselves, and do justice to all.
+
+The good round about us we need not refuse,
+Nor talk of our Zion as if we were Jews;
+But why shirk the badge which our fathers have worn,
+Or beg the world's pardon for having been born?
+
+We need not pray over the Pharisee's prayer,
+Nor claim that our wisdom is Benjamin's share;
+Truth to us and to others is equal and one
+Shall we bottle the free air, or hoard up the sun?
+
+Well know we our birthright may serve but to show
+How the meanest of weeds in the richest soil grow;
+But we need not disparage the good which we hold;
+Though the vessels be earthen, the treasure is gold!
+
+Enough and too much of the sect and the name.
+What matters our label, so truth be our aim?
+The creed may be wrong, but the life may be true,
+And hearts beat the same under drab coats or blue.
+
+So the man be a man, let him worship, at will,
+In Jerusalem's courts, or on Gerizim's hill.
+When she makes up her jewels, what cares yon good town
+For the Baptist of Wayland, the Quaker of Brown?
+
+And this green, favored island, so fresh and seablown,
+When she counts up the worthies her annals have known,
+Never waits for the pitiful gaugers of sect
+To measure her love, and mete out her respect.
+
+Three shades at this moment seem walking her strand,
+Each with head halo-crowned, and with palms in his hand,--
+Wise Berkeley, grave Hopkins, and, smiling serene
+On prelate and puritan, Channing is seen.
+
+One holy name bearing, no longer they need
+Credentials of party, and pass-words of creed
+The new song they sing hath a threefold accord,
+And they own one baptism, one faith, and one Lord!
+
+But the golden sands run out: occasions like these
+Glide swift into shadow, like sails on the seas
+While we sport with the mosses and pebbles ashore,
+They lessen and fade, and we see them no more.
+
+Forgive me, dear friends, if my vagrant thoughts seem
+Like a school-boy's who idles and plays with his theme.
+Forgive the light measure whose changes display
+The sunshine and rain of our brief April day.
+
+There are moments in life when the lip and the eye
+Try the question of whether to smile or to cry;
+And scenes and reunions that prompt like our own
+The tender in feeling, the playful in tone.
+
+I, who never sat down with the boys and the girls
+At the feet of your Slocums, and Cartlands, and Earles,--
+By courtesy only permitted to lay
+On your festival's altar my poor gift, to-day,--
+
+I would joy in your joy: let me have a friend's part
+In the warmth of your welcome of hand and of heart,--
+On your play-ground of boyhood unbend the brow's care,
+And shift the old burdens our shoulders must bear.
+
+Long live the good School! giving out year by year
+Recruits to true manhood and womanhood dear
+Brave boys, modest maidens, in beauty sent forth,
+The living epistles and proof of its worth!
+
+In and out let the young life as steadily flow
+As in broad Narragansett the tides come and go;
+And its sons and its daughters in prairie and town
+Remember its honor, and guard its renown.
+
+Not vainly the gift of its founder was made;
+Not prayerless the stones of its corner were laid
+The blessing of Him whom in secret they sought
+Has owned the good work which the fathers have wrought.
+
+To Him be the glory forever! We bear
+To the Lord of the Harvest our wheat with the tare.
+What we lack in our work may He find in our will,
+And winnow in mercy our good from the ill!
+
+
+
+OUR RIVER.
+
+FOR A SUMMER FESTIVAL AT "THE LAURELS" ON THE MERRIMAC.
+
+     Jean Pierre Brissot, the famous leader of the Girondist party in
+     the French Revolution, when a young man travelled extensively in
+     the United States. He visited the valley of the Merrimac, and
+     speaks in terms of admiration of the view from Moulton's hill
+     opposite Amesbury. The "Laurel Party" so called, as composed of
+     ladies and gentlemen in the lower valley of the Merrimac, and
+     invited friends and guests in other sections of the country. Its
+     thoroughly enjoyable annual festivals were held in the early summer
+     on the pine-shaded, laurel-blossomed slopes of the Newbury side of
+     the river opposite Pleasant Valley in Amesbury. The several poems
+     called out by these gatherings are here printed in sequence.
+
+Once more on yonder laurelled height
+The summer flowers have budded;
+Once more with summer's golden light
+The vales of home are flooded;
+And once more, by the grace of Him
+Of every good the Giver,
+We sing upon its wooded rim
+The praises of our river,
+
+Its pines above, its waves below,
+The west-wind down it blowing,
+As fair as when the young Brissot
+Beheld it seaward flowing,--
+And bore its memory o'er the deep,
+To soothe a martyr's sadness,
+And fresco, hi his troubled sleep,
+His prison-walls with gladness.
+
+We know the world is rich with streams
+Renowned in song and story,
+Whose music murmurs through our dreams
+Of human love and glory
+We know that Arno's banks are fair,
+And Rhine has castled shadows,
+And, poet-tuned, the Doon and Ayr
+Go singing down their meadows.
+
+But while, unpictured and unsung
+By painter or by poet,
+Our river waits the tuneful tongue
+And cunning hand to show it,--
+We only know the fond skies lean
+Above it, warm with blessing,
+And the sweet soul of our Undine
+Awakes to our caressing.
+
+No fickle sun-god holds the flocks
+That graze its shores in keeping;
+No icy kiss of Dian mocks
+The youth beside it sleeping
+Our Christian river loveth most
+The beautiful and human;
+The heathen streams of Naiads boast,
+But ours of man and woman.
+
+The miner in his cabin hears
+The ripple we are hearing;
+It whispers soft to homesick ears
+Around the settler's clearing
+In Sacramento's vales of corn,
+Or Santee's bloom of cotton,
+Our river by its valley-born
+Was never yet forgotten.
+
+The drum rolls loud, the bugle fills
+The summer air with clangor;
+The war-storm shakes the solid hills
+Beneath its tread of anger;
+Young eyes that last year smiled in ours
+Now point the rifle's barrel,
+And hands then stained with fruits and flowers
+Bear redder stains of quarrel.
+
+But blue skies smile, and flowers bloom on,
+And rivers still keep flowing,
+The dear God still his rain and sun
+On good and ill bestowing.
+His pine-trees whisper, "Trust and wait!"
+His flowers are prophesying
+That all we dread of change or fate
+His live is underlying.
+
+And thou, O Mountain-born!--no more
+We ask the wise Allotter
+Than for the firmness of thy shore,
+The calmness of thy water,
+The cheerful lights that overlay,
+Thy rugged slopes with beauty,
+To match our spirits to our day
+And make a joy of duty.
+1861.
+
+
+
+REVISITED.
+
+Read at "The Laurels," on the Merrimac, 6th month, 1865.
+
+The roll of drums and the bugle's wailing
+Vex the air of our vales-no more;
+The spear is beaten to hooks of pruning,
+The share is the sword the soldier wore!
+
+Sing soft, sing low, our lowland river,
+Under thy banks of laurel bloom;
+Softly and sweet, as the hour beseemeth,
+Sing us the songs of peace and home.
+
+Let all the tenderer voices of nature
+Temper the triumph and chasten mirth,
+Full of the infinite love and pity
+For fallen martyr and darkened hearth.
+
+But to Him who gives us beauty for ashes,
+And the oil of joy for mourning long,
+Let thy hills give thanks, and all thy waters
+Break into jubilant waves of song!
+
+Bring us the airs of hills and forests,
+The sweet aroma of birch and pine,
+Give us a waft of the north-wind laden
+With sweethrier odors and breath of kine!
+
+Bring us the purple of mountain sunsets,
+Shadows of clouds that rake the hills,
+The green repose of thy Plymouth meadows,
+The gleam and ripple of Campton rills.
+
+Lead us away in shadow and sunshine,
+Slaves of fancy, through all thy miles,
+The winding ways of Pemigewasset,
+And Winnipesaukee's hundred isles.
+
+Shatter in sunshine over thy ledges,
+Laugh in thy plunges from fall to fall;
+Play with thy fringes of elms, and darken
+Under the shade of the mountain wall.
+
+The cradle-song of thy hillside fountains
+Here in thy glory and strength repeat;
+Give us a taste of thy upland music,
+Show us the dance of thy silver feet.
+
+Into thy dutiful life of uses
+Pour the music and weave the flowers;
+With the song of birds and bloom of meadows
+Lighten and gladden thy heart and ours.
+
+Sing on! bring down, O lowland river,
+The joy of the hills to the waiting sea;
+The wealth of the vales, the pomp of mountains,
+The breath of the woodlands, bear with thee.
+
+Here, in the calm of thy seaward, valley,
+Mirth and labor shall hold their truce;
+Dance of water and mill of grinding,
+Both are beauty and both are use.
+
+Type of the Northland's strength and glory,
+Pride and hope of our home and race,--
+Freedom lending to rugged labor
+Tints of beauty and lines of grace.
+
+Once again, O beautiful river,
+Hear our greetings and take our thanks;
+Hither we come, as Eastern pilgrims
+Throng to the Jordan's sacred banks.
+
+For though by the Master's feet untrodden,
+Though never His word has stilled thy waves,
+Well for us may thy shores be holy,
+With Christian altars and saintly graves.
+
+And well may we own thy hint and token
+Of fairer valleys and streams than these,
+Where the rivers of God are full of water,
+And full of sap are His healing trees!
+
+
+
+"THE LAURELS"
+
+At the twentieth and last anniversary.
+
+FROM these wild rocks I look to-day
+O'er leagues of dancing waves, and see
+The far, low coast-line stretch away
+To where our river meets the sea.
+
+The light wind blowing off the land
+Is burdened with old voices; through
+Shut eyes I see how lip and hand
+The greeting of old days renew.
+
+O friends whose hearts still keep their prime,
+Whose bright example warms and cheers,
+Ye teach us how to smile at Time,
+And set to music all his years!
+
+I thank you for sweet summer days,
+For pleasant memories lingering long,
+For joyful meetings, fond delays,
+And ties of friendship woven strong.
+
+As for the last time, side by side,
+You tread the paths familiar grown,
+I reach across the severing tide,
+And blend my farewells with your own.
+
+Make room, O river of our home!
+For other feet in place of ours,
+And in the summers yet to come,
+Make glad another Feast of Flowers!
+
+Hold in thy mirror, calm and deep,
+The pleasant pictures thou hast seen;
+Forget thy lovers not, but keep
+Our memory like thy laurels green.
+ISLES of SHOALS, 7th mo., 1870.
+
+
+
+JUNE ON THE MERRIMAC.
+
+O dwellers in the stately towns,
+What come ye out to see?
+This common earth, this common sky,
+This water flowing free?
+
+As gayly as these kalmia flowers
+Your door-yard blossoms spring;
+As sweetly as these wild-wood birds
+Your caged minstrels sing.
+
+You find but common bloom and green,
+The rippling river's rune,
+The beauty which is everywhere
+Beneath the skies of June;
+
+The Hawkswood oaks, the storm-torn plumes
+Of old pine-forest kings,
+Beneath whose century-woven shade
+Deer Island's mistress sings.
+
+And here are pictured Artichoke,
+And Curson's bowery mill;
+And Pleasant Valley smiles between
+The river and the hill.
+
+You know full well these banks of bloom,
+The upland's wavy line,
+And how the sunshine tips with fire
+The needles of the pine.
+
+Yet, like some old remembered psalm,
+Or sweet, familiar face,
+Not less because of commonness
+You love the day and place.
+
+And not in vain in this soft air
+Shall hard-strung nerves relax,
+Not all in vain the o'erworn brain
+Forego its daily tax.
+
+The lust of power, the greed of gain
+Have all the year their own;
+The haunting demons well may let
+Our one bright day alone.
+
+Unheeded let the newsboy call,
+Aside the ledger lay
+The world will keep its treadmill step
+Though we fall out to-day.
+
+The truants of life's weary school,
+Without excuse from thrift
+We change for once the gains of toil
+For God's unpurchased gift.
+
+From ceiled rooms, from silent books,
+From crowded car and town,
+Dear Mother Earth, upon thy lap,
+We lay our tired heads down.
+
+Cool, summer wind, our heated brows;
+Blue river, through the green
+Of clustering pines, refresh the eyes
+Which all too much have seen.
+
+For us these pleasant woodland ways
+Are thronged with memories old,
+Have felt the grasp of friendly hands
+And heard love's story told.
+
+A sacred presence overbroods
+The earth whereon we meet;
+These winding forest-paths are trod
+By more than mortal feet.
+
+Old friends called from us by the voice
+Which they alone could hear,
+From mystery to mystery,
+From life to life, draw near.
+
+More closely for the sake of them
+Each other's hands we press;
+Our voices take from them a tone
+Of deeper tenderness.
+
+Our joy is theirs, their trust is ours,
+Alike below, above,
+Or here or there, about us fold
+The arms of one great love!
+
+We ask to-day no countersign,
+No party names we own;
+Unlabelled, individual,
+We bring ourselves alone.
+
+What cares the unconventioned wood
+For pass-words of the town?
+The sound of fashion's shibboleth
+The laughing waters drown.
+
+Here cant forgets his dreary tone,
+And care his face forlorn;
+The liberal air and sunshine laugh
+The bigot's zeal to scorn.
+
+From manhood's weary shoulder falls
+His load of selfish cares;
+And woman takes her rights as flowers
+And brooks and birds take theirs.
+
+The license of the happy woods,
+The brook's release are ours;
+The freedom of the unshamed wind
+Among the glad-eyed flowers.
+
+Yet here no evil thought finds place,
+Nor foot profane comes in;
+Our grove, like that of Samothrace,
+Is set apart from sin.
+
+We walk on holy ground; above
+A sky more holy smiles;
+The chant of the beatitudes
+Swells down these leafy aisles.
+
+Thanks to the gracious Providence
+That brings us here once more;
+For memories of the good behind
+And hopes of good before.
+
+And if, unknown to us, sweet days
+Of June like this must come,
+Unseen of us these laurels clothe
+The river-banks with bloom;
+
+And these green paths must soon be trod
+By other feet than ours,
+Full long may annual pilgrims come
+To keep the Feast of Flowers;
+
+The matron be a girl once more,
+The bearded man a boy,
+And we, in heaven's eternal June,
+Be glad for earthly joy!
+1876.
+
+
+
+HYMN
+
+FOR THE OPENING OF THOMAS STARR KING'S HOUSE OF WORSHIP, 1864.
+
+     The poetic and patriotic preacher, who had won fame in the East,
+     went to California in 1860 and became a power on the Pacific coast.
+     It was not long after the opening of the house of worship built for
+     him that he died.
+
+Amidst these glorious works of Thine,
+The solemn minarets of the pine,
+And awful Shasta's icy shrine,--
+
+Where swell Thy hymns from wave and gale,
+And organ-thunders never fail,
+Behind the cataract's silver veil,
+
+Our puny walls to Thee we raise,
+Our poor reed-music sounds Thy praise:
+Forgive, O Lord, our childish ways!
+
+For, kneeling on these altar-stairs,
+We urge Thee not with selfish prayers,
+Nor murmur at our daily cares.
+
+Before Thee, in an evil day,
+Our country's bleeding heart we lay,
+And dare not ask Thy hand to stay;
+
+But, through the war-cloud, pray to Thee
+For union, but a union free,
+With peace that comes of purity!
+
+That Thou wilt bare Thy arm to, save
+And, smiting through this Red Sea wave,
+Make broad a pathway for the slave!
+
+For us, confessing all our need,
+We trust nor rite nor word nor deed,
+Nor yet the broken staff of creed.
+
+Assured alone that Thou art good
+To each, as to the multitude,
+Eternal Love and Fatherhood,--
+
+Weak, sinful, blind, to Thee we kneel,
+Stretch dumbly forth our hands, and feel
+Our weakness is our strong appeal.
+
+So, by these Western gates of Even
+We wait to see with Thy forgiven
+The opening Golden Gate of Heaven!
+
+Suffice it now. In time to be
+Shall holier altars rise to Thee,--
+Thy Church our broad humanity
+
+White flowers of love its walls shall climb,
+Soft bells of peace shall ring its chime,
+Its days shall all be holy time.
+
+A sweeter song shall then be heard,--
+The music of the world's accord
+Confessing Christ, the Inward Word!
+
+That song shall swell from shore to shore,
+One hope, one faith, one love, restore
+The seamless robe that Jesus wore.
+
+
+
+HYMN
+
+FOR THE HOUSE OF WORSHIP AT GEORGETOWN,
+ERECTED IN MEMORY OF A MOTHER.
+
+     The giver of the house was the late George Peabody,
+     of London.
+
+Thou dwellest not, O Lord of all
+In temples which thy children raise;
+Our work to thine is mean and small,
+And brief to thy eternal days.
+
+Forgive the weakness and the pride,
+If marred thereby our gift may be,
+For love, at least, has sanctified
+The altar that we rear to thee.
+
+The heart and not the hand has wrought
+From sunken base to tower above
+The image of a tender thought,
+The memory of a deathless love!
+
+And though should never sound of speech
+Or organ echo from its wall,
+Its stones would pious lessons teach,
+Its shade in benedictions fall.
+
+Here should the dove of peace be found,
+And blessings and not curses given;
+Nor strife profane, nor hatred wound,
+The mingled loves of earth and heaven.
+
+Thou, who didst soothe with dying breath
+The dear one watching by Thy cross,
+Forgetful of the pains of death
+In sorrow for her mighty loss,
+
+In memory of that tender claim,
+O Mother-born, the offering take,
+And make it worthy of Thy name,
+And bless it for a mother's sake!
+1868.
+
+
+
+A SPIRITUAL MANIFESTATION.
+
+Read at the President's Levee, Brown University,
+29th 6th month, 1870.
+
+To-day the plant by Williams set
+Its summer bloom discloses;
+The wilding sweethrier of his prayers
+Is crowned with cultured roses.
+
+Once more the Island State repeats
+The lesson that he taught her,
+And binds his pearl of charity
+Upon her brown-locked daughter.
+
+Is 't fancy that he watches still
+His Providence plantations?
+That still the careful Founder takes
+A part on these occasions.
+
+Methinks I see that reverend form,
+Which all of us so well know
+He rises up to speak; he jogs
+The presidential elbow.
+
+"Good friends," he says, "you reap a field
+I sowed in self-denial,
+For toleration had its griefs
+And charity its trial.
+
+"Great grace, as saith Sir Thomas More,
+To him must needs be given
+Who heareth heresy and leaves
+The heretic to Heaven!
+
+"I hear again the snuffled tones,
+I see in dreary vision
+Dyspeptic dreamers, spiritual bores,
+And prophets with a mission.
+
+"Each zealot thrust before my eyes
+His Scripture-garbled label;
+All creeds were shouted in my ears
+As with the tongues of Babel.
+
+"Scourged at one cart-tail, each denied
+The hope of every other;
+Each martyr shook his branded fist
+At the conscience of his brother!
+
+"How cleft the dreary drone of man.
+The shriller pipe of woman,
+As Gorton led his saints elect,
+Who held all things in common!
+
+"Their gay robes trailed in ditch and swamp,
+And torn by thorn and thicket,
+The dancing-girls of Merry Mount
+Came dragging to my wicket.
+
+"Shrill Anabaptists, shorn of ears;
+Gray witch-wives, hobbling slowly;
+And Antinomians, free of law,
+Whose very sins were holy.
+
+"Hoarse ranters, crazed Fifth Monarchists,
+Of stripes and bondage braggarts,
+Pale Churchmen, with singed rubrics snatched
+From Puritanic fagots.
+
+"And last, not least, the Quakers came,
+With tongues still sore from burning,
+The Bay State's dust from off their feet
+Before my threshold spurning;
+
+"A motley host, the Lord's debris,
+Faith's odds and ends together;
+Well might I shrink from guests with lungs
+Tough as their breeches leather
+
+"If, when the hangman at their heels
+Came, rope in hand to catch them,
+I took the hunted outcasts in,
+I never sent to fetch them.
+
+"I fed, but spared them not a whit;
+I gave to all who walked in,
+Not clams and succotash alone,
+But stronger meat of doctrine.
+
+"I proved the prophets false, I pricked
+The bubble of perfection,
+And clapped upon their inner light
+The snuffers of election.
+
+"And looking backward on my times,
+This credit I am taking;
+I kept each sectary's dish apart,
+No spiritual chowder making.
+
+"Where now the blending signs of sect
+Would puzzle their assorter,
+The dry-shod Quaker kept the land,
+The Baptist held the water.
+
+"A common coat now serves for both,
+The hat's no more a fixture;
+And which was wet and which was dry,
+Who knows in such a mixture?
+
+"Well! He who fashioned Peter's dream
+To bless them all is able;
+And bird and beast and creeping thing
+Make clean upon His table!
+
+"I walked by my own light; but when
+The ways of faith divided,
+Was I to force unwilling feet
+To tread the path that I did?
+
+"I touched the garment-hem of truth,
+Yet saw not all its splendor;
+I knew enough of doubt to feel
+For every conscience tender.
+
+"God left men free of choice, as when
+His Eden-trees were planted;
+Because they chose amiss, should I
+Deny the gift He granted?
+
+"So, with a common sense of need,
+Our common weakness feeling,
+I left them with myself to God
+And His all-gracious dealing!
+
+"I kept His plan whose rain and sun
+To tare and wheat are given;
+And if the ways to hell were free,
+I left then free to heaven!"
+
+Take heart with us, O man of old,
+Soul-freedom's brave confessor,
+So love of God and man wax strong,
+Let sect and creed be lesser.
+
+The jarring discords of thy day
+In ours one hymn are swelling;
+The wandering feet, the severed paths,
+All seek our Father's dwelling.
+
+And slowly learns the world the truth
+That makes us all thy debtor,--
+That holy life is more than rite,
+And spirit more than letter;
+
+That they who differ pole-wide serve
+Perchance the common Master,
+And other sheep He hath than they
+Who graze one narrow pasture!
+
+For truth's worst foe is he who claims
+To act as God's avenger,
+And deems, beyond his sentry-beat,
+The crystal walls in danger!
+
+Who sets for heresy his traps
+Of verbal quirk and quibble,
+And weeds the garden of the Lord
+With Satan's borrowed dibble.
+
+To-day our hearts like organ keys
+One Master's touch are feeling;
+The branches of a common Vine
+Have only leaves of healing.
+
+Co-workers, yet from varied fields,
+We share this restful nooning;
+The Quaker with the Baptist here
+Believes in close communing.
+
+Forgive, dear saint, the playful tone,
+Too light for thy deserving;
+Thanks for thy generous faith in man,
+Thy trust in God unswerving.
+
+Still echo in the hearts of men
+The words that thou hast spoken;
+No forge of hell can weld again
+The fetters thou hast broken.
+
+The pilgrim needs a pass no more
+From Roman or Genevan;
+Thought-free, no ghostly tollman keeps
+Henceforth the road to Heaven!
+
+
+
+CHICAGO
+
+The great fire at Chicago was on 8-10 October, 1871.
+
+Men said at vespers: "All is well!"
+In one wild night the city fell;
+Fell shrines of prayer and marts of gain
+Before the fiery hurricane.
+
+On threescore spires had sunset shone,
+Where ghastly sunrise looked on none.
+Men clasped each other's hands, and said
+"The City of the West is dead!"
+
+Brave hearts who fought, in slow retreat,
+The fiends of fire from street to street,
+Turned, powerless, to the blinding glare,
+The dumb defiance of despair.
+
+A sudden impulse thrilled each wire
+That signalled round that sea of fire;
+Swift words of cheer, warm heart-throbs came;
+In tears of pity died the flame!
+
+From East, from West, from South and North,
+The messages of hope shot forth,
+And, underneath the severing wave,
+The world, full-handed, reached to save.
+
+Fair seemed the old; but fairer still
+The new, the dreary void shall fill
+With dearer homes than those o'erthrown,
+For love shall lay each corner-stone.
+
+Rise, stricken city! from thee throw
+The ashen sackcloth of thy woe;
+And build, as to Amphion's strain,
+To songs of cheer thy walls again!
+
+How shrivelled in thy hot distress
+The primal sin of selfishness!
+How instant rose, to take thy part,
+The angel in the human heart!
+
+Ah! not in vain the flames that tossed
+Above thy dreadful holocaust;
+The Christ again has preached through thee
+The Gospel of Humanity!
+
+Then lift once more thy towers on high,
+And fret with spires the western sky,
+To tell that God is yet with us,
+And love is still miraculous!
+1871.
+
+
+
+KINSMAN.
+
+     Died at the Island of Panay (Philippine group),
+     aged nineteen years.
+
+Where ceaseless Spring her garland twines,
+As sweetly shall the loved one rest,
+As if beneath the whispering pines
+And maple shadows of the West.
+
+Ye mourn, O hearts of home! for him,
+But, haply, mourn ye not alone;
+For him shall far-off eyes be dim,
+And pity speak in tongues unknown.
+
+There needs no graven line to give
+The story of his blameless youth;
+All hearts shall throb intuitive,
+And nature guess the simple truth.
+
+The very meaning of his name
+Shall many a tender tribute win;
+The stranger own his sacred claim,
+And all the world shall be his kin.
+
+And there, as here, on main and isle,
+The dews of holy peace shall fall,
+The same sweet heavens above him smile,
+And God's dear love be over all
+1874.
+
+
+
+THE GOLDEN WEDDING OF LONGWOOD.
+
+     Longwood, not far from Bayard Taylor's birthplace in Kennett
+
+     Square, Pennsylvania, was the home of my esteemed friends John
+     and Hannah Cox, whose golden wedding was celebrated in 1874.
+
+With fifty years between you and your well-kept wedding vow,
+The Golden Age, old friends of mine, is not a fable now.
+
+And, sweet as has life's vintage been through all your pleasant past,
+Still, as at Cana's marriage-feast, the best wine is the last!
+
+Again before me, with your names, fair Chester's landscape comes,
+Its meadows, woods, and ample barns, and quaint, stone-builded homes.
+
+The smooth-shorn vales, the wheaten slopes, the boscage green and soft,
+Of which their poet sings so well from towered Cedarcroft.
+
+And lo! from all the country-side come neighbors, kith and kin;
+From city, hamlet, farm-house old, the wedding guests come in.
+
+And they who, without scrip or purse, mob-hunted, travel-worn,
+In Freedom's age of martyrs came, as victors now return.
+
+Older and slower, yet the same, files in the long array,
+And hearts are light and eyes are glad, though heads are badger-gray.
+
+The fire-tried men of Thirty-eight who saw with me the fall,
+Midst roaring flames and shouting mob, of Pennsylvania Hall;
+
+And they of Lancaster who turned the cheeks of tyrants pale,
+Singing of freedom through the grates of Moyamensing jail!
+
+And haply with them, all unseen, old comrades, gone before,
+Pass, silently as shadows pass, within your open door,--
+
+The eagle face of Lindley Coates, brave Garrett's daring zeal,
+Christian grace of Pennock, the steadfast heart of Neal.
+
+Ah me! beyond all power to name, the worthies tried and true,
+Grave men, fair women, youth and maid, pass by in hushed review.
+
+Of varying faiths, a common cause fused all their hearts in one.
+God give them now, whate'er their names, the peace of duty done!
+
+How gladly would I tread again the old-remembered places,
+Sit down beside your hearth once more and look in the dear old faces!
+
+And thank you for the lessons your fifty years are teaching,
+For honest lives that louder speak than half our noisy preaching;
+
+For your steady faith and courage in that dark and evil time,
+When the Golden Rule was treason, and to feed the hungry, crime;
+
+For the poor slave's house of refuge when the hounds were on his track,
+And saint and sinner, church and state, joined hands to send him back.
+
+Blessings upon you!--What you did for each sad, suffering one,
+So homeless, faint, and naked, unto our Lord was done!
+
+Fair fall on Kennett's pleasant vales and Longwood's bowery ways
+The mellow sunset of your lives, friends of my early days.
+
+May many more of quiet years be added to your sum,
+And, late at last, in tenderest love, the beckoning angel come.
+
+Dear hearts are here, dear hearts are there, alike below, above;
+Our friends are now in either world, and love is sure of love.
+1874.
+
+
+
+HYMN
+
+FOR THE OPENING OF PLYMOUTH CHURCH, ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA.
+
+All things are Thine: no gift have we,
+Lord of all gifts, to offer Thee;
+And hence with grateful hearts to-day,
+Thy own before Thy feet we lay.
+
+Thy will was in the builders' thought;
+Thy hand unseen amidst us wrought;
+Through mortal motive, scheme and plan,
+Thy wise eternal purpose ran.
+
+No lack Thy perfect fulness knew;
+For human needs and longings grew
+This house of prayer, this home of rest,
+In the fair garden of the West.
+
+In weakness and in want we call
+On Thee for whom the heavens are small;
+Thy glory is Thy children's good,
+Thy joy Thy tender Fatherhood.
+
+O Father! deign these walls to bless,
+Fill with Thy love their emptiness,
+And let their door a gateway be
+To lead us from ourselves to Thee!
+1872.
+
+
+
+LEXINGTON
+
+1775.
+
+No Berserk thirst of blood had they,
+No battle-joy was theirs, who set
+Against the alien bayonet
+Their homespun breasts in that old day.
+
+Their feet had trodden peaceful, ways;
+They loved not strife, they dreaded pain;
+They saw not, what to us is plain,
+That God would make man's wrath his praise.
+
+No seers were they, but simple men;
+Its vast results the future hid
+The meaning of the work they did
+Was strange and dark and doubtful then.
+
+Swift as their summons came they left
+The plough mid-furrow standing still,
+The half-ground corn grist in the mill,
+The spade in earth, the axe in cleft.
+
+They went where duty seemed to call,
+They scarcely asked the reason why;
+They only knew they could but die,
+And death was not the worst of all!
+
+Of man for man the sacrifice,
+All that was theirs to give, they gave.
+The flowers that blossomed from their grave
+Have sown themselves beneath all skies.
+
+Their death-shot shook the feudal tower,
+And shattered slavery's chain as well;
+On the sky's dome, as on a bell,
+Its echo struck the world's great hour.
+
+That fateful echo is not dumb
+The nations listening to its sound
+Wait, from a century's vantage-ground,
+The holier triumphs yet to come,--
+
+The bridal time of Law and Love,
+The gladness of the world's release,
+When, war-sick, at the feet of Peace
+The hawk shall nestle with the dove!--
+
+The golden age of brotherhood
+Unknown to other rivalries
+Than of the mild humanities,
+And gracious interchange of good,
+
+When closer strand shall lean to strand,
+Till meet, beneath saluting flags,
+The eagle of our mountain-crags,
+The lion of our Motherland!
+1875.
+
+
+
+THE LIBRARY.
+
+Sung at the opening of the Haverhill Library, November 11, 1875.
+
+"Let there be light!" God spake of old,
+And over chaos dark and cold,
+And through the dead and formless frame
+Of nature, life and order came.
+
+Faint was the light at first that shone
+On giant fern and mastodon,
+On half-formed plant and beast of prey,
+And man as rude and wild as they.
+
+Age after age, like waves, o'erran
+The earth, uplifting brute and man;
+And mind, at length, in symbols dark
+Its meanings traced on stone and bark.
+
+On leaf of palm, on sedge-wrought roll,
+On plastic clay and leathern scroll,
+Man wrote his thoughts; the ages passed,
+And to! the Press was found at last!
+
+Then dead souls woke; the thoughts of men
+Whose bones were dust revived again;
+The cloister's silence found a tongue,
+Old prophets spake, old poets sung.
+
+And here, to-day, the dead look down,
+The kings of mind again we crown;
+We hear the voices lost so long,
+The sage's word, the sibyl's song.
+
+Here Greek and Roman find themselves
+Alive along these crowded shelves;
+And Shakespeare treads again his stage,
+And Chaucer paints anew his age.
+
+As if some Pantheon's marbles broke
+Their stony trance, and lived and spoke,
+Life thrills along the alcoved hall,
+The lords of thought await our call!
+
+
+
+"I WAS A STRANGER, AND YE TOOK ME IN."
+
+An incident in St. Augustine, Florida.
+
+'Neath skies that winter never knew
+The air was full of light and balm,
+And warm and soft the Gulf wind blew
+Through orange bloom and groves of palm.
+
+A stranger from the frozen North,
+Who sought the fount of health in vain,
+Sank homeless on the alien earth,
+And breathed the languid air with pain.
+
+God's angel came! The tender shade
+Of pity made her blue eye dim;
+Against her woman's breast she laid
+The drooping, fainting head of him.
+
+She bore him to a pleasant room,
+Flower-sweet and cool with salt sea air,
+And watched beside his bed, for whom
+His far-off sisters might not care.
+
+She fanned his feverish brow and smoothed
+Its lines of pain with tenderest touch.
+With holy hymn and prayer she soothed
+The trembling soul that feared so much.
+
+Through her the peace that passeth sight
+Came to him, as he lapsed away
+As one whose troubled dreams of night
+Slide slowly into tranquil day.
+
+The sweetness of the Land of Flowers
+Upon his lonely grave she laid
+The jasmine dropped its golden showers,
+The orange lent its bloom and shade.
+
+And something whispered in her thought,
+More sweet than mortal voices be
+"The service thou for him hast wrought
+O daughter! hath been done for me."
+1875.
+
+
+
+CENTENNIAL HYMN.
+
+     Written for the opening of the International Exhibition,
+     Philadelphia, May 10, 1876. The music for the hymn was written by
+     John K. Paine, and may be found in The Atlantic Monthly for
+     June, 1876.
+
+I.
+Our fathers' God! from out whose hand
+The centuries fall like grains of sand,
+We meet to-day, united, free,
+And loyal to our land and Thee,
+To thank Thee for the era done,
+And trust Thee for the opening one.
+
+II.
+Here, where of old, by Thy design,
+The fathers spake that word of Thine
+Whose echo is the glad refrain
+Of rended bolt and falling chain,
+To grace our festal time, from all
+The zones of earth our guests we call.
+
+III.
+Be with us while the New World greets
+The Old World thronging all its streets,
+Unveiling all the triumphs won
+By art or toil beneath the sun;
+And unto common good ordain
+This rivalship of hand and brain.
+
+IV.
+Thou, who hast here in concord furled
+The war flags of a gathered world,
+Beneath our Western skies fulfil
+The Orient's mission of good-will,
+And, freighted with love's Golden Fleece,
+Send back its Argonauts of peace.
+
+V.
+For art and labor met in truce,
+For beauty made the bride of use,
+We thank Thee; but, withal, we crave
+The austere virtues strong to save,
+The honor proof to place or gold,
+The manhood never bought nor sold.
+
+VI.
+Oh make Thou us, through centuries long,
+In peace secure, in justice strong;
+Around our gift of freedom draw
+The safeguards of Thy righteous law
+And, cast in some diviner mould,
+Let the new cycle shame the old!
+
+
+
+AT SCHOOL-CLOSE.
+
+BOWDOIN STREET, BOSTON, 1877.
+
+The end has come, as come it must
+To all things; in these sweet June days
+The teacher and the scholar trust
+Their parting feet to separate ways.
+
+They part: but in the years to be
+Shall pleasant memories cling to each,
+As shells bear inland from the sea
+The murmur of the rhythmic beach.
+
+One knew the joy the sculptor knows
+When, plastic to his lightest touch,
+His clay-wrought model slowly grows
+To that fine grace desired so much.
+
+So daily grew before her eyes
+The living shapes whereon she wrought,
+Strong, tender, innocently wise,
+The child's heart with the woman's thought.
+
+And one shall never quite forget
+The voice that called from dream and play,
+The firm but kindly hand that set
+Her feet in learning's pleasant way,--
+
+The joy of Undine soul-possessed,
+The wakening sense, the strange delight
+That swelled the fabled statue's breast
+And filled its clouded eyes with sight.
+
+O Youth and Beauty, loved of all!
+Ye pass from girlhood's gate of dreams;
+In broader ways your footsteps fall,
+Ye test the truth of all that seams.
+
+Her little realm the teacher leaves,
+She breaks her wand of power apart,
+While, for your love and trust, she gives
+The warm thanks of a grateful heart.
+
+Hers is the sober summer noon
+Contrasted with your morn of spring,
+The waning with the waxing moon,
+The folded with the outspread wing.
+
+Across the distance of the years
+She sends her God-speed back to you;
+She has no thought of doubts or fears
+Be but yourselves, be pure, be true,
+
+And prompt in duty; heed the deep,
+Low voice of conscience; through the ill
+And discord round about you, keep
+Your faith in human nature still.
+
+Be gentle: unto griefs and needs,
+Be pitiful as woman should,
+And, spite of all the lies of creeds,
+Hold fast the truth that God is good.
+
+Give and receive; go forth and bless
+The world that needs the hand and heart
+Of Martha's helpful carefulness
+No less than Mary's better part.
+
+So shall the stream of time flow by
+And leave each year a richer good,
+And matron loveliness outvie
+The nameless charm of maidenhood.
+
+And, when the world shall link your names
+With gracious lives and manners fine,
+The teacher shall assert her claims,
+And proudly whisper, "These were mine!"
+
+
+
+HYMN OF THE CHILDREN.
+
+Sung at the anniversary of the Children's Mission, Boston, 1878.
+
+Thine are all the gifts, O God!
+Thine the broken bread;
+Let the naked feet be shod,
+And the starving fed.
+
+Let Thy children, by Thy grace,
+Give as they abound,
+Till the poor have breathing-space,
+And the lost are found.
+
+Wiser than the miser's hoards
+Is the giver's choice;
+Sweeter than the song of birds
+Is the thankful voice.
+
+Welcome smiles on faces sad
+As the flowers of spring;
+Let the tender hearts be glad
+With the joy they bring.
+
+Happier for their pity's sake
+Make their sports and plays,
+And from lips of childhood take
+Thy perfected praise!
+
+
+
+THE LANDMARKS.
+
+     This poem was read at a meeting of citizens of Boston having for
+     its object the preservation of the Old South Church famous in
+     Colonial and Revolutionary history.
+
+I.
+THROUGH the streets of Marblehead
+Fast the red-winged terror sped;
+
+Blasting, withering, on it came,
+With its hundred tongues of flame,
+
+Where St. Michael's on its way
+Stood like chained Andromeda,
+
+Waiting on the rock, like her,
+Swift doom or deliverer!
+
+Church that, after sea-moss grew
+Over walls no longer new,
+
+Counted generations five,
+Four entombed and one alive;
+
+Heard the martial thousand tread
+Battleward from Marblehead;
+
+Saw within the rock-walled bay
+Treville's liked pennons play,
+
+And the fisher's dory met
+By the barge of Lafayette,
+
+Telling good news in advance
+Of the coming fleet of France!
+
+Church to reverend memories, dear,
+Quaint in desk and chandelier;
+
+Bell, whose century-rusted tongue
+Burials tolled and bridals rung;
+
+Loft, whose tiny organ kept
+Keys that Snetzler's hand had swept;
+
+Altar, o'er whose tablet old
+Sinai's law its thunders rolled!
+
+Suddenly the sharp cry came
+"Look! St. Michael's is aflame!"
+
+Round the low tower wall the fire
+Snake-like wound its coil of ire.
+
+Sacred in its gray respect
+From the jealousies of sect,
+
+"Save it," seemed the thought of all,
+"Save it, though our roof-trees fall!"
+
+Up the tower the young men sprung;
+One, the bravest, outward swung
+
+By the rope, whose kindling strands
+Smoked beneath the holder's hands,
+
+Smiting down with strokes of power
+Burning fragments from the tower.
+
+Then the gazing crowd beneath
+Broke the painful pause of breath;
+
+Brave men cheered from street to street,
+With home's ashes at their feet;
+
+Houseless women kerchiefs waved:
+"Thank the Lord! St. Michael's saved!"
+
+II.
+In the heart of Boston town
+Stands the church of old renown,
+
+From whose walls the impulse went
+Which set free a continent;
+
+From whose pulpit's oracle
+Prophecies of freedom fell;
+
+And whose steeple-rocking din
+Rang the nation's birth-day in!
+
+Standing at this very hour
+Perilled like St. Michael's tower,
+
+Held not in the clasp of flame,
+But by mammon's grasping claim.
+
+Shall it be of Boston said
+She is shamed by Marblehead?
+
+City of our pride! as there,
+Hast thou none to do and dare?
+
+Life was risked for Michael's shrine;
+Shall not wealth be staked for thine?
+
+Woe to thee, when men shall search
+Vainly for the Old South Church;
+
+When from Neck to Boston Stone,
+All thy pride of place is gone;
+
+When from Bay and railroad car,
+Stretched before them wide and far,
+
+Men shall only see a great
+Wilderness of brick and slate,
+
+Every holy spot o'erlaid
+By the commonplace of trade!
+
+City of our love': to thee
+Duty is but destiny.
+
+True to all thy record saith,
+Keep with thy traditions faith;
+
+Ere occasion's overpast,
+Hold its flowing forelock fast;
+
+Honor still the precedents
+Of a grand munificence;
+
+In thy old historic way
+Give, as thou didst yesterday
+
+At the South-land's call, or on
+Need's demand from fired St. John.
+
+Set thy Church's muffled bell
+Free the generous deed to tell.
+
+Let thy loyal hearts rejoice
+In the glad, sonorous voice,
+
+Ringing from the brazen mouth
+Of the bell of the Old South,--
+
+Ringing clearly, with a will,
+"What she was is Boston still!"
+1879
+
+
+GARDEN
+
+The American Horticultural Society, 1882.
+
+O painter of the fruits and flowers,
+We own wise design,
+Where these human hands of ours
+May share work of Thine!
+
+Apart from Thee we plant in vain
+The root and sow the seed;
+Thy early and Thy later rain,
+Thy sun and dew we need.
+
+Our toil is sweet with thankfulness,
+Our burden is our boon;
+The curse of Earth's gray morning is
+The blessing of its noon.
+
+Why search the wide world everywhere
+For Eden's unknown ground?
+That garden of the primal pair
+May nevermore be found.
+
+But, blest by Thee, our patient toil
+May right the ancient wrong,
+And give to every clime and soil
+The beauty lost so long.
+
+Our homestead flowers and fruited trees
+May Eden's orchard shame;
+We taste the tempting sweets of these
+Like Eve, without her blame.
+
+And, North and South and East and West,
+The pride of every zone,
+The fairest, rarest, and the best
+May all be made our own.
+
+Its earliest shrines the young world sought
+In hill-groves and in bowers,
+The fittest offerings thither brought
+Were Thy own fruits and flowers.
+
+And still with reverent hands we cull
+Thy gifts each year renewed;
+The good is always beautiful,
+The beautiful is good.
+
+
+
+A GREETING
+
+     Read at Harriet Beecher Stowe's seventieth anniversary, June 14,
+     1882, at a garden party at ex-Governor Claflin's in Newtonville,
+     Mass.
+
+Thrice welcome from the Land of Flowers
+And golden-fruited orange bowers
+To this sweet, green-turfed June of ours!
+To her who, in our evil time,
+Dragged into light the nation's crime
+With strength beyond the strength of men,
+And, mightier than their swords, her pen!
+To her who world-wide entrance gave
+To the log-cabin of the slave;
+Made all his wrongs and sorrows known,
+And all earth's languages his own,--
+North, South, and East and West, made all
+The common air electrical,
+Until the o'ercharged bolts of heaven
+Blazed down, and every chain was riven!
+
+Welcome from each and all to her
+Whose Wooing of the Minister
+Revealed the warm heart of the man
+Beneath the creed-bound Puritan,
+And taught the kinship of the love
+Of man below and God above;
+To her whose vigorous pencil-strokes
+Sketched into life her Oldtown Folks;
+Whose fireside stories, grave or gay,
+In quaint Sam Lawson's vagrant way,
+With old New England's flavor rife,
+Waifs from her rude idyllic life,
+Are racy as the legends old
+By Chaucer or Boccaccio told;
+To her who keeps, through change of place
+And time, her native strength and grace,
+Alike where warm Sorrento smiles,
+Or where, by birchen-shaded isles,
+Whose summer winds have shivered o'er
+The icy drift of Labrador,
+She lifts to light the priceless Pearl
+Of Harpswell's angel-beckoned girl!
+To her at threescore years and ten
+Be tributes of the tongue and pen;
+Be honor, praise, and heart-thanks given,
+The loves of earth, the hopes of heaven!
+
+Ah, dearer than the praise that stirs
+The air to-day, our love is hers!
+She needs no guaranty of fame
+Whose own is linked with Freedom's name.
+Long ages after ours shall keep
+Her memory living while we sleep;
+The waves that wash our gray coast lines,
+The winds that rock the Southern pines,
+Shall sing of her; the unending years
+Shall tell her tale in unborn ears.
+And when, with sins and follies past,
+Are numbered color-hate and caste,
+White, black, and red shall own as one
+The noblest work by woman done.
+
+
+GODSPEED
+
+     Written on the occasion of a voyage made by my friends
+     Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett.
+
+Outbound, your bark awaits you. Were I one
+Whose prayer availeth much, my wish should be
+Your favoring trade-wind and consenting sea.
+By sail or steed was never love outrun,
+And, here or there, love follows her in whom
+All graces and sweet charities unite,
+The old Greek beauty set in holier light;
+And her for whom New England's byways bloom,
+Who walks among us welcome as the Spring,
+Calling up blossoms where her light feet stray.
+God keep you both, make beautiful your way,
+Comfort, console, and bless; and safely bring,
+Ere yet I make upon a vaster sea
+The unreturning voyage, my friends to me.
+1882.
+
+
+
+WINTER ROSES.
+
+     In reply to a flower gift from Mrs. Putnam's school at
+     Jamaica Plain.
+
+My garden roses long ago
+Have perished from the leaf-strewn walks;
+Their pale, fair sisters smile no more
+Upon the sweet-brier stalks.
+
+Gone with the flower-time of my life,
+Spring's violets, summer's blooming pride,
+And Nature's winter and my own
+Stand, flowerless, side by side.
+
+So might I yesterday have sung;
+To-day, in bleak December's noon,
+Come sweetest fragrance, shapes, and hues,
+The rosy wealth of June!
+
+Bless the young bands that culled the gift,
+And bless the hearts that prompted it;
+If undeserved it comes, at least
+It seems not all unfit.
+
+Of old my Quaker ancestors
+Had gifts of forty stripes save one;
+To-day as many roses crown
+The gray head of their son.
+
+And with them, to my fancy's eye,
+The fresh-faced givers smiling come,
+And nine and thirty happy girls
+Make glad a lonely room.
+
+They bring the atmosphere of youth;
+The light and warmth of long ago
+Are in my heart, and on my cheek
+The airs of morning blow.
+
+O buds of girlhood, yet unblown,
+And fairer than the gift ye chose,
+For you may years like leaves unfold
+The heart of Sharon's rose
+1883.
+
+
+
+THE REUNION
+
+     Read September 10, 1885, to the surviving students of Haverhill
+     Academy in 1827-1830.
+
+The gulf of seven and fifty years
+We stretch our welcoming hands across;
+The distance but a pebble's toss
+Between us and our youth appears.
+
+For in life's school we linger on
+The remnant of a once full list;
+Conning our lessons, undismissed,
+With faces to the setting sun.
+
+And some have gone the unknown way,
+And some await the call to rest;
+Who knoweth whether it is best
+For those who went or those who stay?
+
+And yet despite of loss and ill,
+If faith and love and hope remain,
+Our length of days is not in vain,
+And life is well worth living still.
+
+Still to a gracious Providence
+The thanks of grateful hearts are due,
+For blessings when our lives were new,
+For all the good vouchsafed us since.
+
+The pain that spared us sorer hurt,
+The wish denied, the purpose crossed,
+And pleasure's fond occasions lost,
+Were mercies to our small desert.
+
+'T is something that we wander back,
+Gray pilgrims, to our ancient ways,
+And tender memories of old days
+Walk with us by the Merrimac;
+
+That even in life's afternoon
+A sense of youth comes back again,
+As through this cool September rain
+The still green woodlands dream of June.
+
+The eyes grown dim to present things
+Have keener sight for bygone years,
+And sweet and clear, in deafening ears,
+The bird that sang at morning sings.
+
+Dear comrades, scattered wide and far,
+Send from their homes their kindly word,
+And dearer ones, unseen, unheard,
+Smile on us from some heavenly star.
+
+For life and death with God are one,
+Unchanged by seeming change His care
+And love are round us here and there;
+He breaks no thread His hand has spun.
+
+Soul touches soul, the muster roll
+Of life eternal has no gaps;
+And after half a century's lapse
+Our school-day ranks are closed and whole.
+
+Hail and farewell! We go our way;
+Where shadows end, we trust in light;
+The star that ushers in the night
+Is herald also of the day!
+
+
+
+NORUMBEGA HALL.
+
+     Norumbega Hall at Wellesley College, named in honor of Eben Norton
+     Horsford, who has been one of the most munificent patrons of that
+     noble institution, and who had just published an essay claiming the
+     discovery of the site of the somewhat mythical city of Norumbega,
+     was opened with appropriate ceremonies, in April, 1886. The
+     following sonnet was written for the occasion, and was read by
+     President Alice E. Freeman, to whom it was addressed.
+
+Not on Penobscot's wooded bank the spires
+Of the sought City rose, nor yet beside
+The winding Charles, nor where the daily tide
+Of Naumkeag's haven rises and retires,
+The vision tarried; but somewhere we knew
+The beautiful gates must open to our quest,
+Somewhere that marvellous City of the West
+Would lift its towers and palace domes in view,
+And, to! at last its mystery is made known--
+Its only dwellers maidens fair and young,
+Its Princess such as England's Laureate sung;
+And safe from capture, save by love alone,
+It lends its beauty to the lake's green shore,
+And Norumbega is a myth no more.
+
+
+
+THE BARTHOLDI STATUE
+
+1886
+
+The land, that, from the rule of kings,
+In freeing us, itself made free,
+Our Old World Sister, to us brings
+Her sculptured Dream of Liberty,
+
+Unlike the shapes on Egypt's sands
+Uplifted by the toil-worn slave,
+On Freedom's soil with freemen's hands
+We rear the symbol free hands gave.
+
+O France, the beautiful! to thee
+Once more a debt of love we owe
+In peace beneath thy Colors Three,
+We hail a later Rochambeau!
+
+Rise, stately Symbol! holding forth
+Thy light and hope to all who sit
+In chains and darkness! Belt the earth
+With watch-fires from thy torch uplit!
+
+Reveal the primal mandate still
+Which Chaos heard and ceased to be,
+Trace on mid-air th' Eternal Will
+In signs of fire: "Let man be free!"
+
+Shine far, shine free, a guiding light
+To Reason's ways and Virtue's aim,
+A lightning-flash the wretch to smite
+Who shields his license with thy name!
+
+
+
+ONE OF THE SIGNERS.
+
+     Written for the unveiling of the statue of Josiah Bartlett at
+     Amesbury, Mass., July 4, 1888. Governor Bartlett, who was a native
+     of the town, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
+     Amesbury or Ambresbury, so called from the "anointed stones" of the
+     great Druidical temple near it, was the seat of one of the earliest
+     religious houses in Britain. The tradition that the guilty wife of
+     King Arthur fled thither for protection forms one of the finest
+     passages in Tennyson's Idyls of the King.
+
+O storied vale of Merrimac
+Rejoice through all thy shade and shine,
+And from his century's sleep call back
+A brave and honored son of thine.
+
+Unveil his effigy between
+The living and the dead to-day;
+The fathers of the Old Thirteen
+Shall witness bear as spirits may.
+
+Unseen, unheard, his gray compeers
+The shades of Lee and Jefferson,
+Wise Franklin reverend with his years
+And Carroll, lord of Carrollton!
+
+Be thine henceforth a pride of place
+Beyond thy namesake's over-sea,
+Where scarce a stone is left to trace
+The Holy House of Amesbury.
+
+A prouder memory lingers round
+The birthplace of thy true man here
+Than that which haunts the refuge found
+By Arthur's mythic Guinevere.
+
+The plain deal table where he sat
+And signed a nation's title-deed
+Is dearer now to fame than that
+Which bore the scroll of Runnymede.
+
+Long as, on Freedom's natal morn,
+Shall ring the Independence bells,
+Give to thy dwellers yet unborn
+The lesson which his image tells.
+
+For in that hour of Destiny,
+Which tried the men of bravest stock,
+He knew the end alone must be
+A free land or a traitor's block.
+
+Among those picked and chosen men
+Than his, who here first drew his breath,
+No firmer fingers held the pen
+Which wrote for liberty or death.
+
+Not for their hearths and homes alone,
+But for the world their work was done;
+On all the winds their thought has flown
+Through all the circuit of the sun.
+
+We trace its flight by broken chains,
+By songs of grateful Labor still;
+To-day, in all her holy fanes,
+It rings the bells of freed Brazil.
+
+O hills that watched his boyhood's home,
+O earth and air that nursed him, give,
+In this memorial semblance, room
+To him who shall its bronze outlive!
+
+And thou, O Land he loved, rejoice
+That in the countless years to come,
+Whenever Freedom needs a voice,
+These sculptured lips shall not be dumb!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          THE TENT ON THE BEACH
+
+     It can scarcely be necessary to name as the two companions whom I
+     reckoned with myself in this poetical picnic, Fields the lettered
+     magnate, and Taylor the free cosmopolite. The long line of sandy
+     beach which defines almost the whole of the New Hampshire sea-coast
+     is especially marked near its southern extremity, by the
+     salt-meadows of Hampton. The Hampton River winds through these
+     meadows, and the reader may, if he choose, imagine my tent pitched
+     near its mouth, where also was the scene of the _Wreck of
+     Rivermouth_. The green bluff to the northward is Great Boar's Head;
+     southward is the Merrimac, with Newburyport lifting its steeples
+     above brown roofs and green trees on banks.
+
+I would not sin, in this half-playful strain,--
+Too light perhaps for serious years, though born
+Of the enforced leisure of slow pain,--
+Against the pure ideal which has drawn
+My feet to follow its far-shining gleam.
+A simple plot is mine: legends and runes
+Of credulous days, old fancies that have lain
+Silent, from boyhood taking voice again,
+Warmed into life once more, even as the tunes
+That, frozen in the fabled hunting-horn,
+Thawed into sound:--a winter fireside dream
+Of dawns and-sunsets by the summer sea,
+Whose sands are traversed by a silent throng
+Of voyagers from that vaster mystery
+Of which it is an emblem;--and the dear
+Memory of one who might have tuned my song
+To sweeter music by her delicate ear.
+
+
+When heats as of a tropic clime
+Burned all our inland valleys through,
+Three friends, the guests of summer time,
+Pitched their white tent where sea-winds blew.
+Behind them, marshes, seamed and crossed
+With narrow creeks, and flower-embossed,
+Stretched to the dark oak wood, whose leafy arms
+Screened from the stormy East the pleasant inland farms.
+
+At full of tide their bolder shore
+Of sun-bleached sand the waters beat;
+At ebb, a smooth and glistening floor
+They touched with light, receding feet.
+Northward a 'green bluff broke the chain
+Of sand-hills; southward stretched a plain
+Of salt grass, with a river winding down,
+Sail-whitened, and beyond the steeples of the town,
+
+Whence sometimes, when the wind was light
+And dull the thunder of the beach,
+They heard the bells of morn and night
+Swing, miles away, their silver speech.
+Above low scarp and turf-grown wall
+They saw the fort-flag rise and fall;
+And, the first star to signal twilight's hour,
+The lamp-fire glimmer down from the tall light-house tower.
+
+They rested there, escaped awhile
+From cares that wear the life away,
+To eat the lotus of the Nile
+And drink the poppies of Cathay,--
+To fling their loads of custom down,
+Like drift-weed, on the sand-slopes brown,
+And in the sea waves drown the restless pack
+Of duties, claims, and needs that barked upon their track.
+
+One, with his beard scarce silvered, bore
+A ready credence in his looks,
+A lettered magnate, lording o'er
+An ever-widening realm of books.
+In him brain-currents, near and far,
+Converged as in a Leyden jar;
+The old, dead authors thronged him round about,
+And Elzevir's gray ghosts from leathern graves looked out.
+
+He knew each living pundit well,
+Could weigh the gifts of him or her,
+And well the market value tell
+Of poet and philosopher.
+But if he lost, the scenes behind,
+Somewhat of reverence vague and blind,
+Finding the actors human at the best,
+No readier lips than his the good he saw confessed.
+
+His boyhood fancies not outgrown,
+He loved himself the singer's art;
+Tenderly, gently, by his own
+He knew and judged an author's heart.
+No Rhadamanthine brow of doom
+Bowed the dazed pedant from his room;
+And bards, whose name is legion, if denied,
+Bore off alike intact their verses and their pride.
+
+Pleasant it was to roam about
+The lettered world as he had, done,
+And see the lords of song without
+Their singing robes and garlands on.
+With Wordsworth paddle Rydal mere,
+Taste rugged Elliott's home-brewed beer,
+And with the ears of Rogers, at fourscore,
+Hear Garrick's buskined tread and Walpole's wit once more.
+
+And one there was, a dreamer born,
+Who, with a mission to fulfil,
+Had left the Muses' haunts to turn
+The crank of an opinion-mill,
+Making his rustic reed of song
+A weapon in the war with wrong,
+Yoking his fancy to the breaking-plough
+That beam-deep turned the soil for truth to spring and grow.
+
+Too quiet seemed the man to ride
+The winged Hippogriff Reform;
+Was his a voice from side to side
+To pierce the tumult of the storm?
+A silent, shy, peace-loving man,
+He seemed no fiery partisan
+To hold his way against the public frown,
+The ban of Church and State, the fierce mob's hounding down.
+
+For while he wrought with strenuous will
+The work his hands had found to do,
+He heard the fitful music still
+Of winds that out of dream-land blew.
+The din about him could not drown
+What the strange voices whispered down;
+Along his task-field weird processions swept,
+The visionary pomp of stately phantoms stepped:
+
+The common air was thick with dreams,--
+He told them to the toiling crowd;
+Such music as the woods and streams
+Sang in his ear he sang aloud;
+In still, shut bays, on windy capes,
+He heard the call of beckoning shapes,
+And, as the gray old shadows prompted him,
+To homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their legends grim.
+
+He rested now his weary hands,
+And lightly moralized and laughed,
+As, tracing on the shifting sands
+A burlesque of his paper-craft,
+He saw the careless waves o'errun
+His words, as time before had done,
+Each day's tide-water washing clean away,
+Like letters from the sand, the work of yesterday.
+
+And one, whose Arab face was tanned
+By tropic sun and boreal frost,
+So travelled there was scarce a land
+Or people left him to exhaust,
+In idling mood had from him hurled
+The poor squeezed orange of the world,
+And in the tent-shade, as beneath a palm,
+Smoked, cross-legged like a Turk, in Oriental calm.
+
+The very waves that washed the sand
+Below him, he had seen before
+Whitening the Scandinavian strand
+And sultry Mauritanian shore.
+From ice-rimmed isles, from summer seas
+Palm-fringed, they bore him messages;
+He heard the plaintive Nubian songs again,
+And mule-bells tinkling down the mountain-paths of Spain.
+
+His memory round the ransacked earth
+On Puck's long girdle slid at ease;
+And, instant, to the valley's girth
+Of mountains, spice isles of the seas,
+Faith flowered in minster stones, Art's guess
+At truth and beauty, found access;
+Yet loved the while, that free cosmopolite,
+Old friends, old ways, and kept his boyhood's dreams in sight.
+
+Untouched as yet by wealth and pride,
+That virgin innocence of beach
+No shingly monster, hundred-eyed,
+Stared its gray sand-birds out of reach;
+Unhoused, save where, at intervals,
+The white tents showed their canvas walls,
+Where brief sojourners, in the cool, soft air,
+Forgot their inland heats, hard toil, and year-long care.
+
+Sometimes along the wheel-deep sand
+A one-horse wagon slowly crawled,
+Deep laden with a youthful band,
+Whose look some homestead old recalled;
+Brother perchance, and sisters twain,
+And one whose blue eyes told, more plain
+Than the free language of her rosy lip,
+Of the still dearer claim of love's relationship.
+
+With cheeks of russet-orchard tint,
+The light laugh of their native rills,
+The perfume of their garden's mint,
+The breezy freedom of the hills,
+They bore, in unrestrained delight,
+The motto of the Garter's knight,
+Careless as if from every gazing thing
+Hid by their innocence, as Gyges by his ring.
+
+The clanging sea-fowl came and went,
+The hunter's gun in the marshes rang;
+At nightfall from a neighboring tent
+A flute-voiced woman sweetly sang.
+Loose-haired, barefooted, hand-in-hand,
+Young girls went tripping down the sand;
+And youths and maidens, sitting in the moon,
+Dreamed o'er the old fond dream from which we wake too soon.
+
+At times their fishing-lines they plied,
+With an old Triton at the oar,
+Salt as the sea-wind, tough and dried
+As a lean cusk from Labrador.
+Strange tales he told of wreck and storm,--
+Had seen the sea-snake's awful form,
+And heard the ghosts on Haley's Isle complain,
+Speak him off shore, and beg a passage to old Spain!
+
+And there, on breezy morns, they saw
+The fishing-schooners outward run,
+Their low-bent sails in tack and flaw
+Turned white or dark to shade and sun.
+Sometimes, in calms of closing day,
+They watched the spectral mirage play,
+Saw low, far islands looming tall and nigh,
+And ships, with upturned keels, sail like a sea the sky.
+
+Sometimes a cloud, with thunder black,
+Stooped low upon the darkening main,
+Piercing the waves along its track
+With the slant javelins of rain.
+And when west-wind and sunshine warm
+Chased out to sea its wrecks of storm,
+They saw the prismy hues in thin spray showers
+Where the green buds of waves burst into white froth flowers.
+
+And when along the line of shore
+The mists crept upward chill and damp,
+Stretched, careless, on their sandy floor
+Beneath the flaring lantern lamp,
+They talked of all things old and new,
+Read, slept, and dreamed as idlers do;
+And in the unquestioned freedom of the tent,
+Body and o'er-taxed mind to healthful ease unbent.
+
+Once, when the sunset splendors died,
+And, trampling up the sloping sand,
+In lines outreaching far and wide,
+The white-waned billows swept to land,
+Dim seen across the gathering shade,
+A vast and ghostly cavalcade,
+They sat around their lighted kerosene,
+Hearing the deep bass roar their every pause between.
+
+Then, urged thereto, the Editor
+Within his full portfolio dipped,
+Feigning excuse while seaching for
+(With secret pride) his manuscript.
+His pale face flushed from eye to beard,
+With nervous cough his throat he cleared,
+And, in a voice so tremulous it betrayed
+The anxious fondness of an author's heart, he read:
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+THE WRECK OF RIVERMOUTH
+
+     The Goody Cole who figures in this poem and The Changeling as
+     Eunice Cole, who for a quarter of a century or more was feared,
+     persecuted, and hated as the witch of Hampton. She lived alone in a
+     hovel a little distant from the spot where the Hampton Academy now
+     stands, and there she died, unattended. When her death was
+     discovered, she was hastily covered up in the earth near by, and a
+     stake driven through her body, to exorcise the evil spirit. Rev.
+     Stephen Bachiler or Batchelder was one of the ablest of the early
+     New England preachers. His marriage late in life to a woman
+     regarded by his church as disreputable induced him to return to
+     England, where he enjoyed the esteem and favor of Oliver Cromwell
+     during the Protectorate.
+
+Rivermouth Rocks are fair to see,
+By dawn or sunset shone across,
+When the ebb of the sea has left them free,
+To dry their fringes of gold-green moss
+For there the river comes winding down,
+From salt sea-meadows and uplands brown,
+And waves on the outer rocks afoam
+Shout to its waters, "Welcome home!"
+
+And fair are the sunny isles in view
+East of the grisly Head of the Boar,
+And Agamenticus lifts its blue
+Disk of a cloud the woodlands o'er;
+And southerly, when the tide is down,
+'Twixt white sea-waves and sand-hills brown,
+The beach-birds dance and the gray gulls wheel
+Over a floor of burnished steel.
+
+Once, in the old Colonial days,
+Two hundred years ago and more,
+A boat sailed down through the winding ways
+Of Hampton River to that low shore,
+Full of a goodly company
+Sailing out on the summer sea,
+Veering to catch the land-breeze light,
+With the Boar to left and the Rocks to right.
+
+In Hampton meadows, where mowers laid
+Their scythes to the swaths of salted grass,
+"Ah, well-a-day! our hay must be made!"
+A young man sighed, who saw them pass.
+Loud laughed his fellows to see him stand
+Whetting his scythe with a listless hand,
+Hearing a voice in a far-off song,
+Watching a white hand beckoning long.
+
+"Fie on the witch!" cried a merry girl,
+As they rounded the point where Goody Cole
+Sat by her door with her wheel atwirl,
+A bent and blear-eyed poor old soul.
+"Oho!" she muttered, "ye 're brave to-day!
+But I hear the little waves laugh and say,
+'The broth will be cold that waits at home;
+For it 's one to go, but another to come!'"
+
+"She's cursed," said the skipper; "speak her fair:
+I'm scary always to see her shake
+Her wicked head, with its wild gray hair,
+And nose like a hawk, and eyes like a snake."
+But merrily still, with laugh and shout,
+From Hampton River the boat sailed out,
+Till the huts and the flakes on Star seemed nigh,
+And they lost the scent of the pines of Rye.
+
+They dropped their lines in the lazy tide,
+Drawing up haddock and mottled cod;
+They saw not the Shadow that walked beside,
+They heard not the feet with silence shod.
+But thicker and thicker a hot mist grew,
+Shot by the lightnings through and through;
+And muffled growls, like the growl of a beast,
+Ran along the sky from west to east.
+
+Then the skipper looked from the darkening sea
+Up to the dimmed and wading sun;
+But he spake like a brave man cheerily,
+"Yet there is time for our homeward run."
+Veering and tacking, they backward wore;
+And just as a breath-from the woods ashore
+Blew out to whisper of danger past,
+The wrath of the storm came down at last!
+
+The skipper hauled at the heavy sail
+"God be our help!" he only cried,
+As the roaring gale, like the stroke of a flail,
+Smote the boat on its starboard side.
+The Shoalsmen looked, but saw alone
+Dark films of rain-cloud slantwise blown,
+Wild rocks lit up by the lightning's glare,
+The strife and torment of sea and air.
+
+Goody Cole looked out from her door
+The Isles of Shoals were drowned and gone,
+Scarcely she saw the Head of the Boar
+Toss the foam from tusks of stone.
+She clasped her hands with a grip of pain,
+The tear on her cheek was not of rain
+"They are lost," she muttered, "boat and crew!
+Lord, forgive me! my words were true!"
+
+Suddenly seaward swept the squall;
+The low sun smote through cloudy rack;
+The Shoals stood clear in the light, and all
+The trend of the coast lay hard and black.
+But far and wide as eye could reach,
+No life was seen upon wave or beach;
+The boat that went out at morning never
+Sailed back again into Hampton River.
+
+O mower, lean on thy bended snath,
+Look from the meadows green and low
+The wind of the sea is a waft of death,
+The waves are singing a song of woe!
+By silent river, by moaning sea,
+Long and vain shall thy watching be
+Never again shall the sweet voice call,
+Never the white hand rise and fall!
+
+O Rivermouth Rocks, how sad a sight
+Ye saw in the light of breaking day
+Dead faces looking up cold and white
+From sand and seaweed where they lay.
+The mad old witch-wife wailed and wept,
+And cursed the tide as it backward crept
+"Crawl back, crawl back, blue water-snake
+Leave your dead for the hearts that break!"
+
+Solemn it was in that old day
+In Hampton town and its log-built church,
+Where side by side the coffins lay
+And the mourners stood in aisle and porch.
+In the singing-seats young eyes were dim,
+The voices faltered that raised the hymn,
+And Father Dalton, grave and stern,
+Sobbed through his prayer and wept in turn.
+
+But his ancient colleague did not pray;
+Under the weight of his fourscore years
+He stood apart with the iron-gray
+Of his strong brows knitted to hide his tears;
+And a fair-faced woman of doubtful fame,
+Linking her own with his honored name,
+Subtle as sin, at his side withstood
+The felt reproach of her neighborhood.
+
+Apart with them, like them forbid,
+Old Goody Cole looked drearily round,
+As, two by two, with their faces hid,
+The mourners walked to the burying-ground.
+She let the staff from her clasped hands fall
+"Lord, forgive us! we're sinners all!"
+And the voice of the old man answered her
+"Amen!" said Father Bachiler.
+
+So, as I sat upon Appledore
+In the calm of a closing summer day,
+And the broken lines of Hampton shore
+In purple mist of cloudland lay,
+The Rivermouth Rocks their story told;
+And waves aglow with sunset gold,
+Rising and breaking in steady chime,
+Beat the rhythm and kept the time.
+
+And the sunset paled, and warmed once more
+With a softer, tenderer after-glow;
+In the east was moon-rise, with boats off-shore
+And sails in the distance drifting slow.
+The beacon glimmered from Portsmouth bar,
+The White Isle kindled its great red star;
+And life and death in my old-time lay
+Mingled in peace like the night and day!
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+"Well!" said the Man of Books, "your story
+Is really not ill told in verse.
+As the Celt said of purgatory,
+One might go farther and fare worse."
+The Reader smiled; and once again
+With steadier voice took up his strain,
+While the fair singer from the neighboring tent
+Drew near, and at his side a graceful listener bent.
+1864.
+
+
+THE GRAVE BY THE LAKE
+
+     At the mouth of the Melvin River, which empties into Moulton-Bay in
+     Lake Winnipesaukee, is a great mound. The Ossipee Indians had their
+     home in the neighborhood of the bay, which is plentifully stocked
+     with fish, and many relics of their occupation have been found.
+
+
+Where the Great Lake's sunny smiles
+Dimple round its hundred isles,
+And the mountain's granite ledge
+Cleaves the water like a wedge,
+Ringed about with smooth, gray stones,
+Rest the giant's mighty bones.
+
+Close beside, in shade and gleam,
+Laughs and ripples Melvin stream;
+Melvin water, mountain-born,
+All fair flowers its banks adorn;
+All the woodland's voices meet,
+Mingling with its murmurs sweet.
+
+Over lowlands forest-grown,
+Over waters island-strown,
+Over silver-sanded beach,
+Leaf-locked bay and misty reach,
+Melvin stream and burial-heap,
+Watch and ward the mountains keep.
+
+Who that Titan cromlech fills?
+Forest-kaiser, lord o' the hills?
+Knight who on the birchen tree
+Carved his savage heraldry?
+Priest o' the pine-wood temples dim,
+Prophet, sage, or wizard grim?
+
+Rugged type of primal man,
+Grim utilitarian,
+Loving woods for hunt and prowl,
+Lake and hill for fish and fowl,
+As the brown bear blind and dull
+To the grand and beautiful:
+
+Not for him the lesson drawn
+From the mountains smit with dawn,
+Star-rise, moon-rise, flowers of May,
+Sunset's purple bloom of day,--
+Took his life no hue from thence,
+Poor amid such affluence?
+
+Haply unto hill and tree
+All too near akin was he
+Unto him who stands afar
+Nature's marvels greatest are;
+Who the mountain purple seeks
+Must not climb the higher peaks.
+
+Yet who knows in winter tramp,
+Or the midnight of the camp,
+What revealings faint and far,
+Stealing down from moon and star,
+Kindled in that human clod
+Thought of destiny and God?
+
+Stateliest forest patriarch,
+Grand in robes of skin and bark,
+What sepulchral mysteries,
+What weird funeral-rites, were his?
+What sharp wail, what drear lament,
+Back scared wolf and eagle sent?
+
+Now, whate'er he may have been,
+Low he lies as other men;
+On his mound the partridge drums,
+There the noisy blue-jay comes;
+Rank nor name nor pomp has he
+In the grave's democracy.
+
+Part thy blue lips, Northern lake!
+Moss-grown rocks, your silence break!
+Tell the tale, thou ancient tree!
+Thou, too, slide-worn Ossipee!
+Speak, and tell us how and when
+Lived and died this king of men!
+
+Wordless moans the ancient pine;
+Lake and mountain give no sign;
+Vain to trace this ring of stones;
+Vain the search of crumbling bones
+Deepest of all mysteries,
+And the saddest, silence is.
+
+Nameless, noteless, clay with clay
+Mingles slowly day by day;
+But somewhere, for good or ill,
+That dark soul is living still;
+Somewhere yet that atom's force
+Moves the light-poised universe.
+
+Strange that on his burial-sod
+Harebells bloom, and golden-rod,
+While the soul's dark horoscope
+Holds no starry sign of hope!
+Is the Unseen with sight at odds?
+Nature's pity more than God's?
+
+Thus I mused by Melvin's side,
+While the summer eventide
+Made the woods and inland sea
+And the mountains mystery;
+And the hush of earth and air
+Seemed the pause before a prayer,--
+
+Prayer for him, for all who rest,
+Mother Earth, upon thy breast,--
+Lapped on Christian turf, or hid
+In rock-cave or pyramid
+All who sleep, as all who live,
+Well may need the prayer, "Forgive!"
+
+Desert-smothered caravan,
+Knee-deep dust that once was man,
+Battle-trenches ghastly piled,
+Ocean-floors with white bones tiled,
+Crowded tomb and mounded sod,
+Dumbly crave that prayer to God.
+
+Oh, the generations old
+Over whom no church-bells tolled,
+Christless, lifting up blind eyes
+To the silence of the skies!
+For the innumerable dead
+Is my soul disquieted.
+
+Where be now these silent hosts?
+Where the camping-ground of ghosts?
+Where the spectral conscripts led
+To the white tents of the dead?
+What strange shore or chartless sea
+Holds the awful mystery?
+
+Then the warm sky stooped to make
+Double sunset in the lake;
+While above I saw with it,
+Range on range, the mountains lit;
+And the calm and splendor stole
+Like an answer to my soul.
+
+Hear'st thou, O of little faith,
+What to thee the mountain saith,
+What is whispered by the trees?
+Cast on God thy care for these;
+Trust Him, if thy sight be dim
+Doubt for them is doubt of Him.
+
+"Blind must be their close-shut eyes
+Where like night the sunshine lies,
+Fiery-linked the self-forged chain
+Binding ever sin to pain,
+Strong their prison-house of will,
+But without He waiteth still.
+
+"Not with hatred's undertow
+Doth the Love Eternal flow;
+Every chain that spirits wear
+Crumbles in the breath of prayer;
+And the penitent's desire
+Opens every gate of fire.
+
+"Still Thy love, O Christ arisen,
+Yearns to reach these souls in prison!
+Through all depths of sin and loss
+Drops the plummet of Thy cross!
+Never yet abyss was found
+Deeper than that cross could sound!"
+
+Therefore well may Nature keep
+Equal faith with all who sleep,
+Set her watch of hills around
+Christian grave and heathen mound,
+And to cairn and kirkyard send
+Summer's flowery dividend.
+
+Keep, O pleasant Melvin stream,
+Thy sweet laugh in shade and gleam
+On the Indian's grassy tomb
+Swing, O flowers, your bells of bloom!
+Deep below, as high above,
+Sweeps the circle of God's love.
+1865
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+He paused and questioned with his eye
+The hearers' verdict on his song.
+A low voice asked: Is 't well to pry
+Into the secrets which belong
+Only to God?--The life to be
+Is still the unguessed mystery
+Unsealed, unpierced the cloudy walls remain,
+We beat with dream and wish the soundless doors in vain.
+
+"But faith beyond our sight may go."
+He said: "The gracious Fatherhood
+Can only know above, below,
+Eternal purposes of good.
+From our free heritage of will,
+The bitter springs of pain and ill
+Flow only in all worlds. The perfect day
+Of God is shadowless, and love is love alway."
+
+"I know," she said, "the letter kills;
+That on our arid fields of strife
+And heat of clashing texts distils
+The clew of spirit and of life.
+But, searching still the written Word,
+I fain would find, Thus saith the Lord,
+A voucher for the hope I also feel
+That sin can give no wound beyond love's power to heal."
+
+"Pray," said the Man of Books, "give o'er
+A theme too vast for time and place.
+Go on, Sir Poet, ride once more
+Your hobby at his old free pace.
+But let him keep, with step discreet,
+The solid earth beneath his feet.
+In the great mystery which around us lies,
+The wisest is a fool, the fool Heaven-helped is wise."
+
+The Traveller said: "If songs have creeds,
+Their choice of them let singers make;
+But Art no other sanction needs
+Than beauty for its own fair sake.
+It grinds not in the mill of use,
+Nor asks for leave, nor begs excuse;
+It makes the flexile laws it deigns to own,
+And gives its atmosphere its color and its tone.
+
+"Confess, old friend, your austere school
+Has left your fancy little chance;
+You square to reason's rigid rule
+The flowing outlines of romance.
+With conscience keen from exercise,
+And chronic fear of compromise,
+You check the free play of your rhymes, to clap
+A moral underneath, and spring it like a trap."
+
+The sweet voice answered: "Better so
+Than bolder flights that know no check;
+Better to use the bit, than throw
+The reins all loose on fancy's neck.
+The liberal range of Art should be
+The breadth of Christian liberty,
+Restrained alone by challenge and alarm
+Where its charmed footsteps tread the border land of harm.
+
+"Beyond the poet's sweet dream lives
+The eternal epic of the man.
+He wisest is who only gives,
+True to himself, the best he can;
+Who, drifting in the winds of praise,
+The inward monitor obeys;
+And, with the boldness that confesses fear,
+Takes in the crowded sail, and lets his conscience steer.
+
+"Thanks for the fitting word he speaks,
+Nor less for doubtful word unspoken;
+For the false model that he breaks,
+As for the moulded grace unbroken;
+For what is missed and what remains,
+For losses which are truest gains,
+For reverence conscious of the Eternal eye,
+And truth too fair to need the garnish of a lie."
+
+Laughing, the Critic bowed. "I yield
+The point without another word;
+Who ever yet a case appealed
+Where beauty's judgment had been heard?
+And you, my good friend, owe to me
+Your warmest thanks for such a plea,
+As true withal as sweet. For my offence
+Of cavil, let her words be ample recompense."
+
+Across the sea one lighthouse star,
+With crimson ray that came and went,
+Revolving on its tower afar,
+Looked through the doorway of the tent.
+While outward, over sand-slopes wet,
+The lamp flashed down its yellow jet
+On the long wash of waves, with red and green
+Tangles of weltering weed through the white foam-wreaths seen.
+
+"Sing while we may,--another day
+May bring enough of sorrow;'--thus
+Our Traveller in his own sweet lay,
+His Crimean camp-song, hints to us,"
+The lady said. "So let it be;
+Sing us a song," exclaimed all three.
+She smiled: "I can but marvel at your choice
+To hear our poet's words through my poor borrowed voice."
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+Her window opens to the bay,
+On glistening light or misty gray,
+And there at dawn and set of day
+In prayer she kneels.
+
+"Dear Lord!" she saith, "to many a borne
+From wind and wave the wanderers come;
+I only see the tossing foam
+Of stranger keels.
+
+"Blown out and in by summer gales,
+The stately ships, with crowded sails,
+And sailors leaning o'er their rails,
+Before me glide;
+They come, they go, but nevermore,
+Spice-laden from the Indian shore,
+I see his swift-winged Isidore
+The waves divide.
+
+"O Thou! with whom the night is day
+And one the near and far away,
+Look out on yon gray waste, and say
+Where lingers he.
+Alive, perchance, on some lone beach
+Or thirsty isle beyond the reach
+Of man, he hears the mocking speech
+Of wind and sea.
+
+"O dread and cruel deep, reveal
+The secret which thy waves conceal,
+And, ye wild sea-birds, hither wheel
+And tell your tale.
+Let winds that tossed his raven hair
+A message from my lost one bear,--
+Some thought of me, a last fond prayer
+Or dying wail!
+
+"Come, with your dreariest truth shut out
+The fears that haunt me round about;
+O God! I cannot bear this doubt
+That stifles breath.
+The worst is better than the dread;
+Give me but leave to mourn my dead
+Asleep in trust and hope, instead
+Of life in death!"
+
+It might have been the evening breeze
+That whispered in the garden trees,
+It might have been the sound of seas
+That rose and fell;
+But, with her heart, if not her ear,
+The old loved voice she seemed to hear
+"I wait to meet thee: be of cheer,
+For all is well!"
+1865
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+The sweet voice into silence went,
+A silence which was almost pain
+As through it rolled the long lament,
+The cadence of the mournful main.
+Glancing his written pages o'er,
+The Reader tried his part once more;
+Leaving the land of hackmatack and pine
+For Tuscan valleys glad with olive and with vine.
+
+
+THE BROTHER OF MERCY.
+
+Piero Luca, known of all the town
+As the gray porter by the Pitti wall
+Where the noon shadows of the gardens fall,
+Sick and in dolor, waited to lay down
+His last sad burden, and beside his mat
+The barefoot monk of La Certosa sat.
+
+Unseen, in square and blossoming garden drifted,
+Soft sunset lights through green Val d'Arno sifted;
+Unheard, below the living shuttles shifted
+Backward and forth, and wove, in love or strife,
+In mirth or pain, the mottled web of life
+But when at last came upward from the street
+Tinkle of bell and tread of measured feet,
+The sick man started, strove to rise in vain,
+Sinking back heavily with a moan of pain.
+And the monk said, "'T is but the Brotherhood
+Of Mercy going on some errand good
+Their black masks by the palace-wall I see."
+Piero answered faintly, "Woe is me!
+This day for the first time in forty years
+In vain the bell hath sounded in my ears,
+Calling me with my brethren of the mask,
+Beggar and prince alike, to some new task
+Of love or pity,--haply from the street
+To bear a wretch plague-stricken, or, with feet
+Hushed to the quickened ear and feverish brain,
+To tread the crowded lazaretto's floors,
+Down the long twilight of the corridors,
+Midst tossing arms and faces full of pain.
+I loved the work: it was its own reward.
+I never counted on it to offset
+My sins, which are many, or make less my debt
+To the free grace and mercy of our Lord;
+But somehow, father, it has come to be
+In these long years so much a part of me,
+I should not know myself, if lacking it,
+But with the work the worker too would die,
+And in my place some other self would sit
+Joyful or sad,--what matters, if not I?
+And now all's over. Woe is me!"--"My son,"
+The monk said soothingly, "thy work is done;
+And no more as a servant, but the guest
+Of God thou enterest thy eternal rest.
+No toil, no tears, no sorrow for the lost,
+Shall mar thy perfect bliss. Thou shalt sit down
+Clad in white robes, and wear a golden crown
+Forever and forever."--Piero tossed
+On his sick-pillow: "Miserable me!
+I am too poor for such grand company;
+The crown would be too heavy for this gray
+Old head; and God forgive me if I say
+It would be hard to sit there night and day,
+Like an image in the Tribune, doing naught
+With these hard hands, that all my life have wrought,
+Not for bread only, but for pity's sake.
+I'm dull at prayers: I could not keep awake,
+Counting my beads. Mine's but a crazy head,
+Scarce worth the saving, if all else be dead.
+And if one goes to heaven without a heart,
+God knows he leaves behind his better part.
+I love my fellow-men: the worst I know
+I would do good to. Will death change me so
+That I shall sit among the lazy saints,
+Turning a deaf ear to the sore complaints
+Of souls that suffer? Why, I never yet
+Left a poor dog in the strada hard beset,
+Or ass o'erladen! Must I rate man less
+Than dog or ass, in holy selfishness?
+Methinks (Lord, pardon, if the thought be sin!)
+The world of pain were better, if therein
+One's heart might still be human, and desires
+Of natural pity drop upon its fires
+Some cooling tears."
+
+Thereat the pale monk crossed
+His brow, and, muttering, "Madman! thou art lost!"
+Took up his pyx and fled; and, left alone,
+The sick man closed his eyes with a great groan
+That sank into a prayer, "Thy will be done!"
+Then was he made aware, by soul or ear,
+Of somewhat pure and holy bending o'er him,
+And of a voice like that of her who bore him,
+Tender and most compassionate: "Never fear!
+For heaven is love, as God himself is love;
+Thy work below shall be thy work above."
+And when he looked, lo! in the stern monk's place
+He saw the shining of an angel's face!
+1864.
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+The Traveller broke the pause. "I've seen
+The Brothers down the long street steal,
+Black, silent, masked, the crowd between,
+And felt to doff my hat and kneel
+With heart, if not with knee, in prayer,
+For blessings on their pious care."
+
+Reader wiped his glasses: "Friends of mine,
+I'll try our home-brewed next, instead of foreign wine."
+
+
+
+THE CHANGELING.
+
+For the fairest maid in Hampton
+They needed not to search,
+Who saw young Anna Favor
+Come walking into church,
+
+Or bringing from the meadows,
+At set of harvest-day,
+The frolic of the blackbirds,
+The sweetness of the hay.
+
+Now the weariest of all mothers,
+The saddest two-years bride,
+She scowls in the face of her husband,
+And spurns her child aside.
+
+"Rake out the red coals, goodman,--
+For there the child shall lie,
+Till the black witch comes to fetch her
+And both up chimney fly.
+
+"It's never my own little daughter,
+It's never my own," she said;
+"The witches have stolen my Anna,
+And left me an imp instead.
+
+"Oh, fair and sweet was my baby,
+Blue eyes, and hair of gold;
+But this is ugly and wrinkled,
+Cross, and cunning, and old.
+
+"I hate the touch of her fingers,
+I hate the feel of her skin;
+It's not the milk from my bosom,
+But my blood, that she sucks in.
+
+"My face grows sharp with the torment;
+Look! my arms are skin and bone!
+Rake open the red coals, goodman,
+And the witch shall have her own.
+
+"She 'll come when she hears it crying,
+In the shape of an owl or bat,
+And she'll bring us our darling Anna
+In place of her screeching brat."
+
+Then the goodman, Ezra Dalton,
+Laid his hand upon her head
+"Thy sorrow is great, O woman!
+I sorrow with thee," he said.
+
+"The paths to trouble are many,
+And never but one sure way
+Leads out to the light beyond it
+My poor wife, let us pray."
+
+Then he said to the great All-Father,
+"Thy daughter is weak and blind;
+Let her sight come back, and clothe her
+Once more in her right mind.
+
+"Lead her out of this evil shadow,
+Out of these fancies wild;
+Let the holy love of the mother
+Turn again to her child.
+
+"Make her lips like the lips of Mary
+Kissing her blessed Son;
+Let her hands, like the hands of Jesus,
+Rest on her little one.
+
+"Comfort the soul of thy handmaid,
+Open her prison-door,
+And thine shall be all the glory
+And praise forevermore."
+
+Then into the face of its mother
+The baby looked up and smiled;
+And the cloud of her soul was lifted,
+And she knew her little child.
+
+A beam of the slant west sunshine
+Made the wan face almost fair,
+Lit the blue eyes' patient wonder,
+And the rings of pale gold hair.
+
+She kissed it on lip and forehead,
+She kissed it on cheek and chin,
+And she bared her snow-white bosom
+To the lips so pale and thin.
+
+Oh, fair on her bridal morning
+Was the maid who blushed and smiled,
+But fairer to Ezra Dalton
+Looked the mother of his child.
+
+With more than a lover's fondness
+He stooped to her worn young face,
+And the nursing child and the mother
+He folded in one embrace.
+
+"Blessed be God!" he murmured.
+"Blessed be God!" she said;
+"For I see, who once was blinded,--
+I live, who once was dead.
+
+"Now mount and ride, my goodman,
+As thou lovest thy own soul
+Woe's me, if my wicked fancies
+Be the death of Goody Cole!"
+
+His horse he saddled and bridled,
+And into the night rode he,
+Now through the great black woodland,
+Now by the white-beached sea.
+
+He rode through the silent clearings,
+He came to the ferry wide,
+And thrice he called to the boatman
+Asleep on the other side.
+
+He set his horse to the river,
+He swam to Newbury town,
+And he called up Justice Sewall
+In his nightcap and his gown.
+
+And the grave and worshipful justice
+(Upon whose soul be peace!)
+Set his name to the jailer's warrant
+For Goodwife Cole's release.
+
+Then through the night the hoof-beats
+Went sounding like a flail;
+And Goody Cole at cockcrow
+Came forth from Ipswich jail.
+1865
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+"Here is a rhyme: I hardly dare
+To venture on its theme worn out;
+What seems so sweet by Doon and Ayr
+Sounds simply silly hereabout;
+And pipes by lips Arcadian blown
+Are only tin horns at our own.
+Yet still the muse of pastoral walks with us,
+While Hosea Biglow sings, our new Theocritus."
+
+
+
+THE MAIDS OF ATTITASH.
+
+     Attitash, an Indian word signifying "huckleberry," is the name of a
+     large and beautiful lake in the northern part of Amesbury.
+
+In sky and wave the white clouds swam,
+And the blue hills of Nottingham
+Through gaps of leafy green
+Across the lake were seen,
+
+When, in the shadow of the ash
+That dreams its dream in Attitash,
+In the warm summer weather,
+Two maidens sat together.
+
+They sat and watched in idle mood
+The gleam and shade of lake and wood;
+The beach the keen light smote,
+The white sail of a boat;
+
+Swan flocks of lilies shoreward lying,
+In sweetness, not in music, dying;
+Hardback, and virgin's-bower,
+And white-spiked clethra-flower.
+
+With careless ears they heard the plash
+And breezy wash of Attitash,
+The wood-bird's plaintive cry,
+The locust's sharp reply.
+
+And teased the while, with playful band,
+The shaggy dog of Newfoundland,
+Whose uncouth frolic spilled
+Their baskets berry-filled.
+
+Then one, the beauty of whose eyes
+Was evermore a great surprise,
+Tossed back her queenly head,
+And, lightly laughing, said:
+
+"No bridegroom's hand be mine to hold
+That is not lined with yellow gold;
+I tread no cottage-floor;
+I own no lover poor.
+
+"My love must come on silken wings,
+With bridal lights of diamond rings,
+Not foul with kitchen smirch,
+With tallow-dip for torch."
+
+The other, on whose modest head
+Was lesser dower of beauty shed,
+With look for home-hearths meet,
+And voice exceeding sweet,
+
+Answered, "We will not rivals be;
+Take thou the gold, leave love to me;
+Mine be the cottage small,
+And thine the rich man's hall.
+
+"I know, indeed, that wealth is good;
+But lowly roof and simple food,
+With love that hath no doubt,
+Are more than gold without."
+
+Hard by a farmer hale and young
+His cradle in the rye-field swung,
+Tracking the yellow plain
+With windrows of ripe grain.
+
+And still, whene'er he paused to whet
+His scythe, the sidelong glance he met
+Of large dark eyes, where strove
+False pride and secret love.
+
+Be strong, young mower of the-grain;
+That love shall overmatch disdain,
+Its instincts soon or late
+The heart shall vindicate.
+
+In blouse of gray, with fishing-rod,
+Half screened by leaves, a stranger trod
+The margin of the pond,
+Watching the group beyond.
+
+The supreme hours unnoted come;
+Unfelt the turning tides of doom;
+And so the maids laughed on,
+Nor dreamed what Fate had done,--
+
+Nor knew the step was Destiny's
+That rustled in the birchen trees,
+As, with their lives forecast,
+Fisher and mower passed.
+
+Erelong by lake and rivulet side
+The summer roses paled and died,
+And Autumn's fingers shed
+The maple's leaves of red.
+
+Through the long gold-hazed afternoon,
+Alone, but for the diving loon,
+The partridge in the brake,
+The black duck on the lake,
+
+Beneath the shadow of the ash
+Sat man and maid by Attitash;
+And earth and air made room
+For human hearts to bloom.
+
+Soft spread the carpets of the sod,
+And scarlet-oak and golden-rod
+With blushes and with smiles
+Lit up the forest aisles.
+
+The mellow light the lake aslant,
+The pebbled margin's ripple-chant
+Attempered and low-toned,
+The tender mystery owned.
+
+And through the dream the lovers dreamed
+Sweet sounds stole in and soft lights streamed;
+The sunshine seemed to bless,
+The air was a caress.
+
+Not she who lightly laughed is there,
+With scornful toss of midnight hair,
+Her dark, disdainful eyes,
+And proud lip worldly-wise.
+
+Her haughty vow is still unsaid,
+But all she dreamed and coveted
+Wears, half to her surprise,
+The youthful farmer's guise!
+
+With more than all her old-time pride
+She walks the rye-field at his side,
+Careless of cot or hall,
+Since love transfigures all.
+
+Rich beyond dreams, the vantage-ground
+Of life is gained; her hands have found
+The talisman of old
+That changes all to gold.
+
+While she who could for love dispense
+With all its glittering accidents,
+And trust her heart alone,
+Finds love and gold her own.
+
+What wealth can buy or art can build
+Awaits her; but her cup is filled
+Even now unto the brim;
+Her world is love and him!
+1866.
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+The while he heard, the Book-man drew
+A length of make-believing face,
+With smothered mischief laughing through
+"Why, you shall sit in Ramsay's place,
+And, with his Gentle Shepherd, keep
+On Yankee hills immortal sheep,
+While love-lorn swains and maids the seas beyond
+Hold dreamy tryst around your huckleberry-pond."
+
+The Traveller laughed: "Sir Galahad
+Singing of love the Trouvere's lay!
+How should he know the blindfold lad
+From one of Vulcan's forge-boys?"--"Nay,
+He better sees who stands outside
+Than they who in procession ride,"
+The Reader answered: "selectmen and squire
+Miss, while they make, the show that wayside folks admire.
+
+"Here is a wild tale of the North,
+Our travelled friend will own as one
+Fit for a Norland Christmas hearth
+And lips of Christian Andersen.
+They tell it in the valleys green
+Of the fair island he has seen,
+Low lying off the pleasant Swedish shore,
+Washed by the Baltic Sea, and watched by Elsinore."
+
+
+KALLUNDBORG CHURCH
+
+               "Tie stille, barn min
+               Imorgen kommer Fin,
+               Fa'er din,
+Og gi'er dig Esbern Snares nine og hjerte at lege med!"
+                                        Zealand Rhyme.
+
+"Build at Kallundborg by the sea
+A church as stately as church may be,
+And there shalt thou wed my daughter fair,"
+Said the Lord of Nesvek to Esbern Snare.
+
+And the Baron laughed. But Esbern said,
+"Though I lose my soul, I will Helva wed!"
+And off he strode, in his pride of will,
+To the Troll who dwelt in Ulshoi hill.
+
+"Build, O Troll, a church for me
+At Kallundborg by the mighty sea;
+Build it stately, and build it fair,
+Build it quickly," said Esbern Snare.
+
+But the sly Dwarf said, "No work is wrought
+By Trolls of the Hills, O man, for naught.
+What wilt thou give for thy church so fair?"
+"Set thy own price," quoth Esbern Snare.
+
+"When Kallundborg church is builded well,
+Than must the name of its builder tell,
+Or thy heart and thy eyes must be my boon."
+"Build," said Esbern, "and build it soon."
+
+By night and by day the Troll wrought on;
+He hewed the timbers, he piled the stone;
+But day by day, as the walls rose fair,
+Darker and sadder grew Esbern Snare.
+
+He listened by night, he watched by day,
+He sought and thought, but he dared not pray;
+In vain he called on the Elle-maids shy,
+And the Neck and the Nis gave no reply.
+
+Of his evil bargain far and wide
+A rumor ran through the country-side;
+And Helva of Nesvek, young and fair,
+Prayed for the soul of Esbern Snare.
+
+And now the church was wellnigh done;
+One pillar it lacked, and one alone;
+And the grim Troll muttered, "Fool thou art
+To-morrow gives me thy eyes and heart!"
+
+By Kallundborg in black despair,
+Through wood and meadow, walked Esbern Snare,
+Till, worn and weary, the strong man sank
+Under the birches on Ulshoi bank.
+
+At, his last day's work he heard the Troll
+Hammer and delve in the quarry's hole;
+Before him the church stood large and fair
+"I have builded my tomb," said Esbern Snare.
+
+And he closed his eyes the sight to hide,
+When he heard a light step at his side
+"O Esbern Snare!" a sweet voice said,
+"Would I might die now in thy stead!"
+
+With a grasp by love and by fear made strong,
+He held her fast, and he held her long;
+With the beating heart of a bird afeard,
+She hid her face in his flame-red beard.
+
+"O love!" he cried, "let me look to-day
+In thine eyes ere mine are plucked away;
+Let me hold thee close, let me feel thy heart
+Ere mine by the Troll is torn apart!
+
+"I sinned, O Helva, for love of thee!
+Pray that the Lord Christ pardon me!"
+But fast as she prayed, and faster still,
+Hammered the Troll in Ulshoi hill.
+
+He knew, as he wrought, that a loving heart
+Was somehow baffling his evil art;
+For more than spell of Elf or Troll
+Is a maiden's prayer for her lover's soul.
+
+And Esbern listened, and caught the sound
+Of a Troll-wife singing underground
+"To-morrow comes Fine, father thine
+Lie still and hush thee, baby mine!
+
+"Lie still, my darling! next sunrise
+Thou'lt play with Esbern Snare's heart and eyes!"
+"Ho! ho!" quoth Esbern, "is that your game?
+Thanks to the Troll-wife, I know his name!"
+
+The Troll he heard him, and hurried on
+To Kallundborg church with the lacking stone.
+"Too late, Gaffer Fine!" cried Esbern Snare;
+And Troll and pillar vanished in air!
+
+That night the harvesters heard the sound
+Of a woman sobbing underground,
+And the voice of the Hill-Troll loud with blame
+Of the careless singer who told his name.
+
+Of the Troll of the Church they sing the rune
+By the Northern Sea in the harvest moon;
+And the fishers of Zealand hear him still
+Scolding his wife in Ulshoi hill.
+
+And seaward over its groves of birch
+Still looks the tower of Kallundborg church,
+Where, first at its altar, a wedded pair,
+Stood Helva of Nesvek and Esbern Snare!
+1865.
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+"What," asked the Traveller, "would our sires,
+The old Norse story-tellers, say
+Of sun-graved pictures, ocean wires,
+And smoking steamboats of to-day?
+And this, O lady, by your leave,
+Recalls your song of yester eve:
+Pray, let us have that Cable-hymn once more."
+"Hear, hear!" the Book-man cried, "the lady has the floor.
+
+"These noisy waves below perhaps
+To such a strain will lend their ear,
+With softer voice and lighter lapse
+Come stealing up the sands to hear,
+And what they once refused to do
+For old King Knut accord to you.
+Nay, even the fishes shall your listeners be,
+As once, the legend runs, they heard St. Anthony."
+
+
+THE CABLE HYMN.
+
+O lonely bay of Trinity,
+O dreary shores, give ear!
+Lean down unto the white-lipped sea
+The voice of God to hear!
+
+From world to world His couriers fly,
+Thought-winged and shod with fire;
+The angel of His stormy sky
+Rides down the sunken wire.
+
+What saith the herald of the Lord?
+"The world's long strife is done;
+Close wedded by that mystic cord,
+Its continents are one.
+
+"And one in heart, as one in blood,
+Shall all her peoples be;
+The hands of human brotherhood
+Are clasped beneath the sea.
+
+"Through Orient seas, o'er Afric's plain
+And Asian mountains borne,
+The vigor of the Northern brain
+Shall nerve the world outworn.
+
+"From clime to clime, from shore to shore,
+Shall thrill the magic thread;
+The new Prometheus steals once more
+The fire that wakes the dead."
+
+Throb on, strong pulse of thunder! beat
+From answering beach to beach;
+Fuse nations in thy kindly heat,
+And melt the chains of each!
+
+Wild terror of the sky above,
+Glide tamed and dumb below!
+Bear gently, Ocean's carrier-dove,
+Thy errands to and fro.
+
+Weave on, swift shuttle of the Lord,
+Beneath the deep so far,
+The bridal robe of earth's accord,
+The funeral shroud of war!
+
+For lo! the fall of Ocean's wall
+Space mocked and time outrun;
+And round the world the thought of all
+Is as the thought of one!
+
+The poles unite, the zones agree,
+The tongues of striving cease;
+As on the Sea of Galilee
+The Christ is whispering, Peace!
+1858.
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+"Glad prophecy! to this at last,"
+The Reader said, "shall all things come.
+Forgotten be the bugle's blast,
+And battle-music of the drum.
+
+"A little while the world may run
+Its old mad way, with needle-gun
+And iron-clad, but truth, at last, shall reign
+The cradle-song of Christ was never sung in vain!"
+
+Shifting his scattered papers, "Here,"
+He said, as died the faint applause,
+"Is something that I found last year
+Down on the island known as Orr's.
+I had it from a fair-haired girl
+Who, oddly, bore the name of Pearl,
+(As if by some droll freak of circumstance,)
+Classic, or wellnigh so, in Harriet Stowe's romance."
+
+
+THE DEAD SHIP OF HARPSWELL.
+
+What flecks the outer gray beyond
+The sundown's golden trail?
+The white flash of a sea-bird's wing,
+Or gleam of slanting sail?
+Let young eyes watch from Neck and Point,
+And sea-worn elders pray,--
+The ghost of what was once a ship
+Is sailing up the bay.
+
+From gray sea-fog, from icy drift,
+From peril and from pain,
+The home-bound fisher greets thy lights,
+O hundred-harbored Maine!
+But many a keel shall seaward turn,
+And many a sail outstand,
+When, tall and white, the Dead Ship looms
+Against the dusk of land.
+
+She rounds the headland's bristling pines;
+She threads the isle-set bay;
+No spur of breeze can speed her on,
+Nor ebb of tide delay.
+Old men still walk the Isle of Orr
+Who tell her date and name,
+Old shipwrights sit in Freeport yards
+Who hewed her oaken frame.
+
+What weary doom of baffled quest,
+Thou sad sea-ghost, is thine?
+What makes thee in the haunts of home
+A wonder and a sign?
+No foot is on thy silent deck,
+Upon thy helm no hand;
+No ripple hath the soundless wind
+That smites thee from the land!
+
+For never comes the ship to port,
+Howe'er the breeze may be;
+Just when she nears the waiting shore
+She drifts again to sea.
+No tack of sail, nor turn of helm,
+Nor sheer of veering side;
+Stern-fore she drives to sea and night,
+Against the wind and tide.
+
+In vain o'er Harpswell Neck the star
+Of evening guides her in;
+In vain for her the lamps are lit
+Within thy tower, Seguin!
+In vain the harbor-boat shall hail,
+In vain the pilot call;
+No hand shall reef her spectral sail,
+Or let her anchor fall.
+
+Shake, brown old wives, with dreary joy,
+Your gray-head hints of ill;
+And, over sick-beds whispering low,
+Your prophecies fulfil.
+Some home amid yon birchen trees
+Shall drape its door with woe;
+And slowly where the Dead Ship sails,
+The burial boat shall row!
+
+From Wolf Neck and from Flying Point,
+From island and from main,
+From sheltered cove and tided creek,
+Shall glide the funeral train.
+The dead-boat with the bearers four,
+The mourners at her stern,--
+And one shall go the silent way
+Who shall no more return!
+
+And men shall sigh, and women weep,
+Whose dear ones pale and pine,
+And sadly over sunset seas
+Await the ghostly sign.
+They know not that its sails are filled
+By pity's tender breath,
+Nor see the Angel at the helm
+Who steers the Ship of Death!
+1866.
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+"Chill as a down-east breeze should be,"
+The Book-man said. "A ghostly touch
+The legend has. I'm glad to see
+Your flying Yankee beat the Dutch."
+"Well, here is something of the sort
+Which one midsummer day I caught
+In Narragansett Bay, for lack of fish."
+"We wait," the Traveller said;
+"serve hot or cold your dish."
+
+
+THE PALATINE.
+
+     Block Island in Long Island Sound, called by the Indians Manisees,
+     the isle of the little god, was the scene of a tragic incident a
+     hundred years or more ago, when _The Palatine_, an emigrant ship
+     bound for Philadelphia, driven off its course, came upon the coast
+     at this point. A mutiny on board, followed by an inhuman desertion
+     on the part of the crew, had brought the unhappy passengers to the
+     verge of starvation and madness. Tradition says that wreckers on
+     shore, after rescuing all but one of the survivors, set fire to the
+     vessel, which was driven out to sea before a gale which had sprung
+     up. Every twelvemonth, according to the same tradition, the
+     spectacle of a ship on fire is visible to the inhabitants of the
+     island.
+
+Leagues north, as fly the gull and auk,
+Point Judith watches with eye of hawk;
+Leagues south, thy beacon flames, Montauk!
+
+Lonely and wind-shorn, wood-forsaken,
+With never a tree for Spring to waken,
+For tryst of lovers or farewells taken,
+
+Circled by waters that never freeze,
+Beaten by billow and swept by breeze,
+Lieth the island of Manisees,
+
+Set at the mouth of the Sound to hold
+The coast lights up on its turret old,
+Yellow with moss and sea-fog mould.
+
+Dreary the land when gust and sleet
+At its doors and windows howl and beat,
+And Winter laughs at its fires of peat!
+
+But in summer time, when pool and pond,
+Held in the laps of valleys fond,
+Are blue as the glimpses of sea beyond;
+
+When the hills are sweet with the brier-rose,
+And, hid in the warm, soft dells, unclose
+Flowers the mainland rarely knows;
+
+When boats to their morning fishing go,
+And, held to the wind and slanting low,
+Whitening and darkening the small sails show,--
+
+Then is that lonely island fair;
+And the pale health-seeker findeth there
+The wine of life in its pleasant air.
+
+No greener valleys the sun invite,
+On smoother beaches no sea-birds light,
+No blue waves shatter to foam more white!
+
+There, circling ever their narrow range,
+Quaint tradition and legend strange
+Live on unchallenged, and know no change.
+
+Old wives spinning their webs of tow,
+Or rocking weirdly to and fro
+In and out of the peat's dull glow,
+
+And old men mending their nets of twine,
+Talk together of dream and sign,
+Talk of the lost ship Palatine,--
+
+The ship that, a hundred years before,
+Freighted deep with its goodly store,
+In the gales of the equinox went ashore.
+
+The eager islanders one by one
+Counted the shots of her signal gun,
+And heard the crash when she drove right on!
+
+Into the teeth of death she sped
+(May God forgive the hands that fed
+The false lights over the rocky Head!)
+
+O men and brothers! what sights were there!
+White upturned faces, hands stretched in prayer!
+Where waves had pity, could ye not spare?
+
+Down swooped the wreckers, like birds of prey
+Tearing the heart of the ship away,
+And the dead had never a word to say.
+
+And then, with ghastly shimmer and shine
+Over the rocks and the seething brine,
+They burned the wreck of the Palatine.
+
+In their cruel hearts, as they homeward sped,
+"The sea and the rocks are dumb," they said
+"There 'll be no reckoning with the dead."
+
+But the year went round, and when once more
+Along their foam-white curves of shore
+They heard the line-storm rave and roar,
+
+Behold! again, with shimmer and shine,
+Over the rocks and the seething brine,
+The flaming wreck of the Palatine!
+
+So, haply in fitter words than these,
+Mending their nets on their patient knees
+They tell the legend of Manisees.
+
+Nor looks nor tones a doubt betray;
+"It is known to us all," they quietly say;
+"We too have seen it in our day."
+
+Is there, then, no death for a word once spoken?
+Was never a deed but left its token
+Written on tables never broken?
+
+Do the elements subtle reflections give?
+Do pictures of all the ages live
+On Nature's infinite negative,
+
+Which, half in sport, in malice half,
+She shows at times, with shudder or laugh,
+Phantom and shadow in photograph?
+
+For still, on many a moonless night,
+From Kingston Head and from Montauk light
+The spectre kindles and burns in sight.
+
+Now low and dim, now clear and higher,
+Leaps up the terrible Ghost of Fire,
+Then, slowly sinking, the flames expire.
+
+And the wise Sound skippers, though skies be fine,
+Reef their sails when they see the sign
+Of the blazing wreck of the Palatine!
+1867.
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+"A fitter tale to scream than sing,"
+The Book-man said. "Well, fancy, then,"
+The Reader answered, "on the wing
+The sea-birds shriek it, not for men,
+But in the ear of wave and breeze!"
+The Traveller mused: "Your Manisees
+Is fairy-land: off Narragansett shore
+Who ever saw the isle or heard its name before?
+
+"'T is some strange land of Flyaway,
+Whose dreamy shore the ship beguiles,
+St. Brandan's in its sea-mist gray,
+Or sunset loom of Fortunate Isles!"
+"No ghost, but solid turf and rock
+Is the good island known as Block,"
+The Reader said. "For beauty and for ease
+I chose its Indian name, soft-flowing Manisees!
+
+"But let it pass; here is a bit
+Of unrhymed story, with a hint
+Of the old preaching mood in it,
+The sort of sidelong moral squint
+Our friend objects to, which has grown,
+I fear, a habit of my own.
+'Twas written when the Asian plague drew near,
+And the land held its breath and paled with sudden fear."
+
+
+ABRAHAM DAVENPORT
+
+     The famous Dark Day of New England, May 19, 1780, was a physical
+     puzzle for many years to our ancestors, but its occurrence brought
+     something more than philosophical speculation into the winds of
+     those who passed through it. The incident of Colonel Abraham
+     Davenport's sturdy protest is a matter of history.
+
+In the old days (a custom laid aside
+With breeches and cocked hats) the people sent
+Their wisest men to make the public laws.
+And so, from a brown homestead, where the Sound
+Drinks the small tribute of the Mianas,
+Waved over by the woods of Rippowams,
+And hallowed by pure lives and tranquil deaths,
+Stamford sent up to the councils of the State
+Wisdom and grace in Abraham Davenport.
+
+'T was on a May-day of the far old year
+Seventeen hundred eighty, that there fell
+Over the bloom and sweet life of the Spring,
+Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon,
+A horror of great darkness, like the night
+In day of which the Norland sagas tell,--
+
+The Twilight of the Gods. The low-hung sky
+Was black with ominous clouds, save where its rim
+Was fringed with a dull glow, like that which climbs
+The crater's sides from the red hell below.
+Birds ceased to sing, and all the barn-yard fowls
+Roosted; the cattle at the pasture bars
+Lowed, and looked homeward; bats on leathern wings
+Flitted abroad; the sounds of labor died;
+Men prayed, and women wept; all ears grew sharp
+To hear the doom-blast of the trumpet shatter
+The black sky, that the dreadful face of Christ
+Might look from the rent clouds, not as he looked
+A loving guest at Bethany, but stern
+As Justice and inexorable Law.
+
+Meanwhile in the old State House, dim as ghosts,
+Sat the lawgivers of Connecticut,
+Trembling beneath their legislative robes.
+"It is the Lord's Great Day! Let us adjourn,"
+Some said; and then, as if with one accord,
+All eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport.
+He rose, slow cleaving with his steady voice
+The intolerable hush. "This well may be
+The Day of Judgment which the world awaits;
+But be it so or not, I only know
+My present duty, and my Lord's command
+To occupy till He come. So at the post
+Where He hath set me in His providence,
+I choose, for one, to meet Him face to face,--
+No faithless servant frightened from my task,
+But ready when the Lord of the harvest calls;
+And therefore, with all reverence, I would say,
+Let God do His work, we will see to ours.
+Bring in the candles." And they brought them in.
+
+Then by the flaring lights the Speaker read,
+Albeit with husky voice and shaking hands,
+An act to amend an act to regulate
+The shad and alewive fisheries. Whereupon
+Wisely and well spake Abraham Davenport,
+Straight to the question, with no figures of speech
+Save the ten Arab signs, yet not without
+The shrewd dry humor natural to the man
+His awe-struck colleagues listening all the while,
+Between the pauses of his argument,
+To hear the thunder of the wrath of God
+Break from the hollow trumpet of the cloud.
+
+And there he stands in memory to this day,
+Erect, self-poised, a rugged face, half seen
+Against the background of unnatural dark,
+A witness to the ages as they pass,
+That simple duty hath no place for fear.
+1866.
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+He ceased: just then the ocean seemed
+To lift a half-faced moon in sight;
+And, shore-ward, o'er the waters gleamed,
+From crest to crest, a line of light,
+Such as of old, with solemn awe,
+The fishers by Gennesaret saw,
+When dry-shod o'er it walked the Son of God,
+Tracking the waves with light where'er his sandals trod.
+
+Silently for a space each eye
+Upon that sudden glory turned
+Cool from the land the breeze blew by,
+The tent-ropes flapped, the long beach churned
+Its waves to foam; on either hand
+Stretched, far as sight, the hills of sand;
+With bays of marsh, and capes of bush and tree,
+The wood's black shore-line loomed beyond the meadowy sea.
+
+The lady rose to leave. "One song,
+Or hymn," they urged, "before we part."
+And she, with lips to which belong
+Sweet intuitions of all art,
+Gave to the winds of night a strain
+Which they who heard would hear again;
+And to her voice the solemn ocean lent,
+Touching its harp of sand, a deep accompaniment.
+
+
+THE WORSHIP OF NATURE.
+
+The harp at Nature's advent strung
+Has never ceased to play;
+The song the stars of morning sung
+Has never died away.
+
+And prayer is made, and praise is given,
+By all things near and far;
+The ocean looketh up to heaven,
+And mirrors every star.
+
+Its waves are kneeling on the strand,
+As kneels the human knee,
+Their white locks bowing to the sand,
+The priesthood of the sea'
+
+They pour their glittering treasures forth,
+Their gifts of pearl they bring,
+And all the listening hills of earth
+Take up the song they sing.
+
+The green earth sends her incense up
+From many a mountain shrine;
+From folded leaf and dewy cup
+She pours her sacred wine.
+
+The mists above the morning rills
+Rise white as wings of prayer;
+The altar-curtains of the hills
+Are sunset's purple air.
+
+The winds with hymns of praise are loud,
+Or low with sobs of pain,--
+The thunder-organ of the cloud,
+The dropping tears of rain.
+
+With drooping head and branches crossed
+The twilight forest grieves,
+Or speaks with tongues of Pentecost
+From all its sunlit leaves.
+
+The blue sky is the temple's arch,
+Its transept earth and air,
+The music of its starry march
+The chorus of a prayer.
+
+So Nature keeps the reverent frame
+With which her years began,
+And all her signs and voices shame
+The prayerless heart of man.
+
+       .     .     .     .     .
+
+The singer ceased. The moon's white rays
+Fell on the rapt, still face of her.
+"_Allah il Allah_! He hath praise
+From all things," said the Traveller.
+"Oft from the desert's silent nights,
+And mountain hymns of sunset lights,
+My heart has felt rebuke, as in his tent
+The Moslem's prayer has shamed my Christian knee unbent."
+
+He paused, and lo! far, faint, and slow
+The bells in Newbury's steeples tolled
+The twelve dead hours; the lamp burned low;
+The singer sought her canvas fold.
+One sadly said, "At break of day
+We strike our tent and go our way."
+But one made answer cheerily, "Never fear,
+We'll pitch this tent of ours in type another year."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                AT SUNDOWN
+
+TO  E. C. S.
+
+Poet and friend of poets, if thy glass
+Detects no flower in winter's tuft of grass,
+Let this slight token of the debt I owe
+Outlive for thee December's frozen day,
+And, like the arbutus budding under snow,
+Take bloom and fragrance from some morn of May
+When he who gives it shall have gone the way
+Where faith shall see and reverent trust shall know.
+
+
+THE CHRISTMAS OF 1888.
+
+Low in the east, against a white, cold dawn,
+The black-lined silhouette of the woods was drawn,
+And on a wintry waste
+Of frosted streams and hillsides bare and brown,
+Through thin cloud-films, a pallid ghost looked down,
+The waning moon half-faced!
+
+In that pale sky and sere, snow-waiting earth,
+What sign was there of the immortal birth?
+What herald of the One?
+Lo! swift as thought the heavenly radiance came,
+A rose-red splendor swept the sky like flame,
+Up rolled the round, bright sun!
+
+And all was changed. From a transfigured world
+The moon's ghost fled, the smoke of home-hearths curled
+Up the still air unblown.
+In Orient warmth and brightness, did that morn
+O'er Nain and Nazareth, when the Christ was born,
+Break fairer than our own?
+
+The morning's promise noon and eve fulfilled
+In warm, soft sky and landscape hazy-hilled
+And sunset fair as they;
+A sweet reminder of His holiest time,
+A summer-miracle in our winter clime,
+God gave a perfect day.
+
+The near was blended with the old and far,
+And Bethlehem's hillside and the Magi's star
+Seemed here, as there and then,--
+Our homestead pine-tree was the Syrian palm,
+Our heart's desire the angels' midnight psalm,
+Peace, and good-will to men!
+
+
+
+THE VOW OF WASHINGTON.
+
+     Read in New York, April 30, 1889, at the Centennial Celebration of
+     the Inauguration of George Washington as the first President of the
+     United States.
+
+The sword was sheathed: in April's sun
+Lay green the fields by Freedom won;
+And severed sections, weary of debates,
+Joined hands at last and were United States.
+
+O City sitting by the Sea
+How proud the day that dawned on thee,
+When the new era, long desired, began,
+And, in its need, the hour had found the man!
+
+One thought the cannon salvos spoke,
+The resonant bell-tower's vibrant stroke,
+The voiceful streets, the plaudit-echoing halls,
+And prayer and hymn borne heavenward from St. Paul's!
+
+How felt the land in every part
+The strong throb of a nation's heart,
+As its great leader gave, with reverent awe,
+His pledge to Union, Liberty, and Law.
+
+That pledge the heavens above him heard,
+That vow the sleep of centuries stirred;
+In world-wide wonder listening peoples bent
+Their gaze on Freedom's great experiment.
+
+Could it succeed? Of honor sold
+And hopes deceived all history told.
+Above the wrecks that strewed the mournful past,
+Was the long dream of ages true at last?
+
+Thank God! the people's choice was just,
+The one man equal to his trust,
+Wise beyond lore, and without weakness good,
+Calm in the strength of flawless rectitude.
+
+His rule of justice, order, peace,
+Made possible the world's release;
+Taught prince and serf that power is but a trust,
+And rule, alone, which serves the ruled, is just;
+
+That Freedom generous is, but strong
+In hate of fraud and selfish wrong,
+Pretence that turns her holy truths to lies,
+And lawless license masking in her guise.
+
+Land of his love! with one glad voice
+Let thy great sisterhood rejoice;
+A century's suns o'er thee have risen and set,
+And, God be praised, we are one nation yet.
+
+And still we trust the years to be
+Shall prove his hope was destiny,
+Leaving our flag, with all its added stars,
+Unrent by faction and unstained by wars.
+
+Lo! where with patient toil he nursed
+And trained the new-set plant at first,
+The widening branches of a stately tree
+Stretch from the sunrise to the sunset sea.
+
+And in its broad and sheltering shade,
+Sitting with none to make afraid,
+Were we now silent, through each mighty limb,
+The winds of heaven would sing the praise of him.
+
+Our first and best!--his ashes lie
+Beneath his own Virginian sky.
+Forgive, forget, O true and just and brave,
+The storm that swept above thy sacred grave.
+
+For, ever in the awful strife
+And dark hours of the nation's life,
+Through the fierce tumult pierced his warning word,
+Their father's voice his erring children heard.
+
+The change for which he prayed and sought
+In that sharp agony was wrought;
+No partial interest draws its alien line
+'Twixt North and South, the cypress and the pine!
+
+One people now, all doubt beyond,
+His name shall be our Union-bond;
+We lift our hands to Heaven, and here and now.
+Take on our lips the old Centennial vow.
+
+For rule and trust must needs be ours;
+Chooser and chosen both are powers
+Equal in service as in rights; the claim
+Of Duty rests on each and all the same.
+
+Then let the sovereign millions, where
+Our banner floats in sun and air,
+From the warm palm-lands to Alaska's cold,
+Repeat with us the pledge a century old?
+
+
+
+THE CAPTAIN'S WELL.
+
+     The story of the shipwreck of Captain Valentine Bagley, on the
+     coast of Arabia, and his sufferings in the desert, has been
+     familiar from my childhood. It has been partially told in the
+     singularly beautiful lines of my friend, Harriet Prescott Spofford,
+     an the occasion of a public celebration at the Newburyport Library.
+     To the charm and felicity of her verse, as far as it goes, nothing
+     can be added; but in the following ballad I have endeavored to give
+     a fuller detail of the touching incident upon which it is founded.
+
+From pain and peril, by land and main,
+The shipwrecked sailor came back again;
+
+And like one from the dead, the threshold cross'd
+Of his wondering home, that had mourned him lost.
+
+Where he sat once more with his kith and kin,
+And welcomed his neighbors thronging in.
+
+But when morning came he called for his spade.
+"I must pay my debt to the Lord," he said.
+
+"Why dig you here?" asked the passer-by;
+"Is there gold or silver the road so nigh?"
+
+"No, friend," he answered: "but under this sod
+Is the blessed water, the wine of God."
+
+"Water! the Powow is at your back,
+And right before you the Merrimac,
+
+"And look you up, or look you down,
+There 's a well-sweep at every door in town."
+
+"True," he said, "we have wells of our own;
+But this I dig for the Lord alone."
+
+Said the other: "This soil is dry, you know.
+I doubt if a spring can be found below;
+
+"You had better consult, before you dig,
+Some water-witch, with a hazel twig."
+
+"No, wet or dry, I will dig it here,
+Shallow or deep, if it takes a year.
+
+"In the Arab desert, where shade is none,
+The waterless land of sand and sun,
+
+"Under the pitiless, brazen sky
+My burning throat as the sand was dry;
+
+"My crazed brain listened in fever dreams
+For plash of buckets and ripple of streams;
+
+"And opening my eyes to the blinding glare,
+And my lips to the breath of the blistering air,
+
+"Tortured alike by the heavens and earth,
+I cursed, like Job, the day of my birth.
+
+"Then something tender, and sad, and mild
+As a mother's voice to her wandering child,
+
+"Rebuked my frenzy; and bowing my head,
+I prayed as I never before had prayed:
+
+"Pity me, God! for I die of thirst;
+Take me out of this land accurst;
+
+"And if ever I reach my home again,
+Where earth has springs, and the sky has rain,
+
+"I will dig a well for the passers-by,
+And none shall suffer from thirst as I.
+
+"I saw, as I prayed, my home once more,
+The house, the barn, the elms by the door,
+
+"The grass-lined road, that riverward wound,
+The tall slate stones of the burying-ground,
+
+"The belfry and steeple on meeting-house hill,
+The brook with its dam, and gray grist mill,
+
+"And I knew in that vision beyond the sea,
+The very place where my well must be.
+
+"God heard my prayer in that evil day;
+He led my feet in their homeward way,
+
+"From false mirage and dried-up well,
+And the hot sand storms of a land of hell,
+
+"Till I saw at last through the coast-hill's gap,
+A city held in its stony lap,
+
+"The mosques and the domes of scorched Muscat,
+And my heart leaped up with joy thereat;
+
+"For there was a ship at anchor lying,
+A Christian flag at its mast-head flying,
+
+"And sweetest of sounds to my homesick ear
+Was my native tongue in the sailor's cheer.
+
+"Now the Lord be thanked, I am back again,
+Where earth has springs, and the skies have rain,
+
+"And the well I promised by Oman's Sea,
+I am digging for him in Amesbury."
+
+His kindred wept, and his neighbors said
+"The poor old captain is out of his head."
+
+But from morn to noon, and from noon to night,
+He toiled at his task with main and might;
+
+And when at last, from the loosened earth,
+Under his spade the stream gushed forth,
+
+And fast as he climbed to his deep well's brim,
+The water he dug for followed him,
+
+He shouted for joy: "I have kept my word,
+And here is the well I promised the Lord!"
+
+The long years came and the long years went,
+And he sat by his roadside well content;
+
+He watched the travellers, heat-oppressed,
+Pause by the way to drink and rest,
+
+And the sweltering horses dip, as they drank,
+Their nostrils deep in the cool, sweet tank,
+
+And grateful at heart, his memory went
+Back to that waterless Orient,
+
+And the blessed answer of prayer, which came
+To the earth of iron and sky of flame.
+
+And when a wayfarer weary and hot,
+Kept to the mid road, pausing not
+
+For the well's refreshing, he shook his head;
+"He don't know the value of water," he said;
+
+"Had he prayed for a drop, as I have done,
+In the desert circle of sand and sun,
+
+"He would drink and rest, and go home to tell
+That God's best gift is the wayside well!"
+
+
+
+AN OUTDOOR RECEPTION.
+
+     The substance of these lines, hastily pencilled several years ago,
+     I find among such of my unprinted scraps as have escaped the
+     waste-basket and the fire. In transcribing it I have made some
+     changes, additions, and omissions.
+
+On these green banks, where falls too soon
+The shade of Autumn's afternoon,
+The south wind blowing soft and sweet,
+The water gliding at nay feet,
+The distant northern range uplit
+By the slant sunshine over it,
+With changes of the mountain mist
+From tender blush to amethyst,
+The valley's stretch of shade and gleam
+Fair as in Mirza's Bagdad dream,
+With glad young faces smiling near
+And merry voices in my ear,
+I sit, methinks, as Hafiz might
+In Iran's Garden of Delight.
+For Persian roses blushing red,
+Aster and gentian bloom instead;
+For Shiraz wine, this mountain air;
+For feast, the blueberries which I share
+With one who proffers with stained hands
+Her gleanings from yon pasture lands,
+Wild fruit that art and culture spoil,
+The harvest of an untilled soil;
+And with her one whose tender eyes
+Reflect the change of April skies,
+Midway 'twixt child and maiden yet,
+Fresh as Spring's earliest violet;
+And one whose look and voice and ways
+Make where she goes idyllic days;
+And one whose sweet, still countenance
+Seems dreamful of a child's romance;
+And others, welcome as are these,
+Like and unlike, varieties
+Of pearls on nature's chaplet strung,
+And all are fair, for all are young.
+Gathered from seaside cities old,
+From midland prairie, lake, and wold,
+From the great wheat-fields, which might feed
+The hunger of a world at need,
+In healthful change of rest and play
+Their school-vacations glide away.
+
+No critics these: they only see
+An old and kindly friend in me,
+In whose amused, indulgent look
+Their innocent mirth has no rebuke.
+They scarce can know my rugged rhymes,
+The harsher songs of evil times,
+Nor graver themes in minor keys
+Of life's and death's solemnities;
+But haply, as they bear in mind
+Some verse of lighter, happier kind,--
+Hints of the boyhood of the man,
+Youth viewed from life's meridian,
+Half seriously and half in play
+My pleasant interviewers pay
+Their visit, with no fell intent
+Of taking notes and punishment.
+
+As yonder solitary pine
+Is ringed below with flower and vine,
+More favored than that lonely tree,
+The bloom of girlhood circles me.
+In such an atmosphere of youth
+I half forget my age's truth;
+The shadow of my life's long date
+Runs backward on the dial-plate,
+Until it seems a step might span
+The gulf between the boy and man.
+
+My young friends smile, as if some jay
+On bleak December's leafless spray
+Essayed to sing the songs of May.
+Well, let them smile, and live to know,
+When their brown locks are flecked with snow,
+'T is tedious to be always sage
+And pose the dignity of age,
+While so much of our early lives
+On memory's playground still survives,
+And owns, as at the present hour,
+The spell of youth's magnetic power.
+
+But though I feel, with Solomon,
+'T is pleasant to behold the sun,
+I would not if I could repeat
+A life which still is good and sweet;
+I keep in age, as in my prime,
+A not uncheerful step with time,
+And, grateful for all blessings sent,
+I go the common way, content
+To make no new experiment.
+On easy terms with law and fate,
+For what must be I calmly wait,
+And trust the path I cannot see,--
+That God is good sufficeth me.
+And when at last on life's strange play
+The curtain falls, I only pray
+That hope may lose itself in truth,
+And age in Heaven's immortal youth,
+And all our loves and longing prove
+The foretaste of diviner love.
+
+The day is done. Its afterglow
+Along the west is burning low.
+My visitors, like birds, have flown;
+I hear their voices, fainter grown,
+And dimly through the dusk I see
+Their 'kerchiefs wave good-night to me,--
+Light hearts of girlhood, knowing nought
+Of all the cheer their coming brought;
+And, in their going, unaware
+Of silent-following feet of prayer
+Heaven make their budding promise good
+With flowers of gracious womanhood!
+
+
+
+R. S. S., AT DEER ISLAND ON THE MERRIMAC.
+
+Make, for he loved thee well, our Merrimac,
+From wave and shore a low and long lament
+For him, whose last look sought thee, as he went
+The unknown way from which no step comes back.
+And ye, O ancient pine-trees, at whose feet
+He watched in life the sunset's reddening glow,
+Let the soft south wind through your needles blow
+A fitting requiem tenderly and sweet!
+No fonder lover of all lovely things
+Shall walk where once he walked, no smile more glad
+Greet friends than his who friends in all men had,
+Whose pleasant memory, to that Island clings,
+Where a dear mourner in the home he left
+Of love's sweet solace cannot be bereft.
+
+
+
+BURNING DRIFT-WOOD
+
+Before my drift-wood fire I sit,
+And see, with every waif I burn,
+Old dreams and fancies coloring it,
+And folly's unlaid ghosts return.
+
+O ships of mine, whose swift keels cleft
+The enchanted sea on which they sailed,
+Are these poor fragments only left
+Of vain desires and hopes that failed?
+
+Did I not watch from them the light
+Of sunset on my towers in Spain,
+And see, far off, uploom in sight
+The Fortunate Isles I might not gain?
+
+Did sudden lift of fog reveal
+Arcadia's vales of song and spring,
+And did I pass, with grazing keel,
+The rocks whereon the sirens sing?
+
+Have I not drifted hard upon
+The unmapped regions lost to man,
+The cloud-pitched tents of Prester John,
+The palace domes of Kubla Khan?
+
+Did land winds blow from jasmine flowers,
+Where Youth the ageless Fountain fills?
+Did Love make sign from rose blown bowers,
+And gold from Eldorado's hills?
+
+Alas! the gallant ships, that sailed
+On blind Adventure's errand sent,
+Howe'er they laid their courses, failed
+To reach the haven of Content.
+
+And of my ventures, those alone
+Which Love had freighted, safely sped,
+Seeking a good beyond my own,
+By clear-eyed Duty piloted.
+
+O mariners, hoping still to meet
+The luck Arabian voyagers met,
+And find in Bagdad's moonlit street,
+Haroun al Raschid walking yet,
+
+Take with you, on your Sea of Dreams,
+The fair, fond fancies dear to youth.
+I turn from all that only seems,
+And seek the sober grounds of truth.
+
+What matter that it is not May,
+That birds have flown, and trees are bare,
+That darker grows the shortening day,
+And colder blows the wintry air!
+
+The wrecks of passion and desire,
+The castles I no more rebuild,
+May fitly feed my drift-wood fire,
+And warm the hands that age has chilled.
+
+Whatever perished with my ships,
+I only know the best remains;
+A song of praise is on my lips
+For losses which are now my gains.
+
+Heap high my hearth! No worth is lost;
+No wisdom with the folly dies.
+Burn on, poor shreds, your holocaust
+Shall be my evening sacrifice.
+
+Far more than all I dared to dream,
+Unsought before my door I see;
+On wings of fire and steeds of steam
+The world's great wonders come to me,
+
+And holier signs, unmarked before,
+Of Love to seek and Power to save,--
+The righting of the wronged and poor,
+The man evolving from the slave;
+
+And life, no longer chance or fate,
+Safe in the gracious Fatherhood.
+I fold o'er-wearied hands and wait,
+In full assurance of the good.
+
+And well the waiting time must be,
+Though brief or long its granted days,
+If Faith and Hope and Charity
+Sit by my evening hearth-fire's blaze.
+
+And with them, friends whom Heaven has spared,
+Whose love my heart has comforted,
+And, sharing all my joys, has shared
+My tender memories of the dead,--
+
+Dear souls who left us lonely here,
+Bound on their last, long voyage, to whom
+We, day by day, are drawing near,
+Where every bark has sailing room!
+
+I know the solemn monotone
+Of waters calling unto me
+I know from whence the airs have blown
+That whisper of the Eternal Sea.
+
+As low my fires of drift-wood burn,
+I hear that sea's deep sounds increase,
+And, fair in sunset light, discern
+Its mirage-lifted Isles of Peace.
+
+
+
+O. W. HOLMES ON HIS EIGHTIETH BIRTH-DAY.
+
+Climbing a path which leads back never more
+We heard behind his footsteps and his cheer;
+Now, face to face, we greet him standing here
+Upon the lonely summit of Fourscore
+Welcome to us, o'er whom the lengthened day
+Is closing and the shadows colder grow,
+His genial presence, like an afterglow,
+Following the one just vanishing away.
+Long be it ere the table shall be set
+For the last breakfast of the Autocrat,
+And love repeat with smiles and tears thereat
+His own sweet songs that time shall not forget.
+Waiting with us the call to come up higher,
+Life is not less, the heavens are only higher!
+
+
+
+JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
+
+From purest wells of English undefiled
+None deeper drank than he, the New World's child,
+Who in the language of their farm-fields spoke
+The wit and wisdom of New England folk,
+Shaming a monstrous wrong. The world-wide laugh
+Provoked thereby might well have shaken half
+The walls of Slavery down, ere yet the ball
+And mine of battle overthrew them all.
+
+
+
+HAVERHILL.
+
+1640-1890.
+
+     Read at the Celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary
+     of the City, July 2, 1890.
+
+O river winding to the sea!
+We call the old time back to thee;
+From forest paths and water-ways
+The century-woven veil we raise.
+
+The voices of to-day are dumb,
+Unheard its sounds that go and come;
+We listen, through long-lapsing years,
+To footsteps of the pioneers.
+
+Gone steepled town and cultured plain,
+The wilderness returns again,
+The drear, untrodden solitude,
+The gloom and mystery of the wood!
+
+Once more the bear and panther prowl,
+The wolf repeats his hungry howl,
+And, peering through his leafy screen,
+The Indian's copper face is seen.
+
+We see, their rude-built huts beside,
+Grave men and women anxious-eyed,
+And wistful youth remembering still
+Dear homes in England's Haverhill.
+
+We summon forth to mortal view
+Dark Passaquo and Saggahew,--
+Wild chiefs, who owned the mighty sway
+Of wizard Passaconaway.
+
+Weird memories of the border town,
+By old tradition handed down,
+In chance and change before us pass
+Like pictures in a magic glass,--
+
+The terrors of the midnight raid,
+The-death-concealing ambuscade,
+The winter march, through deserts wild,
+Of captive mother, wife, and child.
+
+Ah! bleeding hands alone subdued
+And tamed the savage habitude
+Of forests hiding beasts of prey,
+And human shapes as fierce as they.
+
+Slow from the plough the woods withdrew,
+Slowly each year the corn-lands grew;
+Nor fire, nor frost, nor foe could kill
+The Saxon energy of will.
+
+And never in the hamlet's bound
+Was lack of sturdy manhood found,
+And never failed the kindred good
+Of brave and helpful womanhood.
+
+That hamlet now a city is,
+Its log-built huts are palaces;
+The wood-path of the settler's cow
+Is Traffic's crowded highway now.
+
+And far and wide it stretches still,
+Along its southward sloping hill,
+And overlooks on either hand
+A rich and many-watered land.
+
+And, gladdening all the landscape, fair
+As Pison was to Eden's pair,
+Our river to its valley brings
+The blessing of its mountain springs.
+
+And Nature holds with narrowing space,
+From mart and crowd, her old-time grace,
+And guards with fondly jealous arms
+The wild growths of outlying farms.
+
+Her sunsets on Kenoza fall,
+Her autumn leaves by Saltonstall;
+No lavished gold can richer make
+Her opulence of hill and lake.
+
+Wise was the choice which led out sires
+To kindle here their household fires,
+And share the large content of all
+Whose lines in pleasant places fall.
+
+More dear, as years on years advance,
+We prize the old inheritance,
+And feel, as far and wide we roam,
+That all we seek we leave at home.
+
+Our palms are pines, our oranges
+Are apples on our orchard trees;
+Our thrushes are our nightingales,
+Our larks the blackbirds of our vales.
+
+No incense which the Orient burns
+Is sweeter than our hillside ferns;
+What tropic splendor can outvie
+Our autumn woods, our sunset sky?
+
+If, where the slow years came and went,
+And left not affluence, but content,
+Now flashes in our dazzled eyes
+The electric light of enterprise;
+
+And if the old idyllic ease
+Seems lost in keen activities,
+And crowded workshops now replace
+The hearth's and farm-field's rustic grace;
+
+
+No dull, mechanic round of toil
+Life's morning charm can quite despoil;
+And youth and beauty, hand in hand,
+Will always find enchanted land.
+
+No task is ill where hand and brain
+And skill and strength have equal gain,
+And each shall each in honor hold,
+And simple manhood outweigh gold.
+
+Earth shall be near to Heaven when all
+That severs man from man shall fall,
+For, here or there, salvation's plan
+Alone is love of God and man.
+
+O dwellers by the Merrimac,
+The heirs of centuries at your back,
+Still reaping where you have not sown,
+A broader field is now your own.
+
+Hold fast your Puritan heritage,
+But let the free thought of the age
+Its light and hope and sweetness add
+To the stern faith the fathers had.
+
+Adrift on Time's returnless tide,
+As waves that follow waves, we glide.
+God grant we leave upon the shore
+Some waif of good it lacked before;
+
+Some seed, or flower, or plant of worth,
+Some added beauty to the earth;
+Some larger hope, some thought to make
+The sad world happier for its sake.
+
+As tenants of uncertain stay,
+So may we live our little day
+That only grateful hearts shall fill
+The homes we leave in Haverhill.
+
+The singer of a farewell rhyme,
+Upon whose outmost verge of time
+The shades of night are falling down,
+I pray, God bless the good old town!
+
+
+
+TO G. G.
+
+AN AUTOGRAPH.
+
+     The daughter of Daniel Gurteen, Esq., delegate from Haverhill,
+     England, to the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebration of
+     Haverhill, Massachusetts. The Rev. John Ward of the former place
+     and many of his old parishioners were the pioneer settlers of the
+     new town on the Merrimac.
+
+Graceful in name and in thyself, our river
+None fairer saw in John Ward's pilgrim flock,
+Proof that upon their century-rooted stock
+The English roses bloom as fresh as ever.
+
+Take the warm welcome of new friends with thee,
+And listening to thy home's familiar chime
+Dream that thou hearest, with it keeping time,
+The bells on Merrimac sound across the sea.
+
+Think of our thrushes, when the lark sings clear,
+Of our sweet Mayflowers when the daisies bloom;
+And bear to our and thy ancestral home
+The kindly greeting of its children here.
+
+Say that our love survives the severing strain;
+That the New England, with the Old, holds fast
+The proud, fond memories of a common past;
+Unbroken still the ties of blood remain!
+
+
+
+INSCRIPTION
+
+     For the bass-relief by Preston Powers, carved upon the huge boulder
+     in Denver Park, Col., and representing the Last Indian and the Last
+     Bison.
+
+The eagle, stooping from yon snow-blown peaks,
+For the wild hunter and the bison seeks,
+In the changed world below; and finds alone
+Their graven semblance in the eternal stone.
+
+
+
+LYDIA H. SIGOURNEY.
+
+Inscription on her Memorial Tablet in Christ Church at Hartford, Conn.
+
+She sang alone, ere womanhood had known
+The gift of song which fills the air to-day
+Tender and sweet, a music all her own
+May fitly linger where she knelt to pray.
+
+
+
+MILTON
+
+Inscription on the Memorial Window in St. Margaret's Church,
+Westminster, the gift of George W. Childs, of America.
+
+The new world honors him whose lofty plea
+For England's freedom made her own more sure,
+Whose song, immortal as its theme, shall be
+Their common freehold while both worlds endure.
+
+
+
+THE BIRTHDAY WREATH
+
+December 17, 1891.
+
+Blossom and greenness, making all
+The winter birthday tropical,
+And the plain Quaker parlors gay,
+Have gone from bracket, stand, and wall;
+We saw them fade, and droop, and fall,
+And laid them tenderly away.
+
+White virgin lilies, mignonette,
+Blown rose, and pink, and violet,
+A breath of fragrance passing by;
+Visions of beauty and decay,
+Colors and shapes that could not stay,
+The fairest, sweetest, first to die.
+
+But still this rustic wreath of mine,
+Of acorned oak and needled pine,
+And lighter growths of forest lands,
+Woven and wound with careful pains,
+And tender thoughts, and prayers, remains,
+As when it dropped from love's dear hands.
+
+And not unfitly garlanded,
+Is he, who, country-born and bred,
+Welcomes the sylvan ring which gives
+A feeling of old summer days,
+The wild delight of woodland ways,
+The glory of the autumn leaves.
+
+And, if the flowery meed of song
+To other bards may well belong,
+Be his, who from the farm-field spoke
+A word for Freedom when her need
+Was not of dulcimer and reed.
+This Isthmian wreath of pine and oak.
+
+
+
+THE WIND OF MARCH.
+
+Up from the sea, the wild north wind is blowing
+Under the sky's gray arch;
+Smiling, I watch the shaken elm-boughs, knowing
+It is the wind of March.
+
+Between the passing and the coming season,
+This stormy interlude
+Gives to our winter-wearied hearts a reason
+For trustful gratitude.
+
+Welcome to waiting ears its harsh forewarning
+Of light and warmth to come,
+The longed-for joy of Nature's Easter morning,
+The earth arisen in bloom.
+
+In the loud tumult winter's strength is breaking;
+I listen to the sound,
+As to a voice of resurrection, waking
+To life the dead, cold ground.
+
+Between these gusts, to the soft lapse I hearken
+Of rivulets on their way;
+I see these tossed and naked tree-tops darken
+With the fresh leaves of May.
+
+This roar of storm, this sky so gray and lowering
+Invite the airs of Spring,
+A warmer sunshine over fields of flowering,
+The bluebird's song and wing.
+
+Closely behind, the Gulf's warm breezes follow
+This northern hurricane,
+And, borne thereon, the bobolink and swallow
+Shall visit us again.
+
+And, in green wood-paths, in the kine-fed pasture
+And by the whispering rills,
+Shall flowers repeat the lesson of the Master,
+Taught on his Syrian hills.
+
+Blow, then, wild wind! thy roar shall end in singing,
+Thy chill in blossoming;
+Come, like Bethesda's troubling angel, bringing
+The healing of the Spring.
+
+
+
+BETWEEN THE GATES.
+
+Between the gates of birth and death
+An old and saintly pilgrim passed,
+With look of one who witnesseth
+The long-sought goal at last.
+
+O thou whose reverent feet have found
+The Master's footprints in thy way,
+And walked thereon as holy ground,
+A boon of thee I pray.
+
+"My lack would borrow thy excess,
+My feeble faith the strength of thine;
+I need thy soul's white saintliness
+To hide the stains of mine.
+
+"The grace and favor else denied
+May well be granted for thy sake."
+So, tempted, doubting, sorely tried,
+A younger pilgrim spake.
+
+"Thy prayer, my son, transcends my gift;
+No power is mine," the sage replied,
+"The burden of a soul to lift
+Or stain of sin to hide.
+
+"Howe'er the outward life may seem,
+For pardoning grace we all must pray;
+No man his brother can redeem
+Or a soul's ransom pay.
+
+"Not always age is growth of good;
+Its years have losses with their gain;
+Against some evil youth withstood
+Weak hands may strive in vain.
+
+"With deeper voice than any speech
+Of mortal lips from man to man,
+What earth's unwisdom may not teach
+The Spirit only can.
+
+"Make thou that holy guide thine own,
+And following where it leads the way,
+The known shall lapse in the unknown
+As twilight into day.
+
+"The best of earth shall still remain,
+And heaven's eternal years shall prove
+That life and death, and joy and pain,
+Are ministers of Love."
+
+
+
+THE LAST EVE OF SUMMER.
+
+Summer's last sun nigh unto setting shines
+Through yon columnar pines,
+And on the deepening shadows of the lawn
+Its golden lines are drawn.
+
+Dreaming of long gone summer days like this,
+Feeling the wind's soft kiss,
+Grateful and glad that failing ear and sight
+Have still their old delight,
+
+I sit alone, and watch the warm, sweet day
+Lapse tenderly away;
+And, wistful, with a feeling of forecast,
+I ask, "Is this the last?
+
+"Will nevermore for me the seasons run
+Their round, and will the sun
+Of ardent summers yet to come forget
+For me to rise and set?"
+
+Thou shouldst be here, or I should be with thee
+Wherever thou mayst be,
+Lips mute, hands clasped, in silences of speech
+Each answering unto each.
+
+For this still hour, this sense of mystery far
+Beyond the evening star,
+No words outworn suffice on lip or scroll:
+The soul would fain with soul
+
+Wait, while these few swift-passing days fulfil
+The wise-disposing Will,
+And, in the evening as at morning, trust
+The All-Merciful and Just.
+
+The solemn joy that soul-communion feels
+Immortal life reveals;
+And human love, its prophecy and sign,
+Interprets love divine.
+
+Come then, in thought, if that alone may be,
+O friend! and bring with thee
+Thy calm assurance of transcendent Spheres
+And the Eternal Years!
+August 31, 1890.
+
+
+
+TO OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
+8TH Mo. 29TH, 1892.
+
+This, the last of Mr. Whittier's poems, was written but a few weeks
+before his death.
+
+Among the thousands who with hail and cheer
+Will welcome thy new year,
+How few of all have passed, as thou and I,
+So many milestones by!
+
+We have grown old together; we have seen,
+Our youth and age between,
+Two generations leave us, and to-day
+We with the third hold way,
+
+Loving and loved. If thought must backward run
+To those who, one by one,
+In the great silence and the dark beyond
+Vanished with farewells fond,
+
+Unseen, not lost; our grateful memories still
+Their vacant places fill,
+And with the full-voiced greeting of new friends
+A tenderer whisper blends.
+
+Linked close in a pathetic brotherhood
+Of mingled ill and good,
+Of joy and grief, of grandeur and of shame,
+For pity more than blame,--
+
+The gift is thine the weary world to make
+More cheerful for thy sake,
+Soothing the ears its Miserere pains,
+With the old Hellenic strains,
+
+Lighting the sullen face of discontent
+With smiles for blessings sent.
+Enough of selfish wailing has been had,
+Thank God! for notes more glad.
+
+Life is indeed no holiday; therein
+Are want, and woe, and sin,
+Death and its nameless fears, and over all
+Our pitying tears must fall.
+
+Sorrow is real; but the counterfeit
+Which folly brings to it,
+We need thy wit and wisdom to resist,
+O rarest Optimist!
+
+Thy hand, old friend! the service of our days,
+In differing moods and ways,
+May prove to those who follow in our train
+Not valueless nor vain.
+
+Far off, and faint as echoes of a dream,
+The songs of boyhood seem,
+Yet on our autumn boughs, unflown with spring,
+The evening thrushes sing.
+
+The hour draws near, howe'er delayed and late,
+When at the Eternal Gate
+We leave the words and works we call our own,
+And lift void hands alone
+
+For love to fill. Our nakedness of soul
+Brings to that Gate no toll;
+Giftless we come to Him, who all things gives,
+And live because He lives.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                               VOLUME V.
+
+
+              MARGARET SMITH'S JOURNAL TALES AND SKETCHES
+
+                                   BY
+
+                        JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
+
+
+
+The intelligent reader of the following record cannot fail to notice
+occasional inaccuracies in respect to persons, places, and dates; and,
+as a matter of course, will make due allowance for the prevailing
+prejudices and errors of the period to which it relates.  That there are
+passages indicative of a comparatively recent origin, and calculated to
+cast a shade of doubt over the entire narrative, the Editor would be the
+last to deny, notwithstanding its general accordance with historical
+verities and probabilities.  Its merit consists mainly in the fact that
+it presents a tolerably lifelike picture of the Past, and introduces us
+familiarly to the hearths and homes of New England in the seventeenth
+century.
+
+A full and accurate account of Secretary Rawson and his family is about
+to be published by his descendants, to which the reader is referred who
+wishes to know more of the personages who figure prominently in this
+Journal.
+
+1866.
+
+
+
+
+
+MARGARET SMITH'S JOURNAL IN THE PROVINCE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY, 1678-9
+
+TALES AND SKETCHES
+
+     MY SUMMER WITH DR. SINGLETARY: A FRAGMENT
+
+     THE LITTLE IRON SOLDIER
+     PASSACONAWAY
+     THE OPIUM EATER
+     THE PROSELYTES
+     DAVID MATSON
+     THE FISH I DID N'T CATCH
+     YANKEE GYPSIES
+     THE TRAINING
+     THE CITY OF A DAY
+     PATUCKET FALLS
+     FIRST DAY IN LOWELL
+     THE LIGHTING UP
+     TAKING COMFORT
+     CHARMS AND FAIRY FAITH
+     MAGICIANS AND WITCH FOLK
+     THE BEAUTIFUL
+     THE WORLD'S END
+     THE HEROINE OF LONG POINT
+
+
+
+
+
+MARGARET SMITH'S JOURNAL
+
+IN THE PROVINCE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY
+
+1678-9.
+
+
+BOSTON, May 8, 1678.
+
+I remember I did promise my kind Cousin Oliver (whom I pray God to have
+always in his keeping), when I parted with him nigh unto three months
+ago, at mine Uncle Grindall's, that, on coming to this new country,
+I would, for his sake and perusal, keep a little journal of whatsoever
+did happen both unto myself and unto those with whom I might sojourn;
+as also, some account of the country and its marvels, and mine own
+cogitations thereon.  So I this day make a beginning of the same;
+albeit, as my cousin well knoweth, not from any vanity of authorship,
+or because of any undue confiding in my poor ability to edify one justly
+held in repute among the learned, but because my heart tells me that
+what I write, be it ever so faulty, will be read by the partial eye of
+my kinsman, and not with the critical observance of the scholar, and
+that his love will not find it difficult to excuse what offends his
+clerkly judgment.  And, to embolden me withal, I will never forget that
+I am writing for mine old playmate at hide-and-seek in the farm-house at
+Hilton,--the same who used to hunt after flowers for me in the spring,
+and who did fill my apron with hazel-nuts in the autumn, and who was
+then, I fear, little wiser than his still foolish cousin, who, if she
+hath not since learned so many new things as himself, hath perhaps
+remembered more of the old.  Therefore, without other preface, I will
+begin my record.
+
+Of my voyage out I need not write, as I have spoken of it in my letters
+already, and it greatly irks me to think of it.  Oh, a very long, dismal
+time of sickness and great discomforts, and many sad thoughts of all
+I had left behind, and fears of all I was going to meet in the New
+England!  I can liken it only to an ugly dream.  When we got at last
+to Boston, the sight of the land and trees, albeit they were exceeding
+bleak and bare (it being a late season, and nipping cold), was like unto
+a vision of a better world.  As we passed the small wooded islands,
+which make the bay very pleasant, and entered close upon the town, and
+saw the houses; and orchards, and meadows, and the hills beyond covered
+with a great growth of wood, my brother, lifting up both of his hands,
+cried out, "How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, and thy habitations, O
+Israel!"  and for my part I did weep for joy and thankfulness of heart,
+that God had brought us safely to so fair a haven.  Uncle and Aunt
+Rawson met us on the wharf, and made us very comfortable at their house,
+which is about half a mile from the water-side, at the foot of a hill,
+with an oaken forest behind it, to shelter it from the north wind, which
+is here very piercing.  Uncle is Secretary of the Massachusetts, and
+spends a great part of his time in town; and his wife and family are
+with him in the winter season, but they spend their summers at his
+plantation on the Merrimac River, in Newbury.  His daughter, Rebecca,
+is just about my age, very tall and lady-looking; she is like her
+brother John, who was at Uncle Hilton's last year.  She hath, moreover,
+a pleasant wit, and hath seen much goodly company, being greatly admired
+by the young men of family and distinction in the Province.  She hath
+been very kind to me, telling me that she looked upon me as a sister.
+I have been courteously entertained, moreover, by many of the principal
+people, both of the reverend clergy and the magistracy.  Nor must I
+forbear to mention a visit which I paid with Uncle and Aunt Rawson at
+the house of an aged magistrate of high esteem and influence in these
+parts.  He saluted me courteously, and made inquiries concerning our
+family, and whether I had been admitted into the Church.  On my telling
+him that I had not, he knit his brows, and looked at me very sternly.
+
+"Mr. Rawson," said he, "your niece, I fear me, has much more need of
+spiritual adorning than of such gewgaws as these," and took hold of my
+lace ruff so hard that I heard the stitches break; and then he pulled
+out my sleeves, to see how wide they were, though they were only half an
+ell.  Madam ventured to speak a word to encourage me, for she saw I was
+much abashed and flustered, yet he did not heed her, but went on talking
+very loud against the folly and the wasteful wantonness of the times.
+Poor Madam is a quiet, sickly-looking woman, and seems not a little in
+awe of her husband, at the which I do not marvel, for he hath a very
+impatient, forbidding way with him, and, I must say, seemed to carry
+himself harshly at times towards her.  Uncle Rawson says he has had much
+to try his temper; that there have been many and sore difficulties in
+Church as well as State; and he hath bitter enemies, in some of the
+members of the General Court, who count him too severe with the Quakers
+and other disturbers and ranters.  I told him it was no doubt true; but
+that I thought it a bad use of the Lord's chastenings to abuse one's
+best friends for the wrongs done by enemies; and, that to be made to
+atone for what went ill in Church or State, was a kind of vicarious
+suffering that, if I was in Madam's place, I should not bear with half
+her patience and sweetness.
+
+
+
+Ipswitch, near Agawam, May 12.
+
+We set out day before yesterday on our journey to Newbury.  There were
+eight of us,--Rebecca Rawson and her sister, Thomas Broughton, his wife,
+and their man-servant, my brother Leonard and myself, and young Robert
+Pike, of Newbury, who had been to Boston on business, his father having
+great fisheries in the river as well as the sea.  He is, I can perceive,
+a great admirer of my cousin, and indeed not without reason; for she
+hath in mind and person, in her graceful carriage and pleasant
+discourse, and a certain not unpleasing waywardness, as of a merry
+child, that which makes her company sought of all.  Our route the first
+day lay through the woods and along the borders of great marshes and
+meadows on the seashore.  We came to Linne at night, and stopped at the
+house of a kinsman of Robert Pike's,--a man of some substance and note
+in that settlement.  We were tired and hungry, and the supper of warm
+Indian bread and sweet milk relished quite as well as any I ever ate in
+the Old Country.  The next day we went on over a rough road to Wenham,
+through Salem, which is quite a pleasant town.  Here we stopped until
+this morning, when we again mounted our horses, and reached this place,
+after a smart ride of three hours.  The weather in the morning was warm
+and soft as our summer days at home; and, as we rode through the woods,
+where the young leaves were fluttering, and the white blossoms of the
+wind-flowers, and the blue violets and the yellow blooming of the
+cowslips in the low grounds, were seen on either hand, and the birds all
+the time making a great and pleasing melody in the branches, I was glad
+of heart as a child, and thought if my beloved friends and Cousin Oliver
+were only with us, I could never wish to leave so fair a country.
+
+Just before we reached Agawam, as I was riding a little before my
+companions, I was startled greatly by the sight of an Indian.  He was
+standing close to the bridle-path, his half-naked body partly hidden by
+a clump of white birches, through which he looked out on me with eyes
+like two live coals.  I cried for my brother and turned my horse, when
+Robert Pike came up and bid me be of cheer, for he knew the savage, and
+that he was friendly.  Whereupon, he bade him come out of the bushes,
+which he did, after a little parley.  He was a tall man, of very fair
+and comely make, and wore a red woollen blanket with beads and small
+clam-shells jingling about it.  His skin was swarthy, not black like a
+Moor or Guinea-man, but of a color not unlike that of tarnished copper
+coin.  He spake but little, and that in his own tongue, very harsh and
+strange-sounding to my ear.  Robert Pike tells me that he is Chief of
+the Agawams, once a great nation in these parts, but now quite small and
+broken.  As we rode on, and from the top of a hill got a fair view of
+the great sea off at the east, Robert Pike bade me notice a little bay,
+around which I could see four or five small, peaked huts or tents,
+standing just where the white sands of the beach met the green line of
+grass and bushes of the uplands.
+
+"There," said he, "are their summer-houses, which they build near unto
+their fishing-grounds and corn-fields.  In the winter they go far back
+into the wilderness, where game is plenty of all kinds, and there build
+their wigwams in warm valleys thick with trees, which do serve to
+shelter them from the winds."
+
+"Let us look into them," said I to Cousin Rebecca; "it seems but a
+stone's throw from our way."
+
+She tried to dissuade me, by calling them a dirty, foul people; but
+seeing I was not to be put off, she at last consented, and we rode aside
+down the hill, the rest following.  On our way we had the misfortune to
+ride over their corn-field; at the which, two or three women and as many
+boys set up a yell very hideous to hear; whereat Robert Pike came up,
+and appeased them by giving them some money and a drink of Jamaica
+spirits, with which they seemed vastly pleased.  I looked into one of
+their huts; it was made of poles like unto a tent, only it was covered
+with the silver-colored bark of the birch, instead of hempen stuff.  A
+bark mat, braided of many exceeding brilliant colors, covered a goodly
+part of the space inside; and from the poles we saw fishes hanging, and
+strips of dried meat.  On a pile of skins in the corner sat a young
+woman with a child a-nursing; they both looked sadly wild and neglected;
+yet had she withal a pleasant face, and as she bent over her little one,
+her long, straight, and black hair falling over him, and murmuring a low
+and very plaintive melody, I forgot everything save that she was a woman
+and a mother, and I felt my heart greatly drawn towards her.  So, giving
+my horse in charge, I ventured in to her, speaking as kindly as I could,
+and asking to see her child.  She understood me, and with a smile held
+up her little papoose, as she called him,--who, to say truth, I could
+not call very pretty.  He seemed to have a wild, shy look, like the
+offspring of an untamed, animal.  The woman wore a blanket, gaudily
+fringed, and she had a string of beads on her neck.  She took down a
+basket, woven of white and red willows, and pressed me to taste of her
+bread; which I did, that I might not offend her courtesy by refusing.
+It was not of ill taste, although so hard one could scarcely bite it,
+and was made of corn meal unleavened, mixed with a dried berry, which
+gives it a sweet flavor.  She told me, in her broken way, that the whole
+tribe now numbered only twenty-five men and women, counting out the
+number very fast with yellow grains of corn, on the corner of her
+blanket.  She was, she said, the youngest woman in the tribe; and her
+husband, Peckanaminet, was the Indian we had met in the bridlepath.  I
+gave her a pretty piece of ribbon, and an apron for the child; and she
+thanked me in her manner, going with us on our return to the path; and
+when I had ridden a little onward, I saw her husband running towards us;
+so, stopping my horse, I awaited until he came up, when he offered me a
+fine large fish, which he had just caught, in acknowledgment, as I
+judged, of my gift to his wife.  Rebecca and Mistress Broughton laughed,
+and bid him take the thing away; but I would not suffer it, and so
+Robert Pike took it, and brought it on to our present tarrying place,
+where truly it hath made a fair supper for us all.  These poor heathen
+people seem not so exceeding bad as they have been reported; they be
+like unto ourselves, only lacking our knowledge and opportunities,
+which, indeed, are not our own to boast of, but gifts of God, calling
+for humble thankfulness, and daily prayer and watchfulness, that they be
+rightly improved.
+
+
+
+Newbery on the Merrimac, May 14, 1678.
+
+We were hardly on our way yesterday, from Agawam, when a dashing young
+gallant rode up very fast behind us.  He was fairly clad in rich stuffs,
+and rode a nag of good mettle.  He saluted us with much ease and
+courtliness, offering especial compliments to Rebecca, to whom he seemed
+well known, and who I thought was both glad and surprised at his coming.
+As I rode near, she said it gave her great joy to bring to each other's
+acquaintance, Sir Thomas Hale, a good friend of her father's, and her
+cousin Margaret, who, like himself, was a new-comer.  He replied, that
+he should look with favor on any one who was near to her in friendship
+or kindred; and, on learning my father's name, said he had seen him at
+his uncle's, Sir Matthew Hale's, many years ago, and could vouch for him
+as a worthy man.  After some pleasant and merry discoursing with us, he
+and my brother fell into converse upon the state of affairs in the
+Colony, the late lamentable war with the Narragansett and Pequod
+Indians, together with the growth of heresy and schism in the churches,
+which latter he did not scruple to charge upon the wicked policy of the
+home government in checking the wholesome severity of the laws here
+enacted against the schemers and ranters.  "I quite agree," said he,
+"with Mr. Rawson, that they should have hanged ten where they did one."
+Cousin Rebecca here said she was sure her father was now glad the laws
+were changed, and that he had often told her that, although the
+condemned deserved their punishment, he was not sure that it was the
+best way to put down the heresy.  If she was ruler, she continued, in
+her merry way, she would send all the schemers and ranters, and all the
+sour, crabbed, busybodies in the churches, off to Rhode Island, where
+all kinds of folly, in spirituals as well as temporals, were permitted,
+and one crazy head could not reproach another.
+
+Falling back a little, and waiting for Robert Pike and Cousin Broughton
+to come up, I found them marvelling at the coming of the young
+gentleman, who it did seem had no special concernment in these parts,
+other than his acquaintance with Rebecca, and his desire of her company.
+Robert Pike, as is natural, looks upon him with no great partiality, yet
+he doth admit him to be wellbred, and of much and varied knowledge,
+acquired by far travel as well as study.  I must say, I like not his
+confident and bold manner and bearing toward my fair cousin; and he hath
+more the likeness of a cast-off dangler at the court, than of a modest
+and seemly country gentleman, of a staid and well-ordered house.
+Mistress Broughton says he was not at first accredited in Boston, but
+that her father, and Mr. Atkinson, and the chief people there now, did
+hold him to be not only what he professeth, as respecteth his
+gentlemanly lineage, but also learned and ingenious, and well-versed in
+the Scriptures, and the works of godly writers, both of ancient and
+modern time.  I noted that Robert was very silent during the rest of our
+journey, and seemed abashed and troubled in the presence of the gay
+gentleman; for, although a fair and comely youth, and of good family and
+estate, and accounted solid and judicious beyond his years, he does,
+nevertheless, much lack the ease and ready wit with which the latter
+commendeth himself to my sweet kinswoman. We crossed about noon a broad
+stream near to the sea, very deep and miry, so that we wetted our hose
+and skirts somewhat; and soon, to our great joy, beheld the pleasant
+cleared fields and dwellings of the settlement, stretching along for a
+goodly distance; while, beyond all, the great ocean rolled, blue and
+cold, under an high easterly wind.  Passing through a broad path, with
+well-tilled fields on each hand, where men were busy planting corn, and
+young maids dropping the seed, we came at length to Uncle Rawson's
+plantation, looking wellnigh as fair and broad as the lands of Hilton
+Grange, with a good frame house, and large barns thereon.  Turning up
+the lane, we were met by the housekeeper, a respectable kinswoman, who
+received us with great civility.  Sir Thomas, although pressed to stay,
+excused himself for the time, promising to call on the morrow, and rode
+on to the ordinary.  I was sadly tired with my journey, and was glad to
+be shown to a chamber and a comfortable bed.
+
+I was awakened this morning by the pleasant voice of my cousin, who
+shared my bed.  She had arisen and thrown open the window looking
+towards the sunrising, and the air came in soft and warm, and laden with
+the sweets of flowers and green-growing things.  And when I had gotten
+myself ready, I sat with her at the window, and I think I may say it was
+with a feeling of praise and thanksgiving that mine eyes wandered up and
+down over the green meadows, and corn-fields, and orchards of my new
+home.  Where, thought I, foolish one, be the terrors of the wilderness,
+which troubled thy daily thoughts and thy nightly dreams!  Where be the
+gloomy shades, and desolate mountains, and the wild beasts, with their
+dismal howlings and rages!  Here all looked peaceful, and bespoke
+comfort and contentedness.  Even the great woods which climbed up the
+hills in the distance looked thin and soft, with their faint young
+leaves a yellowish-gray, intermingled with pale, silvery shades,
+indicating, as my cousin saith, the different kinds of trees, some of
+which, like the willow, do put on their leaves early, and others late,
+like the oak, with which the whole region aboundeth.  A sweet, quiet
+picture it was, with a warm sun, very bright and clear, shining over it,
+and the great sea, glistening with the exceeding light, bounding the
+view of mine eyes, but bearing my thoughts, like swift ships, to the
+land of my birth, and so uniting, as it were, the New World with the
+Old.  Oh, thought I, the merciful God, who reneweth the earth and maketh
+it glad and brave with greenery and flowers of various hues and smells,
+and causeth his south winds to blow and his rains to fall, that seed-
+time may not fail, doth even here, in the ends of his creation, prank
+and beautify the work of his hands, making the desert places to rejoice,
+and the wilderness to blossom as the rose.  Verily his love is over
+all,--the Indian heathen as well as the English Christian.  And what
+abundant cause for thanks have I, that I have been safely landed on a
+shore so fair and pleasant, and enabled to open mine eyes in peace and
+love on so sweet a May morning!  And I was minded of a verse which I
+learned from my dear and honored mother when a child,--
+
+               "Teach me, my God, thy love to know,
+               That this new light, which now I see,
+               May both the work and workman show;
+               Then by the sunbeams I will climb to thee."
+
+When we went below, we found on the window seat which looketh to the
+roadway, a great bunch of flowers of many kinds, such as I had never
+seen in mine own country, very fresh, and glistening with the dew.  Now,
+when Rebecca took them up, her sister said, "Nay, they are not Sir
+Thomas's gift, for young Pike hath just left them."  Whereat, as I
+thought, she looked vexed, and ill at ease.  "They are yours, then,
+Cousin Margaret," said she, rallying, "for Robert and you did ride aside
+all the way from Agawam, and he scarce spake to me the day long.  I see
+I have lost mine old lover, and my little cousin hath found a new one.
+I shall write Cousin Oliver all about it."
+
+"Nay," said I, "old lovers are better than new; but I fear my sweet
+cousin hath not so considered It."  She blushed, and looked aside, and
+for some space of time I did miss her smile, and she spake little.
+
+
+
+May 20.
+
+We had scarcely breakfasted, when him they Call Sir Thomas called on us,
+and with him came also a Mr. Sewall, and the minister of the church, Mr.
+Richardson, both of whom did cordially welcome home my cousins, and were
+civil to my brother and myself.  Mr. Richardson and Leonard fell to
+conversing about the state of the Church; and Sir Thomas discoursed us
+in his lively way.  After some little tarry, Mr. Sewall asked us to go
+with him to Deer's Island, a small way up the river, where he and Robert
+Pike had some men splitting staves for the Bermuda market.  As the day
+was clear and warm, we did readily agree to go, and forthwith set out
+for the river, passing through the woods for nearly a half mile.  When
+we came to the Merrimac, we found it a great and broad stream.  We took
+a boat, and were rowed up the river, enjoying the pleasing view of the
+green banks, and the rocks hanging over the water, covered with bright
+mosses, and besprinkled with pale, white flowers.  Mr. Sewall pointed
+out to us the different kinds of trees, and their nature and uses, and
+especially the sugar-tree, which is very beautiful in its leaf and
+shape, and from which the people of this country do draw a sap wellnigh
+as sweet as the juice of the Indian cane, making good treacle and sugar.
+Deer's Island hath rough, rocky shores, very high and steep, and is well
+covered with a great growth of trees, mostly evergreen pines and
+hemlocks which looked exceeding old.  We found a good seat on the mossy
+trunk of one of these great trees, which had fallen from its extreme
+age, or from some violent blast of wind, from whence we could see the
+water breaking into white foam on the rocks, and hear the melodious
+sound of the wind in the leaves of the pines, and the singing of birds
+ever and anon; and lest this should seem too sad and lonely, we could
+also hear the sounds of the axes and beetles of the workmen, cleaving
+the timber not far off.  It was not long before Robert Pike came up and
+joined us.  He was in his working dress, and his face and hands were
+much discolored by the smut of the burnt logs, which Rebecca playfully
+remarking, he said there were no mirrors in the woods, and that must be
+his apology; that, besides, it did not become a plain man, like himself,
+who had to make his own fortune in the world, to try to imitate those
+who had only to open their mouths, to be fed like young robins, without
+trouble or toil.  Such might go as brave as they would, if they would
+only excuse his necessity.  I thought he spoke with some bitterness,
+which, indeed, was not without the excuse, that the manner of our gay
+young gentleman towards him savored much of pride and contemptuousness.
+My beloved cousin, who hath a good heart, and who, I must think, apart
+from the wealth and family of Sir Thomas, rather inclineth to her old
+friend and neighbor, spake cheerily and kindly to him, and besought me
+privately to do somewhat to help her remove his vexation.  So we did
+discourse of many things very pleasantly.  Mr. Richardson, on hearing
+Rebecca say that the Indians did take the melancholy noises of the
+pinetrees in the winds to be the voices of the Spirits of the woods,
+said that they always called to his mind the sounds in the mulberry-
+trees which the Prophet spake of.  Hereupon Rebecca, who hath her memory
+well provided with divers readings, both of the poets and other writers,
+did cite very opportunely some ingenious lines, touching what the
+heathens do relate of the Sacred Tree of Dodona, the rustling of whose
+leaves the negro priestesses did hold to be the language of the gods.
+And a late writer, she said, had something in one of his pieces, which
+might well be spoken of the aged and dead tree-trunk, upon which we were
+sitting.  And when we did all desire to know their import, she repeated
+them thus:--
+
+         "Sure thou didst flourish once, and many springs,
+          Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers,
+          Passed o'er thy head; many light hearts and wings,
+          Which now are dead, lodged in thy living towers."
+
+         "And still a new succession sings and flies,
+          Fresh groves grow up, and their green branches shoot
+          Towards the old and still enduring skies,
+          While the low violet thriveth at their root."
+
+
+These lines, she said, were written by one Vaughn, a Brecknockshire
+Welsh Doctor of Medicine, who had printed a little book not many years
+ago.  Mr. Richardson said the lines were good, but that he did hold the
+reading of ballads and the conceits of rhymers a waste of time, to say
+nothing worse.  Sir Thomas hereat said that, as far as he could judge,
+the worthy folk of New England had no great temptation to that sin from
+their own poets, and did then, in a drolling tone, repeat some verses of
+the 137th Psalm, which he said were the best he had seen in the
+Cambridge Psalm Book:--
+
+                   "The rivers of Babylon,
+                    There when we did sit down,
+                    Yea, even then we mourned when
+                    We remembered Sion.
+
+                    Our harp we did hang it amid
+                    Upon the willow-tree;
+                    Because there they that us away
+                    Led to captivity!
+
+                    Required of us a song, and thus
+                    Asked mirth us waste who laid,
+                    Sing us among a Sion's song
+                    Unto us as then they said."
+
+"Nay, Sir Thomas," quoth Mr. Richardson, "it is not seemly to jest over
+the Word of God.  The writers of our Book of Psalms in metre held
+rightly, that God's altar needs no polishing; and truly they have
+rendered the words of David into English verse with great fidelity."
+
+Our young gentleman, not willing to displeasure a man so esteemed as Mr.
+Richardson, here made an apology for his jesting, and said that, as to
+the Cambridge version, it was indeed faithful; and that it was no blame
+to uninspired men, that they did fall short of the beauties and richness
+of the Lord's Psalmist.  It being now near noon, we crossed over the
+river, to where was a sweet spring of water, very clear and bright,
+running out upon the green bank.  Now, as we stood thirsty, having no
+cup to drink from, seeing some people near, we called to them, and
+presently there came running to us a young and modest woman, with a
+bright pewter tankard, which she filled and gave us.  I thought her
+sweet and beautiful, as Rebecca of old, at her father's fountain.  She
+was about leaving, when Mr. Richardson said to her, it was a foul shame
+for one like her to give heed to the ranting of the Quakers, and bade
+her be a good girl, and come to the meeting.
+
+"Nay," said she, "I have been there often, to small profit.  The spirit
+which thou persecutest testifieth against thee and thy meeting."
+
+Sir Thomas jestingly asked her if the spirit she spoke of was not such
+an one as possessed Mary Magdalen.
+
+"Or the swine of the Gadarenes?" asked Mr. Richardson.
+
+I did smile with the others, but was presently sorry for it; for the
+young maid answered not a word to this, but turning to Rebecca, she
+said, "Thy father hath been hard with us, but thou seemest kind and
+gentle, and I have heard of thy charities to the poor.  The Lord keep
+thee, for thou walkest in slippery places; there is danger, and thou
+seest it not; thou trustest to the hearing of the ear and the seeing of
+the eye; the Lord alone seeth the deceitfulness and the guile of man;
+and if thou wilt cry mightily to Him, He can direct thee rightly."
+
+Her voice and manner were very weighty and solemn.  I felt an awe come
+upon me, and Rebecca's countenance was troubled.  As the maiden left us,
+the minister, looking after said, "There is a deal of poison under the
+fair outside of yonder vessel, which I fear is fitted for destruction."
+
+"Peggy Brewster is indeed under a delusion," answered Robert Pike, "but
+I know no harm of her.  She is kind to all, even to them who evil
+entreat her."
+
+"Robert, Robert!" cried the minister, "I fear me you will follow your
+honored father, who has made himself of ill repute, by favoring these
+people."--"The Quaker hath bewitched him with her bright eyes, perhaps,"
+quoth Sir Thomas.  "I would she had laid a spell on an uncivil tongue I
+wot of," answered Robert, angrily.  Hereupon, Mr. Sewall proposed that
+we should return, and in making ready and getting to the boat, the
+matter was dropped.
+
+
+
+NEWBURY, June 1, 1678.
+
+To-day Sir Thomas took his leave of us, being about to go back to
+Boston.  Cousin Rebecca is, I can see, much taken with his outside
+bravery and courtliness, yet she hath confessed to me that her sober
+judgment doth greatly incline her towards her old friend and neighbor,
+Robert Pike.  She hath even said that she doubted not she could live a
+quieter and happier life with him than with such an one as Sir Thomas;
+and that the words of the Quaker maid, whom we met at the spring on the
+river side, had disquieted her not a little, inasmuch as they did seem
+to confirm her own fears and misgivings.  But her fancy is so bedazzled
+with the goodly show of her suitor, that I much fear he can have her for
+the asking, especially as her father, to my knowledge, doth greatly
+favor him.  And, indeed, by reason of her gracious manner, witty and
+pleasant discoursing, excellent breeding, and dignity, she would do no
+discredit to the choice of one far higher than this young gentleman in
+estate and rank.
+
+
+
+June 10.
+
+I went this morning with Rebecca to visit Elnathan Stone, a young
+neighbor, who has been lying sorely ill for a long time.  He was a
+playmate of my cousin when a boy, and was thought to be of great promise
+as he grew up to manhood; but, engaging in the war with the heathen, he
+was wounded and taken captive by them, and after much suffering was
+brought back to his home a few months ago.  On entering the house where
+he lay, we found his mother, a careworn and sad woman, spinning in the
+room by his bedside.  A very great and bitter sorrow was depicted on her
+features; it was the anxious, unreconciled, and restless look of one who
+did feel herself tried beyond her patience, and might not be comforted.
+For, as I learned, she was a poor widow, who had seen her young daughter
+tomahawked by the Indians; and now her only son, the hope of her old
+age, was on his death-bed.  She received us with small civility, telling
+Rebecca that it was all along of the neglect of the men in authority
+that her son had got his death in the wars, inasmuch as it was the want
+of suitable diet and clothing, rather than his wounds, which had brought
+him into his present condition.  Now, as Uncle Rawson is one of the
+principal magistrates, my sweet cousin knew that the poor afflicted
+creature meant to reproach him; but her good heart did excuse and
+forgive the rudeness and distemper of one whom the Lord had sorely
+chastened.  So she spake kindly and lovingly, and gave her sundry nice
+dainty fruits and comforting cordials, which she had got from Boston for
+the sick man.  Then, as she came to his bedside, and took his hand
+lovingly in her own, he thanked her for her many kindnesses, and prayed
+God to bless her.  He must have been a handsome lad in health, for he
+had a fair, smooth forehead, shaded with brown, curling hair, and large,
+blue eyes, very sweet and gentle in their look.  He told us that he felt
+himself growing weaker, and that at times his bodily suffering was
+great.  But through the mercy of his Saviour he had much peace of mind.
+He was content to leave all things in His hand.  For his poor mother's
+sake, he said, more than for his own, he would like to get about once
+more; there were many things he would like to do for her, and for all
+who had befriended him; but he knew his Heavenly Father could do more
+and better for them, and he felt resigned to His will.  He had, he said,
+forgiven all who ever wronged him, and he had now no feeling of anger or
+unkindness left towards any one, for all seemed kind to him beyond his
+deserts, and like brothers and sisters.  He had much pity for the poor
+savages even, although he had suffered sorely at their hands; for he did
+believe that they had been often ill-used, and cheated, and otherwise
+provoked to take up arms against us.  Hereupon, Goodwife Stone twirled
+her spindle very spitefully, and said she would as soon pity the Devil
+as his children.  The thought of her mangled little girl, and of her
+dying son, did seem to overcome her, and she dropped her thread, and
+cried out with an exceeding bitter cry,--"Oh, the bloody heathen!  Oh,
+my poor murdered Molly!  Oh, my son, my son!"--"Nay, mother," said the
+sick man, reaching out his hand and taking hold of his mother's, with a
+sweet smile on his pale face,--"what does Christ tell us about loving
+our enemies, and doing good to them that do injure us?  Let us forgive
+our fellow-creatures, for we have all need of God's forgiveness.  I used
+to feel as mother does," he said, turning to us; "for I went into the
+war with a design to spare neither young nor old of the enemy.
+
+"But I thank God that even in that dark season my heart relented at the
+sight of the poor starving women and children, chased from place to
+place like partridges.  Even the Indian fighters, I found, had sorrows
+of their own, and grievous wrongs to avenge; and I do believe, if we had
+from the first treated them as poor blinded brethren, and striven as
+hard to give them light and knowledge, as we have to cheat them in
+trade, and to get away their lands, we should have escaped many bloody
+wars, and won many precious souls to Christ."
+
+I inquired of him concerning his captivity.  He was wounded, he told me,
+in a fight with the Sokokis Indians two years before.  It was a hot
+skirmish in the woods; the English and the Indians now running forward,
+and then falling back, firing at each other from behind the trees.  He
+had shot off all his powder, and, being ready to faint by reason of a
+wound in his knee, he was fain to sit down against an oak, from whence
+he did behold, with great sorrow and heaviness of heart, his companions
+overpowered by the number of their enemies, fleeing away and leaving him
+to his fate.  The savages soon came to him with dreadful whoopings,
+brandishing their hatchets and their scalping-knives.  He thereupon
+closed his eyes, expecting to be knocked in the head, and killed
+outright.  But just then a noted chief coming up in great haste, bade
+him be of good cheer, for he was his prisoner, and should not be slain.
+He proved to be the famous Sagamore Squando, the chief man of the
+Sokokis.
+
+"And were you kindly treated by this chief?" asked Rebecca.
+
+"I suffered much in moving with him to the Sebago Lake, owing to my
+wound," he replied; "but the chief did all in his power to give me
+comfort, and he often shared with me his scant fare, choosing rather to
+endure hunger himself, than to see his son, as he called me, in want of
+food.  And one night, when I did marvel at this kindness on his part, he
+told me that I had once done him a great service; asking me if I was not
+at Black Point, in a fishing vessel, the summer before?  I told him I
+was.  He then bade me remember the bad sailors who upset the canoe of a
+squaw, and wellnigh drowned her little child, and that I had threatened
+and beat them for it; and also how I gave the squaw a warm coat to wrap
+up the poor wet papoose.  It was his squaw and child that I had
+befriended; and he told me that he had often tried to speak to me, and
+make known his gratitude therefor; and that he came once to the garrison
+at Sheepscot, where he saw me; but being fired at, notwithstanding his
+signs of peace and friendship, he was obliged to flee into the woods.
+He said the child died a few days after its evil treatment, and the
+thought of it made his heart bitter; that he had tried to live peaceably
+with the white men, but they had driven him into the war.
+
+"On one occasion," said the sick soldier, "as we lay side by side in his
+hut, on the shore of the Sebago Lake, Squando, about midnight, began to
+pray to his God very earnestly.  And on my querying with him about it,
+he said he was greatly in doubt what to do, and had prayed for some sign
+of the Great Spirit's will concerning him.  He then told me that some
+years ago, near the place where we then lay, he left his wigwam at
+night, being unable to sleep, by reason of great heaviness and distemper
+of mind.  It was a full moon, and as he did walk to and fro, he saw a
+fair, tall man in a long black dress, standing in the light on the
+lake's shore, who spake to him and called him by name.
+
+"'Squando,' he said, and his voice was deep and solemn, like the wind in
+the hill pines, 'the God of the white man is the God of the Indian, and
+He is angry with his red children.  He alone is able to make the corn
+grow before the frost, and to lead the fish up the rivers in the spring,
+and to fill the woods with deer and other game, and the ponds and
+meadows with beavers.  Pray to Him always.  Do not hunt on His day, nor
+let the squaws hoe the corn.  Never taste of the strong fire-water, but
+drink only from the springs.  It, is because the Indians do not worship
+Him, that He has brought the white men among them; but if they will pray
+like the white men, they will grow very great and strong, and their
+children born in this moon will live to see the English sail back in
+their great canoes, and leave the Indians all their fishing-places and
+hunting-grounds.'
+
+"When the strange man had thus spoken, Squando told me that he went
+straightway up to him, but found where he had stood only the shadow of
+a broken tree, which lay in the moon across the white sand of the shore.
+Then he knew it was a spirit, and he trembled, but was glad.  Ever
+since, he told nee, he had prayed daily to the Great Spirit, had drank
+no rum, nor hunted on the Sabbath.
+
+"He said he did for a long time refuse to dig up his hatchet, and make
+war upon the whites, but that he could not sit idle in his wigwam, while
+his young men were gone upon their war-path.  The spirit of his dead
+child did moreover speak to him from the land of souls, and chide him
+for not seeking revenge.  Once, he told me, he had in a dream seen the
+child crying and moaning bitterly, and that when he inquired the cause
+of its grief, he was told that the Great Spirit was angry with its
+father, and would destroy him and his people unless he did join with the
+Eastern Indians to cut off the English."
+
+"I remember," said Rebecca, "of hearing my father speak of this
+Squando's kindness to a young maid taken captive some years ago at
+Presumpscot."
+
+"I saw her at Cocheco," said the sick man.  "Squando found her in a sad
+plight, and scarcely alive, took her to his wigwam, where his squaw did
+lovingly nurse and comfort her; and when she was able to travel, he
+brought her to Major Waldron's, asking no ransom for her.  He might have
+been made the fast friend of the English at that time, but he scarcely
+got civil treatment."
+
+"My father says that many friendly Indians, by the ill conduct of the
+traders, have been made our worst enemies," said Rebecca.  "He thought
+the bringing in of the Mohawks to help us a sin comparable to that of
+the Jews, who looked for deliverance from the King of Babylon at the
+hands of the Egyptians."
+
+"They did nothing but mischief," said Elnathan Stone; "they killed our
+friends at Newichawannock, Blind Will and his family."
+
+Rebecca here asked him if he ever heard the verses writ by Mr. Sewall
+concerning the killing of Blind Will.  And when he told her he had not,
+and would like to have her repeat them, if she could remember, she did
+recite them thus:--
+
+              "Blind Will of Newiehawannock!
+               He never will whoop again,
+               For his wigwam's burnt above him,
+               And his old, gray scalp is ta'en!
+
+              "Blind Will was the friend of white men,
+               On their errands his young men ran,
+               And he got him a coat and breeches,
+               And looked like a Christian man.
+
+              "Poor Will of Newiehawannock!
+               They slew him unawares,
+               Where he lived among his people,
+               Keeping Sabhath and saying prayers.
+
+              "Now his fields will know no harvest,
+               And his pipe is clean put out,
+               And his fine, brave coat and breeches
+               The Mohog wears about.
+
+              "Woe the day our rulers listened
+               To Sir Edmund's wicked plan,
+               Bringing down the cruel Mohogs
+               Who killed the poor old man.
+
+              "Oh! the Lord He will requite us;
+               For the evil we have done,
+               There'll be many a fair scalp drying
+               In the wind and in the sun!
+
+              "There'll be many a captive sighing,
+               In a bondage long and dire;
+               There'll be blood in many a corn-field,
+               And many a house a-fire.
+
+              "And the Papist priests the tidings
+               Unto all the tribes will send;
+               They'll point to Newiehawannock,--
+               'So the English treat their friend!'
+
+              "Let the Lord's anointed servants
+               Cry aloud against this wrong,
+               Till Sir Edmund take his Mohogs
+               Back again where they belong.
+
+              "Let the maiden and the mother
+               In the nightly watching share,
+               While the young men guard the block-house,
+               And the old men kneel in prayer.
+
+              "Poor Will of Newiehawannock!
+               For thy sad and cruel fall,
+               And the bringing in of the Mohogs,
+               May the Lord forgive us all!"
+
+A young woman entered the house just as Rebecca finished the verses.
+She bore in her hands a pail of milk and a fowl neatly dressed, which
+she gave to Elnathan's mother, and, seeing strangers by his bedside, was
+about to go out, when he called to her and besought her to stay.  As she
+came up and spoke to him, I knew her to be the maid we had met at the
+spring.  The young man, with tears in his eyes, acknowledged her great
+kindness to him, at which she seemed troubled and abashed.  A pure,
+sweet complexion she hath, and a gentle and loving look, full of
+innocence and sincerity.  Rebecca seemed greatly disturbed, for she no
+doubt thought of the warning words of this maiden, when we were at the
+spring.  After she had left, Goodwife Stone said she was sure she could
+not tell what brought that Quaker girl to her house so much, unless she
+meant to inveigle Elnathan; but, for her part, she would rather see him
+dead than live to bring reproach upon his family and the Church by
+following after the blasphemers.  I ventured to tell her that I did look
+upon it as sheer kindness and love on the young woman's part; at which
+Elnathan seemed pleased, and said he could not doubt it, and that he did
+believe Peggy Brewster to be a good Christian, although sadly led astray
+by the Quakers.  His mother said that, with all her meek looks, and kind
+words, she was full of all manner of pestilent heresies, and did remind
+her always of Satan in the shape of an angel of light.
+
+We went away ourselves soon after this, the sick man thanking us for our
+visit, and hoping that he should see us again.  "Poor Elnathan," said
+Rebecca, as we walked home, "he will never go abroad again; but he is in
+such a good and loving frame of mind, that he needs not our pity, as one
+who is without hope."
+
+"He reminds me," I said, "of the comforting promise of Scripture, 'Thou
+wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee.'"
+
+
+
+June 30, 1678.
+
+Mr. Rawson and Sir Thomas Hale came yesterday from Boston.  I was
+rejoiced to see mine uncle, more especially as he brought for me a
+package of letters, and presents and tokens of remembrance from my
+friends on the other side of the water.  As soon as I got them, I went
+up to my chamber, and, as I read of the health of those who are very
+dear to me, and who did still regard me with unchanged love, I wept in
+my great joy, and my heart overflowed in thankfulness.  I read the 22d
+Psalm, and it did seem to express mine own feelings in view of the great
+mercies and blessings vouchsafed to me.  "My head is anointed with oil;
+my cup runneth over.  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the
+days of my life."
+
+This morning, Sir Thomas and Uncle Rawson rode over to Hampton, where
+they will tarry all night.  Last evening, Rebecca had a long talk with
+her father concerning Sir Thomas, who hath asked her of him.  She came
+to bed very late, and lay restless and sobbing; whereupon I pressed her
+to know the cause of her grief, when she told me she had consented to
+marry Sir Thomas, but that her heart was sorely troubled and full of
+misgivings.  On my querying whether she did really love the young
+gentleman, she said she sometimes feared she did not; and that when her
+fancy had made a fair picture of the life of a great lady in England,
+there did often come a dark cloud over it like the shade of some heavy
+disappointment or sorrow.  "Sir Thomas," she said, "was a handsome and
+witty young man, and had demeaned himself to the satisfaction and good
+repute of her father and the principal people of the Colony; and his
+manner towards her had been exceeding delicate and modest, inasmuch as
+he had presumed nothing upon his family or estate, but had sought her
+with much entreaty and humility, although he did well know that some of
+the most admired and wealthy Young women in Boston did esteem him not a
+little, even to the annoying of herself, as one whom he especially
+favored."
+
+"This will be heavy news to Robert Pike," said I; "and I am sorry for
+him, for he is indeed a worthy man."
+
+"That he is," quoth she; "but he hath never spoken to me of aught beyond
+that friendliness which, as neighbors and school companions, we do
+innocently cherish for each other."
+
+"Nay," said I, "my sweet cousin knows full well that he entertaineth so
+strong an affection for her, that there needeth no words to reveal it."
+
+"Alas!" she answered, "it is too true.  When I am with him, I sometimes
+wish I had never seen Sir Thomas.  But my choice is made, and I pray God
+I may not have reason to repent of it."
+
+We said no more, but I fear she slept little, for on waking about the
+break of day, I saw her sitting in her night-dress by the window.
+Whereupon I entreated her to return to her bed, which she at length did,
+and folding me in her arms, and sobbing as if her heart would break, she
+besought me to pity her, for it was no light thing which she had done,
+and she scarcely knew her own mind, nor whether to rejoice or weep over
+it.  I strove to comfort her, and, after a time, she did, to my great
+joy, fall into a quiet sleep.
+
+This afternoon, Robert Pike came in, and had a long talk with Cousin
+Broughton, who told him how matters stood between her sister and Sir
+Thomas, at which he was vehemently troubled, and would fain have gone to
+seek Rebecca at once, and expostulate with her, but was hindered on
+being told that it could only grieve and discomfort her, inasmuch as the
+thing was well settled, and could not be broken off.  He said he had
+known and loved her from a child; that for her sake he had toiled hard
+by day and studied by night; and that in all his travels and voyages,
+her sweet image had always gone with him.  He would bring no accusation
+against her, for she had all along treated him rather as a brother than
+as a suitor: to which last condition he had indeed not felt himself at
+liberty to venture, after her honored father, some months ago, had given
+him to understand that he did design an alliance of his daughter with a
+gentleman of estate and family.  For himself, he would bear himself
+manfully, and endure his sorrow with patience and fortitude.  His only
+fear was, that his beloved friend had been too hasty in deciding the
+matter; and that he who was her choice might not be worthy of the great
+gift of her affection.  Cousin Broughton, who has hitherto greatly
+favored the pretensions of Sir Thomas, told me that she wellnigh changed
+her mind in view of the manly and noble bearing of Robert Pike; and that
+if her sister were to live in this land, she would rather see her the
+wife of him than of any other man therein.
+
+
+
+July 3.
+
+Sir Thomas took his leave to-day.  Robert Pike hath been here to wish
+Rebecca great joy and happiness in her prospect, which he did in so kind
+and gentle a manner, that she was fain to turn away her head to hide her
+tears.  When Robert saw this, he turned the discourse, and did endeavor
+to divert her mind in such sort that the shade of melancholy soon left
+her sweet face, and the twain talked together cheerfully as had been
+their wont, and as became their years and conditions.
+
+
+
+July 6.
+
+Yesterday a strange thing happened in the meeting-house.  The minister
+had gone on in his discourse, until the sand in the hour-glass on the
+rails before the deacons had wellnigh run out, and Deacon Dole was about
+turning it, when suddenly I saw the congregation all about me give a
+great start, and look back.  A young woman, barefooted, and with a
+coarse canvas frock about her, and her long hair hanging loose like a
+periwig, and sprinkled with ashes, came walking up the south aisle.
+Just as she got near Uncle Rawson's seat she stopped, and turning round
+towards the four corners of the house, cried out: "Woe to the
+persecutors!  Woe to them who for a pretence make long prayers!  Humble
+yourselves, for this is the day of the Lord's power, and I am sent as a
+sign among you!"  As she looked towards me I knew her to be the Quaker
+maiden, Margaret Brewster.  "Where is the constable?" asked Mr.
+Richardson.  "Let the woman be taken out."  Thereupon the whole
+congregation arose, and there was a great uproar, men and women climbing
+the seats, and many crying out, some one thing and some another.  In the
+midst of the noise, Mr. Sewall, getting up on a bench, begged the people
+to be quiet, and let the constable lead out the poor deluded creature.
+Mr. Richardson spake to the same effect, and, the tumult a little
+subsiding, I saw them taking the young woman out of the door; and, as
+many followed her, I went out also, with my brother, to see what became
+of her.
+
+We found her in the middle of a great crowd of angry people, who
+reproached her for her wickedness in disturbing the worship on the
+Lord's day, calling her all manner of foul names, and threatening her
+with the stocks and the whipping-post.  The poor creature stood still
+and quiet; she was deathly pale, and her wild hair and sackcloth frock
+gave her a very strange and pitiable look.  The constable was about to
+take her in charge until the morrow, when Robert Pike came forward, and
+said he would answer for her appearance at the court the next day, and
+besought the people to let her go quietly to her home, which, after some
+parley, was agreed to.  Robert then went up to her, and taking her hand,
+asked her to go with him.  She looked up, and being greatly touched by
+his kindness, began to weep, telling him that it had been a sorrowful
+cross to her to do as she had done; but that it had been long upon her
+mind, and that she did feel a relief now that she had found strength for
+obedience.  He, seeing the people still following, hastened her, away,
+and we all went back to the meeting-house.  In the afternoon, Mr.
+Richardson gave notice that he should preach, next Lord's day, from the
+12th and 13th verses of Jude, wherein the ranters and disturbers of the
+present day were very plainly spoken of.  This morning she hath been had
+before the magistrates, who, considering her youth and good behavior
+hitherto, did not proceed against her so far as many of the people
+desired.  A fine was laid upon her, which both she and her father did
+profess they could not in conscience pay, whereupon she was ordered to
+be set in the stocks; but this Mr. Sewall, Robert Pike, and my brother
+would by no means allow, but paid the fine themselves, so that she was
+set at liberty, whereat the boys and rude women were not a little
+disappointed, as they had thought to make sport of her in the stocks.
+Mr. Pike, I hear, did speak openly in her behalf before the magistrates,
+saying that it was all along of the cruel persecution of these people
+that did drive them to such follies and breaches of the peace, Mr.
+Richardson, who hath heretofore been exceeding hard upon the Quakers,
+did, moreover, speak somewhat in excuse of her conduct, believing that
+she was instigated by her elders; and he therefore counselled the court
+that she should not be whipped,
+
+
+
+August 1.
+
+Captain Sewall, R. Pike, and the minister, Mr. Richardson, at our house
+to-day.  Captain Sewall, who lives mostly at Boston, says that a small
+vessel loaded with negroes, taken on the Madagascar coast, came last
+week into the harbor, and that the owner thereof had offered the negroes
+for sale as slaves, and that they had all been sold to magistrates,
+ministers, and other people of distinction in Boston and thereabouts.
+He said the negroes were principally women and children, and scarcely
+alive, by reason of their long voyage and hard fare.  He thought it a
+great scandal to the Colony, and a reproach to the Church, that they
+should be openly trafficked, like cattle in the market.  Uncle Rawson
+said it was not so formerly; for he did remember the case of Captain
+Smith and one Kesar, who brought negroes from Guinea thirty years ago.
+The General Court, urged thereto by Sir Richard Saltonstall and many of
+the ministers, passed an order that, for the purpose of "bearing a
+witness against the heinous sin of man-stealing, justly abhorred of all
+good and just men," the negroes should be taken back to their own
+country at the charge of the Colony; which was soon after done.
+Moreover, the two men, Smith and Kesar, were duly punished.
+
+Mr. Richardson said he did make a distinction between the stealing of
+men from a nation at peace with us, and the taking of captives in war.
+The Scriptures did plainly warrant the holding of such, and especially
+if they be heathen.
+
+Captain Sewall said he did, for himself, look upon all slave-holding as
+contrary to the Gospel and the New Dispensation.  The Israelites had a
+special warrant for holding the heathen in servitude; but he had never
+heard any one pretend that he had that authority for enslaving Indians
+and blackamoors.
+
+Hereupon Mr. Richardson asked him if he did not regard Deacon Dole as a
+godly man; and if he had aught to say against him and other pious men
+who held slaves.  And he cautioned him to be careful, lest he should be
+counted an accuser of the brethren.
+
+Here Robert Pike said he would tell of a matter which had fallen under
+his notice.  "Just after the war was over," said be, "owing to the loss
+of my shallop in the Penobscot Bay, I chanced to be in the neighborhood
+of him they call the Baron of Castine, who hath a strong castle, with
+much cleared land and great fisheries at Byguyduce.  I was preparing to
+make a fire and sleep in the woods, with my two men, when a messenger
+came from the Baron, saying that his master, hearing that strangers were
+in the neighborhood, had sent him to offer us food and shelter, as the
+night was cold and rainy.  So without ado we went with him, and were
+shown into a comfortable room in a wing of the castle, where we found a
+great fire blazing, and a joint of venison with wheaten loaves on the
+table.  After we had refreshed ourselves, the Baron sent for me, and I
+was led into a large, fair room, where he was, with Modockawando, who
+was his father-in-law, and three or four other chiefs of the Indians,
+together with two of his priests.  The Baron, who was a man of goodly
+appearance, received me with much courtesy; and when I told him my
+misfortune, he said he was glad it was in his power to afford us a
+shelter.  He discoursed about the war, which he said had been a sad
+thing to the whites as well as the Indians, but that he now hoped the
+peace would be lasting.  Whereupon, Modockawando, a very grave and
+serious heathen, who had been sitting silent with his friends, got up
+and spoke a load speech to me, which I did not understand, but was told
+that he did complain of the whites for holding as slaves sundry Indian
+captives, declaring that it did provoke another war.  His own sister's
+child, he said, was thus held in captivity.  He entreated me to see the
+great Chief of our people (meaning the Governor), and tell him that the
+cries of the captives were heard by his young men, and that they were
+talking of digging up the hatchet which the old men had buried at Casco.
+I told the old savage that I did not justify the holding of Indians
+after the peace, and would do what I could to have them set at liberty,
+at which he seemed greatly rejoiced.  Since I came back from Castine's
+country, I have urged the giving up of the Indians, and many have been
+released.  Slavery is a hard lot, and many do account it worse than
+death.  When in the Barbadoes, I was told that on one plantation, in the
+space of five years, a score of slaves had hanged themselves."
+
+"Mr. Atkinson's Indian," said Captain Sewall, "whom he bought of a
+Virginia ship-owner, did, straightway on coming to his house, refuse
+meat; and although persuasions and whippings were tried to make him eat,
+he would not so much as take a sip of drink.  I saw him a day or two
+before he died, sitting wrapped up in his blanket, and muttering to
+himself.  It was a sad, sight, and I pray God I may never see the like
+again.  From that time I have looked upon the holding of men as slaves
+as a great wickedness.  The Scriptures themselves do testify, that he
+that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity."
+
+After the company had gone, Rebecca sat silent and thoughtful for a
+time, and then bade her young serving-girl, whom her father had bought,
+about a year before, of the master of a Scotch vessel, and who had been
+sold to pay the cost of her passage, to come to her.  She asked her if
+she had aught to complain of in her situation.  The poor girl looked
+surprised, but said she had not.  "Are you content to live as a
+servant?" asked Rebecca.  "Would you leave me if you could?"  She here
+fell a-weeping, begging her mistress not to speak of her leaving.  "But
+if I should tell you that you are free to go or stay, as you will, would
+you be glad or sorry?" queried her mistress.  The poor girl was silent.
+"I do not wish you to leave me, Effie," said Rebecca, "but I wish you to
+know that you are from henceforth free, and that if you serve me
+hereafter, as I trust you will, it will be in love and good will, and
+for suitable wages."  The bondswoman did not at the first comprehend the
+design of her mistress, but, on hearing it explained once more, she
+dropped down on her knees, and clasping Rebecca, poured forth her thanks
+after the manner of her people; whereupon Rebecca, greatly moved, bade
+her rise, as she had only done what the Scriptures did require, in
+giving to her servant that which is just and equal.
+
+"How easy it is to make others happy, and ourselves also!"  she said,
+turning to me, with the tears shining in her eyes.
+
+
+
+August 8, 1678.
+
+Elnathan Stone, who died two days ago, was buried this afternoon.  A
+very solemn funeral, Mr. Richardson preaching a sermon from the 23d
+psalm, 4th verse: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow
+of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy
+staff, they comfort me."  Deacon Dole provided the wine and spirits, and
+Uncle Rawson the beer, and bread, and fish for the entertainment, and
+others of the neighbors did, moreover, help the widow to sundry matters
+of clothing suitable for the occasion, for she was very poor, and, owing
+to the long captivity and sickness of her son, she hath been much
+straitened at times.  I am told that Margaret Brewster hath been like an
+angel of mercy unto her, watching often with the sick man, and helping
+her in her work, so that the poor woman is now fain to confess that she
+hath a good and kind heart.  A little time before Elnathan died, he did
+earnestly commend the said Margaret to the kindness of Cousin Rebecca,
+entreating her to make interest with the magistrates, and others in
+authority, in her behalf, that they might be merciful to her in her
+outgoings, as he did verily think they did come of a sense of duty,
+albeit mistaken.  Mr. Richardson, who hath been witness to her gracious
+demeanor and charity, and who saith she does thereby shame many of his
+own people, hath often sought to draw her away from the new doctrines,
+and to set before her the dangerous nature of her errors; but she never
+lacketh answer of some sort, being naturally of good parts, and well
+read in the Scriptures.
+
+
+
+August 10.
+
+I find the summer here greatly unlike that of mine own country.  The
+heat is great, the sun shining very strong and bright; and for more than
+a month it hath been exceeding dry, without any considerable fall of
+rain, so that the springs fail in many places, and the watercourses are
+dried up, which doth bring to mind very forcibly the language of Job,
+concerning the brooks which the drouth consumeth: "What time they wax
+warm they vanish; when it is hot they are consumed out of their place.
+The paths of their way are turned aside; they go to nothing and perish."
+The herbage and grass have lost much of the brightness which they did
+wear in the early summer; moreover, there be fewer flowers to be seen.
+The fields and roads are dusty, and all things do seem to faint and wax
+old under the intolerable sun.  Great locusts sing sharp in the hedges
+and bushes, and grasshoppers fly up in clouds, as it were, when one
+walks over the dry grass which they feed upon, and at nightfall
+mosquitoes are no small torment.  Whenever I do look forth at noonday,
+at which time the air is all aglow, with a certain glimmer and dazzle
+like that from an hot furnace, and see the poor fly-bitten cattle
+whisking their tails to keep off the venomous insects, or standing in
+the water of the low grounds for coolness, and the panting sheep lying
+together under the shade of trees, I must needs call to mind the summer
+season of old England, the cool sea air, the soft-dropping showers, the
+fields so thick with grasses, and skirted with hedge-rows like green
+walls, the trees and shrubs all clean and moist, and the vines and
+creepers hanging over walls and gateways, very plenteous and beautiful
+to behold.  Ah me I often in these days do I think of Hilton Grange,
+with its great oaks, and cool breezy hills and meadows green the summer
+long.  I shut mine eyes, and lo! it is all before me like a picture; I
+see mine uncle's gray hairs beneath the trees, and my good aunt standeth
+in the doorway, and Cousin Oliver comes up in his field-dress, from the
+croft or the mill; I can hear his merry laugh, and the sound of his
+horse's hoofs ringing along the gravel-way.  Our sweet Chaucer telleth
+of a mirror in the which he that looked did see all his past life; that
+magical mirror is no fable, for in the memory of love, old things do
+return and show themselves as features do in the glass, with a perfect
+and most beguiling likeness.
+
+Last night, Deacon Dole's Indian--One-eyed Tom, a surly fellow--broke
+into his master's shop, where he made himself drunk with rum, and,
+coming to the house, did greatly fright the womenfolk by his threatening
+words and gestures.  Now, the Deacon coming home late from the church-
+meeting, and seeing him in this way, wherreted him smartly with his
+cane, whereupon he ran off, and came up the road howling and yelling
+like an evil spirit.  Uncle Rawson sent his Irish man-servant to see
+what caused the ado; but he straightway came running back, screaming
+"Murther!  murther!" at the top of his voice.  So uncle himself went to
+the gate, and presently called for a light, which Rebecca and I came
+with, inasmuch as the Irishman and Effie dared not go out.  We found Tom
+sitting on the horse-block, the blood running down his face, and much
+bruised and swollen.  He was very fierce and angry, saying that if he
+lived a month, he would make him a tobacco-pouch of the Deacon's scalp.
+Rebecca ventured to chide him for his threats, but offered to bind up
+his head for him, which she did with her own kerchief.  Uncle Rawson
+then bade him go home and get to bed, and in future let alone strong
+drink, which had been the cause of his beating.  This he would not do,
+but went off into the woods, muttering as far as one could hear him.
+
+This morning Deacon Dole came in, and said his servant Tom had behaved
+badly, for which he did moderately correct him, and that he did
+thereupon run away, and he feared he should lose him.  He bought him,
+he said, of Captain Davenport, who brought him from the Narragansett
+country, paying ten pounds and six shillings for him, and he could ill
+bear so great a loss.  I ventured to tell him that it was wrong to hold
+any man, even an Indian or Guinea black, as a slave.  My uncle, who saw
+that my plainness was not well taken, bade me not meddle with matters
+beyond my depth; and Deacon Dole, looking very surly at me, said I was a
+forward one; that he had noted that I did wear a light and idle look in
+the meeting-house; and, pointing with his cane to my hair, he said I did
+render myself liable to presentment by the Grand Jury for a breach of
+the statute of the General Court, made the year before, against "the
+immodest laying out of the hair," &c.  He then went on to say that he
+had lived to see strange times, when such as I did venture to oppose
+themselves to sober and grave people, and to despise authority, and
+encourage rebellion and disorder; and bade me take heed lest all such
+be numbered with the cursed children which the Apostle did rebuke: "Who,
+as natural brute beasts, speak evil of things they understand not, and
+shall utterly perish in their corruption."  My dear Cousin Rebecca here
+put in a word in my behalf, and told the Deacon that Tom's misbehavior
+did all grow out of the keeping of strong liquors for sale, and that he
+was wrong to beat him so cruelly, seeing that he did himself place the
+temptation before him.  Thereupon the Deacon rose up angrily, bidding
+uncle look well to his forward household.  "Nay, girls," quoth mine
+uncle, after his neighbor had left the house, "you have angered the good
+man sorely."--"Never heed," said Rebecca, laughing and clapping her
+hands, "he hath got something to think of more profitable, I trow, than
+Cousin Margaret's hair or looks in meeting.  He has been tything of mint
+and anise and cummin long enough, and 't is high time for him to look
+after the weightier matters of the law."
+
+The selling of beer and strong liquors, Mr. Ewall says, hath much
+increased since the troubles of the Colony and the great Indian war.
+The General Court do take some care to grant licenses only to discreet
+persons; but much liquor is sold without warrant.  For mine own part, I
+think old Chaucer hath it right in his Pardoner's Tale:--
+
+         "A likerous thing is wine, and drunkenness
+          Is full of striving and of wretchedness.
+          O drunken man!  disfigured is thy face,
+          Sour is thy breath, foul art then to embrace;
+          Thy tongue is lost, and all thine honest care,
+          For drunkenness is very sepulture
+          Of man's wit and his discretion."
+
+
+
+AGAMENTICUS, August 18.
+
+The weather being clear and the heat great, last week uncle and aunt,
+with Rebecca and myself, and also Leonard and Sir Thomas, thought it a
+fitting time to make a little journey by water to the Isles of Shoals,
+and the Agamenticus, where dwelleth my Uncle Smith, who hath strongly
+pressed me to visit him.  One Caleb Powell, a seafaring man, having a
+good new boat, with a small cabin, did undertake to convey us.  He is a
+drolling odd fellow, who hath been in all parts of the world, and hath
+seen and read much, and, having a rare memory, is not ill company,
+although uncle saith one must make no small allowance for his desire of
+making his hearers marvel at his stories and conceits.  We sailed with a
+good westerly wind down the river, passing by the great salt marshes,
+which stretch a long way by the sea, and in which the town's people be
+now very busy in mowing and gathering the grass for winter's use.
+Leaving on our right hand Plum Island (so called on account of the rare
+plums which do grow upon it), we struck into the open sea, and soon came
+in sight of the Islands of Shoals.  There be seven of them in all, lying
+off the town of Hampton on the mainland, about a league.  We landed on
+that called the Star, and were hospitably entertained through the day
+and night by Mr. Abbott, an old inhabitant of the islands, and largely
+employed in fisheries and trade, and with whom uncle had some business.
+In the afternoon Mr. Abbott's son rowed us about among the islands, and
+showed us the manner of curing the dun-fish, for which the place is
+famed.  They split the fishes, and lay them on the rocks in the sun,
+using little salt, but turning them often.  There is a court-house on
+the biggest island, and a famous school, to which many of the planters
+on the main-land do send their children.  We noted a great split in the
+rocks, where, when the Indians came to the islands many years ago, and
+killed some and took others captive, one Betty Moody did hide herself,
+and which is hence called Betty Moody's Hole.  Also, the pile of rocks
+set up by the noted Captain John Smith, when he did take possession of
+the Isles in the year 1614.  We saw our old acquaintance Peckanaminet
+and his wife, in a little birch canoe, fishing a short way off.  Mr.
+Abbott says he well recollects the time when the Agawams were wellnigh
+cut off by the Tarratine Indians; for that early one morning, hearing a
+loud yelling and whooping, he went out on the point of the rocks, and
+saw a great fleet of canoes filled with Indians, going back from Agawam,
+and the noise they made he took to be their rejoicing over their
+victory.
+
+In the evening a cold easterly wind began to blow, and it brought in
+from the ocean a damp fog, so that we were glad to get within doors.
+Sir Thomas entertained us by his lively account of things in Boston, and
+of a journey he had made to the Providence plantations.  He then asked
+us if it was true, as he had learned from Mr. Mather, of Boston, that
+there was an house in Newbury dolefully beset by Satan's imps, and that
+the family could get no sleep because of the doings of evil spirits.
+Uncle Rawson said he did hear something of it, and that Mr. Richardson
+had been sent for to pray against the mischief.  Yet as he did count
+Goody Morse a poor silly woman, he should give small heed to her story;
+but here was her near neighbor, Caleb Powell, who could doubtless tell
+more concerning it.  Whereupon, Caleb said it was indeed true that there
+was a very great disturbance in Goodman Morse's house; doors opening and
+shutting, household stuff whisked out of the room, and then falling down
+the chimney, and divers other strange things, many of which he had
+himself seen.  Yet he did believe it might be accounted for in a natural
+way, especially as the old couple had a wicked, graceless boy living
+with them, who might be able to do the tricks by his great subtlety and
+cunning.  Sir Thomas said it might be the boy; but that Mr. Josselin,
+who had travelled much hereabout, had told him that the Indians did
+practise witchcraft, and that, now they were beaten in war, he feared
+they would betake themselves to it, and so do by their devilish wisdom
+what they could not do by force; and verily this did look much like the
+beginning of their enchantments.  "That the Devil helpeth the heathen in
+this matter, I do myself know for a certainty," said Caleb Powell; "for
+when I was at Port Royal, many years ago, I did see with mine eyes the
+burning of an old negro wizard, who had done to death many of the
+whites, as well as his own people, by a charm which he brought with him
+from the Guinea, country."  Mr. Hull, the minister of the place, who was
+a lodger in the house, said he had heard one Foxwell, a reputable
+planter at Saco, lately deceased, tell of a strange affair that did
+happen to himself, in a voyage to the eastward.  Being in a small
+shallop, and overtaken by the night, he lay at anchor a little way off
+the shore, fearing to land on account of the Indians.  Now, it did
+chance that they were waked about midnight by a loud voice from the
+land, crying out, Foxwell, come ashore! three times over; whereupon,
+looking to see from whence the voice did come, they beheld a great
+circle of fire on the beach, and men and women dancing about it in a
+ring.  Presently they vanished, and the fire was quenched also.  In the
+morning he landed, but found no Indians nor English, only brands' ends
+cast up by the waves; and he did believe, unto the day of his death,
+that it was a piece of Indian sorcery.  "There be strange stories told
+of Passaconaway, the chief of the River Indians," he continued.  "I have
+heard one say who saw it, that once, at the Patucket Falls, this chief,
+boasting of his skill in magic, picked up a dry skin of a snake, which
+had been cast off, as is the wont of the reptile, and making some
+violent motions of his body, and calling upon his Familiar, or Demon, he
+did presently cast it down upon the rocks, and it became a great black
+serpent, which mine informant saw crawl off into some bushes, very
+nimble.  This Passaconaway was accounted by his tribe to be a very
+cunning conjurer, and they do believe that he could brew storms, make
+water burn, and cause green leaves to grow on trees in the winter; and,
+in brief, it may be said of him, that he was not a whit behind the
+magicians of Egypt in the time of Moses."
+
+"There be women in the cold regions about Norway," said Caleb Powell,
+"as I have heard the sailors relate, who do raise storms and sink boats
+at their will."
+
+"It may well be," quoth Mr. Hull, "since Satan is spoken of as the
+prince and power of the air."
+
+"The profane writers of old time do make mention of such sorceries,"
+said Uncle Rawson.  "It is long since I have read any of then; but
+Virgil and Apulius do, if I mistake not, speak of this power over the
+elements."
+
+"Do you not remember, father," said Rebecca, "some verses of Tibullus,
+in which he speaketh of a certain enchantress?  Some one hath rendered
+them thus:--
+
+         "Her with charms drawing stars from heaven, I,
+          And turning the course of rivers, did espy.
+          She parts the earth, and ghosts from sepulchres
+          Draws up, and fetcheth bones away from fires,
+          And at her pleasure scatters clouds in the air,
+          And makes it snow in summer hot and fair."
+
+Here Sir Thomas laughingly told Rebecca, that he did put more faith in
+what these old writers did tell of the magic arts of the sweet-singing
+sirens, and of Circe and her enchantments, and of the Illyrian maidens,
+so wonderful in their beauty, who did kill with their looks such as they
+were angry with.
+
+"It was, perhaps, for some such reason," said Rebecca, "that, as Mr.
+Abbott tells me; the General Court many years ago did forbid women to
+live on these islands."
+
+"Pray, how was that?" asked Sir Thomas.
+
+"You must know," answered our host, "that in the early settlement of
+the Shoals, vessels coming for fish upon this coast did here make their
+harbor, bringing hither many rude sailors of different nations; and the
+Court judged that it was not a fitting place for women, and so did by
+law forbid their dwelling on the islands belonging to the
+Massachusetts."
+
+He then asked his wife to get the order of the Court concerning her stay
+on the islands, remarking that he did bring her over from the Maine in
+despite of the law.  So his wife fetched it, and Uncle Rawson read it,
+it being to this effect,--"That a petition having been sent to the
+Court, praying that the law might be put in force in respect to John
+Abbott his wife, the Court do judge it meet, if no further complaint
+come against her, that she enjoy the company of her husband."  Whereat
+we all laughed heartily.
+
+Next morning, the fog breaking away early, we set sail for Agamenticus,
+running along the coast and off the mouth of the Piscataqua River,
+passing near where my lamented Uncle Edward dwelt, whose fame as a
+worthy gentleman and magistrate is still living.  We had Mount
+Agamenticus before us all day,--a fair stately hill, rising up as it
+were from the water.  Towards night a smart shower came on, with
+thunderings and lightnings such as I did never see or hear before; and
+the wind blowing and a great rain driving upon us, we were for a time in
+much peril; but, through God's mercy, it suddenly cleared up, and we
+went into the Agamenticus River with a bright sun.  Before dark we got
+to the house of my honored uncle, where, he not being at home, his wife
+and daughters did receive us kindly.
+
+
+
+September 10.
+
+I do find myself truly comfortable at this place.  My two cousins, Polly
+and Thankful, are both young, unmarried women, very kind and pleasant,
+and, since my Newbury friends left, I have been learning of them many
+things pertaining to housekeeping, albeit I am still but a poor scholar.
+Uncle is Marshall of the Province, which takes him much from home; and
+aunt, who is a sickly woman, keeps much in her chamber; so that the
+affairs of the household and of the plantation do mainly rest upon the
+young women.  If ever I get back to Hilton Grange again, I shall have
+tales to tell of my baking and brewing, of my pumpkin-pies, and bread
+made of the flour of the Indian corn; yea, more, of gathering of the
+wild fruit in the woods, and cranberries in the meadows, milking the
+cows, and looking after the pigs and barnyard fowls.  Then, too, we have
+had many pleasant little journeys by water and on horseback, young
+Mr. Jordan, of Spurwiuk, who hath asked Polly in marriage, going with us.
+A right comely youth he is, but a great Churchman, as might be expected,
+his father being the minister of the Black Point people, and very bitter
+towards the Massachusetts and its clergy and government.  My uncle, who
+meddles little with Church' matters, thinks him a hopeful young man, and
+not an ill suitor for his daughter.  He hath been in England for his
+learning, and is accounted a scholar; but, although intended for the
+Church service, he inclineth more to the life of a planter, and taketh
+the charge of his father's plantation at Spurwink.  Polly is not
+beautiful and graceful like Rebecca Rawson, but she hath freshness of
+youth and health, and a certain good-heartedness of look and voice, and
+a sweetness of temper which do commend her in the eyes of all.  Thankful
+is older by some years, and, if not as cheerful and merry as her sister,
+it needs not be marvelled at, since one whom she loved was killed in the
+Narragansett country two years ago.  O these bloody wars.  There be few
+in these Eastern Provinces who have not been called to mourn the loss of
+some near and dear friend, so that of a truth the land mourns.
+
+
+
+September 18.
+
+Meeting much disturbed yesterday,--a ranting Quaker coming in and
+sitting with his hat on in sermon time, humming and groaning, and
+rocking his body to and fro like one possessed.  After a time he got up,
+and pronounced a great woe upon the priests, calling them many hard
+names, and declaring that the whole land stank with their hypocrisy.
+Uncle spake sharply to him, and bid him hold his peace, but he only
+cried out the louder.  Some young men then took hold of him, and carried
+him out.  They brought him along close to my seat, he hanging like a bag
+of meal, with his eyes shut, as ill-favored a body as I ever beheld.
+The magistrates had him smartly whipped this morning, and sent out of
+the jurisdiction.  I was told he was no true Quaker; for, although a
+noisy, brawling hanger-on at their meetings, he is not in fellowship
+with the more sober and discreet of that people.
+
+Rebecca writes me that the witchcraft in William Morse's house is much
+talked of; and that Caleb Powell hath been complained of as the wizard.
+Mr. Jordan the elder says he does in no wise marvel at the Devil's power
+in the Massachusetts, since at his instigation the rulers and ministers
+of the Colony have set themselves, against the true and Gospel order of
+the Church, and do slander and persecute all who will not worship at
+their conventicles.
+
+A Mr. Van Valken, a young gentleman of Dutch descent, and the agent of
+Mr. Edmund Andross, of the Duke of York's Territory, is now in this
+place, being entertained by Mr. Godfrey, the late Deputy-Governor.  He
+brought a letter for me from Aunt Rawson, whom he met in Boston.  He is
+a learned, serious man, hath travelled a good deal, and hath an air of
+high breeding.  The minister here thinks him a Papist, and a Jesuit,
+especially as he hath not called upon him, nor been to the meeting.  He
+goes soon to Pemaquid, to take charge of that fort and trading station,
+which have greatly suffered by the war.
+
+
+
+September 30.
+
+Yesterday, Cousin Polly and myself, with young Mr. Jordan, went up to
+the top of the mountain, which is some miles from the harbor.  It is not
+hard to climb in respect to steepness, but it is so tangled with bushes
+and vines, that one can scarce break through them.  The open places were
+yellow with golden-rods, and the pale asters were plenty in the shade,
+and by the side of the brooks, that with pleasing noise did leap down
+the hill.  When we got upon the top, which is bare and rocky, we had a
+fair view of the coast, with its many windings and its islands, from the
+Cape Ann, near Boston, to the Cape Elizabeth, near Casco, the Piscataqua
+and Agamenticus rivers; and away in the northwest we could see the peaks
+of mountains looking like summer clouds or banks of gray fog.  These
+mountains lie many leagues off in the wilderness, and are said to be
+exceeding lofty.
+
+But I must needs speak of the color of the woods, which did greatly
+amaze me, as unlike anything I had ever seen in old England.  As far as
+mine eyes could look, the mighty wilderness, under the bright westerly
+sun, and stirred by a gentle wind, did seem like a garden in its season
+of flowering; green, dark, and light, orange, and pale yellow, and
+crimson leaves, mingling and interweaving their various hues, in a
+manner truly wonderful to behold.  It is owing, I am told, to the sudden
+frosts, which in this climate do smite the vegetation in its full life
+and greenness, so that in the space of a few days the colors of the
+leaves are marvellously changed and brightened.  These colors did remind
+me of the stains of the windows of old churches, and of rich tapestry.
+The maples were all aflame with crimson, the walnuts were orange, the
+hemlocks and cedars were wellnigh black; while the slender birches, with
+their pale yellow leaves, seemed painted upon them as pictures are laid
+upon a dark ground.  I gazed until mine eyes grew weary, and a sense of
+the wonderful beauty of the visible creation, and of God's great
+goodness to the children of men therein, did rest upon me, and I said in
+mine heart, with one of old: "O Lord! how manifold are thy works in
+wisdom hast thou made them all, and the earth is full of thy riches."
+
+
+
+October 6.
+
+Walked out to the iron mines, a great hole digged in the rocks, many
+years ago, for the finding of iron.  Aunt, who was then just settled in
+housekeeping, told me many wonderful stories of the man who caused it to
+be digged, a famous doctor of physic, and, as it seems, a great wizard
+also.  He bought a patent of land on the south side of the Saco River,
+four miles by the sea, and eight miles up into the main-land of Mr.
+Vines, the first owner thereof; and being curious in the seeking and
+working of metals, did promise himself great riches in this new country;
+but his labors came to nothing, although it was said that Satan helped
+him, in the shape of a little blackamoor man-servant, who was his
+constant familiar.  My aunt says she did often see him, wandering about
+among the hills and woods, and along the banks of streams of water,
+searching for precious ores and stones.  He had even been as far as the
+great mountains, beyond Pigwackett, climbing to the top thereof, where
+the snows lie wellnigh all the year, his way thither lying through
+doleful swamps and lonesome woods.  He was a great friend of the
+Indians, who held him to be a more famous conjurer than their own
+powahs; and, indeed, he was learned in all curious and occult arts,
+having studied at the great College of Padua, and travelled in all parts
+of the old countries.  He sometimes stopped in his travels at my uncle's
+house, the little blackamoor sleeping in the barn, for my aunt feared
+him, as he was reputed to be a wicked imp.  Now it so chanced that on
+one occasion my uncle had lost a cow, and had searched the woods many
+days for her to no purpose, when, this noted doctor coming in, he
+besought him to find her out by his skill and learning; but he did
+straightway deny his power to do so, saying he was but a poor scholar,
+and lover of science, and had no greater skill in occult matters than
+any one might attain to by patient study of natural things.  But as mine
+uncle would in no wise be so put off, and still pressing him to his art,
+he took a bit of coal, and began to make marks on the floor, in a very
+careless way.
+
+Then he made a black dot in the midst, and bade my uncle take heed that
+his cow was lying dead in that spot; and my uncle looking at it, said he
+Could find her, for he now knew where she was, inasmuch as the doctor
+had made a fair map of the country round about for many miles.  So he
+set off, and found the cow lying at the foot of a great tree, close
+beside a brook, she being quite dead, which thing did show that he was a
+magician of no Mean sort.
+
+My aunt further said, that in those days there was great talk of mines
+of gold and precious stones, and many people spent all their substance
+in wandering about over the wilderness country seeking a fortune in this
+way.  There was one old man, who, she remembered, did roam about seeking
+for hidden treasures, until he lost his wits, and might be seen filling
+a bag with bright stones and shining sand, muttering and laughing to
+himself.  He was at last missed for some little time, when he was found
+lying dead in the woods, still holding fast in his hands his bag of
+pebbles.
+
+On my querying whether any did find treasures hereabout, my aunt
+laughed, and said she never heard of but one man who did so, and that
+was old Peter Preble of Saco, who, growing rich faster than his
+neighbors, was thought to owe his fortune to the finding of a gold or
+silver mine.  When he was asked about it, he did by no means deny it,
+but confessed he had found treasures in the sea as well as on the land;
+and, pointing to his loaded fish-flakes and his great cornfields, said,
+"Here are my mines."  So that afterwards, when any one prospered greatly
+in his estate, it was said of him by his neighbors, "He has been working
+Peter Preble's mine."
+
+
+
+October 8.
+
+Mr. Van Valken, the Dutchman, had before Mr. Rishworth, one of the
+Commissioners of the Province, charged with being a Papist and a Jesuit.
+He bore himself, I am told, haughtily enough, denying the right to call
+him in question, and threatening the interference of his friend and
+ruler, Sir Edmund, on account of the wrong done him.
+
+My uncle and others did testify that he was a civil and courteous
+gentleman, not intermeddling with matters of a religious nature; and
+that they did regard it as a foul shame to the town that he should be
+molested in this wise.  But the minister put them to silence, by
+testifying that he (Van Valken) had given away sundry Papist books; and,
+one of them being handed to the Court, it proved to be a Latin Treatise,
+by a famous Papist, intituled, "The Imitation of Christ."  Hereupon, Mr.
+Godfrey asked if there was aught evil in the book.  The minister said it
+was written by a monk, and was full of heresy, favoring both the Quakers
+and the Papists; but Mr. Godfrey told him it had been rendered into the
+English tongue, and printed some years before in the Massachusetts Bay;
+and asked him if he did accuse such men as Mr. Cotton and Mr. Wilson,
+and the pious ministers of their day, of heresy.  "Nay," quoth the
+minister, "they did see the heresy of the book, and, on their condemning
+it, the General Court did forbid its sale."  Mr. Rishworth hereupon said
+he did judge the book to be pernicious, and bade the constable burn it
+in the street, which he did.  Mr. Van Valken, after being gravely
+admonished, was set free; and he now saith he is no Papist, but that he
+would not have said that much to the Court to save his life, inasmuch as
+he did deny its right of arraigning him.  Mr. Godfrey says the treatment
+whereof he complains is but a sample of what the people hereaway are to
+look for from the Massachusetts jurisdiction.  Mr. Jordan, the younger,
+says his father hath a copy of the condemned book, of the Boston
+printing; and I being curious to see it, he offers to get it for me.
+
+Like unto Newbury, this is an old town for so new a country.  It was
+made a city in 1642, and took the name of Gorgeana, after that of the
+lord proprietor, Sir Ferdinando Gorges.  The government buildings are
+spacious, but now falling into decay somewhat.  There be a few stone
+houses, but the major part are framed, or laid up with square logs.  The
+look of the land a little out of the town is rude and unpleasing, being
+much covered with stones and stumps; yet the soil is said to be strong,
+and the pear and apple do flourish well here; also they raise rye, oats,
+and barley, and the Indian corn, and abundance of turnips, as well as
+pumpkins, squashes, and melons.  The war with the Indians, and the
+troubles and changes of government, have pressed heavily upon this and
+other towns of the Maine, so that I am told that there be now fewer
+wealthy planters here than there were twenty years ago, and little
+increase of sheep or horned cattle.  The people do seem to me less sober
+and grave, in their carriage and conversation, than they of the
+Massachusetts,--hunting, fishing, and fowling more, and working on the
+land less.  Nor do they keep the Lord's Day so strict; many of the young
+people going abroad, both riding and walking, visiting each other, and
+diverting themselves, especially after the meetings are over.
+
+
+
+October 9.
+
+Goodwife Nowell, an ancient gossip of mine aunt's, looking in this
+morning, and talking of the trial of the Dutchman, Van Valken, spake
+of the coming into these parts many years ago of one Sir Christopher
+Gardiner, who was thought to be a Papist.  He sought lodgings at her
+house for one whom he called his cousin, a fair young woman, together
+with her serving girl, who did attend upon her.  She tarried about a
+month, seeing no one, and going out only towards the evening,
+accompanied by her servant.  She spake little, but did seem melancholy
+and exceeding mournful, often crying very bitterly.  Sir Christopher
+came only once to see her, and Good wife Nowell saith she well remembers
+seeing her take leave of him on the roadside, and come back weeping and
+sobbing dolefully; and that a little time after, bearing that he had
+gotten into trouble in Boston as a Papist and man of loose behavior, she
+suddenly took her departure in a vessel sailing for the Massachusetts,
+leaving to her, in pay for house-room and diet, a few coins, a gold
+cross, and some silk stuffs and kerchiefs.  The cross being such as the
+Papists do worship, and therefore unlawful, her husband did beat it into
+a solid wedge privately, and kept it from the knowledge of the minister
+and the magistrates.  But as the poor man never prospered after, but
+lost his cattle and grain, and two of their children dying of measles
+the next year, and he himself being sickly, and near his end, he spake
+to her of he golden cross, saying that he did believe it was a great sin
+to keep it, as he had done, and that it had wrought evil upon him, even
+as the wedge of gold, and the shekels, and Babylonish garment did upon
+Achan, who was stoned, with all his house, in the valley of Achor; and
+the minister coming in, and being advised concerning it, he judged that
+although it might be a sin to keep it hidden from a love of riches, it
+might, nevertheless, be safely used to support Gospel preaching and
+ordinances, and so did himself take it away.  The goodwife says, that
+notwithstanding her husband died soon after, yet herself and household
+did from thenceforth begin to amend their estate and condition.
+
+Seeing me curious concerning this Sir Christopher and his cousin,
+Goodwife Nowell said there was a little parcel of papers which she found
+in her room after the young woman went away, and she thought they might
+yet be in some part of her house, though she had not seen them for a
+score of years.  Thereupon, I begged of her to look for them, which she
+promised to do.
+
+
+
+October 14.
+
+A strange and wonderful providence!  Last night there was a great
+company of the neighbors at my uncle's, to help him in the husking and
+stripping of the corn, as is the custom in these parts.  The barn-floor
+was about half-filled with the corn in its dry leaves; the company
+sitting down on blocks and stools before it, plucking off the leaves,
+and throwing the yellow ears into baskets.  A pleasant and merry evening
+we had; and when the corn was nigh stripped, I went into the house with
+Cousin Thankful, to look to the supper and the laying of the tables,
+when we heard a loud noise in the barn, and one of the girls came
+running in, crying out, "O Thankful!  Thankful!  John Gibbins has
+appeared to us!  His spirit is in the barn!"  The plates dropt from my
+cousin's hand, and, with a faint cry, she fell back against the wall for
+a little space; when, hearing a man's voice without, speaking her name,
+she ran to the door, with the look of one beside herself; while I,
+trembling to see her in such a plight, followed her.  There was a clear
+moon, and a tall man stood in the light close to the door.
+
+"John," said my cousin, in a quick, choking voice, "is it You?"
+
+"Why, Thankful, don't you know me?  I'm alive; but the folks in the barn
+will have it that I 'm a ghost," said the man, springing towards her.
+
+With a great cry of joy and wonder, my cousin caught hold of him: "O
+John, you are alive!"
+
+Then she swooned quite away, and we had a deal to do to bring her to
+life again.  By this time, the house was full of people, and among the
+rest came John's old mother and his sisters, and we all did weep and
+laugh at the same time.  As soon as we got a little quieted, John told
+us that he had indeed been grievously stunned by the blow of a tomahawk,
+and been left for dead by his comrades, but that after a time he did
+come to his senses, and was able to walk; but, falling into the hands of
+the Indians, he was carried off to the French Canadas, where, by reason
+of his great sufferings on the way, he fell sick, and lay for a long
+time at the point of death.  That when he did get about again, the
+savage who lodged him, and who had taken him as a son, in the place of
+his own, slain by the Mohawks, would not let him go home, although he
+did confess that the war was at an end.  His Indian father, he said, who
+was feeble and old, died not long ago, and he had made his way home by
+the way of Crown Point and Albany.  Supper being ready, we all sat down,
+and the minister, who had been sent for, offered thanks for the
+marvellous preserving and restoring of the friend who was lost and now
+was found, as also for the blessings of peace, by reason of which every
+man could now sit under his own vine and fig-tree, with none to molest
+or make him afraid, and for the abundance of the harvest, and the
+treasures of the seas, and the spoil of the woods, so that our land
+might take up the song of the Psalmist: "The Lord doth build up
+Jerusalem; he gathereth the outcasts of Israel; he healeth the broken in
+heart.  Praise thy God, O Zion I For he strengtheneth the bars of thy
+gates, he maketh peace in thy borders, and filleth thee with the finest
+of wheat."  Oh! a sweet supper we had, albeit little was eaten, for we
+were filled fall of joy, and needed not other food.  When the company
+had gone, my dear cousin and her betrothed went a little apart, and
+talked of all that had happened unto them during their long separation.
+I left them sitting lovingly together in the light of the moon, and a
+measure of their unspeakable happiness did go with me to my pillow.
+
+This morning, Thankful came to my bedside to pour out her heart to me.
+The poor girl is like a new creature.  The shade of her heavy sorrow,
+which did formerly rest upon her countenance, hath passed off like a
+morning cloud, and her eye hath the light of a deep and quiet joy.
+
+"I now know," said she, "what David meant when he said, 'We are like
+them that dream; our mouth is filled with laughter, and our tongue with
+singing; the Lord hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad!'"
+
+
+
+October 18.
+
+A cloudy wet day.  Goody Nowell brought me this morning a little parcel
+of papers, which she found in the corner of a closet.  They are much
+stained and smoked, and the mice have eaten them sadly, so that I can
+make little of them.  They seem to be letters, and some fragments of
+what did take place in the life of a young woman of quality from the
+North of England.  I find frequent mention made of Cousin Christopher,
+who is also spoken of as a soldier in the wars with the Turks, and as a
+Knight of Jerusalem.  Poorly as I can make out the meaning of these
+fragments, I have read enough to make my heart sad, for I gather from
+them that the young woman was in early life betrothed to her cousin, and
+that afterwards, owing, as I judge, to the authority of her parents, she
+did part with him, he going abroad, and entering into the wars, in the
+belief that she was to wed another.  But it seemed that the heart of the
+young woman did so plead for her cousin, that she could not be brought
+to marry as her family willed her to do; and, after a lapse of years,
+she, by chance hearing that Sir Christopher had gone to the New England,
+where he was acting as an agent of his kinsman, Sir Ferdinando Gorges,
+in respect to the Maine Province, did privately leave her home, and take
+passage in a Boston bound ship.  How she did make herself known to Sir
+Christopher, I find no mention made; but, he now being a Knight of the
+Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and vowed to forego marriage, as is the
+rule of that Order, and being, moreover, as was thought, a priest or
+Jesuit, her great love and constancy could meet with but a sorrowful
+return on his part.  It does appear, however, that he journeyed to
+Montreal, to take counsel of some of the great Papist priests there,
+touching the obtaining of a dispensation from the Head of the Church,
+so that he might marry the young woman; but, getting no encouragement
+therein, he went to Boston to find a passage for her to England again.
+He was there complained of as a Papist; and the coming over of his
+cousin being moreover known, a great and cruel scandal did arise from
+it, and he was looked upon as a man of evil life, though I find nothing
+to warrant such a notion, but much to the contrary thereof.  What became
+of him and the young woman, his cousin, in the end, I do not learn.
+
+One small parcel did affect me even unto tears.  It was a paper
+containing some dry, withered leaves of roses, with these words written
+on it "To Anna, from her loving cousin, Christopher Gardiner, being the
+first rose that hath blossomed this season in the College garden.  St.
+Omer's, June, 1630."  I could but think how many tears had been shed
+over this little token, and how often, through long, weary years, it did
+call to mind the sweet joy of early love, of that fairest blossom of the
+spring of life of which it was an emblem, alike in its beauty and its
+speedy withering.
+
+There be moreover among the papers sundry verses, which do seem to have
+been made by Sir Christopher; they are in the Latin tongue, and
+inscribed to his cousin, bearing date many years before the twain were
+in this country, and when he was yet a scholar at the Jesuits' College
+of St. Omer's, in France.  I find nothing of a later time, save the
+verses which I herewith copy, over which there are, in a woman's
+handwriting, these words:
+
+"VERSES
+
+"Writ by Sir Christopher when a prisoner among the Turks in Moldavia,
+and expecting death at their hands.
+
+1.
+"Ere down the blue Carpathian hills
+The sun shall fall again,
+Farewell this life and all its ills,
+Farewell to cell and chain
+
+2.
+"These prison shades are dark and cold,
+But darker far than they
+The shadow of a sorrow old
+Is on mine heart alway.
+
+3.
+"For since the day when Warkworth wood
+Closed o'er my steed and I,--
+An alien from my name and blood,--
+A weed cast out to die;
+
+4.
+"When, looking back, in sunset light
+I saw her turret gleam,
+And from its window, far and white,
+Her sign of farewell stream;
+
+5.
+"Like one who from some desert shore
+Does home's green isles descry,
+And, vainly longing, gazes o'er
+The waste of wave and sky,
+
+6.
+"So, from the desert of my fate,
+Gaze I across the past;
+And still upon life's dial-plate
+The shade is backward cast
+
+7.
+"I've wandered wide from shore to shore,
+I've knelt at many a shrine,
+And bowed me to the rocky floor
+Where Bethlehem's tapers shine;
+
+8.
+"And by the Holy Sepulchre
+I've pledged my knightly sword,
+To Christ his blessed Church, and her
+The Mother of our Lord!
+
+9.
+"Oh, vain the vow, and vain the strife
+How vain do all things seem!
+My soul is in the past, and life
+To-day is but a dream.
+
+10.
+"In vain the penance strange and long,
+And hard for flesh to bear;
+The prayer, the fasting, and the thong,
+And sackcloth shirt of hair:
+
+11.
+"The eyes of memory will not sleep,
+Its ears are open still,
+And vigils with the past they keep
+Against or with my will.
+
+12.
+"And still the loves and hopes of old
+Do evermore uprise;
+I see the flow of locks of gold,
+The shine of loving eyes.
+
+13.
+"Ah me! upon another's breast
+Those golden locks recline;
+I see upon another rest
+The glance that once was mine!
+
+14.
+"'O faithless priest!  O perjured knight!'
+I hear the master cry,
+
+'Shut out the vision from thy sight,
+Let earth and nature die.'
+
+15.
+"'The Church of God is now my spouse,
+And thou the bridegroom art;
+Then let the burden of thy vows
+Keep down thy human heart.'
+
+16.
+"In vain!--This heart its grief must know,
+Till life itself hath ceased,
+And falls beneath the self-same blow
+The lover and the priest!
+
+17.
+"O pitying Mother! souls of light,
+And saints and martyrs old,
+Pray for a weak and sinful knight,
+A suffering man uphold.
+
+18.
+"Then let the Paynim work his will,
+Let death unbind my chain,
+Ere down yon blue Carpathian hill
+The sunset falls again!"
+
+
+My heart is heavy with the thought of these unfortunates.  Where be they
+now?  Did the knight forego his false worship and his vows, and so marry
+his beloved Anna?  Or did they part forever,--she going back to her
+kinsfolk, and he to his companions of Malta?  Did he perish at the hands
+of the infidels, and does the maiden sleep in the family tomb, under her
+father's oaks?  Alas!  who can tell?  I must needs leave them, and their
+sorrows and trials, to Him who doth not willingly afflict the children
+of men; and whatsoever may have been their sins and their follies, my
+prayer is, that they may be forgiven, for they loved much.
+
+
+
+October 20.
+
+I do purpose to start to-morrow for the Massachusetts, going by boat to
+the Piscataqua River, and thence by horse to Newbury.
+
+Young Mr. Jordan spent yesterday and last night with us.  He is a goodly
+youth, of a very sweet and gentle disposition; nor doth he seem to me to
+lack spirit, although his father (who liketh not his quiet ways and easy
+temper, so contrary to his own, and who is sorely disappointed in that
+he hath chosen the life of a farmer to that of a minister, for which he
+did intend him) often accuseth him of that infirmity.  Last night we had
+much pleasant discourse touching the choice he hath made; and when I
+told him that perhaps he might have become a great prelate in the
+Church, and dwelt in a palace, and made a great lady of our cousin;
+whereas now I did see no better prospect for him than to raise corn for
+his wife to make pudding of, and chop wood to boil her kettle, he
+laughed right merrily, and said he should never have gotten higher than
+a curate in a poor parish; and as for Polly, he was sure she was more at
+home in making puddings than in playing the fine lady.
+
+"For my part," he continued, in a serious manner, "I have no notion that
+the pulpit is my place; I like the open fields and sky better than the
+grandest churches of man's building; and when the wind sounds in the
+great grove of pines on the hill near our house, I doubt if there be a
+choir in all England so melodious and solemn.  These painted autumn
+woods, and this sunset light, and yonder clouds of gold and purple, do
+seem to me better fitted to provoke devotional thoughts, and to awaken a
+becoming reverence and love for the Creator, than the stained windows
+and lofty arched roofs of old minsters.  I do know, indeed, that there
+be many of our poor busy planters, who, by reason of ignorance, ill-
+breeding, and lack of quiet for contemplation, do see nothing in these
+things, save as they do affect their crops of grain or grasses, or their
+bodily comforts in one way or another.  But to them whose minds have
+been enlightened and made large and free by study and much reflection,
+and whose eyes have been taught to behold the beauty and fitness of
+things, and whose ears have been so opened that they can hear the
+ravishing harmonies of the creation, the life of a planter is very
+desirable even in this wilderness, and notwithstanding the toil and
+privation thereunto appertaining.  There be fountains gushing up in the
+hearts of such, sweeter than the springs of water which flow from the
+hillsides, where they sojourn; and therein, also, flowers of the summer
+do blossom all the year long.  The brutish man knoweth not this, neither
+doth the fool comprehend it."
+
+"See, now," said Polly to me, "how hard he is upon us poor unlearned
+folk."
+
+"Nay, to tell the truth," said he, turning towards me, "your cousin here
+is to be held not a little accountable for my present inclinations; for
+she it was who did confirm and strengthen them.  While I had been busy
+over books, she had been questioning the fields and the woods; and, as
+if the old fables of the poets were indeed true, she did get answers
+from them, as the priestesses and sibyls did formerly from the rustling
+of leaves and trees, and the sounds of running waters; so that she could
+teach me much concerning the uses and virtues of plants and shrubs, and
+of their time of flowering and decay; of the nature and habitudes of
+wild animals and birds, the changes of the air, and of the clouds and
+winds.  My science, so called, had given me little more than the names
+of things which to her were familiar and common.  It was in her company
+that I learned to read nature as a book always open, and full of
+delectable teachings, until my poor school-lore did seem undesirable and
+tedious, and the very chatter of the noisy blackbirds in the spring
+meadows more profitable and more pleasing than the angry disputes and
+the cavils and subtleties of schoolmen and divines."
+
+My cousin blushed, and, smiling through her moist eyes at this language
+of her beloved friend, said that I must not believe all he said; for,
+indeed, it was along of his studies of the heathen poets that he had
+first thought of becoming a farmer.  And she asked him to repeat some of
+the verses which he had at his tongue's end.  He laughed, and said he
+did suppose she meant some lines of Horace, which had been thus
+Englished:--
+
+              "I often wished I had a farm,
+               A decent dwelling, snug and warm,
+               A garden, and a spring as pure
+               As crystal flowing by my door,
+               Besides an ancient oaken grove,
+               Where at my leisure I might rove.
+
+              "The gracious gods, to crown my bliss,
+               Have granted this, and more than this,--
+               They promise me a modest spouse,
+               To light my hearth and keep my house.
+               I ask no more than, free from strife,
+               To hold these blessings all my life!"
+
+Tam exceedingly pleased, I must say, with the prospect of my cousin
+Polly.  Her suitor is altogether a worthy young man; and, making
+allowances for the uncertainty of all human things, she may well look
+forward to a happy life with him.  I shall leave behind on the morrow
+dear friends, who were strangers unto me a few short weeks ago, but in
+whose joys and sorrows I shall henceforth always partake, so far as I do
+come to the knowledge of them, whether or no I behold their faces any
+more in this life.
+
+
+
+
+HAMPTON, October 24, 1678.
+
+I took leave of my good friends at Agamenticus, or York, as it is now
+called, on the morning after the last date in my journal, going in a
+boat with my uncle to Piscataqua and Strawberry Bank.  It was a cloudy
+day, and I was chilled through before we got to the mouth of the river;
+but, as the high wind was much in our favor, we were enabled to make the
+voyage in a shorter time than is common.  We stopped a little at the
+house of a Mr. Cutts, a man of some note in these parts; but he being
+from home, and one of the children sick with a quinsy, we went up the
+river to Strawberry Bank, where we tarried over night.  The woman who
+entertained us had lost her husband in the war, and having to see to the
+ordering of matters out of doors in this busy season of harvest, it was
+no marvel that she did neglect those within.  I made a comfortable
+supper of baked pumpkin and milk, and for lodgings I had a straw bed on
+the floor, in the dark loft, which was piled wellnigh full with corn-
+ears, pumpkins, and beans, besides a great deal of old household
+trumpery, wool, and flax, and the skins of animals.  Although tired of
+my journey, it was some little time before I could get asleep; and it so
+fell out, that after the folks of the house were all abed, and still, it
+being, as I judge, nigh midnight, I chanced to touch with my foot a
+pumpkin lying near the bed, which set it a-rolling down the stairs,
+bumping hard on every stair as it went.  Thereupon I heard a great stir
+below, the woman and her three daughters crying out that the house was
+haunted.  Presently she called to me from the foot of the stairs, and
+asked me if I did hear anything.  I laughed so at all this, that it was
+some time before I could speak; when I told her I did hear a thumping on
+the stairs.  "Did it seem to go up, or down?"  inquired she, anxiously;
+and on my telling her that the sound went downward, she set up a sad
+cry, and they all came fleeing into the corn-loft, the girls bouncing
+upon my bed, and hiding under the blanket, and the old woman praying and
+groaning, and saying that she did believe it was the spirit of her poor
+husband.  By this time my uncle, who was lying on the settle in the room
+below, hearing the noise, got up, and stumbling over the pumpkin, called
+to know what was the matter.  Thereupon the woman bade him flee up
+stairs, for there was a ghost in the kitchen.  "Pshaw!" said my uncle,
+"is that all?  I thought to be sure the Indians had come."  As soon as I
+could speak for laughing, I told the poor creature what it was that so
+frightened her; at which she was greatly vexed; and, after she went to
+bed again, I could hear her scolding me for playing tricks upon honest
+people.
+
+We were up betimes in the morning, which was bright and pleasant.  Uncle
+soon found a friend of his, a Mr. Weare, who, with his wife, was to go
+to his home, at Hampton, that day, and who did kindly engage to see me
+thus far on my way.  At about eight of the clock we got upon our horses,
+the woman riding on a pillion behind her husband.  Our way was for some
+miles through the woods,--getting at times a view of the sea, and
+passing some good, thriving plantations.  The woods in this country are
+by no means like those of England, where the ancient trees are kept
+clear of bushes and undergrowth, and the sward beneath them is shaven
+clean and close; whereas here they be much tangled with vines, and the
+dead boughs and logs which have fallen, from their great age or which
+the storms do beat off, or the winter snows and ices do break down.
+Here, also, through the thick matting of dead leaves, all manner of
+shrubs and bushes, some of them very sweet and fair in their flowering,
+and others greatly prized for their healing virtues, do grow up
+plenteously.  In the season of them, many wholesome fruits abound in the
+woods, such as blue and black berries.  We passed many trees, well
+loaded with walnuts and oilnuts, seeming all alive, as it were, with
+squirrels, striped, red, and gray, the last having a large, spreading
+tail, which Mr. Weare told me they do use as a sail, to catch the wind,
+that it may blow them over rivers and creeks, on pieces of bark, in some
+sort like that wonderful shell-fish which transformeth itself into a
+boat, and saileth on the waves of the sea.  We also found grapes, both
+white and purple, hanging down in clusters from the trees, over which
+the vines did run, nigh upon as large as those which the Jews of old
+plucked at Eschol.  The air was sweet and soft, and there was a clear,
+but not a hot sun, and the chirping of squirrels, and the noise of
+birds, and the sound of the waves breaking on the beach a little
+distance off, and the leaves, at every breath of the wind in the tree-
+tops, whirling and fluttering down about me, like so many yellow and
+scarlet-colored birds, made the ride wonderfully pleasant and
+entertaining.
+
+Mr. Weare, on the way, told me that there was a great talk of the
+bewitching of Goodman Morse's house at Newbury, and that the case of
+Caleb Powell was still before the Court, he being vehemently suspected
+of the mischief.  I told him I thought the said Caleb was a vain,
+talking man, but nowise of a wizard.  The thing most against him, Mr.
+Weare said, was this: that he did deny at the first that the house was
+troubled by evil spirits, and even went so far as to doubt that such
+things could be at all.  "Yet many wiser men than Caleb Powell do deny
+the same," I said.  "True," answered he; "but, as good Mr. Richardson,
+of Newbury, well saith, there have never lacked Sadducees, who believe
+not in angel or spirit."  I told the story of the disturbance at
+Strawberry Bank the night before, and how so silly a thing as a rolling
+pumpkin did greatly terrify a whole household; and said I did not doubt
+this Newbury trouble was something very like it.  Hereupon the good
+woman took the matter up, saying she had been over to Newbury, and had
+seen with her own eyes, and heard with her own ears; and that she could
+say of it as the Queen of Sheba did of Solomon's glory, "The half had
+not been told her."  She then went on to tell me of many marvellous and
+truly unaccountable things, so that I must needs think there is an
+invisible hand at work there.
+
+We reached Hampton about one hour before noon; and riding up the road
+towards the meeting-house, to my great joy, Uncle Rawson, who had
+business with the Commissioners then sitting, came out to meet me,
+bidding me go on to Mr. Weare's house, whither he would follow me when
+the Court did adjourn.  He came thither accordingly, to sup and lodge,
+bringing with him Mr. Pike the elder, one of the magistrates, a grave,
+venerable man, the father of mine old acquaintance, Robert.  Went in the
+evening with Mistress Weare and her maiden sister to see a young girl in
+the neighborhood, said to be possessed, or bewitched; but for mine own
+part I did see nothing in her behavior beyond that of a vicious and
+spoiled child, delighting in mischief.  Her grandmother, with whom she
+lives, lays the blame on an ill-disposed woman, named Susy Martin,
+living in Salisbury.  Mr. Pike, who dwells near this Martin, saith she
+is no witch, although an arrant scold, as was her mother before her; and
+as for the girl, he saith that a birch twig, smartly laid on, would cure
+her sooner than the hanging of all the old women in the Colony.
+Mistress Weare says this is not the first time the Evil Spirit hath been
+at work in Hampton; for they did all remember the case of Goody
+Marston's child, who was, from as fair and promising an infant as one
+would wish to see, changed into the likeness of an ape, to the great
+grief and sore shame of its parents; and, moreover, that when the child
+died, there was seen by more than one person a little old woman in a
+blue cloak, and petticoat of the same color, following on after the
+mourners, and looking very like old Eunice Cole, who was then locked
+fast in Ipswich jail, twenty miles off.  Uncle Rawson says he has all
+the papers in his possession touching the trial of this Cole, and will
+let me see them when we get back to Newbury.  There was much talk on
+this matter, which so disturbed my fancy that I slept but poorly.  This
+afternoon we go over to Newbury, where, indeed, I do greatly long to be
+once more.
+
+
+
+NEWBURY, October 26.
+
+Cousin Rebecca gone to Boston, and not expected home until next week.
+The house seems lonely without her.  R. Pike looked in upon us this
+morning, telling us that there was a rumor in Boston, brought by way of
+the New York Colony, that a great Papist Plot had been discovered in
+England, and that it did cause much alarm in London and thereabout.
+R. Pike saith he doubts not the Papists do plot, it being the custom of
+their Jesuits so to do; but that, nevertheless, it would be no strange
+thing if it should be found that the Bishops and the Government did set
+this rumor a-going, for the excuse and occasion of some new persecutions
+of Independents and godly people.
+
+
+
+October 27.
+
+Mr. Richardson preached yesterday, from Deuteronomy xviii. 10th, 11th,
+and 12th verses.  An ingenious and solid discourse, in which he showed
+that, as among the heathen nations surrounding the Jews, there were
+sorcerers, charmers, wizards, and consulters with familiar spirits, who
+were an abomination to the Lord, so in our time the heathen nations of
+Indians had also their powahs and panisees and devilish wizards, against
+whom the warning of the text might well be raised by the watchmen on the
+walls of our Zion.  He moreover said that the arts of the Adversary were
+now made manifest in this place in a most strange and terrible manner,
+and it did become the duty of all godly persons to pray and wrestle with
+the Lord, that they who have made a covenant with hell may be speedily
+discovered in their wickedness, and cut off from the congregation.  An
+awful discourse, which made many tremble and quake, and did quite
+overcome Goodwife Morse, she being a weakly woman, so that she had to be
+carried out of the meeting.
+
+It being cold weather, and a damp easterly wind keeping me within doors,
+I have been looking over with uncle his papers about the Hampton witch,
+Eunice Cole, who was twice tried for her mischiefs; and I incline to
+copy some of them, as I know they will be looked upon as worthy of,
+record by my dear Cousin Oliver and mine other English friends.  I find
+that as long ago as the year 1656, this same Eunice Cole was complained
+of, and many witnesses did testify to her wickedness.  Here followeth
+some of the evidence on the first trial:--
+
+"The deposition of Goody Marston and Goodwife Susanna Palmer, who, being
+sworn, sayeth, that Goodwife Cole saith that she was sure there was a
+witch in town, and that she knew where he dwelt, and who they are, and
+that thirteen years ago she knew one bewitched as Goodwife Marston's
+child was, and she was sure that party was bewitched, for it told her
+so, and it was changed from a man to an ape, as Goody Marston's child
+was, and she had prayed this thirteen year that God would discover that
+witch.  And further the deponent saith not.
+
+"Taken on oath before the Commissioners of Hampton, the 8th of the 2nd
+mo., 1656.
+
+                                   "WILLIAM FULLER.
+                                   "HENRY DOW.
+
+"Vera copea:
+           "THOS. BRADBURY, Recorder.
+
+"Sworn before, the 4th of September, 1656,
+
+"EDWARD RAWSON.
+
+
+"Thomas Philbrick testifieth that Goody Cole told him that if any of his
+calves did eat of her grass, she hoped it would poison them; and it fell
+out that one never came home again, and the other coming home died soon
+after.
+
+"Henry Morelton's wife and Goodwife Sleeper depose that, talking about
+Goody Cole and Marston's child, they did hear a great scraping against
+the boards of the window, which was not done by a cat or dog.
+
+"Thomas Coleman's wife testifies that Goody Cole did repeat to another
+the very words which passed between herself and her husband, in their
+own house, in private; and Thomas Ormsby, the constable of Salisbury,
+testifies, that when he did strip Eunice Cole of her shift, to be
+whipped, by the judgment of the Court at Salisbury, he saw a witch's
+mark under her left breast.  Moreover, one Abra. Drake doth depose and
+say, that this Goody Cole threatened that the hand of God would be
+against his cattle, and forthwith two of his cattle died, and before the
+end of summer a third also."
+
+
+About five years ago, she was again presented by the Jury for the
+Massachusetts jurisdiction, for having "entered into a covenant with the
+Devil, contrary to the peace of our Sovereign Lord the King, his crown
+and dignity, the laws of God and this jurisdiction"; and much testimony
+was brought against her, tending to show her to be an arrant witch.  For
+it seems she did fix her evil eye upon a little maid named Ann Smith, to
+entice her to her house, appearing unto her in the shape of a little old
+woman, in a blue coat, a blue cap, and a blue apron, and a white
+neckcloth, and presently changing into a dog, and running up a tree, and
+then into an eagle flying in the air, and lastly into a gray cat,
+speaking to her, and troubling her in a grievous manner.  Moreover, the
+constable of the town of Hampton testifies, that, having to supply Goody
+Cole with diet, by order of the town, she being poor, she complained
+much of him, and after that his wife could bake no bread in the oven
+which did not speedily rot and become loathsome to the smell, but the
+same meal baked at a neighbor's made good and sweet bread; and, further,
+that one night there did enter into their chamber a smell like that of
+the bewitched bread, only more loathsome, and plainly diabolical in its
+nature, so that, as the constable's wife saith, "she was fain to rise in
+the night and desire her husband to go to prayer to drive away the
+Devil; and he, rising, went to prayer, and after that, the smell was
+gone, so that they were not troubled with it."  There is also the
+testimony of Goodwife Perkins, that she did see, on the Lord's day,
+while Mr. Dalton was preaching, an imp in the shape of a mouse, fall out
+the bosom of Eunice Cole down into her lap.  For all which, the County
+Court, held at Salisbury, did order her to be sent to the Boston Jail,
+to await her trial at the Court of Assistants.  This last Court, I learn
+from mine uncle, did not condemn her, as some of the evidence was old,
+and not reliable.  Uncle saith she was a wicked old woman, who had been
+often whipped and set in the ducking-stool, but whether she was a witch
+or no, he knows not for a certainty.
+
+
+
+November 8.
+
+Yesterday, to my great joy, came my beloved Cousin Rebecca from Boston.
+In her company also came the worthy minister and doctor of medicine, Mr.
+Russ, formerly of Wells, but now settled at a plantation near Cocheco.
+He is to make some little tarry in this town, where at this present time
+many complain of sickness.  Rebecca saith he is one of the excellent of
+the earth, and, like his blessed Lord and Master, delighteth in going
+about doing good, and comforting both soul and body.  He hath a
+cheerful, pleasant countenance, and is very active, albeit he is well
+stricken in years.  He is to preach for Mr. Richardson next Sabhath, and
+in the mean time lodgeth at my uncle's house.
+
+This morning the weather is raw and cold, the ground frozen, and some
+snow fell before sunrise.  A little time ago, Dr. Russ, who was walking
+in the garden, came in a great haste to the window where Rebecca and I
+were sitting, bidding us come forth.  So, we hurrying out, the good man
+bade us look whither he pointed, and to! a flock of wild geese,
+streaming across the sky, in two great files, sending down, as it were,
+from the clouds, their loud and sonorous trumpetings, "Cronk, cronk,
+cronk!"  These birds, the Doctor saith, do go northward in March to
+hatch their broods in the great bogs and on the desolate islands, and
+fly back again when the cold season approacheth.  Our worthy guest
+improved the occasion to speak of the care and goodness of God towards
+his creation, and how these poor birds are enabled, by their proper
+instincts, to partake of his bounty, and to shun the evils of adverse
+climates.  He never looked, he said, upon the flight of these fowls,
+without calling to mind the query which was of old put to Job: "Doth the
+hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings toward the south?  Doth
+the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high?"
+
+
+
+November 12, 1678.
+
+Dr. Russ preached yesterday, having for his text 1 Corinthians, chap.
+xiii. verse 5: "Charity seeketh not her own."  He began by saying that
+mutual benevolence was a law of nature,--no one being a whole of
+himself, nor capable of happily subsisting by himself, but rather a
+member of the great body of mankind, which must dissolve and perish,
+unless held together and compacted in its various parts by the force of
+that common and blessed law.  The wise Author of our being hath most
+manifestly framed and fitted us for one another, and ordained that
+mutual charity shall supply our mutual wants and weaknesses, inasmuch
+as no man liveth to himself, but is dependent upon others, as others be
+upon him.  It hath been said by ingenious men, that in the outward world
+all things do mutually operate upon and affect each other; and that it
+is by the energy of this principle that our solid earth is supported,
+and the heavenly bodies are made to keep the rhythmic harmonies of their
+creation, and dispense upon us their benign favors; and it may be said,
+that a law akin to this hath been ordained for the moral world,--mutual
+benevolence being the cement and support of families, and churches, and
+states, and of the great community and brotherhood of mankind.  It doth
+both make and preserve all the peace, and harmony, and beauty, which
+liken our world in some small degree to heaven, and without it all
+things would rush into confusion and discord, and the earth would become
+a place of horror and torment, and men become as ravening wolves,
+devouring and being devoured by one another.
+
+Charity is the second great commandment, upon which hang all the Law
+and the Prophets; and it is like unto the first, and cannot be separated
+from it; for at the great day of recompense we shall be tried by these
+commandments, and our faithfulness unto the first will be seen and
+manifested by our faithfulness unto the last.  Yea, by our love of one
+another the Lord will measure our love of himself.  "Inasmuch as ye have
+done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto
+me."  The grace of benevolence is therefore no small part of our
+meetness for the inheritance of the saints in light; it is the temper of
+heaven; the air which the angels breathe; an immortal grace,--for when
+faith which supporteth us here, and hope which is as an anchor to the
+tossed soul, are no longer needed, charity remaineth forever, for it is
+native in heaven, and partaketh of the divine nature, for God himself is
+love.
+
+"Oh, my hearers," said the preacher, his venerable face brightening as
+if with a light shining from within, "Doth not the Apostle tell us that
+skill in tongues and gifts of prophecy, and mysteries of knowledge and
+faith, do avail nothing where charity is lacking?  What avail great
+talents, if they be not devoted to goodness?  On the other hand, where
+charity dwelleth, it maketh the weak strong and the uncomely beautiful;
+it sheddeth a glory about him who possesseth it, like that which did
+shine on the face of Moses, or that which did sit upon the countenance
+of Stephen, when his face was as the face of an angel.  Above all, it
+conformeth us to the Son of God; for through love he came among us, and
+went about doing good, adorning his life with miracles of mercy, and at
+last laid it down for the salvation of men.  What heart can resist his
+melting entreaty: 'Even as I have loved you, love ye also one another.'
+
+"We do all," he continued, "seek after happiness, but too often blindly
+and foolishly.  The selfish man, striving to live for himself, shutteth
+himself up to partake of his single portion, and marvelleth that he
+cannot enjoy it.  The good things he hath laid up for himself fail to
+comfort him; and although he hath riches, and wanteth nothing for his
+soul of all that he desireth, yet hath he not power to partake thereof.
+They be as delicates poured upon a mouth shut up, or as meats set upon a
+grave.  But he that hath found charity to be the temper of happiness,
+which doth put the soul in a natural and easy condition, and openeth it
+to the solaces of that pure and sublime entertainment which the angels
+do spread for such as obey the will of their Creator, hath discovered a
+more subtle alchemy than any of which the philosophers did dream,--for
+he transmuteth the enjoyments of others into his own, and his large and
+open heart partaketh of the satisfaction of all around him.  Are there
+any here who, in the midst of outward abundance, are sorrowful of
+heart,--who go mourning on their way from some inward discomfort,---Who
+long for serenity of spirit, and cheerful happiness, as the servant
+earnestly desireth the shadow?  Let such seek out the poor and forsaken,
+they who have no homes nor estates, who are the servants of sin and evil
+habits, who lack food for both the body and the mind.  Thus shall they,
+in rememering others, forget themselves; the pleasure they afford to
+their fellow-creatures shall come back larger and fuller unto their own
+bosoms, and they shall know of a truth how much the more blessed it is
+to give than to receive.  In love and compassion, God hath made us
+dependent upon each other, to the end that by the use of our affections
+we may find true happiness and rest to our souls.  He hath united us so
+closely with our fellows, that they do make, as it were, a part of our
+being, and in comforting them we do most assuredly comfort ourselves.
+Therein doth happiness come to us unawares, and without seeking, as the
+servant who goeth on his master's errand findeth pleasant fruits and
+sweet flowers overhanging him, and cool fountains, which he knew not of,
+gushing up by the wayside, for his solace and refreshing."
+
+The minister then spake of the duty of charity towards even the sinful
+and froward, and of winning them by love and good will, and making even
+their correction and punishment a means of awakening them to repentance,
+and the calling forth of the fruits meet for it.  He also spake of self-
+styled prophets and enthusiastic people, who went about to cry against
+the Church and the State, and to teach new doctrines, saying that
+oftentimes such were sent as a judgment upon the professors of the
+truth, who had the form of godliness only, while lacking the power
+thereof; and that he did believe that the zeal which had been manifested
+against such had not always been enough seasoned with charity.  It did
+argue a lack of faith in the truth, to fly into a panic and a great rage
+when it was called in question; and to undertake to become God's
+avengers, and to torture and burn heretics, was an error of the Papists,
+which ill became those who had gone out from among them.  Moreover, he
+did believe that many of these people, who had so troubled the Colony of
+late, were at heart simple and honest men and women, whose heads might
+indeed be unsound, but who at heart sought to do the will of God; and,
+of a truth, all could testify to the sobriety and strictness of their
+lives, and the justice of their dealings in outward things.  He spake
+also somewhat of the Indians, who, he said, were our brethren, and
+concerning whom we would have an account to give at the Great Day.  The
+hand of these heathen people had been heavy upon the Colonies, and many
+had suffered from their cruel slaughterings, and the captivity of
+themselves and their families.  Here the aged minister wept, for he
+doubtless thought of his son, who was slain in the war; and for a time
+the words did seem to die in his throat, so greatly was he moved.  But
+he went on to say, that since God, in his great and undeserved mercy,
+had put an end to the war, all present unkindness and hard dealing
+towards he poor benighted heathen was an offence in the eyes of Him who
+respecteth not the persons of men, but who regardeth with an equal eye
+the white and the red men, both being the workmanship of His hands.  It
+is our blessed privilege to labor to bring them to a knowledge of the
+true God, whom, like the Athenians, some of them do ignorantly worship;
+while the greater part, as was said of the heathen formerly, do not,
+out of the good pings that are seen, know Him that is; neither by
+considering the works do they acknowledge the workmaster, but deem the
+fire or wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the stars, or the
+violent water, or the lights of heaven, to be the gods who govern the
+world.
+
+He counselled against mischief-makers and stirrers up of strife, and
+such as do desire occasion against their brethren.  He said that it did
+seem as if many thought to atone for their own sins by their great heat
+and zeal to discover wickedness in others; and that he feared such might
+be the case now, when there was much talk of the outward and visible
+doings of Satan in this place; whereas, the enemy was most to be feared
+who did work privily in the heart; it being a small thing for him to
+bewitch a dwelling made of wood and stone, who did so easily possess and
+enchant the precious souls of men.
+
+Finally, he did exhort all to keep watch over their own spirits, and to
+remember that what measure they do mete to others shall be measured to
+them again; to lay aside all wrath, and malice, and evil-speaking; to
+bear one another's burdens, and so make this Church in the wilderness
+beautiful and comely, an example to the world of that peace and good
+will to men, which the angels sang of at the birth of the blessed
+Redeemer.
+
+I have been the more careful to give the substance of Mr. Russ's sermon,
+as nearly as I can remember it, forasmuch as it hath given offence to
+some who did listen to it.  Deacon Dole saith it was such a discourse as
+a Socinian or a Papist might have preached, for the great stress it laid
+upon works; and Goodwife Matson, a noisy, talking woman,--such an one,
+no doubt, as those busybodies whom Saint Paul did rebuke for
+forwardness, and command to keep silence in the church,--says the
+preacher did go out of his way to favor Quakers, Indians, and witches;
+and that the Devil in Goody Morse's house was no doubt well pleased with
+the discourse.  R. Pike saith he does no wise marvel at her complaints;
+for when she formerly dwelt at the Marblehead fishing-haven, she was one
+of the unruly women who did break into Thompson's garrison-house, and
+barbarously put to death two Saugus Indians, who had given themselves up
+for safe keeping, and who had never harmed any, which thing was a great
+grief and scandal to all well-disposed people.  And yet this woman, who
+scrupled not to say that she would as lief stick an Indian as a hog, and
+who walked all the way from Marblehead to Boston to see the Quaker woman
+hung, and did foully jest over her dead body, was allowed to have her
+way in the church, Mr. Richardson being plainly in fear of her ill
+tongue and wicked temper.
+
+
+
+November 13.
+
+The Quaker maid, Margaret Brewster, came this morning, inquiring for the
+Doctor, and desiring him to visit a sick man at her father's house, a
+little way up the river; whereupon he took his staff and went with her.
+On his coming back, he said he must do the Quakers the justice to say,
+that, with all their heresies and pestilent errors of doctrine, they
+were a kind people; for here was Goodman Brewster, whose small estate
+had been wellnigh taken from him in fines, and whose wife was a weak,
+ailing woman, who was at this time kindly lodging and nursing a poor,
+broken-down soldier, by no means likely to repay him, in any sort.  As
+for the sick man, he had been hardly treated in the matter of his wages,
+while in the war, and fined, moreover, on the ground that he did profane
+the holy Sabhath; and though he had sent a petition to the Honorable
+Governor and Council, for the remission of the same, it had been to no
+purpose.  Mr. Russ said he had taken a copy of this petition, with the
+answer thereto, intending to make another application himself to the
+authorities; for although the petitioner might have been blamable, yet
+his necessity did go far to excuse it.  He gave me the papers to copy,
+which are as followeth:--
+
+
+"To the Hon.  the Governor and Council, now sitting in Boston, July 30,
+1676.  The Petition of Jonathan Atherton humbly showeth:
+
+"That your Petitioner, being a soldier under Captain Henchman, during
+their abode at Concord, Captain H., under pretence of your petitioner's
+profanation of the Sabhath, had sentenced your petitioner to lose a
+fortnight's pay.  Now, the thing that was alleged against your
+petitioner was, that he cut a piece of an old hat to put in his shoes,
+and emptied three or four cartridges.  Now, there was great occasion and
+necessity for his so doing, for his shoes were grown so big, by walking
+and riding in the wet and dew, that they galled his feet so that he was
+not able to go without pain; and his cartridges, being in a bag,--were
+worn with continual travel, so that they lost the powder out, so that it
+was dangerous to carry them; besides, he did not know how soon he should
+be forced to make use of them, therefore he did account it lawful to do
+the same; yet, if it be deemed a breach of the Sabhath, he desires to be
+humbled before the Lord, and begs the pardon of his people for any
+offence done to them thereby.  And doth humbly request the favor of your
+Honors to consider the premises, and to remit the fine imposed upon him,
+and to give order to the committee for the war for the payment of his
+wages.  So shall he forever pray. . . . "
+
+11 Aug.  1676.--"The Council sees no cause to grant the petitioner any
+relief."
+
+
+
+
+NEWBURY, November 18, 1678.
+
+Went yesterday to the haunted house with Mr. Russ and Mr. Richardson,
+Rebecca and Aunt Rawson being in the company.  Found the old couple in
+much trouble, sitting by the fire, with the Bible open before them, and
+Goody Morse weeping.  Mr. Richardson asked Goodman Morse to tell what he
+had seen and heard in the house; which he did, to this effect: That
+there had been great and strange noises all about the house, a banging
+of doors, and a knocking on the boards, and divers other unaccountable
+sounds; that he had seen his box of tools turn over of itself, and the
+tools fly about the room; baskets dropping down the chimney, and the
+pots hanging over the fire smiting against each other; and, moreover,
+the irons on the hearth jumping into the pots, and dancing on the table.
+Goodwife Morse said that her bread-tray would upset of its own accord,
+and the great woollen wheel would contrive to turn itself upside down,
+and stand on its end; and that when she and the boy did make the beds,
+the blankets would fly off as fast as they put them on, all of which the
+boy did confirm.  Mr. Russ asked her if she suspected any one of the
+mischief; whereupon she said she did believe it was done by the seaman
+Powell, a cunning man, who was wont to boast of his knowledge in
+astrology and astronomy, having been brought tip under one Norwood,
+who is said to have studied the Black Art.  He had wickedly accused her
+grandson of the mischief, whereas the poor boy had himself suffered
+greatly from the Evil Spirit, having been often struck with stones and
+bits of boards, which were flung upon him, and kept awake o' nights by
+the diabolical noises.  Goodman Morse here said that Powell, coming in,
+and pretending to pity their lamentable case, told them that if they
+would let him have the boy for a day or two, they should be free of the
+trouble while he was with him; and that the boy going with him, they had
+no disturbance in that time; which plainly showed that this Powell had
+the wicked spirits in his keeping, and could chain them up, or let them
+out, as he pleased.
+
+Now, while she was speaking, we did all hear a great thumping on the
+ceiling, and presently a piece of a board flew across the room against
+the chair on which Mr. Richardson was sitting; whereat the two old
+people set up a dismal groaning, and the boy cried out, "That's the
+witch!"  Goodman Morse begged of Mr. Richardson to fall to praying,
+which he presently did; and, when he had done, he asked Mr. Russ to
+follow him, who sat silent and musing a little while, and then prayed
+that the worker of the disturbance, whether diabolical or human, might
+be discovered and brought to light.  After which there was no noise
+while we staid.  Mr. Russ talked awhile with the boy, who did stoutly
+deny what Caleb Powell charged upon him, and showed a bruise which he
+got from a stick thrown at him in the cow-house.  When we went away,
+Mr. Richardson asked Mr. Russ what he thought of it.  Mr. Russ said,
+the matter had indeed a strange look, but that it might be,
+nevertheless, the work of the boy, who was a cunning young rogue, and
+capable beyond his years.  Mr. Richardson said he hoped his brother was
+not about to countenance the scoffers and Sadducees, who had all along
+tried to throw doubt upon the matter.  For himself, he did look upon it
+as the work of invisible demons, and an awful proof of the existence of
+such, and of the deplorable condition of all who fall into their bands;
+moreover, he did believe that God would overrule this malice of the
+Devil for good, and make it a means of awakening sinners and lukewarm
+church-members to a sense of their danger.
+
+Last night, brother Leonard, who is studying with the learned Mr. Ward,
+the minister at Haverbill, came down, in the company of the worshipful
+Major Saltonstall, who hath business with Esquire Dummer and other
+magistrates of this place.  Mr. Saltonstall's lady, who is the daughter
+of Mr. Ward, sent by her husband and my brother a very kind and pressing
+invitation to Rebecca and myself to make a visit to her; and Mr.
+Saltonstall did also urge the matter strongly.  So we have agreed to go
+with them the day after to-morrow.  Now, to say the truth, I am not
+sorry to leave Newbury at this time, for there is so much talk of the
+bewitched house, and such dismal stories told of the power of invisible
+demons, added to what I did myself hear and see yesterday, that I can
+scarce sleep for the trouble and disquiet this matter causeth.  Dr.
+Russ, who left this morning, said, in his opinion, the less that was
+said and done about the witchcraft the better for the honor of the
+Church and the peace of the neighborhood; for it might, after all, turn
+out to be nothing more than an "old wife's fable;" but if it were indeed
+the work of Satan, it could, he did believe, do no harm to sincere and
+godly people, who lived sober and prayerful lives, and kept themselves
+busy in doing good.  The doers of the Word seldom fell into the snare of
+the Devil's enchantments.  He might be compared to a wild beast, who
+dareth not to meddle with the traveller who goeth straightway on his
+errand, but lieth in wait for such as loiter and fall asleep by the
+wayside.  He feared, he said, that some in our day were trying to get a
+great character to themselves, as the old monks did, by their skill in
+discerning witcherafts, and their pretended conflicts with the Devil in
+his bodily shape; and thus, while they were seeking to drive the enemy
+out of their neighbors' houses, they were letting him into their own
+hearts, in the guise of deceit and spiritual pride.  Repentance and
+works meet for it were the best exorcism; and the savor of a good life
+driveth off Evil Spirits, even as that of the fish of Tobit, at
+Ecbatana, drove the Devil from the chamber of the bride into the
+uttermost parts of Egypt.  "For mine own part," continued the worthy
+man, "I believe the Lord and Master, whom I seek to serve, is over all
+the powers of Satan; therefore do I not heed them, being afraid only of
+mine own accusing conscience and the displeasure of God."
+
+We are all loath to lose the good Doctor's company.  An Israelite
+indeed!  My aunt, who once tarried for a little time with him for the
+benefit of his skill in physic, on account of sickness, tells me that
+he is as a father to the people about him, advising them in all their
+temporal concerns, and bringing to a timely and wise settlement all
+their disputes, so that there is nowhere a more prosperous and loving
+society.  Although accounted a learned man, he doth not perplex his
+hearers, as the manner of some is, with dark and difficult questions,
+and points of doctrine, but insisteth mainly on holiness of life and
+conversation.  It is said that on one occasion, a famous schoolman and
+disputer from abroad, coming to talk with him on the matter of the
+damnation of infants, did meet him with a cradle on his shoulder, which
+he was carrying to a young mother in his neighborhood, and when the man
+told him his errand,--the good Doctor bade him wait until he got back,
+"for," said he, "I hold it to be vastly more important to take care of
+the bodies of the little infants which God in his love sends among us,
+than to seek to pry into the mysteries of His will concerning their
+souls."  He hath no salary or tithe, save the use of a house and farm,
+choosing rather to labor with his own hands than to burden his
+neighbors; yet, such is their love and good-will, that in the busy
+seasons of the hay and corn harvest, they all join together and help him
+in his fields, counting it a special privilege to do so.
+
+
+
+November 19.
+
+Leonard and Mr. Richardson, talking upon the matter of the ministry,
+disagreed not a little.  Mr. Richardson says my brother hath got into
+his head many unscriptural notions, and that he will never be of service
+in the Church until he casts them off.  He saith, moreover, that he
+shall write to Mr. Ward concerning the errors of the young man.  His
+words troubling me, I straightway discoursed my brother as to the points
+of difference between them; but he, smiling, said it was a long story,
+but that some time he would tell me the substance of the disagreement,
+bidding me have no fear in his behalf, as what had displeasured Mr.
+Richardson had arisen only from tenderness of conscience.
+
+
+
+
+HAVERHILL, November 22.
+
+Left Newbury day before yesterday.  The day cold, but sunshiny, and not
+unpleasant.  Mr. Saltonstall's business calling him that way, we crossed
+over the ferry to Salisbury, and after a ride of about an hour, got to
+the Falls of the Powow River, where a great stream of water rushes
+violently down the rocks, into a dark wooded valley, and from thence
+runs into the Merrimac, about a mile to the southeast.  A wild sight it
+was, the water swollen by the rains of the season, foaming and dashing
+among the rocks and the trees, which latter were wellnigh stripped of
+their leaves.  Leaving this place, we went on towards Haverhill.  Just
+before we entered that town, we overtook an Indian, with a fresh wolf's
+skin hanging over his shoulder.  As soon as he saw us, he tried to hide
+himself in the bushes; but Mr. Saltonstall, riding up to him, asked him
+if he did expect Haverhill folks to pay him forty shillings for killing
+that Amesbury wolf?  "How you know Amesbury wolf?" asked the Indian.
+"Oh," said Mr. Saltonstall, "you can't cheat us again, Simon.  You must
+be honest, and tell no more lies, or we will have you whipped for your
+tricks."  The Indian thereupon looked sullen enough, but at length he
+begged Mr. Saltonstall not to tell where the wolf was killed, as the
+Amesbury folks did now refuse to pay for any killed in their town; and,
+as he was a poor Indian, and his squaw much sick, and could do no work,
+he did need the money.  Mr. Saltonstall told him he would send his wife
+some cornmeal and bacon, when he got home, if he would come for them,
+which he promised to do.
+
+When we had ridden off, and left him, Mr. Saltonstall told us that this
+Simon was a bad Indian, who, when in drink, was apt to be saucy and
+quarrelsome; but that his wife was quite a decent body for a savage,
+having long maintained herself and children and her lazy, cross husband,
+by hard labor in the cornfields and at the fisheries.
+
+Haverhill lieth very pleasantly on the river-side; the land about hilly
+and broken, but of good quality.  Mr. Saltonstall liveth in a stately
+house for these parts, not far from that of his father-in-law, the
+learned Mr. Ward.  Madam, his wife, is a fair, pleasing young woman,
+not unused to society, their house being frequented by many of the first
+people hereabout, as well as by strangers of distinction from other
+parts of the country.  We had hardly got well through our dinner (which
+was abundant and savory, being greatly relished by our hunger), when two
+gentlemen came riding up to the door; and on their coming in, we found
+them to be the young Doctor Clark, of Boston, a son of the old Newbury
+physician, and a Doctor Benjamin Thompson, of Roxbury, who I hear is not
+a little famous for his ingenious poetry and witty pieces on many
+subjects.  He was, moreover, an admirer of my cousin Rebecca; and on
+learning of her betrothal to Sir Thomas did write a most despairing
+verse to her, comparing himself to all manner of lonesome things, so
+that when Rebecca showed it to me, I told her I did fear the poor young
+gentleman would put an end to himself, by reason of his great sorrow and
+disquiet; whereat she laughed merrily, bidding me not fear, for she knew
+the writer too well to be troubled thereat, for he loved nobody so well
+as himself, and that under no provocation would he need the Apostle's
+advice to the jailer, "Do thyself no harm."  All which I found to be
+true,--he being a gay, witty man, full of a fine conceit of himself,
+which is not so much to be marvelled at, as he hath been greatly
+flattered and sought after.
+
+The excellent Mr. Ward spent the evening with us; a pleasant, social old
+man, much beloved by his people.  He told us a great deal about the
+early settlement of the town, and of the grievous hardships which many
+did undergo the first season, from cold, and hunger, and sickness.  He
+thought, however, that, with all their ease and worldly prosperity, the
+present generation were less happy and contented than their fathers; for
+there was now a great striving to outdo each other in luxury and gay
+apparel; the Lord's day was not so well kept as formerly; and the
+drinking of spirits and frequenting of ordinaries and places of public
+resort vastly increased.  Mr. Saltonstall said the war did not a little
+demoralize the people, and that since the soldiers cause back, there had
+been much trouble in Church and State.  The General Court, two years
+ago, had made severe laws against the provoking evils of the times:
+profaneness, Sabbath-breaking, drinking, and revelling to excess, loose
+and sinful conduct on the part of the young and unmarried, pride in
+dress, attending Quakers' meetings, and neglect of attendance upon
+divine worship; but these laws had never been well enforced; and he
+feared too many of the magistrates were in the condition of the Dutch
+Justice in the New York Province, who, when a woman was brought before
+him charged with robbing a henroost, did request his brother on the
+bench to pass sentence upon her; for, said he, if I send her to the
+whipping post, the wench will cry out against me as her accomplice.
+
+Doctor Clark said his friend Doctor Thompson had written a long piece on
+this untoward state of our affairs, which he hoped soon to see in print,
+inasmuch as it did hold the looking-glass to the face of this
+generation, and shame it by a comparison with that of the generation
+which has passed.  Mr. Ward said he was glad to hear of it, and hoped
+his ingenious friend had brought the manuscript with him; whereupon, the
+young gentleman said he did take it along with him, in the hope to
+benefit it by Mr. Ward's judgment and learning, and with the leave of
+the company he would read the Prologue thereof.  To which we all
+agreeing, he read what follows, which I copy from his book:--
+
+
+"The times wherein old PUMPKIN was a saint,
+When men fared hardly, yet without complaint,
+On vilest cates; the dainty Indian maize
+Was eat with clam-shells out of wooden trays,
+Under thatched roofs, without the cry of rent,
+And the best sauce to every dish, content,--
+These golden times (too fortunate to hold)
+Were quickly sinned away for love of gold.
+'T was then among the bushes, not the street,
+If one in place did an inferior meet,
+'Good morrow, brother!  Is there aught you want?
+Take freely of me what I have, you ha'n't.'
+Plain Tom and Dick would pass as current now,
+As ever since 'Your servant, sir,' and bow.
+Deep-skirted doublets, puritanic capes,
+Which now would render men like upright apes,
+Was comelier wear, our wise old fathers thought,
+Than the cast fashions from all Europe brought.
+'T was in those days an honest grace would hold
+Till an hot pudding grew at heart a-cold,
+And men had better stomachs for religion,
+Than now for capon, turkey-cock, or pigeon;
+When honest sisters met to pray, not prate,
+About their own and not their neighbors' state,
+During Plain Dealing's reign, that worthy stud
+Of the ancient planter-race before the Flood.
+
+"These times were good: merchants cared not a rush
+For other fare than jonakin and mush.
+And though men fared and lodged very hard,
+Yet innocence was better than a guard.
+'T was long before spiders and worms had drawn
+Their dingy webs, or hid with cheating lawn
+New England's beauties, which still seemed to me
+Illustrious in their own simplicity.
+'T was ere the neighboring Virgin Land had broke
+The hogsheads of her worse than hellish smoke;
+'T was ere the Islands sent their presents in,
+Which but to use was counted next to sin;
+'T was ere a barge had made so rich a freight
+As chocolate, dust-gold, and bits of eight;
+Ere wines from France and Muscovado too,
+Without the which the drink will scarcely do.
+From Western Isles, ere fruits and delicacies
+Did rot maids' teeth and spoil their handsome faces,
+Or ere these times did chance the noise of war
+Was from our tines and hearts removed far,
+Then had the churches rest: as yet, the coals
+Were covered up in most contentious souls;
+Freeness in judgment, union in affection,
+Dear love, sound truth, they were our grand protection.
+Then were the times in which our Councils sat,
+These grave prognostics of our future state;
+If these be longer lived, our hopes increase,
+These wars will usher in a longer peace;
+But if New England's love die in its youth,
+The grave will open next for blessed truth.
+
+"This theme is out of date; the peaceful hours
+When castles needed not, but pleasant bowers,
+Not ink, but blood and tears now serve the turn
+To draw the figure of New England's urn.
+New England's hour of passion is at hand,
+No power except Divine can it withstand.
+Scarce hath her glass of fifty years run out,
+Than her old prosperous steeds turn heads about;
+Tracking themselves back to their poor beginnings,
+To fear and fare upon the fruits of sinnings.
+So that this mirror of the Christian world
+Lies burnt to heaps in part, her streamers furled.
+Grief sighs, joys flee, and dismal fears surprise,
+Not dastard spirits only, but the wise.
+
+"Thus have the fairest hopes deceived the eye
+Of the big-swoln expectants standing by
+So the proud ship, after a little turn,
+Sinks in the ocean's arms to find its urn:
+Thus hath the heir to many thousands born
+Been in an instant from the mother torn;
+Even thus thy infant cheek begins to pale,
+And thy supporters through great losses fail.
+This is the Prologue to thy future woe--
+The Epilogue no mortal yet can know."
+
+Mr. Ward was much pleased with the verses, saying that they would do
+honor to any writer.
+
+Rebecca thought the lines concerning the long grace at meat happy, and
+said she was minded of the wife of the good Mr. Ames, who prided herself
+on her skill in housewifery and cookery; and on one occasion, seeing a
+nice pair of roasted fowls growing cold under her husband's long grace,
+was fain to jog his elbow, telling him that if he did not stop soon, she
+feared they would have small occasion for thankfulness for their spoiled
+dinner.  Mr. Ward said he was once travelling in company with Mr.
+Phillips of Rowley, and Mr. Parker of Newbury, and stopping all night at
+a poor house near the sea-shore, the woman thereof brought into the room
+for their supper a great wooden tray, full of something nicely covered
+up by a clean linen cloth.  It proved to be a dish of boiled clams, in
+their shells; and as Mr. Phillips was remarkable in his thanks for aptly
+citing passages of Scripture with regard to whatsoever food was upon the
+table before him, Mr. Parker and himself did greatly wonder what he
+could say of this dish; but he, nothing put to it, offered thanks that
+now, as formerly, the Lord's people were enabled to partake of the
+abundance of the seas, and treasures hid in the sands.  "Whereat," said
+Mr. Ward, "we did find it so hard to keep grave countenances, that our
+good hostess was not a little disturbed, thinking we were mocking her
+poor fare; and we were fain to tell her the cause of our mirth, which
+was indeed ill-timed."
+
+Doctor Clark spake of Mr. Ward's father, the renowned minister at
+Ipswich, whose book of "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam," was much admired.
+Mr. Ward said that some of the witty turns therein did give much offence
+at the time of its printing, but that his father could never spoil his
+joke for the sake of friends, albeit he had no malice towards any one,
+and was always ready to do a good, even to his enemies.  He once even
+greatly angered his old and true friend, Mr. Cotton of Boston.  "It fell
+out in this wise," said Mr. Ward.  "When the arch-heretic and fanatic
+Gorton and his crew were in prison in Boston, my father and Mr. Cotton
+went to the jail window to see them; and after some little discourse
+with them, he told Gorton that if he had done or said anything which he
+could with a clear conscience renounce, he would do well to recant the
+same, and the Court, he doubted not, would be merciful; adding, that it
+would be no disparagement for him to do so, as the best of men were
+liable to err: as, for instance, his brother Cotton here generally did
+preach that one year which he publicly repented of before his
+congregation the next year."
+
+Mr. Saltonstall told another story of old Mr. Ward, which made us all
+merry.  There was a noted Antinomian, of Boston, who used to go much
+about the country disputing with all who would listen to him, who,
+coming to Ipswich one night, with another of his sort with him, would
+fain have tarried with Mr. Ward; but he told them that he had scarce hay
+and grain enough in his barn for the use of his own cattle, and that
+they would do well to take their horses to the ordinary, where they
+would be better cared for.  But the fellow, not wishing to be so put
+off, bade him consider what the Scripture said touching the keeping of
+strangers, as some had thereby entertained angels unawares.  "True,
+my friend," said Mr. Ward, "but we don't read that the angels came
+a-horseback!"
+
+The evening passed away in a very pleasant and agreeable manner.  We had
+rare nuts, and apples, and pears, of Mr. Saltonstall's raising,
+wonderfully sweet and luscious.  Our young gentlemen, moreover, seemed
+to think the wine and ale of good quality; for, long after we had gone
+to our beds, we could hear them talking and laughing in the great hall
+below, notwithstanding that Mr. Ward, when he took leave, bade Doctor
+Thompson take heed to his own hint concerning the:
+
+               "Wines from France and Muscovado too;"
+
+to which the young wit replied, that there was Scripture warrant for his
+drinking, inasmuch as the command was, to give wine to those that be of
+heavy heart.  Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his
+misery no more; and, for his part, he had been little better than
+miserable ever since he heard of Rebecca's betrothal.  A light, careless
+man, but of good parts, and as brave a talker as I have heard since I
+have been in the Colony.
+
+
+
+November 24.
+
+Mr. Ward's negro girl Dinah came for me yesterday, saying that her
+master did desire to see me.  So, marvelling greatly what he wanted,
+I went with her, and was shown into the study.  Mr. Ward said he had
+sent for me to have some discourse in regard to my brother Leonard, who
+he did greatly fear was likely to make shipwreck of the faith; and that
+Mr. Richardson had written him concerning the young man, telling him
+that he did visit the Quakers when at Newbury, and even went over to
+their conventicle at Hampton, on the Lord's day, in the company of the
+Brewster family, noted Quakers and ranters.  He had the last evening had
+some words with the lad, but with small satisfaction.  Being sorely
+troubled by this account, I begged him to send for Leonard, which he
+did, and, when he did come into the room, Mr. Ward told him that he
+might see by the plight of his sister (for I was in tears) what a great
+grief he was like to bring upon his family and friends, by running out
+into heresies.  Leonard said he was sorry to give trouble to any one,
+least of all to his beloved sister; that he did indeed go to the
+Quakers' meeting, on one occasion, to judge for himself concerning this
+people, who are everywhere spoken against; and that he must say he did
+hear or see nothing in their worship contrary to the Gospel.  There was,
+indeed, but little said, but the words were savory and Scriptural. "But
+they deny the Scriptures," cried Mr. Ward, "and set above them what they
+call the Light, which I take to be nothing better than their own
+imaginations."  "I do not so understand them," said Leonard; "I think
+they do diligently study the Scripture, and seek to conform their lives
+to its teachings; and for the Light of which they speak, it is borne--
+witness to not only in the Bible, but by the early fathers and devout
+men of all ages.  I do not go to excuse the Quakers in all that they
+have done, nor to defend all their doctrines and practices, many of
+which I see no warrant in Scripture for, but believe to be pernicious
+and contrary to good order; yet I must need look upon them as a sober,
+earnest-seeking people, who do verily think themselves persecuted for
+righteousness' sake."  Hereupon Mr. Ward struck his cane smartly on the
+floor, and, looking severely at my brother, bade him beware how he did
+justify these canting and false pretenders.  "They are," he said,
+"either sad knaves, or silly enthusiasts,--they pretend to Divine
+Revelation, and set up as prophets; like the Rosicrucians and Gnostics,
+they profess to a knowledge of things beyond what plain Scripture
+reveals.  The best that can be said of them is, that they are befooled
+by their own fancies, and the victims of distempered brains and ill
+habits of body.  Then their ranting against the Gospel order of the
+Church, and against the ministers of Christ, calling us all manner of
+hirelings, wolves, and hypocrites; belching out their blasphemies
+against the ordinances and the wholesome laws of the land for the
+support of a sound ministry and faith, do altogether justify the sharp
+treatment they have met with; so that, if they have not all lost their
+ears, they may thank our clemency rather than their own worthiness to
+wear them.  I do not judge of them ignorantly, for I have dipped into
+their books, where, what is not downright blasphemy and heresy, is
+mystical and cabalistic.  They affect a cloudy and canting style, as if
+to keep themselves from being confuted by keeping themselves from being
+understood.  Their divinity is a riddle, a piece of black art; the
+Scripture they turn into allegory and parabolical conceits, and thus
+obscure and debauch the truth.  Argue with them, and they fall to
+divining; reason with them, and they straightway prophesy.  Then their
+silent meetings, so called, in the which they do pretend to justify
+themselves by quoting Revelation, 'There was silence in heaven;' whereas
+they might find other authorities,--as, for instance in Psalm 115, where
+hell is expressed by silence, and in the Gospel, where we read of a dumb
+devil.  As to persecuting these people, we have been quite too
+charitable to them, especially of late, and they are getting bolder in
+consequence; as, for example, the behavior of that shameless young wench
+in Newbury, who disturbed Brother Richardson's church with her antics
+not long ago.  She should have been tied to the cart-tail and whipped
+all the way to Rhode Island."
+
+"Do you speak of Margaret Brewster?" asked Leonard, his face all
+a-crimson, and his lip quivering.  "Let me tell you, Mr. Ward, that you
+greatly wrong one of Christ's little ones."  And he called me to testify
+to her goodness and charity, and the blamelessness of her life.
+
+"Don't talk to me of the blameless life of such an one," said Mr. Ward,
+in aloud, angry tone; "it is the Devil's varnish for heresy.  The
+Manichees, and the Pelagians, and Socinians, all did profess great
+strictness and sanctity of life; and there never was heretic yet, from
+they whom the Apostle makes mention of, who fasted from meats, giving
+heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils, down to the Quakers,
+Dippers, and New Lights of this generation who have not, like their
+fathers of old, put on the shape of Angels of Light, and lived severe
+and over-strict lives.  I grant that the Quakers are honest in their
+dealings, making great show of sobriety and self-denial, and abhor the
+practice of scandalous vices, being temperate, chaste, and grave in
+their behavior, and thereby they win upon unstable souls, and make
+plausible their damnable heresies.  I warn you, young man, to take heed
+of them, lest you be ensnared and drawn into their way."
+
+My brother was about to reply, but, seeing Mr. Ward so moved and vexed,
+I begged of him to say no more; and, company coming in, the matter was
+dropped, to my great joy.  I went back much troubled and disquieted for
+my brother's sake.
+
+
+
+November 28, 1678.
+
+Leonard hath left Mr. Ward, and given up the thought of fitting for the
+ministry.  This will be a heavy blow for his friends in England.  He
+tells me that Mr. Ward spake angrily to him after I left, but that, when
+he come to part with him, the old man wept over him, and prayed that the
+Lord would enable him to see his error, and preserve him from the
+consequences thereof.  I have discoursed with my brother touching his
+future course of life, and he tells me he shall start in a day or two to
+visit the Rhode Island, where he hath an acquaintance, one Mr. Easton,
+formerly of Newbury.  His design is to purchase a small plantation
+there, and betake himself to fanning, of the which he hath some little
+knowledge, believing that he can be as happy and do as much good to his
+fellow-creatures in that employment as in any other.
+
+Here Cousin Rebecca, who was by, looking up with that sweet archness
+which doth so well become her, queried with him whether he did think to
+live alone on his plantation like a hermit, or whether he had not his
+eye upon a certain fair-haired young woman, as suitable to keep him
+company.  Whereat he seemed a little disturbed; but she bade him not
+think her against his prospect, for she had known for some weeks that he
+did favor the Young Brewster woman, who, setting aside her enthusiastic
+notions of religion, was worthy of any man's love; and turning to me,
+she begged of me to look at the matter as she did, and not set myself
+against the choice of my brother, which, in all respects save the one
+she had spoken of, she could approve with all her heart.  Leonard goes
+back with us o-morrow to Newbury, so I shall have a chance of knowing
+how matters stand with him.  The thought of his marrying a Quaker would
+have been exceedingly grievous to me a few months ago; but this Margaret
+Brewster hath greatly won upon me by her beauty, gentleness, and her
+goodness of heart; and, besides, I know that she is much esteemed by the
+best sort of people in her neighborhood.
+
+Doctor Thompson left this morning, but his friend Doctor Clark goes with
+us to Newbury.  Rebecca found in her work-basket, after he had gone,
+some verses, which amused us not a little, and which I here copy.
+
+               "Gone hath the Spring, with all its flowers,
+               And gone the Summer's pomp and show
+               And Autumn in his leafless bowers
+               Is waiting for the Winter's snow.
+
+               "I said to Earth, so cold and gray,
+               'An emblem of myself thou art:'
+               'Not so,' the earth did seem to say,
+               'For Spring shall warm my frozen heart.
+
+               "'I soothe my wintry sleep with dreams
+               Of warmer sun and softer rain,
+               And wait to hear the sound of streams
+               And songs of merry birds again.
+
+               "'But thou, from whom the Spring hath gone,
+               For whom the flowers no longer blow,
+               Who standest, blighted and forlorn,
+               Like Autumn waiting for the snow.
+
+               "'No hope is thine of sunnier hours,
+               Thy winter shall no more depart;
+               No Spring revive thy wasted flowers,
+               Nor Summer warm thy frozen heart.'"
+
+Doctor Clark, on hearing this read, told Rebecca she need not take its
+melancholy to heart, for he could assure her that there was no danger of
+his friend's acting on her account the sad part of the lover in the old
+song of Barbara Allen.  As a medical man, he could safely warrant him to
+be heart-whole; and the company could bear him witness, that the poet
+himself seemed very little like the despairing one depicted in his
+verses.
+
+The Indian Simon calling this forenoon, Rebecca and I went into the
+kitchen to see him.  He looks fierce and cruel, but he thanked Madain
+Saltonstall for her gifts of food and clothing, and, giving her in
+return a little basket wrought of curiously stained stuff, he told her
+that if there were more like her, his heart would not be so bitter.
+
+I ventured to ask him why he felt thus; whereupon he drew himself up,
+and, sweeping about him with his arms, said: "This all Indian land.  The
+Great Spirit made it for Indians.  He made the great river for them, and
+birch-trees to make their canoes of.  All the fish in the ponds, and all
+the pigeons and deer and squirrels he made for Indians.  He made land
+for white men too; but they left it, and took Indian's land, because it
+was better.  My father was a chief; he had plenty meat and corn in his
+wigwam.  But Simon is a dog.  When they fight Eastern Indians, I try to
+live in peace; but they say, Simon, you rogue, you no go into woods to
+hunt; you keep at home.  So when squaw like to starve, I shoot one of
+their hogs, and then they whip me.  Look!"  And he lifted the blanket
+off from his shoulder, and showed the marks of the whip thereon.
+
+"Well, well, Simon," said Mr. Saltonstall, "you do know that our people
+then were much frightened by what the Indians had done in other places,
+and they feared you would join them.  But it is all over now, and you
+have all the woods to yourself to range in; and if you would let alone
+strong drink, you would do well."
+
+"Who makes strong drink?"  asked the Indian, with an ugly look.  "Who
+takes the Indian's beaver-skins and corn for it?  Tell me that,
+Captain."
+
+So saying, he put his pack on his back, and calling a poor, lean dog,
+that was poking his hungry nose into Madam's pots and kettles, he went
+off talking to himself.
+
+
+
+NEWBURY, December 6.
+
+We got back from Haverhill last night, Doctor Clark accompanying us,
+he having business in Newbury.  When we came up to the door, Effie met
+us with a shy look, and told her mistress that Mrs. Prudence (uncle's
+spinster cousin) had got a braw auld wooer in the east room; and surely
+enough we found our ancient kinswoman and Deacon Dole, a widower of
+three years' standing, sitting at the supper-table.  We did take note
+that the Deacon had on a stiff new coat; and as for Aunt Prudence (for
+so she was called in the family), she was clad in her bravest, with a
+fine cap on her head.  They both did seem a little disturbed by our
+coming, but plates being laid for us, we sat down with them.  After
+supper, Rebecca had a fire kindled in uncle's room, whither we did
+betake ourselves; and being very merry at the thought of Deacon Dole's
+visit, it chanced to enter our silly heads that it would do no harm to
+stop the clock in the entry a while, and let the two old folks make a
+long evening of it.  After a time Rebecca made an errand into the east
+room, to see how matters went, and coming back, said the twain were
+sitting on the same settle by the fire, smoking--a pipe of tobacco
+together.  Moreover, our foolish trick did work well, for Aunt Prudence
+coming at last into the entry to look at the clock, we heard her tell
+the Deacon that it was only a little past eight, when in truth it was
+near ten.  Not long after there was a loud knocking at the door, and as
+Effie had gone to bed, Rebecca did open it, when, whom did she see but
+the Widow Hepsy Barnet, Deacon Dole's housekeeper, and with her the
+Deacon's son, Moses, and the minister, Mr. Richardson, with a lantern in
+his hand!  "Dear me," says the woman, looking very dismal, "have you
+seen anything of the Deacon?"  By this time we were all at the door, the
+Deacon and Aunt Prudence among the rest, when Moses, like a great lout
+as he is, pulled off his woollen cap and tossed it up in the air, crying
+out, "There, Goody Barnet, did n't I tell ye so!  There's father now!"
+And the widow, holding up both her hands, said she never did in all her
+born days see the like of this, a man of the Deacon's years and station
+stealing away without letting folks know where to look for him; and then
+turning upon poor Mrs. Prudence, she said she had long known that some
+folks were sly and artful, and she was glad Mr. Richardson was here to
+see for himself.  Whereupon Aunt Prudence, in much amazement, said, it
+was scarce past eight, as they might see by the clock; but Mr.
+Richardson, who could scarce keep a grave face, pulling out his watch,
+said it was past ten, and bade her note that the clock was stopped.  He
+told Deacon Dole, that seeing Goody Barnet so troubled about him, he had
+offered to go along with her a little way, and that he was glad to find
+that the fault was in the clock.  The Deacon, who had stood like one in
+a maze, here clapped on his hat, and snatched up his cane and went off,
+looking as guilty as if he had been caught a-housebreaking, the widow
+scolding him all the way.  Now, as we could scarce refrain from
+laughing, Mr. Richardson, who tarried a moment, shook his head at
+Rebecca, telling her he feared by her looks she was a naughty girl,
+taking pleasure in other folk's trouble.  We did both feel ashamed and
+sorry enough for our mischief, after it was all over; and poor Mistress
+Prudence is so sorely mortified, that she told Rebecca this morning not
+to mention Deacon Dole's name to her again, and that Widow Hepsy is
+welcome to him, since he is so mean-spirited as to let her rule him
+as she doth.
+
+
+
+December 8.
+
+Yesterday I did, at my brother's wish, go with him to Goodman Brewster's
+house, where I was kindly welcomed by the young woman and her parents.
+After some little tarry, I found means to speak privily with her
+touching my brother's regard for her, and to assure her that I did truly
+and freely consent thereunto; while I did hope, for his sake as well as
+her own, that she would, as far as might be consistent with her notion
+of duty, forbear to do or say anything which might bring her into
+trouble with the magistrates and those in authority.  She said that she
+was very grateful for my kindness towards her, and that what I said was
+a great relief to her mind; for when she first met my brother, she did
+fear that his kindness and sympathy would prove a snare to her; and that
+she had been sorely troubled, moreover, lest by encouraging him she
+should not only do violence to her own conscience, but also bring
+trouble and disgrace upon one who was, she did confess, dear unto her,
+not only as respects outward things, but by reason of what she did
+discern of an innocent and pure inward life in his conversation and
+deportment.  She had earnestly sought to conform her conduct in this,
+as in all things, to the mind of her Divine Master; and, as respected my
+caution touching those in authority, she knew not what the Lord might
+require of her, and she could only leave all in His hands, being
+resigned even to deny herself of the sweet solace of human affection,
+and to take up the cross daily, if He did so will.  "Thy visit and kind
+words," she continued, "have removed a great weight from me.  The way
+seems more open before me.  The Lord bless thee for thy kindness."
+
+She said this with so much tenderness of spirit, and withal with such an
+engaging sweetness of look and voice, that I was greatly moved, and,
+pressing her in my arms, I kissed her, and bade her look upon me as her
+dear sister.
+
+The family pressing us, we stayed to supper, and sitting down in silence
+at the table, I was about to speak to my brother, but he made a sign to
+check me, and I held my peace, although not then knowing wherefore.  So
+we all sat still for a little space of time, which I afterwards found is
+the manner of these people at their meat.  The supper was plain, but of
+exceeding good relish: warm rye loaves with butter and honey, and bowls
+of sweet milk, and roasted apples.  Goodwife Brewster, who appeared much
+above her husband (who is a plain, unlearned man) in her carriage and
+discourse, talked with us very pleasantly, and Margaret seemed to grow
+more at ease, the longer we stayed.
+
+On our way back we met Robert Pike, who hath returned from the eastward.
+He said Rebecca Rawson had just told him how matters stood with Leonard,
+and that he was greatly rejoiced to hear of his prospect.  He had known
+Margaret Brewster from a child, and there was scarce her equal in these
+parts for sweetness of temper and loveliness of person and mind; and,
+were she ten times a Quaker, he was free to say this in her behalf.
+I am more and more confirmed in the belief that Leonard hath not done
+unwisely in this matter, and do cheerfully accept of his choice,
+believing it to be in the ordering of Him who doeth all things well.
+
+
+
+BOSTON, December 31.
+
+It wanteth but two hours to the midnight, and the end of the year.  The
+family are all abed, and I can hear nothing save the crackling of the
+fire now burning low on the hearth, and the ticking of the clock in the
+corner.  The weather being sharp with frost, there is no one stirring in
+the streets, and the trees and bushes in the yard, being stripped of
+their leaves, look dismal enough above the white snow with which the
+ground is covered, so that one would think that all things must needs
+die with the year.  But, from my window, I can see the stars shining
+with marvellous brightness in the clear sky, and the sight thereof doth
+assure me that God still watcheth over the work of His hands, and that
+in due season He will cause the flowers to appear on the earth, and the
+time of singing-birds to come, and-the voice of the turtle to be heard
+in the land.  And I have been led, while alone here, to think of the
+many mercies which have been vouchsafed unto me in my travels and
+sojourn in a strange land, and a sense of the wonderful goodness of God
+towards me, and they who are dear unto me, both here and elsewhere, hath
+filled mine heart with thankfulness; and as of old time they did use to
+set up stones of memorial on the banks of deliverance, so would I at
+this season set up, as it were, in my poor journal, a like pillar of
+thanksgiving to the praise and honor of Him who hath so kindly cared for
+His unworthy handmaid.
+
+
+
+January 16, 1679.
+
+Have just got back from Reading, a small town ten or twelve miles out of
+Boston, whither I went along with mine Uncle and Aunt Rawson, and many
+others, to attend the ordination of Mr. Brock, in the place of the
+worthy Mr. Hough, lately deceased.  The weather being clear, and the
+travelling good, a great concourse of people got together.  We stopped
+at the ordinary, which we found wellnigh filled; but uncle, by dint of
+scolding and coaxing, got a small room for aunt and myself, with a clean
+bed, which was more than we had reason to hope for.  The ministers, of
+whom there were many and of note (Mr. Mather and Mr. Wilson of Boston,
+and Mr. Corbet of Ipswich, being among them), were already together at
+the house of one of the deacons.  It was quite a sight the next morning
+to see the people coming in from the neighboring towns, and to note
+their odd dresses, which were indeed of all kinds, from silks and
+velvets to coarsest homespun woollens, dyed with hemlock, or oil-nut
+bark, and fitting so ill that, if they had all cast their clothes into a
+heap, and then each snatched up whatsoever coat or gown came to hand,
+they could not have suited worse.  Yet they were all clean and tidy, and
+the young people especially did look exceeding happy, it being with them
+a famous holiday.  The young men came with their sisters or their
+sweethearts riding behind them on pillions; and the ordinary and all the
+houses about were soon noisy enough with merry talking and laughter.
+The meeting-house was filled long before the services did begin.  There
+was a goodly show of honorable people in the forward seats, and among
+them that venerable magistrate, Simon Broadstreet, who acteth as Deputy-
+Governor since the death of Mr. Leverett; the Honorable Thomas Danforth;
+Mr. William Brown of Salem; and others of note, whose names I do not
+remember, all with their wives and families, bravely apparelled.  The
+Sermon was preached by Mr. Higginson of Salem, the Charge was given by
+Mr. Phillips of Rowley, and the Right Hand of Fellowship by Mr. Corbet
+of Ipswich.  When we got back to our inn, we found a great crowd of
+young roysterers in the yard, who had got Mr. Corbet's negro man, Sam,
+on the top of a barrel, with a bit of leather, cut in the shape of
+spectacles, astride of his nose, where he stood swinging his arms, and
+preaching, after the manner of his master, mimicking his tone and manner
+very shrewdly, to the great delight and merriment of the young rogues
+who did set him on.  We stood in the door a while to hear him, and, to
+say the truth, he did wonderfully well, being a fellow of good parts and
+much humor.  But, just as he was describing the Devil, and telling his
+grinning hearers that he was not like a black but a white man, old Mr.
+Corbet, who had come up behind him, gave him a smart blow with his cane,
+whereupon Sam cried,--
+
+"Dare he be now!" at which all fell to laughing.
+
+"You rascal," said Mr. Corbet, "get down with you; I'll teach you to
+compare me to the Devil."
+
+"Beg pardon, massa!" said Sam, getting down from his pulpit, and rubbing
+his shoulder.  "How you think Sam know you?  He see nothing; he only
+feel de lick."
+
+"You shall feel it again," said his master, striking at him a great
+blow, which Sam dodged.
+
+"Nay, Brother Corbet," said Mr. Phillips, who was with him, "Sam's
+mistake was not so strange after all; for if Satan can transform himself
+into an Angel of Light, why not into the likeness of such unworthy
+ministers as you and I."
+
+This put the old minister in a good humor, and Sam escaped without
+farther punishment than a grave admonition to behave more reverently for
+the future.  Mr. Phillips, seeing some of his young people in the crowd,
+did sharply rebuke them for their folly, at which they were not a little
+abashed.
+
+The inn being greatly crowded, and not a little noisy, we were not
+unwilling to accept the invitation of the provider of the ordination-
+dinner, to sit down with the honored guests thereat.  I waited, with
+others of the younger class, until the ministers and elderly people had
+made an end of their meal.  Among those who sat at the second table was
+a pert, talkative lad, a son of Mr. Increase Mather, who, although but
+sixteen years of age, graduated at the Harvard College last year, and
+hath the reputation of good scholarship and lively wit.  He told some
+rare stories concerning Mr. Brock, the minister ordained, and of the
+marvellous efficacy of his prayers.  He mentioned, among other things,
+that, when Mr. Brock lived on the Isles of Shoals, he persuaded the
+people there to agree to spend one day in a month, beside the Sabhath,
+in religious worship.  Now, it so chanced that there was on one occasion
+a long season of stormy, rough weather, unsuitable for fishing; and when
+the day came which had been set apart, it proved so exceeding fair, that
+his congregation did desire him to put off the meeting, that they might
+fish.  Mr. Brock tried in vain to reason with them, and show the duty of
+seeking first the kingdom of God, when all other things should be added
+thereto, but the major part determined to leave the meeting.  Thereupon
+he cried out after them: "As for you who will neglect God's worship, go,
+and catch fish if you can."  There were thirty men who thus left, and
+only five remained behind, and to these he said: "I will pray the Lord
+for you, that you may catch fish till you are weary."  And it so fell
+out, that the thirty toiled all day, and caught only four fishes; while
+the five who stayed at meeting went out, after the worship was over, and
+caught five hundred; and ever afterwards the fishermen attended all the
+meetings of the minister's appointing.  At another time, a poor man, who
+had made himself useful in carrying people to meeting in his boat, lost
+the same in a storm, and came lamenting his loss to Mr. Brock.  "Go
+home, honest man," said the minister.  "I will mention your case to the
+Lord: you will have your boat again to-morrow."  And surely enough, the
+very next day, a vessel pulling up its anchor near where the boat sank,
+drew up the poor man's boat, safe and whole, after it.
+
+We went back to Boston after dinner, but it was somewhat of a cold ride,
+especially after the night set in, a keen northerly wind blowing in
+great gusts, which did wellnigh benumb us.  A little way from Reading,
+we overtook an old couple in the road; the man had fallen off his horse,
+and his wife was trying to get him up again to no purpose; so young Mr.
+Richards, who was with us, helped him up to the saddle again, telling
+his wife to hold him carefully, as her old man had drank too much flip.
+Thereupon the good wife set upon him with a vile tongue, telling him
+that her old man was none other than Deacon Rogers of Wenham, and as
+good and as pious a saint as there was out of heaven; and it did ill
+become a young, saucy rake and knave to accuse him of drunkenness, and
+it would be no more than his deserts if the bears did eat him before he
+got to Boston.  As it was quite clear that the woman herself had had a
+taste of the mug, we left them and rode on, she fairly scolding us out
+of hearing.  When we got home, we found Cousin Rebecca, whom we did
+leave ill with a cold, much better in health, sitting up and awaiting
+us.
+
+
+
+January 21, 1679.
+
+Uncle Rawson came home to-day in a great passion, and, calling me to
+him, he asked me if I too was going to turn Quaker, and fall to
+prophesying?  Whereat I was not a little amazed; and when I asked him
+what he did mean, he said: "Your brother Leonard hath gone off to them,
+and I dare say you will follow, if one of the ranters should take it
+into his head that you would make him a proper wife, or company-keeper,
+for there's never an honest marriage among them."  Then looking sternly
+at me, he asked me why I did keep this matter from him, and thus allow
+the foolish young man to get entangled in the snares of Satan.  Whereat
+I was so greatly grieved, that I could answer never a word.
+
+"You may well weep," said my uncle, "for you have done wickedly.  As to
+your brother, he will do well to keep where he is in the plantations;
+for if he come hither a theeing and thouing of me, I will spare him
+never a whit; and if I do not chastise him myself, it will be because
+the constable can do it better at the cart-tail.  As the Lord lives, I
+had rather he had turned Turk!"
+
+I tried to say a word for my brother, but he cut me straightway short,
+bidding me not to mention his name again in his presence.  Poor me!  I
+have none here now to whom I can speak freely, Rebecca having gone to
+her sister's at Weymouth.  My young cousin Grindall is below, with his
+college friend, Cotton Mather; but I care not to listen to their
+discourse, and aunt is busied with her servants in the kitchen, so that
+I must even sit alone with my thoughts, which be indeed but sad company.
+
+The little book which I brought with me from the Maine, it being the
+gift of young Mr. Jordan, and which I have kept close hidden in my
+trunk, hath been no small consolation to me this day, for it aboundeth
+in sweet and goodly thoughts, although he who did write it was a monk.
+Especially in my low state, have these words been a comfort to me:--
+
+"What thou canst not amend in thyself or others, bear thou with patience
+until God ordaineth otherwise.  When comfort is taken away, do not
+presently despair.  Stand with an even mind resigned to the will of God,
+whatever shall befall, because after winter cometh the summer; after the
+dark night the day shineth, and after the storm followeth a great calm.
+Seek not for consolation which shall rob thee of the grace of penitence;
+for all that is high is not holy, nor all that is pleasant good; nor
+every desire pure; nor is what is pleasing to us always pleasant in the
+sight of God."
+
+
+
+January 23.
+
+The weather is bitter cold, and a great snow on the ground.  By a letter
+from Newbury, brought me by Mr. Sewall, who hath just returned from that
+place, I hear that Goodwife Morse hath been bound for trial as a witch.
+Mr. Sewall tells me the woman is now in the Boston jail.  As to Caleb
+Powell, he hath been set at liberty, there being no proof of his evil
+practice.  Yet inasmuch as he did give grounds of suspicion by boasting
+of his skill in astrology and astronomy, the Court declared that he
+justly deserves to bear his own shame and the costs of his prosecution
+and lodging in jail.
+
+Mr. Sewall tells me that Deacon Dole has just married his housekeeper,
+Widow Barnet, and that Moses says he never knew before his father to get
+the worst in a bargain.
+
+
+
+January 30.
+
+Robert Pike called this morning, bringing me a letter from my brother,
+and one from Margaret Brewster.  He hath been to the Providence
+Plantations and Rhode Island, and reporteth well of the prospects of my
+brother, who hath a goodly farm, and a house nigh upon finished, the
+neighbors, being mostly Quakers, assisting him much therein.  My
+brother's letter doth confirm this account of his temporal condition,
+although a great part of it is taken up with a defence of his new
+doctrines, for the which he doth ingeniously bring to mind many passages
+of Scripture.  Margaret's letter being short, I here copy it:--
+
+THE PLANTATIONS, 20th of the 1st mo., 1679.
+
+"DEAR FRIEND,--I salute thee with much love from this new country, where
+the Lord hath spread a table for us in the wilderness.  Here is a goodly
+company of Friends, who do seek to know the mind of Truth, and to live
+thereby, being held in favor and esteem by the rulers of the land, and
+so left in peace to worship God according to their consciences.  The
+whole country being covered with snow, and the weather being extreme
+cold, we can scarce say much of the natural gifts and advantages of our
+new home; but it lieth on a small river, and there be fertile meadows,
+and old corn-fields of the Indians, and good springs of water, so that I
+am told it is a desirable and pleasing place in the warm season.  My
+soul is full of thankfulness, and a sweet inward peace is my portion.
+Hard things are made easy to me; this desert place, with its lonely
+woods and wintry snows, is beautiful in mine eyes.  For here we be no
+longer gazing-stocks of the rude multitude, we are no longer haled from
+our meetings, and railed upon as witches and possessed people.  Oh, how
+often have we been called upon heretofore to repeat the prayer of one
+formerly: 'Let me not fall into the hands of man.'  Sweet, beyond the
+power of words to express, hath been the change in this respect; and in
+view of the mercies vouchsafed unto us, what can we do but repeat the
+language of David, 'Praise is comely yea, a joyful and pleasant thing it
+is to be thankful.  It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, to
+sing praises unto thy name, O Most High! to show forth thy loving-
+kindness in the morning, and thy faithfulness every night.'
+
+"Thou hast doubtless heard that thy dear brother hath been favored to
+see the way of truth, according to our persuasion thereof, and hath been
+received into fellowship with us.  I fear this hath been a trial to
+thee; but, dear heart, leave it in the hands of the Lord, whose work I
+do indeed count it.  Nor needest thou to fear that thy brother's regard
+for thee will be lessened thereby, for the rather shall it be increased
+by a measure of that Divine love which, so far from destroying, doth but
+purify and strengthen the natural affections.
+
+"Think, then, kindly of thy brother, for his love towards thee is very
+great; and of me, also, unworthy as I am, for his sake.  And so, with
+salutations of love and peace, in which my dear mother joins, I remain
+thy loving friend,  MARGARET BREWSTER.
+
+"The Morse woman, I hear, is in your jail, to be tried for a witch. She
+is a poor, weak creature, but I know no harm of her, and do believe her
+to be more silly than wicked in the matter of the troubles in her house.
+I fear she will suffer much at this cold season in the jail, she being
+old and weakly, and must needs entreat thee to inquire into her
+condition.
+                      "M. B."
+
+
+
+February 10.
+
+Speaking of Goody Morse to-day, Uncle Rawson says she will, he thinks,
+be adjudged a witch, as there be many witnesses from Newbury to testify
+against her. Aunt sent the old creature some warm blankets and other
+necessaries, which she stood much in need of, and Rebecca and I altered
+one of aunt's old gowns for her to wear, as she hath nothing seemly of
+her own. Mr. Richardson, her minister, hath visited her twice since she
+hath been in jail; but he saith she is hardened in her sin, and will
+confess nothing thereof.
+
+
+
+February 14.
+The famous Mr. John Eliot, having business with my uncle, spent the last
+night with us, a truly worthy man, who, by reason of his great labors
+among the heathen Indians, may be called the chiefest of our apostles.
+He brought with him a young Indian lad, the son of a man of some note
+among his people, very bright and comely, and handsomely apparelled
+after the fashion of his tribe.  This lad hath a ready wit, readeth and
+writeth, and hath some understanding of Scripture; indeed, he did repeat
+the Lord's Prayer in a manner edifying to hear.
+
+The worshipful Major Gookins coming in to sup with us, there was much
+discourse concerning the affairs of the Province: both the Major and his
+friend Eliot being great sticklers for the rights and liberties of the
+people, and exceeding jealous of the rule of the home government, and
+in this matter my uncle did quite agree with them.  In a special manner
+Major Gookins did complain of the Acts of Trade, as injurious to the
+interests of the Colony, and which he said ought not to be submitted to,
+as the laws of England were bounded by the four seas, and did not justly
+reach America.  He read a letter which he had from Mr. Stoughton, one of
+the agents of the Colony in England, showing how they had been put off
+from time to time, upon one excuse or another, without being able to get
+a hearing; and now the Popish Plot did so occupy all minds there, that
+Plantation matters were sadly neglected; but this much was certain, the
+laws for the regulating of trade must be consented to by the
+Massachusetts, if we would escape a total breach.  My uncle struck his
+hand hard on the table at this, and said if all were of his mind they
+would never heed the breach; adding, that he knew his rights as a free-
+born Englishman, under Magna Charta, which did declare it the privilege
+of such to have a voice in the making of laws; whereas the Massachusetts
+had no voice in Parliament, and laws were thrust upon them by strangers.
+
+"For mine own part," said Major Gookins, "I do hold our brother Eliot's
+book on the Christian Commonwealth, which the General Court did make
+haste to condemn on the coming in of the king, to be a sound and
+seasonable treatise, notwithstanding the author himself hath in some
+sort disowned it."
+
+"I did truly condemn and deny the false and seditious doctrines charged
+upon it," said Mr. Eliot, "but for the book itself, rightly taken, and
+making allowance for some little heat of discourse and certain hasty
+and ill-considered words therein, I have never seen cause to repent.
+I quite agree with what my lamented friend and fellow-laborer, Mr.
+Danforth, said, when he was told that the king was to be proclaimed at
+Boston: 'Whatever form of government may be deduced from Scripture, that
+let us yield to for conscience' sake, not forgetting at the same time
+that the Apostle hath said, if thou mayest be free use it rather.'"
+
+My uncle said this was well spoken of Mr. Danforth, who was a worthy
+gentleman and a true friend to the liberties of the Colony; and he asked
+Rebecca to read some ingenious verses writ by him in one of his
+almanacs, which she had copied not long ago, wherein he compareth New
+England to a goodly tree or plant.  Whereupon, Rebecca read them as
+followeth:--
+
+          "A skilful husbandman he was, who brought
+          This matchless plant from far, and here hath sought
+          A place to set it in; and for its sake
+          The wilderness a pleasant land doth make.
+
+          "With pleasant aspect, Phoebus smiles upon
+          The tender buds and blooms that hang thereon;
+          At this tree's root Astrea sits and sings,
+          And waters it, whence upright Justice springs,
+          Which yearly shoots forth laws and liberties
+          That no man's will or wit may tyrannize.
+          Those birds of prey that sometime have oppressed
+          And stained the country with their filthy nest,
+          Justice abhors, and one day hopes to find
+          A way, to make all promise-breakers grind.
+          On this tree's top hangs pleasant Liberty,
+          Not seen in Austria, France, Spain, Italy.
+          True Liberty 's there ripe, where all confess
+          They may do what they will, save wickedness.
+          Peace is another fruit which this tree bears,
+          The chiefest garland that the country wears,
+          Which o'er all house-tops, towns, and fields doth spread,
+          And stuffs the pillow for each weary head.
+          It bloomed in Europe once, but now 't is gone,
+          And glad to find a desert mansion.
+          Forsaken Truth, Time's daughter, groweth here,--
+          More precious fruit what tree did ever bear,--
+          Whose pleasant sight aloft hath many fed,
+          And what falls down knocks Error on the head."
+
+After a little time, Rebecca found means to draw the good Mr. Eliot into
+some account of his labors and journeys among the Indians, and of their
+manner of life, ceremonies, and traditions, telling him that I was a
+stranger in these parts, and curious concerning such matters.  So he did
+address himself to me very kindly, answering such questions as I
+ventured to put to him.  And first, touching the Powahs, of whom I had
+heard much, he said they were manifestly witches, and such as had
+familiar spirits; but that, since the Gospel has been preached here,
+their power had in a great measure gone from them.  "My old friend,
+Passaconaway, the Chief of the Merrimac River Indians," said he, "was,
+before his happy and marvellous conversion, a noted Powah and wizard.
+I once queried with him touching his sorceries, when he said he had done
+wickedly, and it was a marvel that the Lord spared his life, and did not
+strike him dead with his lightnings.  And when I did press him to tell
+me how he did become a Powah, he said he liked not to speak of it, but
+would nevertheless tell me.  His grandmother used to tell him many
+things concerning the good and bad spirits, and in a special manner of
+the Abomako, or Chepian, who had the form of a serpent, and who was the
+cause of sickness and pain, and of all manner of evils.  And it so
+chanced that on one occasion, when hunting in the wilderness, three
+days' journey from home, he did lose his way, and wandered for a long
+time without food, and night coming on, he thought he did hear voices of
+men talking; but, on drawing near to the place whence the noise came, he
+could see nothing but the trees and rocks; and then he did see a light,
+as from a wigwam a little way off, but, going towards it, it moved away,
+and, following it, he was led into a dismal swamp, full of water, and
+snakes, and briers; and being in so sad a plight, he bethought him of
+all he had heard of evil demons and of Chepian, who, he doubted not was
+the cause of his trouble.  At last, coming to a little knoll in the
+swamp, he lay down under a hemlock-tree, and being sorely tired, fell
+asleep.  And he dreamed a dream, which was in this wise:--
+
+"He thought he beheld a great snake crawl up out of the marsh, and stand
+upon his tail under a tall maple-tree; and he thought the snake spake to
+him, and bade him be of good cheer, for he would guide him safe out of
+the swamp, and make of him a great chief and Powah, if he would pray to
+him and own him as his god.  All which he did promise to do; and when he
+awoke in the morning, he beheld before him the maple-tree under which he
+had seen the snake in his dream, and, climbing to the top of it, he saw
+a great distance off the smoke of a wigwam, towards which he went, and
+found some of his own people cooking a plentiful meal of venison.  When
+he got back to Patucket, he told his dream to his grandmother, who was
+greatly rejoiced, and went about from wigwam to wigwam, telling the
+tribe that Chepian had appeared to her grandson.  So they had a great
+feast and dance, and he was thenceforth looked upon as a Powah.  Shortly
+after, a woman of the tribe falling sick, he was sent for to heal her,
+which he did by praying to Chepian and laying his hands upon her; and at
+divers other times the Devil helped him in his enchantments and
+witcheries."
+
+I asked Mr. Eliot whether he did know of any women who were Powahs.
+He confessed he knew none; which was the more strange, as in Christian
+countries the Old Serpent did commonly find instruments of his craft
+among the women.
+
+To my query as to what notion the heathen had of God and a future state,
+he said that, when he did discourse them concerning the great and true
+God, who made all things, and of heaven and hell, they would readily
+consent thereto, saying that so their fathers had taught them; but when
+he spake to them of the destruction of the world by fire, and the
+resurrection of the body, they would not hear to it, for they pretend to
+hold that the spirit of the dead man goes forthwith, after death, to the
+happy hunting-grounds made for good Indians, or to the cold and dreary
+swamps and mountains, where the bad Indians do starve and freeze, and
+suffer all manner of hardships.
+
+There was, Mr. Eliot told us, a famous Powah, who, coming to Punkapog,
+while he was at that Indian town, gave out among the people there that a
+little humming-bird did come to him and peck at him when he did aught
+that was wrong, and sing sweetly to him when he did a good thing, or
+spake the right words; which coming to Mr. Eliot's ear, he made him
+confess, in the presence of the congregation, that he did only mean, by
+the figure of the bird, the sense he had of right and wrong in his own
+mind.  This fellow was, moreover, exceeding cunning, and did often ask
+questions hard to be answered touching the creation of the Devil, and
+the fall of man.
+
+I said to him that I thought it must be a great satisfaction to him to
+be permitted to witness the fruit of his long labors and sufferings in
+behalf of these people, in the hopeful conversion of so many of them to
+the light and knowledge of the Gospel; to which he replied that his poor
+labors had been indeed greatly blest, but it was all of the Lord's
+doing, and he could truly say he felt, in view of the great wants of
+these wild people, and their darkness and misery, that he had by no
+means done all his duty towards them.  He said also, that whenever he
+was in danger of being puffed up with the praise of men, or the vanity
+of his own heart, the Lord had seen meet to abase and humble him, by the
+falling back of some of his people to their old heathenish practices.
+The war, moreover, was a sore evil to the Indian churches, as some few
+of their number were enticed by Philip to join him in his burnings and
+slaughterings, and this did cause even the peaceful and innocent to be
+vehemently suspected and cried out against as deceivers and murderers.
+Poor, unoffending old men, and pious women, had been shot at and killed
+by our soldiers, their wigwams burned, their families scattered, and
+driven to seek shelter with the enemy; yea, many Christian Indians, he
+did believe, had been sold as slaves to the Barbadoes, which he did
+account a great sin, and a reproach to our people.  Major Gookins said
+that a better feeling towards the Indians did now prevail among the
+people; the time having been when, because of his friendliness to them,
+and his condemnation of their oppressors, he was cried out against and
+stoned in the streets, to the great hazard of his life.
+
+So, after some further discourse, our guests left us, Mr. Eliot kindly
+inviting me to visit his Indian congregation near Boston, whereby I
+could judge for myself of their condition.
+
+
+
+February 22, 1679.
+
+The weather suddenly changing from a warm rain and mist to sharp, clear
+cold, the trees a little way from the house did last evening so shine
+with a wonderful brightness in the light of the moon, now nigh unto its
+full, that I was fain to go out upon the hill-top to admire them.  And
+truly it was no mean sight to behold every small twig becrusted with
+ice, and glittering famously like silver-work or crystal, as the rays of
+the moon did strike upon them.  Moreover, the earth was covered with
+frozen snow, smooth and hard like to marble, through which the long
+rushes, the hazels, and mulleins, and the dry blades of the grasses, did
+stand up bravely, bedight with frost.  And, looking upward, there were
+the dark tops of the evergreen trees, such as hemlocks, pines, and
+spruces, starred and bespangled, as if wetted with a great rain of
+molten crystal.  After admiring and marvelling at this rare
+entertainment and show of Nature, I said it did mind me of what the
+Spaniards and Portuguese relate of the great Incas of Guiana, who had a
+garden of pleasure in the Isle of Puna, whither they were wont to betake
+themselves when they would enjoy the air of the sea, in which they had
+all manner of herbs and flowers, and trees curiously fashioned of gold
+and silver, and so burnished that their exceeding brightness did dazzle
+the eyes of the beholders.
+
+"Nay," said the worthy Mr. Mather, who did go with us, "it should
+rather, methinks, call to mind what the Revelator hath said of the Holy
+City.  I never look upon such a wonderful display of the natural world
+without remembering the description of the glory of that city which
+descended out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, and her light
+like unto a stone most precious, even like unto a jasper stone, clear as
+crystal.  And the building of the wall of it was of jasper, and the city
+was pure gold like unto clear glass.  And the twelve gates were twelve
+pearls, every several gate was of one pearl, and the street of the city
+was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.
+
+"There never was a king's palace lighted up and adorned like this,"
+continued Mr. Mather, as we went homewards.  "It seemeth to be Gods
+design to show how that He can glorify himself in the work of His hands,
+even at this season of darkness and death, when all things are sealed
+up, and there be no flowers, nor leaves, nor ruining brooks, to speak of
+His goodness and sing forth His praises.  Truly hath it been said, Great
+things doeth He, which we cannot comprehend.  For He saith to the snow,
+Be thou on the earth; likewise to the small rain and the great rain of
+His strength.  He sealeth up the hand of every man, that all men may
+know His work.  Then the beasts go into their dens, and they remain in
+their places.  Out of the south cometh the whirlwind, and cold out of
+the north.  By the breath of God is the frost given, and the breadth of
+the waters straitened."
+
+
+
+March 10.
+
+I have been now for many days afflicted with a great cold and pleurisy,
+although, by God's blessing on the means used, I am wellnigh free from
+pain, and much relieved, also, from a tedious cough.  In this sickness I
+have not missed the company and kind ministering of my dear Cousin
+Rebecca, which was indeed a great comfort. She tells me to-day that the
+time hath been fixed upon for her marriage with Sir Thomas, which did
+not a little rejoice me, as I am to go back to mine own country in their
+company. I long exceedingly to see once again the dear friends from whom
+I have been separated by many months of time and a great ocean.
+
+Cousin Torrey, of Weymouth, coming in yesterday, brought with her a very
+bright and pretty Indian girl, one of Mr. Eliot's flock, of the Natick
+people. She was apparelled after the English manner, save that she wore
+leggings, called moccasins, in the stead of shoes, wrought over daintily
+with the quills of an animal called a porcupine, and hung about with
+small black and white shells. Her hair, which was exceeding long and
+black, hung straight down her back, and was parted from her forehead,
+and held fast by means of a strip of birch back, wrought with quills and
+feathers, which did encircle her head. She speaks the English well, and
+can write somewhat, as well as read. Rebecca, for my amusement, did
+query much with her regarding the praying Indians; and on her desiring
+to know whether they did in no wise return to their old practices and
+worships, Wauwoonemeen (for so she was called by her people) told us
+that they did still hold their Keutikaw, or Dance for the Dead; and
+that the ministers, although they did not fail to discourage it, had not
+forbidden it altogether, inasmuch as it was but a civil custom of the
+people, and not a religious rite. This dance did usually take place at
+the end of twelve moons after the death of one of their number, and
+finished the mourning.  The guests invited bring presents to the
+bereaved family, of wampum, beaver-skins, corn, and ground-nuts, and
+venison.  These presents are delivered to a speaker, appointed for the
+purpose, who takes them, one by one, and hands them over to the
+mourners, with a speech entreating them to be consoled by these tokens
+of the love of their neighbors, and to forget their sorrows.  After
+which, they sit down to eat, and are merry together.
+
+Now it had so chanced that at a Keutikaw held the present winter, two
+men had been taken ill, and had died the next day; and although Mr.
+Eliot, when he was told of it, laid the blame thereof upon their hard
+dancing until they were in a great heat, and then running out into the
+snow and sharp air to cool themselves, it was thought by many that they
+were foully dealt with and poisoned.  So two noted old Powahs from
+Wauhktukook, on the great river Connecticut, were sent for to discover
+the murderers.  Then these poor heathen got together in a great wigwam,
+where the old wizards undertook, by their spells and incantations, to
+consult the invisible powers in the matter.  I asked Wauwoonemeen if she
+knew how they did practise on the occasion; whereupon she said that none
+but men were allowed to be in the wigwam, but that she could hear the
+beating of sticks on the ground, and the groans and howlings and dismal
+mutterings of the Powahs, and that she, with another young woman,
+venturing to peep through a hole in the back of the wigwam, saw a great
+many people sitting on the ground, and the two Powahs before the fire,
+jumping and smiting their breasts, and rolling their eyes very
+frightfully.
+
+"But what came of it?" asked Rebecca.  "Did the Evil Spirit whom they
+thus called upon testify against himself, by telling who were his
+instruments in mischief?"
+
+The girl said she had never heard of any discovery of the poisoners, if
+indeed there were such.  She told us, moreover, that many of the best
+people in the tribe would have no part in the business, counting it
+sinful; and that the chief actors were much censured by the ministers,
+and so ashamed of it that they drove the Powahs out of the village, the
+women and boys chasing them and beating them with sticks and frozen
+snow, so that they had to take to the woods in a sorry plight.
+
+We gave the girl some small trinkets, and a fair piece of cloth for an
+apron, whereat she was greatly pleased.  We were all charmed with her
+good parts, sweetness of countenance, and discourse and ready wit, being
+satisfied thereby that Nature knoweth no difference between Europe and
+America in blood, birth, and bodies, as we read in Acts 17 that God hath
+made of one blood all mankind.  I was specially minded of a saying of
+that ingenious but schismatic man, Mr. Roger Williams, in the little
+book which he put forth in England on the Indian tongue:--
+
+          "Boast not, proud English, of thy birth and blood,
+          Thy brother Indian is by birth as good;
+          Of one blood God made him and thee and all,
+          As wise, as fair, as strong, as personal.
+
+          "By nature wrath's his portion, thine, no more,
+          Till grace his soul and thine in Christ restore.
+          Make sure thy second birth, else thou shalt see
+          Heaven ope to Indians wild, but shut to thee!"
+
+
+
+March 15.
+
+One Master O'Shane, an Irish scholar, of whom my cousins here did learn
+the Latin tongue, coming in last evening, and finding Rebecca and I
+alone (uncle and aunt being on a visit to Mr. Atkinson's), was exceeding
+merry, entertaining us rarely with his stories and songs.  Rebecca tells
+me he is a learned man, as I can well believe, but that he is too fond
+of strong drink for his good, having thereby lost the favor of many of
+the first families here, who did formerly employ him.  There was one
+ballad, which he saith is of his own making, concerning the selling of
+the daughter of a great Irish lord as a slave in this land, which
+greatly pleased me; and on my asking for a copy of it, he brought it to
+me this morning, in a fair hand.  I copy it in my Journal, as I know
+that Oliver, who is curious in such things, will like it.
+
+
+KATHLEEN.
+
+O NORAH, lay your basket down,
+And rest your weary hand,
+And come and hear me sing a song
+Of our old Ireland.
+
+There was a lord of Galaway,
+A mighty lord was he;
+And he did wed a second wife,
+A maid of low degree.
+
+But he was old, and she was young,
+And so, in evil spite,
+She baked the black bread for his kin,
+And fed her own with white.
+
+She whipped the maids and starved the kern,
+And drove away the poor;
+"Ah, woe is me!" the old lord said,
+"I rue my bargain sore!"
+
+This lord he had a daughter fair,
+Beloved of old and young,
+And nightly round the shealing-fires
+Of her the gleeman sung.
+
+"As sweet and good is young Kathleen
+As Eve before her fall;"
+So sang the harper at the fair,
+So harped he in the hall.
+
+"Oh, come to me, my daughter dear!
+Come sit upon my knee,
+For looking in your face, Kathleen,
+Your mother's own I see!"
+
+He smoothed and smoothed her hair away,
+He kissed her forehead fair;
+"It is my darling Mary's brow,
+It is my darling's hair!"
+
+Oh, then spake up the angry dame,
+"Get up, get up," quoth she,
+"I'll sell ye over Ireland,
+I'll sell ye o'er the sea!"
+
+She clipped her glossy hair away,
+That none her rank might know;
+She took away her gown of silk,
+And gave her one of tow,
+
+And sent her down to Limerick town
+And to a seaman sold
+This daughter of an Irish lord
+For ten good pounds in gold.
+
+The lord he smote upon his breast,
+And tore his beard so gray;
+But he was old, and she was young,
+And so she had her way.
+
+Sure that same night the Banshee howled
+To fright the evil dame,
+And fairy folks, who loved Kathleen,
+With funeral torches came.
+
+She watched them glancing through the trees,
+And glimmering down the hill;
+They crept before the dead-vault door,
+And there they all stood still!
+
+"Get up, old man! the wake-lights shine!"
+"Ye murthering witch," quoth he,
+"So I'm rid of your tongue, I little care
+If they shine for you or me."
+
+"Oh, whoso brings my daughter back,
+My gold and land shall have!"
+Oh, then spake up his handsome page,
+"No gold nor land I crave!
+
+"But give to me your daughter dear,
+Give sweet Kathleen to me,
+Be she on sea or be she on land,
+I'll bring her back to thee."
+
+"My daughter is a lady born,
+And you of low degree,
+But she shall be your bride the day
+You bring her back to me."
+
+He sailed east, he sailed west,
+And far and long sailed he,
+Until he came to Boston town,
+Across the great salt sea.
+
+"Oh, have ye seen the young Kathleen,
+The flower of Ireland?
+Ye'll know her by her eyes so blue,
+And by her snow-white hand!"
+
+Out spake an ancient man, "I know
+The maiden whom ye mean;
+I bought her of a Limerick man,
+And she is called Kathleen.
+
+"No skill hath she in household work,
+Her hands are soft and white,
+Yet well by loving looks and ways
+She doth her cost requite."
+
+So up they walked through Boston town,
+And met a maiden fair,
+A little basket on her arm
+So snowy-white and bare.
+
+"Come hither, child, and say hast thou
+This young man ever seen?"
+They wept within each other's arms,
+The page and young Kathleen.
+
+"Oh give to me this darling child,
+And take my purse of gold."
+"Nay, not by me," her master said,
+"Shall sweet Kathleen be sold.
+
+"We loved her in the place of one
+The Lord hath early ta'en;
+But, since her heart's in Ireland,
+We give her back again!"
+
+Oh, for that same the saints in heaven
+For his poor soul shall pray,
+And Mary Mother wash with tears
+His heresies away.
+
+Sure now they dwell in Ireland;
+As you go up Claremore
+Ye'll see their castle looking down
+The pleasant Galway shore.
+
+And the old lord's wife is dead and gone,
+And a happy man is he,
+For he sits beside his own Kathleen,
+With her darling on his knee.
+1849.
+
+
+
+March 27, 1679.
+
+Spent the afternoon and evening yesterday at Mr. Mather's, with uncle
+and aunt, Rebecca and Sir Thomas, and Mr. Torrey of Weymouth, and his
+wife; Mr. Thacher, the minister of the South Meeting, and Major Simon
+Willard of Concord, being present also.  There was much discourse of
+certain Antinomians, whose loose and scandalous teachings in respect to
+works were strongly condemned, although Mr. Thacher thought there might
+be danger, on the other hand, of falling into the error of the
+Socinians, who lay such stress upon works, that they do not scruple to
+undervalue and make light of faith.  Mr. Torrey told of some of the
+Antinomians, who, being guilty of scandalous sins, did nevertheless
+justify themselves, and plead that they were no longer under the law.
+Sir Thomas drew Rebecca and I into a corner of the room, saying he was
+a-weary of so much disputation, and began relating somewhat which befell
+him in a late visit to the New Haven people.  Among other things, he
+told us that while he was there, a maid of nineteen years was put upon
+trial for her life, by complaint of her parents of disobedience of their
+commands, and reviling them; that at first the mother of the girl did
+seem to testify strongly against her; but when she had spoken a few
+words, the accused crying out with a bitter lamentation, that she should
+be destroyed in her youth by the words of her own mother, the woman did
+so soften her testimony that the Court, being in doubt upon the matter,
+had a consultation with the ministers present, as to whether the accused
+girl had made herself justly liable to the punishment prescribed for
+stubborn and rebellious children in Deut. xxi. 20, 21.  It was thought
+that this law did apply specially unto a rebellious son, according to
+the words of the text, and that a daughter could not be put to death
+under it; to which the Court did assent, and the girl, after being
+admonished, was set free.  Thereupon, Sir Thomas told us, she ran
+sobbing into the arms of her mother, who did rejoice over her as one
+raised from the dead, and did moreover mightily blame herself for
+putting her in so great peril, by complaining of her disobedience
+to the magistrates.
+
+Major Willard, a pleasant, talkative man, being asked by Mr. Thacher
+some questions pertaining to his journey into the New Hampshire, in the
+year '52, with the learned and pious Mr. Edward Johnson, in obedience to
+an order of the General Court, for the finding the northernmost part of
+the river Merrimac, gave us a little history of the same, some parts of
+which I deemed noteworthy.  The company, consisting of the two
+commissioners, and two surveyors, and some Indians, as guides and
+hunters, started from Concord about the middle of July, and followed the
+river on which Concord lies, until they came to the great Falls of the
+Merrimac, at Patucket, where they were kindly entertained at the wigwam
+of a chief Indian who dwelt there.  They then went on to the Falls of
+the Amoskeag, a famous place of resort for the Indians, and encamped at
+the foot of a mountain, under the shade of some great trees, where they
+spent the next day, it being the Sabhath.  Mr. Johnson read a portion
+of the Word, and a psalm was sung, the Indians sitting on the ground a
+little way off, in a very reverential manner.  They then went to
+Annahookline, where were some Indian cornfields, and thence over a wild,
+hilly country, to the head of the Merrimac, at a place called by the
+Indians Aquedahcan, where they took an observation of the latitude, and
+set their names upon a great rock, with that of the worshipful Governor,
+John Endicott.  Here was the great Lake Winnipiseogee, as large over as
+an English county, with many islands upon it, very green with trees and
+vines, and abounding with squirrels and birds.  They spent two days at
+the lake's outlet, one of them the Sabhath, a wonderfully still, quiet
+day of the midsummer.  "It is strange," said the Major, "but so it is,
+that although a quarter of a century hath passed over me since that day,
+it is still very fresh and sweet in my memory.  Many times, in my
+musings, I seem to be once more sitting under the beechen trees of
+Aquedahcan, with my three English friends, and I do verily seem to see
+the Indians squatted on the lake shore, round a fire, cooking their
+dishes, and the smoke thereof curling about among the trees over their
+heads; and beyond them is the great lake and the islands thereof, some
+big and others exceeding small, and the mountains that do rise on the
+other side, and whose woody tops show in the still water as in a glass.
+And, withal, I do seem to have a sense of the smell of flowers, which
+did abound there, and of the strawberries with which the old Indian
+cornfield near unto us was red, they being then ripe and luscious to the
+taste.  It seems, also, as if I could hear the bark of my dog, and the
+chatter of squirrels, and the songs of the birds, in the thick woods
+behind us; and, moreover, the voice of my friend Johnson, as he did call
+to mind these words of the 104th Psalm: 'Bless the Lord, O my soul!  who
+coverest thyself with light, as with a garment; who stretchest out the
+heavens like a curtain; who layeth the beams of his chambers in the
+waters; who maketh the clouds his chariot; and walketh upon the wings of
+the wind!'  Ah me!  I shall never truly hear that voice more, unless,
+through God's mercy, I be permitted to join the saints of light in
+praise and thanksgiving beside stiller waters and among greener pastures
+than are those of Aquedahcan."
+
+"He was a shining light, indeed," said Mr. Mather, "and, in view of his
+loss and that of other worthies in Church and State, we may well say, as
+of old, Help, Lord, for the godly man ceaseth!"
+
+Major Willard said that the works of Mr. Johnson did praise him,
+especially that monument of his piety and learning, "The History of New
+England; or, Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour," wherein he
+did show himself in verse and in prose a workman not to be ashamed.
+There was a piece which Mr. Johnson writ upon birchen bark at the head
+of the Merrimac, during the journey of which he had spoken, which had
+never been printed, but which did more deserve that honor than much of
+the rhymes with which the land now aboundeth.  Mr. Mather said he had
+the piece of bark then in his possession, on which Mr. Johnson did
+write; and, on our desiring to see it, he brought it to us, and, as we
+could not well make out the writing thereon, he read it as followeth:--
+
+
+This lonesome lake, like to a sea, among the mountains lies,
+And like a glass doth show their shapes, and eke the clouds and skies.
+God lays His chambers' beams therein, that all His power may know,
+And holdeth in His fist the winds, that else would mar the show.
+
+The Lord hath blest this wilderness with meadows, streams, and springs,
+And like a garden planted it with green and growing things;
+And filled the woods with wholesome meats, and eke with fowls the air,
+And sown the land with flowers and herbs, and fruits of savor rare.
+
+But here the nations know him not, and come and go the days,
+Without a morning prayer to Him, or evening song of praise;
+The heathen fish upon the lake, or hunt the woods for meat,
+And like the brutes do give no thanks for wherewithal to eat.
+
+They dance in shame and nakedness, with horrid yells to hear,
+And like to dogs they make a noise, or screeching owls anear.
+Each tribe, like Micah, doth its priest or cunning Powah keep;
+Yea, wizards who, like them of old, do mutter and do peep.
+
+A cursed and an evil race, whom Satan doth mislead,
+And rob them of Christ's hope, whereby he makes them poor indeed;
+They hold the waters and the hills, and clouds, and stars to be
+Their gods; for, lacking faith, they do believe but what they see.
+
+Yet God on them His sun and rain doth evermore bestow,
+And ripens all their harvest-fields and pleasant fruits also.
+For them He makes the deer and moose, for them the fishes swim,
+And all the fowls in woods and air are goodly gifts from Him.
+
+Yea, more; for them, as for ourselves, hath Christ a ransom paid,
+And on Himself, their sins and ours, a common burden laid.
+By nature vessels of God's wrath, 't is He alone can give
+To English or to Indians wild the grace whereby we live.
+
+Oh, let us pray that in these wilds the Gospel may be preached,
+And these poor Gentiles of the woods may by its truth be reached;
+That ransomed ones the tidings glad may sound with joy abroad,
+And lonesome Aquedahcan hear the praises of the Lord!
+
+
+
+March 18.
+
+My cough still troubling me, an ancient woman, coming in yesterday, did
+so set forth the worth and virtue of a syrup of her making, that Aunt
+Rawson sent Effie over to the woman's house for a bottle of it.  The
+woman sat with us a pretty while, being a lively talking body, although
+now wellnigh fourscore years of age.  She could tell many things of the
+old people of Boston, for, having been in youth the wife of a man of
+some note and substance, and being herself a notable housewife and of
+good natural parts, she was well looked upon by the better sort of
+people.  After she became a widow, she was for a little time in the
+family of Governor Endicott, at Naumkeag, whom she describeth as a just
+and goodly man, but exceeding exact in the ordering of his household,
+and of fiery temper withal.  When displeasured, he would pull hard at
+the long tuft of hair which he wore upon his chin; and on one occasion,
+while sitting in the court, he plucked off his velvet cap, and cast it
+in the face of one of the assistants, who did profess conscientious
+scruples against the putting to death of the Quakers.
+
+"I have heard say his hand was heavy upon these people," I said.
+
+"And well it might be," said the old woman, for more pestilent and
+provoking strollers and ranters you shall never find than these same
+Quakers.  They were such a sore trouble to the Governor, that I do
+believe his days were shortened by reason of them.  For neither the
+jail, nor whipping, nor cropping of ears, did suffice to rid him of
+them.  At last, when a law was made by the General Court, banishing them
+on pain of death, the Governor, coming home from Boston, said that he
+now hoped to have peace in the Colony, and that this sharpness would
+keep the land free from these troublers.  I remember it well, how the
+next day he did invite the ministers and chief men, and in what a
+pleasant frame he was.  In the morning I had mended his best velvet
+breeches for him, and he praised my work not a little, and gave me six
+shillings over and above my wages; and, says he to me: 'Goody Lake,'
+says he, 'you are a worthy woman, and do feel concerned for the good of
+Zion, and the orderly carrying of matters in Church and State, and hence
+I know you will be glad to hear that, after much ado, and in spite of
+the strivings of evil-disposed people, the General Court have agreed
+upon a law for driving the Quakers out of the jurisdiction, on pain of
+death; so that, if any come after this, their blood be upon their own
+heads.  It is what I have wrestled with the Lord for this many a month,
+and I do count it a great deliverance and special favor; yea, I may
+truly say, with David: "Thou hast given me my heart's desire, and hast
+not withholden the prayer of my lips.  Thy hand shall find out all thine
+enemies; thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine
+anger; the Lord shall wallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall
+devour them."  You will find these words, Goody Lake,' says he, 'in the
+21st Psalm, where what is said of the King will serve for such as be in
+authority at this time.'  For you must know, young woman, that the
+Governor was mighty in Scripture, more especially in his prayers,
+when you could think that he had it all at his tongue's end.
+
+"There was a famous dinner at the Governor's that day, and many guests,
+and the Governor had ordered from his cellar some wine, which was a gift
+from a Portuguese captain, and of rare quality, as I know of mine own
+tasting, when word was sent to the Governor that a man wished to see
+him, whom he bid wait awhile.  After dinner was over, he went into the
+hall, and who should be there but Wharton, the Quaker, who, without
+pulling off his hat, or other salutation, cried out: 'John Endicott,
+hearken to the word of the Lord, in whose fear and dread I am come.
+Thou and thy evil counsellors, the priests, have framed iniquity by law,
+but it shall not avail you.  Thus saith the Lord, Evil shall slay the
+wicked, and they that hate the righteous shall be desolate!'  Now, when
+the Governor did hear this, he fell, as must needs be, into a rage, and,
+seeing me by the door, he bade me call the servants from the kitchen,
+which I did, and they running up, he bade them lay hands on the fellow,
+and take him away; and then, in a great passion, he called for his
+horse, saying he would not rest until he had seen forty stripes save one
+laid upon that cursed Quaker, and that he should go to the gallows yet
+for his sauciness.  So they had him to jail, and the next morning he was
+soundly whipped, and ordered to depart the jurisdiction."
+
+I, being curious to know more concerning the Quakers, asked her if she
+did ever talk with any of them who were dealt with by the authorities,
+and what they said for themselves.
+
+"Oh, they never lacked words," said she, "but cried out for liberty of
+conscience, and against persecution, and prophesied all manner of evil
+upon such as did put in force the law.  Some time about the year '56,
+there did come two women of them to Boston, and brought with them
+certain of their blasphemous books, which the constables burnt in the
+street, as I well remember by this token, that, going near the fire, and
+seeing one of the books not yet burnt, I stooped to pick it up, when one
+of the constables gave me a smart rap with his staff, and snatched it
+away.  The women being sent to the jail, the Deputy-Governor, Mr.
+Bellingham, and the Council, thinking they might be witches, were for
+having them searched; and Madam Bellingham naming me and another woman
+to her husband, he sent for us, and bade us go to the jail and search
+them, to see if there was any witch-mark on their bodies.  So we went,
+and told them our errand, at which they marvelled not a little, and one
+of them, a young, well-favored woman, did entreat that they might not be
+put to such shame, for the jailer stood all the time in the yard,
+looking in at the door; but we told them such was the order, and so,
+without more ado, stripped them of their clothes, but found nothing save
+a mole on the left breast of he younger, into which Goodwife Page thrust
+her needle, at which the woman did give a cry as of pain, and the blood
+flowed; whereas, if it had been witch's mark, she would not have felt
+the prick, for would it have caused blood.  So, finding nothing that did
+look like witchcraft, we left them; and on being brought before the
+Court, Deputy-Governor Bellingham asked us what we had to say concerning
+the women.  Whereupon Goodwife Page, being the oldest of us, told him
+that we did find no appearance of witches upon their bodies, save the
+mole on the younger woman's breast (which was but natural), but that
+otherwise she was fair as Absalom, who had no blemish from the soles of
+his feet to the crown of his head.  Thereupon the Deputy-Governor
+dismissed us, saying that it might be that the Devil did not want them
+for witches, because they could better serve him as Quakers: whereat all
+the Court fell to laughing."
+
+"And what did become of the women?" I asked.
+
+"They kept them in jail awhile," said Nurse Lake, "and then sent them
+back to England.  But the others that followed fared harder,--some
+getting whipped at the cart-tail, and others losing their ears.  The
+hangman's wife showed me once the ears of three of them, which her
+husband cut off in the jail that very morning."
+
+"This is dreadful!" said I, for I thought of my dear brother and sweet
+Margaret Brewster, and tears filled mine eyes.
+
+"Nay; but they were sturdy knaves and vagabonds," answered Nurse Lake,
+"although one of them was the son of a great officer in the Barbadoes,
+and accounted a gentleman before he did run out into his evil practices.
+But cropping of ears did not stop these headstrong people, and they
+still coming, some were put to death.  There were three of them to be
+hanged at one time.  I do remember it well, for it was a clear, warm day
+about the last of October, and it was a brave sight to behold.  There
+was Marshal Michelson and Captain Oliver, with two hundred soldiers
+afoot, besides many on horse of our chief people, and among them the
+minister, Mr. Wilson, looking like a saint as he was, with a pleasant
+and joyful countenance, and a great multitude of people, men, women, and
+children, not only of Boston, but from he towns round about.  I got
+early on to the ground, and when they were going to the gallows I kept
+as near to the condemned ones as I could.  There were two young, well-
+favored men, and a woman with gray hairs.  As they walked hand in band,
+the woman in the middle, the Marshal, who was riding beside them, and
+who was a merry drolling man, asked her if she was n't ashamed to walk
+hand in hand between two young men; whereupon, looking upon him
+solemnly, she said she was not ashamed, for this was to her an hour of
+great joy, and that no eye could see, no ear hear, no tongue speak, and
+no heart understand, the sweet incomes and refreshings of the Lord's
+spirit, which she did then feel.  This she spake aloud, so that all
+about could hear, whereat Captain Oliver bid the drums to beat and drown
+her voice.  Now, when they did come to the gallows ladder, on each side
+of which the officers and chief people stood, the two men kept on their
+hats, as is the ill manner of their sort, which so provoked Mr. Wilson,
+the minister, that he cried out to them: 'What! shall such Jacks as you
+come before authority with your hats on?'  To which one of them said:
+'Mind you, it is for not putting off our hats that we are put to death.'
+The two men then went up the ladder, and tried to speak; but I could not
+catch a word, being outside of the soldiers, and much fretted and
+worried by the crowd.  They were presently turned off, and then the
+woman went up the ladder, and they tied her coats down to her feet, and
+put the halter on her neck, and, lacking a handkerchief to tie over her
+face, the minister lent the hangman his.  Just then your Uncle Rawson
+comes a-riding up to the gallows, waving his hand, and crying out,
+'Stop! she is reprieved!' So they took her down, although she said she
+was ready to die as her brethren did, unless they would undo their
+bloody laws.  I heard Captain Oliver tell her it was for her son's sake
+that she was spared.  So they took her to jail, and after a time sent
+her back to her husband in Rhode Island, which was a favor she did in no
+wise deserve; but good Governor Endicott, much as he did abhor these
+people, sought not their lives, and spared no pains to get them
+peaceably out the country; but they were a stubborn crew, and must needs
+run their necks into the halter, as did this same woman; for, coming
+back again, under pretence of pleading for the repeal of the laws
+against Quakers, she was not long after put to death.  The excellent Mr.
+Wilson made a brave ballad on the hanging, which I have heard the boys
+in the street sing many a time."
+
+A great number, both men and women, were--"whipped and put in the
+stocks," continued the woman, "and I once beheld two of them, one a
+young and the other an aged woman, in a cold day in winter, tied to the
+tail of a cart, going through Salem Street, stripped to their waists as
+naked as they were born, and their backs all covered with red whip-
+marks; but there was a more pitiful case of one Hored Gardner, a young
+married woman, with a little child and her nurse, who, coming to
+Weymouth, was laid hold of and sent to Boston, where both were whipped,
+and, as I was often at the jail to see the keeper's wife, it so chanced
+that I was there at the time.  The woman, who was young and delicate,
+when they were stripping her, held her little child in her arms; and
+when the jailer plucked it from her bosom, she looked round anxiously,
+and, seeing me, said, 'Good woman, I know thou 't have pity on the
+babe,' and asked me to hold it, which I did.  She was then whipped with
+a threefold whip, with knots in the ends, which did tear sadly into her
+flesh; and, after it was over, she kneeled down, with her back all
+bleeding, and prayed for them she called her persecutors.  I must say I
+did greatly pity her, and I spoke to the jailer's wife, and we washed
+the poor creature's back, and put on it some famous ointment, so that
+she soon got healed."
+
+Aunt Rawson now coming in, the matter was dropped; but, on my speaking
+to her of it after Nurse Lake had left, she said it was a sore trial to
+many, even those in authority, and who were charged with the putting in
+force of the laws against these people.  She furthermore said, that
+Uncle Rawson and Mr. Broadstreet were much cried out against by the
+Quakers and their abettors on both sides of the water, but they did but
+their duty in the matter, and for herself she had always mourned over
+the coming of these people, and was glad when the Court did set any of
+them free.  When the woman was hanged, my aunt spent the whole day with
+Madam Broadstreet, who was so wrought upon that she was fain to take to
+her bed, refusing to be comforted, and counting it the heaviest day of
+her life.
+
+"Looking out of her chamber window," said Aunt Rawson, "I saw the people
+who had been to the hanging coming back from the training-field; and
+when Anne Broadstreet did hear the sound of their feet in the road, she
+groaned, and said that it did seem as if every foot fell upon her heart.
+Presently Mr. Broadstreet came home, bringing with him the minister,
+Mr. John Norton.  They sat down in the chamber, and for some little time
+there was scarce a word spoken.  At length Madam Broadstreet, turning to
+her husband and laying her hand on his arm, as was her loving manner,
+asked him if it was indeed all over.  'The woman is dead,' said he; 'but
+I marvel, Anne, to see you so troubled about her.  Her blood is upon her
+own head, for we did by no means seek her life.  She hath trodden under
+foot our laws, and misused our great forbearance, so that we could do no
+otherwise than we have done.  So under the Devil's delusion was she,
+that she wanted no minister or elder to pray with her at the gallows,
+but seemed to think herself sure of heaven, heeding in no wise the
+warnings of Mr. Norton, and other godly people.'
+
+"'Did she rail at, or cry out against any?' asked his wife.  'Nay, not to
+my hearing,' he said, 'but she carried herself as one who had done no
+harm, and who verily believed that she had obeyed the Lord's will.'
+
+"'This is very dreadful,' said she, 'and I pray that the death of that
+poor misled creature may not rest heavy upon us.'
+
+"Hereupon Mr. Norton lifted up his head, which had been bowed down upon
+his hand; and I shall never forget how his pale and sharp features did
+seem paler than their wont, and his solemn voice seemed deeper and
+sadder.  'Madam!' he said, 'it may well befit your gentleness and
+sweetness of heart to grieve over the sufferings even of the froward and
+ungodly, when they be cut off from the congregation of the Lord, as His
+holy and just law enjoineth, for verily I also could weep for the
+condemned one, as a woman and a mother; and, since her coming, I have
+wrestled with the Lord, in prayer and fasting, that I might be His
+instrument in snatching her as a brand from the burning.  But, as a
+watchman on the walls of Zion, when I did see her casting poison into
+the wells of life, and enticing unstable souls into the snares and
+pitfalls of Satan, what should I do but sound an alarm against her?  And
+the magistrate, such as your worthy husband, who is also appointed of
+God, and set for the defence of the truth, and the safety of the Church
+and the State, what can he do but faithfully to execute the law of God,
+which is a terror to evil doers?  The natural pity which we feel must
+give place unto the duty we do severally owe to God and His Church, and
+the government of His appointment.  It is a small matter to be judged of
+man's judgment, for, though certain people have not scrupled to call me
+cruel and hard of heart, yet the Lord knows I have wept in secret places
+over these misguided men and women.
+
+"'But might not life be spared?' asked Madam Broadstreet.  'Death is a
+great thing.'
+
+"'It is appointed unto all to die,' said Mr. Norton, 'and after death
+cometh the judgment.  The death of these poor bodies is a bitter thing,
+but the death of the soul is far more dreadful; and it is better that
+these people should suffer than that hundreds of precious souls should
+be lost through their evil communication.  The care of the dear souls of
+my flock lieth heavily upon me, as many sleepless nights and days of
+fasting do bear witness.  I have not taken counsel of flesh and blood in
+this grave matter, nor yielded unto the natural weakness of my heart.
+And while some were for sparing these workers of iniquity, even as Saul
+spared Agag, I have been strengthened, as it were, to hew them in pieces
+before the Lord in Gilgal.  O madam, your honored husband can tell you
+what travail of spirit, what sore trials, these disturbers have cost us;
+and as you do know in his case, so believe also in mine, that what we
+have done hath been urged, not by hardness and cruelty of heart, but
+rather by our love and tenderness towards the Lord's heritage in this
+land.  Through care and sorrow I have grown old before my time; few and
+evil have been the days of my pilgrimage, and the end seems not far off;
+and though I have many sins and shortcomings to answer for, I do humbly
+trust that the blood of the souls of the flock committed to me will not
+then be found upon my garments.'
+
+"Ah, me! I shall never forget these words of that godly man," continued
+my aunt, "for, as he said, his end was not far off.  He died very
+suddenly, and the Quakers did not scruple to say that it was God's
+judgment upon him for his severe dealing with their people.  They even
+go so far as to say that the land about Boston is cursed because of the
+hangings and whippings, inasmuch as wheat will not now grow here, as it
+did formerly, and, indeed, many, not of their way, do believe the same
+thing."
+
+
+
+April 24.
+
+A vessel from London has just come to port, bringing Rebecca's dresses
+for the wedding, which will take place about the middle of June, as I
+hear.  Uncle Rawson has brought me a long letter from Aunt Grindall,
+with one also from Oliver, pleasant and lively, like himself.  No
+special news from abroad that I hear of.  My heart longs for Old England
+more and more.
+
+It is supposed that the freeholders have chosen Mr. Broadstreet for
+their Governor.  The vote, uncle says, is exceeding small, very few
+people troubling themselves about it.
+
+
+
+May 2.
+
+Mr. John Easton, a man of some note in the Providence Plantations,
+having occasion to visit Boston yesterday, brought me a message from my
+brother, to the effect that he was now married and settled, and did
+greatly desire me to make the journey to his house in the company of his
+friend, John Easton, and his wife's sister.  I feared to break the
+matter to my uncle, but Rebecca hath done so for me, and he hath, to my
+great joy, consented thereto; for, indeed, he refuseth nothing to her.
+My aunt fears for me, that I shall suffer from the cold, as the weather
+is by no means settled, although the season is forward, as compared with
+the last; but I shall take good care as to clothing; and John Easton
+saith we shall be but two nights on the way.
+
+
+
+THE PLANTATIONS, May 10, 1679.
+
+We left Boston on the 4th, at about sunrise, and rode on at a brisk
+trot, until we came to the banks of the river, along which we went near
+a mile before we found a suitable ford, and even there the water was so
+deep that we only did escape a wetting by drawing our feet up to the
+saddle-trees.  About noon, we stopped at a farmer's house, in the hope
+of getting a dinner; but the room was dirty as an Indian wigwam, with
+two children in it, sick with the measles, and the woman herself in a
+poor way, and we were glad to leave as soon as possible, and get into
+the fresh air again.  Aunt had provided me with some cakes, and Mr.
+Easton, who is an old traveller, had with him a roasted fowl and a good
+loaf of Indian bread; so, coming to a spring of excellent water, we got
+off our horses, and, spreading our napkins on the grass and dry leaves,
+had a comfortable dinner.  John's sister is a widow, a lively, merry
+woman, and proved rare company for me.  Afterwards we rode until the sun
+was nigh setting, when we came to a little hut on the shore of a broad
+lake at a place called Massapog.  It had been dwelt in by a white family
+formerly, but it was now empty, and much decayed in the roof, and as we
+did ride up to it we saw a wild animal of some sort leap out of one of
+its windows, and run into the pines.  Here Mr. Easton said we must make
+shift to tarry through the night, as it was many miles to the house of a
+white man.  So, getting off our horses, we went into the hut, which had
+but one room, with loose boards for a floor; and as we sat there in the
+twilight, it looked dismal enough; but presently Mr. Easton, coming in
+with a great load of dried boughs, struck a light in the stone
+fireplace, and we soon had a roaring fire.  His sister broke off some
+hemlock boughs near the door, and made a broom of them, with which she
+swept up the floor, so that when we sat down on blocks by the hearth,
+eating our poor supper, we thought ourselves quite comfortable and tidy.
+It was a wonderful clear night, the moon rising, as we judged, about
+eight of the clock, over the tops of the hills on the easterly side of
+the lake, and shining brightly on the water in a long line of light, as
+if a silver bridge had been laid across it.  Looking out into the
+forest, we could see the beams of the moon, falling here and there
+through the thick tops of the pines and hemlocks, and showing their tall
+trunks, like so many pillars in a church or temple.  There was a
+westerly wind blowing, not steadily, but in long gusts, which, sounding
+from a great distance through the pine leaves, did make a solemn and not
+unpleasing music, to which I listened at the door until the cold drove
+me in for shelter.  Our horses having been fed with corn, which Mr.
+Easton took with him, were tied at the back of the building, under the
+cover of a thick growth of hemlocks, which served to break off the night
+wind.  The widow and I had a comfortable bed in the corner of the room,
+which we made of small hemlock sprigs, having our cloaks to cover us,
+and our saddlebags for pillows.  My companions were soon asleep, but the
+exceeding strangeness of my situation did keep me a long time awake.
+For, as I lay there looking upward, I could see the stars shining down a
+great hole in the roof, and the moonlight streaming through the seams of
+the logs, and mingling with the red glow of the coals on the hearth.  I
+could hear the horses stamping, just outside, and the sound of the water
+on the lake shore, the cry of wild animals in the depth of the woods,
+and, over all, the long and very wonderful murmur of the pines in the
+wind.  At last, being sore weary, I fell asleep, and waked not until I
+felt the warm sun shining in my face, and heard the voice of Mr. Easton
+bidding me rise, as the horses were ready.
+
+After riding about two hours we came upon an Indian camp, in the midst
+of a thick wood of maples.  Here were six spacious wigwams; but the men
+were away, except two very old and infirm ones.  There were five or six
+women, and perhaps twice as many children, who all came out to see us.
+They brought us some dried meat, as hard nigh upon as chips of wood, and
+which, although hungry, I could feel no stomach for; but I bought of one
+of the squaws two great cakes of sugar, made from the sap of the maples
+which abound there, very pure and sweet, and which served me instead of
+their unsavory meat and cakes of pounded corn, of which Mr. Easton and
+his sister did not scruple to partake.  Leaving them, we had a long and
+hard ride to a place called Winnicinnit, where, to my great joy, we
+found a comfortable house and Christian people, with whom we tarried.
+The next day we got to the Plantations; and about noon, from the top of
+a hill, Mr. Easton pointed out the settlement where my brother dwelt,--
+a fair, pleasant valley, through which ran a small river, with the
+houses of the planters on either side.  Shortly after, we came to a new
+frame house, with a great oak-tree left standing on each side of the
+gate, and a broad meadow before it, stretching down to the water.  Here
+Mr. Easton stopped; and now, who should come hastening down to us but my
+new sister, Margaret, in her plain but comely dress, kindly welcoming
+me; and soon my brother came up from the meadow, where he was busy with
+his men.  It was indeed a joyful meeting.
+
+The next day being the Sabhath, I went with my brother and his wife to
+the meeting, which was held in a large house of one of their Quaker
+neighbors.  About a score of grave, decent people did meet there,
+sitting still and quiet for a pretty while, when one of their number,
+a venerable man, spake a few words, mostly Scripture; then a young
+woman, who, I did afterwards learn, had been hardly treated by the
+Plymouth people, did offer a few words of encouragement and exhortation
+from this portion of the 34th Psalm: "The angel of the Lord encampeth
+round about them that fear him, and delivereth them."  When the meeting
+was over, some of the ancient women came and spake kindly to me,
+inviting me to their houses.  In the evening certain of these people
+came to my brother's, and were kind and loving towards me.  There was,
+nevertheless, a gravity and a certain staidness of deportment which I
+could but ill conform unto, and I was not sorry when they took leave.
+My Uncle Rawson need not fear my joining with them; for, although I do
+judge them to be a worthy and pious people, I like not their manner of
+worship, and their great gravity and soberness do little accord with my
+natural temper and spirits.
+
+
+
+May 16.
+
+This place is in what is called the Narragansett country, and about
+twenty miles from Mr. Williams's town of Providence, a place of no small
+note.  Mr. Williams, who is now an aged man, more than fourscore, was
+the founder of the Province, and is held in great esteem by the people,
+who be of all sects and persuasions, as the Government doth not molest
+any in worshipping according to conscience; and hence you will see in
+the same neighborhood Anabaptists, Quakers, New Lights, Brownists,
+Antinomians, and Socinians,--nay, I am told there be Papists also.  Mr.
+Williams is a Baptist, and holdeth mainly with Calvin and Beza, as
+respects the decrees, and hath been a bitter reviler of the Quakers,
+although he hath ofttimes sheltered them from the rigor of the
+Massachusetts Bay magistrates, who he saith have no warrant to deal in
+matters of conscience and religion, as they have done.
+
+Yesterday came the Governor of the Rhode Island, Nicholas Easton, the
+father of John, with his youngest daughter Mary, as fair and as ladylike
+a person as I have seen for many a day.  Both her father and herself do
+meet with the "Friends," as they call themselves, at their great house
+on the Island, and the Governor sometimes speaks therein, having, as one
+of the elders here saith of him, "a pretty gift in the ministry."  Mary,
+who is about the age of my brother's wife, would fain persuade us to go
+back with them on the morrow to the Island, but Leonard's business will
+not allow it, and I would by no means lose his company while I tarry in
+these parts, as I am so soon to depart for home, where a great ocean
+will separate us, it may be for many years.  Margaret, who hath been to
+the Island, saith that the Governor's house is open to all new-comers,
+who are there entertained with rare courtesy, he being a man of
+substance, having a great plantation, with orchards and gardens, and
+a stately house on an hill over-looking the sea on either hand, where,
+six years ago, when the famous George Fox was on the Island, he did
+entertain and lodge no less than fourscore persons, beside his own
+family and servants.
+
+Governor Easton, who is a pleasant talker, told a story of a magistrate
+who had been a great persecutor of his people.  On one occasion, after
+he had cast a worthy Friend into jail, he dreamed a dream in this wise:
+He thought he was in a fair, delightsome place, where were sweet springs
+of water and green meadows, and rare fruit-trees and vines with ripe
+clusters thereon, and in the midst thereof flowed a river whose waters
+were clearer than crystal.  Moreover, he did behold a great multitude
+walking on the river's bank, or sitting lovingly in the shade of the
+trees which grew thereby.  Now, while he stood marvelling at all this,
+he beheld in his dream the man he had cast into prison sitting with his
+hat on, side by side with a minister then dead, whom the magistrate had
+held in great esteem while living; whereat, feeling his anger stirred
+within him, he went straight and bade the man take off his hat in the
+presence of his betters.  Howbeit the twain did give no heed to his
+words, but did continue to talk lovingly together as before; whereupon
+he waxed exceeding wroth, and would have laid hands upon the man.  But,
+hearing a voice calling upon him to forbear, he did look about him, and
+behold one, with a shining countenance, and clad in raiment so white
+that it did dazzle his eyes to look upon it, stood before him.  And the
+shape said, "Dost thou well to be angry?" Then said the magistrate,
+"Yonder is a Quaker with his hat on talking to a godly minister."
+"Nay," quoth the shape, "thou seest but after the manner of the world
+and with the eyes of flesh.  Look yonder, and tell me what thou seest."
+So he looked again, and lo! two men in shining raiment, like him who
+talked with him, sat under the tree.  "Tell me," said the shape, "if thou
+canst, which of the twain is the Quaker and which is the Priest?"  And
+when he could not, but stood in amazement confessing he did see neither
+of them, the shape said, "Thou sayest well, for here be neither Priest
+nor Quaker, Jew nor Gentile, but all are one in the Lord."  Then he
+awoke, and pondered long upon his dream, and when it was morning he went
+straightway to the jail, and ordered the man to be set free, and hath
+ever since carried himself lovingly towards the Quakers.
+
+My brother's lines have indeed fallen unto him in a pleasant, place.
+His house is on a warm slope of a hill, looking to the southeast, with a
+great wood of oaks and walnuts behind it, and before it many acres of
+open land, where formerly the Indians did plant their corn, much of
+which is now ploughed and seeded.  From the top of the hill one can see
+the waters of the great Bay; at the foot of it runs a small river
+noisily over the rocks, making a continual murmur.  Going thither this
+morning, I found a great rock hanging over the water, on which I sat
+down, listening to the noise of the stream and the merriment of the
+birds in the trees, and admiring the green banks, which were besprinkled
+with white and yellow flowers.  I call to mind that sweet fancy of the
+lamented Anne Broadstreet, the wife of the new Governor of
+Massachusetts, in a little piece which she nameth "Contemplations,"
+being written on the banks of a stream, like unto the one whereby I was
+then sitting, in which the writer first describeth the beauties of the
+wood, and the flowing water, with the bright fishes therein, and then
+the songs of birds in the boughs over her head, in this sweet and
+pleasing verse, which I have often heard repeated by Cousin Rebecca:--
+
+          "While musing thus, with contemplation fed,
+          And thousand fancies buzzing in my brain,
+          A sweet-tongued songster perched above my head,
+          And chanted forth her most melodious strain;
+          Which rapt me so with wonder and delight,
+          I judged my hearing better than my sight,
+          And wished me wings with her a while to take my flight.
+
+          "O merry bird!  said I, that fears no snares,
+          That neither toils nor hoards up in the barn,
+          Feels no sad thoughts, nor cruciating cares,
+          To gain more good, or shun what might thee harm.
+          Thy clothes ne'er wear, thy meat is everywhere,
+          Thy bed a bough, thy drink the water clear,
+          Reminds not what is past, nor what's to come dost fear.
+
+          "The dawning morn with songs thou dost prevent,
+          Sets hundred notes unto thy feathered crew,
+          So each one tunes his pretty instrument,
+          And, warbling out the old, begins the new.
+          And thus they pass their youth in summer season,
+          Then follow thee unto a better region,
+          Where winter's never felt by that sweet airy legion."
+
+Now, while I did ponder these lines, hearing a step in the leaves, I
+looked up, and behold there was an old Indian close beside me; and,
+being much affrighted, I gave a loud cry, and ran towards the house.
+The old man laughed at this, and, calling after me, said he would not
+harm me; and Leonard, hearing my cries, now coming up, bade me never
+fear the Indian, for he was a harmless creature, who was well known to
+him.  So he kindly saluted the old man, asking me to shake hands with
+him, which I did, when he struck across the field to a little cleared
+spot on the side of the hill.  My brother bidding me note his actions,
+I saw him stoop down on his knees, with his head to the ground, for some
+space of time, and then, getting up, he stretched out his hands towards
+the southwest, as if imploring some one whom I could not see.  This he
+repeated for nigh upon half an hour, when he came back to the house,
+where he got some beer and bread to eat, and a great loaf to carry away.
+He said but little until he rose to depart, when he told my brother that
+he had been to see the graves of his father and his mother, and that he
+was glad to find them as he did leave them the last year; for he knew
+that the spirits of the dead would be sore grieved, if the white man's
+hoe touched their bones.
+
+My brother promised him that the burial-place of his people should not
+be disturbed, and that he would find it as now, when he did again visit
+it.
+
+"Me never come again," said the old Indian.  "No.  Umpachee is very old.
+He has no squaw; he has no young men who call him father.  Umpachee is
+like that tree;" and he pointed, as he spoke, to a birch, which stood
+apart in the field, from which the bark had fallen, and which did show
+no leaf nor bud.
+
+My brother hereupon spake to him of the great Father of both white and
+red men, and of his love towards them, and of the measure of light which
+he had given unto all men, whereby they might know good from evil, and
+by living in obedience to which they might be happy in this life and in
+that to come; exhorting him to put his trust in God, who was able to
+comfort and sustain him in his old age, and not to follow after lying
+Powahs, who did deceive and mislead him.
+
+"My young brother's talk is good," said the old man.  "The Great Father
+sees that his skin is white, and that mine is red.  He sees my young
+brother when he sits in his praying-house, and me when me offer him corn
+and deer's flesh in the woods, and he says good.  Umpachee's people have
+all gone to one place.  If Umpachee go to a praying-house, the Great
+Father will send him to the white man's place, and his father and his
+mother and his sons will never see him in their hunting-ground.  No.
+Umpachee is an old beaver that sits in his own house, and swims in his
+own pond.  He will stay where he is, until his Father calls him."
+
+Saying this, the old savage went on his way.  As he passed out of the
+valley, and got to the top of the hill on the other side, we, looking
+after him, beheld him standing still a moment, as if bidding farewell to
+the graves of his people.
+
+
+
+May 24.
+
+My brother goes with me to-morrow on my way to Boston.  I am not a
+little loath to leave my dear sister Margaret, who hath greatly won upon
+me by her gentleness and loving deportment, and who doth at all times,
+even when at work in ordering her household affairs, and amidst the
+cares and perplexities of her new life, show forth that sweetness of
+temper and that simplicity wherewith I was charmed when I first saw her.
+She hath naturally an ingenious mind, and, since her acquaintance with
+my brother, hath dipped into such of his studies and readings as she had
+leisure and freedom to engage in, so that her conversation is in no wise
+beneath her station.  Nor doth she, like some of her people, especially
+the more simple and unlearned, affect a painful and melancholy look and
+a canting tone of discourse, but lacketh not for cheerfulness and a
+certain natural ease and grace of demeanor; and the warmth and goodness
+of her heart doth at times break the usual quiet of her countenance,
+like to sunshine and wind on a still water, and she hath the sweetest
+smile I ever saw.  I have often thought, since I have been with her,
+that if Uncle Rawson could see and hear her as I do for a single day,
+he would confess that my brother might have done worse than to take a
+Quaker to wife.
+
+
+
+BOSTON, May 28, 1679.
+
+Through God's mercy, I got here safe and well, saving great weariness,
+and grief at parting with my brother and his wife.  The first day we
+went as far as a place they call Rehoboth, where we tarried over night,
+finding but small comfort therein; for the house was so filled, that
+Leonard and a friend who came with us were fain to lie all night in the
+barn, on the mow before their horses; and, for mine own part, I had to
+choose between lying in the large room, where the man of the house and
+his wife and two sons, grown men, did lodge, or to climb into the dark
+loft, where was barely space for a bed,--which last I did make choice
+of, although the woman thought it strange, and marvelled not a little at
+my unwillingness to sleep in the same room with her husband and boys,
+as she called them.  In the evening, hearing loud voices in a house near
+by, we inquired what it meant, and were told that some people from
+Providence were holding a meeting there, the owner of the house being
+accounted a Quaker.  Whereupon, I went thither with Leonard, and found
+nigh upon a score of people gathered, and a man with loose hair and
+beard speaking to them.  My brother whispered to me that he was no
+Friend, but a noted ranter, a noisy, unsettled man.  He screamed
+exceeding loud, and stamped with his feet, and foamed at the mouth, like
+one possessed with an evil spirit, crying against all order in State or
+Church, and declaring that the Lord had a controversy with Priests and
+Magistrates, the prophets who prophesy falsely, and the priests who bear
+rule by their means, and the people who love to have it so.  He spake of
+the Quakers as a tender and hopeful people in their beginning, and while
+the arm of the wicked was heavy upon them; but now he said that they,
+even as the rest, were settled down into a dead order, and heaping up
+worldly goods, and speaking evil of the Lord's messengers.  They were a
+part of Babylon, and would perish with their idols; they should drink of
+the wine of God's wrath; the day of their visitation was at hand.  After
+going on thus for a while, up gets a tall, wild-looking woman, as pale
+as a ghost, and trembling from head to foot, who, stretching out her
+long arms towards the man who had spoken, bade the people take notice
+that this was the angel spoken of in Revelation, flying through the
+midst of heaven, and crying, Woe! woe!  to the inhabitants of the earth!
+with more of the like wicked rant, whereat I was not a little
+discomposed, and, beckoning my brother, left them to foam out their
+shame to themselves.
+
+The next morning, we got upon our horses at an early hour, and after a
+hard and long ride reached Mr. Torrey's at Weymouth, about an hour after
+dark.  Here we found Cousin Torrey in bed with her second child, a boy,
+whereat her husband is not a little rejoiced.  My brother here took his
+leave of me, going back to the Plantations.  My heart is truly sad and
+heavy with the great grief of parting.
+
+
+
+May 30.
+
+Went to the South meeting to-day, to hear the sermon preached before the
+worshipful Governor, Mr. Broadstreet, and his Majesty's Council, it
+being the election day.  It was a long sermon, from Esther x. 3.  Had
+much to say concerning the duty of Magistrates to support the Gospel and
+its ministers, and to put an end to schism and heresy.  Very pointed,
+also, against time-serving Magistrates.
+
+
+
+June 1.
+
+Mr. Michael Wigglesworth, the Malden minister, at uncle's house last
+night.  Mr. Wigglesworth told aunt that he had preached a sermon against
+the wearing of long hair and other like vanities, which he hoped, with
+God's blessing, might do good.  It was from Isaiah iii. 16, and so on
+to the end of the chapter.  Now, while he was speaking of the sermon,
+I whispered Rebecca that I would like to ask him a question, which he
+overhearing, turned to me, and bade me never heed, but speak out.  So I
+told him that I was but a child in years and knowledge, and he a wise
+and learned man; but if he would not deem it forward in me, I would fain
+know whether the Scripture did anywhere lay down the particular fashion
+of wearing the hair.
+
+Mr. Wigglesworth said that there were certain general rules laid down,
+from which we might make a right application to particular cases.  The
+wearing of long hair by men is expressly forbidden in 1 Corinthians xi.
+14, 15; and there is a special word for women, also, in 1 Tim. ii. 9.
+
+Hereupon Aunt Rawson told me she thought I was well answered; but I
+(foolish one that I was), being unwilling to give up the matter so,
+ventured further to say that there were the Nazarites, spoken of in
+Numbers vi. 5, upon whose heads, by the appointment of God, no razor
+was to come.
+
+"Nay," said Mr. Wigglesworth, "that was by a special appointment only,
+and proveth the general rule and practice."
+
+Uncle Rawson said that long hair might, he judged, be lawfully worn,
+where the bodily health did require it, to guard the necks of weakly
+people from the cold.
+
+"Where there seems plainly a call of nature for it," said Mr.
+Wigglesworth, "as a matter of bodily comfort, and for the warmth of the
+head and neck, it is nowise unlawful.  But for healthy, sturdy young
+people to make this excuse for their sinful vanity doth but add to their
+condemnation.  If a man go any whit beyond God's appointment and the
+comfort of nature, I know not where he will stop, until he grows to be
+the veriest ruffian in the world.  It is a wanton and shameful thing for
+a man to liken himself to a woman, by suffering his hair to grow, and
+curling and parting it in a seam, as is the manner of too many.  It
+betokeneth pride and vanity, and causeth no small offence to godly,
+sober people.
+
+"The time hath been," continued Mr. Wigglesworth, "when God's people
+were ashamed of such vanities, both in the home country and in these
+parts; but since the Bishops and the Papists have had their way, and
+such as feared God are put down from authority, to give place to
+scorners and wantons, there hath been a sad change."
+
+He furthermore spake of the gay apparel of the young women of Boston,
+and their lack of plainness and modesty in the manner of wearing and
+ordering their hair; and said he could in no wise agree with some of his
+brethren in the ministry that this was a light matter, inasmuch as it
+did most plainly appear from Scripture that the pride and haughtiness of
+the daughters of Zion did provoke the judgments of the Lord, not only
+upon them, but upon the men also.  Now, the special sin of women is
+pride and haughtiness, and that because they be generally more ignorant,
+being the weaker vessel; and this sin venteth itself in their gesture,
+their hair and apparel.  Now, God abhors all pride, especially pride in
+base things; and hence the conduct of the daughters of Zion does greatly
+provoke his wrath, first against themselves, secondly their fathers and
+husbands, and thirdly against the land they do inhabit.
+
+Rebecca here roguishly pinched my arm, saying apart that, after all, we
+weaker vessels did seem to be of great consequence, and nobody could
+tell but that our head-dresses would yet prove the ruin of the country.
+
+
+
+June 4
+
+Robert Pike, coming into the harbor with his sloop, from the Pemaquid
+country, looked in upon us yesterday.  Said that since coming to the
+town he had seen a Newbury man, who told him that old Mr. Wheelwright,
+of Salisbury, the famous Boston minister in the time of Sir Harry Vane
+and Madam Hutchinson, was now lying sick, and nigh unto his end.  Also,
+that Goodman Morse was so crippled by a fall in his barn, that he cannot
+get to Boston to the trial of his wife, which is a sore affliction to
+him.  The trial of the witch is now going on, and uncle saith it looks
+much against her, especially the testimony of the Widow Goodwin about
+her child, and of John Gladding about seeing one half of the body of
+Goody Morse flying about in the sun, as if she had been cut in twain, or
+as if the Devil did hide the lower part of her.  Robert Pike said such
+testimony ought not to hang a cat, the widow being little more than a
+fool; and as for the fellow Gladding, he was no doubt in his cups, for
+he had often seen him in such a plight that he could not have told Goody
+Morse from the Queen of Sheba.
+
+
+
+June 8.
+
+The Morse woman having been found guilty by the Court of Assistants,
+she was brought out to the North Meeting, to hear the Thursday Lecture,
+yesterday, before having her sentence.  The house was filled with
+people, they being curious to see the witch.  The Marshal and the
+constables brought her in, and set her in, front of the pulpit; the old
+creature looking round her wildly, as if wanting her wits, and then
+covering her face with her dark wrinkled hands; a dismal sight!  The
+minister took his text in Romans xiii. 3, 4, especially the last clause
+of the 4th verse, relating to rulers: For he beareth not the sword in
+vain, &c.  He dwelt upon the power of the ruler as a Minister of God,
+and as a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil; and showeth
+that the punishment of witches and such as covenant with the Devil is
+one of the duties expressly enjoined upon rulers by the Word of God,
+inasmuch as a witch was not to be suffered to live.
+
+He then did solemnly address himself to the condemned woman, quoting 1
+Tim. v. 20: "Them that sin, rebuke before all, that others also may
+fear."  The woman was greatly moved, for no doubt the sharp words of the
+preacher did prick her guilty conscience, and the terrors of hell did
+take hold of her, so that she was carried out, looking scarcely alive.
+They took her, when the lecture was over, to the Court, where the
+Governor did pronounce sentence of death upon her.  But uncle tells me
+there be many who are stirring to get her respited for a time, at least,
+and he doth himself incline to favor it, especially as Rebecca hath
+labored much with him to that end, as also hath Major Pike and Major
+Saltonstall with the Governor, who himself sent for uncle last night,
+and they had a long talk together, and looked over the testimony against
+the woman, and neither did feel altogether satisfied with it.  Mr.
+Norton adviseth for the hanging; but Mr. Willard, who has seen much of
+the woman, and hath prayed with her in the jail, thinks she may be
+innocent in the matter of witchcraft, inasmuch as her conversation was
+such as might become a godly person in affliction, and the reading of
+the Scripture did seem greatly to comfort her.
+
+
+
+June 9.
+
+Uncle Rawson being at the jail to-day, a messenger, who had been sent to
+the daughter of Goody Morse, who is the wife of one Hate Evil Nutter, on
+the Cocheco, to tell her that her mother did greatly desire to see her
+once more before she was hanged, coming in, told the condemned woman
+that her daughter bade him say to her, that inasmuch as she had sold
+herself to the Devil, she did owe her no further love or service, and
+that she could not complain of this, for as she had made her bed, so she
+must lie.  Whereat the old creature set up a miserable cry, saying that
+to have her own flesh and blood turn against her was more bitter than
+death itself.  And she begged Mr. Willard to pray for her, that her
+trust in the Lord might not be shaken by this new affliction.
+
+
+
+June 10.
+
+The condemned woman hath been reprieved by the Governor and the
+Magistrates until the sitting of the Court in October.  Many people,
+both men and women, coming in from the towns about to see the hanging,
+be sore disappointed, and do vehemently condemn the conduct of the
+Governor therein.  For mine own part, I do truly rejoice that mercy hath
+been shown to the poor creature; for even if she is guilty, it affordeth
+her a season for repentance; and if she be innocent, it saveth the land
+from a great sin.  The sorrowful look of the old creature at the Lecture
+hath troubled me ever since, so forlorn and forsaken did she seem.
+Major Pike (Robert's father), coming in this morning, says, next to the
+sparing of Goody Morse's life, it did please him to see the bloodthirsty
+rabble so cheated out of their diversion; for example, there was Goody
+Matson, who had ridden bare-backed, for lack of a saddle, all the way
+from Newbury, on Deacon Dole's hard-trotting horse, and was so galled
+and lame of it that she could scarce walk.  The Major said he met her at
+the head of King Street yesterday, with half a score more of her sort,
+scolding and railing about the reprieve of the witch, and prophesying
+dreadful judgments upon all concerned in it.  He said he bade her shut
+her mouth and go home, where she belonged; telling her that if he heard
+any more of her railing, the Magistrates should have notice of it, and
+she would find that laying by the heels in the stocks was worse than
+riding Deacon Dole's horse.
+
+
+
+June 14.
+
+Yesterday the wedding took place.  It was an exceeding brave one; most
+of the old and honored families being at it, so that the great house
+wherein my uncle lives was much crowded.  Among them were Governor
+Broadstreet and many of the honorable Magistrates, with Mr. Saltonstall
+and his worthy lady; Mr. Richardson, the Newbury minister, joining the
+twain in marriage, in a very solemn and feeling manner.  Sir Thomas was
+richly apparelled, as became one of his rank, and Rebecca in her white
+silk looked comely as an angel.  She wore the lace collar I wrought for
+her last winter, for my sake, although I fear me she had prettier ones
+of her own working.  The day was wet and dark, with an easterly wind
+blowing in great gusts from the bay, exceeding cold for the season.
+
+Rebecca, or Lady Hale, as she is now called, had invited Robert Pike
+to her wedding, but he sent her an excuse for not coming, to the effect
+that urgent business did call him into the eastern country as far as
+Monhegan and Pemaquid.  His letter, which was full of good wishes for
+her happiness and prosperity, I noted saddened Rebecca a good deal; and
+she was, moreover, somewhat disturbed by certain things that did happen
+yesterday: the great mirror in the hall being badly broken, and the
+family arms hanging over the fire-place thrown down, so that it was
+burned by the coals kindled on the hearth, on account of the dampness;
+which were looked upon as ill signs by most people.  Grindall, a
+thoughtless youth, told his sister of the burning of the arms, and that
+nothing was left save the head of the raven in the crest, at which she
+grew very pale, and said it was strange, indeed, and, turning to me,
+asked me if I did put faith in what was said of signs and prognostics.
+So, seeing her troubled, I laughed at the matter, although I secretly
+did look upon it as an ill omen, especially as I could never greatly
+admire Sir Thomas.  My brother's wife, who seemed fully persuaded that
+he is an unworthy person, sent by me a message to Rebecca, to that
+effect; but I had not courage to speak of it, as matters had gone so
+far, and uncle and aunt did seem so fully bent upon making a great lady
+of their daughter.
+
+The vessel in which we are to take our passage is near upon ready for
+the sea.  The bark is a London one, called "The Three Brothers," and is
+commanded by an old acquaintance of Uncle Rawson.  I am happy with the
+thought of going home, yet, as the time of departure draws nigh, I do
+confess some regrets at leaving this country, where I have been so
+kindly cared for and entertained, and where I have seen so many new and
+strange things.  The great solemn woods, as wild and natural as they
+were thousands of years ago, the fierce suns of the summer season and
+the great snows of the winter, and the wild beasts, and the heathen
+Indians,--these be things the memory whereof will over abide with me.
+To-day the weather is again clear and warm, the sky wonderfully bright;
+the green leaves flutter in the wind, and the birds are singing sweetly.
+The waters of the bay, which be yet troubled by the storm of last night,
+are breaking in white foam on the rocks of the main land, and on the
+small islands covered with trees and vines; and many boats and sloops
+going out with the west wind, to their fishing, do show their white
+sails in the offing.  How I wish I had skill to paint the picture of all
+this for my English friends!  My heart is pained, as I look upon it,
+with the thought that after a few days I shall never see it more.
+
+
+
+June 18.
+
+To-morrow we embark for home.  Wrote a long letter to my dear brother
+and sister, and one to my cousins at York.  Mr. Richardson hath just
+left us, having come all the way from Newbury to the wedding.  The
+excellent Governor Broadstreet hath this morning sent to Lady Hale a
+handsome copy of his first wife's book, entitled "Several Poems by a
+Gentlewoman of New England," with these words on the blank page thereof,
+from Proverbs xxxi. 30, "A woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be
+praised," written in the Governor's own hand.  All the great folks
+hereabout have not failed to visit my cousin since her marriage; but I
+do think she is better pleased with some visits she hath had from poor
+widows and others who have been in times past relieved and comforted by
+her charities and kindness, the gratitude of these people affecting her
+unto tears.  Truly it may be said of her, as of Job: "When the ear heard
+her then it blessed her, and when the eye saw her it gave witness to
+her: because she delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and
+him that had none to help him.  The blessing of him that was ready to
+perish came upon her; and she caused the widow's heart to sing for joy."
+
+[Here the diary ends somewhat abruptly.  It appears as if some of the
+last pages have been lost.  Appended to the manuscript I find a note, in
+another handwriting, signed "R. G.," dated at Malton Rectory, 1747.  One
+Rawson Grindall, M. A., was curate of Malton at this date, and the
+initials are undoubtedly his.  The sad sequel to the history of the fair
+Rebecca Rawson is confirmed by papers now on file in the State-House at
+Boston, in which she is spoken of as "one of the most beautiful, polite,
+and accomplished young ladies in Boston."--Editor.]
+
+"These papers of my honored and pious grandmother, Margaret Smith, who,
+soon after her return from New England, married her cousin, Oliver
+Grindall, Esq., of Hilton Grange, Crowell, in Oxfordshire (both of whom
+have within the last ten years departed this life, greatly lamented by
+all who knew them), having cone into my possession, I have thought it
+not amiss to add to them a narrative of what happened to her friend and
+cousin, as I have had the story often from her own lips.
+
+"It appears that the brave gallant calling himself Sir Thomas Hale,
+for all his fair seething and handsome address, was but a knave and
+impostor, deceiving with abominable villany Rebecca Rawson and most of
+her friends (although my grandmother was never satisfied with him, as is
+seen in her journal).  When they got, to London, being anxious, on
+account of sea-sickness and great weariness, to leave the vessel as soon
+as possible, they went ashore to the house of a kinsman to lodge,
+leaving their trunks and clothing on board.  Early on the next morning,
+he that called himself Sir Thomas left his wife, taking with him the
+keys of her trunks, telling her he would send them up from the vessel in
+season for her to dress for dinner.  The trunks came, as he said, but
+after waiting impatiently for the keys until near the dinner-hour, and
+her husband not returning, she had them broken open, and, to her grief
+and astonishment, found nothing therein but shavings and other
+combustible matter.  Her kinsman forthwith ordered his carriage, and
+went with her to the inn where they first stopped on landing from the
+vessel, where she inquired for Sir Thomas Hale.  The landlord told her
+there was such a gentleman, but he had not seen him for some days.
+'But he was at your house last night,' said the astonished young woman.
+'He is my husband, and I was with him.'  The landlord then said that one
+Thomas Rumsey was at his house, with a young lady, the night before, but
+she was not his lawful wife, for he had one already in Kent.  At this
+astounding news, the unhappy woman swooned outright, and, being taken
+back to her kinsman's, she lay grievously ill for many days, during
+which time, by letters from Kent, it was ascertained that this Rumsey
+was a graceless young spendthrift, who had left his wife and his two
+children three years before, and gone to parts unknown.
+
+"My grandmother, who affectionately watched over her, and comforted her
+in her great affliction, has often told me that, on coming to herself,
+her poor cousin said it was a righteous judgment upon her, for her pride
+and vanity, which had led her to discard worthy men for one of great
+show and pretensions, who had no solid merit to boast of.  She had
+sinned against God, and brought disgrace upon her family, in choosing
+him.  She begged that his name might never be mentioned again in her
+hearing, and that she might only be known as a poor relative of her
+English kinsfolk, and find a home among them until she could seek out
+some employment for her maintenance, as she could not think of going
+back to Boston, to become the laughing-stock of the thoughtless and the
+reproach of her father's family.
+
+"After the marriage of my grandmother, Rebecca was induced to live with
+her for some years.  My great-aunt, Martha Grindall, an ancient
+spinster, now living, remembers her well at that time, describing her as
+a young woman of a sweet and gentle disposition, and much beloved by all
+the members of the family.  Her father, hearing of her misfortunes,
+wrote to her, kindly inviting her to return to New England, and live
+with him, and she at last resolved to do so.  My great-uncle, Robert,
+having an office under the government at Port Royal, in the island of
+Jamaica, she went out with him, intending to sail from thence to Boston.
+From that place she wrote to my grandmother a letter, which I have also
+in my possession, informing her of her safe arrival, and of her having
+seen an old friend, Captain Robert Pike, whose business concerns had
+called him to the island, who had been very kind and considerate in his
+attention to her, offering to take her home in his vessel, which was to
+sail in a few days.  She mentions, in a postscript to her letter, that
+she found Captain Pike to be much improved in his appearance and
+manners,--a true natural gentleman; and she does not forget to notice
+the fact that he was still single.  She had, she said, felt unwilling to
+accept his offer of a passage home, holding herself unworthy of such
+civilities at his hands; but he had so pressed the matter that she had,
+not without some misgivings, consented to it.
+
+"But it was not according to the inscrutable wisdom of Providence that
+she should ever be restored to her father's house.  Among the victims of
+the great earthquake which destroyed Port Royal a few days after the
+date of her letter, was this unfortunate lady.  It was a heavy blow to
+my grandmother, who entertained for her cousin the tenderest affection,
+and, indeed, she seems to have been every way worthy of it,--lovely in
+person, amiable in deportment, and of a generous and noble nature.  She
+was, especially after her great trouble, of a somewhat pensive and
+serious habit of mind, contrasting with the playfulness and innocent
+light-heartedness of her early life, as depicted in the diary of my
+grandmother, yet she was ever ready to forget herself in ministering to
+the happiness and pleasures of others.  She was not, as I learn, a
+member of the church, having some scruples in respect to the rituals, as
+was natural from her education in New England, among Puritanic
+schismatics; but she lived a devout life, and her quiet and
+unostentatious piety exemplified the truth of the language of one of the
+greatest of our divines, the Bishop of Down and Connor 'Prayer is the
+peace of our spirit, the stillness of our thoughts, the issue of a quiet
+mind, the daughter of charity, and the sister of meekness.'  Optimus
+animus est pulcherrimus Dei cultus.
+
+"R. G."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                           TALES AND SKETCHES
+
+                     MY SUMMER WITH DR. SINGLETARY.
+
+                              A FRAGMENT.
+
+                               CHAPTER I.
+
+DR. SINGLETARY is dead!
+
+Well, what of it?  All who live die sooner or later; and pray who was
+Dr. Singletary, that his case should claim particular attention?
+
+Why, in the first place, Dr. Singletary, as a man born to our common
+inheritance of joy and sorrow, earthly instincts and heavenward
+aspirations,--our brother in sin and suffering, wisdom and folly, love,
+and pride, and vanity,--has a claim upon the universal sympathy.
+Besides, whatever the living man may have been, death has now invested
+him with its great solemnity.  He is with the immortals.  For him the
+dark curtain has been lifted.  The weaknesses, the follies, and the
+repulsive mental and personal idiosyncrasies which may have kept him
+without the sphere of our respect and sympathy have now fallen off, and
+he stands radiant with the transfiguration of eternity, God's child, our
+recognized and acknowledged brother.
+
+Dr. Singletary is dead.  He was an old man, and seldom, of latter years,
+ventured beyond the precincts of his neighborhood.  He was a single man,
+and his departure has broken no circle of family affection.  He was
+little known to the public, and is now little missed.  The village
+newspaper simply appended to its announcement of his decease the
+customary post mortem compliment, "Greatly respected by all who knew
+him;" and in the annual catalogue of his alma mater an asterisk has been
+added to his name, over which perchance some gray-haired survivor of his
+class may breathe a sigh, as he calls up, the image of the fresh-faced,
+bright-eyed boy, who, aspiring, hopeful, vigorous, started with him on
+the journey of life,--a sigh rather for himself than for its unconscious
+awakener.
+
+But, a few years have passed since he left us; yet already wellnigh all
+the outward manifestations, landmarks, and memorials of the living man
+have passed away or been removed.  His house, with its broad, mossy roof
+sloping down on one side almost to the rose-bushes and lilacs, and with
+its comfortable little porch in front, where he used to sit of a
+pleasant summer afternoon, has passed into new hands, and has been sadly
+disfigured by a glaring coat of white paint; and in the place of the
+good Doctor's name, hardly legible on the corner-board, may now be seen,
+in staring letters of black and gold, "VALENTINE ORSON STUBBS, M. D.,
+Indian doctor and dealer in roots and herbs."  The good Doctor's old
+horse, as well known as its owner to every man, woman, and child in the
+village, has fallen into the new comer's hands, who (being prepared to
+make the most of him, from the fact that he commenced the practice of
+the healing art in the stable, rising from thence to the parlor) has
+rubbed him into comparative sleekness, cleaned his mane and tail of the
+accumulated burrs of many autumns, and made quite a gay nag of him.  The
+wagon, too, in which at least two generations of boys and girls have
+ridden in noisy hilarity whenever they encountered it on their way to
+school, has been so smartly painted and varnished, that if its former
+owner could look down from the hill-slope where he lies, he would
+scarcely know his once familiar vehicle as it whirls glittering along
+the main road to the village.  For the rest, all things go on as usual;
+the miller grinds, the blacksmith strikes and blows, the cobbler and
+tailor stitch and mend, old men sit in the autumn sun, old gossips stir
+tea and scandal, revival meetings alternate with apple-bees and
+bushings,--toil, pleasure, family jars, petty neighborhood quarrels,
+courtship, and marriage,--all which make up the daily life of a country
+village continue as before.  The little chasm which his death has made
+in the hearts of the people where he lived and labored seems nearly
+closed up.  There is only one more grave in the burying-ground,--that is
+all.
+
+Let nobody infer from what I have said that the good man died
+unlamented; for, indeed, it was a sad day with his neighbors when the
+news, long expected, ran at last from house to house and from workshop
+to workshop, "Dr. Singletary is dead!"
+
+He had not any enemy left among them; in one way or another he had been
+the friend and benefactor of all.  Some owed to his skill their recovery
+from sickness; others remembered how he had watched with anxious
+solicitude by the bedside of their dying relatives, soothing them, when
+all human aid was vain, with the sweet consolations of that Christian
+hope which alone pierces the great shadow of the grave and shows the
+safe stepping-stones above the dark waters.  The old missed a cheerful
+companion and friend, who had taught them much without wounding their
+pride by an offensive display of his superiority, and who, while making
+a jest of his own trials and infirmities, could still listen with real
+sympathy to the querulous and importunate complaints of others.  For one
+day, at least, even the sunny faces of childhood were marked with
+unwonted thoughtfulness; the shadow of the common bereavement fell over
+the play-ground and nursery.  The little girl remembered, with tears,
+how her broken-limbed doll had taxed the surgical ingenuity of her
+genial old friend; and the boy showed sorrowfully to his playmates the
+top which the good Doctor had given him.  If there were few, among the
+many who stood beside his grave, capable of rightly measuring and
+appreciating the high intellectual and spiritual nature which formed the
+background of his simple social life, all could feel that no common loss
+had been sustained, and that the kindly and generous spirit which had
+passed away from them had not lived to himself alone.
+
+As you follow the windings of one of the loveliest rivers of New
+England, a few miles above the sea-mart, at its mouth, you can see on a
+hill, whose grassy slope is checkered with the graceful foliage of the
+locust, and whose top stands relieved against a still higher elevation,
+dark with oaks and walnuts, the white stones of the burying-place.  It
+is a quiet spot, but without gloom, as befits "God's Acre."  Below is
+the village, with its sloops and fishing-boats at the wharves, and its
+crescent of white houses mirrored in the water.  Eastward is the misty
+line of the great sea.  Blue peaks of distant mountains roughen the
+horizon of the north.  Westward, the broad, clear river winds away into
+a maze of jutting bluffs and picturesque wooded headlands.  The tall,
+white stone on the westerly slope of the hill bears the name of
+"Nicholas Singletary, M. D.," and marks the spot which he selected many
+years before his death.  When I visited it last spring, the air about it
+was fragrant with the bloom of sweet-brier and blackberry and the
+balsamic aroma of the sweet-fern; birds were singing in the birch-trees
+by the wall; and two little, brown-locked, merry-faced girls were making
+wreaths of the dandelions and grasses which grew upon the old man's
+grave.  The sun was setting behind the western river-bluffs, flooding
+the valley with soft light, glorifying every object and fusing all into
+harmony and beauty.  I saw and felt nothing to depress or sadden me.  I
+could have joined in the laugh of the children.  The light whistle of a
+young teamster, driving merrily homeward, did not jar upon my ear; for
+from the transfigured landscape, and from the singing birds, and from
+sportive childhood, and from blossoming sweetbrier, and from the grassy
+mound before me, I heard the whisper of one word only, and that word
+was PEACE.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER.  II.
+
+              SOME ACCOUNT OF PEEWAWKIN ON THE TOCKETUCK.
+
+WELL and truly said the wise man of old, "Much study is a weariness to
+the flesh."  Hard and close application through the winter had left me
+ill prepared to resist the baleful influences of a New England spring.
+I shrank alike from the storms of March, the capricious changes of
+April, and the sudden alternations of May, from the blandest of
+southwest breezes to the terrible and icy eastern blasts which sweep our
+seaboard like the fabled sanser, or wind of death.  The buoyancy and
+vigor, the freshness and beauty of life seemed leaving me.  The flesh
+and the spirit were no longer harmonious.  I was tormented by a
+nightmare feeling of the necessity of exertion, coupled with a sense of
+utter inability.  A thousand plans for my own benefit, or the welfare of
+those dear to me, or of my fellow-men at large, passed before me; but I
+had no strength to lay hold of the good angels and detain them until
+they left their blessing.  The trumpet sounded in my ears for the
+tournament of life; but I could not bear the weight of my armor.  In the
+midst of duties and responsibilities which I clearly comprehended, I
+found myself yielding to the absorbing egotism of sickness.  I could
+work only when the sharp rowels of necessity were in my sides.
+
+It needed not the ominous warnings of my acquaintance to convince me
+that some decisive change was necessary.  But what was to be done?  A
+voyage to Europe was suggested by my friends; but unhappily I reckoned
+among them no one who was ready, like the honest laird of Dumbiedikes,
+to inquire, purse in hand, "Will siller do it?"  In casting about for
+some other expedient, I remembered the pleasant old-fashioned village of
+Peewawkin, on the Tocketuck River.  A few weeks of leisure, country air,
+and exercise, I thought might be of essential service to me.  So I
+turned my key upon my cares and studies, and my back to the city, and
+one fine evening of early June the mail coach rumbled over Tocketuck
+Bridge, and left me at the house of Dr. Singletary, where I had been
+fortunate enough to secure bed and board.
+
+The little village of Peewawkin at this period was a well-preserved
+specimen of the old, quiet, cozy hamlets of New England.  No huge
+factory threw its evil shadow over it; no smoking demon of an engine
+dragged its long train through the streets; no steamboat puffed at its
+wharves, or ploughed up the river, like the enchanted ship of the
+Ancient Mariner,--
+
+               "Against the wind, against the tide,
+               Steadied with upright keel."
+
+The march of mind had not overtaken it.  It had neither printing-press
+nor lyceum.  As the fathers had done before them, so did its inhabitants
+at the time of my visit.  There was little or no competition in their
+business; there were no rich men, and none that seemed over-anxious to
+become so.  Two or three small vessels were annually launched from the
+carpenters' yards on the river.  It had a blacksmith's shop, with its
+clang of iron and roar of bellows; a pottery, garnished with its coarse
+earthen-ware; a store, where molasses, sugar, and spices were sold on
+one side, and calicoes, tape, and ribbons on the other.  Three or four
+small schooners annually left the wharves for the St. George's and
+Labrador fisheries.  Just back of the village, a bright, noisy stream,
+gushing out, like a merry laugh, from the walnut and oak woods which
+stretched back far to the north through a narrow break in the hills,
+turned the great wheel of a grist-mill, and went frolicking away, like a
+wicked Undine, under the very windows of the brown, lilac-shaded house
+of Deacon Warner, the miller, as if to tempt the good man's handsome
+daughters to take lessons in dancing.  At one end of the little
+crescent-shaped village, at the corner of the main road and the green
+lane to Deacon Warner's mill, stood the school-house,--a small, ill-
+used, Spanish-brown building, its patched windows bearing unmistakable
+evidence of the mischievous character of its inmates.  At the other end,
+farther up the river, on a rocky knoll open to all the winds, stood the
+meeting-house,--old, two story, and full of windows,--its gilded
+weathercock glistening in the sun.  The bell in its belfry had been
+brought from France by Skipper Evans in the latter part of the last
+century.  Solemnly baptized and consecrated to some holy saint, it had
+called to prayer the veiled sisters of a convent, and tolled heavily in
+the masses for the dead.  At first some of the church felt misgivings as
+to the propriety of hanging a Popish bell in a Puritan steeple-house;
+but their objections were overruled by the minister, who wisely
+maintained that if Moses could use the borrowed jewels and ornaments of
+the Egyptians to adorn and beautify the ark of the Lord, it could not be
+amiss to make a Catholic bell do service in an Orthodox belfry.  The
+space between the school and the meeting-house was occupied by some
+fifteen or twenty dwellings, many-colored and diverse in age and
+appearance.  Each one had its green yard in front, its rose-bushes and
+lilacs.  Great elms, planted a century ago, stretched and interlocked
+their heavy arms across the street.  The mill-stream, which found its
+way into the Tocketuek, near the centre of the village, was spanned by a
+rickety wooden bridge, rendered picturesque by a venerable and gnarled
+white-oak which hung over it, with its great roots half bared by the
+water and twisted among the mossy stones of the crumbling abutment.
+
+The house of Dr. Singletary was situated somewhat apart from the main
+street, just on the slope of Blueberry Will,--a great, green swell of
+land, stretching far down from the north, and terminating in a steep
+bluff at the river side.  It overlooked the village and the river a long
+way up and down.  It was a brown-looking, antiquated mansion, built by
+the Doctor's grandfather in the earlier days of the settlement.  The
+rooms were large and low, with great beams, scaly with whitewash,
+running across them, scarcely above the reach of a tall man's head.
+Great-throated fireplaces, filled with pine-boughs and flower-pots, gave
+promise of winter fires, roaring and crackling in boisterous hilarity,
+as if laughing to scorn the folly and discomfort of our modern stoves.
+In the porch at the frontdoor were two seats, where the Doctor was
+accustomed to sit in fine weather with his pipe and his book, or with
+such friends as might call to spend a half hour with him.  The lawn in
+front had scarcely any other ornament than its green grass, cropped
+short by the Doctor's horse.  A stone wall separated it from the lane,
+half overrun with wild hop, or clematis, and two noble rock-maples
+arched over with their dense foliage the little red gate.  Dark belts of
+woodland, smooth hill pasture, green, broad meadows, and fields of corn
+and rye, the homesteads of the villagers, were seen on one hand; while
+on the other was the bright, clear river, with here and there a white
+sail, relieved against bold, wooded banks, jutting rocks, or tiny
+islands, dark with dwarf evergreens.  It was a quiet, rural picture,
+a happy and peaceful contrast to all I had looked upon for weary,
+miserable months.  It soothed the nervous excitement of pain and
+suffering.  I forgot myself in the pleasing interest which it awakened.
+Nature's healing ministrations came to me through all my senses.  I felt
+the medicinal virtues of her sights, and sounds, and aromal breezes.
+From the green turf of her hills and the mossy carpets of her woodlands
+my languid steps derived new vigor and elasticity.  I felt, day by day,
+the transfusion of her strong life.
+
+The Doctor's domestic establishment consisted of Widow Matson, his
+housekeeper, and an idle slip of a boy, who, when he was not paddling
+across the river, or hunting in the swamps, or playing ball on the
+"Meetin'-'us-Hill," used to run of errands, milk the cow, and saddle the
+horse.  Widow Matson was a notable shrill-tongued woman, from whom two
+long suffering husbands had obtained what might, under the
+circumstances, be well called a comfortable release.  She was neat and
+tidy almost to a fault, thrifty and industrious, and, barring her
+scolding propensity, was a pattern housekeeper.  For the Doctor she
+entertained so high a regard that nothing could exceed her indignation
+when any one save herself presumed to find fault with him.  Her bark was
+worse than her bite; she had a warm, woman's heart, capable of soft
+relentings; and this the roguish errand-boy so well understood that he
+bore the daily infliction of her tongue with a good-natured unconcern
+which would have been greatly to his credit had it not resulted from his
+confident expectation that an extra slice of cake or segment of pie
+would erelong tickle his palate in atonement for the tingling of his
+ears.
+
+It must be confessed that the Doctor had certain little peculiarities
+and ways of his own which might have ruffled the down of a smoother
+temper than that of the Widow Matson.  He was careless and absent-
+minded.  In spite of her labors and complaints, he scattered his
+superfluous clothing, books, and papers over his rooms in "much-admired
+disorder."  He gave the freedom of his house to the boys and girls of
+his neighborhood, who, presuming upon his good nature, laughed at her
+remonstrances and threats as they chased each other up and down the
+nicely-polished stairway.  Worse than all, he was proof against the
+vituperations and reproaches with which she indirectly assailed him from
+the recesses of her kitchen.  He smoked his pipe and dozed over his
+newspaper as complacently as ever, while his sins of omission and
+commission were arrayed against him.
+
+Peewawkin had always the reputation of a healthy town: and if it had
+been otherwise, Dr. Singletary was the last man in the world to
+transmute the aches and ails of its inhabitants into gold for his own
+pocket.  So, at the age of sixty, he was little better off, in point of
+worldly substance, than when he came into possession of the small
+homestead of his father.  He cultivated with his own hands his corn-
+field and potato-patch, and trimmed his apple and pear trees, as well
+satisfied with his patrimony as Horace was with his rustic Sabine villa.
+In addition to the care of his homestead and his professional duties,
+he had long been one of the overseers of the poor and a member of the
+school committee in his town; and he was a sort of standing reference in
+all disputes about wages, boundaries, and cattle trespasses in his
+neighborhood.  He had, nevertheless, a good deal of leisure for reading,
+errands of charity, and social visits.  He loved to talk with his
+friends, Elder Staples, the minister, Deacon Warner, and Skipper Evans.
+He was an expert angler, and knew all the haunts of pickerel and trout
+for many miles around.  His favorite place of resort was the hill back
+of his house, which afforded a view of the long valley of the Tocketuck
+and the great sea.  Here he would sit, enjoying the calm beauty of the
+landscape, pointing out to me localities interesting from their
+historical or traditional associations, or connected in some way with
+humorous or pathetic passages of his own life experience.  Some of these
+autobiographical fragments affected me deeply.  In narrating them he
+invested familiar and commonplace facts with something of the
+fascination of romance.  "Human life," he would say, "is the same
+everywhere.  If we could but get at the truth, we should find that all
+the tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare have been reproduced in this
+little village.  God has made all of one blood; what is true of one man
+is in some sort true of another; manifestations may differ, but the
+essential elements and spring of action are the same.  On the surface,
+everything about us just now looks prosaic and mechanical; you see only
+a sort of bark-mill grinding over of the same dull, monotonous grist of
+daily trifles.  But underneath all this there is an earnest life, rich
+and beautiful with love and hope, or dark with hatred, and sorrow, and
+remorse.  That fisherman by the riverside, or that woman at the stream
+below, with her wash-tub,--who knows what lights and shadows checker
+their memories, or what present thoughts of theirs, born of heaven or
+hell, the future shall ripen into deeds of good or evil?  Ah, what have
+I not seen and heard?  My profession has been to me, in some sort, like
+the vial genie of the Salamanca student; it has unroofed these houses,
+and opened deep, dark chambers to the hearts of their tenants, which no
+eye save that of God had ever looked upon.  Where I least expected them,
+I have encountered shapes of evil; while, on the other hand, I have
+found beautiful, heroic love and self-denial in those who had seemed to
+me frivolous and selfish."
+
+So would Dr. Singletary discourse as we strolled over Blueberry Hill, or
+drove along the narrow willow-shaded road which follows the windings of
+the river.  He had read and thought much in his retired, solitary life,
+and was evidently well satisfied to find in me a gratified listener.  He
+talked well and fluently, with little regard to logical sequence, and
+with something of the dogmatism natural to one whose opinions had seldom
+been subjected to scrutiny.  He seemed equally at home in the most
+abstruse questions of theology and metaphysics, and in the more
+practical matters of mackerel-fishing, corn-growing, and cattle-raising.
+It was manifest that to his book lore he had added that patient and
+close observation of the processes of Nature which often places the
+unlettered ploughman and mechanic on a higher level of available
+intelligence than that occupied by professors and school men.  To him
+nothing which had its root in the eternal verities of Nature was "common
+or unclean."  The blacksmith, subjecting to his will the swart genii of
+the mines of coal and iron; the potter, with his "power over the clay;"
+the skipper, who had tossed in his frail fishing-smack among the
+icebergs of Labrador; the farmer, who had won from Nature the occult
+secrets of her woods and fields; and even the vagabond hunter and
+angler, familiar with the habits of animals and the migration of birds
+and fishes,--had been his instructors; and he was not ashamed to
+acknowledge that they had taught him more than college or library.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III.
+
+                       THE DOCTOR'S MATCH-MAKING.
+
+"GOOD-MORNING, Mrs. Barnet," cried the Doctor, as we drew near a neat
+farm-house during one of our morning drives.
+
+A tall, healthful young woman, in the bloom of matronly beauty, was
+feeding chickens at the door.  She uttered an exclamation of delight and
+hurried towards us.  Perceiving a stranger in the wagon she paused, with
+a look of embarrassment.
+
+"My friend, who is spending a few weeks with me," explained the Doctor.
+
+She greeted me civilly and pressed the Doctor's hand warmly.
+
+"Oh, it is so long since you have called on us that we have been talking
+of going up to the village to see you, as soon as Robert can get away
+from his cornfield.  You don't know how little Lucy has grown.  You must
+stop and see her."
+
+"She's coming to see me herself," replied the Doctor, beckoning to a
+sweet blue-eyed child in the door-way.
+
+The delighted mother caught up her darling and held her before the
+Doctor.
+
+"Does n't she look like Robert?" she inquired.  "His very eyes and
+forehead!  Bless me! here he is now."
+
+A stout, hale young farmer, in a coarse checked frock and broad straw
+hat, came up from the adjoining field.
+
+"Well, Robert," said the Doctor, "how do matters now stand with you?
+Well, I hope."
+
+"All right, Doctor.  We've paid off the last cent of the mortgage, and
+the farm is all free and clear.  Julia and I have worked hard; but we're
+none the worse for it."
+
+"You look well and happy, I am sure," said the Doctor.  "I don't think
+you are sorry you took the advice of the old Doctor, after all."
+
+The young wife's head drooped until her lips touched those of her child.
+
+"Sorry!" exclaimed her husband.  "Not we!  If there's anybody happier
+than we are within ten miles of us.  I don't know them.  Doctor, I'll
+tell you what I said to Julia the night I brought home that mortgage.
+'Well,' said I, 'that debt's paid; but there's one debt we can never pay
+as long as we live.'  'I know it,' says she; 'but Dr. Singletary wants
+no better reward for his kindness than to see us live happily together,
+and do for others what he has done for us.'"
+
+"Pshaw!" said the Doctor, catching up his reins and whip.  "You owe me
+nothing.  But I must not forget my errand.  Poor old Widow Osborne needs
+a watcher to-night; and she insists upon having Julia Barnet, and nobody
+else.  What shall I tell her?"
+
+"I'll go, certainly.  I can leave Lucy now as well as not."
+
+"Good-by, neighbors."
+
+"Good-by, Doctor."
+
+As we drove off I saw the Doctor draw his hand hastily across his eyes,
+and he said nothing for some minutes.
+
+"Public opinion," said he at length, as if pursuing his meditations
+aloud,--"public opinion is, in nine cases out of ten, public folly and
+impertinence.  We are slaves to one another.  We dare not take counsel
+of our consciences and affections, but must needs suffer popular
+prejudice and custom to decide for us, and at their bidding are
+sacrificed love and friendship and all the best hopes of our lives.  We
+do not ask, What is right and best for us?  but, What will folks say of
+it?  We have no individuality, no self-poised strength, no sense of
+freedom.  We are conscious always of the gaze of the many-eyed tyrant.
+We propitiate him with precious offerings; we burn incense perpetually
+to Moloch, and pass through his fire the sacred first-born of our
+hearts.  How few dare to seek their own happiness by the lights which
+God has given them, or have strength to defy the false pride and the
+prejudice of the world and stand fast in the liberty of Christians!  Can
+anything be more pitiable than the sight of so many, who should be the
+choosers and creators under God of their own spheres of utility and
+happiness, self-degraded into mere slaves of propriety and custom, their
+true natures undeveloped, their hearts cramped and shut up, each afraid
+of his neighbor and his neighbor of him, living a life of unreality,
+deceiving and being deceived, and forever walking in a vain show?  Here,
+now, we have just left a married couple who are happy because they have
+taken counsel of their honest affections rather than of the opinions of
+the multitude, and have dared to be true to themselves in defiance of
+impertinent gossip."
+
+"You speak of the young farmer Barnet and his wife, I suppose?"  said I.
+
+"Yes.  I will give their case as an illustration.  Julia Atkins was the
+daughter of Ensign Atkins, who lived on the mill-road, just above Deacon
+Warner's.  When she was ten years old her mother died; and in a few
+months afterwards her father married Polly Wiggin, the tailoress, a
+shrewd, selfish, managing woman.  Julia, poor girl! had a sorry time of
+it; for the Ensign, although a kind and affectionate man naturally, was
+too weak and yielding to interpose between her and his strong-minded,
+sharp-tongued wife.  She had one friend, however, who was always ready
+to sympathize with her.  Robert Barnet was the son of her next-door
+neighbor, about two years older than herself; they had grown up together
+as school companions and playmates; and often in my drives I used to
+meet them coming home hand in hand from school, or from the woods with
+berries and nuts, talking and laughing as if there were no scolding
+step-mothers in the world.
+
+"It so fell out that when Julia was in her sixteenth year there came
+a famous writing-master to Peewawkin.  He was a showy, dashing fellow,
+with a fashionable dress, a wicked eye, and a tongue like the old
+serpent's when he tempted our great-grandmother.  Julia was one of his
+scholars, and perhaps the prettiest of them all.  The rascal singled her
+out from the first; and, the better to accomplish his purpose, he left
+the tavern and took lodgings at the Ensign's.  He soon saw how matters
+stood in the family, and governed himself accordingly, taking special
+pains to conciliate the ruling authority.  The Ensign's wife hated young
+Barnet, and wished to get rid of her step-daughter.  The writing-master,
+therefore, had a fair field.  He flattered the poor young girl by his
+attentions and praised her beauty.  Her moral training had not fitted
+her to withstand this seductive influence; no mother's love, with its
+quick, instinctive sense of danger threatening its object, interposed
+between her and the tempter.  Her old friend and playmate--he who could
+alone have saved her--had been rudely repulsed from the house by her
+step-mother; and, indignant and disgusted, he had retired from all
+competition with his formidable rival.  Thus abandoned to her own
+undisciplined imagination, with the inexperience of a child and the
+passions of a woman, she was deceived by false promises, bewildered,
+fascinated, and beguiled into sin.
+
+"It is the same old story of woman's confidence and man's duplicity.
+The rascally writing-master, under pretence of visiting a neighboring
+town, left his lodgings and never returned.  The last I heard of him,
+he was the tenant of a western penitentiary.  Poor Julia, driven in
+disgrace from her father's house, found a refuge in the humble dwelling
+of an old woman of no very creditable character.  There I was called to
+visit her; and, although not unused to scenes of suffering and sorrow, I
+had never before witnessed such an utter abandonment to grief, shame,
+and remorse.  Alas! what sorrow was like unto her sorrow?  The birth
+hour of her infant was also that of its death.
+
+"The agony of her spirit seemed greater than she could bear.  Her eyes
+were opened, and she looked upon herself with loathing and horror.  She
+would admit of no hope, no consolation; she would listen to no
+palliation or excuse of her guilt.  I could only direct her to that
+Source of pardon and peace to which the broken and contrite heart never
+appeals in vain.
+
+"In the mean time Robert Barnet shipped on board a Labrador vessel.  The
+night before he left he called on me, and put in my hand a sum of money,
+small indeed, but all he could then command.
+
+"'You will see her often,' he said.  'Do not let her suffer; for she is
+more to be pitied than blamed.'
+
+"I answered him that I would do all in my power for her; and added, that
+I thought far better of her, contrite and penitent as she was, than of
+some who were busy in holding her up to shame and censure.
+
+"'God bless you for these words!' he said, grasping my hand.  'I shall
+think of them often.  They will be a comfort to me.'
+
+"As for Julia, God was more merciful to her than man.  She rose from her
+sick-bed thoughtful and humbled, but with hopes that transcended the
+world of her suffering and shame.  She no longer murmured against her
+sorrowful allotment, but accepted it with quiet and almost cheerful
+resignation as the fitting penalty of God's broken laws and the needed
+discipline of her spirit.  She could say with the Psalmist, 'The
+judgments of the Lord are true, justified in themselves.  Thou art just,
+O Lord, and thy judgment is right.'  Through my exertions she obtained
+employment in a respectable family, to whom she endeared herself by her
+faithfulness, cheerful obedience, and unaffected piety.
+
+"Her trials had made her heart tender with sympathy for all in
+affliction.  She seemed inevitably drawn towards the sick and suffering.
+In their presence the burden of her own sorrow seemed to fall off.  She
+was the most cheerful and sunny-faced nurse I ever knew; and I always
+felt sure that my own efforts would be well seconded when I found her by
+the bedside of a patient.  Beautiful it was to see this poor young girl,
+whom the world still looked upon with scorn and unkindness, cheering the
+desponding, and imparting, as it were, her own strong, healthful life to
+the weak and faint; supporting upon her bosom, through weary nights, the
+heads of those who, in health, would have deemed her touch pollution; or
+to hear her singing for the ear of the dying some sweet hymn of pious
+hope or resignation, or calling to mind the consolations of the gospel
+and the great love of Christ."
+
+"I trust," said I, "that the feelings of the community were softened
+towards her."
+
+"You know what human nature is," returned the Doctor, "and with what
+hearty satisfaction we abhor and censure sin and folly in others.  It is
+a luxury which we cannot easily forego, although our own experience
+tells us that the consequences of vice and error are evil and bitter
+enough without the aggravation of ridicule and reproach from without.
+So you need not be surprised to learn that, in poor Julia's case, the
+charity of sinners like herself did not keep pace with the mercy and
+forgiveness of Him who is infinite in purity.  Nevertheless, I will do
+our people the justice to say that her blameless and self-sacrificing
+life was not without its proper effect upon them."
+
+"What became of Robert Barnet?" I inquired.
+
+"He came back after an absence of several months, and called on me
+before he had even seen his father and mother.  He did not mention
+Julia; but I saw that his errand with me concerned her.  I spoke of her
+excellent deportment and her useful life, dwelt upon the extenuating
+circumstances of her error and of her sincere and hearty repentance.
+
+"'Doctor,' said he, at length, with a hesitating and embarrassed manner,
+'what should you think if I should tell you that, after all that has
+passed, I have half made up my mind to ask her to become my wife?'
+
+"'I should think better of it if you had wholly made up your mind,' said
+I; 'and if you were my own son, I wouldn't ask for you a better wife
+than Julia Atkins.  Don't hesitate, Robert, on account of what some ill-
+natured people may say.  Consult your own heart first of all.'
+
+"'I don't care for the talk of all the busybodies in town,' said he;
+'but I wish father and mother could feel as you do about her.'
+
+"'Leave that to me,' said I.  'They are kindhearted and reasonable, and
+I dare say will be disposed to make the best of the matter when they
+find you are decided in your purpose.'
+
+"I did not see him again; but a few days after I learned from his
+parents that he had gone on another voyage.  It was now autumn, and the
+most sickly season I had ever known in Peewawkin.  Ensign Atkins and his
+wife both fell sick; and Julia embraced with alacrity this providential
+opportunity to return to her father's house and fulfil the duties of a
+daughter.  Under her careful nursing the Ensign soon got upon his feet;
+but his wife, whose constitution was weaker, sunk under the fever.  She
+died better than she had lived,--penitent and loving, asking forgiveness
+of Julia for her neglect and unkindness, and invoking blessings on her
+head.  Julia had now, for the first time since the death of her mother,
+a comfortable home and a father's love and protection.  Her sweetness of
+temper, patient endurance, and forgetfulness of herself in her labors
+for others, gradually overcame the scruples and hard feelings of her
+neighbors.  They began to question whether, after all, it was
+meritorious in them to treat one like her as a sinner beyond
+forgiveness.  Elder Staples and Deacon Warner were her fast friends.
+The Deacon's daughters--the tall, blue-eyed, brown-locked girls you
+noticed in meeting the other day--set the example among the young people
+of treating her as their equal and companion.  The dear good girls!
+They reminded me of the maidens of Naxos cheering and comforting the
+unhappy Ariadne.
+
+"One mid-winter evening I took Julia with me to a poor sick patient of
+mine, who was suffering for lack of attendance.  The house where she
+lived was in a lonely and desolate place, some two or three miles below
+us, on a sandy level, just elevated above the great salt marshes,
+stretching far away to the sea.  The night set in dark and stormy; a
+fierce northeasterly wind swept over the level waste, driving thick
+snow-clouds before it, shaking the doors and windows of the old house,
+and roaring in its vast chimney.  The woman was dying when we arrived,
+and her drunken husband was sitting in stupid unconcern in the corner of
+the fireplace.  A little after midnight she breathed her last.
+
+"In the mean time the storm had grown more violent; there was a blinding
+snow-fall in the air; and we could feel the jar of the great waves as
+they broke upon the beach.
+
+"'It is a terrible night for sailors on the coast,' I said, breaking our
+long silence with the dead.  'God grant them sea-room!'
+
+"Julia shuddered as I spoke, and by the dim-flashing firelight I saw she
+was weeping.  Her thoughts, I knew, were with her old friend and
+playmate on the wild waters.
+
+"'Julia,' said I, 'do you know that Robert Barnet loves you with all the
+strength of an honest and true heart?'
+
+"She trembled, and her voice faltered as she confessed that when Robert
+was at home he had asked her to become his wife.
+
+"'And, like a fool, you refused him, I suppose?--the brave, generous
+fellow!'
+
+"'O Doctor!' she exclaimed.  'How can you talk so?  It is just because
+Robert is so good, and noble, and generous, that I dared not take him at
+his word.  You yourself, Doctor, would have despised me if I had taken
+advantage of his pity or his kind remembrance of the old days when we
+were children together.  I have already brought too much disgrace upon
+those dear to me.'
+
+"I was endeavoring to convince her, in reply, that she was doing
+injustice to herself and wronging her best friend, whose happiness
+depended in a great measure upon her, when, borne on the strong blast,
+we both heard a faint cry as of a human being in distress.  I threw up
+the window which opened seaward, and we leaned out into the wild night,
+listening breathlessly for a repetition of the sound.
+
+"Once more, and once only, we heard it,--a low, smothered, despairing
+cry.
+
+"'Some one is lost, and perishing in the snow,' said Julia.  'The sound
+conies in the direction of the beach plum-bushes on the side of the
+marsh.  Let us go at once.'
+
+"She snatched up her hood and shawl, and was already at the door.  I
+found and lighted a lantern and soon overtook her.  The snow was already
+deep and badly drifted, and it was with extreme difficulty that we could
+force our way against the storm.  We stopped often to take breath and
+listen; but the roaring of the wind and waves was alone audible.  At
+last we reached a slightly elevated spot, overgrown with dwarf plum-
+trees, whose branches were dimly visible above the snow.
+
+"'Here, bring the lantern here!' cried Julia, who had strayed a few
+yards from me.  I hastened to her, and found her lifting up the body of
+a man who was apparently insensible.  The rays of the lantern fell full
+upon his face, and we both, at the same instant, recognized Robert
+Barnet.  Julia did not shriek nor faint; but, kneeling in the snow, and
+still supporting the body, she turned towards me a look of earnest and
+fearful inquiry.
+
+"'Courage!' said I.  'He still lives.  He is only overcome with fatigue
+and cold.'
+
+"With much difficulty-partly carrying and partly dragging him through
+the snow--we succeeded in getting him to the house, where, in a short
+time, he so far recovered as to be able to speak.  Julia, who had been
+my prompt and efficient assistant in his restoration, retired into the
+shadow of the room as soon as he began to rouse himself and look about
+him.  He asked where he was and who was with me, saying that his head
+was so confused that he thought he saw Julia Atkins by the bedside.
+'You were not mistaken,' said I; 'Julia is here, and you owe your life
+to her.'  He started up and gazed round the room.  I beckoned Julia to
+the bedside; and I shall never forget the grateful earnestness with
+which he grasped her hand and called upon God to bless her.  Some folks
+think me a tough-hearted old fellow, and so I am; but that scene was
+more than I could bear without shedding tears.
+
+"Robert told us that his vessel had been thrown upon the beach a mile or
+two below, and that he feared all the crew had perished save himself.
+Assured of his safety, I went out once more, in the faint hope of
+hearing the voice of some survivor of the disaster; but I listened only
+to the heavy thunder of the surf rolling along the horizon of the east.
+The storm had in a great measure ceased; the gray light of dawn was just
+visible; and I was gratified to see two of the nearest neighbors
+approaching the house.  On being informed of the wreck they immediately
+started for the beach, where several dead bodies, half buried in snow,
+confirmed the fears of the solitary survivor.
+
+"The result of all this you can easily conjecture.  Robert Barnet
+abandoned the sea, and, with the aid of some of his friends, purchased
+the farm where he now lives, and the anniversary of his shipwreck found
+him the husband of Julia.  I can assure you I have had every reason to
+congratulate myself on my share in the match-making.  Nobody ventured to
+find fault with it except two or three sour old busybodies, who, as
+Elder Staples well says, 'would have cursed her whom Christ had
+forgiven, and spurned the weeping Magdalen from the feet of her Lord.'"
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IV.
+
+                             BY THE SPRING.
+
+IT was one of the very brightest and breeziest of summer mornings that
+the Doctor and myself walked homeward from the town poor-house, where
+he had always one or more patients, and where his coming was always
+welcomed by the poor, diseased, and age-stricken inmates.  Dark,
+miserable faces of lonely and unreverenced age, written over with the
+grim records of sorrow and sin, seemed to brighten at his approach as
+with an inward light, as if the good man's presence had power to call
+the better natures of the poor unfortunates into temporary ascendency.
+Weary, fretful women--happy mothers in happy homes, perchance, half a
+century before--felt their hearts warm and expand under the influence of
+his kind salutations and the ever-patient good-nature with which he
+listened to their reiterated complaints of real or imaginary suffering.
+However it might be with others, he never forgot the man or the woman in
+the pauper.  There was nothing like condescension or consciousness in
+his charitable ministrations; for he was one of the few men I have ever
+known in whom the milk of human kindness was never soured by contempt
+for humanity in whatever form it presented itself.  Thus it was that his
+faithful performance of the duties of his profession, however repulsive
+and disagreeable, had the effect of Murillo's picture of St. Elizabeth
+of Hungary binding up the ulcered limbs of the beggars.  The moral
+beauty transcended the loathsomeness of physical evil and deformity.
+
+Our nearest route home lay across the pastures and over Blueberry Hill,
+just at the foot of which we encountered Elder Staples and Skipper
+Evans, who had been driving their cows to pasture, and were now
+leisurely strolling back to the village.  We toiled together up the hill
+in the hot sunshine, and, just on its eastern declivity, were glad to
+find a white-oak tree, leaning heavily over a little ravine, from the
+bottom of which a clear spring of water bubbled up and fed a small
+rivulet, whose track of darker green might be traced far down the hill
+to the meadow at its foot.
+
+A broad shelf of rock by the side of the spring, cushioned with mosses,
+afforded us a comfortable resting-place.  Elder Staples, in his faded
+black coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head on
+his silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with his
+sturdy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coarse
+stubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost severe expression of his
+keen gray eyes, flashing under their dark penthouse, happily relieved by
+the softer lines of his mouth, indicative of his really genial and
+generous nature.  A small, sinewy figure, half doubled up, with his chin
+resting on his rough palms, Skipper Evans sat on a lower projection of
+the rock just beneath him, in an attentive attitude, as at the feet of
+Gatnaliel.  Dark and dry as one of his own dunfish on a Labrador flake,
+or a seal-skin in an Esquimaux hut, he seemed entirely exempt from one
+of the great trinity of temptations; and, granting him a safe
+deliverance from the world and the devil, he had very little to fear
+from the flesh.
+
+We were now in the Doctor's favorite place of resort, green, cool,
+quiet, and sightly withal.  The keen light revealed every object in the
+long valley below us; the fresh west wind fluttered the oakleaves above;
+and the low voice of the water, coaxing or scolding its way over bare
+roots or mossy stones, was just audible.
+
+"Doctor," said I, "this spring, with the oak hanging over it, is, I
+suppose, your Fountain of Bandusia.  You remember what Horace says of
+his spring, which yielded such cool refreshment when the dog-star had
+set the day on fire.  What a fine picture he gives us of this charming
+feature of his little farm!"
+
+The Doctor's eye kindled.  "I'm glad to see you like Horace; not merely
+as a clever satirist and writer of amatory odes, but as a true lover of
+Nature.  How pleasant are his simple and beautiful descriptions of his
+yellow, flowing Tiber, the herds and herdsmen, the harvesters, the grape
+vintage, the varied aspects of his Sabine retreat in the fierce summer
+heats, or when the snowy forehead of Soracte purpled in winter sunsets!
+Scattered through his odes and the occasional poems which he addresses
+to his city friends, you find these graceful and inimitable touches of
+rural beauty, each a picture in itself."
+
+"It is long since I have looked at my old school-day companions, the
+classics," said Elder Staples; "but I remember Horace only as a light,
+witty, careless epicurean, famous for his lyrics in praise of Falernian
+wine and questionable women."
+
+"Somewhat too much of that, doubtless," said the Doctor; "but to me
+Horace is serious and profoundly suggestive, nevertheless.  Had I laid
+him aside on quitting college, as you did, I should perhaps have only
+remembered such of his epicurean lyrics as recommended themselves to the
+warns fancy of boyhood.  Ah, Elder Staples, there was a time when the
+Lyces and Glyceras of the poet were no fiction to us.  They played
+blindman's buff with us in the farmer's kitchen, sang with us in the
+meeting-house, and romped and laughed with us at huskings and quilting-
+parties.  Grandmothers and sober spinsters as they now are, the change
+in us is perhaps greater than in them."
+
+"Too true," replied the Elder, the smile which had just played over his
+pale face fading into something sadder than its habitual melancholy.
+"The living companions of our youth, whom we daily meet, are more
+strange to us than the dead in yonder graveyard.  They alone remain
+unchanged!"
+
+"Speaking of Horace," continued the Doctor, in a voice slightly husky
+with feeling, "he gives us glowing descriptions of his winter circles of
+friends, where mirth and wine, music and beauty, charm away the hours,
+and of summer-day recreations beneath the vine-wedded elms of the Tiber
+or on the breezy slopes of Soracte; yet I seldom read them without a
+feeling of sadness.  A low wail of inappeasable sorrow, an undertone of
+dirges, mingles with his gay melodies.  His immediate horizon is bright
+with sunshine; but beyond is a land of darkness, the light whereof is
+darkness.  It is walled about by the everlasting night.  The skeleton
+sits at his table; a shadow of the inevitable terror rests upon all his
+pleasant pictures.  He was without God in the world; he had no clear
+abiding hope of a life beyond that which was hastening to a close.  Eat
+and drink, he tells us; enjoy present health and competence; alleviate
+present evils, or forget them, in social intercourse, in wine, music,
+and sensual indulgence; for to-morrow we must die.  Death was in his
+view no mere change of condition and relation; it was the black end of
+all.  It is evident that he placed no reliance on the mythology of his
+time, and that he regarded the fables of the Elysian Fields and their
+dim and wandering ghosts simply in the light of convenient poetic
+fictions for illustration and imagery.  Nothing can, in my view, be
+sadder than his attempts at consolation for the loss of friends.
+Witness his Ode to Virgil on the death of Quintilius.  He tells his
+illustrious friend simply that his calamity is without hope,
+irretrievable and eternal; that it is idle to implore the gods to
+restore the dead; and that, although his lyre may be more sweet than
+that of Orpheus, he cannot reanimate the shadow of his friend nor
+persuade 'the ghost-compelling god' to unbar the gates of death.  He
+urges patience as the sole resource.  He alludes not unfrequently to his
+own death in the same despairing tone.  In the Ode to Torquatus,--one of
+the most beautiful and touching of all he has written,--he sets before
+his friend, in melancholy contrast, the return of the seasons, and of
+the moon renewed in brightness, with the end of man, who sinks into the
+endless dark, leaving nothing save ashes and shadows.  He then, in the
+true spirit of his philosophy, urges Torquatus to give his present hour
+and wealth to pleasures and delights, as he had no assurance of
+to-morrow."
+
+"In something of the same strain," said I, "Moschus moralizes on the
+death of Bion:--
+
+               Our trees and plants revive; the rose
+               In annual youth of beauty glows;
+               But when the pride of Nature dies,
+               Man, who alone is great and wise,
+               No more he rises into light,
+               The wakeless sleeper of eternal night.'"
+
+"It reminds me," said Elder Staples, "of the sad burden of
+Ecclesiastes, the mournfulest book of Scripture; because, while the
+preacher dwells with earnestness upon the vanity and uncertainty of the
+things of time and sense, he has no apparent hope of immortality to
+relieve the dark picture.  Like Horace, he sees nothing better than to
+eat his bread with joy and drink his wine with a merry heart.  It seems
+to me the wise man might have gone farther in his enumeration of the
+folly and emptiness of life, and pronounced his own prescription for the
+evil vanity also.  What is it but plucking flowers on the banks of the
+stream which hurries us over the cataract, or feasting on the thin crust
+of a volcano upon delicate meats prepared over the fires which are soon
+to ingulf us?  Oh, what a glorious contrast to this is the gospel of Him
+who brought to light life and immortality!  The transition from the
+Koheleth to the Epistles of Paul is like passing from a cavern, where
+the artificial light falls indeed upon gems and crystals, but is
+everywhere circumscribed and overshadowed by unknown and unexplored
+darkness, into the warm light and free atmosphere of day."
+
+"Yet," I asked, "are there not times when we all wish for some clearer
+evidence of immortal life than has been afforded us; when we even turn
+away unsatisfied from the pages of the holy book, with all the
+mysterious problems of life pressing about us and clamoring for
+solution, till, perplexed and darkened, we look up to the still heavens,
+as if we sought thence an answer, visible or audible, to their
+questionings?  We want something beyond the bare announcement of the
+momentous fact of a future life; we long for a miracle to confirm our
+weak faith and silence forever the doubts which torment us."
+
+"And what would a miracle avail us at such times of darkness and strong
+temptation?"  said the Elder.  "Have we not been told that they whom
+Moses and the prophets have failed to convince would not believe
+although one rose from the dead?  That God has revealed no more to
+us is to my mind sufficient evidence that He has revealed enough."
+
+"May it not be," queried the Doctor, "that Infinite Wisdom sees that a
+clearer and fuller revelation of the future life would render us less
+willing or able to perform our appropriate duties in the present
+condition?  Enchanted by a clear view of the heavenly hills, and of our
+loved ones beckoning us from the pearl gates of the city of God, could
+we patiently work out our life-task here, or make the necessary
+exertions to provide for the wants of these bodies whose encumbrance
+alone can prevent us from rising to a higher plane of existence?"
+
+"I reckon," said the Skipper, who had been an attentive, although at
+times evidently a puzzled, listener, "that it would be with us pretty
+much as it was with a crew of French sailors that I once shipped at the
+Isle of France for the port of Marseilles.  I never had better hands
+until we hove in sight of their native country, which they had n't seen
+for years.  The first look of the land set 'em all crazy; they danced,
+laughed, shouted, put on their best clothes; and I had to get new hands
+to help me bring the vessel to her moorings."
+
+"Your story is quite to the point, Skipper," said the Doctor.  "If
+things had been ordered differently, we should all, I fear, be disposed
+to quit work and fall into absurdities, like your French sailors, and so
+fail of bringing the world fairly into port."
+
+"God's ways are best," said the Elder; "and I don't see as we can do
+better than to submit with reverence to the very small part of them
+which He has made known to us, and to trust Him like loving and dutiful
+children for the rest."
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V.
+
+                             THE HILLSIDE.
+
+THE pause which naturally followed the observation of the Elder was
+broken abruptly by the Skipper.
+
+"Hillo!" he cried, pointing with the glazed hat with which he had been
+fanning himself.  "Here away in the northeast.  Going down the coast for
+better fishing, I guess."
+
+"An eagle, as I live!" exclaimed the Doctor, following with his cane the
+direction of the Skipper's hat.  "Just see how royally he wheels upward
+and onward, his sail-broad wings stretched motionless, save an
+occasional flap to keep up his impetus!  Look! the circle in which he
+moves grows narrower; he is a gray cloud in the sky, a point, a mere
+speck or dust-mote.  And now he is clean swallowed up in the distance.
+The wise man of old did well to confess his ignorance of 'the way of an
+eagle in the air.'"
+
+"The eagle," said Elder Staples, "seems to have been a favorite
+illustration of the sacred penman.  'They that wait upon the Lord shall
+renew their strength; they shall mount upward as on the wings of an
+eagle.'"
+
+"What think you of this passage?"  said the Doctor.  "'As when a bird
+hath flown through the air, there is no token of her way to be found;
+but the light air, beaten with the stroke of her wings and parted by the
+violent noise and motion thereof, is passed through, and therein
+afterward no sign of her path can be found.'
+
+"I don't remember the passage," said the Elder.
+
+"I dare say not," quoth the Doctor.  "You clergymen take it for granted
+that no good thing can come home from the Nazareth of the Apocrypha.
+But where will you find anything more beautiful and cheering than these
+verses in connection with that which I just cited?--'The hope of the
+ungodly is like dust that is blown away by the wind; like the thin foam
+which is driven by the storm; like the smoke which is scattered here and
+there by the whirlwind; it passeth away like the remembrance of a guest
+that tarrieth but a day.  But the righteous live forevermore; their
+reward also is with the Lord, and the care of them with the Most High.
+Therefore shall they receive a glorious kingdom and a beautiful crown
+from the Lord's hand; for with his right hand shall He cover them, and
+with his arm shall He protect them.'"
+
+"That, if I mistake not, is from the Wisdom of Solomon," said the Elder.
+"It is a striking passage; and there are many such in the uncanonical
+books."
+
+"Canonical or not," answered the Doctor, "it is God's truth, and stands
+in no need of the endorsement of a set of well-meaning but purblind
+bigots and pedants, who presumed to set metes and bounds to Divine
+inspiration, and decide by vote what is God's truth and what is the
+Devil's falsehood.  But, speaking of eagles, I never see one of these
+spiteful old sea-robbers without fancying that he may be the soul of a
+mad Viking of the middle centuries.  Depend upon it, that Italian
+philosopher was not far out of the way in his ingenious speculations
+upon the affinities and sympathies existing between certain men and
+certain animals, and in fancying that he saw feline or canine traits and
+similitudes in the countenances of his acquaintance."
+
+"Swedenborg tells us," said I, "that lost human souls in the spiritual
+world, as seen by the angels, frequently wear the outward shapes of the
+lower animals,--for instance, the gross and sensual look like swine, and
+the cruel and obscene like foul birds of prey, such as hawks and
+vultures,--and that they are entirely unconscious of the metamorphosis,
+imagining themselves marvellous proper men,' and are quite well
+satisfied with their company and condition."
+
+"Swedenborg," said the Elder, "was an insane man, or worse."
+
+"Perhaps so," said the Doctor; "but there is a great deal of 'method in
+his madness,' and plain common sense too.  There is one grand and
+beautiful idea underlying all his revelations or speculations about the
+future life.  It is this: that each spirit chooses its own society, and
+naturally finds its fitting place and sphere of action,--following in
+the new life, as in the present, the leading of its prevailing loves and
+desires,--and that hence none are arbitrarily compelled to be good or
+evil, happy or miserable.  A great law of attraction and gravitation
+governs the spiritual as well as the material universe; but, in obeying
+it, the spirit retains in the new life whatever freedom of will it
+possessed in its first stage of being.  But I see the Elder shakes his
+head, as much as to say, I am 'wise above what is written,' or, at any
+rate, meddling with matters beyond my comprehension.  Our young friend
+here," he continued, turning to me, "has the appearance of a listener;
+but I suspect he is busy with his own reveries, or enjoying the fresh
+sights and sounds of this fine morning.  I doubt whether our discourse
+has edified him."
+
+"Pardon me," said I; "I was, indeed, listening to another and older
+oracle."
+
+"Well, tell us what you hear," said the Doctor.
+
+"A faint, low murmur, rising and falling on the wind.  Now it comes
+rolling in upon me, wave after wave of sweet, solemn music.  There was a
+grand organ swell; and now it dies away as into the infinite distance;
+but I still hear it,--whether with ear or spirit I know not,--the very
+ghost of sound."
+
+"Ah, yes," said the Doctor; "I understand it is the voice of the pines
+yonder,--a sort of morning song of praise to the Giver of life and Maker
+of beauty.  My ear is dull now, and I cannot hear it; but I know it is
+sounding on as it did when I first climbed up here in the bright June
+mornings of boyhood, and it will sound on just the same when the
+deafness of the grave shall settle upon my failing senses.  Did it never
+occur to you that this deafness and blindness to accustomed beauty and
+harmony is one of the saddest thoughts connected with the great change
+which awaits us?  Have you not felt at times that our ordinary
+conceptions of heaven itself, derived from the vague hints and Oriental
+imagery of the Scriptures, are sadly inadequate to our human wants and
+hopes?  How gladly would we forego the golden streets and gates of
+pearl, the thrones, temples, and harps, for the sunset lights of our
+native valleys; the woodpaths, whose moss carpets are woven with violets
+and wild flowers; the songs of birds, the low of cattle, the hum of bees
+in the apple-blossom,--the sweet, familiar voices of human life and
+nature!  In the place of strange splendors and unknown music, should we
+not welcome rather whatever reminded us of the common sights and sounds
+of our old home?"
+
+"You touch a sad chord, Doctor," said I.  "Would that we could feel
+assured of the eternity of all we love!"
+
+"And have I not an assurance of it at this very moment?"  returned the
+Doctor.  "My outward ear fails me; yet I seem to hear as formerly the
+sound of the wind in the pines.  I close my eyes; and the picture of my
+home is still before me.  I see the green hill slope and meadows; the
+white shaft of the village steeple springing up from the midst of maples
+and elms; the river all afire with sunshine; the broad, dark belt of
+woodland; and, away beyond, all the blue level of the ocean.  And now,
+by a single effort of will, I can call before me a winter picture of the
+same scene.  It is morning as now; but how different!  All night has the
+white meteor fallen, in broad flake or minutest crystal, the sport and
+plaything of winds that have wrought it into a thousand shapes of wild
+beauty.  Hill and valley, tree and fence, woodshed and well-sweep, barn
+and pigsty, fishing-smacks frozen tip at the wharf, ribbed monsters of
+dismantled hulks scattered along the river-side,--all lie transfigured
+in the white glory and sunshine.  The eye, wherever it turns, aches with
+the cold brilliance, unrelieved save where.  The blue smoke of morning
+fires curls lazily up from the Parian roofs, or where the main channel
+of the river, as yet unfrozen, shows its long winding line of dark water
+glistening like a snake in the sun.  Thus you perceive that the spirit
+sees and hears without the aid of bodily organs; and why may it not be
+so hereafter?  Grant but memory to us, and we can lose nothing by death.
+The scenes now passing before us will live in eternal reproduction,
+created anew at will.  We assuredly shall not love heaven the less that
+it is separated by no impassable gulf from this fair and goodly earth,
+and that the pleasant pictures of time linger like sunset clouds along
+the horizon of eternity.  When I was younger, I used to be greatly
+troubled by the insecure tenure by which my senses held the beauty and
+harmony of the outward world.  When I looked at the moonlight on the
+water, or the cloud-shadows on the hills, or the sunset sky, with the
+tall, black tree-boles and waving foliage relieved against it, or when I
+heard a mellow gush of music from the brown-breasted fife-bird in the
+summer woods, or the merry quaver of the bobolink in the corn land, the
+thought of an eternal loss of these familiar sights and sounds would
+sometimes thrill through me with a sharp and bitter pain.  I have reason
+to thank God that this fear no longer troubles me.  Nothing that is
+really valuable and necessary for us can ever be lost.  The present will
+live hereafter; memory will bridge over the gulf between the two worlds;
+for only on the condition of their intimate union can we preserve our
+identity and personal consciousness.  Blot out the memory of this world,
+and what would heaven or hell be to us?  Nothing whatever.  Death would
+be simple annihilation of our actual selves, and the substitution
+therefor of a new creation, in which we should have no more interest
+than in an inhabitant of Jupiter or the fixed stars."
+
+The Elder, who had listened silently thus far, not without an occasional
+and apparently involuntary manifestation of dissent, here interposed.
+
+"Pardon me, my dear friend," said he; "but I must needs say that I look
+upon speculations of this kind, however ingenious or plausible, as
+unprofitable, and well-nigh presumptuous.  For myself, I only know that
+I am a weak, sinful man, accountable to and cared for by a just and
+merciful God.  What He has in reserve for me hereafter I know not, nor
+have I any warrant to pry into His secrets.  I do not know what it is to
+pass from one life to another; but I humbly hope that, when I am sinking
+in the dark waters, I may hear His voice of compassion and
+encouragement, 'It is I; be not afraid.'"
+
+"Amen," said the Skipper, solemnly.
+
+"I dare say the Parson is right, in the main," said the Doctor.  "Poor
+creatures at the best, it is safer for us to trust, like children, in
+the goodness of our Heavenly Father than to speculate too curiously in
+respect to the things of a future life; and, notwithstanding all I have
+said, I quite agree with good old Bishop Hall: 'It is enough for me to
+rest in the hope that I shall one day see them; in the mean time, let me
+be learnedly ignorant and incuriously devout, silently blessing the
+power and wisdom of my infinite Creator, who knows how to honor himself
+by all those unrevealed and glorious subordinations.'"
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VI.
+
+                          THE SKIPPER'S STORY.
+
+"WELL, what's the news below?"  asked the Doctor of his housekeeper,
+as she came home from a gossiping visit to the landing one afternoon.
+"What new piece of scandal is afloat now?"
+
+"Nothing, except what concerns yourself," answered Widow Matson, tartly.
+"Mrs. Nugeon says that you've been to see her neighbor Wait's girl--she
+that 's sick with the measles--half a dozen times, and never so much as
+left a spoonful of medicine; and she should like to know what a doctor's
+good for without physic.  Besides, she says Lieutenant Brown would have
+got well if you'd minded her, and let him have plenty of thoroughwort
+tea, and put a split fowl at the pit of his stomach."
+
+"A split stick on her own tongue would be better," said the Doctor,
+with a wicked grimace.
+
+"The Jezebel!  Let her look out for herself the next time she gets the
+rheumatism; I'll blister her from head to heel.  But what else is
+going?"
+
+"The schooner Polly Pike is at the landing."
+
+"What, from Labrador?  The one Tom Osborne went in?"
+
+"I suppose so; I met Tom down street."
+
+"Good!" said the Doctor, with emphasis.  "Poor Widow Osborne's prayers
+are answered, and she will see her son before she dies."
+
+"And precious little good will it do her," said the housekeeper.
+"There's not a more drunken, swearing rakeshame in town than Tom
+Osborne."
+
+"It's too true," responded the Doctor.  "But he's her only son; and you
+know, Mrs. Matson, the heart of a mother."
+
+The widow's hard face softened; a tender shadow passed over it; the
+memory of some old bereavement melted her; and as she passed into the
+house I saw her put her checked apron to her eyes.
+
+By this time Skipper Evans, who had been slowly working his way up
+street for some minutes, had reached the gate.
+
+"Look here!" said he.  "Here's a letter that I've got by the Polly Pike
+from one of your old patients that you gave over for a dead man long
+ago."
+
+"From the other world, of course," said the Doctor.
+
+"No, not exactly, though it's from Labrador, which is about the last
+place the Lord made, I reckon."
+
+"What, from Dick Wilson?"
+
+"Sartin," said the Skipper.
+
+"And how is he?"
+
+"Alive and hearty.  I tell you what, Doctor, physicking and blistering
+are all well enough, may be; but if you want to set a fellow up when
+he's kinder run down, there's nothing like a fishing trip to Labrador,
+'specially if he's been bothering himself with studying, and writing,
+and such like.  There's nothing like fish chowders, hard bunks, and sea
+fog to take that nonsense out of him.  Now, this chap," (the Skipper
+here gave me a thrust in the ribs by way of designation,) "if I could
+have him down with me beyond sunset for two or three months, would come
+back as hearty as a Bay o' Fundy porpoise."
+
+Assuring him that I would like to try the experiment, with him as
+skipper, I begged to know the history of the case he had spoken of.
+
+The old fisherman smiled complacently, hitched up his pantaloons, took a
+seat beside us, and, after extracting a jack-knife from one pocket, and
+a hand of tobacco from the other, and deliberately supplying himself
+with a fresh quid, he mentioned, apologetically, that he supposed the
+Doctor had heard it all before.
+
+"Yes, twenty times," said the Doctor; "but never mind; it's a good story
+yet.  Go ahead, Skipper."
+
+"Well, you see," said the Skipper, "this young Wilson comes down here
+from Hanover College, in the spring, as lean as a shad in dog-days.  He
+had studied himself half blind, and all his blood had got into brains.
+So the Doctor tried to help him with his poticary stuff, and the women
+with their herbs; but all did no good.  At last somebody advised him to
+try a fishing cruise down East; and so he persuaded me to take him
+aboard my schooner.  I knew he'd be right in the way, and poor company
+at the best, for all his Greek and Latin; for, as a general thing, I've
+noticed that your college chaps swop away their common sense for their
+larning, and make a mighty poor bargain of it.  Well, he brought his
+books with him, and stuck to them so close that I was afraid we should
+have to slide him off the plank before we got half way to Labrador.  So
+I just told him plainly that it would n't do, and that if he 'd a mind
+to kill himself ashore I 'd no objection, but he should n't do it aboard
+my schooner.  'I'm e'en just a mind,' says I, 'to pitch your books
+overboard.  A fishing vessel's no place for 'em; they'll spoil all our
+luck.  Don't go to making a Jonah of yourself down here in your bunk,
+but get upon deck, and let your books alone, and go to watching the sea,
+and the clouds, and the islands, and the fog-banks, and the fishes, and
+the birds; for Natur,' says I, don't lie nor give hearsays, but is
+always as true as the Gospels.'
+
+"But 't was no use talking.  There he'd lay in his bunk with his books
+about him, and I had e'en a'most to drag him on deck to snuff the sea-
+air.  Howsomever, one day,--it was the hottest of the whole season,--
+after we left the Magdalenes, and were running down the Gut of Canso, we
+hove in sight of the Gannet Rocks.  Thinks I to myself, I'll show him
+something now that he can't find in his books.  So I goes right down
+after him; and when we got on deck he looked towards the northeast, and
+if ever I saw a chap wonder-struck, he was.  Right ahead of us was a
+bold, rocky island, with what looked like a great snow bank on its
+southern slope; while the air was full overhead, and all about, of what
+seemed a heavy fall of snow.  The day was blazing hot, and there was n't
+a cloud to be seen.
+
+"'What in the world, Skipper, does this mean?' says he.  'We're sailing
+right into a snow-storm in dog-days and in a clear sky.'
+
+"By this time we had got near enough to hear a great rushing noise in
+the air, every moment growing louder and louder.
+
+"'It's only a storm of gannets,' says I.
+
+"'Sure enough!' says he; 'but I wouldn't have believed it possible.'
+
+"When we got fairly off against the island I fired a gun at it: and such
+a fluttering and screaming you can't imagine.  The great snow-banks
+shook, trembled, loosened, and became all alive, whirling away into the
+air like drifts in a nor'wester.  Millions of birds went up, wheeling
+and zigzagging about, their white bodies and blacktipped wings crossing
+and recrossing and mixing together into a thick grayish-white haze above
+us.
+
+"'You're right, Skipper,' says Wilson to me; 
+
+               Nature is better than books.'
+
+"And from that time he was on deck as much as his health would allow of,
+and took a deal of notice of everything new and uncommon.  But, for all
+that, the poor fellow was so sick, and pale, and peaking, that we all
+thought we should have to heave him overboard some day or bury him in
+Labrador moss."
+
+"But he did n't die after all, did he?" said I.
+
+"Die?  No!" cried the Skipper; "not he!"
+
+"And so your fishing voyage really cured him?"
+
+"I can't say as it did, exactly," returned the Skipper, shifting his
+quid from one cheek to the other, with a sly wink at the Doctor.  "The
+fact is, after the doctors and the old herb-women had given him up at
+home, he got cured by a little black-eyed French girl on the Labrador
+coast."
+
+"A very agreeable prescription, no doubt," quoth the Doctor, turning to
+me.  "How do you think it would suit your case?"
+
+"It does n't become the patient to choose his own nostrums," said I,
+laughing.  "But I wonder, Doctor, that you have n't long ago tested the
+value of this by an experiment upon yourself."
+
+"Physicians are proverbially shy of their own medicines," said he.
+
+"Well, you see," continued the Skipper, "we had a rough run down the
+Labrador shore; rainstorms and fogs so thick you could cut 'em up into
+junks with your jack-knife.  At last we reached a small fishing station
+away down where the sun does n't sleep in summer, but just takes a bit
+of a nap at midnight.  Here Wilson went ashore, more dead than alive,
+and found comfortable lodgings with a little, dingy French oil merchant,
+who had a snug, warm house, and a garden patch, where he raised a few
+potatoes and turnips in the short summers, and a tolerable field of
+grass, which kept his two cows alive through the winter.  The country
+all about was dismal enough; as far as you could see there was nothing
+but moss, and rocks, and bare hills, and ponds of shallow water, with
+now and then a patch of stunted firs.  But it doubtless looked pleasant
+to our poor sick passenger, who for some days had been longing for land.
+The Frenchman gave him a neat little room looking out on the harbor, all
+alive with fishermen and Indians hunting seals; and to my notion no
+place is very dull where you can see the salt-water and the ships at
+anchor on it, or scudding over it with sails set in a stiff breeze, and
+where you can watch its changes of lights and colors in fair and foul
+weather, morning and night.  The family was made up of the Frenchman,
+his wife, and his daughter,--a little witch of a girl, with bright black
+eyes lighting up her brown, good-natured face like lamps in a binnacle.
+They all took a mighty liking to young Wilson, and were ready to do
+anything for him.  He was soon able to walk about; and we used to see
+him with the Frenchman's daughter strolling along the shore and among
+the mosses, talking with her in her own language.  Many and many a time,
+as we sat in our boats under the rocks, we could hear her merry laugh
+ringing down to us.
+
+"We stayed at the station about three weeks; and when we got ready to
+sail I called at the Frenchman's to let Wilson know when to come aboard.
+He really seemed sorry to leave; for the two old people urged him to
+remain with them, and poor little Lucille would n't hear a word of his
+going.  She said he would be sick and die on board the vessel, but that
+if he stayed with them he would soon be well and strong; that they
+should have plenty of milk and eggs for him in the winter; and he should
+ride in the dog-sledge with her, and she would take care of him as if he
+was her brother.  She hid his cap and great-coat; and what with crying,
+and scolding, and coaxing, she fairly carried her point.
+
+"'You see I 'm a prisoner,' says he; 'they won't let me go.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'you don't seem to be troubled about it.  I tell you
+what, young man,' says I, 'it's mighty pretty now to stroll round here,
+and pick mosses, and hunt birds' eggs with that gal; but wait till
+November comes, and everything freezes up stiff and dead except white
+bears And Ingens, and there's no daylight left to speak of, and you 'll
+be sick enough of your choice.  You won't live the winter out; and it 's
+an awful place to die in, where the ground freezes so hard that they
+can't bury you.'
+
+"'Lucille says,' says he, 'that God is as near us in the winter as in
+the summer.  The fact is, Skipper, I've no nearer relative left in the
+States than a married brother, who thinks more of his family and
+business than of me; and if it is God's will that I shall die, I may as
+well wait His call here as anywhere.  I have found kind friends here;
+they will do all they can for me; and for the rest I trust Providence.'
+
+"Lucille begged that I would let him stay; for she said God would hear
+her prayers, and he would get well.  I told her I would n't urge him any
+more; for if I was as young as he was, and had such a pretty nurse to
+take care of me, I should be willing to winter at the North Pole.
+Wilson gave me a letter for his brother; and we shook hands, and I left
+him.  When we were getting under way he and Lucille stood on the
+landing-place, and I hailed him for the last time, and made signs of
+sending the boat for him.  The little French girl understood me; she
+shook her head, and pointed to her father's house; and then they both
+turned back, now and then stopping to wave their handkerchiefs to us.  I
+felt sorry to leave him there; but for the life of me I could n't blame
+him."
+
+"I'm sure I don't," said the Doctor.
+
+"Well, next year I was at Nitisquam Harbor; and, although I was doing
+pretty well in the way of fishing, I could n't feel easy without running
+away north to 'Brador to see what had become of my sick passenger.  It
+was rather early in the season, and there was ice still in the harbor;
+but we managed to work in at last; when who should I see on shore but
+young Wilson, so stout and hearty that I should scarcely have known,
+him.  He took me up to his lodgings and told me that he had never spent
+a happier winter; that he was well and strong, and could fish and hunt
+like a native; that he was now a partner with the Frenchman in trade,
+and only waited the coming of the priest from the Magdalenes, on his
+yearly visit to the settlements, to marry his daughter.  Lucille was as
+pretty, merry, and happy as ever; and the old Frenchman and his wife
+seemed to love Wilson as if he was their son.  I've never seen him
+since; but he now writes me that he is married, and has prospered in
+health and property, and thinks Labrador would be the finest country in
+the world if it only had heavy timber-trees."
+
+"One cannot but admire," said the Doctor, "that wise and beneficent
+ordination of Providence whereby the spirit of man asserts its power
+over circumstances, moulding the rough forms of matter to its fine
+ideal, bringing harmony out of discord,--coloring, warming, and lighting
+up everything within the circle of its horizon.  A loving heart carries
+with it, under every parallel of latitude, the warmth and light of the
+tropics.  It plants its Eden in the wilderness and solitary place, and
+sows with flowers the gray desolation of rocks and mosses.  Wherever
+love goes, there springs the true heart's-ease, rooting itself even in
+the polar ices.  To the young invalid of the Skipper's story, the dreary
+waste of what Moore calls, as you remember,
+
+                         'the dismal shore
+               Of cold and pitiless Labrador,'
+
+looked beautiful and inviting; for he saw it softened and irradiated in
+an atmosphere of love.  Its bare hills, bleak rocks, and misty sky were
+but the setting and background of the sweetest picture in the gallery of
+life.  Apart from this, however, in Labrador, as in every conceivable
+locality, the evils of soil and climate have their compensations and
+alleviations.  The long nights of winter are brilliant with moonlight,
+and the changing colors of the northern lights are reflected on the
+snow.  The summer of Labrador has a beauty of its own, far unlike that
+of more genial climates, but which its inhabitants would not forego for
+the warm life and lavish luxuriance of tropical landscapes.  The dwarf
+fir-trees throw from the ends of their branches yellow tufts of stamina,
+like small lamps decorating green pyramids for the festival of spring;
+and if green grass is in a great measure wanting, its place is supplied
+by delicate mosses of the most brilliant colors.  The truth is, every
+season and climate has its peculiar beauties and comforts; the
+footprints of the good and merciful God are found everywhere; and we
+should be willing thankfully to own that 'He has made all things
+beautiful in their time' if we were not a race of envious, selfish,
+ungrateful grumblers."
+
+"Doctor!  Doctor!" cried a ragged, dirty-faced boy, running breathless
+into the yard.
+
+"What's the matter, my lad?" said the Doctor.
+
+"Mother wants you to come right over to our house.  Father's tumbled off
+the hay-cart; and when they got him up he didn't know nothing; but they
+gin him some rum, and that kinder brought him to."
+
+"No doubt, no doubt," said the Doctor, rising to go.  "Similia similibus
+curantur.  Nothing like hair of the dog that bites you."
+
+"The Doctor talks well," said the Skipper, who had listened rather
+dubiously to his friend's commentaries on his story; "but he carries too
+much sail for me sometimes, and I can't exactly keep alongside of him.
+I told Elder.  Staples once that I did n't see but that the Doctor could
+beat him at preaching.  'Very likely,' says the Elder, says he; 'for you
+know, Skipper, I must stick to my text; but the Doctor's Bible is all
+creation.'"
+
+"Yes," said the Elder, who had joined us a few moments before, "the
+Doctor takes a wide range, or, as the farmers say, carries a wide swath,
+and has some notions of things which in my view have as little
+foundation in true philosophy as they have warrant in Scripture; but,
+if he sometimes speculates falsely, he lives truly, which is by far
+the most important matter.  The mere dead letter of a creed, however
+carefully preserved and reverently cherished, may be of no more
+spiritual or moral efficacy than an African fetish or an Indian
+medicine-bag.  What we want is, orthodoxy in practice,--the dry bones
+clothed with warm, generous, holy life.  It is one thing to hold fast
+the robust faith of our fathers,--the creed of the freedom-loving
+Puritan and Huguenot,--and quite another to set up the five points of
+Calvinism, like so many thunder-rods, over a bad life, in the insane
+hope of averting the Divine displeasure from sin."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                        THE LITTLE IRON SOLDIER
+
+                OR, WHAT AMINADAB IVISON DREAMED ABOUT.
+
+AMINADAB IVISON started up in his bed.  The great clock at the head of
+the staircase, an old and respected heirloom of the family, struck one.
+
+"Ah," said he, heaving up a great sigh from the depths of his inner man,
+"I've had a tried time of it."
+
+"And so have I," said the wife.  "Thee's been kicking and threshing
+about all night.  I do wonder what ails thee."
+
+And well she might; for her husband, a well-to-do, portly, middle-aged
+gentleman, being blessed with an easy conscience, a genial temper, and a
+comfortable digestion, was able to bear a great deal of sleep, and
+seldom varied a note in the gamut of his snore from one year's end to
+another.
+
+"A very remarkable exercise," soliloquized Aminadab; "very."
+
+"Dear me! what was it?"  inquired his wife.
+
+"It must have been a dream," said Aminadab.
+
+"Oh, is that all?"  returned the good woman.  "I'm glad it's nothing
+worse.  But what has thee been dreaming about?"
+
+"It's the strangest thing, Hannah, that thee ever heard of," said
+Aminadab, settling himself slowly back into his bed.  Thee recollects
+Jones sent me yesterday a sample of castings from the foundry.  Well, I
+thought I opened the box and found in it a little iron man, in
+regimentals; with his sword by his side and a cocked hat on, looking
+very much like the picture in the transparency over neighbor O'Neal's
+oyster-cellar across the way.  I thought it rather out of place for
+Jones to furnish me with such a sample, as I should not feel easy to
+show it to my customers, on account of its warlike appearance.  However,
+as the work was well done, I took the little image and set him up on the
+table, against the wall; and, sitting down opposite, I began to think
+over my business concerns, calculating how much they would increase in
+profit in case a tariff man should be chosen our ruler for the next four
+years.  Thee knows I am not in favor of choosing men of blood and strife
+to bear rule in the land: but it nevertheless seems proper to consider
+all the circumstances in this case, and, as one or the other of the
+candidates of the two great parties must be chosen, to take the least of
+two evils.  All at once I heard a smart, quick tapping on the table;
+and, looking up, there stood the little iron man close at my elbow,
+winking and chuckling.  'That's right, Aminadab!' said he, clapping his
+little metal hands together till he rang over like a bell, 'take the
+least of two evils.'  His voice had a sharp, clear, jingling sound, like
+that of silver dollars falling into a till.  It startled me so that I
+woke up, but finding it only a dream presently fell asleep again.  Then
+I thought I was down in the Exchange, talking with neighbor Simkins
+about the election and the tariff.  'I want a change in the
+administration, but I can't vote for a military chieftain,' said
+neighbor Simkins, 'as I look upon it unbecoming a Christian people to
+elect men of blood for their rulers.'  'I don't know,' said I, 'what
+objection thee can have to a fighting man; for thee 's no Friend, and
+has n't any conscientious scruples against military matters.  For my own
+part, I do not take much interest in politics, and never attended a
+caucus in my life, believing it best to keep very much in the quiet, and
+avoid, as far as possible, all letting and hindering things; but there
+may be cases where a military man may be voted for as a choice of evils,
+and as a means of promoting the prosperity of the country in business
+matters.'  'What!' said neighbor Simkins, 'are you going to vote for a
+man whose whole life has been spent in killing people?'  This vexed me a
+little, and I told him there was such a thing as carrying a good
+principle too far, and that he night live to be sorry that he had thrown
+away his vote, instead of using it discreetly.  'Why, there's the iron
+business,' said I; but just then I heard a clatter beside me, and,
+looking round, there was the little iron soldier clapping his hands in
+great glee.  'That's it, Aminadab!' said he; 'business first, conscience
+afterwards!  Keep up the price of iron with peace if you can, but keep
+it up at any rate.'  This waked me again in a good deal of trouble; but,
+remembering that it is said that 'dreams come of the multitude of
+business,' I once more composed myself to sleep."
+
+"Well, what happened next?" asked his wife.
+
+"Why, I thought I was in the meeting-house, sitting on the facing-seat
+as usual.  I tried hard to settle my mind down into a quiet and humble
+state; but somehow the cares of the world got uppermost, and, before I
+was well aware of it, I was far gone in a calculation of the chances of
+the election, and the probable rise in the price of iron in the event of
+the choice of a President favorable to a high tariff.  Rap, tap, went
+something on the floor.  I opened my eyes, and there was the little
+image, red-hot, as if just out of the furnace, dancing, and chuckling,
+and clapping his hands.  'That's right, Aminadab!' said he; 'go on as
+you have begun; take care of yourself in this world, and I'll promise
+you you'll be taken care of in the next.  Peace and poverty, or war and
+money.  It's a choice of evils at best; and here's Scripture to decide
+the matter: "Be not righteous overmuch."'  Then the wicked-looking
+little image twisted his hot lips, and leered at me with his blazing
+eyes, and chuckled and laughed with a noise exactly as if a bag of
+dollars had been poured out upon the meeting-house floor.  This waked me
+just now in such a fright.  I wish thee would tell me, Hannah, what thee
+can make of these three dreams?"
+
+"It don't need a Daniel to interpret them," answered Hannah.  "Thee 's
+been thinking of voting for a wicked old soldier, because thee cares
+more for thy iron business than for thy testimony against wars and
+fightings.  I don't a bit wonder at thy seeing the iron soldier thee
+tells of; and if thee votes to-morrow for a man of blood, it wouldn't be
+strange if he should haunt thee all thy life."
+
+Aminadab Ivison was silent, for his conscience spoke in the words of his
+wife.  He slept no more that night, and rose up in the morning a wiser
+and better man.
+
+When he went forth to his place of business he saw the crowds hurrying
+to and fro; there were banners flying across the streets, huge placards
+were on the walls, and he heard all about him the bustle of the great
+election.
+
+"Friend Ivison," said a red-faced lawyer, almost breathless with his
+hurry, "more money is needed in the second ward; our committees are
+doing a great work there.  What shall I put you down for?  Fifty
+dollars?  If we carry the election, your property will rise twenty per
+cent.  Let me see; you are in the iron business, I think?"
+
+Aminadab thought of the little iron soldier of his dream, and excused
+himself.  Presently a bank director came tearing into his office.
+
+"Have you voted yet, Mr. Ivison?  It 's time to get your vote in.  I
+wonder you should be in your office now.  No business has so much at
+stake in this election as yours."
+
+"I don't think I should feel entirely easy to vote for the candidate,"
+said Aminadab.
+
+"Mr. Ivison," said the bank director, "I always took you to be a shrewd,
+sensible man, taking men and things as they are.  The candidate may not
+be all you could wish for; but when the question is between him and a
+worse man, the best you can do is to choose the least of the two evils."
+
+"Just so the little iron man said," thought Aminadab.  "'Get thee behind
+me, Satan!' No, neighbor Discount," said he, "I've made up my mind.  I
+see no warrant for choosing evil at all.  I can't vote for that man."
+
+"Very well," said the director, starting to leave the room; "you can do
+as you please; but if we are defeated through the ill-timed scruples of
+yourself and others, and your business pinches in consequence, you need
+n't expect us to help men who won't help themselves.  Good day, sir."
+
+Aminadab sighed heavily, and his heart sank within him; but he thought
+of his dream, and remained steadfast.  Presently he heard heavy steps
+and the tapping of a cane on the stairs; and as the door opened he saw
+the drab surtout of the worthy and much-esteemed friend who sat beside
+him at the head of the meeting.
+
+"How's thee do, Aminadab?"  said he.  "Thee's voted, I suppose?"
+
+"No, Jacob," said he; "I don't like the candidate.  I can't see my way
+clear to vote for a warrior."
+
+"Well, but thee does n't vote for him because he is a warrior,
+Aminadab," argued the other; "thee votes for him as a tariff man and an
+encourager of home industry.  I don't like his wars and fightings better
+than thee does; but I'm told he's an honest man, and that he disapproves
+of war in the abstract, although he has been brought up to the business.
+If thee feels tender about the matter, I don't like to urge thee; but it
+really seems to me thee had better vote.  Times have been rather hard,
+thou knows; and if by voting at this election we can make business
+matters easier, I don't see how we can justify ourselves in staying at
+home.  Thou knows we have a command to be diligent in business as well
+as fervent in spirit, and that the Apostle accounted him who provided
+not for his own household worse than an infidel.  I think it important
+to maintain on all proper occasions our Gospel testimony against wars
+and fightings; but there is such a thing as going to extremes, thou
+knows, and becoming over-scrupulous, as I think thou art in this case.
+It is said, thou knows, in Ecclesiastes, 'Be not righteous overmuch: why
+shouldst thou destroy thyself?'"
+
+"Ah," said Aminadab to himself, "that's what the little iron soldier
+said in meeting."  So he was strengthened in his resolution, and the
+persuasions of his friend were lost upon him.
+
+At night Aminadab sat by his parlor fire, comfortable alike in his inner
+and his outer man.  "Well, Hannah," said he, "I've taken thy advice.  I
+did n't vote for the great fighter to-day."
+
+"I'm glad of it," said the good woman, "and I dare say thee feels the
+better for it."
+
+Aminadab Ivison slept soundly that night, and saw no more of the little
+iron soldier.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             PASSACONAWAY.
+
+                                [1833.]
+
+          I know not, I ask not, what guilt's in thy heart, But I feel
+          that I love thee, whatever thou art.
+                                                  Moor.
+
+THE township of Haverhill, on the Merrimac, contained, in the autumn of
+1641, the second year of its settlement, but six dwelling-houses,
+situated near each other, on the site of the present village.  They were
+hastily constructed of rude logs, small and inconvenient, but one remove
+from the habitations of the native dwellers of the wilderness.  Around
+each a small opening had been made through the thick forest, down to the
+margin of the river, where, amidst the charred and frequent stumps and
+fragments of fallen trees, the first attempts at cultivation had been
+made.  A few small patches of Indian corn, which had now nearly reached
+maturity, exhibited their thick ears and tasselled stalks, bleached by
+the frost and sunshine; and, here and there a spot of yellow stubble,
+still lingering among the rough incumbrances of the soil, told where a
+scanty crop of common English grain had been recently gathered.  Traces
+of some of the earlier vegetables were perceptible, the melon, the pea,
+and the bean.  The pumpkin lay ripening on its frosted vines, its sunny
+side already changed to a bright golden color; and the turnip spread out
+its green mat of leaves in defiance of the season.  Everything around
+realized the vivid picture of Bryant's Emigrant, who:
+
+              "Hewed the dark old woods away,
+               And gave the virgin fields to the day
+               And the pea and the bean beside the door
+               Bloomed where such flowers ne'er bloomed before;
+               And the maize stood up, and the bearded rye
+               Bent low in the breath of an unknown sky."
+
+Beyond, extended the great forest, vast, limitless, unexplored, whose
+venerable trees had hitherto bowed only to the presence of the storm,
+the beaver's tooth, and the axe of Time, working in the melancholy
+silence of natural decay.  Before the dwellings of the white
+adventurers, the broad Merrimac rolled quietly onward the piled-up
+foliage of its shores, rich with the hues of a New England autumn.
+The first sharp frosts, the avant couriers of approaching winter, had
+fallen, and the whole wilderness was in blossom.  It was like some vivid
+picture of Claude Lorraine, crowded with his sunsets and rainbows, a
+natural kaleidoscope of a thousand colors.  The oak upon the hillside
+stood robed in summer's greenness, in strong contrast with the topaz-
+colored walnut.  The hemlock brooded gloomily in the lowlands, forming,
+with its unbroken mass of shadow, a dark background for the light maple
+beside it, bright with its peculiar beauty.  The solemn shadows of the
+pine rose high in the hazy atmosphere, checkered, here and there, with
+the pale yellow of the birch.
+
+"Truly, Alice, this is one of God's great marvels in the wilderness,"
+said John Ward, the minister, and the original projector of the
+settlement, to his young wife, as they stood in the door of their humble
+dwelling.  "This would be a rare sight for our friends in old Haverhill.
+The wood all about us hath, to my sight, the hues of the rainbow, when,
+in the words of the wise man, it compasseth the heavens as with a
+circle, and the hands of the Most High have bended it.  Very beautifully
+hath He indeed garnished the excellent works of His wisdom."
+
+"Yea, John," answered Alice, in her soft womanly tone; "the Lord is,
+indeed, no respecter of persons.  He hath given the wild savages a more
+goodly show than any in Old England.  Yet, John, I am sometimes very
+sorrowful, when I think of our old home, of the little parlor where you
+and I used to sit of a Sunday evening.  The Lord hath been very
+bountiful to this land, and it may be said of us, as it was said of
+Israel of old, 'How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob! and thy tabernacles,
+O Israel!'  But the people sit in darkness, and the Gentiles know not
+the God of our fathers."
+
+"Nay," answered her husband, "the heathen may be visited and redeemed,
+the spirit of the Lord may turn unto the Gentiles; but a more sure evil
+hath arisen among us.  I tell thee, Alice, it shall be more tolerable in
+the day of the Lord, for the Tyre and Sidon, the Sodom and Gomorrah of
+the heathen, than for the schemers, the ranters, the Familists, and the
+Quakers, who, like Satan of old, are coming among the sons of God."
+
+"I thought," said Alice, "that our godly governor had banished these out
+of the colony."
+
+"Truly he hath," answered Mr. Ward, "but the evil seed they have sown
+here continues to spring up and multiply.  The Quakers have, indeed,
+nearly ceased to molest us; but another set of fanatics, headed by
+Samuel Gorton, have of late been very troublesome.  Their family has
+been broken up, and the ring-leaders have been sentenced to be kept at
+hard labor for the colony's benefit; one being allotted to each of the
+old towns, where they are forbidden to speak on matters of religion.
+But there are said to be many still at large, who, under the
+encouragement of the arch-heretic, Williams, of the Providence
+plantation, are even now zealously doing the evil work of their master.
+But, Alice," he continued, as he saw his few neighbors gathering around
+a venerable oak which had been spared in the centre of the clearing, "it
+is now near our time of worship.  Let us join our friends."
+
+And the minister and his wife entered into the little circle of their
+neighbors.  No house of worship, with spire and tower, and decorated
+pulpit, had as yet been reared on the banks of the Merrimac.  The stern
+settlers came together under the open heavens, or beneath the shadow of
+the old trees, to kneel before that God, whose works and manifestations
+were around them.
+
+The exercises of the Sabhath commenced.  A psalm of the old and homely
+version was sung, with true feeling, if not with a perfect regard to
+musical effect and harmony.  The brief but fervent prayer was offered,
+and the good man had just announced the text for his sermon, when a
+sudden tramp of feet, and a confused murmur of human voices, fell on the
+ears of the assembly.
+
+The minister closed his Bible; and the whole group crowded closer
+together.  "It is surely a war party of the heathen," said Mr. Ward, as
+he listened intently to the approaching sound.  "God grant they mean us
+no evil!"
+
+The sounds drew nearer.  The swarthy figure of an Indian came gliding
+through the brush-wood into the clearing, followed closely by several
+Englishmen.  In answer to the eager inquiries of Mr. Ward, Captain
+Eaton, the leader of the party, stated that he had left Boston at
+the command of Governor Winthrop, to secure and disarm the sachem,
+Passaconaway, who was suspected of hostile intentions towards the
+whites.  They had missed of the old chief, but had captured his son,
+and were taking him to the governor as a hostage for the good faith of
+his father.  He then proceeded to inform Mr. Ward, that letters had been
+received from the governor of the settlements of Good Hoop and Piquag,
+in Connecticut, giving timely warning of a most diabolical plot of the
+Indians to cut off their white neighbors, root and branch.  He pointed
+out to the notice of the minister a member of his party as one of the
+messengers who had brought this alarming intelligence.
+
+He was a tall, lean man, with straight, lank, sandy hair, cut evenly all
+around his narrow forehead, and hanging down so as to remind one of
+Smollett's apt similitude of "a pound of candles."
+
+"What news do you bring us of the savages?" inquired Mr. Ward.
+
+"The people have sinned, and the heathen are the instruments whereby the
+Lord hath willed to chastise them," said the messenger, with that
+peculiar nasal inflection of voice, so characteristic of the "unco'
+guid."  "The great sachem, Miantonimo, chief of the Narragansetts, hath
+plotted to cut off the Lord's people, just after the time of harvest, to
+slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children."
+
+"How have ye known this?" asked the minister.
+
+"Even as Paul knew of those who had bound themselves together with a
+grievous oath to destroy him.  The Lord hath done it.  One of the bloody
+heathens was dreadfully gored by the oxen of our people, and, being in
+great bodily pain and tribulation thereat, he sent for Governor Haines,
+and told him that the Englishman's god was angry with him for concealing
+the plot to kill his people, and had sent the Englishman's cow to kill
+him."
+
+"Truly a marvellous providence," said Mr. Ward; "but what has been done
+in your settlements in consequence of it?"
+
+"We have fasted many days," returned the other, in a tone of great
+solemnity, "and our godly men have besought the Lord that he might now,
+as of old, rebuke Satan.  They have, moreover, diligently and earnestly
+inquired, Whence cometh this evil?  Who is the Achan in the camp of our
+Israel?  It hath been greatly feared that the Quakers and the Papists
+have been sowing tares in the garden of the true worship.  We have
+therefore banished these on pain of death; and have made it highly penal
+for any man to furnish either food or lodging to any of these heretics
+and idolaters.  We have ordered a more strict observance of the Sabbath
+of the Lord, no, one being permitted to walk or run on that day, except
+to and from public worship, and then, only in a reverent and becoming
+manner; and no one is allowed to cook food, sweep the house, shave or
+pare the nails, or kiss a child, on the day which is to be kept holy.
+We have also framed many wholesome laws, against the vanity and
+licentiousness of the age, in respect to apparel and deportment, and
+have forbidden any young man to kiss a maid during the time of
+courtship, as, to their shame be it said, is the manner of many in the
+old lands."
+
+"Ye have, indeed, done well for the spiritual," said Mr. Ward; "what
+have you done for your temporal defence?"
+
+"We have our garrisons and our captains, and a goodly store of carnal
+weapons," answered the other.  "And, besides, we have the good chief
+Uncas, of the Mohegans, to help us against the bloody Narragansetts."
+
+"But, my friend," said the minister, addressing Captain Eaton, "there
+must be surely some mistake about Passaconaway.  I verily believe him to
+be the friend of the white men.  And this is his son Wonolanset?  I saw
+him last year, and remember that he was the pride of the old savage, his
+father.  I will speak to him, for I know something of his barbarous
+tongue."
+
+"Wonolanset!"
+
+The young savage started suddenly at the word, and rolled his keen
+bright eye upon the speaker.
+
+"Why is the son of the great chief bound by my brothers?"
+
+The Indian looked one instant upon the cords which confined his arms,
+and then glanced fiercely upon his conductors.
+
+"Has the great chief forgotten his white friends?  Will he send his
+young men to take their scalps when the Narragansett bids him?"
+
+The growl of the young bear when roused from his hiding-place is not
+more fierce and threatening than were the harsh tones of Wonolanset as
+he uttered through his clenched teeth:--
+
+"Nummus quantum."
+
+"Nay, nay," said Mr. Ward, turning away from the savage, "his heart is
+full of bitterness; he says he is angry, and, verily, I like not his
+bearing.  I fear me there is evil on foot.  But ye have travelled far,
+and must needs be weary rest yourselves awhile, and haply, while ye
+refresh your bodies, I may also refresh your spirits with wholesome and
+comfortable doctrines."
+
+The party having acquiesced in this proposal, their captive was secured
+by fastening one end of his rope to a projecting branch of the tree.
+The minister again named his text, but had only proceeded to the minuter
+divisions of his sermon, when he was again interrupted by a loud, clear
+whistle from the river, and a sudden exclamation of surprise from those
+around him.  A single glance sufficed to show him the Indian, disengaged
+from his rope, and in full retreat.
+
+Eaton raised his rifle to his eye, and called out to the young sachem,
+in his own language, to stop, or he would fire upon him.  The Indian
+evidently understood the full extent of his danger.  He turned suddenly
+about, and, pointing, up the river towards the dwelling of his father,
+pronounced with a threatening gesture:--
+
+"Nosh, Passaconaway!"
+
+"Hold!" exclaimed Mr. Ward, grasping the arm of Eaton.  "He threatens us
+with his father's vengeance.  For God's sake keep your fire!" It was too
+late.  The report of the rifle broke sharply upon the Sabbath stillness.
+It was answered by a shout from the river, and a small canoe, rowed by
+an Indian and a white man, was seen darting along the shore.  Wonolanset
+bounded on unharmed, and, plunging into the river, he soon reached the
+canoe, which was hastily paddled to the opposite bank.  Captain Eaton
+and his party finding it impossible to retake their prisoner, after
+listening to the sermon of Mr. Ward, and partaking of some bodily
+refreshment, took their leave of the settlers of Pentucket, and departed
+for Boston.
+
+The evening, which followed the day whose events we have narrated, was
+one of those peculiar seasons of beauty when the climate of New England
+seems preferable to that of Italy.  The sun went down in the soft haze
+of the horizon, while the full moon was rising at the same time in the
+east.  Its mellow silver mingled with the deep gold of the sunset.  The
+south-west wind, as warm as that of summer, but softer, was heard, at
+long intervals, faintly harping amidst the pines, and blending its low
+sighing with the lulling murmurs of the river.  The inhabitants of
+Pentucket had taken the precaution, as night came on, to load their
+muskets carefully, and place them in readiness for instant use, in the
+event of an attack from the savages.  Such an occurrence, was, indeed,
+not unlikely, after the rude treatment which the son of old Passaconaway
+had received at the settlement.  It was well known that the old chief
+was able, at a word, to send every warrior from Pennacook to Naumkeag
+upon the war-path of Miantonimo; the vengeful character of the Indians
+was also understood; and, in the event of an out-breaking of their
+resentment, the settlement of Pentucket was, of all others, the most
+exposed to danger.
+
+"Don't go to neighbor Clements's to-night, Mary," said Alice Ward to her
+young, unmarried sister; "I'm afraid some of the tawny Indians may be
+lurking hereabout.  Mr. Ward says he thinks they will be dangerous
+neighbors for us."
+
+Mary had thrown her shawl over her head, and was just stepping out.
+"It is but a step, as it were, and I promised good-wife Clements that I
+would certainly come.  I am not afraid of the Indians.  There's none of
+them about here except Red Sam, who wanted to buy me of Mr. Ward for his
+squaw; and I shall not be afraid of my old spark."
+
+The girl tripped lightly from the threshold towards the dwelling of her
+neighbor.  She had passed nearly half the distance when the pathway,
+before open to the moonlight, began to wind along the margin of the
+river, overhung with young sycamores and hemlocks.  With a beating heart
+and a quickened step she was stealing through the shadow, when the
+boughs on the river-side were suddenly parted, and a tall man sprang
+into the path before her.  Shrinking back with terror, she uttered a
+faint scream.
+
+"Mary Edmands!" said the stranger, "do not fear me."
+
+A thousand thoughts wildly chased each other through the mind of the
+astonished girl.  That familiar voice--that knowledge of her name--that
+tall and well-remembered form!  She leaned eagerly forward, and looked
+into the stranger's face.  A straggling gleam of moonshine fell across
+its dark features of manly beauty.
+
+"Richard Martin! can it be possible!"
+
+"Yea, Mary," answered the other, "I have followed thee to the new world,
+in that love which neither sea nor land can abate.  For many weary
+months I have waited earnestly for such a meeting as this, and, in that
+time, I have been in many and grievous perils by the flood and the
+wilderness, and by the heathen Indians and more heathen persecutors
+among my own people.  But I may not tarry, nor delay to tell my errand.
+Mary, thou knowest my love; wilt thou be my wife?"
+
+Mary hesitated.
+
+"I ask thee again, if thou wilt share the fortunes of one who hath loved
+thee ever since thou wast but a child, playing under the cottage trees
+in old Haverhill, and who hath sacrificed his worldly estate, and
+perilled his soul's salvation for thy sake.  Mary, dear Mary, for of a
+truth thou art very dear to me; wilt thou go with me and be my wife?"
+
+The tones of Richard Martin, usually harsh and forbidding, now fell soft
+and musical on the ear of Mary.  He was her first love, her only one.
+What marvel that she consented?
+
+"Let us hasten to depart," said Martin, "this is no place for me.  We
+will go to the Providence plantations.  Passaconaway will assist us in
+our journey."
+
+The bright flush of hope and joy faded from the face of the young girl.
+She started back from the embrace of her lover.
+
+"What mean you, Richard?  What was 't you said about our going to that
+sink of wickedness at Providence?  Why don't you go back with me to
+sister Ward's?"
+
+"Mary Edmands!" said Martin, in a tone of solemn sternness, "it is
+fitting that I should tell thee all.  I have renounced the evil
+doctrines of thy brother-in-law, and his brethren in false prophecy.  It
+was a hard struggle, Mary; the spirit was indeed willing, but the flesh
+was weak, exceeding weak, for I thought of thee, Mary, and of thy
+friends.  But I had a measure of strength given me, whereby I have been
+enabled to do the work which was appointed me."
+
+"Oh, Richard!" said Mary, bursting into tears, "I'm afraid you have
+become a Williamsite, one of them, who, Mr. Ward says, have nothing to
+hope for in this world or in that to come."
+
+"The Lord rebuke him!" said Martin, with a loud voice.  "Woe to such as
+speak evil of the witnesses of the truth.  I have seen the utter
+nakedness of the land of carnal professors, and I have obeyed the call
+to come out from among them and be separate.  I belong to that
+persecuted family whom the proud priests and rulers of this colony have
+driven from their borders.  I was brought, with many others, before the
+wicked magistrates of Boston, and sentenced to labor, without hire, for
+the ungodly.  But I have escaped from my bonds; and the Lord has raised
+up a friend for his servant, even the Indian Passaconaway, whose son I
+assisted, but a little time ago, to escape from his captors."
+
+"Can it be?" sobbed Mary, "can it be?  Richard, our own Richard,
+following the tribe of Gorton, the Familist!  Oh, Richard, if you love
+me, if you love God's people and his true worship, do come away from
+those wicked fanatics."
+
+"Thou art in the very gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity,"
+answered Martin.  "Listen, Mary Edmands, to the creed of those whom thou
+callest fanatics.  We believe in Christ, but not in man-worship.  The
+Christ we reverence is the shadow or image of God in man; he was
+crucified in Adam of old, and hath been crucified in all men since; his
+birth, his passion, and his death, were but manifestations or figures of
+his sufferings in Adam and his descendants.  Faith and Christ are the
+same, the spiritual image of God in the heart.  We acknowledge no rule
+but this Christ, this faith within us, either in temporal or spiritual
+things.  And the Lord hath blessed us, and will bless us, and truth
+shall be magnified and exalted in us; and the children of the heathen
+shall be brought to know and partake of this great redemption whereof we
+testify.  But woe to the false teachers, and to them who prophesy for
+hire and make gain of their soothsaying.  Their churches are the devices
+of Satan, the pride and vanity of the natural Adam.  Their baptism is
+blasphemy; and their sacrament is an abomination, yea, an incantation
+and a spell.  Woe to them who take the shadow for the substance, that
+bow down to the altars of human device and cunning workmanship, that
+make idols of their ceremonies!  Woe to the high priests and the
+Pharisees, and the captains and the rulers; woe to them who love the
+wages of unrighteousness!"
+
+The Familist paused from utter exhaustion, so vehemently had he poured
+forth the abundance of his zeal.  Mary Edmands, overwhelmed by his
+eloquence, but still unconvinced, could only urge the disgrace and
+danger attending his adherence to such pernicious doctrines.  She
+concluded by telling him, in a voice choked by tears, that she could
+never marry him while a follower of Gorton.
+
+"Stay then," said Martin, fiercely dashing her hand from his, "stay and
+partake of the curse of the ungodly, even of the curse of Meroz, who
+come not up to the help of the Lord, against the mighty Stay, till the
+Lord hath made a threshing instrument of the heathen, whereby the pride
+of the rulers, and the chief priests, and the captains of this land
+shall be humbled.  Stay, till the vials of His wrath are poured out upon
+ye, and the blood of the strong man, and the maid, and the little child
+is mingled together!"
+
+The wild language, the fierce tones and gestures of her lover, terrified
+the unhappy girl.  She looked wildly around her, all was dark and
+shadowy, an undefined fear of violence came over her; and, bursting into
+tears, she turned to fly.  "Stay yet a moment," said Martin, in a hoarse
+and subdued voice.  He caught hold of her arm.  She shrieked as if in
+mortal jeopardy.
+
+"Let go the gal, let her go!"  said old Job Clements, thrusting the long
+barrel of his gun through the bushes within a few feet of the head of
+the Familist.  "A white man, as sure as I live!  I thought, sartin, 't
+was a tarnal In-in."  Martin relinquished his hold, and, the next
+instant, found himself surrounded by the settlers.
+
+After a brief explanation had taken place between Mr. Ward and his
+sister-in-law, the former came forward and accosted the Familist.
+"Richard Martin!" he said, "I little thought to see thee so soon in the
+new world, still less to see thee such as thou art.  I am exceeding
+sorry that I cannot greet thee here as a brother, either in a temporal
+or a spiritual nature.  My sister tells me that you are a follower of
+that servant of Satan, Samuel Gorton, and that you have sought to entice
+her away with you to the colony of fanatics at Rhode Island, which may
+be fitly compared to that city which Philip of Macedonia peopled with
+rogues and vagabonds, and the offscouring of the whole earth."
+
+"John Ward, I know thee," said the unshrinking Familist; "I know thee
+for a man wise above what is written, a man vain, uncharitable, and
+given to evil speaking.  I value neither thy taunts nor thy wit; for the
+one hath its rise in the bitterness, and the other in the vanity, of the
+natural Adam.  Those who walk in the true light, and who have given over
+crucifying Christ in their hearts, heed not a jot of the reproaches and
+despiteful doings of the high and mighty in iniquity.  For of us it hath
+been written: 'I have given them thy word and the world hath hated them
+because they are not of the world.  If the world hate you, ye know that
+it hated me before it hated you.  If they have hated me they will hate
+you also; if they have persecuted me they will persecute you.'  And, of
+the scoffers and the scorners, the wise ones of this world, whose wisdom
+and knowledge have perverted them, and who have said in their hearts,
+There is none beside them, it hath been written, yea, and will be
+fulfilled: The day of the Lord of Hosts shall be upon every one that is
+proud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up, and he shall be
+brought low; and the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the
+haughtiness of man shall be brought low; and the Lord alone shall be
+exalted in that day; and the idols shall he utterly abolish.'  Of thee,
+John Ward, and of thy priestly brotherhood, I ask nothing; and for the
+much evil I have received, and may yet receive at your hands, may ye be
+rewarded like Alexander the coppersmith, every man according to his
+works."
+
+"Such damnable heresy," said Mr. Ward, addressing his neighbors, "must
+not be permitted to spread among the people.  My friends, we must send
+this man to the magistrates."
+
+The Familist placed his hands to his month, and gave a whistle, similar
+to that which was heard in the morning, and which preceded the escape of
+Wonolanset.  It was answered by a shout from the river; and a score of
+Indians came struggling up through the brush-wood.
+
+"Vile heretic!" exclaimed Mr. Ward, snatching a musket from the hands of
+his neighbor, and levelling it full at the head of Martin; "you have
+betrayed us into this jeopardy."
+
+"Wagh! down um gun," said a powerful Indian, as he laid his rough hand
+on the shoulder of the minister.  "You catch Wonolanset, tie um, shoot
+um, scare squaw.  Old sachem come now, me tie white man, shoot um, roast
+um;" and the old savage smiled grimly and fiercely in the indistinct
+moonlight, as he witnessed the alarm and terror of his prisoner.
+
+"Hold, Passaconaway!" said Martin, in the Indian tongue.  "Will the
+great chief forget his promise?"
+
+The sachem dropped his hold on Mr. Ward's arm.  "My brother is good," he
+said; "me no kill um, me make um walk woods like Wonolanset."  Martin
+spoke a few words in the chief's ear.  The countenance of the old
+warrior for an instant seemed to express dissatisfaction; but, yielding
+to the powerful influence which the Familist had acquired over him, he
+said, with some reluctance, "My brother is wise, me do so."
+
+"John Ward," said the Familist, approaching the minister, "thou hast
+devised evil against one who hath never injured thee.  But I seek not
+carnal revenge.  I have even now restrained the anger of this heathen
+chief whom thou and thine have wronged deeply.  Let us part in peace,
+for we may never more meet in this world."  And he extended his hand and
+shook that of the minister.
+
+"For thee, Mary," he said, "I had hoped to pluck thee from the evil
+which is to come, even as a brand from the burning.  I had hoped to lead
+thee to the manna of true righteousness, but thou last chosen the flesh-
+pots of Egypt.  I had hoped to cherish thee always, but thou hast
+forgotten me and my love, which brought me over the great waters for thy
+sake.  I will go among the Gentiles, and if it be the Lord's will,
+peradventure I may turn away their wrath from my people.  When my
+wearisome pilgrimage is ended, none shall know the grave of Richard
+Martin; and none but the heathen shall mourn for him.  Mary! I forgive
+thee; may the God of all mercies bless thee! I shall never see thee
+more."
+
+Hot and fast fell the tears of that stern man upon the hand of Mary.
+The eyes of the young woman glanced hurriedly over the faces of her
+neighbors, and fixed tearfully upon that of her lover.  A thousand
+recollections of young affection, of vows and meetings in another land,
+came vividly before her.  Her sister's home, her brother's instructions,
+her own strong faith, and her bitter hatred of her lover's heresy were
+all forgotten.
+
+"Richard, dear Richard, I am your Mary as much as ever I was.  I'll go
+with you to the ends of the earth.  Your God shall be my God, and where
+you are buried there will I be also."
+
+Silent in the ecstasy of joyful surprise, the Familist pressed her to
+his bosom.  Passaconaway, who had hitherto been an unmoved spectator of
+the scene, relaxed the Indian gravity of his features, and murmured, in
+an undertone, "Good, good."
+
+"Will my brother go?"  he inquired, touching Martin's shoulder; "my
+squaws have fine mat, big wigwam, soft samp, for his young woman."
+
+"Mary," said Martin, "the sachem is impatient; and we must needs go with
+him."  Mary did not answer, but her head was reclined upon his bosom,
+and the Familist knew that she resigned herself wholly to his direction.
+He folded the shawl more carefully around her, and supported her down
+the precipitous and ragged bank of the river, followed closely by
+Passaconaway and his companions.
+
+"Come back, Mary Edmands!" shouted Mr. Ward.  "In God's name come back."
+
+Half a dozen canoes shot out into the clear moonlight from the shadow of
+the shore.  "It is too late!" said the minister, as he struggled down to
+the water's edge.  "Satan hath laid his hands upon her; but I will
+contend for her, even as did Michael of old for the body of Moses.
+Mary, sister Mary, for the love of Christ, answer me."
+
+No sound came back from the canoes, which glided like phantoms,
+noiselessly and swiftly, through the still waters of the river.
+"The enemy hath prevailed," said Mr. Ward; "two women were grinding at
+my mill, the one is taken and the other is left.  Let us go home, my
+friends, and wrestle in prayer against the Tempter."
+
+The heretic and his orthodox bride departed into the thick wilderness,
+under the guidance of Passaconaway, and in a few days reached the
+Eldorado of the heretic and the persecuted, the colony of Roger
+Williams.  Passaconaway, ever after, remained friendly to the white men.
+As civilization advanced he retired before it, to Pennacook, now
+Concord, on the Merrimac, where the tribes of the Naumkeags,
+Piscataquas, Accomentas, and Agawams acknowledged his authority.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE OPIUM EATER.
+
+                                [1833.]
+
+     Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving from its lowest depths
+     of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me!
+     Here was a panacea, a pharmakon nepenthes for all human woes; here
+     was the secret of happiness about which philosophers had disputed
+     for so many ages: happiness might be bought for a penny, and
+     carried in the waistcoat pocket.--DEQUINCEY's "Confessions of an
+     Opium Eater."
+
+
+HE was a tall, thin personage, with a marked brow and a sunken eye.
+
+He stepped towards a closet of his apartment, and poured out a few drops
+of a dark liquid.  His hand shook, as he raised the glass which
+contained them to his lips; and with a strange shuddering, a nervous
+tremor, as if all the delicate chords of his system were unloosed and
+trembling, he turned away from his fearful draught.
+
+He saw that my eye was upon him; and I could perceive that his mind
+struggled desperately with the infirmity of his nature, as if ashamed of
+the utter weakness of its tabernacle.  He passed hastily up and down the
+room.  "You seem somewhat ill," I said, in the undecided tone of partial
+interrogatory.
+
+He paused, and passed his long thin fingers over his forehead.  "I am
+indeed ill," he said, slowly, and with that quavering, deep-drawn
+breathing, which is so indicative of anguish, mental and physical.
+"I am weak as a child, weak alike in mind and body, even when I am under
+the immediate influence of yonder drug."  And he pointed, as he spoke,
+to a phial, labelled "Laudanum," upon a table in the corner of the room.
+
+"My dear sir," said I, "for God's sake abandon your desperate practice:
+I know not, indeed, the nature of your afflictions, but I feel assured
+that you have yet the power to be happy.  You have, at least, warm
+friends to sympathize with you.  But forego, if possible, your
+pernicious stimulant of laudanum.  It is hurrying you to your grave."
+
+"It may be so," he replied, while another shudder ran along his nerves;
+"but why should I fear it?  I, who have become worthless to myself and
+annoying to my friends; exquisitely sensible of my true condition, yet
+wanting the power to change it; cursed with a lively apprehension of all
+that I ought now to be, yet totally incapable of even making an effort
+to be so!  My dear sir, I feel deeply the kindness of your motives, but
+it is too late for me to hope to profit by your advice."
+
+I was shocked at his answer.  "But can it be possible," said I, "that
+the influence of such an excessive use of opium can produce any
+alleviation of mental suffering? any real relief to the harassed mind?
+Is it not rather an aggravation?"
+
+"I know not," he said, seating himself with considerable calmness,--"I
+know not.  If it has not removed the evil, it has at least changed its
+character.  It has diverted my mind from its original grief; and has
+broken up and rendered divergent the concentrated agony which oppressed
+me.  It has, in a measure, substituted imaginary afflictions for real
+ones.  I cannot but confess, however, that the relief which it has
+afforded has been produced by the counteraction of one pain by another;
+very much like that of the Russian criminal, who gnaws his own flesh
+while undergoing the punishment of the knout.'"
+
+"For Heaven's sake," said I, "try to dispossess your mind of such horrid
+images.  There are many, very many resources yet left you.  Try the
+effect of society; and let it call into exercise those fine talents
+which all admit are so well calculated to be its ornament and pride.
+At least, leave this hypochondriacal atmosphere, and look out more
+frequently upon nature.  Your opium, if it be an alleviator, is, by your
+own confession, a most melancholy one.  It exorcises one demon to give
+place to a dozen others.
+
+              'With other ministrations, thou, O Nature!
+               Healest thy wandering and distempered child.'"
+
+He smiled bitterly; it was a heartless, melancholy relaxation of
+features, a mere muscular movement, with which the eye had no sympathy;
+for its wild and dreamy expression, the preternatural lustre, without
+transparency, remained unaltered, as if rebuking, with its cold, strange
+glare, the mockery around it.  He sat before me like a statue, whose eye
+alone retained its stony and stolid rigidity, while the other features
+were moved by some secret machinery into "a ghastly smile."
+
+"I am not desirous, even were it practicable," he said, "to defend the
+use of opium, or rather the abuse of it.  I can only say, that the
+substitutes you propose are not suited to my condition.  The world has
+now no enticements for me; society no charms.  Love, fame, wealth,
+honor, may engross the attention of the multitude; to me they are all
+shadows; and why should I grasp at them?  In the solitude of my own
+thoughts, looking on but not mingling in them, I have taken the full
+gauge of their hollow vanities.  No, leave me to myself, or rather to
+that new existence which I have entered upon, to the strange world to
+which my daily opiate invites me.  In society I am alone, fearfully
+solitary; for my mind broods gloomily over its besetting sorrow, and I
+make myself doubly miserable by contrasting my own darkness with the
+light and joy of all about me; nay, you cannot imagine what a very hard
+thing it is, at such times, to overcome some savage feelings of
+misanthropy which will present themselves.  But when I am alone, and
+under the influence of opium, I lose for a season my chief source of
+misery, myself; my mind takes a new and unnatural channel; and I have
+often thought that any one, even that of insanity, would be preferable
+to its natural one.  It is drawn, as it were, out of itself; and I
+realize in my own experience the fable of Pythagoras, of two distinct
+existences, enjoyed by the same intellectual being.
+
+"My first use of opium was the consequence of an early and very bitter
+disappointment.  I dislike to think of it, much more to speak of it.  I
+recollect, on a former occasion, you expressed some curiosity concerning
+it.  I then repelled that curiosity, for my mind was not in a situation
+to gratify it.  But now, since I have been talking of myself, I think I
+can go on with my story with a very decent composure.  In complying with
+your request, I cannot say that my own experience warrants, in any
+degree, the old and commonly received idea that sorrow loses half its
+poignancy by its revelation to others.  It was a humorous opinion of
+Sterne, that a blessing which ties up the tongue, and a mishap which
+unlooses it, are to be considered equal; and, indeed, I have known some
+people happy under all the changes of fortune, when they could find
+patient auditors.  Tully wept over his dead daughter, but when he
+chanced to think of the excellent things he could say on the subject,
+he considered it, on the whole, a happy circumstance.  But, for my own
+part, I cannot say with the Mariner in Coleridge's ballad, that
+
+            "'At an uncertain hour My agony returns;
+
+               And, till my ghastly tale is told,
+               This heart within me burns.'"
+
+He paused a moment, and rested his head upon his hand.  "You have seen
+Mrs. H------, of -------?" he inquired, somewhat abruptly.  I replied in
+the affirmative.
+
+"Do you not think her a fine woman?"
+
+"Yes, certainly, a fine woman.  She was once, I am told, very
+beautiful."
+
+"Once? is she not so now?" he asked.  "Well, I have heard the same
+before.  I sometimes think I should like to see her now, now that the
+mildew of years and perhaps of accusing recollections are upon her; and
+see her toss her gray curls as she used to do her dark ones, and act
+over again her old stratagem of smiles upon a face of wrinkles.  Just
+Heavens! were I revengeful to the full extent of my wrongs, I could wish
+her no worse punishment.
+
+"They told you truly, my dear sir,--she was beautiful, nay, externally,
+faultless.  Her figure was that of womanhood, just touching upon the
+meridian of perfection, from which nothing could be taken, and to which
+nothing could be added.  There was a very witchery in her smile,
+trembling, as it did, over her fine Grecian features, like the play of
+moonlight upon a shifting and beautiful cloud.
+
+"Her voice was music, low, sweet, bewildering.  I have heard it a
+thousand times in my dreams.  It floated around me, like the tones of
+some rare instrument, unseen by the hearer; for, beautiful as she was,
+you could not think of her, or of her loveliness, while she was
+speaking; it was that sweetly wonderful voice, seemingly abstracted from
+herself, pouring forth the soft current of its exquisite cadence, which
+alone absorbed the attention.  Like that one of Coleridge's heroines,
+you could half feel, half fancy, that it had a separate being of its
+own, a spiritual presence manifested to but one of the senses; a living
+something, whose mode of existence was for the ear alone.--[See Memoirs
+of Maria Eleonora Schoning.]
+
+"But what shall I say of the mind?  What of the spirit, the resident
+divinity of so fair a temple?  Vanity, vanity, all was vanity;
+a miserable, personal vanity, too, unrelieved by one noble aspiration,
+one generous feeling; the whited sepulchre spoken of of old, beautiful
+without, but dark and unseemly within.
+
+"I look back with wonder and astonishment to that period of my life,
+when such a being claimed and received the entire devotion of my heart.
+Her idea blended with or predominated over all others.  It was the
+common centre in my mind from which all the radii of thought had their
+direction; the nucleus around which I had gathered all that my ardent
+imagination could conceive, or a memory stored with all the delicious
+dreams of poetry and romances could embody, of female excellence and
+purity and constancy.
+
+"It is idle to talk of the superior attractions of intellectual beauty,
+when compared with mere external loveliness.  The mind, invisible and
+complicated and indefinite, does not address itself directly to the
+senses.  It is comprehended only by its similitude in others.  It
+reveals itself, even then, but slowly and imperfectly.  But the beauty
+of form and color, the grace of motion, the harmony of tone, are seen
+and felt and appreciated at once.  The image of substantial and material
+loveliness once seen leaves an impression as distinct and perfect upon
+the retina of memory as upon that of the eyes.  It does not rise before
+us in detached and disconnected proportions, like that of spiritual
+loveliness, but in crowds, and in solitude, and in all the throngful
+varieties of thought and feeling and action, the symmetrical whole, the
+beautiful perfection comes up in the vision of memory, and stands, like
+a bright angel, between us and all other impressions of outward or
+immaterial beauty.
+
+"I saw her, and could not forget her; I sought her society, and was
+gratified with it.  It is true, I sometimes (in the first stages of my
+attachment) had my misgivings in relation to her character.  I sometimes
+feared that her ideas were too much limited to the perishing beauty of
+her person.  But to look upon her graceful figure yielding to the dance,
+or reclining in its indolent symmetry; to watch the beautiful play of
+coloring upon her cheek, and the moonlight transit of her smile; to
+study her faultless features in their delicate and even thoughtful
+repose, or when lighted up into conversational vivacity, was to forget
+everything, save the exceeding and bewildering fascination before me.
+Like the silver veil of Khorassan it shut out from my view the mental
+deformity beneath it.  I could not reason with myself about her; I had
+no power of ratiocination which could overcome the blinding dazzle of
+her beauty.  The master-passion, which had wrestled down all others,
+gave to every sentiment of the mind something of its own peculiar
+character.
+
+"I will not trouble you with a connected history of my first love, my
+boyish love, you may perhaps call it.  Suffice it to say, that on the
+revelation of that love, it was answered by its object warmly and
+sympathizingly.  I had hardly dared to hope for her favor; for I had
+magnified her into something far beyond mortal desert; and to hear from
+her own lips an avowal of affection seemed more like the condescension
+of a pitying angel than the sympathy of a creature of passion and
+frailty like myself.  I was miserably self-deceived; and self-deception
+is of a nature most repugnant to the healthy operation of truth.  We
+suspect others, but seldom ourselves.  The deception becomes a part of
+our self-love; we hold back the error even when Reason would pluck it
+away from us.
+
+"Our whole life may be considered as made up of earnest yearnings after
+objects whose value increases with the difficulties of obtaining them,
+and which seem greater and more desirable, from our imperfect knowledge
+of their nature, just as the objects of the outward vision are magnified
+and exalted when seen through a natural telescope of mist.  Imagination
+fills up and supplies the picture, of which we can only catch the
+outlines, with colors brighter, and forms more perfect, than those of
+reality.  Yet, you may perhaps wonder why, after my earnest desire had
+been gratified, after my love had found sympathy in its object, I did
+not analyze more closely the inherent and actual qualities of her heart
+and intellect.  But living, as I did, at a considerable distance from
+her, and seeing her only under circumstances calculated to confirm
+previous impressions, I had few advantages, even had I desired to do so,
+of studying her true character.  The world had not yet taught me its
+ungenerous lesson.  I had not yet learned to apply the rack of
+philosophical analysis to the objects around me, and test, by a cold
+process of reasoning, deduced from jealous observation, the reality of
+all which wore the outward semblance of innocence and beauty.  And it
+may be, too, that the belief, nay, the assurance, from her own lips, and
+from the thousand voiceless but eloquent signs which marked our
+interviews, that I was beloved, made me anxious to deceive even myself,
+by investing her with those gifts of the intellect and the heart,
+without which her very love would have degraded its object.  It is not
+in human nature, at least it was not in mine, to embitter the delicious
+aliment which is offered to our vanity, by admitting any uncomfortable
+doubts of the source from which it is derived.
+
+"And thus it was that I came on, careless and secure, dreaming over and
+over the same bright dream; without any doubt, without fear, and in the
+perfect confidence of an unlimited trust, until the mask fell off, all
+at once; without giving me time for preparation, without warning or
+interlude; and the features of cold, heartless, systematic treachery
+glared full upon me.
+
+"I saw her wedded to another.  It was a beautiful morning; and never had
+the sun shone down on a gayer assemblage than that which gathered
+together at the village church.  I witnessed the imposing ceremony which
+united the only one being I had ever truly loved to a happy and favored,
+because more wealthy, rival.  As the grayhaired man pronounced the
+inquiring challenge, 'If any man can show just cause why they may not
+lawfully be joined together, let him now speak or else forever after
+hold his peace,' I struggled forward, and would have cried out, but the
+words died away in my throat.  And the ceremony went on, and the death-
+like trance into which I had fallen was broken by the voice of the
+priest: 'I require and charge ye both, as ye will answer at the dreadful
+day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that
+if either of you know of any impediment why ye may not lawfully be
+joined together in matrimony, ye do now confess it; for be ye well
+assured, that if any persons are joined together otherwise than as God's
+word doth allow, their marriage is not lawful.'  As the solemn tones of
+the old man died away in the church aisles, I almost expected to hear a
+supernatural voice calling upon him to forbear.  But there was no sound.
+For an instant my eyes met those of the bride; the blood boiled rapidly
+to her forehead, and then sank back, and she was as pale as if death had
+been in the glance I had given her.  And I could see the folds of her
+rich dress tremble, and her beautiful lips quiver; and she turned away
+her eyes, and the solemn rites were concluded.
+
+"I returned to my lodgings.  I heeded not the gay smiles and free
+merriment of those around me.  I hurried along like one who wanders
+abroad in a dark dream; for I could hardly think of the events of the
+morning as things of reality.  But, when I spurred my horse aside, as
+the carriage which contained the newly married swept by me, the terrible
+truth came upon me like a tangible substance, and one black and evil
+thought passed over my mind, like the whispered suggestion of Satan.  It
+was a feeling of blood, a sensation like that of grasping the strangling
+throat of an enemy.  I started from it with horror.  For the first time
+a thought of murder had risen up in my bosom; and I quenched it with the
+natural abhorrence of a nature prone to mildness and peace.
+
+"I reached my chamber, and, exhausted alike in mind and body, I threw
+myself upon my bed, but not to sleep.  A sense of my utter desolation
+and loneliness came over me, blended with a feeling of bitter and
+unmerited wrong.  I recollected the many manifestations of affection
+which I had received from her who had that day given herself, in the
+presence of Heaven, to another; and I called to mind the thousand
+sacrifices I had made to her lightest caprices, to every shade and
+variation of her temper; and then came the maddening consciousness of
+the black ingratitude which had requited such tenderness.  Then, too,
+came the thought, bitter to a pride like mine, that the cold world had a
+knowledge of my misfortunes; that I should be pointed out as a
+disappointed man, a subject for the pity of some, and the scorn and
+jestings of others.  Rage and shame mingled with the keen agony of
+outraged feeling.  'I will not endure it,' I said, mentally, springing
+from my bed and crossing the chamber with a flushed brow and a strong
+step; 'never!'  And I ground my teeth upon each other, while a fierce
+light seemed to break in upon my brain; it was the light of the
+Tempter's smile, and I almost laughed aloud as the horrible thought of
+suicide started before me.  I felt that I might escape the ordeal of
+public scorn and pity; that I might bid the world and its falsehood
+defiance, and end, by one manly effort, the agony of an existence whose
+every breath was torment.
+
+"My resolution was fixed.  'I will never see another morrow!' I said,
+sternly, but with a calmness which almost astonished me.  Indeed, I
+seemed gifted with a supernatural firmness, as I made my arrangements
+for the last day of suffering which I was to endure.  A few friends had
+been invited to dine with me, and I prepared to meet them.  They came at
+the hour appointed with smiling faces and warm and friendly greetings;
+and I received them as if nothing had happened, with even a more
+enthusiastic welcome than was my wont.
+
+"Oh! it is terrible to smile when the heart is breaking! to talk
+lightly and freely and mirthfully, when every feeling of the mind is
+wrung with unutterable agony; to mingle in the laugh and in the gay
+volleys of convivial fellowship,
+
+              'With the difficult utterance of one
+               Whose heart is with an iron nerve put down.'
+
+"Yet all this I endured, hour after hour, until my friends departed and I
+had pressed their hands as at a common parting, while my heart whispered
+an everlasting farewell!
+
+"It was late when they left me.  I walked out to look for the last time
+upon Nature in her exceeding beauty.  I hardly acknowledged to myself
+that such was my purpose; but yet I did feel that it was so; and that I
+was taking an everlasting farewell of the beautiful things around me.
+The sun was just setting; and the hills, that rose like pillars of the
+blue horizon, were glowing with a light which was fast deserting the
+valleys.  It was an evening of summer; everything was still; not a leaf
+stirred in the dark, overshadowing foliage; but, silent and beautiful as
+a picture, the wide scenery of rock and hill and woodland, stretched
+away before me; and, beautiful as it was, it seemed to possess a newness
+and depth of beauty beyond its ordinary appearance, as if to aggravate
+the pangs of the last, long farewell.
+
+"They do not err who believe that man has a sympathy with even inanimate
+Nature, deduced from a common origin; a chain of co-existence and
+affinity connecting the outward forms of natural objects with his own
+fearful and wonderful machinery; something, in short, manifested in his
+love of flowing waters, and soft green shadows, and pleasant blowing
+flowers, and in his admiration of the mountain, stretching away into
+heaven, sublimed and awful in its cloudy distance; the heave and swell
+of the infinite ocean; the thunder of the leaping cataract; and the
+onward rush of mighty rivers, which tells of its original source, and
+bears evidence of its kindred affinities.  Nor was the dream of the
+ancient Chaldean 'all a dream.'  The stars of heaven, the beauty and the
+glory above us, have their influences and their power, not evil and
+malignant and partial and irrevocable, but holy and tranquillizing and
+benignant, a moral influence, by which all may profit if they will do
+so.  And I have often marvelled at the hard depravity of that human
+heart which could sanction a deed of violence and crime in the calm
+solitudes of Nature, and surrounded by the enduring evidences of an
+overruling Intelligence.  I could conceive of crime, growing up rank and
+monstrous in the unwholesome atmosphere of the thronged city, amidst the
+taint of moral as well as physical pestilence, and surrounded only by
+man and the works of man.  But there is something in the harmony and
+quiet of the natural world which presents a reproving antagonism to the
+fiercer passions of the human heart; an eye of solemn reprehension looks
+out from the still places of Nature, as if the Great Soul of the
+Universe had chosen the mute creations of his power to be the witnesses
+of the deeds done in the body, the researchers of the bosoms of men.
+
+"And then, even at that awful moment, I could feel the bland and gentle
+ministrations of Nature; I could feel the fever of my heart cooling, and
+a softer haze of melancholy stealing over the blackness of my despair;
+and the fierce passions which had distracted me giving place to the calm
+of a settled anguish, a profound sorrow, the quiet gloom of an
+overshadowing woe, in which love and hatred and wrong were swallowed up
+and lost.  I no longer hated the world; but I felt that it had nothing
+for me; that I was no longer a part and portion of its harmonious
+elements; affliction had shut me out forever from the pale of human
+happiness and sympathy, and hope pointed only to the resting-place of
+the grave!
+
+"I stood steadily gazing at the setting sun.  It touched and sat upon
+the hill-top like a great circle of fire.  I had never before fully
+comprehended the feeling of the amiable but misguided Rousseau, who at
+his death-hour desired to be brought into the open air, that the last
+glance of his failing eye might drink in the glory of the sunset
+heavens, and the light of his great intellect and that of Nature go out
+together.  For surely never did the Mexican idolater mark with deeper
+emotion the God of his worship, for the last time veiling his awful
+countenance, than did I, untainted by superstition, yet full of perfect
+love for the works of Infinite Wisdom, watch over the departure of the
+most glorious of them all.  I felt, even to agony, the truth of these
+exquisite lines of the Milesian poet:
+
+                   'Blest power of sunshine, genial day!
+                    What joy, what life is in thy ray!
+                    To feel thee is such real bliss,
+                    That, had the world no joy but this,
+                    To sit in sunshine, calm and sweet,
+                    It were a world too exquisite
+                    For man to leave it for the gloom,
+                    The dull, cold shadow of the tomb!'
+
+"Never shall I forget my sensations when the sun went down utterly from
+my sight.  It was like receiving the last look of a dying friend.  To
+others he might bring life and health and joy, on the morrow; but tome
+he would never rise.  As this thought came over me, I felt a stifling
+sensation in my throat, tears started in my eyes, and my heart almost
+wavered from its purpose.  But the bent bow had only relaxed for a
+single instant; it returned again to its strong and abiding tension.
+
+"I was alone in my chamber once more.  A single lamp burned gloomily
+before me; and on the table at my side stood a glass of laudanum.  I had
+prepared everything.  I had written my last letter, and had now only to
+drink the fatal draught, and lie down to my last sleep.  I heard the old
+village clock strike eleven.  'I may as well do it now as ever,' I said
+mentally, and my hand moved towards the glass.  But my courage failed
+me; my hand shook, and some moments elapsed before I could sufficiently
+quiet my nerves to lift the glass containing the fatal liquid.  The
+blood ran cold upon my heart, and my brain reeled, as again and again
+I lifted the poison to my closed lips.  'It must be done,' thought I,
+'I must drink it.'  With a desperate effort I unlocked my clenched teeth
+and the deed was done!
+
+"'O God, have mercy upon me!' I murmured, as the empty glass fell from
+my hand.  I threw myself upon the bed, and awaited the awful
+termination.  An age of unutterable misery seemed crowded into a brief
+moment.  All the events of my past life, a life, as it then seemed to
+me, made up of folly and crime, rose distinct before me, like accusing
+witnesses, as if the recording angel had unrolled to my view the full
+and black catalogue of my unnumbered sins:--
+
+              'O'er the soul Winters of memory seemed to roll,
+               And gather, in that drop of time,
+               A life of pain, an age of crime.'
+
+"I felt that what I had done was beyond recall; and the Phantom of Death,
+as it drew nearer, wore an aspect darker and more terrible.  I thought
+of the coffin, the shroud, and the still and narrow grave, into whose
+dumb and frozen solitude none but the gnawing worm intrudes.  And then
+my thoughts wandered away into the vagueness and mystery of eternity, I
+was rushing uncalled for into the presence of a just and pure God, with
+a spirit unrepenting, unannealed!  And I tried to pray and could not;
+for a heaviness, a dull strange torpor crept over me.  Consciousness
+went out slowly.  'This is death,' thought I; yet I felt no pain,
+nothing save a weary drowsiness, against which I struggled in vain.
+
+"My next sensations were those of calmness, deep, ineffable, an
+unearthly quiet; a suspension or rather oblivion of every mental
+affliction; a condition of the mind betwixt the thoughts of wakefulness
+and the dreams of sleep.  It seemed to me that the gulf between mind and
+matter had been passed over, and that I had entered upon a new
+existence.  I had no memory, no hope, no sorrow; nothing but a dim
+consciousness of a pleasurable and tranquil being.  Gradually, however,
+the delusion vanished.  I was sensible of still wearing the fetters of
+the flesh, yet they galled no longer; the burden was lifted from my
+heart, it beat happily and calmly, as in childhood.  As the stronger
+influences of my opiate (for I had really swallowed nothing more, as the
+druggist, suspecting from the incoherence of my language, that I was
+meditating some fearful purpose, furnished me with a harmless, though
+not ineffective draught) passed off, the events of the past came back to
+me.  It was like the slow lifting of a curtain from a picture of which I
+was a mere spectator, about which I could reason calmly, and trace
+dispassionately its light and shadow.  Having satisfied myself that I
+had been deceived in the quantity of opium I had taken, I became also
+convinced that I had at last discovered the great antidote for which
+philosophy had exhausted its resources, the fabled Lethe, the oblivion
+of human sorrow.  The strong necessity of suicide had passed away; life,
+even for me, might be rendered tolerable by the sovereign panacea of
+opium, the only true minister to a mind diseased, the sought 'kalon'
+found.
+
+"From that day I have been habitually an opium eater.  I am perfectly
+sensible that the constant use of the pernicious drug has impaired my
+health; but I cannot relinquish it.  Some time since I formed a
+resolution to abandon it, totally and at once; but had not strength
+enough to carry it into practice.  The very attempt to do so nearly
+drove me to madness.  The great load of mental agony which had been
+lifted up and held aloof by the daily applied power of opium sank back
+upon my heart like a crushing weight.  Then, too, my physical sufferings
+were extreme; an indescribable irritation, a general uneasiness
+tormented me incessantly.  I can only think of it as a total
+disarrangement of the whole nervous system, the jarring of all the
+thousand chords of sensitiveness, each nerve having its own particular
+pain.--[ Essay on the Effects of Opium, London, 1763.]
+
+"De Quincey, in his wild, metaphysical, and eloquent, yet, in many
+respects, fancy sketch, considers the great evil resulting from the use
+of opium to be the effect produced upon the mind during the hours of
+sleep, the fearful inquietude of unnatural dreams.  My own dreams have
+been certainly of a different order from those which haunted me previous
+to my experience in opium eating.  But I cannot easily believe that
+opium necessarily introduces a greater change in the mind's sleeping
+operations, than in those of its wakefulness.
+
+"At one period, indeed, while suffering under a general, nervous
+debility, from which I am even now but partially relieved, my troubled
+and broken sleep was overshadowed by what I can only express as
+'a horror of thick darkness.'  There was nothing distinct or certain in
+my visions, all was clouded, vague, hideous; sounds faint and awful, yet
+unknown; the sweep of heavy wings, the hollow sound of innumerable
+footsteps, the glimpse of countless apparitions, and darkness falling
+like a great cloud from heaven.
+
+"I can scarcely give you an adequate idea of my situation in these
+dreams, without comparing it with that of the ancient Egyptians while
+suffering under the plague of darkness.  I never read the awful
+description of this curse, without associating many of its horrors with
+those of my own experience.
+
+"'But they, sleeping the same sleep that night, which was indeed
+intolerable, and which came upon them out of the bottoms of inevitable
+hell,
+
+"'Were partly vexed with monstrous apparitions, and partly fainted; for
+a sudden fear and not looked for, came upon them.'
+
+"'For neither might the corner which held them keep them from fear; but
+noises, as of waters falling down, sounded about them, and sad visions
+appeared unto them, with heavy countenances.
+
+"'Whether it were a whistling wind, or a melodious voice of birds among
+the spreading branches, or a pleasing fall of water running violently;
+
+"'Or, a terrible sound of stones cast down, or, a running that could not
+be seen, of skipping beasts, or a roaring voice of most savage wild
+beasts, or a rebounding echo from the hollow mountains: these things
+made them to swoon for fear.'--[Wisdom of Solomon, chapter xvii.]
+
+"That creative faculty of the eye, upon which Mr. De Quincey dwells so
+strongly, I have myself experienced.  Indeed, it has been the principal
+cause of suffering which has connected itself with my habit of opium
+eating.  It developed itself at first in a recurrence of the childish
+faculty of painting upon the darkness whatever suggested itself to the
+mind; anon, those figures which had before been called up only at will
+became the cause, instead of the effect, of the mind's employment; in
+other words, they came before me in the night-time, like real images,
+and independent of any previous volition of thought.  I have often,
+after retiring to my bed, seen, looking through the thick wall of
+darkness round about me, the faces of those whom I had not known for
+years, nay, since childhood; faces, too, of the dead, called up, as it
+were, from the church-yard and the wilderness and the deep waters, and
+betraying nothing of the grave's terrible secrets.  And in the same way,
+some of the more important personages I had read of, in history and
+romance, glided often before me, like an assembly of apparitions, each
+preserving, amidst the multitudinous combinations of my visions, his own
+individuality and peculiar characteristics.--[Vide Emanuel Count
+Swedenborg, Nicolai of Berlin's Account of Spectral Illusion, Edinburgh
+Phrenological Journal.]
+
+"These images were, as you may suppose, sufficiently annoying, yet they
+came and went without exciting any emotions of terror.  But a change at
+length came over them, an awful distinctness and a semblance of reality,
+which, operating upon nerves weakened and diseased, shook the very
+depths of my spirit with a superstitious awe, and against which reason
+and philosophy, for a time, struggled in vain.
+
+"My mind had for some days been dwelling with considerable solicitude
+upon an intimate friend, residing in a distant city.  I had heard that
+he was extremely ill, indeed, that his life was despaired of; and I may
+mention that at this period all my mind's operations were dilatory;
+there were no sudden emotions; passion seemed exhausted; and when once
+any new train of thought had been suggested, it gradually incorporated
+itself with those which had preceded it, until it finally became sole
+and predominant, just as certain plants of the tropical islands wind
+about and blend with and finally take the place of those of another
+species.  And perhaps to this peculiarity of the mental economy, the
+gradual concentring of the mind in a channel, narrowing to that point of
+condensation where thought becomes sensible to sight as well as feeling,
+may be mainly attributed the vision I am about to describe.
+
+"I was lying in my bed, listless and inert; it was broad day, for the
+easterly light fell in strongly through the parted curtains.  I felt,
+all at once, a strong curiosity, blended with an unaccountable dread, to
+look upon a small table which stood near the bedside.  I felt certain of
+seeing something fearful, and yet I knew not what; there was an awe and
+a fascination upon me, more dreadful from their very vagueness.  I lay
+for some time hesitating and actually trembling, until the agony of
+suspense became too strong for endurance.  I opened my eyes and fixed
+them upon the dreaded object.  Upon the table lay what seemed to me a
+corpse, wrapped about in the wintry habiliments of the grave, the corpse
+of my friend.
+
+     [William Hone, celebrated for his antiquarian researches, has given
+     a distinct and highly interesting account of spectral illusion, in
+     his own experience, in his Every Day Book.  The artist Cellini has
+     made a similar statement.]
+
+"For a moment, the circumstances of time and place were forgotten; and
+the spectre seemed to me a natural reality, at which I might sorrow, but
+not wonder.  The utter fallacy of this idea was speedily detected; and
+then I endeavored to consider the present vision, like those which had
+preceded it, a mere delusion, a part of the phenomena of opium eating.
+I accordingly closed my eyes for an instant, and then looked again in
+full expectation that the frightful object would no longer be visible.
+It was still there; the body lay upon its side; the countenance turned
+full towards me,--calm, quiet, even beautiful, but certainly that of
+death:
+
+              'Ere yet Decay's effacing fingers
+               Had swept the lines where Beauty lingers'
+
+and the white brow, and its light shadowy hair, and the cold, still
+familiar features lay evident and manifest to the influx of the
+strengthening twilight.  A cold agony crept over me; I buried my head in
+the bed-clothes, in a child-like fear, and when I again ventured to look
+up, the spectre had vanished.  The event made a strong impression on my
+mind; and I can scarcely express the feeling of relief which was
+afforded, a few days after, by a letter from the identical friend in
+question, informing me of his recovery of health.
+
+"It would be a weary task, and one which you would no doubt thank me for
+declining, to detail the circumstances of a hundred similar visitations,
+most of which were, in fact, but different combinations of the same
+illusion.  One striking exception I will mention, as it relates to some
+passages of my early history which you have already heard.
+
+"I have never seen Mrs. H since her marriage.  Time, and the continued
+action of opium, deadening the old sensibilities of the heart and
+awakening new ones, have effected a wonderful change in my feelings
+towards her.  Little as the confession may argue in favor of my early
+passion, I seldom think of her, save with a feeling very closely allied
+to indifference.  Yet I have often seen her in my spectral illusions,
+young and beautiful as ever, but always under circumstances which formed
+a wide contrast between her spectral appearance and all my recollections
+of the real person.  The spectral face, which I often saw looking in
+upon me, in my study, when the door was ajar, and visible only in the
+uncertain lamplight, or peering over me in the moonlight solitude of my
+bed-chamber, when I was just waking from sleep, was uniformly subject
+to, and expressive of, some terrible hate, or yet more terrible anguish.
+Its first appearance was startling in the extreme.  It was the face of
+one of the fabled furies: the demon glared in the eye, the nostril was
+dilated, the pale lip compressed, and the brow bent and darkened; yet
+above all, and mingled with all, the supremacy of human beauty was
+manifest, as if the dream of Eastern superstition had been realized, and
+a fierce and foul spirit had sought out and animated into a fiendish
+existence some beautiful sleeper of the grave.  The other expression of
+the countenance of the apparition, that of agony, I accounted for on
+rational principles.  Some years ago I saw, and was deeply affected by,
+a series of paintings representing the tortures of a Jew in the Holy
+Inquisition; and the expression of pain in the countenance of the victim
+I at once recognized in that of the apparition, rendered yet more
+distressing by the feminine and beautiful features upon which it rested.
+
+"I am not naturally superstitious; but, shaken and clouded as my mind
+had been by the use of opium, I could not wholly divest it of fear when
+these phantoms beset me.  Yet, on all other occasions, save that of
+their immediate presence, I found no difficulty in assigning their
+existence to a diseased state of the bodily organs, and a corresponding
+sympathy of the mind, rendering it capable of receiving and reflecting
+the false, fantastic, and unnatural images presented to it.
+
+     [One of our most celebrated medical writers considers spectral
+     illusion a disease, in which false perceptions take place in some
+     of the senses; thus, when the excitement of motion is produced in a
+     particular organ, that organ does not vibrate with the impression
+     made upon it, but communicates it to another part on which a
+     similar impression was formerly made.  Nicolai states that he made
+     his illusion a source of philosophical amusement.  The spectres
+     which haunted him came in the day time as well as the night, and
+     frequently when he was surrounded by his friends; the ideal images
+     mingling with the real ones, and visible only to himself.  Bernard
+     Barton, the celebrated Quaker poet, describes an illusion of this
+     nature in a manner peculiarly striking:--
+
+               "I only knew thee as thou wert,
+               A being not of earth!
+               "I marvelled much they could not see
+               Thou comest from above
+               And often to myself I said,
+               'How can they thus approach the dead?'
+
+               "But though all these, with fondness warm,
+               Said welcome o'er and o'er,
+               Still that expressive shade or form
+               Was silent, as before!
+               And yet its stillness never brought
+               To them one hesitating thought."]
+
+"I recollected that the mode of exorcism which was successfully adopted
+by Nicolai of Berlin, when haunted by similar fantasies, was a resort to
+the simple process of blood-letting.  I accordingly made trial of it,
+but without the desired effect.  Fearful, from the representations of my
+physicians, and from some of my own sensations, that the almost daily
+recurrence of my visions might ultimately lead to insanity, I came to
+the resolution of reducing my daily allowance of opium; and, confining
+myself, with the most rigid pertinacity, to a quantity not exceeding one
+third of what I had formerly taken, I became speedily sensible of a most
+essential change in my condition.  A state of comparative health, mental
+and physical with calmer sleep and a more natural exercise of the organs
+of vision, succeeded.  I have made many attempts at a further reduction,
+but have been uniformly unsuccessful, owing to the extreme and almost
+unendurable agony occasioned thereby.
+
+"The peculiar creative faculty of the eye, the fearful gift of a
+diseased vision, still remains, but materially weakened and divested of
+its former terrors.  My mind has recovered in some degree its shaken and
+suspended faculties.  But happiness, the buoyant and elastic happiness
+of earlier days, has departed forever.  Although, apparently, a
+practical disciple of Behmen, I am no believer in his visionary creed.
+Quiet is not happiness; nor can the absence of all strong and painful
+emotion compensate for the weary heaviness of inert existence,
+passionless, dreamless, changeless.  The mind requires the excitement of
+active and changeful thought; the intellectual fountain, like the pool
+of Bethesda, has a more healthful influence when its deep waters are
+troubled.  There may, indeed, be happiness in those occasional 'sabbaths
+of the soul,' when calmness, like a canopy, overshadows it, and the
+mind, for a brief season, eddies quietly round and round, instead of
+sweeping onward; but none can exist in the long and weary stagnation of
+feeling, the silent, the monotonous, neverending calm, broken by neither
+hope nor fear."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE PROSELYTES.
+
+                                 [1833]
+
+THE student sat at his books.  All the day he had been poring over an
+old and time-worn volume; and the evening found him still absorbed in
+its contents.  It was one of that interminable series of controversial
+volumes, containing the theological speculations of the ancient fathers
+of the Church.  With the patient perseverance so characteristic of his
+countrymen, he was endeavoring to detect truth amidst the numberless
+inconsistencies of heated controversy; to reconcile jarring
+propositions; to search out the thread of scholastic argument amidst
+the rant of prejudice and the sallies of passion, and the coarse
+vituperations of a spirit of personal bitterness, but little in
+accordance with the awful gravity of the question at issue.
+
+Wearied and baffled in his researches, he at length closed the volume,
+and rested his care-worn forehead upon his hand.  "What avail," he said,
+"these long and painful endeavors, these midnight vigils, these weary
+studies, before which heart and flesh are failing?  What have I gained?
+I have pushed my researches wide and far; my life has been one long and
+weary lesson; I have shut out from me the busy and beautiful world; I
+have chastened every youthful impulse; and at an age when the heart
+should be lightest and the pulse the freest, I am grave and silent and
+sorrowful,' and the frost of a premature age is gathering around my
+heart.  Amidst these ponderous tomes, surrounded by the venerable
+receptacles of old wisdom, breathing, instead of the free air of heaven,
+the sepulchral dust of antiquity, I have become assimilated to the
+objects around me; my very nature has undergone a metamorphosis of which
+Pythagoras never dreamed.  I am no longer a reasoning creature, looking
+at everything within the circle of human investigation with a clear and
+self-sustained vision, but the cheated follower of metaphysical
+absurdities, a mere echo of scholastic subtilty.  God knows that my aim
+has been a lofty and pure one, that I have buried myself in this living
+tomb, and counted the health of this His feeble and outward image as
+nothing in comparison with that of the immortal and inward
+representation and shadow of His own Infinite Mind; that I have toiled
+through what the world calls wisdom, the lore of the old fathers and
+time-honored philosophy, not for the dream of power and gratified
+ambition, not for the alchemist's gold or life-giving elixir, but with
+an eye single to that which I conceived to be the most fitting object of
+a godlike spirit, the discovery of Truth,--truth perfect and unclouded,
+truth in its severe and perfect beauty, truth as it sits in awe and
+holiness in the presence of its Original and Source!
+
+"Was my aim too lofty?  It cannot be; for my Creator has given me a
+spirit which would spurn a meaner one.  I have studied to act in
+accordance with His will; yet have I felt all along like one walking in
+blindness.  I have listened to the living champions of the Church; I
+have pored over the remains of the dead; but doubt and heavy darkness
+still rest upon my pathway.  I find contradiction where I had looked for
+harmony; ambiguity where I had expected clearness; zeal taking the place
+of reason; anger, intolerance, personal feuds and sectarian bitterness,
+interminable discussions and weary controversies; while infinite Truth,
+for which I have been seeking, lies still beyond, or seen, if at all,
+only by transient and unsatisfying glimpses, obscured and darkened by
+miserable subtilties and cabalistic mysteries."
+
+He was interrupted by the entrance of a servant with a letter.  The
+student broke its well-known seal, and read, in a delicate chirography,
+the following words:--
+
+"DEAR ERNEST,--A stranger from the English Kingdom, of gentle birth and
+education, hath visited me at the request of the good Princess Elizabeth
+of the Palatine.  He is a preacher of the new faith, a zealous and
+earnest believer in the gifts of the Spirit, but not like John de
+Labadie or the lady Schurmans.
+
+     [J. de Labadie, Anna Maria Schurmans, and others, dissenters from
+     the French Protestants, established themselves in Holland, 1670.]
+
+"He speaks like one sent on a message from heaven, a message of wisdom
+and salvation.  Come, Ernest, and see him; for he hath but a brief hour
+to tarry with us.  Who knoweth but that this stranger may be
+commissioned to lead us to that which we have so long and anxiously
+sought for,--the truth as it is in God.
+                                            "LEONORA."
+
+"Now may Heaven bless the sweet enthusiast for this interruption of my
+bitter reflections!" said the student, in the earnest tenderness of
+impassioned feeling.  "She knows how gladly I shall obey her summons;
+she knows how readily I shall forsake the dogmas of our wisest
+schoolmen, to obey the slightest wishes of a heart pure and generous as
+hers."
+
+He passed hastily through one of the principal streets of the city to
+the dwelling of the lady, Eleonora.
+
+In a large and gorgeous apartment sat the Englishman, his plain and
+simple garb contrasting strongly with the richness and luxury around
+him.  He was apparently quite young, and of a tall and commanding
+figure.  His countenance was calm and benevolent; it bore no traces of
+passion; care had not marked it; there was a holy serenity in its
+expression, which seemed a token of that inward "peace which passeth all
+understanding."
+
+"And this is thy friend, Eleonora?" said the stranger, as he offered his
+hand to Ernest.  "I hear," he said, addressing the latter, "thou hast
+been a hard student and a lover of philosophy."
+
+"I am but a humble inquirer after Truth," replied Ernest.
+
+"From whence hast thou sought it?"
+
+"From the sacred volume, from the lore of the old fathers, from the
+fountains of philosophy, and from my own brief experience of human
+life."
+
+"And hast thou attained thy object?"
+
+"Alas, no!" replied the student; "I have thus far toiled in vain."
+
+"Ah! thus must the children of this world ever toil, wearily, wearily,
+but in vain.  We grasp at shadows, we grapple with the fashionless air,
+we walk in the blindness of our own vain imaginations, we compass heaven
+and earth for our objects, and marvel that we find them not.  The truth
+which is of God, the crown of wisdom, the pearl of exceeding price,
+demands not this vain-glorious research; easily to be entreated, it
+lieth within the reach of all.  The eye of the humblest spirit may
+discern it.  For He who respecteth not the persons of His children hath
+not set it afar off, unapproachable save to the proud and lofty; but
+hath made its refreshing fountains to murmur, as it were, at the very
+door of our hearts.  But in the encumbering hurry of the world we
+perceive it not; in the noise of our daily vanities we hear not the
+waters of Siloah which go softly.  We look widely abroad; we lose
+ourselves in vain speculation; we wander in the crooked paths of those
+who have gone before us; yea, in the language of one of the old fathers,
+we ask the earth and it replieth not, we question the sea and its
+inhabitants, we turn to the sun, and the moon, and the stars of heaven,
+and they may not satisfy us; we ask our eyes, and they cannot see, and
+our ears, and they cannot hear; we turn to books, and they delude us; we
+seek philosophy, and no response cometh from its dead and silent
+learning.
+
+     [August.  Soliloq.  Cap.  XXXI.  "Interrogavi Terram," etc.]
+
+"It is not in the sky above, nor in the air around, nor in the earth
+beneath; it is in our own spirits, it lives within us; and if we would
+find it, like the lost silver of the woman of the parable, we must look
+at home, to the inward temple, which the inward eye discovereth, and
+wherein the spirit of all truth is manifested.  The voice of that spirit
+is still and small, and the light about it shineth in darkness.  But
+truth is there; and if we seek it in low humility, in a patient waiting
+upon its author, with a giving up of our natural pride of knowledge, a
+seducing of self, a quiet from all outward endeavor, it will assuredly
+be revealed and fully made known.  For as the angel rose of old from the
+altar of Manoah even so shall truth arise from the humbling sacrifice of
+self-knowledge and human vanity, in all its eternal and ineffable
+beauty.
+
+"Seekest thou, like Pilate, after truth?  Look thou within.  The holy
+principle is there; that in whose light the pure hearts of all time have
+rejoiced.  It is 'the great light of ages' of which Pythagoras speaks,
+the 'good spirit' of Socrates; the 'divine mind' of Anaxagoras; the
+'perfect principle' of Plato; the 'infallible and immortal law, and
+divine power of reason' of Philo.  It is the 'unbegotten principle and
+source of all light,' whereof Timmus testifieth; the 'interior guide of
+the soul and everlasting foundation of virtue,' spoken of by Plutarch.
+Yea, it was the hope and guide of those virtuous Gentiles, who, doing by
+nature the things contained in the law, became a law unto themselves.
+
+"Look to thyself.  Turn thine eye inward.  Heed not the opinion of the
+world.  Lean not upon the broken reed of thy philosophy, thy verbal
+orthodoxy, thy skill in tongues, thy knowledge of the Fathers.  Remember
+that truth was seen by the humble fishermen of Galilee, and overlooked
+by the High Priest of the Temple, by the Rabbi and the Pharisee.  Thou
+canst not hope to reach it by the metaphysics of Fathers, Councils,
+Schoolmen, and Universities.  It lies not in the high places of human
+learning; it is in the silent sanctuary of thy own heart; for He, who
+gave thee an immortal soul, hath filled it with a portion of that truth
+which is the image of His own unapproachable light.  The voice of that
+truth is within thee; heed thou its whisper.  A light is kindled in thy
+soul, which, if thou carefully heedest it, shall shine more and more
+even unto the perfect day."
+
+The stranger paused, and the student melted into tears.  "Stranger!" he
+said, "thou hast taken a weary weight from my heart, and a heavy veil
+from my eyes.  I feel that thou hast revealed a wisdom which is not of
+this world."
+
+"Nay, I am but a humble instrument in the hand of Him who is the
+fountain of all truth, and the beginning and the end of all wisdom.  May
+the message which I have borne thee be sanctified to thy well-being."
+
+"Oh, heed him, Ernest!" said the lady.  "It is the holy truth which has
+been spoken.  Let us rejoice in this truth, and, forgetting the world,
+live only for it."
+
+"Oh, may He who watcheth over all His children keep thee in faith of thy
+resolution!" said the Preacher, fervently.  "Humble yourselves to
+receive instruction, and it shall be given you. Turn away now in your
+youth from the corrupting pleasures of the world, heed not its hollow
+vanities, and that peace which is not such as the world giveth, the
+peace of God which passeth all understanding, shall be yours.  Yet, let
+not yours be the world's righteousness, the world's peace, which shuts
+itself up in solitude.  Encloister not the body, but rather shut up the
+soul from sin.  Live in the world, but overcome it: lead a life of
+purity in the face of its allurements: learn, from the holy principle of
+truth within you, to do justly in the sight of its Author, to meet
+reproach without anger, to live without offence, to love those that
+offend you, to visit the widow and the fatherless, and keep yourselves
+unspotted from the world."
+
+"Eleonora!" said the humbled student, "truth is plain before us; can we
+follow its teachings?  Alas! canst thou, the daughter of a noble house,
+forget the glory of thy birth, and, in the beauty of thy years, tread in
+that lowly path, which the wisdom of the world accounteth foolishness?"
+
+"Yes, Ernest, rejoicingly can I do it!" said the lady; and the bright
+glow of a lofty purpose gave a spiritual expression to her majestic
+beauty.  "Glory to God in the highest, that He hath visited us in
+mercy!"
+
+"Lady!" said the Preacher, "the day-star of truth has arisen in thy
+heart; follow thou its light even unto salvation.  Live an harmonious
+life to the curious make and frame of thy creation; and let the beauty
+of thy person teach thee to beautify thy mind with holiness, the
+ornament of the beloved of God.  Remember that the King of Zion's
+daughter is all-glorious within; and if thy soul excel, thy body will
+only set off the lustre of thy mind.  Let not the spirit of this world,
+its cares and its many vanities, its fashions and discourse, prevail
+over the civility of thy nature.  Remember that sin brought the first
+coat, and thou wilt have little reason to be proud of dress or the
+adorning of thy body.  Seek rather the enduring ornament of a meek and
+quiet spirit, the beauty and the purity of the altar of God's temple,
+rather than the decoration of its outward walls.  For, as the Spartan
+monarch said of old to his daughter, when he restrained her from wearing
+the rich dresses of Sicily, 'Thou wilt seem more lovely to me without
+them,' so shalt thou seem, in thy lowliness and humility, more lovely in
+the sight of Heaven and in the eyes of the pure of earth.  Oh, preserve
+in their freshness thy present feelings, wait in humble resignation and
+in patience, even if it be all thy days, for the manifestations of Him
+who as a father careth for all His children."
+
+"I will endeavor, I will endeavor!"  said the lady, humbled in spirit,
+and in tears.
+
+The stranger took the hand of each.  "Farewell!" he said, "I must needs
+depart, for I have much work before me.  God's peace be with you; and
+that love be around you, which has been to me as the green pasture and
+the still water, the shadow in a weary land."
+
+And the stranger went his way; but the lady and her lover, in all their
+after life, and amidst the trials and persecutions which they were
+called to suffer in the cause of truth, remembered with joy and
+gratitude the instructions of the pure-hearted and eloquent William
+Penn.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             DAVID MATSON.
+
+             Published originally in Our Young Folks, 1865.
+
+WHO of my young friends have read the sorrowful story of "Enoch Arden,"
+so sweetly and simply told by the great English poet?  It is the story
+of a man who went to sea, leaving behind a sweet young wife and little
+daughter.  He was cast away on a desert island, where he remained
+several years, when he was discovered and taken off by a passing vessel.
+Coming back to his native town, he found his wife married to an old
+playmate, a good man, rich and honored, and with whom she was living
+happily.  The poor man, unwilling to cause her pain and perplexity,
+resolved not to make himself known to her, and lived and died alone.
+The poem has reminded me of a very similar story of my own New England
+neighborhood, which I have often heard, and which I will try to tell,
+not in poetry, like Alfred Tennyson's, but in my own poor prose.  I can
+assure my readers that in its main particulars it is a true tale.
+
+One bright summer morning, not more than fourscore years ago, David
+Matson, with his young wife and his two healthy, barefooted boys, stood
+on the bank of the river near their dwelling.  They were waiting for
+Pelatiah Curtis to come round the point with his wherry, and take the
+husband and father to the port, a few miles below.  The Lively Turtle
+was about to sail on a voyage to Spain, and David was to go in her as
+mate.  They stood there in the level morning sunshine talking
+cheerfully; but had you been near enough, you could have seen tears in
+Anna Matson's blue eyes, for she loved her husband and knew there was
+always danger on the sea.  And David's bluff, cheery voice trembled a
+little now and then, for the honest sailor loved his snug home on the
+Merrimac, with the dear wife and her pretty boys.  But presently the
+wherry came alongside, and David was just stepping into it, when he
+turned back to kiss his wife and children once more.
+
+"In with you, man," said Pelatiah Curtis.  "There is no time for kissing
+and such fooleries when the tide serves."
+
+And so they parted.  Anna and the boys went back to their home, and
+David to the Port, whence he sailed off in the Lively Turtle.  And
+months passed, autumn followed summer, and winter the autumn, and then
+spring came, and anon it was summer on the river-side, and he did not
+come back.  And another year passed, and then the old sailors and
+fishermen shook their heads solemnly, and, said that the Lively Turtle
+was a lost ship, and would never come back to port.  And poor Anna had
+her bombazine gown dyed black, and her straw bonnet trimmed in mourning
+ribbons, and thenceforth she was known only as the Widow Matson.
+
+And how was it all this time with David himself?
+
+Now you must know that the Mohammedan people of Algiers and Tripoli, and
+Mogadore and Sallee, on the Barbary coast, had been for a long time in
+the habit of fitting out galleys and armed boats to seize upon the
+merchant vessels of Christian nations, and make slaves of their crews
+and passengers, just as men calling themselves Christians in America
+were sending vessels to Africa to catch black slaves for their
+plantations.  The Lively Turtle fell into the hands of one of these sea-
+robbers, and the crew were taken to Algiers, and sold in the market
+place as slaves, poor David Matson among the rest.
+
+When a boy he had learned the trade of ship-carpenter with his father on
+the Merrimac; and now he was set to work in the dock-yards.  His master,
+who was naturally a kind man, did not overwork him.  He had daily his
+three loaves of bread, and when his clothing was worn out, its place was
+supplied by the coarse cloth of wool and camel's hair woven by the
+Berber women.  Three hours before sunset he was released from work, and
+Friday, which is the Mohammedan Sabhath, was a day of entire rest.  Once
+a year, at the season called Ramadan, he was left at leisure for a whole
+week.  So time went on,--days, weeks, months, and years.  His dark hair
+became gray.  He still dreamed of his old home on the Merrimac, and of
+his good Anna and the boys.  He wondered whether they yet lived, what
+they thought of him, and what they were doing.  The hope of ever seeing
+them again grew fainter and fainter, and at last nearly died out; and he
+resigned himself to his fate as a slave for life.
+
+But one day a handsome middle-aged gentleman, in the dress of one of his
+own countrymen, attended by a great officer of the Dey, entered the
+ship-yard, and called up before him the American captives.  The stranger
+was none other than Joel Barlow, Commissioner of the United States to
+procure the liberation of slaves belonging to that government.  He took
+the men by the hand as they came up, and told them that they were free.
+As you might expect, the poor fellows were very grateful; some laughed,
+some wept for joy, some shouted and sang, and threw up their caps, while
+others, with David Matson among them, knelt down on the chips, and
+thanked God for the great deliverance.
+
+"This is a very affecting scene," said the commissioner, wiping his
+eyes.  "I must keep the impression of it for my 'Columbiad';" and
+drawing out his tablet, he proceeded to write on the spot an apostrophe
+to Freedom, which afterwards found a place in his great epic.
+
+David Matson had saved a little money during his captivity by odd jobs
+and work on holidays.  He got a passage to Malaga, where he bought a
+nice shawl for his wife and a watch for each of his boys.  He then went
+to the quay, where an American ship was lying just ready to sail for
+Boston.
+
+Almost the first man he saw on board was Pelatiah Curtis, who had rowed
+him down to the port seven years before.  He found that his old neighbor
+did not know him, so changed was he with his long beard and Moorish
+dress, whereupon, without telling his name, he began to put questions
+about his old home, and finally asked him if he knew a Mrs. Matson.
+
+"I rather think I do," said Pelatiah; "she's my wife."
+
+"Your wife!" cried the other.  "She is mine before God and man.  I am
+David Matson, and she is the mother of my children."
+
+"And mine too!"  said Pelatiah.  "I left her with a baby in her arms.
+If you are David Matson, your right to her is outlawed; at any rate she
+is mine, and I am not the man to give her up."
+
+"God is great!" said poor David Matson, unconsciously repeating the
+familiar words of Moslem submission.  "His will be done.  I loved her,
+but I shall never see her again.  Give these, with my blessing, to the
+good woman and the boys," and he handed over, with a sigh, the little
+bundle containing the gifts for his wife and children.
+
+He shook hands with his rival.  "Pelatiah," he said, looking back as he
+left the ship, "be kind to Anna and my boys."
+
+"Ay, ay, sir!" responded the sailor in a careless tone.  He watched the
+poor man passing slowly up the narrow street until out of sight.  "It's
+a hard case for old David," he said, helping himself to a fresh quid of
+tobacco, "but I 'm glad I 've seen the last of him."
+
+When Pelatiah Curtis reached home he told Anna the story of her husband
+and laid his gifts in her lap.  She did not shriek nor faint, for she
+was a healthy woman with strong nerves; but she stole away by herself
+and wept bitterly.  She lived many years after, but could never be
+persuaded to wear the pretty shawl which the husband of her youth had
+sent as his farewell gift.  There is, however, a tradition that, in
+accordance with her dying wish, it was wrapped about her poor old
+shoulders in the coffin, and buried with her.
+
+The little old bull's-eye watch, which is still in the possession of one
+of her grandchildren, is now all that remains to tell of David Matson,--
+the lost man.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                       THE FISH I DID N'T CATCH.
+
+    Published originally in The Little Pilgrim, Philadelphia, 1843.
+
+OUR old homestead (the house was very old for a new country, having been
+built about the time that the Prince of, Orange drove out James the
+Second) nestled under a long range of hills which stretched off to the
+west.  It was surrounded by woods in all directions save to the
+southeast, where a break in the leafy wall revealed a vista of low green
+meadows, picturesque with wooded islands and jutting capes of upland.
+Through these, a small brook, noisy enough as it foamed, rippled, and
+laughed down its rocky falls by our gardenside, wound, silently and
+scarcely visible, to a still larger stream, known as the Country Brook.
+This brook in its turn, after doing duty at two or three saw and grist
+mills, the clack of which we could hear in still days across the
+intervening woodlands, found its way to the great river, and the river
+took it up and bore it down to the great sea.
+
+I have not much reason for speaking well of these meadows, or rather
+bogs, for they were wet most of the year; but in the early days they
+were highly prized by the settlers, as they furnished natural mowing
+before the uplands could be cleared of wood and stones and laid down to
+grass.  There is a tradition that the hay-harvesters of two adjoining
+towns quarrelled about a boundary question, and fought a hard battle one
+summer morning in that old time, not altogether bloodless, but by no
+means as fatal as the fight between the rival Highland clans, described
+by Scott in "The Fair Maid of Perth."  I used to wonder at their folly,
+when I was stumbling over the rough hassocks, and sinking knee-deep in
+the black mire, raking the sharp sickle-edged grass which we used to
+feed out to the young cattle in midwinter when the bitter cold gave them
+appetite for even such fodder.  I had an almost Irish hatred of snakes,
+and these meadows were full of them,--striped, green, dingy water-
+snakes, and now and then an ugly spotted adder by no means pleasant to
+touch with bare feet.  There were great black snakes, too, in the ledges
+of the neighboring knolls; and on one occasion in early spring I found
+myself in the midst of a score at least of them,--holding their wicked
+meeting of a Sabbath morning on the margin of a deep spring in the
+meadows.  One glimpse at their fierce shining beads in the sunshine, as
+they roused themselves at my approach, was sufficient to send me at full
+speed towards the nearest upland.  The snakes, equally scared, fled in
+the same direction; and, looking back, I saw the dark monsters following
+close at my heels, terrible as the Black Horse rebel regiment at Bull
+Run.  I had, happily, sense enough left to step aside and let the ugly
+troop glide into the bushes.
+
+Nevertheless, the meadows had their redeeming points.  In spring
+mornings the blackbirds and bobolinks made them musical with songs; and
+in the evenings great bullfrogs croaked and clamored; and on summer
+nights we loved to watch the white wreaths of fog rising and drifting in
+the moonlight like troops of ghosts, with the fireflies throwing up ever
+and anon signals of their coming.  But the Brook was far more
+attractive, for it had sheltered bathing-places, clear and white sanded,
+and weedy stretches, where the shy pickerel loved to linger, and deep
+pools, where the stupid sucker stirred the black mud with his fins.  I
+had followed it all the way from its birthplace among the pleasant New
+Hampshire hills, through the sunshine of broad, open meadows, and under
+the shadow of thick woods.  It was, for the most part, a sober, quiet
+little river; but at intervals it broke into a low, rippling laugh over
+rocks and trunks of fallen trees.  There had, so tradition said, once
+been a witch-meeting on its banks, of six little old women in short,
+sky-blue cloaks; and if a drunken teamster could be credited, a ghost
+was once seen bobbing for eels under Country Bridge.  It ground our corn
+and rye for us, at its two grist-mills; and we drove our sheep to it for
+their spring washing, an anniversary which was looked forward to with
+intense delight, for it was always rare fun for the youngsters.
+Macaulay has sung,--
+
+               "That year young lads in Umbro
+               Shall plunge the struggling sheep;"
+
+and his picture of the Roman sheep-washing recalled, when we read it,
+similar scenes in the Country Brook.  On its banks we could always find
+the earliest and the latest wild flowers, from the pale blue, three-
+lobed hepatica, and small, delicate wood-anemone, to the yellow bloom of
+the witch-hazel burning in the leafless October woods.
+
+Yet, after all, I think the chief attraction of the Brook to my brother
+and myself was the fine fishing it afforded us.  Our bachelor uncle who
+lived with us (there has always been one of that unfortunate class in
+every generation of our family) was a quiet, genial man, much given to
+hunting and fishing; and it was one of the great pleasures of our young
+life to accompany him on his expeditions to Great Hill, Brandy-brow
+Woods, the Pond, and, best of all, to the Country Brook.  We were quite
+willing to work hard in the cornfield or the haying-lot to finish the
+necessary day's labor in season for an afternoon stroll through the
+woods and along the brookside.  I remember my first fishing excursion as
+if it were but yesterday.  I have been happy many times in my life, but
+never more intensely so than when I received that first fishing-pole
+from my uncle's hand, and trudged off with him through the woods and
+meadows.  It was a still sweet day of early summer; the long afternoon
+shadows of the trees lay cool across our path; the leaves seemed
+greener, the flowers brighter, the birds merrier, than ever before.
+My uncle, who knew by long experience where were the best haunts of
+pickerel, considerately placed me at the most favorable point.  I threw
+out my line as I had so often seen others, and waited anxiously for a
+bite, moving the bait in rapid jerks on the surface of the water in
+imitation of the leap of a frog.  Nothing came of it.  "Try again," said
+my uncle.  Suddenly the bait sank out of sight.  "Now for it," thought
+I; "here is a fish at last."  I made a strong pull, and brought up a
+tangle of weeds.  Again and again I cast out my line with aching arms,
+and drew it back empty.  I looked to my uncle appealingly.  "Try once
+more," he said.  "We fishermen must have patience."
+
+Suddenly something tugged at my line and swept off with it into deep
+water.  Jerking it up, I saw a fine pickerel wriggling in the sun.
+"Uncle!" I cried, looking back in uncontrollable excitement, "I've got a
+fish!"  "Not yet," said my uncle.  As he spoke there was a plash in the
+water; I caught the arrowy gleam of a scared fish shooting into the
+middle of the stream; my hook hung empty from the line.  I had lost my
+prize.
+
+We are apt to speak of the sorrows of childhood as trifles in comparison
+with those of grown-up people; but we may depend upon it the young folks
+don't agree with us.  Our griefs, modified and restrained by reason,
+experience, and self-respect, keep the proprieties, and, if possible,
+avoid a scene; but the sorrow of childhood, unreasoning and all-
+absorbing, is a complete abandonment to the passion.  The doll's nose is
+broken, and the world breaks up with it; the marble rolls out of sight,
+and the solid globe rolls off with the marble.
+
+So, overcome by my great and bitter disappointment, I sat down on the
+nearest hassock, and for a time refused to be comforted, even by my
+uncle's assurance that there were more fish in the brook.  He refitted
+my bait, and, putting the pole again in my hands, told me to try my luck
+once more.
+
+"But remember, boy," he said, with his shrewd smile, "never brag of
+catching a fish until he is on dry ground.  I've seen older folks doing
+that in more ways than one, and so making fools of themselves.  It 's no
+use to boast of anything until it 's done, nor then either, for it
+speaks for itself."
+
+How often since I have been reminded of the fish that I did not catch!
+When I hear people boasting of a work as yet undone, and trying to
+anticipate the credit which belongs only to actual achievement, I call
+to mind that scene by the brookside, and the wise caution of my uncle in
+that particular instance takes the form of a proverb of universal
+application: "Never brag of your fish before you catch him."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             YANKEE GYPSIES.
+
+     "Here's to budgets, packs, and wallets; Here's to all the wandering
+     train."
+                                                  BURNS.
+
+I CONFESS it, I am keenly sensitive to "skyey influences."  I profess no
+indifference to the movements of that capricious old gentleman known as
+the clerk of the weather.  I cannot conceal my interest in the behavior
+of that patriarchal bird whose wooden similitude gyrates on the church
+spire.  Winter proper is well enough.  Let the thermometer go to zero if
+it will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are frozen and
+unable to flap their stiff wings.  Sounds of bells in the keen air,
+clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of fair moccasined feet
+on glittering ice pavements; bright eyes glancing above the uplifted
+muff like a sultana's behind the folds of her _yashmac_; schoolboys
+coasting down street like mad Greenlanders; the cold brilliance of
+oblique sunbeams flashing back from wide surfaces of glittering snow or
+blazing upon ice jewelry of tree and roof.  There is nothing in all this
+to complain of.  A storm of summer has its redeeming sublimities,--its
+slow, upheaving mountains of cloud glooming in the western horizon like
+new-created volcanoes, veined with fire, shattered by exploding
+thunders.  Even the wild gales of the equinox have their varieties,
+--sounds of wind-shaken woods and waters, creak and clatter of sign and
+casement, hurricane puffs and down-rushing rain-spouts.  But this dull,
+dark autumn day of thaw and rain, when the very clouds seem too
+spiritless and languid to storm outright or take themselves out of the
+way of fair weather; wet beneath and above; reminding one of that
+rayless atmosphere of Dante's Third Circle, where the infernal
+Priessnitz administers his hydropathic torment,--
+
+              "A heavy, cursed, and relentless drench,--
+               The land it soaks is putrid;"
+
+or rather, as everything animate and inanimate is seething in warm mist,
+suggesting the idea that Nature, grown old and rheumatic, is trying the
+efficacy of a Thompsonian steam-box on a grand scale; no sounds save the
+heavy plash of muddy feet on the pavements; the monotonous melancholy
+drip from trees and roofs; the distressful gurgling of waterducts,
+swallowing the dirty amalgam of the gutters; a dim, leaden-colored
+horizon of only a few yards in diameter, shutting down about one, beyond
+which nothing is visible save in faint line or dark projection; the
+ghost of a church spire or the eidolon of a chimney-pot.  He who can
+extract pleasurable emotions from the alembic of such a day has a trick
+of alchemy with which I am wholly unacquainted.
+
+Hark! a rap at my door.  Welcome anybody just now.  One gains nothing by
+attempting to shut out the sprites of the weather.  They come in at the
+keyhole; they peer through the dripping panes; they insinuate themselves
+through the crevices of the casement, or plump down chimney astride of
+the rain-drops.
+
+I rise and throw open the door.  A tall, shambling, loose-jointed
+figure; a pinched, shrewd face, sun-browned and wind-dried; small,
+quick-winking black eyes.  There he stands, the water dripping from his
+pulpy hat and ragged elbows.
+
+I speak to him, but he returns no answer.  With a dumb show of misery,
+quite touching, he hands me a soiled piece of parchment, whereon I read
+what purports to be a melancholy account of shipwreck and disaster, to
+the particular detriment, loss, and damnification of one Pietro Frugoni,
+who is, in consequence, sorely in want of the alms of all charitable
+Christian persons, and who is, in short, the bearer of this veracious
+document, duly certified and indorsed by an Italian consul in one of our
+Atlantic cities, of a high-sounding, but to Yankee organs
+unpronounceable name.
+
+Here commences a struggle.  Every man, the Mohammedans tell us, has two
+attendant angels,--the good one on his right shoulder, the bad on his
+left.  "Give," says Benevolence, as with some difficulty I fish up a
+small coin from the depths of my pocket.  "Not a cent," says selfish
+Prudence; and I drop it from my fingers.  "Think," says the good angel,
+"of the poor stranger in a strange land, just escaped from the terrors
+of the sea-storm, in which his little property has perished, thrown
+half-naked and helpless on our shores, ignorant of our language, and
+unable to find employment suited to his capacity."  "A vile impostor!"
+replies the lefthand sentinel.  "His paper, purchased from one of those
+ready-writers in New York who manufacture beggar-credentials at the low
+price of one dollar per copy, with earthquakes, fires, or shipwrecks, to
+suit customers."
+
+Amidst this confusion of tongues I take another survey of my visitant.
+Ha! a light dawns upon me.  That shrewd old face, with its sharp,
+winking eyes, is no stranger to me.  Pietro Frugoni, I have seen thee
+before.  Si, signor, that face of thine has looked at me over a dirty
+white neckcloth, with the corners of that cunning mouth drawn downwards,
+and those small eyes turned up in sanctimonious gravity, while thou wast
+offering to a crowd of halfgrown boys an extemporaneous exhortation in
+the capacity of a travelling preacher.  Have I not seen it peering out
+from under a blanket, as that of a poor Penobscot Indian, who had lost
+the use of his hands while trapping on the Madawaska?  Is it not the
+face of the forlorn father of six small children, whom the "marcury
+doctors" had "pisened" and crippled?  Did it not belong to that down-
+East unfortunate who had been out to the "Genesee country" and got the
+"fevern-nager," and whose hand shook so pitifully when held out to
+receive my poor gift?  The same, under all disguises,--Stephen Leathers,
+of Barrington,--him, and none other!  Let me conjure him into his own
+likeness:--
+
+"Well, Stephen, what news from old Barrington?"
+
+"Oh, well, I thought I knew ye," he answers, not the least disconcerted.
+"How do you do?  and how's your folks?  All well, I hope.  I took this
+'ere paper, you see, to help a poor furriner, who couldn't make himself
+understood any more than a wild goose.  I thought I 'd just start him
+for'ard a little.  It seemed a marcy to do it."
+
+Well and shiftily answered, thou ragged Proteus.  One cannot be angry
+with such a fellow.  I will just inquire into the present state of his
+Gospel mission and about the condition of his tribe on the Penobscot;
+and it may be not amiss to congratulate him on the success of the steam-
+doctors in sweating the "pisen" of the regular faculty out of him.  But
+he evidently has no'wish to enter into idle conversation.  Intent upon
+his benevolent errand, he is already clattering down stairs.
+Involuntarily I glance out of the window just in season to catch a
+single glimpse of him ere he is swallowed up in the mist.
+
+He has gone; and, knave as he is, I can hardly help exclaiming, "Luck go
+with him!"  He has broken in upon the sombre train of my thoughts and
+called up before me pleasant and grateful recollections.  The old farm-
+house nestling in its valley; hills stretching off to the south and
+green meadows to the east; the small stream which came noisily down its
+ravine, washing the old garden-wall and softly lapping on fallen stones
+and mossy roots of beeches and hemlocks; the tall sentinel poplars at
+the gateway; the oak-forest, sweeping unbroken to the northern horizon;
+the grass-grown carriage-path, with its rude and crazy bridge,--the dear
+old landscape of my boyhood lies outstretched before me like a
+daguerreotype from that picture within which I have borne with me in all
+my wanderings.  I am a boy again, once more conscious of the feeling,
+half terror, half exultation, with which I used to announce the approach
+of this very vagabond and his "kindred after the flesh."
+
+The advent of wandering beggars, or "old stragglers," as we were wont
+to call them, was an event of no ordinary interest in the generally
+monotonous quietude of our farm-life.  Many of them were well known;
+they had their periodical revolutions and transits; we could calculate
+them like eclipses or new moons.  Some were sturdy knaves, fat and
+saucy; and, whenever they ascertained that the "men folks" were absent,
+would order provisions and cider like men who expected to pay for them,
+seating themselves at the hearth or table with the air of Falstaff,--
+"Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?"  Others, poor, pale, patient,
+like Sterne's monk, came creeping up to the door, hat in hand, standing
+there in their gray wretchedness with a look of heartbreak and
+forlornness which was never without its effect on our juvenile
+sensibilities.  At times, however, we experienced a slight revulsion of
+feeling when even these humblest children of sorrow somewhat petulantly
+rejected our proffered bread and cheese, and demanded instead a glass of
+cider.  Whatever the temperance society might in such cases have done,
+it was not in our hearts to refuse the poor creatures a draught of their
+favorite beverage; and was n't it a satisfaction to see their sad,
+melancholy faces light up as we handed them the full pitcher, and, on
+receiving it back empty from their brown, wrinkled hands, to hear them,
+half breathless from their long, delicious draught, thanking us for the
+favor, as "dear, good children!"  Not unfrequently these wandering tests
+of our benevolence made their appearance in interesting groups of man,
+woman, and child, picturesque in their squalidness, and manifesting a
+maudlin affection which would have done honor to the revellers at
+Poosie-Nansie's, immortal in the cantata of Burns.  I remember some who
+were evidently the victims of monomania,--haunted and hunted by some
+dark thought,--possessed by a fixed idea.  One, a black-eyed, wild-
+haired woman, with a whole tragedy of sin, shame, and suffering written
+in her countenance, used often to visit us, warm herself by our winter
+fire, and supply herself with a stock of cakes and cold meat; but was
+never known to answer a question or to ask one.  She never smiled; the
+cold, stony look of her eye never changed; a silent, impassive face,
+frozen rigid by some great wrong or sin.  We used to look with awe upon
+the "still woman," and think of the demoniac of Scripture who had a
+"dumb spirit."
+
+One--I think I see him now, grim, gaunt, and ghastly, working his slow
+way up to our door--used to gather herbs by the wayside and call himself
+doctor.  He was bearded like a he goat and used to counterfeit lameness,
+yet, when he supposed himself alone, would travel on lustily as if
+walking for a wager.  At length, as if in punishment of his deceit, he
+met with an accident in his rambles and became lame in earnest, hobbling
+ever after with difficulty on his gnarled crutches.  Another used to go
+stooping, like Bunyan's pilgrim, under a pack made of an old bed-
+sacking, stuffed out into most plethoric dimensions, tottering on a pair
+of small, meagre legs, and peering out with his wild, hairy face from
+under his burden like a big-bodied spider.  That "man with the pack"
+always inspired me with awe and reverence.  Huge, almost sublime, in its
+tense rotundity, the father of all packs, never laid aside and never
+opened, what might there not be within it?  With what flesh-creeping
+curiosity I used to walk round about it at a safe distance, half
+expecting to see its striped covering stirred by the motions of a
+mysterious life, or that some evil monster would leap out of it, like
+robbers from Ali Baba's jars or armed men from the Trojan horse!
+
+There was another class of peripatetic philosophers--half pedler, half
+mendicant--who were in the habit of visiting us.  One we recollect, a
+lame, unshaven, sinister-eyed, unwholesome fellow, with his basket of
+old newspapers and pamphlets, and his tattered blue umbrella, serving
+rather as a walking staff than as a protection from the rain.  He told
+us on one occasion, in answer to our inquiring into the cause of his
+lameness, that when a young man he was employed on the farm of the chief
+magistrate of a neighboring State; where, as his ill-luck would have it,
+the governor's handsome daughter fell in love with him.  He was caught
+one day in the young lady's room by her father; whereupon the irascible
+old gentleman pitched him unceremoniously out of the window, laming him
+for life, on the brick pavement below, like Vulcan on the rocks of
+Lemnos.  As for the lady, he assured us "she took on dreadfully about
+it."  "Did she die?"  we inquired anxiously.  There was a cun-ing
+twinkle in the old rogue's eye as he responded, "Well, no, she did n't.
+She got married."
+
+Twice a year, usually in the spring and autumn, we were honored with a
+call from Jonathan Plummer, maker of verses, pedler and poet, physician
+and parson,--a Yankee troubadour,--first and last minstrel of the valley
+of the Merrimac, encircled, to my wondering young eyes, with the very
+nimbus of immortality. He brought with him pins, needles, tape, and
+cotton-thread for my mother; jack-knives, razors, and soap for my
+father; and verses of his own composing, coarsely printed and
+illustrated with rude wood-cuts, for the delectation of the younger
+branches of the family.  No lovesick youth could drown himself, no
+deserted maiden bewail the moon, no rogue mount the gallows, without
+fitting memorial in Plummer's verses.  Earthquakes, fires, fevers, and
+shipwrecks he regarded as personal favors from Providence, furnishing
+the raw material of song and ballad.  Welcome to us in our country
+seclusion as Autolycus to the clown in Winter's Tale, we listened with
+infinite satisfaction to his readings of his own verses, or to his ready
+improvisation upon some domestic incident or topic suggested by his
+auditors.  When once fairly over the difficulties at the outset of a new
+subject, his rhymes flowed freely, "as if he had eaten ballads and all
+men's ears grew to his tunes."  His productions answered, as nearly as I
+can remember, to Shakespeare's description of a proper ballad,--"doleful
+matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant theme sung lamentably."  He
+was scrupulously conscientious, devout, inclined to theological
+disquisitions, and withal mighty in Scripture.  He was thoroughly
+independent; flattered nobody, cared for nobody, trusted nobody.  When
+invited to sit down at our dinner-table, he invariably took the
+precaution to place his basket of valuables between his legs for safe
+keeping.  "Never mind thy basket, Jonathan," said my father; "we
+sha'n't steal thy verses."--"I'm not sure of that," returned the
+suspicious guest.  "It is written, 'Trust ye not in any brother.'"
+
+Thou too, O Parson B------, with thy pale student's brow and rubicund
+nose, with thy rusty and tattered black coat overswept by white flowing
+locks, with thy professional white neckcloth scrupulously preserved when
+even a shirt to thy back was problematical,--art by no means to be
+overlooked in the muster-roll of vagrant gentlemen possessing the entree
+of our farm-house.  Well do we remember with what grave and dignified
+courtesy he used to step over its threshold, saluting its inmates with
+the same air of gracious condescension and patronage with which in
+better days he had delighted the hearts of his parishioners.  Poor old
+man!  He had once been the admired and almost worshipped minister of the
+largest church in the town where he afterwards found support in the
+winter season as a pauper.  He had early fallen into intemperate habits;
+and at the age of threescore and ten, when I remember him, he was only
+sober when he lacked the means of being otherwise.  Drunk or sober,
+however, he never altogether forgot the proprieties of his profession;
+he was always grave, decorous, and gentlemanly; he held fast the form of
+sound words, and the weakness of the flesh abated nothing of the rigor
+of his stringent theology.  He had been a favorite pupil of the learned
+and astute Emmons, and was to the last a sturdy defender of the peculiar
+dogmas of his school.  The last time we saw him he was holding a meeting
+in our district school-house, with a vagabond pedler for deacon and
+travelling companion.  The tie which united the ill-assorted couple was
+doubtless the same which endeared Tam O'Shanter to the souter:--
+
+               "They had been fou for weeks thegither."
+
+He took for his text the first seven verses of the concluding chapter of
+Ecclesiastes, furnishing in himself its fitting illustration.  The evil
+days had come; the keepers of the house trembled; the windows of life
+were darkened.  A few months later the silver cord was loosened, the
+golden bowl was broken, and between the poor old man and the temptations
+which beset him fell the thick curtains of the grave.
+
+One day we had a call from a "pawky auld carle" of a wandering
+Scotchman.  To him I owe my first introduction to the songs of Burns.
+After eating his bread and cheese and drinking his mug of cider he gave
+us Bonny Doon, Highland Mary, and Auld Lang Syne.  He had a rich, full
+voice, and entered heartily into the spirit of his lyrics.  I have since
+listened to the same melodies from the lips of Dempster, than whom the
+Scottish bard has had no sweeter or truer interpreter; but the skilful
+performance of the artist lacked the novel charm of the gaberlunzie's
+singing in the old farmhouse kitchen.  Another wanderer made us
+acquainted with the humorous old ballad of "Our gude man cam hame at
+e'en."  He applied for supper and lodging, and the next morning was set
+at work splitting stones in the pasture.  While thus engaged the village
+doctor came riding along the highway on his fine, spirited horse, and
+stopped to talk with my father.  The fellow eyed the animal attentively,
+as if familiar with all his good points, and hummed over a stanza of the
+old poem:--
+
+                   "Our gude man cam hame at e'en,
+                    And hame cam be;
+                    And there he saw a saddle horse
+                    Where nae horse should be.
+                    'How cam this horse here?
+                    How can it be?
+                    How cam this horse here
+                    Without the leave of me?'
+                    'A horse?' quo she.
+                    'Ay, a horse,' quo he.
+                    'Ye auld fool, ye blind fool,--
+                    And blinder might ye be,--
+                    'T is naething but a milking cow
+                    My mamma sent to me.'
+                    A milch cow?' quo he.
+                    'Ay, a milch cow,' quo she.
+                    'Weel, far hae I ridden,
+                    And muckle hae I seen;
+                    But milking cows wi' saddles on
+                    Saw I never nane.'"
+
+That very night the rascal decamped, taking with him the doctor's horse,
+and was never after heard of.
+
+Often, in the gray of the morning, we used to see one or more
+"gaberlunzie men," pack on shoulder and staff in hand, emerging from the
+barn or other outbuildings where they had passed the night.  I was once
+sent to the barn to fodder the cattle late in the evening, and, climbing
+into the mow to pitch down hay for that purpose, I was startled by the
+sudden apparition of a man rising up before me, just discernible in the
+dim moonlight streaming through the seams of the boards.  I made a rapid
+retreat down the ladder; and was only reassured by hearing the object of
+my terror calling after me, and recognizing his voice as that of a
+harmless old pilgrim whom I had known before.  Our farm-house was
+situated in a lonely valley, half surrounded with woods, with no
+neighbors in sight.  One dark, cloudy night, when our parents chanced to
+be absent, we were sitting with our aged grandmother in the fading light
+of the kitchen-fire, working ourselves into a very satisfactory state of
+excitement and terror by recounting to each other all the dismal stories
+we could remember of ghosts, witches, haunted houses and robbers, when
+we were suddenly startled by a loud rap at the door.  A stripling of
+fourteen, I was very naturally regarded as the head of the household;
+so,--with many misgivings, I advanced to the door, which I slowly
+opened, holding the candle tremulously above my head and peering out
+into the darkness.  The feeble glimmer played upon the apparition of a
+gigantic horseman, mounted on a steed of a size worthy of such a rider--
+colossal, motionless, like images cut out of the solid night.  The
+strange visitant gruffly saluted me; and, after making several
+ineffectual efforts to urge his horse in at the door, dismounted and
+followed me into the room, evidently enjoying the terror which his huge
+presence excited.  Announcing himself as the great Indian doctor, he
+drew himself up before the fire, stretched his arms, clenched his fists,
+struck his broad chest, and invited our attention to what he called his
+"mortal frame."  He demanded in succession all kinds of intoxicating
+liquors; and, on being assured that we had none to give him, he grew
+angry, threatened to swallow my younger brother alive, and, seizing me
+by the hair of my head as the angel did the prophet at Babylon, led me
+about from room to room.  After an ineffectual search, in the course of
+which he mistook a jug of oil for one of brandy, and, contrary to my
+explanations and remonstrances, insisted upon swallowing a portion of
+its contents, he released me, fell to crying and sobbing, and confessed
+that he was so drunk already that his horse was ashamed of him.  After
+bemoaning and pitying himself to his satisfaction he wiped his eyes, and
+sat down by the side of my grandmother, giving her to understand that he
+was very much pleased with her appearance; adding, that if agreeable to
+her, he should like the privilege of paying his addresses to her.  While
+vainly endeavoring to make the excellent old lady comprehend his very
+flattering proposition, he was interrupted by the return of my father,
+who, at once understanding the matter, turned him out of doors without
+ceremony.
+
+On one occasion, a few years ago, on my return from the field at
+evening, I was told that a foreigner had asked for lodgings during the
+night, but that, influenced by his dark, repulsive appearance, my mother
+had very reluctantly refused his request.  I found her by no means
+satisfied with her decision.  "What if a son of mine was in a strange
+land?"  she inquired, self-reproachfully.  Greatly to her relief, I
+volunteered to go in pursuit of the wanderer, and, taking a cross-path
+over the fields, soon overtook him.  He had just been rejected at the
+house of our nearest neighbor, and was standing in a state of dubious
+perplexity in the street.  His looks quite justified my mother's
+suspicions.  He was an olive-complexioned, black-bearded Italian, with
+an eye like a live coal, such a face as perchance looks out on the
+traveller in the passes of the Abruzzi,--one of those bandit visages
+which Salvator has painted.  With some difficulty I gave him to
+understand my errand, when he overwhelmed me with thanks, and joyfully
+followed me back.  He took his seat with us at the supper-table; and,
+when we were all gathered around the hearth that cold autumnal evening,
+he told us, partly by words and, partly by gestures, the story of his
+life and misfortunes, amused us with descriptions of the grape-
+gatherings and festivals of his sunny clime, edified my mother with a
+recipe for making bread of chestnuts; and in the morning, when, after
+breakfast, his dark, sullen face lighted up and his fierce eye moistened
+with grateful emotion as in his own silvery Tuscan accent he poured out
+his thanks, we marvelled at the fears which had so nearly closed our
+door against him; and, as he departed, we all felt that he had left with
+us the blessing of the poor.
+
+It was not often that, as in the above instance, my mother's prudence
+got the better of her charity.  The regular "old stragglers" regarded
+her as an unfailing friend; and the sight of her plain cap was to them
+an assurance of forthcoming creature-comforts.  There was indeed a tribe
+of lazy strollers, having their place of rendezvous in the town of
+Barrington, New Hampshire, whose low vices had placed them beyond even
+the pale of her benevolence.  They were not unconscious of their evil
+reputation; and experience had taught them the necessity of concealing,
+under well-contrived disguises, their true character.  They came to us
+in all shapes and with all appearances save the true one, with most
+miserable stories of mishap and sickness and all "the ills which flesh
+is heir to."  It was particularly vexatious to discover, when too late,
+that our sympathies and charities had been expended upon such graceless
+vagabonds as the "Barrington beggars."  An old withered hag, known by
+the appellation of Hopping Pat,--the wise woman of her tribe,--was in
+the habit of visiting us, with her hopeful grandson, who had "a gift for
+preaching" as well as for many other things not exactly compatible with
+holy orders.  He sometimes brought with him a tame crow, a shrewd,
+knavish-looking bird, who, when in the humor for it, could talk like
+Barnaby Rudge's raven.  He used to say he could "do nothin' at exhortin'
+without a white handkercher on his neck and money in his pocket,"--a
+fact going far to confirm the opinions of the Bishop of Exeter and the
+Puseyites generally, that there can be no priest without tithes and
+surplice.
+
+These people have for several generations lived distinct from the great
+mass of the community, like the gypsies of Europe, whom in many respects
+they closely resemble.  They have the same settled aversion to labor and
+the same disposition to avail themselves of the fruits of the industry
+of others.  They love a wild, out-of-door life, sing songs, tell
+fortunes, and have an instinctive hatred of "missionaries and cold
+water."  It has been said--I know not upon what grounds--that their
+ancestors were indeed a veritable importation of English gypsyhood; but
+if so, they have undoubtedly lost a good deal of the picturesque charm
+of its unhoused and free condition.  I very much fear that my friend
+Mary Russell Mitford,--sweetest of England's rural painters,--who has a
+poet's eye for the fine points in gypsy character, would scarcely allow
+their claims to fraternity with her own vagrant friends, whose camp-
+fires welcomed her to her new home at Swallowfield.
+
+"The proper study of mankind is man," and, according to my view, no
+phase of our common humanity is altogether unworthy of investigation.
+Acting upon this belief two or three summers ago, when making, in
+company with my sister, a little excursion into the hill-country of New
+Hampshire, I turned my horse's head towards Barrington for the purpose
+of seeing these semi-civilized strollers in their own home, and
+returning, once for all, their numerous visits.  Taking leave of our
+hospitable cousins in old Lee with about as much solemnity as we may
+suppose Major Laing parted with his friends when he set out in search of
+desert-girdled Timbuctoo, we drove several miles over a rough road,
+passed the Devil's Den unmolested, crossed a fretful little streamlet
+noisily working its way into a valley, where it turned a lonely, half-
+ruinous mill, and climbing a steep hill beyond, saw before us a wide
+sandy level, skirted on the west and north by low, scraggy hills, and
+dotted here and there with dwarf pitch-pines.  In the centre of this
+desolate region were some twenty or thirty small dwellings, grouped
+together as irregularly as a Hottentot kraal.  Unfenced, unguarded, open
+to all comers and goers, stood that city of the beggars,--no wall or
+paling between the ragged cabins to remind one of the jealous
+distinctions of property.  The great idea of its founders seemed visible
+in its unappropriated freedom.  Was not the whole round world their own?
+and should they haggle about boundaries and title-deeds?  For them, on
+distant plains, ripened golden harvests; for them, in far-off workshops,
+busy hands were toiling; for them, if they had but the grace to note it,
+the broad earth put on her garniture of beauty, and over them hung the
+silent mystery of heaven and its stars.  That comfortable philosophy
+which modern transcendentalism has but dimly shadowed forth--that poetic
+agrarianism, which gives all to each and each to all--is the real life
+of this city of unwork.  To each of its dingy dwellers might be not
+unaptly applied the language of one who, I trust, will pardon me for
+quoting her beautiful poem in this connection:--
+
+         "Other hands may grasp the field or forest,
+          Proud proprietors in pomp may shine;
+          Thou art wealthier,--all the world is thine."
+
+
+But look!  the clouds are breaking.  "Fair weather cometh out of the
+north."  The wind has blown away the mists; on the gilded spire of John
+Street glimmers a beam of sunshine; and there is the sky again, hard,
+blue, and cold in its eternal purity, not a whit the worse for the
+storm.  In the beautiful present the past is no longer needed.
+Reverently and gratefully let its volume be laid aside; and when again
+the shadows of the outward world fall upon the spirit, may I not lack a
+good angel to remind me of its solace, even if he comes in the shape of
+a Barrington beggar.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             THE TRAINING.
+
+                "Send for the milingtary."
+                              NOAH CLAYPOLE in Oliver Twist.
+
+WHAT'S now in the wind?  Sounds of distant music float in at my window
+on this still October air.  Hurrying drum-beat, shrill fife-tones,
+wailing bugle-notes, and, by way of accompaniment, hurrahs from the
+urchins on the crowded sidewalks.  Here come the citizen-soldiers, each
+martial foot beating up the mud of yesterday's storm with the slow,
+regular, up-and-down movement of an old-fashioned churn-dasher.  Keeping
+time with the feet below, some threescore of plumed heads bob solemnly
+beneath me.  Slant sunshine glitters on polished gun-barrels and
+tinselled uniform.  Gravely and soberly they pass on, as if duly
+impressed with a sense of the deep responsibility of their position as
+self-constituted defenders of the world's last hope,--the United States
+of America, and possibly Texas.  They look out with honest, citizen
+faces under their leathern visors (their ferocity being mostly the work
+of the tailor and tinker), and, I doubt not, are at this moment as
+innocent of bloodthirstiness as yonder worthy tiller of the Tewksbury
+Hills, who sits quietly in his wagon dispensing apples and turnips
+without so much as giving a glance at the procession.  Probably there is
+not one of them who would hesitate to divide his last tobacco-quid with
+his worst enemy.  Social, kind-hearted, psalm-singing, sermon-hearing,
+Sabhath-keeping Christians; and yet, if we look at the fact of the
+matter, these very men have been out the whole afternoon of this
+beautiful day, under God's holy sunshine, as busily at work as Satan
+himself could wish in learning how to butcher their fellow-creatures and
+acquire the true scientific method of impaling a forlorn Mexican on a
+bayonet, or of sinking a leaden missile in the brain of some unfortunate
+Briton, urged within its range by the double incentive of sixpence per
+day in his pocket and the cat-o'-nine-tails on his back!
+
+Without intending any disparagement of my peaceable ancestry for many
+generations, I have still strong suspicions that somewhat of the old
+Norman blood, something of the grins Berserker spirit, has been
+bequeathed to me.  How else can I account for the intense childish
+eagerness with which I listened to the stories of old campaigners who
+sometimes fought their battles over again in my hearing?  Why did I,
+in my young fancy, go up with Jonathan, the son of Saul, to smite the
+garrisoned Philistines of Michmash, or with the fierce son of Nun
+against the cities of Canaan?  Why was Mr. Greatheart, in Pilgrim's
+Progress, my favorite character?  What gave such fascination to the
+narrative of the grand Homeric encounter between Christian and Apollyon
+in the valley?  Why did I follow Ossian over Morven's battle-fields,
+exulting in the vulture-screams of the blind scald over his fallen
+enemies?  Still later, why did the newspapers furnish me with subjects
+for hero-worship in the half-demented Sir Gregor McGregor, and Ypsilanti
+at the head of his knavish Greeks?  I can account for it only in the
+supposition that the mischief was inhered,--an heirloom from the old
+sea-kings of the ninth century.
+
+Education and reflection have, indeed, since wrought a change in my
+feelings.  The trumpet of the Cid, or Ziska's drum even, could not now
+waken that old martial spirit.  The bull-dog ferocity of a half-
+intoxicated Anglo-Saxon, pushing his blind way against the converging
+cannon-fire from the shattered walls of Ciudad Rodrigo, commends itself
+neither to my reason nor my fancy.  I now regard the accounts of the
+bloody passage of the Bridge of Lodi, and of French cuirassiers madly
+transfixing themselves upon the bayonets of Wellington's squares, with
+very much the same feeling of horror and loathing which is excited by a
+detail of the exploits of an Indian Thug, or those of a mad Malay
+running a-muck, creese in hand, through the streets of Pulo Penang.
+Your Waterloo, and battles of the Nile and Baltic,--what are they, in
+sober fact, but gladiatorial murder-games on a great scale,--human
+imitations of bull-fights, at which Satan sits as grand alguazil and
+master of ceremonies?  It is only when a great thought incarnates itself
+in action, desperately striving to find utterance even in sabre-clash
+and gun-fire, or when Truth and Freedom, in their mistaken zeal and
+distrustful of their own powers, put on battle-harness, that I can feel
+any sympathy with merely physical daring.  The brawny butcher-work of
+men whose wits, like those of Ajax, lie in their sinews, and who are
+"yoked like draught-oxen and made to plough up the wars," is no
+realization of my ideal of true courage.
+
+Yet I am not conscious of having lost in any degree my early admiration
+of heroic achievement.  The feeling remains; but it has found new and
+better objects.  I have learned to appreciate what Milton calls the
+martyr's "unresistible might of meekness,"--the calm, uncomplaining
+endurance of those who can bear up against persecution uncheered by
+sympathy or applause, and, with a full and keen appreciation of the
+value of all which they are called to sacrifice, confront danger and
+death in unselfish devotion to duty.  Fox, preaching through his prison-
+gates or rebuking Oliver Cromwell in the midst of his soldier-court
+Henry Vane beneath the axe of the headsman; Mary Dyer on the scaffold at
+Boston; Luther closing his speech at Worms with the sublime emphasis of
+his "Here stand I; I cannot otherwise; God help me;"  William Penn
+defending the rights of Englishmen from the baledock of the Fleet
+prison; Clarkson climbing the decks of Liverpool slaveships; Howard
+penetrating to infected dungeons; meek Sisters of Charity breathing
+contagion in thronged hospitals,--all these, and such as these, now help
+me to form the loftier ideal of Christian heroism.
+
+Blind Milton approaches nearly to my conception of a true hero.  What a
+picture have we of that sublime old man, as sick, poor, blind, and
+abandoned of friends, he still held fast his heroic integrity, rebuking
+with his unbending republicanism the treachery, cowardice, and servility
+of his old associates!  He had outlived the hopes and beatific visions
+of his youth; he had seen the loudmouthed advocates of liberty throwing
+down a nation's freedom at the feet of the shameless, debauched, and
+perjured Charles II., crouching to the harlot-thronged court of the
+tyrant, and forswearing at once their religion and their republicanism.
+The executioner's axe had been busy among his friends.  Vane and Hampden
+slept in their bloody graves.  Cromwell's ashes had been dragged from
+their resting-place; for even in death the effeminate monarch hated and
+feared the conquerer of Naseby and Marston Moor.  He was left alone, in
+age, and penury, and blindness, oppressed with the knowledge that all
+which his free soul abhorred had returned upon his beloved country.  Yet
+the spirit of the stern old republican remained to the last unbroken,
+realizing the truth of the language of his own Samson Agonistes:--
+
+              "But patience is more oft the exercise
+               Of saints, the trial of their fortitude,
+               Making them each his own deliverer
+               And victor over all
+               That tyranny or fortune can inflict."
+
+The curse of religious and political apostasy lay heavy on the land.
+Harlotry and atheism sat in the high places; and the "caresses of
+wantons and the jests of buffoons regulated the measures of a government
+which had just ability enough to deceive, just religion enough to
+persecute."  But, while Milton mourned over this disastrous change,
+no self-reproach mingled with his sorrow.  To the last he had striven
+against the oppressor; and when confined to his narrow alley, a prisoner
+in his own mean dwelling, like another Prometheus on his rock, he still
+turned upon him an eye of unsubdued defiance.  Who, that has read his
+powerful appeal to his countrymen when they were on the eve of welcoming
+back the tyranny and misrule which, at the expense of so much blood and
+treasure had been thrown off, can ever forget it?  How nobly does
+Liberty speak through him!  "If," said he, "ye welcome back a monarchy,
+it will be the triumph of all tyrants hereafter over any people who
+shall resist oppression; and their song shall then be to others, 'How
+sped the rebellious English?' but to our posterity, 'How sped the
+rebels, your fathers?'"  How solemn and awful is his closing paragraph!
+"What I have spoken is the language of that which is not called amiss
+'the good old cause.'  If it seem strange to any, it will not, I hope,
+seem more strange than convincing to backsliders.  This much I should
+have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and
+stones, and had none to cry to but with the prophet, 'O earth, earth,
+earth!' to tell the very soil itself what its perverse inhabitants are
+deaf to; nay, though what I have spoken should prove (which Thou suffer
+not, who didst make mankind free; nor Thou next, who didst redeem us
+from being servants of sin) to be the last words of our expiring
+liberties."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE CITY OF A DAY.
+
+The writer, when residing in Lowell, in 1843 contributed this and the
+companion pieces to 'The Stranger' in Lowell.
+
+This, then, is Lowell,--a city springing up, like the enchanted palaces
+of the Arabian tales, as it were in a single night, stretching far and
+wide its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling the angle
+of the confluence of the Concord and the Merrimac with the sights and
+sounds of trade and industry.  Marvellously here have art and labor
+wrought their modern miracles.  I can scarcely realize the fact that a
+few years ago these rivers, now tamed and subdued to the purposes of man
+and charmed into slavish subjection to the wizard of mechanism, rolled
+unchecked towards the ocean the waters of the Winnipesaukee and the
+rock-rimmed springs of the White Mountains, and rippled down their falls
+in the wild freedom of Nature.  A stranger, in view of all this
+wonderful change, feels himself, as it were, thrust forward into a new
+century; he seems treading on the outer circle of the millennium of
+steam engines and cotton mills.  Work is here the patron saint.
+Everything bears his image and superscription.  Here is no place for
+that respectable class of citizens called gentlemen, and their much
+vilified brethren, familiarly known as loafers.  Over the gateways of
+this new world Manchester glares the inscription, "Work, or die".
+Here
+
+               "Every worm beneath the moon
+               Draws different threads, and late or soon
+               Spins, toiling out his own cocoon."
+
+The founders of this city probably never dreamed of the theory of
+Charles Lamb in respect to the origin of labor:--
+
+          "Who first invented work, and thereby bound
+          The holiday rejoicing spirit down
+          To the never-ceasing importunity
+          Of business in the green fields and the town?
+
+          "Sabbathless Satan,--he who his unglad
+          Task ever plies midst rotatory burnings
+          For wrath divine has made him like a wheel
+          In that red realm from whence are no returnings."
+
+Rather, of course, would they adopt Carlyle's apostrophe of "Divine
+labor, noble, ever fruitful,--the grand, sole miracle of man;" for this
+is indeed a city consecrated to thrift,--dedicated, every square rod of
+it, to the divinity of work; the gospel of industry preached daily and
+hourly from some thirty temples, each huger than the Milan Cathedral or
+the Temple of Jeddo, the Mosque of St. Sophia or the Chinese pagoda of a
+hundred bells; its mighty sermons uttered by steam and water-power; its
+music the everlasting jar of mechanism and the organ-swell of many
+waters; scattering the cotton and woollen leaves of its evangel from the
+wings of steamboats and rail-cars throughout the land; its thousand
+priests and its thousands of priestesses ministering around their
+spinning-jenny and powerloom altars, or thronging the long, unshaded
+streets in the level light of sunset.  After all, it may well be
+questioned whether this gospel, according to Poor Richard's Almanac, is
+precisely calculated for the redemption of humanity.  Labor, graduated
+to man's simple wants, necessities, and unperverted tastes, is doubtless
+well; but all beyond this is weariness to flesh and spirit.  Every web
+which falls from these restless looms has a history more or less
+connected with sin and suffering, beginning with slavery and ending
+with overwork and premature death.
+
+A few years ago, while travelling in Pennsylvania, I encountered a
+small, dusky-browed German of the name of Etzler.  He was possessed by a
+belief that the world was to be restored to its paradisiacal state by
+the sole agency of mechanics, and that he had himself discovered the
+means of bringing about this very desirable consummation.  His whole
+mental atmosphere was thronged with spectral enginery; wheel within
+wheel; plans of hugest mechanism; Brobdignagian steam-engines; Niagaras
+of water-power; wind-mills with "sail-broad vans," like those of Satan
+in chaos, by the proper application of which every valley was to be
+exalted and every hill laid low; old forests seized by their shaggy tops
+and uprooted; old morasses drained; the tropics made cool; the eternal
+ices melted around the poles; the ocean itself covered with artificial
+islands, blossoming gardens of the blessed, rocking gently on the bosom
+of the deep.  Give him "three hundred thousand dollars and ten years'
+time," and he would undertake to do the work.
+
+Wrong, pain, and sin, being in his view but the results of our physical
+necessities, ill-gratified desires, and natural yearnings for a better
+state, were to vanish before the millennium of mechanism.  "It would
+be," said he, "as ridiculous then to dispute and quarrel about the means
+of life as it would be now about water to drink by the side of mighty
+rivers, or about permission to breathe the common air."  To his mind the
+great forces of Nature took the shape of mighty and benignant spirits,
+sent hitherward to be the servants of man in restoring to him his lost
+paradise; waiting only for his word of command to apply their giant
+energies to the task, but as yet struggling blindly and aimlessly,
+giving ever and anon gentle hints, in the way of earthquake, fire, and
+flood, that they are weary of idleness, and would fain be set at work.
+Looking down, as I now do, upon these huge brick workshops, I have
+thought of poor Etzler, and wondered whether he would admit, were he
+with me, that his mechanical forces have here found their proper
+employment of millennium making.  Grinding on, each in his iron harness,
+invisible, yet shaking, by his regulated and repressed power, his huge
+prison-house from basement to capstone, is it true that the genii of
+mechanism are really at work here, raising us, by wheel and pulley,
+steam and waterpower, slowly up that inclined plane from whose top
+stretches the broad table-land of promise?
+
+Many of the streets of Lowell present a lively and neat aspect, and are
+adorned with handsome public and private buildings; but they lack one
+pleasant feature of older towns,--broad, spreading shade-trees.  One
+feels disposed to quarrel with the characteristic utilitarianism of the
+first settlers, which swept so entirely away the green beauty of Nature.
+For the last few days it has been as hot here as Nebuchadnezzar's
+furnace or Monsieur Chabert's oven, the sun glaring down from a copper
+sky upon these naked, treeless streets, in traversing which one is
+tempted to adopt the language of a warm-weather poet:
+
+     "The lean, like walking skeletons, go stalking pale and gloomy;
+     The fat, like red-hot warming-pans, send hotter fancies through me;
+     I wake from dreams of polar ice, on which I've been a slider,
+     Like fishes dreaming of the sea and waking in the spider."
+
+How unlike the elm-lined avenues of New Haven, upon whose cool and
+graceful panorama the stranger looks down upon the Judge's Cave, or the
+vine-hung pinnacles of West Rock, its tall spires rising white and clear
+above the level greenness! or the breezy leafiness of Portland, with its
+wooded islands in the distance, and itself overhung with verdant beauty,
+rippling and waving in the same cool breeze which stirs the waters of
+the beautiful Bay of Casco!  But time will remedy all this; and, when
+Lowell shall have numbered half the years of her sister cities, her
+newly planted elms and maples, which now only cause us to contrast their
+shadeless stems with the leafy glory of their parents of the forest,
+will stretch out to the future visitor arms of welcome and repose.
+
+There is one beautiful grove in Lowell,--that on Chapel Hill,--where a
+cluster of fine old oaks lift their sturdy stems and green branches, in
+close proximity to the crowded city, blending the cool rustle of their
+leaves with the din of machinery.  As I look at them in this gray
+twilight they seem lonely and isolated, as if wondering what has become
+of their old forest companions, and vainly endeavoring to recognize in
+the thronged and dusty streets before them those old, graceful
+colonnades of maple and thick-shaded oaken vistas, stretching from river
+to river, carpeted with the flowers and grasses of spring, or ankle deep
+with leaves of autumn, through whose leafy canopy the sunlight melted in
+upon wild birds, shy deer, and red Indians.  Long may these oaks remain
+to remind us that, if there be utility in the new, there was beauty in
+the old, leafy Puseyites of Nature, calling us back to the past, but,
+like their Oxford brethren, calling in vain; for neither in polemics nor
+in art can we go backward in an age whose motto is ever "Onward."
+
+The population of Lowell is constituted mainly of New Englanders; but
+there are representatives here of almost every part of the civilized
+world.  The good-humored face of the Milesian meets one at almost every
+turn; the shrewdly solemn Scotchman, the transatlantic Yankee, blending
+the crafty thrift of Bryce Snailsfoot with the stern religious heroism
+of Cameron; the blue-eyed, fair-haired German from the towered hills
+which overlook the Rhine,--slow, heavy, and unpromising in his exterior,
+yet of the same mould and mettle of the men who rallied for "fatherland"
+at the Tyrtean call of Korner and beat back the chivalry of France from
+the banks of the Katzback,--the countrymen of Richter, and Goethe, and
+our own Follen.  Here, too, are pedlers from Hamburg, and Bavaria, and
+Poland, with their sharp Jewish faces, and black, keen eyes.  At this
+moment, beneath my window are two sturdy, sunbrowned Swiss maidens
+grinding music for a livelihood, rehearsing in a strange Yankee land the
+simple songs of their old mountain home, reminding me, by their foreign
+garb and language, of
+
+                    "Lauterbrunnen's peasant girl."
+
+Poor wanderers, I cannot say that I love their music; but now, as the
+notes die away, and, to use the words of Dr. Holmes, "silence comes like
+a poultice to heal the wounded ear," I feel grateful for their
+visitation.  Away from crowded thoroughfares, from brick walls and dusty
+avenues, at the sight of these poor peasants I have gone in thought to
+the vale of Chamouny, and seen, with Coleridge, the morning star pausing
+on the "bald, awful head of sovereign Blanc," and the sun rise and set
+upon snowy-crested mountains, down in whose valleys the night still
+lingers; and, following in the track of Byron and Rousseau, have watched
+the lengthening shadows of the hills on the beautiful waters of the
+Genevan lake.  Blessings, then, upon these young wayfarers, for they
+have "blessed me unawares."  In an hour of sickness and lassitude they
+have wrought for me the miracle of Loretto's Chapel, and, borne me away
+from the scenes around me and the sense of personal suffering to that
+wonderful land where Nature seems still uttering, from lake and valley,
+and from mountains whose eternal snows lean on the hard, blue heaven,
+the echoes of that mighty hymn of a new-created world, when "the morning
+stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."
+
+But of all classes of foreigners the Irish are by far the most numerous.
+Light-hearted, wrongheaded, impulsive, uncalculating, with an Oriental
+love of hyperbole, and too often a common dislike of cold water and of
+that gem which the fable tells us rests at the bottom of the well, the
+Celtic elements of their character do not readily accommodate themselves
+to those of the hard, cool, self-relying Anglo-Saxon.  I am free to
+confess to a very thorough dislike of their religious intolerance and
+bigotry, but am content to wait for the change that time and the
+attrition of new circumstances and ideas must necessarily make in this
+respect.  Meanwhile I would strive to reverence man as man, irrespective
+of his birthplace.  A stranger in a strange land is always to me an
+object of sympathy and interest.  Amidst all his apparent gayety of
+heart and national drollery and wit, the poor Irish emigrant has sad
+thoughts of the "ould mother of him," sitting lonely in her solitary
+cabin by the bog-side; recollections of a father's blessing and a
+sister's farewell are haunting him; a grave mound in a distant
+churchyard far beyond the "wide wathers" has an eternal greenness in his
+memory; for there, perhaps, lies a "darlint child" or a "swate crather"
+who once loved him.  The new world is forgotten for the moment; blue
+Killarney and the Liffey sparkle before him, and Glendalough stretches
+beneath him its dark, still mirror; he sees the same evening sunshine
+rest upon and hallow alike with Nature's blessing the ruins of the Seven
+Churches of Ireland's apostolic age, the broken mound of the Druids, and
+the round towers of the Phoenician sun-worshippers; pleasant and
+mournful recollections of his home waken within him; and the rough and
+seemingly careless and light-hearted laborer melts into tears.  It is no
+light thing to abandon one's own country and household gods.  Touching
+and beautiful was the injunction of the prophet of the Hebrews:
+
+"Ye shall not oppress the stranger; for ye know the heart of the
+stranger, seeing that ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             PATUCKET FALLS.
+
+MANY years ago I read, in some old chronicle of the early history of New
+England, a paragraph which has ever since haunted my memory, calling up
+romantic associations of wild Nature and wilder man:--
+
+"The Sachem Wonolanset, who lived by the Groat Falls of Patucket, on the
+Merrimac."
+
+It was with this passage in my mind that I visited for the first time
+the Rapids of the Merrimac, above Lowell.
+
+Passing up the street by the Hospital, a large and elegant mansion
+surrounded by trees and shrubbery and climbing vines, I found myself,
+after walking a few rods farther, in full view of the Merrimac.  A deep
+and rocky channel stretched between me and the Dracut shore, along which
+rushed the shallow water,--a feeble, broken, and tortuous current,
+winding its way among splintered rocks, rising sharp and jagged in all
+directions.  Drained above the falls by the canal, it resembled some
+mountain streamlet of old Spain, or some Arabian wady, exhausted by a
+year's drought.  Higher up, the arches of the bridge spanned the quick,
+troubled water; and, higher still, the dam, so irregular in its outline
+as to seem less a work of Art than of Nature, crossed the bed of the
+river, a lakelike placidity above contrasting with the foam and murmur
+of the falls below.  And this was all which modern improvements had left
+of "the great Patucket Falls" of the olden time.  The wild river had
+been tamed; the spirit of the falls, whose hoarse voice the Indian once
+heard in the dashing of the great water down the rocks, had become the
+slave of the arch conjurer, Art; and, like a shorn and blinded giant,
+was grinding in the prison-house of his taskmaster.
+
+One would like to know how this spot must have seemed to the "twenty
+goodlie persons from Concord and Woburn" who first visited it in 1652,
+as, worn with fatigue, and wet from the passage of the sluggish Concord,
+"where ford there was none," they wound their slow way through the
+forest, following the growing murmur of the falls, until at length the
+broad, swift river stretched before them, its white spray flashing in
+the sun.  What cared these sturdy old Puritans for the wild beauty of
+the landscape thus revealed before them?  I think I see them standing
+there in the golden light of a closing October day, with their sombre
+brown doublets and slouched hats, and their heavy matchlocks,--such men
+as Ireton fronted death with on the battle-field of Naseby, or those who
+stalked with Cromwell over the broken wall of Drogheda, smiting, "in the
+name of the Lord," old and young, "both maid, and little children."
+Methinks I see the sunset light flooding the river valley, the western
+hills stretching to the horizon, overhung with trees gorgeous and
+glowing with the tints of autumn,--a mighty flower-garden, blossoming
+under the spell of the enchanter, Frost; the rushing river, with its
+graceful water-curves and white foam; and a steady murmur, low, deep
+voices of water, the softest, sweetest sound of Nature, blends with the
+sigh of the south wind in the pine-tops.  But these hard-featured saints
+of the New Canaan "care for none of these things."  The stout hearts
+which beat under their leathern doublets are proof against the sweet
+influences of Nature.  They see only "a great and howling wilderness,
+where be many Indians, but where fish may be taken, and where be meadows
+for ye subsistence of cattle," and which, on the whole, "is a
+comfortable place to accommodate a company of God's people upon, who
+may, with God's blessing, do good in that place for both church and
+state."  (Vide petition to the General Court, 1653.)
+
+In reading the journals and narratives of the early settlers of New
+England nothing is more remarkable than the entire silence of the worthy
+writers in respect to the natural beauty or grandeur of the scenery amid
+which their lot was cast.  They designated the grand and glorious
+forest, broken by lakes and crossed by great rivers, intersected by a
+thousand streams more beautiful than those which the Old World has given
+to song and romance, as "a desert and frightful wilderness."  The wildly
+picturesque Indian, darting his birch canoe down the Falls of the
+Amoskeag or gliding in the deer-track of the forest, was, in their view,
+nothing but a "dirty tawnie," a "salvage heathen," and "devil's imp."
+Many of them were well educated,--men of varied and profound erudition,
+and familiar with the best specimens of Greek and Roman literature; yet
+they seem to have been utterly devoid of that poetic feeling or fancy
+whose subtle alchemy detects the beautiful in the familiar.  Their very
+hymns and spiritual songs seem to have been expressly calculated, like
+"the music-grinders" of Holmes,--
+
+                   "To pluck the eyes of sentiment,
+                    And dock the tail of rhyme,
+                    To crack the voice of melody,
+                    And break the legs of time."
+
+They were sworn enemies of the Muses; haters of stage-play literature,
+profane songs, and wanton sonnets; of everything, in brief, which
+reminded them of the days of the roistering cavaliers and bedizened
+beauties of the court of "the man Charles," whose head had fallen
+beneath the sword of Puritan justice.  Hard, harsh, unlovely, yet with
+many virtues and noble points of character, they were fitted, doubtless,
+for their work of pioneers in the wilderness.  Sternly faithful to duty,
+in peril, and suffering, and self-denial, they wrought out the noblest
+of historical epics on the rough soil of New England.  They lived a
+truer poetry than Homer or Virgil wrote.
+
+The Patuckets, once a powerful native tribe, had their principal
+settlements around the falls at the time of the visit of the white men
+of Concord and Woburn in 1652.  Gookin, the Indian historian, states
+that this tribe was almost wholly destroyed by the great pestilence of
+1612.  In 1674 they had but two hundred and fifty males in the whole
+tribe.  Their chief sachem lived opposite the falls; and it was in his
+wigwam that the historian, in company with John Eliot, the Indian
+missionary, held a "meeting for worshippe on ye 5th of May, 1676," where
+Mr. Eliot preached from "ye twenty-second of Matthew."
+
+The white visitants from Concord and Woburn, pleased with the appearance
+of the place and the prospect it afforded for planting and fishing,
+petitioned the General Court for a grant of the entire tract of land now
+embraced in the limits of Lowell and Chelmsford.  They made no account
+whatever of the rights of the poor Patuckets; but, considering it
+"a comfortable place to accommodate God's people upon," were doubtless
+prepared to deal with the heathen inhabitants as Joshua the son of Nun
+did with the Jebusites and Perizzites, the Hivites and the Hittites, of
+old.  The Indians, however, found a friend in the apostle Eliot, who
+presented a petition in their behalf that the lands lying around the
+Patucket and Wamesit Falls should be appropriated exclusively for their
+benefit and use.  The Court granted the petition of the whites, with the
+exception of the tract in the angle of the two rivers on which the
+Patuckets were settled.  The Indian title to this tract was not finally
+extinguished until 1726, when the beautiful name of Wamesit was lost in
+that of Chelmsford, and the last of the Patuckets turned his back upon
+the graves of his fathers and sought a new home among the strange
+Indians of the North.
+
+But what has all this to do with the falls?  When the rail-cars came
+thundering through his lake country, Wordsworth attempted to exorcise
+them by a sonnet; and, were I not a very decided Yankee, I might
+possibly follow his example, and utter in this connection my protest
+against the desecration of Patucket Falls, and battle with objurgatory
+stanzas these dams and mills, as Balmawapple shot off his horse-pistol
+at Stirling Castle.  Rocks and trees, rapids, cascades, and other water-
+works are doubtless all very well; but on the whole, considering our
+seven months of frost, are not cotton shirts and woollen coats still
+better?  As for the spirits of the river, the Merrimac Naiads, or
+whatever may be their name in Indian vocabulary, they have no good
+reason for complaint; inasmuch as Nature, in marking and scooping out
+the channel of their stream, seems to have had an eye to the useful
+rather than the picturesque.  After a few preliminary antics and
+youthful vagaries up among the White Hills, the Merrimac comes down to
+the seaboard, a clear, cheerful, hard-working Yankee river.  Its
+numerous falls and rapids are such as seem to invite the engineer's
+level rather than the pencil of the tourist; and the mason who piles up
+the huge brick fabrics at their feet is seldom, I suspect, troubled with
+sentimental remorse or poetical misgivings.  Staid and matter of fact as
+the Merrimac is, it has, nevertheless, certain capricious and eccentric
+tributaries; the Powow, for instance, with its eighty feet fall in a few
+rods, and that wild, Indian-haunted Spicket, taking its wellnigh
+perpendicular leap of thirty feet, within sight of the village meeting-
+house, kicking up its Pagan heels, Sundays and all, in sheer contempt of
+Puritan tithing-men.  This latter waterfall is now somewhat modified by
+the hand of Art, but is still, as Professor Hitchcock's "Scenographical
+Geology" says of it, "an object of no little interest."  My friend T.,
+favorably known as the translator of "Undine" and as a writer of fine
+and delicate imagination, visited Spicket Falls before the sound of a
+hammer or the click of a trowel had been heard beside them.  His journal
+of "A Day on the Merrimac" gives a pleasing and vivid description of
+their original appearance as viewed through the telescope of a poetic
+fancy.  The readers of "Undine" will thank me for a passage or two from
+this sketch:--
+
+"The sound of the waters swells more deeply.  Something supernatural in
+their confused murmur; it makes me better understand and sympathize with
+the writer of the Apocalypse when he speaks of the voice of many waters,
+heaping image upon image, to impart the vigor of his conception.
+
+"Through yonder elm-branches I catch a few snowy glimpses of foam in the
+air.  See that spray and vapor rolling up the evergreen on my left The
+two side precipices, one hundred feet apart and excluding objects of
+inferior moment, darken and concentrate the view.  The waters between
+pour over the right-hand and left-hand summit, rushing down and uniting
+among the craggiest and abruptest of rocks.  Oh for a whole mountain-
+side of that living foam!  The sun impresses a faint prismatic hue.
+These falls, compared with those of the Missouri, are nothing,--nothing
+but the merest miniature; and yet they assist me in forming some
+conception of that glorious expanse.
+
+"A fragment of an oak, struck off by lightning, struggles with the
+current midway down; while the shattered trunk frowns above the
+desolation, majestic in ruin.  This is near the southern cliff.  Farther
+north a crag rises out of the stream, its upper surface covered with
+green clover of the most vivid freshness.  Not only all night, but all
+day, has the dew lain upon its purity.  With my eye attaining the
+uppermost margin, where the waters shoot over, I look away into the
+western sky, and discern there (what you least expect) a cow chewing her
+cud with admirable composure, and higher up several sheep and lambs
+browsing celestial buds.  They stand on the eminence that forms the
+background of my present view.  The illusion is extremely picturesque,--
+such as Allston himself would despair of producing.  'Who can paint like
+Nature'?"
+
+To a population like that of Lowell, the weekly respite from monotonous
+in-door toil afforded by the first day of the week is particularly
+grateful.  Sabbath comes to the weary and overworked operative
+emphatically as a day of rest.  It opens upon him somewhat as it did
+upon George Herbert, as he describes it in his exquisite little poem:--
+
+               "Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
+               The bridal of the earth and sky!"
+
+Apart from its soothing religious associations, it brings with it the
+assurance of physical comfort and freedom.  It is something to be able
+to doze out the morning from daybreak to breakfast in that luxurious
+state between sleeping and waking in which the mind eddies slowly and
+peacefully round and round instead of rushing onward,--the future a
+blank, the past annihilated, the present but a dim consciousness of
+pleasurable existence.  Then, too, the satisfaction is by no means
+inconsiderable of throwing aside the worn and soiled habiliments of
+labor and appearing in neat and comfortable attire.  The moral influence
+of dress has not been overrated even by Carlyle's Professor in his
+Sartor Resartus.  William Penn says that cleanliness is akin to
+godliness.  A well-dressed man, all other things being equal, is not
+half as likely to compromise his character as one who approximates to
+shabbiness.  Lawrence Sterne used to say that when he felt himself
+giving way to low spirits and a sense of depression and worthlessness,--
+a sort of predisposition for all sorts of little meannesses,--he
+forthwith shaved himself, brushed his wig, donned his best dress and his
+gold rings, and thus put to flight the azure demons of his unfortunate
+temperament.  There is somehow a close affinity between moral purity and
+clean linen; and the sprites of our daily temptation, who seem to find
+easy access to us through a broken hat or a rent in the elbow, are
+manifestly baffled by the "complete mail" of a clean and decent dress.
+I recollect on one occasion hearing my mother tell our family physician
+that a woman in the neighborhood, not remarkable for her tidiness, had
+become a church-member.  "Humph!" said the doctor, in his quick,
+sarcastic way, "What of that?  Don't you know that no unclean thing can
+enter the kingdom of heaven?"
+
+"If you would see" Lowell "aright," as Walter Scott says of Melrose
+Abbey, one must be here of a pleasant First day at the close of what is
+called the "afternoon service."  The streets are then blossoming like a
+peripatetic flower-garden; as if the tulips and lilies and roses of my
+friend W.'s nursery, in the vale of Nonantum, should take it into their
+heads to promenade for exercise.  Thousands swarm forth who during week-
+days are confined to the mills.  Gay colors alternate with snowy
+whiteness; extremest fashion elbows the plain demureness of old-
+fashioned Methodism.
+
+Fair pale faces catch a warmer tint from the free sunshine and fresh
+air.  The languid step becomes elastic with that "springy motion of the
+gait" which Charles Lamb admired.  Yet the general appearance of the
+city is that of quietude; the youthful multitude passes on calmly, its
+voices subdued to a lower and softened tone, as if fearful of breaking
+the repose of the day of rest.  A stranger fresh from the gayly spent
+Sabbaths of the continent of Europe would be undoubtedly amazed at the
+decorum and sobriety of these crowded streets.
+
+I am not over-precise in outward observances; but I nevertheless welcome
+with joy unfeigned this first day of the week,--sweetest pause in our
+hard life-march, greenest resting-place in the hot desert we are
+treading.  The errors of those who mistake its benignant rest for the
+iron rule of the Jewish Sabbath, and who consequently hedge it about
+with penalties and bow down before it in slavish terror, should not
+render us less grateful for the real blessing it brings us.  As a day
+wrested in some degree from the god of this world, as an opportunity
+afforded for thoughtful self-communing, let us receive it as a good gift
+of our heavenly Parent in love rather than fear.
+
+In passing along Central Street this morning my attention was directed
+by the friend who accompanied me to a group of laborers, with coats off
+and sleeves rolled up, heaving at levers, smiting with sledge-hammers,
+in full view of the street, on the margin of the canal, just above
+Central Street Bridge.  I rubbed my eyes, half expecting that I was the
+subject of mere optical illusion; but a second look only confirmed the
+first.  Around me were solemn, go-to-meeting faces,--smileless and
+awful; and close at hand were the delving, toiling, mud-begrimed
+laborers.  Nobody seemed surprised at it; nobody noticed it as a thing
+out of the common course of events.  And this, too, in a city where the
+Sabbath proprieties are sternly insisted upon; where some twenty pulpits
+deal out anathemas upon all who "desecrate the Lord's day;" where simple
+notices of meetings for moral purposes even can scarcely be read; where
+many count it wrong to speak on that day for the slave, who knows no
+Sabbath of rest, or for the drunkard, who, imbruted by his appetites,
+cannot enjoy it.  Verily there are strange contradictions in our
+conventional morality.  Eyes which, looking across the Atlantic on the
+gay Sabbath dances of French peasants are turned upward with horror, are
+somehow blind to matters close at home.  What would be sin past
+repentance in an individual becomes quite proper in a corporation.
+True, the Sabbath is holy; but the canals must be repaired.  Everybody
+ought to go to meeting; but the dividends must not be diminished.
+Church indulgences are not, after all, confined to Rome.
+
+To a close observer of human nature there is nothing surprising in the
+fact that a class of persons, who wink at this sacrifice of Sabhath
+sanctities to the demon of gain, look at the same time with stern
+disapprobation upon everything partaking of the character of amusement,
+however innocent and healthful, on this day.  But for myself, looking
+down through the light of a golden evening upon these quietly passing
+groups, I cannot find it in my heart to condemn them for seeking on this
+their sole day of leisure the needful influences of social enjoyment,
+unrestrained exercise, and fresh air.  I cannot think any essential
+service to religion or humanity would result from the conversion of
+their day of rest into a Jewish Sabbath, and their consequent
+confinement, like so many pining prisoners, in close and crowded
+boarding-houses.  Is not cheerfulness a duty, a better expression of our
+gratitude for God's blessings than mere words?  And even under the old
+law of rituals, what answer had the Pharisees to the question, "Is it
+not lawful to do good on the Sabbath day?"
+
+I am naturally of a sober temperament, and am, besides, a member of that
+sect which Dr. More has called, mistakenly indeed, "the most melancholy
+of all;" but I confess a special dislike of disfigured faces,
+ostentatious displays of piety, pride aping humility.  Asceticism,
+moroseness, self-torture, ingratitude in view of down-showering
+blessings, and painful restraint of the better feelings of our nature
+may befit a Hindoo fakir, or a Mandan medicine man with buffalo skulls
+strung to his lacerated muscles; but they look to me sadly out of place
+in a believer of the glad evangel of the New Testament.  The life of the
+divine Teacher affords no countenance to this sullen and gloomy
+saintliness, shutting up the heart against the sweet influences of human
+sympathy and the blessed ministrations of Nature.  To the horror and
+clothes-rending astonishment of blind Pharisees He uttered the
+significant truth, that "the Sabhath was made for man, and not man for
+the Sabhath."  From the close air of crowded cities, from thronged
+temples and synagogues,--where priest and Levite kept up a show of
+worship, drumming upon hollow ceremonials the more loudly for their
+emptiness of life, as the husk rustles the more when the grain is gone,
+--He led His disciples out into the country stillness, under clear
+Eastern heavens, on the breezy tops of mountains, in the shade of fruit-
+trees, by the side of fountains, and through yellow harvest-fields,
+enforcing the lessons of His divine morality by comparisons and parables
+suggested by the objects around Him or the cheerful incidents of social
+humanity,--the vineyard, the field-lily, the sparrow in the air, the
+sower in the seed-field, the feast and the marriage.  Thus gently, thus
+sweetly kind and cheerful, fell from His lips the gospel of humanity;
+love the fulfilling of every law; our love for one another measuring and
+manifesting our love of Him.  The baptism wherewith He was baptized was
+that of divine fulness in the wants of our humanity; the deep waters of
+our sorrows went over Him; ineffable purity sounding for our sakes the
+dark abysm of sin; yet how like a river of light runs that serene and
+beautiful life through the narratives of the evangelists!  He broke
+bread with the poor despised publican; He sat down with the fishermen by
+the Sea of Galilee; He spoke compassionate words to sin-sick Magdalen;
+He sanctified by His presence the social enjoyments of home and
+friendship in the family of Bethany; He laid His hand of blessing on the
+sunny brows of children; He had regard even to the merely animal wants
+of the multitude in the wilderness; He frowned upon none of life's
+simple and natural pleasures.  The burden of His Gospel was love; and in
+life and word He taught evermore the divided and scattered children of
+one great family that only as they drew near each other could they
+approach Him who was their common centre; and that while no ostentation
+of prayer nor rigid observance of ceremonies could elevate man to
+heaven, the simple exercise of love, in thought and action, could bring
+heaven down to man.  To weary and restless spirits He taught the great
+truth, that happiness consists in making others happy.  No cloister for
+idle genuflections and bead counting, no hair-cloth for the loins nor
+scourge for the limbs, but works of love and usefulness under the
+cheerful sunshine, making the waste places of humanity glad and causing
+the heart's desert to blossom.  Why, then, should we go searching after
+the cast-off sackcloth of the Pharisee?  Are we Jews, or Christians?
+Must even our gratitude for "glad tidings of great joy" be desponding?
+Must the hymn of our thanksgiving for countless mercies and the
+unspeakable gift of His life have evermore an undertone of funeral
+wailing?  What! shall we go murmuring and lamenting, looking coldly on
+one another, seeing no beauty, nor light, nor gladness in this good
+world, wherein we have the glorious privilege of laboring in God's
+harvest-field, with angels for our task companions, blessing and being
+blessed?
+
+To him who, neglecting the revelations of immediate duty, looks
+regretfully behind and fearfully before him, life may well seem a solemn
+mystery, for, whichever way he turns, a wall of darkness rises before
+him; but down upon the present, as through a skylight between the
+shadows, falls a clear, still radiance, like beams from an eye of
+blessing; and, within the circle of that divine illumination, beauty and
+goodness, truth and love, purity and cheerfulness blend like primal
+colors into the clear harmony of light.  The author of Proverbial
+Philosophy has a passage not unworthy of note in this connection, when
+he speaks of the train which attends the just in heaven:--
+
+"Also in the lengthening troop see I some clad in robes of triumph,
+Whose fair and sunny faces I have known and loved on earth.
+Welcome, ye glorified Loves, Graces, Sciences, and Muses,
+That, like Sisters of Charity, tended in this world's hospital;
+Welcome, for verily I knew ye could not but be children of the light;
+Welcome, chiefly welcome, for I find I have friends in heaven,
+And some I have scarcely looked for; as thou, light-hearted Mirth;
+Thou, also, star-robed Urania; and thou with the curious glass,
+That rejoicest in tracking beauty where the eye was too dull to note it.
+And art thou, too, among the blessed, mild, much-injured Poetry?
+That quickenest with light and beauty the leaden face of matter,
+That not unheard, though silent, fillest earth's gardens with music,
+And not unseen, though a spirit, dost look down upon us from the stars."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             THE LIGHTING UP.
+
+          "He spak to the spynnsters to spynnen it oute."
+                                                  PIERS PLOUGHMAN.
+
+THIS evening, the 20th of the ninth month, is the time fixed upon for
+lighting the mills for night-labor; and I have just returned from
+witnessing for the first time the effect of the new illumination.
+
+Passing over the bridge, nearly to the Dracut shore, I had a fine view
+of the long line of mills, the city beyond, and the broad sweep of the
+river from the falls.  The light of a tranquil and gorgeous sunset was
+slowly fading from river and sky, and the shadows of the trees on the
+Dracut slopes were blending in dusky indistinctness with the great
+shadow of night.  Suddenly gleams of light broke from the black masses
+of masonry on the Lowell bank, at first feeble and scattered, flitting
+from window to window, appearing and disappearing, like will-o'-wisps in
+a forest or fireflies in a summer's night.  Anon tier after tier of
+windows became radiant, until the whole vast wall, stretching far up the
+river, from basement to roof, became checkered with light reflected with
+the starbeams from the still water beneath.  With a little effort of
+fancy, one could readily transform the huge mills, thus illuminated,
+into palaces lighted up for festival occasions, and the figures of the
+workers, passing to and fro before the windows, into forms of beauty and
+fashion, moving in graceful dances.
+
+Alas! this music of the shuttle and the daylong dance to it are not
+altogether of the kind which Milton speaks of when he invokes the "soft
+Lydian airs" of voluptuous leisure.  From this time henceforward for
+half a weary year, from the bell-call of morning twilight to half-past
+seven in the evening, with brief intermissions for two hasty meals, the
+operatives will be confined to their tasks.  The proverbial facility of
+the Yankees in despatching their dinners in the least possible time
+seems to have been taken advantage of and reduced to a system on the
+Lowell corporations.  Strange as it may seem to the uninitiated, the
+working-men and women here contrive to repair to their lodgings, make
+the necessary preliminary ablutions, devour their beef and pudding, and
+hurry back to their looms and jacks in the brief space of half an hour.
+In this way the working-day in Lowell is eked out to an average
+throughout the year of twelve and a half hours.  This is a serious evil,
+demanding the earnest consideration of the humane and philanthropic.
+Both classes--the employer and the employed--would in the end be greatly
+benefited by the general adoption of the "ten-hour system," although the
+one might suffer a slight diminution in daily wages and the other in
+yearly profits.  Yet it is difficult to see how this most desirable
+change is to be effected.  The stronger and healthier portion of the
+operatives might themselves object to it as strenuously as the distant
+stockholder who looks only to his semi-annual dividends.  Health is too
+often a matter of secondary consideration.  Gain is the great,
+all-absorbing object.  Very few, comparatively, regard Lowell as their
+"continuing city."  They look longingly back to green valleys of
+Vermont, to quiet farm-houses on the head-waters of the Connecticut and
+Merrimac, and to old familiar homes along the breezy seaboard of New
+England, whence they have been urged by the knowledge that here they can
+earn a larger amount of money in a given time than in any other place or
+employment.  They come here for gain, not for pleasure; for high wages,
+not for the comforts that cluster about home.  Here are poor widows
+toiling to educate their children; daughters hoarding their wages to
+redeem mortgaged paternal homesteads or to defray the expenses of sick
+and infirm parents; young betrothed girls, about to add their savings to
+those of their country lovers.  Others there are, of maturer age, lonely
+and poor, impelled hither by a proud unwillingness to test to its extent
+the charity of friends and relatives, and a strong yearning for the
+"glorious privilege of being independent."  All honor to them!  Whatever
+may have closed against them the gates of matrimony, whether their own
+obduracy or the faithlessness or indifference of others, instead of
+shutting themselves up in a nunnery or taxing the good nature of their
+friends by perpetual demands for sympathy and support, like weak vines,
+putting out their feelers in every direction for something to twine
+upon, is it not better and wiser for them to go quietly at work, to show
+that woman has a self-sustaining power; that she is something in and of
+herself; that she, too, has a part to bear in life, and, in common with
+the self-elected "lords of creation," has a direct relation to absolute
+being?  To such the factory presents the opportunity of taking the first
+and essential step of securing, within a reasonable space of time, a
+comfortable competency.
+
+There are undoubtedly many evils connected with the working of these
+mills; yet they are partly compensated by the fact that here, more than
+in any other mechanical employment, the labor of woman is placed
+essentially upon an equality with that of man.  Here, at least, one of
+the many social disabilities under which woman as a distinct individual,
+unconnected with the other sex, has labored in all time is removed; the
+work of her hands is adequately rewarded; and she goes to her daily task
+with the consciousness that she is not "spending her strength for
+naught."
+
+'The Lowell Offering', which has been for the last four years published
+monthly in this city, consisting entirely of articles written by females
+employed in the mills, has attracted much attention and obtained a wide
+circulation.  This may be in part owing to the novel circumstances of
+its publication; but it is something more and better than a mere
+novelty.  In its volumes may be found sprightly delineations of home
+scenes and characters, highly wrought imaginative pieces, tales of
+genuine pathos and humor, and pleasing fairy stories and fables.
+'The Offering' originated in a reading society of the mill girls, which,
+under the name of the 'Improvement Circle' was convened once in a month.
+At its meetings, pieces written by its members and dropped secretly into
+a sort of "lion's mouth," provided for the purpose of insuring the
+authors from detection, were read for the amusement and criticism of
+the company.  This circle is still in existence; and I owe to my
+introduction to it some of the most pleasant hours I have passed in
+Lowell.
+
+The manner in which the 'Offering' has been generally noticed in this
+country has not, to my thinking, been altogether in accordance with good
+taste or self-respect.  It is hardly excusable for men, who, whatever
+may be their present position, have, in common with all of us, brothers,
+sisters, or other relations busy in workshop and dairy, and who have
+scarcely washed from their own professional hands the soil of labor, to
+make very marked demonstrations of astonishment at the appearance of a
+magazine whose papers are written by factory girls.  As if the
+compatibility of mental cultivation with bodily labor and the equality
+and brotherhood of the human family were still open questions, depending
+for their decision very much on the production of positive proof that
+essays may be written and carpets woven by the same set of fingers!
+
+The truth is, our democracy lacks calmness and solidity, the repose and
+self-reliance which come of long habitude and settled conviction.  We
+have not yet learned to wear its simple truths with the graceful ease
+and quiet air of unsolicitous assurance with which the titled European
+does his social fictions.  As a people, we do not feel and live out our
+great Declaration.  We lack faith in man,--confidence in simple
+humanity, apart from its environments.
+
+         "The age shows, to my thinking, more infidels to Adam,
+          Than directly, by profession, simple infidels to God."
+
+                                        Elizabeth B. Browning.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             TAKING COMFORT.
+
+For the last few days the fine weather has lured me away from books and
+papers and the close air of dwellings into the open fields, and under
+the soft, warm sunshine, and the softer light of a full moon.  The
+loveliest season of the whole year--that transient but delightful
+interval between the storms of the "wild equinox, with all their wet,"
+and the dark, short, dismal days which precede the rigor of winter--is
+now with us.  The sun rises through a soft and hazy atmosphere; the
+light mist-clouds melt gradually away before him; and his noontide light
+rests warm and clear on still woods, tranquil waters, and grasses green
+with the late autumnal rains.  The rough-wooded slopes of Dracut,
+overlooking the falls of the river; Fort Hill, across the Concord, where
+the red man made his last stand, and where may still be seen the trench
+which he dug around his rude fortress; the beautiful woodlands on the
+Lowell and Tewksbury shores of the Concord; the cemetery; the Patucket
+Falls,--all within the reach of a moderate walk,--offer at this season
+their latest and loveliest attractions.
+
+One fine morning, not long ago, I strolled down the Merrimac, on the
+Tewksbury shore.  I know of no walk in the vicinity of Lowell so
+inviting as that along the margin of the river for nearly a mile from
+the village of Belvidere.  The path winds, green and flower-skirted,
+among beeches and oaks, through whose boughs you catch glimpses of
+waters sparkling and dashing below.  Rocks, huge and picturesque,
+jut out into the stream, affording beautiful views of the river and
+the distant city.
+
+Half fatigued with my walk, I threw myself down upon the rocky slope
+of the bank, where the panorama of earth, sky, and water lay clear and
+distinct about me.  Far above, silent and dim as a picture, was the
+city, with its huge mill-masonry, confused chimney-tops, and church-
+spires; nearer rose the height of Belvidere, with its deserted burial-
+place and neglected gravestones sharply defined on its bleak, bare
+summit against the sky; before me the river went dashing down its rugged
+channel, sending up its everlasting murmur; above me the birch-tree hung
+its tassels; and the last wild flowers of autumn profusely fringed the
+rocky rim of the water.  Right opposite, the Dracut woods stretched
+upwards from the shore, beautiful with the hues of frost, glowing with
+tints richer and deeper than those which Claude or Poussin mingled, as
+if the rainbows of a summer shower had fallen among them.  At a little
+distance to the right a group of cattle stood mid-leg deep in the river;
+and a troop of children, bright-eyed and mirthful, were casting pebbles
+at them from a projecting shelf of rock.  Over all a warm but softened
+sunshine melted down from a slumberous autumnal sky.
+
+My revery was disagreeably broken.  A low, grunting sound, half bestial,
+half human, attracted my attention.  I was not alone.  Close beside me,
+half hidden by a tuft of bushes, lay a human being, stretched out at
+full length, with his face literally rooted into the gravel.  A little
+boy, five or six years of age, clean and healthful, with his fair brown
+locks and blue eyes, stood on the bank above, gazing down upon him with
+an expression of childhood's simple and unaffected pity.
+
+"What ails you?" asked the boy at length.  "What makes you lie there?"
+
+The prostrate groveller struggled half-way up, exhibiting the bloated
+and filthy countenance of a drunkard.  He made two or three efforts to
+get upon his feet, lost his balance, and tumbled forward upon his face.
+
+"What are you doing there?"  inquired the boy.
+
+"I'm taking comfort," he muttered, with his mouth in the dirt.
+
+Taking his comfort!  There he lay,--squalid and loathsome under the
+bright heaven,--an imbruted man.  The holy harmonies of Nature, the
+sounds of gushing waters, the rustle of the leaves above him, the wild
+flowers, the frost-bloom of the woods,--what were they to him?
+Insensible, deaf, and blind, in the stupor of a living death, he lay
+there, literally realizing that most bitterly significant Eastern
+malediction, "May you eat dirt!"
+
+In contrasting the exceeding beauty and harmony of inanimate Nature with
+the human degradation and deformity before me, I felt, as I confess I
+had never done before, the truth of a remark of a rare thinker, that
+"Nature is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because, it has
+no citizen.  The beauty of Nature must ever be universal and mocking
+until the landscape has human figures as good as itself.  Man is fallen;
+Nature is erect."--[Emerson.]  As I turned once more to the calm blue
+sky, the hazy autumnal hills, and the slumberous water, dream-tinted by
+the foliage of its shores, it seemed as if a shadow of shame and sorrow
+fell over the pleasant picture; and even the west wind which stirred the
+tree-tops above me had a mournful murmur, as if Nature felt the
+desecration of her sanctities and the discord of sin and folly which
+marred her sweet harmonies.
+
+God bless the temperance movement!  And He will bless it; for it is His
+work.  It is one of the great miracles of our times.  Not Father Mathew
+in Ireland, nor Hawkins and his little band in Baltimore, but He whose
+care is over all the works of His hand, and who in His divine love and
+compassion "turneth the hearts of men as the rivers of waters are
+turned," hath done it.  To Him be all the glory.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         CHARMS AND FAIRY FAITH
+
+                         "Up the airy mountain,
+                         Down the rushy glen,
+                         We dare n't go a-hunting
+                         For fear of little men.
+                         Wee folk, good folk,
+                         Trooping all together;
+                         Green jacket, red cap,
+                         Gray cock's feather."
+                                        ALLINGHAM.
+
+IT was from a profound knowledge of human nature that Lord Bacon, in
+discoursing upon truth, remarked that a mixture of a lie doth ever add
+pleasure.  "Doth any man doubt," he asks, "that if there were taken out
+of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, and
+imaginations, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor,
+shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to
+themselves?"  This admitted tendency of our nature, this love of the
+pleasing intoxication of unveracity, exaggeration, and imagination, may
+perhaps account for the high relish which children and nations yet in
+the childhood of civilization find in fabulous legends and tales of
+wonder.  The Arab at the present day listens with eager interest to the
+same tales of genii and afrits, sorcerers and enchanted princesses,
+which delighted his ancestors in the times of Haroun al Raschid.  The
+gentle, church-going Icelander of our time beguiles the long night of
+his winter with the very sagas and runes which thrilled with not
+unpleasing horror the hearts of the old Norse sea-robbers.  What child,
+although Anglo-Saxon born, escapes a temporary sojourn in fairy-land?
+Who of us does not remember the intense satisfaction of throwing aside
+primer and spelling-book for stolen ethnographical studies of dwarfs,
+and giants?  Even in our own country and time old superstitions and
+credulities still cling to life with feline tenacity.  Here and there,
+oftenest in our fixed, valley-sheltered, inland villages,--slumberous
+Rip Van Winkles, unprogressive and seldom visited,--may be found the
+same old beliefs in omens, warnings, witchcraft, and supernatural charms
+which our ancestors brought with them two centuries ago from Europe.
+
+The practice of charms, or what is popularly called "trying projects,"
+is still, to some extent, continued in New England.  The inimitable
+description which Burns gives of similar practices in his Halloween may
+not in all respects apply to these domestic conjurations; but the
+following needs only the substitution of apple-seeds for nuts:--
+
+"The auld gude wife's wheel-hoordet nits
+Are round an' round divided;
+An' mony lads and lassies' fates
+Are there that night decided.
+Some kindle couthie side by side
+An' burn thegither trimly;
+Some start awa wi' saucy pride
+And jump out owre the chimlie."
+
+One of the most common of these "projects" is as follows: A young woman
+goes down into the cellar, or into a dark room, with a mirror in her
+hand, and looking in it, sees the face of her future husband peering at
+her through the darkness,--the mirror being, for the time, as potent as
+the famous Cambuscan glass of which Chaucer discourses.  A neighbor of
+mine, in speaking of this conjuration, adduces a case in point.  One of
+her schoolmates made the experiment and saw the face of a strange man in
+the glass; and many years afterwards she saw the very man pass her
+father's door.  He proved to be an English emigrant just landed, and in
+due time became her husband.  Burns alludes to something like the spell
+above described:--
+
+"Wee Jenny to her grannie says,
+'will ye go wi' me, grannie,
+To eat an apple at the glass
+I got from Uncle Johnnie?'
+She fuff't her pipe wi' sic a lunt,
+In wrath she was so vaporin',
+She noticed na an' azle brunt
+Her bran new worset apron.
+
+"Ye little skelpan-limmer's face,
+How dare ye try sic sportin',
+An' seek the foul thief ony place
+For him to try your fortune?
+Nae doubt but ye may get a sight;
+Great cause ye hae to fear it;
+For mony a one has gotten a fright,
+An' lived and died delecrit."
+
+It is not to be denied, and for truth's sake not to be regretted, that
+this amusing juvenile glammary has seen its best days in New England.
+The schoolmaster has been abroad to some purpose.  Not without results
+have our lyceum lecturers and travels of Peter Parley brought everything
+in heaven above and in the earth below to the level of childhood's
+capacities.  In our cities and large towns children nowadays pass
+through the opening acts of life's marvellous drama with as little
+manifestation of wonder and surprise as the Indian does through the
+streets of a civilized city which he has entered for the first time.
+Yet Nature, sooner or later, vindicates her mysteries; voices from the
+unseen penetrate the din of civilization.  The child philosopher and
+materialist often becomes the visionary of riper years, running into
+illuminism, magnetism, and transcendentalism, with its inspired priests
+and priestesses, its revelations and oracular responses.
+
+But in many a green valley of rural New England there are children yet;
+boys and girls are still to be found not quite overtaken by the march of
+mind.  There, too, are huskings, and apple-bees, and quilting parties,
+and huge old-fashioned fireplaces piled with crackling walnut, flinging
+its rosy light over happy countenances of youth and scarcely less happy
+age.  If it be true that, according to Cornelius Agrippa, "a wood fire
+doth drive away dark spirits," it is, nevertheless, also true that
+around it the simple superstitions of our ancestors still love to
+linger; and there the half-sportful, half-serious charms of which I have
+spoken are oftenest resorted to.  It would be altogether out of place to
+think of them by our black, unsightly stoves, or in the dull and dark
+monotony of our furnace-heated rooms.  Within the circle of the light of
+the open fire safely might the young conjurers question destiny; for
+none but kindly and gentle messengers from wonderland could venture
+among them.  And who of us, looking back to those long autumnal evenings
+of childhood when the glow of the kitchen-fire rested on the beloved
+faces of home, does not feel that there is truth and beauty in what the
+quaint old author just quoted affirms?  "As the spirits of darkness grow
+stronger in the dark, so good spirits, which are angels of light, are
+multiplied and strengthened, not only by the divine light of the sun and
+stars, but also by the light of our common wood-fires."  Even Lord
+Bacon, in condemning the superstitious beliefs of his day, admits that
+they might serve for winter talk around the fireside.
+
+Fairy faith is, we may safely say, now dead everywhere,--buried,
+indeed,--for the mad painter Blake saw the funeral of the last of the
+little people, and an irreverent English bishop has sung their requiem.
+It never had much hold upon the Yankee mind, our superstitions being
+mostly of a sterner and less poetical kind.  The Irish Presbyterians who
+settled in New Hampshire about the year 1720 brought indeed with them,
+among other strange matters, potatoes and fairies; but while the former
+took root and flourished among us, the latter died out, after lingering
+a few years in a very melancholy and disconsolate way, looking
+regretfully back to their green turf dances, moonlight revels, and
+cheerful nestling around the shealing fires of Ireland.  The last that
+has been heard of them was some forty or fifty years ago in a tavern
+house in S-------, New Hampshire.  The landlord was a spiteful little
+man, whose sour, pinched look was a standing libel upon the state of his
+larder.  He made his house so uncomfortable by his moroseness that
+travellers even at nightfall pushed by his door and drove to the next
+town.  Teamsters and drovers, who in those days were apt to be very
+thirsty, learned, even before temperance societies were thought of, to
+practice total abstinence on that road, and cracked their whips and
+goaded on their teams in full view of a most tempting array of bottles
+and glasses, from behind which the surly little landlord glared out upon
+them with a look which seemed expressive of all sorts of evil wishes,
+broken legs, overturned carriages, spavined horses, sprained oxen,
+unsavory poultry, damaged butter, and bad markets.  And if, as a matter
+of necessity, to "keep the cold out of his stomach," occasionally a
+wayfarer stopped his team and ventured to call for "somethin' warmin',"
+the testy publican stirred up the beverage in such a spiteful way, that,
+on receiving it foaming from his hand, the poor customer was half afraid
+to open his mouth, lest the red-hot flip iron should be plunged down his
+gullet.
+
+As a matter of course, poverty came upon the house and its tenants like
+an armed man.  Loose clapboards rattled in the wind; rags fluttered from
+the broken windows; within doors were tattered children and scanty fare.
+The landlord's wife was a stout, buxom woman, of Irish lineage, and,
+what with scolding her husband and liberally patronizing his bar in his
+absence, managed to keep, as she said, her "own heart whole," although
+the same could scarcely be said of her children's trousers and her own
+frock of homespun.  She confidently predicted that "a betther day was
+coming," being, in fact, the only thing hopeful about the premises.  And
+it did come, sure enough.  Not only all the regular travellers on the
+road made a point of stopping at the tavern, but guests from all the
+adjacent towns filled its long-deserted rooms,--the secret of which was,
+that it had somehow got abroad that a company of fairies had taken up
+their abode in the hostelry and daily held conversation with each other
+in the capacious parlor.  I have heard those who at the time visited the
+tavern say that it was literally thronged for several weeks.  Small,
+squeaking voices spoke in a sort of Yankee-Irish dialect, in the haunted
+room, to the astonishment and admiration of hundreds.  The inn, of
+course, was blessed by this fairy visitation; the clapboards ceased
+their racket, clear panes took the place of rags in the sashes, and the
+little till under the bar grew daily heavy with coin.  The magical
+influence extended even farther; for it was observable that the landlord
+wore a good-natured face, and that the landlady's visits to the gin-
+bottle were less and less frequent.  But the thing could not, in the
+nature of the case, continue long.  It was too late in the day and on
+the wrong side of the water.  As the novelty wore off, people began to
+doubt and reason about it.  Had the place been traversed by a ghost or
+disturbed by a witch they could have acquiesced in it very quietly; but
+this outlandish belief in fairies was altogether an overtask for Yankee
+credulity.  As might have been expected, the little strangers, unable to
+breathe in an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, soon took their leave,
+shaking off the dust of their elfin feet as a testimony against an
+unbelieving generation.  It was, indeed, said that certain rude fellows
+from the Bay State pulled away a board from the ceiling and disclosed to
+view the fairies in the shape of the landlady's three slatternly
+daughters.  But the reader who has any degree of that charity which
+thinks no evil will rather credit the statement of the fairies
+themselves, as reported by the mistress of the house, "that they were
+tired of the new country, and had no pace of their lives among the
+Yankees, and were going back to Ould Ireland."
+
+It is a curious fact that the Indians had some notion of a race of
+beings corresponding in many respects to the English fairies.
+Schoolcraft describes them as small creatures in human shape, inhabiting
+rocks, crags, and romantic dells, and delighting especially in points of
+land jutting into lakes and rivers and which were covered with
+pinetrees.  They were called Puckweedjinees,--little vanishers.
+
+In a poetical point of view it is to be regretted that our ancestors did
+not think it worth their while to hand down to us more of the simple and
+beautiful traditions and beliefs of the "heathen round about" them.
+Some hints of them we glean from the writings of the missionary Mayhew
+and the curious little book of Roger Williams.  Especially would one
+like to know more of that domestic demon, Wetuomanit, who presided over
+household affairs, assisted the young squaw in her first essay at
+wigwam-keeping, gave timely note of danger, and kept evil spirits at a
+distance,--a kind of new-world brownie, gentle and useful.
+
+Very suggestive, too, is the story of Pumoolah,--a mighty spirit, whose
+home is on the great Katahdin Mountain, sitting there with his earthly
+bride (a beautiful daughter of the Penobscots transformed into an
+immortal by her love), in serenest sunshine, above the storm which
+crouches and growls at his feet.  None but the perfectly pure and good
+can reach his abode.  Many have from time to time attempted it in vain;
+some, after almost reaching the summit, have been driven back by
+thunderbolts or sleety whirlwinds.
+
+Not far from my place of residence are the ruins of a mill, in a narrow
+ravine fringed with trees.  Some forty years ago the mill was supposed
+to be haunted; and horse-shoes, in consequence, were nailed over its
+doors.  One worthy man, whose business lay beyond the mill, was afraid
+to pass it alone; and his wife, who was less fearful of supernatural
+annoyance, used to accompany him.  The little old white-coated miller,
+who there ground corn and wheat for his neighbors, whenever he made a
+particularly early visit to his mill, used to hear it in full
+operation,--the water-wheel dashing bravely, and the old rickety
+building clattering to the jar of the stones.  Yet the moment his hand
+touched the latch or his foot the threshold all was hushed save the
+melancholy drip of water from the dam or the low gurgle of the small
+stream eddying amidst willow roots and mossy stones in the ravine below.
+
+This haunted mill has always reminded me of that most beautiful of
+Scottish ballads, the Song of the Elfin Miller, in which fairies are
+represented as grinding the poor man's grist without toil:--
+
+              "Full merrily rings the mill-stone round;
+               Full merrily rings the wheel;
+               Full merrily gushes out the grist;
+               Come, taste my fragrant meal.
+               The miller he's a warldly man,
+               And maun hae double fee;
+               So draw the sluice in the churl's dam
+               And let the stream gae free!"
+
+Brainerd, who truly deserves the name of an American poet, has left
+behind him a ballad on the Indian legend of the black fox which haunted
+Salmon River, a tributary of the Connecticut.  Its wild and picturesque
+beauty causes us to regret that more of the still lingering traditions
+of the red men have not been made the themes of his verse:--
+
+
+                          THE BLACK FOX.
+
+               "How cold, how beautiful, how bright
+               The cloudless heaven above us shines!
+               But 't is a howling winter's night;
+               'T would freeze the very forest pines.
+
+               "The winds are up while mortals sleep;
+               The stars look forth while eyes are shut;
+               The bolted snow lies drifted deep
+               Around our poor and lonely hut.
+
+               "With silent step and listening ear,
+               With bow and arrow, dog and gun,
+               We'll mark his track,--his prowl we hear:
+               Now is our time!  Come on! come on!
+
+               "O'er many a fence, through many a wood,
+               Following the dog's bewildered scent,
+               In anxious haste and earnest mood,
+               The white man and the Indian went.
+
+               "The gun is cocked; the bow is bent;
+               The dog stands with uplifted paw;
+               And ball and arrow both are sent,
+               Aimed at the prowler's very jaw.
+
+               "The ball to kill that fox is run
+               Not in a mould by mortals made;
+               The arrow which that fox should shun
+               Was never shaped from earthly reed.
+
+               "The Indian Druids of the wood
+               Know where the fatal arrows grow;
+               They spring not by the summer flood;
+               They pierce not through the winter's snow.
+
+               "Why cowers the dog, whose snuffing nose
+               Was never once deceived till now?
+               And why amidst the chilling snows
+               Does either hunter wipe his brow?
+
+               "For once they see his fearful den;
+               'T is a dark cloud that slowly moves
+               By night around the homes of men,
+               By day along the stream it loves.
+
+               "Again the dog is on the track,
+               The hunters chase o'er dale and hill;
+               They may not, though they would, look back;
+               They must go forward, forward still.
+
+               "Onward they go, and never turn,
+               Amidst a night which knows no day;
+               For nevermore shall morning sun
+               Light them upon their endless way.
+
+               "The hut is desolate; and there
+               The famished dog alone returns;
+               On the cold steps he makes his lair;
+               By the shut door he lays his bones.
+
+               "Now the tired sportsman leans his gun
+               Against the ruins on its site,
+               And ponders on the hunting done
+               By the lost wanderers of the night.
+
+               "And there the little country girls
+               Will stop to whisper, listen, and look,
+               And tell, while dressing their sunny curls,
+               Of the Black Fox of Salmon Brook."
+
+The same writer has happily versified a pleasant superstition of the
+valley of the Connecticut.  It is supposed that shad are led from the
+Gulf of Mexico to the Connecticut by a kind of Yankee bogle in the shape
+of a bird.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         THE SHAD SPIRIT.
+
+          "Now drop the bolt, and securely nail
+          The horse-shoe over the door;
+          'T is a wise precaution; and, if it should fail,
+          It never failed before.
+
+          "Know ye the shepherd that gathers his flock
+          Where the gales of the equinox blow
+          From each unknown reef and sunken rock
+          In the Gulf of Mexico,--
+
+          "While the monsoons growl, and the trade-winds bark,
+          And the watch-dogs of the surge
+          Pursue through the wild waves the ravenous shark
+          That prowls around their charge?
+
+          "To fair Connecticut's northernmost source,
+          O'er sand-bars, rapids, and falls,
+          The Shad Spirit holds his onward course
+          With the flocks which his whistle calls.
+
+          "Oh, how shall he know where he went before?
+          Will he wander around forever?
+          The last year's shad heads shall shine on the shore,
+          To light him up the river.
+
+          "And well can he tell the very time
+          To undertake his task
+          When the pork-barrel's low he sits on the chine
+          And drums on the empty cask.
+
+          "The wind is light, and the wave is white
+          With the fleece of the flock that's near;
+          Like the breath of the breeze he comes over the seas
+          And faithfully leads them here.
+
+          "And now he 's passed the bolted door
+          Where the rusted horse-shoe clings;
+          So carry the nets to the nearest shore,
+          And take what the Shad Spirit brings."
+
+The comparatively innocent nature and simple poetic beauty of this class
+of superstitions have doubtless often induced the moralist to hesitate
+in exposing their absurdity, and, like Burns in view of his national
+thistle, to:
+
+              "Turn the weeding hook aside
+               And spare the symbol dear."
+
+But the age has fairly outgrown them, and they are falling away by a
+natural process of exfoliation.  The wonderland of childhood must
+henceforth be sought within the domains of truth.  The strange facts of
+natural history, and the sweet mysteries of flowers and forests, and
+hills and waters, will profitably take the place of the fairy lore of
+the past, and poetry and romance still hold their accustomed seats in
+the circle of home, without bringing with them the evil spirits of
+credulity and untruth.  Truth should be the first lesson of the child
+and the last aspiration of manhood; for it has been well said that the
+inquiry of truth, which is the lovemaking of it, the knowledge of truth,
+which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the
+enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                        MAGICIANS AND WITCH FOLK.
+
+FASCINATION, saith Henry Cornelius Agrippa, in the fiftieth chapter of
+his first book on Occult Philosophy, "is a binding which comes of the
+spirit of the witch through the eyes of him that is bewitched, entering
+to his heart; for the eye being opened and intent upon any one, with a
+strong imagination doth dart its beams, which are the vehiculum of the
+spirit, into the eyes of him that is opposite to her; which tender
+spirit strikes his eyes, stirs up and wounds his heart, and infects his
+spirit.  Whence Apuleius saith, 'Thy eyes, sliding down through my eyes
+into my inmost heart, stirreth up a most vehement burning.' And when
+eyes are reciprocally intent upon each other, and when rays are joined
+to rays, and lights to lights, then the spirit of the one is joined to
+that of the other; so are strong ligations made and vehement loves
+inflamed."  Taking this definition of witchcraft, we sadly fear it is
+still practised to a very great extent among us.  The best we can say of
+it is, that the business seems latterly to have fallen into younger
+hands; its victims do not appear to regard themselves as especial
+objects of compassion; and neither church nor state seems inclined to
+interfere with it.
+
+As might be expected in a shrewd community like ours, attempts are not
+unfrequently made to speculate in the supernatural,--to "make gain of
+sooth-saying."  In the autumn of last year a "wise woman" dreamed, or
+somnambulized, that a large sum of money, in gold and silver coin, lay
+buried in the centre of the great swamp in Poplin, New Hampshire;
+whereupon an immediate search was made for the precious metal.  Under
+the bleak sky of November, in biting frost and sleet rain, some twenty
+or more grown men, graduates of our common schools, and liable, every
+mother's son of them, to be made deacons, squires, and general court
+members, and such other drill officers as may be requisite in the march
+of mind, might be seen delving in grim earnest, breaking the frozen
+earth, uprooting swamp-maples and hemlocks, and waking, with sledge and
+crowbar, unwonted echoes in a solitude which had heretofore only
+answered to the woodman's axe or the scream of the wild fowl.  The snows
+of December put an end to their labors; but the yawning excavation still
+remains, a silent but somewhat expressive commentary upon the age of
+progress.
+
+Still later, in one of our Atlantic cities, an attempt was made,
+partially at least, successful, to form a company for the purpose of
+digging for money in one of the desolate sand-keys of the West Indies.
+It appears that some mesmerized "subject," in the course of one of those
+somnambulic voyages of discovery in which the traveller, like Satan in
+chaos,--
+
+    "O'er bog, o'er steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare,
+     With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way,
+     And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies,"--
+
+while peering curiously into the earth's mysteries, chanced to have his
+eyes gladdened by the sight of a huge chest packed with Spanish coins,
+the spoil, doubtless, of some rich-freighted argosy, or Carthagena
+galleon, in the rare days of Queen Elizabeth's Christian buccaneers.
+
+During the last quarter of a century, a colored woman in one of the
+villages on the southern border of New Hampshire has been consulted by
+hundreds of anxious inquirers into the future.  Long experience in her
+profession has given her something of that ready estimate of character,
+that quick and keen appreciation of the capacity, habits, and wishes of
+her visitors, which so remarkably distinguished the late famous Madame
+Le Normand, of Paris; and if that old squalid sorceress, in her cramped
+Parisian attic, redolent of garlic and bestrewn with the greasy
+implements of sorry housewifery, was, as has been affirmed, consulted by
+such personages as the fair Josephine Beauharnois, and the "man of
+destiny," Napoleon himself, is it strange that the desire to lift the
+veil of the great mystery before us should overcome in some degree our
+peculiar and most republican prejudice against color, and reconcile us
+to the disagreeable necessity of looking at futurity through a black
+medium?
+
+Some forty years ago, on the banks of the pleasant little creek
+separating Berwick, in Maine, from Somersworth, in New Hampshire, within
+sight of my mother's home, dwelt a plain, sedate member of the society
+of Friends, named Bantum.  He passed throughout a circle of several
+miles as a conjurer and skilful adept in the art of magic.  To him
+resorted farmers who had lost their cattle, matrons whose household
+gear, silver spoons, and table-linen had been stolen, or young maidens
+whose lovers were absent; and the quiet, meek-spirited old man received
+them all kindly, put on his huge iron-rimmed spectacles, opened his
+"conjuring book," which my mother describes as a large clasped volume in
+strange language and black-letter type, and after due reflection and
+consideration gave the required answers without money and without price.
+The curious old volume is still in the possession of the conjurer's
+family.  Apparently inconsistent as was this practice of the black art
+with the simplicity and truthfulness of his religious profession, I have
+not been able to learn that he was ever subjected to censure on account
+of it.  It may be that our modern conjurer defended himself on grounds
+similar to those assumed by the celebrated knight of Nettesheim, in the
+preface to his first Book of Magic: "Some," says he, "may crie oute that
+I teach forbidden arts, sow the seed of heresies, offend pious ears, and
+scandalize excellent wits; that I am a sorcerer, superstitious and
+devilish, who indeed am a magician.  To whom I answer, that a magician
+doth not among learned men signifie a sorcerer or one that is
+superstitious or devilish, but a wise man, a priest, a prophet, and that
+the sibyls prophesied most clearly of Christ; that magicians, as wise
+men, by the wonderful secrets of the world, knew Christ to be born, and
+came to worship him, first of all; and that the name of magicke is
+received by philosophers, commended by divines, and not unacceptable to
+the Gospel."
+
+The study of astrology and occult philosophy, to which many of the
+finest minds of the Middle Ages devoted themselves without molestation
+from the Church, was never practised with impunity after the
+Reformation.  The Puritans and Presbyterians, taking the Bible for their
+rule, "suffered not a witch to live;" and, not content with burning the
+books of those who "used curious arts" after the manner of the
+Ephesians, they sacrificed the students themselves on the same pile.
+Hence we hear little of learned and scientific wizards in New England.
+One remarkable character of this kind seems, however, to have escaped
+the vigilance of our modern Doctors of the Mosaic Law.  Dr. Robert Child
+came to this country about the year 1644, and took up his residence in
+the Massachusetts colony.  He was a man of wealth, and owned plantations
+at Nashaway, now Lancaster, and at Saco, in Maine.  He was skilful in
+mineralogy and metallurgy, and seems to have spent a good deal of money
+in searching for mines.  He is well known as the author of the first
+decided movement for liberty of conscience in Massachusetts, his name
+standing at the head of the famous petition of 1646 for a modification
+of the laws in respect to religious worship, and complaining in strong
+terms of the disfranchisement of persons not members of the Church.  A
+tremendous excitement was produced by this remonstrance; clergy and
+magistrates joined in denouncing it; Dr. Child and his associates were
+arrested, tried for contempt of government, and heavily fined.  The
+Court, in passing sentence, assured the Doctor that his crime was only
+equalled by that of Korah and his troop, who rebelled against Moses and
+Aaron.  He resolved to appeal to the Parliament of England, and made
+arrangements for his departure, but was arrested, and ordered to be kept
+a prisoner in his own house until the vessel in which he was to sail had
+left Boston.  He was afterwards imprisoned for a considerable length of
+time, and on his release found means to return to England.  The Doctor's
+trunks were searched by the Puritan authorities while he was in prison;
+but it does not appear that they detected the occult studies to which
+lie was addicted, to which lucky circumstance it is doubtless owing that
+the first champion of religious liberty in the New World was not hung
+for a wizard.
+
+Dr. Child was a graduate of the renowned University of Padua, and had
+travelled extensively in the Old World.  Probably, like Michael Scott,
+he had:
+
+              "Learned the art of glammarye
+               In Padua, beyond the sea;"
+
+for I find in the dedication of an English translation of a Continental
+work on astrology and magic, printed in 1651 "at the sign of the Three
+Bibles," that his "sublime hermeticall and theomagicall lore" is
+compared to that of Hermes and Agrippa.  He is complimented as a master
+of the mysteries of Rome and Germany, and as one who had pursued his
+investigations among the philosophers of the Old World and the Indians
+of the New, "leaving no stone unturned, the turning whereof might
+conduce to the discovery of what is occult."
+
+There was still another member of the Friends' society in Vermont, of
+the name of Austin, who, in answer, as he supposed, to prayer and a
+long-cherished desire to benefit his afflicted fellow-creatures,
+received, as he believed, a special gift of healing.  For several years
+applicants from nearly all parts of New England visited him with the
+story of their sufferings and praying for a relief, which, it is
+averred, was in many instances really obtained.  Letters from the sick
+who were unable to visit him, describing their diseases, were sent him;
+and many are yet living who believe that they were restored miraculously
+at the precise period of time when Austin was engaged in reading their
+letters.  One of my uncles was commissioned to convey to him a large
+number of letters from sick persons in his neighborhood.  He found the
+old man sitting in his plain parlor in the simplest garb of his sect,--
+grave, thoughtful, venerable,--a drab-coated Prince Hohenlohe.  He
+received the letters in silence, read them slowly, casting them one
+after another upon a large pile of similar epistles in a corner of the
+apartment.
+
+Half a century ago nearly every neighborhood in New England was favored
+with one or more reputed dealers in magic.  Twenty years later there
+were two poor old sisters who used to frighten school urchins and
+"children of a larger growth" as they rode down from New Hampshire on
+their gaunt skeleton horses, strung over with baskets for the
+Newburyport market.  They were aware of the popular notion concerning
+them, and not unfrequently took advantage of it to levy a sort of black
+mail upon their credulous neighbors.  An attendant at the funeral of one
+of these sisters, who when living was about as unsubstantial as Ossian's
+ghost, through which the stars were visible, told me that her coffin was
+so heavy that four stout men could barely lift it.
+
+One, of my earliest recollections is that of an old woman, residing
+about two miles from the place of my nativity, who for many years had
+borne the unenviable reputation of a witch.  She certainly had the look
+of one,--a combination of form, voice, and features which would have
+made the fortune of an English witch finder in the days of Matthew Paris
+or the Sir John Podgers of Dickens, and insured her speedy conviction in
+King James's High Court of Justiciary.  She was accused of divers ill-
+doings,--such as preventing the cream in her neighbor's churn from
+becoming butter, and snuffing out candles at huskings and quilting-
+parties.
+
+              "She roamed the country far and near,
+               Bewitched the children of the peasants,
+               Dried up the cows, and lamed the deer,
+               And sucked the eggs, and killed the pheasants."
+
+The poor old woman was at length so sadly annoyed by her unfortunate
+reputation that she took the trouble to go before a justice of the
+peace, and made solemn oath that she was a Christian woman, and no
+witch.
+
+Not many years since a sad-visaged, middle-aged man might be seen in the
+streets of one of our seaboard towns at times suddenly arrested in the
+midst of a brisk walk and fixed motionless for some minutes in the busy
+thoroughfare.  No effort could induce him to stir until, in his opinion,
+the spell was removed and his invisible tormentor suffered him to
+proceed.  He explained his singular detention as the act of a whole
+family of witches whom he had unfortunately offended during a visit down
+East.  It was rumored that the offence consisted in breaking off a
+matrimonial engagement with the youngest member of the family,--a
+sorceress, perhaps, in more than one sense of the word, like that
+"winsome wench and walie" in Tam O'Shanter's witch-dance at Kirk
+Alloway.  His only hope was that he should outlive his persecutors; and
+it is said that at the very hour in which the event took place he
+exultingly assured his friends that the spell was forever broken, and
+that the last of the family of his tormentors was no more.
+
+When a boy, I occasionally met, at the house of a relative in an
+adjoining town, a stout, red-nosed old farmer of the neighborhood.
+A fine tableau he made of a winter's evening, in the red light of a
+birch-log fire, as he sat for hours watching its progress, with sleepy,
+half-shut eyes, changing his position only to reach the cider-mug on the
+shelf near him.  Although he seldom opened his lips save to assent to
+some remark of his host or to answer a direct question, yet at times,
+when the cider-mug got the better of his taciturnity, he would amuse us
+with interesting details of his early experiences in "the Ohio country."
+
+There was, however, one chapter in these experiences which he usually
+held in reserve, and with which "the stranger intermeddled not."  He was
+not willing to run the risk of hearing that which to him was a frightful
+reality turned into ridicule by scoffers and unbelievers.  The substance
+of it, as I received it from one of his neighbors, forms as clever a
+tale of witchcraft as modern times have produced.
+
+It seems that when quite a young man he left the homestead, and,
+strolling westward, worked his way from place to place until he found
+himself in one of the old French settlements on the Ohio River.  Here he
+procured employment on the farm of a widow; and being a smart, active
+fellow, and proving highly serviceable in his department, he rapidly
+gained favor in the eyes of his employer.  Ere long, contrary to the
+advice of the neighbors, and in spite of somewhat discouraging hints
+touching certain matrimonial infelicities experienced by the late
+husband, he resolutely stepped into the dead man's shoes: the mistress
+became the wife, and the servant was legally promoted to the head of the
+household.--
+
+For a time matters went on cosily and comfortably enough.  He was now
+lord of the soil; and, as he laid in his crops of corn and potatoes,
+salted down his pork, and piled up his wood for winter's use, he
+naturally enough congratulated himself upon his good fortune and laughed
+at the sinister forebodings of his neighbors.  But with the long winter
+months came a change over his "love's young dream."  An evil and
+mysterious influence seemed to be at work in his affairs.  Whatever he
+did after consulting his wife or at her suggestion resulted favorably
+enough; but all his own schemes and projects were unaccountably marred
+and defeated.  If he bought a horse, it was sure to prove spavined or
+wind-broken.  His cows either refused to give down their milk, or,
+giving it, perversely kicked it over.  A fine sow which he had bargained
+for repaid his partiality by devouring, like Saturn, her own children.
+By degrees a dark thought forced its way into his mind.  Comparing his
+repeated mischances with the ante-nuptial warnings of his neighbors, he
+at last came to the melancholy conclusion that his wife was a witch.
+The victim in Motherwell's ballad of the Demon Lady, or the poor fellow
+in the Arabian tale who discovered that he had married a ghoul in the
+guise of a young and blooming princess, was scarcely in a more sorrowful
+predicament.  He grew nervous and fretful.  Old dismal nursery stories
+and all the witch lore of boyhood came back to his memory; and he crept
+to his bed like a criminal to the gallows, half afraid to fall asleep
+lest his mysterious companion should take a fancy to transform him into
+a horse, get him shod at the smithy, and ride him to a witch-meeting.
+And, as if to make the matter worse, his wife's affection seemed to
+increase just in proportion as his troubles thickened upon him.  She
+aggravated him with all manner of caresses and endearments.  This was
+the drop too much.  The poor husband recoiled from her as from a waking
+nightmare.  His thoughts turned to New England; he longed to see once
+more the old homestead, with its tall well-sweep and butternut-trees by
+the roadside; and he sighed amidst the rich bottom-lands of his new home
+for his father's rocky pasture, with its crop of stinted mulleins.  So
+one cold November day, finding himself out of sight and hearing of his
+wife, he summoned courage to attempt an escape, and, resolutely turning
+his back on the West, plunged into the wilderness towards the sunrise.
+After a long and hard journey he reached his birthplace, and was kindly
+welcomed by his old friends.  Keeping a close mouth with respect to his
+unlucky adventure in Ohio, he soon after married one of his schoolmates,
+and, by dint of persevering industry and economy, in a few years found
+himself in possession of a comfortable home.
+
+But his evil star still lingered above the horizon.  One summer evening,
+on returning from the hayfield, who should meet him but his witch wife
+from Ohio!  She came riding up the street on her old white horse, with a
+pillion behind the saddle.  Accosting him in a kindly tone, yet not
+without something of gentle reproach for his unhandsome desertion of
+her, she informed him that she had come all the way from Ohio to take
+him back again.
+
+It was in vain that he pleaded his later engagements; it was in vain
+that his new wife raised her shrillest remonstrances, not unmingled with
+expressions of vehement indignation at the revelation of her husband's
+real position; the witch wife was inexorable; go he must, and that
+speedily.  Fully impressed with a belief in her supernatural power of
+compelling obedience, and perhaps dreading more than witchcraft itself
+the effects of the unlucky disclosure on the temper of his New England
+helpmate, he made a virtue of the necessity of the case, bade farewell
+to the latter amidst a perfect hurricane of reproaches, and mounted the
+white horse, with his old wife on the pillion behind him.
+
+Of that ride Burger might have written a counterpart to his ballad:--
+
+              "Tramp, tramp, along the shore they ride,
+               Splash, splash, along the sea."
+
+Two or three years had passed away, bringing no tidings of the
+unfortunate husband, when he once more made his appearance in his native
+village.  He was not disposed to be very communicative; but for one
+thing, at least, he seemed willing to express his gratitude.  His Ohio
+wife, having no spell against intermittent fever, had paid the debt of
+nature, and had left him free; in view of which, his surviving wife,
+after manifesting a due degree of resentment, consented to take him back
+to her bed and board; and I could never learn that she had cause to
+regret her clemency.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                              THE BEAUTIFUL
+
+          "A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face;
+          a beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form;
+          it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures;
+          it is the finest of the fine arts."
+                         EMERSON'S Essays, Second Series, iv., p.  162.
+
+A FEW days since I was walking with a friend, who, unfortunately for
+himself, seldom meets with anything in the world of realities worthy of
+comparison with the ideal of his fancy, which, like the bird in the
+Arabian tale, glides perpetually before him, always near yet never
+overtaken.  He was half humorously, half seriously, complaining of the
+lack of beauty in the faces and forms that passed us on the crowded
+sidewalk.  Some defect was noticeable in all: one was too heavy, another
+too angular; here a nose was at fault, there a mouth put a set of
+otherwise fine features out of countenance; the fair complexions had red
+hair, and glossy black locks were wasted upon dingy ones.  In one way or
+another all fell below his impossible standard.
+
+The beauty which my friend seemed in search of was that of proportion
+and coloring; mechanical exactness; a due combination of soft curves and
+obtuse angles, of warm carnation and marble purity.  Such a man, for
+aught I can see, might love a graven image, like the girl of Florence
+who pined into a shadow for the Apollo Belvidere, looking coldly on her
+with stony eyes from his niche in the Vatican.  One thing is certain,--
+he will never find his faultless piece of artistical perfection by
+searching for it amidst flesh-and-blood realities.  Nature does not,
+as far as I can perceive, work with square and compass, or lay on her
+colors by the rules of royal artists or the dunces of the academies.
+She eschews regular outlines.  She does not shape her forms by a common
+model.  Not one of Eve's numerous progeny in all respects resembles her
+who first culled the flowers of Eden.  To the infinite variety and
+picturesque inequality of Nature we owe the great charm of her uncloying
+beauty.  Look at her primitive woods; scattered trees, with moist sward
+and bright mosses at their roots; great clumps of green shadow, where
+limb intwists with limb and the rustle of one leaf stirs a hundred
+others,--stretching up steep hillsides, flooding with green beauty the
+valleys, or arching over with leaves the sharp ravines, every tree and
+shrub unlike its neighbor in size and proportion,--the old and storm-
+broken leaning on the young and vigorous,--intricate and confused,
+without order or method.  Who would exchange this for artificial French
+gardens, where every tree stands stiff and regular, clipped and trimmed
+into unvarying conformity, like so many grenadiers under review?  Who
+wants eternal sunshine or shadow?  Who would fix forever the loveliest
+cloudwork of an autumn sunset, or hang over him an everlasting
+moonlight?  If the stream had no quiet eddying place, could we so admire
+its cascade over the rocks?  Were there no clouds, could we so hail the
+sky shining through them in its still, calm purity?  Who shall venture
+to ask our kind Mother Nature to remove from our sight any one of her
+forms or colors?  Who shall decide which is beautiful, or otherwise, in
+itself considered?
+
+There are too many, like my fastidious friend, who go through the world
+"from Dan to Beersheba, finding all barren,"--who have always some fault
+or other to find with Nature and Providence, seeming to consider
+themselves especially ill used because the one does not always coincide
+with their taste, nor the other with their narrow notions of personal
+convenience.  In one of his early poems, Coleridge has well expressed a
+truth, which is not the less important because it is not generally
+admitted.  The idea is briefly this: that the mind gives to all things
+their coloring, their gloom, or gladness; that the pleasure we derive
+from external nature is primarily from ourselves:--
+
+                      "from the mind itself must issue forth
+                    A light, a glory, a fair luminous mist,
+                    Enveloping the earth."
+
+The real difficulty of these lifelong hunters after the beautiful exists
+in their own spirits.  They set up certain models of perfection in their
+imaginations, and then go about the world in the vain expectation of
+finding them actually wrought out according to pattern; very
+unreasonably calculating that Nature will suspend her everlasting laws
+for the purpose of creating faultless prodigies for their especial
+gratification.
+
+The authors of Gayeties and Gravities give it as their opinion that no
+object of sight is regarded by us as a simple disconnected form, but
+that--an instantaneous reflection as to its history, purpose, or
+associations converts it into a concrete one,--a process, they shrewdly
+remark, which no thinking being can prevent, and which can only be
+avoided by the unmeaning and stolid stare of "a goose on the common or a
+cow on the green."  The senses and the faculties of the understanding
+are so blended with and dependent upon each other that not one of them
+can exercise its office alone and without the modification of some
+extrinsic interference or suggestion.  Grateful or unpleasant
+associations cluster around all which sense takes cognizance of; the
+beauty which we discern in an external object is often but the
+reflection of our own minds.
+
+What is beauty, after all?  Ask the lover who kneels in homage to one
+who has no attractions for others.  The cold onlooker wonders that he
+can call that unclassic combination of features and that awkward form
+beautiful.  Yet so it is.  He sees, like Desdemona, her "visage in her
+mind," or her affections.  A light from within shines through the
+external uncomeliness,--softens, irradiates, and glorifies it.  That
+which to others seems commonplace and unworthy of note is to him, in the
+words of Spenser,--
+
+                   "A sweet, attractive kind of grace;
+                    A full assurance given by looks;
+                    Continual comfort in a face;
+                    The lineaments of Gospel books."
+
+"Handsome is that handsome does,--hold up your heads, girls!" was the
+language of Primrose in the play when addressing her daughters.  The
+worthy matron was right.  Would that all my female readers who are
+sorrowing foolishly because they are not in all respects like Dubufe's
+Eve, or that statue of the Venus "which enchants the world," could be
+persuaded to listen to her.  What is good looking, as Horace Smith
+remarks, but looking good?  Be good, be womanly, be gentle,--generous in
+your sympathies, heedful of the well-being of all around you; and, my
+word for it, you will not lack kind words of admiration.  Loving and
+pleasant associations will gather about you.  Never mind the ugly
+reflection which your glass may give you.  That mirror has no heart.
+But quite another picture is yours on the retina of human sympathy.
+There the beauty of holiness, of purity, of that inward grace which
+passeth show, rests over it, softening and mellowing its features just
+as the full calm moonlight melts those of a rough landscape into
+harmonious loveliness.  "Hold up your heads, girls!" I repeat after
+Primrose.  Why should you not?  Every mother's daughter of you can be
+beautiful.  You can envelop yourselves in an atmosphere of moral and
+intellectual beauty, through which your otherwise plain faces will look
+forth like those of angels.  Beautiful to Ledyard, stiffening in the
+cold of a northern winter, seemed the diminutive, smokestained women of
+Lapland, who wrapped him in their furs and ministered to his necessities
+with kindness and gentle words of compassion.  Lovely to the homesick
+heart of Park seemed the dark maids of Sego, as they sung their low and
+simple song of welcome beside his bed, and sought to comfort the white
+stranger, who had "no mother to bring him milk and no wife to grind him
+corn."  Oh, talk as we may of beauty as a thing to be chiselled from
+marble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors and
+outlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all?  The
+heart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outward
+environment, it discovers a deeper and more real loveliness.
+
+This was well understood by the old painters.  In their pictures of
+Mary, the virgin mother, the beauty which melts and subdues the gazer is
+that of the soul and the affections, uniting the awe and mystery of that
+mother's miraculous allotment with the irrepressible love, the
+unutterable tenderness, of young maternity,--Heaven's crowning miracle
+with Nature's holiest and sweetest instinct.  And their pale Magdalens,
+holy with the look of sins forgiven,--how the divine beauty of their
+penitence sinks into the heart!  Do we not feel that the only real
+deformity is sin, and that goodness evermore hallows and sanctifies its
+dwelling-place?  When the soul is at rest, when the passions and desires
+are all attuned to the divine harmony,--
+
+                   "Spirits moving musically
+                    To a lute's well-ordered law,"
+                         The Haunted Palace, by Edgar A. Poe.
+
+do we not read the placid significance thereof in the human countenance?
+"I have seen," said Charles Lamb, "faces upon which the dove of peace
+sat brooding."  In that simple and beautiful record of a holy life, the
+Journal of John Woolman, there is a passage of which I have been more
+than once reminded in my intercourse with my fellow-beings: "Some
+glances of real beauty may be seen in their faces who dwell in true
+meekness.  There is a harmony in the sound of that voice to which divine
+love gives utterance."
+
+Quite the ugliest face I ever saw was that of a woman whom the world
+calls beautiful.  Through its "silver veil" the evil and ungentle
+passions looked out hideous and hateful.  On the other hand, there are
+faces which the multitude at the first glance pronounce homely,
+unattractive, and such as "Nature fashions by the gross," which I always
+recognize with a warm heart-thrill; not for the world would I have one
+feature changed; they please me as they are; they are hallowed by kind
+memories; they are beautiful through their associations; nor are they
+any the less welcome that with my admiration of them "the stranger
+intermeddleth not."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             THE WORLD'S END.
+
+
+
+                    "Our Father Time is weak and gray,
+                    Awaiting for the better day;
+                    See how idiot-like he stands,
+                    Fumbling his old palsied hands!"
+                                   SHELLEY's Masque of Anarchy.
+
+"STAGE ready, gentlemen!  Stage for campground, Derry!  Second Advent
+camp-meeting!"
+
+Accustomed as I begin to feel to the ordinary sights and sounds of this
+busy city, I was, I confess, somewhat startled by this business-like
+annunciation from the driver of a stage, who stood beside his horses
+swinging his whip with some degree of impatience: "Seventy-five cents to
+the Second Advent camp-ground!"
+
+The stage was soon filled; the driver cracked his whip and went rattling
+down the street.
+
+The Second Advent,--the coming of our Lord in person upon this earth,
+with signs, and wonders, and terrible judgments,--the heavens robing
+together as a scroll, the elements melting with fervent heat!  The
+mighty consummation of all things at hand, with its destruction and its
+triumphs, sad wailings of the lost and rejoicing songs of the glorified!
+From this overswarming hive of industry,--from these crowded treadmills
+of gain,--here were men and women going out in solemn earnestness to
+prepare for the dread moment which they verily suppose is only a few
+months distant,--to lift up their warning voices in the midst of
+scoffers and doubters, and to cry aloud to blind priests and careless
+churches, "Behold, the Bridegroom cometh!"
+
+It was one of the most lovely mornings of this loveliest season of the
+year; a warm, soft atmosphere; clear sunshine falling on the city spires
+and roofs; the hills of Dracut quiet and green in the distance, with
+their white farm-houses and scattered trees; around me the continual
+tread of footsteps hurrying to the toils of the day; merchants spreading
+out their wares for the eyes of purchasers; sounds of hammers, the sharp
+clink of trowels, the murmur of the great manufactories subdued by
+distance.  How was it possible, in the midst of so much life, in that
+sunrise light, and in view of all abounding beauty, that the idea of the
+death of Nature--the baptism of the world in fire--could take such a
+practical shape as this?  Yet here were sober, intelligent men, gentle
+and pious women, who, verily believing the end to be close at hand, had
+left their counting-rooms, and workshops, and household cares to publish
+the great tidings, and to startle, if possible, a careless and
+unbelieving generation into preparation for the day of the Lord and for
+that blessed millennium,--the restored paradise,--when, renovated and
+renewed by its fire-purgation, the earth shall become as of old the
+garden of the Lord, and the saints alone shall inherit it.
+
+Very serious and impressive is the fact that this idea of a radical
+change in our planet is not only predicted in the Scriptures, but that
+the Earth herself, in her primitive rocks and varying formations, on
+which are lithographed the history of successive convulsions, darkly
+prophesies of others to come.  The old poet prophets, all the world
+over, have sung of a renovated world.  A vision of it haunted the
+contemplations of Plato.  It is seen in the half-inspired speculations
+of the old Indian mystics.  The Cumaean sibyl saw it in her trances.
+The apostles and martyrs of our faith looked for it anxiously and
+hopefully.  Gray anchorites in the deserts, worn pilgrims to the holy
+places of Jewish and Christian tradition, prayed for its coming.  It
+inspired the gorgeous visions of the early fathers.  In every age since
+the Christian era, from the caves, and forests, and secluded "upper
+chambers" of the times of the first missionaries of the cross, from the
+Gothic temples of the Middle Ages, from the bleak mountain gorges of the
+Alps, where the hunted heretics put up their expostulation, "How long,
+O Lord, how long?" down to the present time, and from this Derry
+campground, have been uttered the prophecy and the prayer for its
+fulfilment.
+
+How this great idea manifests itself in the, lives of the enthusiasts of
+the days of Cromwell!  Think of Sir Henry Vane, cool, sagacious
+statesman as he was, waiting with eagerness for the foreshadowings of
+the millennium, and listening, even in the very council hall, for the
+blast of the last trumpet!  Think of the Fifth Monarchy Men, weary with
+waiting for the long-desired consummation, rushing out with drawn swords
+and loaded matchlocks into the streets of London to establish at once
+the rule of King Jesus!  Think of the wild enthusiasts at Munster,
+verily imagining that the millennial reign had commenced in their mad
+city!  Still later, think of Granville Sharpe, diligently laboring in
+his vocation of philanthropy, laying plans for the slow but beneficent
+amelioration of the condition of his country and the world, and at the
+same time maintaining, with the zeal of Father Miller himself, that the
+earth was just on the point of combustion, and that the millennium would
+render all his benevolent schemes of no sort of consequence!
+
+And, after all, is the idea itself a vain one?  Shall to-morrow be as
+to-day?  Shall the antagonism of good and evil continue as heretofore
+forever?  Is there no hope that this world-wide prophecy of the human
+soul, uttered in all climes, in all times, shall yet be fulfilled?  Who
+shall say it may not be true?  Nay, is not its truth proved by its
+universality?  The hope of all earnest souls must be realized.  That
+which, through a distorted and doubtful medium, shone even upon the
+martyr enthusiasts of the French revolution,--soft gleams of heaven's
+light rising over the hell of man's passions and crimes,--the glorious
+ideal of Shelley, who, atheist as he was through early prejudice and
+defective education, saw the horizon of the world's future kindling with
+the light of a better day,--that hope and that faith which constitute,
+as it were, the world's life, and without which it would be dark and
+dead, cannot be in vain.
+
+I do not, I confess, sympathize with my Second Advent friends in their
+lamentable depreciation of Mother Earth even in her present state.  I
+find it extremely difficult to comprehend how it is that this goodly,
+green, sunlit home of ours is resting under a curse.  It really does not
+seem to me to be altogether like the roll which the angel bore in the
+prophet's vision, "written within and without with mourning,
+lamentation, and woe."  September sunsets, changing forests, moonrise
+and cloud, sun and rain,--I for one am contented with them.  They fill
+my heart with a sense of beauty.  I see in them the perfect work of
+infinite love as well as wisdom.  It may be that our Advent friends,
+however, coincide with the opinions of an old writer on the prophecies,
+who considered the hills and valleys of the earth's surface and its
+changes of seasons as so many visible manifestations of God's curse, and
+that in the millennium, as in the days of Adam's innocence, all these
+picturesque inequalities would be levelled nicely away, and the flat
+surface laid handsomely down to grass.
+
+As might be expected, the effect of this belief in the speedy
+destruction of the world and the personal coming of the Messiah, acting
+upon a class of uncultivated, and, in some cases, gross minds, is not
+always in keeping with the enlightened Christian's ideal of the better
+day.  One is shocked in reading some of the "hymns" of these believers.
+Sensual images,--semi-Mahometan descriptions of the condition of the
+"saints,"--exultations over the destruction of the "sinners,"--mingle
+with the beautiful and soothing promises of the prophets.  There are
+indeed occasionally to be found among the believers men of refined and
+exalted spiritualism, who in their lives and conversation remind one of
+Tennyson's Christian knight-errant in his yearning towards the hope set
+before him:
+
+                           "to me is given
+               Such hope I may not fear;
+               I long to breathe the airs of heaven,
+               Which sometimes meet me here.
+
+               "I muse on joys that cannot cease,
+               Pure spaces filled with living beams,
+               White lilies of eternal peace,
+               Whose odors haunt my dreams."
+
+One of the most ludicrous examples of the sensual phase of Millerism,
+the incongruous blending of the sublime with the ridiculous, was
+mentioned to me not long since.  A fashionable young woman in the
+western part of this State became an enthusiastic believer in the
+doctrine.  On the day which had been designated as the closing one of
+time she packed all her fine dresses and toilet valuables in a large
+trunk, with long straps attached to it, and, seating herself upon it,
+buckled the straps over her shoulders, patiently awaiting the crisis,--
+shrewdly calculating that, as she must herself go upwards, her goods and
+chattels would of necessity follow.
+
+Three or four years ago, on my way eastward, I spent an hour or two at a
+camp-ground of the Second Advent in East Kingston.  The spot was well
+chosen.  A tall growth of pine and hemlock threw its melancholy shadow
+over the multitude, who were arranged upon rough seats of boards and
+logs.  Several hundred--perhaps a thousand people--were present, and
+more were rapidly coming.  Drawn about in a circle, forming a background
+of snowy whiteness to the dark masses of men and foliage, were the white
+tents, and back of them the provision-stalls and cook-shops.  When I
+reached the ground, a hymn, the words of which I could not distinguish,
+was pealing through the dim aisles of the forest.  I could readily
+perceive that it had its effect upon the multitude before me, kindling
+to higher intensity their already excited enthusiasm.  The preachers
+were placed in a rude pulpit of rough boards, carpeted only by the dead
+forest-leaves and flowers, and tasselled, not with silk and velvet, but
+with the green boughs of the sombre hemlocks around it.  One of them
+followed the music in an earnest exhortation on the duty of preparing
+for the great event.  Occasionally he was really eloquent, and his
+description of the last day had the ghastly distinctness of Anelli's
+painting of the End of the World.
+
+Suspended from the front of the rude pulpit were two broad sheets of
+canvas, upon one of which was the figure of a man, the head of gold, the
+breast and arms of silver, the belly of brass, the legs of iron, and
+feet of clay,--the dream of Nebuchadnezzar.  On the other were depicted
+the wonders of the Apocalyptic vision,--the beasts, the dragons, the
+scarlet woman seen by the seer of Patmos, Oriental types, figures, and
+mystic symbols, translated into staring Yankee realities, and exhibited
+like the beasts of a travelling menagerie.  One horrible image, with its
+hideous heads and scaly caudal extremity, reminded me of the tremendous
+line of Milton, who, in speaking of the same evil dragon, describes him
+as
+
+          "Swinging the scaly horrors of his folded tail."
+
+To an imaginative mind the scene was full of novel interest.  The white
+circle of tents; the dim wood arches; the upturned, earnest faces; the
+loud voices of the speakers, burdened with the awful symbolic language
+of the Bible; the smoke from the fires, rising like incense,--carried me
+back to those days of primitive worship which tradition faintly whispers
+of, when on hill-tops and in the shade of old woods Religion had her
+first altars, with every man for her priest and the whole universe for
+her temple.
+
+Wisely and truthfully has Dr. Channing spoken of this doctrine of the
+Second Advent in his memorable discourse in Berkshire a little before
+his death:--
+
+"There are some among us at the present moment who are waiting for the
+speedy coming of Christ.  They expect, before another year closes, to
+see Him in the clouds, to hear His voice, to stand before His judgment-
+seat.  These illusions spring from misinterpretation of Scripture
+language.  Christ, in the New Testament, is said to come whenever His
+religion breaks out in new glory or gains new triumphs.  He came in the
+Holy Spirit in the day of Pentecost.  He came in the destruction of
+Jerusalem, which, by subverting the old ritual law and breaking the
+power of the worst enemies of His religion, insured to it new victories.
+He came in the reformation of the Church.  He came on this day four
+years ago, when, through His religion, eight hundred thousand men were
+raised from the lowest degradation to the rights, and dignity, and
+fellowship of men.  Christ's outward appearance is of little moment
+compared with the brighter manifestation of His spirit.  The Christian,
+whose inward eyes and ears are touched by God, discerns the coming of
+Christ, hears the sound of His chariot-wheels and the voice of His
+trumpet, when no other perceives them.  He discerns the Saviour's advent
+in the dawning of higher truth on the world, in new aspirations of the
+Church after perfection, in the prostration of prejudice and error, in
+brighter expressions of Christian love, in more enlightened and intense
+consecration of the Christian to the cause of humanity, freedom, and
+religion.  Christ comes in the conversion, the regeneration, the
+emancipation, of the world."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                       THE HEROINE OF LONG POINT.
+
+                                [1869.]
+
+LOOKING at the Government Chart of Lake Erie, one sees the outlines of a
+long, narrow island, stretching along the shore of Canada West, opposite
+the point where Loudon District pushes its low, wooded wedge into the
+lake.  This is Long Point Island, known and dreaded by the navigators of
+the inland sea which batters its yielding shores, and tosses into
+fantastic shapes its sandheaps.  The eastern end is some twenty miles
+from the Canada shore, while on the west it is only separated from the
+mainland by a narrow strait known as "The Cut."  It is a sandy, desolate
+region, broken by small ponds, with dreary tracts of fenland, its ridges
+covered with a low growth of pine, oak, beech, and birch, in the midst
+of which, in its season, the dogwood puts out its white blossoms.  Wild
+grapes trail over the sand-dunes and festoon the dwarf trees.  Here and
+there are almost impenetrable swamps, thick-set with white cedars,
+intertwisted and contorted by the lake winds, and broken by the weight
+of snow and ice in winter.  Swans and wild geese paddle in the shallow,
+reedy bayous; raccoons and even deer traverse the sparsely wooded
+ridges.  The shores of its creeks and fens are tenanted by minks and
+muskrats.  The tall tower of a light-house rises at the eastern
+extremity of the island, the keeper of which is now its solitary
+inhabitant.
+
+Fourteen years ago, another individual shared the proprietorship of Long
+Point.  This was John Becker, who dwelt on the south side of the island,
+near its westerly termination, in a miserable board shanty nestled
+between naked sand-hills.  He managed to make a poor living by trapping
+and spearing muskrats, the skins of which he sold to such boatmen and
+small-craft skippers as chanced to land on his forlorn territory.  His
+wife, a large, mild-eyed, patient young woman of some twenty-six years,
+kept her hut and children as tidy as circumstances admitted, assisted
+her husband in preparing the skins, and sometimes accompanied him on his
+trapping excursions.
+
+On that lonely coast, seldom visited in summer, and wholly cut off from
+human communication in winter, they might have lived and died with as
+little recognition from the world as the minks and wildfowl with whom
+they were tenants in common, but for a circumstance which called into
+exercise unsuspected qualities of generous courage and heroic self-
+sacrifice.
+
+The dark, stormy close of November, 1854, found many vessels on Lake
+Erie, but the fortunes of one alone have special interest for us.  About
+that time the schooner Conductor, owned by John McLeod, of the
+Provincial Parliament, a resident of Amherstburg, at the mouth of the
+Detroit River, entered the lake from that river, bound for Port
+Dalhousie, at the mouth of the Welland Canal.
+
+She was heavily loaded with grain.  Her crew consisted of Captain
+Hackett, a Highlander by birth, and a skilful and experienced navigator,
+and six sailors.  At nightfall, shortly after leaving the head of the
+lake, one of those terrific storms, with which the late autumnal
+navigators of that "Sea of the Woods" are all too familiar, overtook
+them.  The weather was intensely cold for the season; the air was filled
+with snow and sleet; the chilled water made ice rapidly, encumbering the
+schooner, and loading down her decks and rigging.  As the gale
+increased, the tops of the waves were shorn off by the fierce blasts,
+clouding the whole atmosphere with frozen spray, or what the sailors
+call "spoondrift," rendering it impossible to see any object a few rods
+distant.  Driving helplessly before the wind, yet in the direction of
+her place of destination, the schooner sped through the darkness.  At
+last, near midnight, running closer than her crew supposed to the
+Canadian shore, she struck on the outer bar off Long Point Island, beat
+heavily across it, and sunk in the deeper water between it and the inner
+bar.  The hull was entirely submerged, the waves rolling in heavily, and
+dashing over the rigging, to which the crew betook themselves.  Lashed
+there, numb with cold, drenched by the pitiless waves, and scourged by
+the showers of sleet driven before the wind, they waited for morning.
+The slow, dreadful hours wore away, and at length the dubious and
+doubtful gray of a morning of tempest succeeded to the utter darkness of
+night.
+
+Abigail Becker chanced at that time to be in her hut with none but her
+young children.  Her husband was absent on the Canada shore, and she was
+left the sole adult occupant of the island, save the light-keeper, at
+its lower end, some fifteen miles off.  Looking out at daylight on the
+beach in front of her door, she saw the shattered boat of the Conductor,
+east up by the waves.  Her experience of storm and disaster on that
+dangerous coast needed nothing more to convince her that somewhere in
+her neighborhood human life had been, or still was, in peril.  She
+followed the southwesterly trend of the island for a little distance,
+and, peering through the gloom of the stormy morning, discerned the
+spars of the sunken schooner, with what seemed to be human forms
+clinging to the rigging.  The heart of the strong woman sunk within her,
+as she gazed upon those helpless fellow-creatures, so near, yet so
+unapproachable.  She had no boat, and none could have lived on that wild
+water.  After a moment's reflection she went back to her dwelling, put
+the smaller children in charge of the eldest, took with her an iron
+kettle, tin teapot, and matches, and returned to the beach, at the
+nearest point to the vessel; and, gathering up the logs and drift-wood
+always abundant, on the coast, kindled a great fire, and, constantly
+walking back and forth between it and the water, strove to intimate to
+the sufferers that they were at least not beyond human sympathy.  As the
+wrecked sailors looked shoreward, and saw, through the thick haze of
+snow and sleet, the red light of the fire and the tall figure of the
+woman passing to and fro before it, a faint hope took the place of the
+utter despair which had prompted them to let go their hold and drop into
+the seething waters, that opened and closed about them like the jaws of
+death.  But the day wore on, bringing no abatement of the storm that
+tore through the frail spars, and clutched at and tossed them as it
+passed, and drenched them with ice-cold spray,--a pitiless, unrelenting
+horror of sight, sound, and touch!  At last the deepening gloom told
+them that night was approaching, and night under such circumstances was
+death.
+
+All day long Abigail Becker had fed her fire, and sought to induce the
+sailors by signals--for even her strong voice could not reach them--to
+throw themselves into the surf, and trust to Providence and her for
+succor.  In anticipation of this, she had her kettle boiling over the
+drift-wood, and her tea ready made for restoring warmth and life to the
+half-frozen survivors.  But either they did not understand her, or the
+chance of rescue seemed too small to induce them to abandon the
+temporary safety of the wreck.  They clung to it with the desperate
+instinct of life brought face to face with death.  Just at nightfall
+there was a slight break in the west; a red light glared across the
+thick air, as if for one instant the eye of the storm looked out upon
+the ruin it had wrought, and closed again under lids of cloud.  Taking
+advantage of this, the solitary watcher ashore made one more effort.
+She waded out into the water, every drop of which, as it struck the
+beach, became a particle of ice, and stretching out and drawing in her
+arms, invited, by her gestures, the sailors to throw themselves into the
+waves, and strive to reach her.  Captain Hackett understood her.  He
+called to his mate in the rigging of the other mast: "It is our last
+chance.  I will try!  If I live, follow me; if I drown, stay where you
+are!"  With a great effort he got off his stiffly frozen overcoat,
+paused for one moment in silent commendation of his soul to God, and,
+throwing himself into the waves, struck out for the shore.  Abigail
+Becker, breast-deep in the surf, awaited him.  He was almost within her
+reach, when the undertow swept him back.  By a mighty exertion she
+caught hold of him, bore him in her strong arms out of the water, and,
+laying him down by her fire, warmed his chilled blood with copious
+draughts of hot tea.  The mate, who had watched the rescue, now
+followed, and the captain, partially restored, insisted upon aiding him.
+As the former neared the shore, the recoiling water baffled him.
+Captain Hackett caught hold of him, but the undertow swept them both
+away, locked in each other's arms.  The brave woman plunged after them,
+and, with the strength of a giantess, bore them, clinging to each other,
+to the shore, and up to her fire.  The five sailors followed in
+succession, and were all rescued in the same way.
+
+A few days after, Captain Hackett and his crew were taken off Long Point
+by a passing vessel; and Abigail Becker resumed her simple daily duties
+without dreaming that she had done anything extraordinary enough to win
+for her the world's notice.  In her struggle every day for food and
+warmth for her children, she had no leisure for the indulgence of self-
+congratulation.  Like the woman of Scripture, she had only "done what
+she could," in the terrible exigency that had broken the dreary monotony
+of her life.
+
+It so chanced, however, that a gentleman from Buffalo, E. P. Dorr, who
+had, in his early days, commanded a vessel on the lake, found himself,
+shortly after, at a small port on the Canada shore, not far from Long
+Point Island.  Here he met an old shipmate, Captain Davis, whose vessel
+had gone ashore at a more favorable point, and who related to him the
+circumstances of the wreck of the Conductor.  Struck by the account,
+Captain Dorr procured a sleigh and drove across the frozen bay to the
+shanty of Abigail Becker.  He found her with her six children, all
+thinly clad and barefooted in the bitter cold.  She stood there six feet
+or more of substantial womanhood,--not in her stockings, for she had
+none,--a veritable daughter of Anak, broad-bosomed, large-limbed, with
+great, patient blue eyes, whose very smile had a certain pathos, as if
+one saw in it her hard and weary life-experience.  She might have passed
+for any amiable giantess, or one of those much--developed maids of honor
+who tossed Gulliver from hand to hand in the court of Brobdingnag.  The
+thing that most surprised her visitor was the childlike simplicity of
+the woman, her utter unconsciousness of deserving anything for an action
+that seemed to her merely a matter of course.  When he expressed his
+admiration with all the warmth of a generous nature, she only opened her
+wide blue eyes still wider with astonishment.
+
+"Well, I don't know," she said, slowly, as if pondering the matter for
+the first time,--"I don't know as I did more 'n I'd ought to, nor more'n
+I'd do again."
+
+Before Captain Dorr left, he took the measure of her own and her
+children's feet, and on his return to Buffalo sent her a box containing
+shoes, stockings, and such other comfortable articles of clothing as
+they most needed.  He published a brief account of his visit to the
+heroine of Long Point, which attracted the attention of some members of
+the Provincial Parliament, and through their exertions a grant of one
+hundred acres of land, on the Canada shore, near Port Rowan, was made to
+her.  Soon after she was invited to Buffalo, where she naturally excited
+much interest.  A generous contribution of one thousand dollars, to
+stock her farm, was made by the merchants, ship-owners and masters of
+the city, and she returned to her family a grateful and, in her own
+view, a rich woman.
+
+When the story of her adventure reached New York, the Life-Saving
+Benevolent Association sent her a gold medal with an appropriate
+inscription, and a request that she would send back a receipt in her own
+name.  As she did not know how to write, Captain Dorr hit upon the
+expedient of having her photograph taken with the medal in her hand, and
+sent that in lieu of her autograph.
+
+In a recent letter dictated at Walsingham, where Abigail Becker now
+lives,--a widow, cultivating with her own hands her little farm in the
+wilderness,--she speaks gratefully of the past and hopefully of the
+future.  She mentions a message received from Captain Hackett, who she
+feared had almost forgotten her, that he was about to make her a visit,
+adding with a touch of shrewdness: "After his second shipwreck last
+summer, I think likely that I must have recurred very fresh to him."
+
+The strong lake winds now blow unchecked over the sand-hills where once
+stood the board shanty of Abigail Becker.  But the summer tourist of the
+great lakes, who remembers her story, will not fail to give her a place
+in his imagination with Perry's battle-line and the Indian heroines of
+Cooper and Longfellow.  Through her the desolate island of Long Point is
+richly dowered with the interest which a brave and generous action gives
+to its locality.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                VOLUME VI.
+
+
+                     OLD PORTRAITS AND MODERN SKETCHES
+
+                        PERSONAL SKETCHES AND TRIBUTES
+
+                            HISTORICAL PAPERS
+
+                                   BY
+
+                         JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+OLD PORTRAITS AND MODERN SKETCHES.
+     JOHN BUNYAN
+     THOMAS ELLWOOD
+     JAMES NAYLER
+     ANDREW MARVELL
+     JOHN ROBERTS
+     SAMUEL HOPKINS
+     RICHARD BAXTER
+     WILLIAM LEGGETT
+     NATHANIEL PEABODY ROGERS
+     ROBERT DINSMORE
+     PLACIDO, THE SLAVE POET
+
+PERSONAL SKETCHES AND TRIBUTES.
+     THE FUNERAL OF TORREY
+     EDWARD EVERETT
+     LEWIS TAPPAN
+     BAYARD TAYLOR
+     WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING
+     DEATH OF PRESIDENT GARFIELD
+     LYDIA MARIA CHILD
+
+     OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+     LONGFELLOW
+     OLD NEWBURY
+     SCHOOLDAY REMEMBRANCES
+     EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE
+
+HISTORICAL PAPERS.
+     DANIEL O'CONNELL
+     ENGLAND UNDER JAMES II.
+     THE BORDER WAR OF 1708
+     THE GREAT IPSWICH FRIGHT
+     THE BOY CAPTIVES
+     THE BLACK MEN IN THE REVOLUTION AND WAR OF 1812
+     THE SCOTTISH REFORMERS
+     THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
+     GOVERNOR ENDICOTT
+     JOHN WINTHROP
+
+
+
+
+
+                    OLD PORTRAITS AND MODERN SKETCHES
+
+     Inscribed as follows, when first collected in book-form:--
+     To Dr. G.  BAILEY, of the National Era, Washington, D. C., these
+     sketches, many of which originally appeared in the columns of the
+     paper under his editorial supervision, are, in their present form,
+     offered as a token of the esteem and confidence which years of
+     political and literary communion have justified and confirmed, on
+     the part of his friend and associate,
+                               THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+
+                               JOHN BUNYAN.
+
+     "Wouldst see
+     A man I' the clouds, and hear him speak to thee?"
+
+Who has not read Pilgrim's Progress?  Who has not, in childhood,
+followed the wandering Christian on his way to the Celestial City?  Who
+has not laid at night his young head on the pillow, to paint on the
+walls of darkness pictures of the Wicket Gate and the Archers, the Hill
+of Difficulty, the Lions and Giants, Doubting Castle and Vanity Fair,
+the sunny Delectable Mountains and the Shepherds, the Black River and
+the wonderful glory beyond it; and at last fallen asleep, to dream over
+the strange story, to hear the sweet welcomings of the sisters at the
+House Beautiful, and the song of birds from the window of that "upper
+chamber which opened towards the sunrising?" And who, looking back to
+the green spots in his childish experiences, does not bless the good
+Tinker of Elstow?
+
+And who, that has reperused the story of the Pilgrim at a maturer age,
+and felt the plummet of its truth sounding in the deep places of the
+soul, has not reason to bless the author for some timely warning or
+grateful encouragement?  Where is the scholar, the poet, the man of taste
+and feeling, who does not, with Cowper,
+
+         "Even in transitory life's late day,
+          Revere the man whose Pilgrim marks the road,
+          And guides the Progress of the soul to God!"
+
+We have just been reading, with no slight degree of interest, that simple
+but wonderful piece of autobiography, entitled Grace abounding to the
+Chief of Sinners, from the pen of the author of Pilgrim's Progress.  It
+is the record of a journey more terrible than that of the ideal Pilgrim;
+"truth stranger than fiction;" the painful upward struggling of a spirit
+from the blackness of despair and blasphemy, into the high, pure air of
+Hope and Faith.  More earnest words were never written.  It is the entire
+unveiling of a human heart; the tearing off of the fig-leaf covering of
+its sin.  The voice which speaks to us from these old pages seems not so
+much that of a denizen of the world in which we live, as of a soul at the
+last solemn confessional.  Shorn of all ornament, simple and direct as
+the contrition and prayer of childhood, when for the first time the
+Spectre of Sin stands by its bedside, the style is that of a man dead to
+self-gratification, careless of the world's opinion, and only desirous to
+convey to others, in all truthfulness and sincerity, the lesson of his
+inward trials, temptations, sins, weaknesses, and dangers; and to give
+glory to Him who had mercifully led him through all, and enabled him,
+like his own Pilgrim, to leave behind the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
+the snares of the Enchanted Ground, and the terrors of Doubting Castle,
+and to reach the land of Beulah, where the air was sweet and pleasant,
+and the birds sang and the flowers sprang up around him, and the Shining
+Ones walked in the brightness of the not distant Heaven.  In the
+introductory pages he says "he could have dipped into a style higher than
+this in which I have discoursed, and could have adorned all things more
+than here I have seemed to do; but I dared not.  God did not play in
+tempting me; neither did I play when I sunk, as it were, into a
+bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell took hold on me; wherefore, I may
+not play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the
+thing as it was."
+
+This book, as well as Pilgrim's Progress, was written in Bedford prison,
+and was designed especially for the comfort and edification of his
+"children, whom God had counted him worthy to beget in faith by his
+ministry."  In his introduction he tells them, that, although taken from
+them, and tied up, "sticking, as it were, between the teeth of the lions
+of the wilderness," he once again, as before, from the top of Shemer and
+Hermon, so now, from the lion's den and the mountain of leopards, would
+look after then with fatherly care and desires for their everlasting
+welfare.  "If," said he, "you have sinned against light; if you are
+tempted to blaspheme; if you are drowned in despair; if you think God
+fights against you; or if Heaven is hidden from your eyes, remember it
+was so with your father.  But out of all the Lord delivered me."
+
+He gives no dates; he affords scarcely a clue to his localities; of the
+man, as he worked, and ate, and drank, and lodged, of his neighbors and
+contemporaries, of all he saw and heard of the world about him, we have
+only an occasional glimpse, here and there, in his narrative.  It is the
+story of his inward life only that he relates.  What had time and place
+to do with one who trembled always with the awful consciousness of an
+immortal nature, and about whom fell alternately the shadows of hell and
+the splendors of heaven?  We gather, indeed, from his record, that he was
+not an idle on-looker in the time of England's great struggle for
+freedom, but a soldier of the Parliament, in his young years, among the
+praying sworders and psalm-singing pikemen, the Greathearts and Holdfasts
+whom he has immortalized in his allegory; but the only allusion which he
+makes to this portion of his experience is by way of illustration of the
+goodness of God in preserving him on occasions of peril.
+
+He was born at Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in 1628; and, to use his own
+words, his "father's house was of that rank which is the meanest and most
+despised of all the families of the land."  His father was a tinker, and
+the son followed the same calling, which necessarily brought him into
+association with the lowest and most depraved classes of English society.
+The estimation in which the tinker and his occupation were held, in the
+seventeenth century, may be learned from the quaint and humorous
+description of Sir Thomas Overbury.  "The tinker," saith he, "is a
+movable, for he hath no abiding in one place; he seems to be devout, for
+his life is a continual pilgrimage, and sometimes, in humility, goes
+barefoot, therein making necessity a virtue; he is a gallant, for he
+carries all his wealth upon his back; or a philosopher, for he bears all
+his substance with him.  He is always furnished with a song, to which his
+hammer, keeping tune, proves that he was the first founder of the kettle-
+drum; where the best ale is, there stands his music most upon crotchets.
+The companion of his travel is some foul, sun-burnt quean, that, since
+the terrible statute, has recanted gypsyism, and is turned pedlaress.  So
+marches he all over England, with his bag and baggage; his conversation
+is irreprovable, for he is always mending.  He observes truly the
+statutes, and therefore had rather steal than beg.  He is so strong an
+enemy of idleness, that in mending one hole he would rather make three
+than want work; and when he hath done, he throws the wallet of his faults
+behind him.  His tongue is very voluble, which, with canting, proves him
+a linguist.  He is entertained in every place, yet enters no farther than
+the door, to avoid suspicion.  To conclude, if he escape Tyburn and
+Banbury, he dies a beggar."
+
+Truly, but a poor beginning for a pious life was the youth of John
+Bunyan.  As might have been expected, he was a wild, reckless, swearing
+boy, as his father doubtless was before him.  "It was my delight," says
+he, "to be taken captive by the Devil.  I had few equals, both for
+cursing and swearing, lying and blaspheming."  Yet, in his ignorance and
+darkness, his powerful imagination early lent terror to the reproaches of
+conscience.  He was scared, even in childhood, with dreams of hell and
+apparitions of devils.  Troubled with fears of eternal fire, and the
+malignant demons who fed it in the regions of despair, he says that he
+often wished either that there was no hell, or that he had been born a
+devil himself, that he might be a tormentor rather than one of the
+tormented.
+
+At an early age he appears to have married.  His wife was as poor as
+himself, for he tells us that they had not so much as a dish or spoon
+between them; but she brought with her two books on religious subjects,
+the reading of which seems to have had no slight degree of influence on
+his mind.  He went to church regularly, adored the priest and all things
+pertaining to his office, being, as he says, "overrun with superstition."
+On one occasion, a sermon was preached against the breach of the Sabbath
+by sports or labor, which struck him at the moment as especially designed
+for himself; but by the time he had finished his dinner he was prepared
+to "shake it out of his mind, and return to his sports and gaming."
+
+"But the same day," he continues, "as I was in the midst of a game of
+cat, and having struck it one blow from the hole, just as I was about to
+strike it a second time, a voice did suddenly dart from Heaven into my
+soul, which said, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy
+sins and go to hell?'  At this, I was put to an exceeding maze;
+wherefore, leaving my cat upon the ground, I looked up to Heaven, and it
+was as if I had, with the eyes of my understanding, seen the Lord Jesus
+look down upon me, as being very hotly displeased with me, and as if He
+did severely threaten me with some grievous punishment for those and
+other ungodly practices.
+
+"I had no sooner thus conceived in my mind, but suddenly this conclusion
+fastened on my spirit, (for the former hint did set my sins again before
+my face,) that I had been a great and grievous sinner, and that it was
+now too late for me to look after Heaven; for Christ would not forgive me
+nor pardon my transgressions.  Then, while I was thinking of it, and
+fearing lest it should be so, I felt my heart sink in despair, concluding
+it was too late; and therefore I resolved in my mind to go on in sin;
+for, thought I, if the case be thus, my state is surely miserable;
+miserable if I leave my sins, and but miserable if I follow them; I can
+but be damned; and if I must be so, I had as good be damned for many sins
+as be damned for few."
+
+The reader of Pilgrim's Progress cannot fail here to call to mind the
+wicked suggestions of the Giant to Christian, in the dungeon of Doubting
+Castle.
+
+"I returned," he says, "desperately to my sport again; and I well
+remember, that presently this kind of despair did so possess my soul,
+that I was persuaded I could never attain to other comfort than what I
+should get in sin; for Heaven was gone already, so that on that I must
+not think; wherefore, I found within me great desire to take my fill of
+sin, that I might taste the sweetness of it; and I made as much haste as
+I could to fill my belly with its delicates, lest I should die before I
+had my desires; for that I feared greatly.  In these things, I protest
+before God, I lie not, neither do I frame this sort of speech; these were
+really, strongly, and with all my heart, my desires; the good Lord, whose
+mercy is unsearchable, forgive my transgressions."
+
+One day, while standing in the street, cursing and blaspheming, he met
+with a reproof which startled him.  The woman of the house in front of
+which the wicked young tinker was standing, herself, as he remarks, "a
+very loose, ungodly wretch," protested that his horrible profanity made
+her tremble; that he was the ungodliest fellow for swearing she had ever
+heard, and able to spoil all the youth of the town who came in his
+company.  Struck by this wholly unexpected rebuke, he at once abandoned
+the practice of swearing; although previously he tells us that "he had
+never known how to speak, unless he put an oath before and another
+behind."
+
+The good name which he gained by this change was now a temptation to him.
+"My neighbors," he says, "were amazed at my great conversion from
+prodigious profaneness to something like a moral life and sober man.
+Now, therefore, they began to praise, to commend, and to speak well of
+me, both to my face and behind my back.  Now I was, as they said, become
+godly; now I was become a right honest man.  But oh! when I understood
+those were their words and opinions of me, it pleased me mighty well; for
+though as yet I was nothing but a poor painted hypocrite, yet I loved to
+be talked of as one that was truly godly.  I was proud of my godliness,
+and, indeed, I did all I did either to be seen of or well spoken of by
+men; and thus I continued for about a twelvemonth or more."
+
+The tyranny of his imagination at this period is seen in the following
+relation of his abandonment of one of his favorite sports.
+
+"Now, you must know, that before this I had taken much delight in
+ringing, but my conscience beginning to be tender, I thought such
+practice was but vain, and therefore forced myself to leave it; yet my
+mind hankered; wherefore, I would go to the steeple-house and look on,
+though I durst not ring; but I thought this did not become religion
+neither; yet I forced myself, and would look on still.  But quickly
+after, I began to think, 'How if one of the bells should fall?'  Then I
+chose to stand under a main beam, that lay overthwart the steeple, from
+side to side, thinking here I might stand sure; but then I thought again,
+should the bell fall with a swing, it might first hit the wall, and then,
+rebounding upon me, might kill me for all this beam.  This made me stand
+in the steeple door; and now, thought I, I am safe enough; for if a bell
+should then fall, I can slip out behind these thick walls, and so be
+preserved notwithstanding.
+
+"So after this I would yet go to see them ring, but would not go any
+farther than the steeple-door.  But then it came in my head, 'How if the
+steeple itself should fall?' And this thought (it may, for aught I know,
+when I stood and looked on) did continually so shake my mind, that I
+durst not stand at the steeple-door any longer, but was forced to flee,
+for fear the steeple should fall upon my head."
+
+About this time, while wandering through Bedford in pursuit of
+employment, he chanced to see three or four poor old women sitting at a
+door, in the evening sun, and, drawing near them, heard them converse
+upon the things of God; of His work in their hearts; of their natural
+depravity; of the temptations of the Adversary; and of the joy of
+believing, and of the peace of reconciliation.  The words of the aged
+women found a response in the soul of the listener.  "He felt his heart
+shake," to use his own words; he saw that he lacked the true tokens of a
+Christian.  He now forsook the company of the profane and licentious, and
+sought that of a poor man who had the reputation of piety, but, to his
+grief, he found him "a devilish ranter, given up to all manner of
+uncleanness; he would laugh at all exhortations to sobriety, and deny
+that there was a God, an angel, or a spirit."
+
+"Neither," he continues, "was this man only a temptation to me, but, my
+calling lying in the country, I happened to come into several people's
+company, who, though strict in religion formerly, yet were also drawn
+away by these ranters.  These would also talk with me of their ways, and
+condemn me as illegal and dark; pretending that they only had attained to
+perfection, that they could do what they would, and not sin.  Oh! these
+temptations were suitable to my flesh, I being but a young man, and my
+nature in its prime; but God, who had, as I hope, designed me for better
+things, kept me in the fear of His name, and did not suffer me to accept
+such cursed principles."
+
+At this time he was sadly troubled to ascertain whether or not he had
+that faith which the Scriptures spake of.  Travelling one day from Elstow
+to Bedford, after a recent rain, which had left pools of water in the
+path, he felt a strong desire to settle the question, by commanding the
+pools to become dry, and the dry places to become pools.  Going under the
+hedge, to pray for ability to work the miracle, he was struck with the
+thought that if he failed he should know, indeed, that he was a castaway,
+and give himself up to despair.  He dared not attempt the experiment, and
+went on his way, to use his own forcible language, "tossed up and down
+between the Devil and his own ignorance."
+
+Soon after, he had one of those visions which foreshadowed the wonderful
+dream of his Pilgrim's Progress.  He saw some holy people of Bedford on
+the sunny side of an high mountain, refreshing themselves in the pleasant
+air and sunlight, while he was shivering in cold and darkness, amidst
+snows and never-melting ices, like the victims of the Scandinavian hell.
+A wall compassed the mountain, separating him from the blessed, with one
+small gap or doorway, through which, with great pain and effort, he was
+at last enabled to work his way into the sunshine, and sit down with the
+saints, in the light and warmth thereof.
+
+But now a new trouble assailed him.  Like Milton's metaphysical spirits,
+who sat apart,
+
+"And reasoned of foreknowledge, will, and fate," he grappled with one of
+those great questions which have always perplexed and baffled human
+inquiry, and upon which much has been written to little purpose.  He was
+tortured with anxiety to know whether, according to the Westminster
+formula, he was elected to salvation or damnation.  His old adversary
+vexed his soul with evil suggestions, and even quoted Scripture to
+enforce them.  "It may be you are not elected," said the Tempter; and the
+poor tinker thought the supposition altogether too probable.  "Why,
+then," said Satan, "you had as good leave off, and strive no farther; for
+if, indeed, you should not be elected and chosen of God, there is no hope
+of your being saved; for it is neither in him that willeth nor in him
+that runneth, but in God who showeth mercy."  At length, when, as he
+says, he was about giving up the ghost of all his hopes, this passage
+fell with weight upon his spirit: "Look at the generations of old, and
+see; did ever any trust in God, and were confounded?"  Comforted by these
+words, he opened his Bible took note them, but the most diligent search
+and inquiry of his neighbors failed to discover them.  At length his eye
+fell upon them in the Apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus.  This, he says,
+somewhat doubted him at first, as the book was not canonical; but in the
+end he took courage and comfort from the passage.  "I bless God," he
+says, "for that word; it was good for me.  That word doth still
+oftentimes shine before my face."
+
+A long and weary struggle was now before him.  "I cannot," he says,
+"express with what longings and breathings of my soul I cried unto Christ
+to call me.  Gold! could it have been gotten by gold, what would I have
+given for it.  Had I a whole world, it had all gone ten thousand times
+over for this, that my soul might have been in a converted state.  How
+lovely now was every one in my eyes, that I thought to be converted men
+and women.  They shone, they walked like a people who carried the broad
+seal of Heaven with them."
+
+With what force and intensity of language does he portray in the
+following passage the reality and earnestness of his agonizing
+experience:--
+
+"While I was thus afflicted with the fears of my own damnation, there
+were two things would make me wonder: the one was, when I saw old people
+hunting after the things of this life, as if they should live here
+always; the other was, when I found professors much distressed and cast
+down, when they met with outward losses; as of husband, wife, or child.
+Lord, thought I, what seeking after carnal things by some, and what grief
+in others for the loss of them!  If they so much labor after and shed so
+many tears for the things of this present life, how am I to be bemoaned,
+pitied, and prayed for!  My soul is dying, my soul is damning.  Were my
+soul but in a good condition, and were I but sure of it, ah I how rich
+should I esteem myself, though blessed but with bread and water!  I
+should count these but small afflictions, and should bear them as little
+burdens.  'A wounded spirit who can bear!'"
+
+He looked with envy, as he wandered through the country, upon the birds
+in the trees, the hares in the preserves, and the fishes in the streams.
+They were happy in their brief existence, and their death was but a
+sleep.  He felt himself alienated from God, a discord in the harmonies of
+the universe.  The very rooks which fluttered around the old church spire
+seemed more worthy of the Creator's love and care than himself.  A vision
+of the infernal fire, like that glimpse of hell which was afforded to
+Christian by the Shepherds, was continually before him, with its
+"rumbling noise, and the cry of some tormented, and the scent of
+brimstone."  Whithersoever he went, the glare of it scorched him, and its
+dreadful sound was in his ears.  His vivid but disturbed imagination lent
+new terrors to the awful figures by which the sacred writers conveyed the
+idea of future retribution to the Oriental mind.  Bunyan's World of Woe,
+if it lacked the colossal architecture and solemn vastness of Milton's
+Pandemonium, was more clearly defined; its agonies were within the pale
+of human comprehension; its victims were men and women, with the same
+keen sense of corporeal suffering which they possessed in life; and who,
+to use his own terrible description, had "all the loathed variety of hell
+to grapple with; fire unquenchable, a lake of choking brimstone, eternal
+chains, darkness more black than night, the everlasting gnawing of the
+worm, the sight of devils, and the yells and outcries of the damned."
+
+His mind at this period was evidently shaken in some degree from its
+balance.  He was troubled with strange, wicked thoughts, confused by
+doubts and blasphemous suggestions, for which he could only account by
+supposing himself possessed of the Devil.  He wanted to curse and swear,
+and had to clap his hands on his mouth to prevent it.  In prayer, he
+felt, as he supposed, Satan behind him, pulling his clothes, and telling
+him to have done, and break off; suggesting that he had better pray to
+him, and calling up before his mind's eye the figures of a bull, a tree,
+or some other object, instead of the awful idea of God.
+
+He notes here, as cause of thankfulness, that, even in this dark and
+clouded state, he was enabled to see the "vile and abominable things
+fomented by the Quakers," to be errors.  Gradually, the shadow wherein he
+had so long
+
+         "Walked beneath the day's broad glare,
+          A darkened man,"
+
+passed from him, and for a season he was afforded an "evidence of his
+salvation from Heaven, with many golden seals thereon hanging in his
+sight."  But, ere long, other temptations assailed him.  A strange
+suggestion haunted him, to sell or part with his Saviour.  His own
+account of this hallucination is too painfully vivid to awaken any other
+feeling than that of sympathy and sadness.
+
+"I could neither eat my food, stoop for a pin, chop a stick, or cast mine
+eye to look on this or that, but still the temptation would come, Sell
+Christ for this, or sell Christ for that; sell him, sell him.
+
+"Sometimes it would run in my thoughts, not so little as a hundred times
+together, Sell him, sell him; against which, I may say, for whole hours
+together, I have been forced to stand as continually leaning and forcing
+my spirit against it, lest haply, before I were aware, some wicked
+thought might arise in my heart, that might consent thereto; and
+sometimes the tempter would make me believe I had consented to it; but
+then I should be as tortured upon a rack, for whole days together.
+
+"This temptation did put me to such scares, lest I should at sometimes, I
+say, consent thereto, and be overcome therewith, that, by the very force
+of my mind, my very body would be put into action or motion, by way of
+pushing or thrusting with my hands or elbows; still answering, as fast as
+the destroyer said, Sell him, I will not, I will not, I will not; no, not
+for thousands, thousands, thousands of worlds; thus reckoning, lest I
+should set too low a value on him, even until I scarce well knew where I
+was, or how to be composed again.
+
+"But to be brief: one morning, as I did lie in my bed, I was, as at other
+times, most fiercely assaulted with this temptation, to sell and part
+with Christ; the wicked suggestion still running in my mind, Sell him,
+sell him, sell him, sell him, sell him, as fast as a man could speak;
+against which, also, in my mind, as at other times, I answered, No, no,
+not for thousands, thousands, thousands, at least twenty times together;
+but at last, after much striving, I felt this thought pass through my
+heart, Let him go if he will; and I thought also, that I felt my heart
+freely consent thereto.  Oh, the diligence of Satan!  Oh, the
+desperateness of man's heart!
+
+"Now was the battle won, and down fell I, as a bird that is shot from the
+top of a tree, into great guilt, and fearful despair.  Thus getting out
+of my bed, I went moping into the field; but God knows with as heavy a
+heart as mortal man, I think, could bear; where, for the space of two
+hours, I was like a man bereft of life; and, as now, past all recovery,
+and bound over to eternal punishment.
+
+"And withal, that Scripture did seize upon my soul: 'Or profane person,
+as Esau, who, for one morsel of meat, sold his birthright; for ye know,
+how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was
+rejected; for he found no place for repentance, though he sought it
+carefully with tears."
+
+For two years and a half, as he informs us, that awful scripture sounded
+in his ears like the knell of a lost soul.  He believed that he had
+committed they unpardonable sin.  His mental anguish 'was united with
+bodily illness and suffering.  His nervous system became fearfully
+deranged; his limbs trembled; and he supposed this visible tremulousness
+and agitation to be the mark of Cain.  'Troubled with pain and
+distressing sensations in his chest, he began to fear that his breast-
+bone would split open, and that he should perish like Judas Iscariot.  He
+feared that the tiles of the houses would fall upon him as he walked in
+the streets.  He was like his own Man in the Cage at the House of the
+Interpreter, shut out from the promises, and looking forward to certain
+judgment.  "Methought," he says, "the very sun that shineth in heaven did
+grudge to give me light."  And still the dreadful words, "He found no
+place for repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears," sounded
+in the depths of his soul.  They were, he says, like fetters of brass to
+his legs, and their continual clanking followed him for months.
+Regarding himself elected and predestined for damnation, he thought that
+all things worked for his damage and eternal overthrow, while all things
+wrought for the best and to do good to the elect and called of God unto
+salvation.  God and all His universe had, he thought, conspired against
+him; the green earth, the bright waters, the sky itself, were written
+over with His irrevocable curse.
+
+Well was it said by Bunyan's contemporary, the excellent Cudworth, in his
+eloquent sermon before the Long Parliament, that "We are nowhere
+commanded to pry into the secrets of God, but the wholesome advice given
+us is this: 'To make our calling and election sure.'  We have no warrant
+from Scripture to peep into the hidden rolls of eternity, to spell out
+our names among the stars."  "Must we say that God sometimes, to exercise
+His uncontrollable dominion, delights rather in plunging wretched souls
+down into infernal night and everlasting darkness?  What, then, shall we
+make the God of the whole world?  Nothing but a cruel and dreadful
+_Erinnys_, with curled fiery snakes about His head, and firebrands in His
+hand; thus governing the world!  Surely, this will make us either
+secretly think there is no God in the world, if He must needs be such, or
+else to wish heartily there were none."  It was thus at times with
+Bunyan.  He was tempted, in this season of despair, to believe that there
+was no resurrection and no judgment.
+
+One day, he tells us, a sudden rushing sound, as of wind or the wings of
+angels, came to him through the window, wonderfully sweet and pleasant;
+and it was as if a voice spoke to him from heaven words of encouragement
+and hope, which, to use his language, commanded, for the time, "a silence
+in his heart to all those tumultuous thoughts that did use, like
+masterless hell-hounds, to roar and bellow and make a hideous noise
+within him."  About this time, also, some comforting passages of
+Scripture were called to mind; but he remarks, that whenever he strove to
+apply them to his case, Satan would thrust the curse of Esau in his face,
+and wrest the good word from him.  The blessed promise "Him that cometh
+to me, I will in no wise cast out" was the chief instrumentality in
+restoring his lost peace.  He says of it: "If ever Satan and I did strive
+for any word of God in all my life, it was for this good word of Christ;
+he at one end, and I at the other.  Oh, what work we made!  It was for
+this in John, I say, that we did so tug and strive; he pulled, and I
+pulled, but, God be praised!  I overcame him; I got sweetness from it.
+Oh, many a pull hath my heart had with Satan for this blessed sixth
+chapter of John!"  Who does not here call to mind the struggle between
+Christian and Apollyon in the valley!
+
+That was no fancy sketch; it was the narrative of the author's own
+grapple with the Spirit of Evil.  Like his ideal Christian, he "conquered
+through Him that loved him."  Love wrought the victory the Scripture of
+Forgiveness overcame that of Hatred.
+
+He never afterwards relapsed into that state of religious melancholy from
+which he so hardly escaped.  He speaks of his deliverance as the waking
+out of a troublesome dream.  His painful experience was not lost upon
+him; for it gave him, ever after, a tender sympathy for the weak, the
+sinful, the ignorant, and desponding.  In some measure, he had been
+"touched with the feeling of their infirmities."  He could feel for those
+in the bonds of sin and despair, as bound with them.  Hence his power as
+a preacher; hence the wonderful adaptation of his great allegory to all
+the variety of spiritual conditions.  Like Fearing, he had lain a month
+in the Slough of Despond, and had played, like him, the long melancholy
+bass of spiritual heaviness.  With Feeble-mind, he had fallen into the
+hands of Slay-good, of the nature of Man-eaters: and had limped along his
+difficult way upon the crutches of Ready-to-halt.  Who better than
+himself could describe the condition of Despondency, and his daughter
+Much-afraid, in the dungeon of Doubting Castle?  Had he not also fallen
+among thieves, like Little-faith?
+
+His account of his entering upon the solemn duties of a preacher of the
+Gospel is at once curious and instructive.  He deals honestly with
+himself, exposing all his various moods, weaknesses, doubts, and
+temptations.  "I preached," he says, "what I felt; for the terrors of the
+law and the guilt of transgression lay heavy on my conscience.  I have
+been as one sent to them from the dead.  I went, myself in chains, to
+preach to them in chains; and carried that fire in my conscience which I
+persuaded them to beware of."  At times, when he stood up to preach,
+blasphemies and evil doubts rushed into his mind, and he felt a strong
+desire to utter them aloud to his congregation; and at other seasons,
+when he was about to apply to the sinner some searching and fearful text
+of Scripture, he was tempted to withhold it, on the ground that it
+condemned himself also; but, withstanding the suggestion of the Tempter,
+to use his own simile, he bowed himself like Samson to condemn sin
+wherever he found it, though he brought guilt and condemnation upon
+himself thereby, choosing rather to die with the Philistines than to deny
+the truth.
+
+Foreseeing the consequences of exposing himself to the operation of the
+penal laws by holding conventicles and preaching, he was deeply afflicted
+at the thought of the suffering and destitution to which his wife and
+children might be exposed by his death or imprisonment.  Nothing can be
+more touching than his simple and earnest words on this point.  They show
+how warm and deep were him human affections, and what a tender and loving
+heart he laid as a sacrifice on the altar of duty.
+
+"I found myself a man compassed with infirmities; the parting with my
+wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling
+the flesh from the bones; and also it brought to my mind the many
+hardships, miseries, and wants, that my poor family was like to meet
+with, should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who
+lay nearer my heart than all beside.  Oh, the thoughts of the hardships I
+thought my poor blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces.
+
+"Poor child! thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion
+in this world! thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold,
+nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind
+should blow upon thee.  But yet, thought I, I must venture you all with
+God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you: oh! I saw I was as a man
+who was pulling down his house upon the heads of his wife and children;
+yet I thought on those 'two milch kine that were to carry the ark of God
+into another country, and to leave their calves behind them.'
+
+"But that which helped me in this temptation was divers considerations:
+the first was, the consideration of those two Scriptures, 'Leave thy
+fatherless children, I will preserve them alive; and let thy widows trust
+in me;' and again, 'The Lord said, verily it shall go well with thy
+remnant; verily I will cause the enemy to entreat them well in the time
+of evil.'"
+
+He was arrested in 1660, charged with "devilishly and perniciously
+abstaining from church," and of being "a common upholder of
+conventicles."  At the Quarter Sessions, where his trial seems to have
+been conducted somewhat like that of Faithful at Vanity Fair, he was
+sentenced to perpetual banishment.  This sentence, however, was never
+executed, but he was remanded to Bedford jail, where he lay a prisoner
+for twelve years.
+
+Here, shut out from the world, with no other books than the Bible and
+Fox's Martyrs, he penned that great work which has attained a wider and
+more stable popularity than any other book in the English tongue.  It is
+alike the favorite of the nursery and the study.  Many experienced
+Christians hold it only second to the Bible; the infidel himself would
+not willingly let it die.  Men of all sects read it with delight, as in
+the main a truthful representation of the 'Christian pilgrimage, without
+indeed assenting to all the doctrines which the author puts in the month
+of his fighting sermonizer, Great-heart, or which may be deduced from
+some other portions of his allegory.  A recollection of his fearful
+sufferings, from misapprehension of a single text in the Scriptures,
+relative to the question of election, we may suppose gave a milder tone
+to the theology of his Pilgrim than was altogether consistent with the
+Calvinism of the seventeenth century.  "Religion," says Macaulay, "has
+scarcely ever worn a form so calm and soothing as in Bunyan's allegory."
+In composing it, he seems never to have altogether lost sight of the
+fact, that, in his life-and-death struggle with Satan for the blessed
+promise recorded by the Apostle of Love, the adversary was generally
+found on the Genevan side of the argument. Little did the short-sighted
+persecutors of Bunyan dream, when they closed upon him the door of
+Bedford jail, that God would overrule their poor spite and envy to His
+own glory and the worldwide renown of their victim.  In the solitude of
+his prison, the ideal forms of beauty and sublimity, which had long
+flitted before him vaguely, like the vision of the Temanite, took shape
+and coloring; and he was endowed with power to reduce them to order, and
+arrange them in harmonious groupings.  His powerful imagination, no
+longer self-tormenting, but under the direction of reason and grace,
+expanded his narrow cell into a vast theatre, lighted up for the display
+of its wonders.  To this creative faculty of his mind might have been
+aptly applied the language which George Wither, a contemporary prisoner,
+addressed to his Muse:--
+
+              "The dull loneness, the black shade
+               Which these hanging vaults have made,
+               The rude portals that give light
+               More to terror than delight;
+               This my chamber of neglect,
+               Walled about with disrespect,--
+               From all these, and this dull air,
+               A fit object for despair,
+               She hath taught me by her might,
+               To draw comfort and delight."
+
+That stony cell of his was to him like the rock of Padan-aram to the
+wandering Patriarch.  He saw angels ascending and descending.  The House
+Beautiful rose up before him, and its holy sisterhood welcomed him.  He
+looked, with his Pilgrim, from the Chamber of Peace.  The Valley of
+Humiliation lay stretched out beneath his eye, and he heard "the curious,
+melodious note of the country birds, who sing all the day long in the
+spring time, when the flowers appear, and the sun shines warm, and make
+the woods and groves and solitary places glad."  Side by side with the
+good Christiana and the loving Mercy, he walked through the green and
+lowly valley, "fruitful as any the crow flies over," through "meadows
+beautiful with lilies;" the song of the poor but fresh-faced shepherd-
+boy, who lived a merry life, and wore the herb heartsease in his bosom,
+sounded through his cell:--
+
+              "He that is down need fear no fall;
+               He that is low no pride."
+
+The broad and pleasant "river of the Water of Life" glided peacefully
+before him, fringed "on either side with green trees, with all manner of
+fruit," and leaves of healing, with "meadows beautified with lilies, and
+green all the year long;" he saw the Delectable Mountains, glorious with
+sunshine, overhung with gardens and orchards and vineyards; and beyond
+all, the Land of Beulah, with its eternal sunshine, its song of birds,
+its music of fountains, its purple clustered vines, and groves through
+which walked the Shining Ones, silver-winged and beautiful.
+
+What were bars and bolts and prison-walls to him, whose eyes were
+anointed to see, and whose ears opened to hear, the glory and the
+rejoicing of the City of God, when the pilgrims were conducted to its
+golden gates, from the black and bitter river, with the sounding
+trumpeters, the transfigured harpers with their crowns of gold, the sweet
+voices of angels, the welcoming peal of bells in the holy city, and the
+songs of the redeemed ones?  In reading the concluding pages of the first
+part of Pilgrim's Progress, we feel as if the mysterious glory of the
+Beatific Vision was unveiled before us.  We are dazzled with the excess
+of light.  We are entranced with the mighty melody; overwhelmed by the
+great anthem of rejoicing spirits.  It can only be adequately described
+in the language of Milton in respect to the Apocalypse, as "a seven-fold
+chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies."
+
+Few who read Bunyan nowadays think of him as one of the brave old English
+confessors, whose steady and firm endurance of persecution baffled and in
+the end overcame the tyranny of the Established Church in the reign of
+Charles II.  What Milton and Penn and Locke wrote in defence of Liberty,
+Bunyan lived out and acted.  He made no concessions to worldly rank.
+Dissolute lords and proud bishops he counted less than the humblest and
+poorest of his disciples at Bedford.  When first arrested and thrown into
+prison, he supposed he should be called to suffer death for his faithful
+testimony to the truth; and his great fear was, that he should not meet
+his fate with the requisite firmness, and so dishonor the cause of his
+Master.  And when dark clouds came over him, and he sought in vain for a
+sufficient evidence that in the event of his death it would be well with
+him, he girded up his soul with the reflection, that, as he suffered for
+the word and way of God, he was engaged not to shrink one hair's breadth
+from it.  "I will leap," he says, "off the ladder blindfold into
+eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell.  Lord Jesus, if thou wilt
+catch me, do; if not, I will venture in thy name!"
+
+The English revolution of the seventeenth century, while it humbled the
+false and oppressive aristocracy of rank and title, was prodigal in the
+development of the real nobility of the mind and heart.  Its history is
+bright with the footprints of men whose very names still stir the hearts
+of freemen, the world over, like a trumpet peal.  Say what we may of its
+fanaticism, laugh as we may at its extravagant enjoyment of newly
+acquired religious and civil liberty, who shall now venture to deny that
+it was the golden age of England?  Who that regards freedom above
+slavery, will now sympathize with the outcry and lamentation of those
+interested in the continuance of the old order of things, against the
+prevalence of sects and schism, but who, at the same time, as Milton
+shrewdly intimates, dreaded more the rending of their pontifical sleeves
+than the rending of the Church?  Who shall now sneer at Puritanism, with
+the Defence of Unlicensed Printing before him?  Who scoff at Quakerism
+over the Journal of George Fox?  Who shall join with debauched lordlings
+and fat-witted prelates in ridicule of Anabaptist levellers and dippers,
+after rising from the perusal of Pilgrim's Progress?  "There were giants
+in those days."  And foremost amidst that band of liberty-loving and God-
+fearing men,
+
+         "The slandered Calvinists of Charles's time,
+          Who fought, and won it, Freedom's holy fight,"
+
+stands the subject of our sketch, the Tinker of Elstow.  Of his high
+merit as an author there is no longer any question.  The Edinburgh Review
+expressed the common sentiment of the literary world, when it declared
+that the two great creative minds of the seventeenth century were those
+which produced Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             THOMAS ELLWOOD.
+
+Commend us to autobiographies!  Give us the veritable notchings of
+Robinson Crusoe on his stick, the indubitable records of a life long
+since swallowed up in the blackness of darkness, traced by a hand the
+very dust of which has become undistinguishable.  The foolishest egotist
+who ever chronicled his daily experiences, his hopes and fears, poor
+plans and vain reachings after happiness, speaking to us out of the Past,
+and thereby giving us to understand that it was quite as real as our
+Present, is in no mean sort our benefactor, and commands our attention,
+in spite of his folly.  We are thankful for the very vanity which
+prompted him to bottle up his poor records, and cast them into the great
+sea of Time, for future voyagers to pick up.  We note, with the deepest
+interest, that in him too was enacted that miracle of a conscious
+existence, the reproduction of which in ourselves awes and perplexes us.
+He, too, had a mother; he hated and loved; the light from old-quenched
+hearths shone over him; he walked in the sunshine over the dust of those
+who had gone before him, just as we are now walking over his.  These
+records of him remain, the footmarks of a long-extinct life, not of mere
+animal organism, but of a being like ourselves, enabling us, by studying
+their hieroglyphic significance, to decipher and see clearly into the
+mystery of existence centuries ago.  The dead generations live again in
+these old self-biographies.  Incidentally, unintentionally, yet in the
+simplest and most natural manner, they make us familiar with all the
+phenomena of life in the bygone ages.  We are brought in contact with
+actual flesh-and-blood men and women, not the ghostly outline figures
+which pass for such, in what is called History.  The horn lantern of the
+biographer, by the aid of which, with painful minuteness, he chronicled,
+from day to day, his own outgoings and incomings, making visible to us
+his pitiful wants, labors, trials, and tribulations of the stomach and of
+the conscience, sheds, at times, a strong clear light upon
+contemporaneous activities; what seemed before half fabulous, rises up in
+distinct and full proportions; we look at statesmen, philosophers, and
+poets, with the eyes of those who lived perchance their next-door
+neighbors, and sold them beer, and mutton, and household stuffs, had
+access to their kitchens, and took note of the fashion of their wigs and
+the color of their breeches.  Without some such light, all history would
+be just about as unintelligible and unreal as a dimly remembered dream.
+
+The journals of the early Friends or Quakers are in this respect
+invaluable.  Little, it is true, can be said, as a general thing, of
+their literary merits.  Their authors were plain, earnest men and women,
+chiefly intent upon the substance of things, and having withal a strong
+testimony to bear against carnal wit and outside show and ornament.  Yet,
+even the scholar may well admire the power of certain portions of George
+Fox's Journal, where a strong spirit clothes its utterance in simple,
+downright Saxon words; the quiet and beautiful enthusiasm of Pennington;
+the torrent energy of Edward Burrough; the serene wisdom of Penn; the
+logical acuteness of Barclay; the honest truthfulness of Sewell; the wit
+and humor of John Roberts, (for even Quakerism had its apostolic jokers
+and drab-coated Robert Halls;) and last, not least, the simple beauty of
+Woolman's Journal, the modest record of a life of good works and love.
+
+Let us look at the Life of Thomas Ellwood.  The book before us is a
+hardly used Philadelphia reprint, bearing date of 1775.  The original was
+published some sixty years before.  It is not a book to be found in
+fashionable libraries, or noticed in fashionable reviews, but is none the
+less deserving of attention.
+
+Ellwood was born in 1639, in the little town of Crowell, in Oxfordshire.
+Old Walter, his father, was of "gentlemanly lineage," and held a
+commission of the peace under Charles I.  One of his most intimate
+friends was Isaac Pennington, a gentleman of estate and good reputation,
+whose wife, the widow of Sir John Springette, was a lady of superior
+endowments.  Her only daughter, Gulielma, was the playmate and companion
+of Thomas.  On making this family a visit, in 1658, in company with his
+father, he was surprised to find that they had united with the Quakers, a
+sect then little known, and everywhere spoken against.  Passing through
+the vista of nearly two centuries, let us cross the threshold, and look
+with the eyes of young Ellwood upon this Quaker family.  It will
+doubtless give us a good idea of the earnest and solemn spirit of that
+age of religious awakening.
+
+"So great a change from a free, debonair, and courtly sort of behavior,
+which we had formerly found there, into so strict a gravity as they now
+received us with, did not a little amuse us, and disappointed our
+expectations of such a pleasant visit as we had promised ourselves.
+
+"For my part, I sought, and at length found, means to cast myself into
+the company of the daughter, whom I found gathering flowers in the
+garden, attended by her maid, also a Quaker.  But when I addressed her
+after my accustomed manner, with intention to engage her in discourse on
+the foot of our former acquaintance, though she treated me with a
+courteous mien, yet, as young as she was, the gravity of her looks and
+behavior struck such an awe upon me, that I found myself not so much
+master of myself as to pursue any further converse with her.
+
+"We staid dinner, which was very handsome, and lacked nothing to
+recommend it to me but the want of mirth and pleasant discourse, which we
+could neither have with them, nor, by reason of them, with one another;
+the weightiness which was upon their spirits and countenances keeping
+down the lightness that would have been up in ours."
+
+Not long after, they made a second visit to their sober friends, spending
+several days, during which they attended a meeting, in a neighboring
+farmhouse, where we are introduced by Ellwood to two remarkable
+personages, Edward Burrough, the friend and fearless reprover of
+Cromwell, and by far the most eloquent preacher of his sect and James
+Nayler, whose melancholy after-history of fanaticism, cruel sufferings,
+and beautiful repentance, is so well known to the readers of English
+history under the Protectorate.  Under the preaching of these men, and
+the influence of the Pennington family, young Ellwood was brought into
+fellowship with the Quakers.  Of the old Justice's sorrow and indignation
+at this sudden blasting of his hopes and wishes in respect to his son,
+and of the trials and difficulties of the latter in his new vocation, it
+is now scarcely worth while to speak.  Let us step forward a few years,
+to 1662, considering meantime how matters, political and spiritual, are
+changed in that brief period.  Cromwell, the Maccabeus of Puritanism, is
+no longer among men; Charles the Second sits in his place; profane and
+licentious cavaliers have thrust aside the sleek-haired, painful-faced
+Independents, who used to groan approval to the Scriptural illustrations
+of Harrison and Fleetwood; men easy of virtue, without sincerity, either
+in religion or politics, occupying the places made honorable by the
+Miltons, Whitlocks, and Vanes of the Commonwealth.  Having this change in
+view, the light which the farthing candle of Ellwood sheds upon one of
+these illustrious names will not be unwelcome.  In his intercourse with
+Penn, and other learned Quakers, he had reason to lament his own
+deficiencies in scholarship, and his friend Pennington undertook to put
+him in a way of remedying the defect.
+
+"He had," says Ellwood, "an intimate acquaintance with Dr. Paget, a
+physician of note in London, and he with John Milton, a gentleman of
+great note for learning throughout the learned world, for the accurate
+pieces he had written on various subjects and occasions.
+
+"This person, having filled a public station in the former times, lived a
+private and retired life in London, and, having lost his sight, kept
+always a man to read for him, which usually was the son of some gentleman
+of his acquaintance, whom, in kindness, he took to improve in his
+learning.
+
+"Thus, by the mediation of my friend Isaac Pennington with Dr. Paget, and
+through him with John Milton, was I admitted to come to him, not as a
+servant to him, nor to be in the house with him, but only to have the
+liberty of coming to his house at certain hours when I would, and read to
+him what books he should appoint, which was all the favor I desired.
+
+"He received me courteously, as well for the sake of Dr. Paget, who
+introduced me, as of Isaac Pennington, who recommended me, to both of
+whom he bore a good respect.  And, having inquired divers things of me,
+with respect to my former progression in learning, he dismissed me, to
+provide myself with such accommodations as might be most suitable to my
+studies.
+
+"I went, therefore, and took lodgings as near to his house (which was
+then in Jewen Street) as I conveniently could, and from thenceforward
+went every day in the afternoon, except on the first day of the week,
+and, sitting by him in his dining-room, read to him such books in the
+Latin tongue as he pleased to have me read.
+
+"He perceiving with what earnest desire I had pursued learning, gave me
+not only all the encouragement, but all the help he could.  For, having a
+curious ear, he understood by my tone when I understood what I read and
+when I did not, and accordingly would stop me, examine me, and open the
+most difficult passages to me."
+
+Thanks, worthy Thomas, for this glimpse into John Milton's dining-room!
+
+He had been with "Master Milton," as he calls him, only a few weeks,
+when, being one "first day morning," at the Bull and Mouth meeting,
+Aldersgate, the train-bands of the city, "with great noise and clamor,"
+headed by Major Rosewell, fell upon him and his friends.  The immediate
+cause of this onslaught upon quiet worshippers was the famous plot of the
+Fifth Monarchy men, grim old fanatics, who (like the Millerites of the
+present day) had been waiting long for the personal reign of Christ and
+the saints upon earth, and in their zeal to hasten such a consummation
+had sallied into London streets with drawn swords and loaded matchlocks.
+The government took strong measures for suppressing dissenters' meetings
+or "conventicles;" and the poor Quakers, although not at all implicated
+in the disturbance, suffered more severely than any others.  Let us look
+at the "freedom of conscience and worship" in England under that
+irreverent Defender of the Faith, Charles II.  Ellwood says: "He that
+commanded the party gave us first a general charge to come out of the
+room.  But we, who came thither at God's requiring to worship Him, (like
+that good man of old, who said, we ought to obey God rather than man,)
+stirred not, but kept our places.  Whereupon, he sent some of his
+soldiers among us, with command to drag or drive us out, which they did
+roughly enough."  Think of it: grave men and women, and modest maidens,
+sitting there with calm, impassive countenances, motionless as death, the
+pikes of the soldiery closing about them in a circle of bristling steel!
+Brave and true ones!  Not in vain did ye thus oppose God's silence to the
+Devil's uproar; Christian endurance and calm persistence in the exercise
+of your rights as Englishmen and men to the hot fury of impatient
+tyranny!  From your day down to this, the world has been the better for
+your faithfulness.
+
+Ellwood and some thirty of his friends were marched off to prison in Old
+Bridewell, which, as well as nearly all the other prisons, was already
+crowded with Quaker prisoners.  One of the rooms of the prison was used
+as a torture chamber.  "I was almost affrighted," says Ellwood, "by the
+dismalness of the place; for, besides that the walls were all laid over
+with black, from top to bottom, there stood in the middle a great
+whipping-post.
+
+"The manner of whipping there is, to strip the party to the skin, from
+the waist upward, and, having fastened him to the whipping-post, (so that
+he can neither resist nor shun the strokes,) to lash his naked body with
+long, slender twigs of holly, which will bend almost like thongs around
+the body; and these, having little knots upon them, tear the skin and
+flesh, and give extreme pain."
+
+To this terrible punishment aged men and delicately nurtured young
+females were often subjected, during this season of hot persecution.
+
+From the Bridewell, Ellwood was at length removed to Newgate, and thrust
+in, with other "Friends," amidst the common felons.  He speaks of this
+prison, with its thieves, murderers, and prostitutes, its over-crowded
+apartments and loathsome cells, as "a hell upon earth."  In a closet,
+adjoining the room where he was lodged, lay for several days the
+quartered bodies of Phillips, Tongue, and Gibbs, the leaders of the Fifth
+Monarchy rising, frightful and loathsome, as they came from the bloody
+hands of the executioners!  These ghastly remains were at length obtained
+by the friends of the dead, and buried.  The heads were ordered to be
+prepared for setting up in different parts of the city.  Read this grim
+passage of description:--
+
+"I saw the heads when they were brought to be boiled.  The hangman
+fetched them in a dirty basket, out of some by-place, and, setting them
+down among the felons, he and they made sport of them.  They took them by
+the hair, flouting, jeering, and laughing at them; and then giving them
+some ill names, boxed them on their ears and cheeks; which done, the
+hangman put them into his kettle, and parboiled them with bay-salt and
+cummin-seed: that to keep them from putrefaction, and this to keep off
+the fowls from seizing upon them.  The whole sight, as well that of the
+bloody quarters first as this of the heads afterwards, was both frightful
+and loathsome, and begat an abhorrence in my nature."
+
+At the next session of the municipal court at the Old Bailey, Ellwood
+obtained his discharge.  After paying a visit to "my Master Milton," he
+made his way to Chalfont, the home of his friends the Penningtons, where
+he was soon after engaged as a Latin teacher.  Here he seems to have had
+his trials and temptations.  Gulielma Springette, the daughter of
+Pennington's wife, his old playmate, had now grown to be "a fair woman of
+marriageable age," and, as he informs us, "very desirable, whether regard
+was had to her outward person, which wanted nothing to make her
+completely comely, or to the endowments of her mind, which were every way
+extraordinary, or to her outward fortune, which was fair."  From all
+which, we are not surprised to learn that "she was secretly and openly
+sought for by many of almost every rank and condition."  "To whom,"
+continues Thomas, "in their respective turns, (till he at length came for
+whom she was reserved,) she carried herself with so much evenness of
+temper, such courteous freedom, guarded by the strictest modesty, that as
+it gave encouragement or ground of hope to none, so neither did it
+administer any matter of offence or just cause of complaint to any."
+
+Beautiful and noble maiden!  How the imagination fills up this outline
+limning by her friend, and, if truth must be told, admirer!  Serene,
+courteous, healthful; a ray of tenderest and blandest light, shining
+steadily in the sober gloom of that old household!  Confirmed Quaker as
+she is, shrinking from none of the responsibilities and dangers of her
+profession, and therefore liable at any time to the penalties of prison
+and whipping-post, under that plain garb and in spite of that "certain
+gravity of look and behavior,"--which, as we have seen, on one occasion
+awed young Ellwood into silence,--youth, beauty, and refinement assert
+their prerogatives; love knows no creed; the gay, and titled, and wealthy
+crowd around her, suing in vain for her favor.
+
+              "Followed, like the tided moon,
+               She moves as calmly on,"
+
+"until he at length comes for whom she was reserved," and her name is
+united with that of one worthy even of her, the world-renowned William
+Penn.
+
+Meantime, one cannot but feel a good degree of sympathy with young
+Ellwood, her old schoolmate and playmate, placed, as he was, in the same
+family with her, enjoying her familiar conversation and unreserved
+confidence, and, as he says, the "advantageous opportunities of riding
+and walking abroad with her, by night as well as by day, without any
+other company than her maid; for so great, indeed, was the confidence
+that her mother had in me, that she thought her daughter safe, if I was
+with her, even from the plots and designs of others upon her."  So near,
+and yet, alas! in truth, so distant!  The serene and gentle light which
+shone upon him, in the sweet solitudes of Chalfont, was that of a star,
+itself unapproachable.
+
+As he himself meekly intimates, she was reserved for another.  He seems
+to have fully understood his own position in respect to her; although, to
+use his own words, "others, measuring him by the propensity of their own
+inclinations, concluded he would steal her, run away with her, and marry
+her."  Little did these jealous surmisers know of the true and really
+heroic spirit of the young Latin master.  His own apology and defence of
+his conduct, under circumstances of temptation which St. Anthony himself
+could have scarcely better resisted, will not be amiss.
+
+"I was not ignorant of the various fears which filled the jealous heads
+of some concerning me, neither was I so stupid nor so divested of all
+humanity as not to be sensible of the real and innate worth and virtue
+which adorned that excellent dame, and attracted the eyes and hearts of
+so many, with the greatest importunity, to seek and solicit her; nor was
+I so devoid of natural heat as not to feel some sparklings of desire, as
+well as others; but the force of truth and sense of honor suppressed
+whatever would have risen beyond the bounds of fair and virtuous
+friendship.  For I easily foresaw that, if I should have attempted any
+thing in a dishonorable way, by fraud or force, upon her, I should have
+thereby brought a wound upon mine own soul, a foul scandal upon my
+religious profession, and an infamous stain upon mine honor, which was
+far more dear unto me than my life.  Wherefore, having observed how some
+others had befooled themselves, by misconstruing her common kindness
+(expressed in an innocent, open, free, and familiar conversation,
+springing from the abundant affability, courtesy, and sweetness of her
+natural temper) to be the effect of a singular regard and peculiar
+affection to them, I resolved to shun the rock whereon they split; and,
+remembering the saying of the poet
+
+          'Felix quem faciunt aliena Pericula cantum,'
+
+I governed myself in a free yet respectful carriage towards her, thereby
+preserving a fair reputation with my friends, and enjoying as much of her
+favor and kindness, in a virtuous and firm friendship, as was fit for her
+to show or for me to seek."
+
+Well and worthily said, poor Thomas!  Whatever might be said of others,
+thou, at least, wast no coxcomb.  Thy distant and involuntary admiration
+of "the fair Guli" needs, however, no excuse.  Poor human nature, guard
+it as one may, with strictest discipline and painfully cramping
+environment, will sometimes act out itself; and, in thy case, not even
+George Fox himself, knowing thy beautiful young friend, (and doubtless
+admiring her too, for he was one of the first to appreciate and honor the
+worth and dignity or woman,) could have found it in his heart to censure
+thee!
+
+At this period, as was indeed most natural, our young teacher solaced
+himself with occasional appeals to what he calls "the Muses."  There is
+reason to believe, however, that the Pagan sisterhood whom he ventured to
+invoke seldom graced his study with their personal attendance.  In these
+rhyming efforts, scattered up and down his Journal, there are occasional
+sparkles of genuine wit, and passages of keen sarcasm, tersely and fitly
+expressed.  Others breathe a warm, devotional feeling; in the following
+brief prayer, for instance, the wants of the humble Christian are
+condensed in a manner worthy of Quarles or Herbert:--
+
+              "Oh! that mine eye might closed be
+               To what concerns me not to see;
+               That deafness might possess mine ear
+               To what concerns me not to hear;
+               That Truth my tongue might always tie
+               From ever speaking foolishly;
+               That no vain thought might ever rest
+               Or be conceived in my breast;
+               That by each word and deed and thought
+               Glory may to my God be brought!
+               But what are wishes?  Lord, mine eye
+               On Thee is fixed, to Thee I cry
+               Wash, Lord, and purify my heart,
+               And make it clean in every part;
+               And when 't is clean, Lord, keep it too,
+               For that is more than I can do."
+
+The thought in the following extracts from a poem written on the death of
+his friend Pennington's son is trite, but not inaptly or inelegantly
+expressed:--
+
+              "What ground, alas, has any man
+               To set his heart on things below,
+               Which, when they seem most like to stand,
+               Fly like the arrow from the bow!
+               Who's now atop erelong shall feel
+               The circling motion of the wheel!
+
+              "The world cannot afford a thing
+               Which to a well-composed mind
+               Can any lasting pleasure bring,
+               But in itself its grave will find.
+               All things unto their centre tend
+               What had beginning must have end!
+
+              "No disappointment can befall
+               Us, having Him who's all in all!
+               What can of pleasure him prevent
+               Who lath the Fountain of Content?"
+
+In the year 1663 a severe law was enacted against the "sect called
+Quakers," prohibiting their meetings, with the penalty of banishment for
+the third offence!  The burden of the prosecution which followed fell
+upon the Quakers of the metropolis, large numbers of whom were heavily
+fined, imprisoned, and sentenced to be banished from their native land.
+Yet, in time, our worthy friend Ellwood came in for his own share of
+trouble, in consequence of attending the funeral of one of his friends.
+An evil-disposed justice of the county obtained information of the Quaker
+gathering; and, while the body of the dead was "borne on Friends'
+shoulders through the street, in order to be carried to the burying-
+ground, which was at the town's end," says Ellwood, "he rushed out upon
+us with the constables and a rabble of rude fellows whom he had gathered
+together, and, having his drawn sword in his hand, struck one of the
+foremost of the bearers with it, commanding them to set down the coffin.
+But the Friend who was so stricken, being more concerned for the safety
+of the dead body than for his own, lest it should fall, and any indecency
+thereupon follow, held the coffin fast; which the justice observing, and
+being enraged that his word was not forthwith obeyed, set his hand to the
+coffin, and with a forcible thrust threw it off from the bearers'
+shoulders, so, that it fell to the ground in the middle of the street,
+and there we were forced to leave it; for the constables and rabble fell
+upon us, and drew some and drove others into the inn.  Of those thus
+taken," continues Ellwood, "I was one.  They picked out ten of us, and
+sent us to Aylesbury jail.
+
+"They caused the body to lie in the open street and cartway, so that all
+travellers that passed, whether horsemen, coaches, carts, or wagons, were
+fain to break out of the way to go by it, until it was almost night.  And
+then, having caused a grave to be made in the unconsecrated part of what
+is called the Churchyard, they forcibly took the body from the widow, and
+buried it there."
+
+He remained a prisoner only about two months, during which period he
+comforted himself by such verse-making as follows, reminding us of
+similar enigmas in Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_:
+
+               "Lo! a Riddle for the wise,
+               In the which a Mystery lies.
+
+                         RIDDLE.
+          "Some men are free whilst they in prison lie;
+          Others who ne'er saw prison captives die.
+
+                        CAUTION.
+               "He that can receive it may,
+               He that cannot, let him stay,
+               Not be hasty, but suspend
+               Judgment till he sees the end.
+
+                        SOLUTION.
+          "He's only free, indeed, who's free from sin,
+          And he is fastest bound that's bound therein."
+
+
+In the mean time, where is our "Master Milton"?  We, left him deprived of
+his young companion and reader, sitting lonely in his small dining-room,
+in Jewen Street.  It is now the year 1665; is not the pestilence in
+London?  A sinful and godless city, with its bloated bishops fawning
+around the Nell Gwyns of a licentious and profane Defender of the Faith;
+its swaggering and drunken cavaliers; its ribald jesters; its obscene
+ballad-singers; its loathsome prisons, crowded with Godfearing men and
+women: is not the measure of its iniquity already filled up?  Three years
+only have passed since the terrible prayer of Vane went upward from the
+scaffold on Tower Hill: "When my blood is shed upon the block, let it, O
+God, have a voice afterward!"  Audible to thy ear, O bosom friend of the
+martyr! has that blood cried from earth; and now, how fearfully is it
+answered!  Like the ashes which the Seer of the Hebrews cast towards
+Heaven, it has returned in boils and blains upon the proud and oppressive
+city.  John Milton, sitting blind in Jewen Street, has heard the toll of
+the death-bells, and the nightlong rumble of the burial-carts, and the
+terrible summons, "Bring out your dead!" The Angel of the Plague, in
+yellow mantle, purple-spotted, walks the streets.  Why should he tarry in
+a doomed city, forsaken of God!  Is not the command, even to him, "Arise
+and flee, for thy life"?  In some green nook of the quiet country, he may
+finish the great work which his hands have found to do.  He bethinks him
+of his old friends, the Penningtons, and his young Quaker companion, the
+patient and gentle Ellwood.  "Wherefore," says the latter, "some little
+time before I went to Aylesbury jail, I was desired by my quondam Master
+Milton to take an house for him in the neighborhood where I dwelt, that
+he might go out of the city for the safety of himself and his family, the
+pestilence then growing hot in London.  I took a pretty box for him in
+Giles Chalfont, a mile from me, of which I gave him notice, and intended
+to have waited on him and seen him well settled, but was prevented by
+that imprisonment.  But now being released and returned home, I soon made
+a visit to him, to welcome him into the country.  After some common
+discourse had passed between us, he called for a manuscript of his,
+which, having brought, he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with
+me and read it at my leisure, and when I had so done return it to him,
+with my judgment thereupon."
+
+Now, what does the reader think young Ellwood carried in his gray coat
+pocket across the dikes and hedges and through the green lanes of Giles
+Chalfont that autumn day?  Let us look farther "When I came home, and had
+set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he
+entitled _Paradise Lost_.  After I had, with the best attention, read it
+through, I made him another visit; and, returning his book with due
+acknowledgment of the favor he had done me in communicating it to me, he
+asked me how I liked it and what I thought of it, which I modestly but
+freely told him; and, after some farther discourse about it, I pleasantly
+said to him, 'Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost; what hast thou
+to say of Paradise Found?'  He made me no answer, but sat some time in a
+muse; then brake off that discourse, and fell upon another subject."
+
+"I modestly but freely told him what I thought" of Paradise Lost!  What
+he told him remains a mystery.  One would like to know more precisely
+what the first critical reader of that song "of Man's first disobedience"
+thought of it.  Fancy the young Quaker and blind Milton sitting, some
+pleasant afternoon of the autumn of that old year, in "the pretty box" at
+Chalfont, the soft wind through the open window lifting the thin hair of
+the glorious old Poet!  Back-slidden England, plague-smitten, and
+accursed with her faithless Church and libertine King, knows little of
+poor "Master Milton," and takes small note of his Puritanic verse-making.
+Alone, with his humble friend, he sits there, conning over that poem
+which, he fondly hoped, the world, which had grown all dark and strange
+to the author, "would not willingly let die."  The suggestion in respect
+to Paradise Found, to which, as we have seen, "he made no answer, but sat
+some time in a muse," seems not to have been lost; for, "after the
+sickness was over," continues Ellwood, "and the city well cleansed, and
+become safely habitable again, he returned thither; and when afterwards I
+waited on him there, which I seldom failed of doing whenever my occasions
+drew me to London, he showed me his second poem, called Paradise Gained;
+and, in a pleasant tone, said to me, 'This is owing to you, for you put
+it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont, which before I
+had not thought of.'"
+
+Golden days were these for the young Latin reader, even if it be true, as
+we suspect, that he was himself very far from appreciating the glorious
+privilege which he enjoyed, of the familiar friendship and confidence of
+Milton.  But they could not last.  His amiable host, Isaac Pennington,
+a blameless and quiet country gentleman, was dragged from his house by a
+military force, and lodged in Aylesbury jail; his wife and family
+forcibly ejected from their pleasant home, which was seized upon by the
+government as security for the fines imposed upon its owner.  The plague
+was in the village of Aylesbury, and in the very prison itself; but the
+noble-hearted Mary Pennington followed her husband, sharing with him the
+dark peril.  Poor Ellwood, while attending a monthly meeting at Hedgerly,
+with six others, (among them one Morgan Watkins, a poor old Welshman,
+who, painfully endeavoring to utter his testimony in his own dialect, was
+suspected by the Dogberry of a justice of being a Jesuit trolling over
+his Latin,) was arrested, and committed to Wiccomb House of Correction.
+
+This was a time of severe trial for the sect with which Ellwood had
+connected himself.  In the very midst of the pestilence, when thousands
+perished weekly in London, fifty-four Quakers were marched through the
+almost deserted streets, and placed on board a ship, for the purpose of
+being conveyed, according to their sentence of banishment, to the West
+Indies.  The ship lay for a long time, with many others similarly
+situated, a helpless prey to the pestilence.  Through that terrible
+autumn, the prisoners sat waiting for the summons of the ghastly
+Destroyer; and, from their floating dungeon.
+
+                              "Heard the groan
+               Of agonizing ships from shore to shore;
+               Heard nightly plunged beneath the sullen wave
+               The frequent corse."
+
+When the vessel at length set sail, of the fifty-four who went on board,
+twenty-seven only were living.  A Dutch privateer captured her, when two
+days out, and carried the prisoners to North Holland, where they were set
+at liberty.  The condition of the jails in the city, where were large
+numbers of Quakers, was dreadful in the extreme.  Ill ventilated,
+crowded, and loathsome with the accumulated filth of centuries, they
+invited the disease which daily decimated their cells.  "Go on!" says
+Pennington, writing to the King and bishops from his plague-infected cell
+in the Aylesbury prison: "try it out with the Spirit of the Lord!  Come
+forth with your laws, and prisons, and spoiling of goods, and banishment,
+and death, if the Lord please, and see if ye can carry it!  Whom the Lord
+loveth He can save at His pleasure.  Hath He begun to break our bonds and
+deliver us, and shall we now distrust Him?  Are we in a worse condition
+than Israel was when the sea was before them, the mountains on either
+side, and the Egyptians behind, pursuing them?"
+
+Brave men and faithful!  It is not necessary that the present generation,
+how quietly reaping the fruit of your heroic endurance, should see eye to
+eye with you in respect to all your testimonies and beliefs, in order to
+recognize your claim to gratitude and admiration.  For, in an age of
+hypocritical hollowness and mean self-seeking, when, with noble
+exceptions, the very Puritans of Cromwell's Reign of the Saints were
+taking profane lessons from their old enemies, and putting on an outside
+show of conformity, for the sake of place or pardon, ye maintained the
+austere dignity of virtue, and, with King and Church and Parliament
+arrayed against you, vindicated the Rights of Conscience, at the cost of
+home, fortune, and life.  English liberty owes more to your unyielding
+firmness than to the blows stricken for her at Worcester and Naseby.
+
+In 1667, we find the Latin teacher in attendance at a great meeting of
+Friends, in London, convened at the suggestion of George Fox, for the
+purpose of settling a little difficulty which had arisen among the
+Friends, even under the pressure of the severest persecution, relative to
+the very important matter of "wearing the hat."  George Fox, in his love
+of truth and sincerity in word and action, had discountenanced the
+fashionable doffing of the hat, and other flattering obeisances towards
+men holding stations in Church or State, as savoring of man-worship,
+giving to the creature the reverence only due to the Creator, as
+undignified and wanting in due self-respect, and tending to support
+unnatural and oppressive distinctions among those equal in the sight of
+God.  But some of his disciples evidently made much more of this "hat
+testimony" than their teacher.  One John Perrott, who had just returned
+from an unsuccessful attempt to convert the Pope, at Rome, (where that
+dignitary, after listening to his exhortations, and finding him in no
+condition to be benefited by the spiritual physicians of the Inquisition,
+had quietly turned him over to the temporal ones of the Insane Hospital,)
+had broached the doctrine that, in public or private worship, the hat was
+not to be taken off, without an immediate revelation or call to do so!
+Ellwood himself seems to have been on the point of yielding to this
+notion, which appears to have been the occasion of a good deal of
+dissension and scandal.  Under these circumstances, to save truth from
+reproach, and an important testimony to the essential equality of mankind
+from running into sheer fanaticism, Fox summoned his tried and faithful
+friends together, from all parts of the United Kingdom, and, as it
+appears, with the happiest result.  Hat-revelations were discountenanced,
+good order and harmony reestablished, and John Perrott's beaver and the
+crazy head under it were from thenceforth powerless for evil.  Let those
+who are disposed to laugh at this notable "Ecumenical Council of the Hat"
+consider that ecclesiastical history has brought down to us the records
+of many larger and more imposing convocations, wherein grave bishops and
+learned fathers took each other by the beard upon matters of far less
+practical importance.
+
+In 1669, we find Ellwood engaged in escorting his fair friend, Gulielma,
+to her uncle's residence in Sussex.  Passing through London, and taking
+the Tunbridge road, they stopped at Seven Oak to dine.  The Duke of York
+was on the road, with his guards and hangers-on, and the inn was filled
+with a rude company.  "Hastening," says Ellwood, "from a place where we
+found nothing but rudeness, the roysterers who swarmed there, besides the
+damning oaths they belched out against each other, looked very sourly
+upon us, as if they grudged us the horses which we rode and the clothes
+we wore."  They had proceeded but a little distance, when they were
+overtaken by some half dozen drunken rough-riding cavaliers, of the
+Wildrake stamp, in full pursuit after the beautiful Quakeress.  One of
+them impudently attempted to pull her upon his horse before him, but was
+held at bay by Ellwood, who seems, on this occasion, to have relied
+somewhat upon his "stick," in defending his fair charge.  Calling up
+Gulielma's servant, he bade him ride on one side of his mistress, while
+he guarded her on the other.  "But he," says Ellwood, "not thinking it
+perhaps decent to ride so near his mistress, left room enough for another
+to ride between."  In dashed the drunken retainer, and Gulielma was once
+more in peril.  It was clearly no time for exhortations and
+expostulations; "so," says Ellwood, "I chopped in upon him, by a nimble
+turn, and kept him at bay.  I told him I had hitherto spared him, but
+wished him not to provoke me further.  This I spoke in such a tone as
+bespoke an high resentment of the abuse put upon us, and withal pressed
+him so hard with my horse that I suffered him not to come up again to
+Guli."  By this time, it became evident to the companions of the
+ruffianly assailant that the young Quaker was in earnest, and they
+hastened to interfere.  "For they," says Ellwood, "seeing the contest
+rise so high, and probably fearing it would rise higher, not knowing
+where it might stop, came in to part us; which they did by taking him
+away."
+
+Escaping from these sons of Belial, Ellwood and his fair companion rode
+on through Tunbridge Wells, "the street thronged with men, who looked
+very earnestly at them, but offered them no affront," and arrived, late
+at night, in a driving rain, at the mansion-house of Herbert Springette.
+The fiery old gentleman was so indignant at the insult offered to his
+niece, that he was with difficulty dissuaded from demanding satisfaction
+at the hands of the Duke of York.
+
+This seems to have been his last ride with Gulielma.  She was soon after
+married to William Penn, and took up her abode at Worminghurst, in
+Sussex.  How blessed and beautiful was that union may be understood from
+the following paragraph of a letter, written by her husband, on the eve
+of his departure for America to lay the foundations of a Christian
+colony:--
+
+     "My dear wife! remember thou wast the love of my youth, and much the
+     joy of my life, the most beloved as well as the most worthy of all
+     my earthly comforts; and the reason of that love was more thy inward
+     than thy outward excellences, which yet were many.  God knows, and
+     thou knowest it, I can say it was a match of Providence's making;
+     and God's image in us both was the first thing and the most amiable
+     and engaging ornament in our eyes."
+
+About this time our friend Thomas, seeing that his old playmate at
+Chalfont was destined for another, turned his attention towards a "young
+Friend, named Mary Ellis."  He had been for several years acquainted with
+her, but now he "found his heart secretly drawn and inclining towards
+her."  "At length," he tells us, "as I was sitting all alone, waiting
+upon the Lord for counsel and guidance in this, in itself and to me,
+important affair, I felt a word sweetly arise in me, as if I had heard a
+Voice which said, Go, and prevail! and faith springing in my heart at the
+word, I immediately rose and went, nothing doubting."  On arriving at her
+residence, he states that he "solemnly opened his mind to her, which was
+a great surprisal to her, for she had taken in an apprehension, as others
+had also done," that his eye had been fixed elsewhere and nearer home.
+"I used not many words to her," he continues, "but I felt a Divine Power
+went along with the words, and fixed the matter expressed by them so fast
+in her breast, that, as she afterwards acknowledged to me, she could not
+shut it out."
+
+"I continued," he says, "my visits to my best-beloved Friend until we
+married, which was on the 28th day of the eighth month, 1669.  We took
+each other in a select meeting of the ancient and grave Friends of that
+country.  A very solemn meeting it was, and in a weighty frame of spirit
+we were."  His wife seems to have had some estate; and Ellwood, with that
+nice sense of justice which marked all his actions, immediately made his
+will, securing to her, in case of his decease, all her own goods and
+moneys, as well as all that he had himself acquired before marriage.
+"Which," he tells, "was indeed but little, yet, by all that little, more
+than I had ever given her ground to expect with me."  His father, who was
+yet unreconciled to the son's religious views, found fault with his
+marriage, on the ground that it was unlawful and unsanctioned by priest
+or liturgy, and consequently refused to render him any pecuniary
+assistance.  Yet, in spite of this and other trials, he seems to have
+preserved his serenity of spirit.  After an unpleasant interview with his
+father, on one occasion, he wrote, at his lodgings in an inn, in London,
+what he calls _A Song of Praise_.  An extract from it will serve to show
+the spirit of the good man in affliction:--
+
+              "Unto the Glory of Thy Holy Name,
+               Eternal God!  whom I both love and fear,
+               I hereby do declare, I never came
+               Before Thy throne, and found Thee loath to hear,
+               But always ready with an open ear;
+               And, though sometimes Thou seem'st Thy face to hide,
+               As one that had withdrawn his love from me,
+               'T is that my faith may to the full, be tried,
+               And that I thereby may the better see
+               How weak I am when not upheld by Thee!"
+
+The next year, 1670, an act of Parliament, in relation to "Conventicles,"
+provided that any person who should be present at any meeting, under
+color or pretence of any exercise of religion, in other manner than
+according to the liturgy and practice of the Church of England, "should
+be liable to fines of from five to ten shillings; and any person
+preaching at or giving his house for the meeting, to a fine of twenty
+pounds: one third of the fines being received by the informer or
+informers."  As a natural consequence of such a law, the vilest
+scoundrels in the land set up the trade of informers and heresy-hunters.
+Wherever a dissenting meeting or burial took place, there was sure to be
+a mercenary spy, ready to bring a complaint against all in attendance.
+The Independents and Baptists ceased, in a great measure, to hold public
+meetings, yet even they did not escape prosecution.  Bunyan, for
+instance, in these days, was dreaming, like another Jacob, of angels
+ascending and descending, in Bedford prison.  But upon the poor Quakers
+fell, as usual, the great force of the unjust enactment.  Some of these
+spies or informers, men of sharp wit, close countenances, pliant tempers,
+and skill in dissimulation, took the guise of Quakers, Independents, or
+Baptists, as occasion required, thrusting themselves into the meetings of
+the proscribed sects, ascertaining the number who attended, their rank
+and condition, and then informing against them.  Ellwood, in his Journal
+for 1670, describes several of these emissaries of evil.  One of them
+came to a Friend's house, in Bucks, professing to be a brother in the
+faith, but, overdoing his counterfeit Quakerism, was detected and
+dismissed by his host.  Betaking himself to the inn, he appeared in his
+true character, drank and swore roundly, and confessed over his cups that
+he had been sent forth on his mission by the Rev. Dr. Mew, Vice-
+Chancellor of Oxford.  Finding little success in counterfeiting
+Quakerism, he turned to the Baptists, where, for a time, he met with
+better success.  Ellwood, at this time, rendered good service to his
+friends, by exposing the true character of these wretches, and bringing
+them to justice for theft, perjury, and other misdemeanors.
+
+While this storm of persecution lasted, (a period of two or three years,)
+the different dissenting sects felt, in some measure, a common sympathy,
+and, while guarding themselves against their common foe, had little
+leisure for controversy with each other; but, as was natural, the
+abatement of their mutual suffering and danger was the signal for
+renewing their suspended quarrels.  The Baptists fell upon the Quakers,
+with pamphlet and sermon; the latter replied in the same way.  One of the
+most conspicuous of the Baptist disputants was the famous Jeremy Ives,
+with whom our friend Ellwood seems to have had a good deal of trouble.
+"His name," says Ellwood, "was up for a topping Disputant.  He was well,
+read in the fallacies of logic, and was ready in framing syllogisms.  His
+chief art lay in tickling the humor of rude, unlearned, and injudicious
+hearers."
+
+The following piece of Ellwood's, entitled "An Epitaph for Jeremy Ives,"
+will serve to show that wit and drollery were sometimes found even among
+the proverbially sober Quakers of the seventeenth century:--
+
+              "Beneath this stone, depressed, doth lie
+               The Mirror of Hypocrisy--
+               Ives, whose mercenary tongue
+               Like a Weathercock was hung,
+               And did this or that way play,
+               As Advantage led the way.
+               If well hired, he would dispute,
+               Otherwise he would be mute.
+               But he'd bawl for half a day,
+               If he knew and liked his pay.
+
+              "For his person, let it pass;
+               Only note his face was brass.
+               His heart was like a pumice-stone,
+               And for Conscience he had none.
+               Of Earth and Air he was composed,
+               With Water round about enclosed.
+               Earth in him had greatest share,
+               Questionless, his life lay there;
+               Thence his cankered Envy sprung,
+               Poisoning both his heart and tongue.
+
+              "Air made him frothy, light, and vain,
+               And puffed him with a proud disdain.
+               Into the Water oft he went,
+               And through the Water many sent
+               That was, ye know, his element!
+               The greatest odds that did appear
+               Was this, for aught that I can hear,
+               That he in cold did others dip,
+               But did himself hot water sip.
+
+              "And his cause he'd never doubt,
+               If well soak'd o'er night in Stout;
+               But, meanwhile, he must not lack
+               Brandy and a draught of Sack.
+               One dispute would shrink a bottle
+               Of three pints, if not a pottle.
+               One would think he fetched from thence
+               All his dreamy eloquence.
+
+              "Let us now bring back the Sot
+               To his Aqua Vita pot,
+               And observe, with some content,
+               How he framed his argument.
+               That his whistle he might wet,
+               The bottle to his mouth he set,
+               And, being Master of that Art,
+               Thence he drew the Major part,
+               But left the Minor still behind;
+               Good reason why, he wanted wind;
+               If his breath would have held out,
+               He had Conclusion drawn, no doubt."
+
+The residue of Ellwood's life seems to have glided on in serenity and
+peace.  He wrote, at intervals, many pamphlets in defence of his Society,
+and in favor of Liberty of Conscience.  At his hospitable residence, the
+leading spirits of the sect were warmly welcomed.  George Fox and William
+Penn seem to have been frequent guests.  We find that, in 1683, he was
+arrested for seditious publications, when on the eve of hastening to his
+early friend, Gulielma, who, in the absence of her husband, Governor
+Penn, had fallen dangerously ill.  On coming before the judge, "I told
+him," says Ellwood, "that I had that morning received an express out of
+Sussex, that William Penn's wife (with whom I had an intimate
+acquaintance and strict friendship, _ab ipsis fere incunabilis_, at
+least, _a teneris unguiculis_) lay now ill, not without great danger, and
+that she had expressed her desire that I would come to her as soon as I
+could."  The judge said "he was very sorry for Madam Penn's illness," of
+whose virtues he spoke very highly, but not more than was her due.  Then
+he told me, "that, for her sake, he would do what he could to further my
+visit to her."  Escaping from the hands of the law, he visited his
+friend, who was by this time in a way of recovery, and, on his return,
+learned that the prosecution had been abandoned.
+
+At about this date his narrative ceases.  We learn, from other sources,
+that he continued to write and print in defence of his religious views up
+to the year of his death, which took place in 1713.  One of his
+productions, a poetical version of the Life of David, may be still met
+with, in the old Quaker libraries.  On the score of poetical merit, it is
+about on a level with Michael Drayton's verses on the same subject.  As
+the history of one of the firm confessors of the old struggle for
+religious freedom, of a genial-hearted and pleasant scholar, the friend
+of Penn and Milton, and the suggester of Paradise Regained, we trust our
+hurried sketch has not been altogether without interest; and that,
+whatever may be the religious views of our readers, they have not failed
+to recognize a good and true man in Thomas Ellwood.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                              JAMES NAYLER.
+
+     "You will here read the true story of that much injured, ridiculed
+     man, James Nayler; what dreadful sufferings, with what patience he
+     endured, even to the boring of the tongue with hot irons, without a
+     murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had
+     fallen into, which they stigmatized as blasphemy, had given place to
+     clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error in a strain of the
+     beautifullest humility."--Essays of Elia.
+
+"Would that Carlyle could now try his hand at the English Revolution!"
+was our exclamation, on laying down the last volume of his remarkable
+History of the French Revolution with its brilliant and startling word-
+pictures still flashing before us.  To some extent this wish has been
+realized in the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell.  Yet we confess
+that the perusal of these volumes has disappointed us.  Instead of giving
+himself free scope, as in his French Revolution, and transferring to his
+canvas all the wild and ludicrous, the terrible and beautiful phases of
+that moral phenomenon, he has here concentrated all his artistic skill
+upon a single figure, whom he seems to have regarded as the embodiment
+and hero of the great event.  All else on his canvas is subordinated to
+the grim image of the colossal Puritan.  Intent upon presenting him as
+the fitting object of that "hero-worship," which, in its blind admiration
+and adoration of mere abstract Power, seems to us at times nothing less
+than devil-worship, he dwarfs, casts into the shadow, nay, in some
+instances caricatures and distorts, the figures which surround him.  To
+excuse Cromwell in his usurpation, Henry Vane, one of those exalted and
+noble characters, upon whose features the lights held by historical
+friends or foes detect no blemish, is dismissed with a sneer and an
+utterly unfounded imputation of dishonesty.  To reconcile, in some
+degree, the discrepancy between the declarations of Cromwell, in behalf
+of freedom of conscience, and that mean and cruel persecution which the
+Quakers suffered under the Protectorate, the generally harmless
+fanaticism of a few individuals bearing that name is gravely urged.  Nay,
+the fact that some weak-brained enthusiasts undertook to bring about the
+millennium, by associating together, cultivating the earth, and "dibbling
+beans" for the New Jerusalem market, is regarded by our author as the
+"germ of Quakerism;" and furnishes an occasion for sneering at "my poor
+friend Dryasdust, lamentably tearing his hair over the intolerance of
+that old time to Quakerism and such like."
+
+The readers of this (with all its faults) powerfully written Biography
+cannot fail to have been impressed with the intensely graphic description
+(Part I., vol.  ii., pp.  184, 185) of the entry of the poor fanatic,
+James Nayler, and his forlorn and draggled companions into Bristol.
+Sadly ludicrous is it; affecting us like the actual sight of tragic
+insanity enacting its involuntary comedy, and making us smile through our
+tears.
+
+In another portion of the work, a brief account is given of the trial and
+sentence of Nayler, also in the serio-comic view; and the poor man is
+dismissed with the simple intimation, that after his punishment he
+"repented, and confessed himself mad."  It was no part of the author's
+business, we are well aware, to waste time and words upon the history of
+such a man as Nayler; he was of no importance to him, otherwise than as
+one of the disturbing influences in the government of the Lord Protector.
+But in our mind the story of James Nayler has always been one of
+interest; and in the belief that it will prove so to others, who, like
+Charles Lamb, can appreciate the beautiful humility of a forgiven spirit,
+we have taken some pains to collect and embody the facts of it.
+
+James Nayler was born in the parish of Ardesley, in Yorkshire, 1616.  His
+father was a substantial farmer, of good repute and competent estate and
+be, in consequence, received a good education: At the age of twenty-two,
+he married and removed to Wakefield parish, which has since been made
+classic ground by the pen of Goldsmith.  Here, an honest, God-fearing
+farmer, he tilled his soil, and alternated between cattle-markets and
+Independent conventicles.  In 1641, he obeyed the summons of "my Lord
+Fairfax" and the Parliament, and joined a troop of horse composed of
+sturdy Independents, doing such signal service against "the man of
+Belial, Charles Stuart," that he was promoted to the rank of
+quartermaster, in which capacity he served under General Lambert, in his
+Scottish campaign.  Disabled at length by sickness, he was honorably
+dismissed from the service, and returned to his family in 1649.
+
+For three or four years, he continued to attend the meetings of the
+Independents, as a zealous and devout member.  But it so fell out, that
+in the winter of 1651, George Fox, who had just been released from a
+cruel imprisonment in Derby jail, felt a call to set his face towards
+Yorkshire.  "So travelling," says Fox, in his Journal, "through the
+countries, to several places, preaching Repentance and the Word of Life,
+I came into the parts about Wakefield, where James Navler lived."  The
+worn and weary soldier, covered with the scars of outward battle,
+received, as he believed, in the cause of God and his people, against
+Antichrist and oppression, welcomed with thankfulness the veteran of
+another warfare; who, in conflict with a principalities and powers, and
+spiritual wickedness in high places, had made his name a familiar one in
+every English hamlet.  "He and Thomas Goodyear," says Fox, "came to me,
+and were both convinced, and received the truth."  He soon after joined
+the Society of Friends.  In the spring of the next year he was in his
+field following his plough, and meditating, as he was wont, on the great
+questions of life and duty, when he seemed to hear a voice bidding him go
+out from his kindred and his father's house, with an assurance that the
+Lord would be with him, while laboring in his service.  Deeply impressed,
+he left his employment, and, returning to his house, made immediate
+preparations for a journey.  But hesitation and doubt followed; he became
+sick from anxiety of mind, and his recovery, for a time, was exceedingly
+doubtful.  On his restoration to bodily health, he obeyed what he
+regarded as a clear intimation of duty, and went forth a preacher of the
+doctrines he had embraced.  The Independent minister of the society to
+which he had formerly belonged sent after him the story that he was the
+victim of sorcery; that George Fox carried with him a bottle, out of
+which he made people drink; and that the draught had the power to change
+a Presbyterian or Independent into a Quaker at once; that, in short, the
+Arch-Quaker, Fox, was a wizard, and could be seen at the same moment of
+time riding on the same black horse, in two places widely separated.  He
+had scarcely commenced his exhortations, before the mob, excited by such
+stories, assailed him.  In the early summer of the year we hear of him in
+Appleby jail.  On his release, he fell in company with George Fox.  At
+Walney Island, he was furiously assaulted, and beaten with clubs and
+stones; the poor priest-led fishermen being fully persuaded that they
+were dealing with a wizard.  The spirit of the man, under these
+circumstances, may be seen in the following extract from a letter to his
+friends, dated at "Killet, in Lancashire, the 30th of 8th Month, 1652:"--
+
+"Dear friends!  Dwell in patience, and wait upon the Lord, who will do
+his own work.  Look not at man who is in the work, nor at any man
+opposing it; but rest in the will of the Lord, that so ye may be
+furnished with patience, both to do and to suffer what ye shall be called
+unto, that your end in all things may be His praise.  Meet often
+together; take heed of what exalteth itself above its brother; but keep
+low, and serve one another in love."
+
+Laboring thus, interrupted only by persecution, stripes, and
+imprisonment, he finally came to London, and spoke with great power and
+eloquence in the meetings of Friends in that city.  Here he for the first
+time found himself surrounded by admiring and sympathizing friends.  He
+saw and rejoiced in the fruits of his ministry.  Profane and drunken
+cavaliers, intolerant Presbyters, and blind Papists, owned the truths
+which he uttered, and counted themselves his disciples.  Women, too, in
+their deep trustfulness and admiring reverence, sat at the feet of the
+eloquent stranger.  Devout believers in the doctrine of the inward light
+and manifestation of God in the heart of man, these latter, at length,
+thought they saw such unmistakable evidences of the true life in James
+Nayler, that they felt constrained to declare that Christ was, in an
+especial manner, within him, and to call upon all to recognize in
+reverent adoration this new incarnation of the divine and heavenly.  The
+wild enthusiasm of his disciples had its effect on the teacher.  Weak in
+body, worn with sickness, fasting, stripes, and prison-penance, and
+naturally credulous and imaginative, is it strange that in some measure
+he yielded to this miserable delusion?  Let those who would harshly judge
+him, or ascribe his fall to the peculiar doctrines of his sect, think of
+Luther, engaged in personal combat with the Devil, or conversing with him
+on points of theology in his bed-chamber; or of Bunyan at actual
+fisticuffs with the adversary; or of Fleetwood and Vane and Harrison
+millennium-mad, and making preparations for an earthly reign of King
+Jesus.  It was an age of intense religious excitement.  Fanaticism had
+become epidemic.  Cromwell swayed his Parliaments by "revelations" and
+Scripture phrases in the painted chamber; stout generals and sea-captains
+exterminated the Irish, and swept Dutch navies from the ocean, with old
+Jewish war-cries, and hymns of Deborah and Miriam; country justices
+charged juries in Hebraisms, and cited the laws of Palestine oftener than
+those of England.  Poor Nayler found himself in the very midst of this
+seething and confused moral maelstrom.  He struggled against it for a
+time, but human nature was weak; he became, to use his own words,
+"bewildered and darkened," and the floods went over him.
+
+Leaving London with some of his more zealous followers, not without
+solemn admonition and rebuke from Francis Howgill and Edward Burrough,
+who at that period were regarded as the most eminent and gifted of the
+Society's ministers, he bent his steps towards Exeter.  Here, in
+consequence of the extravagance of his language and that of his
+disciples, he was arrested and thrown into prison.  Several infatuated
+women surrounded the jail, declaring that "Christ was in prison," and on
+being admitted to see him, knelt down and kissed his feet, exclaiming,
+"Thy name shall be no more called James Nayler, but Jesus!" Let us pity
+him and them.  They, full of grateful and extravagant affection for the
+man whose voice had called them away from worldly vanities to what they
+regarded as eternal realities, whose hand they imagined had for them
+swung back the pearl gates of the celestial city, and flooded their
+atmosphere with light from heaven; he, receiving their homage (not as
+offered to a poor, weak, sinful Yorkshire trooper, but rather to the
+hidden man of the heart, the "Christ within" him) with that self-
+deceiving humility which is but another name for spiritual pride.
+Mournful, yet natural; such as is still in greater or less degree
+manifested between the Catholic enthusiast and her confessor; such as the
+careful observer may at times take note of in our Protestant revivals and
+camp meetings.
+
+How Nayler was released from Exeter jail does not appear, but the next we
+hear of him is at Bristol, in the fall of the year.  His entrance into
+that city shows the progress which he and his followers had made in the
+interval.  Let us look at Carlyle's description of it: "A procession of
+eight persons one, a man on horseback riding single, the others, men and
+women partly riding double, partly on foot, in the muddiest highway in
+the wettest weather; singing, all but the single rider, at whose bridle
+walk and splash two women, 'Hosannah!  Holy, holy!  Lord God of Sabaoth,'
+and other things, 'in a buzzing tone,' which the impartial hearer could
+not make out.  The single rider is a raw-boned male figure, 'with lank
+hair reaching below his cheeks,' hat drawn close over his brows, 'nose
+rising slightly in the middle,' of abstruse 'down look,' and large
+dangerous jaws strictly closed: he sings not, sits there covered, and is
+sung to by the others bare.  Amid pouring deluges and mud knee-deep, 'so
+that the rain ran in at their necks and vented it at their hose and
+breeches: 'a spectacle to the West of England and posterity!  Singing as
+above; answering no question except in song.  From Bedminster to
+Ratcliffgate, along the streets to the High Cross of Bristol: at the High
+Cross they are laid hold of by the authorities: turn out to be James
+Nayler and Company."
+
+Truly, a more pitiful example of "hero-worship" is not well to be
+conceived of.  Instead of taking the rational view of it, however, and
+mercifully shutting up the actors in a mad-house, the authorities of that
+day, conceiving it to be a stupendous blasphemy, and themselves God's
+avengers in the matter, sent Nayler under strong guard up to London, to
+be examined before the Parliament.  After long and tedious examinations
+and cross-questionings, and still more tedious debates, some portion of
+which, not uninstructive to the reader, may still be found in Burton's
+Diary, the following horrible resolution was agreed upon:--
+
+"That James Nayler be set in the pillory, with his head in the pillory in
+the Palace Yard, Westminster, during the space of two hours on Thursday
+next; and be whipped by the hangman through the streets from Westminster
+to the Old Exchange, and there, likewise, be set in the pillory, with his
+head in the pillory for the space of two hours, between eleven and one,
+on Saturday next, in each place wearing a paper containing a description
+of his crimes; and that at the Old Exchange his tongue be bored through
+with a hot iron, and that he be there stigmatized on the forehead with
+the letter 'B;' and that he be afterwards sent to Bristol, to be conveyed
+into and through the said city on horseback with his face backward, and
+there, also, publicly whipped the next market-day after he comes thither;
+that from thence he be committed to prison in Bridewell, London, and
+there restrained from the society of people, and there to labor hard
+until he shall be released by Parliament; and during that time be
+debarred the use of pen, ink, and paper, and have no relief except what
+he earns by his daily labor."
+
+Such, neither more nor less, was, in the opinion of Parliament, required
+on their part to appease the divine vengeance.  The sentence was
+pronounced on the 17th of the twelfth month; the entire time of the
+Parliament for the two months previous having been occupied with the
+case.  The Presbyterians in that body were ready enough to make the most
+of an offence committed by one who had been an Independent; the
+Independents, to escape the stigma of extenuating the crimes of one of
+their quondam brethren, vied with their antagonists in shrieking over the
+atrocity of Nayler's blasphemy, and in urging its severe punishment.
+Here and there among both classes were men disposed to leniency, and more
+than one earnest plea was made for merciful dealing with a man whose
+reason was evidently unsettled, and who was, therefore, a fitting object
+of compassion; whose crime, if it could indeed be called one, was
+evidently the result of a clouded intellect, and not of wilful intention
+of evil.  On the other hand, many were in favor of putting him to death
+as a sort of peace-offering to the clergy, who, as a matter of course,
+were greatly scandalized by Nayler's blasphemy, and still more by the
+refusal of his sect to pay tithes, or recognize their divine commission.
+
+Nayler was called into the Parliament-house to receive his sentence.
+"I do not know mine offence," he said mildly.  "You shall know it," said
+Sir Thomas Widrington, "by your sentence."  When the sentence was read,
+he attempted to speak, but was silenced.  "I pray God," said Nayler,
+"that he may not lay this to your charge."
+
+The next day, the 18th of the twelfth month, he stood in the pillory two
+hours, in the chill winter air, and was then stripped and scourged by the
+hangman at the tail of a cart through the streets.  Three hundred and ten
+stripes were inflicted; his back and arms were horribly cut and mangled,
+and his feet crushed and bruised by the feet of horses treading on him in
+the crowd.  He bore all with uncomplaining patience; but was so far
+exhausted by his sufferings, that it was found necessary to postpone the
+execution of the residue of the sentence for one week.  The terrible
+severity of his sentence, and his meek endurance of it, had in the mean
+time powerfully affected many of the humane and generous of all classes
+in the city; and a petition for the remission of the remaining part of
+the penalty was numerously signed and presented to Parliament.  A debate
+ensued upon it, but its prayer was rejected.  Application was then made
+to Cromwell, who addressed a letter to the Speaker of the House,
+inquiring into the affair, protesting an "abhorrence and detestation of
+giving or occasioning the least countenance to such opinions and
+practices" as were imputed to Nayler; "yet we, being intrusted in the
+present government on behalf of the people of these nations, and not
+knowing how far such proceeding entered into wholly without us may extend
+in the consequence of it, do hereby desire the House may let us know the
+grounds and reasons whereon they have proceeded."  From this, it is not
+unlikely that the Protector might have been disposed to clemency, and to
+look with a degree of charity upon the weakness and errors of one of his
+old and tried soldiers who had striven like a brave man, as he was, for
+the rights and liberties of Englishmen; but the clergy here interposed,
+and vehemently, in the name of God and His Church, demanded that the
+executioner should finish his work.  Five of the most eminent of them,
+names well known in the Protectorate, Caryl, Manton, Nye, Griffith, and
+Reynolds, were deputed by Parliament to visit the mangled prisoner.  A
+reasonable request was made, that some impartial person might be present,
+that justice might be done Nayler in the report of his answers.  This was
+refused.  It was, however, agreed that the conversation should be written
+down and a copy of it left with the jailer.  He was asked if he was sorry
+for his blasphemies.  He said he did not know to what blasphemies they
+alluded; that he did believe in Jesus Christ; that He had taken up His
+dwelling in his own heart, and for the testimony of Him he now suffered.
+"I believe," said one of the ministers, "in a Christ who was never in any
+man's heart."  "I know no such Christ," rejoined the prisoner; "the
+Christ I witness to fills Heaven and Earth, and dwells in the hearts of
+all true believers."  On being asked why he allowed the women to adore
+and worship him, he said he "denied bowing to the creature; but if they
+beheld the power of Christ, wherever it was, and bowed to it, he could
+not resist it, or say aught against it."
+
+After some further parley, the reverend visitors grew angry, threw the
+written record of the conversation in the fire, and left the prison, to
+report the prisoner incorrigible.
+
+On the 27th of the month, he was again led out of his cell and placed
+upon the pillory.  Thousands of citizens were gathered around, many of
+them earnestly protesting against the extreme cruelty of his punishment.
+Robert Rich, an influential and honorable merchant, followed him up to
+the pillory with expressions of great sympathy, and held him by the hand
+while the red-hot iron was pressed through his tongue and the brand was
+placed on his forehead.  He was next sent to Bristol, and publicly
+whipped through the principal streets of that city; and again brought
+back to the Bridewell prison, where he remained about two years, shut out
+from all intercourse with his fellow-beings.  At the expiration of this
+period, he was released by order of Parliament.  In the solitude of his
+cell, the angel of patience had been with him.
+
+Through the cloud which had so long rested over him, the clear light of
+truth shone in upon his spirit; the weltering chaos of a disordered
+intellect settled into the calm peace of a reconciliation with God and
+man.  His first act on leaving prison was to visit Bristol, the scene of
+his melancholy fall.  There he publicly confessed his errors, in the
+eloquent earnestness of a contrite spirit, humbled in view of the past,
+yet full of thanksgiving and praise for the great boon of forgiveness.  A
+writer who was present says, the "assembly was tendered, and broken into
+tears; there were few dry eyes, and many were bowed in their minds."
+
+In a paper which he published soon after, he acknowledges his lamentable
+delusion.  "Condemned forever," he says, "be all those false worships
+with which any have idolized my person in that Night of my Temptation,
+when the Power of Darkness was above rue; all that did in any way tend to
+dishonor the Lord, or draw the minds of any from the measure of Christ
+Jesus in themselves, to look at flesh, which is as grass, or to ascribe
+that to the visible which belongs to Him.  Darkness came over me
+through want of watchfulness and obedience to the pure Eye of God.  I was
+taken captive from the true light; I was walking in the Night, as a
+wandering bird fit for a prey.  And if the Lord of all my mercies had not
+rescued me, I had perished; for I was as one appointed to death and
+destruction, and there was none to deliver me."
+
+"It is in my heart to confess to God, and before men, my folly and
+offence in that day; yet there were many things formed against me in
+that day, to take away my life and bring scandal upon the truth, of
+which I was not guilty at all." "The provocation of that Time of
+Temptation was exceeding great against the Lord, yet He left me not; for
+when Darkness was above, and the Adversary so prevailed that all things
+were turned and perverted against my right seeing, hearing, or
+understanding, only a secret hope and faith I had in my God, whom I had
+served, that He would bring me through it and to the end of it, and that
+I should again see the day of my redemption from under it all,--this
+quieted my soul in its greatest tribulation." He concludes his
+confession with these words: "He who hath saved my soul from death, who
+hath lifted my feet up out of the pit, even to Him be glory forever; and
+let every troubled soul trust in Him, for his mercy endureth forever!"
+
+Among his papers, written soon after his release, is a remarkable prayer,
+or rather thanksgiving.  The limit I have prescribed to myself will only
+allow me to copy an extract:--
+
+"It is in my heart to praise Thee, O my God!  Let me never forget Thee,
+what Thou hast been to me in the night, by Thy presence in my hour of
+trial, when I was beset in darkness, when I was cast out as a wandering
+bird; when I was assaulted with strong temptations, then Thy presence, in
+secret, did preserve me, and in a low state I felt Thee near me; when my
+way was through the sea, when I passed under the mountains, there wast
+Thou present with me; when the weight of the hills was upon me, Thou
+upheldest me.  Thou didst fight, on my part, when I wrestled with death;
+when darkness would have shut me up, Thy light shone about me; when my
+work was in the furnace, and I passed through the fire, by Thee I was not
+consumed; when I beheld the dreadful visions, and was among the fiery
+spirits, Thy faith staid me, else through fear I had fallen.  I saw Thee,
+and believed, so that the enemy could not prevail."  After speaking of
+his humiliation and sufferings, which Divine Mercy had overruled for his
+spiritual good, he thus concludes: "Thou didst lift me out from the pit,
+and set me forth in the sight of my enemies; Thou proclaimedst liberty to
+the captive; Thou calledst my acquaintances near me; they to whom I had
+been a wonder looked upon me; and in Thy love I obtained favor with those
+who had deserted me.  Then did gladness swallow up sorrow, and I forsook
+my troubles; and I said, How good is it that man be proved in the night,
+that he may know his folly, that every mouth may become silent, until
+Thou makest man known unto himself, and has slain the boaster, and shown
+him the vanity which vexeth Thy spirit."
+
+All honor to the Quakers of that day, that, at the risk of
+misrepresentation and calumny, they received back to their communion
+their greatly erring, but deeply repentant, brother.  His life, ever
+after, was one of self-denial and jealous watchfulness over himself,--
+blameless and beautiful in its humility and lowly charity.
+
+Thomas Ellwood, in his autobiography for the year 1659, mentions Nayler,
+whom he met in company with Edward Burrough at the house of Milton's
+friend, Pennington.  Ellwood's father held a discourse with the two
+Quakers on their doctrine of free and universal grace.  "James Nailer,"
+says Ellwood, "handled the subject with so much perspicuity and clear
+demonstration, that his reasoning seemed to be irresistible.  As for
+Edward Burrough, he was a brisk young Man, of a ready Tongue, and might
+have been for aught I then knew, a Scholar, which made me less admire his
+Way of Reasoning.  But what dropt from James Nailer had the greater Force
+upon me, because he lookt like a simple Countryman, having the appearance
+of an Husbandman or Shepherd."
+
+In the latter part of the eighth month, 1660, he left London on foot, to
+visit his wife and children in Wakefield.  As he journeyed on, the sense
+of a solemn change about to take place seemed with him; the shadow of the
+eternal world fell over him.  As he passed through Huntingdon, a friend
+who saw him describes him as "in an awful and weighty frame of mind, as
+if he had been redeemed from earth, and a stranger on it, seeking a
+better home and inheritance."  A few miles beyond the town, he was found,
+in the dusk of the evening, very ill, and was taken to the house of a
+friend, who lived not far distant.  He died shortly after, expressing his
+gratitude for the kindness of his attendants, and invoking blessings upon
+them.  About two hours before his death, he spoke to the friend at his
+bedside these remarkable words, solemn as eternity, and beautiful as the
+love which fills it:--
+
+"There is a spirit which I feel which delights to do no evil, nor to
+avenge any wrong; but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its
+own in the end; its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to
+weary out all exultation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary
+to itself.  It sees to the end of all temptations; as it bears no evil in
+itself, so it conceives none in thought to any other: if it be betrayed,
+it bears it, for its ground and spring is the mercy and forgiveness of
+God.  Its crown is meekness; its life is everlasting love unfeigned; it
+takes its kingdom with entreaty, and not with contention, and keeps it by
+lowliness of mind.  In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regard
+it, or can own its life.  It is conceived in sorrow, and brought forth
+with none to pity it; nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression.  It
+never rejoiceth but through sufferings, for with the world's joy it is
+murdered.  I found it alone, being forsaken.  I have fellowship therein
+with them who lived in dens and desolate places of the earth, who through
+death obtained resurrection and eternal Holy Life."
+
+So died James Nayler.  He was buried in "Thomas Parnell's burying-ground,
+at King's Rippon," in a green nook of rural England.  Wrong and violence,
+and temptation and sorrow, and evil-speaking, could reach him no more.
+And in taking leave of him, let us say, with old Joseph Wyeth, where he
+touches upon this case in his _Anguis Flagellatus_: "Let none insult, but
+take heed lest they also, in the hour of their temptation, do fall away."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                              ANDREW MARVELL
+
+     "They who with a good conscience and an upright heart do their civil
+     duties in the sight of God, and in their several places, to resist
+     tyranny and the violence of superstition banded both against them,
+     will never seek to be forgiven that which may justly be attributed
+     to their immortal praise."--Answer to Eikon Basilike.
+
+Among, the great names which adorned the Protectorate,--that period of
+intense mental activity, when political and religious rights and duties
+were thoroughly discussed by strong and earnest statesmen and
+theologians,--that of Andrew Marvell, the friend of Milton, and Latin
+Secretary of Cromwell, deserves honorable mention.  The magnificent prose
+of Milton, long neglected, is now perhaps as frequently read as his great
+epic; but the writings of his friend and fellow secretary, devoted like
+his own to the cause of freedom and the rights of the people, are
+scarcely known to the present generation.  It is true that Marvell's
+political pamphlets were less elaborate and profound than those of the
+author of the glorious _Defence of Unlicensed Printing_.  He was light,
+playful, witty, and sarcastic; he lacked the stern dignity, the terrible
+invective, the bitter scorn, the crushing, annihilating retort, the grand
+and solemn eloquence, and the devout appeals, which render immortal the
+controversial works of Milton.  But he, too, has left his foot-prints on
+his age; he, too, has written for posterity that which they "will not
+willingly let die."  As one of the inflexible defenders of English
+liberty, sowers of the seed, the fruits of which we are now reaping, he
+has a higher claim on the kind regards of this generation than his merits
+as a poet, by no means inconsiderable, would warrant.
+
+Andrew Marvell was born in Kingston-upon-Hull, in 1620.  At the age of
+eighteen he entered Trinity College, whence he was enticed by the
+Jesuits, then actively seeking proselytes.  After remaining with them a
+short time, his father found him, and brought him back to his studies.
+On leaving college, he travelled on the Continent.  At Rome he wrote his
+first satire, a humorous critique upon Richard Flecknoe, an English
+Jesuit and verse writer, whose lines on Silence Charles Lamb quotes in
+one of his Essays.  It is supposed that he made his first acquaintance
+with Milton in Italy.
+
+At Paris he made the Abbot de Manihan the subject of another satire.  The
+Abbot pretended to skill in the arts of magic, and used to prognosticate
+the fortunes of people from the character of their handwriting.  At what
+period he returned from his travels we are not aware.  It is stated, by
+some of his biographers, that he was sent as secretary of a Turkish
+mission.  In 1653, he was appointed the tutor of Cromwell's nephew; and,
+four years after, doubtless through the instrumentality of his friend
+Milton, he received the honorable appointment of Latin Secretary of the
+Commonwealth.  In 1658, he was selected by his townsmen of Hull to
+represent them in Parliament.  In this service he continued until 1663,
+when, notwithstanding his sturdy republican principles, he was appointed
+secretary to the Russian embassy.  On his return, in 1665, he was again
+elected to Parliament, and continued in the public service until the
+prorogation of the Parliament of 1675.
+
+The boldness, the uncompromising integrity and irreproachable consistency
+of Marvell, as a statesman, have secured for him the honorable
+appellation of "the British Aristides."  Unlike too many of his old
+associates under the Protectorate, he did not change with the times.  He
+was a republican in Cromwell's day, and neither threats of assassination,
+nor flatteries, nor proffered bribes, could make him anything else in
+that of Charles II.  He advocated the rights of the people at a time when
+patriotism was regarded as ridiculous folly; when a general corruption,
+spreading downwards from a lewd and abominable Court, had made
+legislation a mere scramble for place and emolument.  English history
+presents no period so disgraceful as the Restoration.  To use the words
+of Macaulay, it was "a day of servitude without loyalty and sensuality
+without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of
+cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot,
+and the slave.  The principles of liberty were the scoff of every
+grinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean."  It
+is the peculiar merit of Milton and Marvell, that in such an age they
+held fast their integrity, standing up in glorious contrast with clerical
+apostates and traitors to the cause of England's liberty.
+
+In the discharge of his duties as a statesman Marvell was as punctual and
+conscientious as our own venerable Apostle of Freedom, John Quincy Adams.
+He corresponded every post with his constituents, keeping them fully
+apprised of all that transpired at Court or in Parliament.  He spoke but
+seldom, but his great personal influence was exerted privately upon the
+members of the Commons as well as upon the Peers.  His wit, accomplished
+manners, and literary eminence made him a favorite at the Court itself.
+The voluptuous and careless monarch laughed over the biting satire of the
+republican poet, and heartily enjoyed his lively conversation.  It is
+said that numerous advances were made to him by the courtiers of Charles
+II., but he was found to be incorruptible.  The personal compliments of
+the King, the encomiums of Rochester, the smiles and flatteries of the
+frail but fair and high-born ladies of the Court; nay, even the golden
+offers of the King's treasurer, who, climbing with difficulty to his
+obscure retreat on an upper floor of a court in the Strand, laid a
+tempting bribe of L1,000 before him, on the very day when he had been
+compelled to borrow a guinea, were all lost upon the inflexible patriot.
+He stood up manfully, in an age of persecution, for religious liberty,
+opposed the oppressive excise, and demanded frequent Parliaments and a
+fair representation of the people.
+
+In 1672, Marvell engaged in a controversy with the famous High-Churchman,
+Dr. Parker, who had taken the lead in urging the persecution of Non-
+conformists.  In one of the works of this arrogant divine, he says that
+"it is absolutely necessary to the peace and government of the world that
+the supreme magistrate should be vested with power to govern and conduct
+the consciences of subjects in affairs of religion.  Princes may with
+less hazard give liberty to men's vices and debaucheries than to their
+consciences."  And, speaking of the various sects of Non-conformists, he
+counsels princes and legislators that "tenderness and indulgence to such
+men is to nourish vipers in their own bowels, and the most sottish
+neglect of our quiet and security."  Marvell replied to him in a severely
+satirical pamphlet, which provoked a reply from the Doctor.  Marvell
+rejoined, with a rare combination of wit and argument.  The effect of his
+sarcasm on the Doctor and his supporters may be inferred from an
+anonymous note sent him, in which the writer threatens by the eternal God
+to cut his throat, if he uttered any more libels upon Dr. Parker.  Bishop
+Burnet remarks that "Marvell writ in a burlesque strain, but with so
+peculiar and so entertaining a conduct 'that from the King down to the
+tradesman his books were read with great pleasure, and not only humbled
+Parker, but his whole party, for Marvell had all the wits on his side.'"
+The Bishop further remarks that Marvell's satire "gave occasion to the
+only piece of modesty with which Dr. Parker was ever charged, namely, of
+withdrawing from town, and not importuning the press for some years,
+since even a face of brass must grow red when it is burnt as his has
+been."
+
+Dean Swift, in commenting upon the usual fate of controversial pamphlets,
+which seldom live beyond their generation, says: "There is indeed an
+exception, when a great genius undertakes to expose a foolish piece; so
+we still read Marvell's answer to Parker with pleasure, though the book
+it answers be sunk long ago."
+
+Perhaps, in the entire compass of our language, there is not to be found
+a finer piece of satirical writing than Marvell's famous parody of the
+speeches of Charles II., in which the private vices and public
+inconsistencies of the King, and his gross violations of his pledges on
+coming to the throne, are exposed with the keenest wit and the most
+laugh-provoking irony.  Charles himself, although doubtless annoyed by
+it, could not refrain from joining in the mirth which it excited at his
+expense.
+
+The friendship between Marvell and Milton remained firm and unbroken to
+the last.  The former exerted himself to save his illustrious friend from
+persecution, and omitted no opportunity to defend him as a politician and
+to eulogize him as a poet.  In 1654 he presented to Cromwell Milton's
+noble tract in _Defence of the People of England_, and, in writing to the
+author, says of the work, "When I consider how equally it teems and rises
+with so many figures, it seems to me a Trajan's column, in whose winding
+ascent we see embossed the several monuments of your learned victories."
+He was one of the first to appreciate _Paradise Lost_, and to commend it
+in some admirable lines.  One couplet is exceedingly beautiful, in its
+reference to the author's blindness:--
+
+              "Just Heaven, thee like Tiresias to requite,
+               Rewards with prophecy thy loss of sight."
+
+His poems, written in the "snatched leisure" of an active political life,
+bear marks of haste, and are very unequal.  In the midst of passages of
+pastoral description worthy of Milton himself, feeble lines and hackneyed
+phrases occur.  His _Nymph lamenting the Death of her Fawn_ is a finished
+and elaborate piece, full of grace and tenderness.  _Thoughts in a
+Garden_ will be remembered by the quotations of that exquisite critic,
+Charles Lamb.  How pleasant is this picture!
+
+                   "What wondrous life is this I lead!
+                    Ripe apples drop about my head;
+                    The luscious clusters of the vine
+                    Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
+                    The nectarine and curious peach
+                    Into my hands themselves do reach;
+                    Stumbling on melons as I pass,
+                    Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
+
+                   "Here at this fountain's sliding foot,
+                    Or at the fruit-tree's mossy root,
+                    Casting the body's vest aside,
+                    My soul into the boughs does glide.
+                    There like a bird it sits and sings,
+                    And whets and claps its silver wings;
+                    And, till prepared for longer flight,
+                    Waves in its plumes the various light.
+
+                   "How well the skilful gard'ner drew
+                    Of flowers and herbs this dial true!
+                    Where, from above, the milder sun
+                    Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
+                    And, as it works, the industrious bee
+                    Computes his time as well as we.
+                    How could such sweet and wholesome hours
+                    Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers!"
+
+
+One of his longer poems, _Appleton House_, contains passages of admirable
+description, and many not unpleasing conceits.  Witness the following:--
+
+                   "Thus I, an easy philosopher,
+                    Among the birds and trees confer,
+                    And little now to make me wants,
+                    Or of the fowl or of the plants.
+                    Give me but wings, as they, and I
+                    Straight floating on the air shall fly;
+                    Or turn me but, and you shall see
+                    I am but an inverted tree.
+                    Already I begin to call
+                    In their most learned original;
+                    And, where I language want, my signs
+                    The bird upon the bough divines.
+                    No leaf does tremble in the wind,
+                    Which I returning cannot find.
+                    Out of these scattered Sibyl's leaves,
+                    Strange prophecies my fancy weaves:
+                    What Rome, Greece, Palestine, e'er said,
+                    I in this light Mosaic read.
+                    Under this antic cope I move,
+                    Like some great prelate of the grove;
+                    Then, languishing at ease, I toss
+                    On pallets thick with velvet moss;
+                    While the wind, cooling through the boughs,
+                    Flatters with air my panting brows.
+                    Thanks for my rest, ye mossy banks!
+                    And unto you, cool zephyrs, thanks!
+                    Who, as my hair, my thoughts too shed,
+                    And winnow from the chaff my head.
+                    How safe, methinks, and strong behind
+                    These trees have I encamped my mind!"
+
+Here is a picture of a piscatorial idler and his trout stream, worthy of
+the pencil of Izaak Walton:--
+
+              "See in what wanton harmless folds
+               It everywhere the meadow holds:
+               Where all things gaze themselves, and doubt
+               If they be in it or without;
+               And for this shade, which therein shines
+               Narcissus-like, the sun too pines.
+               Oh! what a pleasure 't is to hedge
+               My temples here in heavy sedge;
+               Abandoning my lazy side,
+               Stretched as a bank unto the tide;
+               Or, to suspend my sliding foot
+               On the osier's undermining root,
+               And in its branches tough to hang,
+               While at my lines the fishes twang."
+
+A little poem of Marvell's, which he calls Eyes and Tears, has the
+following passages:--
+
+              "How wisely Nature did agree
+               With the same eyes to weep and see!
+               That having viewed the object vain,
+               They might be ready to complain.
+               And, since the self-deluding sight
+               In a false angle takes each height,
+               These tears, which better measure all,
+               Like watery lines and plummets fall."
+
+              "Happy are they whom grief doth bless,
+               That weep the more, and see the less;
+               And, to preserve their sight more true,
+               Bathe still their eyes in their own dew;
+               So Magdalen, in tears more wise,
+               Dissolved those captivating eyes,
+               Whose liquid chains could, flowing, meet
+               To fetter her Redeemer's feet.
+               The sparkling glance, that shoots desire,
+               Drenched in those tears, does lose its fire;
+               Yea, oft the Thunderer pity takes,
+               And there his hissing lightning slakes.
+               The incense is to Heaven dear,
+               Not as a perfume, but a tear;
+               And stars shine lovely in the night,
+               But as they seem the tears of light.
+               Ope, then, mine eyes, your double sluice,
+               And practise so your noblest use;
+               For others, too, can see or sleep,
+               But only human eyes can weep."
+
+The Bermuda Emigrants has some happy lines, as the following:--
+
+              "He hangs in shade the orange bright,
+               Like golden lamps in a green night."
+
+Or this, which doubtless suggested a couplet in Moore's _Canadian Boat
+Song_:--
+
+              "And all the way, to guide the chime,
+               With falling oars they kept the time."
+
+His facetious and burlesque poetry was much admired in his day; but a
+great portion of it referred to persons and events no longer of general
+interest.  The satire on Holland is an exception.  There is nothing in
+its way superior to it in our language.  Many of his best pieces were
+originally written in Latin, and afterwards translated by himself.  There
+is a splendid Ode to Cromwell--a worthy companion of Milton's glorious
+sonnet--which is not generally known, and which we transfer entire to our
+pages.  Its simple dignity and the melodious flow of its versification
+commend themselves more to our feelings than its eulogy of war.  It is
+energetic and impassioned, and probably affords a better idea of the
+author, as an actor in the stirring drama of his time, than the "soft
+Lydian airs" of the poems that we have quoted.
+
+
+          AN HORATIAN ODE UPON CROMWELL'S RETURN FROM IRELAND.
+
+               The forward youth that would appear
+               Must now forsake his Muses dear;
+               Nor in the shadows sing
+               His numbers languishing.
+
+               'T is time to leave the books in dust,
+               And oil the unused armor's rust;
+               Removing from the wall
+               The corslet of the hall.
+
+               So restless Cromwell could not cease
+               In the inglorious arts of peace,
+               But through adventurous war
+               Urged his active star.
+
+               And, like the three-forked lightning, first
+               Breaking the clouds wherein it nurst,
+               Did thorough his own side
+               His fiery way divide.
+
+               For 't is all one to courage high,
+               The emulous, or enemy;
+               And with such to enclose
+               Is more than to oppose.
+
+               Then burning through the air he went,
+               And palaces and temples rent;
+               And Caesar's head at last
+               Did through his laurels blast.
+
+               'T is madness to resist or blame
+               The face of angry Heaven's flame;
+               And, if we would speak true,
+               Much to the man is due,
+
+               Who, from his private gardens, where
+               He lived reserved and austere,
+               (As if his highest plot
+               To plant the bergamot,)
+
+               Could by industrious valor climb
+               To ruin the great work of time,
+               And cast the kingdoms old
+               Into another mould!
+
+               Though justice against fate complain,
+               And plead the ancient rights in vain,--
+               But those do hold or break,
+               As men are strong or weak.
+
+               Nature, that hateth emptiness,
+               Allows of penetration less,
+               And therefore must make room
+               Where greater spirits come.
+
+               What field of all the civil war,
+               Where his were not the deepest scar?
+               And Hampton shows what part
+               He had of wiser art;
+
+               Where, twining subtle fears with hope,
+               He wove a net of such a scope,
+               That Charles himself might chase
+               To Carisbrook's narrow case;
+
+               That hence the royal actor borne,
+               The tragic scaffold might adorn,
+               While round the armed bands
+               Did clap their bloody hands.
+
+               HE nothing common did or mean
+               Upon that memorable scene,
+               But with his keener eye
+               The axe's edge did try
+
+               Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite,
+               To vindicate his helpless right!
+               But bowed his comely head,
+               Down, as upon a bed.
+
+               This was that memorable hour,
+               Which first assured the forced power;
+               So when they did design
+               The Capitol's first line,
+
+               A bleeding head, where they begun,
+               Did fright the architects to run;
+               And yet in that the state
+               Foresaw its happy fate.
+
+               And now the Irish are ashamed
+               To see themselves in one year tamed;
+               So much one man can do,
+               That does best act and know.
+
+               They can affirm his praises best,
+               And have, though overcome, confest
+               How good he is, how just,
+               And fit for highest trust.
+
+               Nor yet grown stiffer by command,
+               But still in the Republic's hand,
+               How fit he is to sway
+               That can so well obey.
+
+               He to the Commons' feet presents
+               A kingdom for his first year's rents,
+               And, what he may, forbears
+               His fame to make it theirs.
+
+               And has his sword and spoils ungirt,
+               To lay them at the public's skirt;
+               So when the falcon high
+               Falls heavy from the sky,
+
+               She, having killed, no more does search,
+               But on the next green bough to perch,
+               Where, when he first does lure,
+               The falconer has her sure.
+
+               What may not, then, our isle presume,
+               While Victory his crest does plume?
+               What may not others fear,
+
+               If thus he crowns each year?
+
+               As Caesar, he, erelong, to Gaul;
+               To Italy as Hannibal,
+               And to all states not free
+               Shall climacteric be.
+
+               The Pict no shelter now shall find
+               Within his parti-contoured mind;
+               But from his valor sad
+               Shrink underneath the plaid,
+
+               Happy if in the tufted brake
+               The English hunter him mistake,
+               Nor lay his hands a near
+               The Caledonian deer.
+
+               But thou, the war's and fortune's son,
+               March indefatigably on;
+               And, for the last effect,
+               Still keep the sword erect.
+
+               Besides the force, it has to fright
+               The spirits of the shady night
+               The same arts that did gain
+               A power, must it maintain.
+
+
+Marvell was never married.  The modern critic, who affirms that bachelors
+have done the most to exalt women into a divinity, might have quoted his
+extravagant panegyric of Maria Fairfax as an apt illustration:--
+
+               "'T is she that to these gardens gave
+               The wondrous beauty which they have;
+               She straitness on the woods bestows,
+               To her the meadow sweetness owes;
+               Nothing could make the river be
+               So crystal pure but only she,--
+               She, yet more pure, sweet, strait, and fair,
+               Than gardens, woods, meals, rivers are
+               Therefore, what first she on them spent
+               They gratefully again present:
+               The meadow carpets where to tread,
+               The garden flowers to crown her head,
+               And for a glass the limpid brook
+               Where she may all her beauties look;
+               But, since she would not have them seen,
+               The wood about her draws a screen;
+               For she, to higher beauty raised,
+               Disdains to be for lesser praised;
+               She counts her beauty to converse
+               In all the languages as hers,
+               Nor yet in those herself employs,
+               But for the wisdom, not the noise,
+               Nor yet that wisdom could affect,
+               But as 't is Heaven's dialect."
+
+It has been the fashion of a class of shallow Church and State defenders
+to ridicule the great men of the Commonwealth, the sturdy republicans of
+England, as sour-featured, hard-hearted ascetics, enemies of the fine
+arts and polite literature.  The works of Milton and Marvell, the prose-
+poem of Harrington, and the admirable discourses of Algernon Sydney are a
+sufficient answer to this accusation.  To none has it less application
+than to the subject of our sketch.  He was a genial, warmhearted man, an
+elegant scholar, a finished gentleman at home, and the life of every
+circle which he entered, whether that of the gay court of Charles II.,
+amidst such men as Rochester and L'Estrange, or that of the republican
+philosophers who assembled at Miles's Coffee House, where he discussed
+plans of a free representative government with the author of Oceana, and
+Cyriack Skinner, that friend of Milton, whom the bard has immortalized in
+the sonnet which so pathetically, yet heroically, alludes to his own
+blindness.  Men of all parties enjoyed his wit and graceful conversation.
+His personal appearance was altogether in his favor.  A clear, dark,
+Spanish complexion, long hair of jetty blackness falling in graceful
+wreaths to his shoulders, dark eyes, full of expression and fire, a
+finely chiselled chin, and a mouth whose soft voluptuousness scarcely
+gave token of the steady purpose and firm will of the inflexible
+statesman: these, added to the prestige of his genius, and the respect
+which a lofty, self-sacrificing patriotism extorts even from those who
+would fain corrupt and bribe it, gave him a ready passport to the
+fashionable society of the metropolis.  He was one of the few who mingled
+in that society, and escaped its contamination, and who,
+
+              "Amidst the wavering days of sin,
+               Kept himself icy chaste and pure."
+
+The tone and temper of his mind may be most fitly expressed in his own
+paraphrase of Horace:--
+
+              "Climb at Court for me that will,
+               Tottering Favor's pinnacle;
+               All I seek is to lie still!
+               Settled in some secret nest,
+               In calm leisure let me rest;
+               And, far off the public stage,
+               Pass away my silent age.
+               Thus, when, without noise, unknown,
+               I have lived out all my span,
+               I shall die without a groan,
+               An old, honest countryman.
+               Who, exposed to other's eyes,
+               Into his own heart ne'er pries,
+               Death's to him a strange surprise."
+
+He died suddenly in 1678, while in attendance at a popular meeting of his
+old constituents at Hull.  His health had previously been remarkably
+good; and it was supposed by many that he was poisoned by some of his
+political or clerical enemies.  His monument, erected by his grateful
+constituency, bears the following inscription:--
+
+     "Near this place lyeth the body of Andrew Marvell, Esq., a man so
+     endowed by Nature, so improved by Education, Study, and Travel, so
+     consummated by Experience, that, joining the peculiar graces of Wit
+     and Learning, with a singular penetration and strength of judgment;
+     and exercising all these in the whole course of his life, with an
+     unutterable steadiness in the ways of Virtue, he became the ornament
+     and example of his age, beloved by good men, feared by bad, admired
+     by all, though imitated by few; and scarce paralleled by any.  But a
+     Tombstone can neither contain his character, nor is Marble necessary
+     to transmit it to posterity; it is engraved in the minds of this
+     generation, and will be always legible in his inimitable writings,
+     nevertheless.  He having served twenty years successfully in
+     Parliament, and that with such Wisdom, Dexterity, and Courage, as
+     becomes a true Patriot, the town of Kingston-upon-Hull, from whence
+     he was deputed to that Assembly, lamenting in his death the public
+     loss, have erected this Monument of their Grief and their Gratitude,
+     1688."
+
+Thus lived and died Andrew Marvell.  His memory is the inheritance of
+Americans as well as Englishmen.  His example commends itself in an
+especial manner to the legislators of our Republic.  Integrity and
+fidelity to principle are as greatly needed at this time in our halls of
+Congress as in the Parliaments of the Restoration; men are required who
+can feel, with Milton, that "it is high honor done them from God, and a
+special mark of His favor, to have been selected to stand upright and
+steadfast in His cause, dignified with the defence of Truth and public
+liberty."
+
+
+
+
+
+                              JOHN ROBERTS.
+
+Thomas Carlyle, in his history of the stout and sagacious Monk of St.
+Edmunds, has given us a fine picture of the actual life of Englishmen in
+the middle centuries.  The dim cell-lamp of the somewhat apocryphal
+Jocelin of Brakelond becomes in his hands a huge Drummond-light, shining
+over the Dark Ages like the naphtha-fed cressets over Pandemonium,
+proving, as he says in his own quaint way, that "England in the year 1200
+was no dreamland, but a green, solid place, which grew corn and several
+other things; the sun shone on it; the vicissitudes of seasons and human
+fortunes were there; cloth was woven, ditches dug, fallow fields
+ploughed, and houses built."  And if, as the writer just quoted insists,
+it is a matter of no small importance to make it credible to the present
+generation that the Past is not a confused dream of thrones and battle-
+fields, creeds and constitutions, but a reality, substantial as hearth
+and home, harvest-field and smith-shop, merry-making and death, could
+make it, we shall not wholly waste our time and that of our readers in
+inviting them to look with us at the rural life of England two centuries
+ago, through the eyes of John Roberts and his worthy son, Daniel, yeomen,
+of Siddington, near Cirencester.
+
+_The Memoirs of John Roberts, alias Haywood, by his son, Daniel Roberts_,
+(the second edition, printed verbatim from the original one, with its
+picturesque array of italics and capital letters,) is to be found only in
+a few of our old Quaker libraries.  It opens with some account of the
+family.  The father of the elder Roberts "lived reputably, on a little
+estate of his own," and it is mentioned as noteworthy that he married a
+sister of a gentleman in the Commission of the Peace.  Coming of age
+about the beginning of the civil wars, John and one of his young
+neighbors enlisted in the service of Parliament.  Hearing that
+Cirencester had been taken by the King's forces, they obtained leave of
+absence to visit their friends, for whose safety they naturally felt
+solicitous.  The following account of the reception they met with from
+the drunken and ferocious troopers of Charles I., the "bravos of Alsatia
+and the pages of Whitehall," throws a ghastly light upon the horrors of
+civil war:--
+
+"As they were passing by Cirencester, they were discovered, and pursued
+by two soldiers of the King's party, then in possession of the town.
+Seeing themselves pursued, they quitted their horses, and took to their
+heels; but, by reason of their accoutrements, could make little speed.
+They came up with my father first; and, though he begged for quarter,
+none they would give him, but laid on him with their swords, cutting and
+slashing his hands and arms, which he held up to save his head; as the
+marks upon them did long after testify.  At length it pleased the
+Almighty to put it into his mind to fall down on his face; which he did.
+Hereupon the soldiers, being on horseback, cried to each other, _Alight,
+and cut his throat_! but neither of them did; yet continued to strike and
+prick him about the jaws, till they thought him dead.  Then they left
+him, and pursued his neighbor, whom they presently overtook and killed.
+Soon after they had left my father, it was said in his heart, _Rise, and
+flee for thy life_! which call he obeyed; and, starting upon his feet,
+his enemies espied him in motion, and pursued him again.  He ran down a
+steep hill, and through a river which ran at the bottom of it; though
+with exceeding difficulty, his boots filling with water, and his wounds
+bleeding very much.  They followed him to the top of the hill; but,
+seeing he had got over, pursued him no farther."
+
+The surgeon who attended him was a Royalist, and bluntly told his
+bleeding patient that if he had met him in the street he would have
+killed him himself, but now he was willing to cure him.  On his recovery,
+young Roberts again entered the army, and continued in it until the
+overthrow, of the Monarchy.  On his return, he married "Lydia Tindall,
+of the denomination of Puritans."  A majestic figure rises before us,
+on reading the statement that Sir Matthew Hale, afterwards Lord Chief
+Justice of England, the irreproachable jurist and judicial saint, was
+"his wife's kinsman, and drew her marriage settlement."
+
+No stronger testimony to the high-toned morality and austere virtue of
+the Puritan yeomanry of England can be adduced than the fact that, of the
+fifty thousand soldiers who were discharged on the accession of Charles
+II., and left to shift for themselves, comparatively few, if any, became
+chargeable to their parishes, although at that very time one out of six
+of the English population were unable to support themselves.  They
+carried into their farm-fields and workshops the strict habits of
+Cromwell's discipline; and, in toiling to repair their wasted fortunes,
+they manifested the same heroic fortitude and self-denial which in war
+had made them such formidable and efficient "Soldiers of the Lord."  With
+few exceptions, they remained steadfast in their uncompromising non-
+conformity, abhorring Prelacy and Popery, and entertaining no very
+orthodox notions with respect to the divine right of Kings.  From them
+the Quakers drew their most zealous champions; men who, in renouncing the
+"carnal weapons" of their old service, found employment for habitual
+combativeness in hot and wordy sectarian warfare.  To this day the
+vocabulary of Quakerism abounds in the military phrases and figures which
+were in use in the Commonwealth's time.  Their old force and significance
+are now in a great measure lost; but one can well imagine that, in the
+assemblies of the primitive Quakers, such stirring battle-cries and
+warlike tropes, even when employed in enforcing or illustrating the
+doctrines of peace, must have made many a stout heart' to beat quicker,
+tinder its drab coloring, with recollections of Naseby and Preston;
+transporting many a listener from the benches of his place of worship to
+the ranks of Ireton and Lambert, and causing him to hear, in the place of
+the solemn and nasal tones of the preacher, the blast of Rupert's bugles,
+and the answering shout of Cromwell's pikemen: "Let God arise, and let
+his enemies be scattered!"
+
+Of this class was John Roberts.  He threw off his knapsack, and went back
+to his small homestead, contented with the privilege of supporting
+himself and family by daily toil, and grumbling in concert with his old
+campaign brothers at the new order of things in Church and State.  To his
+apprehension, the Golden Days of England ended with the parade on
+Blackheath to receive the restored King.  He manifested no reverence for
+Bishops and Lords, for he felt none.  For the Presbyterians he had no
+good will; they had brought in the King, and they denied the liberty of
+prophesying.  John Milton has expressed the feeling of the Independents
+and Anabaptists towards this latter class, in that famous line in which
+he defines Presbyter as "old priest writ large."  Roberts was by no means
+a gloomy fanatic; he had a great deal of shrewdness and humor, loved a
+quiet joke; and every gambling priest and swearing magistrate in the
+neighborhood stood in fear of his sharp wit.  It was quite in course for
+such a man to fall in with the Quakers, and he appears to have done so at
+the first opportunity.
+
+In the year 1665, "it pleased the Lord to send two women Friends out of
+the North to Cirencester," who, inquiring after such as feared God, were
+directed to the house of John Roberts.  He received them kindly, and,
+inviting in some of his neighbors, sat down with them, whereupon "the
+Friends spake a few words, which had a good effect."  After the meeting
+was over, he was induced to visit a "Friend" then confined in Banbury
+jail, whom he found preaching through the grates of his cell to the
+people in the street.  On seeing Roberts he called to mind the story of
+Zaccheus, and declared that the word was now to all who were seeking
+Christ by climbing the tree of knowledge, "Come down, come down; for that
+which is to be known of God is manifested within."  Returning home, he
+went soon after to the parish meeting-house, and, entering with his hat
+on, the priest noticed him, and, stopping short in his discourse,
+declared that he could not go on while one of the congregation wore his
+hat.  He was thereupon led out of the house, and a rude fellow, stealing
+up behind, struck him on the back with a heavy stone.  "Take that for
+God's sake," said the ruffian.  "So I do," answered Roberts, without
+looking back to see his assailant, who the next day came and asked his
+forgiveness for the injury, as he could not sleep in consequence of it.
+
+We next find him attending the Quarter Sessions, where three "Friends"
+were arraigned for entering Cirencester Church with their hats on.
+Venturing to utter a word of remonstrance against the summary proceedings
+of the Court, Justice Stephens demanded his name, and, on being told,
+exclaimed, in the very tone and temper of Jeffreys:
+
+I 've heard of you.  I'm glad I have you here.  You deserve a stone
+doublet.  There's many an honester man than you hanged."
+
+"It may be so," said Roberts, "but what becomes of such as hang honest
+men?"
+
+The Justice snatched a ball of wax and hurled it at the quiet questioner.
+"I 'll send you to prison," said he; "and if any insurrection or tumult
+occurs, I 'll come and cut your throat with my own sword."  A warrant was
+made out, and he was forthwith sent to the jail.  In the evening, Justice
+Sollis, his uncle, released him, on condition of his promise to appear at
+the next Sessions.  He returned to his home, but in the night following
+he was impressed with a belief that it was his duty to visit Justice
+Stephens.  Early in the morning, with a heavy heart, without eating or
+drinking, he mounted his horse and rode towards the residence of his
+enemy.  When he came in sight of the house, he felt strong misgivings
+that his uncle, Justice Sollis, who had so kindly released him, and his
+neighbors generally, would condemn him for voluntarily running into
+danger, and drawing down trouble upon himself and family.  He alighted
+from his horse, and sat on the ground in great doubt and sorrow, when a
+voice seemed to speak within him, "Go, and I will go with thee."  The
+Justice met him at the door.  "I am come," said Roberts, "in the fear
+and dread of Heaven, to warn thee to repent of thy wickedness with speed,
+lest the Lord send thee to the pit that is bottomless!"  This terrible
+summons awed the Justice; he made Roberts sit down on his couch beside
+him, declaring that he received the message from God, and asked
+forgiveness for the wrong he had done him.
+
+The parish vicar of Siddington at this time was George Bull, afterwards
+Bishop of St. David's, whom Macaulay speaks of as the only rural parish
+priest who, during the latter part of the seventeenth century, was noted
+as a theologian, or Who possessed a respectable library.  Roberts refused
+to pay the vicar his tithes, and the vicar sent him to prison.  It was
+the priest's "Short Method with Dissenters."  While the sturdy Non-
+conformist lay in prison, he was visited by the great woman of the
+neighborhood, Lady Dunch, of Down Amney.  "What do you lie in jail for?"
+inquired the lady.  Roberts replied that it was because he could not put
+bread into the mouth of a hireling priest.  The lady suggested that he
+might let somebody else satisfy the demands of the priest; and that she
+had a mind to do this herself, as she wished to talk with him on
+religious subjects.  To this Roberts objected; there were poor people who
+needed her charities, which would be wasted on such devourers as the
+priests, who, like Pharaoh's lean kine, were eating up the fat and the
+goodly, without looking a whit the better.  But the lady, who seems to
+have been pleased and amused by the obstinate prisoner, paid the tithe
+and the jail fees, and set him at liberty, making him fix a day when he
+would visit her.  At the time appointed he went to Down Amney, and was
+overtaken on the way by the priest of Cirencester, who had been sent for
+to meet the Quaker.  They found the lady ill in bed; but she had them
+brought to her chamber, being determined not to lose the amusement of
+hearing a theological discussion, to which she at once urged them,
+declaring that it would divert her and do her good.  The parson began by
+accusing the Quakers of holding Popish doctrines.  The Quaker retorted
+by telling him that if he would prove the Quakers like the Papists in one
+thing, by the help of God, he would prove him like them in ten.  After a
+brief and sharp dispute, the priest, finding his adversary's wit too keen
+for his comfort, hastily took his leave.
+
+The next we hear of Roberts he is in Gloucester Castle, subjected to the
+brutal usage of a jailer, who took a malicious satisfaction in thrusting
+decent and respectable Dissenters, imprisoned for matters of conscience,
+among felons and thieves.  A poor vagabond tinker was hired to play at
+night on his hautboy, and prevent their sleeping; but Roberts spoke to
+him in such a manner that the instrument fell from his hand; and he told
+the jailer that he would play no more, though he should hang him up at
+the door for it.
+
+How he was released from jail does not appear; but the narrative tells us
+that some time after an apparitor came to cite him to the Bishop's Court
+at Gloucester.  When he was brought before the Court, Bishop Nicholson, a
+kind-hearted and easy-natured prelate, asked him the number of his
+children, and how many of them had been _bishoped_?
+
+"None, that I know of," said Roberts.
+
+"What reason," asked the Bishop, "do you give for this?"
+
+"A very good one," said the Quaker: "most of my children were born in
+Oliver's days, when Bishops were out of fashion."
+
+The Bishop and the Court laughed at this sally, and proceeded to question
+him touching his views of baptism.  Roberts admitted that John had a
+Divine commission to baptize with water, but that he never heard of
+anybody else that had.  The Bishop reminded him that Christ's disciples
+baptized.  "What 's that to me?" responded Roberts.  "Paul says he was
+not sent to baptize, but to preach the Gospel.  And if he was not sent,
+who required it at his hands?  Perhaps he had as little thanks for his
+labor as thou hast for thine; and I would willingly know who sent thee to
+baptize?"
+
+The Bishop evaded this home question, and told him he was there to answer
+for not coming to church.  Roberts denied the charge; sometimes he went
+to church, and sometimes it came to him.  "I don't call that a church
+which you do, which is made of wood and stone."
+
+"What do you call it?"  asked the Bishop.
+
+"It might be properly called a mass-house," was the reply; "for it was
+built for that purpose."  The Bishop here told him he might go for the
+present; he would take another opportunity to convince him of his errors.
+
+The next person called was a Baptist minister, who, seeing that Roberts
+refused to put off his hat, kept on his also.  The Bishop sternly
+reminded him that he stood before the King's Court, and the
+representative of the majesty of England; and that, while some regard
+might be had to the scruples of men who made a conscience of putting off
+the hat, such contempt could not be tolerated on the part of one who
+could put it off to every mechanic be met.  The Baptist pulled off his
+hat, and apologized, on the ground of illness.
+
+We find Roberts next following George Fox on a visit to Bristol.  On his
+return, reaching his house late in the evening, he saw a man standing in
+the moonlight at his door, and knew him to be a bailiff.
+
+"Hast thou anything against me?" asked Roberts.
+
+"No," said the bailiff, "I've wronged you enough, God forgive me!  Those
+who lie in wait for you are my Lord Bishop's bailiffs; they are merciless
+rogues.  Ever, my master, while you live, please a knave, for an honest
+man won't hurt you."
+
+The next morning, having, as he thought, been warned by a dream to do so,
+he went to the Bishop's house at Cleave, near Gloucester.  Confronting
+the Bishop in his own hall, he told him that he had come to know why he
+was hunting after him with his bailiffs, and why he was his adversary.
+"The King is your adversary," said the Bishop; "you have broken the
+King's law."  Roberts ventured to deny the justice of the law.  "What!"
+cried the Bishop, "do such men as you find fault with the laws?"  "Yes,"
+replied the other, stoutly; "and I tell thee plainly to thy face, it is
+high time wiser men were chosen, to make better laws."
+
+The discourse turning upon the Book of Common Prayer, Roberts asked the
+Bishop if the sin of idolatry did not consist in worshipping the work of
+men's hands.  The Bishop admitted it, as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar's
+image.
+
+"Then," said Roberts, "whose hands made your Prayer Book?  It could not
+make itself."
+
+"Do you compare our Prayer Book to Nebuchadnezzar's image?" cried the
+Bishop.
+
+"Yes," returned Roberts, "that was his image; this is thine.  I no more
+dare bow to thy Common-Prayer Book than the Three Children to
+Nebuchadnezzar's image."
+
+"Yours is a strange upstart religion," said the Bishop.
+
+Roberts told him it was older than his by several hundred years.  At this
+claim of antiquity the prelate was greatly amused, and told Roberts that
+if he would make out his case, he should speed the better for it.
+
+"Let me ask thee," said Roberts, "where thy religion was in Oliver's
+days, when thy Common-Prayer Book was as little regarded as an old
+almanac, and your priests, with a few honest exceptions, turned with the
+tide, and if Oliver had put mass in their mouths would have conformed to
+it for the sake of their bellies."
+
+"What would you have us do?"  asked the Bishop.  "Would you have had
+Oliver cut our throats?"
+
+"No," said Roberts; "but what sort of religion was that which you were
+afraid to venture your throats for?"
+
+The Bishop interrupted him to say, that in Oliver's days he had never
+owned any other religion than his own, although he did not dare to openly
+maintain it as he then did.
+
+"Well," continued Roberts, "if thou didst not think thy religion worth
+venturing thy throat for then, I desire thee to consider that it is not
+worth the cutting of other men's throats now for not conforming to it."
+
+"You are right," responded the frank Bishop.  "I hope we shall have a
+care how we cut men's throats."
+
+The following colloquy throws some light on the condition and character
+of the rural clergy at this period, and goes far to confirm the
+statements of Macaulay, which many have supposed exaggerated.  Baxter's
+early religious teachers were more exceptionable than even the maudlin
+mummer whom Roberts speaks of, one of them being "the excellentest stage-
+player in all the country, and a good gamester and goodfellow, who,
+having received Holy Orders, forged the like for a neighbor's son, who on
+the strength of that title officiated at the desk and altar; and after
+him came an attorney's clerk, who had tippled himself into so great
+poverty that he had no other way to live than to preach."
+
+J. ROBERTS.  I was bred up under a Common-Prayer Priest; and a poor
+drunken old Man he was.  Sometimes he was so drunk he could not say his
+Prayers, and at best he could but say them; though I think he was by far
+a better Man than he that is Priest there now.
+
+BISHOP.  Who is your Minister now?
+
+J. ROBERTS.  My Minister is Christ Jesus, the Minister of the everlasting
+Covenant; but the present Priest of the Parish is George Bull.
+
+BISHOP.  Do you say that drunken old Man was better than Mr. Bull?  I
+tell you, I account Mr. Bull as sound, able, and orthodox a Divine as any
+we have among us.
+
+J. ROBERT.  I am sorry for that; for if he be one of the best of you, I
+believe the Lord will not suffer you long; for he is a proud, ambitious,
+ungodly Man: he hath often sued me at Law, and brought his Servants to
+swear against me wrongfully.  His Servants themselves have confessed to
+my Servants, that I might have their Ears; for their Master made them
+drunk, and then told them they were set down in the List as Witnesses
+against me, and they must swear to it: And so they did, and brought
+treble Damages.  They likewise owned they took Tithes from my Servants,
+threshed them out, and sold them for their Master.  They have also
+several Times took my Cattle out of my Grounds, drove them to Fairs and
+Markets, and sold them, without giving me any Account.
+
+BISHOP.  I do assure you I will inform Mr. Bull of what you say.
+
+J. ROBERTS.  Very well.  And if thou pleasest to send for me to face him,
+I shall make much more appear to his Face than I'll say behind his Back.
+
+After much more discourse, Roberts told the Bishop that if it would do
+him any good to have him in jail, he would voluntarily go and deliver
+himself up to the keeper of Gloucester Castle.  The good-natured prelate
+relented at this, and said he should not be molested or injured, and
+further manifested his good will by ordering refreshments.  One of the
+Bishop's friends who was present was highly offended by the freedom of
+Roberts with his Lordship, and undertook to rebuke him, but was so
+readily answered that he flew into a rage.  "If all the Quakers in
+England," said he, "are not hanged in a month's time, I 'll be hanged for
+them."  "Prithee, friend," quoth Roberts, "remember and be as good as thy
+word!"
+
+Good old Bishop Nicholson, it would seem, really liked his incorrigible
+Quaker neighbor, and could enjoy heartily his wit and humor, even when
+exercised at the expense of his own ecclesiastical dignity.  He admired
+his blunt honesty and courage.  Surrounded by flatterers and self-
+seekers, he found satisfaction in the company and conversation of one
+who, setting aside all conventionalisms, saw only in my Lord Bishop a
+poor fellow-probationer, and addressed him on terms of conscious
+equality.  The indulgence which he extended to him naturally enough
+provoked many of the inferior clergy, who had been sorely annoyed by the
+sturdy Dissenter's irreverent witticisms and unsparing ridicule.  Vicar
+Bull, of Siddington, and Priest Careless, of Cirencester, in particular,
+urged the Bishop to deal sharply with him.  The former accused him of
+dealing in the Black Art, and filled the Bishop's ear with certain
+marvellous stories of his preternatural sagacity and discernment in
+discovering cattle which were lost.  The Bishop took occasion to inquire
+into these stories; and was told by Roberts that, except in a single
+instance, the discoveries were the result of his acquaintance with the
+habits of animals and his knowledge of the localities where they were
+lost.  The circumstance alluded to, as an exception, will be best related
+in his own words.
+
+"I had a poor Neighbor, who had a Wife and six Children, and whom the
+chief men about us permitted to keep six or seven Cows upon the Waste,
+which were the principal Support of the Family, and preserved them from
+becoming chargeable to the Parish.  One very stormy night the Cattle were
+left in the Yard as usual, but could not be found in the morning.  The
+Man and his Sons had sought them to no purpose; and, after they had been
+lost four days, his Wife came to me, and, in a great deal of grief,
+cried, 'O Lord!  Master Hayward, we are undone!  My Husband and I must go
+a begging in our old age!  We have lost all our Cows.  My Husband and the
+Boys have been round the country, and can hear nothing of them.  I'll
+down on my bare knees, if you'll stand our Friend!'  I desired she would
+not be in such an agony, and told her she should not down on her knees to
+me; but I would gladly help them in what I could.  'I know,' said she,
+'you are a good Man, and God will hear your Prayers.'  I desire thee,
+said I, to be still and quiet in thy mind; perhaps thy Husband or Sons
+may hear of them to-day; if not, let thy Husband get a horse, and come to
+me to-morrow morning as soon as he will; and I think, if it please God,
+to go with him to seek then.  The Woman seemed transported with joy,
+crying, 'Then we shall have our Cows again.'  Her Faith being so strong,
+brought the greater Exercise on me, with strong cries to the Lord, that
+he would be pleased to make me instrumental in his Hand, for the help of
+the poor Family.  In the Morning early comes the old Man.  In the Name of
+God, says he, which way shall we go to seek them?  I, being deeply
+concerned in my Mind, did not answer him till he had thrice repeated it;
+and then I answered, In the Name of God, I would go to seek them; and
+said (before I was well aware) we will go to Malmsbury, and at the Horse-
+Fair we shall find them.  When I had spoken the Words, I was much
+troubled lest they should not prove true.  It was very early, and the
+first Man we saw, I asked him if he had seen any stray Milch Cows
+thereabouts.  What manner of Cattle are they?  said he.  And the old Man
+describing their Mark and Number, he told us there were some stood
+chewing their Cuds in the Horse-Fair; but thinking they belonged to some
+in the Neighborhood, he did not take particular Notice of them.  When we
+came to the Place, the old Man found them to be his; but suffered his
+Transports of Joy to rise so high, that I was ashamed of his behavior;
+for he fell a hallooing, and threw up his Montier Cap in the Air several
+times, till he raised the Neighbors out of their Beds to see what was the
+Matter.  'O!' said he, 'I had lost my Cows four or five days ago, and
+thought I should never see them again; and this honest Neighbor of mine
+told me this Morning, by his own Fire's Side, nine Miles off, that here
+I should find them, and here I have them!'  Then up goes his Cap again.
+I begged of the poor Man to be quiet, and take his Cows home, and be
+thankful; as indeed I was, being reverently bowed in my Spirit before the
+Lord, in that he was pleased to put the words of Truth into my mouth.
+And the Man drove his Cattle home, to the great Joy of his Family."
+
+Not long after the interview with the Bishop at his own palace, which has
+been related, that dignitary, with the Lord Chancellor, in their coaches,
+and about twenty clergymen on horseback, made a call at the humble
+dwelling of Roberts, on their way to Tedbury, where the Bishop was to
+hold a Visitation.  "I could not go out of the country without seeing
+you," said the prelate, as the farmer came to his coach door and pressed
+him to alight.
+
+"John," asked Priest Evans, the Bishop's kinsman, "is your house free to
+entertain such men as we are?"
+
+"Yes, George," said Roberts; "I entertain honest men, and sometimes
+others."
+
+"My Lord," said Evans, turning to the Bishop, "John's friends are the
+honest men, and we are the others."
+
+The Bishop told Roberts that they could not then alight, but would gladly
+drink with him; whereupon the good wife brought out her best beer.
+"I commend you, John," quoth the Bishop, as he paused from his hearty
+draught; "you keep a cup of good beer in your house.  I have not drank
+any that has pleased me better since I left home."  The cup passed next
+to the Chancellor, and finally came to Priest Bull, who thrust it aside,
+declaring that it was full of hops and heresy.  As to hops, Roberts
+replied, he could not say, but as for heresy, he bade the priest take
+note that the Lord Bishop had drank of it, and had found no heresy in the
+cup.
+
+The Bishop leaned over his coach door and whispered: "John, I advise you
+to take care you don't offend against the higher Powers.  I have heard
+great complaints against you, that you are the Ringleader of the Quakers
+in this Country; and that, if you are not suppressed, all will signify
+nothing.  Therefore, pray, John, take care, for the future, you don't
+offend any more."
+
+"I like thy Counsel very well," answered Roberts, "and intend to take it.
+But thou knowest God is the higher Power; and you mortal Men, however
+advanced in this World, are but the lower Power; and it is only because I
+endeavor to be obedient to the will of the higher Powers, that the lower
+Powers are angry with me.  But I hope, with the assistance of God, to
+take thy Counsel, and be subject to the higher Powers, let the lower
+Powers do with me as it may please God to suffer them."
+
+The Bishop then said he would like to talk with him further, and
+requested him to meet him at Tedbury the next day.  At the time
+appointed, Roberts went to the inn where the Bishop lodged, and was
+invited to dine with him.  After dinner was over, the prelate told him
+that he must go to church, and leave off holding conventicles at his
+house, of which great complaint was made.  This he flatly refused to do;
+and the Bishop, losing patience, ordered the constable to be sent for.
+Roberts told him that if, after coming to his house under the guise of
+friendship, he should betray him and send him to prison, he, who had
+hitherto commended him for his moderation, would put his name in print,
+and cause it to stink before all sober people.  It was the priests, he
+told him, who set him on; but, instead of hearkening to them, he should
+commend them to some honest vocation, and not suffer them to rob their
+honest neighbors, and feed on the fruits of other men's toil, like
+caterpillars.
+
+"Whom do you call caterpillars?" cried Priest Rich, of North Surrey.
+
+"We farmers," said Roberts, "call those so who live on other men's
+fields, and by the sweat of other men's brows; and if thou dost so, thou
+mayst be one of them."
+
+This reply so enraged the Bishop's attendants that they could only be
+appeased by an order for the constable to take him to jail.  In fact,
+there was some ground for complaint of a lack of courtesy on the part of
+the blunt farmer; and the Christian virtue of forbearance, even in
+Bishops, has its limits.
+
+The constable, obeying the summons, came to the inn, at the door of which
+the landlady met him.  "What do you here!" cried the good woman, "when
+honest John is going to be sent to prison?  Here, come along with me."
+The constable, nothing loath, followed her into a private room, where she
+concealed him.  Word was sent to the Bishop, that the constable was not
+to be found; and the prelate, telling Roberts he could send him to jail
+in the afternoon, dismissed him until evening.  At the hour appointed,
+the latter waited upon the Bishop, and found with him only one priest and
+a lay gentleman.  The priest begged the Bishop to be allowed to discourse
+with the prisoner; and, leave being granted, he began by telling Roberts
+that the knowledge of the Scriptures had made him mad, and that it was a
+great pity he had ever seen them.
+
+"Thou art an unworthy man," said the Quaker, "and I 'll not dispute with
+thee.  If the knowledge of the Scriptures has made me mad, the knowledge
+of the sack-pot hath almost made thee mad; and if we two madmen should
+dispute about religion, we should make mad work of it."
+
+"An 't please you, my Lord," said the scandalized priest, "he says I 'm
+drunk."
+
+The Bishop asked Roberts to repeat his words; and, instead of
+reprimanding him, as the priest expected, was so much amused that he held
+up his hands and laughed; whereupon the offended inferior took a hasty
+leave.  The Bishop, who was evidently glad to be rid of him, now turned
+to Roberts, and complained that he had dealt hardly with him, in telling
+him, before so many gentlemen, that he had sought to betray him by
+professions of friendship, in order to send him to prison; and that,
+if he had not done as he did, people would have reported him as an
+encourager of the Quakers.  "But now, John," said the good prelate, "I'll
+burn the warrant against you before your face."  "You know, Mr. Burnet,"
+he continued, addressing his attendant, "that a Ring of Bells may be made
+of excellent metal, but they may be out of tune; so we may say of John:
+he is a man of as good metal as I ever met with, but quite out of tune."
+
+"Thou mayst well say so," quoth Roberts, "for I can't tune after thy
+pipe."
+
+The inferior clergy were by no means so lenient as the Bishop.  They
+regarded Roberts as the ringleader of Dissent, an impracticable,
+obstinate, contumacious heretic, not only refusing to pay them tithes
+himself, but encouraging others to the same course.  Hence, they thought
+it necessary to visit upon him the full rigor of the law.  His crops were
+taken from his field, and his cattle from his yard.  He was often
+committed to the jail, where, on one occasion, he was kept, with many
+others, for a long time, through the malice of the jailer, who refused to
+put the names of his prisoners in the Calendar, that they might have a
+hearing.  But the spirit of the old Commonwealth's man remained
+steadfast.  When Justice George, at the Ram in Cirencester, told him he
+must conform, and go to church, or suffer the penalty of the law, he
+replied that he had heard indeed that some were formerly whipped out of
+the Temple, but he had never heard of any being whipped in.  The Justice,
+pointing, through the open window of the inn, at the church tower, asked
+him what that was.  "Thou mayst call it a daw-house," answered the
+incorrigible Quaker.  "Dost thou not see how the jackdaws flock about
+it?"
+
+Sometimes it happened that the clergyman was also a magistrate, and
+united in his own person the authority of the State and the zeal of the
+Church.  Justice Parsons, of Gloucester, was a functionary of this sort.
+He wielded the sword of the Spirit on the Sabbath against Dissenters, and
+on week days belabored them with the arm of flesh and the constable's
+staff.  At one time he had between forty and fifty of them locked up in
+Gloucester Castle, among them Roberts and his sons, on the charge of
+attending conventicles.  But the troublesome prisoners baffled his
+vigilance, and turned their prison into a meeting-house, and held their
+conventicles in defiance of him.  The Reverend Justice pounced upon them
+on one occasion, with his attendants.  An old, gray-haired man, formerly
+a strolling fencing-master, was preaching when he came in.  The Justice
+laid hold of him by his white locks, and strove to pull him down, but the
+tall fencing-raster stood firm and spoke on; he then tried to gag him,
+but failed in that also.  He demanded the names of the prisoners, but no
+one answered him.  A voice (we fancy it was that of our old friend
+Roberts) called out: "The Devil must be hard put to it to have his
+drudgery done, when the Priests must leave their pulpits to turn
+informers against poor prisoners."  The Justice obtained a list of the
+names of the prisoners, made out on their commitment, and, taking it for
+granted that all were still present, issued warrants for the collection
+of fines by levies upon their estates.  Among the names was that of a
+poor widow, who had been discharged, and was living, at the time the
+clerical magistrate swore she was at the meeting, twenty miles distant
+from the prison.
+
+Soon after this event, our old friend fell sick.  He had been discharged
+from prison, but his sons were still confined.  The eldest had leave,
+however, to attend him in his illness, and he bears his testimony that
+the Lord was pleased to favor his father with His living presence in his
+last moments.  In keeping with the sturdy Non-conformist's life, he was
+interred at the foot of his own orchard, in Siddington, a spot he had
+selected for a burial-ground long before, where neither the foot of a
+priest nor the shadow of a steeple-house could rest upon his grave.
+
+In closing our notice of this pleasant old narrative, we may remark that
+the light it sheds upon the antagonistic religious parties of the time is
+calculated to dissipate prejudices and correct misapprehensions, common
+alike to Churchmen and Dissenters.  The genial humor, sound sense, and
+sterling virtues of the Quaker farmer should teach the one class that
+poor James Nayler, in his craziness and folly, was not a fair
+representative of his sect; while the kind nature, the hearty
+appreciation of goodness, and the generosity and candor of Bishop
+Nicholson should convince the other class that a prelate is not
+necessarily, and by virtue of his mitre, a Laud or a Bonner.  The
+Dissenters of the seventeenth century may well be forgiven for the
+asperity of their language; men whose ears had been cropped because they
+would not recognize Charles I. as a blessed martyr, and his scandalous
+son as the head of the Church, could scarcely be expected to make
+discriminations, or suggest palliating circumstances, favorable to any
+class of their adversaries.  To use the homely but apt simile of
+McFingal,
+
+         "The will's confirmed by treatment horrid,
+          As hides grow harder when they're curried."
+
+They were wronged, and they told the world of it.  Unlike Shakespeare's
+cardinal, they did not die without a sign.  They branded, by their fierce
+epithets, the foreheads of their persecutors more deeply than the
+sheriff's hot iron did their own.  If they lost their ears, they enjoyed
+the satisfaction of making those of their oppressors tingle.  Knowing
+their persecutors to be in the wrong, they did not always inquire whether
+they themselves had been entirely right, and had done no unrequired works
+of supererogation by the way of "testimony" against their neighbors' mode
+cf worship.  And so from pillory and whipping-post, from prison and
+scaffold, they sent forth their wail and execration, their miserere and
+anathema, and the sound thereof has reached down to our day.  May it
+never wholly die away until, the world over, the forcing of conscience is
+regarded as a crime against humanity and a usurpation of God's
+prerogative.  But abhorring, as we must, persecution under whatever
+pretext it is employed, we are not, therefore, to conclude that all
+persecutors were bad and unfeeling men.  Many of their severities, upon
+which we now look back with horror, were, beyond a question, the result
+of an intense anxiety for the well-being of immortal souls, endangered by
+the poison which, in their view, heresy was casting into the waters of
+life.  Coleridge, in one of the moods of a mind which traversed in
+imagination the vast circle of human experience, reaches this point in
+his Table-Talk.  "It would require," says he, "stronger arguments than
+any I have seen to convince me that men in authority have not a right,
+involved in an imperative duty, to deter those under their control from
+teaching or countenancing doctrines which they believe to be damnable,
+and even to punish with death those who violate such prohibition."  It
+would not be very difficult for us to imagine a tender-hearted Inquisitor
+of this stamp, stifling his weak compassion for the shrieking wretch
+under bodily torment by his strong pity for souls in danger of perdition
+from the sufferer's heresy.  We all know with what satisfaction the
+gentle-spirited Melanethon heard of the burning of Servetus, and with
+what zeal he defended it.  The truth is, the notion that an intellectual
+recognition of certain dogmas is the essential condition of salvation
+lies at the bottom of all intolerance in matters of religion.  Under this
+impression, men are too apt to forget that the great end of Christianity
+is love, and that charity is its crowning virtue; they overlook the
+beautiful significance of the parable of the heretic Samaritan and the
+orthodox Pharisee: and thus, by suffering their speculative opinions of
+the next world to make them uncharitable and cruel in this, they are
+really the worse for them, even admitting them to be true.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             SAMUEL HOPKINS.
+
+Three quarters of a century ago, the name of Samuel Hopkins was as
+familiar as a household word throughout New England.  It was a spell
+wherewith to raise at once a storm of theological controversy.  The
+venerable minister who bore it had his thousands of ardent young
+disciples, as well as defenders and followers of mature age and
+acknowledged talent; a hundred pulpits propagated the dogmas which he had
+engrafted on the stock of Calvinism.  Nor did he lack numerous and
+powerful antagonists.  The sledge ecclesiastic, with more or less effect,
+was unceasingly plied upon the strong-linked chain of argument which he
+slowly and painfully elaborated in the seclusion of his parish.  The
+press groaned under large volumes of theological, metaphysical, and
+psychological disquisition, the very thought of which is now "a weariness
+to the flesh;" in rapid succession pamphlet encountered pamphlet, horned,
+beaked, and sharp of talon, grappling with each other in mid-air, like
+Milton's angels.  That loud controversy, the sound whereof went over
+Christendom, awakening responses from beyond the Atlantic, has now died
+away; its watchwords no longer stir the blood of belligerent sermonizers;
+its very terms and definitions have well-nigh become obsolete and
+unintelligible.  The hands which wrote and the tongues which spoke in
+that day are now all cold and silent; even Emmons, the brave old
+intellectual athlete of Franklin, now sleeps with his fathers,--the last
+of the giants.  Their fame is still in all the churches; effeminate
+clerical dandyism still affects to do homage to their memories; the
+earnest young theologian, exploring with awe the mountainous debris of
+their controversial lore, ponders over the colossal thoughts entombed
+therein, as he would over the gigantic fossils of an early creation, and
+endeavors in vain to recall to the skeleton abstractions before him the
+warm and vigorous life wherewith they were once clothed; but
+Hopkinsianism, as a distinct and living school of philosophy, theology,
+and metaphysics, no longer exists.  It has no living oracles left; and
+its memory survives only in the doctrinal treatises of the elder and
+younger Edwards, Hopkins, Bellamy, and Emmons.
+
+It is no part of our present purpose to discuss the merits of the system
+in question.  Indeed, looking at the great controversy which divided New
+England Calvinism in the eighteenth century, from a point of view which
+secures our impartiality and freedom from prejudice, we find it
+exceedingly difficult to get a precise idea of what was actually at
+issue.  To our poor comprehension, much of the dispute hinges upon names
+rather than things; on the manner of reaching conclusions quite as much
+as upon the conclusions themselves.  Its origin may be traced to the
+great religious awakening of the middle of the past century, when the
+dogmas of the Calvinistic faith were subjected to the inquiry of acute
+and earnest minds, roused up from the incurious ease and passive
+indifference of nominal orthodoxy.  Without intending it, it broke down
+some of the barriers which separated Arminianism and Calvinism; its
+product, Hopkinsianism, while it pushed the doctrine of the Genevan
+reformer on the subject of the Divine decrees and agency to that extreme
+point where it well-nigh loses itself in Pantheism, held at the same time
+that guilt could not be hereditary; that man, being responsible for his
+sinful acts, and not for his sinful nature, can only be justified by a
+personal holiness, consisting not so much in legal obedience as in that
+disinterested benevolence which prefers the glory of God and the welfare
+of universal being above the happiness of self.  It had the merit,
+whatever it may be, of reducing the doctrines of the Reformation to an
+ingenious and scholastic form of theology; of bringing them boldly to the
+test of reason and philosophy.  Its leading advocates were not mere
+heartless reasoners and closet speculators.  They taught that sin was
+selfishness, and holiness self-denying benevolence, and they endeavored
+to practise accordingly.  Their lives recommended their doctrines.  They
+were bold and faithful in the discharge of what they regarded as duty.
+In the midst of slave-holders, and in an age of comparative darkness on
+the subject of human rights, Hopkins and the younger Edwards lifted up
+their voices for the slave.  And twelve years ago, when Abolitionism was
+everywhere spoken against, and the whole land was convulsed with mobs to
+suppress it, the venerable Emmons, burdened with the weight of ninety
+years, made a journey to New York, to attend a meeting of the Anti-
+Slavery Society.  Let those who condemn the creed of these men see to
+it that they do not fall behind them in practical righteousness and
+faithfulness to the convictions of duty.
+
+Samuel Hopkins, who gave his name to the religious system in question,
+was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1721.  In his fifteenth year he
+was placed under the care of a neighboring clergyman, preparatory for
+college, which he entered about a year after.  In 1740, the celebrated
+Whitefield visited New Haven, and awakened there, as elsewhere, serious
+inquiry on religious subjects.  He was followed the succeeding spring by
+Gilbert Tennent, the New Jersey revivalist, a stirring and powerful
+preacher.  A great change took place in the college.  All the phenomena
+which President Edwards has described in his account of the Northampton
+awakening were reproduced among the students.  The excellent David
+Brainard, then a member of the college, visited Hopkins in his apartment,
+and, by a few plain and earnest words, convinced him that he was a
+stranger to vital Christianity.  In his autobiographical sketch, he
+describes in simple and affecting language the dark and desolate state of
+his mind at this period, and the particular exercise which finally
+afforded him some degree of relief, and which he afterwards appears to
+have regarded as his conversion from spiritual death to life.  When he
+first heard Tennent, regarding him as the greatest as well as the best of
+men, he made up his mind to study theology with him; but just before the
+commencement at which he was to take his degree, the elder Edwards
+preached at New Haven.  Struck by the power of the great theologian, he
+at once resolved to make him his spiritual father.  In the winter
+following, he left his father's house on horseback, on a journey of
+eighty miles to Northampton.  Arriving at the house of President Edwards,
+he was disappointed by hearing that he was absent on a preaching tour.
+But he was kindly received by the gifted and accomplished lady of the
+mansion, and encouraged to remain during the winter.  Still doubtful in
+respect to his own spiritual state, he was, he says, "very gloomy, and
+retired most of the time in his chamber."  The kind heart of his amiable
+hostess was touched by his evident affliction.  After some days she came
+to his chamber, and, with the gentleness and delicacy of a true woman,
+inquired into the cause of his unhappiness.  The young student disclosed
+to her, without reserve, the state of his feelings and the extent of his
+fears.  "She told me," says the Doctor, "that she had had peculiar
+exercises respecting me since I had been in the family; that she trusted
+I should receive light and comfort, and doubted not that God intended yet
+to do great things by me."
+
+After pursuing his studies for some months with the Puritan philosopher,
+young Hopkins commenced preaching, and, in 1743, was ordained at
+Sheffield, (now Great Barrington') in the western part of Massachusetts.
+There were at the time only about thirty families in the town.  He says
+it was a matter of great regret to him to be obliged to settle so far
+from his spiritual guide and tutor but seven years after he was relieved
+and gratified by the removal of Edwards to Stockbridge, as the Indian
+missionary at that station, seven miles only from his own residence; and
+for several years the great metaphysician and his favorite pupil enjoyed
+the privilege of familiar intercourse with each other.  The removal of
+the former in 1758 to Princeton, New Jersey, and his death, which soon
+followed, are mentioned in the diary of Hopkins as sore trials and
+afflictive dispensations.
+
+Obtaining a dismissal from his society in Great Barrington in 1769,
+he was installed at Newport the next year, as minister of the first
+Congregational church in that place.  Newport, at this period, was, in
+size, wealth, and commercial importance, the second town in New England.
+It was the great slave mart of the North.  Vessels loaded with stolen men
+and women and children, consigned to its merchant princes, lay at its
+wharves; immortal beings were sold daily in its market, like cattle at a
+fair.  The soul of Hopkins was moved by the appalling spectacle.  A
+strong conviction of the great wrong of slavery, and of its utter
+incompatibility with the Christian profession, seized upon his mind.
+While at Great Barrington, he had himself owned a slave, whom he had sold
+on leaving the place, without compunction or suspicion in regard to the
+rightfulness of the transaction.  He now saw the origin of the system in
+its true light; he heard the seamen engaged in the African trade tell of
+the horrible scenes of fire and blood which they had witnessed, and in
+which they had been actors; he saw the half-suffocated wretches brought
+up from their noisome and narrow prison, their squalid countenances and
+skeleton forms bearing fearful evidence of the suffering attendant upon
+the transportation from their native homes.  The demoralizing effects of
+slaveholding everywhere forced themselves upon his attention, for the
+evil had struck its roots deeply in the community, and there were few
+families into which it had not penetrated.  The right to deal in slaves,
+and use them as articles of property, was questioned by no one; men of
+all professions, clergymen and church-members, consulted only their
+interest and convenience as to their purchase or sale.  The magnitude of
+the evil at first appalled him; he felt it to be his duty to condemn it,
+but for a time even his strong spirit faltered and turned pale in
+contemplation of the consequences to be apprehended from an attack upon
+it.  Slavery and slave-trading were at that time the principal source of
+wealth to the island; his own church and congregation were personally
+interested in the traffic; all were implicated in its guilt.  He stood
+alone, as it were, in its condemnation; with here and there an exception,
+all Christendom maintained the rightfulness of slavery.  No movement had
+yet been made in England against the slave-trade; the decision of
+Granville Sharp's Somerset case had not yet taken place.  The Quakers,
+even, had not at that time redeemed themselves from the opprobrium.
+Under these circumstances, after a thorough examination of the subject,
+he resolved, in the strength of the Lord, to take his stand openly and
+decidedly on the side of humanity.  He prepared a sermon for the purpose,
+and for the first time from a pulpit of New England was heard an emphatic
+testimony against the sin of slavery.  In contrast with the unselfish and
+disinterested benevolence which formed in his mind the essential element
+of Christian holiness, he held up the act of reducing human beings to the
+condition of brutes, to minister to the convenience, the luxury, and
+lusts of the owner.  He had expected bitter complaint and opposition from
+his hearers, but was agreeably surprised to find that in most cases his
+sermon only excited astonishment in their minds that they themselves had
+never before looked at the subject in the light in which he presented it.
+Steadily and faithfully pursuing the matter, he had the satisfaction to
+carry with him his church, and obtain from it, in the midst of a
+slaveholding and slavetrading community, a resolution every way worthy of
+note in this day of cowardly compromise with the evil on the part of our
+leading ecclesiastical bodies:--
+
+"Resolved, That the slave-trade and the slavery of the Africans, as it
+has existed among us, is a gross violation of the righteousness and
+benevolence which are so much inculcated in the Gospel, and therefore we
+will not tolerate it in this church."
+
+There are few instances on record of moral heroism superior to that of
+Samuel Hopkins, in thus rebuking slavery in the time and place of its
+power.  Honor to the true man ever, who takes his life in his hands, and,
+at all hazards, speaks the word which is given him to utter, whether men
+will hear or forbear, whether the end thereof is to be praise or censure,
+gratitude or hatred.  It well may be doubted whether on that Sabbath day
+the angels of God, in their wide survey of His universe, looked upon a
+nobler spectacle than that of the minister of Newport, rising up before
+his slaveholding congregation, and demanding, in the name of the Highest,
+the "deliverance of the captive, and the opening of prison doors to them
+that were bound."
+
+Dr. Hopkins did not confine his attention solely to slaveholding in his
+own church and congregation.  He entered into correspondence with the
+early Abolitionists of Europe as well as his own country.  He labored
+with his brethren in the ministry to bring then to his own view of the
+great wrong of holding men as slaves.  In a visit to his early friend,
+Dr. Bellamy, at Bethlehem, who was the owner of a slave, he pressed the
+subject kindly but earnestly upon his attention.  Dr. Bellamy urged the
+usual arguments in favor of slavery.  Dr. Hopkins refuted them in the
+most successful manner, and called upon his friend to do an act of simple
+justice, in giving immediate freedom to his slave.  Dr. Bellamy, thus
+hardly pressed, said that the slave was a most judicious and faithful
+fellow; that, in the management of his farm, he could trust everything to
+his discretion; that he treated him well, and he was so happy in his
+service that he would refuse his freedom if it were offered him.
+
+"Will you," said Hopkins, "consent to his liberation, if he really
+desires it?"
+
+"Yes, certainly," said Dr. Bellamy.
+
+"Then let us try him," said his guest.
+
+The slave was at work in an adjoining field, and at the call of his
+master came promptly to receive his commands.
+
+"Have you a good master?"  inquired Hopkins.
+
+"O yes; massa, he berry good."
+
+"But are you happy in your present condition?"  queried the Doctor.
+
+"O yes, massa; berry happy."
+
+Dr. Bellamy here could scarcely suppress his exultation at what he
+supposed was a complete triumph over his anti-slavery brother.  But the
+pertinacious guest continued his queries.
+
+"Would you not be more happy if you were free?"
+
+"O yes, massa," exclaimed the negro, his dark face glowing with new life;
+"berry much more happy!"
+
+To the honor of Dr. Bellamy, he did not hesitate.
+
+"You have your wish," he said to his servant.  "From this moment you are
+free."
+
+Dr. Hopkins was a poor man, but one of his first acts, after becoming
+convinced of the wrongfulness of slavery, was to appropriate the very sum
+which, in the days of his ignorance, he had obtained as the price of his
+slave to the benevolent purpose of educating some pious colored men in
+the town of Newport, who were desirous of returning to their native
+country as missionaries.  In one instance he borrowed, on his own
+responsibility, the sum requisite to secure the freedom of a slave in
+whom he became interested.  One of his theological pupils was Newport
+Gardner, who, twenty years after the death of his kind patron, left
+Boston as a missionary to Africa.  He was a native African, and was held
+by Captain Gardner, of Newport, who allowed him to labor for his own
+benefit, whenever by extra diligence he could gain a little time for that
+purpose.  The poor fellow was in the habit of laying up his small
+earnings on these occasions, in the faint hope of one day obtaining
+thereby the freedom of himself and his family.  But time passed on, and
+the hoard of purchase-money still looked sadly small.  He concluded to
+try the efficacy of praying.  Having gained a day for himself, by severe
+labor, and communicating his plan only to Dr. Hopkins and two or three
+other Christian friends, he shut himself up in his humble dwelling, and
+spent the time in prayer for freedom.  Towards the close of the day, his
+master sent for him.  He was told that this was his gained time, and that
+he was engaged for himself.  "No matter," returned the master, "I must
+see him."  Poor Newport reluctantly abandoned his supplications, and came
+at his master's bidding, when, to his astonishment, instead of a
+reprimand, he received a paper, signed by his master, declaring him and
+his family from thenceforth free.  He justly attributed this signal
+blessing to the all-wise Disposer, who turns the hearts of men as the
+rivers of water are turned; but it cannot be doubted that the labors and
+arguments of Dr. Hopkins with his master were the human instrumentality
+in effecting it.
+
+In the year 1773, in connection with Dr. Ezra Stiles, he issued an appeal
+to the Christian community in behalf of a society which he had been
+instrumental in forming, for the purpose of educating missionaries for
+Africa.  In the desolate and benighted condition of that unhappy
+continent he had become painfully interested, by conversing with the
+slaves brought into Newport.  Another appeal was made on the subject in
+1776.
+
+The war of the Revolution interrupted, for a time, the philanthropic
+plans of Dr. Hopkins.  The beautiful island on which he lived was at an
+early period exposed to the exactions and devastations of the enemy.  All
+who could do so left it for the mainland.  Its wharves were no longer
+thronged with merchandise; its principal dwellings stood empty; the very
+meeting houses were in a great measure abandoned.  Dr. Hopkins, who had
+taken the precaution, at the commencement of hostilities, to remove his
+family to Great Barrington, remained himself until the year 1776, when
+the British took possession of the island.  During the period of its
+occupation, he was employed in preaching to destitute congregations.
+He spent the summer of 1777 at Newburyport, where his memory is still
+cherished by the few of his hearers who survive.  In the spring of 1780,
+he returned to Newport.  Everything had undergone a melancholy change.
+The garden of New England lay desolate.  His once prosperous and wealthy
+church and congregation were now poor, dispirited, and, worst of all,
+demoralized.  His meeting-house had been used as a barrack for soldiers;
+pulpit and pews had been destroyed; the very bell had been stolen.
+Refusing, with his characteristic denial of self, a call to settle in a
+more advantageous position, he sat himself down once more in the midst of
+his reduced and impoverished parishioners, and, with no regular salary,
+dependent entirely on such free-will offerings as from time to time were
+made him, he remained with them until his death.
+
+In 1776, Dr. Hopkins published his celebrated "Dialogue concerning the
+Slavery of the Africans; showing it to be the Duty and Interest of the
+American States to Emancipate all their Slaves."  This he dedicated to
+the Continental Congress, the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.
+It was republished in 1785, by the New York Abolition Society, and was
+widely circulated.  A few years after, on coming unexpectedly into
+possession of a few hundred dollars, he devoted immediately one hundred
+of it to the society for ameliorating the condition of the Africans.
+
+He continued to preach until he had reached his eighty-third year.  His
+last sermon was delivered on the 16th of the tenth month, 1803, and his
+death took place in the twelfth month following.  He died calmly, in the
+steady faith of one who had long trusted all things in the hand of God.
+"The language of my heart is," said he, "let God be glorified by all
+things, and the best interest of His kingdom promoted, whatever becomes
+of me or my interest."  To a young friend, who visited him three days
+before his death, he said, "I am feeble and cannot say much.  I have said
+all I can say.  With my last words, I tell you, religion is the one thing
+needful."  "And now," he continued, affectionately pressing the hand of
+his friend, "I am going to die, and I am glad of it."  Many years before,
+an agreement had been made between Dr. Hopkins and his old and tried
+friend, Dr. Hart, of Connecticut, that when either was called home, the
+survivor should preach the funeral sermon of the deceased.  The venerable
+Dr. Hart accordingly came, true to his promise, preaching at the funeral
+from the words of Elisha, "My father, my father; the chariots of Israel,
+and the horsemen thereof."  In the burial-ground adjoining his meeting-
+house lies all that was mortal of Samuel Hopkins.
+
+One of Dr. Hopkins's habitual hearers, and who has borne grateful
+testimony to the beauty and holiness of his life and conversation, was
+William Ellery Channing.  Widely as he afterwards diverged from the creed
+of his early teacher, it contained at least one doctrine to the influence
+of which the philanthropic devotion of his own life to the welfare of man
+bears witness.  He says, himself, that there always seemed to him
+something very noble in the doctrine of disinterested benevolence, the
+casting of self aside, and doing good, irrespective of personal
+consequences, in this world or another, upon which Dr. Hopkins so
+strongly insisted, as the all-essential condition of holiness.
+
+How widely apart, as mere theologians, stood Hopkins and Channing!  Yet
+how harmonious their lives and practice!  Both could forget the poor
+interests of self, in view of eternal right and universal humanity.  Both
+could appreciate the saving truth, that love to God and His creation is
+the fulfilling of the divine law.  The idea of unselfish benevolence,
+which they held in common, clothed with sweetness and beauty the stern
+and repulsive features of the theology of Hopkins, and infused a sublime
+spirit of self-sacrifice and a glowing humanity into the indecisive and
+less robust faith of Charming.  What is the lesson of this but that
+Christianity consists rather in the affections than in the intellect;
+that it is a life rather than a creed; and that they who diverge the
+widest from each other in speculation upon its doctrines may, after all,
+be found working side by side on the common ground of its practice.
+
+We have chosen to speak of Dr. Hopkins as a philanthropist rather than as
+a theologian.  Let those who prefer to contemplate the narrow sectarian
+rather than the universal man dwell upon his controversial works, and
+extol the ingenuity and logical acumen with which he defended his own
+dogmas and assailed those of others.  We honor him, not as the founder of
+a new sect, but as the friend of all mankind,--the generous defender of
+the poor and oppressed.  Great as unquestionably were his powers of
+argument, his learning, and skill in the use of the weapons of theologic
+warfare, these by no means constitute his highest title to respect and
+reverence.  As the product of an honest and earnest mind, his doctrinal
+dissertations have at least the merit of sincerity.  They were put forth
+in behalf of what he regarded as truth; and the success which they met
+with, while it called into exercise his profoundest gratitude, only
+served to deepen the humility and self-abasement of their author.  As the
+utterance of what a good man believed and felt, as a part of the history
+of a life remarkable for its consecration to apprehended duty, these
+writings cannot be without interest even to those who dissent from their
+arguments and deny their assumptions; but in the time now, we trust, near
+at hand, when distracted and divided Christendom shall unite in a new
+Evangelical union, in which orthodoxy in life and practice shall be
+estimated above orthodoxy in theory, he will be honored as a good man,
+rather than as a successful creed-maker; as a friend of the oppressed and
+the fearless rebuker of popular sin rather than as the champion of a
+protracted sectarian war.  Even now his writings, so popular in their
+day, are little known.  The time may come when no pilgrim of sectarianism
+shall visit his grave.  But his memory shall live in the hearts of the
+good and generous; the emancipated slave shall kneel over his ashes, and
+bless God for the gift to humanity of a life so devoted to its welfare.
+To him may be applied the language of one who, on the spot where he
+labored and lay down to rest, while rejecting the doctrinal views of the
+theologian, still cherishes the philanthropic spirit of the man:--
+
+         "He is not lost,--he hath not passed away
+          Clouds, earths, may pass, but stars shine calmly on;
+          And he who doth the will of God, for aye
+          Abideth, when the earth and heaven are gone.
+
+         "Alas that such a heart is in the grave!'
+          Thanks for the life that now shall never end!
+          Weep, and rejoice, thou terror-hunted slave,
+          That hast both lost and found so great a friend!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             RICHARD BAXTER.
+
+The picture drawn by a late English historian of the infamous Jeffreys in
+his judicial robes, sitting in judgment upon the venerable Richard
+Baxter, brought before him to answer to an indictment, setting; forth
+that the said "Richardus Baxter, persona seditiosa et factiosa pravae
+mentis, impiae, inquietae, turbulent disposition et conversation; falso
+illicte, injuste nequit factiose seditiose, et irreligiose, fecit,
+composuit, scripsit quendam falsum, seditiosum, libellosum, factiosum et
+irreligiosum librum," is so remarkable that the attention of the most
+careless reader is at once arrested.  Who was that old man, wasted with
+disease and ghastly with the pallor of imprisonment, upon whom the foul-
+mouthed buffoon in ermine exhausted his vocabulary of abuse and ridicule?
+Who was Richardus Baxter?
+
+The author of works so elaborate and profound as to frighten by their
+very titles and ponderous folios the modern ecclesiastical student from
+their perusal, his hold upon the present generation is limited to a few
+practical treatises, which, from their very nature, can never become
+obsolete.  The _Call to the Unconverted_ and the _Saints' Everlasting
+Rest_ belong to no time or sect.  They speak the universal language of
+the wants and desires of the human soul.  They take hold of the awful
+verities of life and death, righteousness and judgment to come.  Through
+them the suffering and hunted minister of Kidderminster has spoken in
+warning, entreaty, and rebuke, or in tones of tenderest love and pity, to
+the hearts of the generations which have succeeded him.  His
+controversial works, his confessions of faith, his learned disputations,
+and his profound doctrinal treatises are no longer read.  Their author
+himself, towards the close of his life, anticipated, in respect to these
+favorite productions, the children of his early zeal, labor, and
+suffering, the judgment of posterity.  "I perceive," he says, "that most
+of the doctrinal controversies among Protestants are far more about
+equivocal words than matter.  Experience since the year 1643 to this year
+1675 hath loudly called me to repent of my own prejudices, sidings, and
+censurings of causes and persons not understood, and of all the
+miscarriages of my ministry and life which have been thereby caused; and
+to make it my chief work to call men that are within my bearing to more
+peaceable thoughts, affections, and practices."
+
+Richard Baxter was born at the village of Eton Constantine, in 1615.  He
+received from officiating curates of the little church such literary
+instruction as could be given by men who had left the farmer's flail, the
+tailor's thimble, and the service of strolling stage-players, to perform
+church drudgery under the parish incumbent, who was old and well-nigh
+blind.  At the age of sixteen, he was sent to a school at Wroxeter, where
+he spent three years, to little purpose, so far as a scientific education
+was concerned.  His teacher left him to himself mainly, and following the
+bent of his mind, even at that early period, he abandoned the exact
+sciences for the perusal of such controversial and metaphysical writings
+of the schoolmen as his master's library afforded.  The smattering of
+Latin which he acquired only served in after years to deform his
+treatises with barbarous, ill-adapted, and erroneous citations.  "As to
+myself," said he, in his letter written in old age to Anthony Wood, who
+had inquired whether he was an Oxonian graduate, "my faults are no
+disgrace to a university, for I was of none; I have but little but what I
+had out of books and inconsiderable help of country divines.  Weakness
+and pain helped me to study how to die; that set me a-studying how to
+live; and that on studying the doctrine from which I must fetch my
+motives and comforts; beginning with necessities, I proceeded by degrees,
+and am now going to see that for which I have lived and studied."
+
+Of the first essays of the young theologian as a preacher of the
+Established Church, his early sufferings from that complication of
+diseases with which his whole life was tormented, of the still keener
+afflictions of a mind whose entire outlook upon life and nature was
+discolored and darkened by its disordered bodily medium, and of the
+struggles between his Puritan temperament and his reverence for Episcopal
+formulas, much might be profitably said, did the limits we have assigned
+ourselves admit.  Nor can we do more than briefly allude to the religious
+doubts and difficulties which darkened and troubled his mind at an early
+period.
+
+He tells us at length in his Life how he struggled with these spiritual
+infirmities and temptations.  The future life, the immortality of the
+soul, and the truth of the Scriptures were by turns questioned.  "I
+never," says he in a letter to Dr. More, inserted in the _Sadducisimus
+Triumphatus_, "had so much ado to overcome a temptation as that to the
+opinion of Averroes, that, as extinguished candles go all out in an
+illuminated air, so separated souls go all into one common anima mundi,
+and lose their individuation."  With these and similar "temptations"
+Baxter struggled long, earnestly, and in the end triumphantly.  His
+faith, when once established, remained unshaken to the last; and although
+always solemn, reverential, and deeply serious, he was never the subject
+of religious melancholy, or of that mournful depression of soul which
+arises from despair of an interest in the mercy and paternal love of our
+common Father.
+
+The Great Revolution found him settled as a minister in Kidderminster,
+under the sanction of a drunken vicar, who, yielding to the clamor of his
+more sober parishioners, and his fear of their appeal to the Long
+Parliament, then busy in its task of abating church nuisances, had agreed
+to give him sixty pounds per year, in the place of a poor tippling
+curate, notorious as a common railer and pothouse encumbrance.
+
+As might have been expected, the sharp contrast which the earnest,
+devotional spirit and painful strictness of Baxter presented to the
+irreverent license and careless good humor of his predecessor by no means
+commended him to the favor of a large class of his parishioners.  Sabbath
+merry-makers missed the rubicund face and maudlin jollity of their old
+vicar; the ignorant and vicious disliked the new preacher's rigid
+morality; the better informed revolted at his harsh doctrines, austere
+life, and grave manner.  Intense earnestness characterized all his
+efforts.  Contrasting human nature with the Infinite Purity and Holiness,
+he was oppressed with the sense of the loathsomeness and deformity of
+sin, and afflicted by the misery of his fellow-creatures separated from
+the divine harmony.  He tells us that at this period he preached the
+terrors of the Law and the necessity of repentance, rather than the joys
+and consolations of the Gospel, upon which he so loved to dwell in his
+last years.  He seems to have felt a necessity laid upon him to startle
+men from false hope and security, and to call for holiness of life and
+conformity to the divine will as the only ground of safety.  Powerful and
+impressive as are the appeals and expostulations contained in his written
+works, they probably convey but a faint idea of the force and earnestness
+of those which he poured forth from his pulpit.  As he advanced in years,
+these appeals were less frequently addressed to the fears of his
+auditors, for he had learned to value a calm and consistent life of
+practical goodness beyond any passionate exhibition of terrors, fervors,
+and transports.  Having witnessed, in an age of remarkable enthusiasm and
+spiritual awakening, the ill effects of passional excitements and
+religious melancholy, he endeavored to present cheerful views of
+Christian life and duty, and made it a special object to repress morbid
+imaginations and heal diseased consciences.  Thus it came to pass that no
+man of his day was more often applied to for counsel and relief by
+persons laboring under mental depression than himself.  He has left
+behind him a very curious and not uninstructive discourse, which he
+entitled The Cure of Melancholy, by Faith and Physick, in which he shows
+a great degree of skill in his morbid mental anatomy.  He had studied
+medicine to some extent for the benefit of the poor of his parish, and
+knew something of the intimate relations and sympathy of the body and
+mind; he therefore did not hesitate to ascribe many of the spiritual
+complaints of his applicants to disordered bodily functions, nor to
+prescribe pills and powders in the place of Scripture texts.  More than
+thirty years after the commencement of his labors at Kidderminster he
+thus writes: "I was troubled this year with multitudes of melancholy
+persons from several places of the land; some of high quality, some of
+low, some exquisitely learned, and some unlearned.  I know not how it
+came to pass, but if men fell melancholy I must hear from them or see
+them, more than any physician I knew."  He cautions against ascribing
+melancholy phantasms and passions to the Holy Spirit, warns the young
+against licentious imaginations and excitements, and ends by advising all
+to take heed how they make of religion a matter of "fears, tears, and
+scruples."  "True religion," he remarks, "doth principally consist in
+obedience, love, and joy."
+
+At this early period of his ministry, however, he had all of Whitefield's
+intensity and fervor, added to reasoning powers greatly transcending
+those of the revivalist of the next century.  Young in years, he was even
+then old in bodily infirmity and mental experience.  Believing himself
+the victim of a mortal disease, he lived and preached in the constant
+prospect of death.  His memento mori was in his bed-chamber, and sat by
+him at his frugal meal.  The glory of the world was stained to his
+vision.  He was blind to the beauty of all its "pleasant pictures."  No
+monk of Mount Athos or silent Chartreuse, no anchorite of Indian
+superstition, ever more completely mortified the flesh, or turned his
+back more decidedly upon the "good things" of this life.  A solemn and
+funeral atmosphere surrounded him.  He walked in the shadows of the
+cypress, and literally "dwelt among the tombs."  Tortured by incessant
+pain, he wrestled against its attendant languor and debility, as a sinful
+wasting of inestimable time; goaded himself to constant toil and
+devotional exercise, and, to use his own words, "stirred up his sluggish
+soul to speak to sinners with compassion, as a dying man to dying men."
+
+Such entire consecration could not long be without its effect, even upon
+the "vicious rabble," as Baxter calls them.  His extraordinary
+earnestness, self-forgetting concern for the spiritual welfare of others,
+his rigid life of denial and sacrifice, if they failed of bringing men to
+his feet as penitents, could not but awaken a feeling of reverence and
+awe.  In Kidderminster, as in most other parishes of the kingdom, there
+were at this period pious, sober, prayerful people, diligent readers of
+the Scriptures, who were derided by their neighbors as Puritans,
+precisians, and hypocrites.  These were naturally drawn towards the new
+preacher, and he as naturally recognized them as "honest seekers of the
+word and way of God."  Intercourse with such men, and the perusal of the
+writings of certain eminent Non-conformists, had the effect to abate, in
+some degree, his strong attachment to the Episcopal formula and polity.
+He began to doubt the rightfulness of making the sign of the cross in
+baptism, and to hesitate about administering the sacrament to profane
+swearers and tipplers.
+
+But while Baxter, in the seclusion of his parish, was painfully weighing
+the arguments for and against the wearing of surplices, the use of
+marriage rings, and the prescribed gestures and genuflections of his
+order, tithing with more or less scruple of conscience the mint and anise
+and cummin of pulpit ceremonials, the weightier matters of the law,
+freedom, justice, and truth were claiming the attention of Pym and
+Hampden, Brook and Vane, in the Parliament House.  The controversy
+between King and Commons had reached the point where it could only be
+decided by the dread arbitrament of battle.  The somewhat equivocal
+position of the Kidderminster preacher exposed him to the suspicion of
+the adherents of the King and Bishops.  The rabble, at that period
+sympathizing with the party of license in morals and strictness in
+ceremonials, insulted and mocked him, and finally drove him from his
+parish.
+
+On the memorable 23d of tenth month, 1642, he was invited to occupy a
+friend's pulpit at Alcester.
+
+While preaching, a low, dull, jarring roll, as of continuous thunder,
+sounded in his ears.  It was the cannon-fire of Edgehill, the prelude to
+the stern battle-piece of revolution.  On the morrow, Baxter hurried to
+the scene of action.  "I was desirous," he says, "to see the field.  I
+found the Earl of Essex keeping the ground, and the King's army facing
+them on a hill about a mile off.  There were about a thousand dead bodies
+in the field between them."  Turning from this ghastly survey, the
+preacher mingled with the Parliamentary army, when, finding the surgeons
+busy with the wounded, he very naturally sought occasion for the exercise
+of his own vocation as a spiritual practitioner.  He attached himself to
+the army.  So far as we can gather from his own memoirs and the testimony
+of his contemporaries, he was not influenced to this step by any of the
+political motives which actuated the Parliamentary leaders.  He was no
+revolutionist.  He was as blind and unquestioning in his reverence for
+the King's person and divine right, and as hearty in his hatred of
+religious toleration and civil equality, as any of his clerical brethren
+who officiated in a similar capacity in the ranks of Goring and Prince
+Rupert.  He seems only to have looked upon the soldiers as a new set of
+parishioners, whom Providence had thrown in his way.  The circumstances
+of his situation left him little choice in the matter.  "I had," he says,
+"neither money nor friends.  I knew not who would receive me in a place
+of safety, nor had I anything to satisfy them for diet and
+entertainment."  He accepted an offer to live in the Governor's house at
+Coventry, and preach to the soldiers of the garrison.  Here his skill in
+polemics was called into requisition, in an encounter with two New
+England Antinomians, and a certain Anabaptist tailor who was making more
+rents in the garrison's orthodoxy than he mended in their doublets and
+breeches.  Coventry seems at this time to have been the rendezvous of a
+large body of clergymen, who, as Baxter says, were "for King and
+Parliament,"--men who, in their desire for a more spiritual worship, most
+unwillingly found themselves classed with the sentries whom they regarded
+as troublers and heretics, not to be tolerated; who thought the King had
+fallen into the hands of the Papists, and that Essex and Cromwell were
+fighting to restore him; and who followed the Parliamentary forces to see
+to it that they were kept sound in faith, and free from the heresy of
+which the Court News-Book accused them.  Of doing anything to overturn
+the order of Church and State, or of promoting any radical change in the
+social and political condition of the people, they had no intention
+whatever.  They looked at the events of the time, and upon their duties
+in respect to them, not as politicians or reformers, but simply as
+ecclesiastics and spiritual teachers, responsible to God for the
+religious beliefs and practices of the people, rather than for their
+temporal welfare and happiness.  They were not the men who struck down
+the solemn and imposing prelacy of England, and vindicated the divine
+right of men to freedom by tossing the head of an anointed tyrant from
+the scaffold at Whitehall.  It was the so-called schismatics, ranters,
+and levellers, the disputatious corporals and Anabaptist musketeers, the
+dread and abhorrence alike of prelate and presbyter, who, under the lead
+of Cromwell,
+
+                   "Ruined the great work of time,
+                    And cast the kingdoms old
+                    Into another mould."
+
+The Commonwealth was the work of the laity, the sturdy yeomanry and God-
+fearing commoners of England.
+
+The news of the fight of Naseby reaching Coventry, Baxter, who had
+friends in the Parliamentary forces, wishing, as he says, to be assured
+of their safety, passed over to the stricken field, and spent a night
+with them.  He was afflicted and confounded by the information which they
+gave him, that the victorious army was full of hot-headed schemers and
+levellers, who were against King and Church, prelacy and ritual, and who
+were for a free Commonwealth and freedom of religious belief and worship.
+He was appalled to find that the heresies of the Antinomians, Arminians,
+and Anabaptists had made sadder breaches in the ranks of Cromwell than
+the pikes of Jacob Astley, or the daggers of the roysterers who followed
+the mad charge of Rupert.  Hastening back to Coventry, he called together
+his clerical brethren, and told them "the sad news of the corruption of
+the army."  After much painful consideration of the matter, it was deemed
+best for Baxter to enter Cromwell's army, nominally as its chaplain, but
+really as the special representative of orthodoxy in politics and
+religion, against the democratic weavers and prophesying tailors who
+troubled it.  He joined Whalley's regiment, and followed it through many
+a hot skirmish and siege.  Personal fear was by no means one of Baxter's
+characteristics, and he bore himself through all with the coolness of an
+old campaigner.  Intent upon his single object, he sat unmoved under the
+hail of cannon-shot from the walls of Bristol, confronted the well-plied
+culverins of Sherburne, charged side by side with Harrison upon Goring's
+musketeers at Langford, and heard the exulting thanksgiving of that grim
+enthusiast, when "with a loud voice he broke forth in praises of God, as
+one in rapture;" and marched, Bible in hand, with Cromwell himself, to
+the storming of Basing-House, so desperately defended by the Marquis of
+Winchester.  In truth, these storms of outward conflict were to him of
+small moment.  He was engaged in a sterner battle with spiritual
+principalities and powers, struggling with Satan himself in the guise of
+political levellers and Antinomian sowers of heresy.  No antagonist was
+too high and none too low for him.  Distrusting Cromwell, he sought to
+engage him in a discussion of certain points of abstract theology,
+wherein his soundness seemed questionable; but the wary chief baffled off
+the young disputant by tedious, unanswerable discourses about free grace,
+which Baxter admits were not unsavory to others, although the speaker
+himself had little understanding of the matter.  At other times, he
+repelled his sad-visaged chaplain with unwelcome jests and rough,
+soldierly merriment; for he had "a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity as
+another man hath when he hath taken a cup too much."  Baxter says of him,
+complainingly, "he would not dispute with me at all."  But, in the midst
+of such an army, he could not lack abundant opportunity for the exercise
+of his peculiar powers of argumentation.  At Amersham, he had a sort of
+pitched battle with the contumacious soldiers.  "When the public talking
+day came," says he, "I took the reading-pew, and Pitchford's cornet and
+troopers took the gallery.  There did the leader of the Chesham men
+begin, and afterwards Pitchford's soldiers set in; and I alone disputed
+with them from morning until almost night; for I knew their trick, that
+if I had gone out first, they would have prated what boasting words they
+listed, and made the people believe that they had baffled me, or got the
+best; therefore I stayed it out till they first rose and went away."  As
+usual in such cases, both parties claimed the victory.  Baxter got thanks
+only from the King's adherents; "Pitchford's troops and the leader of the
+Chesham men" retired from their hard day's work, to enjoy the countenance
+and favor of Cromwell, as men after his own heart, faithful to the Houses
+and the Word, against kingcraft and prelacy.
+
+Laughed at and held at arm's length by Cromwell, shunned by Harrison and
+Berry and other chief officers, opposed on all points by shrewd, earnest
+men, as ready for polemic controversy as for battle with the King's
+malignants, and who set off against his theological and metaphysical
+distinctions their own personal experiences and spiritual exercises, he
+had little to encourage him in his arduous labors.  Alone in such a
+multitude, flushed with victory and glowing with religious enthusiasm,
+he earnestly begged his brother ministers to come to his aid.  "If the
+army," said he, "had only ministers enough, who could have done such
+little as I did, all their plot might have been broken, and King,
+Parliament, and Religion might have been preserved."  But no one
+volunteered to assist him, and the "plot" of revolution went on.
+
+After Worcester fight he returned to Coventry, to make his report to the
+ministers assembled there.  He told them of his labors and trials, of the
+growth of heresy and levelling principles in the army, and of the evident
+design of its leaders to pull down Church, King, and Ministers.  He
+assured them that the day was at hand when all who were true to the King,
+Parliament, and Religion should come forth to oppose these leaders, and
+draw away their soldiers from them.  For himself, he was willing to go
+back to the army, and labor there until the crisis of which he spoke had
+arrived.  "Whereupon," says he, "they all voted me to go yet longer."
+
+Fortunately for the cause of civil and religious freedom, the great body
+of the ministers, who disapproved of the ultraism of the victorious army,
+and sympathized with the defeated King, lacked the courage and
+devotedness of Baxter.  Had they promptly seconded his efforts, although
+the restoration of the King might have been impossible at that late
+period, the horrors of civil war must have been greatly protracted.  As
+it was, they preferred to remain at home, and let Baxter have the benefit
+of their prayers and good wishes.  He returned to the army with the
+settled purpose, of causing its defection from Cromwell; but, by one of
+those dispensations which the latter used to call "births of Providence,"
+he was stricken down with severe sickness.  Baxter's own comments upon
+this passage in his life are not without interest.  He says, God
+prevented his purposes in his last and chiefest opposition to the army;
+that he intended to take off or seduce from their officers the regiment
+with which he was connected, and then to have tried his persuasion upon
+the others.  He says he afterwards found that his sickness was a mercy to
+himself, "for they were so strong and active, and I had been likely to
+have had small success in the attempt, and to have lost my life among
+them in their fury."  He was right in this last conjecture; Oliver
+Cromwell would have had no scruples in making an example of a plotting
+priest; and "Pitchford's soldiers" might have been called upon to
+silence, with their muskets, the tough disputant who was proof against
+their tongues.
+
+After a long and dubious illness, Baxter was so far restored as to be
+able to go back to his old parish at Kidderminster.  Here, under the
+Protectorate of Cromwell, he remained in the full enjoyment of that
+religious liberty which he still stoutly condemned in its application to
+others.
+
+He afterwards candidly admits, that, under the "Usurper," as he styles
+Cromwell, "he had such liberty and advantage to preach the Gospel with
+success, as he could not have under a King, to whom he had sworn and
+performed true subjection and obedience."  Yet this did not prevent him
+from preaching and printing, "seasonably and moderately," against the
+Protector.  "I declared," said he, "Cromwell and his adherents to be
+guilty of treason and rebellion, aggravated by perfidiousness and
+hypocrisy.  But yet I did not think it my duty to rave against him in the
+pulpit, or to do this so unseasonably and imprudently as might irritate
+him to mischief.  And the rather, because, as he kept up his approbation
+of a godly life in general, and of all that was good, except that which
+the interest of his sinful cause engaged him to be against.  So I
+perceived that it was his design to do good in the main, and to promote
+the Gospel and the interests of godliness more than any had done before
+him."
+
+Cromwell, if he heard of his diatribes against him, appears to have cared
+little for them.  Lords Warwick and Broghill, on one occasion, brought
+him to preach before the Lord Protector.  He seized the occasion to
+preach against the sentries, to condemn all who countenanced them, and to
+advocate the unity of the Church.  Soon after, he was sent for by
+Cromwell, who made "a long and tedious speech" in the presence of three
+of his chief men, (one of whom, General Lambert, fell asleep the while,)
+asserting that God had owned his government in a signal manner.  Baxter
+boldly replied to him, that he and his friends regarded the ancient
+monarchy as a blessing, and not an evil, and begged to know how that
+blessing was forfeited to England, and to whom that forfeiture was made.
+Cromwell, with some heat, made answer that it was no forfeiture, but that
+God had made the change.  They afterwards held a long conference with
+respect to freedom of conscience, Cromwell defending his liberal policy,
+and Baxter opposing it.  No one can read Baxter's own account of these
+interviews, without being deeply impressed with the generous and
+magnanimous spirit of the Lord Protector in tolerating the utmost freedom
+of speech on the part of one who openly denounced him as a traitor and
+usurper.  Real greatness of mind could alone have risen above personal
+resentment under such circumstances of peculiar aggravation.
+
+In the death of the Protector, the treachery of Monk, and the restoration
+of the King, Baxter and his Presbyterian friends believed that they saw
+the hand of a merciful Providence preparing the way for the best good of
+England and the Church.  Always royalists, they had acted with the party
+opposed to the King from necessity rather than choice.  Considering all
+that followed, one can scarcely avoid smiling over the extravagant
+jubilations of the Presbyterian divines, on the return of the royal
+debauchee to Whitehall.  They hurried up to London with congratulations
+of formidable length and papers of solemn advice and counsel, to all
+which the careless monarch listened, with what patience he was master of.
+Baxter was one of the first to present himself at Court, and it is
+creditable to his heart rather than his judgment and discrimination that
+he seized the occasion to offer a long address to the King, expressive of
+his expectation that his Majesty would discountenance all sin and promote
+godliness, support the true exercise of Church discipline and cherish and
+hold up the hands of the faithful ministers of the Church.  To all which
+Charles II. "made as gracious an answer as we could expect," says Baxter,
+"insomuch that old Mr. Ash burst out into tears of joy."  Who doubts that
+the profligate King avenged himself as soon as the backs of his unwelcome
+visitors were fairly turned, by coarse jests and ribaldry, directed
+against a class of men whom he despised and hated, but towards whom
+reasons of policy dictated a show of civility and kindness?
+
+There is reason to believe that Charles II., had he been able to effect
+his purpose, would have gone beyond Cromwell himself in the matter of
+religious toleration; in other words, he would have taken, in the outset
+of his reign, the very steps which cost his successor his crown, and
+procured the toleration of Catholics by a declaration of universal
+freedom in religion.  But he was not in a situation to brave the
+opposition alike of Prelacy and Presbyterianism, and foiled in a scheme
+to which he was prompted by that vague, superstitious predilection for
+the Roman Catholic religion which at times struggled with his habitual
+scepticism, his next object was to rid himself of the importunities of
+sentries and the trouble of religious controversies by reestablishing the
+liturgy, and bribing or enforcing conformity to it on the part of the
+Presbyterians.  The history of the successful execution of this purpose
+is familiar to all the readers of the plausible pages of Clarendon on the
+one side, or the complaining treatises of Neal and Calamy on the other.
+
+Charles and his advisers triumphed, not so much through their own art,
+dissimulation, and bad faith as through the blind bigotry, divided
+counsels, and self-seeking of the Nonconformists.  Seduction on one hand
+and threats on the other, the bribe of bishoprics, hatred of Independents
+and Quakers, and the terror of penal laws, broke the strength of
+Presbyterianism.
+
+Baxter's whole conduct, on this occasion, bears testimony to his honesty
+and sincerity, while it shows him to have been too intolerant to secure
+his own religious freedom at the price of toleration for Catholics,
+Quakers, and Anabaptists; and too blind in his loyalty to perceive that
+pure and undefiled Christianity had nothing to hope for from a scandalous
+and depraved King, surrounded by scoffing, licentious courtiers and a
+haughty, revengeful prelacy.  To secure his influence, the Court offered
+him the bishopric of Hereford.  Superior to personal considerations, he
+declined the honor; but somewhat inconsistently, in his zeal for the
+interests of his party, he urged the elevation of at least three of his
+Presbyterian friends to the Episcopal bench, to enforce that very liturgy
+which they condemned.  He was the chief speaker for the Presbyterians at
+the famous Savoy Conference, summoned to advise and consult upon the Book
+of Common Prayer.  His antagonist was Dr. Gunning, ready, fluent, and
+impassioned.  "They spent," as Gilbert Burnet says, "several days in
+logical arguing, to the diversion of the town, who looked upon them as a
+couple of fencers, engaged in a discussion which could not be brought to
+an end."  In themselves considered, many of the points at issue seem
+altogether too trivial for the zeal with which Baxter contested them,--
+the form of a surplice, the wording of a prayer, kneeling at sacrament,
+the sign of the cross, etc.  With him, however, they were of momentous
+interest and importance, as things unlawful in the worship of God.  He
+struggled desperately, but unavailingly.  Presbyterianism, in its
+eagerness for peace and union and a due share of State support, had
+already made fatal concessions, and it was too late to stand upon non-
+essentials.  Baxter retired from the conference baffled and defeated,
+amidst murmurs and jests.  "If you had only been as fat as Dr. Manton,"
+said Clarendon to him, "you would have done well."
+
+The Act of Conformity, in which Charles II. and his counsellors gave the
+lie to the liberal declarations of Breda and Whitehall, drove Baxter from
+his sorrowing parishioners of Kidderminster, and added the evils of
+poverty and persecution to the painful bodily infirmities under which he
+was already bowed down.  Yet his cup was not one of unalloyed bitterness,
+and loving lips were prepared to drink it with him.
+
+Among Baxter's old parishioners of Kidderminster was a widowed lady of
+gentle birth, named Charlton, who, with her daughter Margaret, occupied a
+house in his neighborhood.  The daughter was a brilliant girl, of
+"strangely vivid wit," and "in early youth," he tells us, "pride, and
+romances, and company suitable thereunto, did take her up."  But erelong,
+Baxter, who acted in the double capacity of spiritual and temporal
+physician, was sent for to visit her, on an occasion of sickness.  He
+ministered to her bodily and mental sufferings, and thus secured her
+gratitude and confidence.  On her recovery, under the influence of his
+warnings and admonitions, the gay young girl became thoughtful and
+serious, abandoned her light books and companions, and devoted herself to
+the duties of a Christian profession.  Baxter was her counsellor and
+confidant.  She disclosed to him all her doubts, trials, and temptations,
+and he, in return, wrote her long letters of sympathy, consolation, and
+encouragement.  He began to feel such an unwonted interest in the moral
+and spiritual growth of his young disciple, that, in his daily walks
+among his parishioners, he found himself inevitably drawn towards her
+mother's dwelling.  In her presence, the habitual austerity of his manner
+was softened; his cold, close heart warmed and expanded.  He began to
+repay her confidence with his own, disclosing to her all his plans of
+benevolence, soliciting her services, and waiting, with deference, for
+her judgment upon them.  A change came over his habits of thought and his
+literary tastes; the harsh, rude disputant, the tough, dry logician,
+found himself addressing to his young friend epistles in verse on
+doctrinal points and matters of casuistry; Westminster Catechism in
+rhyme; the Solemn League and Covenant set to music.  A miracle alone
+could have made Baxter a poet; the cold, clear light of reason "paled the
+ineffectual fires" of his imagination; all things presented themselves to
+his vision "with hard outlines, colorless, and with no surrounding
+atmosphere."  That he did, nevertheless, write verses, so creditable as
+to justify a judicious modern critic in their citation and approval, can
+perhaps be accounted for only as one of the phenomena of that subtle and
+transforming influence to which even his stern nature was unconsciously
+yielding.  Baxter was in love.
+
+Never did the blind god try his archery on a more unpromising subject.
+Baxter was nearly fifty years of age, and looked still older.  His life
+had been one long fast and penance.  Even in youth he had never known a
+schoolboy's love for cousin or playmate.  He had resolutely closed up his
+heart against emotions which he regarded as the allurements of time and
+sense.  He had made a merit of celibacy, and written and published
+against the entanglement of godly ministers in matrimonial engagements
+and family cares.  It is questionable whether he now understood his own
+case, or attributed to its right cause the peculiar interest which he
+felt in Margaret Charlton.  Left to himself, it is more than probable
+that he might never have discovered the true nature of that interest, or
+conjectured that anything whatever of earthly passion or sublunary
+emotion had mingled with his spiritual Platonism.  Commissioned and set
+apart to preach repentance to dying men, penniless and homeless, worn
+with bodily pain and mental toil, and treading, as he believed, on the
+very margin of his grave, what had he to do with love?  What power had he
+to inspire that tender sentiment, the appropriate offspring only of
+youth, and health, and beauty?
+
+                   "Could any Beatrice see
+                    A lover in such anchorite!"
+
+But in the mean time a reciprocal feeling was gaining strength in the
+heart of Margaret.  To her grateful appreciation of the condescension of
+a great and good man--grave, learned, and renowned--to her youth and
+weakness, and to her enthusiastic admiration of his intellectual powers,
+devoted to the highest and holiest objects, succeeded naturally enough
+the tenderly suggestive pity of her woman's heart, as she thought of his
+lonely home, his unshared sorrows, his lack of those sympathies and
+kindnesses which make tolerable the hard journey of life.  Did she not
+owe to him, under God, the salvation of body and mind?  Was he not her
+truest and most faithful friend, entering with lively interest into all
+her joys and sorrows?  Had she not seen the cloud of his habitual sadness
+broken by gleams of sunny warmth and cheerfulness, as they conversed
+together?  Could she do better than devote herself to the pleasing task
+of making his life happier, of comforting him in seasons of pain and
+weariness, encouraging him in his vast labors, and throwing over the cold
+and hard austerities of his nature the warmth and light of domestic
+affection?  Pity, reverence, gratitude, and womanly tenderness, her
+fervid imagination and the sympathies of a deeply religious nature,
+combined to influence her decision.  Disparity of age and condition
+rendered it improbable that Baxter would ever venture to address her in
+any other capacity than that of a friend and teacher; and it was left to
+herself to give the first intimation of the possibility of a more
+intimate relation.
+
+It is easy to imagine with what mixed feelings of joy, surprise, and
+perplexity Baxter must have received the delicate avowal.  There was much
+in the circumstances of the case to justify doubt, misgiving, and close
+searchings of heart.  He must have felt the painful contrast which that
+fair girl in the bloom of her youth presented to the worn man of middle
+years, whose very breath was suffering, and over whom death seemed always
+impending.  Keenly conscious of his infirmities of temper, he must have
+feared for the happiness of a loving, gentle being, daily exposed to
+their manifestations.  From his well-known habit of consulting what he
+regarded as the divine will in every important step of his life, there
+can be no doubt that his decision was the result quite as much of a
+prayerful and patient consideration of duty as of the promptings of his
+heart.  Richard Baxter was no impassioned Abelard; his pupil in the
+school of his severe and self-denying piety was no Heloise; but what
+their union lacked in romantic interest was compensated by its purity and
+disinterestedness, and its sanction by all that can hallow human passion,
+and harmonize the love of the created with the love and service of the
+Creator.
+
+Although summoned by a power which it would have been folly to resist,
+the tough theologian did not surrender at discretion.  "From the first
+thoughts yet many changes and stoppages intervened, and long delays," he
+tells us.  The terms upon which he finally capitulated are perfectly in
+keeping with his character.  "She consented," he says, "to three
+conditions of our marriage.  1st. That I should have nothing that before
+our marriage was hers; that I, who wanted no earthly supplies, might not
+seem to marry her from selfishness.  2d. That she would so alter her
+affairs that I might be entangled in no lawsuits.  3d. That she should
+expect none of my time which my ministerial work should require."
+
+As was natural, the wits of the Court had their jokes upon this singular
+marriage; and many of his best friends regretted it, when they called to
+mind what he had written in favor of ministerial celibacy, at a time
+when, as he says, "he thought to live and die a bachelor."  But Baxter
+had no reason to regret the inconsistency of his precept and example.
+How much of the happiness of the next twenty years of his life resulted
+from his union with a kind and affectionate woman he has himself
+testified, in his simple and touching Breviate of the Life of the late
+Mrs. Baxter.  Her affections were so ardent that her husband confesses
+his fear that he was unable to make an adequate return, and that she must
+have been disappointed in him in consequence.  He extols her pleasant
+conversation, her active benevolence, her disposition to aid him in all
+his labors, and her noble forgetfulness of self, in ministering to his
+comfort, in sickness and imprisonment.  "She was the meetest helper I
+could have had in the world," is his language.  "If I spoke harshly or
+sharply, it offended her.  If I carried it (as I am apt) with too much
+negligence of ceremony or humble compliment to any, she would modestly
+tell me of it.  If my looks seemed not pleasant, she would have me amend
+them (which my weak, pained state of body indisposed me to do)."  He
+admits she had her failings, but, taken as a whole, the Breviate is an
+exalted eulogy.
+
+His history from this time is marked by few incidents of a public
+character.  During that most disgraceful period in the annals of England,
+the reign of the second Charles, his peculiar position exposed him to the
+persecutions of prelacy and the taunts and abuse of the sentries,
+standing as he did between these extremes, and pleading for a moderate
+Episcopacy.  He was between the upper millstone of High Church and the
+nether one of Dissent.  To use his own simile, he was like one who seeks
+to fill with his hand a cleft in a log, and feels both sides close upon
+him with pain.  All parties and sects had, as they thought, grounds of
+complaint against him.  There was in him an almost childish simplicity of
+purpose, a headlong earnestness and eagerness, which did not allow him to
+consider how far a present act or opinion harmonized with what he had
+already done or written.  His greatest admirers admit his lack of
+judgment, his inaptitude for the management of practical matters.  His
+utter incapacity to comprehend rightly the public men and measures of his
+day is abundantly apparent; and the inconsistencies of his conduct and
+his writings are too marked to need comment.  He suffered persecution for
+not conforming to some trifling matters of Church usage, while he
+advocated the doctrine of passive obedience to the King or ruling power,
+and the right of that power to enforce conformity.  He wrote against
+conformity while himself conforming; seceded from the Church, and yet
+held stated communion with it; begged for the curacy of Kidderminster,
+and declined the bishopric of Hereford.  His writings were many of them
+directly calculated to make Dissenters from the Establishment, but he was
+invariably offended to find others practically influenced by them, and
+quarrelled with his own converts to Dissent.  The High Churchmen of
+Oxford burned his Holy Commonwealth as seditious and revolutionary; while
+Harrington and the republican club of Miles's Coffee House condemned it
+for its hostility to democracy and its servile doctrine of obedience to
+kings.  He made noble pleas for liberty of conscience and bitterly
+complained of his own suffering from Church courts, yet maintained the
+necessity of enforcing conformity, and stoutly opposed the tolerant
+doctrines of Penn and Milton.  Never did a great and good man so entangle
+himself with contradictions and inconsistencies.  The witty and wicked
+Sir Roger L'Estrange compiled from the irreconcilable portions of his
+works a laughable Dialogue between Richard and Baxter.  The Antinomians
+found him guilty of Socinianism; and one noted controversialist undertook
+to show, not without some degree of plausibility, that he was by turns a
+Quaker and a Papist!
+
+Although able to suspend his judgment and carefully weigh evidence, upon
+matters which he regarded as proper subjects of debate and scrutiny, he
+possessed the power to shut out and banish at will all doubt and
+misgiving in respect to whatever tended to prove, illustrate, or enforce
+his settled opinions and cherished doctrines.  His credulity at times
+seems boundless.  Hating the Quakers, and prepared to believe all manner
+of evil of them, he readily came to the conclusion that their leaders
+were disguised Papists.  He maintained that Lauderdale was a good and
+pious man, in spite of atrocities in Scotland which entitle him to a
+place with Claverhouse; and indorsed the character of the infamous
+Dangerfield, the inventor of the Meal-tub Plot, as a worthy convert from
+popish errors.  To prove the existence of devils and spirits, he
+collected the most absurd stories and old-wives' fables, of soldiers
+scared from their posts at night by headless bears, of a young witch
+pulling the hooks out of Mr. Emlen's breeches and swallowing them, of Mr.
+Beacham's locomotive tobacco-pipe, and the Rev. Mr. Munn's jumping Bible,
+and of a drunken man punished for his intemperance by being lifted off
+his legs by an invisible hand!  Cotton Mather's marvellous account of his
+witch experiments in New England delighted him.  He had it republished,
+declaring that "he must be an obstinate Sadducee who doubted it."
+
+The married life of Baxter, as might be inferred from the state of the
+times, was an unsettled one.  He first took a house at Moorfields, then
+removed to Acton, where he enjoyed the conversation of his neighbor, Sir
+Matthew Hale; from thence he found refuge in Rickmansworth, and after
+that in divers other places.  "The women have most of this trouble," he
+remarks, "but my wife easily bore it all."  When unable to preach, his
+rapid pen was always busy.  Huge folios of controversial and doctrinal
+lore followed each other in quick succession.  He assailed Popery and the
+Establishment, Anabaptists, ultra Calvinists, Antinomians, Fifth Monarchy
+men, and Quakers.  His hatred of the latter was only modified by his
+contempt.  He railed rather than argued against the "miserable
+creatures," as he styled them.  They in turn answered him in like manner.
+"The Quakers," he says, "in their shops, when I go along London streets,
+say, 'Alas' poor man, thou art yet in darkness.' They have oft come to
+the congregation, when I had liberty to preach Christ's Gospel, and cried
+out against me as a deceiver of the people.  They have followed me home,
+crying out in the streets, 'The day of the Lord is coming, and thou shalt
+perish as a deceiver.'  They have stood in the market-place, and under my
+window, year after year, crying to the people, 'Take heed of your
+priests, they deceive your souls;' and if any one wore a lace or neat
+clothing, they cried out to me, 'These are the fruits of your ministry.'"
+
+At Rickmansworth, he found himself a neighbor of William Penn, whom he
+calls "the captain of the Quakers."  Ever ready for battle, Baxter
+encountered him in a public discussion, with such fierceness and
+bitterness as to force from that mild and amiable civilian the remark,
+that he would rather be Socrates at the final judgment than Richard
+Baxter.  Both lived to know each other better, and to entertain
+sentiments of mutual esteem.  Baxter himself admits that the Quakers, by
+their perseverance in holding their religious meetings in defiance of
+penal laws, took upon themselves the burden of persecution which would
+otherwise have fallen upon himself and his friends; and makes special
+mention of the noble and successful plea of Penn before the Recorder's
+Court in London, based on the fundamental liberties of Englishmen and the
+rights of the Great Charter.
+
+The intolerance of Baxter towards the Separatists was turned against him
+whenever he appealed to the King and Parliament against the proscription
+of himself and his friends.  "They gathered," he complains, "out of mine
+and other men's books all that we had said against liberty for Popery and
+Quakers railing against ministers in open congregation, and applied it as
+against the toleration of ourselves."  It was in vain that he explained
+that he was only in favor of a gentle coercion of dissent, a moderate
+enforcement of conformity.  His plan for dealing with sentries reminds
+one of old Isaak Walton's direction to his piscatorial readers, to impale
+the frog on the hook as gently as if they loved him.
+
+While at Acton, he was complained of by Dr. Ryves, the rector, one of the
+King's chaplains in ordinary, for holding religious services in his
+family with more than five strangers present.  He was cast into
+Clerkenwell jail, whither his faithful wife followed him.  On his
+discharge, he sought refuge in the hamlet of Totteridge, where he wrote
+and published that Paraphrase on the New Testament which was made the
+ground of his prosecution and trial before Jeffreys.
+
+On the 14th of the sixth month, 1681, he was called to endure the
+greatest affliction of his life.  His wife died on that day, after a
+brief illness.  She who had been his faithful friend, companion, and
+nurse for twenty years was called away from him in the time of his
+greatest need of her ministrations.  He found consolation in dwelling on
+her virtues and excellences in the Breviate of her life; "a paper
+monument," he says, "erected by one who is following her even at the door
+in some passion indeed of love and grief."  In the preface to his
+poetical pieces he alludes to her in terms of touching simplicity and
+tenderness: "As these pieces were mostly written in various passions, so
+passion hath now thrust them out into the world.  God having taken away
+the dear companion of the last nineteen years of my life, as her sorrows
+and sufferings long ago gave being to some of these poems, for reasons,
+which the world is not concerned to know; so my grief for her removal,
+and the revival of the sense of former things, have prevailed upon me to
+be passionate in the sight of all."
+
+The circumstances of his trial before the judicial monster, Jeffreys, are
+too well known to justify their detail in this sketch.  He was sentenced
+to pay a fine of five hundred marks.  Seventy years of age, and reduced
+to poverty by former persecutions, he was conveyed to the King's Bench
+prison.  Here for two years he lay a victim to intense bodily suffering.
+When, through the influence of his old antagonist, Penn, he was restored
+to freedom, he was already a dying man.  But he came forth from prison as
+he entered it, unsubdued in spirit.
+
+Urged to sign a declaration of thanks to James II., his soul put on the
+athletic habits of youth, and he stoutly refused to commend an act of
+toleration which had given freedom not to himself alone, but to Papists
+and sentries.  Shaking off the dust of the Court from his feet, he
+retired to a dwelling in Charter-House Square, near his friend
+Sylvester's, and patiently awaited his deliverance.  His death was quiet
+and peaceful.  "I have pain," he said to his friend Mather; "there is no
+arguing against sense; but I have peace.  I have peace."  On being asked
+how he did, he answered, in memorable words, "Almost well!"
+
+He was buried in Christ Church, where the remains of his wife and her
+mother had been placed.  An immense concourse attended his funeral, of
+all ranks and parties.  Conformist and Non-conformist forgot the
+bitterness of the controversialist, and remembered only the virtues and
+the piety of the man.  Looking back on his life of self-denial and
+faithfulness to apprehended duty, the men who had persecuted him while
+living wept over his grave.  During the last few years of his life, the
+severity of his controversial tone had been greatly softened; he lamented
+his former lack of charity, the circle of his sympathies widened, his
+social affections grew stronger with age, and love for his fellow-men
+universally, and irrespective of religious differences, increased within
+him.  In his Narrative, written in the long, cool shadows of the evening
+of life, he acknowledges with extraordinary candor this change in his
+views and feelings.  He confesses his imperfections as a writer and
+public teacher.
+
+"I wish," he says, "all over-sharp passages were expunged from my
+writings, and I ask forgiveness of God and man."  He tells us that
+mankind appear more equal to him; the good are not so good as he once
+thought, nor the bad so evil; and that in all there is more for grace to
+make advantage of, and more to testify for God and holiness, than he once
+believed.  "I less admire," he continues, "gifts of utterance, and the
+bare profession of religion, than I once did, and have now much more
+charity for those who, by want of gifts, do make an obscurer profession."
+
+He laments the effects of his constitutional irritability and impatience
+upon his social intercourse and his domestic relations, and that his
+bodily infirmities did not allow him a free expression of the tenderness
+and love of his heart.  Who does not feel the pathos and inconsolable
+regret which dictated the following paragraph?
+
+"When God forgiveth me, I cannot forgive myself, especially for my rash
+words and deeds by which I have seemed injurious and less tender and kind
+than I should have been to my near and dear relations, whose love
+abundantly obliged me.  When such are dead, though we never differed in
+point of interest or any other matter, every sour or cross or provoking
+word which I gave them maketh me almost irreconcilable to myself, and
+tells me how repentance brought some of old to pray to the dead whom they
+had wronged to forgive them, in the hurry of their passion."
+
+His pride as a logician and skilful disputant abated in the latter and
+better portion of his life he had more deference to the judgment of
+others, and more distrust of his own.  "You admire," said he to a
+correspondent who had lauded his character, "one you do not know;
+knowledge will cure your error."  In his Narrative he writes: "I am much
+more sensible than heretofore of the breadth and length and depth of the
+radical, universal, odious sin of selfishness, and therefore have written
+so much against it; and of the excellency and necessity of self-denial
+and of a public mind, and of loving our neighbors as ourselves."  Against
+many difficulties and discouragements, both within himself and in his
+outward circumstances, he strove to make his life and conversation an
+expression of that Christian love whose root, as he has said with equal
+truth and beauty, "is set
+
+               In humble self-denial, undertrod,
+               While flower and fruit are growing up to God."
+
+Of the great mass of his writings, more voluminous than those of any
+author of his time, it would ill become us to speak with confidence.  We
+are familiar only with some of the best of his practical works, and our
+estimate of the vast and appalling series of his doctrinal, metaphysical
+and controversial publications would be entitled to small weight, as the
+result of very cursory examination.  Many of them relate to obsolete
+questions and issues, monumental of controversies long dead, and of
+disputatious doctors otherwise forgotten.  Yet, in respect to even these,
+we feel justified in assenting to the opinion of one abundantly capable
+of appreciating the character of Baxter as a writer.  "What works of Mr.
+Baxter shall I read?" asked Boswell of Dr. Johnson.  "Read any of them,"
+was the answer, "for they are all good."  He has left upon all the
+impress of his genius.  Many of them contain sentiments which happily
+find favor with few in our time: philosophical and psychological
+disquisitions, which look oddly enough in the light of the intellectual
+progress of nearly two centuries; dissertations upon evil spirits,
+ghosts, and witches, which provoke smiles at the good man's credulity;
+but everywhere we find unmistakable evidences of his sincerity and
+earnest love of truth.  He wrote under a solemn impression of duty,
+allowing neither pain, nor weakness, nor the claims of friendship, nor
+the social enjoyments of domestic affection, to interfere with his
+sleepless intensity of purpose.  He stipulated with his wife, before
+marriage, that she should not expect him to relax, even for her society,
+the severity of his labors.  He could ill brook interruption, and
+disliked the importunity of visitors.  "We are afraid, sir, we break in
+upon your time," said some of his callers to him upon one occasion.  "To
+be sure you do," was his answer.  His seriousness seldom forsook him;
+there is scarce a gleam of gayety in all his one hundred and sixty-eight
+volumes.  He seems to have relished, however, the wit of others,
+especially when directed against what he looked upon as error.  Marvell's
+inimitable reply to the High-Church pretensions of Parker fairly overcame
+his habitual gravity, and he several times alludes to it with marked
+satisfaction; but, for himself, he had no heart for pleasentry.  His
+writings, like his sermons, were the earnest expostulations of a dying
+man with dying men.  He tells us of no other amusement or relaxation than
+the singing of psalms.  "Harmony and melody," said he, "are the pleasure
+and elevation of my soul.  It was not the least comfort that I had in the
+converse of my late dear wife, that our first act in the morning and last
+in bed at night was a psalm of praise."
+
+It has been fashionable to speak of Baxter as a champion of civil and
+religious freedom.  He has little claim to such a reputation.  He was the
+stanch advocate of monarchy, and of the right and duty of the State to
+enforce conformity to what he regarded as the essentials of religious
+belief and practice.  No one regards the prelates who went to the Tower,
+under James II., on the ground of conscientious scruples against reading
+the King's declaration of toleration to Dissenters, as martyrs in the
+cause of universal religious freedom.  Nor can Baxter, although he wrote
+much against the coercion and silencing of godly ministers, and suffered
+imprisonment himself for the sake of a good conscience, be looked upon in
+the light of an intelligent and consistent confessor of liberty.  He did
+not deny the abstract right of ecclesiastical coercion, but complained of
+its exercise upon himself and his friends as unwarranted and unjust.
+
+One of the warmest admirers and ablest commentators of Baxter designates
+the leading and peculiar trait of his character as unearthliness.  In our
+view, this was its radical defect.  He had too little of humanity, he
+felt too little of the attraction of this world, and lived too
+exclusively in the spiritual and the unearthly, for a full and healthful
+development of his nature as a man, or of the graces, charities, and
+loves of the Christian.  He undervalued the common blessings and joys of
+life, and closed his eyes and ears against the beauty and harmony of
+outward nature.  Humanity, in itself considered, seemed of small moment
+to him; "passing away" was written alike on its wrongs and its rights,
+its pleasures and its pains; death would soon level all distinctions; and
+the sorrows or the joys, the poverty or the riches, the slavery or the
+liberty, of the brief day of its probation seemed of too little
+consequence to engage his attention and sympathies.  Hence, while he was
+always ready to minister to temporal suffering wherever it came to his
+notice, he made no efforts to remove its political or social causes.
+In this respect he differed widely from some of his illustrious
+contemporaries.  Penn, while preaching up and down the land, and writing
+theological folios and pamphlets, could yet urge the political rights of
+Englishmen, mount the hustings for Algernon Sydney, and plead for
+unlimited religious liberty; and Vane, while dreaming of a coming
+millennium and reign of the saints, and busily occupied in defending his
+Antinomian doctrines, could at the same time vindicate, with tongue and
+pen, the cause of civil and religious freedom.  But Baxter overlooked the
+evils and oppressions which were around him, and forgot the necessities
+and duties of the world of time and sense in his earnest aspirations
+towards the world of spirits.  It is by no means an uninstructive fact,
+that with the lapse of years his zeal for proselytism, doctrinal
+disputations, and the preaching of threats and terrors visibly declined,
+while love for his fellow-men and catholic charity greatly increased, and
+he was blessed with a clearer perception of the truth that God is best
+served through His suffering children, and that love and reverence for
+visible humanity is an indispensable condition of the appropriate worship
+of the Unseen God.
+
+But, in taking leave of Richard Baxter, our last words must not be those
+of censure.  Admiration and reverence become us rather.  He was an honest
+man.  So far as we can judge, his motives were the highest and best which
+can influence human action.  He had faults and weaknesses, and committed
+grave errors, but we are constrained to believe that the prayer with
+which he closes his Saints' Rest and which we have chosen as the fitting
+termination of our article, was the earnest aspiration of his life:--
+
+"O merciful Father of Spirits! suffer not the soul of thy unworthy
+servant to be a stranger to the joys which he describes to others, but
+keep me while I remain on earth in daily breathing after thee, and in a
+believing affectionate walking with thee!  Let those who shall read these
+pages not merely read the fruits of my studies, but the breathing of my
+active hope and love; that if my heart were open to their view, they
+might there read thy love most deeply engraven upon it with a beam from
+the face of the Son of God; and not find vanity or lust or pride within
+where the words of life appear without, that so these lines may not
+witness against me, but, proceeding from the heart of the writer, be
+effectual through thy grace upon the heart of the reader, and so be the
+savor of life to both."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             WILLIAM LEGGETT
+
+          "O Freedom!  thou art not, as poets dream,
+          A fair young girl, with light and delicate limbs,
+          And wavy tresses, gushing from the cap
+          With which the Roman master crowned his slave,
+          When he took off the gyves.  A bearded man,
+          Armed to the teeth, art thou; one mailed hand
+          Grasps the broad shield, and one the sword; thy brow,
+          Glorious in beauty though it be, is scarred
+          With tokens of old wars; thy massive limbs
+          Are strong with struggling.  Power at thee has launched
+          His bolts, and with his lightnings smitten thee;
+          They could not quench the life thou hast from Heaven."
+                                                 BRYANT.
+
+WHEN the noblest woman in all France stood on the scaffold, just before
+her execution, she is said to have turned towards the statue of Liberty,
+--which, strangely enough, had been placed near the guillotine, as its
+patron saint,--with the exclamation, "O Liberty! what crimes have been
+committed in thy name!"  It is with a feeling akin to that which prompted
+this memorable exclamation of Madame Roland that the sincere lover of
+human freedom and progress is often compelled to regard American
+democracy.
+
+For democracy, pure and impartial,--the self-government of the whole;
+equal rights and privileges, irrespective of birth or complexion; the
+morality of the Gospel of Christ applied to legislation; Christianity
+reduced to practice, and showering the blessings of its impartial love
+and equal protection upon all, like the rain and dews of heaven,--we have
+the sincerest love and reverence.  So far as our own government
+approaches this standard--and, with all its faults, we believe it does so
+more nearly than any other--it has our hearty and steadfast allegiance.
+We complain of and protest against it only where, in its original
+framework or actual administration, it departs from the democratic
+principle.  Holding, with Novalis, that the Christian religion is the
+root of all democracy and the highest fact in the rights of man, we
+regard the New Testament as the true political text-book; and believe
+that, just in proportion as mankind receive its doctrines and precepts,
+not merely as matters of faith and relating to another state of being,
+but as practical rules, designed for the regulation of the present life
+as well as the future, their institutions, social arrangements, and forms
+of government will approximate to the democratic model.  We believe in
+the ultimate complete accomplishment of the mission of Him who came "to
+preach deliverance to the captive, and the opening of prison doors to
+them that are bound."  We look forward to the universal dominion of His
+benign humanity; and, turning from the strife and blood, the slavery, and
+social and political wrongs of the past and present, anticipate the
+realization in the distant future of that state when the song of the
+angels at His advent shall be no longer a prophecy, but the jubilant
+expression of a glorious reality,--"Glory to God in the highest!  Peace
+on earth, and good will to man!"
+
+For the party in this country which has assumed the name of Democracy, as
+a party, we have had, we confess, for some years past, very little
+respect. It has advocated many salutary measures, tending to equalize the
+advantages of trade and remove the evils of special legislation.  But if
+it has occasionally lopped some of the branches of the evil tree of
+oppression, so far from striking at its root, it has suffered itself to
+be made the instrument of nourishing and protecting it.  It has allowed
+itself to be called, by its Southern flatterers, "the natural ally of
+slavery."  It has spurned the petitions of the people in behalf of
+freedom under its feet, in Congress and State legislatures.  Nominally
+the advocate of universal suffrage, it has wrested from the colored
+citizens of Pennsylvania that right of citizenship which they had enjoyed
+under a Constitution framed by Franklin and Rush.  Perhaps the most
+shameful exhibition of its spirit was made in the late Rhode Island
+struggle, when the free suffrage convention, solemnly calling heaven and
+earth to witness its readiness to encounter all the horrors of civil war,
+in defence of the holy principle of equal and universal suffrage,
+deliberately excluded colored Rhode Islanders from the privilege of
+voting.  In the Constitutional Conventions of Michigan and Iowa, the same
+party declared all men equal, and then provided an exception to this rule
+in the case of the colored inhabitants.  Its course on the question of
+excluding slavery from Texas is a matter of history, known and read of
+all.
+
+After such exhibitions of its practice, its professions have lost their
+power.  The cant of democracy upon the lips of men who are living down
+its principles is, to an earnest mind, well nigh insufferable.  Pertinent
+were the queries of Eliphaz the Temanite, "Shall a man utter vain
+knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind?  Shall he reason with
+unprofitable talk, or with speeches wherewith he can do no good?"  Enough
+of wearisome talk we have had about "progress," the rights of "the
+masses," the "dignity of labor," and "extending the area of freedom"!
+"Clear your mind of cant, sir," said Johnson to Boswell; and no better
+advice could be now given to a class of our democratic politicians.  Work
+out your democracy; translate your words into deeds; away with your
+sentimental generalizations, and come down to the practical details of
+your duty as men and Christians.  What avail your abstract theories, your
+hopeless virginity of democracy, sacred from the violence of meanings?
+A democracy which professes to hold, as by divine right, the doctrine of
+human equality in its special keeping, and which at the same time gives
+its direct countenance and support to the vilest system of oppression on
+which the sun of heaven looks, has no better title to the name it
+disgraces than the apostate Son of the Morning has to his old place in
+heaven.  We are using strong language, for we feel strongly on this
+subject.  Let those whose hypocrisy we condemn, and whose sins against
+humanity we expose, remember that they are the publishers of their own
+shame, and that they have gloried in their apostasy.  There is a cutting
+severity in the answer which Sophocles puts in the mouth of Electra, in
+justification of her indignant rebuke of her wicked mother:--
+
+              "'Tis you that say it, not I
+               You do the unholy deeds which find rue words."
+
+Yet in that party calling itself democratic we rejoice to recognize true,
+generous, and thoroughly sincere men,--lovers of the word of democracy,
+and doers of it also, honest and hearty in their worship of liberty, who
+are still hoping that the antagonism which slavery presents to democracy
+will be perceived by the people, in spite of the sophistry and appeals to
+prejudice by which interested partisans have hitherto succeeded in
+deceiving them.  We believe with such that the mass of the democratic
+voters of the free States are in reality friends of freedom, and hate
+slavery in all its forms; and that, with a full understanding of the
+matter, they could never consent to be sold to presidential aspirants, by
+political speculators, in lots to suit purchasers, and warranted to be
+useful in putting down free discussion, perpetuating oppression, and
+strengthening the hands of modern feudalism.  They are beginning already
+to see that, under the process whereby men of easy virtue obtain offices
+from the general government, as the reward of treachery to free
+principles, the strength and vitality of the party are rapidly declining.
+To them, at least, democracy means something more than collectorships,
+consulates, and governmental contracts.  For the sake of securing a
+monopoly of these to a few selfish and heartless party managers, they are
+not prepared to give up the distinctive principles of democracy, and
+substitute in their place the doctrines of the Satanic school of
+politics.  They will not much longer consent to stand before the world as
+the slavery party of the United States, especially when policy and
+expediency, as well as principle, unite in recommending a position more
+congenial to the purposes of their organization, the principles of the
+fathers of their political faith, the spirit of the age, and the
+obligations of Christianity.
+
+The death-blow of slavery in this country will be given by the very power
+upon which it has hitherto relied with so much confidence.  Abused and
+insulted Democracy will, erelong, shake off the loathsome burden under
+which it is now staggering.  In the language of the late Theodore
+Sedgwiek, of Massachusetts, a consistent democrat of the old school:
+"Slavery, in all its forms, is anti-democratic,--an old poison left in
+the veins, fostering the worst principles of aristocracy, pride, and
+aversion to labor; the natural enemy of the poor man, the laboring man,
+the oppressed man.  The question is, whether absolute dominion over any
+creature in the image of man be a wholesome power in a free country;
+whether this is a school in which to train the young republican mind;
+whether slave blood and free blood can course healthily together in the
+same body politic.  Whatever may be present appearances, and by whatever
+name party may choose to call things, this question must finally be
+settled by the democracy of the country."
+
+This prediction was made eight years ago, at a time when all the facts in
+the case seemed against the probability of its truth, and when only here
+and there the voice of an indignant freeman protested against the
+exulting claims of the slave power upon the democracy as its "natural
+ally."  The signs of the times now warrant the hope of its fulfilment.
+Over the hills of the East, and over the broad territory of the Empire
+State, a new spirit is moving.  Democracy, like Balaam upon Zophim, has
+felt the divine _afflatus_, and is blessing that which it was summoned to
+curse.
+
+The present hopeful state of things is owing, in no slight degree, to the
+self-sacrificing exertions of a few faithful and clear-sighted men,
+foremost among whom was the late William Leggett; than whom no one has
+labored more perseveringly, or, in the end, more successfully, to bring
+the practice of American democracy into conformity with its professions.
+
+William Leggett!  Let our right hand forget its cunning, when that name
+shall fail to awaken generous emotions and aspirations for a higher and
+worthier manhood!  True man and true democrat; faithful always to
+Liberty, following wherever she led, whether the storm beat in his face
+or on his back; unhesitatingly counting her enemies his own, whether in
+the guise of Whig monopoly and selfish expediency, or democratic
+servility north of Mason and Dixon's line towards democratic slaveholding
+south of it; poor, yet incorruptible; dependent upon party favor, as a
+party editor, yet risking all in condemnation of that party, when in the
+wrong; a man of the people, yet never stooping to flatter the people's
+prejudices,--he is the politician, of all others, whom we would hold up
+to the admiration and imitation of the young men of our country.  What
+Fletcher of Saltoun is to Scotland, and the brave spirits of the old
+Commonwealth time--
+
+              "Hands that penned
+               And tongues that uttered wisdom, better none
+               The later Sydney, Marvell, Harrington,
+               Young Vane, and others, who called Milton friend--"
+
+are to England, should Leggett be to America.  His character was formed
+on these sturdy democratic models.  Had he lived in their day, he would
+have scraped with old Andrew Marvell the bare blade-bone of poverty, or
+even laid his head on the block with Vane, rather than forego his
+independent thought and speech.
+
+Of the early life of William Leggett we have no very definite knowledge.
+Born in moderate circumstances; at first a woodsman in the Western
+wilderness, then a midshipman in the navy, then a denizen of New York;
+exposed to sore hardships and perilous temptations, he worked his way by
+the force of his genius to the honorable position of associate editor of
+the Evening Post, the leading democratic journal of our great commercial
+metropolis.  Here he became early distinguished for his ultraism in
+democracy.  His whole soul revolted against oppression.  He was for
+liberty everywhere and in all things, in thought, in speech, in vote, in
+religion, in government, and in trade; he was for throwing off all
+restraints upon the right of suffrage; regarding all men as brethren, he
+looked with disapprobation upon attempts to exclude foreigners from the
+rights of citizenship; he was for entire freedom of commerce; he
+denounced a national bank; he took the lead in opposition to the monopoly
+of incorporated banks; he argued in favor of direct taxation, and
+advocated a free post-office, or a system by which letters should be
+transported, as goods and passengers now are, by private enterprise.  In
+all this he was thoroughly in earnest.  That he often erred through
+passion and prejudice cannot be doubted; but in no instance was he found
+turning aside from the path which he believed to be the true one, from
+merely selfish considerations.  He was honest alike to himself and the
+public.  Every question which was thrown up before him by the waves of
+political or moral agitation he measured by his standard of right and
+truth, and condemned or advocated it in utter disregard of prevailing
+opinions, of its effect upon his pecuniary interest, or of his standing
+with his party.  The vehemence of his passions sometimes betrayed him
+into violence of language and injustice to his opponents; but he had that
+rare and manly trait which enables its possessor, whenever he becomes
+convinced of error, to make a prompt acknowledgment of the conviction.
+
+In the summer of 1834, a series of mobs, directed against the
+Abolitionists, who had organized a national society, with the city of New
+York as its central point, followed each other in rapid succession.  The
+houses of the leading men in the society were sacked and pillaged;
+meeting-houses broken into and defaced; and the unoffending colored
+inhabitants of the city treated with the grossest indignity, and
+subjected, in some instances, to shameful personal outrage.  It was
+emphatically a "Reign of Terror."  The press of both political parties
+and of the leading religious sects, by appeals to prejudice and passion,
+and by studied misrepresentation of the designs and measures of the
+Abolitionists, fanned the flame of excitement, until the fury of demons
+possessed the misguided populace.  To advocate emancipation, or defend
+those who did so, in New York, at that period, was like preaching
+democracy in Constantinople or religious toleration in Paris on the eve
+of St. Bartholomew.  Law was prostrated in the dust; to be suspected of
+abolitionism was to incur a liability to an indefinite degree of insult
+and indignity; and the few and hunted friends of the slave who in those
+nights of terror laid their heads upon the pillow did so with the prayer
+of the Psalmist on their lips, "Defend me from them that rise up against
+me; save me from bloody men."
+
+At this period the New York Evening Post spoke out strongly in
+condemnation of the mob.  William Leggett was not then an Abolitionist;
+he had known nothing of the proscribed class, save through the cruel
+misrepresentations of their enemies; but, true to his democratic faith,
+he maintained the right to discuss the question of slavery.  The
+infection of cowardly fear, which at that time sealed the lips of
+multitudes who deplored the excesses of the mob and sympathized with its
+victims, never reached him.  Boldly, indignantly, he demanded that the
+mob should be put down at once by the civil authorities.  He declared the
+Abolitionists, even if guilty of all that had been charged upon them,
+fully entitled to the privileges and immunities of American citizens.  He
+sternly reprimanded the board of aldermen of the city for rejecting with
+contempt the memorial of the Abolitionists to that body, explanatory of
+their principles and the measures by which they had sought to disseminate
+them.  Referring to the determination, expressed by the memorialists in
+the rejected document, not to recant or relinquish any principle which
+they had adopted, but to live and die by their faith, he said: "In this,
+however mistaken, however mad, we may consider their opinions in relation
+to the blacks, what honest, independent mind can blame them?  Where is
+the man so poor of soul, so white-livered, so base, that he would do less
+in relation to any important doctrine in which he religiously believed?
+Where is the man who would have his tenets drubbed into him by the clubs
+of ruffians, or hold his conscience at the dictation of a mob?"
+
+In the summer of 1835, a mob of excited citizens broke open the post-
+office at Charleston, South Carolina, and burnt in the street such papers
+and pamphlets as they judged to be "incendiary;" in other words, such as
+advocated the application of the democratic principle to the condition of
+the slaves of the South.  These papers were addressed, not to the slave,
+but to the master.  They contained nothing which had not been said and
+written by Southern men themselves, the Pinkneys, Jeffersons, Henrys, and
+Martins, of Maryland and Virginia.  The example set at Charleston did not
+lack imitators.  Every petty postmaster south of Mason and Dixon's line
+became ex officio a censor of the press.  The Postmaster-General, writing
+to his subordinate at Charleston, after stating that the post-office
+department had "no legal right to exclude newspapers from the mail, or
+prohibit their carriage or delivery, on account of their character or
+tendency, real or supposed," declared that he would, nevertheless, give
+no aid, directly or indirectly, in circulating publications of an
+incendiary or inflammatory character; and assured the perjured
+functionary, who had violated his oath of office, that, while he could
+not sanction, he would not condemn his conduct.  Against this virtual
+encouragement of a flagrant infringement of a constitutional right, this
+licensing of thousands of petty government officials to sit in their mail
+offices--to use the figure of Milton--cross-legged, like so many envious
+Junos, in judgment upon the daily offspring of the press, taking counsel
+of passion, prejudice, and popular excitement as to what was "incendiary"
+or "inflammatory," the Evening Post spoke in tones of manly protest.
+
+While almost all the editors of his party throughout the country either
+openly approved of the conduct of the Postmaster-General or silently
+acquiesced in it, William Leggett, who, in the absence of his colleague,
+was at that time sole editor of the Post, and who had everything to lose,
+in a worldly point of view, by assailing a leading functionary of the
+government, who was a favorite of the President and a sharer of his
+popularity, did not hesitate as to the course which consistency and duty
+required at his hands.  He took his stand for unpopular truth, at a time
+when a different course on his part could not have failed to secure him
+the favor and patronage of his party.  In the great struggle with the
+Bank of the United States, his services had not been unappreciated by the
+President and his friends.  Without directly approving the course of the
+administration on the question of the rights of the Abolitionists, by
+remaining silent in respect to it, he might have avoided all suspicion of
+mental and moral independence incompatible with party allegiance.  The
+impracticable honesty of Leggett, never bending from the erectness of
+truth for the sake of that "thrift which follows fawning," dictated a
+most severe and scorching review of the letter of the Postmaster-General.
+"More monstrous, more detestable doctrines we have never heard
+promulgated," he exclaimed in one of his leading editorials.  "With what
+face, after this, can the Postmaster-General punish a postmaster for any
+exercise of the fearfully dangerous power of stopping and destroying any
+portion of the mails?"  "The Abolitionists do not deserve to be placed on
+the same footing with a foreign enemy, nor their publications as the
+secret despatches of a spy.  They are American citizens, in the exercise
+of their undoubted right of citizenship; and however erroneous their
+views, however fanatic their conduct, while they act within the limits of
+the law, what official functionary, be he merely a subordinate or the
+head of the post-office department, shall dare to abridge them of their
+rights as citizens, and deny them those facilities of intercourse which
+were instituted for the equal accommodation of all?  If the American
+people will submit to this, let us expunge all written codes, and resolve
+society into its original elements, where the might of the strong is
+better than the right of the weak."
+
+A few days after the publication of this manly rebuke, he wrote an
+indignantly sarcastic article upon the mobs which were at this time
+everywhere summoned to "put down the Abolitionists."  The next day, the
+4th of the ninth month, 1835, he received a copy of the Address of the
+American Anti-Slavery Society to the public, containing a full and
+explicit avowal of all the principles and designs of the association.  He
+gave it a candid perusal, weighed its arguments, compared its doctrines
+with those at the foundation of his own political faith, and rose up from
+its examination an Abolitionist.  He saw that he himself, misled by the
+popular clamor, had done injustice to benevolent and self-sacrificing
+men; and he took the earliest occasion, in an article of great power and
+eloquence, to make the amplest atonement.  He declared his entire
+concurrence with the views of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with the
+single exception of a doubt which rested, on his mind as to the abolition
+of slavery in the District of Columbia.  We quote from the concluding
+paragraph of this article:--
+
+"We assert without hesitation, that, if we possessed the right, we should
+not scruple to exercise it for the speedy annihilation of servitude and
+chains.  The impression made in boyhood by the glorious exclamation of
+Cato,
+
+               "'A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty
+               Is worth a whole eternity of bondage!'
+
+has been worn deeper, not effaced, by time; and we eagerly and ardently
+trust that the day will yet arrive when the clank of the bondman's
+fetters will form no part of the multitudinous sounds which our country
+sends up to Heaven, mingling, as it were, into a song of praise for our
+national prosperity.  We yearn with strong desire for the day when
+freedom shall no longer wave
+
+               "Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.'"
+
+A few days after, in reply to the assaults made upon him from all
+quarters, he calmly and firmly reiterated his determination to maintain
+the right of free discussion of the subject of slavery.
+
+"The course we are pursuing," said he, "is one which we entered upon after
+mature deliberation, and we are not to be turned from it by a species of
+opposition, the inefficacy of which we have seen displayed in so many
+former instances.  It is Philip Van Artevelde who says:--
+
+               "'All my life long,
+               I have beheld with most respect the man
+               Who knew himself, and knew the ways before him;
+               And from among them chose considerately,
+               With a clear foresight, not a blindfold courage;
+               And, having chosen, with a steadfast mind.
+               Pursued his purpose.'
+
+"This is the sort of character we emulate.  If to believe slavery a
+deplorable evil and curse, in whatever light it is viewed; if to yearn
+for the day which shall break the fetters of three millions of human
+beings, and restore to them their birthright of equal freedom; if to be
+willing, in season and out of season, to do all in our power to promote
+so desirable a result, by all means not inconsistent with higher duty: if
+these sentiments constitute us Abolitionists, then are we such, and glory
+in the name."
+
+"The senseless cry of 'Abolitionist' shall never deter us, nor the more
+senseless attempt of puny prints to read us out of the democratic party.
+The often-quoted and beautiful saying of the Latin historian, Homo sum:
+humani nihil a me alienum puto, we apply to the poor slave as well as his
+master, and shall endeavor to fulfil towards both the obligations of an
+equal humanity."
+
+The generation which, since the period of which we are speaking, have
+risen into active life can have but a faint conception of the boldness of
+this movement on the part of William Leggett.  To be an Abolitionist then
+was to abandon all hope of political preferment or party favor; to be
+marked and branded as a social outlaw, under good society's interdict of
+food and fire; to hold property, liberty, and life itself at the mercy of
+lawless mobs.  All this William Leggett clearly saw.  He knew how rugged
+and thorny was the path upon which, impelled by his love of truth and the
+obligations of humanity, he was entering.  From hunted and proscribed
+Abolitionists and oppressed and spirit-broken colored men, the Pariahs of
+American democracy, he could alone expect sympathy.  The Whig journals,
+with a few honorable exceptions, exulted over what they regarded as the
+fall of a formidable opponent; and after painting his abolitionism in the
+most hideous colors, held him up to their Southern allies as a specimen
+of the radical disorganizers and democratic levellers of the North.  His
+own party, in consequence, made haste to proscribe him.  Government
+advertising was promptly withdrawn from his paper.  The official journals
+of Washington and Albany read him out of the pale of democracy.  Father
+Ritchie scolded and threatened.  The democratic committee issued its bull
+against him from Tammany Hall.  The resolutions of that committee were
+laid before him when he was sinking under a severe illness.  Rallying his
+energies, he dictated from his sick-bed an answer marked by all his
+accustomed vigor and boldness.  Its tone was calm, manly, self-relying;
+the language of one who, having planted his feet hard down on the rock of
+principle, stood there like Luther at Worms, because he "could not
+otherwise."  Exhausted nature sunk under the effort.  A weary sickness of
+nearly a year's duration followed.  In this sore affliction, deserted as
+he was by most of his old political friends, we have reason to know that
+he was cheered by the gratitude of those in whose behalf he had well-nigh
+made a martyr's sacrifice; and that from the humble hearths of his poor
+colored fellow-citizens fervent prayers went up for his restoration.
+
+His work was not yet done.  Purified by trial, he was to stand forth once
+more in vindication of the truths of freedom.  As soon as his health was
+sufficiently reestablished, he commenced the publication of an
+independent political and literary journal, under the expressive title of
+The Plaindealer.  In his first number he stated, that, claiming the right
+of absolute freedom of discussion, he should exercise it with no other
+limitations than those of his own judgment.  A poor man, he admitted that
+he established the paper in the expectation of deriving from it a
+livelihood, but that even for that object he could not trim its sails to
+suit the varying breeze of popular prejudice.  "If," said he, "a paper
+which makes the Right, and not the Expedient, its cardinal object, will
+not yield its conductor a support, there are honest vocations that will,
+and better the humblest of them than to be seated at the head of an
+influential press, if its influence is not exerted to promote the cause
+of truth."  He was true to his promise.  The free soul of a free, strong
+man spoke out in his paper.  How refreshing was it, after listening to
+the inanities, the dull, witless vulgarity, the wearisome commonplace of
+journalists, who had no higher aim than to echo, with parrot-like
+exactness, current prejudices and falsehoods, to turn to the great and
+generous thoughts, the chaste and vigorous diction, of the Plaindealer!
+No man ever had a clearer idea of the duties and responsibilities of a
+conductor of the public press than William Leggett, and few have ever
+combined so many of the qualifications for their perfect discharge: a
+nice sense of justice, a warm benevolence, inflexible truth, honesty
+defying temptation, a mind stored with learning, and having at command
+the treasures of the best thoughts of the best authors.  As was said of
+Fletcher of Saltoun, he was "a gentleman steady in his principles; of
+nice honor, abundance of learning; bold as a lion; a sure friend; a man
+who would lose his life to serve his country, and would not do a base
+thing to save it."
+
+He had his faults: his positive convictions sometimes took the shape
+of a proud and obstinate dogmatism; he who could so well appeal to the
+judgment and the reason of his readers too often only roused their
+passions by invective and vehement declamation.  Moderate men were
+startled and pained by the fierce energy of his language; and he not
+unfrequently made implacable enemies of opponents whom he might have
+conciliated and won over by mild expostulation and patient explanation.
+It must be urged in extenuation, that, as the champion of unpopular
+truths, he was assailed unfairly on all sides, and indecently
+misrepresented and calumniated to a degree, as his friend Sedgwick justly
+remarks, unprecedented even in the annals of the American press; and that
+his errors in this respect were, in the main, errors of retaliation.
+
+In the Plaindealer, in common with the leading moral and political
+subjects of the day, that of slavery was freely discussed in all its
+bearings.  It is difficult, in a single extract, to convey an adequate
+idea of the character of the editorial columns of a paper, where terse
+and concentrated irony and sarcasm alternate with eloquent appeal and
+diffuse commentary and labored argument.  We can only offer at random the
+following passages from a long review of a speech of John C. Calhoun, in
+which that extraordinary man, whose giant intellect has been shut out of
+its appropriate field of exercise by the very slavery of which he is the
+champion, undertook to maintain, in reply to a Virginia senator, that
+chattel slavery was not an evil, but "a great good."
+
+"We have Mr. Calhoun's own warrant for attacking his position with all
+the fervor which a high sense of duty can give, for we do hold, from the
+bottom of our soul, that slavery is an evil,--a deep, detestable,
+damnable evil; evil in all its aspects to the blacks, and a greater evil
+to the whites; an evil moral, social, and political; an evil which shows
+itself in the languishing condition of agriculture where it exists, in
+paralyzed commerce, and in the prostration of the mechanic arts; an evil
+which stares you in the face from uncultivated fields, and howls in your
+ears through tangled swamps and morasses.  Slavery is such an evil that
+it withers what it touches.  Where it is once securely established the
+land becomes desolate, as the tree inevitably perishes which the sea-hawk
+chooses for its nest; while freedom, on the contrary, flourishes like the
+tannen, 'on the loftiest and least sheltered rocks,' and clothes with its
+refreshing verdure what, without it, would frown in naked and incurable
+sterility.
+
+"If any one desires an illustration of the opposite influences of slavery
+and freedom, let him look at the two sister States of Kentucky and Ohio.
+Alike in soil and climate, and divided only by a river, whose translucent
+waters reveal, through nearly the whole breadth, the sandy bottom over
+which they sparkle, how different are they in all the respects over which
+man has control!  On the one hand the air is vocal with the mingled
+tumult of a vast and prosperous population.  Every hillside smiles with
+an abundant harvest, every valley shelters a thriving village, the click
+of a busy mill drowns the prattle of every rivulet, and all the
+multitudinous sounds of business denote happy activity in every branch
+of social occupation.
+
+"This is the State which, but a few years ago, slept in the unbroken
+solitude of nature.  The forest spread an interminable canopy of shade
+over the dark soil on which the fat and useless vegetation rotted at
+ease, and through the dusky vistas of the wood only savage beasts and
+more savage men prowled in quest of prey.  The whole land now blossoms
+like a garden.  The tall and interlacing trees have unlocked their hold,
+and bowed before the woodman's axe.  The soil is disencumbered of the
+mossy trunks which had reposed upon it for ages.  The rivers flash in the
+sunlight, and the fields smile with waving harvests.  This is Ohio, and
+this is what freedom has done for it.
+
+"Now, let us turn to Kentucky, and note the opposite influences of
+slavery.  A narrow and unfrequented path through the close and sultry
+canebrake conducts us to a wretched hovel.  It stands in the midst of an
+unweeded field, whose dilapidated enclosure scarcely protects it from the
+lowing and hungry kine.  Children half clad and squalid, and destitute of
+the buoyancy natural to their age, lounge in the sunshine, while their
+parent saunters apart, to watch his languid slaves drive the ill-
+appointed team afield.  This is not a fancy picture.  It is a true copy
+of one of the features which make up the aspect 'of the State, and of
+every State where the moral leprosy of slavery covers the people with its
+noisome scales; a deadening lethargy benumbs the limbs of the body
+politic; a stupor settles on the arts of life; agriculture reluctantly
+drags the plough and harrow to the field, only when scourged by
+necessity; the axe drops from the woodman's nerveless hand the moment his
+fire is scantily supplied with fuel; and the fen, undrained, sends up its
+noxious exhalations, to rack with cramps and agues the frame already too
+much enervated by a moral epidemic to creep beyond the sphere of the
+material miasm."
+
+The Plaindealer was uniformly conducted with eminent ability; but its
+editor was too far in advance of his contemporaries to find general
+acceptance, or even toleration.  In addition to pecuniary embarrassments,
+his health once more failed, and in the autumn of 1837 he was compelled
+to suspend the publication of his paper.  One of the last articles which
+he wrote for it shows the extent to which he was sometimes carried by the
+intensity and depth of his abhorrence of oppression, and the fervency of
+his adoration of liberty.  Speaking of the liability of being called upon
+to aid the master in the subjection of revolted slaves, and in replacing
+their cast-off fetters, he thus expresses himself: "Would we comply with
+such a requisition?  No!  Rather would we see our right arm lopped from
+our body, and the mutilated trunk itself gored with mortal wounds, than
+raise a finger in opposition to men struggling in the holy cause of
+freedom.  The obligations of citizenship are strong, but those of
+justice, humanity, and religion, stronger.  We earnestly trust that the
+great contest of opinion which is now going on in this country may
+terminate in the enfranchisement of the slaves, without recourse to the
+strife of blood; but should the oppressed bondmen, impatient of the tardy
+progress of truth, urged only in discussion, attempt to burst their
+chains by a more violent and shorter process, they should never encounter
+our arm nor hear our voice in the ranks of their opponents.  We should
+stand a sad spectator of the conflict; and, whatever commiseration we
+might feel for the discomfiture of the oppressors, we should pray that
+the battle might end in giving freedom to the oppressed."
+
+With the Plain dealer, his connection with the public, in a great
+measure, ceased.  His steady and intimate friend, personal as well as
+political, Theodore Sedgwick, Jun., a gentleman who has, on many
+occasions, proved himself worthy of his liberty-loving ancestry, thus
+speaks of him in his private life at this period: "Amid the reverses of
+fortune, harassed by pecuniary embarrassments, during the tortures of a
+disease which tore away his life piecemeal, hee ever maintained the same
+manly and unaltered front, the same cheerfulness of disposition, the same
+dignity of conduct.  No humiliating solicitation, no weak complaint,
+escaped him."  At the election in the fall of 1838, the noble-spirited
+democrat was not wholly forgotten.  A strenuous effort, which was well-
+nigh successful, was made to secure his nomination as a candidate for
+Congress.  It was at this juncture that he wrote to a friend in the city,
+from his residence at New Rochelle, one of the noblest letters ever
+penned by a candidate for popular favor.  The following extracts will
+show how a true man can meet the temptations of political life:--
+
+"What I am most afraid of is, that some of my friends, in their too
+earnest zeal, will place me in a false position on the subject of
+slavery.  I am an Abolitionist.  I hate slavery in all its forms,
+degrees, and influences; and I deem myself bound, by the highest moral
+and political obligations, not to let that sentiment of hate lie dormant
+and smouldering in my own breast, but to give it free vent, and let it
+blaze forth, that it may kindle equal ardor through the whole sphere of
+my influence.  I would not have this fact disguised or mystified for any
+office the people have it in their power to give.  Rather, a thousand
+times rather, would I again meet the denunciations of Tammany Hall, and
+be stigmatized with all the foul epithets with which the anti-abolition
+vocabulary abounds, than recall or deny one tittle of my creed.
+Abolition is, in my sense, a necessary and a glorious part of democracy;
+and I hold the right and duty to discuss the subject of slavery, and to
+expose its hideous evils in all their bearings,--moral, social, and
+political,--as of infinitely higher importance than to carry fifty sub-
+treasury bills.  That I should discharge this duty temperately; that I
+should not let it come in collision with other duties; that I should not
+let my hatred of slavery transcend the express obligations of the
+Constitution, or violate its clear spirit, I hope and trust you think
+sufficiently well of me to believe.  But what I fear is, (not from you,
+however,) that some of my advocates and champions will seek to recommend
+me to popular support by representing me as not an Abolitionist, which is
+false.  All that I have written gives the lie to it.  All I shall write
+will give the lie to it.
+
+"And here, let me add, (apart from any consideration already adverted
+to,) that, as a matter of mere policy, I would not, if I could, have my
+name disjoined from abolitionism.  To be an Abolitionist now is to be an
+incendiary; as, three years ago, to be an anti-monopolist was to be a
+leveller and a Jack Cade.  See what three short years have done in
+effecting the anti-monopoly reform; and depend upon it that the next
+three years, or, if not three, say three times three, if you please, will
+work a greater revolution on the slavery question.  The stream of public
+opinion now sets against us; but it is about to turn, and the
+regurgitation will be tremendous.  Proud in that day may well be the man
+who can float in triumph on the first refluent wave, swept onward by the
+deluge which he himself, in advance of his fellows, has largely shared in
+occasioning.  Such be my fate; and, living or dead, it will, in some
+measure, be mine!  I have written my name in ineffaceable letters on the
+abolition record; and whether the reward ultimately come in the shape of
+honors to the living man, or a tribute to the memory of a departed one, I
+would not forfeit my right to it for as many offices as has in his gift,
+if each of them was greater than his own."
+
+After mentioning that he had understood that some of his friends had
+endeavored to propitiate popular prejudice by representing him as no
+Abolitionist, he says:--
+
+"Keep them, for God's sake, from committing any such fooleries for the
+sake of getting me into Congress.  Let others twist themselves into what
+shapes they please, to gratify the present taste of the people; as for
+me, I am not formed of such pliant materials, and choose to retain,
+undisturbed, the image of my God!  I do not wish to cheat the people of
+their votes.  I would not get their support, any more than their money,
+under false pretences.  I am what I am; and if that does not suit them,
+I am content to stay at home."
+
+God be praised for affording us, even in these latter days, the sight of
+an honest man!  Amidst the heartlessness, the double-dealing, the
+evasions, the prevarications, the shameful treachery and falsehood, of
+political men of both parties, in respect to the question of slavery, how
+refreshing is it to listen to words like these!  They renew our failing
+faith in human nature.  They reprove our weak misgivings.  We rise up
+from their perusal stronger and healthier.  With something of the spirit
+which dictated them, we renew our vows to freedom, and, with manlier
+energy, gird up our souls for the stern struggle before us.
+
+As might have been expected, and as he himself predicted, the efforts of
+his friends to procure his nomination failed; but the same generous
+appreciators of his rare worth were soon after more successful in their
+exertions in his behalf.  He received from President Van Buren the
+appointment of the mission to Guatemala,--an appointment which, in
+addition to honorable employment in the service of his country, promised
+him the advantages of a sea voyage and a change of climate, for the
+restoration of his health.  The course of Martin Van Buren on the subject
+of slavery in the District of Columbia forms, in the estimation of many
+of his best friends, by no means the most creditable portion of his
+political history; but it certainly argues well for his magnanimity and
+freedom from merely personal resentment that he gave this appointment to
+the man who had animadverted upon that course with the greatest freedom,
+and whose rebuke of the veto pledge, severe in its truth and justice,
+formed the only discord in the paean of partisan flattery which greeted
+his inaugural.  But, however well intended, it came too late.  In the
+midst of the congratulations of his friends on the brightening prospect
+before him, the still hopeful and vigorous spirit of William Leggett was
+summoned away by death.  Universal regret was awakened.  Admiration of
+his intellectual power, and that generous and full appreciation of his
+high moral worth which had been in too many instances withheld from the
+living man by party policy and prejudice, were now freely accorded to the
+dead.  The presses of both political parties vied with each other in
+expressions of sorrow at the loss of a great and true man.  The
+Democracy, through all its organs, hastened to canonize him as one of the
+saints of its calendar.  The general committee, in New York, expunged
+their resolutions of censure.  The Democratic Review, at that period the
+most respectable mouthpiece of the democratic party, made him the subject
+of exalted eulogy.  His early friend and co-editor, William Cullen
+Bryant, laid upon his grave the following tribute, alike beautiful and
+true:--
+
+              "The earth may ring, from shore to shore,
+               With echoes of a glorious name,
+               But he whose loss our tears deplore
+               Has left behind him more than fame.
+
+              "For when the death-frost came to lie
+               On Leggett's warm and mighty heart,
+               And quenched his bold and friendly eye,
+               His spirit did not all depart.
+
+              "The words of fire that from his pen
+               He flung upon the lucid page
+               Still move, still shake the hearts of men,
+               Amid a cold and coward age.
+
+              "His love of Truth, too warm, too strong,
+               For Hope or Fear to chain or chill,
+               His hate of tyranny and wrong,
+               Burn in the breasts they kindled still."
+
+So lived and died William Leggett.  What a rebuke of party perfidy, of
+political meanness, of the common arts and stratagems of demagogues,
+comes up from his grave!  How the cheek of mercenary selfishness crimsons
+at the thought of his incorruptible integrity!  How heartless and hollow
+pretenders, who offer lip service to freedom, while they give their hands
+to whatever work their slaveholding managers may assign them; who sit in
+chains round the crib of governmental patronage, putting on the spaniel,
+and putting off the man, and making their whole lives a miserable lie,
+shrink back from a contrast with the proud and austere dignity of his
+character!  What a comment on their own condition is the memory of a man
+who could calmly endure the loss of party favor, the reproaches of his
+friends, the malignant assaults of his enemies, and the fretting evils of
+poverty, in the hope of bequeathing, like the dying testator of Ford,
+
+              "A fame by scandal untouched,
+               To Memory and Time's old daughter, Truth."
+
+The praises which such men are now constrained to bestow upon him are
+their own condemnation.  Every stone which they pile upon his grave is
+written over with the record of their hypocrisy.
+
+We have written rather for the living than the dead.  As one of that
+proscribed and hunted band of Abolitionists, whose rights were so bravely
+defended by William Leggett, we should, indeed, be wanting in ordinary
+gratitude not to do honor to his memory; but we have been actuated at the
+present time mainly by a hope that the character, the lineaments of which
+we have so imperfectly sketched, may awaken a generous emulation in the
+hearts of the young democracy of our country.  Democracy such as William
+Leggett believed and practised, democracy in its full and all-
+comprehensive significance, is destined to be the settled political faith
+of this republic.  Because the despotism of slavery has usurped its name,
+and offered the strange incense of human tears and blood on its profaned
+altars, shall we, therefore, abandon the only political faith which
+coincides with the Gospel of Jesus, and meets the aspirations and wants
+of humanity?  No.  The duty of the present generation in the United
+States is to reduce this faith to practice, to make the beautiful ideal a
+fact.
+
+"Every American," says Leggett, "who in any way countenances slavery is
+derelict to his duty, as a Christian, a patriot, a man; and every one
+does countenance and authorize it who suffers any opportunity of
+expressing his deep abhorrence of its manifold abominations to pass
+unimproved."  The whole world has an interest in this matter.  The
+influence of our democratic despotism is exerted against the liberties of
+Europe.  Political reformers in the Old World, who have testified to
+their love of freedom by serious sacrifices, hold but one language on
+this point.  They tell us that American slavery furnishes kings and
+aristocracies with their most potent arguments; that it is a perpetual
+drag on the wheel of political progress.
+
+We have before us, at this time, a letter from Seidensticker, one of the
+leaders of the patriotic movement in behalf of German liberty in 1831.
+It was written from the prison of Celle, where he had been confined for
+eight years.  The writer expresses his indignant astonishment at the
+speeches of John C. Calhoun, and others in Congress, on the slavery
+question, and deplores the disastrous influence of our great
+inconsistency upon the cause of freedom throughout the world,--an
+influence which paralyzes the hands of the patriotic reformer, while it
+strengthens those of his oppressor, and deepens around the living martyrs
+and confessors of European democracy the cold shadow of their prisons.
+
+Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham, the President of the British Free Suffrage
+Union, and whose philanthropy and democracy have been vouched for by the
+Democratic Review in this country, has the following passage in an
+address to the citizens of the United States: "Although an admirer of the
+institutions of your country, and deeply lamenting the evils of my own
+government, I find it difficult to reply to those who are opposed to any
+extension of the political rights of Englishmen, when they point to
+America, and say that where all have a control over the legislation but
+those who are guilty of a dark skin, slavery and the slave trade remain,
+not only unmitigated, but continue to extend; and that while there is an
+onward movement in favor of its extinction, not only in England and
+France, but in Cuba and Brazil, American legislators cling to this
+enormous evil, without attempting to relax or mitigate its horrors."
+
+How long shall such appeals, from such sources, be wasted upon us?  Shall
+our baleful example enslave the world?  Shall the tree of democracy,
+which our fathers intended for "the healing of the nations," be to them
+like the fabled upas, blighting all around it?
+
+The men of the North, the pioneers of the free West, and the non-
+slaveholders of the South must answer these questions.  It is for them to
+say whether the present wellnigh intolerable evil shall continue to
+increase its boundaries, and strengthen its hold upon the government, the
+political parties, and the religious sects of our country.  Interest and
+honor, present possession and future hope, the memory of fathers, the
+prospects of children, gratitude, affection, the still call of the dead,
+the cry of oppressed nations looking hitherward for the result of all
+their hopes, the voice of God in the soul, in revelation, and in His
+providence, all appeal to them for a speedy and righteous decision.  At
+this moment, on the floor of Congress, Democracy and Slavery have met in
+a death-grapple.  The South stands firm; it allows no party division on
+the slave question.  One of its members has declared that "the slave
+States have no traitors."  Can the same be said of the free?  Now, as in
+the time of the fatal Missouri Compromise, there are, it is to be feared,
+political peddlers among our representatives, whose souls are in the
+market, and whose consciences are vendible commodities.  Through their
+means, the slave power may gain a temporary triumph; but may not the very
+baseness of the treachery arouse the Northern heart?  By driving the free
+States to the wall, may it not compel them to turn and take an aggressive
+attitude, clasp hands over the altar of their common freedom, and swear
+eternal hostility to slavery?
+
+Be the issue of the present contest what it may, those who are faithful
+to freedom should allow no temporary reverse to shake their confidence in
+the ultimate triumph of the right.  The slave will be free.  Democracy in
+America will yet be a glorious reality; and when the topstone of that
+temple of freedom which our fathers left unfinished shall be brought
+forth with shoutings and cries of grace unto it, when our now drooping-
+Liberty lifts up her head and prospers, happy will be he who can say,
+with John Milton, "Among those who have something more than wished her
+welfare, I too have my charter and freehold of rejoicing to me and my
+heirs."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+NATHANIEL PEABODY ROGERS.
+
+"And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
+Has vanished from his kindly hearth."
+
+So, in one of the sweetest and most pathetic of his poems touching the
+loss of his literary friends, sang Wordsworth.  We well remember with
+what freshness and vividness these simple lines came before us, on
+hearing, last autumn, of the death of the warm-hearted and gifted friend
+whose name heads this article; for there was much in his character and
+genius to remind us of the gentle author of Elia.  He had the latter's
+genial humor and quaintness; his nice and delicate perception of the
+beautiful and poetic; his happy, easy diction, not the result, as in the
+case of that of the English essayist, of slow and careful elaboration,
+but the natural, spontaneous language in which his conceptions at once
+embodied themselves, apparently without any consciousness of effort.  As
+Mark Antony talked, he wrote, "right on," telling his readers often what
+"they themselves did know," yet imparting to the simplest commonplaces of
+life interest and significance, and throwing a golden haze of poetry over
+the rough and thorny pathways of every-day duty.  Like Lamb, he loved his
+friends without stint or limit.  The "old familiar faces" haunted him.
+Lamb loved the streets and lanes of London--the places where he oftenest
+came in contact with the warm, genial heart of humanity--better than the
+country.  Rogers loved the wild and lonely hills and valleys of New
+Hampshire none the less that he was fully alive to the enjoyments of
+society, and could enter with the heartiest sympathy into all the joys
+and sorrows of his friends and neighbors.
+
+In another point of view, he was not unlike Elia.  He had the same love
+of home, and home friends, and familiar objects; the same fondness for
+common sights and sounds; the same dread of change; the same shrinking
+from the unknown and the dark.  Like him, he clung with a child's love to
+the living present, and recoiled from a contemplation of the great change
+which awaits us.  Like him, he was content with the goodly green earth
+and human countenances, and would fain set up his tabernacle here.  He
+had less of what might be termed self-indulgence in this feeling than
+Lamb.  He had higher views; he loved this world not only for its own
+sake, but for the opportunities it afforded of doing good.  Like the
+Persian seer, he beheld the legions of Ormuzd and Ahriman, of Light and
+Darkness, contending for mastery over the earth, as the sunshine and
+shadow of a gusty, half-cloudy day struggled on the green slopes of his
+native mountains; and, mingled with the bright host, he would fain have
+fought on until its banners waved in eternal sunshine over the last
+hiding-place of darkness.  He entered into the work of reform with the
+enthusiasm and chivalry of a knight of the crusades.  He had faith in
+human progress,--in the ultimate triumph of the good; millennial lights
+beaconed up all along his horizon.  In the philanthropic movements of the
+day; in the efforts to remove the evils of slavery, war, intemperance,
+and sanguinary laws; in the humane and generous spirit of much of our
+modern poetry and literature; in the growing demand of the religious
+community, of all sects, for the preaching of the gospel of love and
+humanity, he heard the low and tremulous prelude of the great anthem of
+universal harmony.  "The world," said he, in a notice of the music of the
+Hutchinson family, "is out of tune now.  But it will be tuned again, and
+all will become harmony."  In this faith he lived and acted; working, not
+always, as it seemed to some of his friends, wisely, but bravely,
+truthfully, earnestly, cheering on his fellow-laborers, and imparting to
+the dullest and most earthward looking of them something of his own zeal
+and loftiness of purpose.
+
+"Who was he?" does the reader ask?  Naturally enough, too, for his name
+has never found its way into fashionable reviews; it has never been
+associated with tale, or essay, or poem, to our knowledge.  Our friend
+Griswold, who, like another Noah, has launched some hundreds of American
+poets and prose writers on the tide of immortality in his two huge arks
+of rhyme and reason, has either overlooked his name, or deemed it
+unworthy of preservation.  Then, too, he was known mainly as the editor
+of a proscribed and everywhere-spoken-against anti-slavery paper.  It had
+few readers of literary taste and discrimination; plain, earnest men and
+women, intent only upon the thought itself, and caring little for the
+clothing of it, loved the _Herald of Freedom_ for its honestness and
+earnestness, and its bold rebukes of the wrong, its all-surrendering
+homage to what its editor believed to be right.  But the literary world
+of authors and critics saw and heard little or nothing of him or his
+writings.  "I once had a bit of scholar-craft," he says of himself on one
+occasion, "and had I attempted it in some pitiful sectarian or party or
+literary sheet, I should have stood a chance to get quoted into the
+periodicals.  Now, who dares quote from the _Herald of Freedom_?"  He
+wrote for humanity, as his biographer justly says, not for fame.  "He
+wrote because he had something to say, and true to nature, for to him
+nature was truth; he spoke right on, with the artlessness and simplicity
+of a child."
+
+He was born in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in the sixth month of 1794,--
+a lineal descendant from John Rogers, of martyr-memory.  Educated at
+Dartmouth College, he studied law with Hon. Richard Fletcher, of
+Salisbury, New Hampshire, now of Boston, and commenced the practice of it
+in 1819, in his native village.  He was diligent and successful in his
+profession, although seldom known as a pleader.  About the year 1833, he
+became interested in the anti-slavery movement.  His was one of the few
+voices of encouragement and sympathy which greeted the author of this
+sketch on the publication of a pamphlet in favor of immediate
+emancipation.  He gave us a kind word of approval, and invited us to his
+mountain home, on the banks of the Pemigewasset,--an invitation which,
+two years afterwards, we accepted.  In the early autumn, in company with
+George Thompson, (the eloquent reformer, who has since been elected a
+member of the British Parliament from the Tower Hamlets,) we drove up the
+beautiful valley of the White Mountain tributary of the Merrimac, and,
+just as a glorious sunset was steeping river, valley, and mountain in its
+hues of heaven, were welcomed to the pleasant home and family circle of
+our friend Rogers.  We spent two delightful evenings with him.  His
+cordiality, his warm-hearted sympathy in our object, his keen wit,
+inimitable humor, and childlike and simple mirthfulness, his full
+appreciation of the beautiful in art and nature, impressed us with the
+conviction that we were the guests of no ordinary man; that we were
+communing with unmistakable genius, such an one as might have added to
+the wit and eloquence of Ben Jonson's famous club at the _Mermaid_, or
+that which Lamb and Coleridge and Southey frequented at the _Salutation
+and Cat_, of Smithfield.  "The most brilliant man I have met in America!"
+said George Thompson, as we left the hospitable door of our friend.
+
+In 1838, he gave up his law practice, left his fine outlook at Plymouth
+upon the mountains of the North, Moosehillock and the Haystacks, and took
+up his residence at Concord, for the purpose of editing the _Herald of
+Freedom_, an anti-slavery paper which had been started some three or four
+years before.  John Pierpont, than whom there could not be a more
+competent witness, in his brief and beautiful sketch of the life and
+writings of Rogers, does not overestimate the ability with which the
+Herald was conducted, when he says of its editor: "As a newspaper writer,
+we think him unequalled by any living man; and in the general strength,
+clearness, and quickness of his intellect, we think all who knew him well
+will agree with us that he was not excelled by any editor in the
+country."  He was not a profound reasoner: his imagination and brilliant
+fancy played the wildest tricks with his logic; yet, considering the way
+by which he reached them, it is remarkable that his conclusions were so
+often correct.  The tendency of his mind was to extremes.  A zealous
+Calvinistic church-member, he became an equally zealous opponent of
+churches and priests; a warm politician, he became an ultra non-resistant
+and no-government man.  In all this, his sincerity was manifest.  If, in
+the indulgence of his remarkable powers of sarcasm, in the free antics of
+a humorous fancy, upon whose graceful neck he had flung loose the reins,
+he sometimes did injustice to individuals, and touched, in irreverent
+sport, the hem of sacred garments, it had the excuse, at least, of a
+generous and honest motive.  If he sometimes exaggerated, those who best,
+knew him can testify that he "set down naught in malice."
+
+We have before us a printed collection of his writings,--hasty
+editorials, flung off without care or revision, the offspring of sudden
+impulse frequently; always free, artless, unstudied; the language
+transparent as air, exactly expressing the thought.  He loved the common,
+simple dialect of the people,--the "beautiful strong old Saxon,--the talk
+words."  He had an especial dislike of learned and "dictionary words."
+He used to recommend Cobbett's Works to "every young man and woman who
+has been hurt in his or her talk and writing by going to school."
+
+Our limits will not admit of such extracts from the Collection of his
+writings as would convey to our readers an adequate idea of his thought
+and manner.  His descriptions of natural scenery glow with life.  One can
+almost see the sunset light flooding the Franconia Notch, and glorifying
+the peaks of Moosehillock, and hear the murmur of the west wind in the
+pines, and the light, liquid voice of Pemigewasset sounding up from its
+rocky channel, through its green hem of maples, while reading them.  We
+give a brief extract from an editorial account of an autumnal trip to
+Vermont:
+
+"We have recently journeyed through a portion of this, free State; and it
+is not all imagination in us that sees, in its bold scenery, its
+uninfected inland position, its mountainous but fertile and verdant
+surface, the secret of the noble predisposition of its people.  They are
+located for freedom.  Liberty's home is on their Green Mountains.  Their
+farmer republic nowhere touches the ocean, the highway of the world's
+crimes, as well as its nations.  It has no seaport for the importation of
+slavery, or the exportation of its own highland republicanism.  Should
+slavery ever prevail over this nation, to its utter subjugation, the last
+lingering footsteps of retiring Liberty will be seen, not, as Daniel
+Webster said, in the proud old Commonwealth of Massachusetts, about
+Bunker Hill and Faneuil Hall; but she will be found wailing, like
+Jephthah's daughter, among the 'hollows' and along the sides of the Green
+Mountains.
+
+"Vermont shows gloriously at this autumn season.  Frost has gently laid
+hands on her exuberant vegetation, tinging her rock-maple woods without
+abating the deep verdure of her herbage.  Everywhere along her peopled
+hollows and her bold hillslopes and summits the earth is alive with
+green, while her endless hard-wood forests are uniformed with all the
+hues of early fall, richer than the regimentals of the kings that
+glittered in the train of Napoleon on the confines of Poland, when he
+lingered there, on the last outposts of summer, before plunging into the
+snow-drifts of the North; more gorgeous than the array of Saladin's life-
+guard in the wars of the Crusaders, or of 'Solomon in all his glory,'
+decked in, all colors and hues, but still the hues of life.  Vegetation
+touched, but not dead, or, if killed, not bereft yet of 'signs of life.'
+'Decay's effacing fingers' had not yet 'swept the hills' 'where beauty
+lingers.' All looked fresh as growing foliage.  Vermont frosts don't seem
+to be 'killing frosts.' They only change aspects of beauty.  The mountain
+pastures, verdant to the peaks, and over the peaks of the high, steep
+hills, were covered with the amplest feed, and clothed with countless
+sheep; the hay-fields heavy with second crop, in some partly cut and
+abandoned, as if in very weariness and satiety, blooming with
+honeysuckle, contrasting strangely with the colors on the woods; the fat
+cattle and the long-tailed colts and close-built Morgans wallowing in it
+up to the eyes, or the cattle down to rest, with full bellies, by ten in
+the morning.  Fine but narrow roads wound along among the hills, free
+almost entirely of stone, and so smooth as to be safe for the most rapid
+driving, made of their rich, dark, powder-looking soil.  Beautiful
+villages or scattered settlements breaking upon the delighted view, on
+the meandering way, making the ride a continued scene of excitement and
+admiration.  The air fresh, free, and wholesome; the road almost dead
+level for miles and miles, among mountains that lay over the land like
+the great swells of the sea, and looking in the prospect as though there
+could be no passage."
+
+To this autumnal limning, the following spring picture may be a fitting
+accompaniment:--
+
+"At last Spring is here in full flush.  Winter held on tenaciously and
+mercilessly, but it has let go.  The great sun is high on his northern
+journey, and the vegetation, and the bird-singing, and the loud frog-
+chorus, the tree budding and blowing, are all upon us; and the glorious
+grass--super-best of earth's garniture--with its ever-satisfying green.
+The king-birds have come, and the corn-planter, the scolding bob-o-link.
+'Plant your corn, plant your corn,' says he, as he scurries athwart the
+ploughed ground, hardly lifting his crank wings to a level with his back,
+so self-important is he in his admonitions.  The earlier birds have gone
+to housekeeping, and have disappeared from the spray.  There has been
+brief period for them, this spring, for scarcely has the deep snow gone,
+but the dark-green grass has come, and first we shall know, the ground
+will be yellow with dandelions.
+
+"I incline to thank Heaven this glorious morning of May 16th for the
+pleasant home from which we can greet the Spring.  Hitherto we have had
+to await it amid a thicket of village houses, low down, close together,
+and awfully white.  For a prospect, we had the hinder part of an ugly
+meeting-house, which an enterprising neighbor relieved us of by planting
+a dwelling-house, right before our eyes, (on his own land, and he had a
+right to,) which relieved us also of all prospect whatever.  And the
+revival spirit of habitation which has come over Concord is clapping up a
+house between every two in the already crowded town; and the prospect is,
+it will be soon all buildings.  They are constructing, in quite good
+taste though, small, trim, cottage-like.  But I had rather be where I can
+breathe air, and see beyond my own features, than be smothered among the
+prettiest houses ever built.  We are on the slope of a hill; it is all
+sand, be sure, on all four sides of us, but the air is free, (and the
+sand, too, at times,) and our water, there is danger of hard drinking to
+live by it.  Air and water, the two necessaries of life, and high, free
+play-ground for the small ones.  There is a sand precipice hard by, high
+enough, were it only rock and overlooked the ocean, to be as sublime as
+any of the Nahant cliffs.  As it is, it is altogether a safer haunt for
+daring childhood, which could hardly break its neck by a descent of some
+hundreds of feet.
+
+"A low flat lies between us and the town, with its State-house, and body-
+guard of well-proportioned steeples standing round.  It was marshy and
+wet, but is almost all redeemed by the translation into it of the high
+hills of sand.  It must have been a terrible place for frogs, judging
+from what remains of it.  Bits of water from the springs hard by lay here
+and there about the low ground, which are peopled as full of singers as
+ever the gallery of the old North Meeting-house was, and quite as
+melodious ones.  Such performers I never heard, in marsh or pool.  They
+are not the great, stagnant, bull-paddocks, fat and coarse-noted like
+Parson, but clear-water frogs, green, lively, and sweet-voiced.  I
+passed their orchestra going home the other evening, with a small lad,
+and they were at it, all parts, ten thousand peeps, shrill, ear-piercing,
+and incessant, coming up from every quarter, accompanied by a second,
+from some larger swimmer with his trombone, and broken in upon, every now
+and then, but not discordantly, with the loud, quick hallo, that
+resembles the cry of the tree-toad.  'There are the Hutchinsons,' cried
+the lad.  'The Rainers,' responded I, glad to remember enough of my
+ancient Latin to know that Rana, or some such sounding word, stood for
+frog.  But it was a 'band of music,' as the Miller friends say.  Like
+other singers, (all but the Hutchinsons,) these are apt to sing too much,
+all the time they are awake, constituting really too much of a good
+thing.  I have wondered if the little reptiles were singing in concert,
+or whether every one peeped on his own hook, their neighbor hood only
+making it a chorus.  I incline to the opinion that they are performing
+together, that they know the tune, and each carries his part, self-
+selected, in free meeting, and therefore never discordant.  The hour rule
+of Congress might be useful, though far less needed among the frogs than
+among the profane croakers of the fens at Washington."
+
+Here is a sketch of the mountain scenery of New Hampshire, as seen from
+the Holderness Mountain, or North Hill, during a visit which he made to
+his native valley in the autumn of 1841:--
+
+"The earth sphered up all around us, in every quarter of the horizon,
+like the crater of a vast volcano, and the great hollow within the
+mountain circle was as smoky as Vesuvius or Etna in their recess of
+eruption.  The little village of Plymouth lay right at our feet, with its
+beautiful expanse of intervale opening on the eye like a lake among the
+woods and hills, and the Pemigewasset, bordered along its crooked way
+with rows of maples, meandering from upland to upland through the
+meadows.  Our young footsteps had wandered over these localities.  Time
+had cast it all far back that Pemigewasset, with its meadows and border
+trees; that little village whitening in the margin of its inter vale; and
+that one house which we could distinguish, where the mother that watched
+over and endured our wayward childhood totters at fourscore!
+
+"To the south stretched a broken, swelling upland country, but champaign
+from the top of North Hill, patched all over with grain-fields and green
+wood-lots, the roofs of the farm-houses shining in the sun.  Southwest,
+the Cardigan Mountain showed its bald forehead among the smokes of a
+thousand fires, kindled in the woods in the long drought.  Westward,
+Moosehillock heaved up its long back, black as a whale; and turning the
+eye on northward, glancing down the while on the Baker's River valley,
+dotted over with human dwellings like shingle-bunches for size, you
+behold the great Franconia Range, its Notch and its Haystacks, the
+Elephant Mountain on the left, and Lafayette (Great Haystack) on the
+right, shooting its peak in solemn loneliness high up into the desert
+sky, and overtopping all the neighboring Alps but Mount Washington
+itself.  The prospect of these is most impressive and satisfactory.  We
+don't believe the earth presents a finer mountain display.  The Haystacks
+stand there like the Pyramids on the wall of mountains.  One of them
+eminently has this Egyptian shape.  It is as accurate a pyramid to the
+eye as any in the old valley of the Nile, and a good deal bigger than any
+of those hoary monuments of human presumption, of the impious tyranny of
+monarchs and priests, and of the appalling servility of the erecting
+multitude.  Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh does not more finely resemble a
+sleeping lion than the huge mountain on the left of the Notch does an
+elephant, with his great, overgrown rump turned uncivilly toward the gap
+where the people have to pass.  Following round the panorama, you come to
+the Ossipees and the Sandwich Mountains, peaks innumerable and nameless,
+and of every variety of fantastic shape.  Down their vast sides are
+displayed the melancholy-looking slides, contrasting with the fathomless
+woods.
+
+"But the lakes,--you see lakes, as well as woods and mountains, from the
+top of North Hill.  Newfound Lake in Hebron, only eight miles distant,
+you can't see; it lies too deep among the hills.  Ponds show their small
+blue mirrors from various quarters of the great picture.  Worthen's Mill-
+Pond and the Hardhack, where we used to fish for trout in truant,
+barefooted days, Blair's Mill-Pond, White Oak Pond, and Long Pond, and
+the Little Squam, a beautiful dark sheet of deep, blue water, about two
+miles long, stretched an id the green hills and woods, with a charming
+little beach at its eastern end, and without an island.  And then the
+Great Squam, connected with it on the east by a short, narrow stream, the
+very queen of ponds, with its fleet of islands, surpassing in beauty all
+the foreign waters we have seen, in Scotland or elsewhere,--the islands
+covered with evergreens, which impart their hue to the mass of the lake,
+as it stretches seven miles on east from its smaller sister, towards the
+peerless Winnipesaukee.  Great Squam is as beautiful as water and island
+can be.  But Winnipesaukee, it is the very 'Smile of the Great Spirit.'
+It looks as if it had a thousand islands; some of them large enough for
+little towns, and others not bigger than a swan or a wild duck swimming
+on its surface of glass."
+
+His wit and sarcasm were generally too good-natured to provoke even their
+unfortunate objects, playing all over his editorials like the thunderless
+lightnings which quiver along the horizon of a night of summer calmness;
+but at times his indignation launched them like bolts from heaven.  Take
+the following as a specimen.  He is speaking of the gag rule of Congress,
+and commending Southern representatives for their skilful selection of a
+proper person to do their work:--
+
+"They have a quick eye at the South to the character, or, as they would
+say, the points of a slave.  They look into him shrewdly, as an old
+jockey does into a horse.  They will pick him out, at rifle-shot
+distance, among a thousand freemen.  They have a nice eye to detect
+shades of vassalage.  They saw in the aristocratic popinjay strut of a
+counterfeit Democrat an itching aspiration to play the slaveholder.  They
+beheld it in 'the cut of his jib,' and his extreme Northern position made
+him the very tool for their purpose.  The little creature has struck at
+the right of petition.  A paltrier hand never struck at a noble right.
+The Eagle Right of Petition, so loftily sacred in the eyes of the
+Constitution that Congress can't begin to 'abridge' it, in its pride of
+place, is hawked at by this crested jay-bird.  A 'mousing owl' would have
+seen better at midnoon than to have done it.  It is an idiot blue-jay,
+such as you see fooling about among the shrub oaks and dwarf pitch pines
+in the winter.  What an ignominious death to the lofty right, were it to
+die by such a hand; but it does not die.  It is impalpable to the
+'malicious mockery' of such vain blows.' We are glad it is done--done by
+the South--done proudly, and in slaveholding style, by the hand of a
+vassal.  What a man does by another he does by himself, says the maxim.
+But they will disown the honor of it, and cast it on the despised 'free
+nigger' North."
+
+Or this description--not very flattering to the "Old Commonwealth"--of
+the treatment of the agent of Massachusetts in South Carolina:--
+
+"Slavery may perpetrate anything, and New England can't see it.  It can
+horsewhip the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and spit in her
+governmental face, and she will not recognize it as an offence.  She sent
+her agent to Charleston on a State embassy.  Slavery caught him, and sent
+him ignominiously home.  The solemn great man came back in a hurry.  He
+returned in a most undignified trot.  He ran; he scampered,--the stately
+official.  The Old Bay State actually pulled foot, cleared, dug, as they
+say, like any scamp with a hue and cry after him.  Her grave old Senator,
+who no more thought of having to break his stately walk than he had of
+being flogged at school for stealing apples, came back from Carolina upon
+the full run, out of breath and out of dignity.  Well, what's the result?
+Why, nothing.  She no more thinks of showing resentment about it than she
+would if lightning had struck him.  He was sent back 'by the visitation
+of God;' and if they had lynched him to death, and stained the streets of
+Charleston with his blood, a Boston jury, if they could have held inquest
+over him, would have found that he 'died by the visitation of God.' And
+it would have been crowner's quest law, Slavery's crowners."
+
+Here is a specimen of his graceful blending of irony and humor.  He is
+expostulating with his neighbor of the New Hampshire Patriot, assuring
+him that he cannot endure the ponderous weight of his arguments, begging
+for a little respite, and, as a means of obtaining it, urging the editor
+to travel.  He advises him to go South, to the White Sulphur Springs, and
+thinks that, despite of his dark complexion, he would be safe there from
+being sold for jail fees, as his pro-slavery merits would more than
+counterbalance his colored liabilities, which, after all, were only prima
+facie evidence against him.  He suggests Texas, also, as a place where
+"patriots" of a certain class "most do congregate," and continues as
+follows:--
+
+"There is Arkansas, too, all glorious in new-born liberty, fresh and
+unsullied, like Venus out of the ocean,--that newly discovered star, in
+the firmament banner of this Republic.  Sister Arkansas, with her bowie-
+knife graceful at her side, like the huntress Diana with her silver bow,
+--oh it would be refreshing and recruiting to an exhausted patriot to go
+and replenish his soul at her fountains.  The newly evacuated lands of
+the Cherokee, too, a sweet place now for a lover of his country to visit,
+to renew his self-complacency by wandering among the quenched hearths of
+the expatriated Indians; a land all smoking with the red man's departing
+curse,--a malediction that went to the centre.  Yes, and Florida,--
+blossoming and leafy Florida, yet warm with the life-blood of Osceola and
+his warriors, shed gloriously under flag of truce.  Why should a patriot
+of such a fancy for nature immure himself in the cells of the city, and
+forego such an inviting and so broad a landscape?  Ite viator.  Go forth,
+traveller, and leave this mouldy editing to less elastic fancies.  We
+would respectfully invite our Colonel to travel.  What signifies?
+Journey--wander--go forth--itinerate--exercise--perambulate--roam."
+
+He gives the following ludicrous definition of Congress:--
+
+"But what is Congress?  It is the echo of the country at home,--the
+weathercock, that denotes and answers the shifting wind,--a thing of
+tail, nearly all tail, moved by the tail and by the wind, with small
+heading, and that corresponding implicitly in movement with the broad
+sail-like stern, which widens out behind to catch the rum-fraught breath
+of 'the Brotherhood.' As that turns, it turns; when that stops, it stops;
+and in calmish weather looks as steadfast and firm as though it was
+riveted to the centre.  The wind blows, and the little popularity-hunting
+head dodges this way and that, in endless fluctuation.  Such is Congress,
+or a great portion of it.  It will point to the northwest heavens of
+Liberty, whenever the breezes bear down irresistibly upon it, from the
+regions of political fair weather.  It will abolish slavery at the
+Capitol, when it has already been doomed to abolition and death
+everywhere else in the country.  'It will be in at the death.'"
+
+Replying to the charge that the Abolitionists of the North were "secret"
+in their movements and designs, he says:--
+
+"'In secret!' Why, our movements have been as prominent and open as the
+house-tops from the beginning.  We have striven from the outset to write
+the whole matter cloud-high in the heavens, that the utmost South might
+read it.  We have cast an arc upon the horizon, like the semicircle of
+the polar lights, and upon it have bent our motto, 'Immediate
+Emancipation,' glorious as the rainbow.  We have engraven it there, on
+the blue table of the cold vault, in letters tall enough for the reading
+of the nations.  And why has the far South not read and believed before
+this?  Because a steam has gone up--a fog--from New England's pulpit and
+her degenerate press, and hidden the beaming revelation from its vision.
+The Northern hierarchy and aristocracy have cheated the South."
+
+He spoke at times with severity of slaveholders, but far oftener of those
+who, without the excuse of education and habit, and prompted only by a
+selfish consideration of political or sectarian advantage, apologized for
+the wrong, and discountenanced the anti-slavery movement.  "We have
+nothing to say," said he, "to the slave.  He is no party to his own
+enslavement,--he is none to his disenthralment.  We have nothing to say
+to the South.  The real holder of slaves is not there.  He is in the
+North, the free North.  The South alone has not the power to hold the
+slave.  It is the character of the nation that binds and holds him.  It
+is the Republic that does it, the efficient force of which is north of
+Mason and Dixon's line.  By virtue of the majority of Northern hearts and
+voices, slavery lives in the South!"
+
+In 1840, he spent a few weeks in England, Ireland, and Scotland.  He has
+left behind a few beautiful memorials of his tour.  His Ride over the
+Border, Ride into Edinburgh, Wincobank hall, Ailsa Craig, gave his paper
+an interest in the eyes of many who had no sympathy with his political
+and religious views.
+
+Scattered all over his editorials, like gems, are to be found beautiful
+images, sweet touches of heartfelt pathos,--thoughts which the reader
+pauses over with surprise and delight.  We subjoin a few specimens, taken
+almost at random from the book before us:--
+
+"A thunder-storm,--what can match it for eloquence and poetry?  That rush
+from heaven of the big drops, in what multitude and succession, and how
+they sound as they strike!  How they play on the old home roof and the
+thick tree-tops!  What music to go to sleep by, to the tired boy, as he
+lies under the naked roof!  And the great, low bass thunder, as it rolls
+off over the hills, and settles down behind them to the very centre, and
+you can feel the old earth jar under your feet!"
+
+"There was no oratory in the speech of the _Learned Blacksmith_, in the
+ordinary sense of that word, no grace of elocution, but mighty thoughts
+radiating off from his heated mind, like sparks from the glowing steel of
+his own anvil."
+
+"The hard hands of Irish labor, with nothing in them,--they ring like
+slabs of marble together, in response to the wild appeals of O'Connell,
+and the British stand conquered before them, with shouldered arms.
+Ireland is on her feet, with nothing in her hands, impregnable,
+unassailable, in utter defencelessness,--the first time that ever a
+nation sprung to its feet unarmed.  The veterans of England behold them,
+and forbear to fire.  They see no mark.  It will not do to fire upon men;
+it will do only to fire upon soldiers.  They are the proper mark of the
+murderous gun, but men cannot be shot."
+
+"It is coming to that [abolition of war] the world over; and when it does
+come to it, oh what a long breath of relief the tired world will draw, as
+it stretches itself for the first time out upon earth's greensward, and
+learns the meaning of repose and peaceful sleep!"
+
+"He who vests his labor in the faithful ground is dealing directly with
+God; human fraud or weakness do not intervene between him and his
+requital.  No mechanic has a set of customers so trustworthy as God and
+the elements.  No savings bank is so sure as the old earth."
+
+"Literature is the luxury of words.  It originates nothing, it does
+nothing.  It talks hard words about the labor of others, and is reckoned
+more meritorious for it than genius and labor for doing what learning can
+only descant upon.  It trades on the capital of unlettered minds.  It
+struts in stolen plumage, and it is mere plumage.  A learned man
+resembles an owl in more respects than the matter of wisdom.  Like that
+solemn bird, he is about all feathers."
+
+"Our Second Advent friends contemplate a grand conflagration about the
+first of April next.  I should be willing there should be one, if it
+could be confined to the productions of the press, with which the earth
+is absolutely smothered.  Humanity wants precious few books to read, but
+the great living, breathing, immortal volume of Providence.  Life,--real
+life,--how to live, how to treat one another, and how to trust God in
+matters beyond our ken and occasion,--these are the lessons to learn, and
+you find little of them in libraries."
+
+"That accursed drum and fife!  How they have maddened mankind!  And the
+deep bass boom of the cannon, chiming in in the chorus of battle, that
+trumpet and wild charging bugle,--how they set the military devil in a
+man, and make him into a soldier!  Think of the human family falling upon
+one another at the inspiration of music!  How must God feel at it, to see
+those harp-strings he meant should be waked to a love bordering on
+divine, strung and swept to mortal hate and butchery!"
+
+"Leave off being Jews," (he is addressing Major Noah with regard to his
+appeal to his brethren to return to Judaea,) "and turn mankind.  The
+rocks and sands of Palestine have been worshipped long enough.
+Connecticut River or the Merrimac are as good rivers as any Jordan that
+ever run into a dead or live sea, and as holy, for that matter.  In
+Humanity, as in Christ Jesus, as Paul says, 'there is neither Jew nor
+Greek.' And there ought to be none.  Let Humanity be reverenced with the
+tenderest devotion; suffering, discouraged, down-trodden, hard-handed,
+haggard-eyed, care-worn mankind!  Let these be regarded a little.  Would
+to God I could alleviate all their sorrows, and leave them a chance to
+laugh!  They are, miserable now.  They might be as happy as the blackbird
+on the spray, and as full of melody."
+
+"I am sick as death at this miserable struggle among mankind for a
+living.  Poor devils! were they born to run such a gauntlet after the
+means of life?  Look about you, and see your squirming neighbors,
+writhing and twisting like so many angleworms in a fisher's bait-box, or
+the wriggling animalculae seen in the vinegar drop held to the sun.  How
+they look, how they feel, how base it makes them all!"
+
+"Every human being is entitled to the means of life, as the trout is to
+his brook or the lark to the blue sky.  Is it well to put a human 'young
+one' here to die of hunger, thirst, and nakedness, or else be preserved
+as a pauper?  Is this fair earth but a poor-house by creation and intent?
+Was it made for that?--and these other round things we see dancing in
+the firmament to the music of the spheres, are they all great shining
+poor-houses?"
+
+"The divines always admit things after the age has adopted them.  They
+are as careful of the age as the weathercock is of the wind.  You might
+as well catch an old experienced weathercock, on some ancient Orthodox
+steeple, standing all day with its tail east in a strong out wind, as the
+divines at odds with the age."
+
+But we must cease quoting.  The admirers of Jean Paul Richter might find
+much of the charm and variety of the "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces" in
+this newspaper collection.  They may see, perhaps, as we do, some things
+which they cannot approve of, the tendency of which, however intended, is
+very questionable.  But, with us, they will pardon something to the
+spirit of liberty, much to that of love and humanity which breathes
+through all.
+
+Disgusted and heart-sick at the general indifference of Church and clergy
+to the temporal condition of the people,--at their apologies for and
+defences of slavery, war, and capital punishment,--Rogers turned
+Protestant, in the full sense of the term.  He spoke of priests and
+"pulpit wizards" as freely as John Milton did two centuries ago,
+although with far less bitterness and rasping satire.  He could not
+endure to see Christianity and Humanity divorced.  He longed to see the
+beautiful life of Jesus--his sweet humanities, his brotherly love, his
+abounding sympathies--made the example of all men.  Thoroughly
+democratic, in his view all men were equal.  Priests, stripped of their
+sacerdotal tailoring, were in his view but men, after all.  He pitied
+them, he said, for they were in a wrong position,--above life's comforts
+and sympathies,--"up in the unnatural cold, they had better come down
+among men, and endure and enjoy with them."  "Mankind," said he, "want
+the healing influences of humanity.  They must love one another more.
+Disinterested good will make the world as it should be."
+
+His last visit to his native valley was in the autumn of 1845.  In a
+familiar letter to a friend, he thus describes his farewell view of the
+mountain glories of his childhood's home:--
+
+"I went a jaunt, Thursday last, about twenty miles north of this valley,
+into the mountain region, where what I beheld, if I could tell it as I
+saw it, would make your outlawed sheet sought after wherever our Anglo-
+Saxon tongue is spoken in the wide world.  I have been many a time among
+those Alps, and never without a kindling of wildest enthusiasm in my
+woodland blood.  But I never saw them till last Thursday.  They never
+loomed distinctly to my eye before, and the sun never shone on them from
+heaven till then.  They were so near me, I could seem to hear the voice
+of their cataracts, as I could count their great slides, streaming adown
+their lone and desolate sides,--old slides, some of them overgrown with
+young woods, like half-healed scars on the breast of a giant.  The great
+rains had clothed the valleys of the upper Pemigewasset in the darkest
+and deepest green.  The meadows were richer and more glorious in their
+thick 'fall feed' than Queen Anne's Garden, as I saw it from the windows
+of Windsor Castle.  And the dark hemlock and hackmatack woods were yet
+darker after the wet season, as they lay, in a hundred wildernesses, in
+the mighty recesses of the mountains.  But the peaks,--the eternal, the
+solitary, the beautiful, the glorious and dear mountain peaks, my own
+Moosehillock and my native Haystacks,--these were the things on which eye
+and heart gazed and lingered, and I seemed to see them for the last time.
+It was on my way back that I halted and turned to look at them from a
+high point on the Thornton road.  It was about four in the afternoon.  It
+had rained among the hills about the Notch, and cleared off.  The sun,
+there sombred at that early hour, as towards his setting, was pouring his
+most glorious light upon the naked peaks, and they casting their mighty
+shadows far down among the inaccessible woods that darken the hollows
+that stretch between their bases.  A cloud was creeping up to perch and
+rest awhile on the highest top of Great Haystack.  Vulgar folks have
+called it Mount Lafayette, since the visit of that brave old Frenchman in
+1825 or 1826.  If they had asked his opinion, he would have told them the
+names of mountains couldn't be altered, and especially names like that,
+so appropriate, so descriptive, and so picturesque.  A little hard white
+cloud, that looked like a hundred fleeces of wool rolled into one, was
+climbing rapidly along up the northwestern ridge, that ascended to the
+lonely top of Great Haystack.  All the others were bare.  Four or five of
+them,--as distinct and shapely as so many pyramids; some topped out with
+naked cliff, on which the sun lay in melancholy glory; others clothed
+thick all the way up with the old New Hampshire hemlock or the daring
+hackmatack,--Pierpont's hackmatack.  You could see their shadows
+stretching many and many a mile, over Grant and Location, away beyond the
+invading foot of Incorporation,--where the timber-hunter has scarcely
+explored, and where the moose browses now, I suppose, as undisturbed as
+he did before the settlement of the State.  I wish our young friend and
+genius, Harrison Eastman, had been with me, to see the sunlight as it
+glared on the tops of those woods, and to see the purple of the
+mountains.  I looked at it myself almost with the eye of a painter.  If a
+painter looked with mine, though, he never could look off upon his canvas
+long enough to make a picture; he would gaze forever at the original.
+
+"But I had to leave it, and to say in my heart, Farewell!  And as I
+travelled on down, and the sun sunk lower and lower towards the summit of
+the western ridge, the clouds came up and formed an Alpine range in the
+evening heavens above it,--like other Haystacks and Moosehillocks,--so
+dark and dense that fancy could easily mistake them for a higher Alps.
+There were the peaks and the great passes; the Franconia Notches among
+the cloudy cliffs, and the great White Mountain Gap."
+
+His health, never robust, had been gradually failing for some time
+previous to his death.  He needed more repose and quiet than his duties
+as an editor left him; and to this end he purchased a small and pleasant
+farm in his loved Pennigewasset valley, in the hope that he might there
+recruit his wasted energies.  In the sixth month of the year of his
+death, in a letter to us, he spoke of his prospects in language which
+even then brought moisture to our eyes:--
+
+"I am striving to get me an asylum of a farm.  I have a wife and seven
+children, every one of them with a whole spirit.  I don't want to be
+separated from any of them, only with a view to come together again.  I
+have a beautiful little retreat in prospect, forty odd miles north, where
+I imagine I can get potatoes and repose,--a sort of haven or port.  I am
+among the breakers, and 'mad for land.' If I get this home,--it is a mile
+or two in among the hills from the pretty domicil once visited by
+yourself and glorious Thompson,--I am this moment indulging the fancy
+that I may see you at it before we die.  Why can't I have you come and
+see me?  You see, dear W., I don't want to send you anything short of a
+full epistle.  Let me end as I begun, with the proffer of my hand in
+grasp of yours extended.  My heart I do not proffer,--it was yours
+before,--it shall be yours while I am N. P. ROGERS."
+
+Alas! the haven of a deeper repose than he had dreamed of was close at
+hand.  He lingered until the middle of the tenth month, suffering much,
+yet calm and sensible to the last.  Just before his death, he desired his
+children to sing at his bedside that touching song of Lover's, _The
+Angel's Whisper_.  Turning his eyes towards the open window, through
+which the leafy glory of the season he most loved was visible, he
+listened to the sweet melody.  In the words of his friend Pierpont,--
+
+     "The angel's whisper stole in song upon his closing ear;
+     From his own daughter's lips it came, so musical and clear,
+     That scarcely knew the dying man what melody was there--
+     The last of earth's or first of heaven's pervading all the air."
+
+He sleeps in the Concord burial-ground, under the shadow of oaks; the
+very spot he would have chosen, for he looked upon trees with something
+akin to human affection.  "They are," he said, "the beautiful handiwork
+and architecture of God, on which the eye never tires.  Every one is
+a feather in the earth's cap, a plume in her bonnet, a tress on her
+forehead,--a comfort, a refreshing, and an ornament to her."  Spring has
+hung over him her buds, and opened beside him her violets.  Summer has
+laid her green oaken garland on his grave, and now the frost-blooms of
+autumn drop upon it.  Shall man cast a nettle on that mound?  He loved
+humanity,--shall it be less kind to him than Nature?  Shall the bigotry
+of sect, and creed, and profession, drive its condemnatory stake into his
+grave?  God forbid.  The doubts which he sometimes unguardedly expressed
+had relation, we are constrained to believe, to the glosses of
+commentators and creed-makers and the inconsistency of professors, rather
+than to those facts and precepts of Christianity to which he gave the
+constant assent of his practice.  He sought not his own.  His heart
+yearned with pity and brotherly affection for all the poor and suffering
+in the universe.  Of him, the angel of Leigh Hunt's beautiful allegory
+might have written, in the golden book of remembrance, as he did of the
+good Abou Ben Adhem, "He loved his fellow-men."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT DINSMORE.
+
+The great charm of Scottish poetry consists in its simplicity, and
+genuine, unaffected sympathy with the common joys and sorrows of daily
+life.  It is a home-taught, household melody.  It calls to mind the
+pastoral bleat on the hillsides, the kirkbells of a summer Sabbath, the
+song of the lark in the sunrise, the cry of the quail in the corn-land,
+the low of cattle, and the blithe carol of milkmaids "when the kye come
+hame" at gloaming.  Meetings at fair and market, blushing betrothments,
+merry weddings, the joy of young maternity, the lights and shades of
+domestic life, its bereavements and partings, its chances and changes,
+its holy death-beds, and funerals solemnly beautiful in quiet kirkyards,
+--these furnish the hints of the immortal melodies of Burns, the sweet
+ballads of the Ettrick Shepherd and Allan Cunningham, and the rustic
+drama of Ramsay.  It is the poetry of home, of nature, and the
+affections.
+
+All this is sadly wanting in our young literature.  We have no songs;
+American domestic life has never been hallowed and beautified by the
+sweet and graceful and tender associations of poetry.  We have no Yankee
+pastorals.  Our rivers and streams turn mills and float rafts, and are
+otherwise as commendably useful as those of Scotland; but no quaint
+ballad or simple song reminds us that men and women have loved, met, and
+parted on their banks, or that beneath each roof within their valleys the
+tragedy and comedy of life have been enacted.  Our poetry is cold and
+imitative; it seems more the product of over-strained intellects than the
+spontaneous outgushing of hearts warm with love, and strongly
+sympathizing with human nature as it actually exists about us, with the
+joys and griefs of the men and women whom we meet daily.  Unhappily, the
+opinion prevails that a poet must be also a philosopher, and hence it is
+that much of our poetry is as indefinable in its mysticism as an Indian
+Brahmin's commentary on his sacred books, or German metaphysics subjected
+to homeopathic dilution.  It assumes to be prophetical, and its
+utterances are oracular.  It tells of strange, vague emotions and
+yearnings, painfully suggestive of spiritual "groanings which cannot be
+uttered."  If it "babbles o' green fields" and the common sights and
+sounds of nature, it is only for the purpose of finding some vague
+analogy between them and its internal experiences and longings.  It
+leaves the warm and comfortable fireside of actual knowledge and human
+comprehension, and goes wailing and gibbering like a ghost about the
+impassable doors of mystery:--
+
+                   "It fain would be resolved
+                    How things are done,
+                    And who the tailor is
+                    That works for the man I' the sun."
+
+How shall we account for this marked tendency in the literature of a
+shrewd, practical people?  Is it that real life in New England lacks
+those conditions of poetry and romance which age, reverence, and
+superstition have gathered about it in the Old World?  Is it that
+
+          "Ours are not Tempe's nor Arcadia's vales,"
+
+but are more famous for growing Indian corn and potatoes, and the
+manufacture of wooden ware and pedler notions, than for romantic
+associations and legendary interest?  That our huge, unshapely shingle
+structures, blistering in the sun and glaring with windows, were
+evidently never reared by the spell of pastoral harmonies, as the walls
+of Thebes rose at the sound of the lyre of Amphion?  That the habits of
+our people are too cool, cautious, undemonstrative, to furnish the warp
+and woof of song and pastoral, and that their dialect and figures of
+speech, however richly significant and expressive in the autobiography of
+Sam Slick, or the satire of Hosea Biglow and Ethan Spike, form a very
+awkward medium of sentiment and pathos?  All this may be true.  But the
+Yankee, after all, is a man, and as such his history, could it be got at,
+must have more or less of poetic material in it; moreover, whether
+conscious of it or not, he also stands relieved against the background of
+Nature's beauty or sublimity.  There is a poetical side to the
+commonplace of his incomings and outgoings; study him well, and you may
+frame an idyl of some sort from his apparently prosaic existence.  Our
+poets, we must needs think, are deficient in that shiftiness, ready
+adaptation to circumstances, and ability of making the most of things,
+for which, as a people, we are proverbial.  Can they make nothing of our
+Thanksgiving, that annual gathering of long-severed friends?  Do they
+find nothing to their purpose in our apple-bees, buskings, berry-
+pickings, summer picnics, and winter sleigh-rides?  Is there nothing
+available in our peculiarities of climate, scenery, customs, and
+political institutions?  Does the Yankee leap into life, shrewd, hard,
+and speculating, armed, like Pallas, for a struggle with fortune?  Are
+there not boys and girls, school loves and friendship, courtings and
+match-makings, hope and fear, and all the varied play of human passions,
+--the keen struggles of gain, the mad grasping of ambition,--sin and
+remorse, tearful repentance and holy aspirations?  Who shall say that we
+have not all the essentials of the poetry of human life and simple
+nature, of the hearth and the farm-field?  Here, then, is a mine
+unworked, a harvest ungathered.  Who shall sink the shaft and thrust in
+the sickle?
+
+And here let us say that the mere dilettante and the amateur ruralist may
+as well keep their hands off.  The prize is not for them.  He who would
+successfully strive for it must be himself what he sings,--part and
+parcel of the rural life of New England,--one who has grown strong amidst
+its healthful influences, familiar with all its details, and capable of
+detecting whatever of beauty, humor, or pathos pertain to it,--one who
+has added to his book-lore the large experience of an active
+participation in the rugged toil, the hearty amusements, the trials, and
+the pleasures he describes.
+
+We have been led to these reflections by an incident which has called up
+before us the homespun figure of an old friend of our boyhood, who had
+the good sense to discover that the poetic element existed in the simple
+home life of a country farmer, although himself unable to give a very
+creditable expression of it.  He had the "vision," indeed, but the
+"faculty divine" was wanting; or, if he possessed it in any degree, as
+Thersites says of the wit of Ajax, "it would not out, but lay coldly in
+him like fire in the flint."
+
+While engaged this morning in looking over a large exchange list of
+newspapers, a few stanzas of poetry in the Scottish dialect attracted our
+attention.  As we read them, like a wizard's rhyme they seemed to have
+the power of bearing us back to the past.  They had long ago graced the
+columns of that solitary sheet which once a week diffused happiness over
+our fireside circle, making us acquainted, in our lonely nook, with the
+goings-on of the great world.  The verses, we are now constrained to
+admit, are not remarkable in themselves, truth and simple nature only;
+yet how our young hearts responded to them!  Twenty years ago there were
+fewer verse-makers than at present; and as our whole stock of light
+literature consisted of Ellwood's _Davideis_ and the selections of
+_Lindley Murray's English Reader_, it is not improbable that we were in a
+condition to overestimate the contributions to the poet's corner of our
+village newspaper.  Be that as it may, we welcome them as we would the
+face of an old friend, for they somehow remind us of the scent of
+haymows, the breath of cattle, the fresh greenery by the brookside, the
+moist earth broken by the coulter and turned up to the sun and winds of
+May.  This particular piece, which follows, is entitled _The Sparrow_,
+and was occasioned by the crushing of a bird's-nest by the author while
+ploughing among his corn.  It has something of the simple tenderness of
+Burns.
+
+               "Poor innocent and hapless Sparrow
+               Why should my mould-board gie thee sorrow!
+               This day thou'll chirp and mourn the morrow
+               Wi' anxious breast;
+               The plough has turned the mould'ring furrow
+               Deep o'er thy nest!
+
+               "Just I' the middle o' the hill
+               Thy nest was placed wi' curious skill;
+               There I espied thy little bill
+               Beneath the shade.
+               In that sweet bower, secure frae ill,
+               Thine eggs were laid.
+
+               "Five corns o' maize had there been drappit,
+               An' through the stalks thy head was pappit,
+               The drawing nowt could na be stappit
+               I quickly foun';
+               Syne frae thy cozie nest thou happit,
+               Wild fluttering roun'.
+
+               "The sklentin stane beguiled the sheer,
+               In vain I tried the plough to steer;
+               A wee bit stumpie I' the rear
+               Cam' 'tween my legs,
+               An' to the jee-side gart me veer
+               An' crush thine eggs.
+
+               "Alas! alas! my bonnie birdie!
+               Thy faithful mate flits round to guard thee.
+               Connubial love!--a pattern worthy
+               The pious priest!
+               What savage heart could be sae hardy
+               As wound thy breast?
+
+               "Ah me! it was nae fau't o' mine;
+               It gars me greet to see thee pine.
+               It may be serves His great design
+               Who governs all;
+               Omniscience tents wi' eyes divine
+               The Sparrow's fall!
+
+               "How much like thine are human dools,
+               Their sweet wee bairns laid I' the mools?
+               The Sovereign Power who nature rules
+               Hath said so be it
+               But poor blip' mortals are sic fools
+               They canna see it.
+
+               "Nae doubt that He who first did mate us
+               Has fixed our lot as sure as fate is,
+               An' when He wounds He disna hate us,
+               But anely this,
+               He'll gar the ills which here await us
+               Yield lastin' bliss."
+
+In the early part of the eighteenth century a considerable number of
+Presbyterians of Scotch descent, from the north of Ireland, emigrated to
+the New World.  In the spring of 1719, the inhabitants of Haverhill, on
+the Merrimac, saw them passing up the river in several canoes, one of
+which unfortunately upset in the rapids above the village.  The following
+fragment of a ballad celebrating this event has been handed down to the
+present time, and may serve to show the feelings even then of the old
+English settlers towards the Irish emigrants:--
+
+               "They began to scream and bawl,
+               As out they tumbled one and all,
+               And, if the Devil had spread his net,
+               He could have made a glorious haul!"
+
+The new-comers proceeded up the river, and, landing opposite to the
+Uncanoonuc Hills, on the present site of Manchester, proceeded inland to
+Beaver Pond.  Charmed with the appearance of the country, they resolved
+here to terminate their wanderings.  Under a venerable oak on the margin
+of the little lake, they knelt down with their minister, Jamie McGregore,
+and laid, in prayer and thanksgiving, the foundation of their settlement.
+In a few years they had cleared large fields, built substantial stone and
+frame dwellings and a large and commodious meeting-house; wealth had
+accumulated around them, and they had everywhere the reputation of a
+shrewd and thriving community.  They were the first in New England to
+cultivate the potato, which their neighbors for a long time regarded as a
+pernicious root, altogether unfit for a Christian stomach.  Every lover
+of that invaluable esculent has reason to remember with gratitude the
+settlers of Londonderry.
+
+Their moral acclimation in Ireland had not been without its effect upon
+their character.  Side by side with a Presbyterianism as austere as that
+of John Knox had grown up something of the wild Milesian humor, love of
+convivial excitement and merry-making.  Their long prayers and fierce
+zeal in behalf of orthodox tenets only served, in the eyes of their
+Puritan neighbors, to make more glaring still the scandal of their marked
+social irregularities.  It became a common saying in the region round
+about that "the Derry Presbyterians would never give up a pint of
+doctrine or a pint of rum."  Their second minister was an old scarred
+fighter, who had signalized himself in the stout defence of Londonderry,
+when James II. and his Papists were thundering at its gates.  Agreeably
+to his death-bed directions, his old fellow-soldiers, in their leathern
+doublets and battered steel caps, bore him to his grave, firing over him
+the same rusty muskets which had swept down rank after rank of the men of
+Amalek at the Derry siege.
+
+Erelong the celebrated Derry fair was established, in imitation of those
+with which they had been familiar in Ireland.  Thither annually came all
+manner of horse-jockeys and pedlers, gentlemen and beggars, fortune-
+tellers, wrestlers, dancers and fiddlers, gay young farmers and buxom
+maidens.  Strong drink abounded.  They who had good-naturedly wrestled
+and joked together in the morning not unfrequently closed the day with a
+fight, until, like the revellers of Donnybrook,
+
+               "Their hearts were soft with whiskey,
+               And their heads were soft with blows."
+
+A wild, frolicking, drinking, fiddling, courting, horse-racing, riotous
+merry-making,--a sort of Protestant carnival, relaxing the grimness of
+Puritanism for leagues around it.
+
+In the midst of such a community, and partaking of all its influences,
+Robert Dinsmore, the author of the poem I have quoted, was born, about
+the middle of the last century.  His paternal ancestor, John, younger son
+of a Laird of Achenmead, who left the banks of the Tweed for the green
+fertility of Northern Ireland, had emigrated to New England some forty
+years before, and, after a rough experience of Indian captivity in the
+wild woods of Maine, had settled down among his old neighbors in
+Londonderry.  Until nine years of age, Robert never saw a school.  He was
+a short time under the tuition of an old British soldier, who had strayed
+into the settlement after the French war, "at which time," he says in a
+letter to a friend, "I learned to repeat the shorter and larger
+catechisms.  These, with the Scripture proofs annexed to them, confirmed
+me in the orthodoxy of my forefathers, and I hope I shall ever remain an
+evidence of the truth of what the wise man said, 'Train up a child in the
+way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.'"  He
+afterwards took lessons with one Master McKeen, who used to spend much of
+his time in hunting squirrels with his pupils.  He learned to read and
+write; and the old man always insisted that he should have done well at
+ciphering also, had he not fallen in love with Molly Park.  At the age of
+eighteen he enlisted in the Revolutionary army, and was at the battle of
+Saratoga.  On his return he married his fair Molly, settled down as a
+farmer in Windham, formerly a part of Londonderry, and before he was
+thirty years of age became an elder in the church, of the creed and
+observances of which he was always a zealous and resolute defender.  From
+occasional passages in his poems, it is evident that the instructions
+which he derived from the pulpit were not unlike those which Burns
+suggested as needful for the unlucky lad whom he was commending to his
+friend Hamilton:--
+
+               "Ye 'll catechise him ilka quirk,
+               An' shore him weel wi' hell."
+
+In a humorous poem, entitled Spring's Lament, he thus describes the
+consternation produced in the meeting-house at sermon time by a dog, who,
+in search of his mistress, rattled and scraped at the "west porch
+door:"--
+
+               "The vera priest was scared himsel',
+               His sermon he could hardly spell;
+               Auld carlins fancied they could smell
+               The brimstone matches;
+               They thought he was some imp o' hell,
+               In quest o' wretches."
+
+He lived to a good old age, a home-loving, unpretending farmer,
+cultivating his acres with his own horny hands, and cheering the long
+rainy days and winter evenings with homely rhyme.  Most of his pieces
+were written in the dialect of his ancestors, which was well understood
+by his neighbors and friends, the only audience upon which he could
+venture to calculate.  He loved all old things, old language, old
+customs, old theology.  In a rhyming letter to his cousin Silas,
+he says:--
+
+               "Though Death our ancestors has cleekit,
+               An' under clods then closely steekit,
+               We'll mark the place their chimneys reekit,
+               Their native tongue we yet wad speak it,
+               Wi' accent glib."
+
+He wrote sometimes to amuse his neighbors, often to soothe their sorrow
+under domestic calamity, or to give expression to his own.  With little
+of that delicacy of taste which results from the attrition of fastidious
+and refined society, and altogether too truthful and matter-of-fact to
+call in the aid of imagination, he describes in the simplest and most
+direct terms the circumstances in which he found himself, and the
+impressions which these circumstances had made on his own mind.  He calls
+things by their right names; no euphuism or transcendentalism,--the
+plainer and commoner the better.  He tells us of his farm life, its
+joys and sorrows, its mirth and care, with no embellishment, with no
+concealment of repulsive and ungraceful features.  Never having seen a
+nightingale, he makes no attempt to describe the fowl; but he has seen
+the night-hawk, at sunset, cutting the air above him, and he tells of it.
+Side by side with his waving corn-fields and orchard-blooms we have the
+barn-yard and pigsty.  Nothing which was necessary to the comfort and
+happiness of his home and avocation was to him "common or unclean."
+Take, for instance, the following, from a poem written at the close of
+autumn, after the death of his wife:--
+
+               "No more may I the Spring Brook trace,
+               No more with sorrow view the place
+               Where Mary's wash-tub stood;
+               No more may wander there alone,
+               And lean upon the mossy stone
+               Where once she piled her wood.
+               'T was there she bleached her linen cloth,
+               By yonder bass-wood tree
+               From that sweet stream she made her broth,
+               Her pudding and her tea.
+               That stream, whose waters running,
+               O'er mossy root and stone,
+               Made ringing and singing,
+               Her voice could match alone."
+
+We envy not the man who can sneer at this simple picture.  It is honest
+as Nature herself.  An old and lonely man looks back upon the young years
+of his wedded life.  Can we not look with him?  The sunlight of a summer
+morning is weaving itself with the leafy shadows of the bass-tree,
+beneath which a fair and ruddy-checked young woman, with her full,
+rounded arms bared to the elbow, bends not ungracefully to her task,
+pausing ever and anon to play with the bright-eyed child beside her, and
+mingling her songs with the pleasant murmurings of gliding water!  Alas!
+as the old man looks, he hears that voice, which perpetually sounds to us
+all from the past--no more!
+
+Let us look at him in his more genial mood.  Take the opening lines of
+his Thanksgiving Day.  What a plain, hearty picture of substantial
+comfort!
+
+               "When corn is in the garret stored,
+               And sauce in cellar well secured;
+               When good fat beef we can afford,
+               And things that 're dainty,
+               With good sweet cider on our board,
+               And pudding plenty;
+
+               "When stock, well housed, may chew the cud,
+               And at my door a pile of wood,
+               A rousing fire to warm my blood,
+               Blest sight to see!
+               It puts my rustic muse in mood
+               To sing for thee."
+
+If he needs a simile, he takes the nearest at hand.  In a letter to his
+daughter he says:--
+
+               "That mine is not a longer letter,
+               The cause is not the want of matter,--
+               Of that there's plenty, worse or better;
+               But like a mill
+               Whose stream beats back with surplus water,
+               The wheel stands still."
+
+Something of the humor of Burns gleams out occasionally from the sober
+decorum of his verses.  In an epistle to his friend Betton, high sheriff
+of the county, who had sent to him for a peck of seed corn, he says:--
+
+               "Soon plantin' time will come again,
+               Syne may the heavens gie us rain,
+               An' shining heat to bless ilk plain
+               An' fertile hill,
+               An' gar the loads o' yellow grain,
+               Our garrets fill.
+
+               "As long as I has food and clothing,
+               An' still am hale and fier and breathing,
+               Ye 's get the corn--and may be aething
+               Ye'll do for me;
+               (Though God forbid)--hang me for naething
+               An' lose your fee."
+
+And on receiving a copy of some verses written by a lady, he talks in a
+sad way for a Presbyterian deacon:--
+
+               "Were she some Aborigine squaw,
+               Wha sings so sweet by nature's law,
+               I'd meet her in a hazle shaw,
+               Or some green loany,
+               And make her tawny phiz and 'a
+               My welcome crony."
+
+The practical philosophy of the stout, jovial rhymer was but little
+affected by the sour-featured asceticism of the elder.  He says:--
+
+               "We'll eat and drink, and cheerful take
+               Our portions for the Donor's sake,
+               For thus the Word of Wisdom spake--
+               Man can't do better;
+               Nor can we by our labors make
+               The Lord our debtor!"
+
+A quaintly characteristic correspondence in rhyme between the Deacon and
+Parson McGregore, evidently "birds o' ane feather," is still in
+existence.  The minister, in acknowledging the epistle of his old friend,
+commences his reply as follows:--
+
+               "Did e'er a cuif tak' up a quill,
+               Wha ne'er did aught that he did well,
+               To gar the muses rant and reel,
+               An' flaunt and swagger,
+               Nae doubt ye 'll say 't is that daft chiel
+               Old Dite McGregore!"
+
+The reply is in the same strain, and may serve to give the reader some
+idea of the old gentleman as a religious controversialist:--
+
+               "My reverend friend and kind McGregore,
+               Although thou ne'er was ca'd a bragger,
+               Thy muse I'm sure nave e'er was glegger
+               Thy Scottish lays
+               Might gar Socinians fa' or stagger,
+               E'en in their ways.
+
+               "When Unitarian champions dare thee,
+               Goliah like, and think to scare thee,
+               Dear Davie, fear not, they'll ne'er waur thee;
+               But draw thy sling,
+               Weel loaded frae the Gospel quarry,
+               An' gie 't a fling."
+
+The last time I saw him, he was chaffering in the market-place of my
+native village, swapping potatoes and onions and pumpkins for tea,
+coffee, molasses, and, if the truth be told, New England rum.  Threescore
+years and ten, to use his own words,
+
+               "Hung o'er his back,
+               And bent him like a muckle pack,"
+
+yet he still stood stoutly and sturdily in his thick shoes of cowhide,
+like one accustomed to tread independently the soil of his own acres,--
+his broad, honest face seamed by care and darkened by exposure to "all
+the airts that blow," and his white hair flowing in patriarchal glory
+beneath his felt hat.  A genial, jovial, large-hearted old man, simple as
+a child, and betraying, neither in look nor manner, that he was
+accustomed to
+
+               "Feed on thoughts which voluntary move
+               Harmonious numbers."
+
+Peace to him!  A score of modern dandies and sentimentalists could ill
+supply the place of this one honest man.  In the ancient burial-ground of
+Windham, by the side of his "beloved Molly," and in view of the old
+meeting-house, there is a mound of earth, where, every spring, green
+grasses tremble in the wind and the warm sunshine calls out the flowers.
+There, gathered like one of his own ripe sheaves, the farmer poet sleeps
+with his fathers.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PLACIDO, THE SLAVE POET.
+
+[1845.]
+
+I have been greatly interested in the fate of Juan Placido, the black
+revolutionist of Cuba, who was executed in Havana, as the alleged
+instigator and leader of an attempted revolt on the part of the slaves in
+that city and its neighborhood.
+
+Juan Placido was born a slave on the estate of Don Terribio de Castro.
+His father was an African, his mother a mulatto.  His mistress treated
+him with great kindness, and taught him to read.  When he was twelve
+years of age she died, and he fell into other and less compassionate
+hands.  At the age of eighteen, on seeing his mother struck with a heavy
+whip, he for the first time turned upon his tormentors.  To use his own
+words, "I felt the blow in my heart.  To utter a loud cry, and from a
+downcast boy, with the timidity of one weak as a lamb, to become all at
+office like a raging lion, was a thing of a moment."  He was, however,
+subdued, and the next morning, together with his mother, a tenderly
+nurtured and delicate woman, severely scourged.  On seeing his mother
+rudely stripped and thrown down upon the ground, he at first with tears
+implored the overseer to spare her; but at the sound of the first blow,
+as it cut into her naked flesh, he sprang once more upon the ruffian,
+who, having superior strength, beat him until he was nearer dead than
+alive.
+
+After suffering all the vicissitudes of slavery,--hunger, nakedness,
+stripes; after bravely and nobly bearing up against that slow, dreadful
+process which reduces the man to a thing, the image of God to a piece of
+merchandise, until he had reached his thirty-eighth year, he was
+unexpectedly released from his bonds.  Some literary gentlemen in Havana,
+into whose hands two or three pieces of his composition had fallen,
+struck with the vigor, spirit, and natural grace which they manifested,
+sought out the author, and raised a subscription to purchase his freedom.
+He came to Havana, and maintained himself by house-painting, and such
+other employments as his ingenuity and talents placed within his reach.
+He wrote several poems, which have been published in Spanish at Havana,
+and translated by Dr. Madden, under the title of _Poems by a Slave_.
+
+It is not too much to say of these poems that they will bear a comparison
+with most of the productions of modern Spanish literature.  The style is
+bold, free, energetic.  Some of the pieces are sportive and graceful;
+such is the address to _The Cucuya_, or Cuban firefly.  This beautiful
+insect is sometimes fastened in tiny nets to the light dresses of the
+Cuban ladies, a custom to which the writer gallantly alludes in the
+following lines:--
+
+          "Ah!--still as one looks on such brightness and bloom,
+          On such beauty as hers, one might envy the doom
+          Of a captive Cucuya that's destined, like this,
+          To be touched by her hand and revived by her kiss!
+          In the cage which her delicate hand has prepared,
+          The beautiful prisoner nestles unscared,
+          O'er her fair forehead shining serenely and bright,
+          In beauty's own bondage revealing its light!
+          And when the light dance and the revel are done,
+          She bears it away to her alcove alone,
+          Where, fed by her hand from the cane that's most choice,
+          In secret it gleans at the sound of her voice!
+          O beautiful maiden! may Heaven accord
+          Thy care of the captive a fitting reward,
+          And never may fortune the fetters remove
+          Of a heart that is thine in the bondage of love!"
+
+In his Dream, a fragment of some length, Placido dwells in a touching
+manner upon the scenes of his early years.  It is addressed to his
+brother Florence, who was a slave near Matanzas, while the author was in
+the same condition at Havana.  There is a plaintive and melancholy
+sweetness in these lines, a natural pathos, which finds its way to the
+heart:--
+
+          "Thou knowest, dear Florence, my sufferings of old,
+          The struggles maintained with oppression for years;
+          We shared them together, and each was consoled
+          With the love which was nurtured by sorrow and tears.
+
+          "But now far apart, the sad pleasure is gone,
+          We mingle our sighs and our sorrows no more;
+          The course is a new one which each has to run,
+          And dreary for each is the pathway before.
+
+          "But in slumber our spirits at least shall commune,
+          We will meet as of old in the visions of sleep,
+          In dreams which call back early days, when at noon
+          We stole to the shade of the palm-tree to weep!
+
+          "For solitude pining, in anguish of late
+          The heights of Quintana I sought for repose;
+          And there, in the cool and the silence, the weight
+          Of my cares was forgotten, I felt not any woes.
+
+          "Exhausted and weary, the spell of the place
+          Sank down on my eyelids, and soft slumber stole
+          So sweetly upon me, it left not a trace
+          Of sorrow o'ercasting the light of the soul."
+
+
+The writer then imagines himself borne lightly through the air to the
+place of his birth.  The valley of Matanzas lies beneath him, hallowed by
+the graves of his parents.  He proceeds:--
+
+          "I gazed on that spot where together we played,
+          Our innocent pastimes came fresh to my mind,
+          Our mother's caress, and the fondness displayed
+          In each word and each look of a parent so kind.
+
+          "I looked on the mountain, whose fastnesses wild
+          The fugitives seek from the rifle and hound;
+          Below were the fields where they suffered and toiled,
+          And there the low graves of their comrades are found.
+
+          "The mill-house was there, and the turmoil of old;
+          But sick of these scenes, for too well were they known,
+          I looked for the stream where in childhood I strolled
+          When a moment of quiet and peace was my own.
+
+          "With mingled emotions of pleasure and pain,
+          Dear Florence, I sighed to behold thee once more;
+          I sought thee, my brother, embraced thee again,
+          But I found thee a slave as I left thee before!"
+
+Some of his devotional pieces evince the fervor and true feeling of the
+Christian poet.  His _Ode to Religion_ contains many admirable lines.
+Speaking of the martyrs of the early days of Christianity, he says
+finely:--
+
+          "Still in that cradle, purpled with their blood,
+          The infant Faith waxed stronger day by day."
+
+I cannot forbear quoting the last stanza of this poem:--
+
+          "O God of mercy, throned in glory high,
+          On earth and all its misery look down:
+          Behold the wretched, hear the captive's cry,
+          And call Thy exiled children round Thy throne!
+          There would I fain in contemplation gaze
+          On Thy eternal beauty, and would make
+          Of love one lasting canticle of praise,
+          And every theme but Thee henceforth forsake!"
+
+His best and noblest production is an ode _To Cuba_, written on the
+occasion of Dr. Madden's departure from the island, and presented to that
+gentleman.  It was never published in Cuba, as its sentiments would have
+subjected the author to persecution.  It breathes a lofty spirit of
+patriotism, and an indignant sense of the wrongs inflicted upon his race.
+Withal, it has something of the grandeur and stateliness of the old
+Spanish muse.
+
+          "Cuba!--of what avail that thou art fair,
+          Pearl of the Seas, the pride of the Antilles,
+          If thy poor sons have still to see thee share
+          The pangs of bondage and its thousand ills?
+          Of what avail the verdure of thy hills,
+          The purple bloom thy coffee-plain displays;
+          The cane's luxuriant growth, whose culture fills
+          More graves than famine, or the sword finds ways
+          To glut with victims calmly as it slays?
+
+          "Of what avail that thy clear streams abound
+          With precious ore, if wealth there's, none to buy
+          Thy children's rights, and not one grain is found
+          For Learning's shrine, or for the altar nigh
+          Of poor, forsaken, downcast Liberty?
+          Of what avail the riches of thy port,
+          Forests of masts and ships from every sea,
+          If Trade alone is free, and man, the sport
+          And spoil of Trade, bears wrongs of every sort?
+
+          "Cuba! O Cuba!---when men call thee fair,
+          And rich, and beautiful, the Queen of Isles,
+          Star of the West, and Ocean's gem most rare,
+          Oh, say to those who mock thee with such wiles:
+          Take off these flowers; and view the lifeless spoils
+          Which wait the worm; behold their hues beneath
+          The pale, cold cheek; and seek for living smiles
+          Where Beauty lies not in the arms of Death,
+          And Bondage taints not with its poison breath!"
+
+The disastrous result of the last rising of the slaves--in Cuba is well
+known.  Betrayed, and driven into premature collision with their
+oppressors, the insurrectionists were speedily crushed into subjection.
+Placido was arrested, and after a long hearing was condemned to be
+executed, and consigned to the Chapel of the Condemned.
+
+How far he was implicated in the insurrectionary movement it is now
+perhaps impossible to ascertain.  The popular voice at Havana pronounced
+him its leader and projector, and as such he was condemned.  His own
+bitter wrongs; the terrible recollections of his life of servitude; the
+sad condition of his relatives and race, exposed to scorn, contumely, and
+the heavy hand of violence; the impunity with which the most dreadful
+outrages upon the persons of slaves were inflicted,--acting upon a mind
+fully capable of appreciating the beauty and dignity of freedom,--
+furnished abundant incentives to an effort for the redemption of his race
+and the humiliation of his oppressors.  The Heraldo, of Madrid speaks of
+him as "the celebrated poet, a man of great natural genius, and beloved
+and appreciated by the most respectable young men of Havana."  It accuses
+him of wild and ambitious projects, and states that he was intended to be
+the chief of the black race after they had thrown off the yoke of
+bondage.
+
+He was executed at Havana in the seventh month, 1844.  According to the
+custom in Cuba with condemned criminals, he was conducted from prison to
+the Chapel of the Doomed.  He passed thither with singular composure,
+amidst a great concourse of people, gracefully saluting his numerous
+acquaintances.  The chapel was hung with black cloth, and dimly lighted.
+He was seated beside his coffin.  Priests in long black robes stood
+around him, chanting in sepulchral voices the service of the dead.  It is
+an ordeal under which the stoutest-hearted and most resolute have been
+found to sink.  After enduring it for twenty-four hours he was led out to
+execution.  He came forth calm and undismayed; holding a crucifix in his
+hand, he recited in a loud, clear voice a solemn prayer in verse, which
+he had composed amidst the horrors of the Chapel.  The following is an
+imperfect rendering of a poem which thrilled the hearts of all who heard
+it:--
+
+          "God of unbounded love and power eternal,
+          To Thee I turn in darkness and despair!
+          Stretch forth Thine arm, and from the brow infernal
+          Of Calumny the veil of Justice tear;
+          And from the forehead of my honest fame
+          Pluck the world's brand of infamy and shame!
+
+          "O King of kings!--my fathers' God!--who only
+          Art strong to save, by whom is all controlled,
+          Who givest the sea its waves, the dark and lonely
+          Abyss of heaven its light, the North its cold,
+          The air its currents, the warm sun its beams,
+          Life to the flowers, and motion to the streams!
+
+          "All things obey Thee, dying or reviving
+          As thou commandest; all, apart from Thee,
+          From Thee alone their life and power deriving,
+          Sink and are lost in vast eternity!
+          Yet doth the void obey Thee; since from naught
+          This marvellous being by Thy hand was wrought.
+
+          "O merciful God!  I cannot shun Thy presence,
+          For through its veil of flesh Thy piercing eye
+          Looketh upon my spirit's unsoiled essence,
+          As through the pure transparence of the sky;
+          Let not the oppressor clap his bloody hands,
+          As o'er my prostrate innocence he stands!
+
+          "But if, alas, it seemeth good to Thee
+          That I should perish as the guilty dies,
+          And that in death my foes should gaze on me
+          With hateful malice and exulting eyes,
+          Speak Thou the word, and bid them shed my blood,
+          Fully in me Thy will be done, O God!"
+
+On arriving at the fatal spot, he sat down as ordered, on a bench, with
+his back to the soldiers.  The multitude recollected that in some
+affecting lines, written by the conspirator in prison, he had said that
+it would be useless to seek to kill him by shooting his body,--that his
+heart must be pierced ere it would cease its throbbings.  At the last
+moment, just as the soldiers were about to fire, he rose up and gazed for
+an instant around and above him on the beautiful capital of his native
+land and its sail-flecked bay, on the dense crowds about him, the blue
+mountains in the distance, and the sky glorious with summer sunshine.
+"Adios, mundo!" (Farewell, world!) he said calmly, and sat down.  The
+word was given, and five balls entered his body.  Then it was that,
+amidst the groans and murmurs of the horror-stricken spectators, he rose
+up once more, and turned his head to the shuddering soldiers, his face
+wearing an expression of superhuman courage.  "Will no one pity me?" he
+said, laying his hand over his heart.  "Here, fire here!"  While he yet
+spake, two balls entered his heart, and he fell dead.
+
+Thus perished the hero poet of Cuba.  He has not fallen in vain.  His
+genius and his heroic death will doubtless be regarded by his race as
+precious legacies.  To the great names of L'Ouverture and Petion the
+colored man can now add that of Juan Placido.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                      PERSONAL SKETCHES AND TRIBUTES
+
+
+THE FUNERAL OF TORREY.
+
+     Charles T. Torrey, an able young Congregational clergyman, died May
+     9, 1846, in the state's prison of Maryland, for the offence of
+     aiding slaves to escape from bondage.  His funeral in Boston,
+     attended by thousands, was a most impressive occasion.  The
+     following is an extract from an article written for the _Essex
+     Transcript_:--
+
+Some seven years ago, we saw Charles T. Torrey for the first time.  His
+wife was leaning on his arm,--young, loving, and beautiful; the heart
+that saw them blessed them.  Since that time, we have known him as a most
+energetic and zealous advocate of the anti-slavery cause.  He had fine
+talents, improved by learning and observation, a clear, intensely active
+intellect, and a heart full of sympathy and genial humanity.  It was with
+strange and bitter feelings that we bent over his coffin and looked upon
+his still face.  The pity which we had felt for him in his long
+sufferings gave place to indignation against his murderers.  Hateful
+beyond the power of expression seemed the tyranny which had murdered him
+with the slow torture of the dungeon.  May God forgive us, if for the
+moment we felt like grasping His dread prerogative of vengeance.  As we
+passed out of the hall, a friend grasped our hand hard, his eye flashing
+through its tears, with a stern reflection of our own emotions, while he
+whispered through his pressed lips: "It is enough to turn every anti-
+slavery heart into steel."  Our blood boiled; we longed to see the wicked
+apologists of slavery--the blasphemous defenders of it in Church and
+State--led up to the coffin of our murdered brother, and there made to
+feel that their hands had aided in riveting the chain upon those still
+limbs, and in shutting out from those cold lips the free breath of
+heaven.
+
+A long procession followed his remains to their resting-place at Mount
+Auburn.  A monument to his memory will be raised in that cemetery, in the
+midst of the green beauty of the scenery which he loved in life, and side
+by side with the honored dead of Massachusetts.  Thither let the friends
+of humanity go to gather fresh strength from the memory of the martyr.
+There let the slaveholder stand, and as he reads the record of the
+enduring marble commune with his own heart, and feel that sorrow which
+worketh repentance.
+
+The young, the beautiful, the brave!--he is safe now from the malice of
+his enemies.  Nothing can harm him more.  His work for the poor and
+helpless was well and nobly done.  In the wild woods of Canada, around
+many a happy fireside and holy family altar, his name is on the lips of
+God's poor.  He put his soul in their souls' stead; he gave his life for
+those who had no claim on his love save that of human brotherhood.  How
+poor, how pitiful and paltry, seem our labors!  How small and mean our
+trials and sacrifices!  May the spirit of the dead be with us, and infuse
+into our hearts something of his own deep sympathy, his hatred of
+injustice, his strong faith and heroic endurance.  May that spirit be
+gladdened in its present sphere by the increased zeal and faithfulness of
+the friends he has left behind.
+
+
+
+
+EDWARD EVERETT.
+
+A letter to Robert C. Waterston.
+
+Amesbury, 27th 1st Month, 1865.
+
+I acknowledge through thee the invitation of the standing committee of
+the Massachusetts Historical Society to be present at a special meeting
+of the Society for the purpose of paying a tribute to the memory of our
+late illustrious associate, Edward Everett.
+
+It is a matter of deep regret to me that the state of my health will not
+permit me to be with you on an occasion of so much interest.
+
+It is most fitting that the members of the Historical Society of
+Massachusetts should add their tribute to those which have been already
+offered by all sects, parties, and associations to the name and fame of
+their late associate.  He was himself a maker of history, and part and
+parcel of all the noble charities and humanizing influences of his State
+and time.
+
+When the grave closed over him who added new lustre to the old and
+honored name of Quincy, all eyes instinctively turned to Edward Everett
+as the last of that venerated class of patriotic civilians who, outliving
+all dissent and jealousy and party prejudice, held their reputation by
+the secure tenure of the universal appreciation of its worth as a common
+treasure of the republic.  It is not for me to pronounce his eulogy.
+Others, better qualified by their intimate acquaintance with him, have
+done and will do justice to his learning, eloquence, varied culture, and
+social virtues.  My secluded country life has afforded me few
+opportunities of personal intercourse with him, while my pronounced
+radicalism on the great question which has divided popular feeling
+rendered our political paths widely divergent.  Both of us early saw the
+danger which threatened the country.  In the language of the prophet, we
+"saw the sword coming upon the land," but while he believed in the
+possibility of averting it by concession and compromise, I, on the
+contrary, as firmly believed that such a course could only strengthen and
+confirm what I regarded as a gigantic conspiracy against the rights and
+liberties, the union and the life, of the nation.
+
+Recent events have certainly not tended to change this belief on my part;
+but in looking over the past, while I see little or nothing to retract in
+the matter of opinion, I am saddened by the reflection that through the
+very intensity of my convictions I may have done injustice to the motives
+of those with whom I differed.  As respects Edward Everett, it seems to
+me that only within the last four years I have truly known him.
+
+In that brief period, crowded as it is with a whole life-work of
+consecration to the union, freedom, and glory of his country, he not only
+commanded respect and reverence, but concentrated upon himself in a most
+remarkable degree the love of all loyal and generous hearts.  We have
+seen, in these years of trial, very great sacrifices offered upon the
+altar of patriotism,--wealth, ease, home, love, life itself.  But Edward
+Everett did more than this: he laid on that altar not only his time,
+talents, and culture, but his pride of opinion, his long-cherished views
+of policy, his personal and political predilections and prejudices, his
+constitutional fastidiousness of conservatism, and the carefully
+elaborated symmetry of his public reputation.  With a rare and noble
+magnanimity, he met, without hesitation, the demand of the great
+occasion.  Breaking away from all the besetments of custom and
+association, he forgot the things that are behind, and, with an eye
+single to present duty, pressed forward towards the mark of the high
+calling of Divine Providence in the events of our time.  All honor to
+him!  If we mourn that he is now beyond the reach of our poor human
+praise, let us reverently trust that he has received that higher plaudit:
+"Well done, thou good and faithful servant!"
+
+When I last met him, as my colleague in the Electoral College of
+Massachusetts, his look of health and vigor seemed to promise us many
+years of his wisdom and usefulness.  On greeting him I felt impelled to
+express my admiration and grateful appreciation of his patriotic labors;
+and I shall never forget how readily and gracefully he turned attention
+from himself to the great cause in which we had a common interest, and
+expressed his thankfulness that he had still a country to serve.
+
+To keep green the memory of such a man is at once a privilege and a duty.
+That stainless life of seventy years is a priceless legacy.  His hands
+were pure.  The shadow of suspicion never fell on him.  If he erred in
+his opinions (and that he did so he had the Christian grace and courage
+to own), no selfish interest weighed in the scale of his judgment against
+truth.
+
+As our thoughts follow him to his last resting-place, we are sadly
+reminded of his own touching lines, written many years ago at Florence.
+The name he has left behind is none the less "pure" that instead of being
+"humble," as he then anticipated, it is on the lips of grateful millions,
+and written ineffaceable on the record of his country's trial and
+triumph:--
+
+         "Yet not for me when I shall fall asleep
+          Shall Santa Croce's lamps their vigils keep.
+          Beyond the main in Auburn's quiet shade,
+          With those I loved and love my couch be made;
+          Spring's pendant branches o'er the hillock wave,
+          And morning's dewdrops glisten on my grave,
+          While Heaven's great arch shall rise above my bed,
+          When Santa Croce's crumbles on her dead,--
+          Unknown to erring or to suffering fame,
+          So may I leave a pure though humble name."
+
+Congratulating the Society on the prospect of the speedy consummation of
+the great objects of our associate's labors,--the peace and permanent
+union of our country,--
+
+I am very truly thy friend.
+
+
+
+
+LEWIS TAPPAN.
+
+[1873.]
+
+One after another, those foremost in the antislavery conflict of the last
+half century are rapidly passing away.  The grave has just closed over
+all that was mortal of Salmon P. Chase, the kingliest of men, a statesman
+second to no other in our history, too great and pure for the Presidency,
+yet leaving behind him a record which any incumbent of that station might
+envy,--and now the telegraph brings us the tidings of the death of Lewis
+Tappan, of Brooklyn, so long and so honorably identified with the anti-
+slavery cause, and with every philanthropic and Christian enterprise.  He
+was a native of Massachusetts, born at Northampton in 1788, of Puritan
+lineage,--one of a family remarkable for integrity, decision of
+character, and intellectual ability.  At the very outset, in company with
+his brother Arthur, he devoted his time, talents, wealth, and social
+position to the righteous but unpopular cause of Emancipation, and
+became, in consequence, a mark for the persecution which followed such
+devotion.  His business was crippled, his name cast out as evil, his
+dwelling sacked, and his furniture dragged into the street and burned.
+Yet he never, in the darkest hour, faltered or hesitated for a moment.
+He knew he was right, and that the end would justify him; one of the
+cheerfullest of men, he was strong where others were weak, hopeful where
+others despaired.  He was wise in counsel, and prompt in action; like
+Tennyson's Sir Galahad,
+
+              "His strength was as the strength of ten,
+               Because his heart was pure."
+
+I met him for the first time forty years ago, at the convention which
+formed the American Anti-Slavery Society, where I chanced to sit by him
+as one of the secretaries.  Myself young and inexperienced, I remember
+how profoundly I was impressed by his cool self-possession, clearness of
+perception, and wonderful executive ability.  Had he devoted himself to
+party politics with half the zeal which he manifested in behalf of those
+who had no votes to give and no honors to bestow, he could have reached
+the highest offices in the land.  He chose his course, knowing all that
+he renounced, and he chose it wisely.  He never, at least, regretted it.
+
+And now, at the ripe age of eighty-five years, the brave old man has
+passed onward to the higher life, having outlived here all hatred, abuse,
+and misrepresentation, having seen the great work of Emancipation
+completed, and white men and black men equal before the law.  I saw him
+for the last time three years ago, when he was preparing his valuable
+biography of his beloved brother Arthur.  Age had begun to tell upon his
+constitution, but his intellectual force was not abated.  The old,
+pleasant laugh and playful humor remained.  He looked forward to the
+close of life hopefully, even cheerfully, as he called to mind the dear
+friends who had passed on before him, to await his coming.
+
+Of the sixty-three signers of the Anti-Slavery Declaration at the
+Philadelphia Convention in 1833, probably not more than eight or ten are
+now living.
+
+              "As clouds that rake the mountain summits,
+               As waves that know no guiding hand,
+               So swift has brother followed brother
+               From sunshine to the sunless land."
+
+Yet it is a noteworthy fact that the oldest member of that convention,
+David Thurston, D. D., of Maine, lived to see the slaves emancipated, and
+to mingle his voice of thanksgiving with the bells that rang in the day
+of universal freedom.
+
+
+
+
+BAYARD TAYLOR
+
+Read at the memorial meeting in Tremont Temple, Boston, January 10, 1879.
+
+I am not able to attend the memorial meeting in Tremont Temple on the
+10th instant, but my heart responds to any testimonial appreciative of
+the intellectual achievements and the noble and manly life of Bayard
+Taylor.  More than thirty years have intervened between my first meeting
+him in the fresh bloom of his youth and hope and honorable ambition, and
+my last parting with him under the elms of Boston Common, after our visit
+to Richard H. Dana, on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of that
+honored father of American poetry, still living to lament the death of
+his younger disciple and friend.  How much he has accomplished in these
+years!  The most industrious of men, slowly, patiently, under many
+disadvantages, he built up his splendid reputation.  Traveller, editor,
+novelist, translator, diplomatist, and through all and above all poet,
+what he was he owed wholly to himself.  His native honesty was satisfied
+with no half tasks.  He finished as he went, and always said and did his
+best.
+
+It is perhaps too early to assign him his place in American literature.
+His picturesque books of travel, his Oriental lyrics, his Pennsylvanian
+idyls, his Centennial ode, the pastoral beauty and Christian sweetness of
+Lars, and the high argument and rhythmic marvel of Deukalion are sureties
+of the permanence of his reputation.  But at this moment my thoughts
+dwell rather upon the man than the author.  The calamity of his death,
+felt in both hemispheres, is to me and to all who intimately knew and
+loved him a heavy personal loss.  Under the shadow of this bereavement,
+in the inner circle of mourning, we sorrow most of all that we shall see
+his face no more, and long for "the touch of a vanished hand, and the
+sound of a voice that is still."
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING
+
+Read at the dedication of the Channing Memorial Church at Newport, R.  I.
+
+DANVERS, MASS., 3d Mo., 13, 1880.
+
+I scarcely need say that I yield to no one in love and reverence for the
+great and good man whose memory, outliving all prejudices of creed, sect,
+and party, is the common legacy of Christendom.  As the years go on, the
+value of that legacy will be more and more felt; not so much, perhaps, in
+doctrine as in spirit, in those utterances of a devout soul which are
+above and beyond the affirmation or negation of dogma.
+
+His ethical severity and Christian tenderness; his hatred of wrong and
+oppression, with love and pity for the wrong-doer; his noble pleas for
+self-culture, temperance, peace, and purity; and above all, his precept
+and example of unquestioning obedience to duty and the voice of God in
+his soul, can never become obsolete.  It is very fitting that his memory
+should be especially cherished with that of Hopkins and Berkeley in the
+beautiful island to which the common residence of those worthies has lent
+additional charms and interest.
+
+
+
+
+
+DEATH OF PRESIDENT GARFIELD.
+
+A letter written to W. H. B.  Currier, of Amesbury, Mass.
+
+DANVERS, MASS., 9th Mo., 24, 1881.
+
+I regret that it is not in my power to join the citizens of Amesbury and
+Salisbury in the memorial services on the occasion of the death of our
+lamented President.  But in heart and sympathy I am with you.  I share
+the great sorrow which overshadows the land; I fully appreciate the
+irretrievable loss.  But it seems to me that the occasion is one for
+thankfulness as well as grief.
+
+Through all the stages of the solemn tragedy which has just closed with
+the death of our noblest and best, I have felt that the Divine Providence
+was overruling the mighty affliction,--that the patient sufferer at
+Washington was drawing with cords of sympathy all sections and parties
+nearer to each other.  And now, when South and North, Democrat and
+Republican, Radical and Conservative, lift their voices in one unbroken
+accord of lamentation; when I see how, in spite of the greed of gain, the
+lust of office, the strifes and narrowness of party politics, the great
+heart of the nation proves sound and loyal, I feel a new hope for the
+republic, I have a firmer faith in its stability.  It is said that no man
+liveth and no man dieth to himself; and the pure and noble life of
+Garfield, and his slow, long martyrdom, so bravely borne in view of all,
+are, I believe, bearing for us as a people "the peaceable fruits of
+righteousness."  We are stronger, wiser, better, for them.
+
+With him it is well.  His mission fulfilled, he goes to his grave by the
+Lakeside honored and lamented as man never was before.  The whole world
+mourns him.  There is no speech nor language where the voice of his
+praise is not heard.  About his grave gather, with heads uncovered, the
+vast brotherhood of man.
+
+And with us it is well, also.  We are nearer a united people than ever
+before.  We are at peace with all; our future is full of promise; our
+industrial and financial condition is hopeful.  God grant that, while our
+material interests prosper, the moral and spiritual influence of the
+occasion may be permanently felt; that the solemn sacrament of Sorrow,
+whereof we have been made partakers, may be blest to the promotion of the
+righteousness which exalteth a nation.
+
+
+
+
+LYDIA MARIA CHILD.
+
+     In 1882 a collection of the Letters of Lydia Maria Child was
+     published, for which I wrote the following sketch, as an
+     introduction:--
+
+In presenting to the public this memorial volume, its compilers deemed
+that a brief biographical introduction was necessary; and as a labor of
+love I have not been able to refuse their request to prepare it.
+
+Lydia Maria Francis was born in Medford, Massachusetts, February 11,
+1802.  Her father, Convers Francis, was a worthy and substantial citizen
+of that town.  Her brother, Convers Francis, afterwards theological
+professor in Harvard College, was some years older than herself, and
+assisted her in her early home studies, though, with the perversity of an
+elder brother, he sometimes mystified her in answering her questions.
+Once, when she wished to know what was meant by Milton's "raven down of
+darkness," which was made to smile when smoothed, he explained that it
+was only the fur of a black cat, which sparkled when stroked!  Later in
+life this brother wrote of her, "She has been a dear, good sister to me
+would that I had been half as good a brother to her."  Her earliest
+teacher was an aged spinster, known in the village as "Marm Betty,"
+painfully shy, and with many oddities of person and manner, the never-
+forgotten calamity of whose life was that Governor Brooks once saw her
+drinking out of the nose of her tea-kettle.  Her school was in her
+bedroom, always untidy, and she was a constant chewer of tobacco but the
+children were fond of her, and Maria and her father always carried her a
+good Sunday dinner.  Thomas W. Higginson, in _Eminent Women of the Age_,
+mentions in this connection that, according to an established custom, on
+the night before Thanksgiving "all the humble friends of the Francis
+household--Marm Betty, the washerwoman, wood-sawyer, and journeymen, some
+twenty or thirty in all--were summoned to a preliminary entertainment.
+They there partook of an immense chicken pie, pumpkin pie made in milk-
+pans, and heaps of doughnuts.  They feasted in the large, old-fashioned
+kitchen, and went away loaded with crackers and bread and pies, not
+forgetting 'turnovers' for the children.  Such plain application of the
+doctrine that it is more blessed to give than receive may have done more
+to mould the character of Lydia Maria Child of maturer years than all the
+faithful labors of good Dr. Osgood, to whom she and her brother used to
+repeat the Assembly's catechism once a month."
+
+Her education was limited to the public schools, with the exception of
+one year at a private seminary in her native town.  From a note by her
+brother, Dr. Francis, we learn that when twelve years of age she went to
+Norridgewock, Maine, where her married sister resided.  At Dr. Brown's,
+in Skowhegan, she first read _Waverley_.  She was greatly excited, and
+exclaimed, as she laid down the book, "Why cannot I write a novel?"
+She remained in Norridgewock and vicinity for several years, and on her
+return to Massachusetts took up her abode with her brother at Watertown.
+He encouraged her literary tastes, and it was in his study that she
+commenced her first story, _Hobomok_, which she published in the twenty-
+first year of her age.  The success it met with induced her to give to
+the public, soon after, _The Rebels: a Tale of the Revolution_, which was
+at once received into popular favor, and ran rapidly through several
+editions.  Then followed in close succession _The Mother's Book_, running
+through eight American editions, twelve English, and one German, _The
+Girl's Book_, the _History of Women_, and the _Frugal Housewife_, of
+which thirty-five editions were published.  Her _Juvenile Miscellany_ was
+commenced in 1826.
+
+It is not too much to say that half a century ago she was the most
+popular literary woman in the United States.  She had published
+historical novels of unquestioned power of description and
+characterization, and was widely and favorably known as the editor of the
+_Juvenile Miscellany_, which was probably the first periodical in the
+English tongue devoted exclusively to children, and to which she was by
+far the largest contributor.  Some of the tales and poems from her pen
+were extensively copied and greatly admired.  It was at this period that
+the _North American Review_, the highest literary authority of the
+country, said of her, "We are not sure that any woman of our country
+could outrank Mrs. Child.  This lady has been long before the public as
+an author with much success.  And she well deserves it, for in all her
+works nothing can be found which does not commend itself, by its tone of
+healthy morality and good sense.  Few female writers, if any, have done
+more or better things for our literature in the lighter or graver
+departments."
+
+Comparatively young, she had placed herself in the front rank of American
+authorship.  Her books and her magazine had a large circulation, and were
+affording her a comfortable income, at a time when the rewards of
+authorship were uncertain and at the best scanty.
+
+In 1828 she married David Lee Child, Esq., a young and able lawyer, and
+took up her residence in Boston.  In 1831-32 both became deeply
+interested in the subject of slavery, through the writings and personal
+influence of William Lloyd Garrison.  Her husband, a member of the
+Massachusetts legislature and editor of the _Massachusetts Journal_, had,
+at an earlier date, denounced the project of the dismemberment of Mexico
+for the purpose of strengthening and extending American slavery.  He was
+one of the earliest members of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and
+his outspoken hostility to the peculiar institution greatly and
+unfavorably affected his interests as a lawyer.  In 1832 he addressed a
+series of able letters on slavery and the slave-trade to Edward S. Abdy,
+a prominent English philanthropist.  In 1836 he published in Philadelphia
+ten strongly written articles on the same subject.  He visited England
+and France in 1837, and while in Paris addressed an elaborate memoir to
+the Societe pour l'Abolition d'Esclavage, and a paper on the same subject
+to the editor of the _Eclectic Review_, in London.  To his facts and
+arguments John Quincy Adams was much indebted in the speeches which he
+delivered in Congress on the Texas question.
+
+In 1833 the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed by a convention in
+Philadelphia.  Its numbers were small, and it was everywhere spoken
+against.  It was at this time that Lydia Maria Child startled the country
+by the publication of her noble _Appeal in Behalf of that Class of
+Americans called Africans_.  It is quite impossible for any one of the
+present generation to imagine the popular surprise and indignation which
+the book called forth, or how entirely its author cut herself off from
+the favor and sympathy of a large number of those who had previously
+delighted to do her honor.  Social and literary circles, which had been
+proud of her presence, closed their doors against her.  The sale of her
+books, the subscriptions to her magazine, fell off to a ruinous extent.
+She knew all she was hazarding, and made the great sacrifice, prepared
+for all the consequences which followed.  In the preface to her book she
+says, "I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have
+undertaken; but though I expect ridicule and censure, I do not fear them.
+A few years hence, the opinion of the world will be a matter in which I
+have not even the most transient interest; but this book will be abroad
+on its mission of humanity long after the hand that wrote it is mingling
+with the dust.  Should it be the means of advancing, even one single
+hour, the inevitable progress of truth and justice, I would not exchange
+the consciousness for all Rothschild's wealth or Sir Walter's fame."
+
+Thenceforth her life was a battle; a constant rowing hard against the
+stream of popular prejudice and hatred.  And through it all--pecuniary
+privation, loss of friends and position, the painfulness of being
+suddenly thrust from "the still air of delightful studies" into the
+bitterest and sternest controversy of the age--she bore herself with
+patience, fortitude, and unshaken reliance upon the justice and ultimate
+triumph of the cause she had espoused.  Her pen was never idle.  Wherever
+there was a brave word to be spoken, her voice was heard, and never
+without effect.  It is not exaggeration to say that no man or woman at
+that period rendered more substantial service to the cause of freedom, or
+made such a "great renunciation" in doing it.
+
+A practical philanthropist, she had the courage of her convictions, and
+from the first was no mere closet moralist or sentimental bewailer of the
+woes of humanity.  She was the Samaritan stooping over the wounded Jew.
+She calmly and unflinchingly took her place by the side, of the despised
+slave and free man of color, and in word and act protested against the
+cruel prejudice which shut out its victims from the rights and privileges
+of American citizens.  Her philanthropy had no taint of fanaticism;
+throughout the long struggle, in which she was a prominent actor, she
+kept her fine sense of humor, good taste, and sensibility to the
+beautiful in art and nature.
+
+     The opposition she met with from those who had shared her confidence
+     and friendship was of course keenly felt, but her kindly and genial
+     disposition remained unsoured.  She rarely spoke of her personal
+     trials, and never posed as a martyr.  The nearest approach to
+     anything like complaint is in the following lines, the date of which
+     I have not been able to ascertain:--
+
+               THE WORLD THAT I AM PASSING THROUGH.
+
+               Few in the days of early youth
+               Trusted like me in love and truth.
+               I've learned sad lessons from the years,
+               But slowly, and with many tears;
+               For God made me to kindly view
+               The world that I am passing through.
+
+               Though kindness and forbearance long
+               Must meet ingratitude and wrong,
+               I still would bless my fellow-men,
+               And trust them though deceived again.
+               God help me still to kindly view
+               The world that I am passing through.
+
+               From all that fate has brought to me
+               I strive to learn humility,
+               And trust in Him who rules above,
+               Whose universal law is love.
+               Thus only can I kindly view
+               The world that I am passing through.
+
+               When I approach the setting sun,
+               And feel my journey well-nigh done,
+               May Earth be veiled in genial light,
+               And her last smile to me seem bright.
+               Help me till then to kindly view
+               The world that I am passing through.
+
+               And all who tempt a trusting heart
+               From faith and hope to drift apart,
+               May they themselves be spared the pain
+               Of losing power to trust again.
+               God help us all to kindly view
+               The world that we are passing through.
+
+While faithful to the great duty which she felt was laid upon her in an
+especial manner, she was by no means a reformer of one idea, but her
+interest was manifested in every question affecting the welfare of
+humanity.  Peace, temperance, education, prison reform, and equality of
+civil rights, irrespective of sex, engaged her attention.  Under all the
+disadvantages of her estrangement from popular favor, her charming Greek
+romance of _Philothea_ and her _Lives of Madame Roland_ and the _Baroness
+de Stael_ proved that her literary ability had lost nothing of its
+strength, and that the hand which penned such terrible rebukes had still
+kept its delicate touch, and gracefully yielded to the inspiration of
+fancy and art.  While engaged with her husband in the editorial
+supervision of the _Anti-Slavery Standard_, she wrote her admirable
+_Letters from New York_; humorous, eloquent, and picturesque, but still
+humanitarian in tone, which extorted the praise of even a pro-slavery
+community.  Her great work, in three octavo volumes, _The Progress of
+Religious Ideas_, belongs, in part, to that period.  It is an attempt to
+represent in a candid, unprejudiced manner the rise and progress of the
+great religions of the world, and their ethical relations to each other.
+She availed herself of, and carefully studied, the authorities at that
+time accessible, and the result is creditable to her scholarship,
+industry, and conscientiousness.  If, in her desire to do justice to the
+religions of Buddha and Mohammed, in which she has been followed by
+Maurice, Max Muller, and Dean Stanley, she seems at times to dwell upon
+the best and overlook the darker features of those systems, her
+concluding reflections should vindicate her from the charge of
+undervaluing the Christian faith, or of lack of reverent appreciation of
+its founder.  In the closing chapter of her work, in which the large
+charity and broad sympathies of her nature are manifest, she thus turns
+with words of love, warm from the heart, to Him whose Sermon on the Mount
+includes most that is good and true and vital in the religions and
+philosophies of the world:--
+
+"It was reserved for Him to heal the brokenhearted, to preach a gospel to
+the poor, to say, 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved
+much.'  Nearly two thousand years have passed away since these words of
+love and pity were uttered, yet when I read them my eyes fill with tears.
+I thank Thee, O Heavenly Father, for all the messengers thou hast sent to
+man; but, above all, I thank Thee for Him, thy beloved Son!  Pure lily
+blossom of the centuries, taking root in the lowliest depths, and
+receiving the light and warmth of heaven in its golden heart!  All that
+the pious have felt, all that poets have said, all that artists have
+done, with their manifold forms of beauty, to represent the ministry of
+Jesus, are but feeble expressions of the great debt we owe Him who is
+even now curing the lame, restoring sight to the blind, and raising the
+dead in that spiritual sense wherein all miracle is true."
+
+During her stay in New York, as editor of the _Anti-Slavery Standard_,
+she found a pleasant home at the residence of the genial philanthropist,
+Isaac T. Hopper, whose remarkable life she afterwards wrote.  Her
+portrayal of this extraordinary man, so brave, so humorous, so tender and
+faithful to his convictions of duty, is one of the most readable pieces
+of biography in English literature.  Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in a
+discriminating paper published in 1869, speaks of her eight years'
+sojourn in New York as the most interesting and satisfactory period of
+her whole life.  "She was placed where her sympathetic nature found
+abundant outlet and occupation.  Dwelling in a house where
+disinterestedness and noble labor were as daily breath, she had great
+opportunities.  There was no mere alms-giving; but sin and sorrow must
+be brought home to the fireside and the heart; the fugitive slave, the
+drunkard, the outcast woman, must be the chosen guests of the abode,--
+must be taken, and held, and loved into reformation or hope."
+
+It would be a very imperfect representation of Maria Child which regarded
+her only from a literary point of view.  She was wise in counsel; and men
+like Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, Salmon P. Chase, and Governor Andrew
+availed themselves of her foresight and sound judgment of men and
+measures.  Her pen was busy with correspondence, and whenever a true man
+or a good cause needed encouragement, she was prompt to give it.  Her
+donations for benevolent causes and beneficent reforms were constant and
+liberal; and only those who knew her intimately could understand the
+cheerful and unintermitted self-denial which alone enabled her to make
+them.  She did her work as far as possible out of sight, without noise or
+pretension.  Her time, talents, and money were held not as her own, but a
+trust from the Eternal Father for the benefit of His suffering children.
+Her plain, cheap dress was glorified by the generous motive for which she
+wore it.  Whether in the crowded city among the sin-sick and starving, or
+among the poor and afflicted in the neighborhood of her country home, no
+story of suffering and need, capable of alleviation, ever reached her
+without immediate sympathy and corresponding action.  Lowell, one of her
+warmest admirers, in his _Fable for Critics_ has beautifully portrayed
+her abounding benevolence:--
+
+     "There comes Philothea, her face all aglow:
+     She has just been dividing some poor creature's woe,
+     And can't tell which pleases her most, to relieve
+     His want, or his story to hear and believe.
+     No doubt against many deep griefs she prevails,
+     For her ear is the refuge of destitute tales;
+     She knows well that silence is sorrow's best food,
+     And that talking draws off from the heart its black blood."
+
+     "The pole, science tells us, the magnet controls,
+     But she is a magnet to emigrant Poles,
+     And folks with a mission that nobody knows
+     Throng thickly about her as bees round a rose.
+     She can fill up the carets in such, make their scope
+     Converge to some focus of rational hope,
+     And, with sympathies fresh as the morning, their gall
+     Can transmute into honey,--but this is not all;
+     Not only for those she has solace; O, say,
+     Vice's desperate nursling adrift in Broadway,
+     Who clingest, with all that is left of thee human,
+     To the last slender spar from the wreck of the woman,
+     Hast thou not found one shore where those tired, drooping feet
+     Could reach firm mother-earth, one full heart on whose beat
+     The soothed head in silence reposing could hear
+     The chimes of far childhood throb back on the ear?"
+
+     "Ah, there's many a beam from the fountain of day
+     That, to reach us unclouded, must pass, on its way,
+     Through the soul of a woman, and hers is wide ope
+     To the influence of Heaven as the blue eyes of Hope;
+     Yes, a great heart is hers, one that dares to go in
+     To the prison, the slave-hut, the alleys of sin,
+     And to bring into each, or to find there, some line
+     Of the never completely out-trampled divine;
+     If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then,
+     'T is but richer for that when the tide ebbs again,
+     As, after old Nile has subsided, his plain
+     Overflows with a second broad deluge of grain;
+     What a wealth would it bring to the narrow and sour,
+     Could they be as a Child but for one little hour!"
+
+After leaving New York, her husband and herself took up their residence
+in the rural town of Wayland, Mass.  Their house, plain and
+unpretentious, had a wide and pleasant outlook; a flower garden,
+carefully tended by her own hands, in front, and on the side a fruit
+orchard and vegetable garden, under the special care of her husband.  The
+house was always neat, with some appearance of unostentatious decoration,
+evincing at once the artistic taste of the hostess and the conscientious
+economy which forbade its indulgence to any great extent.  Her home was
+somewhat apart from the lines of rapid travel, and her hospitality was in
+a great measure confined to old and intimate friends, while her visits to
+the city were brief and infrequent.  A friend of hers, who had ample
+opportunities for a full knowledge of her home-life, says, "The domestic
+happiness of Mr. and Mrs. Child seemed to me perfect.  Their sympathies,
+their admiration of all things good, and their hearty hatred of all
+things mean and evil were in entire unison.  Mr. Child shared his wife's
+enthusiasms, and was very proud of her.  Their affection, never paraded,
+was always manifest.  After Mr. Child's death, Mrs. Child, in speaking of
+the future life, said, 'I believe it would be of small value to me if I
+were not united to him.'"
+
+In this connection I cannot forbear to give an extract from some
+reminiscences of her husband, which she left among her papers, which,
+better than any words of mine, will convey an idea of their simple and
+beautiful home-life:--
+
+"In 1852 we made a humble home in Wayland, Mass., where we spent twenty-
+two pleasant years entirely alone, without any domestic, mutually serving
+each other, and dependent upon each other for intellectual companionship.
+I always depended on his richly stored mind, which was able and ready to
+furnish needed information on any subject.  He was my walking dictionary
+of many languages, my Universal Encyclopaedia.
+
+"In his old age he was as affectionate and devoted as when the lover of
+my youth; nay, he manifested even more tenderness.  He was often
+singing,--
+
+               "'There's nothing half so sweet in life
+               As Love's old dream.'
+
+"Very often, when he passed by me, he would lay his hand softly on my
+head and murmur, 'Carum caput.' .  .  .  But what I remember with the
+most tender gratitude is his uniform patience and forbearance with my
+faults.  .  .  .  He never would see anything but the bright side of my
+character.  He always insisted upon thinking that whatever I said was the
+wisest and the wittiest, and that whatever I did was the best.  The
+simplest little jeu d'esprit of mine seemed to him wonderfully witty.
+Once, when he said, 'I wish for your sake, dear, I were as rich as
+Croesus,' I answered, 'You are Croesus, for you are king of Lydia.' How
+often he used to quote that!
+
+"His mind was unclouded to the last.  He had a passion for philology, and
+only eight hours before he passed away he was searching out the
+derivation of a word."
+
+Her well-stored mind and fine conversational gifts made her company
+always desirable.  No one who listened to her can forget the earnest
+eloquence with which she used to dwell upon the evidences, from history,
+tradition, and experience, of the superhuman and supernatural; or with
+what eager interest she detected in the mysteries of the old religions of
+the world the germs of a purer faith and a holier hope.  She loved to
+listen, as in St. Pierre's symposium of _The Coffee-House of Surat_,
+to the confessions of faith of all sects and schools of philosophy,
+Christian and pagan, and gather from them the consoling truth that our
+Father has nowhere left his children without some witness of Himself.
+She loved the old mystics, and lingered with curious interest and
+sympathy over the writings of Bohme, Swedenborg, Molinos, and Woolman.
+Yet this marked speculative tendency seemed not in the slightest degree
+to affect her practical activities.  Her mysticism and realism ran in
+close parallel lines without interfering with each other.
+
+With strong rationalistic tendencies from education and conviction, she
+found herself in spiritual accord with the pious introversion of Thomas
+a Kempis and Madame Guion.  She was fond of Christmas Eve stories, of
+warnings, signs, and spiritual intimations, her half belief in which
+sometimes seemed like credulity to her auditors.  James Russell Lowell,
+in his tender tribute to her, playfully alludes to this characteristic:--
+
+          "She has such a musical taste that she 'll go
+          Any distance to hear one who draws a long bow.
+          She will swallow a wonder by mere might and main."
+
+In 1859 the descent of John Brown upon Harper's Ferry, and his capture,
+trial, and death, startled the nation.  When the news reached her that
+the misguided but noble old man lay desperately wounded in prison, alone
+and unfriended, she wrote him a letter, under cover of one to Governor
+Wise, asking permission to go and nurse and care for him.  The expected
+arrival of Captain Brown's wife made her generous offer unnecessary.  The
+prisoner wrote her, thanking her, and asking her to help his family, a
+request with which she faithfully complied.  With his letter came one
+from Governor Wise, in courteous reproval of her sympathy for John Brown.
+To this she responded in an able and effective manner.  Her reply found
+its way from Virginia to the New York Tribune, and soon after Mrs. Mason,
+of King George's County, wife of Senator Mason, the author of the
+infamous Fugitive Slave Law, wrote her a vehement letter, commencing with
+threats of future damnation, and ending with assuring her that "no
+Southerner, after reading her letter to Governor Wise, ought to read a
+line of her composition, or touch a magazine which bore her name in its
+list of contributors."  To this she wrote a calm, dignified reply,
+declining to dwell on the fierce invectives of her assailant, and wishing
+her well here and hereafter.  She would not debate the specific merits or
+demerits of a man whose body was in charge of the courts, and whose
+reputation was sure to be in charge of posterity.  "Men," she continues,
+"are of small consequence in comparison with principles, and the
+principle for which John Brown died is the question at issue between us."
+These letters were soon published in pamphlet form, and had the immense
+circulation of 300,000 copies.
+
+In 1867 she published _A Romance of the Republic_, a story of the days of
+slavery; powerful in its delineation of some of the saddest as well as
+the most dramatic conditions of master and slave in the Southern States.
+Her husband, who had been long an invalid, died in 1874.  After his death
+her home, in winter especially, became a lonely one, and in 1877 she
+began to spend the cold months in Boston.
+
+Her last publication was in 1878, when her _Aspirations of the World_, a
+book of selections, on moral and religious subjects, from the literature
+of all nations and times, was given to the public.  The introduction,
+occupying fifty pages, shows, at threescore and ten, her mental vigor
+unabated, and is remarkable for its wise, philosophic tone and felicity
+of diction.  It has the broad liberality of her more elaborate work on
+the same subject, and in the mellow light of life's sunset her words seem
+touched with a tender pathos and beauty.  "All we poor mortals," she
+says, "are groping our way through paths that are dim with shadows; and
+we are all striving, with steps more or less stumbling, to follow some
+guiding star.  As we travel on, beloved companions of our pilgrimage
+vanish from our sight, we know not whither; and our bereaved hearts utter
+cries of supplication for more light.  We know not where Hermes
+Trismegistus lived, or who he was; but his voice sounds plaintively
+human, coming up from the depths of the ages, calling out, 'Thou art God!
+and thy man crieth these things unto Thee!'  Thus closely allied in our
+sorrows and limitations, in our aspirations and hopes, surely we ought
+not to be separated in our sympathies.  However various the names by
+which we call the Heavenly Father, if they are set to music by brotherly
+love, they can all be sung together."
+
+Her interest in the welfare of the emancipated class at the South and of
+the ill-fated Indians of the West remained unabated, and she watched with
+great satisfaction the experiment of the education of both classes in
+General Armstrong's institution at Hampton, Va.  She omitted no
+opportunity of aiding the greatest social reform of the age, which aims
+to make the civil and political rights of women equal to those of men.
+Her sympathies, to the last, went out instinctively to the wronged and
+weak.  She used to excuse her vehemence in this respect by laughingly
+quoting lines from a poem entitled _The Under Dog in the Fight_:--
+
+          "I know that the world, the great big world,
+          Will never a moment stop
+          To see which dog may be in the wrong,
+          But will shout for the dog on top.
+
+          "But for me, I never shall pause to ask
+          Which dog may be in the right;
+          For my heart will beat, while it beats at all,
+          For the under dog in the fight."
+
+I am indebted to a gentleman who was at one time a resident of Wayland,
+and who enjoyed her confidence and warm friendship, for the following
+impressions of her life in that place:--
+
+"On one of the last beautiful Indian summer afternoons, closing the past
+year, I drove through Wayland, and was anew impressed with the charm of
+our friend's simple existence there.  The tender beauty of the fading
+year seemed a reflection of her own gracious spirit; the lovely autumn of
+her life, whose golden atmosphere the frosts of sorrow and advancing age
+had only clarified and brightened.
+
+"My earliest recollection of Mrs. Child in Wayland is of a gentle face
+leaning from the old stage window, smiling kindly down on the childish
+figures beneath her; and from that moment her gracious motherly presence
+has been closely associated with the charm of rural beauty in that
+village, which until very lately has been quite apart from the line of
+travel, and unspoiled by the rush and worry of our modern steam-car mode
+of living.
+
+"Mrs. Child's life in the place made, indeed, an atmosphere of its own, a
+benison of peace and good-will, which was a noticeable feature to all who
+were acquainted with the social feeling of the little community, refined,
+as it was too, by the elevating influence of its distinguished pastor,
+Dr. Sears.  Many are the acts of loving kindness and maternal care which
+could be chronicled of her residence there, were we permitted to do so;
+and numberless are the lives that have gathered their onward impulse from
+her helping hand.  But it was all a confidence which she hardly betrayed
+to her inmost self, and I will not recall instances which might be her
+grandest eulogy.  Her monument is builded in the hearts which knew her
+benefactions, and it will abide with 'the power that makes for
+righteousness.'
+
+"One of the pleasantest elements of her life in Wayland was the high
+regard she won from the people of the village, who, proud of her literary
+attainment, valued yet more the noble womanhood of the friend who dwelt
+so modestly among them.  The grandeur of her exalted personal character
+had, in part, eclipsed for them the qualities which made her fame with
+the world outside.
+
+"The little house on the quiet by-road overlooked broad green meadows.
+The pond behind it, where bloom the lilies whose spotless purity may well
+symbolize her gentle spirit, is a sacred pool to her townsfolk.  But
+perhaps the most fitting similitude of her life in Wayland was the quiet
+flow of the river, whose gentle curves make green her meadows, but whose
+powerful energy, joining the floods from distant mountains, moves, with
+resistless might, the busy shuttles of a hundred mills.  She was too
+truthful to affect to welcome unwarrantable invaders of her peace, but no
+weary traveller on life's hard ways ever applied to her in vain.  The
+little garden plot before her door was a sacred enclosure, not to be
+rudely intruded upon; but the flowers she tended with maternal care were
+no selfish possession, for her own enjoyment only, and many are the lives
+their sweetness has gladdened forever.  So she lived among a singularly
+peaceful and intelligent community as one of themselves, industrious,
+wise, and happy; with a frugality whose motive of wider benevolence was
+in itself a homily and a benediction."
+
+In my last interview with her, our conversation, as had often happened
+before, turned upon the great theme of the future life.  She spoke, as I
+remember, calmly and not uncheerfully, but with the intense earnestness
+and reverent curiosity of one who felt already the shadow of the unseen
+world resting upon her.
+
+Her death was sudden and quite unexpected.  For some months she had been
+troubled with a rheumatic affection, but it was by no means regarded as
+serious.  A friend, who visited her a few days before her departure,
+found her in a comfortable condition, apart from lameness.  She talked of
+the coming election with much interest, and of her plans for the winter.
+On the morning of her death (October 20, 1880) she spoke of feeling
+remarkably well.  Before leaving her chamber she complained of severe
+pain in the region of the heart.  Help was called by her companion, but
+only reached her to witness her quiet passing away.
+
+The funeral was, as befitted one like her, plain and simple.  Many of her
+old friends were present, and Wendell Phillips paid an affecting and
+eloquent tribute to his old friend and anti-slavery coadjutor.  He
+referred to the time when she accepted, with serene self-sacrifice, the
+obloquy which her _Appeal_ had brought upon her, and noted, as one of the
+many ways in which popular hatred was manifested, the withdrawal from her
+of the privileges of the Boston Athenaeum.  Her pallbearers were elderly,
+plain farmers in the neighborhood; and, led by the old white-haired
+undertaker, the procession wound its way to the not distant burial-
+ground, over the red and gold of fallen leaves, and tinder the half-
+clouded October sky.  A lover of all beautiful things, she was, as her
+intimate friends knew, always delighted by the sight of rainbows, and
+used to so arrange prismatic glasses as to throw the colors on the walls
+of her room.  Just after her body was consigned to the earth, a
+magnificent rainbow spanned with its are of glory the eastern sky.
+
+     The incident at her burial is alluded to in a sonnet written by
+     William P.  Andrews:--
+
+          "Freedom! she knew thy summons, and obeyed
+          That clarion voice as yet scarce heard of men;
+          Gladly she joined thy red-cross service when
+          Honor and wealth must at thy feet be laid
+          Onward with faith undaunted, undismayed
+          By threat or scorn, she toiled with hand and brain
+          To make thy cause triumphant, till the chain
+          Lay broken, and for her the freedmen prayed.
+          Nor yet she faltered; in her tender care
+          She took us all; and wheresoe'er she went,
+          Blessings, and Faith, and Beauty followed there,
+          E'en to the end, where she lay down content;
+          And with the gold light of a life more fair,
+          Twin bows of promise o'er her grave were blest."
+
+The letters in this collection constitute but a small part of her large
+correspondence.  They have been gathered up and arranged by the hands of
+dear relatives and friends as a fitting memorial of one who wrote from
+the heart as well as the head, and who held her literary reputation
+subordinate always to her philanthropic aim to lessen the sum of human
+suffering, and to make the world better for her living.  If they
+sometimes show the heat and impatience of a zealous reformer, they may
+well be pardoned in consideration of the circumstances under which they
+were written, and of the natural indignation of a generous nature in view
+of wrong and oppression.  If she touched with no very reverent hand the
+garment hem of dogmas, and held to the spirit of Scripture rather than
+its letter, it must be remembered that she lived in a time when the Bible
+was cited in defence of slavery, as it is now in Utah in support of
+polygamy; and she may well be excused for some degree of impatience with
+those who, in the tithing of mint and anise and cummin, neglected the
+weightier matters of the law of justice and mercy.
+
+Of the men and women directly associated with the beloved subject of this
+sketch, but few are now left to recall her single-hearted devotion to
+apprehended duty, her unselfish generosity, her love of all beauty and
+harmony, and her trustful reverence, free from pretence and cant.  It is
+not unlikely that the surviving sharers of her love and friendship may
+feel the inadequateness of this brief memorial, for I close it with the
+consciousness of having failed to fully delineate the picture which my
+memory holds of a wise and brave, but tender and loving woman, of whom it
+might well have been said, in the words of the old Hebrew text, "Many,
+daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all."
+
+
+
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+     On the occasion of the seventy-fifth birthday of Dr. Holmes _The
+     Critic of New York_ collected personal tributes from friends and
+     admirers of that author.  My own contribution was as follows:--
+
+Poet, essayist, novelist, humorist, scientist, ripe scholar, and wise
+philosopher, if Dr. Holmes does not, at the present time, hold in popular
+estimation the first place in American literature, his rare versatility
+is the cause.  In view of the inimitable prose writer, we forget the
+poet; in our admiration of his melodious verse, we lose sight of _Elsie
+Venner_ and _The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_.  We laugh over his wit
+and humor, until, to use his own words,
+
+     "We suspect the azure blossom that unfolds upon a shoot,
+     As if Wisdom's old potato could not flourish at its root;"
+
+and perhaps the next page melts us into tears by a pathos only equalled
+by that of Sterne's sick Lieutenant.  He is Montaigne and Bacon under one
+hat.  His varied qualities would suffice for the mental furnishing of
+half a dozen literary specialists.
+
+To those who have enjoyed the privilege of his intimate acquaintance, the
+man himself is more than the author.  His genial nature, entire freedom
+from jealousy or envy, quick tenderness, large charity, hatred of sham,
+pretence, and unreality, and his reverent sense of the eternal and
+permanent have secured for him something more and dearer than literary
+renown,--the love of all who know him.  I might say much more: I could
+not say less.  May his life be long in the land.
+
+Amesbury, Mass., 8th Month, 18, 1884.
+
+
+
+
+LONGFELLOW
+
+     Written to the chairman of the committee of arrangements for
+     unveiling the bust of Longfellow at Portland, Maine, on the poet's
+     birthday, February 27, 1885.
+
+I am sorry it is not in my power to accept the invitation of the
+committee to be present at the unveiling of the bust of Longfellow on the
+27th instant, or to write anything worthy of the occasion in metrical
+form.
+
+The gift of the Westminster Abbey committee cannot fail to add another
+strong tie of sympathy between two great English-speaking peoples.  And
+never was gift more fitly bestowed.  The city of Portland--the poet's
+birthplace, "beautiful for situation," looking from its hills on the
+scenery he loved so well, Deering's Oaks, the many-islanded bay and far
+inland mountains, delectable in sunset--needed this sculptured
+representation of her illustrious son, and may well testify her joy and
+gratitude at its reception, and repeat in so doing the words of the
+Hebrew prophet: "O man, greatly beloved!  thou shalt stand in thy place."
+
+
+
+
+OLD NEWBURY.
+
+     Letter to Samuel J. Spalding, D.  D., on the occasion of the
+     celebration of the 250th anniversary of the settlement of Newbury.
+
+MY DEAR FRIEND,--I am sorry that I cannot hope to be with you on the
+250th anniversary of the settlement of old Newbury.  Although I can
+hardly call myself a son of the ancient town, my grandmother, Sarah
+Greenleaf, of blessed memory, was its daughter, and I may therefore claim
+to be its grandson.  Its genial and learned historian, Joshua Coffin, was
+my first school-teacher, and all my life I have lived in sight of its
+green hills and in hearing of its Sabbath bells.  Its wealth of natural
+beauty has not been left unsung by its own poets, Hannah Gould, Mrs.
+Hopkins, George Lunt, and Edward A. Washburn, while Harriet Prescott
+Spofford's Plum Island Sound is as sweet and musical as Tennyson's Brook.
+Its history and legends are familiar to me.  I seem to have known all its
+old worthies, whose descendants have helped to people a continent, and
+who have carried the name and memories of their birthplace to the Mexican
+gulf and across the Rocky Mountains to the shores of the Pacific.  They
+were the best and selectest of Puritanism, brave, honest, God-fearing men
+and women; and if their creed in the lapse of time has lost something of
+its vigor, the influence of their ethical righteousness still endures.
+The prophecy of Samuel Sewall that Christians should be found in Newbury
+so long as pigeons shall roost on its oaks and Indian corn grows in
+Oldtown fields remains still true, and we trust will always remain so.
+Yet, as of old, the evil personage sometimes intrudes himself into
+company too good for him.  It was said in the witchcraft trials of 1692
+that Satan baptized his converts at Newbury Falls, the scene, probably,
+of one of Hawthorne's weird _Twice Told Tales_; and there is a tradition
+that, in the midst of a heated controversy between one of Newbury's
+painful ministers and his deacon, who (anticipating Garrison by a
+century) ventured to doubt the propriety of clerical slaveholding, the
+Adversary made his appearance in the shape of a black giant stalking
+through Byfield.  It was never, I believe, definitely settled whether he
+was drawn there by the minister's zeal in defence of slavery or the
+deacon's irreverent denial of the minister's right and duty to curse
+Canaan in the person of his negro.
+
+Old Newbury has sometimes been spoken of as ultra-conservative and
+hostile to new ideas and progress, but this is not warranted by its
+history.  More than two centuries ago, when Major Pike, just across the
+river, stood up and denounced in open town meeting the law against
+freedom of conscience and worship, and was in consequence fined and
+outlawed, some of Newbury's best citizens stood bravely by him.  The town
+took no part in the witchcraft horror, and got none of its old women and
+town charges hanged for witches, "Goody" Morse had the spirit rappings in
+her house two hundred years earlier than the Fox girls did, and somewhat
+later a Newbury minister, in wig and knee-buckles, rode, Bible in hand,
+over to Hampton to lay a ghost who had materialized himself and was
+stamping up and down stairs in his military boots.
+
+Newbury's ingenious citizen, Jacob Perkins, in drawing out diseases with
+his metallic tractors, was quite as successful as modern "faith and mind"
+doctors.  The Quakers, whipped at Hampton on one hand and at Salem on the
+other, went back and forth unmolested in Newbury, for they could make no
+impression on its iron-clad orthodoxy.  Whitefield set the example, since
+followed by the Salvation Army, of preaching in its streets, and now lies
+buried under one of its churches with almost the honors of sainthood.
+William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newbury.  The town must be regarded as
+the Alpha and Omega of anti-slavery agitation, beginning with its
+abolition deacon and ending with Garrison.  Puritanism, here as
+elsewhere, had a flavor of radicalism; it had its humorous side, and its
+ministers did not hesitate to use wit and sarcasm, like Elijah before the
+priests of Baal.  As, for instance, the wise and learned clergyman,
+Puritan of the Puritans, beloved and reverenced by all, who has just laid
+down the burden of his nearly one hundred years, startled and shamed his
+brother ministers who were zealously for the enforcement of the Fugitive
+Slave Law, by preparing for them a form of prayer for use while engaged
+in catching runaway slaves.
+
+I have, I fear, dwelt too long upon the story and tradition of the old
+town, which will doubtless be better told by the orator of the day.  The
+theme is to me full of interest.  Among the blessings which I would
+gratefully own is the fact that my lot has been cast in the beautiful
+valley of the Merrimac, within sight of Newbury steeples, Plum Island,
+and Crane Neck and Pipe Stave hills.
+
+Let me, in closing, pay something of the debt I have owed from boyhood,
+by expressing a sentiment in which I trust every son of the ancient town
+will unite: Joshua Coffin, historian of Newbury, teacher, scholar, and
+antiquarian, and one of the earliest advocates of slave emancipation. May
+his memory be kept green, to use the words of Judge Sewall, "so long as
+Plum island keeps its post and a sturgeon leaps in Merrimac River."
+
+Amesbury, 6th Month, 1885.
+
+
+
+
+SCHOOLDAY REMEMBRANCES.
+
+     To Rev. Charles Wingate, Hon. James H. Carleton, Thomas B. Garland,
+     Esq., Committee of Students of Haverhill Academy:
+
+DEAR FRIENDS,--I was most agreeably surprised last evening by receiving
+your carefully prepared and beautiful Haverhill Academy Album, containing
+the photographs of a large number of my old friends and schoolmates.  I
+know of nothing which could have given me more pleasure.  If the faces
+represented are not so unlined and ruddy as those which greeted each
+other at the old academy, on the pleasant summer mornings so long ago,
+when life was before us, with its boundless horizon of possibilities,
+yet, as I look over them, I see that, on the whole, Time has not been
+hard with us, but has touched us gently.  The hieroglyphics he has traced
+upon us may, indeed, reveal something of the cares, trials, and sorrows
+incident to humanity, but they also tell of generous endeavor, beneficent
+labor, developed character, and the slow, sure victories of patience and
+fortitude.  I turn to them with the proud satisfaction of feeling that I
+have been highly favored in my early companions, and that I have not been
+disappointed in my school friendships.  The two years spent at the
+academy I have always reckoned among the happiest of my life, though I
+have abundant reason for gratitude that, in the long, intervening years,
+I have been blessed beyond my deserving.
+
+It has been our privilege to live in an eventful period, and to witness
+wonderful changes since we conned our lessons together.  How little we
+then dreamed of the steam car, electric telegraph, and telephone!  We
+studied the history and geography of a world only half explored.  Our
+country was an unsolved mystery.  "The Great American Desert" was an
+awful blank on our school maps.  We have since passed through the
+terrible ordeal of civil war, which has liberated enslaved millions, and
+made the union of the States an established fact, and no longer a
+doubtful theory.  If life is to be measured not so much by years as by
+thoughts, emotion, knowledge, action, and its opportunity of a free
+exercise of all our powers and faculties, we may congratulate ourselves
+upon really outliving the venerable patriarchs.  For myself, I would not
+exchange a decade of my own life for a century of the Middle Ages, or a
+"cycle of Cathay."
+
+Let me, gentlemen, return my heartiest thanks to you, and to all who have
+interested themselves in the preparation of the Academy Album, and assure
+you of my sincere wishes for your health and happiness.
+
+OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, 12th Month, 25, 1885.
+
+
+
+
+EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE.
+
+I have been pained to learn of the decease of nay friend of many years,
+Edwin P. Whipple.  Death, however expected, is always something of a
+surprise, and in his case I was not prepared for it by knowing of any
+serious failure of his health.  With the possible exception of Lowell and
+Matthew Arnold, he was the ablest critical essayist of his time, and the
+place he has left will not be readily filled.
+
+Scarcely inferior to Macaulay in brilliance of diction and graphic
+portraiture, he was freer from prejudice and passion, and more loyal to
+the truth of fact and history.  He was a thoroughly honest man.  He wrote
+with conscience always at his elbow, and never sacrificed his real
+convictions for the sake of epigram and antithesis.  He instinctively
+took the right side of the questions that came before him for decision,
+even when by so doing he ranked himself with the unpopular minority.  He
+had the manliest hatred of hypocrisy and meanness; but if his language
+had at times the severity of justice, it was never merciless.  He "set
+down naught in malice."
+
+Never blind to faults, he had a quick and sympathetic eye for any real
+excellence or evidence of reserved strength in the author under
+discussion.
+
+He was a modest man, sinking his own personality out of sight, and he
+always seemed to me more interested in the success of others than in his
+own.  Many of his literary contemporaries have had reason to thank him
+not only for his cordial recognition and generous praise, but for the
+firm and yet kindly hand which pointed out deficiencies and errors of
+taste and judgment.  As one of those who have found pleasure and profit
+in his writings in the past, I would gratefully commend them to the
+generation which survives him.  His _Literature of the Age of Elizabeth_
+is deservedly popular, but there are none of his Essays which will not
+repay a careful study.  "What works of Mr. Baxter shall I read?" asked
+Boswell of Dr. Johnson.  "Read any of them," was the answer, "for they
+are all good."
+
+He will have an honored place in the history of American literature.  But
+I cannot now dwell upon his authorship while thinking of him as the
+beloved member of a literary circle now, alas sadly broken.  I recall the
+wise, genial companion and faithful friend of nearly half a century, the
+memory of whose words and acts of kindness moistens my eyes as I write.
+
+It is the inevitable sorrow of age that one's companions must drop away
+on the right hand and the left with increasing frequency, until we are
+compelled to ask with Wordsworth,--
+
+               "Who next shall fall and disappear?"
+
+But in the case of him who has just passed from us, we have the
+satisfaction of knowing that his life-work has been well and faithfully
+done, and that he leaves behind him only friends.
+
+DANVERS, 6th Month, 18, 1886.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          HISTORICAL PAPERS
+
+
+DANIEL O'CONNELL.
+
+     In February, 1839, Henry Clay delivered a speech in the United
+     States Senate, which was intended to smooth away the difficulties
+     which his moderate opposition to the encroachments of slavery had
+     erected in his path to the presidency.  His calumniation of
+     O'Connell called out the following summary of the career of the
+     great Irish patriot.  It was published originally in the
+     Pennsylvania Freeman of Philadelphia, April 25, 1839.
+
+Perhaps the most unlucky portion of the unlucky speech of Henry Clay on
+the slavery question is that in which an attempt is made to hold up to
+scorn and contempt the great Liberator of Ireland.  We say an attempt,
+for who will say it has succeeded?  Who feels contempt for O'Connell?
+Surely not the slaveholder?  From Henry Clay, surrounded by his slave-
+gang at Ashland, to the most miserable and squalid slave-driver and small
+breeder of human cattle in Virginia and Maryland who can spell the name
+of O'Connell in his newspaper, these republican brokers in blood fear and
+hate the eloquent Irishman.  But their contempt, forsooth!  Talk of the
+sheep-stealer's contempt for the officer of justice who nails his ears to
+the pillory, or sets the branding iron on his forehead!
+
+After denouncing the abolitionists for gratuitously republishing the
+advertisements for runaway slaves, the Kentucky orator says:--
+
+"And like a notorious agitator upon another theatre, they would hunt down
+and proscribe from the pale of civilized society the inhabitants of that
+entire section.  Allow me, Mr. President, to say that whilst I recognize
+in the justly wounded feelings of the Minister of the United States at
+the Court of St. James much to excuse the notice which he was provoked to
+take of that agitator, in my humble opinion he would better have
+consulted the dignity of his station and of his country in treating him
+with contemptuous silence.  He would exclude us from European society, he
+who himself, can only obtain a contraband admission, and is received with
+scornful repugnance into it!  If he be no more desirous of our society
+than we are of his, he may rest assured that a state of perpetual non-
+intercourse will exist between us.  Yes, sir, I think the American
+Minister would best have pursued the dictates of true dignity by
+regarding the language of the member of the British House of Commons as
+the malignant ravings of the plunderer of his own country, and the
+libeller of a foreign and kindred people."
+
+The recoil of this attack "followed hard upon" the tones of
+congratulation and triumph of partisan editors at the consummate skill
+and dexterity with which their candidate for the presidency had absolved
+himself from the suspicion of abolitionism, and by a master-stroke of
+policy secured the confidence of the slaveholding section of the
+Union.  But the late Whig defeat in New York has put an end to these
+premature rejoicings.  "The speech of Mr. Clay in reference to the Irish
+agitator has been made use of against us with no small success," say the
+New York papers.  "They failed," says the Daily Evening Star, "to
+convince the Irish voters that Daniel O'Connell was the 'plunderer of his
+country,' or that there was an excuse for thus denouncing him."
+
+The defeat of the Whigs of New York and the cause of it have excited no
+small degree of alarm among the adherents of the Kentucky orator.  In
+this city, the delicate _Philadelphia Gazette_ comes magnanimously to the
+aid of Henry Clay,--
+
+               "A tom-tit twittering on an eagle's back."
+
+The learned editor gives it as his opinion that Daniel O'Connell is a
+"political beggar," a "disorganizing apostate;" talks in its pretty way
+of the man's "impudence" and "falsehoods" and "cowardice," etc.; and
+finally, with a modesty and gravity which we cannot but admire, assures
+us that "his weakness of mind is almost beyond calculation!"
+
+We have heard it rumored during the past week, among some of the self-
+constituted organs of the Clay party in this city, that at a late meeting
+in Chestnut Street a committee was appointed to collect, collate, and
+publish the correspondence between Andrew Stevenson and O'Connell, and so
+much of the latter's speeches and writings as relate to American slavery,
+for the purpose of convincing the countrymen of O'Connell of the justice,
+propriety, and, in view of the aggravated circumstances of the case,
+moderation and forbearance of Henry Clay when speaking of a man who has
+had the impudence to intermeddle with the "patriarchal institutions" of
+our country, and with the "domestic relations" of Kentucky and Virginia
+slave-traders.
+
+We wait impatiently for the fruits of the labors of this sagacious
+committee.  We should like to see those eloquent and thrilling appeals to
+the sense of shame and justice and honor of America republished.  We
+should like to see if any Irishman, not wholly recreant to the interests
+and welfare of the Green Island of his birth, will in consequence of this
+publication give his vote to the slanderer of Ireland's best and noblest
+champion.
+
+But who is Daniel O'Connell?  "A demagogue--a ruffian agitator!"  say the
+Tory journals of Great Britain, quaking meantime with awe and
+apprehension before the tremendous moral and political power which he is
+wielding,--a power at this instant mightier than that of any potentate of
+Europe.  "A blackguard"--a fellow who "obtains contraband admission into
+European society"--a "malignant libeller"--a "plunderer of his country"--
+a man whose "wind should be stopped," say the American slaveholders, and
+their apologists, Clay, Stevenson, Hamilton, and the Philadelphia
+Gazette, and the Democratic Whig Association.
+
+But who is Daniel O'Connell?  Ireland now does justice to him, the world
+will do so hereafter.  No individual of the present age has done more for
+human liberty.  His labors to effect the peaceable deliverance of his own
+oppressed countrymen, and to open to the nations of Europe a new and
+purer and holier pathway to freedom unstained with blood and unmoistened
+by tears, and his mighty instrumentality in the abolition of British
+colonial slavery, have left their impress upon the age.  They will be
+remembered and felt beneficially long after the miserable slanders of
+Tory envy and malignity at home, and the clamors of slaveholders abroad,
+detected in their guilt, and writhing in the gaze of Christendom, shall
+have perished forever,--when the Clays and Calhouns, the Peels and
+Wellingtons, the opponents of reform in Great Britain and the enemies of
+slave emancipation in the United States, shall be numbered with those who
+in all ages, to use the words of the eloquent Lamartine, have "sinned
+against the Holy Ghost in opposing the improvement of things,--in an
+egotistical and stupid attempt to draw back the moral and social world
+which God and nature are urging forward."
+
+The character and services of O'Connell have never been fully appreciated
+in this country.  Engrossed in our own peculiar interests, and in the
+plenitude of our self-esteem; believing that "we are the people, and that
+wisdom will perish with us," that all patriotism and liberality of
+feeling are confined to our own territory, we have not followed the
+untitled Barrister of Derrynane Abbey, step by step, through the
+development of one of the noblest experiments ever made for the cause
+of liberty and the welfare of man.
+
+The revolution which O'Connell has already partially effected in his
+native land, and which, from the evident signs of cooperation in England
+and Scotland, seems not far from its entire accomplishment, will form a
+new era in the history of the civilized world.  Heretofore the patriot
+has relied more upon physical than moral means for the regeneration of
+his country and its redemption from oppression.  His revolutions, however
+pure in principle, have ended in practical crime.  The great truth was
+yet to be learned that brute force is incompatible with a pure love of
+freedom, inasmuch as it is in itself an odious species of tyranny--the
+relic of an age of slavery and barbarism--the common argument of
+despotism--a game
+
+              "which, were their subjects wise,
+               Kings would not play at."
+
+But the revolution in which O'Connell is engaged, although directed
+against the oppression of centuries, relies with just confidence upon the
+united moral energies of the people: a moral victory of reason over
+prejudice, of justice over oppression; the triumph of intellectual energy
+where the brute appeal to arms had miserably failed; the vindication of
+man's eternal rights, not by the sword fleshed in human hearts, but by
+weapons tempered in the armory of Heaven with truth and mercy and love.
+
+Nor is it a visionary idea, or the untried theory of an enthusiast, this
+triumphant reliance upon moral and intellectual power for the reform of
+political abuses, for the overthrowing of tyranny and the pulling down of
+the strongholds of arbitrary power.  The emancipation of the Catholic of
+Great Britain from the thrall of a century, in 1829, prepared the way for
+the bloodless triumph of English reform in 1832.  The Catholic
+Association was the germ of those political unions which compelled, by
+their mighty yet peaceful influence, the King of England to yield
+submissively to the supremacy of the people.
+
+     [The celebrated Mr. Attwood has been called the "father of political
+     unions."  In a speech delivered by his brother, C. Attwood, Esq., at
+     the Sunderland Reform Meeting, September 10, 1832, I find the
+     following admission: "Gentlemen, the first political union was the
+     Roman Catholic Association of Ireland, and the true founder and
+     father of political unions is Daniel O'Connell."]
+
+Both of these remarkable events, these revolutions shaking nations to
+their centre, yet polluted with no blood and sullied by no crime, were
+effected by the salutary agitations of the public mind, first set in
+motion by the masterspirit of O'Connell, and spreading from around him to
+every portion of the British empire like the undulations from the
+disturbed centre of a lake.
+
+The Catholic question has been but imperfectly understood in this
+country.  Many have allowed their just disapprobation of the Catholic
+religion to degenerate into a most unwarrantable prejudice against its
+conscientious followers.  The cruel persecutions of the dissenters from
+the Romish Church, the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day, the horrors of
+the Inquisition, the crusades against the Albigenses and the simple
+dwellers of the Vaudois valleys, have been regarded as atrocities
+peculiar to the believers in papal infallibility, and the necessary
+consequences of their doctrines; and hence they have looked upon the
+constitutional agitation of the Irish Catholics for relief from grieveous
+disabilities and unjust distinctions as a struggle merely for supremacy
+or power.
+
+Strange, that the truth to which all history so strongly testifies should
+thus be overlooked,--the undeniable truth that religious bigotry and
+intolerance have been confined to no single sect; that the persecuted of
+one century have been the persecutors of another.  In our own country,
+it would be well for us to remember that at the very time when in New
+England the Catholic, the Quaker, and the Baptist were banished on pain
+of death, and where some even suffered that dreadful penalty, in Catholic
+Maryland, under the Catholic Lord Baltimore, perfect liberty of
+conscience was established, and Papist and Protestant went quietly
+through the same streets to their respective altars.
+
+At the commencement of O'Connell's labors for emancipation he found the
+people of Ireland divided into three great classes,--the Protestant or
+Church party, the Dissenters, and the Catholics: the Church party
+constituting about one tenth of the population, yet holding in possession
+the government and a great proportion of the landed property of Ireland,
+controlling church and state and law and revenue, the army, navy,
+magistracy, and corporations, the entire patronage of the country,
+holding their property and power by the favor of England, and
+consequently wholly devoted to her interest; the Dissenters, probably
+twice as numerous as the Church party, mostly engaged in trade and
+manufactures,--sustained by their own talents and industry, Irish in
+feeling, partaking in no small degree of the oppression of their Catholic
+brethren, and among the first to resist that oppression in 1782; the
+Catholics constituting at least two thirds of the whole population, and
+almost the entire peasantry of the country, forming a large proportion
+of the mercantile interest, yet nearly excluded from the possession of
+landed property by the tyrannous operation of the penal laws.  Justly has
+a celebrated Irish patriot (Theobald Wolfe Tone) spoken of these laws as
+"an execrable and infamous code, framed with the art and malice of demons
+to plunder and degrade and brutalize the Catholics of Ireland.  There was
+no disgrace, no injustice, no disqualification, moral, political, or
+religious, civil or military, which it has not heaped upon them."
+
+The following facts relative to the disabilities under which the
+Catholics of the United Kingdom labored previous to the emancipation of
+1829 will serve to show in some measure the oppressive operation of those
+laws which placed the foot of one tenth of the population of Ireland upon
+the necks of the remainder.
+
+A Catholic peer could not sit in the House of Peers, nor a Catholic
+commoner in the House of Commons.  A Catholic could not be Lord
+Chancellor, or Keeper, or Commissioner of the Great Seal; Master or
+Keeper of the Rolls; Justice of the King's Bench or of the Common Pleas;
+Baron of the Exchequer; Attorney or Solicitor General; King's Sergeant at
+Law; Member of the King's Council; Master in Chancery, nor Chairman of
+Sessions for the County of Dublin.  He could not be the Recorder of a
+city or town; an advocate in the spiritual courts; Sheriff of a county,
+city, or town; Sub-Sheriff; Lord Lieutenant, Lord Deputy, or other
+governor of Ireland; Lord High Treasurer; Governor of a county; Privy
+Councillor; Postmaster General; Chancellor of the Exchequer or Secretary
+of State; Vice Treasurer, Cashier of the Exchequer; Keeper of the Privy
+Seal or Auditor General; Provost or Fellow of Dublin University; nor Lord
+Mayor or Alderman of a corporate city or town. He could not be a member
+of a parish vestry, nor bequeath any sum of money or any lands for the
+maintenance of a clergyman, or for the support of a chapel or a school;
+and in corporate towns he was excluded from the grand juries.
+
+O'Connell commenced his labors for emancipation with the strong
+conviction that nothing short of the united exertions of the Irish people
+could overthrow the power of the existing government, and that a union of
+action could only be obtained by the establishment of something like
+equality between the different religious parties. Discarding all other
+than peaceful means for the accomplishment of his purpose, he placed
+himself and his followers beyond the cognizance of unjust and oppressive
+laws.  Wherever he poured the oil of his eloquence upon the maddened
+spirits of his wronged and insulted countrymen, the mercenary soldiery
+found no longer an excuse for violence; and calm, firm, and united, the
+Catholic Association remained secure in the moral strength of its pure
+and peaceful purpose, amid the bayonets of a Tory administration.  His
+influence was felt in all parts of the island.  Wherever an unlawful
+association existed, his great legal knowledge enabled him at once to
+detect its character, and, by urging its dissolution, to snatch its
+deluded members from the ready fangs of their enemies.  In his presence
+the Catholic and the Protestant shook hands together, and the wild Irish
+clansman forgot his feuds.  He taught the party in power, and who
+trembled at the dangers around them, that security and peace could only
+be obtained by justice and kindness.  He entreated his oppressed Catholic
+brethren to lay aside their weapons, and with pure hearts and naked hands
+to stand firmly together in the calm but determined energy of men, too
+humane for deeds of violence, yet too mighty for the patient endurance of
+wrong.
+
+The spirit of the olden time was awakened, of the day when Flood
+thundered and Curran lightened; the light which shone for a moment in the
+darkness of Ireland's century of wrong burned upwards clearly and
+steadily from all its ancient altars.  Shoulder to shoulder gathered
+around him the patriot spirits of his nation,--men unbribed by the golden
+spoils of governmental patronage Shiel with his ardent eloquence, O'Dwyer
+and Walsh, and Grattan and O'Connor, and Steel, the Protestant agitator,
+wearing around him the emblem of national reconciliation, of the reunion
+of Catholic and Protestant,--the sash of blended orange and green, soiled
+and defaced by his patriotic errands, stained with the smoke of cabins,
+and the night rains and rust of weapons, and the mountain mist, and the
+droppings of the wild woods of Clare.  He united in one mighty and
+resistless mass the broken and discordant factions, whose desultory
+struggles against tyranny had hitherto only added strength to its
+fetters, and infused into that mass his own lofty principles of action,
+until the solemn tones of expostulation and entreaty, bursting at once
+from the full heart of Ireland, were caught up by England and echoed back
+from Scotland, and the language of justice and humanity was wrung from
+the reluctant lips of the cold and remorseless oppressor of his native
+land, at once its disgrace and glory,--the conqueror of Napoleon; and, in
+the words of his own Curran, the chains of the Catholic fell from around
+him, and he stood forth redeemed and disenthralled by the irresistible
+genius of Universal Emancipation.
+
+On the passage of the bill for Catholic emancipation, O'Connell took his
+seat in the British Parliament.  The eyes of millions were upon him.
+Ireland--betrayed so often by those in whom she had placed her
+confidence; brooding in sorrowful remembrance over the noble names and
+brilliant reputations sullied by treachery and corruption, the long and
+dark catalogue of her recreant sons, who, allured by British gold and
+British patronage, had sacrificed on the altar of their ambition Irish
+pride and Irish independence, and lifted their parricidal arms against
+their sorrowing mother, "crownless and voiceless in her woe"--now hung
+with breathless eagerness over the ordeal to which her last great
+champion was subjected.
+
+The crisis in O'Connell's destiny had come.
+
+The glitter of the golden bribe was in his eye; the sound of titled
+magnificence was in his ear; the choice was before him to sit high among
+the honorable, the titled, and the powerful, or to take his humble seat
+in the hall of St. Stephen's as the Irish demagogue, the agitator, the
+Kerry representative.  He did not hesitate in his choice.  On the first
+occasion that offered he told the story of Ireland's wrongs, and demanded
+justice in the name of his suffering constituents.  He had put his hand
+to the plough of reform, and he could not relinquish his hold, for his
+heart was with it.
+
+Determined to give the Whig administration no excuse for neglecting the
+redress of Irish grievances, he entered heart and soul into the great
+measure of English reform, and his zeal, tact, and eloquence contributed
+not a little to its success.  Yet even his friends speak of his first
+efforts in the House of Commons as failures.  The Irish accent; the harsh
+avowal of purposes smacking of rebellion; the eccentricities and flowery
+luxuriance of an eloquence nursed in the fervid atmosphere of Ireland
+suddenly transplanted to the cold and commonplace one of St. Stephen's;
+the great and illiberal prejudices against him scarcely abated from what
+they were when, as the member from Clare, he was mobbed on his way to
+London, for a time opposed a barrier to the influence of his talents and
+patriotism.  But he triumphed at last: the mob-orator of Clare and Kerry,
+the declaimer in the Dublin Rooms of the Political and Trades' Union,
+became one of the most attractive and popular speakers of the British
+Parliament; one whose aid has been courted and whose rebuke has been
+feared by the ablest of England's representatives.  Amid the sneers of
+derision and the clamor of hate and prejudice he has triumphed,--on that
+very arena so fatal to Irish eloquence and Irish fame, where even Grattan
+failed to sustain himself, and the impetuous spirit of Flood was stricken
+down.
+
+No subject in which Ireland was not directly interested has received a
+greater share of O'Connell's attention than that of the abolition of
+colonial slavery.  Utterly detesting tyranny of all kinds, he poured
+forth his eloquent soul in stern reprobation of a system full at once of
+pride and misery and oppression, and darkened with blood.  His speech on
+the motion of Thomas Fowell Buxton for the immediate emancipation of the
+slaves gave a new tone to the discussion of the question.  He entered
+into no petty pecuniary details; no miserable computation of the
+shillings and pence vested in beings fashioned in the image of God.  He
+did not talk of the expediency of continuing the evil because it had
+grown monstrous.  To use his own words, he considered "slavery a crime to
+be abolished; not merely an evil to be palliated."  He left Sir Robert
+Peel and the Tories to eulogize the characters and defend the interests
+of the planters, in common with those of a tithe-reaping priesthood,
+building their houses by oppression and their chambers by wrong, and
+spoke of the negro's interest, the negro's claim to justice; demanding
+sympathy for the plundered as well as the plunderers, for the slave as
+well as his master.  He trampled as dust under his feet the blasphemy
+that obedience to the law of eternal justice is a principle to be
+acknowledged in theory only, because unsafe in practice.  He would,
+he said, enter into no compromise with slavery.  He cared not what cast
+or creed or color it might assume, whether personal or political,
+intellectual or spiritual; he was for its total, immediate abolition.  He
+was for justice,--justice in the name of humanity and according to the
+righteous law of the living God.
+
+Ardently admiring our free institutions, and constantly pointing to our
+glorious political exaltation as an incentive to the perseverance of his
+own countrymen in their struggle against oppression, he has yet omitted
+no opportunity of rebuking our inexcusable slave system.  An enthusiastic
+admirer of Jefferson, he has often regretted that his practice should
+have so illy accorded with his noble sentiments on the subject of
+slavery, which so fully coincided with his own.  In truth, wherever man
+has been oppressed by his fellow-man, O'Connell's sympathy has been
+directed: to Italy, chained above the very grave of her ancient
+liberties; to the republics of Southern America; to Greece, dashing the
+foot of the indolent Ottoman from her neck; to France and Belgium; and
+last, not least, to Poland, driven from her cherished nationality, and
+dragged, like his own Ireland, bleeding and violated, to the deadly
+embrace of her oppressor.  American slavery but shares in his common
+denunciation of all tyranny; its victims but partake of his common pity
+for the oppressed and persecuted and the trodden down.
+
+In this hasty and imperfect sketch we cannot enter into the details of
+that cruel disregard of Irish rights which was manifested by a Reformed
+Parliament, convoked, to use the language of William IV., "to ascertain
+the sense of the people."  It is perhaps enough to say that O'Connell's
+indignant refusal to receive as full justice the measure of reform meted
+out to Ireland was fully justified by the facts of the case.  The Irish
+Reform Bill gave Ireland, with one third of the entire population of the
+United Kingdoms, only one sixth of the Parliamentary delegation.  It
+diminished instead of increasing the number of voters; in the towns and
+cities it created a high and aristocratic franchise; in many boroughs it
+established so narrow a basis of franchise as to render them liable to
+corruption and abuse as the rotten boroughs of the old system.  It threw
+no new power into the hands of the people; and with no little justice has
+O'Connell himself termed it an act to restore to power the Orange
+ascendancy in Ireland, and to enable a faction to trample with impunity
+on the friends of reform and constitutional freedom. [Letters to the
+Reformers of Great Britain, No. 1.]
+
+In May, 1832, O'Connell commenced the publication of his celebrated
+_Letters to the Reformers of Great Britain_.  Like Tallien, before the
+French convention, he "rent away the veil" which Hume and Atwood had only
+partially lifted.  He held up before the people of Great Britain the new
+indignities which had been added to the long catalogue of Ireland's
+wrongs; he appealed to their justice, their honor, their duty, for
+redress, and cast down before the Whig administration the gauntlet of his
+country's defiance and scorn.  There is a fine burst of indignant Irish
+feeling in the concluding paragraphs of his fourth letter:--
+
+"I have demonstrated the contumelious injuries inflicted upon us by this
+Reform Bill.  My letters are long before the public.  They have been
+unrefuted, uncontradicted in any of their details.  And with this case of
+atrocious injustice to Ireland placed before the reformers of Great
+Britain, what assistance, what sympathy, do we receive?  Why, I have got
+some half dozen drivelling letters from political unions and political
+characters, asking me whether I advise them to petition or bestir
+themselves in our behalf!
+
+"Reformers of Great Britain! I do not ask you either to petition or be
+silent.  I do not ask you to petition or to do any other act in favor of
+the Irish.  You will consult your own feelings of justice and generosity,
+unprovoked by any advice or entreaty of mine.
+
+"For my own part, I never despaired of Ireland; I do not, I will not,
+I cannot, despair of my beloved country.  She has, in my view, obtained
+freedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself.  She has shaken
+off the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out its
+folly and its falsehoods.  She can, and she will, obtain for herself
+justice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at British
+neglect and ingratitude, there is no sound of despair in that sigh, nor
+any want of moral energy on her part to attain her own rights by
+peaceable and legal means."
+
+The tithe system, unutterably odious and full of all injustice, had
+prepared the way for this expression of feeling on the part of the
+people.  Ireland had never, in any period of her history, bowed her neck
+peaceably to the ecclesiastical yoke.  From the Canon of Cashel, prepared
+by English deputies in the twelfth century, decreeing for the first time
+that tithes should be paid in Ireland, down to the present moment, the
+Church in her borders has relied solely upon the strong arm of the law,
+and literally reaped its tithes with the sword.  The decree of the Dublin
+Synod, under Archbishop Comyn, in 1185, could only be enforced within the
+pale of the English settlement.  The attempts of Henry VIII. also failed.
+Without the pale all endeavors to collect tithes were met by stern
+opposition.  And although from the time of William III. the tithe system
+has been established in Ireland, yet at no period has it been regarded
+otherwise than as a system of legalized robbery by seven eighths of the
+people.  An examination of this system cannot fail to excite our wonder,
+not that it has been thus regarded, but that it has been so long endured
+by any people on the face of the earth, least of all by Irishmen.  Tithes
+to the amount of L1,000,000 are annually wrung from impoverished Ireland,
+in support of a clergy who can only number about one sixteenth of her
+population as their hearers; and wrung, too, in an undue proportion, from
+the Catholic counties. [See Dr. Doyle's Evidence before Hon. E. G.
+Stanley.]  In the southern and middle counties, almost entirely inhabited
+by the Catholic peasantry, every thing they possess is subject to the
+tithe: the cow is seized in the hovel, the potato in the barrel, the coat
+even on the poor man's back. [Speech of T. Reynolds, Esq., at an anti-
+tithe meeting.]  The revenues of five of the dignitaries of the Irish
+Church Establishment are as follows: the Primacy L140,000; Derry
+L120,000; Kilmore L100,000; Clogher L100,000; Waterford L70,000.  Compare
+these enormous sums with that paid by Scotland for the maintenance of the
+Church, namely L270,000.  Yet that Church has 2,000,000 souls under its
+care, while that of Ireland has not above 500,000.  Nor are these
+princely livings expended in Ireland by their possessors.  The bishoprics
+of Cloyne and Meath have been long held by absentees,--by men who know no
+more of their flocks than the non-resident owner of a West India
+plantation did of the miserable negroes, the fruits of whose thankless
+labor were annually transmitted to him.  Out of 1289 benefited clergymen
+in Ireland, between five and six hundred are non-residents, spending in
+Bath and London, or in making the fashionable tour of the Continent, the
+wealth forced from the Catholic peasant and the Protestant dissenter by
+the bayonets of the military.  Scorching and terrible was the sarcasm of
+Grattan applied to these locusts of the Church: "A beastly and pompous
+priesthood, political potentates and Christian pastors, full of false
+zeal, full of worldly pride, and full of gluttony, empty of the true
+religion, to their flocks oppressive, to their inferior clergy brutal, to
+their king abject, and to their God impudent and familiar,--they stand on
+the altar as a stepping-stone to the throne, glorying in the ear of
+princes, whom they poison with crooked principles and heated advice; a
+faction against their king when they are not his slaves,--ever the dirt
+under his feet or a poniard to his heart."
+
+For the evils of absenteeism, the non-residence of the wealthy
+landholders, draining from a starving country the very necessaries of
+life, a remedy is sought in a repeal of the union, and the provisions of
+a domestic parliament.  In O'Connell's view, a restoration of such a
+parliament can alone afford that adequate protection to the national
+industry so loudly demanded by thousands of unemployed laborers, starving
+amid the ruins of deserted manufactories.  During the brief period of
+partial Irish liberty which followed the pacific revolution of '82, the
+manufactures of the country revived and flourished; and the smile of
+contented industry was visible all over the land.  In 1797 there were
+15,000 silk-weavers in the city of Dublin alone.  There are now but 400.
+Such is the practical effect of the Union, of that suicidal act of the
+Irish Parliament which yielded up in a moment of treachery and terror the
+dearest interests of the country to the legislation of an English
+Parliament and the tender mercies of Castlereagh,--of that Castlereagh
+who, when accused by Grattan of spending L15,000 in purchasing votes for
+the Union, replied with the rare audacity of high-handed iniquity, "We
+did spend L15,000, and we would have spent L15,000,000 if necessary to
+carry the Union; "that Castlereagh who, when 707,000 Irishmen petitioned
+against the Union and 300,000 for it, maintained that the latter
+constituted the majority!  Well has it been said that the deep vengeance
+which Ireland owed him was inflicted by the great criminal upon himself.
+The nation which he sold and plundered saw him make with his own hand the
+fearful retribution.  The great body of the Irish people never assented
+to the Union.  The following extract from a speech of Earl (then Mr.)
+Grey, in 1800, upon the Union question, will show what means were made
+use of to drag Ireland, while yet mourning over her slaughtered children,
+to the marriage altar with England: "If the Parliament of Ireland had
+been left to itself, untempted and unawed, it would without hesitation
+have rejected the resolutions.  Out of the 300 members, 120 strenuously
+opposed the measure, 162 voted for it: of these, 116 were placemen; some
+of them were English generals on the staff, without a foot of ground in
+Ireland, and completely dependent on government."  "Let us reflect upon
+the arts made use of since the last session of the Irish Parliament to
+pack a majority, for Union, in the House of Commons.  All persons holding
+offices under government, if they hesitated to vote as directed, were
+stripped of all their employments.  A bill framed for preserving the
+purity of Parliament was likewise abused, and no less than 63 seats were
+vacated by their holders having received nominal offices."
+
+The signs of the times are most favorable to the success of the Irish
+Liberator.  The tremendous power of the English political unions is
+beginning to develop itself in favor of Ireland.  A deep sympathy is
+evinced for her sufferings, and a general determination to espouse her
+cause.  Brute force cannot put down the peaceable and legal agitation of
+the question of her rights and interests.  The spirit of the age forbids
+it.  The agitation will go on, for it is spreading among men who, to use
+the words of the eloquent Shiel, while looking out upon the ocean, and
+gazing upon the shore, which Nature has guarded with so many of her
+bulwarks, can hear the language of Repeal muttered in the dashing of the
+very waves which separate them from Great Britain by a barrier of God's
+own creation.  Another bloodless victory, we trust, awaits O'Connell,--a
+victory worthy of his heart and intellect, unstained by one drop of human
+blood, unmoistened by a solitary tear.
+
+Ireland will be redeemed and disenthralled, not perhaps by a repeal of
+the Union, but by the accomplishment of such a thorough reform in the
+government and policy of Great Britain as shall render a repeal
+unnecessary and impolitic.
+
+The sentiments of O'Connell in regard to the means of effecting his
+object of political reform are distinctly impressed upon all his appeals
+to the people.  In his letter of December, 1832, to the Dublin Trades
+Union, he says: "The Repealers must not have our cause stained with
+blood.  Far indeed from it.  We can, and ought to, carry the repeal only
+in the total absence of offence against the laws of man or crime in the
+sight of God.  The best revolution which was ever effected could not be
+worth one drop of human blood."  In his speech at the public dinner given
+him by--the citizens of Cork, we find a yet more earnest avowal of
+pacific principles.  "It may be stated," said he, "to countervail our
+efforts, that this struggle will involve the destruction of life and
+property; that it will overturn the framework of civil society, and give
+an undue and fearful influence to one rank to the ruin of all others.
+These are awful considerations, truly, if risked.  I am one of those who
+have always believed that any political change is too dearly purchased by
+a single drop of blood, and who think that any political superstructure
+based upon other opinion is like the sand-supported fabric,--beautiful in
+the brief hour of sunshine, but the moment one drop of rain touches the
+arid basis melting away in wreck and ruin!  I am an accountable being; I
+have a soul and a God to answer to, in another and better world, for my
+thoughts and actions in this.  I disclaim here any act of mine which
+would sport with the lives of my fellow-creatures, any amelioration of
+our social condition which must be purchased by their blood.  And here,
+in the face of God and of our common country, I protest that if I did not
+sincerely and firmly believe that the amelioration I desire could be
+effected without violence, without any change in the relative scale of
+ranks in the present social condition of Ireland, except that change
+which all must desire, making each better than it was before, and
+cementing all in one solid irresistible mass, I would at once give up the
+struggle which I have always kept with tyranny.  I would withdraw from
+the contest which I have hitherto waged with those who would perpetuate
+our thraldom.  I would not for one moment dare to venture for that which
+in costing one human life would cost infinitely too dear.  But it will
+cost no such price.  Have we not had within my memory two great political
+revolutions?  And had we them not without bloodshed or violence to the
+social compact?  Have we not arrived at a period when physical force and
+military power yield to moral and intellectual energy.  Has not the time
+of 'Cedant arma togae' come for us and the other nations of the earth?"
+
+Let us trust that the prediction of O'Connell will be verified; that
+reason and intellect are destined, under God, to do that for the nations
+of the earth which the physical force of centuries and the red sacrifice
+of a thousand battle-fields have failed to accomplish.  Glorious beyond
+all others will be the day when "nation shall no more rise up against
+nation;" when, as a necessary consequence of the universal acknowledgment
+of the rights of man, it shall no longer be in the power of an individual
+to drag millions into strife, for the unholy gratification of personal
+prejudice and passion.  The reformed governments of Great Britain and
+France, resting, as they do, upon a popular basis, are already tending to
+this consummation, for the people have suffered too much from the warlike
+ambition of their former masters not to have learned that the gains of
+peaceful industry are better than the wages of human butchery.
+
+Among the great names of Ireland--alike conspicuous, yet widely
+dissimilar--stand Wellington and O'Connell.  The one smote down the
+modern Alexander upon Waterloo's field of death, but the page of his
+reputation is dim with the tears of the widow and the orphan, and dark
+with the stain of blood.  The other, armed only with the weapons of truth
+and reason, has triumphed over the oppression of centuries, and opened a
+peaceful pathway to the Temple of Freedom, through which its Goddess may
+be seen, no longer propitiated with human sacrifices, like some foul idol
+of the East, but clothed in Christian attributes, and smiling in the
+beauty of holiness upon the pure hearts and peaceful hands of its
+votaries.  The bloodless victories of the latter have all the sublimity
+with none of the criminality which attaches itself to the triumphs of the
+former.  To thunder high truths in the deafened ear of nations, to rouse
+the better spirit of the age, to soothe the malignant passions of.
+assembled and maddened men, to throw open the temple doors of justice to
+the abused, enslaved, and persecuted, to unravel the mysteries of guilt,
+and hold up the workers of iniquity in the severe light of truth stripped
+of their disguise and covered with the confusion of their own vileness,--
+these are victories more glorious than any which have ever reddened the
+earth with carnage:--
+
+         "They ask a spirit of more exalted pitch,
+          And courage tempered with a holier fire."
+
+Of the more recent efforts of O'Connell we need not speak, for no one can
+read the English periodicals and papers without perceiving that O'Connell
+is, at this moment, the leading politician, the master mind of the
+British empire.  Attempts have been made to prejudice the American mind
+against him by a republication on this side of the water of the false and
+foul slanders of his Tory enemies, in reference to what is called the
+"O'Connell rent," a sum placed annually in his hands by a grateful
+people, and which he has devoted scrupulously to the great object of
+Ireland's political redemption.  He has acquired no riches by his
+political efforts his heart and soul and mind and strength have been
+directed to his suffering country and the cause of universal freedom.
+For this he has deservedly a place in the heart and affections of every
+son of Ireland.  One million of ransomed slaves in the British
+dependencies will teach their children to repeat the name of O'Connell
+with that of Wilberforce and Clarkson.  And when the stain and caste of
+slavery shall have passed from our own country, he will be regarded as
+our friend and benefactor, whose faithful rebukes and warnings and
+eloquent appeals to our pride of character, borne to us across the
+Atlantic, touched the guilty sensitiveness of the national conscience,
+and through shame prepared the way for repentance.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ENGLAND UNDER JAMES II.
+
+     A review of the first two volumes of Macaulay's _History of England
+     from the Accession of James II_.
+
+In accordance with the labor-saving spirit of the age, we have in these
+volumes an admirable example of history made easy.  Had they been
+published in his time, they might have found favor in the eyes of the
+poet Gray, who declared that his ideal of happiness was "to lie on a sofa
+and read eternal new romances."
+
+The style is that which lends such a charm to the author's essays,--
+brilliant, epigrammatic, vigorous.  Indeed, herein lies the fault of the
+work, when viewed as a mere detail of historical facts.  Its sparkling
+rhetoric is not the safest medium of truth to the simple-minded inquirer.
+A discriminating and able critic has done the author no injustice in
+saying that, in attempting to give effect and vividness to his thoughts
+and diction, he is often overstrained and extravagant, and that his
+epigrammatic style seems better fitted for the glitter of paradox than
+the sober guise of truth.  The intelligent and well-informed reader of
+the volume before us will find himself at times compelled to reverse the
+decisions of the author, and deliver some unfortunate personage, sect, or
+class from the pillory of his rhetoric and the merciless pelting of his
+ridicule.  There is a want of the repose and quiet which we look for in
+a narrative of events long passed away; we rise from the perusal of the
+book pleased and excited, but with not so clear a conception of the
+actual realities of which it treats as would be desirable.  We cannot
+help feeling that the author has been somewhat over-scrupulous in
+avoiding the dulness of plain detail, and the dryness of dates, names,
+and statistics.  The freedom, flowing diction, and sweeping generality of
+the reviewer and essayist are maintained throughout; and, with one
+remarkable exception, the _History of England_ might be divided into
+papers of magazine length, and published, without any violence to
+propriety, as a continuation of the author's labors in that department of
+literature in which he confessedly stands without a rival,--historical
+review.
+
+That exception is, however, no unimportant one.  In our view, it is the
+crowning excellence of the first volume,--its distinctive feature and
+principal attraction.  We refer to the third chapter of the volume, from
+page 260 to page 398,--the description of the condition of England at the
+period of the accession of James II.  We know of nothing like it in the
+entire range of historical literature.  The veil is lifted up from the
+England of a century and a half ago; its geographical, industrial,
+social, and moral condition is revealed; and, as the panorama passes
+before us of lonely heaths, fortified farm-houses, bands of robbers,
+rude country squires doling out the odds and ends of their coarse fare
+to clerical dependents,--rough roads, serviceable only for horseback
+travelling,--towns with unlighted streets, reeking with filth and offal,
+--and prisons, damp, loathsome, infected with disease, and swarming with
+vermin,--we are filled with wonder at the contrast which it presents to
+the England of our day.  We no longer sigh for "the good old days."  The
+most confirmed grumbler is compelled to admit that, bad as things now
+are, they were far worse a few generations back.  Macaulay, in this
+elaborate and carefully prepared chapter, has done a good service to
+humanity in disabusing well-intentioned ignorance of the melancholy
+notion that the world is growing worse, and in putting to silence the
+cant of blind, unreasoning conservatism.
+
+In 1685 the entire population of England our author estimates at from
+five millions to five millions five hundred thousand.  Of the eight
+hundred thousand families at that period, one half had animal food twice
+a week.  The other half ate it not at all, or at most not oftener than
+once a week.  Wheaten, loaves were only seen at the tables of the
+comparatively wealthy.  Rye, barley, and oats were the food of the vast
+majority.  The average wages of workingmen was at least one half less
+than is paid in England for the same service at the present day.  One
+fifth of the people were paupers, or recipients of parish relief.
+Clothing and bedding were scarce and dear.  Education was almost unknown
+to the vast majority.  The houses and shops were not numbered in the
+cities, for porters, coachmen, and errand-runners could not read.  The
+shopkeeper distinguished his place of business by painted signs and
+graven images.  Oxford and Cambridge Universities were little better than
+modern grammar and Latin school in a provincial village.  The country
+magistrate used on the bench language too coarse, brutal, and vulgar for
+a modern tap-room.  Fine gentlemen in London vied with each other in the
+lowest ribaldry and the grossest profanity.  The poets of the time, from
+Dryden to Durfey, ministered to the popular licentiousness.  The most
+shameless indecency polluted their pages.  The theatre and the brothel
+were in strict unison.  The Church winked at the vice which opposed
+itself to the austere morality or hypocrisy of Puritanism.  The superior
+clergy, with a few noble exceptions, were self-seekers and courtiers; the
+inferior were idle, ignorant hangerson upon blaspheming squires and
+knights of the shire.  The domestic chaplain, of all men living, held the
+most unenviable position.  "If he was permitted to dine with the family,
+he was expected to content himself with the plainest fare.  He might fill
+himself with the corned beef and carrots; but as soon as the tarts and
+cheese-cakes made their appearance he quitted his seat, and stood aloof
+till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, from a great part
+of which he had been excluded."
+
+Beyond the Trent the country seems at this period to have been in a state
+of barbarism.  The parishes kept bloodhounds for the purpose of hunting
+freebooters.  The farm-houses were fortified and guarded.  So dangerous
+was the country that persons about travelling thither made their wills.
+Judges and lawyers only ventured therein, escorted by a strong guard of
+armed men.
+
+The natural resources of the island were undeveloped.  The tin mines of
+Cornwall, which two thousand years before attracted the ships of the
+merchant princes of Tyre beyond the Pillars of Hercules, were indeed
+worked to a considerable extent; but the copper mines, which now yield
+annually fifteen thousand tons, were entirely neglected.  Rock salt was
+known to exist, but was not used to any considerable extent; and only a
+partial supply of salt by evaporation was obtained.  The coal and iron of
+England are at this time the stable foundations of her industrial and
+commercial greatness.  But in 1685 the great part of the iron used was
+imported.  Only about ten thousand tons were annually cast.  Now eight
+hundred thousand is the average annual production.  Equally great has
+been the increase in coal mining.  "Coal," says Macaulay, "though very
+little used in any species of manufacture, was already the ordinary fuel
+in some districts which were fortunate enough to possess large beds, and
+in the capital, which could easily be supplied by water carriage.  It
+seems reasonable to believe that at least one half of the quantity then
+extracted from the pits was consumed in London.  The consumption of
+London seemed to the writers of that age enormous, and was often
+mentioned by them as a proof of the greatness of the imperial city.  They
+scarcely hoped to be believed when they affirmed that two hundred and
+eighty thousand chaldrons--that is to say, about three hundred and fifty
+thousand tons-were, in the last year of the reign of Charles II., brought
+to the Thames.  At present near three millions and a half of tons are
+required yearly by the metropolis; and the whole annual produce cannot,
+on the most moderate computation, be estimated at less than twenty
+millions of tons."
+
+After thus passing in survey the England of our ancestors five or six
+generations back, the author closes his chapter with some eloquent
+remarks upon the progress of society.  Contrasting the hardness and
+coarseness of the age of which he treats with the softer and more humane
+features of our own, he says: "Nowhere could be found that sensitive and
+restless compassion which has in our time extended powerful protection to
+the factory child, the Hindoo widow, to the negro slave; which pries into
+the stores and water-casks of every emigrant ship; which winces at every
+lash laid on the back of a drunken soldier; which will not suffer the
+thief in the hulks to be ill fed or overworked; and which has repeatedly
+endeavored to save the life even of the murderer.  The more we study the
+annals of the past, the more shall we rejoice that we live in a merciful
+age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even when
+deserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty.  Every
+class, doubtless, has gained largely by this great moral change; but the
+class which has gained most is the poorest, the most dependent, and the
+most defenceless."
+
+The history itself properly commences at the close of this chapter.
+Opening with the deathscene of the dissolute Charles II., it presents a
+series of brilliant pictures of the events succeeding: The miserable fate
+of Oates and Dangerfield, the perjured inventors of the Popish Plot; the
+trial of Baxter by the infamous Jeffreys; the ill-starred attempt of the
+Duke of Monmouth; the battle of Sedgemoor, and the dreadful atrocities of
+the king's soldiers, and the horrible perversion of justice by the king's
+chief judge in the "Bloody Assizes;" the barbarous hunting of the Scotch
+Dissenters by Claverbouse; the melancholy fate of the brave and noble
+Duke of Argyle,--are described with graphic power unknown to Smollett or
+Hume.  Personal portraits are sketched with a bold freedom which at times
+startles us.  The "old familiar faces," as we have seen them through the
+dust of a century and a half, start before us with lifelike distinctness
+of outline and coloring.  Some of them disappoint us; like the ghost of
+Hamlet's father, they come in a "questionable shape."  Thus, for
+instance, in his sketch of William Penn, the historian takes issue with
+the world on his character, and labors through many pages of disingenuous
+innuendoes and distortion of facts to transform the saint of history into
+a pliant courtier.
+
+The second volume details the follies and misfortunes, the decline and
+fall, of the last of the Stuarts.  All the art of the author's splendid
+rhetoric is employed in awakening, by turns, the indignation and contempt
+of the reader in contemplating the character of the wrong-headed king.
+In portraying that character, he has brought into exercise all those
+powers of invective and merciless ridicule which give such a savage
+relish to his delineation of Barrere.  To preserve the consistency of
+this character, he denies the king any credit for whatever was really
+beneficent and praiseworthy in his government.  He holds up the royal
+delinquent in only two lights: the one representing him as a tyrant
+towards his people; the other as the abject slave of foreign priests,--
+a man at once hateful and ludicrous, of whom it is difficult to speak
+without an execration or a sneer.
+
+The events which preceded the revolution of 1688; the undisguised
+adherence of the king to the Church of Rome; the partial toleration of
+the despised Quakers and Anabaptists; the gradual relaxation of the
+severity of the penal laws against Papists and Dissenters, preparing the
+way for the royal proclamation of entire liberty of conscience throughout
+the British realm, allowing the crop-eared Puritan and the Papist priest
+to build conventicles and mass houses under the very eaves of the palaces
+of Oxford and Canterbury; the mining and countermining of Jesuits and
+prelates, are detailed with impartial minuteness.  The secret springs of
+the great movements of the time are laid bare; the mean and paltry
+instrumentalities are seen at work in the under world of corruption,
+prejudice, and falsehood.  No one, save a blind, unreasoning partisan of
+Catholicism or Episcopacy, can contemplate this chapter in English
+history without a feeling of disgust.  However it may have been overruled
+for good by that Providence which takes the wise in their own craftiness,
+the revolution of 1688, in itself considered, affords just as little
+cause for self-congratulation on the part of Protestants as the
+substitution of the supremacy of the crowned Bluebeard, Henry VIII., for
+that of the Pope, in the English Church.  It had little in common with
+the revolution of 1642.  The field of its action was the closet of
+selfish intrigue,--the stalls of discontented prelates,--the chambers of
+the wanton and adulteress,--the confessional of a weak prince, whose
+mind, originally narrow, had been cramped closer still by the strait-
+jacket of religious bigotry and superstition.  The age of nobility and
+heroism had well-nigh passed away.  The pious fervor, the self-denial,
+and the strict morality of the Puritanism of the days of Cromwell, and
+the blunt honesty and chivalrous loyalty of the Cavaliers, had both
+measurably given place to the corrupting influences of the licentious and
+infidel court of Charles II.; and to the arrogance, intolerance, and
+shameless self-seeking of a prelacy which, in its day of triumph and
+revenge, had more than justified the terrible denunciations and scathing
+gibes of Milton.
+
+Both Catholic and Protestant writers have misrepresented James II.  He
+deserves neither the execrations of the one nor the eulogies of the
+other.  The candid historian must admit that he was, after all, a better
+man than his brother Charles II.  He was a sincere and bigoted Catholic,
+and was undoubtedly honest in the declaration, which he made in that
+unlucky letter which Burnet ferreted out on the Continent, that he was
+prepared to make large steps to build up the Catholic Church in England,
+and, if necessary, to become a martyr in her cause.  He was proud,
+austere, and self-willed.  In the treatment of his enemies he partook of
+the cruel temper of his time.  He was at once ascetic and sensual,
+alternating between the hair-shirt of penance and the embraces of
+Catharine Sedley.  His situation was one of the most difficult and
+embarrassing which can be conceived of.  He was at once a bigoted Papist
+and a Protestant pope.  He hated the French domination to which his
+brother had submitted; yet his pride as sovereign was subordinated to his
+allegiance to Rome and a superstitious veneration for the wily priests
+with which Louis XIV. surrounded him.  As the head of Anglican heretics,
+he was compelled to submit to conditions galling alike to the sovereign
+and the man.  He found, on his accession, the terrible penal laws against
+the Papists in full force; the hangman's knife was yet warm with its
+ghastly butcher-work of quartering and disembowelling suspected Jesuits
+and victims of the lie of Titus Oates; the Tower of London had scarcely
+ceased to echo the groans of Catholic confessors stretched on the rack by
+Protestant inquisitors.  He was torn by conflicting interests and
+spiritual and political contradictions.  The prelates of the Established
+Church must share the responsibility of many of the worst acts of the
+early part of his reign.  Oxford sent up its lawned deputations to mingle
+the voice of adulation with the groans of tortured Covenanters, and
+fawning ecclesiastics burned the incense of irreverent flattery under the
+nostrils of the Lord's anointed, while the blessed air of England was
+tainted by the carcasses of the ill-fated followers of Monmouth, rotting
+on a thousand gibbets.  While Jeffreys was threatening Baxter and his
+Presbyterian friends with the pillory and whipping-post; while Quakers
+and Baptists were only spared from extermination as game preserves for
+the sport of clerical hunters; while the prisons were thronged with the
+heads of some fifteen thousand beggared families, and Dissenters of every
+name and degree were chased from one hiding-place to another, like David
+among the cliffs of Ziph and the rocks of the wild goats,--the
+thanksgivings and congratulations of prelacy arose in an unbroken strain
+of laudation from all the episcopal palaces of England.  What mattered it
+to men, in whose hearts, to use the language of John Milton, "the sour
+leaven of human traditions, mixed with the poisonous dregs of hypocrisy,
+lay basking in the sunny warmth of wealth and promotion, hatching
+Antichrist," that the privileges of Englishmen and the rights secured by
+the great charter were violated and trodden under foot, so long as
+usurpation enured to their own benefit?  But when King James issued his
+Declaration of Indulgence, and stretched his prerogative on the side of
+tolerance and charity, the zeal of the prelates for preserving the
+integrity of the British constitution and the limiting of the royal power
+flamed up into rebellion.  They forswore themselves without scruple: the
+disciples of Laud, the asserters of kingly infallibility and divine
+right, talked of usurped power and English rights in the strain of the
+very schismatics whom they had persecuted to the death.  There is no
+reason to believe that James supposed that, in issuing his declaration
+suspending the penal laws, he had transcended the rightful prerogative of
+his throne.  The power which he exercised had been used by his
+predecessors for far less worthy purposes, and with the approbation of
+many of the very men who now opposed him.  His ostensible object,
+expressed in language which even those who condemn his policy cannot but
+admire, was a laudable and noble one.  "We trust," said he, "that it will
+not be vain that we have resolved to use our utmost endeavors to
+establish liberty of conscience on such just and equal foundations as
+will render it unalterable, and secure to all people the free exercise of
+their religion, by which future ages may reap the benefit of what is so
+undoubtedly the general good of the whole kingdom."  Whatever may have
+been the motive of this declaration,--even admitting the suspicions of
+his enemies to have been true, that he advocated universal toleration as
+the only means of restoring Roman Catholics to all the rights and
+privileges of which the penal laws deprived them,--it would seem that
+there could have been no very serious objection on the part of real
+friends of religious toleration to the taking of him at his word and
+placing Englishmen of every sect on an equality before the law.  The
+Catholics were in a very small minority, scarcely at that time as
+numerous as the Quakers and Anabaptists.  The army, the navy, and nine
+tenths of the people of England were Protestants.  Real danger,
+therefore, from a simple act of justice towards their Catholic fellow-
+citizens, the people of England had no ground for apprehending.  But the
+great truth, which is even now but imperfectly recognized throughout
+Christendom, that religious opinions rest between man and his Maker, and
+not between man and the magistrate, and that the domain of conscience is
+sacred, was almost unknown to the statesmen and schoolmen of the
+seventeenth century.  Milton--ultra liberal as he was--excepted the
+Catholics from his plan of toleration.  Locke, yielding to the prejudices
+of the time, took the same ground.  The enlightened latitudinarian
+ministers of the Established Church--men whose talents and Christian
+charity redeem in some measure the character of that Church in the day of
+its greatest power and basest apostasy--stopped short of universal
+toleration.  The Presbyterians excluded Quakers, Baptists, and Papists
+from the pale of their charity.  With the single exception of the sect of
+which William Penn was a conspicuous member, the idea of complete and
+impartial toleration was novel and unwelcome to all sects and classes of
+the English people.  Hence it was that the very men whose liberties and
+estates had been secured by the declaration, and who were thereby
+permitted to hold their meetings in peace and quietness, used their newly
+acquired freedom in denouncing the king, because the same key which had
+opened their prison doors had also liberated the Papists and the Quakers.
+Baxter's severe and painful spirit could not rejoice in an act which had,
+indeed, restored him to personal freedom, but which had, in his view,
+also offended Heaven, and strengthened the powers of Antichrist by
+extending the same favor to Jesuits and Ranters.  Bunyan disliked the
+Quakers next to the Papists; and it greatly lessened his satisfaction at
+his release from Bedford jail that it had been brought about by the
+influence of the former at the court of a Catholic prince.  Dissenters
+forgot the wrongs and persecutions which they had experienced at the
+hands of the prelacy, and joined the bishops in opposition to the
+declaration.  They almost magnified into Christian confessors the
+prelates who remonstrated against the indulgence, and actually plotted
+against the king for restoring them to liberty of person and conscience.
+The nightmare fear of Popery overcame their love of religious liberty;
+and they meekly offered their necks to the yoke of prelacy as the only
+security against the heavier one of Papist supremacy.  In a far different
+manner the cleareyed and plain-spoken John Milton met the claims and
+demands of the hierarchy in his time.  "They entreat us," said he, "that
+we be not weary of the insupportable grievances that our shoulders have
+hitherto cracked under; they beseech us that we think them fit to be our
+justices of peace, our lords, our highest officers of state.  They pray
+us that it would please us to let them still haul us and wrong us with
+their bandogs and pursuivants; and that it would please the Parliament
+that they may yet have the whipping, fleecing, and flaying of us in their
+diabolical courts, to tear the flesh from our bones, and into our wide
+wounds, instead of balm, to pour in the oil of tartar, vitriol, and
+mercury.  Surely a right, reasonable, innocent, and soft-hearted
+petition!  O the relenting bowels of the fathers!"
+
+Considering the prominent part acted by William Penn in the reign of
+James II., and his active and influential support of the obnoxious
+declaration which precipitated the revolution of 1688, it could hardly
+have been otherwise than that his character should suffer from the
+unworthy suspicions and prejudices of his contemporaries.  His views of
+religious toleration were too far in advance of the age to be received
+with favor.  They were of necessity misunderstood and misrepresented.
+All his life he had been urging them with the earnestness of one whose
+convictions were the result, not so much of human reason as of what he
+regarded as divine illumination.  What the council of James yielded upon
+grounds of state policy he defended on those of religious obligation.
+He had suffered in person and estate for the exercise of his religion.
+He had travelled over Holland and Germany, pleading with those in
+authority for universal toleration and charity.  On a sudden, on the
+accession of James, the friend of himself and his family, he found
+himself the most influential untitled citizen in the British realm.
+He had free access to the royal ear.  Asking nothing for himself or his
+relatives, he demanded only that the good people of England should be no
+longer despoiled of liberty and estate for their religious opinions.
+James, as a Catholic, had in some sort a common interest with his
+dissenting subjects, and the declaration was for their common relief.
+Penn, conscious of the rectitude of his own motives and thoroughly
+convinced of the Christian duty of toleration, welcomed that declaration
+as the precursor of the golden age of liberty and love and good-will to
+men.  He was not the man to distrust the motives of an act so fully in
+accordance with his lifelong aspirations and prayers.  He was charitable
+to a fault: his faith in his fellow-men was often stronger than a clearer
+insight of their characters would have justified.  He saw the errors of
+the king, and deplored them; he denounced Jeffreys as a butcher who had
+been let loose by the priests; and pitied the king, who was, he thought,
+swayed by evil counsels.  He remonstrated against the interference of the
+king with Magdalen College; and reproved and rebuked the hopes and aims
+of the more zealous and hot-headed Catholics, advising them to be content
+with simple toleration.  But the constitution of his mind fitted him
+rather for the commendation of the good than the denunciation of the bad.
+He had little in common with the bold and austere spirit of the Puritan
+reformers.  He disliked their violence and harshness; while, on the other
+hand, he was attracted and pleased by the gentle disposition and mild
+counsels of Locke, and Tillotson, and the latitudinarians of the English
+Church.  He was the intimate personal and political friend of Algernon
+Sydney; sympathized with his republican theories, and shared his
+abhorrence of tyranny, civil and ecclesiastical.  He found in him a man
+after his own heart,--genial, generous, and loving; faithful to duty and
+the instincts of humanity; a true Christian gentleman.  His sense of
+gratitude was strong, and his personal friendships sometimes clouded his
+judgment.  In giving his support to the measures of James in behalf of
+liberty of conscience, it must be admitted that he acted in consistency
+with his principles and professions.  To have taken ground against them,
+he must have given the lie to his declarations from his youth upward.  He
+could not disown and deny his own favorite doctrine because it came from
+the lips of a Catholic king and his Jesuit advisers; and in thus rising
+above the prejudices of his time, and appealing to the reason and
+humanity of the people of England in favor of a cordial indorsement on
+the part of Parliament of the principles of the declaration, he believed
+that he was subserving the best interests of his beloved country and
+fulfilling the solemn obligations of religious duty.  The downfall of
+James exposed Penn to peril and obloquy.  Perjured informers endeavored
+to swear away his life; and, although nothing could be proved against him
+beyond the fact that he had steadily supported the great measure of
+toleration, he was compelled to live secluded in his private lodgings in
+London for two or three years, with a proclamation for his arrest hanging
+over his head.  At length, the principal informer against him having been
+found guilty of perjury, the government warrant was withdrawn; and Lords
+Sidney, Rochester, and Somers, and the Duke of Buckingham, publicly bore
+testimony that nothing had been urged against him save by impostors, and
+that "they had known him, some of them, for thirty years, and had never
+known him to do an ill thing, but many good offices."  It is a matter of
+regret that one professing to hold the impartial pen of history should
+have given the sanction of his authority to the slanderous and false
+imputations of such a man as Burnet, who has never been regarded as an
+authentic chronicler.  The pantheon of history should not be lightly
+disturbed.  A good man's character is the world's common legacy; and
+humanity is not so rich in models of purity and goodness as to be able to
+sacrifice such a reputation as that of William Penn to the point of an
+antithesis or the effect of a paradox.
+
+     Gilbert Burnet, in liberality as a politician and tolerance as a
+     Churchman, was far in advance of his order and time.  It is true
+     that he shut out the Catholics from the pale of his charity and
+     barely tolerated the Dissenters.  The idea of entire religious
+     liberty and equality shocked even his moderate degree of
+     sensitiveness.  He met Penn at the court of the Prince of Orange,
+     and, after a long and fruitless effort to convince the Dissenter
+     that the penal laws against the Catholics should be enforced, and
+     allegiance to the Established Church continue the condition of
+     qualification for offices of trust and honor, and that he and his
+     friends should rest contented with simple toleration, he became
+     irritated by the inflexible adherence of Penn to the principle of
+     entire religious freedom.  One of the most worthy sons of the
+     Episcopal Church, Thomas Clarkson, alluding to this discussion, says
+     "Burnet never mentioned him (Penn) afterwards but coldly or
+     sneeringly, or in a way to lower him in the estimation of the
+     reader, whenever he had occasion to speak of him in his History of
+     his Own Times."
+
+     He was a man of strong prejudices; he lived in the midst of
+     revolutions, plots, and intrigues; he saw much of the worst side of
+     human nature; and he candidly admits, in the preface to his great
+     work, that he was inclined to think generally the worst of men and
+     parties, and that the reader should make allowance for this
+     inclination, although he had honestly tried to give the truth.  Dr.
+     King, of Oxford, in his Anecdotes of his Own Times, p. 185, says:
+     "I knew Burnet: he was a furious party-man, and easily imposed upon
+     by any lying spirit of his faction; but he was a better pastor than
+     any man who is now seated on the bishops' bench."  The Tory writers
+     --Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and others--have undoubtedly exaggerated
+     the defects of Burnet's narrative; while, on the other hand, his
+     Whig commentators have excused them on the ground of his avowed and
+     fierce partisanship.  Dr. Johnson, in his blunt way, says: "I do not
+     believe Burnet intentionally lied; but he was so much prejudiced
+     that he took no pains to find out the truth."  On the contrary, Sir
+     James Mackintosh, in the Edinburgh Review, speaks of the Bishop as
+     an honest writer, seldom substantially erroneous, though often
+     inaccurate in points of detail; and Macaulay, who has quite too
+     closely followed him in his history, defends him as at least quite
+     as accurate as his contemporary writers, and says that, "in his
+     moral character, as in his intellectual, great blemishes were more
+     than compensated by great excellences."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BORDER WAR OF 1708.
+
+The picturesque site of the now large village of Haverhill, on the
+Merrimac River, was occupied a century and a half ago by some thirty
+dwellings, scattered at unequal distances along the two principal roads,
+one of which, running parallel with the river, intersected the other,
+which ascended the hill northwardly and lost itself in the dark woods.
+The log huts of the first settlers had at that time given place to
+comparatively spacious and commodious habitations, framed and covered
+with sawed boards, and cloven clapboards, or shingles.  They were, many
+of them, two stories in front, with the roof sloping off behind to a
+single one; the windows few and small, and frequently so fitted as to be
+opened with difficulty, and affording but a scanty supply of light and
+air.  Two or three of the best constructed were occupied as garrisons,
+where, in addition to the family, small companies of soldiers were
+quartered.  On the high grounds rising from the river stood the mansions
+of the well-defined aristocracy of the little settlement,--larger and
+more imposing, with projecting upper stories and carved cornices.  On the
+front of one of these, over the elaborately wrought entablature of the
+doorway, might be seen the armorial bearings of the honored family of
+Saltonstall.  Its hospitable door was now closed; no guests filled its
+spacious hall or partook of the rich delicacies of its ample larder.
+Death had been there; its venerable and respected occupant had just been
+borne by his peers in rank and station to the neighboring graveyard.
+Learned, affable, intrepid, a sturdy asserter of the rights and liberties
+of the Province, and so far in advance of his time as to refuse to yield
+to the terrible witchcraft delusion, vacating his seat on the bench and
+openly expressing his disapprobation of the violent and sanguinary
+proceedings of the court, wise in council and prompt in action,--not his
+own townsmen alone, but the people of the entire Province, had reason to
+mourn the loss of Nathaniel Saltonstall.
+
+Four years before the events of which we are about to speak, the Indian
+allies of the French in Canada suddenly made their appearance in the
+westerly part of the settlement.  At the close of a midwinter day six
+savages rushed into the open gate of a garrison-house owned by one
+Bradley, who appears to have been absent at the time.  A sentinel,
+stationed in the house, discharged his musket, killing the foremost
+Indian, and was himself instantly shot down.  The mistress of the house,
+a spirited young woman, was making soap in a large kettle over the fire.
+--She seized her ladle and dashed the boiling liquid in the faces of the
+assailants, scalding one of them severely, and was only captured after
+such a resistance as can scarcely be conceived of by the delicately
+framed and tenderly nurtured occupants of the places of our great-
+grandmothers.  After plundering the house, the Indians started on their
+long winter march for Canada.  Tradition says that some thirteen persons,
+probably women and children, were killed outright at the garrison.
+Goodwife Bradley and four others were spared as prisoners.  The ground
+was covered with deep snow, and the captives were compelled to carry
+heavy burdens of their plundered household-stuffs; while for many days in
+succession they had no other sustenance than bits of hide, ground-nuts,
+the bark of trees, and the roots of wild onions, and lilies.  In this
+situation, in the cold, wintry forest, and unattended, the unhappy young
+woman gave birth to a child.  Its cries irritated the savages, who
+cruelly treated it and threatened its life.  To the entreaties of the
+mother they replied, that they would spare it on the condition that it
+should be baptized after their fashion.  She gave the little innocent
+into their hands, when with mock solemnity they made the sign of the
+cross upon its forehead, by gashing it with their knives, and afterwards
+barbarously put it to death before the eyes of its mother, seeming to
+regard the whole matter as an excellent piece of sport.  Nothing so
+strongly excited the risibilities of these grim barbarians as the tears
+and cries of their victims, extorted by physical or mental agony.
+Capricious alike in their cruelties and their kindnesses, they treated
+some of their captives with forbearance and consideration and tormented
+others apparently without cause.  One man, on his way to Canada, was
+killed because they did not like his looks, "he was so sour;" another,
+because he was "old and good for nothing."  One of their own number, who
+was suffering greatly from the effects of the scalding soap, was derided
+and mocked as a "fool who had let a squaw whip him;" while on the other
+hand the energy and spirit manifested by Goodwife Bradley in her defence
+was a constant theme of admiration, and gained her so much respect among
+her captors as to protect her from personal injury or insult.  On her
+arrival in Canada she was sold to a French farmer, by whom she was kindly
+treated.
+
+In the mean time her husband made every exertion in his power to
+ascertain her fate, and early in the next year learned that she was a
+slave in Canada.  He immediately set off through the wilderness on foot,
+accompanied only by his dog, who drew a small sled, upon which he carried
+some provisions for his sustenance, and a bag of snuff, which the
+Governor of the Province gave him as a present to the Governor of Canada.
+After encountering almost incredible hardships and dangers with a
+perseverance which shows how well he appreciated the good qualities of
+his stolen helpmate, he reached Montreal and betook himself to the
+Governor's residence.  Travel-worn, ragged, and wasted with cold and
+hunger, he was ushered into the presence of M. Vaudreuil.  The courtly
+Frenchman civilly received the gift of the bag of snuff, listened to the
+poor fellow's story, and put him in a way to redeem his wife without
+difficulty.  The joy of the latter on seeing her husband in the strange
+land of her captivity may well be imagined.  They returned by water,
+landing at Boston early in the summer.
+
+There is a tradition that this was not the goodwife's first experience of
+Indian captivity.  The late Dr. Abiel Abbott, in his manuscript of Judith
+Whiting's _Recollections of the Indian Wars_, states that she had
+previously been a prisoner, probably before her marriage.  After her
+return she lived quietly at the garrison-house until the summer of the
+next year.  One bright moonlit-night a party of Indians were seen
+silently and cautiously approaching.  The only occupants of the garrison
+at that time were Bradley, his wife and children, and a servant.  The
+three adults armed themselves with muskets, and prepared to defend
+themselves.  Goodwife Bradley, supposing the Indians had come with the
+intention of again capturing her, encouraged her husband to fight to the
+last, declaring that she had rather die on her own hearth than fall into
+their hands.  The Indians rushed upon the garrison, and assailed the
+thick oaken door, which they forced partly open, when a well-aimed shot
+from Goodwife Bradley laid the foremost dead on the threshold.  The loss
+of their leader so disheartened them that they made a hasty retreat.
+
+The year 1707 passed away without any attack upon the exposed frontier
+settlement.  A feeling of comparative security succeeded to the almost
+sleepless anxiety and terror of the inhabitants; and they were beginning
+to congratulate each other upon the termination of their long and bitter
+trials.  But the end was not yet.
+
+Early in the spring of 1708, the principal tribes of Indians in alliance
+with the French held a great council, and agreed to furnish three hundred
+warriors for an expedition to the English frontier.
+
+They were joined by one hundred French Canadians and several volunteers,
+consisting of officers of the French army, and younger sons of the
+nobility, adventurous and unscrupulous.  The Sieur de Chaillons, and
+Hertel de Rouville, distinguished as a partisan in former expeditions,
+cruel and unsparing as his Indian allies, commanded the French troops;
+the Indians, marshalled under their several chiefs, obeyed the general
+orders of La Perriere.  A Catholic priest accompanied them.  De Ronville,
+with the French troops and a portion of the Indians, took the route by
+the River St. Francois about the middle of summer.  La Perriere, with the
+French Mohawks, crossed Lake Champlain.  The place of rendezvous was Lake
+Nickisipigue.  On the way a Huron accidentally killed one of his
+companions; whereupon the tribe insisted on halting and holding a
+council.  It was gravely decided that this accident was an evil omen, and
+that the expedition would prove disastrous; and, in spite of the
+endeavors of the French officers, the whole band deserted.  Next the
+Mohawks became dissatisfied, and refused to proceed.  To the entreaties
+and promises of their French allies they replied that an infectious
+disease had broken out among them, and that, if they remained, it would
+spread through the whole army.  The French partisans were not deceived by
+a falsehood so transparent; but they were in no condition to enforce
+obedience; and, with bitter execrations and reproaches, they saw the
+Mohawks turn back on their warpath.  The diminished army pressed on to
+Nickisipigue, in the expectation of meeting, agreeably to their promise,
+the Norridgewock and Penobscot Indians.  They found the place deserted,
+and, after waiting for some days, were forced to the conclusion that the
+Eastern tribes had broken their pledge of cooperation.  Under these
+circumstances a council was held; and the original design of the
+expedition, namely, the destruction of the whole line of frontier towns,
+beginning with Portsmouth, was abandoned.  They had still a sufficient
+force for the surprise of a single settlement; and Haverhill, on the
+Merrimac, was selected for conquest.
+
+In the mean time, intelligence of the expedition, greatly exaggerated in
+point of numbers and object, had reached Boston, and Governor Dudley had
+despatched troops to the more exposed out posts of the Provinces of
+Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  Forty men, under the command of Major
+Turner and Captains Price and Gardner, were stationed at Haverhill in the
+different garrison-houses.  At first a good degree of vigilance was
+manifested; but, as days and weeks passed without any alarm, the
+inhabitants relapsed into their old habits; and some even began to
+believe that the rumored descent of the Indians was only a pretext for
+quartering upon them two-score of lazy, rollicking soldiers, who
+certainly seemed more expert in making love to their daughters, and
+drinking their best ale and cider, than in patrolling the woods or
+putting the garrisons into a defensible state.  The grain and hay harvest
+ended without disturbance; the men worked in their fields, and the women
+pursued their household avocations, without any very serious apprehension
+of danger.
+
+Among the inhabitants of the village was an eccentric, ne'er-do-well
+fellow, named Keezar, who led a wandering, unsettled life, oscillating,
+like a crazy pendulum, between Haverhill and Amesbury.  He had a
+smattering of a variety of trades, was a famous wrestler, and for a mug
+of ale would leap over an ox-cart with the unspilled beverage in his
+hand.  On one occasion, when at supper, his wife complained that she had
+no tin dishes; and, as there were none to be obtained nearer than Boston,
+he started on foot in the evening, travelled through the woods to the
+city, and returned with his ware by sunrise the next morning, passing
+over a distance of between sixty and seventy miles.  The tradition of his
+strange habits, feats of strength, and wicked practical jokes is still
+common in his native town.  On the morning of the 29th of the eighth
+month he was engaged in taking home his horse, which, according to his
+custom, he had turned into his neighbor's rich clover field the evening
+previous.  By the gray light of dawn he saw a long file of men marching
+silently towards the town.  He hurried back to the village and gave the
+alarm by firing a gun.  Previous to this, however, a young man belonging
+to a neighboring town, who had been spending the night with a young woman
+of the village, had met the advance of the war-party, and, turning back
+in extreme terror and confusion, thought only of the safety of his
+betrothed, and passed silently through a considerable part of the village
+to her dwelling.  After he had effectually concealed her he ran out to
+give the alarm.  But it was too late.  Keezar's gun was answered by the
+terrific yells, whistling, and whooping of the Indians.  House after
+house was assailed and captured.  Men, women, and children were
+massacred.  The minister of the town was killed by a shot through his
+door.  Two of his children were saved by the courage and sagacity of his
+negro slave Hagar.  She carried them into the cellar and covered them
+with tubs, and then crouched behind a barrel of meat just in time to
+escape the vigilant eyes of the enemy, who entered the cellar and
+plundered it.  She saw them pass and repass the tubs under which the
+children lay and take meat from the very barrel which concealed herself.
+Three soldiers were quartered in the house; but they made no defence, and
+were killed while begging for quarter.
+
+The wife of Thomas Hartshorne, after her husband and three sons had
+fallen, took her younger children into the cellar, leaving an infant on a
+bed in the garret, fearful that its cries would betray her place of
+concealment if she took it with her.  The Indians entered the garret and
+tossed the child out of the window upon a pile of clapboards, where it
+was afterwards found stunned and insensible.  It recovered, nevertheless,
+and became a man of remarkable strength and stature; and it used to be a
+standing joke with his friends that he had been stinted by the Indians
+when they threw him out of the window.  Goodwife Swan, armed with a long
+spit, successfully defended her door against two Indians.  While the
+massacre went on, the priest who accompanied the expedition, with some of
+the French officers, went into the meeting-house, the walls of which were
+afterwards found written over with chalk.  At sunrise, Major Turner, with
+a portion of his soldiers, entered the village; and the enemy made a
+rapid retreat, carrying with them seventeen, prisoners.  They were
+pursued and overtaken just as they were entering the woods; and a severe
+skirmish took place, in which the rescue of some of the prisoners was
+effected.  Thirty of the enemy were left dead on the field, including the
+infamous Hertel de Rouville.  On the part of the villagers, Captains Ayer
+and Wainwright and Lieutenant Johnson, with thirteen others, were killed.
+The intense heat of the weather made it necessary to bury the dead on the
+same day.  They were laid side by side in a long trench in the burial-
+ground.  The body of the venerated and lamented minister, with those of
+his wife and child, sleep in another part of the burial-ground, where may
+still be seen a rude monument with its almost llegible inscription:--
+
+"_Clauditur hoc tumulo corpus Reverendi pii doctique viri D. Benjamin
+Rolfe, ecclesiae Christi quae est in Haverhill pastoris fidelissimi; qui
+domi suae ab hostibus barbare trucidatus.  A laboribus suis requievit
+mane diei sacrae quietis, Aug. XXIX, anno Dom. MDCCVIII.  AEtatis suae
+XLVI_."
+
+Of the prisoners taken, some escaped during the skirmish, and two or
+three were sent back by the French officers, with a message to the
+English soldiers, that, if they pursued the party on their retreat to
+Canada, the other prisoners should be put to death.  One of them, a
+soldier stationed in Captain Wainwright's garrison, on his return four
+years after, published an account of his captivity.  He was compelled to
+carry a heavy pack, and was led by an Indian by a cord round his neck.
+The whole party suffered terribly from hunger.  On reaching Canada the
+Indians shaved one side of his head, and greased the other, and painted
+his face.  At a fort nine miles from Montreal a council was held in order
+to decide his fate; and he had the unenviable privilege of listening to a
+protracted discussion upon the expediency of burning him.  The fire was
+already kindled, and the poor fellow was preparing to meet his doom with
+firmness, when it was announced to him that his life was spared.  This
+result of the council by no means satisfied the women and boys, who had
+anticipated rare sport in the roasting of a white man and a heretic.  One
+squaw assailed him with a knife and cut off one of his fingers; another
+beat him with a pole.  The Indians spent the night in dancing and
+singing, compelling their prisoner to go round the ring with them.  In
+the morning one of their orators made a long speech to him, and formally
+delivered him over to an old squaw, who took him to her wigwam and
+treated him kindly.  Two or three of the young women who were carried
+away captive married Frenchmen in Canada and never returned.  Instances
+of this kind were by no means rare during the Indian wars.  The simple
+manners, gayety, and social habits of the French colonists among whom the
+captives were dispersed seem to have been peculiarly fascinating to the
+daughters of the grave and severe Puritans.
+
+At the beginning of the present century, Judith Whiting was the solitary
+survivor of all who witnessed the inroad of the French and Indians in
+1708.  She was eight years of age at the time of the attack, and her
+memory of it to the last was distinct and vivid.  Upon her old brain,
+from whence a great portion of the records of the intervening years had
+been obliterated, that terrible picture, traced with fire and blood,
+retained its sharp outlines and baleful colors.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT IPSWICH FRIGHT.
+
+               "The Frere into the dark gazed forth;
+               The sounds went onward towards the north
+               The murmur of tongues, the tramp and tread
+               Of a mighty army to battle led."
+                                       BALLAD OF THE CID.
+
+
+
+Life's tragedy and comedy are never far apart.  The ludicrous and the
+sublime, the grotesque and the pathetic, jostle each other on the stage;
+the jester, with his cap and bells, struts alongside of the hero; the
+lord mayor's pageant loses itself in the mob around Punch and Judy; the
+pomp and circumstance of war become mirth-provoking in a militia muster;
+and the majesty of the law is ridiculous in the mock dignity of a
+justice's court.  The laughing philosopher of old looked on one side of
+life and his weeping contemporary on the other; but he who has an eye to
+both must often experience that contrariety of feeling which Sterne
+compares to "the contest in the moist eyelids of an April morning,
+whether to laugh or cry."
+
+The circumstance we are about to relate, may serve as an illustration of
+the way in which the woof of comedy interweaves with the warp of tragedy.
+It occurred in the early stages of the American Revolution, and is part
+and parcel of its history in the northeastern section of Massachusetts.
+
+About midway between Salem and the ancient town of Newburyport, the
+traveller on the Eastern Railroad sees on the right, between him and the
+sea, a tall church-spire, rising above a semicircle of brown roofs and
+venerable elms; to which a long scalloping range of hills, sweeping off
+to the seaside, forms a green background.  This is Ipswich, the ancient
+Agawam; one of those steady, conservative villages, of which a few are
+still left in New England, wherein a contemporary of Cotton Mather and
+Governor Endicott, were he permitted to revisit the scenes of his painful
+probation, would scarcely feel himself a stranger.  Law and Gospel,
+embodied in an orthodox steeple and a court-house, occupy the steep,
+rocky eminence in its midst; below runs the small river under its
+picturesque stone bridge; and beyond is the famous female seminary, where
+Andover theological students are wont to take unto themselves wives of
+the daughters of the Puritans.  An air of comfort and quiet broods over
+the whole town.  Yellow moss clings to the seaward sides of the roofs;
+one's eyes are not endangered by the intense glare of painted shingles
+and clapboards.  The smoke of hospitable kitchens curls up through the
+overshadowing elms from huge-throated chimneys, whose hearth-stones have
+been worn by the feet of many generations.  The tavern was once renowned
+throughout New England, and it is still a creditable hostelry.  During
+court time it is crowded with jocose lawyers, anxious clients, sleepy
+jurors, and miscellaneous hangers on; disinterested gentlemen, who have
+no particular business of their own in court, but who regularly attend
+its sessions, weighing evidence, deciding upon the merits of a lawyer's
+plea or a judge's charge, getting up extempore trials upon the piazza or
+in the bar-room of cases still involved in the glorious uncertainty of
+the law in the court-house, proffering gratuitous legal advice to
+irascible plaintiffs and desponding defendants, and in various other ways
+seeing that the Commonwealth receives no detriment.  In the autumn old
+sportsmen make the tavern their headquarters while scouring the marshes
+for sea-birds; and slim young gentlemen from the city return thither with
+empty game-bags, as guiltless in respect to the snipes and wagtails as
+Winkle was in the matter of the rooks, after his shooting excursion at
+Dingle Dell.  Twice, nay, three times, a year, since third parties have
+been in fashion, the delegates of the political churches assemble in
+Ipswich to pass patriotic resolutions, and designate the candidates whom
+the good people of Essex County, with implicit faith in the wisdom of the
+selection, are expected to vote for.  For the rest there are pleasant
+walks and drives around the picturesque village.  The people are noted
+for their hospitality; in summer the sea-wind blows cool over its healthy
+hills, and, take it for all in all, there is not a better preserved or
+pleasanter specimen of a Puritan town remaining in the ancient
+Commonwealth.
+
+The 21st of April, 1775, witnessed an awful commotion in the little
+village of Ipswich.  Old men, and boys, (the middle-aged had marched to
+Lexington some days before) and all the women in the place who were not
+bedridden or sick, came rushing as with one accord to the green in front
+of the meeting-house.  A rumor, which no one attempted to trace or
+authenticate, spread from lip to lip that the British regulars had landed
+on the coast and were marching upon the town.  A scene of indescribable
+terror and confusion followed.  Defence was out of the question, as the
+young and able-bodied men of the entire region round about had marched to
+Cambridge and Lexington.  The news of the battle at the latter place,
+exaggerated in all its details, had been just received; terrible stories
+of the atrocities committed by the dreaded "regulars" had been related;
+and it was believed that nothing short of a general extermination of the
+patriots--men, women, and children--was contemplated by the British
+commander.--Almost simultaneously the people of Beverly, a village a few
+miles distant, were smitten with the same terror.  How the rumor was
+communicated no one could tell.  It was there believed that the enemy had
+fallen upon Ipswich, and massacred the inhabitants without regard to age
+or sex.
+
+It was about the middle of the afternoon of this day that the people of
+Newbury, ten miles farther north, assembled in an informal meeting, at
+the town-house to hear accounts from the Lexington fight, and to consider
+what action was necessary in consequence of that event.  Parson Carey was
+about opening the meeting with prayer when hurried hoof-beats sounded up
+the street, and a messenger, loose-haired and panting for breath, rushed
+up the staircase.  "Turn out, turn out, for God's sake," he cried, "or
+you will be all killed!  The regulars are marching onus; they are at
+Ipswich now, cutting and slashing all before them!"  Universal
+consternation was the immediate result of this fearful announcement;
+Parson Carey's prayer died on his lips; the congregation dispersed over
+the town, carrying to every house the tidings that the regulars had come.
+Men on horseback went galloping up and down the streets, shouting the
+alarm.  Women and children echoed it from every corner.  The panic became
+irresistible, uncontrollable.  Cries were heard that the dreaded invaders
+had reached Oldtown Bridge, a little distance from the village, and that
+they were killing all whom they encountered.  Flight was resolved upon.
+All the horses and vehicles in the town were put in requisition; men,
+women, and children hurried as for life towards the north.  Some threw
+their silver and pewter ware and other valuables into wells.  Large
+numbers crossed the Merrimac, and spent the night in the deserted houses
+of Salisbury, whose inhabitants, stricken by the strange terror, had fled
+into New Hampshire, to take up their lodgings in dwellings also abandoned
+by their owners.  A few individuals refused to fly with the multitude;
+some, unable to move by reason of sickness, were left behind by their
+relatives.  One old gentleman, whose excessive corpulence rendered
+retreat on his part impossible, made a virtue of necessity; and, seating
+himself in his doorway with his loaded king's arm, upbraided his more
+nimble neighbors, advising them to do as he did, and "stop and shoot the
+devils."  Many ludicrous instances of the intensity of the terror might
+be related.  One man got his family into a boat to go to Ram Island for
+safety.  He imagined he was pursued by the enemy through the dusk of the
+evening, and was annoyed by the crying of an infant in the after part of
+the boat.  "Do throw that squalling brat overboard," he called to his
+wife, "or we shall be all discovered and killed!"  A poor woman ran four
+or five miles up the river, and stopped to take breath and nurse her
+child, when she found to her great horror that she had brought off the
+cat instead of the baby!
+
+All through that memorable night the terror swept onward towards the
+north with a speed which seems almost miraculous, producing everywhere
+the same results.  At midnight a horseman, clad only in shirt and
+breeches, dashed by our grandfather's door, in Haverhill, twenty miles up
+the river.  "Turn out!  Get a musket!  Turn out!" he shouted; "the
+regulars are landing on Plum Island!"  "I'm glad of it," responded the
+old gentleman from his chamber window; "I wish they were all there, and
+obliged to stay there."  When it is understood that Plum Island is little
+more than a naked sand-ridge, the benevolence of this wish can be readily
+appreciated.
+
+All the boats on the river were constantly employed for several hours in
+conveying across the terrified fugitives.  Through "the dead waste and
+middle of the night" they fled over the border into New Hampshire.  Some
+feared to take the frequented roads, and wandered over wooded hills and
+through swamps where the snows of the late winter had scarcely melted.
+They heard the tramp and outcry of those behind them, and fancied that
+the sounds were made by pursuing enemies.  Fast as they fled, the terror,
+by some unaccountable means, outstripped them.  They found houses
+deserted and streets strewn with household stuffs, abandoned in the hurry
+of escape.  Towards morning, however, the tide partially turned.  Grown
+men began to feel ashamed of their fears.  The old Anglo-Saxon hardihood
+paused and looked the terror in its face.  Single or in small parties,
+armed with such weapons as they found at hand,--among which long poles,
+sharpened and charred at the end, were conspicuous,--they began to
+retrace their steps.  In the mean time such of the good people of Ipswich
+as were unable or unwilling to leave their homes became convinced that
+the terrible rumor which had nearly depopulated their settlement was
+unfounded.
+
+Among those who had there awaited the onslaught of the regulars was a
+young man from Exeter, New Hampshire.  Becoming satisfied that the whole
+matter was a delusion, he mounted his horse and followed after the
+retreating multitude, undeceiving all whom he overtook.  Late at night
+he reached Newburyport, greatly to the relief of its sleepless
+inhabitants, and hurried across the river, proclaiming as he rode the
+welcome tidings.  The sun rose upon haggard and jaded fugitives, worn
+with excitement and fatigue, slowly returning homeward, their
+satisfaction at the absence of danger somewhat moderated by an unpleasant
+consciousness of the ludicrous scenes of their premature night flitting.
+
+Any inference which might be drawn from the foregoing narrative
+derogatory to the character of the people of New England at that day, on
+the score of courage, would be essentially erroneous.  It is true, they
+were not the men to court danger or rashly throw away their lives for the
+mere glory of the sacrifice.  They had always a prudent and wholesome
+regard to their own comfort and safety; they justly looked upon sound
+heads and limbs as better than broken ones; life was to them too serious
+and important, and their hard-gained property too valuable, to be lightly
+hazarded.  They never attempted to cheat themselves by under-estimating
+the difficulty to be encountered, or shutting their eyes to its probable
+consequences.  Cautious, wary, schooled in the subtle strategy of Indian
+warfare, where self-preservation is by no means a secondary object, they
+had little in common with the reckless enthusiasm of their French allies,
+or the stolid indifference of the fighting machines of the British
+regular army.  When danger could no longer be avoided, they met it with
+firmness and iron endurance, but with a very vivid appreciation of its
+magnitude.  Indeed, it must be admitted by all who are familiar with the
+history of our fathers that the element of fear held an important place
+among their characteristics.  It exaggerated all the dangers of their
+earthly pilgrimage, and peopled the future with shapes of evil.  Their
+fear of Satan invested him with some of the attributes of Omnipotence,
+and almost reached the point of reverence.  The slightest shock of an
+earthquake filled all hearts with terror.  Stout men trembled by their
+hearths with dread of some paralytic old woman supposed to be a witch.
+And when they believed themselves called upon to grapple with these
+terrors and endure the afflictions of their allotment, they brought to
+the trial a capability of suffering undiminished by the chloroform of
+modern philosophy.  They were heroic in endurance.  Panics like the one
+we have described might bow and sway them like reeds in the wind; but
+they stood up like the oaks of their own forests beneath the thunder and
+the hail of actual calamity.
+
+It was certainly lucky for the good people of Essex County that no wicked
+wag of a Tory undertook to immortalize in rhyme their ridiculous hegira,
+as Judge Hopkinson did the famous Battle of the Kegs in Philadelphia.
+Like the more recent Madawaska war in Maine, the great Chepatchet
+demonstration in Rhode Island, and the "Sauk fuss" of Wisconsin, it
+remains to this day "unsyllabled, unsung;" and the fast-fading memory of
+age alone preserves the unwritten history of the great Ipswich fright.
+
+
+
+
+
+POPE NIGHT.
+
+               "Lay up the fagots neat and trim;
+               Pile 'em up higher;
+               Set 'em afire!
+               The Pope roasts us, and we 'll roast him!"
+                                     Old Song.
+
+The recent attempt of the Romish Church to reestablish its hierarchy in
+Great Britain, with the new cardinal, Dr. Wiseman, at its head, seems to
+have revived an old popular custom, a grim piece of Protestant sport,
+which, since the days of Lord George Gordon and the "No Popery" mob, had
+very generally fallen into disuse.  On the 5th of the eleventh month of
+this present year all England was traversed by processions and lighted up
+with bonfires, in commemoration of the detection of the "gunpowder plot"
+of Guy Fawkes and the Papists in 1605.  Popes, bishops, and cardinals, in
+straw and pasteboard, were paraded through the streets and burned amid
+the shouts of the populace, a great portion of whom would have doubtless
+been quite as ready to do the same pleasant little office for the Bishop
+of Exeter or his Grace of Canterbury, if they could have carted about and
+burned in effigy a Protestant hierarchy as safely as a Catholic one.
+
+In this country, where every sect takes its own way, undisturbed by legal
+restrictions, each ecclesiastical tub balancing itself as it best may on
+its own bottom, and where bishops Catholic and bishops Episcopal, bishops
+Methodist and bishops Mormon, jostle each other in our thoroughfares, it
+is not to be expected that we should trouble ourselves with the matter at
+issue between the rival hierarchies on the other side of the water.  It
+is a very pretty quarrel, however, and good must come out of it, as it
+cannot fail to attract popular attention to the shallowness of the
+spiritual pretensions of both parties, and lead to the conclusion that a
+hierarchy of any sort has very little in common with the fishermen and
+tent-makers of the New Testament.
+
+Pope Night--the anniversary of the discovery of the Papal incendiary Guy
+Fawkes, booted and spurred, ready to touch fire to his powder-train under
+the Parliament House--was celebrated by the early settlers of New
+England, and doubtless afforded a good deal of relief to the younger
+plants of grace in the Puritan vineyard.  In those solemn old days, the
+recurrence of the powder-plot anniversary, with its processions, hideous
+images of the Pope and Guy Fawkes, its liberal potations of strong
+waters, and its blazing bonfires reddening the wild November hills, must
+have been looked forward to with no slight degree of pleasure.  For one
+night, at least, the cramped and smothered fun and mischief of the
+younger generation were permitted to revel in the wild extravagance
+of a Roman saturnalia or the Christmas holidays of a slave plantation.
+Bigotry--frowning upon the May-pole, with its flower wreaths and sportive
+revellers, and counting the steps of the dancers as so many steps towards
+perdition--recognized in the grim farce of Guy Fawkes's anniversary
+something of its own lineaments, smiled complacently upon the riotous
+young actors, and opened its close purse to furnish tar-barrels to roast
+the Pope, and strong water to moisten the throats of his noisy judges and
+executioners.
+
+Up to the time of the Revolution the powder plot was duly commemorated
+throughout New England.  At that period the celebration of it was
+discountenanced, and in many places prohibited, on the ground that it was
+insulting to our Catholic allies from France.  In Coffin's History of
+Newbury it is stated that, in 1774, the town authorities of Newburyport
+ordered "that no effigies be carried about or exhibited only in the
+daytime."  The last public celebration in that town was in the following
+year.  Long before the close of the last century the exhibitions of Pope
+Night had entirely ceased throughout the country, with, as far as we can
+learn, a solitary exception.  The stranger who chances to be travelling
+on the road between Newburyport and Haverhill, on the night of the 5th of
+November, may well fancy that an invasion is threatened from the sea, or
+that an insurrection is going on inland; for from all the high hills
+overlooking the river tall fires are seen blazing redly against the cold,
+dark, autumnal sky, surrounded by groups of young men and boys busily
+engaged in urging them with fresh fuel into intenser activity.  To feed
+these bonfires, everything combustible which could be begged or stolen
+from the neighboring villages, farm-houses, and fences is put in
+requisition.  Old tar-tubs, purloined from the shipbuilders of the
+river-side, and flour and lard barrels from the village-traders, are
+stored away for days, and perhaps weeks, in the woods or in the rain-
+gullies of the hills, in preparation for Pope Night.  From the earliest
+settlement of the towns of Amesbury and Salisbury, the night of the
+powder plot has been thus celebrated, with unbroken regularity, down to
+the present time.  The event which it once commemorated is probably now
+unknown to most of the juvenile actors.  The symbol lives on from
+generation to generation after the significance is lost; and we have seen
+the children of our Catholic neighbors as busy as their Protestant
+playmates in collecting, "by hook or by crook," the materials for Pope-
+Night bonfires.  We remember, on one occasion, walking out with a gifted
+and learned Catholic friend to witness the fine effect of the
+illumination on the hills, and his hearty appreciation of its picturesque
+and wild beauty,--the busy groups in the strong relief of the fires, and
+the play and corruscation of the changeful lights on the bare, brown
+hills, naked trees, and autumn clouds.
+
+In addition to the bonfires on the hills, there was formerly a procession
+in the streets, bearing grotesque images of the Pope, his cardinals and
+friars; and behind them Satan himself, a monster with huge ox-horns on
+his head, and a long tail, brandishing his pitchfork and goading them
+onward.  The Pope was generally furnished with a movable head, which
+could be turned round, thrown back, or made to bow, like that of a china-
+ware mandarin.  An aged inhabitant of the neighborhood has furnished us
+with some fragments of the songs sung on such occasions, probably the
+same which our British ancestors trolled forth around their bonfires two
+centuries ago:--
+
+                    "The fifth of November,
+                    As you well remember,
+                    Was gunpowder treason and plot;
+                    And where is the reason
+                    That gunpowder treason
+                    Should ever be forgot?"
+
+          "When James the First the sceptre swayed,
+          This hellish powder plot was laid;
+          They placed the powder down below,
+          All for Old England's overthrow.
+          Lucky the man, and happy the day,
+          That caught Guy Fawkes in the middle of his play!"
+
+          "Hark! our bell goes jink, jink, jink;
+          Pray, madam, pray, sir, give us something to drink;
+          Pray, madam, pray, sir, if you'll something give,
+          We'll burn the dog, and not let him live.
+          We'll burn the dog without his head,
+          And then you'll say the dog is dead."
+
+               "Look here! from Rome The Pope has come,
+               That fiery serpent dire;
+               Here's the Pope that we have got,
+               The old promoter of the plot;
+               We'll stick a pitchfork in his back,
+               And throw him in the fire!"
+
+There is a slight savor of a Smithfield roasting about these lines, such
+as regaled the senses of the Virgin Queen or Bloody Mary, which entirely
+reconciles us to their disuse at the present time.
+
+It should be the fervent prayer of all good men that the evil spirit of
+religious hatred and intolerance, which on the one hand prompted the
+gunpowder plot, and which on the other has ever since made it the
+occasion of reproach and persecution of an entire sect of professing
+Christians, may be no longer perpetuated.  In the matter of exclusiveness
+and intolerance, none of the older sects can safely reproach each other;
+and it becomes all to hope and labor for the coming of that day when the
+hymns of Cowper and the Confessions of Augustine, the humane philosophy
+of Channing and the devout meditations of Thomas a Kempis, the simple
+essays of Woolman and the glowing periods of Bossuet, shall be regarded
+as the offspring of one spirit and one faith,--lights of a common altar,
+and precious stones in the temple of the one universal Church.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BOY CAPTIVES.
+
+AN INCIDENT OF THE INDIAN WAR OF 1695.
+
+The township of Haverhill, even as late as the close of the seventeenth
+century, was a frontier settlement, occupying an advanced position in the
+great wilderness, which, unbroken by the clearing of a white man,
+extended from the Merrimac River to the French villages on the St.
+Francois.  A tract of twelve miles on the river and three or four
+northwardly was occupied by scattered settlers, while in the centre of
+the town a compact village had grown up.  In the immediate vicinity there
+were but few Indians, and these generally peaceful and inoffensive.  On
+the breaking out of the Narragansett war, the inhabitants had erected
+fortifications and taken other measures for defence; but, with the
+possible exception of one man who was found slain in the woods in 1676,
+none of the inhabitants were molested; and it was not until about the
+year 1689 that the safety of the settlement was seriously threatened.
+Three persons were killed in that year.  In 1690 six garrisons were
+established in different parts of the town, with a small company of
+soldiers attached to each.  Two of these houses are still standing.  They
+were built of brick, two stories high, with a single outside door, so
+small and narrow that but one person could enter at a time; the windows
+few, and only about two and a half feet long by eighteen inches with
+thick diamond glass secured with lead, and crossed inside with bars of
+iron.  The basement had but two rooms, and the chamber was entered by a
+ladder instead of stairs; so that the inmates, if driven thither, could
+cut off communication with the rooms below.  Many private houses were
+strengthened and fortified.  We remember one familiar to our boyhood,--
+a venerable old building of wood, with brick between the weather boards
+and ceiling, with a massive balustrade over the door, constructed of oak
+timber and plank, with holes through the latter for firing upon
+assailants.  The door opened upon a stone-paved hall, or entry, leading
+into the huge single room of the basement, which was lighted by two small
+windows, the ceiling black with the smoke of a century and a half; a huge
+fireplace, calculated for eight-feet wood, occupying one entire side;
+while, overhead, suspended from the timbers, or on shelves fastened to
+them, were household stores, farming utensils, fishing-rods, guns,
+bunches of herbs gathered perhaps a century ago, strings of dried apples
+and pumpkins, links of mottled sausages, spareribs, and flitches of
+bacon; the firelight of an evening dimly revealing the checked woollen
+coverlet of the bed in one far-off corner, while in another "the pewter
+plates on the dresser Caught and reflected the flame as shields of armies
+the sunshine."
+
+Tradition has preserved many incidents of life in the garrisons.  In
+times of unusual peril the settlers generally resorted at night to the
+fortified houses, taking thither their flocks and herds and such
+household valuables as were most likely to strike the fancy or minister
+to the comfort or vanity of the heathen marauders.  False alarms were
+frequent.  The smoke of a distant fire, the bark of a dog in the deep
+woods, a stump or bush taking in the uncertain light of stars and moon
+the appearance of a man, were sufficient to spread alarm through the
+entire settlement, and to cause the armed men of the garrison to pass
+whole nights in sleepless watching.  It is said that at Haselton's
+garrison-house the sentinel on duty saw, as he thought, an Indian inside
+of the paling which surrounded the building, and apparently seeking to
+gain an entrance.  He promptly raised his musket and fired at the
+intruder, alarming thereby the entire garrison.  The women and children
+left their beds, and the men seized their guns and commenced firing on
+the suspicious object; but it seemed to bear a charmed life, and remained
+unharmed.  As the morning dawned, however, the mystery was solved by the
+discovery of a black quilted petticoat hanging on the clothes-line,
+completely riddled with balls.
+
+As a matter of course, under circumstances of perpetual alarm and
+frequent peril, the duty of cultivating their fields, and gathering their
+harvests, and working at their mechanical avocations was dangerous and
+difficult to the settlers.  One instance will serve as an illustration.
+At the garrison-house of Thomas Dustin, the husband of the far-famed Mary
+Dustin, (who, while a captive of the Indians, and maddened by the murder
+of her infant child, killed and scalped, with the assistance of a young
+boy, the entire band of her captors, ten in number,) the business of
+brick-making was carried on.  The pits where the clay was found were only
+a few rods from the house; yet no man ventured to bring the clay to the
+yard within the enclosure without the attendance of a file of soldiers.
+An anecdote relating to this garrison has been handed down to the present
+tune.  Among its inmates were two young cousins, Joseph and Mary
+Whittaker; the latter a merry, handsome girl, relieving the tedium of
+garrison duty with her light-hearted mirthfulness, and
+
+               "Making a sunshine in that shady place."
+
+Joseph, in the intervals of his labors in the double capacity of brick-
+maker and man-at-arms, was assiduous in his attentions to his fair
+cousin, who was not inclined to encourage him.  Growing desperate, he
+threatened one evening to throw himself into the garrison well.  His
+threat only called forth the laughter of his mistress; and, bidding her
+farewell, he proceeded to put it in execution.  On reaching the well he
+stumbled over a log; whereupon, animated by a happy idea, he dropped the
+wood into the water instead of himself, and, hiding behind the curb,
+awaited the result.  Mary, who had been listening at the door, and who
+had not believed her lover capable of so rash an act, heard the sudden
+plunge of the wooden Joseph.  She ran to the well, and, leaning over the
+curb and peering down the dark opening, cried out, in tones of anguish
+and remorse, "O Joseph, if you're in the land of the living, I 'll have
+you!"  "I'll take ye at your word," answered Joseph, springing up from
+his hiding-place, and avenging himself for her coyness and coldness by a
+hearty embrace.
+
+Our own paternal ancestor, owing to religious scruples in the matter of
+taking arms even for defence of life and property, refused to leave his
+undefended house and enter the garrison.  The Indians frequently came to
+his house; and the family more than once in the night heard them
+whispering under the windows, and saw them put their copper faces to the
+glass to take a view of the apartments.  Strange as it may seen, they
+never offered any injury or insult to the inmates.
+
+In 1695 the township was many times molested by Indians, and several
+persons were killed and wounded.  Early in the fall a small party made
+their appearance in the northerly part of the town, where, finding two
+boys at work in an open field, they managed to surprise and capture them,
+and, without committing further violence, retreated through the woods to
+their homes on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee.  Isaac Bradley, aged
+fifteen, was a small but active and vigorous boy; his companion in
+captivity, Joseph Whittaker, was only eleven, yet quite as large in size,
+and heavier in his movements.  After a hard and painful journey they
+arrived at the lake, and were placed in an Indian family, consisting of a
+man and squaw and two or three children.  Here they soon acquired a
+sufficient knowledge of the Indian tongue to enable them to learn from
+the conversation carried on in their presence that it was designed to
+take them to Canada in the spring.  This discovery was a painful one.
+Canada, the land of Papist priests and bloody Indians, was the especial
+terror of the New England settlers, and the anathema maranatha of Puritan
+pulpits.  Thither the Indians usually hurried their captives, where they
+compelled them to work in their villages or sold them to the French
+planters.  Escape from thence through a deep wilderness, and across lakes
+and mountains and almost impassable rivers, without food or guide, was
+regarded as an impossibility.  The poor boys, terrified by the prospect
+of being carried still farther from their home and friends, began to
+dream of escaping from their masters before they started for Canada.  It
+was now winter; it would have been little short of madness to have chosen
+for flight that season of bitter cold and deep snows.  Owing to exposure
+and want of proper food and clothing, Isaac, the eldest of the boys, was
+seized with a violent fever, from which he slowly recovered in the course
+of the winter.  His Indian mistress was as kind to him as her
+circumstances permitted,--procuring medicinal herbs and roots for her
+patient, and tenderly watching over him in the long winter nights.
+Spring came at length; the snows melted; and the ice was broken up on the
+lake.  The Indians began to make preparations for journeying to Canada;
+and Isaac, who had during his sickness devised a plan of escape, saw that
+the time of putting it in execution had come.  On the evening before he
+was to make the attempt he for the first time informed his younger
+companion of his design, and told him, if he intended to accompany him,
+he must be awake at the time appointed.  The boys lay down as usual in
+the wigwam, in the midst of the family.  Joseph soon fell asleep; but
+Isaac, fully sensible of the danger and difficulty of the enterprise
+before him, lay awake, watchful for his opportunity.  About midnight he
+rose, cautiously stepping over the sleeping forms of the family, and
+securing, as he went, his Indian master's flint, steel, and tinder, and a
+small quantity of dry moose-meat and cornbread.  He then carefully
+awakened his companion, who, starting up, forgetful of the cause of his
+disturbance, asked aloud, "What do you want?"  The savages began to stir;
+and Isaac, trembling with fear of detection, lay down again and pretended
+to be asleep.  After waiting a while he again rose, satisfied, from the
+heavy breathing of the Indians, that they were all sleeping; and fearing
+to awaken Joseph a second time, lest he should again hazard all by his
+thoughtlessness, he crept softly out of the wigwam.  He had proceeded but
+a few rods when he heard footsteps behind him; and, supposing himself
+pursued, he hurried into the woods, casting a glance backward.  What was
+his joy to see his young companion running after him!  They hastened on
+in a southerly direction as nearly as they could determine, hoping to
+reach their distant home.  When daylight appeared they found a large
+hollow log, into which they crept for concealment, wisely judging that
+they would be hotly pursued by their Indian captors.
+
+Their sagacity was by no means at fault.  The Indians, missing their
+prisoners in the morning, started off in pursuit with their dogs.  As the
+young boys lay in the log they could hear the whistle of the Indians and
+the barking of dogs upon their track.  It was a trying moment; and even
+the stout heart of the elder boy sank within him as the dogs came up to
+the log and set up a loud bark of discovery.  But his presence of mind
+saved him.  He spoke in a low tone to the dogs, who, recognizing his
+familiar voice, wagged their tails with delight and ceased barking.  He
+then threw to them the morsel of moose-meat he had taken from the wigwam.
+While the dogs were thus diverted the Indians made their appearance.  The
+boys heard the light, stealthy sound of their moccasins on the leaves.
+They passed close to the log; and the dogs, having devoured their moose-
+meat, trotted after their masters.  Through a crevice in the log the boys
+looked after them and saw them disappear in the thick woods.  They
+remained in their covert until night, when they started again on their
+long journey, taking a new route to avoid the Indians.  At daybreak they
+again concealed themselves, but travelled the next night and day without
+resting.  By this time they had consumed all the bread which they had
+taken, and were fainting from hunger and weariness.  Just at the close of
+the third day they were providentially enabled to kill a pigeon and a
+small tortoise, a part of which they ate raw, not daring to make a fire,
+which might attract the watchful eyes of savages.  On the sixth day they
+struck upon an old Indian path, and, following it until night, came
+suddenly upon a camp of the enemy.  Deep in the heart of the forest,
+under the shelter of a ridge of land heavily timbered, a great fire of
+logs and brushwood was burning; and around it the Indians sat, eating
+their moose-meat and smoking their pipes.
+
+The poor fugitives, starving, weary, and chilled by the cold spring
+blasts, gazed down upon the ample fire; and the savory meats which the
+squaws were cooking by it, but felt no temptation to purchase warmth and
+food by surrendering themselves to captivity.  Death in the forest seemed
+preferable.  They turned and fled back upon their track, expecting every
+moment to hear the yells of pursuers.  The morning found them seated on
+the bank of a small stream, their feet torn and bleeding, and their
+bodies emaciated.  The elder, as a last effort, made search for roots,
+and fortunately discovered a few ground-nuts, (glicine apios) which
+served to refresh in some degree himself and his still weaker companion.
+As they stood together by the stream, hesitating and almost despairing,
+it occurred to Isaac that the rivulet might lead to a larger stream of
+water, and that to the sea and the white settlements near it; and he
+resolved to follow it.  They again began their painful march; the day
+passed, and the night once more overtook them.  When the eighth morning
+dawned, the younger of the boys found himself unable to rise from his bed
+of leaves.  Isaac endeavored to encourage him, dug roots, and procured
+water for him; but the poor lad was utterly exhausted.  He had no longer
+heart or hope.  The elder boy laid him on leaves and dry grass at the
+foot of a tree, and with a heavy heart bade him farewell.  Alone he
+slowly and painfully proceeded down the stream, now greatly increased in
+size by tributary rivulets.  On the top of a hill, he climbed with
+difficulty into a tree, and saw in the distance what seemed to be a
+clearing and a newly raised frame building.  Hopeful and rejoicing, he
+turned back to his young companion, told him what he had seen, and, after
+chafing his limbs awhile, got him upon his feet.  Sometimes supporting
+him, and at others carrying him on his back, the heroic boy staggered
+towards the clearing.  On reaching it he found it deserted, and was
+obliged to continue his journey.  Towards night signs of civilization
+began to appear,--the heavy, continuous roar of water was heard; and,
+presently emerging from the forest, he saw a great river dashing in white
+foam down precipitous rocks, and on its bank the gray walls of a huge
+stone building, with flankers, palisades, and moat, over which the
+British flag was flying.  This was the famous Saco Fort, built by
+Governor Phips two years before, just below the falls of the Saco River.
+The soldiers of the garrison gave the poor fellows a kindly welcome.
+Joseph, who was scarcely alive, lay for a long time sick in the fort; but
+Isaac soon regained his strength, and set out for his home in Haverhill,
+which he had the good fortune to arrive at in safety.
+
+Amidst the stirring excitements of the present day, when every thrill of
+the electric wire conveys a new subject for thought or action to a
+generation as eager as the ancient Athenians for some new thing, simple
+legends of the past like that which we have transcribed have undoubtedly
+lost in a great degree their interest.  The lore of the fireside is
+becoming obsolete, and with the octogenarian few who still linger among
+us will perish the unwritten history of border life in New England.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BLACK MEN IN THE REVOLUTION AND WAR OF 1812.
+
+The return of the festival of our national independence has called our
+attention to a matter which has been very carefully kept out of sight by
+orators and toast-drinkers.  We allude to the participation of colored
+men in the great struggle for American freedom.  It is not in accordance
+with our taste or our principles to eulogize the shedders of blood even
+in a cause of acknowledged justice; but when we see a whole nation doing
+honor to the memories of one class of its defenders to the total neglect
+of another class, who had the misfortune to be of darker complexion, we
+cannot forego the satisfaction of inviting notice to certain historical
+facts which for the last half century have been quietly elbowed aside,
+as no more deserving of a place in patriotic recollection than the
+descendants of the men to whom the facts in question relate have to a
+place in a Fourth of July procession.
+
+Of the services and sufferings of the colored soldiers of the Revolution
+no attempt has, to our knowledge, been made to preserve a record.  They
+have had no historian.  With here and there an exception, they have all
+passed away; and only some faint tradition of their campaigns under
+Washington and Greene and Lafayette, and of their cruisings under Decatur
+and Barry, lingers among their, descendants.  Yet enough is known to show
+that the free colored men of the United States bore their full proportion
+of the sacrifices and trials of the Revolutionary War.
+
+The late Governor Eustis, of Massachusetts,--the pride and boast of the
+democracy of the East, himself an active participant in the war, and
+therefore a most competent witness,--Governor Morrill, of New Hampshire,
+Judge Hemphill, of Pennsylvania, and other members of Congress, in the
+debate on the question of admitting Missouri as a slave State into the
+Union, bore emphatic testimony to the efficiency and heroism of the black
+troops.  Hon. Calvin Goddard, of Connecticut, states that in the little
+circle of his residence he was instrumental in securing, under the act of
+1818, the pensions of nineteen colored soldiers.  "I cannot," he says,
+"refrain from mentioning one aged black man, Primus Babcock, who proudly
+presented to me an honorable discharge from service during the war, dated
+at the close of it, wholly in the handwriting of George Washington; nor
+can I forget the expression of his feelings when informed, after his
+discharge had been sent to the War Department, that it could not be
+returned.  At his request it was written for, as he seemed inclined to
+spurn the pension and reclaim the discharge."  There is a touching
+anecdote related of Baron Stenben on the occasion of the disbandment of
+the American army.  A black soldier, with his wounds unhealed, utterly
+destitute, stood on the wharf just as a vessel bound for his distant home
+was getting under way.  The poor fellow gazed at the vessel with tears in
+his eyes, and gave himself up to despair.  The warm-hearted foreigner
+witnessed his emotion, and, inquiring into the cause of it, took his last
+dollar from his purse and gave it to him, with tears of sympathy
+trickling down his cheeks.  Overwhelmed with gratitude, the poor wounded
+soldier hailed the sloop and was received on board.  As it moved out from
+the wharf, he cried back to his noble friend on shore, "God Almighty
+bless you, Master Baron!"
+
+"In Rhode Island," says Governor Eustis in his able speech against
+slavery in Missouri, 12th of twelfth month, 1820, "the blacks formed an
+entire regiment, and they discharged their duty with zeal and fidelity.
+The gallant defence of Red Bank, in which the black regiment bore a part,
+is among the proofs of their valor."  In this contest it will be
+recollected that four hundred men met and repulsed, after a terrible and
+sanguinary struggle, fifteen hundred Hessian troops, headed by Count
+Donop.  The glory of the defence of Red Bank, which has been pronounced
+one of the most heroic actions of the war, belongs in reality to black
+men; yet who now hears them spoken of in connection with it?  Among the
+traits which distinguished the black regiment was devotion to their
+officers.  In the attack made upon the American lines near Croton River
+on the 13th of the fifth month, 1781, Colonel Greene, the commander of
+the regiment, was cut down and mortally wounded; but the sabres of the
+enemy only reached him through the bodies of his faithful guard of
+blacks, who hovered over him to protect him, every one of whom was
+killed.  The late Dr. Harris, of Dunbarton, New Hampshire, a
+Revolutionary veteran, stated, in a speech at Francistown, New Hampshire,
+some years ago, that on one occasion the regiment to which he was
+attached was commanded to defend an important position, which the enemy
+thrice assailed, and from which they were as often repulsed.  "There
+was," said the venerable speaker, "a regiment of blacks in the same
+situation,--a regiment of negroes fighting for our liberty and
+independence, not a white man among them but the officers,--in the same
+dangerous and responsible position.  Had they been unfaithful or given
+way before the enemy, all would have been lost.  Three times in
+succession were they attacked with most desperate fury by well-
+disciplined and veteran troops; and three times did they successfully
+repel the assault, and thus preserve an army.  They fought thus through
+the war.  They were brave and hardy troops."
+
+In the debate in the New York Convention of 1821 for amending the
+Constitution of the State, on the question of extending the right of
+suffrage to the blacks, Dr. Clarke, the delegate from Delaware County,
+and other members, made honorable mention of the services of the colored
+troops in the Revolutionary army.
+
+The late James Forten, of Philadelphia, well known as a colored man of
+wealth, intelligence, and philanthropy, enlisted in the American navy
+under Captain Decatur, of the Royal Louis, was taken prisoner during his
+second cruise, and, with nineteen other colored men, confined on board
+the horrible Jersey prison-ship; All the vessels in the American service
+at that period were partly manned by blacks.  The old citizens of
+Philadelphia to this day remember the fact that, when the troops of the
+North marched through the city, one or more colored companies were
+attached to nearly all the regiments.
+
+Governor Eustis, in the speech before quoted, states that the free
+colored soldiers entered the ranks with the whites.  The time of those
+who were slaves was purchased of their masters, and they were induced to
+enter the service in consequence of a law of Congress by which, on
+condition of their serving in the ranks during the war, they were made
+freemen.  This hope of liberty inspired them with courage to oppose their
+breasts to the Hessian bayonet at Red Bank, and enabled them to endure
+with fortitude the cold and famine of Valley Forge.  The anecdote of the
+slave of General Sullivan, of New Hampshire, is well known.  When his
+master told him that they were on the point of starting for the army, to
+fight for liberty, he shrewdly suggested that it would be a great
+satisfaction to know that he was indeed going to fight for his liberty.
+Struck with the reasonableness and justice of this suggestion, General
+Sullivan at once gave him his freedom.
+
+The late Tristam Burgess, of Rhode Island, in a speech in Congress, first
+month, 1828, said "At the commencement of the Revolutionary War, Rhode
+Island had a number of slaves.  A regiment of them were enlisted into the
+Continental service, and no braver men met the enemy in battle; but not
+one of them was permitted to be a soldier until he had first been made a
+freeman."
+
+The celebrated Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, in his speech on the
+Missouri question, and in defence of the slave representation of the
+South, made the following admissions:--
+
+"They (the colored people) were in numerous instances the pioneers, and
+in all the laborers, of our armies.  To their hands were owing the
+greatest part of the fortifications raised for the protection of the
+country.  Fort Moultrie gave, at an early period of the inexperienced and
+untried valor of our citizens, immortality to the American arms; and in
+the Northern States numerous bodies of them were enrolled, and fought
+side by side with the whites at the battles of the Revolution."
+
+Let us now look forward thirty or forty years, to the last war with Great
+Britain, and see whether the whites enjoyed a monopoly of patriotism at
+that time.
+
+Martindale, of New York, in Congress, 22d of first month, 1828, said:
+"Slaves, or negroes who had been slaves, were enlisted as soldiers in the
+war of the Revolution; and I myself saw a battalion of them, as fine,
+martial-looking men as I ever saw, attached to the Northern army in the
+last war, on its march from Plattsburg to Sackett's Harbor."
+
+Hon. Charles Miner, of Pennsylvania, in Congress, second month, 7th,
+1828, said: "The African race make excellent soldiers.  Large numbers of
+them were with Perry, and helped to gain the brilliant victory of Lake
+Erie.  A whole battalion of them were distinguished for their orderly
+appearance."
+
+Dr. Clarke, in the convention which revised the Constitution of New York
+in 1821, speaking of the colored inhabitants of the State, said:--
+
+"In your late war they contributed largely towards some of your most
+splendid victories.  On Lakes Erie and Champlain, where your fleets
+triumphed over a foe superior in numbers and engines of death, they were
+manned in a large proportion with men of color.  And in this very house,
+in the fall of 1814, a bill passed, receiving the approbation of all the
+branches of your government, authorizing the governor to accept the
+services of a corps of two thousand free people of color.  Sir, these
+were times which tried men's souls.  In these times it was no sporting
+matter to bear arms.  These were times when a man who shouldered his
+musket did not know but he bared his bosom to receive a death-wound from
+the enemy ere he laid it aside; and in these times these people were
+found as ready and as willing to volunteer in your service as any other.
+They were not compelled to go; they were not drafted.  No; your pride had
+placed them beyond your compulsory power.  But there was no necessity for
+its exercise; they were volunteers,--yes, sir, volunteers to defend that
+very country from the inroads and ravages of a ruthless and vindictive
+foe which had treated them with insult, degradation, and slavery."
+
+On the capture of Washington by the British forces, it was judged
+expedient to fortify, without delay, the principal towns and cities
+exposed to similar attacks.  The Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia
+waited upon three of the principal colored citizens, namely, James
+Forten, Bishop Allen, and Absalom Jones, soliciting the aid of the people
+of color in erecting suitable defences for the city.  Accordingly,
+twenty-five hundred colored then assembled in the State-House yard, and
+from thence marched to Gray's Ferry, where they labored for two days
+almost without intermission.  Their labors were so faithful and efficient
+that a vote of thanks was tendered them by the committee.  A battalion of
+colored troops was at the same time organized in the city under an
+officer of the United States army; and they were on the point of marching
+to the frontier when peace was proclaimed.
+
+General Jackson's proclamations to the free colored inhabitants of
+Louisiana are well known.  In his first, inviting them to take up arms,
+he said:--
+
+"As sons of freedom, you are now called on to defend our most inestimable
+blessings.  As Americans, your country looks with confidence to her
+adopted children for a valorous support.  As fathers, husbands, and
+brothers, you are summoned to rally round the standard of the eagle, to
+defend all which is dear in existence."
+
+The second proclamation is one of the highest compliments ever paid by a
+military chief to his soldiers:--
+
+"TO THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR.
+
+"Soldiers! when on the banks of the Mobile I called you to take up arms,
+inviting you to partake the perils and glory of your white fellow-
+citizens, I expected much from you; for I was not ignorant that you
+possessed qualities most formidable to an invading enemy.  I knew with
+what fortitude you could endure hunger, and thirst, and all the fatigues
+of a campaign.  I knew well how you loved your native country, and that
+you, as well as ourselves, had to defend what man holds most dear,--his
+parents, wife, children, and property.  You have done more than I
+expected.  In addition to the previous qualities I before knew you to
+possess, I found among you a noble enthusiasm, which leads to the
+performance of great things.
+
+"Soldiers! the President of the United States shall hear how praiseworthy
+was your conduct in the hour of danger, and the Representatives of the
+American people will give you the praise your exploits entitle you to.
+Your general anticipates them in applauding your noble ardor."
+
+It will thus be seen that whatever honor belongs to the "heroes of the
+Revolution" and the volunteers in "the second war for independence" is to
+be divided between the white and the colored man.  We have dwelt upon
+this subject at length, not because it accords with our principles or
+feelings, for it is scarcely necessary for us to say that we are one of
+those who hold that
+
+                    "Peace hath her victories
+                    No less renowned than war,"
+
+and certainly far more desirable and useful; but because, in popular
+estimation, the patriotism which dares and does on the battle-field takes
+a higher place than the quiet exercise of the duties of peaceful
+citizenship; and we are willing that colored soldiers, with their
+descendants, should have the benefit, if possible, of a public sentiment
+which has so extravagantly lauded their white companions in arms.  If
+pulpits must be desecrated by eulogies of the patriotism of bloodshed, we
+see no reason why black defenders of their country in the war for liberty
+should not receive honorable mention as well as white invaders of a
+neighboring republic who have volunteered in a war for plunder and
+slavery extension.  For the latter class of "heroes" we have very little
+respect.  The patriotism of too many of them forcibly reminds us of Dr.
+Johnson's definition of that much-abused term "Patriotism, sir!  'T is
+the last refuge of a scoundrel."
+
+"What right, I demand," said an American orator some years ago, "have the
+children of Africa to a homestead in the white man's country?"  The
+answer will in part be found in the facts which we have presented.  Their
+right, like that of their white fellow-citizens, dates back to the dread
+arbitrament of battle.  Their bones whiten every stricken field of the
+Revolution; their feet tracked with blood the snows of Jersey; their toil
+built up every fortification south of the Potomac; they shared the famine
+and nakedness of Valley Forge and the pestilential horrors of the old
+Jersey prisonship.  Have they, then, no claim to an equal participation
+in the blessings which have grown out of the national independence for
+which they fought?  Is it just, is it magnanimous, is it safe, even, to
+starve the patriotism of such a people, to cast their hearts out of the
+treasury of the Republic, and to convert them, by political
+disfranchisement and social oppression, into enemies?
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SCOTTISH REFORMERS.
+
+     "The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small;
+     Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He
+     all."
+                         FRIEDRICH VON LOGAU.
+
+The great impulse of the French Revolution was not confined by
+geographical boundaries.  Flashing hope into the dark places of the
+earth, far down among the poor and long oppressed, or startling the
+oppressor in his guarded chambers like that mountain of fire which fell
+into the sea at the sound of the apocalyptic trumpet, it agitated the
+world.
+
+The arguments of Condorcet, the battle-words of Mirabeau, the fierce zeal
+of St. Just, the iron energy of Danton, the caustic wit of Camille
+Desmoulins, and the sweet eloquence of Vergniaud found echoes in all
+lands, and nowhere more readily than in Great Britain, the ancient foe
+and rival of France.  The celebrated Dr. Price, of London, and the still
+more distinguished Priestley, of Birmingham, spoke out boldly in defence
+of the great principles of the Revolution.  A London club of reformers,
+reckoning among its members such men as Sir William Jones, Earl Grey,
+Samuel Whitbread, and Sir James Mackintosh, was established for the
+purpose of disseminating liberal appeals and arguments throughout the
+United Kingdom.
+
+In Scotland an auxiliary society was formed, under the name of Friends of
+the People.  Thomas Muir, young in years, yet an elder in the Scottish
+kirk, a successful advocate at the bar, talented, affable, eloquent, and
+distinguished for the purity of his life and his enthusiasm in the cause
+of freedom, was its principal originator.  In the twelfth month of 1792 a
+convention of reformers was held at Edinburgh.  The government became
+alarmed, and a warrant was issued for the arrest of Muir.  He escaped to
+France; but soon after, venturing to return to his native land, was
+recognized and imprisoned.  He was tried upon the charge of lending books
+of republican tendency, and reading an address from Theobald Wolfe Tone
+and the United Irishmen before the society of which he was a member.  He
+defended himself in a long and eloquent address, which concluded in the
+following manly strain:--
+
+"What, then, has been my crime?  Not the lending to a relation a copy of
+Thomas Paine's works,--not the giving away to another a few numbers of an
+innocent and constitutional publication; but my crime is, for having
+dared to be, according to the measure of my feeble abilities, a strenuous
+and an active advocate for an equal representation of the people in the
+House of the people,--for having dared to accomplish a measure by legal
+means which was to diminish the weight of their taxes and to put an end
+to the profusion of their blood.  Gentlemen, from my infancy to this
+moment I have devoted myself to the cause of the people.  It is a good
+cause: it will ultimately prevail,--it will finally triumph."
+
+He was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, and was removed to
+the Edinburgh jail, from thence to the hulks, and lastly to the
+transport-ship, containing eighty-three convicts, which conveyed him to
+Botany Bay.
+
+The next victim was Palmer, a learned and highly accomplished Unitarian
+minister in Dundee.  He was greatly beloved and respected as a polished
+gentleman and sincere friend of the people.  He was charged with
+circulating a republican tract, and was sentenced to seven years'
+transportation.
+
+But the Friends of the People were not quelled by this summary punishment
+of two of their devoted leaders.  In the tenth month, 1793, delegates
+were called together from various towns in Scotland, as well as from
+Birmingham, Sheffield, and other places in England.  Gerrald and Margarot
+were sent up by the London society.  After a brief sitting, the
+convention was dispersed by the public authorities.  Its sessions were
+opened and closed with prayer, and the speeches of its members manifested
+the pious enthusiasm of the old Cameronians and Parliament-men of the
+times of Cromwell.  Many of the dissenting clergy were present.  William
+Skirving, the most determined of the band, had been educated for the
+ministry, and was a sincerely religious man.  Joseph Gerrald was a young
+man of brilliant talents and exemplary character.  When the sheriff
+entered the hall to disperse the friends of liberty, Gerrald knelt in
+prayer.  His remarkable words were taken down by a reporter on the spot.
+There is nothing in modern history to compare with this supplication,
+unless it be that of Sir Henry Vane, a kindred martyr, at the foot of the
+scaffold, just before his execution.  It is the prayer of universal
+humanity, which God will yet hear and answer.
+
+"O thou Governor of the universe, we rejoice that, at all times and in
+all circumstances, we have liberty to approach Thy throne, and that we
+are assured that no sacrifice is more acceptable to Thee than that which
+is made for the relief of the oppressed.  In this moment of trial and
+persecution we pray that Thou wouldst be our defender, our counsellor,
+and our guide.  Oh, be Thou a pillar of fire to us, as Thou wast to our
+fathers of old, to enlighten and direct us; and to our enemies a pillar
+of cloud, and darkness, and confusion.
+
+"Thou art Thyself the great Patron of liberty.  Thy service is perfect
+freedom.  Prosper, we beseech Thee, every endeavor which we make to
+promote Thy cause; for we consider the cause of truth, or every cause
+which tends to promote the happiness of Thy creatures, as Thy cause.
+
+"O thou merciful Father of mankind, enable us, for Thy name's sake, to
+endure persecution with fortitude; and may we believe that all trials and
+tribulations of life which we endure shall work together for good to them
+that love Thee; and grant that the greater the evil, and the longer it
+may be continued, the greater good, in Thy holy and adorable providence,
+may be produced therefrom.  And this we beg, not for our own merits, but
+through the merits of Him who is hereafter to judge the world in
+righteousness and mercy."
+
+He ceased, and the sheriff, who had been temporarily overawed by the
+extraordinary scene, enforced the warrant, and the meeting was broken up.
+The delegates descended to the street in silence,--Arthur's Seat and
+Salisbury Crags glooming in the distance and night,--an immense and
+agitated multitude waiting around, over which tossed the flaring
+flambeaux of the sheriff's train.  Gerrald, who was already under arrest,
+as he descended, spoke aloud, "Behold the funeral torches of Liberty!"
+
+Skirving and several others were immediately arrested.  They were tried
+in the first month, 1794, and sentenced, as Muir and Palmer had
+previously been, to transportation.  Their conduct throughout was worthy
+of their great and holy cause.  Gerrald's defence was that of freedom
+rather than his own.  Forgetting himself, he spoke out manfully and
+earnestly for the poor, the oppressed, the overtaxed, and starving
+millions of his countrymen.  That some idea may be formed of this noble
+plea for liberty, I give an extract from the concluding paragraphs:--
+
+"True religion, like all free governments, appeals to the understanding
+for its support, and not to the sword.  All systems, whether civil or
+moral, can only be durable in proportion as they are founded on truth and
+calculated to promote the good of mankind.  This will account to us why
+governments suited to the great energies of man have always outlived the
+perishable things which despotism has erected.  Yes, this will account to
+us why the stream of Time, which is continually washing away the
+dissoluble fabrics of superstitions and impostures, passes without injury
+by the adamant of Christianity.
+
+"Those who are versed in the history of their country, in the history of
+the human race, must know that rigorous state prosecutions have always
+preceded the era of convulsion; and this era, I fear, will be accelerated
+by the folly and madness of our rulers.  If the people are discontented,
+the proper mode of quieting their discontent is, not by instituting
+rigorous and sanguinary prosecutions, but by redressing their wrongs and
+conciliating their affections.  Courts of justice, indeed, may be called
+in to the aid of ministerial vengeance; but if once the purity of their
+proceedings is suspected, they will cease to be objects of reverence to
+the nation; they will degenerate into empty and expensive pageantry, and
+become the partial instruments of vexatious oppression.  Whatever may
+become of me, my principles will last forever.  Individuals may perish;
+but truth is eternal.  The rude blasts of tyranny may blow from every
+quarter; but freedom is that hardy plant which will survive the tempest
+and strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil.
+
+"Gentlemen, I am in your hands.  About my life I feel not the slightest
+anxiety: if it would promote the cause, I would cheerfully make the
+sacrifice; for if I perish on an occasion like the present, out of my
+ashes will arise a flame to consume the tyrants and oppressors of my
+country."
+
+Years have passed, and the generation which knew the persecuted reformers
+has given place to another.  And now, half a century after William
+Skirving, as he rose to receive his sentence, declared to his judges,
+"You may condemn us as felons, but your sentence shall yet be reversed by
+the people," the names of these men are once more familiar to British
+lips.  The sentence has been reversed; the prophecy of Skirving has
+become history.  On the 21st of the eighth month, 1853, the corner-stone
+of a monument to the memory of the Scottish martyrs--for which
+subscriptions had been received from such men as Lord Holland, the Dukes
+of Bedford and Norfolk; and the Earls of Essex and Leicester--was laid
+with imposing ceremonies in the beautiful burial-place of Calton Hill,
+Edinburgh, by the veteran reformer and tribune of the people, Joseph
+Hume, M. P.  After delivering an appropriate address, the aged radical
+closed the impressive scene by reading the prayer of Joseph Gerrald.  At
+the banquet which afterwards took place, and which was presided over by
+John Dunlop, Esq., addresses were made by the president and Dr. Ritchie,
+and by William Skirving, of Kirkaldy, son of the martyr.  The Complete
+Suffrage Association of Edinburgh, to the number of five hundred, walked
+in procession to Calton Hill, and in the open air proclaimed unmolested
+the very principles for which the martyrs of the past century had
+suffered.
+
+The account of this tribute to the memory of departed worth cannot fail
+to awaken in generous hearts emotions of gratitude towards Him who has
+thus signally vindicated His truth, showing that the triumph of the
+oppressor is but for a season, and that even in this world a lie cannot
+live forever.  Well and truly did George Fox say in his last days,
+
+                    "The truth is above all."
+
+Will it be said, however, that this tribute comes too late; that it
+cannot solace those brave hearts which, slowly broken by the long agony
+of colonial servitude, are now cold in strange graves?  It is, indeed, a
+striking illustration of the truth that he who would benefit his fellow-
+man must "walk by faith," sowing his seed in the morning, and in the
+evening withholding not his hand; knowing only this, that in God's good
+time the harvest shall spring up and ripen, if not for himself, yet for
+others, who, as they bind the full sheaves and gather in the heavy
+clusters, may perchance remember him with gratitude and set up stones of
+memorial on the fields of his toil and sacrifices.  We may regret that in
+this stage of the spirit's life the sincere and self-denying worker is
+not always permitted to partake of the fruits of his toil or receive the
+honors of a benefactor.  We hear his good evil spoken of, and his noblest
+sacrifices counted as naught; we see him not only assailed by the wicked,
+but discountenanced and shunned by the timidly good, followed on his hot
+and dusty pathway by the execrations of the hounding mob and the
+contemptuous pity of the worldly wise and prudent; and when at last the
+horizon of Time shuts down between him and ourselves, and the places
+which have known him know him no more forever, we are almost ready to say
+with the regal voluptuary of old,  This also is vanity and a great evil;
+"for what hath a man of all his labor and of the vexation of his heart
+wherein he hath labored under the sun?"  But is this the end?  Has God's
+universe no wider limits than the circle of the blue wall which shuts in
+our nestling-place?  Has life's infancy only been provided for, and
+beyond this poor nursery-chamber of Time is there no playground for the
+soul's youth, no broad fields for its manhood?  Perchance, could we but
+lift the curtains of the narrow pinfold wherein we dwell, we might see
+that our poor friend and brother whose fate we have thus deplored has by
+no means lost the reward of his labors, but that in new fields of duty he
+is cheered even by the tardy recognition of the value of his services in
+the old.  The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward
+and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same
+waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad
+by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,--flowers,
+perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of
+Time.  Who shall say that the mournful and repentant love with which the
+benefactors of our race are at length regarded may not be to them, in
+their new condition of being, sweet and grateful as the perfume of long-
+forgotten flowers, or that our harvest-hymns of rejoicing may not reach
+the ears of those who in weakness and suffering scattered the seeds of
+blessing?
+
+The history of the Edinburgh reformers is no new one; it is that of all
+who seek to benefit their age by rebuking its popular crimes and exposing
+its cherished errors.  The truths which they told were not believed, and
+for that very reason were the more needed; for it is evermore the case
+that the right word when first uttered is an unpopular and denied one.
+Hence he who undertakes to tread the thorny pathway of reform--who,
+smitten with the love of truth and justice, or indignant in view of wrong
+and insolent oppression, is rashly inclined to throw himself at once into
+that great conflict which the Persian seer not untruly represented as a
+war between light and darkness--would do well to count the cost in the
+outset.  If he can live for Truth alone, and, cut off from the general
+sympathy, regard her service as its "own exceeding great reward;" if he
+can bear to be counted a fanatic and crazy visionary; if, in all good
+nature, he is ready to receive from the very objects of his solicitude
+abuse and obloquy in return for disinterested and self-sacrificing
+efforts for their welfare; if, with his purest motives misunderstood and
+his best actions perverted and distorted into crimes, he can still hold
+on his way and patiently abide the hour when "the whirligig of Time shall
+bring about its revenges;" if, on the whole, he is prepared to be looked
+upon as a sort of moral outlaw or social heretic, under good society's
+interdict of food and fire; and if he is well assured that he can,
+through all this, preserve his cheerfulness and faith in man,--let him
+gird up his loins and go forward in God's name.  He is fitted for his
+vocation; he has watched all night by his armor.  Whatever his trial may
+be, he is prepared; he may even be happily disappointed in respect to it;
+flowers of unexpected refreshing may overhang the hedges of his strait
+and narrow way; but it remains to be true that he who serves his
+contemporaries in faithfulness and sincerity must expect no wages from
+their gratitude; for, as has been well said, there is, after all, but one
+way of doing the world good, and unhappily that way the world does not
+like; for it consists in telling it the very thing which it does not wish
+to hear.
+
+Unhappily, in the case of the reformer, his most dangerous foes are those
+of his own household.  True, the world's garden has become a desert and
+needs renovation; but is his own little nook weedless?  Sin abounds
+without; but is his own heart pure?  While smiting down the giants and
+dragons which beset the outward world, are there no evil guests sitting
+by his own hearth-stone?  Ambition, envy, self-righteousness, impatience,
+dogmatism, and pride of opinion stand at his door-way ready to enter
+whenever he leaves it unguarded.  Then, too, there is no small danger of
+failing to discriminate between a rational philanthropy, with its
+adaptation of means to ends, and that spiritual knight-errantry which
+undertakes the championship of every novel project of reform, scouring
+the world in search of distressed schemes held in durance by common sense
+and vagaries happily spellbound by ridicule.  He must learn that,
+although the most needful truth may be unpopular, it does not follow that
+unpopularity is a proof of the truth of his doctrines or the expediency
+of his measures.  He must have the liberality to admit that it is barely
+possible for the public on some points to be right and himself wrong, and
+that the blessing invoked upon those who suffer for righteousness is not
+available to such as court persecution and invite contempt; for folly has
+its martyrs as well as wisdom; and he who has nothing better to show of
+himself than the scars and bruises which the popular foot has left upon
+him is not even sure of winning the honors of martyrdom as some
+compensation for the loss of dignity and self-respect involved in the
+exhibition of its pains.  To the reformer, in an especial manner, comes
+home the truth that whoso ruleth his own spirit is greater than he who
+taketh a city.  Patience, hope, charity, watchfulness unto prayer,--how
+needful are all these to his success!  Without them he is in danger of
+ingloriously giving up his contest with error and prejudice at the first
+repulse; or, with that spiteful philanthropy which we sometimes witness,
+taking a sick world by the nose, like a spoiled child, and endeavoring to
+force down its throat the long-rejected nostrums prepared for its relief.
+
+What then?  Shall we, in view of these things, call back young, generous
+spirits just entering upon the perilous pathway?  God forbid!  Welcome,
+thrice welcome, rather.  Let them go forward, not unwarned of the dangers
+nor unreminded of the pleasures which belong to the service of humanity.
+Great is the consciousness of right.  Sweet is the answer of a good
+conscience.  He who pays his whole-hearted homage to truth and duty, who
+swears his lifelong fealty on their altars, and rises up a Nazarite
+consecrated to their holy service, is not without his solace and
+enjoyment when, to the eyes of others, he seems the most lonely and
+miserable.  He breathes an atmosphere which the multitude know not of;
+"a serene heaven which they cannot discern rests over him, glorious in
+its purity and stillness."  Nor is he altogether without kindly human
+sympathies.  All generous and earnest hearts which are brought in contact
+with his own beat evenly with it.  All that is good, and truthful, and
+lovely in man, whenever and wherever it truly recognizes him, must sooner
+or later acknowledge his claim to love and reverence.  His faith
+overcomes all things.  The future unrolls itself before him, with its
+waving harvest-fields springing up from the seed he is scattering; and he
+looks forward to the close of life with the calm confidence of one who
+feels that he has not lived idle and useless, but with hopeful heart and
+strong arm has labored with God and Nature for the best.
+
+And not in vain.  In the economy of God, no effort, however small, put
+forth for the right cause, fails of its effect.  No voice, however
+feeble, lifted up for truth, ever dies amidst the confused noises of
+time.  Through discords of sin and sorrow, pain and wrong, it rises a
+deathless melody, whose notes of wailing are hereafter to be changed to
+those of triumph as they blend with the great harmony of a reconciled
+universe.  The language of a transatlantic reformer to his friends is
+then as true as it is hopeful and cheering: "Triumph is certain.  We have
+espoused no losing cause.  In the body we may not join our shout with the
+victors; but in spirit we may even now.  There is but an interval of time
+between us and the success at which we aim.  In all other respects the
+links of the chain are complete.  Identifying ourselves with immortal and
+immutable principles, we share both their immortality and immutability.
+The vow which unites us with truth makes futurity present with us.  Our
+being resolves itself into an everlasting now.  It is not so correct to
+say that we shall be victorious as that we are so.  When we will in
+unison with the supreme Mind, the characteristics of His will become, in
+some sort, those of ours.  What He has willed is virtually done.  It may
+take ages to unfold itself; but the germ of its whole history is wrapped
+up in His determination.  When we make His will ours, which we do when we
+aim at truth, that upon which we are resolved is done, decided, born.
+Life is in it.  It is; and the future is but the development of its
+being.  Ours, therefore, is a perpetual triumph.  Our deeds are, all of
+them, component elements of success." [Miall's Essays; Nonconformist,
+Vol. iv.]
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH.
+
+From a letter on the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the landing
+of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, December 22, 1870.
+
+No one can appreciate more highly than myself the noble qualities of the
+men and women of the Mayflower.  It is not of them that I, a descendant
+of the "sect called Quakers," have reason to complain in the matter of
+persecution.  A generation which came after them, with less piety and
+more bigotry, is especially responsible for the little unpleasantness
+referred to; and the sufferers from it scarcely need any present
+championship.  They certainly did not wait altogether for the revenges of
+posterity.  If they lost their ears, it is satisfactory to remember that
+they made those of their mutilators tingle with a rhetoric more sharp
+than polite.
+
+A worthy New England deacon once described a brother in the church as a
+very good man Godward, but rather hard man-ward.  It cannot be denied
+that some very satisfactory steps have been taken in the latter
+direction, at least, since the days of the Pilgrims.  Our age is tolerant
+of creed and dogma, broader in its sympathies, more keenly sensitive to
+temporal need, and, practically recognizing the brotherhood of the race,
+wherever a cry of suffering is heard its response is quick and generous.
+It has abolished slavery, and is lifting woman from world-old degradation
+to equality with man before the law.  Our criminal codes no longer embody
+the maxim of barbarism, "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," but
+have regard not only for the safety of the community, but to the reform
+and well-being of the criminal.  All the more, however, for this amiable
+tenderness do we need the counterpoise of a strong sense of justice.
+With our sympathy for the wrong-doer we need the old Puritan and Quaker
+hatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions a
+righteous abhorrence of sin.  All the more for the sweet humanities and
+Christian liberalism which, in drawing men nearer to each other, are
+increasing the sum of social influences for good or evil, we need the
+bracing atmosphere, healthful, if austere, of the old moralities.
+Individual and social duties are quite as imperative now as when they
+were minutely specified in statute-books and enforced by penalties no
+longer admissible.  It is well that stocks, whipping-post, and ducking-
+stool are now only matters of tradition; but the honest reprobation of
+vice and crime which they symbolized should by no means perish with them.
+The true life of a nation is in its personal morality, and no excellence
+of constitution and laws can avail much if the people lack purity and
+integrity.  Culture, art, refinement, care for our own comfort and that
+of others, are all well, but truth, honor, reverence, and fidelity to
+duty are indispensable.
+
+The Pilgrims were right in affirming the paramount authority of the law
+of God.  If they erred in seeking that authoritative law, and passed over
+the Sermon on the Mount for the stern Hebraisms of Moses; if they
+hesitated in view of the largeness of Christian liberty; if they seemed
+unwilling to accept the sweetness and light of the good tidings, let us
+not forget that it was the mistake of men who feared more than they dared
+to hope, whose estimate of the exceeding awfulness of sin caused them to
+dwell upon God's vengeance rather than his compassion; and whose dread of
+evil was so great that, in shutting their hearts against it, they
+sometimes shut out the good.  It is well for us if we have learned to
+listen to the sweet persuasion of the Beatitudes; but there are crises in
+all lives which require also the emphatic "Thou shalt not" or the
+Decalogue which the founders wrote on the gate-posts of their
+commonwealth.
+
+Let us then be thankful for the assurances which the last few years have
+afforded us that:
+
+              "The Pilgrim spirit is not dead,
+               But walks in noon's broad light."
+
+We have seen it in the faith and trust which no circumstances could
+shake, in heroic self-sacrifice, in entire consecration to duty.  The
+fathers have lived in their sons.  Have we not all known the Winthrops
+and Brewsters, the Saltonstalls and Sewalls, of old times, in
+gubernatorial chairs, in legislative halls, around winter camp-fires, in
+the slow martyrdoms of prison and hospital?  The great struggle through
+which we have passed has taught us how much we owe to the men and women
+of the Plymouth Colony,--the noblest ancestry that ever a people looked
+back to with love and reverence.  Honor, then, to the Pilgrims! Let their
+memory be green forever!
+
+
+
+
+
+GOVERNOR ENDICOTT.
+
+I am sorry that I cannot respond in person to the invitation of the Essex
+Institute to its commemorative festival on the 18th.  I especially regret
+it, because, though a member of the Society of Friends, and, as such,
+regarding with abhorrence the severe persecution of the sect under the
+administration of Governor Endicott, I am not unmindful of the otherwise
+noble qualities and worthy record of the great Puritan, whose misfortune
+it was to live in an age which regarded religious toleration as a crime.
+He was the victim of the merciless logic of his creed.  He honestly
+thought that every convert to Quakerism became by virtue of that
+conversion a child of perdition; and, as the head of the Commonwealth,
+responsible for the spiritual as well as temporal welfare of its
+inhabitants, he felt it his duty to whip, banish, and hang heretics to
+save his people from perilous heresy.
+
+The extravagance of some of the early Quakers has been grossly
+exaggerated.  Their conduct will compare in this respect favorably with
+that of the first Anabaptists and Independents; but it must be admitted
+that many of them manifested a good deal of that wild enthusiasm which
+has always been the result of persecution and the denial of the rights of
+conscience and worship.  Their pertinacious defiance of laws enacted
+against them, and their fierce denunciations of priests and magistrates,
+must have been particularly aggravating to a man as proud and high
+tempered as John Endicott.  He had that free-tongued neighbor of his,
+Edward Wharton, smartly whipped at the cart-tail about once a month, but
+it may be questioned whether the governor's ears did not suffer as much
+under Wharton's biting sarcasm and "free speech" as the latter's back did
+from the magisterial whip.
+
+Time has proved that the Quakers had the best of the controversy; and
+their descendants can well afford to forget and forgive an error which
+the Puritan governor shared with the generation in which he lived.
+
+WEST OSSIPEE, N. H., 14th 9th Month, 1878.
+
+
+
+
+
+JOHN WINTHROP.
+
+On the anniversary of his landing at Salem.
+
+I see by the call of the Essex Institute that some probability is
+suggested that I may furnish a poem for the occasion of its meeting at
+The Willows on the 22d.  I would be glad to make the implied probability
+a fact, but I find it difficult to put my thoughts into metrical form,
+and there will be little need of it, as I understand a lady of Essex
+County, who adds to her modern culture and rare poetical gifts the best
+spirit of her Puritan ancestry, has lent the interest of her verse to the
+occasion.
+
+It was a happy thought of the Institute to select for its first meeting
+of the season the day and the place of the landing of the great and good
+governor, and permit me to say, as thy father's old friend, that its
+choice for orator, of the son of him whose genius, statesmanship, and
+eloquence honored the place of his birth, has been equally happy.  As I
+look over the list of the excellent worthies of the first emigrations, I
+find no one who, in all respects, occupies a nobler place in the early
+colonial history of Massachusetts than John Winthrop.  Like Vane and
+Milton, he was a gentleman as well as a Puritan, a cultured and
+enlightened statesman as well as a God-fearing Christian.  It was not
+under his long and wise chief magistracy that religious bigotry and
+intolerance hung and tortured their victims, and the terrible delusion of
+witchcraft darkened the sun at noonday over Essex.  If he had not quite
+reached the point where, to use the words of Sir Thomas More, he could
+"hear heresies talked and yet let the heretics alone," he was in charity
+and forbearance far in advance of his generation.
+
+I am sorry that I must miss an occasion of so much interest.  I hope you
+will not lack the presence of the distinguished citizen who inherits the
+best qualities of his honored ancestor, and who, as a statesman, scholar,
+and patriot, has added new lustre to the name of Winthrop.
+
+DANVERS, 6th Month, 19, 1880.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                               VOLUME VII.
+
+
+                        THE CONFLICT WITH SLAVERY
+
+                           POLITICS AND REFORM
+
+                              THE INNER LIFE
+
+                                CRITICISM
+
+
+                                    BY
+
+                         JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+THE CONFLICT WITH SLAVERY
+     JUSTICE AND EXPEDIENCY
+     THE ABOLITIONISTS; THEIR SENTIMENTS AND OBJECTS
+     LETTER TO SAMUEL E. SEWALL
+     JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
+     THE BIBLE AND SLAVERY
+     WHAT IS SLAVERY
+     DEMOCRAT AND SLAVERY
+     THE TWO PROCESSIONS
+     A CHAPTER OF HISTORY
+     THOMAS CARLYLE ON THE SLAVE QUESTION
+     FORMATION OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY
+     THE LESSON AND OUR DUTY
+     CHARLES SUMNER AND THE STATE DEPARTMENT
+     THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1872
+     THE CENSURE OF SUMNER
+     THE ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION OF 1833
+     KANSAS
+     WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
+     ANTI-SLAVERY ANNIVERSARY
+     RESPONSE TO THE CELEBRATION OF MY EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY
+
+REFORM AND POLITICS.
+     UTOPIAN SCHEMES AND POLITICAL THEORISTS
+     PECULIAR INSTITUTIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS
+     LORD ASHLEY AND THE THIEVES
+     WOMAN SUFFRAGE
+     ITALIAN UNITY
+     INDIAN CIVILIZATION
+     READING FOR THE BLIND
+     THE INDIAN QUESTION
+     THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
+     OUR DUMB RELATIONS
+     INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION
+     SUFFRAGE FOR WOMEN
+
+THE INNER LIFE.
+     THE AGENCY OF EVIL
+     HAMLET AMONG THE GRAVES
+     SWEDENBORG
+     THE BETTER LAND
+     DORA GREENWELL
+     THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
+     JOHN WOOLMAN'S JOURNAL
+     THE OLD WAY
+     HAVERFORD COLLEGE
+
+CRITICISM.
+     EVANGELINE
+     MIRTH AND MEDICINE
+     FAME AND GLORY
+     FANATICISM
+     THE POETRY OF THE NORTH
+
+
+
+
+                        THE CONFLICT WITH SLAVERY
+
+
+
+                          JUSTICE AND EXPEDIENCY
+
+OR, SLAVERY CONSIDERED WITH A VIEW TO ITS RIGHTFUL AND EFFECTUAL REMEDY,
+ABOLITION.
+
+                                 [1833.]
+
+     "There is a law above all the enactments of human codes, the same
+     throughout the world, the same in all time,--such as it was before
+     the daring genius of Columbus pierced the night of ages, and opened
+     to one world the sources of wealth and power and knowledge, to
+     another all unutterable woes; such as it is at this day: it is the
+     law written by the finger of God upon the heart of man; and by that
+     law, unchangeable and eternal while men despise fraud, and loathe
+     rapine, and abhor blood, they shall reject with indignation the wild
+     and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man."
+     --LORD BROUGHAM.
+
+IT may be inquired of me why I seek to agitate the subject of Slavery in
+New England, where we all acknowledge it to be an evil.  Because such an
+acknowledgment is not enough on our part.  It is doing no more than the
+slave-master and the slave-trader.  "We have found," says James Monroe,
+in his speech on the subject before the Virginia Convention, "that this
+evil has preyed upon the very vitals of the Union; and has been
+prejudicial to all the states in which it has existed."  All the states
+in their several Constitutions and declarations of rights have made a
+similar statement.  And what has been the consequence of this general
+belief in the evil of human servitude?  Has it sapped the foundations of
+the infamous system?  No.  Has it decreased the number of its victims?
+Quite the contrary.  Unaccompanied by philanthropic action, it has been
+in a moral point of view worthless, a thing without vitality, sightless,
+soulless, dead.
+
+But it may be said that the miserable victims of the system have our
+sympathies.  Sympathy the sympathy of the Priest and the Levite, looking
+on, and acknowledging, but holding itself aloof from mortal suffering.
+Can such hollow sympathy reach the broken of heart, and does the blessing
+of those who are ready to perish answer it?  Does it hold back the lash
+from the slave, or sweeten his bitter bread?  One's heart and soul are
+becoming weary of this sympathy, this heartless mockery of feeling; sick
+of the common cant of hypocrisy, wreathing the artificial flowers of
+sentiment over unutterable pollution and unimaginable wrong.  It is
+white-washing the sepulchre to make us forget its horrible deposit.  It
+is scattering flowers around the charnel-house and over the yet festering
+grave to turn away our thoughts "from the dead men's bones and all
+uncleanness," the pollution and loathsomeness below.
+
+No! let the truth on this subject, undisguised, naked, terrible as it is,
+stand out before us.  Let us no longer seek to cover it; let us no longer
+strive to forget it; let us no more dare to palliate it.  It is better to
+meet it here with repentance than at the bar of God.  The cry of the
+oppressed, of the millions who have perished among us as the brute
+perisheth, shut out from the glad tidings of salvation, has gone there
+before us, to Him who as a father pitieth all His children.  Their blood
+is upon us as a nation; woe unto us, if we repent not, as a nation, in
+dust and ashes.  Woe unto us if we say in our hearts, "The Lord shall not
+see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it.  He that planted the ear,
+shall He not hear?  He who formed the eye, shall He not see?"
+
+But it may be urged that New England has no participation in slavery, and
+is not responsible for its wickedness.
+
+Why are we thus willing to believe a lie?  New England not responsible!
+Bound by the United States constitution to protect the slave-holder in
+his sins, and yet not responsible!  Joining hands with crime, covenanting
+with oppression, leaguing with pollution, and yet not responsible!
+Palliating the evil, hiding the evil, voting for the evil, do we not
+participate in it?
+
+     [Messrs.  Harvey of New Hampshire, Mallary of Vermont, and Ripley of
+     Maine, voted in the Congress of 1829 against the consideration of a
+     Resolution for inquiring into the expediency of abolishing slavery
+     in the District of Columbia.]
+
+Members of one confederacy, children of one family, the curse and the
+shame, the sin against our brother, and the sin against our God, all the
+iniquity of slavery which is revealed to man, and all which crieth in the
+ear, or is manifested to the eye of Jehovah, will assuredly be visited
+upon all our people.  Why, then, should we stretch out our hands towards
+our Southern brethren, and like the Pharisee thank God we are not like
+them?  For so long as we practically recognize the infernal principle
+that "man can hold property in man," God will not hold us guiltless.  So
+long as we take counsel of the world's policy instead of the justice of
+heaven, so long as we follow a mistaken political expediency in
+opposition to the express commands of God, so long will the wrongs of the
+slaves rise like a cloud of witnesses against us at the inevitable bar.
+
+Slavery is protected by the constitutional compact, by the standing army,
+by the militia of the free states.
+
+     [J. Q. Adams is the only member of Congress who has ventured to
+     speak plainly of this protection.  See also his very able Report
+     from the minority of the Committee on Manufactures.  In his speech
+     during the last session, upon the bill of the Committee of Ways and
+     Means, after discussing the constitutional protection of slavery, he
+     says: "But that same interest is further protected by the Laws of
+     the United States.  It was protected by the existence of a standing
+     army.  If the States of this Union were all free republican States,
+     and none of them possessed any of the machinery of which he had
+     spoken, and if another portion of the Union were not exposed to
+     another danger, from their vicinity to the tribes of Indian savages,
+     he believed it would be difficult to prove to the House any such
+     thing as the necessity of a standing army.  What in fact was the
+     occupation of the army?  It had been protecting this very same
+     interest.  It had been doing so ever since the army existed.  Of
+     what use to the district of Plymouth (which he there represented)
+     was the standing army of the United States?  Of not one dollar's
+     use, and never had been."]
+
+Let us not forget that should the slaves, goaded by wrongs unendurable,
+rise in desperation, and pour the torrent of their brutal revenge over
+the beautiful Carolinas, or the consecrated soil of Virginia, New England
+would be called upon to arrest the progress of rebellion,--to tread out
+with the armed heel of her soldiery that spirit of freedom, which knows
+no distinction of cast or color; which has been kindled in the heart of
+the black as well as in that of the white.
+
+And what is this system which we are thus protecting and upholding?  A
+system which holds two millions of God's creatures in bondage, which
+leaves one million females without any protection save their own feeble
+strength, and which makes even the exercise of that strength in
+resistance to outrage punishable with death! which considers rational,
+immortal beings as articles of traffic, vendible commodities,
+merchantable property,--which recognizes no social obligations, no
+natural relations,--which tears without scruple the infant from the
+mother, the wife from the husband, the parent from the child.  In the
+strong but just language of another: "It is the full measure of pure,
+unmixed, unsophisticated wickedness; and scorning all competition or
+comparison, it stands without a rival in the secure, undisputed
+possession of its detestable preeminence."
+
+So fearful an evil should have its remedies.  The following are among the
+many which have been from time to time proposed:--
+
+1.  Placing the slaves in the condition of the serfs of Poland and
+Russia, fixed to the soil, and without the right on the part of the
+master to sell or remove them.  This was intended as a preliminary to
+complete emancipation at some remote period, but it is impossible to
+perceive either its justice or expediency.
+
+2.  Gradual abolition, an indefinite term, but which is understood to
+imply the draining away drop by drop, of the great ocean of wrong;
+plucking off at long intervals some, straggling branches of the moral
+Upas; holding out to unborn generations the shadow of a hope which the
+present may never feel gradually ceasing to do evil; gradually refraining
+from robbery, lust, and murder: in brief, obeying a short-sighted and
+criminal policy rather than the commands of God.
+
+3.  Abstinence on the part of the people of the free states from the use
+of the known products of slave labor, in order to render that labor
+profitless.  Beyond a doubt the example of conscientious individuals may
+have a salutary effect upon the minds of some of the slave-holders; I but
+so long as our confederacy exists, a commercial intercourse with slave
+states and a consumption of their products cannot be avoided.
+
+     [The following is a recorded statement of the venerated Sir William
+     Jones: "Let sugar be as cheap as it may, it is better to eat none,
+     better to eat aloes and colloquintida, than violate a primary law
+     impressed on every heart not imbruted with avarice; than rob one
+     human creature of those eternal rights of which no law on earth can
+     justly deprive him."]
+
+4.  Colonization.
+The exclusive object of the American Colonization Society, according to
+the second article of its constitution, is to colonize the free people of
+color residing among us, in Africa or such other place as Congress may
+direct.  Steadily adhering to this object it has nothing to do with
+slavery; and I allude to it as a remedy only because some of its friends
+have in view an eventual abolition or an amelioration of the evil.
+
+Let facts speak.  The Colonization Society was organized in 1817.  It has
+two hundred and eighteen auxiliary societies.  The legislatures of
+fourteen states have recommended it.  Contributions have poured into its
+treasury from every quarter of the United States.  Addresses in its favor
+have been heard from all our pulpits.  It has been in operation sixteen
+years.  During this period nearly one million human beings have died in
+slavery: and the number of slaves has increased more than half a million,
+or in round numbers, 550,000
+
+The Colonization Society has been busily engaged all this while in
+conveying the slaves to Africa; in other words, abolishing slavery.  In
+this very charitable occupation it has carried away of manumitted slaves
+613
+
+Balance against the society .  .  .  .  549,387!
+
+But enough of its abolition tendency.  What has it done for amelioration?
+Witness the newly enacted laws of some of the slave states, laws bloody
+as the code of Draco, violating the laws of Cod and the unalienable
+rights of His children?--[It will be seen that the society approves of
+these laws.]--But why talk of amelioration?  Amelioration of what? of
+sin, of crime unutterable, of a system of wrong and outrage horrible in
+the eye of God Why seek to mark the line of a selfish policy, a carnal
+expediency between the criminality of hell and that repentance and its
+fruits enjoined of heaven?
+
+For the principles and views of the society we must look to its own
+statements and admissions; to its Annual Reports; to those of its
+auxiliaries; to the speeches and writings of its advocates; and to its
+organ, the African Repository.
+
+1.  It excuses slavery and apologizes for slaveholders.
+
+Proof.  "Slavery is an evil entailed upon the present generation of
+slave-holders, which they must suffer, whether they will or not!"  "The
+existence of slavery among us, though not at all to be objected to our
+Southern brethren as a fault," etc?  "It (the society) condemns no man
+because he is a slave-holder." "Recognizing the constitutional and
+legitimate existence of slavery, it seeks not to interfere, either
+directly or indirectly, with the rights it creates.  Acknowledging the
+necessity by which its present continuance and the rigorous provisions
+for its maintenance are justified," etc. "They (the Abolitionists)
+confound the misfortunes of one generation with the crimes of another,
+and would sacrifice both individual and public good to an unsubstantial
+theory of the rights of man."
+
+2.  It pledges itself not to oppose the system of slavery.
+
+Proof.  "Our society and the friends of colonization wish to be
+distinctly understood upon this point.  From the beginning they have
+disavowed, and they do yet disavow, that their object is the emancipation
+of slaves."--[Speech of James S. Green, Esq., First Annual Report of the
+New Jersey Colonization Society.]
+
+"This institution proposes to do good by a single specific course of
+measures.  Its direct and specific purpose is not the abolition of
+slavery, or the relief of pauperism, or the extension of commerce and
+civilization, or the enlargement of science, or the conversion of the
+heathen.  The single object which its constitution prescribes, and to
+which all its efforts are necessarily directed, is African colonization
+from America.  It proposes only to afford facilities for the voluntary
+emigration of free people of color from this country to the country of
+their fathers."
+
+"It is no abolition society; it addresses as yet arguments to no master,
+and disavows with horror the idea of offering temptations to any slave.
+It denies the design of attempting emancipation, either partial or
+general."
+
+"The Colonization Society, as such, have renounced wholly the name and
+the characteristics of abolitionists.  On this point they have been
+unjustly and injuriously slandered.  Into their accounts the subject of
+emancipation does not enter at all."
+
+"From its origin, and throughout the whole period of its existence, it
+has constantly disclaimed all intention of interfering, in the smallest
+degree, with the rights of property, or the object of emancipation,
+gradual or immediate."  .  .  .  "The society presents to the American
+public no project of emancipation."--[ Mr. Clay's Speech, Idem, vol.  vi.
+pp.  13, 17.]
+
+"The emancipation of slaves or the amelioration of their condition, with
+the moral, intellectual, and political improvement of people of color
+within the United States, are subjects foreign to the powers of this
+society."
+
+"The society, as a society, recognizes no principles in reference to the
+slave system.  It says nothing, and proposes to do nothing, respecting
+it." . . . "So far as we can ascertain, the supporters of the
+colonization policy generally believe that slavery is in this country a
+constitptional and legitimate system, which they have no inclination,
+interest, nor ability to disturb."
+
+3.  It regards God's rational creatures as property.
+
+Proof.  "We hold their slaves, as we hold their other property, sacred."
+
+"It is equally plain and undeniable that the society, in the prosecution
+of this work, has never interfered or evinced even a disposition to
+interfere in any way with the rights of proprietors of slaves."
+
+"To the slave-holder, who has charged upon them the wicked design of
+interfering with the rights of property under the specious pretext of
+removing a vicious and dangerous free population, they address themselves
+in a tone of conciliation and sympathy.  We know your rights, say they,
+and we respect them."
+
+4.  It boasts that its measures are calculated to perpetuate the detested
+system of slavery, to remove the fears of the slave-holder, and increase
+the value of his stock of human beings.
+
+Proof.  "They (the Southern slave-holders) will contribute more
+effectually to the continuance and strength of this system (slavery) by
+removing those now free than by any or all other methods which can
+possibly be devised."
+
+"So far from being connected with the abolition of slavery, the measure
+proposed would be one of the greatest securities to enable the master to
+keep in possession his own property."--[Speech of John Randolph at the
+first meeting of the Colonization Society.]
+
+"The tendency of the scheme, and one of its objects, is to secure slave-
+holders, and the whole Southern country, against certain evil
+consequences growing out of the present threefold mixture of our
+population."
+
+"There was but one way (to avert danger), but that might be made
+effectual, fortunately.  It was to provide and keep open a drain for the
+excess beyond the occasions of profitable employment.  Mr. Archer had
+been stating the case in the supposition, that after the present class of
+free blacks had been exhausted, by the operation of the plan he was
+recommending, others would be supplied for its action, in the proportion
+of the excess of colored population it would be necessary to throw off,
+by the process of voluntary manumission or sale.  This effect must result
+inevitably from the depreciating value of the slaves, ensuing their
+disproportionate multiplication.  The depreciation would be relieved and
+retarded at the same time by the process.  The two operations would aid
+reciprocally, and sustain each other, and both be in the highest degree
+beneficial.  It was on the ground of interest, therefore, the most
+indisputable pecuniary interest, that he addressed himself to the people
+and legislatures of the slave-holding states."
+
+"The slave-holder, who is in danger of having his slaves contaminated by
+their free friends of color, will not only be relieved from this danger,
+but the value of his slave will be enhanced."
+
+5.  It denies the power of Christian love to overcome an unholy prejudice
+against a portion of our fellow-creatures.
+
+Proof.  "The managers consider it clear that causes exist and are
+operating to prevent their (the blacks) improvement and elevation to any
+considerable extent as a class, in this country, which are fixed, not
+only beyond the control of the friends of humanity, but of any human
+power.  Christianity will not do for them here what it will do for them
+in Africa.  This is not the fault of the colored man, nor Christianity;
+but an ordination of Providence, and no more to be changed than the laws
+of Nature!"--[Last Annual Report of the American Colonization Society.]
+
+"The habits, the feelings, all the prejudices of society--prejudices
+which neither refinement, nor argument, nor education, nor religion
+itself, can subdue--mark the people of color, whether bond or free, as
+the subjects of a degradation inevitable and incurable.  The African in
+this country belongs by birth to the very lowest station in society, and
+from that station he can never rise, be his talents, his enterprise, his
+virtues what they may. .  .  .  They constitute a class by themselves, a
+class out of which no individual can be elevated, and below which none
+can be depressed."
+
+"Is it not wise, then, for the free people of color and their friends to
+admit, what cannot reasonably be doubted, that the people of color must,
+in this country, remain for ages, probably forever, a separate and
+inferior caste, weighed down by causes, powerful, universal, inevitable;
+which neither legislation nor Christianity can remove?"
+
+6.  It opposes strenuously the education of the blacks in this country as
+useless as well as dangerous.
+
+Proof.  "If the free colored people were generally taught to read it
+might be an inducement to them to remain in this country (that is, in
+their native country).  We would offer then no such inducement."--
+[Southern Religious Telegraph, February 19, 1831.]
+
+"The public safety of our brethren at the South requires them (the
+slaves) to be kept ignorant and uninstructed."
+
+"It is the business of the free (their safety requires it) to keep the
+slaves in ignorance.  But a few days ago a proposition was made in the
+legislature of Georgia to allow them so much instruction as to enable
+them to read the Bible; which was promptly rejected by a large
+majority."--[Proceedings of New York State Colonization Society at its
+second anniversary.]
+
+E. B. Caldwell, the first Secretary of the American Colonization Society,
+in his speech at its formation, recommended them to be kept "in the
+lowest state of ignorance and degradation, for (says he) the nearer you
+bring them to the condition of brutes, the better chance do you give them
+of possessing their apathy."
+
+My limits will not admit of a more extended examination.  To the
+documents from whence the above extracts have been made I would call the
+attention of every real friend of humanity.  I seek to do the
+Colonization Society no injustice, but I wish the public generally to
+understand its character.
+
+The tendency of the society to abolish the slave-trade by means of its
+African colony has been strenuously urged by its friends.  But the
+fallacy of this is now admitted by all: witness the following from the
+reports of the society itself:--
+
+"Some appalling facts in regard to the slave-trade have come to the
+knowledge of the Board of Managers during the last year.  With
+undiminished atrocity and activity is this odious traffic now carried on
+all along the African coast.  Slave factories are established in the
+immediate vicinity of the colony; and at the Gallinas (between Liberia
+and Sierra Leone) not less than nine hundred slaves were shipped during
+the last summer, in the space of three weeks."
+
+April 6, 1832, the House of Commons of England ordered the printing of a
+document entitled "Slave-Trade, Sierra Leone," containing official
+evidence of the fact that the pirates engaged in the African slave-trade
+are supplied from the stores of Sierra Leone and Liberia with such
+articles as the infernal traffic demands!  An able English writer on the
+subject of Colonization thus notices this astounding fact:--
+
+"And here it may be well to observe, that as long as negro slavery lasts,
+all colonies on the African coast, of whatever description, must tend to
+support it, because, in all commerce, the supply is more or less
+proportioned to the demand.  The demand exists in negro slavery; the
+supply arises from the African slave-trade.  And what greater convenience
+could the African slave-traders desire than shops well stored along the
+coast with the very articles which their trade demands.  That the African
+slave-traders do get thus supplied at Sierra Leone and Liberia is matter
+of official evidence; and we know, from the nature of human things, that
+they will get so supplied, in defiance of all law or precaution, as long
+as the demand calls for the supply, and there are free shops stored with
+all they want at hand.  The shopkeeper, however honest, would find it
+impossible always to distinguish between the African slave-trader or his
+agents and other dealers.  And how many shopkeepers are there anywhere
+that would be over scrupulous in questioning a customer with a full
+purse?"
+
+But we are told that the Colonization Society is to civilize and
+evangelize Africa.
+
+"Each emigrant," says Henry Clay, the ablest advocate which the society
+has yet found, "is a missionary, carrying with him credentials in the
+holy cause of civilization, religion, and free institutions."
+
+Beautiful and heart-cheering idea!  But stay who are these emigrants,
+these missionaries?
+
+The free people of color.  "They, and they only," says the African
+Repository, the society's organ, "are qualified for colonizing Africa."
+
+What are their qualifications?  Let the society answer in its own words:--
+Free blacks are a greater nuisance than even slaves themselves."--
+[African Repository, vol. ii.  p. 328.]
+
+"A horde of miserable people--the objects of universal suspicion--
+subsisting by plunder."
+
+"An anomalous race of beings the most debased upon earth."--[African
+Repository, vol. vii. p. 230.]
+
+"Of all classes of our population the most vicious is that of the free
+colored."--[Tenth Annual Report of the Colonization Society.]
+
+I might go on to quote still further from the "credentials" which the
+free people of color are to carry with them to Liberia.  But I forbear.
+
+I come now to the only practicable, the only just scheme of emancipation:
+Immediate abolition of slavery; an immediate acknowledgment of the great
+truth, that man cannot hold property in man; an immediate surrender of
+baneful prejudice to Christian love; an immediate practical obedience to
+the command of Jesus Christ: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto
+you, do ye even so to them."
+
+A correct understanding of what is meant by immediate abolition must
+convince every candid mind that it is neither visionary nor dangerous;
+that it involves no disastrous consequences of bloodshed and desolation;
+but, on the, contrary, that it is a safe, practicable, efficient remedy
+for the evils of the slave system.
+
+The term immediate is used in contrast with that of gradual.  Earnestly
+as I wish it, I do not expect, no one expects, that the tremendous system
+of oppression can be instantaneously overthrown.  The terrible and
+unrebukable indignation of a free people has not yet been sufficiently
+concentrated against it.  The friends of abolition have not forgotten the
+peculiar organization of our confederacy, the delicate division of power
+between the states and the general government.  They see the many
+obstacles in their pathway; but they know that public opinion can
+overcome them all.  They ask no aid of physical coercion.  They seek to
+obtain their object not with the weapons of violence and blood, but with
+those of reason and truth, prayer to God, and entreaty to man.
+
+They seek to impress indelibly upon every human heart the true doctrines
+of the rights of man; to establish now and forever this great and
+fundamental truth of human liberty, that man cannot hold property in his
+brother; for they believe that the general admission of this truth will
+utterly destroy the system of slavery, based as that system is upon a
+denial or disregard of it.  To make use of the clear exposition of an
+eminent advocate of immediate abolition, our plan of emancipation is
+simply this: "To promulgate the true doctrine of human rights in high
+places and low places, and all places where there are human beings; to
+whisper it in chimney corners, and to proclaim it from the house-tops,
+yea, from the mountain-tops; to pour it out like water from the pulpit
+and the press; to raise it up with all the food of the inner man, from
+infancy to gray hairs; to give 'line upon line, and precept upon
+precept,' till it forms one of the foundation principles and parts
+indestructible of the public soul.  Let those who contemn this plan
+renounce, if they have not done it already, the gospel plan of converting
+the world; let them renounce every plan of moral reformation, and every
+plan whatsoever, which does not terminate in the gratification of their
+own animal natures."
+
+The friends of emancipation would urge in the first instance an immediate
+abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and in the Territories
+of Florida and Arkansas.
+
+The number of slaves in these portions of the country, coming under the
+direct jurisdiction of the general government, is as follows:--
+
+District of Columbia ..... 6,119
+Territory of Arkansas .... 4,576
+Territory of Florida .... 15,501
+
+                  Total   26,196
+
+Here, then, are twenty-six thousand human beings, fashioned in the image
+of God, the fitted temples of His Holy Spirit, held by the government in
+the abhorrent chains of slavery.  The power to emancipate them is clear.
+It is indisputable. It does not depend upon the twenty-five slave votes
+in Congress.  It lies with the free states.  Their duty is before them:
+in the fear of God, and not of man let them perform it.
+
+Let them at once strike off the grievous fetters.  Let them declare that
+man shall no longer hold his fellow-man in bondage, a beast of burden, an
+article of traffic, within the governmental domain.  God and truth and
+eternal justice demand this.  The very reputation of our fathers, the
+honor of our land, every principle of liberty, humanity, expediency,
+demand it.  A sacred regard to free principles originated our
+independence, not the paltry amount of practical evil complained of.  And
+although our fathers left their great work unfinished, it is our duty to
+follow out their principles.  Short of liberty and equality we cannot
+stop without doing injustice to their memories.  If our fathers intended
+that slavery should be perpetual, that our practice should forever give
+the lie to our professions, why is the great constitutional compact so
+guardedly silent on the subject of human servitude?  If state necessity
+demanded this perpetual violation of the laws of God and the rights of
+man, this continual solecism in a government of freedom, why is it not
+met as a necessity, incurable and inevitable, and formally and distinctly
+recognized as a settled part of our social system?  State necessity, that
+imperial tyrant, seeks no disguise.  In the language of Sheridan, "What
+he does, he dares avow, and avowing, scorns any other justification than
+the great motives which placed the iron sceptre in his grasp."
+
+Can it be possible that our fathers felt this state necessity strong upon
+them?  No; for they left open the door for emancipation, they left us the
+light of their pure principles of liberty, they framed the great charter
+of American rights, without employing a term in its structure to which in
+aftertimes of universal freedom the enemies of our country could point
+with accusation or reproach.
+
+What, then, is our duty?
+
+To give effect to the spirit of our Constitution; to plant ourselves upon
+the great declaration and declare in the face of all the world that
+political, religious, and legal hypocrisy shall no longer cover as with
+loathsome leprosy the features of American freedom; to loose at once the
+bands of wickedness; to undo the heavy burdens, and let the oppressed go
+free.
+
+We have indeed been authoritatively told in Congress and elsewhere that
+our brethren of the South and West will brook no further agitation of the
+subject of slavery.  What then! shall we heed the unrighteous
+prohibition?  No; by our duty as Christians, as politicians, by our duty
+to ourselves, to our neighbor, and to God, we are called upon to agitate
+this subject; to give slavery no resting-place under the hallowed aegis
+of a government of freedom; to tear it root and branch, with all its
+fruits of abomination, at least from the soil of the national domain.
+The slave-holder may mock us; the representatives of property,
+merchandise, vendible commodities, may threaten us; still our duty is
+imperative; the spirit of the Constitution should be maintained within
+the exclusive jurisdiction of the government.  If we cannot "provide for
+the general welfare," if we cannot "guarantee to each of the states a
+republican form of government," let us at least no longer legislate for a
+free nation within view of the falling whip, and within hearing of the
+execrations of the task-master and the prayer of his slave!
+
+I deny the right of the slave-holder to impose silence on his brother of
+the North in reference to slavery.  What!  compelled to maintain the
+system, to keep up the standing army which protects it, and yet be denied
+the poor privilege of remonstrance!  Ready, at the summons of the master
+to put down the insurrections of his slaves, the outbreaking of that
+revenge which is now, and has been, in all nations, and all times, the
+inevitable consequence of oppression and wrong, and yet like automata to
+act but not speak!  Are we to be denied even the right of a slave, the
+right to murmur?
+
+I am not unaware that my remarks may be regarded by many as dangerous and
+exceptionable; that I may be regarded as a fanatic for quoting the
+language of eternal truth, and denounced as an incendiary for
+maintaining, in the spirit as well as the letter, the doctrines of
+American Independence.  But if such are the consequences of a simple
+performance of duty, I shall not regard them.  If my feeble appeal but
+reaches the hearts of any who are now slumbering in iniquity; if it shall
+have power given it to shake down one stone from that foul temple where
+the blood of human victims is offered to the Moloch of slavery; if under
+Providence it can break one fetter from off the image of God, and enable
+one suffering African
+
+"To feel
+The weight of human misery less, and glide
+Ungroaning to the tomb,"
+
+I shall not have written in vain; my conscience will be satisfied.
+
+Far be it from me to cast new bitterness into the gall and wormwood
+waters of sectional prejudice.  No; I desire peace, the peace of
+universal love, of catholic sympathy, the peace of a common interest, a
+common feeling, a common humanity.  But so long as slavery is tolerated,
+no such peace can exist.  Liberty and slavery cannot dwell in harmony
+together.  There will be a perpetual "war in the members" of the
+political Mezentius between the living and the dead.  God and man have
+placed between them an everlasting barrier, an eternal separation.  No
+matter under what name or law or compact their union is attempted, the
+ordination of Providence has forbidden it, and it cannot stand.  Peace!
+there can be no peace between justice and oppression, between robbery and
+righteousness, truth and falsehood, freedom and slavery.
+
+The slave-holding states are not free.  The name of liberty is there, but
+the spirit is wanting.  They do not partake of its invaluable blessings.
+Wherever slavery exists to any considerable extent, with the exception of
+some recently settled portions of the country, and which have not yet
+felt in a great degree the baneful and deteriorating influences of slave
+labor, we hear at this moment the cry of suffering.  We are told of
+grass-grown streets, of crumbling mansions, of beggared planters and
+barren plantations, of fear from without, of terror within.  The once
+fertile fields are wasted and tenantless, for the curse of slavery, the
+improvidence of that labor whose hire has been kept back by fraud, has
+been there, poisoning the very earth beyond the reviving influence of the
+early and the latter rain.  A moral mildew mingles with and blasts the
+economy of nature.  It is as if the finger of the everlasting God had
+written upon the soil of the slave-holder the language of His
+displeasure.
+
+Let, then, the slave-holding states consult their present interest by
+beginning without delay the work of emancipation.  If they fear not, and
+mock at the fiery indignation of Him, to whom vengeance belongeth, let
+temporal interest persuade them.  They know, they must know, that the
+present state of things cannot long continue.  Mind is the same
+everywhere, no matter what may be the complexion of the frame which it
+animates: there is a love of liberty which the scourge cannot eradicate,
+a hatred of oppression which centuries of degradation cannot extinguish.
+The slave will become conscious sooner or later of his brute strength,
+his physical superiority, and will exert it.  His torch will be at the
+threshold and his knife at the throat of the planter.  Horrible and
+indiscriminate will be his vengeance.  Where, then, will be the pride,
+the beauty, and the chivalry of the South?  The smoke of her torment will
+rise upward like a thick cloud visible over the whole earth.
+
+     "Belie the negro's powers: in headlong will,
+     Christian, thy brother thou shalt find him still.
+     Belie his virtues: since his wrongs began,
+     His follies and his crimes have stamped him man."
+
+Let the cause of insurrection be removed, then, as speedily as possible.
+Cease to oppress.  "Let him that stole steal no more."  Let the laborer
+have his hire.  Bind him no longer by the cords of slavery, but with
+those of kindness and brotherly love.  Watch over him for his good.  Pray
+for him; instruct him; pour light into the darkness of his mind.
+
+Let this be done, and the horrible fears which now haunt the slumbers of
+the slave-holder will depart.  Conscience will take down its racks and
+gibbets, and his soul will be at peace.  His lands will no longer
+disappoint his hopes.  Free labor will renovate them.
+
+Historical facts; the nature of the human mind; the demonstrated truths
+of political economy; the analysis of cause and effect, all concur in
+establishing:
+
+1.  That immediate abolition is a safe and just and peaceful remedy for
+the evils of the slave system.
+
+2.  That free labor, its necessary consequence, is more productive, and
+more advantageous to the planter than slave labor.
+
+In proof of the first proposition it is only necessary to state the
+undeniable fact that immediate emancipation, whether by an individual or
+a community, has in no instance been attended with violence and disorder
+on the part of the emancipated; but that on the contrary it has promoted
+cheerfulness, industry, and laudable ambition in the place of sullen
+discontent, indolence, and despair.
+
+The case of St. Domingo is in point.  Blood was indeed shed on that
+island like water, but it was not in consequence of emancipation.  It was
+shed in the civil war which preceded it, and in the iniquitous attempt to
+restore the slave system in 1801.  It flowed on the sanguine altar of
+slavery, not on the pure and peaceful one of emancipation.  No; there, as
+in all the world and in all time, the violence of oppression engendered
+violence on the part of the oppressed, and vengeance followed only upon
+the iron footsteps of wrong.  When, where, did justice to the injured
+waken their hate and vengeance?  When, where, did love and kindness and
+sympathy irritate and madden the persecuted, the broken-hearted, the
+foully wronged?
+
+In September, 1793, the Commissioner of the French National Convention
+issued his proclamation giving immediate freedom to all the slaves of St.
+Domingo.  Did the slaves baptize their freedom in blood?  Did they fight
+like unchained desperadoes because they had been made free?  Did they
+murder their emancipators?  No; they acted, as human beings must act,
+under similar circumstances, by a law as irresistible as those of the
+universe: kindness disarmed them, justice conciliated them, freedom
+ennobled them.  No tumult followed this wide and instantaneous
+emancipation.  It cost not one drop of blood; it abated not one tittle of
+the wealth or the industry of the island.  Colonel Malenfant, a slave
+proprietor residing at the time on the island, states that after the
+public act of abolition, the negroes remained perfectly quiet; they had
+obtained all they asked for, liberty, and they continued to work upon all
+the plantations.--[Malenfant in Memoirs for a History of St. Domingo by
+General Lecroix, 1819.]
+
+"There were estates," he says, "which had neither owners nor managers
+resident upon them, yet upon these estates, though abandoned, the negroes
+continued their labors where there were any, even inferior, agents to
+guide them; and on those estates where no white men were left to direct
+them, they betook themselves to the planting of provisions; but upon all
+the plantations where the whites resided the blacks continued to labor as
+quietly as before."  Colonel Malenfant says that when many of his
+neighbors, proprietors or managers, were in prison, the negroes of their
+plantations came to him to beg him to direct them in their work.  "If you
+will take care not to talk to them of the restoration of slavery, but
+talk to them of freedom, you may with this word chain them down to their
+labor.  How did Toussaint succeed?  How did I succeed before his time in
+the plain of the Cul-de-Sac on the plantation of Gouraud, during more
+than eight months after liberty had been granted to the slaves?  Let
+those who knew me at that time, let the blacks themselves be asked.  They
+will all reply that not a single negro upon that plantation, consisting
+of more than four hundred and fifty laborers, refused to work; and yet
+this plantation was thought to be under the worst discipline and the
+slaves the most idle of any in the plain.  I inspired the same activity
+into three other plantations of which I had the management.  If all the
+negroes had come from Africa within six months, if they had the love of
+independence that the Indians have, I should own that force must be
+employed; but ninety-nine out of a hundred of the blacks are aware that
+without labor they cannot procure the things that are necessary for them;
+that there is no other method of satisfying their wants and their tastes.
+They know that they must work, they wish to do so, and they will do so."
+
+This is strong testimony.  In 1796, three years after the act of
+emancipation, we are told that the colony was flourishing under
+Toussaint, that the whites lived happily and peaceably on their estates,
+and the blacks continued to work for them.  Up to 1801 the same happy
+state of things continued.  The colony went on as by enchantment;
+cultivation made day by day a perceptible progress, under the
+recuperative energies of free labor.
+
+In 1801 General Vincent, a proprietor of estates in the island, was sent
+by Toussaint to Paris for the purpose of laying before the Directory the
+new Constitution which had been adopted at St. Domingo.  He reached
+France just after the peace of Amiens, when Napoleon was fitting out his
+ill-starred armament for the insane purpose of restoring slavery in the
+island.  General Vincent remonstrated solemnly and earnestly against an
+expedition so preposterous, so cruel and unnecessary; undertaken at a
+moment when all was peace and quietness in the colony, when the
+proprietors were in peaceful possession of their estates, when
+cultivation was making a rapid progress, and the blacks were industrious
+and happy beyond example.  He begged that this beautiful state of things
+might not be reversed.  The remonstrance was not regarded, and the
+expedition proceeded.  Its issue is well known.  Threatened once more
+with the horrors of slavery, the peaceful and quiet laborer became
+transformed into a demon of ferocity.  The plough-share and the pruning-
+hook gave way to the pike and the dagger.  The white invaders were driven
+back by the sword and the pestilence; and then, and not till then, was
+the property of the planters seized upon by the excited and infuriated
+blacks.
+
+In 1804 Dessalines was proclaimed Emperor of Hayti.  The black troops
+were in a great measure disbanded, and they immediately returned to the
+cultivation of the plantations.  From that period up to the present there
+has been no want of industry among the inhabitants.
+
+Mr. Harvey, who during the reign of Christophe resided at Cape Francois,
+in describing the character and condition of the inhabitants, says "It
+was an interesting sight to behold this class of the Haytiens, now in
+possession of their freedom, coming in groups to the market nearest which
+they resided, bringing the produce of their industry there for sale; and
+afterwards returning, carrying back the necessary articles of living
+which the disposal of their commodities had enabled them to purchase; all
+evidently cheerful and happy.  Nor could it fail to occur to the mind
+that their present condition furnished the most satisfactory answer to
+that objection to the general emancipation of slaves founded on their
+alleged unfitness to value and improve the benefits of liberty.  .  .  .
+As they would not suffer, so they do not require, the attendance of one
+acting in the capacity of a driver with the instrument of punishment in
+his hand.  As far as I had an opportunity of ascertaining from what fell
+under my own observation, and from what I gathered from other European
+residents, I am persuaded of one general fact, which on account of its
+importance I shall state in the most explicit terms, namely, that the
+Haytiens employed in cultivating the plantations, as well as the rest of
+the population, perform as much work in a given time as they were
+accustomed to do during their subjection to the French.  And if we may
+judge of their future improvement by the change which has been already
+effected, it may be reasonably anticipated that Hayti will erelong
+contain a population not inferior in their industry to that of any
+civilized nation in the world.  .  .  .  Every man had some calling to
+occupy his attention; instances of idleness or intemperance were of rare
+occurrence; the most perfect subordination prevailed, and all appeared
+contented and happy.  A foreigner would have found it difficult to
+persuade himself, on his first entering the place, that the people he now
+beheld so submissive, industrious, and contented, were the same people
+who a few years before had escaped from the shackles of slavery."
+
+The present condition of Hayti may be judged of from the following well-
+authenticated facts its population is more than 700,000, its resources
+ample, its prosperity and happiness general, its crimes few, its labor
+crowned with abundance, with no paupers save the decrepit and aged, its
+people hospitable, respectful, orderly, and contented.
+
+The manumitted slaves, who to the number of two thousand were settled in
+Nova Scotia by the British Government at the close of the Revolutionary
+War, "led a harmless life, and gained the character of an honest,
+industrious people from their white neighbors."  Of the free laborers of
+Trinidad we have the same report.  At the Cape of Good Hope, three
+thousand negroes received their freedom, and with scarce a single
+exception betook themselves to laborious employments.
+
+But we have yet stronger evidence.  The total abolishment of slavery in
+the southern republics has proved beyond dispute the safety and utility
+of immediate abolition.  The departed Bolivar indeed deserves his
+glorious title of Liberator, for he began his career of freedom by
+striking off the fetters of his own slaves, seven hundred in number.
+
+In an official letter from the Mexican Envoy of the British Government,
+dated Mexico, March, 1826, and addressed 'to the Right Hon.  George
+Canning, the superiority of free over slave labor is clearly demonstrated
+by the following facts:--
+
+2.  It is now carried on exclusively by the labor of free blacks.
+
+3.  It was formerly wholly sustained by the forced labor of slaves,
+purchased at Vera Cruz at $300 to $400 each.
+
+4.  Abolition in this section was effected not by governmental
+interference, not even from motives of humanity, but from an irresistible
+conviction on the part of the planters that their pecuniary interest
+demanded it.
+
+5.  The result has proved the entire correctness of this conviction; and
+the planters would now be as unwilling as the blacks themselves to return
+to the old system.
+
+Let our Southern brethren imitate this example.  It is in vain, in the
+face of facts like these, to talk of the necessity of maintaining the
+abominable system, operating as it does like a double curse upon planters
+and slaves.  Heaven and earth deny its necessity.  It is as necessary as
+other robberies, and no more.
+
+Yes, putting aside altogether the righteous law of the living God--the
+same yesterday, to-day, and forever--and shutting out the clearest
+political truths ever taught by man, still, in human policy selfish
+expediency would demand of the planter the immediate emancipation of his
+slaves.
+
+Because slave labor is the labor of mere machines; a mechanical impulse
+of body and limb, with which the mind of the laborer has no sympathy, and
+from which it constantly and loathingly revolts.
+
+Because slave labor deprives the master altogether of the incalculable
+benefit of the negro's will.  That does not cooperate with the forced
+toil of the body.  This is but the necessary consequence of all labor
+which does not benefit the laborer.  It is a just remark of that profound
+political economist, Adam Smith, that "a slave can have no other interest
+than to eat and waste as much, and work as little, as he can."
+
+To my mind, in the wasteful and blighting influences of slave labor there
+is a solemn and warning moral.
+
+They seem the evidence of the displeasure of Him who created man after
+His own image, at the unnatural attempt to govern the bones and sinews,
+the bodies and souls, of one portion of His children by the caprice, the
+avarice, the lusts of another; at that utter violation of the design of
+His merciful Providence, whereby the entire dependence of millions of His
+rational creatures is made to centre upon the will, the existence, the
+ability, of their fellow-mortals, instead of resting under the shadow of
+His own Infinite Power and exceeding love.
+
+I shall offer a few more facts and observations on this point.
+
+1.  A distinguished scientific gentleman, Mr. Coulomb, the superintendent
+of several military works in the French West Indies, gives it as his
+opinion, that the slaves do not perform more than one third of the labor
+which they would do, provided they were urged by their own interests and
+inclinations instead of brute force.
+
+2.  A plantation in Barbadoes in 1780 was cultivated by two hundred and
+eighty-eight slaves ninety men, eighty-two women, fifty-six boys, and
+sixty girls.  In three years and three months there were on this
+plantation fifty-seven deaths, and only fifteen births.  A change was
+then made in the government of the slaves.  The use of the whip was
+denied; all severe and arbitrary punishments were abolished; the laborers
+received wages, and their offences were all tried by a sort of negro
+court established among themselves: in short, they were practically free.
+Under this system, in four years and three months there were forty-four
+births, and but forty-one deaths; and the annual net produce of the
+plantation was more than three times what it had been before.--[English
+Quarterly Magazine and Review, April, 1832.]
+
+3.  The following evidence was adduced by Pitt in the British Parliament,
+April, 1792.  The assembly of Grenada had themselves stated, "that though
+the negroes were allowed only the afternoon of one day in a week, they
+would do as much work in that afternoon, when employed for their own
+benefit, as in the whole day when employed in their master's service."
+"Now after this confession," said Mr. Pitt, "the house might burn all its
+calculations relative to the negro population.  A negro, if he worked for
+himself, could no doubt do double work.  By an improvement, then, in the
+mode of labor, the work in the islands could be doubled."
+
+4.  "In coffee districts it is usual for the master to hire his people
+after they have done the regular task for the day, at a rate varying from
+10d. to 15.8d.  for every extra bushel which they pluck from the trees;
+and many, almost all, are found eager to earn their wages."
+
+5.  In a report made by the commandant of Castries for the government of
+St. Lucia, in 1822, it is stated, in proof of the intimacy between the
+slaves and the free blacks, that "many small plantations of the latter,
+and occupied by only one man and his wife, are better cultivated and have
+more land in cultivation than those of the proprietors of many slaves,
+and that the labor on them is performed by runaway slaves;" thus clearly
+proving that even runaway slaves, under the all-depressing fears of
+discovery and oppression, labor well, because the fruits of their labor
+are immediately their own.
+
+Let us look at this subject from another point of view.  The large sum of
+money necessary for stocking a plantation with slaves has an inevitable
+tendency to place the agriculture of a slave-holding community
+exclusively in the hands of the wealthy, a tendency at war with practical
+republicanism and conflicting with the best maxims of political economy.
+
+Two hundred slaves at $200 per head would cost in the outset $40,000.
+Compare this enormous outlay for the labor of a single plantation with
+the beautiful system of free labor as exhibited in New England, where
+every young laborer, with health and ordinary prudence, may acquire by
+his labor on the farms of others, in a few years, a farm of his own, and
+the stock necessary for its proper cultivation; where on a hard and
+unthankful soil independence and competence may be attained by all.
+
+Free labor is perfectly in accordance with the spirit of our
+institutions; slave labor is a relic of a barbarous, despotic age.  The
+one, like the firmament of heaven, is the equal diffusion of similar
+lights, manifest, harmonious, regular; the other is the fiery
+predominance of some disastrous star, hiding all lesser luminaries around
+it in one consuming glare.
+
+Emancipation would reform this evil.  The planter would no longer be
+under the necessity of a heavy expenditure for slaves.  He would only pay
+a very moderate price for his labor; a price, indeed, far less than the
+cost of the maintenance of a promiscuous gang of slaves, which the
+present system requires.
+
+In an old plantation of three hundred slaves, not more than one hundred
+effective laborers will be found.  Children, the old and superannuated,
+the sick and decrepit, the idle and incorrigibly vicious, will be found
+to constitute two thirds of the whole number.  The remaining third
+perform only about one third as much work as the same number of free
+laborers.
+
+Now disburden the master of this heavy load of maintenance; let him
+employ free able, industrious laborers only, those who feel conscious of
+a personal interest in the fruits of their labor, and who does not see
+that such a system would be vastly more safe and economical than the
+present?
+
+The slave states are learning this truth by fatal experience.  Most of
+them are silently writhing under the great curse.  Virginia has uttered
+her complaints aloud.  As yet, however, nothing has been done even there,
+save a small annual appropriation for the purpose of colonizing the free
+colored inhabitants of the state.  Is this a remedy?
+
+But it may be said that Virginia will ultimately liberate her slaves on
+condition of their colonization in Africa, peacefully if possible,
+forcibly if necessary.
+
+Well, admitting that Virginia may be able and willing at some remote
+period to rid herself of the evil by commuting the punishment of her
+unoffending colored people from slavery to exile, will her fearful remedy
+apply to some of the other slaveholding states?
+
+It is a fact, strongly insisted upon by our Southern brethren as a reason
+for the perpetuation of slavery, that their climate and peculiar
+agriculture will not admit of hard labor on the part of the whites; that
+amidst the fatal malaria of the rice plantations the white man is almost
+annually visited by the country fever; that few of the white overseers of
+these plantations reach the middle period of ordinary life; that the
+owners are compelled to fly from their estates as the hot season
+approaches, without being able to return until the first frosts have
+fallen.  But we are told that the slaves remain there, at their work,
+mid-leg in putrid water, breathing the noisome atmosphere, loaded with
+contagion, and underneath the scorching fervor of a terrible sun; that
+they indeed suffer; but, that their habits, constitutions, and their long
+practice enable them to labor, surrounded by such destructive influences,
+with comparative safety.
+
+The conclusive answer, therefore, to those who in reality cherish the
+visionary hope of colonizing all the colored people of the United States
+in Africa or elsewhere, is this single, all-important fact: The labor of
+the blacks will not and cannot be dispensed with by the planter of the
+South.
+
+To what remedy, then, can the friends of humanity betake themselves but
+to that of emancipation?
+
+And nothing but a strong, unequivocal expression of public sentiment is
+needed to carry into effect this remedy, so far as the general government
+is concerned.
+
+And when the voice of all the non-slave-holding states shall be heard on
+this question, a voice of expostulation, rebuke, entreaty--when the full
+light of truth shall break through the night of prejudice, and reveal all
+the foul abominations of slavery, will Delaware still cling to the curse
+which is wasting her moral strength, and still rivet the fetters upon her
+three or four thousand slaves?  Let Delaware begin the work, and Maryland
+and Virginia must follow; the example will be contagious; and the great
+object of universal emancipation will be attained.  Freemen, Christians,
+lovers of truth and justice Why stand ye idle?  Ours is a government of
+opinion, and slavery is interwoven with it.  Change the current of
+opinion, and slavery will be swept away.  Let the awful sovereignty of
+the people, a power which is limited only by the sovereignty of Heaven,
+arise and pronounce judgment against the crying iniquity.  Let each
+individual remember that upon himself rests a portion of that
+sovereignty; a part of the tremendous responsibility of its exercise.
+The burning, withering concentration of public opinion upon the slave
+system is alone needed for its total annihilation.  God has given us the
+power to overthrow it; a power peaceful, yet mighty, benevolent, yet
+effectual, "awful without severity," a moral strength equal to the
+emergency.
+
+"How does it happen," inquires an able writer, "that whenever duty is named
+we begin to hear of the weakness of human nature?  That same nature which
+outruns the whirlwind in the chase of gain, which rages like a maniac at
+the trumpet call of glory, which laughs danger and death to scorn when
+its least passion is awakened, becomes weak as childhood when reminded of
+the claims of duty."  But let no one hope to find an excuse in hypocrisy.
+The humblest individual of the community in one way or another possesses
+influence; and upon him as well as upon the proudest rests the
+responsibility of its rightful exercise and proper direction.  The
+overthrow of a great national evil like that of slavery can only be
+effected by the united energies of the great body of the people.
+Shoulder must be put to shoulder and hand linked with hand, the whole
+mass must be put in motion and its entire strength applied, until the
+fabric of oppression is shaken to its dark foundations and not one stone
+is left upon another.
+
+Let the Christian remember that the God of his worship hateth oppression;
+that the mystery of faith can only be held by a pure conscience; and that
+in vain is the tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin, if the weihtier
+matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and truth, are forgotten.  Let him
+remember that all along the clouded region of slavery the truths of the
+everlasting gospel are not spoken, that the ear of iniquity is lulled,
+that those who minister between the "porch and the altar" dare not speak
+out the language of eternal justice: "Is not this the fast which I have
+chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and
+to let the oppressed go free?" (Isa. viii. 6.) "He that stealeth a man
+and selleth him; or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to
+death."  (Exod. xxi. 16.1) Yet a little while and the voice of impartial
+prayer for humanity will be heard no more in the abiding place of
+slavery.  The truths of the gospel, its voice of warning and exhortation,
+will be denounced as incendiary?  The night of that infidelity, which
+denies God in the abuse and degradation of man, will settle over the
+land, to be broken only by the upheaving earthquake of eternal
+retribution.
+
+To the members of the religious Society of Friends, I would earnestly
+appeal.  They have already done much to put away the evil of slavery in
+this country and Great Britain.  The blessings of many who were ready to
+perish have rested upon them.  But their faithful testimony must be still
+steadily upborne, for the great work is but begun.  Let them not relax
+their exertions, nor be contented with a lifeless testimony, a formal
+protestation against the evil.  Active, prayerful, unwearied exertion is
+needed for its overthrow.  But above all, let them not aid in excusing
+and palliating it.  Slavery has no redeeming qualities, no feature of
+benevolence, nothing pure, nothing peaceful, nothing just.  Let them
+carefully keep themselves aloof from all societies and all schemes which
+have a tendency to excuse or overlook its crying iniquity.  True to a
+doctrine founded on love and mercy, "peace on earth and good will to
+men," they should regard the suffering slave as their brother, and
+endeavor to "put their souls in his soul's stead."  They may earnestly
+desire the civilization of Africa, but they cannot aid in building up the
+colony of Liberia so long as that colony leans for support upon the arm
+of military power; so long as it proselytes to Christianity under the
+muzzles of its cannon; and preaches the doctrines of Christ while
+practising those of Mahomet.  When the Sierra Leone Company was formed in
+England, not a member of the Society of Friends could be prevailed upon
+to engage in it, because the colony was to be supplied with cannon and
+other military stores.  Yet the Foreign Agent of the Liberia Colony
+Society, to which the same insurmountable objection exists, is a member
+of the Society of Friends, and I understand has been recently employed in
+providing gunpowder, etc., for the use of the colony.  There must be an
+awakening on this subject; other Woolmans and other Benezets must arise
+and speak the truth with the meek love of James and the fervent sincerity
+of Paul.
+
+To the women of America, whose sympathies know no distinction of cline,
+or sect, or color, the suffering slave is making a strong appeal.  Oh,
+let it not be unheeded! for of those to whom much is given much will be
+required at the last dread tribunal; and never in the strongest terms of
+human eulogy was woman's influence overrated.  Sisters, daughters, wives,
+and mothers, your influence is felt everywhere, at the fireside, and in
+the halls of legislation, surrounding, like the all-encircling
+atmosphere, brother and father, husband and son!  And by your love of
+them, by every holy sympathy of your bosoms, by every mournful appeal
+which comes up to you from hearts whose sanctuary of affections has been
+made waste and desolate, you are called upon to exert it in the cause of
+redemption from wrong and outrage.
+
+Let the patriot, the friend of liberty and the Union of the States, no
+longer shut his eyes to the great danger, the master-evil before which
+all others dwindle into insignificance.  Our Union is tottering to its
+foundation, and slavery is the cause.  Remove the evil.  Dry up at their
+source the bitter waters.  In vain you enact and abrogate your tariffs;
+in vain is individual sacrifice, or sectional concession.  The accursed
+thing is with us, the stone of stumbling and the rock of offence remains.
+Drag, then, the Achan into light; and let national repentance atone for
+national sin.
+
+The conflicting interests of free and slave labor furnish the only ground
+for fear in relation to the permanency of the Union.  The line of
+separation between them is day by day growing broader and deeper;
+geographically and politically united, we are already, in a moral point
+of view, a divided people.  But a few months ago we were on the very
+verge of civil war, a war of brothers, a war between the North and the
+South, between the slave-holder and the free laborer.  The danger has
+been delayed for a time; this bolt has fallen without mortal injury to
+the Union, but the cloud from whence it came still hangs above us,
+reddening with the elements of destruction.
+
+Recent events have furnished ample proof that the slave-holding interest
+is prepared to resist any legislation on the part of the general
+government which is supposed to have a tendency, directly or indirectly,
+to encourage and invigorate free labor; and that it is determined to
+charge upon its opposite interest the infliction of all those evils which
+necessarily attend its own operation, "the primeval curse of Omnipotence
+upon slavery."
+
+We have already felt in too many instances the extreme difficulty of
+cherishing in one common course of national legislation the opposite
+interests of republican equality and feudal aristocracy and servitude.
+The truth is, we have undertaken a moral impossibility.  These interests
+are from their nature irreconcilable.  The one is based upon the pure
+principles of rational liberty; the other, under the name of freedom,
+revives the ancient European system of barons and villains, nobles and
+serfs.  Indeed, the state of society which existed among our Anglo-Saxon
+ancestors was far more tolerable than that of many portions of our
+republican confederacy.  For the Anglo-Saxon slaves had it in their power
+to purchase their freedom; and the laws of the realm recognized their
+liberation and placed them under legal protection.
+
+     [The diffusion of Christianity in Great Britain was moreover
+     followed by a general manumission; for it would seem that the
+     priests and missionaries of religion in that early and benighted age
+     were more faithful in the performance of their duties than those of
+     the present.  "The holy fathers, monks, and friars," says Sir T.
+     Smith, "had in their confessions, and specially in their extreme and
+     deadly sickness, convinced the laity how dangerous a thing it was
+     for one Christian to hold another in bondage; so that temporal men,
+     by reason of the terror in their consciences, were glad to manumit
+     all their villains."--Hilt.  Commonwealth, Blackstone, p.  52.]
+
+To counteract the dangers resulting from a state of society so utterly at
+variance with the great Declaration of American freedom should be the
+earnest endeavor of every patriotic statesman.  Nothing unconstitutional,
+nothing violent, should be attempted; but the true doctrine of the rights
+of man should be steadily kept in view; and the opposition to slavery
+should be inflexible and constantly maintained.  The almost daily
+violations of the Constitution in consequence of the laws of some of the
+slave states, subjecting free colored citizens of New England and
+elsewhere, who may happen to be on board of our coasting vessels, to
+imprisonment immediately on their arrival in a Southern port should be
+provided against.  Nor should the imprisonment of the free colored
+citizens of the Northern and Middle states, on suspicion of being
+runaways, subjecting them, even after being pronounced free, to the costs
+of their confinement and trial, be longer tolerated; for if we continue
+to yield to innovations like these upon the Constitution of our fathers,
+we shall erelong have the name only of a free government left us.
+
+Dissemble as we may, it is impossible for us to believe, after fully
+considering the nature of slavery, that it can much longer maintain a
+peaceable existence among us.  A day of revolution must come, and it is
+our duty to prepare for it.  Its threatened evil may be changed into a
+national blessing.  The establishment of schools for the instruction of
+the slave children, a general diffusion of the lights of Christianity,
+and the introduction of a sacred respect for the social obligations of
+marriage and for the relations between parents and children, among our
+black population, would render emancipation not only perfectly safe, but
+also of the highest advantage to the country.  Two millions of freemen
+would be added to our population, upon whom in the hour of danger we
+could safely depend; "the domestic foe" would be changed into a firm
+friend, faithful, generous, and ready to encounter all dangers in our
+defence.  It is well known that during the last war with Great Britain,
+wherever the enemy touched upon our Southern coast, the slaves in
+multitudes hastened to join them.  On the other hand, the free blacks
+were highly serviceable in repelling them.  So warm was the zeal of the
+latter, so manifest their courage in the defence of Louisiana, that the
+present Chief Magistrate of the United States publicly bestowed upon them
+one of the highest eulogiums ever offered by a commander to his soldiers.
+
+Let no one seek an apology for silence on the subject of slavery because
+the laws of the land tolerate and sanction it.  But a short time ago the
+slave-trade was protected by laws and treaties, and sanctioned by the
+example of men eminent for the reputation of piety and integrity.  Yet
+public opinion broke over these barriers; it lifted the curtain and
+revealed the horrors of that most abominable traffic; and unrighteous law
+and ancient custom and avarice and luxury gave way before its
+irresistible authority.  It should never be forgotten that human law
+cannot change the nature of human action in the pure eye of infinite
+justice; and that the ordinances of man cannot annul those of God.  The
+slave system, as existing in this country, can be considered in no other
+light than as the cause of which the foul traffic in human flesh is the
+legitimate consequence.  It is the parent, the fosterer, the sole
+supporter of the slave-trade.  It creates the demand for slaves, and the
+foreign supply will always be equal to the demand of consumption.  It
+keeps the market open.  It offers inducements to the slave-trader which
+no severity of law against his traffic can overcome.  By our laws his
+trade is piracy; while slavery, to which alone it owes its existence, is
+protected and cherished, and those engaged in it are rewarded by an
+increase of political power proportioned to the increase of their stock
+of human beings!  To steal the natives of Africa is a crime worthy of an
+ignominious death; but to steal and enslave annually nearly one hundred
+thousand of the descendants of these stolen natives, born in this
+country, is considered altogether excusable and proper!  For my own part,
+I know no difference between robbery in Africa and robbery at home.  I
+could with as quiet a conscience engage in the one as the other.
+
+"There is not one general principle," justly remarks Lord Nugent, "on
+which the slave-trade is to be stigmatized which does not impeach slavery
+itself."  Kindred in iniquity, both must fall speedily, fall together,
+and be consigned to the same dishonorable grave.  The spirit which is
+thrilling through every nerve of England is awakening America from her
+sleep of death.  Who, among our statesmen, would not shrink from the
+baneful reputation of having supported by his legislative influence the
+slave-trade, the traffic in human flesh?  Let them then beware; for the
+time is near at hand when the present defenders of slavery will sink
+under the same fatal reputation, and leave to posterity a memory which
+will blacken through all future time, a legacy of infamy.
+
+"Let us not betake us to the common arts and stratagems of nations, but
+fear God, and put away the evil which provokes Him; and trust not in man,
+but in the living God; and it shall go well for England!"  This counsel,
+given by the purehearted William Penn, in a former age, is about to be
+followed in the present.  An intense and powerful feeling is working in
+the mighty heart of England; it is speaking through the lips of Brougham
+and Buxton and O'Connell, and demanding justice in the name of humanity
+and according to the righteous law of God.  The immediate emancipation of
+eight hundred thousand slaves is demanded with an authority which cannot
+much longer be disputed or trifled with.  That demand will be obeyed;
+justice will be done; the heavy burdens will be unloosed; the oppressed
+set free.  It shall go well for England.
+
+And when the stain on our own escutcheon shall be seen no more; when the
+Declaration of our Independence and the practice of our people shall
+agree; when truth shall be exalted among us; when love shall take the
+place of wrong; when all the baneful pride and prejudice of caste and
+color shall fall forever; when under one common sun of political liberty
+the slave-holding portions of our republic shall no longer sit, like the
+Egyptians of old, themselves mantled in thick darkness, while all around
+them is glowing with the blessed light of freedom and equality, then, and
+not till then, shall it go well for America!
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE ABOLITIONISTS.
+
+                      THEIR SENTIMENTS AND OBJECTS.
+
+Two letters to the 'Jeffersonian and Times', Richmond, Va.
+
+
+                                    I.
+
+A FRIEND has banded me a late number of your paper, containing a brief
+notice of a pamphlet, which I have recently published on the subject of
+slavery.
+
+From an occasional perusal of your paper, I have formed a favorable
+opinion of your talent and independence.  Compelled to dissent from some
+of your political sentiments, I still give you full credit for the lofty
+tone of sincerity and manliness with which these sentiments are avowed
+and defended.
+
+I perceive that since the adjustment of the tariff question a new subject
+of discontent and agitation seems to engross your attention.
+
+The "accursed tariff" has no sooner ceased to be the stone of stumbling
+and the rock of offence, than the "abolition doctrines of the Northern
+enthusiasts," as you are pleased to term the doctrines of your own
+Jefferson, furnish, in your opinion, a sufficient reason for poising the
+"Ancient Dominion" on its sovereignty, and rousing every slaveowner to
+military preparations, until the entire South, from the Potomac to the
+Gulf, shall bristle with bayonets, "like quills upon the fretful
+porcupine."
+
+In proof of a conspiracy against your "vested rights," you have commenced
+publishing copious extracts from the pamphlets and periodicals of the
+abolitionists of New England and New York.  An extract from my own
+pamphlet you have headed "The Fanatics," and in introducing it to your
+readers you inform them that "it exhibits, in strong colors, the morbid
+spirit of that false and fanatical philanthropy, which is at work in the
+Northern states, and, to some extent, in the South."
+
+Gentlemen, so far as I am personally concerned in the matter, I feel no
+disposition to take exceptions to any epithets which you may see fit to
+apply to me or my writings.  A humble son of New England--a tiller of her
+rugged soil, and a companion of her unostentatious yeomanry--it matters
+little, in any personal consideration of the subject, whether the voice
+of praise or opprobrium reaches me from beyond the narrow limits of my
+immediate neighborhood.
+
+But when I find my opinions quoted as the sentiment of New England, and
+then denounced as dangerous, "false and fanatical;" and especially when I
+see them made the occasion of earnest appeals to the prejudices and
+sectional jealousies of the South, it becomes me to endeavor to establish
+their truths, and defend them from illegitimate influences and unjust
+suspicions.
+
+In the first place, then, let me say, that if it be criminal to publicly
+express a belief that it is in the power of the slave states to
+emancipate their slaves, with profit and safety to themselves, and that
+such is their immediate duty, a majority of the people of New England are
+wholly guiltless.  Of course, all are nominally opposed to slavery; but
+upon the little band of abolitionists should the anathemas of the slave-
+holder be directed, for they are the agitators of whom you complain, men
+who are acting under a solemn conviction of duty, and who are bending
+every energy of their minds to the accomplishment of their object.
+
+And that object is the overthrow of slavery in the United States, by such
+means only as are sanctioned by law, humanity, and religion.
+
+I shall endeavor, gentlemen, as briefly as may be, to give you some of
+our reasons for opposing slavery and seeking its abolition; and,
+secondly, to explain our mode of operation; to disclose our plan of
+emancipation, fully and entirely.  We wish to do nothing darkly; frank
+republicans, we acknowledge no double-dealing.  At this busy season of
+the year, I cannot but regret that I have not leisure for such a
+deliberate examination of the subject as even my poor ability might
+warrant.  My remarks, penned in the intervals of labor, must necessarily
+be brief, and wanting in coherence.
+
+We seek the abolishment of slavery
+
+1.  Because it is contrary to the law of God.
+
+In your paper of the 2d of 7th mo., the same in which you denounce the
+"false and fanatical philanthropy" of abolitionists, you avow yourselves
+members of the Bible Society, and bestow warm and deserved encomiums on
+the "truly pious undertaking of sending the truth among all nations."
+
+You, therefore, gentlemen, whatever others may do, will not accuse me of
+"fanaticism," if I endeavor to sustain my first great reason for opposing
+slavery by a reference to the volume of inspiration:
+
+"Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you do
+ye even so to them."
+
+"Wherefore now let the fear of the Lord be upon you, take heed and do it;
+for there is no iniquity with the Lord, nor respect of persons."
+
+"Is not this the fast that I have chosen?  To loose the bands of
+wickedness; to undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free, and
+that ye break every yoke?"
+
+"If a man be found stealing any of his brethren, and maketh merchandise
+of him, or selling him, that thief shall die."
+
+"Of a truth, I perceive that God is no respecter of persons."
+
+"And he that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his
+hands, he shall surely be put to death."
+
+2.  Because it is an open violation of all human equality, of the laws of
+Nature and of nations.
+
+The fundamental principle of all equal and just law is contained in the
+following extract from Blackstone's Commentaries, Introduction, sec.  2.
+
+"The rights which God and Nature have established, and which are
+therefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty, need not the
+aid of human laws to be more effectually vested in every man than they
+are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by
+municipal laws to be inviolable: on the contrary, no human legislation
+has power to abridge or destroy there, unless the owner shall himself
+commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture."
+
+Has the negro committed such offence?  Above all, has his infant child
+forfeited its unalienable right?
+
+Surely it can be no act of the innocent child.
+
+Yet you must prove the forfeiture, or no human legislation can deprive
+that child of its freedom.
+
+Its black skin constitutes the forfeiture!
+
+What! throw the responsibility upon God!  Charge the common Father of the
+white and the black, He, who is no respecter of persons, with plundering
+His unoffending children of all which makes the boon of existence
+desirable; their personal liberty!
+
+"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal;
+that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;
+that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."--
+[Declaration of Independence, from the pen of Thomas Jefferson.]
+
+In this general and unqualified declaration, on the 4th of July, 1776,
+all the people of the United States, without distinction of color, were
+proclaimed free, by the delegates of the people of those states assembled
+in their highest sovereign capacity.
+
+For more than half a century we have openly violated that solemn
+declaration.
+
+3.  Because it renders nugatory the otherwise beneficial example of our
+free institutions, and exposes us to the scorn and reproach of the
+liberal and enlightened of other nations.
+
+"Chains clank and groans echo around the walls of their spotless
+Congress."--[Francis Jeffrey.]
+
+"Man to be possessed by man!  Man to be made property of!  The image of
+the Deity to be put under the yoke!  Let these usurpers show us their
+title-deeds!"--[Simon Boliver.]
+
+"When I am indulging in my views of American prospects and American
+liberty, it is mortifying to be told that in that very country a large
+portion of the people are slaves!  It is a dark spot on the face of the
+nation.  Such a state of things cannot always exist."--[Lafayette.]
+
+"I deem it right to raise my humble voice to convince the citizens of
+America that the slaveholding states are held in abomination by all those
+whose opinion ought to be valuable.  Man is the property of man in about
+one half of the American States: let them not therefore dare to prate of
+their institutions or of their national freedom, while they hold their
+fellow-men in bondage!  Of all men living, the American citizen who is
+the owner of slaves is the most despicable.  He is a political hypocrite
+of the very worst description.  The friends of humanity and liberty in
+Europe should join in one universal cry of shame on the American slave-
+holders!  'Base wretches!' should we shout in chorus; 'base wretches!
+how dare you profane the temple of national freedom, the sacred fane of
+republican rites, with the presence and the sufferings of human beings in
+chains and slavery!'"--[Daniel O'Connell.]
+
+4.  Because it subjects one portion of our American brethren to the
+unrestrained violence and unholy passions of another.
+
+Here, gentlemen, I might summon to my support a cloud of witnesses, a
+host of incontrovertible, damning facts, the legitimate results of a
+system whose tendency is to harden and deprave the heart.  But I will not
+descend to particulars.  I am willing to believe that the majority of the
+masters of your section of the country are disposed to treat their
+unfortunate slaves with kindness.  But where the dreadful privilege of
+slave-holding is extended to all, in every neighborhood, there must be
+individuals whose cupidity is unrestrained by any principle of humanity,
+whose lusts are fiercely indulged, whose fearful power over the bodies,
+nay, may I not say the souls, of their victims is daily and hourly
+abused.
+
+Will the evidence of your own Jefferson, on this point, be admissible?
+
+"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise, of
+the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one
+part, and degrading submission on the other.  Our children see this, and
+learn to imitate it.  The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the
+lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller
+slaves, gives loose to the worst of passions; and thus nursed, educated,
+and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot fail to be stamped by it with
+odious peculiarities.  The man must be a prodigy who can retain his
+morals and manners undepraved by such circumstances."--[Notes on
+Virginia, p. 241.]
+
+"Il n'existe a la verite aucune loi qui protege l'esclave le mauvais
+traitement du maitre," says Achille Murat, himself a Floridian slave-
+holder, in his late work on the United States.
+
+Gentlemen, is not this true?  Does there exist even in Virginia any law
+limiting the punishment of a slave?  Are there any bounds prescribed,
+beyond which the brutal, the revengeful, the intoxicated slave-master,
+acting in the double capacity of judge and executioner, cannot pass?
+
+You will, perhaps, tell me that the general law against murder applies
+alike to master and slave.  True; but will you point out instances of
+masters suffering the penalty of that law for the murder of their slaves?
+If you examine your judicial reports you will find the wilful murder of a
+slave decided to be only a trespass!--[Virginia Reports, vol. v.  p. 481,
+Harris versus Nichols.]
+
+It indeed argues well for Virginian pride of character, that latterly,
+the law, which expressly sanctioned the murder of a slave, who in the
+language of Georgia and North Carolina, "died of moderate correction,"
+has been repealed.  But, although the letter of the law is changed, its
+practice remains the same.  In proof of this, I would refer to
+Brockenborough and Holmes' Virginia Cases, p. 258.
+
+In Georgia and North Carolina the murder of a slave is tolerated and
+justified by law, provided that in the opinion of the court he died "of
+moderate correction!"
+
+In South Carolina the following clause of a law enacted in 1740 is still
+in force:--
+
+"If any slave shall suffer in his life, limbs, or members, when no white
+person shall be present, or being present shall neglect or refuse to give
+evidence concerning the same, in every such case the owner or other
+person who shall have the care and government of the slave shall be
+deemed and taken to be guilty of such offence; unless such owner or other
+person can make the contrary appear by good and sufficient evidence, or
+shall by his own oath clear and exculpate himself, which oath every court
+where such offence shall be tried is hereby empowered to administer and
+to acquit the offender accordingly, if clear proof of the offence be not
+made by two witnesses at least, any law, usage, or custom to the contrary
+notwithstanding."
+
+Is not this offering a reward for perjury?  And what shall we think of
+that misnamed court of justice, where it is optional with the witnesses,
+in a case of life and death, to give or withhold their testimony.
+
+5.  Because it induces dangerous sectional jealousies, creates of
+necessity a struggle between the opposing interests of free and slave
+labor, and threatens the integrity of the Union.
+
+That sectional jealousies do exist, the tone of your paper, gentlemen, is
+of itself an evidence, if indeed any were needed.  The moral sentiment of
+the free states is against slavery.  The freeman has declared his
+unwillingness that his labor should be reduced to a level with that of
+slaves.  Harsh epithets and harsh threats have been freely exchanged,
+until the beautiful Potomac, wherever it winds its way to the ocean, has
+become the dividing line, not of territory only, but of feeling,
+interest, national pride, a moral division.
+
+What shook the pillars of the Union when the Missouri question was
+agitated?  What but a few months ago arrayed in arms a state against the
+Union, and the Union against a state?
+
+From Maine to Florida, gentlemen, the answer must be the same, slavery.
+
+6.  Because of its pernicious influence upon national wealth and
+prosperity.
+
+Political economy has been the peculiar study of Virginia.  But there are
+some important truths connected with this science which she has hitherto
+overlooked or wantonly disregarded.
+
+Population increasing with the means of subsistence is a fair test of
+national wealth.
+
+By reference to the several censuses of the United States, it will be
+seen that the white population increases nearly twice as fast in states
+where there are few or no slaves as in the slave states.
+
+Again, in the latter states the slave population has increased twice as
+fast as the white.  Let us take, for example, the period of twenty years,
+from 1790 to 1810, and compare the increase of the two classes in three
+of the Southern states.
+
+Per cent. of whites.  Per cent. of blacks.
+
+Maryland       13                  31
+Virginia       24                  38
+North Carolina 30                  70
+
+The causes of this disproportionate increase, so inimical to the true
+interests of the country, are very manifest.
+
+A large proportion of the free inhabitants of the United States are
+dependent upon their labor for subsistence.  The forced, unnatural system
+of slavery in some of the states renders the demand for free laborers
+less urgent; they are not so readily and abundantly supplied with the
+means of subsistence as those of their own class in the free states, and
+as the necessaries of life diminish population also diminishes.
+
+There is yet another cause for the decline of the white population.  In
+the free states labor is reputable.  The statesman, whose eloquence has
+electrified a nation, does not disdain in the intervals of the public
+service to handle the axe and the hoe.  And the woman whose beauty,
+talents, and accomplishments have won the admiration of all deems it no
+degradation to "look well to her household."
+
+But the slave stamps with indelible ignominy the character of occupation.
+It is a disgrace for a highborn Virginian or chivalrous Carolinian to
+labor, side by side, with the low, despised, miserable black man.
+Wretched must be the condition of the poorer classes of whites in a
+slave-holding community!  Compelled to perform the despised offices of
+the slave, they can hardly rise above his level.  They become the pariahs
+of society.  No wonder, then, that the tide of emigration flows from the
+slave-cursed shores of the Atlantic to the free valleys of the West.
+
+In New England the labor of a farmer or mechanic is worth from $150 to
+$200 per annum.  That of a female from $50 to $100.  Our entire
+population, with the exception of those engaged in mercantile affairs,
+the professional classes, and a very few moneyed idlers, are working men
+and women.  If that of the South were equally employed (and slavery
+apart, there is no reason why they should not be), how large an addition
+would be annually made to the wealth of the country?  The truth is, a
+very considerable portion of the national wealth produced by Northern
+labor is taxed to defray the expenses of twenty-five representatives of
+Southern property in Congress, and to maintain an army mainly for the
+protection of the slave-master against the dangerous tendencies of that
+property.
+
+In the early and better days of the Roman Republic, the ancient warriors
+and statesmen cultivated their fields with their own hands; but so soon
+as their agriculture was left to the slaves, it visibly declined, the
+once fertile fields became pastures, and the inhabitants of that garden
+of the world were dependent upon foreign nations for the necessaries of
+life.  The beautiful villages, once peopled by free contented laborers,
+became tenantless, and, over the waste of solitude, we see, here and
+there, at weary distances, the palaces of the master, contrasting
+painfully with the wretched cottages and subterranean cells of the slave.
+In speaking of the extraordinary fertility of the soil in the early times
+of the Republic, Pliny inquires, "What was the cause of these abundant
+harvests?  It was this, that men of rank employed themselves in the
+culture of the fields; whereas now it is left to wretches loaded with
+fetters, who carry in their countenances the shameful evidence of their
+slavery."
+
+And what was true in the days of the Roman is now written legibly upon
+the soil of your own Virginia.  A traveller in your state, in
+contemplating the decline of its agriculture, has justly remarked that,
+"if the miserable condition of the negro had left his mind for
+reflection, he would laugh in his chains to see how slavery has stricken
+the land with ugliness."
+
+Is the rapid increase of a population of slaves in itself no evil?  In
+all the slave states the increase of the slaves is vastly more rapid than
+that of the whites or free blacks.  When we recollect that they are under
+no natural or moral restraint, careless of providing food or clothing for
+themselves or their children; when, too, we consider that they are raised
+as an article of profitable traffic, like the cattle of New England and
+the hogs of Kentucky; that it is a matter of interest, of dollars and
+cents, to the master that they should multiply as fast as possible, there
+is surely nothing at all surprising in the increase of their numbers.
+Would to heaven there were also nothing alarming!
+
+7.  Because, by the terms of the national compact, the free and the slave
+states are alike involved in the guilt of maintaining slavery, and the
+citizens of the former are liable, at any moment, to be called upon to
+aid the latter in suppressing, at the point of the bayonet, the
+insurrection of the slaves.
+
+Slavery is, at the best, an unnatural state.  And Nature, when her
+eternal principles are violated, is perpetually struggling to restore
+them to their first estate.
+
+All history, ancient and modern, is full of warning on this point.  Need
+I refer to the many revolts of the Roman and Grecian slaves, the bloody
+insurrection of Etruria, the horrible servile wars of Sicily and Capua?
+Or, to come down to later times, to France in the fourteenth century,
+Germany in the sixteenth, to Malta in the last?  Need I call to mind the
+untold horrors of St.  Domingo, when that island, under the curse of its
+servile war, glowed redly in the view of earth and heaven,--an open hell?
+Have our own peculiar warnings gone by unheeded,--the frequent slave
+insurrections of the South?  One horrible tragedy, gentlemen, must still
+be fresh in your recollection,--Southampton, with its fired dwellings and
+ghastly dead!  Southampton, with its dreadful associations, of the death
+struggle with the insurgents, the groans of the tortured negroes, the
+lamentations of the surviving whites over woman in her innocence and
+beauty, and childhood, and hoary age!
+
+"The hour of emancipation," said Thomas Jefferson, "is advancing in the
+march of time.  It will come.  If not brought on by the generous energy
+of our own minds, it will come by the bloody process of St. Domingo!"
+
+To the just and prophetic language of your own great statesman I have but
+a few words to add.  They shall be those of truth and soberness.
+
+We regard the slave system in your section of the country as a great
+evil, moral and political,--an evil which, if left to itself for even a
+few years longer, will give the entire South into the hands of the
+blacks.
+
+The terms of the national compact compel us to consider more than two
+millions of our fellow-beings as your property; not, indeed, morally,
+really, de facto, but still legally your property!  We acknowledge that
+you have a power derived from the United States Constitution to hold this
+"property," but we deny that you have any moral right to take advantage
+of that power.  For truth will not allow us to admit that any human law
+or compact can make void or put aside the ordinance of the living God and
+the eternal laws of Nature.
+
+We therefore hold it to be the duty of the people of the slave-holding
+states to begin the work of emancipation now; that any delay must be
+dangerous to themselves in time and eternity, and full of injustice to
+their slaves and to their brethren of the free states.
+
+Because the slave has never forfeited his right to freedom, and the
+continuance of his servitude is a continuance of robbery; and because, in
+the event of a servile war, the people of the free states would be called
+upon to take a part in its unutterable horrors.
+
+New England would obey that call, for she will abide unto death by the
+Constitution of the land.  Yet what must be the feelings of her citizens,
+while engaged in hunting down like wild beasts their fellow-men--brutal
+and black it may be, but still oppressed, suffering human beings,
+struggling madly and desperately for their liberty, if they feel and know
+that the necessity of so doing has resulted from a blind fatality on the
+part of the oppressor, a reckless disregard of the warnings of earth and
+heaven, an obstinate perseverance in a system founded and sustained by
+robbery and wrong?
+
+All wars are horrible, wicked, inexcusable, and truly and solemnly has
+Jefferson himself said that, in a contest of this kind, between the slave
+and the master, "the Almighty has no attribute which could take side with
+us."
+
+Understand us, gentlemen.  We only ask to have the fearful necessity
+taken away from us of sustaining the wretched policy of slavery by moral
+influence or physical force.  We ask alone to be allowed to wash our
+hands of the blood of millions of your fellow-beings, the cry of whom is
+rising up as a swift witness unto God against us.
+
+8.  Because all the facts connected with the subject warrant us in a most
+confident belief that a speedy and general emancipation might be made
+with entire safety, and that the consequences of such an emancipation
+would be highly beneficial to the planters of the South.
+
+Awful as may be their estimate in time and eternity, I will not,
+gentlemen, dwell upon the priceless benefits of a conscience at rest, a
+soul redeemed from the all-polluting influences of slavery, and against
+which the cry of the laborer whose hire has been kept back by fraud does
+not ascend.  Nor will I rest the defence of my position upon the fact
+that it can never be unsafe to obey the commands of God.  These are the
+old and common arguments of "fanatics" and "enthusiasts," melting away
+like frost-work in the glorious sunshine of expediency and utility.  In
+the light of these modern luminaries, then, let us reason together.
+
+A long and careful examination of the subject will I think fully justify
+me in advancing this general proposition.
+
+Wherever, whether in Europe, the East and West Indies, South America, or
+in our own country, a fair experiment has been made of the comparative
+expense of free and slave labor, the result has uniformly been favorable
+to the former.
+
+     [See Brougham's Colonial Policy.  Hodgdon's Letter to Jean Baptiste
+     Say.  Waleh's Brazil.  Official Letter of Hon.  Mr. Ward, from
+     Mexico.  Dr. Dickson's Mitigation of Slavery.  Franklin on The
+     Peopling of Countries.  Ramsay's Essay.  Botham's Sugar Cultivation
+     in Batavia.  Marsden's History of Sumatra.  Coxe's Travels.  Dr.
+     Anderson's Observations on Slavery.  Storch's Political Economy.
+     Adam Smith.  J. Jeremies' Essays.  Humboldt's Travels, etc., etc.]
+
+Here, gentlemen, the issue is tendered.  Standing on your own ground of
+expediency, I am ready to defend my position.
+
+I pass from the utility to the safety of emancipation.  And here,
+gentlemen, I shall probably be met at the outset with your supposed
+consequences, bloodshed, rapine, promiscuous massacre!
+
+The facts, gentlemen!  In God's name, bring out your facts!  If slavery
+is to cast over the prosperity of our country the thick shadow of an
+everlasting curse, because emancipation is dreaded as a remedy worse than
+the disease itself, let us know the real grounds of your fear.
+
+Do you find them in the emancipation of the South American Republics?  In
+Hayti?  In the partial experiments of some of the West India Islands?
+Does history, ancient or modern, justify your fears?  Can you find any
+excuse for them in the nature of the human mind, everywhere maddened by
+injury and conciliated by kindness?  No, gentlemen; the dangers of
+slavery are manifest and real, all history lies open for your warning.
+But the dangers of emancipation, of "doing justly and loving mercy,"
+exist only in your imaginations.  You cannot produce one fact in
+corroboration of your fears.  You cannot point to the stain of a single
+drop of any master's blood shed by the slave he has emancipated.
+
+I have now given some of our reasons for opposing slavery.  In my next
+letter I shall explain our method of opposition, and I trust I shall be
+able to show that there is nothing "fanatical," nothing
+"unconstitutional," and nothing unchristian in that method.
+
+In the mean time, gentlemen, I am your friend and well-wisher.
+
+HAVERHILL, MASS., 22d 7th Mo., 1833.
+
+
+
+
+                                   II.
+
+The abolitionists of the North have been grossly misrepresented.  In
+attacking the system of slavery, they have never recommended any measure
+or measures conflicting with the Constitution of the United States.
+
+They have never sought to excite or encourage a spirit of rebellion among
+the slaves: on the contrary, they would hold any such attempt, by
+whomsoever made, in utter and stern abhorrence.
+
+All the leading abolitionists of my acquaintance are, from principle,
+opposed to war of all kinds, believing that the benefits of no war
+whatever can compensate for the sacrifice of one human life by violence.
+
+Consequently, they would be the first to deprecate any physical
+interference with your slave system on the part of the general
+government.
+
+They are, without exception, opposed to any political interposition of
+the government, in regard to slavery as it exists in the states.  For,
+although they feel and see that the canker of the moral disease is
+affecting all parts of the confederacy, they believe that the remedy lies
+with yourselves alone.  Any such interference they would consider
+unlawful and unconstitutional; and the exercise of unconstitutional
+power, although sanctioned by the majority of a republican government,
+they believe to be a tyranny as monstrous and as odious as the despotism
+of a Turkish Sultan.
+
+Having made this disclaimer on the part of myself and my friends, let me
+inquire from whence this charge of advocating the interference of the
+general government with the sovereign jurisdiction of the states has
+arisen?  Will you, gentlemen, will the able editors of the United States
+Telegraph and the Columbian Telescope, explain?  For myself, I have
+sought in vain among the writings of our "Northern Enthusiasts," and
+among the speeches of the Northern statesmen and politicians, for some
+grounds for the accusation.
+
+The doctrine, such as it is, does not belong to us.  I think it may be
+traced home to the South, to Virginia, to her Convention of 1829, to the
+speech of Ex-President Monroe, on the white basis question.
+
+"As to emancipation," said that distinguished son of your state, "if ever
+that should take place, it cannot be done by the state; it must be done
+by the Union."
+
+Again, "If emancipation can ever be effected, it can only be done with
+the aid of the general government."
+
+Gentlemen, you are welcome to your doctrine.  It has no advocates among
+the abolitionists of New England.
+
+We aim to overthrow slavery by the moral influence of an enlightened
+public sentiment;
+
+By a clear and fearless exposition of the guilt of holding property in
+man;
+
+By analyzing the true nature of slavery, and boldly rebuking sin;
+
+By a general dissemination of the truths of political economy, in regard
+to free and slave labor;
+
+By appeals from the pulpit to the consciences of men;
+
+By the powerful influence of the public press;
+
+By the formation of societies whose object shall be to oppose the
+principle of slavery by such means as are consistent with our obligations
+to law, religion, and humanity;
+
+By elevating, by means of education and sympathy, the character of the
+free people of color among us.
+
+Our testimony against slavery is the same which has uniformly, and with
+so much success, been applied to prevailing iniquity in all ages of the
+world, the truths of divine revelation.
+
+Believing that there can be nothing in the Providence of God to which His
+holy and eternal law is not strictly applicable, we maintain that no
+circumstances can justify the slave-holder in a continuance of his
+system.
+
+That the fact that this system did not originate with the present
+generation is no apology for retaining it, inasmuch as crime cannot be
+entailed; and no one is under a necessity of sinning because others have
+done so before him;
+
+That the domestic slave-trade is as repugnant to the laws of God, and
+should be as odious in the eyes of a Christian community, as the foreign;
+
+That the black child born in a slave plantation is not "an entailed
+article of property;" and that the white man who makes of that child a
+slave is a thief and a robber, stealing the child as the sea pirate stole
+his father!
+
+We do not talk of gradual abolition, because, as Christians, we find no
+authority for advocating a gradual relinquishment of sin.  We say to
+slaveholders, "Repent now, to-day, immediately;" just as we say to the
+intemperate, "Break off from your vice at once; touch not, taste not,
+handle not, from henceforth forever."
+
+Besides, the plan of gradual abolition has been tried in this country and
+the West Indies, and found wanting.  It has been in operation in our
+slave states ever since the Declaration of Independence, and its results
+are before the nation.  Let us see.
+
+THE ABOLITIONISTS  79
+
+In 1790 there were in the slave states south of the Potomac and the Ohio
+20,415 free blacks.  Their increase for the ten years following was at
+the rate of sixty per cent., their number in 1800 being 32,604.  In 1810
+there were 58,046, an increase of seventy-five per cent.  This
+comparatively large increase was, in a great measure, owing to the free
+discussions going on in England and in this country on the subject of the
+slave-trade and the rights of man.  The benevolent impulse extended to
+the slave-masters, and manumissions were frequent.  But the salutary
+impression died away; the hand of oppression closed again upon its
+victims; and the increase for the period of twenty years, 1810 to 1830,
+was only seventy-seven per cent., about one half of what it was in the
+ten years from 1800 to 1810.  And this is the practical result of the
+much-lauded plan of gradual abolition.
+
+In 1790, in the states above mentioned, there were only 550,604 slaves,
+but in 1830 there were 1,874,098!  And this, too, is gradual abolition.
+
+"What, then!" perhaps you will ask, "do you expect to overthrow our whole
+slave system at once? to turn loose to-day two millions of negroes?"
+
+No, gentlemen; we expect no such thing.  Enough for us if in the spirit
+of fraternal duty we point to your notice the commands of God; if we urge
+you by every cherished remembrance of common sacrifices upon a common
+altar, by every consideration of humanity, justice, and expediency, to
+begin now, without a moment's delay, to break away from your miserable
+system,--to begin the work of moral reformation, as God commands you to
+begin, not as selfishness, or worldly policy, or short-sighted political
+expediency, may chance to dictate.
+
+Such is our doctrine of immediate emancipation.  A doctrine founded on
+God's eternal truth, plain, simple, and perfect,--the doctrine of
+immediate, unprocrastinated repentance applied to the sin of slavery.
+
+Of this doctrine, and of our plan for crrrying it into effect, I have
+given an exposition, with the most earnest regard to the truth.  Does
+either embrace anything false, fanatical, or unconstitutional?  Do they
+afford a reasonable protext for your fierce denunciations of your
+Northern brethren?  Do they furnish occasion for your newspaper chivalry,
+your stereotyped demonstrations of Southern magnanimity and Yankee
+meanness?--things, let me say, unworthy of Virginians, degrading to
+yourselves, insulting to us.
+
+Gentlemen, it is too late for Virginia, with all her lofty intellect and
+nobility of feeling, to defend and advocate the principle of slavery.
+The death-like silence which for nearly two centuries brooded over her
+execrable system has been broken; light is pouring in upon the minds of
+her citizens; truth is abroad, "searching out and overturning the lies of
+the age."  A moral reformation has been already awakened, and it cannot
+now be drugged to sleep by the sophistries of detected sin.  A thousand
+intelligences are at work in her land; a thousand of her noblest hearts
+are glowing with the redeeming spirit of that true philanthropy, which is
+moving all the world.  No, gentlemen; light is spreading from the hills
+of Western Virginia to the extremest East.  You cannot arrest its
+progress.  It is searching the consciences; it is exercising the reason;
+it is appealing to the noblest characteristics of intelligent Virginians.
+It is no foreign influence.  From every abandoned plantation where the
+profitless fern and thistle have sprung up under the heel of slavery;
+from every falling mansion of the master, through whose windows the fox
+may look out securely, and over whose hearth-stone the thin grass is
+creeping, a warning voice is sinking deeply into all hearts not imbruted
+by avarice, indolence, and the lust of power.
+
+Abolitionist as I am, the intellectual character of Virginia has no
+warmer admirer than myself.  Her great names, her moral trophies, the
+glories of her early day, the still proud and living testimonials of her
+mental power, I freely acknowledge and strongly appreciate.  And, believe
+me, it is with no other feelings than those of regret and heartfelt
+sorrow that I speak plainly of her great error, her giant crime, a crime
+which is visibly calling down upon her the curse of an offended Deity.
+But I cannot forget that upon some of the most influential and highly
+favored of her sons rests the responsibility at the present time of
+sustaining this fearful iniquity.  Blind to the signs of the times,
+careless of the wishes of thousands of their white fellow-citizens and of
+the manifold wrongs of the black man, they have dared to excuse, defend,
+nay, eulogize, the black abominations of slavery.
+
+Against the tottering ark of the idol these strong men have placed their
+shoulders.  That ark must fall; that idol must be cast down; what, then,
+will be the fate of their supporters?
+
+When the Convention of 1829 had gathered in its splendid galaxy of
+talents the great names of Virginia, the friends of civil liberty turned
+their eyes towards it in the earnest hope and confidence that it would
+adopt some measures in regard to slavery worthy of the high character of
+its members and of the age in which they lived.  I need not say how deep
+and bitter was our disappointment.  Western Virginia indeed spoke on that
+occasion, through some of her delegates, the words of truth and humanity.
+But their counsels and warnings were unavailing; the majority turned away
+to listen to the bewildering eloquence of Leigh and Upshur and Randolph,
+as they desecrated their great intellects to the defence of that system
+of oppression under which the whole land is groaning.  The memorial of
+the citizens of Augusta County, bearing the signatures of many slave-
+holders, placed the evils of slavery in a strong light before the
+convention.  Its facts and arguments could only be arbitrarily thrust
+aside and wantonly disregarded; they could not be disproved.
+
+"In a political point of view," says the memorial, "we esteem slavery an
+evil greater than the aggregate of all the other evils which beset us,
+and we are perfectly willing to bear our proportion of the burden of
+removing it.  We ask, further, What is the evil of any such alarm as our
+proposition may excite in minds unnecessarily jealous compared with that
+of the fatal catastrophe which ultimately awaits our country, and the
+general depravation of manners which slavery has already produced and is
+producing?"
+
+I cannot forbear giving one more extract from this paper.  The
+memorialists state their belief
+
+"That the labor of slaves is vastly less productive than that of freemen;
+that it therefore requires a larger space to furnish subsistence for a
+given number of the former than of the latter; that the employment of the
+former necessarily excludes that of the latter; that hence our
+population, white and black, averages seventeen, when it ought, and would
+under other circumstances, average, as in New England, at least sixty to
+a square mile; that the possession and management of slaves form a source
+of endless vexation and misery in the house, and of waste and ruin on the
+farm; that the youth of the country are growing up with a contempt of
+steady industry as a low and servile thing, which contempt induces
+idleness and all its attendant effeminacy, vice, and worthlessness; that
+the waste of the products of the land, nay, of the land itself, is
+bringing poverty on all its inhabitants; that this poverty and the
+sparseness of population either prevent the institution of schools
+throughout the country, or keep them in a most languid and inefficient
+condition; and that the same causes most obviously paralyze all our
+schemes and efforts for the useful improvement of the country."
+
+Gentlemen, you have only to look around you to know that this picture has
+been drawn with the pencil of truth.  What has made desolate and sterile
+one of the loveliest regions of the whole earth?  What mean the signs of
+wasteful neglect, of long improvidence around you: the half-finished
+mansion already falling into decay, the broken-down enclosures, the weed-
+grown garden the slave hut open to the elements, the hillsides galled and
+naked, the fields below them run over with brier and fern?  Is all this
+in the ordinary course of nature?  Has man husbanded well the good gifts
+of God, and are they nevertheless passing from him, by a process of
+deterioration over which he has no control?  No, gentlemen.  For more
+than two centuries the cold and rocky soil of New England has yielded its
+annual tribute, and it still lies green and luxuriant beneath the sun of
+our brief summer.  The nerved and ever-exercised arm of free labor has
+changed a landscape wild and savage as the night scenery of Salvator Rosa
+into one of pastoral beauty,--the abode of independence and happiness.
+Under a similar system of economy and industry, how would Virginia, rich
+with Nature's prodigal blessings, have worn at this time over all her
+territory the smiles of plenty, the charms of rewarded industry!  What a
+change would have been manifest in your whole character!  Freemen in the
+place of slaves, industry, reputable  economy, a virtue, dissipation
+despised, emigration unnecessary!
+
+     [A late Virginia member of Congress described the Virginia slave-
+     holder as follows: "He is an Eastern Virginian whose good fortune it
+     has been to have been born wealthy, and to have become a profound
+     politician at twenty-one without study or labor.  This individual,
+     from birth and habit, is above all labor and exertion.  He never
+     moves a finger for any useful purpose; he lives on the labor of his
+     slaves, and even this labor he is too proud and indolent to direct
+     in person.  While he is at his ease, a mercenary with a whip in his
+     hand drives his slaves in the field.  Their dinner, consisting of a
+     few scraps and lean bones, is eaten in the burning sun.  They have
+     no time to go to a shade and be refreshed such easement is reserved
+     for the horses"!--Speech of Hon. P. P. Doddridge in House of
+     Delegates, 1829.]
+
+All this, you will say, comes too late; the curse is upon you, the evil
+in the vitals of your state, the desolation widening day by day.  No, it
+is not too late.  There are elements in the Virginian character capable
+of meeting the danger, extreme as it is, and turning it aside.  Could you
+but forget for a time partisan contest and unprofitable political
+speculations, you might successfully meet the dangerous exigencies of
+your state with those efficient remedies which the spirit of the age
+suggests; you might, and that too without pecuniary loss, relinquish your
+claims to human beings as slaves, and employ them as free laborers, under
+such restraint and supervision as their present degraded condition may
+render necessary.  In the language of one of your own citizens, "it is
+useless for you to attempt to linger on the skirts of the age which is
+departed.  The action of existing causes and principles is steady and
+progressive.  It cannot be retarded, unless you would blow out all the
+moral lights around you; and if you refuse to keep up with it, you will
+be towed in the wake, whether you will or not."--[Speech in Virginia
+legislature, 1832.]
+
+The late noble example of the eloquent statesman of Roanoke, the
+manumission of his slaves, speaks volumes to his political friends.  In
+the last hour of existence, when his soul was struggling from his broken
+tenement, his latest effort was the confirmation of this generous act of
+a former period.  Light rest the turf upon him beneath his own
+patrimonial oaks!  The prayers of many hearts made happy by his
+benevolence shall linger over his grave and bless it.
+
+Gentlemen, in concluding these letters, let me once more assure you that
+I entertain towards you and your political friends none other than kindly
+feelings.  If I have spoken at all with apparent harshness, it has been
+of principles rather than of men.  But I deprecate no censure.  Conscious
+of the honest and patriotic motives which have prompted their avowal, I
+cheerfully leave my sentiments to their fate.  Despised and contemned as
+they may be, I believe they cannot be gainsaid.  Sustained by the truth
+as it exists in Nature and Revelation, sanctioned by the prevailing
+spirit of the age, they are yet destined to work out the political and
+moral regeneration of our country.  The opposition which they meet with
+does not dishearten me.  In the lofty confidence of John Milton, I
+believe that "though all the winds of doctrine be let loose upon the
+earth, so Truth be among them, we need not fear.  Let her and Falsehood
+grapple; whoever knew her to be put to the worst in a free and open
+encounter?"
+
+HAVERHILL, MASS., 29th of 7th Mo., 1833.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                       LETTER TO SAMUEL E. SEWALL.
+
+                    HAVERHILL, 10th of 1st Mo., 1834.
+
+SAMUEL E. SEWALL, ESQ.,
+Secretary New England A. S. Society
+
+DEAR FRIEND,--I regret that circumstances beyond my control will not
+allow of my attendance at the annual meeting of the New England Anti-
+Slavery Society.
+
+I need not say to the members of that society that I am with them, heart
+and soul, in the cause of abolition; the abolition not of physical
+slavery alone, abhorrent and monstrous as it is, but of that intellectual
+slavery, the bondage of corrupt and mistaken opinion, which has fettered
+as with iron the moral energies and intellectual strength of New England.
+
+For what is slavery, after all, but fear,--fear, forcing mind and body
+into unnatural action?  And it matters little whether it be the terror of
+the slave-whip on the body, or of the scourge of popular opinion upon the
+inner man.
+
+We all know how often the representatives of the Southern division of the
+country have amused themselves in Congress by applying the opprobrious
+name of "slave" to the free Northern laborer.  And how familiar have the
+significant epithets of "white slave" and "dough-face" become!
+
+I fear these epithets have not been wholly misapplied.  Have we not been
+told here, gravely and authoritatively, by some of our learned judges,
+divines, and politicians, that we, the free people of New England, have
+no right to discuss the subject of slavery?  Freemen, and no right to
+suggest the duty or the policy of a practical adherence to the doctrines
+of that immortal declaration upon which our liberties are founded!
+Christians, enjoying perfect liberty of conscience, yet possessing no
+right to breathe one whisper against a system of adultery and blood,
+which is filling the whole land with abomination and blasphemy!  And this
+craven sentiment is echoed by the very men whose industry is taxed to
+defray the expenses of twenty-five representatives of property, vested in
+beings fashioned in the awful image of their Maker; by men whose hard
+earnings aid in supporting a standing army mainly for the protection of
+slaveholding indolence; by men who are liable at any moment to be called
+from the field and workshop to put down by force the ever upward
+tendencies of oppressed humanity, to aid the negro-breeder and the negro-
+trader in the prosecution of a traffic most horrible in the eye of God,
+to wall round with their bayonets two millions of colored Americans,
+children of a common Father and heirs of a common eternity, while the
+broken chain is riveted anew and the thrown-off fetter replaced.
+
+I am for the abolition of this kind of slavery.  It must be accomplished
+before we can hope to abolish the negro slavery of the country.  The
+people of the free states, with a perfect understanding of their own
+rights and a sacred respect for the rights of others, must put their
+strong shoulders to the work of moral reform, and our statesmen, orators,
+and politicians will follow, floating as they must with the tendency of
+the current, the mere indices of popular sentiment.  They cannot be
+expected to lead in this matter.  They are but instruments in the hands
+of the people for good or evil:--
+
+          "A breath can make them, as a breath has made."
+
+Be it our task to give tone and direction to these instruments; to turn
+the tide of popular feeling into the pure channels of justice; to break
+up the sinful silence of the nation; to bring the vaunted Christianity of
+our age and country to the test of truth; to try the strength and purity
+of our republicanism.  If the Christianity we profess has not power to
+pull down the strongholds of prejudice, and overcome hate, and melt the
+heart of oppression, it is not of God.  If our republicanism is based on
+other foundation than justice and humanity, let it fall forever.
+
+No better evidence is needed of the suicidal policy of this nation than
+the death-like silence on the subject of slavery which pervades its
+public documents.  Who that peruses the annual messages of the national
+executive would, from their perusal alone, conjecture that such an evil
+as slavery had existence among us?  Have the people reflected upon the
+cause of this silence?  The evil has grown to be too monstrous to be
+questioned.  Its very magnitude has sealed the lips of the rulers.
+Uneasily, and troubled with its dream of guilt, the nation sleeps on.
+The volcano is beneath.  God is above us.
+
+At every step of our peaceful and legal agitation of this subject we are
+met with one grave objection.  We are told that the system which we are
+conscientiously opposing is recognized and protected by the Constitution.
+For all the benefits of our fathers' patriotism--and they are neither few
+nor trifling--let us be grateful to God and to their memories.  But it
+should not be forgotten that the same constitutional compact which now
+sanctions slavery guaranteed protection for twenty years to the foreign
+slave-trade.  It threw the shield of its "sanctity" around the now
+universally branded pirate.  It legalized the most abhorrent system of
+robbery which ever cursed the family of man.
+
+During those years of sinful compromise the crime of man-robbery less
+atrocious than at present?  Because the Constitution permitted, in that
+single crime, the violation of all the commandments of God, was that
+violation less terrible to earth or offensive to heaven?
+
+No one now defends that "constitutional" slavetrade.  Loaded with the
+curse of God and man, it stands amidst minor iniquities, like Satan in
+Pandemonium, preeminent and monstrous in crime.
+
+And if the slave-trade has become thus odious, what must be the fate,
+erelong, of its parent, slavery?  If the mere consequence be thus
+blackening under the execration of all the world, who shall measure the
+dreadful amount of infamy which must finally settle on the cause itself?
+The titled ecclesiastic and the ambitious statesman should have their
+warning on this point.  They should know that public opinion is steadily
+turning to the light of truth.  The fountains are breaking up around us,
+and the great deep will soon be in motion.  A stern, uncompromising, and
+solemn spirit of inquiry is abroad.  It cannot be arrested, and its
+result may be easily foreseen.  It will not long be popular to talk of
+the legality of soul-murder, the constitutionality of man-robbery.
+
+One word in relation to our duty to our Southern brethren.  If we detest
+their system of slavery in our hearts, let us not play the hypocrite with
+our lips.  Let us not pay so poor a compliment to their understandings as
+to suppose that we can deceive them into a compliance with our views of
+justice by ambiguous sophistry, and overcome their sinful practices and
+established prejudices by miserable stratagem.  Let us not first do
+violence to our consciences by admitting their moral right to property in
+man, and then go to work like so many vagabond pedlers to cheat them out
+of it.  They have a right to complain of such treatment.  It is mean, and
+wicked, and dishonorable.  Let us rather treat our Southern friends as
+intelligent and high-minded men, who, whatever may be their faults,
+despise unmanly artifice, and loathe cant, and abhor hypocrisy.
+Connected with them, not by political ties alone, but by common
+sacrifices and mutual benefits, let us seek to expostulate with them
+earnestly and openly, to gain at least their confidence in our sincerity,
+to appeal to their consciences, reason, and interests; and, using no
+other weapons than those of moral truth, contend fearlessly with the evil
+system they are cherishing.  And if, in an immediate compliance with the
+strict demands of justice, they should need our aid and sympathy, let us
+open to them our hearts and our purses.  But in the name of sincerity,
+and for the love of peace and the harmony of the Union, let there be no
+more mining and countermining, no more blending of apology with
+denunciation, no more Janus-like systems of reform, with one face for the
+South and another for the North.
+
+If we steadily adhere to the principles upon which we have heretofore
+acted, if we present our naked hearts to the view of all, if we meet the
+threats and violence of our misguided enemies with the bare bosom and
+weaponless hand of innocence, may we not trust that the arm of our
+Heavenly Father will be under us, to strengthen and support us?  And
+although we may not be able to save our country from the awful judgment
+she is provoking, though the pillars of the Union fall and all the
+elements of her greatness perish, still let it be our part to rally
+around the standard of truth and justice, to wash our hands of evil, to
+keep our own souls unspotted, and, bearing our testimony and lifting our
+warning voices to the last, leave the event in the hands of a righteous
+God.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.
+
+     In 1837 Isaac Knapp printed Letters from John Quincy Adams to his
+     Constituents of the Twelfth Congressional District in Massachusetts,
+     to which is added his Speech in Congress, delivered February 9,
+     1837, and the following stood as an introduction to the pamphlet.
+
+THE following letters have been published, within a few weeks, in the
+Quincy (Mass.) 'Patriot'.  Notwithstanding the great importance of the
+subjects which they discuss, the intense interest which they are
+calculated to awaken throughout this commonwealth and the whole country,
+and the exalted reputation of their author as a profound statesman and
+powerful writer, they are as yet hardly known beyond the limits of the
+constituency to whom they are particularly addressed.  The reason of this
+is sufficiently obvious.  John Quincy Adams belongs to neither of the
+prominent political parties, fights no partisan battles, and cannot be
+prevailed upon to sacrifice truth and principle upon the altar of party
+expediency and interest.  Hence neither party is interested in defending
+his course, or in giving him an opportunity to defend himself.  But
+however systematic may be the efforts of mere partisan presses to
+suppress and hold back from the public eye the powerful and triumphant
+vindication of the Right of Petition, the graphic delineation of the
+slavery spirit in Congress, and the humbling disclosure of Northern
+cowardice and treachery, contained in these letters, they are destined to
+exert a powerful influence upon the public mind.  They will constitute
+one of the most striking pages in the history of our times.  They will be
+read with avidity in the North and in the South, and throughout Europe.
+Apart from the interest excited by the subjects under discussion, and
+viewed only as literary productions, they may be ranked among the highest
+intellectual efforts of their author.  Their sarcasm is Junius-like,--
+cold, keen, unsparing.  In boldness, directness, and eloquent appeal,
+they will bear comparison with O'Connell's celebrated 'Letters to the
+Reformers of Great Britain'.  They are the offspring of an intellect
+unshorn of its primal strength, and combining the ardor of youth with the
+experience of age.
+
+The disclosure made in these letters of the slavery influence exerted in
+Congress over the representatives of the free states, of the manner in
+which the rights of freemen have been bartered for Southern votes, or
+basely yielded to the threats of men educated in despotism, and stamped
+by the free indulgence of unrestrained tyranny with the "odious
+peculiarities" of slavery, is painful and humiliating in the extreme.  It
+will be seen that, in the great struggle for and against the Right of
+Petition, an account of which is given in the following pages, their
+author stood, in a great measure, alone and unsupported by his Northern
+colleagues.  On his "gray, discrowned head" the entire fury of slave-
+holding arrogance and wrath was expended.  He stood alone, beating back,
+with his aged and single arm, the tide which would have borne down and
+overwhelmed a less sturdy and determined spirit.
+
+We need not solicit for these letters, and the speech which accompanies
+them, a thorough perusal.  They deserve, and we trust will receive, a
+circulation throughout the entire country.  They will meet a cordial
+welcome from every lover of human liberty, from every friend of justice
+and the rights of man, irrespective of color or condition.  The
+principles which they defend, the sentiments which they express, are
+those of Massachusetts, as recently asserted, almost unanimously, by her
+legislature.  In both branches of that body, during the discussion of the
+subject of slavery and the right of petition, the course of the ex-
+President was warmly and eloquently commended.  Massachusetts will
+sustain her tried and faithful representative; and the time is not far
+distant when the best and worthiest citizens of the entire North will
+proffer him their thanks for his noble defence of their rights as
+freemen, and of the rights of the slave as a man.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BIBLE AND SLAVERY.
+
+     From a review of a pro-slavery pamphlet by "Evangelicus" in the
+     Boston Emancipator in 1843.
+
+THE second part of the essay is occupied in proving that the slavery in
+the Roman world, at the time of our Saviour, was similar in all essential
+features to American slavery at the present day; and the third and
+concluding part is devoted to an examination of the apostolical
+directions to slaves and masters, as applicable to the same classes in
+the United States.  He thinks the command to give to servants that which
+is just and equal means simply that the masters should treat their slaves
+with equity, and that while the servant is to be profitable to the
+master, the latter is bound in "a fair and equitable manner to provide
+for the slave's subsistence and happiness."  Although he professes to
+believe that a faithful adherence to Scriptural injunctions on this point
+would eventually terminate in the emancipation of the slaves, he thinks
+it not necessary to inquire whether the New Testament does or does not
+"tolerate slavery as a permanent institution"!
+
+From the foregoing synopsis it will be seen at once that whatever may
+have been the motives of the writer, the effect of his publication, so
+far as it is at all felt, will be to strengthen the oppressor in his
+guilt, and hold him back from the performance of his immediate duty in
+respect to his slaves, and to shield his conscience from the reproofs of
+that class who, according to "Evangelicus," have "no personal
+acquaintance with the actual domestic state or the social and political
+connections of their Southern fellow-citizens."  We look upon it only as
+another vain attempt to strike a balance between Christian duty and
+criminal policy, to reconcile Christ and Belial, the holy philanthropy of
+Him who went about doing good with the most abhorrent manifestation of
+human selfishness, lust, and hatred which ever provoked the divine
+displeasure.  There is a grave-stone coldness about it.  The author
+manifests as little feeling as if he were solving a question in algebra.
+No sigh of sympathy breathes through its frozen pages for the dumb,
+chained millions, no evidence of a feeling akin to that of Him who at the
+grave of Lazarus
+
+          "Wept, and forgot His power to save;"
+
+no outburst of that indignant reproof with which the Divine Master
+rebuked the devourers of widows' houses and the oppressors of the poor is
+called forth by the writer's stoical contemplation of the tyranny of his
+"Christian brethren" at the South.
+
+"It is not necessary," says Evangelicus, "to inquire whether the New
+Testament does not tolerate slavery as a permanent institution."  And
+this is said when the entire slave-holding church has sheltered its
+abominations under the pretended sanction of the gospel; when slavery,
+including within itself a violation of every command uttered amidst the
+thunders of Sinai, a system which has filled the whole South with the
+oppression of Egypt and the pollutions of Sodom, is declared to be an
+institution of the Most High.  With all due deference to the author, we
+tell him, and we tell the church, North and South, that this question
+must be met.  Once more we repeat the solemn inquiry which has been
+already made in our columns, "Is the Bible to enslave the world?"  Has it
+been but a vain dream of ours that the mission of the Author of the
+gospel was to undo the heavy burdens, to open the prison doors, and to
+break the yoke of the captive?  Let Andover and Princeton answer.  If the
+gospel does sanction the vilest wrong which man can inflict upon his
+fellow-man, if it does rivet the chains which humanity, left to itself,
+would otherwise cast off, then, in humanity's name, let it perish forever
+from the face of the earth.  Let the Bible societies dissolve; let not
+another sheet issue from their presses.  Scatter not its leaves abroad
+over the dark places of the earth; they are not for the healing of the
+nations.  Leave rather to the Persian his Zendavesta, to the Mussulman
+his Koran.  We repeat it, this question must be met.  Already we have
+heard infidelity exulting over the astute discoveries of bespectacled
+theological professors, that the great Head of the Christian Church
+tolerated the horrible atrocities of Roman slavery, and that His most
+favored apostle combined slave-catching with his missionary labors.  And
+why should it not exult?  Fouler blasphemy than this was never uttered.
+A more monstrous libel upon the Divine Author of Christianity was never
+propagated by Paine or Voltaire, Kneeland or Owen; and we are constrained
+to regard the professor of theology or the doctor of divinity who tasks
+his sophistry and learning in an attempt to show that the Divine Mind
+looks with complacency upon chattel slavery as the most dangerous enemy
+with which Christianity has to contend.  The friends of pure and
+undefiled religion must awake to this danger.  The Northern church must
+shake itself clean from its present connection with blasphemers and
+slave-holders, or perish with them.
+
+
+
+
+
+WHAT IS SLAVERY
+
+
+     Addressed to the Liberty Party Convention at New Bedford in
+     September, 1843.
+
+I HAVE just received your kind invitation to attend the meeting of the
+Liberty Party in New Bedford on the 2d of next month.  Believe me, it is
+with no ordinary feelings of regret that I find myself under the
+necessity of foregoing the pleasure of meeting with you on that occasion.
+But I need not say to you, and through you to the convention, that you
+have my hearty sympathy.
+
+I am with the Liberty Party because it is the only party in the country
+which is striving openly and honestly to reduce to practice the great
+truths which lie at the foundation of our republic: all men created
+equal, endowed with rights inalienable; the security of these rights the
+only just object of government; the right of the people to alter or
+modify government until this great object is attained.  Precious and
+glorious truths!  Sacred in the sight of their Divine Author, grateful
+and beneficent to suffering humanity, essential elements of that ultimate
+and universal government of which God is laying the strong and wide
+foundations, turning and overturning, until He whose right it is shall
+rule.  The voice which calls upon us to sustain them is the voice of God.
+In the eloquent language of the lamented Myron Holley, the man who first
+lifted up the standard of the Liberty Party: "He calls upon us to sustain
+these truths in the recorded voice of the holy of ancient times.  He
+calls us to sustain them in the sound as of many waters and mighty
+thunderings rising from the fields of Europe, converted into one vast
+Aceldama by the exertions of despots to suppress them; in the persuasive
+history of the best thoughts and boldest deeds of all our brave, self-
+sacrificing ancestors; in the tender, heart-reaching whispers of our
+children, preparing to suffer or enjoy the future, as we leave it for
+them; in the broken and disordered but moving accents of half our race
+yet groping in darkness and galled by the chains of bondage.  He calls
+upon us to sustain them by the solemn and considerate use of all the
+powers with which He has invested us."  In a time of almost universal
+political scepticism, in the midst of a pervading and growing unbelief in
+the great principles enunciated in the revolutionary declaration, the
+Liberty Party has dared to avow its belief in these truths, and to carry
+them into action as far as it has the power.  It is a protest against the
+political infidelity of the day, a recurrence to first principles, a
+summons once more to that deserted altar upon which our fathers laid
+their offerings.
+
+It may be asked why it is that a party resting upon such broad principles
+is directing its exclusive exertions against slavery.  "Are there not
+other great interests?" ask all manner of Whig and Democrat editors and
+politicians.  "Consider, for instance," say the Democrats, "the mighty
+question which is agitating us, whether a 'Northern man with Southern
+principles' or a Southern man with the principles of a Nero or Caligula
+shall be President."  "Or look at us," say the Whigs, "deprived of our
+inalienable right to office by this Tyler-Calhoun administration.  And
+bethink you, gentlemen, how could your Liberty Party do better than to
+vote with us for a man who, if he does hold some threescore of slaves,
+and maintain that 'two hundred years of legislation has sanctioned and
+sanctified negro slavery,' is, at the same time, the champion of Greek
+liberty, and Polish liberty, and South American liberty, and, in short,
+of all sorts of liberties, save liberty at home."
+
+Yes, friends, we have considered all this, and more, namely, that one
+sixth part of our entire population are slaves, and that you, with your
+subtreasuries and national banks, propose no relief for them.  Nay,
+farther, it is because both of you, when in power, have used your
+authority to rivet closer the chains of unhappy millions, that we have
+been compelled to abandon you, and form a liberty party having for its
+first object the breaking of these chains.
+
+What is slavery?  For upon the answer to this question must the Liberty
+Party depend for its justification.
+
+The slave laws of the South tell us that it is the conversion of men into
+articles of property; the transformation of sentient immortal beings into
+"chattels personal."  The principle of a reciprocity of benefits, which
+to some extent characterizes all other relations, does not exist in that
+of master and slave.  The master holds the plough which turns the soil of
+his plantation, the horse which draws it, and the slave who guides it by
+one and the same tenure.  The profit of the master is the great end of
+the slave's existence.  For this end he is fed, clothed, and prescribed
+for in sickness.  He learns nothing, acquires nothing, for himself.  He
+cannot use his own body for his own benefit.  His very personality is
+destroyed.  He is a mere instrument, a means in the hands of another for
+the accomplishment of an end in which his own interests are not regarded,
+a machine moved not by his own will, but by another's.  In him the awful
+distinction between a person and a thing is annihilated: he is thrust
+down from the place which God and Nature assigned him, from the equal
+companionship of rational intelligence's,--a man herded with beasts, an
+immortal nature classed with the wares of the merchant!
+
+The relations of parent and child, master and apprentice, government and
+subject, are based upon the principle of benevolence, reciprocal
+benefits, and the wants of human society; relations which sacredly
+respect the rights and legacies which God has given to all His rational
+creatures.  But slavery exists only by annihilating or monopolizing these
+rights and legacies.  In every other modification of society, man's
+personal ownership remains secure.  He may be oppressed, deprived of
+privileges, loaded with burdens, hemmed about with legal disabilities,
+his liberties restrained.  But, through all, the right to his own body
+and soul remains inviolate.  He retains his inherent, original possession
+of himself.  Even crime cannot forfeit it, for that law which destroys
+his personality makes void its own claims upon him as a moral agent; and
+the power to punish ceases with the accountability of the criminal.  He
+may suffer and die under the penalties of the law, but he suffers as a
+man, he perishes as a man, and not as a thing.  To the last moments of
+his existence the rights of a moral agent are his; they go with him to
+the grave; they constitute the ground of his accountability at the bar of
+infinite justice,--rights fixed, eternal, inseparable; attributes of all
+rational intelligence in time and eternity; the same in essence, and
+differing in degree only, with those of the highest moral being, of God
+himself.
+
+Slavery alone lays its grasp upon the right of personal ownership, that
+foundation right, the removal of which uncreates the man; a right which
+God himself could not take away without absolving the being thus deprived
+of all moral accountability; and so far as that being is concerned,
+making sin and holiness, crime and virtue, words without significance,
+and the promises and sanctions of revelation, dreams.  Hence, the
+crowning horror of slavery, that which lifts it above all other
+iniquities, is not that it usurps the prerogatives of Deity, but that it
+attempts that which even He who has said, "All souls are mine," cannot
+do, without breaking up the foundations of His moral government.  Slavery
+is, in fact, a struggle with the Almighty for dominion over His rational
+creatures.  It is leagued with the powers of darkness, in wresting man
+from his Maker.  It is blasphemy lifting brazen brow and violent hand to
+heaven, attempting a reversal of God's laws.  Man claiming the right to
+uncreate his brother; to undo that last and most glorious work, which God
+himself pronounced good, amidst the rejoicing hosts of heaven!  Man
+arrogating to himself the right to change, for his own selfish purposes,
+the beautiful order of created existences; to pluck the crown of an
+immortal nature, scarce lower than that of angels, from the brow of his
+brother; to erase the God-like image and superscription stamped upon him
+by the hand of his Creator, and to write on the despoiled and desecrated
+tablet, "A chattel personal!"
+
+This, then, is slavery.  Nature, with her thousand voices, cries out
+against it.  Against it, divine revelation launches its thunders.  The
+voice of God condemns it in the deep places of the human heart.  The woes
+and wrongs unutterable which attend this dreadful violation of natural
+justice, the stripes, the tortures, the sunderings of kindred, the
+desolation of human affections, the unchastity and lust, the toil
+uncompensated, the abrogated marriage, the legalized heathenism, the
+burial of the mind, are but the mere incidentals of the first grand
+outrage, that seizure of the entire man, nerve, sinew, and spirit, which
+robs him of his body, and God of his soul.  These are but the natural
+results and outward demonstrations of slavery, the crystallizations from
+the chattel principle.
+
+It is against this system, in its active operation upon three millions of
+our countrymen, that the Liberty Party is, for the present, directing all
+its efforts.  With such an object well may we be "men of one idea."  Nor
+do we neglect "other great interests," for all are colored and controlled
+by slavery, and the removal of this disastrous influence would most
+effectually benefit them.
+
+Political action is the result and immediate object of moral suasion on
+this subject.  Action, action, is the spirit's means of progress, its
+sole test of rectitude, its only source of happiness.  And should not
+decided action follow our deep convictions of the wrong of slavery?
+Shall we denounce the slave-holders of the states, while we retain our
+slavery in the District of Columbia?  Shall we pray that the God of the
+oppressed will turn the hearts of "the rulers" in South Carolina, while
+we, the rulers of the District, refuse to open the prisons and break up
+the slave-markets on its ten miles square?  God keep us from such
+hypocrisy!  Everybody now professes to be opposed to slavery.  The
+leaders of the two great political parties are grievously concerned lest
+the purity of the antislavery enterprise will suffer in its connection
+with politics.  In the midst of grossest pro-slavery action, they are
+full of anti-slavery sentiment.  They love the cause, but, on the whole,
+think it too good for this world.  They would keep it sublimated, aloft,
+out of vulgar reach or use altogether, intangible as Magellan's clouds.
+Everybody will join us in denouncing slavery, in the abstract; not a
+faithless priest nor politician will oppose us; abandon action, and
+forsooth we can have an abolition millennium; the wolf shall lie down
+with the lamb, while slavery in practice clanks, in derision, its three
+millions of unbroken chains.  Our opponents have no fear of the harmless
+spectre of an abstract idea.  They dread it only when it puts on the
+flesh and sinews of a practical reality, and lifts its right arm in the
+strength which God giveth to do as well as theorize.
+
+As honest men, then, we must needs act; let us do so as becomes men
+engaged in a great and solemn cause.  Not by processions and idle parades
+and spasmodic enthusiasms, by shallow tricks and shows and artifices, can
+a cause like ours be carried onward.  Leave these to parties contending
+for office, as the "spoils of victory."  We need no disguises, nor false
+pretences, nor subterfuges; enough for us to present before our fellow-
+countrymen the holy truths of freedom, in their unadorned and native
+beauty.  Dark as the present may seem, let us remember with hearty
+confidence that truth and right are destined to triumph.  Let us blot out
+the word "discouragement" from the anti-slavery vocabulary.  Let the
+enemies of freedom be discouraged; let the advocates of oppression
+despair; but let those who grapple with wrong and falsehood, in the name
+of God and in the power of His truth, take courage.  Slavery must die.
+The Lord hath spoken it.  The vials of His hot displeasure, like those
+which chastised the nations in the Apocalyptic vision, are smoking even
+now, above its "habitations of cruelty."  It can no longer be borne with
+by Heaven.  Universal humanity cries out against it.  Let us work, then,
+to hasten its downfall, doing whatsoever our hands find to do, "with all
+our might."
+
+October, 1843.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY.
+
+                                 [1843.]
+
+THE great leader of American Democracy, Thomas Jefferson, was an ultra-
+abolitionist in theory, while from youth to age a slave-holder in
+practice.  With a zeal which never abated, with a warmth which the frost
+of years could not chill, he urged the great truths, that each man should
+be the guardian of his own weal; that one man should never have absolute
+control over another.  He maintained the entire equality of the race, the
+inherent right of self-ownership, the equal claim of all to a fair
+participation in the enactment of the laws by which they are governed.
+
+He saw clearly that slavery, as it existed in the South and on his own
+plantation, was inconsistent with this doctrine.  His early efforts for
+emancipation in Virginia failed of success; but he next turned his
+attention to the vast northwestern territory, and laid the foundation of
+that ordinance of 1787, which, like the flaming sword of the angel at the
+gates of Paradise, has effectually guarded that territory against the
+entrance of slavery.  Nor did he stop here.  He was the friend and
+admirer of the ultra-abolitionists of revolutionary France; he warmly
+urged his British friend, Dr. Price, to send his anti-slavery pamphlets
+into Virginia; he omitted no opportunity to protest against slavery as
+anti-democratic, unjust, and dangerous to the common welfare; and in his
+letter to the territorial governor of Illinois, written in old age, he
+bequeathed, in earnest and affecting language, the cause of negro
+emancipation to the rising generation.  "This enterprise," said he, "is
+for the young, for those who can carry it forward to its consummation.
+It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old
+man."
+
+Such was Thomas Jefferson, the great founder of American Democracy, the
+advocate of the equality of human rights, irrespective of any conditions
+of birth, or climate, or color.  His political doctrines, it is strange
+to say, found their earliest recipients and most zealous admirers in the
+slave states of the Union.  The privileged class of slaveholders, whose
+rank and station "supersede the necessity of an order of nobility,"
+became earnest advocates of equality among themselves--the democracy of
+aristocracy.  With the misery and degradation of servitude always before
+them, in the condition of their own slaves, an intense love of personal
+independence, and a haughty impatience of any control over their actions,
+prepared them to adopt the democratic idea, so far as it might be applied
+to their own order.  Of that enlarged and generous democracy, the love,
+not of individual freedom alone, but of the rights and liberties of all
+men, the unselfish desire to give to others the privileges which all men
+value for themselves, we are constrained to believe the great body of
+Thomas Jefferson's slave-holding admirers had no adequate conception.
+They were just such democrats as the patricians of Rome and the
+aristocracy of Venice; lords over their own plantations, a sort of "holy
+alliance" of planters, admitting and defending each other's divine right
+of mastership.
+
+Still, in Virginia, Maryland, and in other sections of the slave states,
+truer exponents and exemplifiers of the idea of democracy, as it existed
+in the mind of Jefferson, were not wanting.  In the debate on the
+memorials presented to the first Congress of the United States, praying
+for the abolition of slavery, the voice of the Virginia delegation in
+that body was unanimous in deprecation of slavery as an evil, social,
+moral, and political.  In the Virginia constitutional convention--of 1829
+there were men who had the wisdom to perceive and the firmness to declare
+that slavery was not only incompatible with the honor and prosperity of
+the state, but wholly indefensible on any grounds which could be
+consistently taken by a republican people.  In the debate on the same
+subject in the legislature in 1832, universal and impartial democracy
+found utterance from eloquent lips.  We might say as much of Kentucky,
+the child of Virginia.  But it remains true that these were exceptions to
+the general rule.  With the language of universal liberty on their lips,
+and moved by the most zealous spirit of democratic propagandism, the
+greater number of the slave-holders of the Union seem never to have
+understood the true meaning, or to have measured the length and breadth
+of that doctrine which they were the first to adopt, and of which they
+have claimed all along to be the peculiar and chosen advocates.
+
+The Northern States were slow to adopt the Democratic creed.  The
+oligarchy of New England, and the rich proprietors and landholders of the
+Middle States, turned with alarm and horror from the levelling doctrines
+urged upon them by the "liberty and equality" propagandists of the South.
+The doctrines of Virginia were quite as unpalatable to Massachusetts at
+the beginning of the present century as those of Massachusetts now are to
+the Old Dominion.  Democracy interfered with old usages and time-honored
+institutions, and threatened to plough up the very foundations of the
+social fabric.  It was zealously opposed by the representatives of New
+England in Congress and in the home legislatures; and in many pulpits
+hands were lifted to God in humble entreaty that the curse and bane of
+democracy, an offshoot of the rabid Jacobinism of revolutionary France,
+might not be permitted to take root and overshadow the goodly heritage of
+Puritanism.  The alarmists of the South, in their most fervid pictures of
+the evils to be apprehended from the prevalence of anti-slavery doctrines
+in their midst, have drawn nothing more fearful than the visions of such
+
+          "Prophets of war and harbingers of ill"
+
+as Fisher Ames in the forum and Parish in the desk, when contemplating
+the inroads of Jeffersonian democracy upon the politics, religion, and
+property of the North.
+
+But great numbers of the free laborers of the Northern States, the
+mechanics and small farmers, took a very different view of the matter.
+The doctrines of Jefferson were received as their political gospel.  It
+was in vain that federalism denounced with indignation the impertinent
+inconsistency of slave-holding interference in behalf of liberty in the
+free states.  Come the doctrine from whom it might, the people felt it to
+be true.  State after state revolted from the ranks of federalism, and
+enrolled itself on the side of democracy.  The old order of things was
+broken up; equality before the law was established, religious tests and
+restrictions of the right of suffrage were abrogated.  Take
+Massachusetts, for example.  There the resistance to democratic
+principles was the most strenuous and longest continued.  Yet, at this
+time, there is no state in the Union more thorough in its practical
+adoption of them.  No property qualifications or religious tests prevail;
+all distinctions of sect, birth, or color, are repudiated, and suffrage
+is universal.  The democracy, which in the South has only been held in a
+state of gaseous abstraction, hardened into concrete reality in the cold
+air of the North.  The ideal became practical, for it had found lodgment
+among men who were accustomed to act out their convictions and test all
+their theories by actual experience.
+
+While thus making a practical application of the new doctrine, the people
+of the free states could not but perceive the incongruity of democracy
+and slavery.
+
+Selleck Osborn, who narrowly escaped the honor of a Democratic martyr in
+Connecticut, denounced slave-holding, in common with other forms of
+oppression.  Barlow, fresh from communion with Gregoire, Brissot, and
+Robespierre, devoted to negro slavery some of the most vigorous and
+truthful lines of his great poem.  Eaton, returning from his romantic
+achievements in Tunis for the deliverance of white slaves, improved the
+occasion to read a lecture to his countrymen on the inconsistency and
+guilt of holding blacks in servitude.  In the Missouri struggle of 1819-
+20, the people of the free states, with a few ignoble exceptions, took
+issue with the South against the extension of slavery.  Some ten years
+later, the present antislavery agitation commenced.  It originated,
+beyond a question, in the democratic element.  With the words of
+Jefferson on their lips, young, earnest, and enthusiastic men called the
+attention of the community to the moral wrong and political reproach of
+slavery.  In the name and spirit of democracy, the moral and political
+powers of the people were invoked to limit, discountenance, and put an
+end to a system so manifestly subversive of its foundation principles.
+It was a revival of the language of Jefferson and Page and Randolph, an
+echo of the voice of him who penned the Declaration of Independence and
+originated the ordinance of 1787.
+
+Meanwhile the South had wellnigh forgotten the actual significance of the
+teachings of its early political prophets, and their renewal in the shape
+of abolitionism was, as might have been expected, strange and unwelcome.
+Pleasant enough it had been to hold up occasionally these democratic
+abstractions for the purpose of challenging the world's admiration and
+cheaply acquiring the character of lovers of liberty and equality.
+Frederick of Prussia, apostrophizing the shades of Cato and Brutus,
+
+          "Vous de la liberte heros que je revere,"
+
+while in the full exercise of his despotic power, was quite as consistent
+as these democratic slaveowners, whose admiration of liberty increased in
+exact ratio with its distance from their own plantations.  They had not
+calculated upon seeing their doctrine clothed with life and power, a
+practical reality, pressing for application to their slaves as well as to
+themselves.  They had not taken into account the beautiful ordination of
+Providence, that no man can vindicate his own rights, without directly or
+impliedly including in that vindication the rights of all other men.  The
+haughty and oppressive barons who wrung from their reluctant monarch the
+Great Charter at Runnymede, acting only for themselves and their class,
+little dreamed of the universal application which has since been made of
+their guaranty of rights and liberties.  As little did the nobles of the
+parliament of Paris, when strengthening themselves by limiting the kingly
+prerogative, dream of the emancipation of their own serfs, by a
+revolution to which they were blindly giving the first impulse.  God's
+truth is universal; it cannot be monopolized by selfishness.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                           THE TWO PROCESSIONS.
+
+                                 [1844.]
+
+              "Look upon this picture, and on this."  HAMLET.
+
+CONSIDERING that we have a slave population of nearly three millions, and
+that in one half of the states of the Republic it is more hazardous to
+act upon the presumption that "all men are created free and equal" than
+it would be in Austria or Russia, the lavish expression of sympathy and
+extravagant jubilation with which, as a people, we are accustomed to
+greet movements in favor of freedom abroad are not a little remarkable.
+We almost went into ecstasies over the first French revolution; we filled
+our papers with the speeches of orator Hunt and the English radicals; we
+fraternized with the United Irishmen; we hailed as brothers in the cause
+of freedom the very Mexicans whom we have since wasted with fire and
+sword; our orators, North and South, grew eloquent and classic over the
+Greek and Polish revolutions.  In short, long ere this, if the walls of
+kingcraft and despotism had been, like those of Jericho, destined to be
+overthrown by sound, our Fourth of July cannon-shootings and bell-
+ringings, together with our fierce, grandiloquent speech-makings in and
+out of Congress, on the occasions referred to, would have left no stone
+upon another.
+
+It is true that an exception must be made in the case of Hayti.  We fired
+no guns, drank no toasts, made no speeches in favor of the establishment
+of that new republic in our neighborhood.  The very mention of the
+possibility that Haytien delegates might ask admittance to the congress
+of the free republics of the New World at Panama "frightened from their
+propriety" the eager propagandists of republicanism in the Senate, and
+gave a death-blow to their philanthropic projects.  But as Hayti is a
+republic of blacks who, having revolted from their masters as well as
+from the mother country, have placed themselves entirely without the pale
+of Anglo-Saxon sympathy by their impertinent interference with the
+monopoly of white liberty, this exception by no means disproves the
+general fact, that in the matter of powder-burning, bell-jangling,
+speech-making, toast-drinking admiration of freedom afar off and in the
+abstract we have no rivals.  The caricature of our "general sympathizers"
+in Martin Chuzzlewit is by no means a fancy sketch.
+
+The news of the revolution of the three days in Paris, and the triumph of
+the French people over Charles X. and his ministers, as a matter of
+course acted with great effect upon our national susceptibility.  We all
+threw up our hats in excessive joy at the spectacle of a king dashed down
+headlong from his throne and chased out of his kingdom by his long-
+suffering and oppressed subjects.  We took half the credit of the
+performance to ourselves, inasmuch as Lafayette was a principal actor in
+it.  Our editors, from Passamaquoddy to the Sabine, indited paragraphs
+for a thousand and one newspapers, congratulating the Parisian patriots,
+and prophesying all manner of evil to holy alliances, kings, and
+aristocracies.  The National Intelligencer for September 27, 1830,
+contains a full account of the public rejoicings of the good people of
+Washington on the occasion.  Bells were rung in all the steeples, guns
+were fired, and a grand procession was formed, including the President of
+the United States, the heads of departments, and other public
+functionaries.  Decorated with tricolored ribbons, and with tricolored
+flags mingling with the stripes and stars over their heads, and gazed
+down upon by bright eyes from window and balcony, the "general
+sympathizers" moved slowly and majestically through the broad avenue
+towards the Capitol to celebrate the revival of French liberty in a
+manner becoming the chosen rulers of a free people.
+
+What a spectacle was this for the representatives of European kingcraft
+at our seat of government!  How the titled agents of Metternich and
+Nicholas must have trembled, in view of this imposing demonstration, for
+the safety of their "peculiar institutions!"
+
+Unluckily, however, the moral effect of this grand spectacle was marred
+somewhat by the appearance of another procession, moving in a contrary
+direction.  It was a gang of slaves!  Handcuffed in pairs, with the
+sullen sadness of despair in their faces, they marched wearily onward to
+the music of the driver's whip and the clanking iron on their limbs.
+Think of it!  Shouts of triumph, rejoicing bells, gay banners, and
+glittering cavalcades, in honor of Liberty, in immediate contrast with
+men and women chained and driven like cattle to market!  The editor of
+the American Spectator, a paper published at Washington at that time,
+speaking of this black procession of slavery, describes it as "driven
+along by what had the appearance of a man on horseback."  The miserable
+wretches who composed it were doubtless consigned to a slave-jail to
+await their purchase and transportation to the South or Southwest; and
+perhaps formed a part of that drove of human beings which the same editor
+states that he saw on the Saturday following, "males and females chained
+in couples, starting from Robey's tavern, on foot, for Alexandria, to
+embark on board a slave-ship."
+
+At a Virginia camp-meeting, many years ago, one of the brethren,
+attempting an exhortation, stammered, faltered, and finally came to a
+dead stand.  "Sit down, brother," said old Father Kyle, the one-eyed
+abolition preacher; "it's no use to try; you can't preach with twenty
+negroes sticking in your throat!" It strikes us that our country is very
+much in the condition of the poor confused preacher at the camp-meeting.
+Slavery sticks in its throat, and spoils its finest performances,
+political and ecclesiastical; confuses the tongues of its evangelical
+alliances; makes a farce of its Fourth of July celebrations; and, as in
+the case of the grand Washington procession of 1830, sadly mars the
+effect of its rejoicings in view of the progress of liberty abroad.
+There is a stammer in all our exhortations; our moral and political
+homilies are sure to run into confusions and contradictions; and the
+response which comes to us from the nations is not unlike that of Father
+Kyle to the planter's attempt at sermonizing: "It's no use, brother
+Jonathan; you can't preach liberty with three millions of slaves in your
+throat!"
+
+
+
+
+
+                          A CHAPTER OF HISTORY.
+
+                                 [1844.]
+
+THE theory which a grave and learned Northern senator has recently
+announced in Congress, that slavery, like the cotton-plant, is confined
+by natural laws to certain parallels of latitude, beyond which it can by
+no possibility exist, however it may have satisfied its author and its
+auditors, has unfortunately no verification in the facts of the case.
+Slavery is singularly cosmopolitan in its habits.  The offspring of
+pride, and lust, and avarice, it is indigenous to the world.  Rooted in
+the human heart, it defies the rigors of winter in the steppes of Tartary
+and the fierce sun of the tropics.  It has the universal acclimation of
+sin.
+
+The first account we have of negro slaves in New England is from the pen
+of John Josselyn.  Nineteen years after the landing at Plymouth, this
+interesting traveller was for some time the guest of Samuel Maverick, who
+then dwelt, like a feudal baron, in his fortalice on Noddle's Island,
+surrounded by retainers and servants, bidding defiance to his Indian
+neighbors behind his strong walls, with "four great guns" mounted
+thereon, and "giving entertainment to all new-comers gratis."
+
+"On the 2d of October, 1639, about nine o'clock in the morning, Mr.
+Maverick's negro woman," says Josselyn, "came to my chamber, and in her
+own country language and tune sang very loud and shrill.  Going out to
+her, she used a great deal of respect towards me, and would willingly
+have expressed her grief in English had she been able to speak the
+language; but I apprehended it by her countenance and deportment.
+Whereupon I repaired to my host to learn of him the cause, and resolved
+to entreat him in her behalf; for I had understood that she was a queen
+in her own country, and observed a very dutiful and humble garb used
+towards her by another negro, who was her maid.  Mr. Maverick was
+desirous to have a breed of negroes; and therefore, seeing she would not
+yield by persuasions to company with a negro young man he had in his
+house, he commanded him, willed she, nilled she, to go to her bed, which
+was no sooner done than she thrust him out again.  This she took in high
+disdain beyond her slavery; and this was the cause of her grief."
+
+That the peculiar domestic arrangements and unfastidious economy of this
+slave-breeding settler were not countenanced by the Puritans of that
+early time we have sufficient evidence.  It is but fair to suppose, from
+the silence of all other writers of the time with respect to negroes and
+slaves, that this case was a marked exception to the general habits and
+usage of the Colonists.  At an early period a traffic was commenced
+between the New England Colonies and that of Barbadoes; and it is not
+improbable that slaves were brought to Boston from that island.  The
+laws, however, discouraged their introduction and purchase, giving
+freedom to all held to service at the close of seven years.
+
+In 1641, two years after Josselyn's adventure on Noddle's Island, the
+code of laws known by the name of the Body of Liberties was adopted by
+the Colony.  It was drawn up by Nathaniel Ward, the learned and ingenious
+author of the 'Simple Cobbler of Agawarn', the earliest poetical satire
+of New England.  One of its provisions was as follows:--
+
+"There shall be never any bond slaverie, villainage, or captivitie
+amongst us, unless it be lawfull captives taken in just warres and such
+strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us.  And these
+shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God
+established in Israel doth morally require."
+
+In 1646, Captain Smith, a Boston church-member, in connection with one
+Keeser, brought home two negroes whom he obtained by the surprise and
+burning of a negro village in Africa and the massacre of many of its
+inhabitants.  Sir Richard Saltonstall, one of the assistants, presented a
+petition to the General Court, stating the outrage thereby committed as
+threefold in its nature, namely murder, man-stealing, and Sabbath-
+breaking; inasmuch as the offence of "chasing the negers, as aforesayde,
+upon the Sabbath day (being a servile work, and such as cannot be
+considered under any other head) is expressly capital by the law of God;"
+for which reason he prays that the offenders may be brought to justice,
+"soe that the sin they have committed may be upon their own heads and not
+upon ourselves."
+
+Upon this petition the General Court passed the following order,
+eminently worthy of men professing to rule in the fear and according to
+the law of God,--a terror to evil-doers, and a praise to them that do
+well:--
+
+"The General Court, conceiving themselves bound by the first opportunity
+to bear witness against the heinous and crying sin of man-stealing, as
+also to prescribe such timely redress for what has passed, and such a law
+for the future as may sufficiently deter all others belonging to us to
+have to do in such vile and odious courses, justly abhorred of all good
+and just men, do order that the negro interpreter, and others unlawfully
+taken, be by the first opportunity, at the charge of the country for the
+present, sent to his native country, Guinea, and a letter with him of the
+indignation of the Court thereabout, and justice thereof, desiring our
+honored Governor would please put this order in execution."
+
+There is, so far as we know, no historical record of the actual return of
+these stolen men to their home.  A letter is extant, however, addressed
+in behalf of the General Court to a Mr. Williams on the Piscataqua, by
+whom one of the negroes had been purchased, requesting him to send the
+man forthwith to Boston, that he may be sent home, "which this Court do
+resolve to send back without delay."
+
+Three years after, in 1649, the following law was placed upon the
+statute-book of the Massachusetts Colony:--
+
+"If any man stealeth a man, or mankind, he shall surely be put to death."
+
+It will thus be seen that these early attempts to introduce slavery into
+New England were opposed by severe laws and by that strong popular
+sentiment in favor of human liberty which characterized the Christian
+radicals who laid the foundations of the Colonies.  It was not the rigor
+of her Northern winter, nor the unkindly soil of Massachusetts, which
+discouraged the introduction of slavery in the first half-century of her
+existence as a colony.  It was the Puritan's recognition of the
+brotherhood of man in sin, suffering, and redemption, his estimate of the
+awful responsibilities and eternal destinies of humanity, his hatred of
+wrong and tyranny, and his stern sense of justice, which led him to
+impose upon the African slave-trader the terrible penalty of the Mosaic
+code.
+
+But that brave old generation passed away.  The civil contentions in the
+mother country drove across the seas multitudes of restless adventurers
+and speculators.  The Indian wars unsettled and demoralized the people.
+Habits of luxury and the greed of gain took the place of the severe self-
+denial and rigid virtues of the fathers.  Hence we are not surprised to
+find that Josselyn, in his second visit to New England, some twenty-five
+years after his first, speaks of the great increase of servants and
+negroes.  In 1680 Governor Bradstreet, in answer to the inquiries of his
+Majesty's Privy Council, states that two years before a vessel from
+Madagasca "brought into the Colony betwixt forty and fifty negroes,
+mostly women and children, who were sold at a loss to the owner of the
+vessel."  "Now and then," he continues, "two or three negroes are brought
+from Barbadoes and other of his Majesty's plantations and sold for twenty
+pounds apiece; so that there may be within the government about one
+hundred or one hundred and twenty, and it may be as many Scots, brought
+hither and sold for servants in the time of the war with Scotland, and
+about half as many Irish."
+
+The owning of a black or white slave, or servant, at this period was
+regarded as an evidence of dignity and respectability; and hence
+magistrates and clergymen winked at the violation of the law by the
+mercenary traders, and supplied themselves without scruple.  Indian
+slaves were common, and are named in old wills, deeds, and inventories,
+with horses, cows, and household furniture.  As early as the year 1649 we
+find William Hilton, of Newbury, sells to George Carr, "for one quarter
+part of a vessel, James, my Indian, with all the interest I have in him,
+to be his servant forever."  Some were taken in the Narragansett war and
+other Indian wars; others were brought from South Carolina and the
+Spanish Main.  It is an instructive fact, as illustrating the retributive
+dealings of Providence, that the direst affliction of the Massachusetts
+Colony--the witchcraft terror of 1692--originated with the Indian Tituba,
+a slave in the family of the minister of Danvers.
+
+In the year 1690 the inhabitants of Newbury were greatly excited by the
+arrest of a Jerseyman who had been engaged in enticing Indians and
+negroes to leave their masters.  He was charged before the court with
+saying that "the English should be cut off and the negroes set free."
+James, a negro slave, and Joseph, an Indian, were arrested with him.
+Their design was reported to be, to seize a vessel in the port and escape
+to Canada and join the French, and return and lay waste and plunder their
+masters.  They were to come back with five hundred Indians and three
+hundred Canadians; and the place of crossing the Merrimac River, and of
+the first encampment on the other side, were even said to be fixed upon.
+When we consider that there could not have been more than a score of
+slaves in the settlement, the excitement into which the inhabitants were
+thrown by this absurd rumor of conspiracy seems not very unlike that of a
+convocation of small planters in a backwoods settlement in South Carolina
+on finding an anti-slavery newspaper in their weekly mail bag.
+
+In 1709 Colonel Saltonstall, of Haverhill, had several negroes, and among
+them a high-spirited girl, who, for some alleged misdemeanor, was
+severely chastised.  The slave resolved upon revenge for her injury, and
+soon found the means of obtaining it.  The Colonel had on hand, for
+service in the Indian war then raging, a considerable store of gunpowder.
+This she placed under the room in which her master and mistress slept,
+laid a long train, and dropped a coal on it.  She had barely time to
+escape to the farm-house before the explosion took place, shattering the
+stately mansion into fragments.  Saltonstall and his wife were carried on
+their bed a considerable distance, happily escaping serious injury.  Some
+soldiers stationed in the house were scattered in all directions; but no
+lives were lost.  The Colonel, on recovering from the effects of his
+sudden overturn, hastened to the farm-house and found his servants all up
+save the author of the mischief, who was snug in bed and apparently in a
+quiet sleep.
+
+In 1701 an attempt was made in the General Court of Massachusetts to
+prevent the increase of slaves.  Judge Sewall soon after published a
+pamphlet against slavery, but it seems with little effect.  Boston
+merchants and ship-owners became, to a considerable extent, involved in
+the slave-trade.  Distilleries, established in that place and in Rhode
+Island, furnished rum for the African market.  The slaves were usually
+taken to the West Indies, although occasionally part of a cargo found its
+way to New England, where the wholesome old laws against man-stealing had
+become a dead letter on the statute-book.
+
+In 1767 a bill was brought before the Legislature of Massachusetts to
+prevent "the unwarrantable and unnatural custom of enslaving mankind."
+The Council of Governor Bernard sent it back to the House greatly changed
+and curtailed, and it was lost by the disagreement of the two branches.
+Governor Bernard threw his influence on the side of slavery.  In 1774 a
+bill prohibiting the traffic in slaves passed both Houses; but Governor
+Hutchinson withheld his assent and dismissed the Legislature.  The
+colored men sent a deputation of their own to the Governor to solicit his
+consent to the bill; but he told them his instructions forbade him.  A
+similar committee waiting upon General Gage received the same answer.
+
+In the year 1770 a servant of Richard Lechmere, of Cambridge, stimulated
+by the general discussion of the slavery question and by the advice of
+some of the zealous advocates of emancipation, brought an action against
+his master for detaining him in bondage.  The suit was decided in his
+favor two years before the similar decision in the case of Somerset in
+England.  The funds necessary for carrying on this suit were raised among
+the blacks themselves.  Other suits followed in various parts of the
+Province; and the result was, in every instance, the freedom of the
+plaintiff.  In 1773 Caesar Hendrick sued his master, one Greenleaf, of
+Newburyport, for damages, laid at fifty pounds, for holding him as a
+slave.  The jury awarded him his freedom and eighteen pounds.
+
+According to Dr. Belknap, whose answers to the queries on the subject,
+propounded by Judge Tucker, of Virginia, have furnished us with many of
+the facts above stated, the principal grounds upon which the counsel of
+the masters depended were, that the negroes were purchased in open
+market, and included in the bills of sale like other property; that
+slavery was sanctioned by usage; and, finally, that the laws of the
+Province recognized its existence by making masters liable for the
+maintenance of their slaves, or servants.
+
+On the part of the blacks, the law and usage of the mother country,
+confirmed by the Great Charter, that no man can be deprived of his
+liberty but by the judgment of his peers, were effectually pleaded.  The
+early laws of the Province prohibited slavery, and no subsequent
+legislation had sanctioned it; for, although the laws did recognize its
+existence, they did so only to mitigate and modify an admitted evil.
+
+The present state constitution was established in 1780.  The first
+article of the Bill of Rights prohibited slavery by affirming the
+foundation truth of our republic, that "all men are born free and equal."
+The Supreme Court decided in 1783 that no man could hold another as
+property without a direct violation of that article.
+
+In 1788 three free black citizens of Boston were kidnapped and sold into
+slavery in one of the French islands.  An intense excitement followed.
+Governor Hancock took efficient measures for reclaiming the unfortunate
+men.  The clergy of Boston petitioned the Legislature for a total
+prohibition of the foreign slave-trade.  The Society of Friends, and the
+blacks generally, presented similar petitions; and the same year an act
+was passed prohibiting the slave-trade and granting relief to persons
+kidnapped or decoyed out of the Commonwealth.  The fear of a burden to
+the state from the influx of negroes from abroad led the Legislature, in
+connection with this law, to prevent those who were not citizens of the
+state or of other states from gaining a residence.
+
+The first case of the arrest of a fugitive slave in Massachusetts under
+the law of 1793 took place in Boston soon after the passage of the law.
+It is the case to which President Quincy alludes in his late letter
+against the fugitive slave law.  The populace at the trial aided the
+slave to escape, and nothing further was done about it.
+
+The arrest of George Latimer as a slave, in Boston, and his illegal
+confinement in jail, in 1842, led to the passage of the law of 1843 for
+the "protection of personal liberty," prohibiting state officers from
+arresting or detaining persons claimed as slaves, and the use of the
+jails of the Commonwealth for their confinement.  This law was strictly
+in accordance with the decision of the supreme judiciary, in the case of
+Prigg vs. The State of Pennsylvania, that the reclaiming of fugitives was
+a matter exclusively belonging to the general government; yet that the
+state officials might, if they saw fit, carry into effect the law of
+Congress on the subject, "unless prohibited by state legislation."
+
+It will be seen by the facts we have adduced that slavery in
+Massachusetts never had a legal existence.  The ermine of the judiciary
+of the Puritan state has never been sullied by the admission of its
+detestable claims.  It crept into the Commonwealth like other evils and
+vices, but never succeeded in clothing itself with the sanction and
+authority of law.  It stood only upon its own execrable foundation of
+robbery and wrong.
+
+With a history like this to look back upon, is it strange that the people
+of Massachusetts at the present day are unwilling to see their time-
+honored defences of personal freedom, the good old safeguards of Saxon
+liberty, overridden and swept away after the summary fashion of "the
+Fugitive Slave Bill;" that they should loathe and scorn the task which
+that bill imposes upon them of aiding professional slave-hunters in
+seizing, fettering, and consigning to bondage men and women accused only
+of that which commends them to esteem and sympathy, love of liberty and
+hatred of slavery; that they cannot at once adjust themselves to
+"constitutional duties" which in South Carolina and Georgia are reserved
+for trained bloodhounds?  Surely, in view of what Massachusetts has been,
+and her strong bias in favor of human freedom, derived from her great-
+hearted founders, it is to be hoped that the Executive and Cabinet at
+Washington will grant her some little respite, some space for turning,
+some opportunity for conquering her prejudices, before letting loose the
+dogs of war upon her.  Let them give her time, and treat with forbearance
+her hesitation, qualms of conscience, and wounded pride.  Her people,
+indeed, are awkward in the work of slave-catching, and, it would seem,
+rendered but indifferent service in a late hunt in Boston.  Whether they
+would do better under the surveillance of the army and navy of the United
+States is a question which we leave with the President and his Secretary
+of State.  General Putnam once undertook to drill a company of Quakers,
+and instruct them, by force of arms, in the art and mystery of fighting;
+but not a single pair of drab-colored breeches moved at his "forward
+march;" not a broad beaver wheeled at his word of command; no hand
+unclosed to receive a proffered musket.  Patriotic appeal, hard swearing,
+and prick of bayonet had no effect upon these impracticable raw recruits;
+and the stout general gave them up in despair.  We are inclined to
+believe that any attempt on the part of the Commander-in-chief of our
+army and navy to convert the good people of Massachusetts into expert
+slave-catchers, under the discipline of West Point and Norfolk, would
+prove as idle an experiment as that of General Putnam upon the Quakers.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                  THOMAS CARLYLE ON THE SLAVE-QUESTION.
+
+                                 [1846.]
+
+A LATE number of Fraser's Magazine contains an article bearing the
+unmistakable impress of the Anglo-German peculiarities of Thomas Carlyle,
+entitled, 'An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question', which would be
+interesting as a literary curiosity were it not in spirit and tendency so
+unspeakably wicked as to excite in every rightminded reader a feeling of
+amazement and disgust.  With a hard, brutal audacity, a blasphemous
+irreverence, and a sneering mockery which would do honor to the devil of
+Faust, it takes issue with the moral sense of mankind and the precepts of
+Christianity.  Having ascertained that the exports of sugar and spices
+from the West Indies have diminished since emancipation,--and that the
+negroes, having worked, as they believed, quite long enough without
+wages, now refuse to work for the planters without higher pay than the
+latter, with the thriftless and evil habits of slavery still clinging to
+them, can afford to give,--the author considers himself justified in
+denouncing negro emancipation as one of the "shams" which he was
+specially sent into this world to belabor.  Had he confned himself to
+simple abuse and caricature of the self-denying and Christian
+abolitionists of England--"the broad-brimmed philanthropists of Exeter
+Hall"--there would have been small occasion for noticing his splenetic
+and discreditable production.  Doubtless there is a cant of philanthropy
+--the alloy of human frailty and folly--in the most righteous reforms,
+which is a fair subject for the indignant sarcasm of a professed hater of
+shows and falsities.  Whatever is hollow and hypocritical in politics,
+morals, or religion, comes very properly within the scope of his mockery,
+and we bid him Godspeed in plying his satirical lash upon it.  Impostures
+and frauds of all kinds deserve nothing better than detection and
+exposure.  Let him blow them up to his heart's content, as Daniel did the
+image of Bell and the Dragon.
+
+But our author, in this matter of negro slavery, has undertaken to apply
+his explosive pitch and rosin, not to the affectation of humanity, but to
+humanity itself.  He mocks at pity, scoffs at all who seek to lessen the
+amount of pain and suffering, sneers at and denies the most sacred
+rights, and mercilessly consigns an entire class of the children of his
+Heavenly Father to the doom of compulsory servitude.  He vituperates the
+poor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to a
+Mississippi slave-driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle on
+the banks of the Potomac.  His rhetoric has a flavor of the slave-pen and
+auction-block, vulgar, unmanly, indecent, a scandalous outrage upon good
+taste and refined feeling, which at once degrades the author and insults
+his readers.
+
+He assumes (for he is one of those sublimated philosophers who reject the
+Baconian system of induction and depend upon intuition without recourse
+to facts and figures) that the emancipated class in the West India
+Islands are universally idle, improvident, and unfit for freedom; that
+God created them to be the servants and slaves of their "born lords," the
+white men, and designed them to grow sugar, coffee, and spices for their
+masters, instead of raising pumpkins and yams for themselves; and that,
+if they will not do this, "the beneficent whip" should be again employed
+to compel them.  He adopts, in speaking of the black class, the lowest
+slang of vulgar prejudice.  "Black Quashee," sneers the gentlemanly
+philosopher,--"black Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out the
+spices, will get himself made a slave again (which state will be a little
+less ugly than his present one), and with beneficent whip, since other
+methods avail not, will be compelled to work."
+
+It is difficult to treat sentiments so atrocious and couched in such
+offensive language with anything like respect.  Common sense and
+unperverted conscience revolt instinctively against them.  The doctrine
+they inculcate is that which underlies all tyranny and wrong of man
+towards man.  It is that under which "the creation groaneth and
+travaileth unto this day."  It is as old as sin; the perpetual argument
+of strength against weakness, of power against right; that of the Greek
+philosopher, that the barbarians, being of an inferior race, were born to
+be slaves to the Greeks; and of the infidel Hobbes, that every man, being
+by nature at war with every other man, has a perpetual right to reduce
+him to servitude if he has the power.  It is the cardinal doctrine of
+what John Quincy Adams has very properly styled the Satanic school of
+philosophy,--the ethics of an old Norse sea robber or an Arab plunderer
+of caravans.  It is as widely removed from the sweet humanities and
+unselfish benevolence of Christianity as the faith and practice of the
+East India Thug or the New Zealand cannibal.
+
+Our author does not, however, take us altogether by surprise.  He has
+before given no uncertain intimations of the point towards which his
+philosophy was tending.  In his brilliant essay upon 'Francia of
+Paraguay', for instance, we find him entering with manifest satisfaction
+and admiration into the details of his hero's tyranny.  In his 'Letters
+and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell'--in half a dozen pages of savage and
+almost diabolical sarcasm directed against the growing humanity of the
+age, the "rose-pink sentimentalisms," and squeamishness which shudders at
+the sight of blood and infliction of pain--he prepares the way for a
+justification of the massacre of Drogheda.  More recently he has
+intimated that the extermination of the Celtic race is the best way of
+settling the Irish question; and that the enslavement and forcible
+transportation of her poor, to labor under armed taskmasters in the
+colonies, is the only rightful and proper remedy for the political and
+social evils of England.  In the 'Discourse on Negro Slavery' we see this
+devilish philosophy in full bloom.  The gods, he tells us, are with the
+strong.  Might has a divine right to rule,--blessed are the crafty of
+brain and strong of hand!  Weakness is crime.  "Vae victis!" as Brennus
+said when he threw his sword into the scale,--Woe to the conquered!  The
+negro is weaker in intellect than his "born lord," the white man, and has
+no right to choose his own vocation.  Let the latter do it for him, and,
+if need be, return to the "beneficent whip."  "On the side of the
+oppressor there is power;" let him use it without mercy, and hold flesh
+and blood to the grindstone with unrelenting rigor.  Humanity is
+squeamishness; pity for the suffering mere "rose-pink sentimentalism,"
+maudlin and unmanly.  The gods (the old Norse gods doubtless) laugh to
+scorn alike the complaints of the miserable and the weak compassions and
+"philanthropisms" of those who would relieve them.  This is the substance
+of Thomas Carlyle's advice; this is the matured fruit of his philosophic
+husbandry,--the grand result for which he has been all his life sounding
+unfathomable abysses or beating about in the thin air of
+Transcendentalism.  Such is the substitute which he offers us for the
+Sermon on the Mount.
+
+He tells us that the blacks have no right to use the islands of the West
+Indies for growing pumpkins and garden stuffs for their own use and
+behoof, because, but for the wisdom and skill of the whites, these
+islands would have been productive only of "jungle, savagery, and swamp
+malaria."  The negro alone could never have improved the islands or
+civilized himself; and therefore their and his "born lord," the white
+man, has a right to the benefits of his own betterments of land and "two-
+legged cattle!"  "Black Quashee" has no right to dispose of himself and
+his labor because he owes his partial civilization to others!  And pray
+how has it been with the white race, for whom our philosopher claims the
+divine prerogative of enslaving?  Some twenty and odd centuries ago, a
+pair of half-naked savages, daubed with paint, might have been seen
+roaming among the hills and woods of the northern part of the British
+island, subsisting on acorns and the flesh of wild animals, with an
+occasional relish of the smoked hams and pickled fingers of some
+unfortunate stranger caught on the wrong side of the Tweed.  This
+interesting couple reared, as they best could, a family of children, who,
+in turn, became the heads of families; and some time about the beginning
+of the present century one of their descendants in the borough of
+Ecclefechan rejoiced over the birth of a man child now somewhat famous as
+"Thomas Carlyle, a maker of books."  Does it become such a one to rave
+against the West India negro's incapacity for self-civilization?  Unaided
+by the arts, sciences, and refinements of the Romans, he might have been,
+at this very day, squatted on his naked haunches in the woods of
+Ecclefechan, painting his weather-hardened epidermis in the sun like his
+Piet ancestors.  Where, in fact, can we look for unaided self-improvement
+and spontaneous internal development, to any considerable extent, on the
+part of any nation or people?  From people to people the original God-
+given impulse towards civilization and perfection has been transmitted,
+as from Egypt to Greece, and thence to the Roman world.
+
+But the blacks, we are told, are indolent and insensible to the duty of
+raising sugar and coffee and spice for the whites, being mainly careful
+to provide for their own household and till their own gardens for
+domestic comforts and necessaries.  The exports have fallen off somewhat.
+And what does this prove?  Only that the negro is now a consumer of
+products, of which, under the rule of the whip, he was a producer merely.
+As to indolence, under the proper stimulus of fair wages we have reason
+to believe that the charge is not sustained.  If unthrifty habits and
+lack of prudence on the part of the owners of estates, combined with the
+repeal of duties on foreign sugars by the British government, have placed
+it out of their power to pay just and reasonable wages for labor, who can
+blame the blacks if they prefer to cultivate their own garden plots
+rather than raise sugar and spice for their late masters upon terms
+little better than those of their old condition, the "beneficent whip"
+always excepted?  The despatches of the colonial governors agree in
+admitting that the blacks have had great cause for complaint and
+dissatisfaction, owing to the delay or non-payment of their wages.  Sir
+C. E.  Gray, writing from Jamaica, says, that "in a good many instances
+the payment of the wages they have earned has been either very
+irregularly made, or not at all, probably on account of the inability of
+the employers."  He says, moreover:--
+
+"The negroes appear to me to be generally as free from rebellious
+tendencies or turbulent feelings and malicious thoughts as any race of
+laborers I ever saw or heard of.  My impression is, indeed, that under a
+system of perfectly fair dealing and of real justice they will come to be
+an admirable peasantry and yeomanry; able-bodied, industrious, and hard-
+working, frank, and well-disposed."
+
+It must, indeed, be admitted that, judging by their diminished exports
+and the growing complaints of the owners of estates, the condition of the
+islands, in a financial point of view, is by no means favorable.  An
+immediate cause of this, however, must be found in the unfortunate Sugar
+Act of 1846.  The more remote, but for the most part powerful, cause of
+the present depression is to be traced to the vicious and unnatural
+system of slavery, which has been gradually but surely preparing the way
+for ruin, bankruptcy, and demoralization.  Never yet, by a community or
+an individual, have the righteous laws of God been violated with
+impunity.  Sooner or later comes the penalty which the infinite justice
+has affixed to sin.  Partial and temporary evils and inconveniences have
+undoubtedly resulted from the emancipation of the laborers; and many
+years must elapse before the relations of the two heretofore antagonistic
+classes can be perfectly adjusted and their interests brought into entire
+harmony.  But that freedom is not to be held mainly accountable for the
+depression of the British colonies is obvious from the fact that Dutch
+Surinam, where the old system of slavery remains in its original rigor,
+is in an equally depressed condition.  The 'Paramaribo Neuws en
+Advertentie Blad', quoted in the Jamaica Gazette, says, under date of
+January 2, 1850: "Around us we hear nothing but complaints.  People seek
+and find matter in everything to picture to themselves the lot of the
+place in which they live as bitterer than that of any other country.  Of
+a large number of flourishing plantations, few remain that can now be
+called such.  So deteriorated has property become within the last few
+years, that many of these estates have not been able to defray their
+weekly expenses.  The colony stands on the brink of a yawning abyss, into
+which it must inevitably plunge unless some new and better system is
+speedily adopted.  It is impossible that our agriculture can any longer
+proceed on its old footing; our laboring force is dying away, and the
+social position they held must undergo a revolution."
+
+The paper from which we have quoted, the official journal of the colony,
+thinks the condition of the emancipated British colonies decidedly
+preferable to that of Surinam, where the old slave system has continued
+in force, and insists that the Dutch government must follow the example
+of Great Britain.  The actual condition of the British colonies since
+emancipation is perfectly well known in Surinam: three of them,
+Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice, being its immediate neighbors, whatever
+evils and inconveniences have resuited from emancipation must be well
+understood by the Dutch slave-holders; yet we find them looking towards
+emancipation as the only prospect of remedy for the greater evils of
+their own system.
+
+This fact is of itself a sufficient answer to the assumption of Carlyle
+and others, that what they call "the ruin of the colonies" has been
+produced by the emancipation acts of 1833 and 1838.
+
+We have no fears whatever of the effect of this literary monstrosity,
+which we have been considering upon the British colonies.  Quashee, black
+and ignorant as he may be, will not "get himself made a slave again."
+The mission of the "beneficent whip" is there pretty well over; and it
+may now find its place in museums and cabinets of ghastly curiosities,
+with the racks, pillories, thumbscrews, and branding-irons of old days.
+What we have feared, however, is, that the advocates and defenders of
+slave-holding in this country might find in this discourse matter of
+encouragement, and that our anti-christian prejudices against the colored
+man might be strengthened and confirmed by its malignant vituperation and
+sarcasm.  On this point we have sympathized with the forebodings of an
+eloquent writer in the London Enquirer:--
+
+"We cannot imagine a more deadly moral poison for the American people
+than his [Carlyle's] last composition.  Every cruel practice of social
+exclusion will derive from it new sharpness and venom.  The slave-holder,
+of course, will exult to find himself, not apologized for, but
+enthusiastically cheered, upheld, and glorified, by a writer of European
+celebrity.  But it is not merely the slave who will feel Mr. Carlyle's
+hand in the torture of his flesh, the riveting of his fetters, and the
+denial of light to his mind.  The free black will feel him, too, in the
+more contemptuous and abhorrent scowl of his brother man, who will easily
+derive from this unfortunate essay the belief that his inhuman feelings
+are of divine ordination.  It is a true work of the Devil, the fostering
+of a tyrannical prejudice.  Far and wide over space, and long into the
+future, the winged words of evil counsel will go.  In the market-place,
+in the house, in the theatre, and in the church,--by land and by sea, in
+all the haunts of men,--their influence will be felt in a perennial
+growth of hate and scorn, and suffering and resentment.  Amongst the
+sufferers will be many to whom education has given every refined
+susceptibility that makes contempt and exclusion bitter.  Men and women,
+faithful and diligent, loving and worthy to be loved, and bearing, it may
+be, no more than an almost imperceptible trace of African descent, will
+continue yet longer to be banished from the social meal of the white man,
+and to be spurned from his presence in the house of God, because a writer
+of genius has lent the weight of his authority and his fame, if not of
+his power, to the perpetuation of a prejudice which Christianity was
+undermining."
+
+A more recent production, 'Latter Day Pamphlets', in which man's
+capability of self-government is more than doubted, democracy somewhat
+contemptuously sneered at, and the "model republic" itself stigmatized as
+a "nation of bores," may have a salutary effect in restraining our
+admiration and in lessening our respect for the defender and eulogist of
+slavery.  The sweeping impartiality with which in this latter production
+he applies the principle of our "peculiar institution" to the laboring
+poor man, irrespective of color, recognizing as his only inalienable
+right "the right of being set to labor" for his "born lords," will, we
+imagine, go far to neutralize the mischief of his Discourse upon Negro
+Slavery.  It is a sad thing to find so much intellectual power as Carlyle
+really possesses so little under the control of the moral sentiments.  In
+some of his earlier writings--as, for instance, his beautiful tribute to
+the Corn Law Rhymer--we thought we saw evidence of a warm and generous
+sympathy with the poor and the wronged, a desire to ameliorate human
+suffering, which would have done credit to the "philanthropisms of Exeter
+Hall" and the "Abolition of Pain Society."  Latterly, however, like
+Moliere's quack, he has "changed all that;" his heart has got upon the
+wrong side; or rather, he seems to us very much in the condition of the
+coal-burner in the German tale, who had swapped his heart of flesh for a
+cobblestone.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+              FORMATION OF THE AMERICAN ANTISLAVERY SOCIETY.
+
+     A letter to William Lloyd Garrison, President of the Society.
+
+                         AMESBURY, 24th 11th mo., 1863.
+
+MY DEAR FRIEND,--I have received thy kind letter, with the accompanying
+circular, inviting me to attend the commemoration of the thirtieth
+anniversary of the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society, at
+Philadelphia.  It is with the deepest regret that I am compelled, by the
+feeble state of my health, to give up all hope of meeting thee and my
+other old and dear friends on an occasion of so much interest.  How much
+it costs me to acquiesce in the hard necessity thy own feelings will tell
+thee better than any words of mine.
+
+I look back over thirty years, and call to mind all the circumstances of
+my journey to Philadelphia, in company with thyself and the excellent Dr.
+Thurston of Maine, even then, as we thought, an old man, but still
+living, and true as ever to the good cause.  I recall the early gray
+morning when, with Samuel J. May, our colleague on the committee to
+prepare a Declaration of Sentiments for the convention, I climbed to the
+small "upper chamber" of a colored friend to hear thee read the first
+draft of a paper which will live as long as our national history.  I see
+the members of the convention, solemnized by the responsibility, rise one
+by one, and solemnly affix their names to that stern pledge of fidelity
+to freedom.  Of the signers, many have passed away from earth, a few have
+faltered and turned back, but I believe the majority still live to
+rejoice over the great triumph of truth and justice, and to devote what
+remains of time and strength to the cause to which they consecrated their
+youth and manhood thirty years ago.
+
+For while we may well thank God and congratulate one another on the
+prospect of the speedy emancipation of the slaves of the United States,
+we must not for a moment forget that, from this hour, new and mighty
+responsibilities devolve upon us to aid, direct, and educate these
+millions, left free, indeed, but bewildered, ignorant, naked, and
+foodless in the wild chaos of civil war.  We have to undo the accumulated
+wrongs of two centuries; to remake the manhood which slavery has well-
+nigh unmade; to see to it that the long-oppressed colored man has a fair
+field for development and improvement; and to tread under our feet the
+last vestige of that hateful prejudice which has been the strongest
+external support of Southern slavery.  We must lift ourselves at once to
+the true Christian altitude where all distinctions of black and white are
+overlooked in the heartfelt recognition of the brotherhood of man.
+
+I must not close this letter without confessing that I cannot be
+sufficiently thankful to the Divine Providence which, in a great measure
+through thy instrumentality, turned me away so early from what Roger
+Williams calls "the world's great trinity, pleasure, profit, and honor,"
+to take side with the poor and oppressed.  I am not insensible to
+literary reputation.  I love, perhaps too well, the praise and good-will
+of my fellow-men; but I set a higher value on my name as appended to the
+Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833 than on the title-page of any book.
+Looking over a life marked by many errors and shortcomings, I rejoice
+that I have been able to maintain the pledge of that signature, and that,
+in the long intervening years,
+
+    "My voice, though not the loudest, has been heard Wherever Freedom
+     raised her cry of pain."
+
+Let me, through thee, extend a warm greeting to the friends, whether of
+our own or the new generation, who may assemble on the occasion of
+commemoration.  There is work yet to be done which will task the best
+efforts of us all.  For thyself, I need not say that the love and esteem
+of early boyhood have lost nothing by the test of time; and
+
+                    I am, very cordially, thy friend,
+
+                              JOHN G.  WHITTIER
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         THE LESSON AND OUR DUTY.
+
+                       From the Amesbury Villager.
+
+                                 [1865.]
+
+
+IN the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the unspeakably brutal
+assault upon Secretary Seward slavery has made another revelation of
+itself.  Perhaps it was needed.  In the magnanimity of assured victory we
+were perhaps disposed to overlook, not so much the guilty leaders and
+misguided masses of the great rebellion as the unutterable horror and sin
+of slavery which prompted it.
+
+How slowly we of the North have learned the true character of this mighty
+mischief!  How our politicians bowed their strong shoulders under its
+burthens!  How our churches reverenced it!  How our clergy contrasted the
+heresy-tolerating North with the purely orthodox and Scriptural type of
+slave-holding Christianity!  How all classes hunted down, not merely the
+fugitive slave, but the few who ventured to give him food and shelter and
+a Godspeed in his flight from bondage!  How utterly ignored was the
+negro's claim of common humanity!  How readily was the decision of the
+slave-holding chief justice acquiesced in, that "the black man had no
+rights which the white man is bound to respect"!
+
+We saw a senator of the United States, world-known and honored for his
+learning, talents, and stainless integrity, beaten down and all but
+murdered at his official desk by a South Carolina slave-holder, for the
+crime of speaking against the extension of slavery; and we heard the
+dastardly deed applauded throughout the South, while its brutal
+perpetrator was rewarded with orations and gifts and smiles of beauty as
+a chivalrous gentleman.  We saw slavery enter Kansas, with bowieknife in
+hand and curses on its lips; we saw the life of the Union struck at by
+secession and rebellion; we heard of the bones of sons and brothers,
+fallen in defence of freedom and law, dug up and wrought into ornaments
+for the wrists and bosoms of slave-holding women; we looked into the open
+hell of Andersonville, upon the deliberate, systematic starvation of
+helpless prisoners; we heard of Libby Prison underlaid with gunpowder,
+for the purpose of destroying thousands of Union prisoners in case of the
+occupation of Richmond by our army; we saw hundreds of prisoners
+massacred in cold blood at Fort Pillow, and the midnight sack of Lawrence
+and the murder of its principal citizens.  The flames of our merchant
+vessels, seized by pirates, lighted every sea; we heard of officers of
+the rebel army and navy stealing into our cities, firing hotels filled
+with sleeping occupants, and laying obstructions on the track of rail
+cars, for the purpose of killing and mangling their passengers.  Yet in
+spite of these revelations of the utterly barbarous character of slavery
+and its direful effect upon all connected with it, we were on the very
+point of trusting to its most criminal defenders the task of
+reestablishing the state governments of the South, leaving the real Union
+men, white as well as black, at the mercy of those who have made hatred a
+religion and murder a sacrament.  The nation needed one more terrible
+lesson.  It has it in the murder of its beloved chief magistrate and the
+attempted assassination of its honored prime minister, the two men of all
+others prepared to go farthest to smooth the way of defeated rebellion
+back to allegiance.
+
+Even now the lesson of these terrible events seems but half learned.  In
+the public utterances I hear much of punishing and hanging leading
+traitors, fierce demands for vengeance, and threats of the summary
+chastisement of domestic sympathizers with treason, but comparatively
+little is said of the accursed cause, the prolific mother of
+abominations, slavery.  The government is exhorted to remember that it
+does not bear the sword in vain, the Old Testament is ransacked for texts
+of Oriental hatred and examples of the revenges of a semi-barbarous
+nation; but, as respects the four millions of unmistakably loyal people
+of the South, the patient, the long-suffering, kind-hearted victims of
+oppressions, only here and there a voice pleads for their endowment with
+the same rights of citizenship which are to be accorded to the rank and
+file of disbanded rebels.  The golden rule of the Sermon on the Mount is
+not applied to them.  Much is said of executing justice upon rebels;
+little of justice to loyal black men.  Hanging a few ringleaders of
+treason, it seems to be supposed, is all that is needed to restore and
+reestablish the revolted states.  The negro is to be left powerless in
+the hands of the "white trash," who hate him with a bitter hatred,
+exceeding that of the large slave-holders.  In short, four years of
+terrible chastisement, of God's unmistakable judgments, have not taught
+us, as a people, their lesson, which could scarcely be plainer if it had
+been written in letters of fire on the sky.  Why is it that we are so
+slow to learn, so unwilling to confess that slavery is the accursed thing
+which whets the knife of murder, and transforms men, with the exterior of
+gentlemen and Christians, into fiends?  How pitiful is our exultation
+over the capture of the wretched Booth and his associates!  The great
+criminal, of whom he and they were but paltry instruments, still stalks
+abroad in the pine woods of Jersey, where the state has thrown around him
+her legislative sanction and protection.  He is in Pennsylvania,
+thrusting the black man from public conveyances.  Wherever God's children
+are despised, insulted, and abused on account of their color, there is
+the real assassin of the President still at large.  I do not wonder at
+the indignation which has been awakened by the late outrage, for I have
+painfully shared it.  But let us see to it that it is rightly directed.
+The hanging of a score of Southern traitors will not restore Abraham
+Lincoln nor atone for the mighty loss.  In wreaking revenge upon these
+miserable men, we must see to it that we do not degrade ourselves and do
+dishonor to the sacred memory of the dead.  We do well to be angry; and,
+if need be, let our wrath wax seven times hotter, until that which "was a
+murderer from the beginning" is consumed from the face of the earth.  As
+the people stand by the grave of Lincoln, let them lift their right hands
+to heaven and take a solemn vow upon their souls to give no sleep to
+their eyes nor slumber to their eyelids until slavery is hunted from its
+last shelter, and every man, black and white, stands equal before the
+law.
+
+In dealing with the guilty leaders and instigators of the rebellion we
+should beware how we take counsel of passion.  Hatred has no place beside
+the calm and awful dignity of justice.  Human life is still a very sacred
+thing; Christian forbearance and patience are still virtues.  For my own
+part, I should be satisfied to see the chiefs of the great treason go out
+from among us homeless, exiled, with the mark of Cain on their foreheads,
+carrying with them, wherever they go, the avenging Nemesis of conscience.
+We cannot take lessons, at this late day, in their school of barbarism;
+we cannot starve and torture them as they have starved and tortured our
+soldiers.  Let them live.  Perhaps that is, after all, the most terrible
+penalty.  For wherever they hide themselves the story of their acts will
+pursue them; they can have no rest nor peace save in that deep repentance
+which, through the mercy of God, is possible for all.
+
+I have no disposition to stand between these men and justice.  If
+arrested, they can have no claim to exemption from the liabilities of
+criminals.  But it is not simply a question of deserts that is to be
+considered; we are to take into account our own reputation as a Christian
+people, the wishes of our best friends abroad, and the humane instincts
+of the age, which forbid all unnecessary severity.  Happily we are not
+called upon to take counsel of our fears.  Rabbinical writers tell us
+that evil spirits who are once baffled in a contest with human beings
+lose from thenceforth all power of further mischief.  The defeated rebels
+are in the precise condition of these Jewish demons.  Deprived of
+slavery, they are like wasps that have lost their stings.
+
+As respects the misguided masses of the South, the shattered and crippled
+remnants of the armies of treason, the desolate wives, mothers, and
+children mourning for dear ones who have fallen in a vain and hopeless
+struggle, it seems to me our duty is very plain.  We must forgive their
+past treason, and welcome and encourage their returning loyalty.  None
+but cowards will insult and taunt the defeated and defenceless.  We must
+feed and clothe the destitute, instruct the ignorant, and, bearing
+patiently with the bitterness and prejudice which will doubtless for a
+time thwart our efforts and misinterpret our motives, aid them in
+rebuilding their states on the foundation of freedom.  Our sole enemy was
+slavery, and slavery is dead.  We have now no quarrel with the people of
+the South, who have really more reason than we have to rejoice over the
+downfall of a system which impeded their material progress, perverted
+their religion, shut them out from the sympathies of the world, and
+ridged their land with the graves of its victims.
+
+We are victors, the cause of all this evil and suffering is removed
+forever, and we can well afford to be magnanimous.  How better can we
+evince our gratitude to God for His great mercy than in doing good to
+those who hated us, and in having compassion on those who have
+despitefully used us?  The hour is hastening for us all when our sole
+ground of dependence will be the mercy and forgiveness of God.  Let us
+endeavor so to feel and act in our relations to the people of the South
+that we can repeat in sincerity the prayer of our Lord: "Forgive us our
+trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," reverently
+acknowledging that He has indeed "led captivity captive and received
+gifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that the Lord God might
+dwell among them."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                 CHARLES SUMNER AND THE STATE-DEPARTMENT.
+
+                                 [1868.]
+
+
+
+THE wise reticence of the President elect in the matter of his cabinet
+has left free course to speculation and conjecture as to its composition.
+That he fully comprehends the importance of the subject, and that he will
+carefully weigh the claims of the possible candidates on the score of
+patriotic services, ability, and fitness for specific duties, no one who
+has studied his character, and witnessed his discretion, clear insight,
+and wise adaptation of means to ends, under the mighty responsibilities
+of his past career, can reasonably doubt.
+
+It is not probable that the distinguished statesman now at the head of
+the State Department will, under the circumstances, look for a
+continuance in office.  History will do justice to his eminent services
+in the Senate and in the cabinet during the first years of the rebellion,
+but the fact that he has to some extent shared the unpopularity of the
+present chief magistrate seems to preclude the idea of his retention in
+the new cabinet.  In looking over the list of our public men in search of
+a successor, General Grant is not likely to be embarrassed by the number
+of individuals fitted by nature, culture, and experience for such an
+important post.  The newspaper press, in its wide license of conjecture
+and suggestion, has, as far as I have seen, mentioned but three or four
+names in this connection.  Allusions have been made to Senator Fessenden
+of Maine, ex-Minister Motley, General Dix, ex-Secretary Stanton, and
+Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.
+
+Without disparaging in any degree his assumed competitors, the last-named
+gentleman is unquestionably preeminently fitted for the place.  He has
+had a lifelong education for it.  The entire cast of his mind, the bent
+of his studies, the habit and experience of his public life, his profound
+knowledge of international law and the diplomatic history of his own and
+other countries, his well-earned reputation as a statesman and
+constitutional lawyer, not only at home, but wherever our country has
+relations of amity and commerce, the honorable distinction which he
+enjoys of having held a foremost place in the great conflict between
+freedom and slavery, union and rebellion, all mark him as the man for the
+occasion.  There seems, indeed, a certain propriety in assigning to the
+man who struck the heaviest blows at secession and slavery in the
+national Senate the first place under him who, in the field, made them
+henceforth impossible.  The great captain and the great senator united in
+war should not be dissevered in peace.
+
+I am not unaware that there are some, even in the Republican party, who
+have failed to recognize in Senator Sumner the really wise and practical
+statesmanship which a careful review of his public labors cannot but make
+manifest.  It is only necessary to point such to the open record of his
+senatorial career.  Few men have had the honor of introducing and
+defending with exhaustive ability and thoroughness so many measures of
+acknowledged practical importance to his immediate constituents, the
+country at large, and the wider interests of humanity and civilization.
+In what exigency has he been found wanting?  What legislative act of
+public utility for the last eighteen years has lacked his encouragement?
+At the head of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, his clearness of vision,
+firmness, moderation, and ready comprehension of the duties of his time
+and place must be admitted by all parties.  It was shrewdly said by Burke
+that "men are wise with little reflection and good with little self-
+denial, in business of all times except their own."  But Charles Sumner,
+the scholar, loving the "still air of delightful studies," has shown
+himself as capable of thoroughly comprehending and digesting the events
+transpiring before his eyes as of pronouncing judgment upon those
+recorded in history.  Far in advance of most of his contemporaries, he
+saw and enunciated the true doctrine of reconstruction, the early
+adoption of which would have been of incalculable service to the country.
+One of the ablest statesmen and jurists of the Democratic party has had
+the rare magnanimity to acknowledge that in this matter the Republican
+senator was right, and himself and his party wrong.
+
+The Republicans of Massachusetts will make no fractious or importunate
+demand upon the new President.  They are content to leave to his unbiased
+and impartial judgment the selection of his cabinet.  But if, looking to
+the best interests of the country, he shall see fit to give their
+distinguished fellow-citizen the first place in it, they will feel no
+solicitude as to the manner in which the duties of the office will be
+discharged.  They will feel that "the tools are with him who can use
+them."  Nothing more directly affects the reputation of a country than
+the character of its diplomatic correspondence and its foreign
+representatives.  We have suffered in times past from sad mismanagement
+abroad, and intelligent Americans have too often been compelled to hang
+their heads with shame to see the flag of their country floating over the
+consular offices of worthless, incompetent agents.  There can be no
+question that so far as they are entrusted to Senator Sumner's hands, the
+interest, honor, and dignity of the nation will be safe.
+
+In a few weeks Charles Summer will be returned for his fourth term in the
+United States Senate by the well-nigh unanimous vote of both branches of
+the legislature of Massachusetts.  Not a syllable of opposition to his
+reelection is heard from any quarter.  There is not a Republican in the
+legislature who could have been elected unless he had been virtually
+pledged to his support.  No stronger evidence of the popular estimate of
+his ability and integrity than this could be offered.  As a matter of
+course, the marked individuality of his intense convictions, earnestness,
+persistence, and confident reliance upon the justice of his conclusions,
+naturally growing out of the consciousness of having brought to his
+honest search after truth all the lights of his learning and experience,
+may, at times, have brought him into unpleasant relations with some of
+his colleagues; but no one, friend or foe, has questioned his ability and
+patriotism, or doubted his fidelity to principle.  He has lent himself to
+no schemes of greed.  While so many others have taken advantage of the
+facilities of their official stations to fill, directly or indirectly,
+their own pockets or those of their relatives and retainers, it is to the
+honor of Massachusetts that her representatives in the Senate have not
+only "shaken their hands from the holding of bribes," but have so borne
+themselves that no shadow of suspicion has ever rested on them.
+
+In this connection it may be proper to state that, in the event of a
+change in the War Department, the claims of General Wilson, to whose
+services in the committee on military affairs the country is deeply
+indebted, may be brought under consideration.  In that case Massachusetts
+would not, if it were in her power, discriminate between her senators.
+Both have deserved well of her and of the country.  In expressing thus
+briefly my opinion, I do not forget that after all the choice and
+responsibility rest with General Grant alone.  There I am content to
+leave them.  I am very far from urging any sectional claim.  Let the
+country but have peace after its long discord, let its good faith and
+financial credit be sustained, and all classes of its citizens everywhere
+protected in person and estate, and it matters very little to me whether
+Massachusetts is represented at the Executive Council board, or not.
+Personally, Charles Sumner would gain nothing by a transfer from the
+Senate Chamber to the State Department.  He does not need a place in the
+American cabinet any more than John Bright does in the British.  The
+highest ambition might well be satisfied with his present position, from
+which, looking back upon an honorable record, he might be justified in
+using Milton's language of lofty confidence in the reply to Salmasius: "I
+am not one who has disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct,
+or the maxims of a freeman by the actions of a slave, but, by the grace
+of God, I have kept my life unsullied."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                    THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1872.
+
+     The following letter was written on receiving a request from a
+     committee of colored voters for advice as to their action at the
+     presidential election of 1872.
+
+                              AMESBURY, 9th mo. 3d, 1872.
+
+DEAR FRIENDS,--I have just received your letter of the 29th ult. asking
+my opinion of your present duty as colored voters in the choice between
+General Grant and Horace Greeley for the presidency.  You state that you
+have been confused by the contradictory advice given you by such friends
+of your people as Charles Sumner on one hand, and William L. Garrison and
+Wendell Phillips on the other; and you ask me, as one whom you are
+pleased to think "free from all bias," to add my counsel to theirs.
+
+I thank you for the very kind expression of your confidence and your
+generous reference to my endeavors to serve the cause of freedom; but I
+must own that I would fain have been spared the necessity of adding to
+the already too long list of political epistles.  I have felt it my duty
+in times past to take an active part--often very distasteful to me--in
+political matters, having for my first object the deliverance of my
+country from the crime and curse of slavery.  That great question being
+now settled forever, I have been more than willing to leave to younger
+and stronger hands the toils and the honors of partisan service.  Pained
+and saddened by the bitter and unchristian personalities of the canvass
+now in progress, I have hitherto held myself aloof from it as far as
+possible, unwilling to sanction in the slightest degree the criminations
+and recriminations of personal friends whom I have every reason to love
+and respect, and in whose integrity I have unshaken confidence.  In the
+present condition of affairs I have not been able to see that any special
+action as an abolitionist was required at my hands.  Both of the great
+parties, heretofore widely separated, have put themselves on
+substantially the same platform.  The Republican party, originally
+pledged only to the non-extension of slavery, and whose most illustrious
+representative, President Lincoln, avowed his willingness to save the
+Union without abolishing slavery, has been, under Providence, mainly
+instrumental in the total overthrow of the detestable system; while the
+Democratic party, composed largely of slave-holders, and, even at the
+North, scarcely willing to save the Union at the expense of the slave
+interest upon which its success depended, shattered and crippled by the
+civil war and its results, has at last yielded to the inexorable logic of
+events, abandoned a position no longer tenable, and taken its "new
+departure" with an abolitionist as its candidate.  As a friend of the
+long-oppressed colored man, and for the sake of the peace and prosperity
+of the country, I rejoice at this action of the Democratic party.  The
+underlying motives of this radical change are doubtless somewhat mixed
+and contradictory, honest conviction on the part of some, and party
+expediency and desire of office on the part of others; but the change
+itself is real and irrevocable; the penalty of receding would be swift
+and irretrievable ruin.  In any point of view the new order of things is
+desirable; and nothing more fully illustrates "the ways that are dark and
+the tricks that are vain" of party politics than the attempt of professed
+friends of the Union and equal rights for all to counteract it by giving
+aid and comfort to a revival of the worst characteristics of the old
+party in the shape of a straight-out Democratic convention.
+
+As respects the candidates now before us, I can see no good reason why
+colored voters as such should oppose General Grant, who, though not an
+abolitionist and not even a member of the Republican party previous to
+his nomination, has faithfully carried out the laws of Congress in their
+behalf.  Nor, on the other hand, can I see any just grounds for distrust
+of such a man as Horace Greeley, who has so nobly distinguished himself
+as the advocate of human rights irrespective of race or color, and who by
+the instrumentality of his press has been for thirty years the educator
+of the people in the principles of justice, temperance, and freedom.
+Both of these men have, in different ways, deserved too well of the
+country to be unnecessarily subjected to the brutalities of a
+presidential canvass; and, so far as they are personally concerned, it
+would doubtless have been better if the one had declined a second term of
+uncongenial duties, and the other continued to indite words of wisdom in
+the shades of Chappaqua.  But they have chosen otherwise; and I am
+willing, for one, to leave my colored fellow-citizens to the unbiased
+exercise of their own judgment and instincts in deciding between them.
+The Democratic party labors under the disadvantage of antecedents not
+calculated to promote a rapid growth of confidence; and it is no matter
+of surprise that the vote of the emancipated class is likely to be
+largely against it.  But if, as will doubtless be the case, that vote
+shall be to some extent divided between the two candidates, it will have
+the effect of inducing politicians of the rival parties to treat with
+respect and consideration this new element of political power, from self-
+interest if from no higher motive.  The fact that at this time both
+parties are welcoming colored orators to their platforms, and that, in
+the South, old slave-masters and their former slaves fraternize at caucus
+and barbecue, and vote for each other at the polls, is full of
+significance.  If, in New England, the very men who thrust Frederick
+Douglass from car and stage-coach, and mobbed and hunted him like a wild
+beast, now crowd to shake his hand and cheer him, let us not despair of
+seeing even the Ku-Klux tarried into decency, and sitting "clothed in
+their right minds" as listeners to their former victims.  The colored man
+is to-day the master of his own destiny.  No power on earth can deprive
+him of his rights as an American citizen.  And it is in the light of
+American citizenship that I choose to regard my colored friends, as men
+having a common stake in the welfare of the country; mingled with, and
+not separate from, their white fellow-citizens; not herded together as a
+distinct class to be wielded by others, without self-dependence and
+incapable of self-determination.  Thanks to such men as Sumner and Wilson
+and their compeers, nearly all that legislation can do for them has
+already been done.  We can now only help them to help themselves.
+Industry, economy, temperance, self-culture, education for their
+children,--these things, indispensable to their elevation and progress,
+are in a great measure in their own hands.
+
+You will, therefore, my friends and fellow-citizens, pardon me if I
+decline to undertake to decide for you the question of your political
+duty as respects the candidates for the presidency,--a question which you
+have probably already settled in your own minds.  If it had been apparent
+to me that your rights and liberties were really in danger from the
+success of either candidate, your letter would not have been needed to
+call forth my opinion.  In the long struggle of well-nigh forty years, I
+can honestly say that no consideration of private interest, nor my
+natural love of peace and retirement and the good-will of others, have
+kept me silent when a word could be fitly spoken for human rights.  I
+have not so long acted with the class to which you belong without
+acquiring respect for your intelligence and capacity for judging wisely
+for yourselves.  I shall abide your decision with confidence, and
+cheerfully acquiesce in it.
+
+If, on the whole, you prefer to vote for the reelection of General Grant,
+let me hope you will do so without joining with eleventh-hour friends in
+denouncing and reviling such an old and tried friend as Charles Sumner,
+who has done and suffered so much in your behalf.  If, on the other hand,
+some of you decide to vote for Horace Greeley, you need not in so doing
+forget your great obligations to such friends as William Lloyd Garrison,
+Wendell Phillips, and Lydia Maria Child.  Agree or disagree with them,
+take their advice or reject it, but stand by them still, and teach the
+parties with which you are connected to respect your feelings towards
+your benefactors.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          THE CENSURE OF SUMNER.
+
+
+     A letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser in reference to the petition
+     for the rescinding of the resolutions censuring Senator Sumner for
+     his motion to erase from the United States flags the record of the
+     battles of the civil war.
+
+
+I BEG leave to occupy a small space in the columns of the Advertiser for
+the purpose of noticing a charge which has been brought against the
+petitioners for rescinding the resolutions of the late extra session
+virtually censuring the Hon. Charles Sumner.  It is intimated that the
+action of these petitioners evinces a lack of appreciation of the
+services of the soldiers of the Union, and that not to censure Charles
+Sumner is to censure the volunteers of Massachusetts.
+
+As a matter of fact, the petitioners express no opinion as to the policy
+or expediency of the senator's proposition.  Some may believe it not only
+right in itself, but expedient and well-timed; others that it was
+inexpedient or premature.  None doubt that, sooner or later, the thing
+which it contemplates must be done, if we are to continue a united
+people.  What they feel and insist upon is that the proposition is one
+which implies no disparagement of the soldiers of Massachusetts and the
+Union; that it neither receives nor merits the "unqualified condemnation
+of the people" of the state; and that it furnishes no ground whatever for
+legislative interference or censure.  A single glance at the names of the
+petitioners is a sufficient answer to the insinuation that they are
+unmindful of that self-sacrifice and devotion, the marble and granite
+memorials of which, dotting the state from the Merrimac to the
+Connecticut, testify the gratitude of the loyal heart of Massachusetts.
+
+I have seen no soldier yet who considered himself wronged or "insulted"
+by the proposition.  In point of fact the soldiers have never asked for
+such censure of the brave and loyal statesman who was the bosom friend
+and confidant of Secretary Stanton (the great war-minister, second, if at
+all, only to Carnot) and of John A.  Andrew, dear to the heart of every
+Massachusetts soldier, and whose tender care and sympathy reached them
+wherever they struggled or died for country and freedom.  The proposal of
+Senator Sumner, instead of being an "insult," was, in fact, the highest
+compliment which could be paid to brave men; for it implied that they
+cherished no vindictive hatred of fallen foes; that they were too proudly
+secure of the love and gratitude of their countrymen to need above their
+heads the flaunting blazon of their achievements; that they were as
+magnanimous in peace and victory as they were heroic and patient through
+the dark and doubtful arbitrament of war.  As such they understand it.  I
+should be sorry to think there existed a single son of Massachusetts weak
+enough to believe that his reputation and honor as a soldier needed this
+censure of Charles Sumner.  I have before me letters from men, ranking
+from orderly sergeant to general, who have looked at death full in the
+face on every battlefield where the flag of Massachusetts floated, and
+they all thank me for my efforts to rescind this uncalled-for censure,
+and pledge me their hearty support.  They cordially indorse the noble
+letter of Vice-President Wilson offering his signature to the petition
+for rescinding the obnoxious resolutions; and if these resolutions are
+not annulled, it will not be the fault of Massachusetts volunteers, but
+rather of the mistaken zeal of men more familiar with the drill of the
+caucus than with that of the camp.
+
+I am no blind partisan of Charles Sumner.  I have often differed from him
+in opinion.  I regretted deeply the position which he thought it his duty
+to take during the late presidential campaign.  He felt the atmosphere
+about him thick and foul with corruption and bribery and greed; he saw
+the treasury ringed about like Saturn with unscrupulous combinations and
+corporations; and it is to be regretted more than wondered at if he
+struck out wildly in his indignation, and that his blows fell sometimes
+upon the wrong object.  But I did not intend to act the part of his
+apologist.  The twenty years of his senatorial life are crowded with
+memorials of his loyalty to truth and free dom and humanity, which will
+be enduring as our history.  He is no party to this movement, in which my
+name has been more prominent than I could have wished, and no word of his
+prompted or suggested it.  From its inception to the present time he has
+remained silent in his chamber of pain, waiting to bequeath, like the
+testator of the dramatist,
+
+         "A fame by scandal untouched
+          To Memory and Time's old daughter Truth."
+
+He can well afford to wait, and the issue of the present question before
+our legislature is of far less consequence to him than to us.  To use the
+words of one who stood by him in the dark days of the Fugitive Slave Law,
+the Chief Justice of the United States,--"Time and the wiser thought will
+vindicate the illustrious statesman to whom Massachusetts, the country,
+and humanity owe so much, but the state can ill afford the damage to its
+own reputation which such a censure of such a man will inflict."
+
+AMESBURY, 3d month, 8, 1873.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                   THE ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION OF 1833.
+
+                                 [1874.]
+
+In the gray twilight of a chill day of late November, forty years ago, a
+dear friend of mine, residing in Boston, made his appearance at the old
+farm-house in East Haverhill.  He had been deputed by the abolitionists
+of the city, William L. Garrison, Samuel E.  Sewall, and others, to
+inform me of my appointment as a delegate to the Convention about to be
+held in Philadelphia for the formation of an American Anti-Slavery
+Society, and to urge upon me the necessity of my attendance.
+
+Few words of persuasion, however, were needed.  I was unused to
+travelling; my life had been spent on a secluded farm; and the journey,
+mostly by stage-coach, at that time was really a formidable one.
+Moreover, the few abolitionists were everywhere spoken against, their
+persons threatened, and in some instances a price set on their heads by
+Southern legislators.  Pennsylvania was on the borders of slavery, and it
+needed small effort of imagination to picture to one's self the breaking
+up of the Convention and maltreatment of its members.  This latter
+consideration I do not think weighed much with me, although I was better
+prepared for serious danger than for anything like personal indignity.  I
+had read Governor Trumbull's description of the tarring and feathering of
+his hero MacFingal, when, after the application of the melted tar, the
+feather-bed was ripped open and shaken over him, until
+
+          "Not Maia's son, with wings for ears,
+          Such plumes about his visage wears,
+          Nor Milton's six-winged angel gathers
+          Such superfluity of feathers,"
+
+and I confess I was quite unwilling to undergo a martyrdom which my best
+friends could scarcely refrain from laughing at.  But a summons like that
+of Garrison's bugle-blast could scarcely be unheeded by one who, from
+birth and education, held fast the traditions of that earlier
+abolitionism which, under the lead of Benezet and Woolman, had effaced
+from the Society of Friends every vestige of slave-holding.  I had thrown
+myself, with a young man's fervid enthusiasm, into a movement which
+commended itself to my reason and conscience, to my love of country, and
+my sense of duty to God and my fellow-men.  My first venture in
+authorship was the publication, at my own expense, in the spring of 1833,
+of a pamphlet entitled Justice and Expediency, on the moral and political
+evils of slavery, and the duty of emancipation.  Under such circumstances
+I could not hesitate, but prepared at once for my journey.  It was
+necessary that I should start on the morrow, and the intervening time,
+with a small allowance for sleep, was spent in providing for the care of
+the farm and homestead during my absence.
+
+So the next morning I took the stage for Boston, stopping at the ancient
+hostelry known as the Eastern Stage Tavern; and on the day following, in
+company with William Lloyd Garrison, I left for New York.  At that city
+we were joined by other delegates, among them David Thurston, a
+Congregational minister from Maine.  On our way to Philadelphia, we took,
+as a matter of necessary economy, a second-class conveyance, and found
+ourselves, in consequence, among rough and hilarious companions, whose
+language was more noteworthy for strength than refinement.  Our worthy
+friend the clergyman bore it awhile in painful silence, but at last felt
+it his duty to utter words of remonstrance and admonition.  The leader of
+the young roisterers listened with a ludicrous mock gravity, thanked him
+for his exhortation, and, expressing fears that the extraordinary effort
+had exhausted his strength, invited him to take a drink with him.  Father
+Thurston buried his grieved face in his cloak-collar, and wisely left the
+young reprobates to their own devices.
+
+On reaching Philadelphia, we at once betook, ourselves to the humble
+dwelling on Fifth Street occupied by Evan Lewis, a plain, earnest man and
+lifelong abolitionist, who had been largely interested in preparing the
+way for the Convention.  In one respect the time of our assembling seemed
+unfavorable.  The Society of Friends, upon whose cooperation we had
+counted, had but recently been rent asunder by one of those unhappy
+controversies which so often mark the decline of practical righteousness.
+The martyr-age of the society had passed, wealth and luxury had taken the
+place of the old simplicity, there was a growing conformity to the maxims
+of the world in trade and fashion, and with it a corresponding
+unwillingness to hazard respectability by the advocacy of unpopular
+reforms.  Unprofitable speculation and disputation on one hand, and a
+vain attempt on the other to enforce uniformity of opinion, had
+measurably lost sight of the fact that the end of the gospel is love, and
+that charity is its crowning virtue.  After a long and painful struggle
+the disruption had taken place; the shattered fragments, under the name
+of Orthodox and Hicksite, so like and yet so separate in feeling,
+confronted each other as hostile sects, and
+
+         "Never either found another
+          To free the hollow heart from paining;
+          They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
+          Like cliffs that have been torn asunder
+          A dreary sea now flows between;
+          But neither rain, nor frost, nor thunder,
+          Can wholly do away, I ween,
+          The marks of that which once has been."
+
+We found about forty members assembled in the parlors of our friend
+Lewis, and, after some general conversation, Lewis Tappan was asked to
+preside over an informal meeting, preparatory to the opening of the
+Convention.  A handsome, intellectual-looking man, in the prime of life,
+responded to the invitation, and in a clear, well-modulated voice, the
+firm tones of which inspired hope and confidence, stated the objects of
+our preliminary council, and the purpose which had called us together, in
+earnest and well-chosen words.  In making arrangements for the
+Convention, it was thought expedient to secure, if possible, the services
+of some citizen of Philadelphia, of distinction and high social standing,
+to preside over its deliberations.  Looking round among ourselves in vain
+for some titled civilian or doctor of divinity, we were fain to confess
+that to outward seeming we were but "a feeble folk," sorely needing the
+shield of a popular name.  A committee, of which I was a member, was
+appointed to go in search of a president of this description.  We visited
+two prominent gentlemen, known as friendly to emancipation and of high
+social standing.  They received us with the dignified courtesy of the old
+school, declined our proposition in civil terms, and bowed us out with a
+cool politeness equalled only by that of the senior Winkle towards the
+unlucky deputation of Pickwick and his unprepossessing companions.  As we
+left their doors we could not refrain from smiling in each other's faces
+at the thought of the small inducement our proffer of the presidency held
+out to men of their class.  Evidently our company was not one for
+respectability to march through Coventry with.
+
+On the following morning we repaired to the Adelphi Building, on Fifth
+Street, below Walnut, which had been secured for our use.  Sixty-two
+delegates were found to be in attendance.  Beriah Green, of the Oneida
+(New York) Institute, was chosen president, a fresh-faced, sandy-haired,
+rather common-looking man, but who had the reputation of an able and
+eloquent speaker.  He had already made himself known to us as a resolute
+and self-sacrificing abolitionist.  Lewis Tappan and myself took our
+places at his side as secretaries, on the elevation at the west end of
+the hall.
+
+Looking over the assembly, I noticed that it was mainly composed of
+comparatively young men, some in middle age, and a few beyond that
+period.  They were nearly all plainly dressed, with a view to comfort
+rather than elegance.  Many of the faces turned towards me wore a look of
+expectancy and suppressed enthusiasm; all had the earnestness which might
+be expected of men engaged in an enterprise beset with difficulty and
+perhaps with peril.  The fine, intellectual head of Garrison, prematurely
+bald, was conspicuous; the sunny-faced young man at his side, in whom all
+the beatitudes seemed to find expression, was Samuel J. May, mingling in
+his veins the best blood of the Sewalls and Quincys,--a man so
+exceptionally pure and large-hearted, so genial, tender, and loving, that
+he could be faithful to truth and duty without making an enemy.
+
+              "The de'il wad look into his face,
+               And swear he couldna wrang him."
+
+That tall, gaunt, swarthy man, erect, eagle-faced, upon whose somewhat
+martial figure the Quaker coat seemed a little out of place, was Lindley
+Coates, known in all eastern Pennsylvania as a stern enemy of slavery;
+that slight, eager man, intensely alive in every feature and gesture, was
+Thomas Shipley, who for thirty years had been the protector of the free
+colored people of Philadelphia, and whose name was whispered reverently
+in the slave cabins of Maryland as the friend of the black man, one of a
+class peculiar to old Quakerism, who in doing what they felt to be duty,
+and walking as the Light within guided them, knew no fear and shrank from
+no sacrifice.  Braver men the world has not known.  Beside him, differing
+in creed, but united with him in works of love and charity, sat Thomas
+Whitson, of the Hicksite school of Friends, fresh from his farm in
+Lancaster County, dressed in plainest homespun, his tall form surmounted
+by a shock of unkempt hair, the odd obliquity of his vision contrasting
+strongly with he clearness and directness of his spiritual insight.
+Elizur Wright, the young professor of a Western college, who had lost his
+place by his bold advocacy of freedom, with a look of sharp concentration
+in keeping with an intellect keen as a Damascus blade, closely watched
+the proceedings through his spectacles, opening his mouth only to speak
+directly to the purpose.  The portly form of Dr. Bartholomew Russell, the
+beloved physician, from that beautiful land of plenty and peace which
+Bayard Taylor has described in his Story of Kennett, was not to be
+overlooked.  Abolitionist in heart and soul, his house was known as the
+shelter of runaway slaves, and no sportsman ever entered into the chase
+with such zest as he did into the arduous and sometimes dangerous work of
+aiding their escape and baffling their pursuers.  The youngest man
+present was, I believe, James Miller McKim, a Presbyterian minister from
+Columbia, afterwards one of our most efficient workers.  James Mott, E.
+L. Capron, Arnold Buffum, and Nathan Winslow, men well known in the anti-
+slavery agitation, were conspicuous members.  Vermont sent down from her
+mountains Orson S. Murray, a man terribly in earnest, with a zeal that
+bordered on fanaticism, and who was none the more genial for the mob-
+violence to which he had been subjected.  In front of me, awakening
+pleasant associations of the old homestead in Merrimac valley, sat my
+first school-teacher, Joshua Coffin, the learned and worthy antiquarian
+and historian of Newbury.  A few spectators, mostly of the Hicksite
+division of Friends, were present, in broad brims and plain bonnets,
+among them Esther Moore and Lucretia Mott.
+
+Committees were chosen to draft a constitution for a national Anti-
+Slavery Society, nominate a list of officers, and prepare a declaration
+of principles to be signed by the members.  Dr. A. L. Cox of New York,
+while these committees were absent, read something from my pen eulogistic
+of William Lloyd Garrison; and Lewis Tappan and Amos A.  Phelps, a
+Congregational clergyman of Boston, afterwards one of the most devoted
+laborers in the cause, followed in generous commendation of the zeal,
+courage, and devotion of the young pioneer.  The president, after calling
+James McCrummell, one of the two or three colored members of the
+Convention, to the chair, made some eloquent remarks upon those editors
+who had ventured to advocate emancipation.  At the close of his speech a
+young man rose to speak, whose appearance at once arrested my attention.
+I think I have never seen a finer face and figure, and his manner, words,
+and bearing were in keeping.  "Who is he?"  I asked of one of the
+Pennsylvania delegates.  "Robert Purvis, of this city, a colored man,"
+was the answer.  He began by uttering his heart-felt thanks to the
+delegates who had convened for the deliverance of his people.  He spoke
+of Garrison in terms of warmest eulogy, as one who had stirred the heart
+of the nation, broken the tomblike slumber of the church, and compelled
+it to listen to the story of the slave's wrongs.  He closed by declaring
+that the friends of colored Americans would not be forgotten.  "Their
+memories," he said, "will be cherished when pyramids and monuments shall
+have crumbled in dust.  The flood of time which is sweeping away the
+refuge of lies is bearing on the advocates of our cause to a glorious
+immortality."
+
+The committee on the constitution made their report, which after
+discussion was adopted.  It disclaimed any right or intention of
+interfering, otherwise than by persuasion and Christian expostulation,
+with slavery as it existed in the states, but affirming the duty of
+Congress to abolish it in the District of Columbia and territories, and
+to put an end to the domestic slave-trade.  A list of officers of the new
+society was then chosen: Arthur Tappan of New York, president, and Elizur
+Wright, Jr., William Lloyd Garrison, and A. L. Cox, secretaries.  Among
+the vice-presidents was Dr. Lord of Dartmouth College, then professedly
+in favor of emancipation, but who afterwards turned a moral somersault, a
+self-inversion which left him ever after on his head instead of his feet.
+
+He became a querulous advocate of slavery as a divine institution, and
+denounced woe upon the abolitionists for interfering with the will and
+purpose of the Creator.  As the cause of freedom gained ground, the poor
+man's heart failed him, and his hope for church and state grew fainter
+and fainter.  A sad prophet of the evangel of slavery, he testified in
+the unwilling ears of an unbelieving generation, and died at last
+despairing of a world which seemed determined that Canaan should no
+longer be cursed, nor Onesimus sent back to Philemon.
+
+The committee on the declaration of principles, of which I was a member,
+held a long session, discussing the proper scope and tenor of the
+document.  But little progress being made, it was finally decided to
+entrust the matter to a sub-committee, consisting of William L.
+Garrison, S. J. May, and myself; and after a brief consultation and
+comparison of each other's views, the drafting of the important paper was
+assigned to the former gentleman.  We agreed to meet him at his lodgings
+in the house of a colored friend early the next morning.  It was still
+dark when we climbed up to his room, and the lamp was still burning by
+the light of which he was writing the last sentence of the declaration.
+We read it carefully, made a few verbal changes, and submitted it to the
+large committee, who unanimously agreed to report it to the Convention.
+
+The paper was read to the Convention by Dr. Atlee, chairman of the
+committee, and listened to with the profoundest interest.
+
+Commencing with a reference to the time, fifty-seven years before, when,
+in the same city of Philadelphia, our fathers announced to the world
+their Declaration of Independence,--based on the self-evident truths of
+human equality and rights,--and appealed to arms for its defence, it
+spoke of the new enterprise as one "without which that of our fathers is
+incomplete," and as transcending theirs in magnitude, solemnity, and
+probable results as much "as moral truth does physical force."  It spoke
+of the difference of the two in the means and ends proposed, and of the
+trifling grievances of our fathers compared with the wrongs and
+sufferings of the slaves, which it forcibly characterized as unequalled
+by any others on the face of the earth.  It claimed that the nation was
+bound to repent at once, to let the oppressed go free, and to admit them
+to all the rights and privileges of others; because, it asserted, no man
+has a right to enslave or imbrute his brother; because liberty is
+inalienable; because there is no difference, in principle, between slave-
+holding and man-stealing, which the law brands as piracy; and because no
+length of bondage can invalidate man's claim to himself, or render slave
+laws anything but "an audacious usurpation."
+
+It maintained that no compensation should be given to planters
+emancipating slaves, because that would be a surrender of fundamental
+principles; "slavery is a crime, and is, therefore, not an article to be
+sold;" because slave-holders are not just proprietors of what they claim;
+because emancipation would destroy only nominal, not real property; and
+because compensation, if given at all, should be given to the slaves.
+
+It declared any "scheme of expatriation" to be "delusive, cruel, and
+dangerous."  It fully recognized the right of each state to legislate
+exclusively on the subject of slavery within its limits, and conceded
+that Congress, under the present national compact, had no right to
+interfere; though still contending that it had the power, and should
+exercise it, "to suppress the domestic slave-trade between the several
+states," and "to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and in
+those portions of our territory which the Constitution has placed under
+its exclusive jurisdiction."
+
+After clearly and emphatically avowing the principles underlying the
+enterprise, and guarding with scrupulous care the rights of persons and
+states under the Constitution, in prosecuting it, the declaration closed
+with these eloquent words:--
+
+We also maintain that there are, at the present time, the highest
+obligations resting upon the people of the free states to remove slavery
+by moral and political action, as prescribed in the Constitution of the
+United States.  They are now living under a pledge of their tremendous
+physical force to fasten the galling fetters of tyranny upon the limbs of
+millions in the Southern states; they are liable to be called at any
+moment to suppress a general insurrection of the slaves; they authorize
+the slave-owner to vote on three fifths of his slaves as property, and
+thus enable him to perpetuate his oppression; they support a standing
+army at the South for its protection; and they seize the slave who has
+escaped into their territories, and send him back to be tortured by an
+enraged master or a brutal driver.  This relation to slavery is criminal
+and full of danger.  It must be broken up.
+
+"These are our views and principles,--these our designs and measures.
+With entire confidence in the overruling justice of God, we plant
+ourselves upon the Declaration of Independence and the truths of divine
+revelation as upon the everlasting rock.
+
+"We shall organize anti-slavery societies, if possible, in every city,
+town, and village in our land.
+
+"We shall send forth agents to lift up the voice of remonstrance, of
+warning, of entreaty and rebuke.
+
+"We shall circulate unsparingly and extensively anti-slavery tracts and
+periodicals.
+
+"We shall enlist the pulpit and the press in the cause of the suffering
+and the dumb.
+
+"We shall aim at a purification of the churches from all participation in
+the guilt of slavery.
+
+"We shall encourage the labor of freemen over that of the slaves, by
+giving a preference to their productions; and
+
+"We shall spare no exertions nor means to bring the whole nation to
+speedy repentance.
+
+"Our trust for victory is solely in God.  We may be personally defeated,
+but our principles never.  Truth, justice, reason, humanity, must and
+will gloriously triumph.  Already a host is coming up to the help of the
+Lord against the mighty, and the prospect before us is full of
+encouragement.
+
+"Submitting this declaration to the candid examination of the people of
+this country, and of the friends of liberty all over the world, we hereby
+affix our signatures to it; pledging ourselves that, under the guidance
+and by the help of Almighty God, we will do all that in us lies,
+consistently with this declaration of our principles, to overthrow the
+most execrable system of slavery that has ever been witnessed upon earth,
+to deliver our land from its deadliest curse, to wipe out the foulest
+stain which rests upon our national escutcheon, and to secure to the
+colored population of the United States all the rights and privileges
+which belong to them as men and as Americans, come what may to our
+persons, our interests, or our reputations, whether we live to witness
+the triumph of justice, liberty, and humanity, or perish untimely as
+martyrs in this great, benevolent, and holy cause."
+
+The reading of the paper was followed by a discussion which lasted
+several hours.  A member of the Society of Friends moved its immediate
+adoption.  "We have," he said, "all given it our assent: every heart here
+responds to it.  It is a doctrine of Friends that these strong and deep
+impressions should be heeded."  The Convention, nevertheless, deemed it
+important to go over the declaration carefully, paragraph by paragraph.
+During the discussion, one of the spectators asked leave to say a few
+words.  A beautiful and graceful woman, in the prime of life, with a face
+beneath her plain cap as finely intellectual as that of Madame Roland,
+offered some wise and valuable suggestions, in a clear, sweet voice, the
+charm of which I have never forgotten.  It was Lucretia Mott of
+Philadelphia.  The president courteously thanked her, and encouraged her
+to take a part in the discussion.  On the morning of the last day of our
+session, the declaration, with its few verbal amendments, carefully
+engrossed on parchment, was brought before the Convention.  Samuel J. May
+rose to read it for the last time.  His sweet, persuasive voice faltered
+with the intensity of his emotions as he repeated the solemn pledges of
+the concluding paragraphs.  After a season of silence, David Thurston of
+Maine rose as his name was called by one of the secretaries, and affixed
+his name to the document.  One after another passed up to the platform,
+signed, and retired in silence.  All felt the deep responsibility of the
+occasion the shadow and forecast of a life-long struggle rested upon
+every countenance.
+
+Our work as a Convention was now done.  President Green arose to make the
+concluding address.  The circumstances under which it was uttered may
+have lent it an impressiveness not its own; but as I now recall it, it
+seems to me the most powerful and eloquent speech to which I have ever
+listened.  He passed in review the work that had been done, the
+constitution of the new society, the declaration of sentiments, and the
+union and earnestness which had marked the proceedings.  His closing
+words will never be forgotten by those who heard them:--
+
+"Brethren, it has been good to be here.  In this hallowed atmosphere I
+have been revived and refreshed.  This brief interview has more than
+repaid me for all that I have ever suffered.  I have here met congenial
+minds; I have rejoiced in sympathies delightful to the soul.  Heart has
+beat responsive to heart, and the holy work of seeking to benefit the
+outraged and despised has proved the most blessed employment.
+
+"But now we must retire from these balmy influences and breathe another
+atmosphere.  The chill hoar-frost will be upon us.  The storm and tempest
+will rise, and the waves of persecution will dash against our souls.  Let
+us be prepared for the worst.  Let us fasten ourselves to the throne of
+God as with hooks of steel.  If we cling not to Him, our names to that
+document will be but as dust.
+
+"Let us court no applause, indulge in no spirit of vain boasting.  Let us
+be assured that our only hope in grappling with the bony monster is in an
+Arm that is stronger than ours.  Let us fix our gaze on God, and walk in
+the light of His countenance.  If our cause be just--and we know it is--
+His omnipotence is pledged to its triumph.  Let this cause be entwined
+around the very fibres of our hearts.  Let our hearts grow to it, so that
+nothing but death can sunder the bond."
+
+He ceased, and then, amidst a silence broken only by the deep-drawn
+breath of emotion in the assembly, lifted up his voice in a prayer to
+Almighty God, full of fervor and feeling, imploring His blessing and
+sanctification upon the Convention and its labors.  And with the
+solemnity of this supplication in our hearts we clasped hands in
+farewell, and went forth each man to his place of duty, not knowing the
+things that should befall us as individuals, but with a confidence, never
+shaken by abuse and persecution, in the certain triumph of our cause.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  KANSAS
+
+Read at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the state of
+Kansas.
+
+                    BEAR CAMP HOUSE, WEST OSSIPEE, N. H.,
+                              Eighth month, 29th, 1879.
+
+To J. S. EMERY,  R. MORROW, AND C. W. SMITH, COMMITTEE:
+
+I HAVE received your invitation to the twenty-fifth anniversary
+celebration of the first settlement of Kansas.  It would give me great
+pleasure to visit your state on an occasion of such peculiar interest,
+and to make the acquaintance of its brave and self-denying pioneers, but
+I have not health and strength for the journey.  It is very fitting that
+this anniversary should be duly recognized.  No one of your sister states
+has such a record as yours,--so full of peril and adventure, fortitude,
+self-sacrifice, and heroic devotion to freedom.  Its baptism of martyr
+blood not only saved the state to liberty, but made the abolition of
+slavery everywhere possible.  Barber and Stillwell and Colpetzer and
+their associates did not die in vain.  All through your long, hard
+struggle I watched the course of events in Kansas with absorbing
+interest.  I rejoiced, while I marvelled at the steady courage which no
+danger could shake, at the firm endurance which outwearied the
+brutalities of your slaveholding invaders, and at that fidelity to right
+and duty which the seduction of immediate self-interest could not swerve,
+nor the military force of a proslavery government overawe.  All my
+sympathies were with you in that stern trial of your loyalty to God and
+humanity.  And when, in the end, you had conquered peace, and the last of
+the baffled border ruffians had left your territory, I felt that the doom
+of the accursed institution was sealed, and that its abolition was but a
+question of time.  A state with such a record will, I am sure, be true to
+its noble traditions, and will do all in its power to aid the victims of
+prejudice and oppression who may be compelled to seek shelter within its
+borders.  I will not for a moment distrust the fidelity of Kansas to her
+foundation principle.  God bless and prosper her!  Thanking you for the
+kind terms of your invitation, I am, gentlemen, very truly your friend.
+
+
+
+
+
+                         WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.
+
+An Introduction to Oliver Johnson's "William Lloyd Garrison and his
+Times."
+
+                                 [1879.]
+
+I no not know that any word of mine can give additional interest to this
+memorial of William Lloyd Garrison from the pen of one of his earliest
+and most devoted friends, whose privilege it has been to share his
+confidence and his labors for nearly half a century; but I cannot well
+forego the opportunity afforded me to add briefly my testimony to the
+tribute to the memory of the great Reformer, whose friendship I have
+shared, and with whom I have been associated in a common cause from youth
+to age.
+
+My acquaintance with him commenced in boyhood.  My father was a
+subscriber to his first paper, the Free Press, and the humanitarian tone
+of his editorials awakened a deep interest in our little household, which
+was increased by a visit which he made us.  When he afterwards edited the
+Journal of the Times, at Bennington, Vt., I ventured to write him a
+letter of encouragement and sympathy, urging him to continue his labors
+against slavery, and assuring him that he could "do great things," an
+unconscious prophecy which has been fulfilled beyond the dream of my
+boyish enthusiasm.  The friendship thus commenced has remained unbroken
+through half a century, confirming my early confidence in his zeal and
+devotion, and in the great intellectual and moral strength which he
+brought to the cause with which his name is identified.
+
+During the long and hard struggle in which the abolitionists were
+engaged, and amidst the new and difficult questions and side-issues which
+presented themselves, it could scarcely be otherwise than that
+differences of opinion and action should arise among them.  The leader
+and his disciples could not always see alike.  My friend, the author of
+this book, I think, generally found himself in full accord with him,
+while I often decidedly dissented.  I felt it my duty to use my right of
+citizenship at the ballot-box in the cause of liberty, while Garrison,
+with equal sincerity, judged and counselled otherwise.  Each acted under
+a sense of individual duty and responsibility, and our personal relations
+were undisturbed.  If, at times, the great anti-slavery leader failed to
+do justice to the motives of those who, while in hearty sympathy with his
+hatred of slavery, did not agree with some of his opinions and methods,
+it was but the pardonable and not unnatural result of his intensity of
+purpose, and his self-identification with the cause he advocated; and,
+while compelled to dissent, in some particulars, from his judgment of men
+and measures, the great mass of the antislavcry people recognized his
+moral leadership.  The controversies of old and new organization,
+nonresistance and political action, may now be looked upon by the parties
+to them, who still survive, with the philosophic calmness which follows
+the subsidence of prejudice and passion.  We were but fallible men, and
+doubtless often erred in feeling, speech, and action.  Ours was but the
+common experience of reformers in all ages.
+
+          "Never in Custom's oiled grooves
+          The world to a higher level moves,
+          But grates and grinds with friction hard
+          On granite bowlder and flinty shard.
+          Ever the Virtues blush to find
+          The Vices wearing their badge behind,
+          And Graces and Charities feel the fire
+          Wherein the sins of the age expire."
+
+It is too late now to dwell on these differences.  I choose rather, with
+a feeling of gratitude to God, to recall the great happiness of laboring
+with the noble company of whom Garrison was the central figure.  I love
+to think of him as he seemed to me, when in the fresh dawn of manhood he
+sat with me in the old Haverhill farmhouse, revolving even then schemes
+of benevolence; or, with cheery smile, welcoming me to his frugal meal of
+bread and milk in the dingy Boston printing-room; or, as I found him in
+the gray December morning in the small attic of a colored man, in
+Philadelphia, finishing his night-long task of drafting his immortal
+Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society; or, as I
+saw him in the jail of Leverett Street, after his almost miraculous
+escape from the mob, playfully inviting me to share the safe lodgings
+which the state had provided for him; and in all the varied scenes and
+situations where we acted together our parts in the great endeavor and
+success of Freedom.
+
+The verdict of posterity in his case may be safely anticipated.  With the
+true reformers and benefactors of his race he occupies a place inferior
+to none other.  The private lives of many who fought well the battles of
+humanity have not been without spot or blemish.  But his private
+character, like his public, knew no dishonor.  No shadow of suspicion
+rests upon the white statue of a life, the fitting garland of which
+should be the Alpine flower that symbolizes noble purity.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                        ANTI-SLAVERY ANNIVERSARY.
+
+Read at the semi-centennial celebration of the American Anti-Slavery
+Society at Philadelphia, on the 3d December, 1883.
+
+                              OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, MASS.,
+                                     11th mo., 30, 1883.
+
+I NEED not say how gladly I would be with you at the semi-centennial of
+the American Anti-Slavery Society.  I am, I regret to say, quite unable
+to gratify this wish, and can only represent myself by a letter.
+
+Looking back over the long years of half a century, I can scarcely
+realize the conditions under which the convention of 1833 assembled.
+Slavery was predominant.  Like Apollyon in Pilgrim's Progress, it
+"straddled over the whole breadth of the way."  Church and state, press
+and pulpit, business interests, literature, and fashion were prostrate at
+its feet.  Our convention, with few exceptions, was composed of men
+without influence or position, poor and little known, strong only in
+their convictions and faith in the justice of their cause.  To onlookers
+our endeavor to undo the evil work of two centuries and convert a nation
+to the "great renunciation" involved in emancipation must have seemed
+absurd in the last degree.  Our voices in such an atmosphere found no
+echo.  We could look for no response but laughs of derision or the
+missiles of a mob.
+
+But we felt that we had the strength of truth on our side; we were right,
+and all the world about us was wrong.  We had faith, hope, and
+enthusiasm, and did our work, nothing doubting, amidst a generation who
+first despised and then feared and hated us.  For myself I have never
+ceased to be grateful to the Divine Providence for the privilege of
+taking a part in that work.
+
+And now for more than twenty years we have had a free country.  No slave
+treads its soil.  The anticipated dangerous consequences of complete
+emancipation have not been felt.  The emancipated class, as a whole, have
+done wisely, and well under circumstances of peculiar difficulty.  The
+masters have learned that cotton can be raised better by free than by
+slave labor, and nobody now wishes a return to slave-holding.  Sectional
+prejudices are subsiding, the bitterness of the civil war is slowly
+passing away.  We are beginning to feel that we are one people, with no
+really clashing interests, and none more truly rejoice in the growing
+prosperity of the South than the old abolitionists, who hated slavery as
+a curse to the master as well as to the slave.
+
+In view of this commemorative semi-centennial occasion, many thoughts
+crowd upon me; memory recalls vanished faces and voices long hushed.  Of
+those who acted with me in the convention fifty years ago nearly all have
+passed into another state of being.  We who remain must soon follow; we
+have seen the fulfilment of our desire; we have outlived scorn and
+persecution; the lengthening shadows invite us to rest.  If, in looking
+back, we feel that we sometimes erred through impatient zeal in our
+contest with a great wrong, we have the satisfaction of knowing that we
+were influenced by no merely selfish considerations.  The low light of
+our setting sun shines over a free, united people, and our last prayer
+shall be for their peace, prosperity, and happiness.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 RESPONSE
+
+TO THE CELEBRATION OF MY EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY BY THE COLORED CITIZENS OF
+WASHINGTON D. C.
+
+To R. H. TERRELL AND GEORGE W. WILLIAMS, ESQUIRES.
+
+GENTLEMEN,--Among the great number of tokens of interest and good-will
+which reached me on my birthday, none have touched me more deeply than
+the proceedings of the great meeting of the colored citizens of the
+nation's capital, of which you are the representatives.  The resolutions
+of that meeting came to me as the voice of millions of my fellow-
+countrymen.  That voice was dumb in slavery when, more than half a
+century ago, I put forth my plea for the freedom of the slave.
+
+It could not answer me from the rice swamp and cotton field, but now, God
+be praised, it speaks from your great meeting in Washington and from all
+the colleges and schools where the youth of your race are taught.  I
+scarcely expected then that the people for whom I pleaded would ever know
+of my efforts in their behalf.  I cannot be too thankful to the Divine
+Providence that I have lived to hear their grateful response.
+
+I stand amazed at the rapid strides which your people have made since
+emancipation, at your industry, your acquisition of property and land,
+your zeal for education, your self-respecting but unresentful attitude
+toward those who formerly claimed to be your masters, your pathetic but
+manly appeal for just treatment and recognition.  I see in all this the
+promise that the time is not far distant when, in common with the white
+race, you will have the free, undisputed rights of American citizenship
+in all parts of the Union, and your rightful share in the honors as well
+as the protection of the government.
+
+Your letter would have been answered sooner if it had been possible.  I
+have been literally overwhelmed with letters and telegrams, which, owing
+to illness, I have been in a great measure unable to answer or even read.
+
+I tender to you, gentlemen, and to the people you represent my heartfelt
+thanks, and the assurance that while life lasts you will find me, as I
+have been heretofore, under more difficult circumstances, your faithful
+friend.
+
+OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, MASS.,
+first mo., 9, 1888.
+
+
+
+
+
+                           REFORM AND POLITICS
+
+                 UTOPIAN SCHEMES AND POLITICAL THEORISTS.
+
+THERE is a large class of men, not in Europe alone, but in this country
+also, whose constitutional conservatism inclines them to regard any
+organic change in the government of a state or the social condition of
+its people with suspicion and distrust.  They admit, perhaps, the evils
+of the old state of things; but they hold them to be inevitable, the
+alloy necessarily mingled with all which pertains to fallible humanity.
+Themselves generally enjoying whatever of good belongs to the political
+or social system in which their lot is cast, they are disposed to look
+with philosophic indifference upon the evil which only afflicts their
+neighbors.  They wonder why people are not contented with their
+allotments; they see no reason for change; they ask for quiet and peace
+in their day; being quite well satisfied with that social condition which
+an old poet has quaintly described:--
+
+               "The citizens like pounded pikes;
+               The lesser feed the great;
+               The rich for food seek stomachs,
+               And the poor for stomachs meat."
+
+This class of our fellow-citizens have an especial dislike of theorists,
+reformers, uneasy spirits, speculators upon the possibilities of the
+world's future, constitution builders, and believers in progress.  They
+are satisfied; the world at least goes well enough with them; they sit as
+comfortable in it as Lafontaine's rat in the cheese; and why should those
+who would turn it upside down come hither also?  Why not let well enough
+alone?  Why tinker creeds, constitutions, and laws, and disturb the good
+old-fashioned order of things in church and state?  The idea of making
+the world better and happier is to them an absurdity.  He who entertains
+it is a dreamer and a visionary, destitute of common sense and practical
+wisdom.  His project, whatever it may be, is at once pronounced to be
+impracticable folly, or, as they are pleased to term it, _Utopian._
+
+The romance of Sir Thomas More, which has long afforded to the
+conservatives of church and state a term of contempt applicable to all
+reformatory schemes and innovations, is one of a series of fabulous
+writings, in which the authors, living in evil times and unable to
+actualize their plans for the well-being of society, have resorted to
+fiction as a safe means of conveying forbidden truths to the popular
+mind.  Plato's "Timaeus," the first of the series, was written after the
+death of Socrates and the enslavement of the author's country.  In this
+are described the institutions of the Island of Atlantis,--the writer's
+ideal of a perfect commonwealth.  Xenophon, in his "Cyropaedia," has also
+depicted an imaginary political society by overlaying with fiction
+historical traditions.  At a later period we have the "New Atlantis" of
+Lord Bacon, and that dream of the "City of the Sun" with which Campanella
+solaced himself in his long imprisonment.
+
+The "Utopia" of More is perhaps the best of its class.  It is the work of
+a profound thinker, the suggestive speculations and theories of one who
+could
+
+               "Forerun his age and race, and let
+               His feet millenniums hence be set
+               In midst of knowledge dreamed not yet."
+
+Much of what he wrote as fiction is now fact, a part of the frame-work of
+European governments, and the political truths of his imaginary state are
+now practically recognized in our own democratic system.  As might be
+expected, in view of the times in which the author wrote, and the
+exceedingly limited amount of materials which he found ready to his hands
+for the construction of his social and political edifice, there is a want
+of proportion and symmetry in the structure.  Many of his theories are no
+doubt impracticable and unsound.  But, as a whole, the work is an
+admirable one, striding in advance of the author's age, and prefiguring a
+government of religious toleration and political freedom.  The following
+extract from it was doubtless regarded in his day as something worse than
+folly or the dream of a visionary enthusiast:--
+
+"He judged it wrong to lay down anything rashly, and seemed to doubt
+whether these different forms of religion might not all come from God,
+who might inspire men in a different manner, and be pleased with the
+variety.  He therefore thought it to be indecent and foolish for any man
+to threaten and terrify another, to make him believe what did not strike
+him as true."
+
+Passing by the "Telemachus" of Fenelon, we come to the political romance
+of Harrington, written in the time of Cromwell.  "Oceana" is the name by
+which the author represents England; and the republican plan of
+government which he describes with much minuteness is such as he would
+have recommended for adoption in case a free commonwealth had been
+established.  It deals somewhat severely with Cromwell's usurpation; yet
+the author did not hesitate to dedicate it to that remarkable man, who,
+after carefully reading it, gave it back to his daughter, Lady Claypole,
+with the remark, full of characteristic bluntness, that "the gentleman
+need not think to cheat him of his power and authority; for what he had
+won with the sword he would never suffer himself to be scribbled out of."
+
+Notwithstanding the liberality and freedom of his speculations upon
+government and religion in his Utopia, it must be confessed that Sir
+Thomas More, in after life, fell into the very practices of intolerance
+and bigotry which he condemned.  When in the possession of the great seal
+under that scandal of kingship, Henry VIII., he gave his countenance to
+the persecution of heretics.  Bishop Burnet says of him, that he caused a
+gentleman of the Temple to be whipped and put to the rack in his
+presence, in order to compel him to discover those who favored heretical
+opinions.  In his Utopia he assailed the profession of the law with
+merciless satire; yet the satirist himself finally sat upon the
+chancellor's woolsack; and, as has been well remarked by Horace Smith,
+"if, from this elevated seat, he ever cast his eyes back upon his past
+life, he must have smiled at the fond conceit which could imagine a
+permanent Utopia, when he himself, certainly more learned, honest, and
+conscientious than the mass of men has ever been, could in the course of
+one short life fall into such glaring and frightful rebellion against his
+own doctrines."
+
+Harrington, on the other hand, as became the friend of Milton and Marvel,
+held fast, through good and evil report, his republican faith.  He
+published his work after the Restoration, and defended it boldly and ably
+from the numerous attacks made upon it.  Regarded as too dangerous an
+enthusiast to be left at liberty, he was imprisoned at the instance of
+Lord Chancellor Hyde, first in the Tower, and afterwards on the Island of
+St.  Nicholas, where disease and imprudent remedies brought on a partial
+derangement, from which he never recovered.
+
+Bernardin St. Pierre, whose pathetic tale of "Paul and Virginia" has
+found admirers in every language of the civilized world, in a fragment,
+entitled "Arcadia," attempted to depict an ideal republic, without
+priest, noble, or slave, where all are so religious that each man is the
+pontiff of his family, where each man is prepared to defend his country,
+and where all are in such a state of equality that there are no such
+persons as servants.  The plan of it was suggested by his friend Rousseau
+during their pleasant walking excursions about the environs of Paris, in
+which the two enthusiastic philosophers, baffled by the evil passions and
+intractable materials of human nature as manifested in existing society,
+comforted themselves by appealing from the actual to the possible, from
+the real to the imaginary.  Under the chestnut-trees of the Bois de
+Boulogne, through long summer days, the two friends, sick of the noisy
+world about them, yet yearning to become its benefactors,--gladly
+escaping from it, yet busy with schemes for its regeneration and
+happiness,--at once misanthropes and philanthropists,--amused and solaced
+themselves by imagining a perfect and simple state of society, in which
+the lessons of emulation and selfish ambition were never to be taught;
+where, on the contrary, the young were to obey their parents, and to
+prefer father, mother, brother, sister, wife, and friend to themselves.
+They drew beautiful pictures of a country blessed with peace, indus try,
+and love, covered with no disgusting monuments of violence and pride and
+luxury, without columns, triumphal arches, hospitals, prisons, or
+gibbets; but presenting to view bridges over torrents, wells on the arid
+plain, groves of fruit-trees, and houses of shelter for the traveller in
+desert places, attesting everywhere the sentiment of humanity.  Religion
+was to speak to all hearts in the eternal language of Nature.  Death was
+no longer to be feared; perspectives of holy consolation were to open
+through the cypress shadows of the tomb; to live or to die was to be
+equally an object of desire.
+
+The plan of the "Arcadia" of St. Pierre is simply this: A learned young
+Egyptian, educated at Thebes by the priests of Osiris, desirous of
+benefiting humanity, undertakes a voyage to Gaul for the purpose of
+carrying thither the arts and religion of Egypt.  He is shipwrecked on
+his return in the Gulf of Messina, and lands upon the coast, where he is
+entertained by an Arcadian, to whom he relates his adventures, and from
+whom he receives in turn an account of the simple happiness and peace of
+Arcadia, the virtues and felicity of whose inhabitants are beautifully
+exemplified in the lives and conversation of the shepherd and his
+daughter.  This pleasant little prose poem closes somewhat abruptly.
+Although inferior in artistic skill to "Paul and Virginia" or the "Indian
+Cottage", there is not a little to admire in the simple beauty of its
+pastoral descriptions.  The closing paragraph reminds one of Bunyan's
+upper chamber, where the weary pilgrim's windows opened to the sunrising
+and the singing of birds:--
+
+"Tyrteus conducted his guests to an adjoining chamber.  It had a window
+shut by a curtain of rushes, through the crevices of which the islands of
+the Alpheus might be seen in the light of the moon.  There were in this
+chamber two excellent beds, with coverlets of warm and light wool.
+
+"Now, as soon as Amasis was left alone with Cephas, he spoke with joy of
+the delight and tranquillity of the valley, of the goodness of the
+shepherd, and the grace of his young daughter, to whom he had seen none
+worthy to be compared, and of the pleasure which he promised himself the
+next day, at the festival on Mount Lyceum, of beholding a whole people as
+happy as this sequestered family.  Converse so delightful might have
+charmed away the night without the aid of sleep, had they not been
+invited to repose by the mild light of the moon shining through the
+window, the murmuring wind in the leaves of the poplars, and the distant
+noise of the Achelous, which falls roaring from the summit of Mount
+Lyceum."
+
+The young patrician wits of Athens doubtless laughed over Plato's ideal
+republic.  Campanella's "City of the Sun" was looked upon, no doubt, as
+the distempered vision of a crazy state prisoner.  Bacon's college, in
+his "New Atlantis," moved the risibles of fat-witted Oxford.  More's
+"Utopia," as we know, gave to our language a new word, expressive of the
+vagaries and dreams of fanatics and lunatics.  The merciless wits,
+clerical and profane, of the court of Charles II.  regarded Harrington's
+romance as a perfect godsend to their vocation of ridicule.  The gay
+dames and carpet knights of Versailles made themselves merry with the
+prose pastoral of St.  Pierre; and the poor old enthusiast went down to
+his grave without finding an auditory for his lectures upon natural
+society.
+
+The world had its laugh over these romances.  When unable to refute their
+theories, it could sneer at the authors, and answer them to the
+satisfaction of the generation in which they lived, at least by a general
+charge of lunacy.  Some of their notions were no doubt as absurd as those
+of the astronomer in "Rasselas", who tells Imlac that he has for five
+years possessed the regulation of the weather, and has got the secret of
+making to the different nations an equal and impartial dividend of rain
+and sunshine.  But truth, even when ushered into the world through the
+medium of a dull romance and in connection with a vast progeny of errors,
+however ridiculed and despised at first, never fails in the end of
+finding a lodging-place in the popular mind.  The speculations of the
+political theorists whom we have noticed have not all proved to be of
+
+                                "such stuff
+          As dreams are made of, and their little life
+          Rounded with sleep."
+
+They have entered into and become parts of the social and political
+fabrics of Europe and America.  The prophecies of imagination have been
+fulfilled; the dreams of romance have become familiar realities.
+
+What is the moral suggested by this record?  Is it not that we should
+look with charity and tolerance upon the schemes and speculations of the
+political and social theorists of our day; that, if unprepared to venture
+upon new experiments and radical changes, we should at least consider
+that what was folly to our ancestors is our wisdom, and that another
+generation may successfully put in practice the very theories which now
+seem to us absurd and impossible?  Many of the evils of society have been
+measurably removed or ameliorated; yet now, as in the days of the
+Apostle, "the creation groaneth and travaileth in pain;" and although
+quackery and empiricism abound, is it not possible that a proper
+application of some of the remedies proposed might ameliorate the general
+suffering?  Rejecting, as we must, whatever is inconsistent with or
+hostile to the doctrines of Christianity, on which alone rests our hope
+for humanity, it becomes us to look kindly upon all attempts to apply
+those doctrines to the details of human life, to the social, political,
+and industrial relations of the race.  If it is not permitted us to
+believe all things, we can at least hope them.  Despair is infidelity and
+death.  Temporally and spiritually, the declaration of inspiration holds
+good, "We are saved by hope."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                 PECULIAR INSTITUTIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
+
+                                 [1851.]
+
+BERNARDIN ST. PIERRE, in his Wishes of a Solitary, asks for his country
+neither wealth, nor military glory, nor magnificent palaces and
+monuments, nor splendor of court nobility, nor clerical pomp.  "Rather,"
+he says, "O France, may no beggar tread thy plains, no sick or suffering
+man ask in vain for relief; in all thy hamlets may every young woman find
+a lover and every lover a true wife; may the young be trained arightly
+and guarded from evil; may the old close their days in the tranquil hope
+of those who love God and their fellow-men."
+
+We are reminded of the amiable wish of the French essayist--a wish even
+yet very far from realization, we fear, in the empire of Napoleon III.--
+by the perusal of two documents recently submitted to the legislature of
+the State of Massachusetts.  They indicate, in our view, the real glory
+of a state, and foreshadow the coming of that time when Milton's
+definition of a true commonwealth shall be no longer a prophecy, but the
+description of an existing fact,--"a huge Christian personage, a mighty
+growth and stature of an honest man, moved by the purpose of a love of
+God and of mankind."
+
+Some years ago, the Legislature of Massachusetts, at the suggestion of
+several benevolent gentlemen whose attention had been turned to the
+subject, appointed a commission to inquire into the condition of the
+idiots of the Commonwealth, to ascertain their numbers, and whether
+anything could be done in their behalf.
+
+The commissioners were Dr. Samuel G. Howe, so well and honorably known
+for his long and arduous labors in behalf of the blind, Judge Byington,
+and Dr. Gilman Kimball.  The burden of the labor fell upon the chairman,
+who entered upon it with the enthusiasm, perseverance, and practical
+adaptation of means to ends which have made him so efficient in his
+varied schemes of benevolence.  On the 26th of the second month, 1848, a
+full report of the results of this labor was made to the Governor,
+accompanied by statistical tables and minute details.  One hundred towns
+had been visited by the chairman or his reliable agent, in which five
+hundred and seventy-five persons in a state of idiocy were discovered.
+These were examined carefully in respect to their physical as well as
+mental condition, no inquiry being omitted which was calculated to throw
+light upon the remote or immediate causes of this mournful imperfection
+in the creation of God.  The proximate causes Dr. Howe mentions are to be
+found in the state of the bodily organization, deranged and
+disproportioned by some violation of natural law on the part of the
+parents or remoter ancestors of the sufferers.  Out of 420 cases of
+idiocy, he had obtained information respecting the condition of the
+progenitors of 359; and in all but four of these eases he found that one
+or the other, or both, of their immediate progenitors had in some way
+departed widely from the condition of health; they were scrofulous, or
+predisposed to affections of the brain, and insanity, or had intermarried
+with blood-relations, or had been intemperate, or guilty of sensual
+excesses.
+
+Of the 575 cases, 420 were those of idiocy from birth, and 155 of idiocy
+afterwards.  Of the born idiots, 187 were under twenty-five years of age,
+and all but 13 seemed capable of improvement.  Of those above twenty-five
+years of age, 73 appeared incapable of improvement in their mental
+condition, being helpless as children at seven years of age; 43 out of
+the 420 seemed as helpless as children at two years of age; 33 were in
+the condition of mere infants; and 220 were supported at the public
+charge in almshouses.  A large proportion of them were found to be given
+over to filthy and loathsome habits, gluttony, and lust, and constantly
+sinking lower towards the condition of absolute brutishness.
+
+Those in private houses were found, if possible, in a still more
+deplorable state.  Their parents were generally poor, feeble in mind and
+body, and often of very intemperate habits.  Many of them seemed scarcely
+able to take care of themselves, and totally unfit for the training of
+ordinary children.  It was the blind leading the blind, imbecility
+teaching imbecility.  Some instances of the experiments of parental
+ignorance upon idiotic offspring, which fell under the observation of Dr.
+Howe, are related in his report Idiotic children were found with their
+heads covered over with cold poultices of oak-bark, which the foolish
+parents supposed would tan the brain and harden it as the tanner does his
+ox-hides, and so make it capable of retaining impressions and remembering
+lessons.  In other cases, finding that the child could not be made to
+comprehend anything, the sagacious heads of the household, on the
+supposition that its brain was too hard, tortured it with hot poultices
+of bread and milk to soften it.  Others plastered over their children's
+heads with tar.  Some administered strong doses of mercury, to "solder up
+the openings" in the head and make it tight and strong.  Others
+encouraged the savage gluttony of their children, stimulating their
+unnatural and bestial appetites, on the ground that "the poor creatures
+had nothing else to enjoy but their food, and they should have enough of
+that!"
+
+In consequence of this report, the legislature, in the spring of 1848,
+made an annual appropriation of twenty-five hundred dollars, for three
+years, for the purpose of training and teaching ten idiot children, to be
+selected by the Governor and Council.  The trustees of the Asylum for the
+Blind, under the charge of Dr. Howe, made arrangements for receiving
+these pupils.  The school was opened in the autumn of 1848; and its first
+annual report, addressed to the Governor and printed by order of the
+Senate, is now before us.
+
+Of the ten pupils, it appears that not one had the usual command of
+muscular motion,--the languid body obeyed not the service of the imbecile
+will.  Some could walk and use their limbs and hands in simple motions;
+others could make only make slight use of their muscles; and two were
+without any power of locomotion.
+
+One of these last, a boy six years of age, who had been stupefied on the
+day of his birth by the application of hot rum to his head, could
+scarcely see or notice objects, and was almost destitute of the sense of
+touch.  He could neither stand nor sit upright, nor even creep, but would
+lie on the floor in whatever position he was placed.  He could not feed
+himself nor chew solid food, and had no more sense of decency than an
+infant.  His intellect was a blank; he had no knowledge, no desires, no
+affections.  A more hopeless object for experiment could scarcely have
+been selected.
+
+A year of patient endeavor has nevertheless wrought a wonderful change in
+the condition of this miserable being.  Cold bathing, rubbing of the
+limbs, exercise of the muscles, exposure to the air, and other appliances
+have enabled him to stand upright, to sit at table and feed himself, and
+chew his food, and to walk about with slight assistance.  His habits are
+no longer those of a brute; he observes decency; his eye is brighter; his
+cheeks glow with health; his countenance, is more expressive of thought.
+He has learned many words and constructs simple sentences; his affections
+begin to develop; and there is every prospect that he will be so far
+renovated as to be able to provide for himself in manhood.
+
+In the case of another boy, aged twelve years, the improvement has been
+equally remarkable.  The gentleman who first called attention to him, in
+a recent note to Dr. Howe, published in the report, thus speaks of his
+present condition: "When I remember his former wild and almost frantic
+demeanor when approached by any one, and the apparent impossibility of
+communicating with him, and now see him standing in his class, playing
+with his fellows, and willingly and familiarly approaching me, examining
+what I gave him,--and when I see him already selecting articles named by
+his teacher, and even correctly pronouncing words printed on cards,--
+improvement does not convey the idea presented to my mind; it is
+creation; it is making him anew."
+
+All the pupils have more or less advanced.  Their health and habits have
+improved; and there is no reason to doubt that the experiment, at the
+close of its three years, will be found to have been quite as successful
+as its most sanguine projectors could have anticipated.  Dr. Howe has
+been ably seconded by an accomplished teacher, James B. Richards, who has
+devoted his whole time to the pupils.  Of the nature and magnitude of
+their task, an idea may be formed only by considering the utter
+listlessness of idiocy, the incapability of the poor pupil to fix his
+attention upon anything, and his general want of susceptibility to
+impressions.  All his senses are dulled and perverted.  Touch, hearing,
+sight, smell, are all more or less defective.  His gluttony is
+unaccompanied with the gratification of taste,--the most savory viands
+and the offal which he shares with the pigs equally satisfy him.  His
+mental state is still worse than his physical.  Thought is painful and
+irksome to him.
+
+His teacher can only engage his attention by strenuous efforts, loud,
+earnest tones, gesticulations and signs, and a constant presentation of
+some visible object of bright color and striking form.  The eye wanders,
+and the spark of consciousness and intelligence which has been fanned
+into momentary brightness darkens at the slightest relaxation of the
+teacher's exertions.  The names of objects presented to him must
+sometimes be repeated hundreds of times before he can learn them.  Yet
+the patience and enthusiasm of the teacher are rewarded by a progress,
+slow and unequal, but still marked and manifest.  Step by step, often
+compelled to turn back and go over the inch of ground he had gained, the
+idiot is still creeping forward; and by almost imperceptible degrees his
+sick, cramped, and prisoned spirit casts off the burden of its body of
+death, breath as from the Almighty--is breathed into him, and he becomes
+a living soul.
+
+After the senses of the idiot are trained to take note
+of their appropriate objects, the various perceptive faculties are next
+to be exercised.  The greatest possible number of facts are to be
+gathered up through the medium of these faculties into the storehouse of
+memory, from whence eventually the higher faculties of mind may draw the
+material of general ideas.  It has been found difficult, if not
+impossible, to teach the idiot to read by the letters first, as in the
+ordinary method; but while the varied powers of the three letters, h, a,
+t, could not be understood by him, he could be made to comprehend the
+complex sign of the word hat, made by uniting the three.
+
+The moral nature of the idiot needs training and development as well as
+his physical and mental.  All that can be said of him is, that he has the
+latent capacity for moral development and culture.  Uninstructed and left
+to himself, he has no ideas of regulated appetites and propensities, of
+decency and delicacy of affection and social relations.  The germs of
+these ideas, which constitute the glory and beauty of humanity,
+undoubtedly exist in him; but there can be no growth without patient and
+persevering culture.  Where this is afforded, to use the language of the
+report, "the idiot may learn what love is, though he may not know the
+word which expresses it; he may feel kindly affections while unable to
+understand the simplest virtuous principle; and he may begin to live
+acceptably to God before he has learned the name by which men call him."
+
+In the facts and statistics presented in the report, light is shed upon
+some of the dark pages of God's providence, and it is seen that the
+suffering and shame of idiocy are the result of sin, of a violation of
+the merciful laws of God and of the harmonies of His benign order.  The
+penalties which are ordained for the violators of natural laws are
+inexorable and certain.  For the transgressor of the laws of life there
+is, as in the case of Esau, "no place for repentance, though he seek it
+earnestly and with tears."  The curse cleaves to him and his children.
+In this view, how important becomes the subject of the hereditary
+transmission of moral and physical disease and debility! and how
+necessary it is that there should be a clearer understanding of, and a
+willing obedience, at any cost, to the eternal law which makes the parent
+the blessing or the curse of the child, giving strength and beauty, and
+the capacity to know and do the will of God, or bequeathing
+loathsomeness, deformity, and animal appetite, incapable of the
+restraints of the moral faculties!  Even if the labors of Dr. Howe and
+his benevolent associates do not materially lessen the amount of present
+actual evil and suffering in this respect, they will not be put forth in
+vain if they have the effect of calling public attention to the great
+laws of our being, the violation of which has made this goodly earth a
+vast lazarhouse of pain and sorrow.
+
+The late annual message of the Governor of Massachusetts invites our
+attention to a kindred institution of charity.  The chief magistrate
+congratulates the legislature, in language creditable to his mind and
+heart, on the opening of the Reform School for Juvenile Criminals,
+established by an act of a previous legislature.  The act provides that,
+when any boy under sixteen years of age shall be convicted of crime
+punishable by imprisonment other than such an offence as is punished by
+imprisonment for life, he may be, at the discretion of the court or
+justice, sent to the State Reform School, or sentenced to such
+imprisonment as the law now provides for his offence.  The school is
+placed under the care of trustees, who may either refuse to receive a boy
+thus sent there, or, after he has been received, for reasons set forth in
+the act, may order him to be committed to prison under the previous penal
+law of the state.  They are also authorized to apprentice the boys, at
+their discretion, to inhabitants of the Commonwealth.  And whenever any
+boy shall be discharged, either as reformed or as having reached the age
+of twenty-one years, his discharge is a full release from his sentence.
+
+It is made the duty of the trustees to cause the boys to be instructed in
+piety and morality, and in branches of useful knowledge, in some regular
+course of labor, mechanical, agricultural, or horticultural, and such
+other trades and arts as may be best adapted to secure the amendment,
+reformation, and future benefit of the boys.  The class of offenders for
+whom this act provides are generally the offspring of parents depraved by
+crime or suffering from poverty and want,--the victims often of
+circumstances of evil which almost constitute a necessity,--issuing from
+homes polluted and miserable, from the sight and hearing of loathsome
+impurities and hideous discords, to avenge upon society the ignorance,
+and destitution, and neglect with which it is too often justly
+chargeable.  In 1846 three hundred of these youthful violators of law
+were sentenced to jails and other places of punishment in Massachusetts,
+where they incurred the fearful liability of being still more thoroughly
+corrupted by contact with older criminals, familiar with atrocity, and
+rolling their loathsome vices "as a sweet morsel under the tongue."  In
+view of this state of things the Reform School has been established,
+twenty-two thousand dollars having been contributed to the state for that
+purpose by an unknown benefactor of his race.  The school is located in
+Westboro', on a fine farm of two hundred acres.  The buildings are in the
+form of a square, with a court in the centre, three stories in front,
+with wings.  They are constructed with a degree of architectural taste,
+and their site is happily chosen,--a gentle eminence, overlooking one of
+the loveliest of the small lakes which form a pleasing feature in New
+England scenery.  From this place the atmosphere and associations of the
+prison are excluded.  The discipline is strict, as a matter of course;
+but it is that of a well-regulated home or school-room,--order, neatness,
+and harmony within doors; and without, the beautiful 'sights and sounds
+and healthful influences of Nature.  One would almost suppose that the
+poetical dream of Coleridge, in his tragedy of Remorse, had found its
+realization in the Westboro' School, and that, weary of the hopelessness
+and cruelty of the old penal system, our legislators had embodied in
+their statutes the idea of the poet:--
+
+"With other ministrations thou, O Nature,
+Healest thy wandering and distempered child
+Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,
+Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,
+Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,
+Till he relent, and can no more endure
+To be a jarring and a dissonant thing
+Amidst this general dance and minstrelsy."
+
+Thus it is that the Christian idea of reformation, rather than revenge,
+is slowly but surely incorporating itself in our statute books.  We have
+only to look back but a single century to be able to appreciate the
+immense gain for humanity in the treatment of criminals which has been
+secured in that space of time.  Then the use of torture was common
+throughout Europe.  Inability to comprehend and believe certain religious
+dogmas was a crime to be expiated by death, or confiscation of estate, or
+lingering imprisonment.  Petty offences against property furnished
+subjects for the hangman.  The stocks and the whipping-post stood by the
+side of the meeting-house.  Tongues were bored with redhot irons and ears
+shorn off.  The jails were loathsome dungeons, swarming with vermin,
+unventilated, unwarmed.  A century and a half ago the populace of
+Massachusetts were convulsed with grim merriment at the writhings of a
+miserable woman scourged at the cart-tail or strangling in the ducking-
+stool; crowds hastened to enjoy the spectacle of an old man enduring the
+unutterable torment of the 'peine forte et dare,'--pressed slowly to
+death under planks,--for refusing to plead to an indictment for
+witchcraft.  What a change from all this to the opening of the State
+Reform School, to the humane regulations of prisons and penitentiaries,
+to keen-eyed benevolence watching over the administration of justice,
+which, in securing society from lawless aggression, is not suffered to
+overlook the true interest and reformation of the criminal, nor to forget
+that the magistrate, in the words of the Apostle, is to be indeed "the
+minister of God to man for good!"
+
+
+
+
+                       LORD ASHLEY AND THE THIEVES.
+
+"THEY that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick," was
+the significant answer of our Lord to the self-righteous Pharisees who
+took offence at his companions,--the poor, the degraded, the weak, and
+the sinful.  "Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and
+not sacrifice; for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to
+repentance."
+
+The great lesson of duty inculcated by this answer of the Divine Teacher
+has been too long overlooked by individuals and communities professedly
+governed by His maxims.  The phylacteries of our modern Pharisees are as
+broad as those of the old Jewish saints.  The respectable Christian
+detests his vicious and ill-conditioned neighbors as heartily as the
+Israelite did the publicans and sinners of his day.  He folds his robe of
+self-righteousness closely about him, and denounces as little better than
+sinful weakness all commiseration for the guilty; and all attempts to
+restore and reclaim the erring violators of human law otherwise than by
+pains and penalties as wicked collusion with crime, dangerous to the
+stability and safety of society, and offensive in the sight of God.  And
+yet nothing is more certain than that, just in proportion as the example
+of our Lord has been followed in respect to the outcast and criminal, the
+effect has been to reform and elevate,--to snatch as brands from the
+burning souls not yet wholly given over to the service of evil.  The
+wonderful influence for good exerted over the most degraded and reckless
+criminals of London by the excellent and self-denying Elizabeth Fry, the
+happy results of the establishment of houses of refuge, and reformation,
+and Magdalen asylums, all illustrate the wisdom of Him who went about
+doing good, in pointing out the morally diseased as the appropriate
+subjects of the benevolent labors of His disciples.  No one is to be
+despaired of.  We have no warrant to pass by any of our fellow-creatures
+as beyond the reach of God's grace and mercy; for, beneath the most
+repulsive and hateful outward manifestation, there is always a
+consciousness of the beauty of goodness and purity, and of the
+loathsomeness of sin,--one chamber of the heart as yet not wholly
+profaned, whence at times arises the prayer of a burdened and miserable
+spirit for deliverance.  Deep down under the squalid exterior,
+unparticipative in the hideous merriment and recklessness of the
+criminal, there is another self,--a chained and suffering inner man,--
+crying out, in the intervals of intoxication and brutal excesses, like
+Jonah from the bosom of hell.  To this lingering consciousness the
+sympathy and kindness of benevolent and humane spirits seldom appeal in
+vain; for, whatever may be outward appearances, it remains true that the
+way of the transgressor is hard, and that sin and suffering are
+inseparable.  Crime is seldom loved or persevered in for its own sake;
+but, when once the evil path is entered upon, a return is in reality
+extremely difficult to the unhappy wanderer, and often seems as well nigh
+impossible.  The laws of social life rise up like insurmountable barriers
+between him and escape.  As he turns towards the society whose rights he
+has outraged, its frown settles upon him; the penalties of the laws he
+has violated await him; and he falls back despairing, and suffers the
+fetters of the evil habit to whose power he has yielded himself to be
+fastened closer and heavier upon him.  O for some good angel, in the form
+of a brother-man and touched with a feeling of his sins and infirmities,
+to reassure his better nature and to point out a way of escape from its
+body of death!
+
+We have been led into these remarks by an account, given in the London
+Weekly Chronicle, of a most remarkable interview between the professional
+thieves of London and Lord Ashley,--a gentleman whose best patent of
+nobility is to be found in his generous and untiring devotion to the
+interests of his fellow-men.  It appears that a philanthropic gentleman
+in London had been applied to by two young thieves, who had relinquished
+their evil practices and were obtaining a precarious but honest
+livelihood by picking up bones and rags in the streets, their loss of
+character closing against them all other employments.  He had just been
+reading an address of Lord Ashley's in favor of colonial emigration, and
+he was led to ask one of the young men how he would like to emigrate.
+
+"I should jump at the chance!" was the reply. Not long after the
+gentleman was sent for to visit one of those obscure and ruinous courts
+of the great metropolis where crime and poverty lie down together,--
+localities which Dickens has pictured with such painful distinctness.
+Here, to his surprise, he met a number of thieves and outlaws, who
+declared themselves extremely anxious to know whether any hope could be
+held out to them of obtaining an honest living, however humble, in the
+colonies, as their only reason for continuing in their criminal course
+was the impossibility of extricating themselves.  He gave them such
+advice and encouragement as he was able, and invited them to assemble
+again, with such of their companions as they could persuade to do so, at
+the room of the Irish Free School, for the purpose of meeting Lord
+Ashley.  On the 27th of the seventh month last the meeting took place.
+At the hour appointed, Lord Ashley and five or six other benevolent
+gentlemen, interested in emigration as a means of relief and reformation
+to the criminal poor, entered the room, which was already well-nigh
+filled.  Two hundred and seven professed thieves were present.  "Several
+of the most experienced thieves were stationed at the door to prevent the
+admission of any but thieves.  Some four or five individuals, who were
+not at first known, were subjected to examination, and only allowed to
+remain on stating that they were, and being recognized as, members of the
+dishonest fraternity; and before the proceedings of the evening commenced
+the question was very carefully put, and repeated several times, whether
+any one was in the room of whom others entertained doubts as to who he
+was.  The object of this care was, as so many of them were in danger of
+'getting into trouble,' or, in other words, of being taken up for their
+crimes, to ascertain if any who might betray them were present; and
+another intention of this scrutiny was, to give those assembled, who
+naturally would feel considerable fear, a fuller confidence in opening
+their minds."
+
+What a novel conference between the extremes of modern society!  All that
+is beautiful in refinement and education, moral symmetry and Christian
+grace, contrasting with the squalor, the ignorance, the lifelong
+depravity of men living "without God in the world,"--the pariahs of
+civilization,--the moral lepers, at the sight of whom decency covers its
+face, and cries out, "Unclean!"  After a prayer had been offered, Lord
+Ashley spoke at considerable length, making a profound impression on his
+strange auditory as they listened to his plans of emigration, which
+offered them an opportunity to escape from their miserable condition and
+enter upon a respectable course of life.  The hard heart melted and the
+cold and cruel eye moistened.  With one accord the wretched felons
+responded to the language of Christian love and good-will, and declared
+their readiness to follow the advice of their true friend.  They looked
+up to him as to an angel of mercy, and felt the malignant spirits which
+had so long tormented them disarmed of all power of evil in the presence
+of simple goodness.  He stood in that felon audience like Spenser's Una
+amidst the satyrs; unassailable and secure in the "unresistible might of
+meekness," and panoplied in that "noble grace which dashed brute violence
+with sudden adoration and mute awe."
+
+Twenty years ago, when Elizabeth Fry ventured to visit those "spirits in
+prison,"--the female tenants of Newgate,--her temerity was regarded with
+astonishment, and her hope of effecting a reformation in the miserable
+objects of her sympathy was held to be wholly visionary.  Her personal
+safety and the blessed fruits of her labors, nevertheless, confirmed the
+language of her Divine Master to His disciples when He sent them forth as
+lambs among wolves: "Behold, I give unto you power over all the power of
+the enemy."  The still more unpromising experiment of Lord Ashley, thus
+far, has been equally successful; and we hail it as the introduction of a
+new and more humane method of dealing with the victims of sin and
+ignorance, and the temptations growing out of the inequalities and vices
+of civilization.
+
+
+
+
+
+                             WOMAN SUFFRAGE.
+
+                    Letter to the Newport Convention.
+
+                 AMESBURY, MASS., 12th, 8th Month, 1869.
+
+I HAVE received thy letter inviting me to attend the Convention in behalf
+of Woman's Suffrage, at Newport, R.  I., on the 25th inst.  I do not see
+how it is possible for me to accept the invitation; and, were I to do so,
+the state of my health would prevent me from taking such a part in the
+meeting as would relieve me from the responsibility of seeming to
+sanction anything in its action which might conflict with my own views of
+duty or policy.  Yet I should do myself great injustice if I did not
+embrace this occasion to express my general sympathy with the movement.
+I have seen no good reason why mothers, wives, and daughters should not
+have the same right of person, property, and citizenship which fathers,
+husbands, and brothers have.
+
+The sacred memory of mother and sister; the wisdom and dignity of women
+of my own religious communion who have been accustomed to something like
+equality in rights as well as duties; my experience as a co-worker with
+noble and self-sacrificing women, as graceful and helpful in their
+household duties as firm and courageous in their public advocacy of
+unpopular truth; the steady friendships which have inspired and
+strengthened me, and the reverence and respect which I feel for human
+nature, irrespective of sex, compel me to look with something more than
+acquiescence on the efforts you are making.  I frankly confess that I am
+not able to forsee all the consequences of the great social and political
+change proposed, but of this I am, at least, sure, it is always safe to
+do right, and the truest expediency is simple justice.  I can understand,
+without sharing, the misgivings of those who fear that, when the vote
+drops from woman's hand into the ballot-box, the beauty and sentiment,
+the bloom and sweetness, of womankind will go with it.  But in this
+matter it seems to me that we can trust Nature.  Stronger than statutes
+or conventions, she will be conservative of all that the true man loves
+and honors in woman.  Here and there may be found an equivocal, unsexed
+Chevalier D'Eon, but the eternal order and fitness of things will remain.
+I have no fear that man will be less manly or woman less womanly when
+they meet on terms of equality before the law.
+
+On the other hand, I do not see that the exercise of the ballot by woman
+will prove a remedy for all the evils of which she justly complains.  It
+is her right as truly as mine, and when she asks for it, it is something
+less than manhood to withhold it.  But, unsupported by a more practical
+education, higher aims, and a deeper sense of the responsibilities of
+life and duty, it is not likely to prove a blessing in her hands any more
+than in man's.
+
+With great respect and hearty sympathy, I am very truly thy friend.
+
+
+
+
+
+                              ITALIAN UNITY
+
+                   AMESBURY, MASS., 1st Mo., 4th, 1871.
+
+     Read at the great meeting in New York, January, 1871, in celebration
+     of the freedom of Rome and complete unity of Italy.
+
+IT would give me more than ordinary satisfaction to attend the meeting on
+the 12th instant for the celebration of Italian Unity, the emancipation
+of Rome, and its occupation as the permanent capital of the nation.
+
+For many years I have watched with deep interest and sympathy the popular
+movement on the Italian peninsula, and especially every effort for the
+deliverance of Rome from a despotism counting its age by centuries.  I
+looked at these struggles of the people with little reference to their
+ecclesiastical or sectarian bearings.  Had I been a Catholic instead of a
+Protestant, I should have hailed every symptom of Roman deliverance from
+Papal rule, occupying, as I have, the standpoint of a republican radical,
+desirous that all men, of all creeds, should enjoy the civil liberty
+which I prized so highly for myself.
+
+I lost all confidence in the French republic of 1849, when it forfeited
+its own right to exist by crushing out the newly formed Roman republic
+under Mazzini and Garibaldi.  From that hour it was doomed, and the
+expiation of its monstrous crime is still going on.  My sympathies are
+with Jules Favre and Leon Gambetta in their efforts to establish and
+sustain a republic in France, but I confess that the investment of Paris
+by King William seems to me the logical sequence of the bombardment of
+Rome by Oudinot.  And is it not a significant fact that the terrible
+chassepot, which made its first bloody experiment upon the halfarmed
+Italian patriots without the walls of Rome, has failed in the hands of
+French republicans against the inferior needle-gun of Prussia?  It was
+said of a fierce actor in the old French Revolution that he demoralized
+the guillotine.  The massacre at Mentana demoralized the chassepot.
+
+It is a matter of congratulation that the redemption of Rome has been
+effected so easily and bloodlessly.  The despotism of a thousand years
+fell at a touch in noiseless rottenness.  The people of Rome, fifty to
+one, cast their ballots of condemnation like so many shovelfuls of earth
+upon its grave.  Outside of Rome there seems to be a very general
+acquiescence in its downfall.  No Peter the Hermit preaches a crusade in
+its behalf.  No one of the great Catholic powers of Europe lifts a finger
+for it.  Whatever may be the feelings of Isabella of Spain and the
+fugitive son of King Bomba, they are in no condition to come to its
+rescue.  It is reserved for American ecclesiastics, loud-mouthed in
+professions of democracy, to make solemn protest against what they call
+an "outrage," which gives the people of Rome the right of choosing their
+own government, and denies the divine right of kings in the person of Pio
+Nono.
+
+The withdrawal of the temporal power of the Pope will prove a blessing to
+the Catholic Church, as well as to the world.  Many of its most learned
+and devout priests and laymen have long seen the necessity of such a
+change, which takes from it a reproach and scandal that could no longer
+be excused or tolerated.  A century hence it will have as few apologists
+as the Inquisition or the massacre of St. Bartholomew.
+
+In this hour of congratulation let us not forget those whose suffering
+and self-sacrifice, in the inscrutable wisdom of Providence, prepared the
+way for the triumph which we celebrate.  As we call the long, illustrious
+roll of Italian patriotism--the young, the brave, and beautiful; the
+gray-haired, saintly confessors; the scholars, poets, artists, who, shut
+out from human sympathy, gave their lives for God and country in the
+slow, dumb agony of prison martyrdom--let us hope that they also rejoice
+with us, and, inaudible to earthly ears, unite in our thanksgiving:
+"Alleluia!  for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth!  He hath avenged the
+blood of his servants!"
+
+In the belief that the unity of Italy and the overthrow of Papal rule
+will strengthen the cause of liberty throughout the civilized' world, I
+am very truly thy friend.
+
+
+
+
+
+                           INDIAN CIVILIZATION.
+
+THE present condition and future prospects of the remnants of the
+aboriginal inhabitants of this continent can scarcely be a matter of
+indifference to any class of the people of the United States.  Apart from
+all considerations of justice and duty, a purely selfish regard to our
+own well-being would compel attention to the subject.  The irreversible
+laws of God's moral government, and the well-attested maxims of political
+and social economy, leave us in no doubt that the suffering, neglect, and
+wrong of one part of the community must affect all others.  A common
+responsibility rests upon each and all to relieve suffering, enlighten
+ignorance, and redress wrong, and the penalty of neglect in this respect
+no nation has ever escaped.
+
+It is only within a comparatively recent period that the term Indian
+Civilization could be appropriately used in this country.  Very little
+real progress bad been made in this direction, up to the time when
+Commissioner Lang in 1844 visited the tribes now most advanced.  So
+little had been done, that public opinion had acquiesced in the
+assumption that the Indians were not susceptible of civilization and
+progress.  The few experiments had not been calculated to assure a
+superficial observer.
+
+The unsupported efforts of Elliot in New England were counteracted by the
+imprisonment, and in some instances the massacre of his "praying
+Indians," by white men under the exasperation of war with hostile tribes.
+The salutary influence of the Moravians and Friends in Pennsylvania was
+greatly weakened by the dreadful massacre of the unarmed and blameless
+converts of Gnadenhutten.  But since the first visit of Commissioner
+Lang, thirty-three years ago, the progress of education, civilization,
+and conversion to Christianity, has been of a most encouraging nature,
+and if Indian civilization was ever a doubtful problem, it has been
+practically solved.
+
+The nomadic habits and warlike propensities of the native tribes are
+indeed formidable but not insuperable difficulties in the way of their
+elevation.  The wildest of them may compare not unfavorably with those
+Northern barbarian hordes that swooped down upon Christian Europe, and
+who were so soon the docile pupils and proselytes of the peoples they had
+conquered.  The Arapahoes and Camanches of our day are no further removed
+from the sweetness and light of Christian culture than were the
+Scandinavian Sea Kings of the middle centuries, whose gods were patrons
+of rapine and cruelty, their heaven a vast, cloud-built ale-house, where
+ghostly warriors drank from the skulls of their victims, and whose hell
+was a frozen horror of desolation and darkness, to be avoided only by
+diligence in robbery and courage in murder.  The descendants of these
+human butchers are now among the best exponents of the humanizing
+influence of the gospel of Christ.  The report of the Superintendent of
+the remnants of the once fierce and warlike Six Nations, now peaceable
+and prosperous in Canada, shows that the Indian is not inferior to the
+Norse ancestors of the Danes and Norwegians of our day in capability of
+improvement.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to say, what is universally conceded, that the
+wars waged by the Indians against the whites have, in nearly every
+instance, been provoked by violations of solemn treaties and systematic
+disregard of their rights of person, property, and life.  The letter of
+Bishop Whipple, of Minnesota, to the New York Tribune of second month,
+1877, calls attention to the emphatic language of Generals Sherman,
+Harney, Terry, and Augur, written after a full and searching
+investigation of the subject: "That the Indian goes to war is not
+astonishing: he is often compelled to do so: wrongs are borne by him in
+silence, which never fail to drive civilized men to deeds of violence.
+The best possible way to avoid war is to do no injustice."
+
+It is not difficult to understand the feelings of the unfortunate pioneer
+settlers on the extreme borders of civilization, upon whom the blind
+vengeance of the wronged and hunted Indians falls oftener than upon the
+real wrong-doers.  They point to terrible and revolting cruelties as
+proof that nothing short of the absolute extermination of the race can
+prevent their repetition.  But a moment's consideration compels us to
+admit that atrocious cruelty is not peculiar to the red man.  "All wars
+are cruel," said General Sherman, and for eighteen centuries Christendom
+has been a great battle-field.  What Indian raid has been more dreadful
+than the sack of Magdeburg, the massacre of Glencoe, the nameless
+atrocities of the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands, the murders of St.
+Bartholomew's day, the unspeakable agonies of the South of France under
+the demoniac rule of revolution!  All history, black with crime and red
+with blood, is but an awful commentary upon "man's inhumanity to man,"
+and it teaches us that there is nothing exceptional in the Indian's
+ferocity and vindictiveness, and that the alleged reasons for his
+extermination would, at one time or another, have applied with equal
+force to the whole family of man.
+
+A late lecture of my friend, Stanley Pumphrey, comprises more of valuable
+information and pertinent suggestions on the Indian question than I have
+found in any equal space; and I am glad of the opportunity to add to it
+my hearty endorsement, and to express the conviction that its general
+circulation could not fail to awaken a deeper and more kindly interest in
+the condition of the red man, and greatly aid in leading the public mind
+to a fuller appreciation of the responsibility which rests upon us as a
+people to rectify, as far as possible, past abuses, and in our future
+relations to the native owners of the soil to "deal justly and love
+mercy."
+
+
+
+
+
+READING FOR THE BLIND.
+
+[1880.]
+
+To Mary C.  Moore, teacher in the Perkins Asylum.
+
+DEAR FRIEND,--It gives me great pleasure to know that the pupils in thy
+class at the Institution for the Blind have the opportunity afforded them
+to read through the sense of touch some of my writings, and thus hold
+what I hope will prove a pleasant communion with me.  Very glad I shall
+be if the pen-pictures of nature, and homely country firesides, which I
+have tried to make, are understood and appreciated by those who cannot
+discern them by natural vision.  I shall count it a great privilege to
+see for them, or rather to let them see through my eyes.  It is the mind
+after all that really sees, shapes, and colors all things.  What visions
+of beauty and sublimity passed before the inward and spiritual sight of
+blind Milton and Beethoven!
+
+I have an esteemed friend, Morrison Hendy, of Kentucky, who is deaf and
+blind; yet under these circumstances he has cultivated his mind to a high
+degree, and has written poems of great beauty, and vivid descriptions of
+scenes which have been witnessed only by the "light within."
+
+I thank thee for thy letter, and beg of thee to assure the students that
+I am deeply interested in their welfare and progress, and that my prayer
+is that their inward and spiritual eyes may become so clear that they can
+well dispense with the outward and material ones.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE INDIAN QUESTION.
+
+Read at the meeting in Boston, May, 1883, for the consideration of the
+condition of the Indians in the United States.
+
+AMESBURY, 4th mo., 1883.
+
+I REGRET that I cannot be present at the meeting called in reference to
+the pressing question of the day, the present condition and future
+prospects of the Indian race in the United States.  The old policy,
+however well intended, of the government is no longer available.  The
+westward setting tide of immigration is everywhere sweeping over the
+lines of the reservations.  There would seem to be no power in the
+government to prevent the practical abrogation of its solemn treaties and
+the crowding out of the Indians from their guaranteed hunting grounds.
+Outbreaks of Indian ferocity and revenge, incited by wrong and robbery on
+the part of the whites, will increasingly be made the pretext of
+indiscriminate massacres.  The entire question will soon resolve itself
+into the single alternative of education and civilization or
+extermination.
+
+The school experiments at Hampton, Carlisle, and Forest Grove in Oregon
+have proved, if such proof were ever needed, that the roving Indian can
+be enlightened and civilized, taught to work and take interest and
+delight in the product of his industry, and settle down on his farm or in
+his workshop, as an American citizen, protected by and subject to the
+laws of the republic.  What is needed is that not only these schools
+should be more liberally supported, but that new ones should be opened
+without delay.  The matter does not admit of procrastination.  The work
+of education and civilization must be done.  The money needed must be
+contributed with no sparing hand.  The laudable example set by the
+Friends and the American Missionary Association should be followed by
+other sects and philanthropic societies.  Christianity, patriotism, and
+enlightened self interest have a common stake in the matter.  Great and
+difficult as the work may be the country is strong enough, rich enough,
+wise enough, and, I believe, humane and Christian enough to do it.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.
+
+Read at a meeting of the Essex Club, in Boston,
+November, 1885.
+
+AMESBURY, 11th Mo., 10, 1885.
+
+I AM sorry that I cannot accept thy invitation to attend the meeting of
+the Essex Club on the 14th inst.  I should be glad to meet my old
+Republican friends and congratulate them on the results of the election
+in Massachusetts, and especially in our good old county of Essex.
+
+Some of our friends and neighbors, who have been with us heretofore, last
+year saw fit to vote with the opposite party.  I would be the last to
+deny their perfect right to do so, or to impeach their motives, but I
+think they were mistaken in expecting that party to reform the abuses and
+evils which they complained of.  President Cleveland has proved himself
+better than his party, and has done and said some good things which I
+give him full credit for, but the instincts of his party are against him,
+and must eventually prove too strong for him, and, instead of his
+carrying the party, it will be likely to carry him.  It has already
+compelled him to put his hands in his pockets for electioneering
+purposes, and travel all the way from Washington to Buffalo to give his
+vote for a spoilsman and anti-civil service machine politician.  I would
+not like to call it a case of "offensive partisanship," but it looks a
+good deal like it.
+
+As a Republican from the outset, I am proud of the noble record of the
+party, but I should rejoice to see its beneficent work taken up by the
+Democratic party and so faithfully carried on as to make our organization
+no longer necessary.  But, as far as we can see, the Republican party has
+still its mission and its future.  When labor shall everywhere have its
+just reward, and the gains of it are made secure to the earners; when
+education shall be universal, and, North and South, all men shall have
+the free and full enjoyment of civil rights and privileges, irrespective
+of color or former condition; when every vice which debases the community
+shall be discouraged and prohibited, and every virtue which elevates it
+fostered and strengthened; when merit and fitness shall be the conditions
+of office; and when sectional distrust and prejudice shall give place to
+well-merited confidence in the loyalty and patriotism of all, then will
+the work of the Republican party, as a party, be ended, and all political
+rivalries be merged in the one great party of the people, with no other
+aim than the common welfare, and no other watchwords than peace, liberty,
+and union.  Then may the language which Milton addressed to his
+countrymen two centuries ago be applied to the United States, "Go on,
+hand in hand, O peoples, never to be disunited; be the praise and heroic
+song of all posterity.  Join your invincible might to do worthy and
+godlike deeds; and then he who seeks to break your Union, a cleaving
+curse be his inheritance."
+
+
+
+
+
+OUR DUMB RELATIONS.
+
+[1886.]
+
+IT was said of St. Francis of Assisi, that he had attained, through the
+fervor of his love, the secret of that deep amity with God and His
+creation which, in the language of inspiration, makes man to be in league
+with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field to be at peace
+with him.  The world has never been without tender souls, with whom the
+golden rule has a broader application than its letter might seem to
+warrant.  The ancient Eastern seers recognized the rights of the brute
+creation, and regarded the unnecessary taking of the life of the humblest
+and meanest as a sin; and in almost all the old religions of the world
+there are legends of saints, in the depth of whose peace with God and
+nature all life was sacredly regarded as the priceless gift of heaven,
+and who were thus enabled to dwell safely amidst lions and serpents.
+
+It is creditable to human nature and its unperverted instincts that
+stories and anecdotes of reciprocal kindness and affection between men
+and animals are always listened to with interest and approval.  How
+pleasant to think of the Arab and his horse, whose friendship has been
+celebrated in song and romance.  Of Vogelwied, the Minnesinger, and his
+bequest to the birds.  Of the English Quaker, visited, wherever he went,
+by flocks of birds, who with cries of joy alighted on his broad-brimmed
+hat and his drab coat-sleeves.  Of old Samuel Johnson, when half-blind
+and infirm, groping abroad of an evening for oysters for his cat.  Of
+Walter Scott and John Brown, of Edinburgh, and their dogs.  Of our own
+Thoreau, instinctively recognized by bird and beast as a friend.  Emerson
+says of him: "His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller
+records of Butler, the apologist, that either he had told the bees
+things, or the bees had told him.  Snakes coiled round his legs; the
+fishes swam into his hand; he pulled the woodchuck out of his hole by his
+tail, and took foxes under his protection from the hunters."
+
+In the greatest of the ancient Hindu poems--the sacred book of the
+Mahabharata--there is a passage of exceptional beauty and tenderness,
+which records the reception of King Yudishthira at the gate of Paradise.
+A pilgrim to the heavenly city, the king had travelled over vast spaces,
+and, one by one, the loved ones, the companions of his journey, had all
+fallen and left him alone, save his faithful dog, which still followed.
+He was met by Indra, and invited to enter the holy city.  But the king
+thinks of his friends who have fallen on the way, and declines to go in
+without them.  The god tells him they are all within waiting for him.
+Joyful, he is about to seek them, when he looks upon the poor dog, who,
+weary and wasted, crouches at his feet, and asks that he, too, may enter
+the gate.  Indra refuses, and thereupon the king declares that to abandon
+his faithful dumb friend would be as great a sin as to kill a Brahmin.
+
+     "Away with that felicity whose price is to abandon the faithful!
+     Never, come weal or woe, will I leave my faithful dog.
+     The poor creature, in fear and distress, has trusted in my power to
+     save him;
+     Not, therefore, for life itself, will I break my plighted word."
+
+In full sight of heaven he chooses to go to hell with his dog, and
+straightway descends, as he supposes, thither.  But his virtue and
+faithfulness change his destination to heaven, and he finds himself
+surrounded by his old friends, and in the presence of the gods, who thus
+honor and reward his humanity and unselfish love.
+
+
+
+
+
+INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION.
+
+Read at the reception in Boston of the English delegation representing
+more than two hundred members of the British Parliament who favor
+international arbitration.
+
+AMESBURY, 11th Mo., 9, 1887.
+
+IT is a very serious disappointment to me not to be able to be present at
+the welcome of the American Peace Society to the delegation of more than
+two hundred members of the British Parliament who favor international
+arbitration.  Few events have more profoundly impressed me than the
+presentation of this peaceful overture to the President of the United
+States.  It seems to me that every true patriot who seeks the best
+interests of his country and every believer in the gospel of Christ must
+respond to the admirable address of Sir Lyon Playfair and that of his
+colleagues who represented the workingmen of England.  We do not need to
+be told that war is always cruel, barbarous, and brutal; whether used by
+professed Christians with ball and bayonet, or by heathen with club and
+boomerang.  We cannot be blind to its waste of life and treasure and the
+demoralization which follows in its train; nor cease to wonder at the
+spectacle of Christian nations exhausting all their resources in
+preparing to slaughter each other, with only here and there a voice, like
+Count Tolstoi's in the Russian wilderness, crying in heedless ears that
+the gospel of Christ is peace, not war, and love, not hatred.
+
+The overture which comes to us from English advocates of arbitration is a
+cheering assurance that the tide of sentiment is turning in favor of
+peace among English speaking peoples.  I cannot doubt that whatever stump
+orators and newspapers may say for party purposes, the heart of America
+will respond to the generous proposal of our kinsfolk across the water.
+No two nations could be more favorably conditioned than England and the
+United States for making the "holy experiment of arbitration."
+
+In our associations and kinship, our aims and interests, our common
+claims in the great names and achievements of a common ancestry, we are
+essentially one people.  Whatever other nations may do, we at least
+should be friends.  God grant that the noble and generous attempt shall
+not be in vain!  May it hasten the time when the only rivalry between us
+shall be the peaceful rivalry of progress and the gracious interchange of
+good.
+
+              "When closer strand shall lean to strand,
+               Till meet beneath saluting flags,
+               The eagle of our mountain crags,
+               The lion of our mother land!"
+
+
+
+
+
+SUFFRAGE FOR WOMEN.
+
+Read at the Woman's Convention at Washington.
+
+OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, MASS., Third Mo., 8, 1888.
+
+I THANK thee for thy kind letter.  It would be a great satisfaction to be
+able to be present at the fortieth anniversary of the Woman's Suffrage
+Association.  But, as that is not possible, I can only reiterate my
+hearty sympathy with the object of the association, and bid it take heart
+and assurance in view of all that has been accomplished.  There is no
+easy royal road to a reform of this kind, but if the progress has been
+slow there has been no step backward.  The barriers which at first seemed
+impregnable in the shape of custom and prejudice have been undermined and
+their fall is certain.  A prophecy of your triumph at no distant day is
+in the air; your opponents feel it and believe it.  They know that yours
+is a gaining and theirs a losing cause.  The work still before you
+demands on your part great patience, steady perseverance, a firm,
+dignified, and self-respecting protest against the injustice of which you
+have so much reason to complain, and of serene confidence which is not
+discouraged by temporary checks, nor embittered by hostile criticism, nor
+provoked to use any weapons of retort, which, like the boomerang, fall
+back on the heads of those who use them.  You can afford
+in your consciousness of right to be as calm and courteous as the
+archangel Michael, who, we are told in Scripture in his controversy with
+Satan himself, did not bring a railing accusation against him.  A wise
+adaptation of means to ends is no yielding of principle, but care should
+be taken to avoid all such methods as have disgraced political and
+religious parties of the masculine sex.  Continue to make it manifest
+that all which is pure and lovely and of good repute in womanhood is
+entirely compatible with the exercise of the rights of citizenship, and
+the performance of the duties which we all owe to our homes and our
+country.  Confident that you will do this, and with no doubt or misgiving
+as to your success, I bid you Godspeed.  I find I have written to the
+association rather than to thyself, but as one of the principal
+originators and most faithful supporters, it was very natural that I
+should identify thee with it.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE INNER LIFE
+
+THE AGENCY OF EVIL.
+
+From the Supernaturalism of New England, in the Democratic Review for
+1843.
+
+IN this life of ours, so full of mystery, so hung about with wonders, so
+written over with dark riddles, where even the lights held by prophets
+and inspired ones only serve to disclose the solemn portals of a future
+state of being, leaving all beyond in shadow, perhaps the darkest and
+most difficult problem which presents itself is that of the origin of
+evil,--the source whence flow the black and bitter waters of sin and
+suffering and discord,--the wrong which all men see in others and feel
+in themselves,--the unmistakable facts of human depravity and misery.  A
+superficial philosophy may attempt to refer all these dark phenomena of
+man's existence to his own passions, circumstances, and will; but the
+thoughtful observer cannot rest satisfied with secondary causes.  The
+grossest materialism, at times, reveals something of that latent dread
+of an invisible and spiritual influence which is inseparable from our
+nature.  Like Eliphaz the Temanite, it is conscious of a spirit passing
+before its face, the form whereof is not discerned.
+
+It is indeed true that our modern divines and theologians, as if to atone
+for the too easy credulity of their order formerly, have unceremoniously
+consigned the old beliefs of Satanic agency, demoniacal possession, and
+witchcraft, to Milton's receptacle of exploded follies and detected
+impostures,
+
+              "Over the backside of the world far off,
+               Into a limbo broad and large, and called
+               The paradise of fools,"--
+
+that indeed, out of their peculiar province, and apart from the routine
+of their vocation, they have become the most thorough sceptics and
+unbelievers among us.  Yet it must be owned that, if they have not the
+marvellous themselves, they are the cause of it in others.  In certain
+states of mind, the very sight of a clergyman in his sombre professional
+garb is sufficient to awaken all the wonderful within us.  Imagination
+goes wandering back to the subtle priesthood of mysterious Egypt.  We
+think of Jannes and Jambres; of the Persian magi; dim oak groves, with
+Druid altars, and priests, and victims, rise before us.  For what is the
+priest even of our New England but a living testimony to the truth of the
+supernatural and the reality of the unseen,--a man of mystery, walking in
+the shadow of the ideal world,--by profession an expounder of spiritual
+wonders?  Laugh he may at the old tales of astrology and witchcraft and
+demoniacal possession; but does he not believe and bear testimony to his
+faith in the reality of that dark essence which Scripture more than hints
+at, which has modified more or less all the religious systems and
+speculations of the heathen world,--the Ahriman of the Parsee, the Typhon
+of the Egyptian, the Pluto of the Roman mythology, the Devil of Jew,
+Christian, and Mussulman, the Machinito of the Indian,--evil in the
+universe of goodness, darkness in the light of divine intelligence,--in
+itself the great and crowning mystery from which by no unnatural process
+of imagination may be deduced everything which our forefathers believed
+of the spiritual world and supernatural agency?  That fearful being with
+his tributaries and agents,--"the Devil and his angels,"--how awfully he
+rises before us in the brief outline limning of the sacred writers!  How
+he glooms, "in shape and gesture proudly eminent," on the immortal canvas
+of Milton and Dante!  What a note of horror does his name throw into the
+sweet Sabbath psalmody of our churches.  What strange, dark fancies are
+connected with the very language of common-law indictments, when grand
+juries find under oath that the offence complained of has been committed
+"at the instigation of the Devil"!
+
+How hardly effaced are the impressions of childhood!  Even at this day,
+at the mention of the evil angel, an image rises before me like that with
+which I used especially to horrify myself in an old copy of Pilgrim's
+Progress.  Horned, hoofed, scaly, and fire-breathing, his caudal
+extremity twisted tight with rage, I remember him, illustrating the
+tremendous encounter of Christian in the valley where "Apollyon straddled
+over the whole breadth of the way."  There was another print of the enemy
+which made no slight impression upon me.  It was the frontispiece of an
+old, smoked, snuff-stained pamphlet, the property of an elderly lady,
+(who had a fine collection of similar wonders, wherewith she was kind
+enough to edify her young visitors,) containing a solemn account of the
+fate of a wicked dancing-party in New Jersey, whose irreverent
+declaration, that they would have a fiddler if they had to send to the
+lower regions after him, called up the fiend himself, who forthwith
+commenced playing, while the company danced to the music incessantly,
+without the power to suspend their exercise, until their feet and legs
+were worn off to the knees!  The rude wood-cut represented the demon
+fiddler and his agonized companions literally stumping it up and down in
+"cotillons, jigs, strathspeys, and reels."  He would have answered very
+well to the description of the infernal piper in Tam O'Shanter.
+
+To this popular notion of the impersonation of the principle of evil we
+are doubtless indebted for the whole dark legacy of witchcraft and
+possession.  Failing in our efforts to solve the problem of the origin of
+evil, we fall back upon the idea of a malignant being,--the antagonism of
+good.  Of this mysterious and dreadful personification we find ourselves
+constrained to speak with a degree of that awe and reverence which are
+always associated with undefined power and the ability to harm.  "The
+Devil," says an old writer, "is a dignity, though his glory be somewhat
+faded and wan, and is to be spoken of accordingly."
+
+The evil principle of Zoroaster was from eternity self-created and
+existent, and some of the early Christian sects held the same opinion.
+The gospel, however, affords no countenance to this notion of a divided
+sovereignty of the universe.  The Divine Teacher, it is true, in
+discoursing of evil, made use of the language prevalent in His time, and
+which was adapted to the gross conceptions of His Jewish bearers; but He
+nowhere presents the embodiment of sin as an antagonism to the absolute
+power and perfect goodness of God, of whom, and through whom, and to whom
+are all things.  Pure himself, He can create nothing impure.  Evil,
+therefore, has no eternity in the past.  The fact of its present actual
+existence is indeed strongly stated; and it is not given us to understand
+the secret of that divine alchemy whereby pain, and sin, and discord
+become the means to beneficent ends worthy of the revealed attributes of
+the Infinite Parent.  Unsolved by human reason or philosophy, the dark
+mystery remains to baffle the generations of men; and only to the eye of
+humble and childlike faith can it ever be reconciled to the purity,
+justice, and mercy of Him who is "light, and in whom is no darkness at
+all."
+
+"Do you not believe in the Devil?" some one once asked the Non-conformist
+Robinson.  "I believe in God," was the reply; "don't you?"
+
+Henry of Nettesheim says "that it is unanimously maintained that devils
+do wander up and down in the earth; but what they are, or how they are,
+ecclesiasticals have not clearly expounded."  Origen, in his Platonic
+speculations on this subject, supposed them to be spirits who, by
+repentance, might be restored, that in the end all knees might be bowed
+to the Father of spirits, and He become all in all.  Justin Martyr was of
+the opinion that many of them still hoped for their salvation; and the
+Cabalists held that this hope of theirs was well founded.  One is
+irresistibly reminded here of the closing verse of the _Address to the
+Deil_, by Burns:--
+
+              "But fare ye weel, Auld Nickie ben!
+               Gin ye wad take a thought and mend,
+               Ye aiblins might--I dinna ken--
+               Still has a stake
+               I'm was to think upon yon den
+               Fen for your sake."
+
+The old schoolmen and fathers seem to agree that the Devil and his
+ministers have bodies in some sort material, subject to passions and
+liable to injury and pain.  Origen has a curious notion that any evil
+spirit who, in a contest with a human being, is defeated, loses from
+thenceforth all his power of mischief, and may be compared to a wasp who
+has lost his sting.
+
+"The Devil," said Samson Occum, the famous Indian preacher, in a
+discourse on temperance, "is a gentleman, and never drinks."
+Nevertheless it is a remarkable fact, and worthy of the serious
+consideration of all who "tarry long at the wine," that, in that state of
+the drunkard's malady known as delirium tremens, the adversary, in some
+shape or other, is generally visible to the sufferers, or at least, as
+Winslow says of the Powahs, "he appeareth more familiarly to them than to
+others."  I recollect a statement made to me by a gentleman who has had
+bitter experience of the evils of intemperance, and who is at this time
+devoting his fine talents to the cause of philanthropy and mercy, as the
+editor of one of our best temperance journals, which left a most vivid
+impression on my mind.  He had just returned from a sea-voyage; and, for
+the sake of enjoying a debauch, unmolested by his friends, took up his
+abode in a rum-selling tavern in a somewhat lonely location on the
+seaboard.  Here he drank for many days without stint, keeping himself the
+whole time in a state of semi-intoxication.  One night he stood leaning
+against a tree, looking listlessly and vacantly out upon the ocean; the
+waves breaking on the beach, and the white sails of passing vessels
+vaguely impressing him like the pictures of a dream.  He was startled by
+a voice whispering hoarsely in his ear, _"You have murdered a man; the
+officers of justice are after you; you must fly for your life!"_  Every
+syllable was pronounced slowly and separately; and there was something in
+the hoarse, gasping sound of the whisper which was indescribably
+dreadful.  He looked around him, and seeing nothing but the clear
+moonlight on the grass, became partially sensible that he was the victim
+of illusion, and a sudden fear of insanity thrilled him with a momentary
+horror.  Rallying himself, he returned to the tavern, drank another glass
+of brandy, and retired to his chamber.  He had scarcely lain his head on
+the pillow when he heard that hoarse, low, but terribly distinct whisper,
+repeating the same words.  He describes his sensations at this time as
+inconceivably fearful.  Reason was struggling with insanity; but amidst
+the confusion and mad disorder one terrible thought evolved itself.  Had
+he not, in a moment of mad frenzy of which his memory made no record,
+actually murdered some one?  And was not this a warning from Heaven?
+Leaving his bed and opening his door, he heard the words again repeated,
+with the addition, in a tone of intense earnestness, "Follow me!"  He
+walked forward in the direction of the sound, through a long entry, to
+the head of the staircase, where he paused for a moment, when again he
+heard the whisper, half-way down the stairs, "Follow me!"
+
+Trembling with terror, he passed down two flights of stairs, and found
+himself treading on the cold brick floor of a large room in the basement,
+or cellar, where he had never been before.  The voice still beckoned him
+onward; and, groping after it, his hand touched an upright post, against
+which he leaned for a moment.  He heard it again, apparently only two or
+three yards in front of him "You have murdered a man; the officers are
+close behind you; follow me!"  Putting one foot forward while his hand
+still grasped the post, it fell upon empty air, and he with difficulty
+recovered himself.  Stooping down and feeling with his hands, he found
+himself on the very edge of a large uncovered cistern, or tank, filled
+nearly to the top with water.  The sudden shock of this discovery broke
+the horrible enchantment.  The whisperer was silent.  He believed, at the
+time, that he had been the subject, and well-nigh the victim, of a
+diabolical delusion; and he states that, even now, with the recollection
+of that strange whisper is always associated a thought of the universal
+tempter.
+
+Our worthy ancestors were, in their own view of the matter, the advance
+guard and forlorn hope of Christendom in its contest with the bad angel.
+The New World, into which they had so valiantly pushed the outposts of
+the Church militant, was to them, not God's world, but the Devil's.  They
+stood there on their little patch of sanctified territory like the
+gamekeeper of Der Freischutz in the charmed circle; within were prayer
+and fasting, unmelodious psalmody and solemn hewing of heretics, "before
+the Lord in Gilgal;" without were "dogs and sorcerers, red children of
+perdition, Powah wizards," and "the foul fiend."  In their grand old
+wilderness, broken by fair, broad rivers and dotted with loveliest lakes,
+hanging with festoons of leaf, and vine, and flower, the steep sides of
+mountains whose naked tops rose over the surrounding verdure like altars
+of a giant world,--with its early summer greenness and the many-colored
+wonder of its autumn, all glowing as if the rainbows of a summer shower
+had fallen upon it, under the clear, rich light of a sun to which the
+misty day of their cold island was as moonlight,--they saw no beauty,
+they recognized no holy revelation.  It was to them terrible as the
+forest which Dante traversed on his way to the world of pain.  Every
+advance step they made was upon the enemy's territory.  And one has only
+to read the writings of the two Mathers to perceive that that enemy was
+to them no metaphysical abstraction, no scholastic definition, no figment
+of a poetical fancy, but a living, active reality, alternating between
+the sublimest possibilities of evil and the lowest details of mean
+mischief; now a "tricksy spirit," disturbing the good-wife's platters or
+soiling her newwashed linen, and anon riding the storm-cloud and pointing
+its thunder-bolts; for, as the elder Mather pertinently inquires, "how
+else is it that our meeting-houses are burned by the lightning?"  What
+was it, for instance, but his subtlety which, speaking through the lips
+of Madame Hutchinson, confuted the "judges of Israel" and put to their
+wits' end the godly ministers of the Puritan Zion?  Was not his evil
+finger manifested in the contumacious heresy of Roger Williams?  Who else
+gave the Jesuit missionaries--locusts from the pit as they were--such a
+hold on the affections of those very savages who would not have scrupled
+to hang the scalp of pious Father Wilson himself from their girdles?  To
+the vigilant eye of Puritanism was he not alike discernible in the light
+wantonness of the May-pole revellers, beating time with the cloven foot
+to the vain music of obscene dances, and in the silent, hat-canopied
+gatherings of the Quakers, "the most melancholy of the sects," as Dr.
+Moore calls them?  Perilous and glorious was it, under these
+circumstances, for such men as Mather and Stoughton to gird up their
+stout loins and do battle with the unmeasured, all-surrounding terror.
+Let no man lightly estimate their spiritual knight-errantry.  The heroes
+of old romance, who went about smiting dragons, lopping giants' heads,
+and otherwise pleasantly diverting themselves, scarcely deserve mention
+in comparison with our New England champions, who, trusting not to carnal
+sword and lance, in a contest with principalities and powers, "spirits
+that live throughout, Vital in every part, not as frail man,"--
+encountered their enemies with weapons forged by the stern spiritual
+armorer of Geneva.  The life of Cotton Mather is as full of romance as
+the legends of Ariosto or the tales of Beltenebros and Florisando in
+Amadis de Gaul.  All about him was enchanted ground; devils glared on him
+in his "closet wrestlings;" portents blazed in the heavens above him;
+while he, commissioned and set apart as the watcher, and warder, and
+spiritual champion of "the chosen people," stood ever ready for battle,
+with open eye and quick ear for the detection of the subtle approaches of
+the enemy.  No wonder is it that the spirits of evil combined against
+him; that they beset him as they did of old St. Anthony; that they shut
+up the bowels of the General Court against his long-cherished hope of the
+presidency of Old Harvard; that they even had the audacity to lay hands
+on his anti-diabolical manuscripts, or that "ye divil that was in ye girl
+flewe at and tore" his grand sermon against witches.  How edifying is his
+account of the young bewitched maiden whom he kept in his house for the
+purpose of making experiments which should satisfy all "obstinate
+Sadducees"!  How satisfactory to orthodoxy and confounding to heresy is
+the nice discrimination of "ye divil in ye girl," who was choked in
+attempting to read the Catechism, yet found no trouble with a pestilent
+Quaker pamphlet; who was quiet and good-humored when the worthy Doctor
+was idle, but went into paroxysms of rage when he sat down to indite his
+diatribes against witches and familiar spirits!
+
+     [The Quakers appear to have, at a comparatively early period,
+     emancipated themselves in a great degree from the grosser
+     superstitions of their times.  William Penn, indeed, had a law in
+     his colony against witchcraft; but the first trial of a person
+     suspected of this offence seems to have opened his eyes to its
+     absurdity.  George Fox, judging from one or two passages in his
+     journal, appears to have held the common opinions of the day on the
+     subject; yet when confined in Doomsdale dungeon, on being told that
+     the place was haunted and that the spirits of those who had died
+     there still walked at night in his room, he replied, "that if all
+     the spirits and devils in hell were there, he was over them in the
+     power of God, and feared no such thing."
+
+     The enemies of the Quakers, in order to account for the power and
+     influence of their first preachers, accused them of magic and
+     sorcery.  "The Priest of Wakefield," says George Fox (one trusts he
+     does not allude to our old friend the Vicar), "raised many wicked
+     slanders upon me, as that I carried bottles with me and made people
+     drink, and that made them follow me; that I rode upon a great black
+     horse, and was seen in one county upon my black horse in one hour,
+     and in the same hour in another county fourscore miles off."  In his
+     account of the mob which beset him at Walney Island, he says: "When
+     I came to myself I saw James Lancaster's wife throwing stones at my
+     face, and her husband lying over me to keep off the blows and
+     stones; for the people had persuaded her that I had bewitched her
+     husband."
+
+     Cotton Mather attributes the plague of witchcraft in New England in
+     about an equal degree to the Quakers and Indians.  The first of the
+     sect who visited Boston, Ann Austin and Mary Fisher,--the latter a
+     young girl,--were seized upon by Deputy-Governor Bellingham, in the
+     absence of Governor Endicott, and shamefully stripped naked for the
+     purpose of ascertaining whether they were witches with the Devil's
+     mark on them.  In 1662 Elizabeth Horton and Joan Broksop, two
+     venerable preachers of the sect, were arrested in Boston, charged by
+     Governor Endicott with being witches, and carried two days' journey
+     into the woods, and left to the tender mercies of Indians and
+     wolves.]
+
+All this is pleasant enough now; we can laugh at the Doctor and his
+demons; but little matter of laughter was it to the victims on Salem
+Hill; to the prisoners in the jails; to poor Giles Corey, tortured with
+planks upon his breast, which forced the tongue from his mouth and his
+life from his old, palsied body; to bereaved and quaking families; to a
+whole community, priest-ridden and spectresmitten, gasping in the sick
+dream of a spiritual nightmare and given over to believe a lie.  We may
+laugh, for the grotesque is blended with the horrible; but we must also
+pity and shudder.  The clear-sighted men who confronted that delusion in
+its own age, disenchanting, with strong good sense and sharp ridicule,
+their spell-bound generation,--the German Wierus, the Italian D'Apone,
+the English Scot, and the New England Calef,--deserve high honors as the
+benefactors of their race.  It is true they were branded through life as
+infidels and "damnable Sadducees;" but the truth which they uttered
+lived after them, and wrought out its appointed work, for it had a Divine
+commission and Godspeed.
+
+         "The oracles are dumb;
+          No voice nor hideous hum
+Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving;
+          Apollo from his shrine
+          Can now no more divine,
+With hollow shriek the steep of Delphns leaving."
+
+Dimmer and dimmer, as the generations pass away, this tremendous terror,
+this all-pervading espionage of evil, this active incarnation of
+motiveless malignity, presents itself to the imagination.  The once
+imposing and solemn rite of exorcism has become obsolete in the Church.
+Men are no longer, in any quarter of the world, racked or pressed under
+planks to extort a confession of diabolical alliance.  The heretic now
+laughs to scorn the solemn farce of the Church which, in the name of the
+All-Merciful, formally delivers him over to Satan.  And for the sake of
+abused and long-cheated humanity let us rejoice that it is so, when we
+consider how for long, weary centuries the millions of professed
+Christendom stooped, awestricken, under the yoke of spiritual and
+temporal despotism, grinding on from generation to generation in a
+despair which had passed complaining, because superstition, in alliance
+with tyranny, had filled their upward pathway to freedom with shapes of
+terror,--the spectres of God's wrath to the uttermost, the fiend, and
+that torment the smoke of which rises forever.  Through fear of a Satan
+of the future,--a sort of ban-dog of priestcraft, held in its leash and
+ready to be let loose upon the disputers of its authority,--our toiling
+brothers of past ages have permitted their human taskmasters to convert
+God's beautiful world, so adorned and fitted for the peace and happiness
+of all, into a great prison-house of suffering, filled with the actual
+terrors which the imagination of the old poets gave to the realm of
+Rhadamanthus.  And hence, while I would not weaken in the slightest
+degree the influence of that doctrine of future retribution,--the
+accountability of the spirit for the deeds done in the body,--the truth
+of which reason, revelation, and conscience unite in attesting as the
+necessary result of the preservation in another state of existence of the
+soul's individuality and identity, I must, nevertheless, rejoice that the
+many are no longer willing to permit the few, for their especial benefit,
+to convert our common Father's heritage into a present hell, where, in
+return for undeserved suffering and toil uncompensated, they can have
+gracious and comfortable assurance of release from a future one.  Better
+is the fear of the Lord than the fear of the Devil; holier and more
+acceptable the obedience of love and reverence than the submission of
+slavish terror.  The heart which has felt the "beauty of holiness," which
+has been in some measure attuned to the divine harmony which now, as of
+old in the angel-hymn of the Advent, breathes of "glory to God, peace on
+earth, and good-will to men," in the serene atmosphere of that "perfect
+love which casteth out fear," smiles at the terrors which throng the sick
+dreams of the sensual, which draw aside the nightcurtains of guilt, and
+startle with whispers of revenge the oppressor of the poor.
+
+There is a beautiful moral in one of Fouque's miniature romances,--_Die
+Kohlerfamilie_.  The fierce spectre, which rose giant-like, in its
+bloodred mantle, before the selfish and mercenary merchant, ever
+increasing in size and, terror with the growth of evil and impure thought
+in the mind of the latter, subdued by prayer, and penitence, and patient
+watchfulness over the heart's purity, became a loving and gentle
+visitation of soft light and meekest melody; "a beautiful radiance, at
+times hovering and flowing on before the traveller, illuminating the
+bushes and foliage of the mountain-forest; a lustre strange and lovely,
+such as the soul may conceive, but no words express.  He felt its power
+in the depths of his being,--felt it like the mystic breathing of the
+Spirit of God."
+
+The excellent Baxter and other pious men of his day deprecated in all
+sincerity and earnestness the growing disbelief in witchcraft and
+diabolical agency, fearing that mankind, losing faith in a visible Satan
+and in the supernatural powers of certain paralytic old women, would
+diverge into universal skepticism.  It is one of the saddest of sights to
+see these good men standing sentry at the horn gate of dreams; attempting
+against the most discouraging odds to defend their poor fallacies from
+profane and irreverent investigation; painfully pleading doubtful
+Scripture and still more doubtful tradition in behalf of detected and
+convicted superstitions tossed on the sharp horns of ridicule, stretched
+on the rack of philosophy, or perishing under the exhausted receiver of
+science.  A clearer knowledge of the aspirations, capacities, and
+necessities of the human soul, and of the revelations which the infinite
+Spirit makes to it, not only through the senses by the phenomena of
+outward nature, but by that inward and direct communion which, under
+different names, has been recognized by the devout and thoughtful of
+every religious sect and school of philosophy, would have saved them much
+anxious labor and a good deal of reproach withal in their hopeless
+championship of error.  The witches of Baxter and "the black man" of
+Mather have vanished; belief in them is no longer possible on the part of
+sane men.  But this mysterious universe, through which, half veiled in
+its own shadow, our dim little planet is wheeling, with its star worlds
+and thought-wearying spaces, remains.  Nature's mighty miracle is still
+over and around us; and hence awe, wonder, and reverence remain to be the
+inheritance of humanity; still are there beautiful repentances and holy
+deathbeds; and still over the soul's darkness and confusion rises,
+starlike, the great idea of duty.  By higher and better influences than
+the poor spectres of superstition, man must henceforth be taught to
+reverence the Invisible, and, in the consciousness of his own weakness,
+and sin, and sorrow, to lean with childlike trust on the wisdom and mercy
+of an overruling Providence,--walking by faith through the shadow and
+mystery, and cheered by the remembrance that, whatever may be his
+apparent allotment,--
+
+    "God's greatness flows around our incompleteness;
+     Round our restlessness His rest."
+
+It is a sad spectacle to find the glad tidings of the Christian faith and
+its "reasonable service" of devotion transformed by fanaticism and
+credulity into superstitious terror and wild extravagance; but, if
+possible, there is one still sadder.  It is that of men in our own time
+regarding with satisfaction such evidences of human weakness, and
+professing to find in them new proofs of their miserable theory of a
+godless universe, and new occasion for sneering at sincere devotion as
+cant, and humble reverence as fanaticism.  Alas!  in comparison with
+such, the religious enthusiast, who in the midst of his delusion still
+feels that he is indeed a living soul and an heir of immortality, to whom
+God speaks from the immensities of His universe, is a sane man.  Better
+is it, in a life like ours, to be even a howling dervis or a dancing
+Shaker, confronting imaginary demons with Thalaba's talisman of faith,
+than to lose the consciousness of our own spiritual nature, and look upon
+ourselves as mere brute masses of animal organization,--barnacles on a
+dead universe; looking into the dull grave with no hope beyond it; earth
+gazing into earth, and saying to corruption, "Thou art my father," and to
+the worm, "Thou art my sister."
+
+
+
+
+
+                         HAMLET AMONG THE GRAVES.
+
+                                 [1844.]
+
+AN amiable enthusiast, immortal in his beautiful little romance of Paul
+and Virginia, has given us in his Miscellanies a chapter on the Pleasures
+of Tombs,--a title singular enough, yet not inappropriate; for the meek-
+spirited and sentimental author has given, in his own flowing and
+eloquent language, its vindication.  "There is," says he, "a voluptuous
+melancholy arising from the contemplation of tombs; the result, like
+every other attractive sensation, of the harmony of two opposite
+principles,--from the sentiment of our fleeting life and that of our
+immortality, which unite in view of the last habitation of mankind.  A
+tomb is a monument erected on the confines of two worlds.  It first
+presents to us the end of the vain disquietudes of life and the image of
+everlasting repose; it afterwards awakens in us the confused sentiment of
+a blessed immortality, the probabilities of which grow stronger and
+stronger in proportion as the person whose memory is recalled was a
+virtuous character.
+
+"It is from this intellectual instinct, therefore, in favor of virtue,
+that the tombs of great men inspire us with a veneration so affecting.
+From the same sentiment, too, it is that those which contain objects that
+have been lovely excite so much pleasing regret; for the attractions of
+love arise entirely out of the appearances of virtue.  Hence it is that
+we are moved at the sight of the small hillock which covers the ashes of
+an infant, from the recollection of its innocence; hence it is that we
+are melted into tenderness on contemplating the tomb in which is laid to
+repose a young female, the delight and the hope of her family by reason
+of her virtues.  In order to give interest to such monuments, there is no
+need of bronzes, marbles, and gildings.  The more simple they are, the
+more energy they communicate to the sentiment of melancholy.  They
+produce a more powerful effect when poor rather than rich, antique rather
+than modern, with details of misfortune rather than titles of honor, with
+the attributes of virtue rather than with those of power.  It is in the
+country principally that their impression makes itself felt in a very
+lively manner.  A simple, unornamented grave there causes more tears to
+flow than the gaudy splendor of a cathedral interment.  There it is that
+grief assumes sublimity; it ascends with the aged yews in the churchyard;
+it extends with the surrounding hills and plains; it allies itself with
+all the effects of Nature,--with the dawning of the morning, with the
+murmuring of wind, with the setting of the sun, and with the darkness of
+the night."
+
+Not long since I took occasion to visit the cemetery near this city.  It
+is a beautiful location for a "city of the dead,"--a tract of some forty
+or fifty acres on the eastern bank of the Concord, gently undulating, and
+covered with a heavy growth of forest-trees, among which the white oak is
+conspicuous.  The ground beneath has been cleared of undergrowth, and is
+marked here and there with monuments and railings enclosing "family
+lots."  It is a quiet, peaceful spot; the city, with its crowded mills,
+its busy streets and teeming life, is hidden from view; not even a
+solitary farm-house attracts the eye.  All is still and solemn, as befits
+the place where man and nature lie down together; where leaves of the
+great lifetree, shaken down by death, mingle and moulder with the frosted
+foliage of the autumnal forest.
+
+Yet the contrast of busy life is not wanting.  The Lowell and Boston
+Railroad crosses the river within view of the cemetery; and, standing
+there in the silence and shadow, one can see the long trains rushing
+along their iron pathway, thronged with living, breathing humanity,--the
+young, the beautiful, the gay,--busy, wealth-seeking manhood of middle
+years, the child at its mother's knee, the old man with whitened hairs,
+hurrying on, on,--car after car,--like the generations of man sweeping
+over the track of time to their last 'still resting-place.
+
+It is not the aged and the sad of heart who make this a place of favorite
+resort.  The young, the buoyant, the light-hearted, come and linger among
+these flower-sown graves, watching the sunshine falling in broken light
+upon these cold, white marbles, and listening to the song of birds in
+these leafy recesses.  Beautiful and sweet to the young heart is the
+gentle shadow of melancholy which here falls upon it, soothing, yet sad,
+--a sentiment midway between joy and sorrow.  How true is it, that, in the
+language of Wordsworth,--
+
+         "In youth we love the darkling lawn,
+          Brushed by the owlet's wing;
+          Then evening is preferred to dawn,
+          And autumn to the spring.
+          Sad fancies do we then affect,
+          In luxury of disrespect
+          To our own prodigal excess
+          Of too familiar happiness."
+
+The Chinese, from the remotest antiquity, have adorned and decorated
+their grave-grounds with shrubs and sweet flowers, as places of popular
+resort.  The Turks have their graveyards planted with trees, through
+which the sun looks in upon the turban stones of the faithful, and
+beneath which the relatives of the dead sit in cheerful converse through
+the long days of summer, in all the luxurious quiet and happy
+indifference of the indolent East.  Most of the visitors whom I met at
+the Lowell cemetery wore cheerful faces; some sauntered laughingly along,
+apparently unaffected by the associations of the place; too full,
+perhaps, of life, and energy, and high hope to apply to themselves the
+stern and solemn lesson which is taught even by these flower-garlanded
+mounds.  But, for myself, I confess that I am always awed by the presence
+of the dead.  I cannot jest above the gravestone.  My spirit is silenced
+and rebuked before the tremendous mystery of which the grave reminds me,
+and involuntarily pays:
+
+         "The deep reverence taught of old,
+          The homage of man's heart to death."
+
+Even Nature's cheerful air, and sun, and birdvoices only serve to remind
+me that there are those beneath who have looked on the same green leaves
+and sunshine, felt the same soft breeze upon their cheeks, and listened
+to the same wild music of the woods for the last time.  Then, too, comes
+the saddening reflection, to which so many have given expression, that
+these trees will put forth their leaves, the slant sunshine still fall
+upon green meadows and banks of flowers, and the song of the birds and
+the ripple of waters still be heard after our eyes and ears have closed
+forever.  It is hard for us to realize this.  We are so accustomed to
+look upon these things as a part of our life environment that it seems
+strange that they should survive us.  Tennyson, in his exquisite
+metaphysical poem of the Two Voices, has given utterance to this
+sentiment:--
+
+         "Alas!  though I should die, I know
+          That all about the thorn will blow
+          In tufts of rosy-tinted snow.
+
+         "Not less the bee will range her cells,
+          The furzy prickle fire the dells,
+          The foxglove cluster dappled bells."
+
+"The pleasures of the tombs!" Undoubtedly, in the language of the
+Idumean, seer, there are many who "rejoice exceedingly and are glad when
+they can find the grave;" who long for it "as the servant earnestly
+desireth the shadow."  Rest, rest to the sick heart and the weary brain,
+to the long afflicted and the hopeless,--rest on the calm bosom of our
+common mother.  Welcome to the tired ear, stunned and confused with
+life's jarring discords, the everlasting silence; grateful to the weary
+eyes which "have seen evil, and not good," the everlasting shadow.
+
+Yet over all hangs the curtain of a deep mystery,--a curtain lifted only
+on one side by the hands of those who are passing under its solemn
+shadow.  No voice speaks to us from beyond it, telling of the unknown
+state; no hand from within puts aside the dark drapery to reveal the
+mysteries towards which we are all moving.  "Man giveth up the ghost; and
+where is he?"
+
+Thanks to our Heavenly Father, He has not left us altogether without an
+answer to this momentous question.  Over the blackness of darkness a
+light is shining.  The valley of the shadow of death is no longer "a land
+of darkness and where the light is as darkness."  The presence of a
+serene and holy life pervades it.  Above its pale tombs and crowded
+burial-places, above the wail of despairing humanity, the voice of Him
+who awakened life and beauty beneath the grave-clothes of the tomb at
+Bethany is heard proclaiming, "I am the Resurrection and the Life."  We
+know not, it is true, the conditions of our future life; we know not what
+it is to pass fromm this state of being to another; but before us in that
+dark passage has gone the Man of Nazareth, and the light of His footsteps
+lingers in the path.  Where He, our Brother in His humanity, our Redeemer
+in His divine nature, has gone, let us not fear to follow.  He who
+ordereth all aright will uphold with His own great arm the frail spirit
+when its incarnation is ended; and it may be, that, in language which I
+have elsewhere used,
+
+          --when Time's veil shall fall asunder,
+          The soul may know
+          No fearful change nor sudden wonder,
+          Nor sink the weight of mystery under,
+          But with the upward rise and with the vastness grow.
+
+          And all we shrink from now may seem
+          No new revealing;
+          Familiar as our childhood's stream,
+          Or pleasant memory of a dream,
+          The loved and cherished past upon the new life stealing.
+
+          Serene and mild the untried light
+          May have its dawning;
+          As meet in summer's northern night
+          The evening gray and dawning white,
+          The sunset hues of Time blend with the soul's new morning.
+
+
+
+
+                                SWEDENBORG
+
+                                 [1844.]
+
+THERE are times when, looking only on the surface of things, one is
+almost ready to regard Lowell as a sort of sacred city of Mammon,--the
+Benares of gain: its huge mills, temples; its crowded dwellings, lodging-
+places of disciples and "proselytes within the gate;" its warehouses,
+stalls for the sale of relics.  A very mean idol-worship, too, unrelieved
+by awe and reverence,--a selfish, earthward-looking devotion to the
+"least-erected spirit that fell from paradise."  I grow weary of seeing
+man and mechanism reduced to a common level, moved by the same impulse,
+answering to the same bell-call.  A nightmare of materialism broods over
+all.  I long at times to hear a voice crying through the streets like
+that of one of the old prophets proclaiming the great first truth,--that
+the Lord alone is God.
+
+Yet is there not another side to the picture?  High over sounding
+workshops spires glisten in the sun,--silent fingers pointing heavenward.
+The workshops themselves are instinct with other and subtler processes
+than cotton-spinning or carpet-weaving.  Each human being who watches
+beside jack or power loom feels more or less intensely that it is a
+solemn thing to live.  Here are sin and sorrow, yearnings for lost peace,
+outgushing gratitude of forgiven spirits, hopes and fears, which stretch
+beyond the horizon of time into eternity.  Death is here.  The graveyard
+utters its warning.  Over all bends the eternal heaven in its silence and
+mystery.  Nature, even here, is mightier than Art, and God is above all.
+Underneath the din of labor and the sounds of traffic, a voice, felt
+rather than beard, reaches the heart, prompting the same fearful
+questions which stirred the soul of the world's oldest poet,--"If a man
+die, shall he live again?"  "Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?"
+Out of the depths of burdened and weary hearts comes up the agonizing
+inquiry, "What shall I do to be saved?"  "Who shall deliver me from the
+body of this death?"
+
+As a matter of course, in a city like this, composed of all classes of
+our many-sided population, a great variety of religious sects have their
+representatives in Lowell.  The young city is dotted over with "steeple
+houses," most of them of the Yankee order of architecture.  The
+Episcopalians have a house of worship on Merrimac Street,--a pile of dark
+stone, with low Gothic doors and arched windows.  A plat of grass lies
+between it and the dusty street; and near it stands the dwelling-house
+intended for the minister, built of the same material as the church and
+surrounded by trees and shrubbery.  The attention of the stranger is also
+attracted by another consecrated building on the hill slope of
+Belvidere,--one of Irving's a "shingle palaces," painted in imitation of
+stone,--a great wooden sham, "whelked and horned" with pine spires and
+turrets, a sort of whittled representation of the many-beaded beast of
+the Apocalypse.
+
+In addition to the established sects which have reared their visible
+altars in the City of Spindles, there are many who have not yet marked
+the boundaries or set up the pillars and stretched out the curtains of
+their sectarian tabernacles; who, in halls and "upper chambers" and in
+the solitude of their own homes, keep alive the spirit of devotion, and,
+wrapping closely around them the mantles of their order, maintain the
+integrity of its peculiarities in the midst of an unbelieving generation.
+
+Not long since, in company with a friend who is a regular attendant, I
+visited the little meeting of the disciples of Emanuel Swedenborg.
+Passing over Chapel Hill and leaving the city behind us, we reached the
+stream which winds through the beautiful woodlands at the Powder Mills
+and mingles its waters with the Concord.  The hall in which the followers
+of the Gothland seer meet is small and plain, with unpainted seats, like
+those of "the people called Quakers," and looks out upon the still woods
+and that "willowy stream which turns a mill."  An organ of small size,
+yet, as it seemed to me, vastly out of proportion with the room, filled
+the place usually occupied by the pulpit, which was here only a plain
+desk, placed modestly by the side of it.  The congregation have no
+regular preacher, but the exercises of reading the Scriptures, prayers,
+and selections from the Book of Worship were conducted by one of the lay
+members.  A manuscript sermon, by a clergyman of the order in Boston, was
+read, and apparently listened to with much interest.  It was well written
+and deeply imbued with the doctrines of the church.  I was impressed by
+the gravity and serious earnestness of the little audience.  There were
+here no circumstances calculated to excite enthusiasm, nothing of the
+pomp of religious rites and ceremonies; only a settled conviction of the
+truth of the doctrines of their faith could have thus brought them
+together.  I could scarcely make the fact a reality, as I sat among them,
+that here, in the midst of our bare and hard utilities, in the very
+centre and heart of our mechanical civilization, were devoted and
+undoubting believers in the mysterious and wonderful revelations of the
+Swedish prophet,--revelations which look through all external and outward
+manifestations to inward realities; which regard all objects in the world
+of sense only as the types and symbols of the world of spirit; literally
+unmasking the universe and laying bare the profoundest mysteries of life.
+
+The character and writings of Emanuel Swedenborg constitute one of the
+puzzles and marvels of metaphysics and psychology.  A man remarkable for
+his practical activities, an ardent scholar of the exact sciences, versed
+in all the arcana of physics, a skilful and inventive mechanician, he has
+evolved from the hard and gross materialism of his studies a system of
+transcendent spiritualism.  From his aggregation of cold and apparently
+lifeless practical facts beautiful and wonderful abstractions start forth
+like blossoms on the rod of the Levite.  A politician and a courtier, a
+man of the world, a mathematician engaged in the soberest details of the
+science, he has given to the world, in the simplest and most natural
+language, a series of speculations upon the great mystery of being:
+detailed, matter-of-fact narratives of revelations from the spiritual
+world, which at once appall us by their boldness, and excite our wonder
+at their extraordinary method, logical accuracy, and perfect consistency.
+These remarkable speculations--the workings of a mind in which a powerful
+imagination allied itself with superior reasoning faculties, the
+marvellous current of whose thought ran only in the diked and guarded
+channels of mathematical demonstration--he uniformly speaks of as
+"facts."  His perceptions of abstractions were so intense that they seem
+to have reached that point where thought became sensible to sight as well
+as feeling.  What he thought, that he saw.
+
+He relates his visions of the spiritual world as he would the incidents
+of a walk round his own city of Stockholm.  One can almost see him in his
+"brown coat and velvet breeches," lifting his "cocked hat" to an angel,
+or keeping an unsavory spirit at arm's length with that "gold-headed
+cane" which his London host describes as his inseparable companion in
+walking.  His graphic descriptions have always an air of naturalness and
+probability; yet there is a minuteness of detail at times almost
+bordering on the ludicrous.  In his Memorable Relations he manifests
+nothing of the imagination of Milton, overlooking the closed gates of
+paradise, or following the "pained fiend" in his flight through chaos;
+nothing of Dante's terrible imagery appalls us; we are led on from heaven
+to heaven very much as Defoe leads us after his shipwrecked Crusoe.  We
+can scarcely credit the fact that we are not traversing our lower planet;
+and the angels seem vastly like our common acquaintances.  We seem to
+recognize the "John Smiths," and "Mr. Browns," and "the old familiar
+faces" of our mundane habitation.  The evil principle in Swedenborg's
+picture is, not the colossal and massive horror of the Inferno, nor that
+stern wrestler with fate who darkens the canvas of Paradise Lost, but an
+aggregation of poor, confused spirits, seeking rest and finding none save
+in the unsavory atmosphere of the "falses."  These small fry of devils
+remind us only of certain unfortunate fellows whom we have known, who
+seem incapable of living in good and wholesome society, and who are
+manifestly given over to believe a lie.  Thus it is that the very
+"heavens" and "hells" of the Swedish mystic seem to be "of the earth,
+earthy."  He brings the spiritual world into close analogy with the
+material one.
+
+In this hurried paper I have neither space nor leisure to attempt an
+analysis of the great doctrines which underlie the "revelations" of
+Swedenborg.  His remarkably suggestive books are becoming familiar to the
+reading and reflecting portion of the community.  They are not unworthy
+of study; but, in the language of another, I would say, "Emulate
+Swedenborg in his exemplary life, his learning, his virtues, his
+independent thought, his desire for wisdom, his love of the good and
+true; aim to be his equal, his superior, in these things; but call no man
+your master."
+
+
+
+
+
+                             THE BETTER LAND.
+
+                                 [1844.]
+
+"THE shapings of our heavens are the modifications of our constitution,"
+said Charles Lamb, in his reply to Southey's attack upon him in the
+Quarterly Review.
+
+He who is infinite in love as well as wisdom has revealed to us the fact
+of a future life, and the fearfully important relation in which the
+present stands to it.  The actual nature and conditions of that life He
+has hidden from us,--no chart of the ocean of eternity is given us,--no
+celestial guidebook or geography defines, localizes, and prepares us for
+the wonders of the spiritual world.  Hence imagination has a wide field
+for its speculations, which, so long as they do not positively contradict
+the revelation of the Scriptures, cannot be disproved.
+
+We naturally enough transfer to our idea of heaven whatever we love and
+reverence on earth.  Thither the Catholic carries in his fancy the
+imposing rites and time-honored solemnities of his worship.  There the
+Methodist sees his love-feasts and camp-meetings in the groves and by the
+still waters and green pastures of the blessed abodes.  The Quaker, in
+the stillness of his self-communing, remembers that there was "silence in
+heaven."
+
+The Churchman, listening to the solemn chant of weal music or the deep
+tones of the organ, thinks of the song of the elders and the golden harps
+of the New Jerusalem.
+
+The heaven of the northern nations of Europe was a gross and sensual
+reflection of the earthly life of a barbarous and brutal people.
+
+The Indians of North America had a vague notion of a sunset land, a
+beautiful paradise far in the west, mountains and forests filled with
+deer and buffalo, lakes and streams swarming with fishes,--the happy
+hunting-ground of souls.  In a late letter from a devoted missionary
+among the Western Indians (Paul Blohm, a converted Jew) we have noticed a
+beautiful illustration of this belief.  Near the Omaha mission-house, on
+a high luff, was a solitary Indian grave.  "One evening,"
+says the missionary, "having come home with some cattle which I had been
+seeking, I heard some one wailing; and, looking in the direction from
+whence I proceeded, I found it to be from the grave near our house.  In a
+moment after a mourner rose up from a kneeling or lying posture, and,
+turning to the setting sun, stretched forth his arms in prayer and
+supplication with an intensity and earnestness as though he would detain
+the splendid luminary from running his course.  With his body leaning
+forward and his arms stretched towards the sun, he presented a most
+striking figure of sorrow and petition.  It was solemnly awful.  He
+seemed to me to be one of the ancients come forth to teach me how to
+pray."
+
+A venerable and worthy New England clergyman, on his death-bed, just
+before the close of his life, declared that he was only conscious of an
+awfully solemn and intense curiosity to know the great secret of death
+and eternity.
+
+The excellent Dr. Nelson, of Missouri, was one who, while on earth,
+seemed to live another and higher life in the contemplation of infinite
+purity and happiness.  A friend once related an incident concerning him
+which made a deep impression upon my mind.  They had been travelling
+through a summer's forenoon in the prairie, and had lain down to rest
+beneath a solitary tree.  The Doctor lay for a long time, silently
+looking upwards through the openings of the boughs into the still
+heavens, when he repeated the following lines, in a low tone, as if
+communing with himself in view of the wonders he described:--
+
+    "O the joys that are there mortal eye bath not seen!
+     O the songs they sing there, with hosannas between!
+     O the thrice-blessed song of the Lamb and of Moses!
+     O brightness on brightness!  the pearl gate uncloses!
+     O white wings of angels!  O fields white with roses!
+     O white tents of peace, where the rapt soul reposes
+     O the waters so still, and the pastures so green!"
+
+The brief hints afforded us by the sacred writings concerning the better
+land are inspiring and beautiful.  Eye hath not seen, nor the ear heard,
+neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive of the good in
+store for the righteous.  Heaven is described as a quiet habitation,--a
+rest remaining for the people of God.  Tears shall be wiped away from all
+eyes; there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither
+shall there be any more pain.  To how many death-beds have these words
+spoken peace!  How many failing hearts have gathered strength from them
+to pass through the dark valley of shadows!
+
+Yet we should not forget that "the kingdom of heaven is within;" that it
+is the state and affections of the soul, the answer of a good conscience,
+the sense of harmony with God, a condition of time as well as of
+eternity.  What is really momentous and all-important with us is the
+present, by which the future is shaped and colored.  A mere change of
+locality cannot alter the actual and intrinsic qualities of the soul.
+Guilt and remorse would make the golden streets of Paradise intolerable
+as the burning marl of the infernal abodes; while purity and innocence
+would transform hell itself into heaven.
+
+
+
+
+
+DORA GREEN WELL.
+
+First published as an introduction to an American edition of that
+author's _The Patience of Hope_.
+
+THERE are men who, irrespective of the names by which they are called in
+the Babel confusion of sects, are endeared to the common heart of
+Christendom.  Our doors open of their own accord to receive them.  For in
+them we feel that in some faint degree, and with many limitations, the
+Divine is again manifested: something of the Infinite Love shines out of
+them; their very garments have healing and fragrance borrowed from the
+bloom of Paradise.  So of books.  There are volumes which perhaps contain
+many things, in the matter of doctrine and illustration, to which our
+reason does not assent, but which nevertheless seem permeated with a
+certain sweetness and savor of life.  They have the Divine seal and
+imprimatur; they are fragrant with heart's-ease and asphodel; tonic with
+the leaves which are for the healing of the nations.  The meditations of
+the devout monk of Kempen are the common heritage of Catholic and
+Protestant; our hearts burn within us as we walk with Augustine under
+Numidian fig-trees in the gardens of Verecundus; Feuelon from his
+bishop's palace and John Woolman from his tailor's shop speak to us in
+the same language.  The unknown author of that book which Luther loved
+next to his Bible, the Theologia Germanica, is just as truly at home in
+this present age, and in the ultra Protestantism of New England, as in
+the heart of Catholic Europe, and in the fourteenth century.  For such
+books know no limitations of time or place; they have the perpetual
+freshness and fitness of truth; they speak out of profound experience
+heart answers to heart as we read them; the spirit that is in man, and
+the inspiration that giveth understanding, bear witness to them.  The
+bent and stress of their testimony are the same, whether written in this
+or a past century, by Catholic or Quaker: self-renunciation,--
+reconcilement to the Divine will through simple faith in the Divine
+goodness, and the love of it which must needs follow its recognition, the
+life of Christ made our own by self-denial and sacrifice, and the
+fellowship of His suffering for the good of others, the indwelling
+Spirit, leading into all truth, the Divine Word nigh us, even in our
+hearts.  They have little to do with creeds, or schemes of doctrine, or
+the partial and inadequate plans of salvation invented by human
+speculation and ascribed to Him who, it is sufficient to know, is able to
+save unto the uttermost all who trust in Him.  They insist upon simple
+faith and holiness of life, rather than rituals or modes of worship; they
+leave the merely formal, ceremonial, and temporal part of religion to
+take care of itself, and earnestly seek for the substantial, the
+necessary, and the permanent.
+
+With these legacies of devout souls, it seems to me, the little volume
+herewith presented is not wholly unworthy of a place.  It assumes the
+life and power of the gospel as a matter of actual experience; it bears
+unmistakable evidence of a realization, on the part of its author, of the
+truth, that Christianity is not simply historical and traditional, but
+present and permanent, with its roots in the infinite past and its
+branches in the infinite future, the eternal spring and growth of Divine
+love; not the dying echo of words uttered centuries ago, never to be
+repeated, but God's good tidings spoken afresh in every soul,--the
+perennial fountain and unstinted outflow of wisdom and goodness, forever
+old and forever new.  It is a lofty plea for patience, trust, hope, and
+holy confidence, under the shadow, as well as in the light, of Christian
+experience, whether the cloud seems to rest on the tabernacle, or moves
+guidingly forward.  It is perhaps too exclusively addressed to those who
+minister in the inner sanctuary, to be entirely intelligible to the
+vaster number who wait in the outer courts; it overlooks, perhaps, too
+much the solidarity and oneness of humanity;' but all who read it will
+feel its earnestness, and confess to the singular beauty of its style,
+the strong, steady march of its argument, and the wide and varied
+learning which illustrates it.
+
+     ["The good are not so good as I once thought, nor the bad so evil,
+     and in all there is more for grace to make advantage of, and more to
+     testify for God and holiness, than I once believed."--Baxter.]
+
+To use the language of one of its reviewers in the Scottish press:--
+
+"Beauty there is in the book; exquisite glimpses into the loveliness of
+nature here and there shine out from its lines,--a charm wanting which
+meditative writing always seems to have a defect; beautiful gleams, too,
+there are of the choicest things of art, and frequent allusions by the
+way to legend or picture of the religious past; so that, while you read,
+you wander by a clear brook of thought, coining far from the beautiful
+hills, and winding away from beneath the sunshine of gladness and beauty
+into the dense, mysterious forest of human existence, that loves to sing,
+amid the shadow of human darkness and anguish, its music of heavenborn
+consolation; bringing, too, its pure waters of cleansing and healing, yet
+evermore making its praise of holy affection and gladness; while it is
+still haunted by the spirits of prophet, saint, and poet, repeating
+snatches of their strains, and is led on, as by a spirit from above, to
+join the great river of God's truth.  .  .  .
+
+"This is a book for Christian men, for the quiet hour of holy solitude,
+when the heart longs and waits for access to the presence of the Master.
+The weary heart that thirsts amidst its conflicts and its toils for
+refreshing water will drink eagerly of these sweet and refreshing words.
+To thoughtful men and women, especially such as have learnt any of the
+patience of hope in the experiences of sorrow and trial, we commend this
+little volume most heartily and earnestly."
+
+
+_The Patience of Hope_ fell into my hands soon after its publication in
+Edinburgh, some two years ago.  I was at once impressed by its
+extraordinary richness of language and imagery,--its deep and solemn tone
+of meditation in rare combination with an eminently practical tendency,--
+philosophy warm and glowing with love.  It will, perhaps, be less the
+fault of the writer than of her readers, if they are not always able to
+eliminate from her highly poetical and imaginative language the subtle
+metaphysical verity or phase of religious experience which she seeks to
+express, or that they are compelled to pass over, without appropriation,
+many things which are nevertheless profoundly suggestive as vague
+possibilities of the highest life.  All may not be able to find in some
+of her Scriptural citations the exact weight and significance so apparent
+to her own mind.  She startles us, at times, by her novel applications of
+familiar texts, by meanings reflected upon them from her own spiritual
+intuitions, making the barren Baca of the letter a well.  If the
+rendering be questionable, the beauty and quaint felicity of illustration
+and comparison are unmistakable; and we call to mind Augustine's saying,
+that two or more widely varying interpretations of Scripture may be alike
+true in themselves considered.  "When one saith, Moses meant as I do,'
+and another saith, 'Nay, but as I do,' I ask, more reverently, 'Why not
+rather as both, if both be true?"
+
+Some minds, for instance, will hesitate to assent to the use of certain
+Scriptural passages as evidence that He who is the Light of men, the Way
+and the Truth, in the mystery of His economy, designedly "delays,
+withdraws, and even hides Himself from those who love and follow Him."
+They will prefer to impute spiritual dearth and darkness to human
+weakness, to the selfishness which seeks a sign for itself, to evil
+imaginations indulged, to the taint and burden of some secret sin, or to
+some disease and exaggeration of the conscience, growing out of bodily
+infirmity, rather than to any purpose on the part of our Heavenly Father
+to perplex and mislead His children.  The sun does not shine the less
+because one side of our planet is in darkness.  To borrow the words of
+Augustine "Thou, Lord, forsakest nothing thou hast made.  Thou alone art
+near to those even who remove far from thee.  Let them turn and seek
+thee, for not as they have forsaken their Creator hast thou forsaken thy
+creation."  It is only by holding fast the thought of Infinite Goodness,
+and interpreting doubtful Scripture and inward spiritual experience by
+the light of that central idea, that we can altogether escape the
+dreadful conclusion of Pascal, that revelation has been given us in
+dubious cipher, contradictory and mystical, in order that some, through
+miraculous aid, may understand it to their salvation, and others be
+mystified by it to their eternal loss.
+
+I might mention other points of probable divergence between reader and
+writer, and indicate more particularly my own doubtful parse and
+hesitancy over some of these pages.  But it is impossible for me to make
+one to whom I am so deeply indebted an offender for a word or a
+Scriptural rendering.  On the grave and awful themes which she discusses,
+I have little to say in the way of controversy.  I would listen, rather
+than criticise.  The utterances of pious souls, in all ages, are to me
+often like fountains in a thirsty land, strengthening and refreshing, yet
+not without an after-taste of human frailty and inadequateness, a slight
+bitterness of disappointment and unsatisfied quest.  Who has not felt at
+times that the letter killeth, that prophecies fail, and tongues cease to
+edify, and been ready to say, with the author of the Imitation of Christ:
+"Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.  Let not Moses nor the prophets
+speak to me, but speak thou rather, who art the Inspirer and Enlightener
+of all.  I am weary with reading and hearing many things; let all
+teachers hold their peace; let all creatures keep silence: speak thou
+alone to me."
+
+The writer of The Patience of Hope had, previous to its publication,
+announced herself to a fit, if small, audience of earnest and thoughtful
+Christians, in a little volume entitled, A Present Heaven.  She has
+recently published a collection of poems, of which so competent a judge
+as Dr. Brown, the author of _Horae Subsecivae_ and _Rab and his Friends_,
+thus speaks, in the _North British Review_:--
+
+"Such of our readers--a fast increasing number--as have read and enjoyed
+_The Patience of Hope_, listening to the gifted nature which, through
+such deep and subtile thought, and through affection and godliness still
+deeper and more quick, has charmed and soothed them, will not be
+surprised to learn that she is not only poetical, but, what is more, a
+poet, and one as true as George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, or our own
+Cowper; for, with all our admiration of the searching, fearless
+speculation, the wonderful power of speaking clearly upon dark and all
+but unspeakable subjects, the rich outcome of 'thoughts that wander
+through eternity,' which increases every time we take up that wonderful
+little book, we confess we were surprised at the kind and the amount of
+true poetic _vis_ in these poems, from the same fine and strong hand.
+There is a personality and immediateness, a sort of sacredness and
+privacy, as if they were overheard rather than read, which gives to these
+remarkable productions a charm and a flavor all their own.  With no
+effort, no consciousness of any end but that of uttering the inmost
+thoughts and desires of the heart, they flow out as clear, as living, as
+gladdening as the wayside well, coming from out the darkness of the
+central depths, filtered into purity by time and travel.  The waters are
+copious, sometimes to overflowing; but they are always limpid and
+unforced, singing their own quiet tune, not saddening, though sometimes
+sad, and their darkness not that of obscurity, but of depth, like that of
+the deep sea.
+
+"This is not a book to criticise or speak about, and we give no extracts
+from the longer, and in this case, we think, the better poems.  In
+reading this Cardiphonia set to music, we have been often reminded, not
+only of Herbert and Vaughan, but of Keble,--a likeness of the spirit, not
+of the letter; for if there is any one poet who has given a bent to her
+mind, it is Wordsworth,--the greatest of all our century's poets, both in
+himself and in his power of making poets."
+
+In the belief that whoever peruses the following pages will be
+sufficiently interested in their author to be induced to turn back and
+read over again, with renewed pleasure, extracts from her metrical
+writings, I copy from the volume so warmly commended a few brief pieces
+and extracts from the longer poems.
+
+Here are three sonnets, each a sermon in itself:--
+
+
+                                ASCENDING.
+
+They who from mountain-peaks have gazed upon
+The wide, illimitable heavens have said,
+That, still receding as they climbed, outspread,
+The blue vault deepens over them, and, one
+By one drawn further back, each starry sun
+Shoots down a feebler splendor overhead
+So, Saviour, as our mounting spirits, led
+Along Faith's living way to Thee, have won
+A nearer access, up the difficult track
+Still pressing, on that rarer atmosphere,
+When low beneath us flits the cloudy rack,
+We see Thee drawn within a widening sphere
+Of glory, from us further, further back,--
+Yet is it then because we are more near.
+
+
+                              LIFE TAPESTRY.
+
+Top long have I, methought, with tearful eye
+Pored o'er this tangled work of mine, and mused
+Above each stitch awry and thread confused;
+Now will I think on what in years gone by
+I heard of them that weave rare tapestry
+At royal looms, and hew they constant use
+To work on the rough side, and still peruse
+The pictured pattern set above them high;
+So will I set my copy high above,
+And gaze and gaze till on my spirit grows
+Its gracious impress; till some line of love,
+Transferred upon my canvas, faintly glows;
+Nor look too much on warp or woof, provide
+He whom I work for sees their fairer side!
+
+
+                                  HOPE.
+
+When I do think on thee, sweet Hope, and how
+Thou followest on our steps, a coaxing child
+Oft chidden hence, yet quickly reconciled,
+Still turning on us a glad, beaming brow,
+And red, ripe lips for kisses: even now
+Thou mindest me of him, the Ruler mild,
+Who led God's chosen people through the wild,
+And bore with wayward murmurers, meek as thou
+That bringest waters from the Rock, with bread
+Of angels strewing Earth for us! like him
+Thy force abates not, nor thine eye grows dim;
+But still with milk and honey-droppings fed,
+Thou leadest to the Promised Country fair,
+Though thou, like Moses, may'st not enter there
+
+
+There is something very weird and striking in the following lines:--
+
+
+                                  GONE.
+
+Alone, at midnight as he knelt, his spirit was aware
+Of Somewhat falling in between the silence and the prayer;
+
+A bell's dull clangor that hath sped so far, it faints and dies
+So soon as it hath reached the ear whereto its errand lies;
+
+And as he rose up from his knees, his spirit was aware
+Of Somewhat, forceful and unseen, that sought to hold him there;
+
+As of a Form that stood behind, and on his shoulders prest
+Both hands to stay his rising up, and Somewhat in his breast,
+
+In accents clearer far than words, spake, "Pray yet longer, pray,
+For one that ever prayed for thee this night hath passed away;
+
+"A soul, that climbing hour by hour the silver-shining stair
+That leads to God's great treasure-house, grew covetous; and there
+
+"Was stored no blessing and no boon, for thee she did not claim,
+(So lowly, yet importunate!) and ever with thy name
+
+"She link'd--that none in earth or heaven might hinder it or stay--
+One Other Name, so strong, that thine hath never missed its way.
+
+"This very night within my arms this gracious soul I bore Within the
+Gate, where many a prayer of hers had gone before;
+
+"And where she resteth, evermore one constant song they raise Of 'Holy,
+holy,' so that now I know not if she prays;
+
+"But for the voice of praise in Heaven, a voice of Prayer hath gone
+From Earth; thy name upriseth now no more; pray on, pray on!"
+
+
+The following may serve as a specimen of the writer's lighter, half-
+playful strain of moralizing:--
+
+
+                                 SEEKING.
+
+"And where, and among what pleasant places,
+Have ye been, that ye come again
+With your laps so full of flowers, and your faces
+Like buds blown fresh after rain?"
+
+"We have been," said the children, speaking
+In their gladness, as the birds chime,
+All together,--"we have been seeking
+For the Fairies of olden time;
+For we thought, they are only hidden,--
+They would never surely go
+From this green earth all unbidden,
+And the children that love them so.
+Though they come not around us leaping,
+As they did when they and the world
+Were young, we shall find them sleeping
+Within some broad leaf curled;
+For the lily its white doors closes
+But only over the bee,
+And we looked through the summer roses,
+Leaf by leaf, so carefully.
+
+But we thought, rolled up we shall find them
+Among mosses old and dry;
+From gossamer threads that bind them,
+They will start like the butterfly,
+All winged: so we went forth seeking,
+Yet still they have kept unseen;
+Though we think our feet have been keeping
+The track where they have been,
+For we saw where their dance went flying
+O'er the pastures,--snowy white."
+
+Their seats and their tables lying,
+O'erthrown in their sudden flight.
+And they, too, have had their losses,
+For we found the goblets white
+And red in the old spiked mosses,
+That they drank from over-night;
+And in the pale horn of the woodbine
+Was some wine left, clear and bright;
+"But we found," said the children, speaking
+More quickly, "so many things,
+That we soon forgot we were seeking,--
+Forgot all the Fairy rings,
+Forgot all the stories olden
+That we hear round the fire at night,
+Of their gifts and their favors golden,--
+The sunshine was so bright;
+And the flowers,--we found so many
+That it almost made us grieve
+To think there were some, sweet as any,
+That we were forced to leave;
+As we left, by the brook-side lying,
+The balls of drifted foam,
+And brought (after all our trying)
+These Guelder-roses home."
+
+"Then, oh!" I heard one speaking
+Beside me soft and low,
+"I have been, like the blessed children, seeking,
+Still seeking, to and fro;
+Yet not, like them, for the Fairies,--
+They might pass unmourned away
+For me, that had looked on angels,--
+On angels that would not stay;
+No!  not though in haste before them
+I spread all my heart's best cheer,
+And made love my banner o'er them,
+If it might but keep them here;
+They stayed but a while to rest them;
+Long, long before its close,
+From my feast, though I mourned and prest them
+The radiant guests arose;
+And their flitting wings struck sadness
+And silence; never more
+Hath my soul won back the gladness,
+That was its own before.
+No; I mourned not for the Fairies
+When I had seen hopes decay,
+That were sweet unto my spirit
+So long; I said, 'If they,
+That through shade and sunny weather
+Have twined about my heart,
+Should fade, we must go together,
+For we can never part!'
+But my care was not availing;
+I found their sweetness gone;
+I saw their bright tints paling;--
+They died; yet I lived on.
+
+"Yet seeking, ever seeking,
+Like the children, I have won
+A guerdon all undreamt of
+
+When first my quest begun,
+And my thoughts come back like wanderers,
+Out-wearied, to my breast;
+What they sought for long they found not,
+Yet was the Unsought best.
+For I sought not out for crosses,
+I did not seek for pain;
+Yet I find the heart's sore losses
+Were the spirit's surest gain."
+
+
+In _A Meditation_, the writer ventures, not without awe and reverence,
+upon that dim, unsounded ocean of mystery, the life beyond:--
+
+                  "But is there prayer
+Within your quiet homes, and is there care
+For those ye leave behind?  I would address
+My spirit to this theme in humbleness
+No tongue nor pen hath uttered or made known
+This mystery, and thus I do but guess
+At clearer types through lowlier patterns shown;
+Yet when did Love on earth forsake its own?
+Ye may not quit your sweetness; in the Vine
+More firmly rooted than of old, your wine
+Hath freer flow!  ye have not changed, but grown
+To fuller stature; though the shock was keen
+That severed you from us, how oft below
+Hath sorest parting smitten but to show
+True hearts their hidden wealth that quickly grow
+The closer for that anguish,--friend to friend
+Revealed more clear,--and what is Death to rend
+The ties of life and love, when He must fade
+In light of very Life, when He must bend
+To love, that, loving, loveth to the end?
+
+              "I do not deem ye look
+Upon us now, for be it that your eyes
+Are sealed or clear, a burden on them lies
+Too deep and blissful for their gaze to brook
+Our troubled strife; enough that once ye dwelt
+Where now we dwell, enough that once ye felt
+As now we feel, to bid you recognize
+Our claim of kindred cherished though unseen;
+And Love that is to you for eye and ear
+Hath ways unknown to us to bring you near,--
+To keep you near for all that comes between;
+As pious souls that move in sleep to prayer,
+As distant friends, that see not, and yet share
+(I speak of what I know) each other's care,
+So may your spirits blend with ours!
+Above Ye know not haply of our state, yet
+Love Acquaints you with our need, and through a way
+More sure than that of knowledge--so ye pray!
+
+               "And even thus we meet,
+And even thus we commune!  spirits freed
+And spirits fettered mingle, nor have need
+To seek a common atmosphere, the air
+Is meet for either in this olden, sweet,
+Primeval breathing of Man's spirit,--Prayer!"
+
+
+I give, in conclusion, a portion of one of her most characteristic poems,
+_The Reconciler_:--
+
+                  "Our dreams are reconciled,
+Since Thou didst come to turn them all to Truth;
+The World, the Heart, are dreamers in their youth
+Of visions beautiful, and strange and wild;
+And Thou, our Life's Interpreter, dost still
+At once make clear these visions and fulfil;
+
+Each dim sweet Orphic rhyme,
+Each mythic tale sublime
+Of strength to save, of sweetness to subdue,
+Each morning dream the few,
+Wisdom's first lovers told, if read in Thee comes true.
+
+           . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+                   "Thou, O Friend
+From heaven, that madest this our heart Thine own,
+Dost pierce the broken language of its moan--
+Thou dost not scorn our needs, but satisfy!
+Each yearning deep and wide,
+Each claim, is justified;
+Our young illusions fail not, though they die
+Within the brightness of Thy Rising, kissed
+To happy death, like early clouds that lie
+About the gates of Dawn,--a golden mist
+Paling to blissful white, through rose and amethyst.
+
+               "The World that puts Thee by,
+That opens not to greet Thee with Thy train,
+That sendeth after Thee the sullen cry,
+'We will not have Thee over us to reign,'
+Itself Both testify through searchings vain
+Of Thee and of its need, and for the good
+It will not, of some base similitude
+Takes up a taunting witness, till its mood,
+Grown fierce o'er failing hopes, doth rend and tear
+Its own illusions grown too thin and bare
+To wrap it longer; for within the gate
+Where all must pass, a veiled and hooded Fate,
+A dark Chimera, coiled and tangled lies,
+And he who answers not its questions dies,--
+Still changing form and speech, but with the same
+Vexed riddles, Gordian-twisted, bringing shame
+Upon the nations that with eager cry
+Hail each new solver of the mystery;
+Yet he, of these the best,
+Bold guesser, hath but prest
+Most nigh to Thee, our noisy plaudits wrong;
+True Champion, that hast wrought
+Our help of old, and brought
+Meat from this eater, sweetness from this strong.
+
+                     "O Bearer of the key
+That shuts and opens with a sound so sweet
+Its turning in the wards is melody,
+All things we move among are incomplete
+And vain until we fashion them in Thee!
+We labor in the fire,
+Thick smoke is round about us; through the din
+Of words that darken counsel clamors dire
+Ring from thought's beaten anvil, where within
+Two Giants toil, that even from their birth
+With travail-pangs have torn their mother Earth,
+And wearied out her children with their keen
+Upbraidings of the other, till between
+Thou tamest, saying, 'Wherefore do ye wrong
+Each other?--ye are Brethren.' Then these twain
+Will own their kindred, and in Thee retain
+Their claims in peace, because Thy land is wide
+As it is goodly!  here they pasture free,
+This lion and this leopard, side by side,
+A little child doth lead them with a song;
+Now, Ephraim's envy ceaseth, and no more
+Doth Judah anger Ephraim chiding sore,
+For one did ask a Brother, one a King,
+So dost Thou gather them in one, and bring--
+Thou, King forevermore, forever Priest,
+Thou, Brother of our own from bonds released
+A Law of Liberty,
+A Service making free,
+A Commonweal where each has all in Thee.
+
+                  "And not alone these wide,
+Deep-planted yearnings, seeking with a cry
+Their meat from God, in Thee are satisfied;
+But all our instincts waking suddenly
+Within the soul, like infants from their sleep
+That stretch their arms into the dark and weep,
+Thy voice can still.  The stricken heart bereft
+Of all its brood of singing hopes, and left
+'Mid leafless boughs, a cold, forsaken nest
+With snow-flakes in it, folded in Thy breast
+Doth lose its deadly chill; and grief that creeps
+Unto Thy side for shelter, finding there
+The wound's deep cleft, forgets its moan, and weeps
+Calm, quiet tears, and on Thy forehead Care
+Hath looked until its thorns, no longer bare,
+Put forth pale roses.  Pain on Thee doth press
+Its quivering cheek, and all the weariness,
+The want that keep their silence, till from Thee
+They hear the gracious summons, none beside
+Hath spoken to the world-worn, 'Come to me,'
+Tell forth their heavy secrets.
+
+                  "Thou dost hide
+These in Thy bosom, and not these alone,
+But all our heart's fond treasure that had grown
+A burden else: O Saviour, tears were weighed
+To Thee in plenteous measure!  none hath shown
+That Thou didst smile! yet hast Thou surely made
+All joy of ours Thine own.
+
+                 "Thou madest us for Thine;
+We seek amiss, we wander to and fro;
+Yet are we ever on the track Divine;
+The soul confesseth Thee, but sense is slow
+To lean on aught but that which it may see;
+So hath it crowded up these Courts below
+With dark and broken images of Thee;
+Lead Thou us forth upon Thy Mount, and show
+Thy goodly patterns, whence these things of old
+By Thee were fashioned; One though manifold.
+Glass Thou Thy perfect likeness in the soul,
+Show us Thy countenance, and we are whole!"
+
+
+No one, I am quite certain, will regret that I have made these liberal
+quotations.  Apart from their literary merit, they have a special
+interest for the readers of The Patience of Hope, as more fully
+illustrating the writer's personal experience and aspirations.
+
+It has been suggested by a friend that it is barely possible that an
+objection may be urged against the following treatise, as against all
+books of a like character, that its tendency is to isolate the individual
+from his race, and to nourish an exclusive and purely selfish personal
+solicitude; that its piety is self-absorbent, and that it does not take
+sufficiently into account active duties and charities, and the love of
+the neighbor so strikingly illustrated by the Divine Master in His life
+and teachings.  This objection, if valid, would be a fatal one.  For, of
+a truth, there can be no meaner type of human selfishness than that
+afforded by him who, unmindful of the world of sin and suffering about
+him, occupies himself in the pitiful business of saving his own soul, in
+the very spirit of the miser, watching over his private hoard while his
+neighbors starve for lack of bread.  But surely the benevolent unrest,
+the far-reaching sympathies and keen sensitiveness to the suffering of
+others, which so nobly distinguish our present age, can have nothing to
+fear from a plea for personal holiness, patience, hope, and resignation
+to the Divine will.  "The more piety, the more compassion," says Isaac
+Taylor; and this is true, if we understand by piety, not self-concentred
+asceticism, but the pure religion and undefiled which visits the widow
+and the fatherless, and yet keeps itself unspotted from the world,--which
+deals justly, loves mercy, and yet walks humbly before God.  Self-
+scrutiny in the light of truth can do no harm to any one, least of all to
+the reformer and philanthropist.  The spiritual warrior, like the young
+candidate for knighthood, may be none the worse for his preparatory
+ordeal of watching all night by his armor.
+
+Tauler in mediaeval times and Woolman in the last century are among the
+most earnest teachers of the inward life and spiritual nature of
+Christianity, yet both were distinguished for practical benevolence.
+They did not separate the two great commandments.  Tauler strove with
+equal intensity of zeal to promote the temporal and the spiritual welfare
+of men.  In the dark and evil time in which he lived, amidst the untold
+horrors of the "Black Plague," he illustrated by deeds of charity and
+mercy his doctrine of disinterested benevolence.  Woolman's whole life
+was a nobler Imitation of Christ than that fervid rhapsody of monastic
+piety which bears the name.
+
+How faithful, yet, withal, how full of kindness, were his rebukes of
+those who refused labor its just reward, and ground the faces of the
+poor?  How deep and entire was his sympathy with overtasked and ill-paid
+laborers; with wet and illprovided sailors; with poor wretches
+blaspheming in the mines, because oppression had made them mad; with the
+dyers plying their unhealthful trade to minister to luxury and pride;
+with the tenant wearing out his life in the service of a hard landlord;
+and with the slave sighing over his unrequited toil!  What a significance
+there was in his vision of the "dull, gloomy mass" which appeared before
+him, darkening half the heavens, and which he was told was "human beings
+in as great misery as they could be and live; and he was mixed with them,
+and henceforth he might not consider himself a distinct and separate
+being"!  His saintliness was wholly unconscious; he seems never to have
+thought himself any nearer to the tender heart of God than the most
+miserable sinner to whom his compassion extended.  As he did not
+live, so neither did he die to himself.  His prayer upon his death-bed
+was for others rather than himself; its beautiful humility and simple
+trust were marred by no sensual imagery of crowns and harps and golden
+streets, and personal beatific exaltations; but tender and touching
+concern for suffering humanity, relieved only by the thought of the
+paternity of God, and of His love and omnipotence, alone found utterance
+in ever-memorable words.
+
+In view of the troubled state of the country and the intense
+preoccupation of the public mind, I have had some hesitation in offering
+this volume to its publishers.  But, on further reflection, it has seemed
+to me that it might supply a want felt by many among us; that, in the
+chaos of civil strife and the shadow of mourning which rests over the
+land, the contemplation of "things unseen which are eternal" might not be
+unwelcome; that, when the foundations of human confidence are shaken, and
+the trust in man proves vain, there might be glad listeners to a voice
+calling from the outward and the temporal to the inward and the
+spiritual; from the troubles and perplexities of time, to the eternal
+quietness which God giveth.  I cannot but believe that, in the heat and
+glare through which we are passing, this book will not invite in vain to
+the calm, sweet shadows of holy meditation, grateful as the green wings
+of the bird to Thalaba in the desert; and thus afford something of
+consolation to the bereaved, and of strength to the weary.  For surely
+never was the Patience of Hope more needed; never was the inner sanctuary
+of prayer more desirable; never was a steadfast faith in the Divine
+goodness more indispensable, nor lessons of self-sacrifice and
+renunciation, and that cheerful acceptance of known duty which shifts not
+its proper responsibility upon others, nor asks for "peace in its day" at
+the expense of purity and justice, more timely than now, when the solemn
+words of ancient prophecy are as applicable to our own country as to that
+of the degenerate Jew,--"Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy
+backsliding reprove thee; know, therefore, it is an evil thing, and
+bitter, that thou bast forsaken the Lord, and that my fear is not in
+thee,"--when "His way is in the deep, in clouds, and in thick darkness,"
+and the hand heavy upon us which shall "turn and overturn until he whose
+right it is shall reign,"--until, not without rending agony, the evil
+plant which our Heavenly Father hath not planted, whose roots have wound
+themselves about altar and hearth-stone, and whose branches, like the
+tree Al-Accoub in Moslem fable, bear the accursed fruit of oppression,
+rebellion, and all imaginable crime, shall be torn up and destroyed
+forever.
+
+AMESBURY, 1st 6th mo., 1862.
+
+
+
+
+
+                         THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS.
+
+The following letters were addressed to the Editor of the Friends' Review
+in Philadelphia, in reference to certain changes of principle and
+practice in the Society then beginning to be observable, but which have
+since more than justified the writer's fears and solicitude.
+
+
+I.
+
+                         AMESBURY, 2d mo., 1870.
+
+TO THE EDITOR OF THE REVIEW.
+
+ESTEEMED FRIEND,--If I have been hitherto a silent, I have not been an
+indifferent, spectator of the movements now going on in our religious
+Society.  Perhaps from lack of faith, I have been quite too solicitous
+concerning them, and too much afraid that in grasping after new things we
+may let go of old things too precious to be lost.  Hence I have been
+pleased to see from time to time in thy paper very timely and fitting
+articles upon a _Hired Ministry_ and _Silent Worship_.
+
+The present age is one of sensation and excitement, of extreme measures
+and opinions, of impatience of all slow results.  The world about us
+moves with accelerated impulse, and we move with it: the rest we have
+enjoyed, whether true or false, is broken; the title-deeds of our
+opinions, the reason of our practices, are demanded.  Our very right to
+exist as a distinct society is questioned.  Our old literature--the
+precious journals and biographies of early and later Friends--is
+comparatively neglected for sensational and dogmatic publications.  We
+bear complaints of a want of educated ministers; the utility of silent
+meetings is denied, and praying and preaching regarded as matters of will
+and option.  There is a growing desire for experimenting upon the dogmas
+and expedients and practices of other sects.  I speak only of admitted
+facts, and not for the purpose of censure or complaint.  No one has less
+right than myself to indulge in heresy-hunting or impatience of minor
+differences of opinion.  If my dear friends can bear with me, I shall not
+find it a hard task to bear with them.
+
+But for myself I prefer the old ways.  With the broadest possible
+tolerance for all honest seekers after truth! I love the Society of
+Friends.  My life has been nearly spent in laboring with those of other
+sects in behalf of the suffering and enslaved; and I have never felt like
+quarrelling with Orthodox or Unitarians, who were willing to pull with
+me, side by side, at the rope of Reform.  A very large proportion of my
+dearest personal friends are outside of our communion; and I have learned
+with John Woolman to find "no narrowness respecting sects and opinions."
+But after a kindly and candid survey of them all, I turn to my own
+Society, thankful to the Divine Providence which placed me where I am;
+and with an unshaken faith in the one distinctive doctrine of Quakerism--
+the Light within--the immanence of the Divine Spirit in Christianity.  I
+cheerfully recognize and bear testimony to the good works and lives of
+those who widely differ in faith and practice; but I have seen no truer
+types of Christianity, no better men and women, than I have known and
+still know among those who not blindly, but intelligently, hold the
+doctrines and maintain the testimonies of our early Friends.  I am not
+blind to the shortcomings of Friends.  I know how much we have lost by
+narrowness and coldness and inactivity, the overestimate of external
+observances, the neglect of our own proper work while acting as
+conscience-keepers for others.  We have not, as a society, been active
+enough in those simple duties which we owe to our suffering fellow-
+creatures, in that abundant labor of love and self-denial which is never
+out of place.  Perhaps our divisions and dissensions might have been
+spared us if we had been less "at ease in Zion."  It is in the decline of
+practical righteousness that men are most likely to contend with each
+other for dogma and ritual, for shadow and letter, instead of substance
+and spirit.  Hence I rejoice in every sign of increased activity in doing
+good among us, in the precious opportunities afforded of working with the
+Divine Providence for the Freedmen and Indians; since the more we do, in
+the true spirit of the gospel, for others, the more we shall really do
+for ourselves.  There is no danger of lack of work for those who, with an
+eye single to the guidance of Truth, look for a place in God's vineyard;
+the great work which the founders of our Society began is not yet done;
+the mission of Friends is not accomplished, and will not be until this
+world of ours, now full of sin and suffering, shall take up, in jubilant
+thanksgiving, the song of the Advent: "Glory to God in the highest!
+Peace on earth and good-will to men!"
+
+It is charged that our Society lacks freedom and adaptation to the age in
+which we live, that there is a repression of individuality and manliness
+among us.  I am not prepared to deny it in certain respects.  But, if we
+look at the matter closely, we shall see that the cause is not in the
+central truth of Quakerism, but in a failure to rightly comprehend it; in
+an attempt to fetter with forms and hedge about with dogmas that great
+law of Christian liberty, which I believe affords ample scope for the
+highest spiritual aspirations and the broadest philanthropy.  If we did
+but realize it, we are "set in a large place."
+
+"We may do all we will save wickedness."
+
+"Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."
+
+Quakerism, in the light of its great original truth, is "exceeding
+broad."  As interpreted by Penn and Barclay it is the most liberal and
+catholic of faiths.  If we are not free, generous, tolerant, if we are
+not up to or above the level of the age in good works, in culture and
+love of beauty, order and fitness, if we are not the ready recipients of
+the truths of science and philosophy,--in a word, if we are not full-
+grown men and Christians, the fault is not in Quakerism, but in
+ourselves.  We shall gain nothing by aping the customs and trying to
+adjust ourselves to the creeds of other sects.  By so doing we make at
+the best a very awkward combination, and just as far as it is successful,
+it is at the expense of much that is vital in our old faith.  If, for
+instance, I could bring myself to believe a hired ministry and a written
+creed essential to my moral and spiritual well-being, I think I should
+prefer to sit down at once under such teachers as Bushnell and Beecher,
+the like of whom in Biblical knowledge, ecclesiastical learning, and
+intellectual power, we are not likely to manufacture by half a century of
+theological manipulation in a Quaker "school of the prophets."  If I must
+go into the market and buy my preaching, I should naturally seek the best
+article on sale, without regard to the label attached to it.
+
+I am not insensible of the need of spiritual renovation in our Society.
+I feel and confess my own deficiencies as an individual member.  And I
+bear a willing testimony to the zeal and devotion of some dear friends,
+who, lamenting the low condition and worldliness too apparent among us,
+seek to awaken a stronger religious life by the partial adoption of the
+practices, forms, and creeds of more demonstrative sects.  The great
+apparent activity of these sects seems to them to contrast very strongly
+with our quietness and reticence; and they do not always pause to inquire
+whether the result of this activity is a truer type of practical
+Christianity than is found in our select gatherings.  I think I
+understand these brethren; to some extent I have sympathized with them.
+But it seems clear to me, that a remedy for the alleged evil lies not in
+going back to the "beggarly elements" from which our worthy ancestors
+called the people of their generation; not in will-worship; not in
+setting the letter above the spirit; not in substituting type and symbol,
+and oriental figure and hyperbole for the simple truths they were
+intended to represent; not in schools of theology; not in much speaking
+and noise and vehemence, nor in vain attempts to make the "plain
+language" of Quakerism utter the Shibboleth of man-made creeds: but in
+heeding more closely the Inward Guide and Teacher; in faith in Christ not
+merely in His historical manifestation of the Divine Love to humanity,
+but in His living presence in the hearts open to receive Him; in love for
+Him manifested in denial of self, in charity and love to our neighbor;
+and in a deeper realization of the truth of the apostle's declaration:
+"Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit
+the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself
+unspotted from the world."
+
+In conclusion, let me say that I have given this expression of my
+opinions with some degree of hesitation, being very sensible that I have
+neither the right nor the qualification to speak for a society whose
+doctrines and testimonies commend themselves to my heart and head, whose
+history is rich with the precious legacy of holy lives, and of whose
+usefulness as a moral and spiritual Force in the world I am fully
+assured.
+
+
+II.
+
+Having received several letters from dear friends in various sections
+suggested by a recent communication in thy paper, and not having time or
+health to answer them in detail, will thou permit me in this way to
+acknowledge them, and to say to the writers that I am deeply sensible of
+the Christian love and personal good-will to myself, which, whether in
+commendation or dissent, they manifest?  I think I may say in truth that
+my letter was written in no sectarian or party spirit, but simply to
+express a solicitude, which, whether groundless or not, was nevertheless
+real.  I am, from principle, disinclined to doctrinal disputations and
+so-called religious controversies, which only tend to separate and
+disunite.  We have had too many divisions already.  I intended no censure
+of dear brethren whose zeal and devotion command my sympathy,
+notwithstanding I may not be able to see with them in all respects.  The
+domain of individual conscience is to me very sacred; and it seems the
+part of Christian charity to make a large allowance for varying
+experiences; mental characteristics, and temperaments, as well as for
+that youthful enthusiasm which, if sometimes misdirected, has often been
+instrumental in infusing a fresher life into the body of religious
+profession.  It is too much to expect that we can maintain an entire
+uniformity in the expression of truths in which we substantially agree;
+and we should be careful that a rightful concern for "the form of sound
+words" does not become what William Penn calls "verbal orthodoxy."  We
+must consider that the same accepted truth looks somewhat differently
+from different points of vision.  Knowing our own weaknesses and
+limitations, we must bear in mind that human creeds, speculations,
+expositions, and interpretations of the Divine plan are but the faint and
+feeble glimpses of finite creatures into the infinite mysteries of God.
+
+         "They are but broken lights of Thee,
+          And Thou, O Lord, art more than they."
+
+Differing, as we do, more or less as to means and methods, if we indeed
+have the "mind of Christ," we shall rejoice in whatever of good is really
+accomplished, although by somewhat different instrumentalities than those
+which we feel ourselves free to make use of, remembering that our Lord
+rebuked the narrowness and partisanship of His disciples by assuring them
+that they that were not against Him were for Him.
+
+It would, nevertheless, give me great satisfaction to know, as thy kindly
+expressed editorial comments seem to intimate, that I have somewhat
+overestimated the tendencies of things in our Society.  I have no pride
+of opinion which would prevent me from confessing with thankfulness my
+error of judgment.  In any event, it can, I think, do no harm to repeat
+my deep conviction that we may all labor, in the ability given us, for
+our own moral and spiritual well-being, and that of our fellow-creatures,
+without laying aside the principles and practice of our religious
+Society.  I believe so much of liberty is our right as well as our
+privilege, and that we need not really overstep our bounds for the
+performance of any duty which may be required of us.  When truly called
+to contemplate broader fields of labor, we shall find the walls about us,
+like the horizon seen from higher levels, expanding indeed, but nowhere
+broken.
+
+I believe that the world needs the Society of Friends as a testimony and
+a standard.  I know that this is the opinion of some of the best and most
+thoughtful members of other Christian sects.  I know that any serious
+departure from the original foundation of our Society would give pain to
+many who, outside of our communion, deeply realize the importance of our
+testimonies.  They fail to read clearly the signs of the times who do not
+see that the hour is coming when, under the searching eye of philosophy
+and the terrible analysis of science, the letter and the outward evidence
+will not altogether avail us; when the surest dependence must be upon the
+Light of Christ within, disclosing the law and the prophets in our own
+souls, and confirming the truth of outward Scripture by inward
+experience; when smooth stones from the brook of present revelation
+shall' prove mightier than the weapons of Saul; when the doctrine of the
+Holy Spirit, as proclaimed by George Fox and lived by John Woolman, shall
+be recognized as the only efficient solvent of doubts raised by an age of
+restless inquiry.  In this belief my letter was written.  I am sorry it
+did not fall to the lot of a more fitting hand; and can only hope that no
+consideration of lack of qualification on the part of its writer may
+lessen the value of whatever testimony to truth shall be found in it.
+
+AMESBURY, 3d mo., 1870.
+
+
+P. S.  I may mention that I have been somewhat encouraged by a perusal of
+the Proceedings of the late First-day School Conference in Philadelphia,
+where, with some things which I am compelled to pause over, and regret, I
+find much with which I cordially unite, and which seems to indicate a
+providential opening for good.  I confess to a lively and tender sympathy
+with my younger brethren and sisters who, in the name of Him who "went
+about doing good," go forth into the highways and byways to gather up the
+lost, feed the hungry, instruct the ignorant, and point the sinsick and
+suffering to the hopes and consolations of Christian faith, even if, at
+times, their zeal goes beyond "reasonable service," and although the
+importance of a particular instrumentality may be exaggerated, and love
+lose sight of its needful companion humility, and he that putteth on his
+armor boast like him who layeth it off.  Any movement, however irregular,
+which indicates life, is better than the quiet of death.  In the
+overruling providence of God, the troubling may prepare the way for
+healing.  Some of us may have erred on one hand and some on the other,
+and this shaking of the balance may adjust it.
+
+
+
+
+
+JOHN WOOLMAN'S JOURNAL.
+
+Originally published as an introduction to a reissue of the work.
+
+To those who judge by the outward appearance, nothing is more difficult
+of explanation than the strength of moral influence often exerted by
+obscure and uneventful lives.  Some great reform which lifts the world to
+a higher level, some mighty change for which the ages have waited in
+anxious expectancy, takes place before our eyes, and, in seeking to trace
+it back to its origin, we are often surprised to find the initial link in
+the chain of causes to be some comparatively obscure individual, the
+divine commission and significance of whose life were scarcely understood
+by his contemporaries, and perhaps not even by himself.  The little one
+has become a thousand; the handful of corn shakes like Lebanon.  "The
+kingdom of God cometh not by observation;" and the only solution of the
+mystery is in the reflection that through the humble instrumentality
+Divine power was manifested, and that the Everlasting Arm was beneath the
+human one.
+
+The abolition of human slavery now in process of consummation throughout
+the world furnishes one of the most striking illustrations of this truth.
+A far-reaching moral, social, and political revolution, undoing the evil
+work of centuries, unquestionably owes much of its original impulse to
+the life and labors of a poor, unlearned workingman of New Jersey, whose
+very existence was scarcely known beyond the narrow circle of his
+religious society.
+
+It is only within a comparatively recent period that the journal and
+ethical essays of this remarkable man have attracted the attention to
+which they are manifestly entitled.  In one of my last interviews with
+William Ellery Channing, he expressed his very great surprise that they
+were so little known.  He had himself just read the book for the first
+time, and I shall never forget how his countenance lighted up as he
+pronounced it beyond comparison the sweetest and purest autobiography in
+the language.  He wished to see it placed within the reach of all classes
+of readers; it was not a light to be hidden under the bushel of a sect.
+Charles Lamb, probably from his friends, the Clarksons, or from Bernard
+Barton, became acquainted with it, and on more than one occasion, in his
+letters and Essays of Elia, refers to it with warm commendation.  Edward
+Irving pronounced it a godsend.  Some idea of the lively interest which
+the fine literary circle gathered around the hearth of Lamb felt in the
+beautiful simplicity of Woolman's pages may be had from the Diary of
+Henry Crabb Robinson, one of their number, himself a man of wide and
+varied culture, the intimate friend of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.
+In his notes for First Month, 1824, he says, after a reference to a
+sermon of his friend Irving, which he feared would deter rather than
+promote belief:
+
+"How different this from John Woolman's Journal I have been reading at
+the same time!  A perfect gem!  His is a _schone Seele_, a beautiful
+soul.  An illiterate tailor, he writes in a style of the most exquisite
+purity and grace.  His moral qualities are transferred to his writings.
+Had he not been so very humble, he would have written a still better
+book; for, fearing to indulge in vanity, he conceals the events in which
+he was a great actor.  His religion was love.  His whole existence and
+all his passions were love.  If one could venture to impute to his creed,
+and not to his personal character, the delightful frame of mind he
+exhibited, one could not hesitate to be a convert.  His Christianity is
+most inviting, it is fascinating!  One of the leading British reviews a
+few years ago, referring to this Journal, pronounced its author the man
+who, in all the centuries since the advent of Christ, lived nearest to
+the Divine pattern.  The author of The Patience of Hope, whose authority
+in devotional literature is unquestioned, says of him: 'John Woolman's
+gift was love, a charity of which it does not enter into the natural
+heart of man to conceive, and of which the more ordinary experiences,
+even of renewed nature, give but a faint shadow.  Every now and then, in
+the world's history, we meet with such men, the kings and priests of
+Humanity, on whose heads this precious ointment has been so poured forth
+that it has run down to the skirts of their clothing, and extended over
+the whole of the visible creation; men who have entered, like Francis of
+Assisi, into the secret of that deep amity with God and with His
+creatures which makes man to be in league with the stones of the field,
+and the beasts of the field to be at peace with him.  In this pure,
+universal charity there is nothing fitful or intermittent, nothing that
+comes and goes in showers and gleams and sunbursts.  Its springs are deep
+and constant, its rising is like that of a mighty river, its very
+overflow calm and steady, leaving life and fertility behind it.'"
+
+After all, anything like personal eulogy seems out of place in speaking
+of one who in the humblest self-abasement sought no place in the world's
+estimation, content to be only a passive instrument in the hands of his
+Master; and who, as has been remarked, through modesty concealed the
+events in which he was an actor.  A desire to supply in some sort this
+deficiency in his Journal is my especial excuse for this introductory
+paper.
+
+It is instructive to study the history of the moral progress of
+individuals or communities; to mark the gradual development of truth; to
+watch the slow germination of its seed sown in simple obedience to the
+command of the Great Husbandman, while yet its green promise, as well as
+its golden fruition, was hidden from the eyes of the sower; to go back to
+the well-springs and fountain-heads, tracing the small streamlet from its
+hidden source, and noting the tributaries which swell its waters, as it
+moves onward, until it becomes a broad river, fertilizing and gladdening
+our present humanity.  To this end it is my purpose, as briefly as
+possible, to narrate the circumstances attending the relinquishment of
+slave-holding by the Society of Friends, and to hint at the effect of
+that act of justice and humanity upon the abolition of slavery throughout
+the world.
+
+At an early period after the organization of the Society, members of it
+emigrated to the Maryland, Carolina, Virginia, and New England colonies.
+The act of banishment enforced against dissenters under Charles II.
+consigned others of the sect to the West Indies, where their frugality,
+temperance, and thrift transmuted their intended punishment into a
+blessing.  Andrew Marvell, the inflexible republican statesman, in some
+of the sweetest and tenderest lines in the English tongue, has happily
+described their condition:--
+
+What shall we do but sing His praise
+Who led us through the watery maze,
+Unto an isle so long unknown,
+And yet far kinder than our own?
+He lands us on a grassy stage,
+Safe from the storms and prelates' rage;
+He gives us this eternal spring,
+Which here enamels everything,
+And sends the fowls to us in care,
+On daily visits through the air.
+He hangs in shades the orange bright,
+Like golden lamps, in a green night,
+And doth in the pomegranate close
+Jewels more rich than Ormus shows.
+
+       . . . . . . . . .
+
+And in these rocks for us did frame
+A temple where to sound His name.
+Oh!  let our voice His praise exalt,
+Till it arrive at heaven's vault,
+Which then, perhaps rebounding, may
+Echo beyond the Mexic bay.'
+
+"So sang they in the English boat,
+A holy and a cheerful note;
+And all the way, to guide their chime,
+With falling oars they kept the time."
+
+Unhappily, they very early became owners of slaves, in imitation of the
+colonists around them.  No positive condemnation of the evil system had
+then been heard in the British islands.  Neither English prelates nor
+expounders at dissenting conventicles had aught to say against it.  Few
+colonists doubted its entire compatibility with Christian profession and
+conduct.  Saint and sinner, ascetic and worldling, united in its
+practice.  Even the extreme Dutch saints of Bohemia Manor community, the
+pietists of John de Labadie, sitting at meat with hats on, and pausing
+ever and anon with suspended mouthfuls to bear a brother's or sister's
+exhortation, and sandwiching prayers between the courses, were waited
+upon by negro slaves.  Everywhere men were contending with each other
+upon matters of faith, while, so far as their slaves were concerned,
+denying the ethics of Christianity itself.
+
+Such was the state of things when, in 1671, George Fox visited Barbadoes.
+He was one of those men to whom it is given to discern through the mists
+of custom and prejudice something of the lineaments of absolute truth,
+and who, like the Hebrew lawgiver, bear with them, from a higher and
+purer atmosphere, the shining evidence of communion with the Divine
+Wisdom.  He saw slavery in its mildest form among his friends, but his
+intuitive sense of right condemned it.  He solemnly admonished those who
+held slaves to bear in mind that they were brethren, and to train them up
+in the fear of God.  "I desired, also," he says, "that they would cause
+their overseers to deal gently and mildly with their negroes, and not use
+cruelty towards them as the manner of some hath been and is; and that,
+after certain years of servitude, they should make them free."
+
+In 1675, the companion of George Fox, William Edmundson, revisited
+Barbadoes, and once more bore testimony against the unjust treatment of
+slaves.  He was accused of endeavoring to excite an insurrection among
+the blacks, and was brought before the Governor on the charge.  It was
+probably during this journey that he addressed a remonstrance to friends
+in Maryland and Virginia on the subject of holding slaves.  It is one of
+the first emphatic and decided testimonies on record against negro
+slavery as incompatible with Christianity, if we except the Papal bulls
+of Urban and Leo the Tenth.
+
+Thirteen years after, in 1688, a meeting of German Quakers, who had
+emigrated from Kriesbeim, and settled at Germantown, Pennsylvania,
+addressed a memorial against "the buying and keeping of negroes" to the
+Yearly Meeting for the Pennsylvania and New Jersey colonies.  That
+meeting took the subject into consideration, but declined giving judgment
+in the case.  In 1696, the Yearly Meeting advised against "bringing in
+any more negroes."  In 1714, in its Epistle to London Friends, it
+expresses a wish that Friends would be "less concerned in buying or
+selling slaves."  The Chester Quarterly Meeting, which had taken a higher
+and clearer view of the matter, continued to press the Yearly Meeting to
+adopt some decided measure against any traffic in human beings.
+
+The Society gave these memorials a cold reception.  The love of gain and
+power was too strong, on the part of the wealthy and influential planters
+and merchants who had become slaveholders, to allow the scruples of the
+Chester meeting to take the shape of discipline.  The utmost that could
+be obtained of the Yearly Meeting was an expression of opinion adverse to
+the importation of negroes, and a desire that "Friends generally do, as
+much as may be, avoid buying such negroes as shall hereafter be brought
+in, rather than offend any Friends who are against it; yet this is only
+caution, and not censure."
+
+In the mean time the New England Yearly Meeting was agitated by the same
+question.  Slaves were imported into Boston and Newport, and Friends
+became purchasers, and in some instances were deeply implicated in the
+foreign traffic.  In 1716, the monthly meetings of Dartmouth and
+Nantucket suggested that it was "not agreeable to truth to purchase
+slaves and keep them during their term of life."  Nothing was done in the
+Yearly Meeting, however, until 1727, when the practice of importing
+negroes was censured.  That the practice was continued notwithstanding,
+for many years afterwards, is certain.  In 1758, a rule was adopted
+prohibiting Friends within the limits of New England Yearly Meeting from
+engaging in or countenancing the foreign slave-trade.
+
+In the year 1742 an event, simple and inconsiderable in itself, was made
+the instrumentality of exerting a mighty influence upon slavery in the
+Society of Friends.  A small storekeeper at Mount Holly, in New Jersey, a
+member of the Society, sold a negro woman, and requested the young man in
+his employ to make a bill of sale of her.
+
+     [Mount Holly is a village lying in the western part of the long,
+     narrow township of Northampton, on Rancocas Creek, a tributary of
+     the Delaware.  In John Woolman's day it was almost entirely a
+     settlement of Friends.  A very few of the old houses with their
+     quaint stoops or porches are left.  That occupied by John Woolman
+     was a small, plain, two-story structure, with two windows in each
+     story in front, a four-barred fence inclosing the grounds, with the
+     trees he planted and loved to cultivate.  The house was not painted,
+     but whitewashed.  The name of the place is derived from the highest
+     hill in the county, rising two hundred feet above the sea, and
+     commanding a view of a rich and level country, of cleared farms and
+     woodlands.  Here, no doubt, John Woolman often walked under the
+     shadow of its holly-trees, communing with nature and musing on the
+     great themes of life and duty.
+
+     When the excellent Joseph Sturge was in this country, some thirty
+     years ago, on his errand of humanity, he visited Mount Holly, and
+     the house of Woolman, then standing.  He describes it as a very
+     "humble abode."  But one person was then living in the town who had
+     ever seen its venerated owner.  This aged man stated that he was at
+     Woolman's little farm in the season of harvest when it was customary
+     among farmers to kill a calf or sheep for the laborers.  John
+     Woolman, unwilling that the animal should be slowly bled to death,
+     as the custom had been, and to spare it unnecessary suffering, had a
+     smooth block of wood prepared to receive the neck of the creature,
+     when a single blow terminated its existence.  Nothing was more
+     remarkable in the character of Woolman than his concern for the
+     well-being and comfort of the brute creation.  "What is religion?"
+     asks the old Hindoo writer of the Vishnu Sarman.  "Tenderness toward
+     all creatures."  Or, as Woolman expresses it, "Where the love of God
+     is verily perfected, a tenderness towards all creatures made subject
+     to our will is experienced, and a care felt that we do not lessen
+     that sweetness of life in the animal creation which the Creator
+     intends for them under our government."]
+
+On taking up his pen, the young clerk felt a sudden and strong scruple in
+his mind.  The thought of writing an instrument of slavery for one of his
+fellow-creatures oppressed him.  God's voice against the desecration of
+His image spoke in the soul.  He yielded to the will of his employer,
+but, while writing the instrument, he was constrained to declare, both to
+the buyer and the seller, that he believed slave-keeping inconsistent
+with the Christian religion.  This young man was John Woolman.  The
+circumstance above named was the starting-point of a life-long testimony
+against slavery.  In the year 1746 he visited Maryland, Virginia, and
+North Carolina.  He was afflicted by the prevalence of slavery.  It
+appeared to him, in his own words, "as a dark gloominess overhanging the
+land."  On his return, he wrote an essay on the subject, which was
+published in 1754.  Three years after, he made a second visit to the
+Southern meetings of Friends.  Travelling as a minister of the gospel, he
+was compelled to sit down at the tables of slaveholding planters, who
+were accustomed to entertain their friends free of cost, and who could
+not comprehend the scruples of their guest against receiving as a gift
+food and lodging which he regarded as the gain of oppression.  He was a
+poor man, but he loved truth more than money.  He therefore either placed
+the pay for his entertainment in the hands of some member of the family,
+for the benefit of the slaves, or gave it directly to them, as he had
+opportunity.  Wherever he went, he found his fellow-professors entangled
+in the mischief of slavery.  Elders and ministers, as well as the younger
+and less high in profession, had their house servants and field hands.
+He found grave drab-coated apologists for the slave-trade, who quoted the
+same Scriptures, in support of oppression and avarice, which have since
+been cited by Presbyterian doctors of divinity, Methodist bishops; and
+Baptist preachers for the same purpose.  He found the meetings generally
+in a low and evil state.  The gold of original Quakerism had become dim,
+and the fine gold changed.  The spirit of the world prevailed among them,
+and had wrought an inward desolation.  Instead of meekness, gentleness,
+and heavenly wisdom, he found "a spirit of fierceness and love of
+dominion."
+
+     [The tradition is that he travelled mostly on foot during his
+     journeys among slaveholders.  Brissot, in his New Travels in
+     America, published in 1788, says: "John Woolman, one of the most
+     distinguished of men in the cause of humanity, travelled much as a
+     minister of his sect, but always on foot, and without money, in
+     imitation of the Apostles, and in order to be in a situation to be
+     more useful to poor people and the blacks.  He hated slavery so much
+     that he could not taste food provided by the labor of slaves."  That
+     this writer was on one point misinformed is manifest from the
+     following passage from the Journal: "When I expected soon to leave a
+     friend's house where I had entertainment, if I believed that I
+     should not keep clear from the gain of oppression without leaving
+     money, I spoke to one of the heads of the family privately, and
+     desired them to accept of pieces of silver, and give them to such of
+     their negroes as they believed would make the best use of them; and
+     at other times I gave them to the negroes myself, as the way looked
+     clearest to me.  Before I came out, I had provided a large number of
+     small pieces for this purpose, and thus offering them to some who
+     appeared to be wealthy people was a trial both to me and them.  But
+     the fear of the Lord so covered me at times that my way was made
+     easier than I expected; and few, if any, manifested any resentment
+     at the offer, and most of them, after some conversation, accepted of
+     them."]
+
+In love, but at the same time with great faithfulness, he endeavored to
+convince the masters of their error, and to awaken a degree of sympathy
+for the enslaved.
+
+At this period, or perhaps somewhat earlier, a remarkable personage took
+up his residence in Pennsylvania.  He was by birthright a member of the
+Society of Friends, but having been disowned in England for some
+extravagances of conduct and language, he spent several years in the West
+Indies, where he became deeply interested in the condition of the slaves.
+His violent denunciations of the practice of slaveholding excited the
+anger of the planters, and he was compelled to leave the island.  He came
+to Philadelphia, but, contrary to his expectations, he found the same
+evil existing there.  He shook off the dust of the city, and took up his
+abode in the country, a few miles distant.  His dwelling was a natural
+cave, with some slight addition of his own making.  His drink was the
+spring-water flowing by his door; his food, vegetables alone.  He
+persistently refused to wear any garment or eat any food purchased at the
+expense of animal life, or which was in any degree the product of slave
+labor.  Issuing from his cave, on his mission of preaching "deliverance
+to the captive," he was in the habit of visiting the various meetings for
+worship and bearing his testimony against slaveholders, greatly to their
+disgust and indignation.  On one occasion he entered the Market Street
+Meeting, and a leading Friend requested some one to take him out.  A
+burly blacksmith volunteered to do it, leading him to the gate and
+thrusting him out with such force that he fell into the gutter of the
+street.  There he lay until the meeting closed, telling the bystanders
+that he did not feel free to rise himself.  "Let those who cast me here
+raise me up.  It is their business, not mine."
+
+His personal appearance was in remarkable keeping with his eccentric
+life.  A figure only four and a half feet high, hunchbacked, with
+projecting chest, legs small and uneven, arms longer than his legs; a
+huge head, showing only beneath the enormous white hat large, solemn eyes
+and a prominent nose; the rest of his face covered with a snowy
+semicircle of beard falling low on his breast,--a figure to recall the
+old legends of troll, brownie, and kobold.  Such was the irrepressible
+prophet who troubled the Israel of slave-holding Quakerism, clinging like
+a rough chestnut-bur to the skirts of its respectability, and settling
+like a pertinacious gad-fly on the sore places of its conscience.
+
+On one occasion, while the annual meeting was in session at Burlington,
+N. J., in the midst of the solemn silence of the great assembly, the
+unwelcome figure of Benjamin Lay, wrapped in his long white overcoat,
+was seen passing up the aisle.  Stopping midway, he exclaimed, "You
+slaveholders!  Why don't you throw off your Quaker coats as I do mine,
+and show yourselves as you are?"  Casting off as he spoke his outer
+garment, he disclosed to the astonished assembly a military coat
+underneath and a sword dangling at his heels.  Holding in one hand a
+large book, he drew his sword with the other.  "In the sight of God," he
+cried, "you are as guilty as if you stabbed your slaves to the heart, as
+I do this book!" suiting the action to the word, and piercing a small
+bladder filled with the juice of poke-weed (playtolacca decandra), which
+he had concealed between the covers, and sprinkling as with fresh blood
+those who sat near him.  John Woolman makes no mention of this
+circumstance in his Journal, although he was probably present, and it
+must have made a deep impression on his sensitive spirit.  The violence
+and harshness of Lay's testimony, however, had nothing in common with
+the tender and sorrowful remonstrances and appeals of the former, except
+the sympathy which they both felt for the slave himself.
+
+     [Lay was well acquainted with Dr. Franklin, who sometimes visited him.
+     Among other schemes of reform he entertained the idea of converting
+     all mankind to Christianity.  This was to be done by three
+     witnesses,--himself, Michael Lovell, and Abel Noble, assisted by Dr.
+     Franklin.  But on their first meeting at the Doctor's house, the
+     three "chosen vessels" got into a violent controversy on points of
+     doctrine, and separated in ill-humor.  The philosopher, who had been
+     an amused listener, advised the three sages to give up the project
+     of converting the world until they had learned to tolerate each
+     other.]
+
+Still later, a descendant of the persecuted French Protestants, Anthony
+Benezet, a man of uncommon tenderness of feeling, began to write and
+speak against slavery.  How far, if at all, he was moved thereto by the
+example of Woolman is not known, but it is certain that the latter found
+in him a steady friend and coadjutor in his efforts to awaken the
+slumbering moral sense of his religious brethren.  The Marquis de
+Chastellux, author of _De la Felicite Publique_, describes him as a
+small, eager-faced man, full of zeal and activity, constantly engaged in
+works of benevolence, which were by no means confined to the blacks.
+Like Woolman and Lay, he advocated abstinence from intoxicating spirits.
+The poor French neutrals who were brought to Philadelphia from Nova
+Scotia, and landed penniless and despairing among strangers in tongue and
+religion, found in him a warm and untiring friend, through whose aid and
+sympathy their condition was rendered more comfortable than that of their
+fellow-exiles in other colonies.
+
+The annual assemblage of the Yearly Meeting in 1758 at Philadelphia must
+ever be regarded as one of the most important religious convocations in
+the history of the Christian church.  The labors of Woolman and his few
+but earnest associates had not been in vain.  A deep and tender interest
+had been awakened; and this meeting was looked forward to with varied
+feelings of solicitude by all parties.  All felt that the time had come
+for some definite action; conservative and reformer stood face to face in
+the Valley of Decision.  John Woolman, of course, was present,--a man
+humble and poor in outward appearance, his simple dress of undyed
+homespun cloth contrasting strongly with the plain but rich apparel of
+the representatives of the commerce of the city and of the large slave-
+stocked plantations of the country.  Bowed down by the weight of his
+concern for the poor slaves and for the well-being and purity of the
+Society, he sat silent during the whole meeting, while other matters were
+under discussion.  "My mind," he says, "was frequently clothed with
+inward prayer; and I could say with David that 'tears were my meat and
+drink, day and night.'  The case of slave-keeping lay heavy upon me; nor
+did I find any engagement, to speak directly to any other matter before
+the meeting."  When the important subject came up for consideration, many
+faithful Friends spoke with weight and earnestness.  No one openly
+justified slavery as a system, although some expressed a concern lest the
+meeting should go into measures calculated to cause uneasiness to many
+members of the Society.  It was also urged that Friends should wait
+patiently until the Lord in His own time should open a way for the
+deliverance of the slave.  This was replied to by John Woolman.  "My
+mind," he said, "is led to consider the purity of the Divine Being, and
+the justice of His judgments; and herein my soul is covered with
+awfulness.  I cannot forbear to hint of some cases where people have not
+been treated with the purity of justice, and the event has been most
+lamentable.  Many slaves on this continent are oppressed, and their cries
+have entered into the ears of the Most High.  Such are the purity and
+certainty of His judgments that He cannot be partial in our favor.  In
+infinite love and goodness He hath opened our understandings from one
+time to another, concerning our duty towards this people; and it is not a
+time for delay.  Should we now be sensible of what He requires of us, and
+through a respect to the private interest of some persons, or through a
+regard to some friendships which do not stand upon an immutable
+foundation, neglect to do our duty in firmness and constancy, still
+waiting for some extraordinary means to bring about their deliverance,
+God may by terrible things in righteousness answer us in this matter."
+
+This solemn and weighty appeal was responded to by many in the assembly,
+in a spirit of sympathy and unity.  Some of the slave-holding members
+expressed their willingness that a strict rule of discipline should be
+adopted against dealing in slaves for the future.  To this it was
+answered that the root of the evil would never be reached effectually
+until a searching inquiry was made into the circumstances and motives of
+such as held slaves.  At length the truth in a great measure triumphed
+over all opposition; and, without any public dissent, the meeting agreed
+that the injunction of our Lord and Saviour to do to others as we would
+that others should do to us should induce Friends who held slaves "to set
+them at liberty, making a Christian provision for them," and four
+Friends--John Woolman, John Scarborough, Daniel Stanton, and John Sykes--
+were approved of as suitable persons to visit and treat with such as kept
+slaves, within the limits of the meeting.
+
+This painful and difficult duty was faithfully performed.  In that
+meekness and humility of spirit which has nothing in common with the
+"fear of man, which bringeth a snare," the self-denying followers of
+their Divine Lord and Master "went about doing good."  In the city of
+Philadelphia, and among the wealthy planters of the country, they found
+occasion often to exercise a great degree of patience, and to keep a
+watchful guard over their feelings.  In his Journal for this important
+period of his life John Woolman says but little of his own services.  How
+arduous and delicate they were may be readily understood.  The number of
+slaves held by members of the Society was very large.  Isaac Jackson, in
+his report of his labors among slave-holders in a single Quarterly
+Meeting, states that he visited the owners of more than eleven hundred
+slaves.  From the same report may be gleaned some hints of the
+difficulties which presented themselves.  One elderly man says he has
+well brought up his eleven slaves, and "now they must work to maintain
+him."  Another owns it is all wrong, but "cannot release his slaves; his
+tender wife under great concern of mind" on account of his refusal.  A
+third has fifty slaves; knows it to be wrong, but can't see his way clear
+out of it.  "Perhaps," the report says, "interest dims his vision."  A
+fourth is full of "excuses and reasonings."  "Old Jos. Richison has
+forty, and is determined to keep them."  Another man has fifty, and
+"means to keep them."  Robert Ward "wants to release his slaves, but his
+wife and daughters hold back."  Another "owns it is wrong, but says he
+will not part with his negroes,--no, not while he lives."  The far
+greater number, however, confess the wrong of slavery, and agree to take
+measures for freeing their slaves.
+
+     [An incident occurred during this visit of Isaac Jackson which
+     impressed him deeply.  On the last evening, just as he was about to
+     turn homeward, he was told that a member of the Society whom he had
+     not seen owned a very old slave who was happy and well cared for.
+     It was a case which it was thought might well be left to take care
+     of itself.  Isaac Jackson, sitting in silence, did not feel his mind
+     quite satisfied; and as the evening wore away, feeling more and more
+     exercised, he expressed his uneasiness, when a young son of his host
+     eagerly offered to go with him and show him the road to the place.
+     The proposal was gladly accepted.  On introducing the object of
+     their visit, the Friend expressed much surprise that any uneasiness
+     should be felt in the case, but at length consented to sign the form
+     of emancipation, saying, at the same time, it would make no
+     difference in their relations, as the old man was perfectly happy.
+     At Isaac Jackson's request the slave was called in and seated before
+     them.  His form was nearly double, his thin hands were propped on
+     his knees, his white head was thrust forward, and his keen,
+     restless, inquiring eyes gleamed alternately on the stranger and on
+     his master.  At length he was informed of what had been done; that
+     he was no longer a slave, and that his master acknowledged his past
+     services entitled him to a maintenance so long as he lived.  The old
+     man listened in almost breathless wonder, his head slowly sinking on
+     his breast.  After a short pause, he clasped his hands; then
+     spreading them high over his hoary head, slowly and reverently
+     exclaimed, "Oh, goody Gody, oh!"--bringing his hands again down on
+     his knees.  Then raising them as before, he twice repeated the
+     solemn exclamation, and with streaming eyes and a voice almost too
+     much choked for utterance, he continued, "I thought I should die a
+     slave, and now I shall die a free man!"
+
+     It is a striking evidence of the divine compensations which are
+     sometimes graciously vouchsafed to those who have been faithful to
+     duty, that on his death-bed this affecting scene was vividly revived
+     in the mind of Isaac Jackson.  At that supreme moment, when all
+     other pictures of time were fading out, that old face, full of
+     solemn joy and devout thanksgiving, rose before him, and comforted
+     him as with the blessing of God.]
+
+An extract or two from the Journal at this period will serve to show both
+the nature of the service in which he was engaged and the frame of mind
+in which he accomplished it:--
+
+"In the beginning of the 12th month I joined in company with my friends,
+John Sykes and Daniel Stanton, in visiting such as had slaves.  Some,
+whose hearts were rightly exercised about them, appeared to be glad of
+our visit, but in some places our way was more difficult.  I often saw
+the necessity of keeping down to that root from whence our concern
+proceeded, and have cause in reverent thankfulness humbly to bow down
+before the Lord who was near to me, and preserved my mind in calmness
+under some sharp conflicts, and begat a spirit of sympathy and tenderness
+in me towards some who were grievously entangled by the spirit of this
+world."
+
+"1st month, 1759.--Having found my mind drawn to visit some of the more
+active members of society at Philadelphia who had slaves, I met my friend
+John Churchman there by agreement, and we continued about a week in the
+city.  We visited some that were sick, and some widows and their
+families; and the other part of the time was mostly employed in visiting
+such as had slaves. It was a time of deep exercise; but looking often to
+the Lord for assistance, He in unspeakable kindness favored us with the
+influence of that spirit which crucifies to the greatness and splendor of
+this world, and enabled us to go through some heavy labors, in which we
+found peace."
+
+These labors were attended with the blessing of the God of the poor and
+oppressed.  Dealing in slaves was almost entirely abandoned, and many who
+held slaves set them at liberty.  But many members still continuing the
+practice, a more emphatic testimony against it was issued by the Yearly
+Meeting in 1774; and two years after the subordinate meetings were
+directed to deny the right of membership to such as persisted in holding
+their fellow-men as property.
+
+A concern was now felt for the temporal and religious welfare of the
+emancipated slaves, and in 1779 the Yearly Meeting came to the conclusion
+that some reparation was due from the masters to their former slaves for
+services rendered while in the condition of slavery.  The following is an
+extract from an epistle on this subject:
+
+"We are united in judgment that the state of the oppressed people who
+have been held by any of us, or our predecessors, in captivity and
+slavery, calls for a deep inquiry and close examination how far we are
+clear of withholding from them what under such an exercise may open to
+view as their just right; and therefore we earnestly and affectionately
+entreat our brethren in religious profession to bring this matter home,
+and that all who have let the oppressed go free may attend to the further
+openings of duty.
+
+"A tender Christian sympathy appears to be awakened in the minds of many
+who are not in religious profession with us, who have seriously
+considered the oppressions and disadvantages under which those people
+have long labored; and whether a pious care extended to their offspring
+is not justly due from us to them is a consideration worthy our serious
+and deep attention."
+
+Committees to aid and advise the colored people were accordingly
+appointed in the various Monthly Meetings.  Many former owners of slaves
+faithfully paid the latter for their services, submitting to the award
+and judgment of arbitrators as to what justice required at their hands.
+So deeply had the sense of the wrong of slavery sunk into the hearts of
+Friends!
+
+John Woolman, in his Journal for 1769, states, that having some years
+before, as one of the executors of a will, disposed of the services of a
+negro boy belonging to the estate until he should reach the age of thirty
+years, he became uneasy in respect to the transaction, and, although he
+had himself derived no pecuniary benefit from it, and had simply acted as
+the agent of the heirs of the estate to which the boy belonged, he
+executed a bond, binding himself to pay the master of the young man for
+four years and a half of his unexpired term of service.
+
+The appalling magnitude of the evil against which he felt himself
+especially called to contend was painfully manifest to John Woolman.  At
+the outset, all about him, in every department of life and human
+activity, in the state and the church, he saw evidences of its strength,
+and of the depth and extent to which its roots had wound their way among
+the foundations of society.  Yet he seems never to have doubted for a
+moment the power of simple truth to eradicate it, nor to have hesitated
+as to his own duty in regard to it.  There was no groping like Samson in
+the gloom; no feeling in blind wrath and impatience for the pillars of
+the temple of Dagon.  "The candle of the Lord shone about him," and his
+path lay clear and unmistakable before him.  He believed in the goodness
+of God that leadeth to repentance; and that love could reach the witness
+for itself in the hearts of all men, through all entanglements of custom
+and every barrier of pride and selfishness.  No one could have a more
+humble estimate of himself; but as he went forth on his errand of mercy
+he felt the Infinite Power behind him, and the consciousness that he had
+known a preparation from that Power "to stand as a trumpet through which
+the Lord speaks."  The event justified his confidence; wherever he went
+hard hearts were softened, avarice and love of power and pride of opinion
+gave way before his testimony of love.
+
+The New England Yearly Meeting then, as now, was held in Newport, on
+Rhode Island.  In the year 1760 John Woolman, in the course of a
+religious visit to New England, attended that meeting.  He saw the
+horrible traffic in human beings,--the slave-ships lying at the wharves
+of the town, the sellers and buyers of men and women and children
+thronging the market-place.  The same abhorrent scenes which a few years
+after stirred the spirit of the excellent Hopkins to denounce the slave-
+trade and slavery as hateful in the sight of God to his congregation at
+Newport were enacted in the full view and hearing of the annual
+convocation of Friends, many of whom were themselves partakers in the
+shame and wickedness.  "Understanding," he says, "that a large number of
+slaves had been imported from Africa into the town, and were then on sale
+by a member of our Society, my appetite failed; I grew outwardly weak,
+and had a feeling of the condition of Habakkuk: 'When I heard, my belly
+trembled, my lips quivered; I trembled in myself, that I might rest in
+the day of trouble.'  I had many cogitations, and was sorely distressed."
+He prepared a memorial to the Legislature, then in session, for the
+signatures of Friends, urging that body to take measures to put an end to
+the importation of slaves.  His labors in the Yearly Meeting appear to
+have been owned and blessed by the Divine Head of the church.  The London
+Epistle for 1758, condemning the unrighteous traffic in men, was read,
+and the substance of it embodied in the discipline of the meeting; and
+the following query was adopted, to be answered by the subordinate
+meetings:--
+
+"Are Friends clear of importing negroes, or buying them when imported;
+and do they use those well, where they are possessed by inheritance or
+otherwise, endeavoring to train them up in principles of religion?"
+
+At the close of the Yearly Meeting, John Woolman requested those members
+of the Society who held slaves to meet with him in the chamber of the
+house for worship, where he expressed his concern for the well-being of
+the slaves, and his sense of the iniquity of the practice of dealing in
+or holding them as property.  His tender exhortations were not lost upon
+his auditors; his remarks were kindly received, and the gentle and loving
+spirit in which they were offered reached many hearts.
+
+In 1769, at the suggestion of the Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting, the
+Yearly Meeting expressed its sense of the wrongfulness of holding slaves,
+and appointed a large committee to visit those members who were
+implicated in the practice.  The next year this committee reported that
+they had completed their service, "and that their visits mostly seemed to
+be kindly accepted.  Some Friends manifested a disposition to set such at
+liberty as were suitable; some others, not having so clear a sight of
+such an unreasonable servitude as could be desired, were unwilling to
+comply with the advice given them at present, yet seemed willing to take
+it into consideration; a few others manifested a disposition to keep them
+in continued bondage."
+
+It was stated in the Epistle to London Yearly Meeting of the year 1772,
+that a few Friends had freed their slaves from bondage, but that others
+"have been so reluctant thereto that they have been disowned for not
+complying with the advice of this meeting."
+
+In 1773 the following minute was made: "It is our sense and judgment that
+truth not only requires the young of capacity and ability, but likewise
+the aged and impotent, and also all in a state of infancy and nonage,
+among Friends, to be discharged and set free from a state of slavery,
+that we do no more claim property in the human race, as we do in the
+brutes that perish."
+
+In 1782 no slaves were known to be held in the New England Yearly
+Meeting.  The next year it was recommended to the subordinate meetings to
+appoint committees to effect a proper and just settlement between the
+manumitted slaves and their former masters, for their past services.  In
+1784 it was concluded by the Yearly Meeting that any former slave-holder
+who refused to comply with the award of these committees should, after
+due care and labor with him, be disowned from the Society.  This was
+effectual; settlements without disownment were made to the satisfaction
+of all parties, and every case was disposed of previous to the year 1787.
+
+In the New York Yearly Meeting, slave-trading was prohibited about the
+middle of the last century.  In 1771, in consequence of an Epistle from
+the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, a committee was appointed to visit those
+who held slaves, and to advise with them in relation to emancipation.  In
+1776 it was made a disciplinary offence to buy, sell, or hold slaves upon
+any condition.  In 1784 but one slave was to be found in the limits of
+the meeting.  In the same year, by answers from the several subordinate
+meetings, it was ascertained that an equitable settlement for past
+services had been effected between the emancipated negroes and their
+masters in all save three cases.
+
+In the Virginia Yearly Meeting slavery had its strongest hold.  Its
+members, living in the midst of slave-holding communities, were
+necessarily exposed to influences adverse to emancipation.  I have
+already alluded to the epistle addressed to them by William Edmondson,
+and to the labors of John Woolman while travelling among them.  In 1757
+the Virginia Yearly Meeting condemned the foreign slave-trade.  In 1764
+it enjoined upon its members the duty of kindness towards their servants,
+of educating them, and carefully providing for their food and clothing.
+Four years after, its members were strictly prohibited from purchasing
+any more slaves.  In 1773 it earnestly recommended the immediate
+manumission of all slaves held in bondage, after the females had reached
+eighteen and the males twenty-one years of age.  At the same time it was
+advised that committees should be appointed for the purpose of
+instructing the emancipated persons in the principles of morality and
+religion, and for advising and aiding them in their temporal concerns.
+
+I quote a single paragraph from the advice sent down to the subordinate
+meetings, as a beautiful manifestation of the fruits of true repentance:--
+
+"It is the solid sense of this meeting, that we of the present generation
+are under strong obligations to express our love and concern for the
+offspring of those people who by their labors have greatly contributed
+towards the cultivation of these colonies under the afflictive
+disadvantage of enduring a hard bondage, and the benefit of whose toil
+many among us are enjoying."
+
+In 1784, the different Quarterly Meetings having reported that many still
+held slaves, notwithstanding the advice and entreaties of their friends,
+the Yearly Meeting directed that where endeavors to convince those
+offenders of their error proved ineffectual, the Monthly Meetings should
+proceed to disown them.  We have no means of ascertaining the precise
+number of those actually disowned for slave-holding in the Virginia
+Yearly Meeting, but it is well known to have been very small.  In almost
+all cases the care and assiduous labors of those who had the welfare of
+the Society and of humanity at heart were successful in inducing
+offenders to manumit their slaves, and confess their error in resisting
+the wishes of their friends and bringing reproach upon the cause of
+truth.
+
+So ended slavery in the Society of Friends.  For three quarters of a
+century the advice put forth in the meetings of the Society at stated
+intervals, that Friends should be "careful to maintain their testimony
+against slavery," has been adhered to so far as owning, or even hiring, a
+slave is concerned.  Apart from its first-fruits of emancipation, there
+is a perennial value in the example exhibited of the power of truth,
+urged patiently and in earnest love, to overcome the difficulties in the
+way of the eradication of an evil system, strengthened by long habit,
+entangled with all the complex relations of society, and closely allied
+with the love of power, the pride of family, and the lust of gain.
+
+The influence of the life and labors of John Woolman has by no means been
+confined to the religious society of which he was a member.  It may be
+traced wherever a step in the direction of emancipation has been taken in
+this country or in Europe.  During the war of the Revolution many of the
+noblemen and officers connected with the French army became, as their
+journals abundantly testify, deeply interested in the Society of Friends,
+and took back to France with them something of its growing anti-slavery
+sentiment.  Especially was this the case with Jean Pierre Brissot, the
+thinker and statesman of the Girondists, whose intimacy with Warner
+Mifflin, a friend and disciple of Woolman, so profoundly affected his
+whole after life.  He became the leader of the "Friends of the Blacks,"
+and carried with him to the scaffold a profound hatred, of slavery.  To
+his efforts may be traced the proclamation of emancipation in Hayti by
+the commissioners of the French convention, and indirectly the subsequent
+uprising of the blacks and their successful establishment of a free
+government.  The same influence reached Thomas Clarkson and stimulated
+his early efforts for the abolition of the slave-trade; and in after life
+the volume of the New Jersey Quaker was the cherished companion of
+himself and his amiable helpmate.  It was in a degree, at least, the
+influence of Stephen Grellet and William Allen, men deeply imbued with
+the spirit of Woolman, and upon whom it might almost be said his mantle
+had fallen, that drew the attention of Alexander I. of Russia to the
+importance of taking measures for the abolition of serfdom, an object the
+accomplishment of which the wars during his reign prevented, but which,
+left as a legacy of duty, has been peaceably effected by his namesake,
+Alexander II.  In the history of emancipation in our own country
+evidences of the same original impulse of humanity are not wanting.  In
+1790 memorials against slavery from the Society of Friends were laid
+before the first Congress of the United States.  Not content with
+clearing their own skirts of the evil, the Friends of that day took an
+active part in the formation of the abolition societies of New England,
+New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.  Jacob Lindley, Elisha
+Tyson, Warner Mifflin, James Pemberton, and other leading Friends were
+known throughout the country as unflinching champions of freedom.  One of
+the earliest of the class known as modern abolitionists was Benjamin
+Lundy, a pupil in the school of Woolman, through whom William Lloyd
+Garrison became interested in the great work to which his life has been
+so faithfully and nobly devoted.  Looking back to the humble workshop at
+Mount Holly from the stand-point of the Proclamation of President
+Lincoln, how has the seed sown in weakness been raised up in power!
+
+The larger portion of Woolman's writings is devoted to the subjects of
+slavery, uncompensated labor, and the excessive toil and suffering of the
+many to support the luxury of the few.  The argument running through them
+is searching, and in its conclusions uncompromising, but a tender love
+for the wrong-doer as well as the sufferer underlies all.  They aim to
+convince the judgment and reach the heart without awakening prejudice and
+passion.  To the slave-holders of his time they must have seemed like the
+voice of conscience speaking to them in the cool of the day.  One feels,
+in reading them, the tenderness and humility of a nature redeemed from
+all pride of opinion and self-righteousness, sinking itself out of sight,
+and intent only upon rendering smaller the sum of human sorrow and sin by
+drawing men nearer to God, and to each other.  The style is that of a man
+unlettered, but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness,
+the purity of whose heart enters into his language.  There is no attempt
+at fine writing, not a word or phrase for effect; it is the simple
+unadorned diction of one to whom the temptations of the pen seem to have
+been wholly unknown.  He wrote, as he believed, from an inward spiritual
+prompting; and with all his unaffected humility he evidently felt that
+his work was done in the clear radiance of
+
+          "The light which never was on land or sea."
+
+It was not for him to outrun his Guide, or, as Sir Thomas Browne
+expresses it, to "order the finger of the Almighty to His will and
+pleasure, but to sit still under the soft showers of Providence."  Very
+wise are these essays, but their wisdom is not altogether that of this
+world.  They lead one away from all the jealousies, strifes, and
+competitions of luxury, fashion, and gain, out of the close air of
+parties and sects, into a region of calmness,--
+
+                               "The haunt
+          Of every gentle wind whose breath can teach
+          The wild to love tranquillity,"--
+
+a quiet habitation where all things are ordered in what he calls "the
+pure reason;" a rest from all self-seeking, and where no man's interest
+or activity conflicts with that of another.  Beauty they certainly have,
+but it is not that which the rules of art recognize; a certain
+indefinable purity pervades them, making one sensible, as he reads, of a
+sweetness as of violets.  "The secret of Woolman's purity of style," said
+Dr. Channing, "is that his eye was single, and that conscience dictated
+his words."
+
+Of course we are not to look to the writings of such a man for tricks of
+rhetoric, the free play of imagination, or the unscrupulousness of
+epigram and antithesis.  He wrote as he lived, conscious of "the great
+Task-master's eye."  With the wise heathen Marcus Aurelius Antoninus he
+had learned to "wipe out imaginations, to check desire, and let the
+spirit that is the gift of God to every man, as his guardian and guide,
+bear rule."
+
+I have thought it inexpedient to swell the bulk of this volume with the
+entire writings appended to the old edition of the Journal, inasmuch as
+they mainly refer to a system which happily on this continent is no
+longer a question at issue.  I content myself with throwing together a
+few passages from them which touch subjects of present interest.
+
+"Selfish men may possess the earth: it is the meek alone who inherit it
+from the Heavenly Father free from all defilements and perplexities of
+unrighteousness."
+
+"Whoever rightly advocates the cause of some thereby promotes the good of
+the whole."
+
+"If one suffer by the unfaithfulness of another, the mind, the most noble
+part of him that occasions the discord, is thereby alienated from its
+true happiness."
+
+"There is harmony in the several parts of the Divine work in the hearts
+of men.  He who leads them to cease from those gainful employments which
+are carried on in the wisdom which is from beneath delivers also from the
+desire of worldly greatness, and reconciles to a life so plain that a
+little suffices."
+
+"After days and nights of drought, when the sky hath grown dark, and
+clouds like lakes of water have hung over our heads, I have at times
+beheld with awfulness the vehement lightning accompanying the blessings
+of the rain, a messenger from Him to remind us of our duty in a right use
+of His benefits."
+
+"The marks of famine in a land appear as humbling admonitions from God,
+instructing us by gentle chastisements, that we may remember that the
+outward supply of life is a gift from our Heavenly Father, and that we
+should not venture to use or apply that gift in a way contrary to pure
+reason."
+
+"Oppression in the extreme appears terrible; but oppression in more
+refined appearances remains to be oppression.  To labor for a perfect
+redemption from the spirit of it is the great business of the whole
+family of Jesus Christ in this world."
+
+"In the obedience of faith we die to self-love, and, our life being `hid
+with Christ in God,' our hearts are enlarged towards mankind universally;
+but many in striving to get treasures have departed from this true light
+of life and stumbled on the dark mountains.  That purity of life which
+proceeds from faithfulness in following the pure spirit of truth, that
+state in which our minds are devoted to serve God and all our wants are
+bounded by His wisdom, has often been opened to me as a place of
+retirement for the children of the light, in which we may be separated
+from that which disordereth and confuseth the affairs of society, and may
+have a testimony for our innocence in the hearts of those who behold us."
+
+"There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which in
+different places and ages bath had different names; it is, however, pure,
+and proceeds from God.  It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of
+religion nor excluded from any, when the heart stands in perfect
+sincerity.  In whomsoever this takes root and grows, they become
+brethren."
+
+"The necessity of an inward stillness hath appeared clear to my mind.  In
+true silence strength is renewed, and the mind is weaned from all things,
+save as they may be enjoyed in the Divine will; and a lowliness in
+outward living, opposite to worldly honor, becomes truly acceptable to
+us.  In the desire after outward gain the mind is prevented from a
+perfect attention to the voice of Christ; yet being weaned from all
+things, except as they may be enjoyed in the Divine will, the pure light
+shines into the soul.  Where the fruits of the spirit which is of this
+world are brought forth by many who profess to be led by the Spirit of
+truth, and cloudiness is felt to be gathering over the visible church,
+the sincere in heart, who abide in true stillness, and are exercised
+therein before the Lord for His name's sake, have knowledge of Christ in
+the fellowship of His sufferings; and inward thankfulness is felt at
+times, that through Divine love our own wisdom is cast out, and that
+forward, active part in us is subjected, which would rise and do
+something without the pure leadings of the spirit of Christ.
+
+"While aught remains in us contrary to a perfect resignation of our
+wills, it is like a seal to the book wherein is written 'that good and
+acceptable and perfect will of God' concerning us.  But when our minds
+entirely yield to Christ, that silence is known which followeth the
+opening of the last of the seals.  In this silence we learn to abide in
+the Divine will, and there feel that we have no cause to promote except
+that alone in which the light of life directs us."
+
+Occasionally, in Considerations on the Keeping of? Negroes, the intense
+interest of his subject gives his language something of passionate
+elevation, as in the following extract:--
+
+"When trade is carried on productive of much misery, and they who suffer
+by it are many thousand miles off, the danger is the greater of not
+laying their sufferings to heart.  In procuring slaves on the coast of
+Africa, many children are stolen privately; wars are encouraged among the
+negroes, but all is at a great distance.  Many groans arise from dying
+men which we hear not.  Many cries are uttered by widows and fatherless
+children which reach not our ears.  Many cheeks are wet with tears, and
+faces sad with unutterable grief, which we see not.  Cruel tyranny is
+encouraged.  The hands of robbers are strengthened.
+
+"Were we, for the term of one year only, to be eye-witnesses of what
+passeth in getting these slaves; were the blood that is there shed to be
+sprinkled on our garments; were the poor captives, bound with thongs, and
+heavily laden with elephants' teeth, to pass before our eyes on their way
+to the sea; were their bitter lamentations, day after day, to ring in our
+ears, and their mournful cries in the night to hinder us from sleeping,--
+were we to behold and hear these things, what pious heart would not be
+deeply affected with sorrow!"
+
+"It is good for those who live in fulness to cultivate tenderness of
+heart, and to improve every opportunity of being acquainted with the
+hardships and fatigues of those who labor for their living, and thus to
+think seriously with themselves: Am I influenced by true charity in
+fixing all my demands?  Have I no desire to support myself in expensive
+customs, because my acquaintances live in such customs?
+
+"If a wealthy man, on serious reflection, finds a witness in his own
+conscience that he indulges himself in some expensive habits, which might
+be omitted, consistently with the true design of living, and which, were
+he to change places with those who occupy his estate, he would desire to
+be discontinued by them,--whoever is thus awakened will necessarily find
+the injunction binding, 'Do ye even so to them.'  Divine Love imposeth no
+rigorous or unreasonable commands, but graciously points out the spirit
+of brotherhood and the way to happiness, in attaining which it is
+necessary that we relinquish all that is selfish.
+
+"Our gracious Creator cares and provides for all His creatures; His
+tender mercies are over all His works, and so far as true love influences
+our minds, so far we become interested in His workmanship, and feel a
+desire to make use of every opportunity to lessen the distresses of the
+afflicted, and to increase the happiness of the creation.  Here we have a
+prospect of one common interest from which our own is inseparable, so
+that to turn all we possess into the channel of universal love becomes
+the business of our lives."
+
+His liberality and freedom from "all narrowness as to sects and opinions"
+are manifest in the following passages:--
+
+"Men who sincerely apply their minds to true virtue, and find an inward
+support from above, by which all vicious inclinations are made subject;
+who love God sincerely, and prefer the real good of mankind universally
+to their own private interest,--though these, through the strength of
+education and tradition, may remain under some great speculative errors,
+it would be uncharitable to say that therefore God rejects them.  The
+knowledge and goodness of Him who creates, supports, and gives
+understanding to all men are superior to the various states and
+circumstances of His creatures, which to us appear the most difficult.
+Idolatry indeed is wickedness; but it is the thing, not the name, which
+is so.  Real idolatry is to pay that adoration to a creature which is
+known to be due only to the true God.
+
+"He who professeth to believe in one Almighty Creator, and in His Son
+Jesus Christ, and is yet more intent on the honors, profits, and
+friendships of the world than he is, in singleness of heart, to stand
+faithful to the Christian religion, is in the channel of idolatry; while
+the Gentile, who, notwithstanding some mistaken opinions, is established
+in the true principle of virtue, and humbly adores an Almighty Power, may
+be of the number that fear God and work righteousness."
+
+Nowhere has what is called the "Labor Question," which is now agitating
+the world, been discussed more wisely and with a broader humanity than in
+these essays.  His sympathies were with the poor man, yet the rich too
+are his brethren, and he warns them in love and pity of the consequences
+of luxury and oppression:--
+
+"Every degree of luxury, every demand for money inconsistent with the
+Divine order, hath connection with unnecessary labors."
+
+"To treasure up wealth for another generation, by means of the immoderate
+labor of those who in some measure depend upon us, is doing evil at
+present, without knowing that wealth thus gathered may not be applied to
+evil purposes when we are gone.  To labor hard, or cause others to do so,
+that we may live conformably to customs which our Redeemer
+discountenanced by His example, and which are contrary to Divine order,
+is to manure a soil for propagating an evil seed in the earth."
+
+"When house is joined to house, and field laid to field, until there is
+no place, and the poor are thereby straitened, though this is done by
+bargain and purchase, yet so far as it stands distinguished from
+universal love, so far that woe predicted by the prophet will accompany
+their proceedings.  As He who first founded the earth was then the true
+proprietor of it, so He still remains, and though He hath given it to the
+children of men, so that multitudes of people have had their sustenance
+from it while they continued here, yet He bath never alienated it, but
+His right is as good as at first; nor can any apply the increase of their
+possessions contrary to universal love, nor dispose of lands in a way
+which they know tends to exalt some by oppressing others, without being
+justly chargeable with usurpation."
+
+It will not lessen the value of the foregoing extracts in the minds of
+the true-disciples of our Divine Lord, that they are manifestly not
+written to subserve the interests of a narrow sectarianism.  They might
+have been penned by Fenelon in his time, or Robertson in ours, dealing as
+they do with Christian practice,--the life of Christ manifesting itself
+in purity and goodness,--rather than with the dogmas of theology.  The
+underlying thought of all is simple obedience to the Divine word in the
+soul.  "Not every one that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the
+kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father in heaven."
+In the preface to an English edition, published some years ago, it is
+intimated that objections had been raised to the Journal on the ground
+that it had so little to say of doctrines and so much of duties.  One may
+easily understand that this objection might have been forcibly felt by
+the slave-holding religious professors of Woolman's day, and that it may
+still be entertained by a class of persons who, like the Cabalists,
+attach a certain mystical significance to words, names, and titles, and
+who in consequence question the piety which hesitates to flatter the
+Divine ear by "vain repetitions" and formal enumeration of sacred
+attributes, dignities, and offices.  Every instinct of his tenderly
+sensitive nature shrank from the wordy irreverence of noisy profession.
+His very silence is significant: the husks of emptiness rustle in every
+wind; the full corn in the ear holds up its golden fruit noiselessly to
+the Lord of the harvest.  John Woolman's faith, like the Apostle's, is
+manifested by his labors, standing not in words but in the demonstration
+of the spirit,--a faith that works by love to the purifying of the heart.
+The entire outcome of this faith was love manifested in reverent waiting
+upon God, and in that untiring benevolence, that quiet but deep
+enthusiasm of humanity, which made his daily service to his fellow-
+creatures a hymn of praise to the common Father.
+
+However the intellect may criticise such a life, whatever defects it may
+present to the trained eyes of theological adepts, the heart has no
+questions to ask, but at once owns and reveres it.  Shall we regret that
+he who had so entered into fellowship of suffering with the Divine One,
+walking with Him under the cross, and dying daily to self, gave to the
+faith and hope that were in him this testimony of a life, rather than any
+form of words, however sound?  A true life is at once interpreter and
+proof of the gospel, and does more to establish its truth in the hearts
+of men than all the "Evidences" and "Bodies of Divinity" which have
+perplexed the world with more doubts than they solved.  Shall we venture
+to account it a defect in his Christian character, that, under an abiding
+sense of the goodness and long-suffering of God, he wrought his work in
+gentleness and compassion, with the delicate tenderness which comes of a
+deep sympathy with the trials and weaknesses of our nature, never
+allowing himself to indulge in heat or violence, persuading rather than
+threatening?  Did he overestimate that immeasurable Love, the
+manifestation of which in his own heart so reached the hearts of others,
+revealing everywhere unsuspected fountains of feeling and secret longings
+after purity, as the rod of the diviner detects sweet, cool water-springs
+under the parched surfaces of a thirsty land?  And, looking at the
+purity, wisdom, and sweetness of his life, who shall say that his faith
+in the teaching of the Holy Spirit--the interior guide and light--was a
+mistaken one?  Surely it was no illusion by which his feet were so guided
+that all who saw him felt that, like Enoch, he walked with God.  "Without
+the actual inspiration of the Spirit of Grace, the inward teacher and
+soul of our souls," says Fenelon, "we could neither do, will, nor believe
+good.  We must silence every creature, we must silence ourselves also, to
+hear in a profound stillness of the soul this inexpressible voice of
+Christ.  The outward word of the gospel itself without this living
+efficacious word within would be but an empty sound."  "Thou Lord," says
+Augustine in his Meditations, "communicatest thyself to all: thou
+teachest the heart without words; thou speakest to it without articulate
+sounds."
+
+     "However, I am sure that there is a common spirit that plays within
+     us, and that is the Spirit of God.  Whoever feels not the warm gale
+     and gentle ventilation of this Spirit, I dare not say he lives; for
+     truly without this to me there is no heat under the tropic, nor any
+     light though I dwelt in the body of the sun."--Sir Thomas Browne's
+     Religio Medici.
+
+Never was this divine principle more fully tested than by John Wool man;
+and the result is seen in a life of such rare excellence that the world
+is still better and richer for its sake, and the fragrance of it comes
+down to us through a century, still sweet and precious.
+
+It will be noted throughout the Journal and essays that in his lifelong
+testimony against wrong he never lost sight of the oneness of humanity,
+its common responsibility, its fellowship of suffering and communion of
+sin.  Few have ever had so profound a conviction of the truth of the
+Apostle's declaration that no man liveth and no man dieth to himself.
+Sin was not to him an isolated fact, the responsibility of which began
+and ended with the individual transgressor; he saw it as a part of a vast
+network and entanglement, and traced the lines of influence converging
+upon it in the underworld of causation.  Hence the wrong and discord
+which pained him called out pity, rather than indignation.  The first
+inquiry which they awakened was addressed to his own conscience.  How far
+am I in thought, word, custom, responsible for this?  Have none of my
+fellow-creatures an equitable right to any part which is called mine?
+Have the gifts and possessions received by me from others been conveyed
+in a way free from all unrighteousness?  "Through abiding in the law of
+Christ," he says, "we feel a tenderness towards our fellow-creatures, and
+a concern so to walk that our conduct may not be the means of
+strengthening them in error."  He constantly recurs to the importance of
+a right example in those who profess to be led by the spirit of Christ,
+and who attempt to labor in His name for the benefit of their fellow-men.
+If such neglect or refuse themselves to act rightly, they can but
+"entangle the minds of others and draw a veil over the face of
+righteousness."  His eyes were anointed to see the common point of
+departure from the Divine harmony, and that all the varied growths of
+evil had their underlying root in human selfishness.  He saw that every
+sin of the individual was shared in greater or less degree by all whose
+lives were opposed to the Divine order, and that pride, luxury, and
+avarice in one class gave motive and temptation to the grosser forms of
+evil in another.  How gentle, and yet how searching, are his rebukes of
+self-complacent respectability, holding it responsible, in spite of all
+its decent seemings, for much of the depravity which it condemned with
+Pharisaical harshness!  In his Considerations on the True Harmony of
+Mankind be dwells with great earnestness upon the importance of
+possessing "the mind of Christ," which removes from the heart the desire
+of superiority and worldly honors, incites attention to the Divine
+Counsellor, and awakens an ardent engagement to promote the happiness of
+all.  "This state," he says, "in which every motion from the selfish
+spirit yieldeth to pure love, I may acknowledge with gratitude to the
+Father of Mercies, is often opened before me as a pearl to seek after."
+
+At times when I have felt true love open my heart towards my fellow-
+creatures, and have been engaged in weighty conversation in the cause of
+righteousness, the instructions I have received under these exercises in
+regard to the true use of the outward gifts of God have made deep and
+lasting impressions on my mind.  I have beheld how the desire to provide
+wealth and to uphold a delicate life has greviously entangled many, and
+has been like a snare to their offspring; and though some have been
+affected with a sense of their difficulties, and have appeared desirous
+at times to be helped out of them, yet for want of abiding under the
+humbling power of truth they have continued in these entanglements;
+expensive living in parents and children hath called for a large supply,
+and in answering this call the 'faces of the poor' have been ground away,
+and made thin through hard dealing.
+
+"There is balm; there is a physician! and oh what longings do I feel that
+we may embrace the means appointed for our healing; may know that removed
+which now ministers cause for the cries of many to ascend to Heaven
+against their oppressors; and that thus we may see the true harmony
+restored!--a restoration of that which was lost at Babel, and which will
+be, as the prophet expresses it, 'the returning of a pure language!'"
+
+It is easy to conceive how unwelcome this clear spiritual insight must
+have been to the superficial professors of his time busy in tithing mint,
+anise, and cummin.  There must have been something awful in the presence
+of one endowed with the gift of looking through all the forms, shows, and
+pretensions of society, and detecting with certainty the germs of evil
+hidden beneath them; a man gentle and full of compassion, clothed in "the
+irresistible might of meekness," and yet so wise in spiritual
+discernment,
+
+          "Bearing a touchstone in his hand
+          And testing all things in the land
+          By his unerring spell.
+
+          "Quick births of transmutation smote
+          The fair to foul, the foul to fair;
+          Purple nor ermine did he spare,
+          Nor scorn the dusty coat."
+
+In bringing to a close this paper, the preparation of which has been to
+me a labor of love, I am not unmindful of the wide difference between the
+appreciation of a pure and true life and the living of it, and am willing
+to own that in delineating a character of such moral and spiritual
+symmetry I have felt something like rebuke from my own words.  I have
+been awed and solemnized by the presence of a serene and beautiful spirit
+redeemed of the Lord from all selfishness, and I have been made thankful
+for the ability to recognize and the disposition to love him.  I leave
+the book with its readers.  They may possibly make large deductions from
+my estimate of the author; they may not see the importance of all his
+self-denying testimonies; they may question some of his scruples, and
+smile over passages of childlike simplicity; but I believe they will all
+agree in thanking me for introducing them to the Journal of John Woolman.
+
+AMESBURY, 20th 1st mo.,1871.
+
+
+
+
+
+                            HAVERFORD COLLEGE.
+
+                 Letter to President Thomas Chase, LL. D.
+
+                         AMESBURY, MASS., 9th mo., 1884.
+
+THE Semi-Centennial of Haverford College is an event that no member of
+the Society of Friends can regard without deep interest.  It would give
+me great pleasure to be with you on the 27th inst., but the years rest
+heavily upon me, and I have scarcely health or strength for such a
+journey.
+
+It was my privilege to visit Haverford in 1838, in "the day of small
+beginnings."  The promise of usefulness which it then gave has been more
+than fulfilled.  It has grown to be a great and well-established
+institution, and its influence in thorough education and moral training
+has been widely felt.  If the high educational standard presented in the
+scholastic treatise of Barclay and the moral philosophy of Dymond has
+been lowered or disowned by many who, still retaining the name of
+Quakerism, have lost faith in the vital principle wherein precious
+testimonials of practical righteousness have their root, and have gone
+back to a dead literalness, and to those materialistic ceremonials for
+leaving which our old confessors suffered bonds and death, Haverford, at
+least, has been in a good degree faithful to the trust committed to it.
+
+Under circumstances of more than ordinary difficulty, it has endeavored
+to maintain the Great Testimony.  The spirit of its culture has not been
+a narrow one, nor could it be, if true to the broad and catholic
+principles of the eminent worthies who founded the State of
+Pennsylvania, Penn, Lloyd, Pastorius, Logan, and Story; men who were
+masters of the scientific knowledge and culture of their age, hospitable
+to all truth, and open to all light, and who in some instances
+anticipated the result of modern research and critical inquiry.
+
+It was Thomas Story, a minister of the Society of Friends, and member of
+Penn's Council of State, who, while on a religious visit to England,
+wrote to James Logan that he had read on the stratified rocks of
+Scarborough, as from the finger of God, proofs of the immeasurable age
+of our planet, and that the "days" of the letter of Scripture could
+only mean vast spaces of time.
+
+May Haverford emulate the example of these brave but reverent men, who,
+in investigating nature, never lost sight of the Divine Ideal, and who,
+to use the words of Fenelon, "Silenced themselves to hear in the
+stillness of their souls the inexpressible voice of Christ."  Holding
+fast the mighty truth of the Divine Immanence, the Inward Light and
+Word, a Quaker college can have no occasion to renew the disastrous
+quarrel of religion with science.  Against the sublime faith which shall
+yet dominate the world, skepticism has no power.  No possible
+investigation of natural facts; no searching criticism of letter and
+tradition can disturb it, for it has its witness in all human hearts.
+
+That Haverford may fully realize and improve its great opportunities as
+an approved seat of learning and the exponent of a Christian philosophy
+which can never be superseded, which needs no change to fit it for
+universal acceptance, and which, overpassing the narrow limits of sect,
+is giving new life and hope to Christendom, and finding its witnesses in
+the Hindu revivals of the Brahmo Somaj and the fervent utterances of
+Chunda Sen and Mozoomdar, is the earnest desire of thy friend.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                CRITICISM
+
+                                EVANGELINE
+
+                    A review of Mr. Longfellow's poem.
+
+EUREKA!  Here, then, we have it at last,--an American poem, with the lack
+of which British reviewers have so long reproached us.  Selecting the
+subject of all others best calculated for his purpose,--the expulsion of
+the French settlers of Acadie from their quiet and pleasant homes around
+the Basin of Minas, one of the most sadly romantic passages in the
+history of the Colonies of the North,--the author has succeeded in
+presenting a series of exquisite pictures of the striking and peculiar
+features of life and nature in the New World.  The range of these
+delineations extends from Nova Scotia on the northeast to the spurs of
+the Rocky Mountains on the west and the Gulf of Mexico on the south.
+Nothing can be added to his pictures of quiet farm-life in Acadie, the
+Indian summer of our northern latitudes, the scenery of the Ohio and
+Mississippi Rivers, the bayous and cypress forests of the South, the
+mocking-bird, the prairie, the Ozark hills, the Catholic missions, and
+the wild Arabs of the West, roaming with the buffalo along the banks of
+the Nebraska.  The hexameter measure he has chosen has the advantage of a
+prosaic freedom of expression, exceedingly well adapted to a descriptive
+and narrative poem; yet we are constrained to think that the story of
+Evangeline would have been quite as acceptable to the public taste had it
+been told in the poetic prose of the author's Hyperion.
+
+In reading it and admiring its strange melody we were not without fears
+that the success of Professor Longfellow in this novel experiment might
+prove the occasion of calling out a host of awkward imitators, leading us
+over weary wastes of hexameters, enlivened neither by dew, rain, nor
+fields of offering.
+
+Apart from its Americanism, the poem has merits of a higher and universal
+character.  It is not merely a work of art; the pulse of humanity throbs
+warmly through it.  The portraits of Basil the blacksmith, the old
+notary, Benedict Bellefontaine, and good Father Felician, fairly glow
+with life.  The beautiful Evangeline, loving and faithful unto death, is
+a heroine worthy of any poet of the present century.
+
+The editor of the Boston Chronotype, in the course of an appreciative
+review of this poem, urges with some force a single objection, which we
+are induced to notice, as it is one not unlikely to present itself to the
+minds of other readers:--
+
+"We think Mr. Longfellow ought to have expressed a much deeper
+indignation at the base, knavish, and heartless conduct of the English
+and Colonial persecutors than he has done.  He should have put far bolder
+and deeper tints in the picture of suffering.  One great, if not the
+greatest, end of poetry is rhadamanthine justice.  The poet should mete
+out their deserts to all his heroes; honor to whom honor, and infamy to
+whom infamy, is due.
+
+"It is true that the wrong in this case is in a great degree fathered
+upon our own Massachusetts; and it maybe said that it is afoul bird that
+pollutes its own nest.  We deny the applicability of the rather musty
+proverb.  All the worse.  Of not a more contemptible vice is what is
+called American literature guilty than this of unmitigated self-
+laudation.  If we persevere in it, the stock will become altogether too
+small for the business.  It seems that no period of our history has been
+exempt from materials for patriotic humiliation and national self-
+reproach; and surely the present epoch is laying in a large store of that
+sort.  Had our poets always told us the truth of ourselves, perhaps it
+would now be otherwise.  National self-flattery and concealment of faults
+must of course have their natural results."
+
+We must confess that we read the first part of Evangeline with something
+of the feeling so forcibly expressed by Professor Wright.  The natural
+and honest indignation with which, many years ago, we read for the first
+time that dark page of our Colonial history--the expulsion of the French
+neutrals--was reawakened by the simple pathos of the poem; and we longed
+to find an adequate expression of it in the burning language of the poet.
+We marvelled that he who could so touch the heart by his description of
+the sad suffering of the Acadian peasants should have permitted the
+authors of that suffering to escape without censure.  The outburst of the
+stout Basil, in the church of Grand Pre, was, we are fain to acknowledge,
+a great relief to us.  But, before reaching the close of the volume, we
+were quite reconciled to the author's forbearance.  The design of the
+poem is manifestly incompatible with stern "rhadamanthine justice" and
+indignant denunciation of wrong.  It is a simple story of quiet pastoral
+happiness, of great sorrow and painful bereavement, and of the endurance
+of a love which, hoping and seeking always, wanders evermore up and down
+the wilderness of the world, baffled at every turn, yet still retaining
+faith in God and in the object of its lifelong quest.  It was no part of
+the writer's object to investigate the merits of the question at issue
+between the poor Acadians and their Puritan neighbors.  Looking at the
+materials before him with the eye of an artist simply, he has arranged
+them to suit his idea of the beautiful and pathetic, leaving to some
+future historian the duty of sitting in judgment upon the actors in the
+atrocious outrage which furnished them.  With this we are content.  The
+poem now has unity and sweetness which might have been destroyed by
+attempting to avenge the wrongs it so vividly depicts.  It is a psalm of
+love and forgiveness: the gentleness and peace of Christian meekness and
+forbearance breathe through it.  Not a word of censure is directly
+applied to the marauding workers of the mighty sorrow which it describes
+just as it would a calamity from the elements,--a visitation of God.  The
+reader, however, cannot fail to award justice to the wrong-doers.  The
+unresisting acquiescence of the Acadians only deepens his detestation of
+the cupidity and religious bigotry of their spoilers.  Even in the
+language of the good Father Felician, beseeching his flock to submit to
+the strong hand which had been laid upon them, we see and feel the
+magnitude of the crime to be forgiven:--
+
+     "Lo, where the crucified Christ from his cross is gazing upon you!
+     See in those sorrowful eyes what meekness and holy     compassion!
+     Hark!  how those lips still repeat the prayer, O Father, forgive
+     them!
+     Let us repeat that prayer in the hour when the wicked assail us;
+     Let us repeat it now, and say, O Father, forgive them!"
+
+How does this simple prayer of the Acadians contrast with the "deep
+damnation of their taking off!"
+
+The true history of the Puritans of New England is yet to be written.
+Somewhere midway between the caricatures of the Church party and the
+self-laudations of their own writers the point may doubtless be found
+from whence an impartial estimate of their character may be formed.  They
+had noble qualities: the firmness and energy which they displayed in the
+colonization of New England must always command admiration.  We would not
+rob them, were it in our power to do so, of one jot or tittle of their
+rightful honor.  But, with all the lights which we at present possess, we
+cannot allow their claim of saintship without some degree of
+qualification.  How they seemed to their Dutch neighbors at New
+Netherlands, and their French ones at Nova Scotia, and to the poor
+Indians, hunted from their fisheries and game-grounds, we can very well
+conjecture.  It may be safely taken for granted that their gospel claim
+to the inheritance of the earth was not a little questionable to the
+Catholic fleeing for his life from their jurisdiction, to the banished
+Baptist shaking off the dust of his feet against them, and to the
+martyred Quaker denouncing woe and judgment upon them from the steps of
+the gallows.  Most of them were, beyond a doubt, pious and sincere; but
+we are constrained to believe that among them were those who wore the
+livery of heaven from purely selfish motives, in a community where
+church-membership was an indispensable requisite, the only open sesame
+before which the doors of honor and distinction swung wide to needy or
+ambitious aspirants.  Mere adventurers, men of desperate fortunes,
+bankrupts in character and purse, contrived to make gain of godliness
+under the church and state government of New England, put on the austere
+exterior of sanctity, quoted Scripture, anathematized heretics, whipped
+Quakers, exterminated Indians, burned and spoiled the villages of their
+Catholic neighbors, and hewed down their graven images and "houses of
+Rimmon."  It is curious to observe how a fierce religious zeal against
+heathen and idolaters went hand in hand with the old Anglo-Saxon love of
+land and plunder.  Every crusade undertaken against the Papists of the
+French colonies had its Puritan Peter the Hermit to summon the saints to
+the wars of the Lord.  At the siege of Louisburg, ten years before the
+onslaught upon the Acadian settlers, one minister marched with the
+Colonial troops, axe in hand, to hew down the images in the French
+churches; while another officiated in the double capacity of drummer and
+chaplain,--a "drum ecclesiastic," as Hudibras has it.
+
+At the late celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims in New York, the
+orator of the day labored at great length to show that the charge of
+intolerance, as urged against the colonists of New England, is unfounded
+in fact.  The banishment of the Catholics was very sagaciously passed
+over in silence, inasmuch as the Catholic Bishop of New York was one of
+the invited guests, and (hear it, shade of Cotton Mather!) one of the
+regular toasts was a compliment to the Pope.  The expulsion of Roger
+Williams was excused and partially justified; while the whipping, ear-
+cropping, tongue-boring, and hanging of the Quakers was defended, as the
+only effectual method of dealing with such devil-driven heretics, as
+Mather calls them.  The orator, in the new-born zeal of his amateur
+Puritanism, stigmatizes the persecuted class as "fanatics and ranters,
+foaming forth their mad opinions;" compares them to the Mormons and the
+crazy followers of Mathias; and cites an instance of a poor enthusiast,
+named Eccles, who, far gone in the "tailor's melancholy," took it into
+his head that he must enter into a steeple-house pulpit and stitch
+breeches "in singing time,"--a circumstance, by the way, which took place
+in Old England,--as a justification of the atrocious laws of the
+Massachusetts Colony.  We have not the slightest disposition to deny the
+fanaticism and folly of some few professed Quakers in that day; and had
+the Puritans treated them as the Pope did one of their number whom he
+found crazily holding forth in the church of St. Peter, and consigned
+them to the care of physicians as religious monomaniacs, no sane man
+could have blamed them.  Every sect, in its origin, and especially in its
+time of persecution, has had its fanatics.  The early Christians, if we
+may credit the admissions of their own writers or attach the slightest
+credence to the statements of pagan authors, were by no means exempt from
+reproach and scandal in this respect.  Were the Puritans themselves the
+men to cast stones at the Quakers and Baptists?  Had they not, in the
+view at least of the Established Church, turned all England upside down
+with their fanaticisms and extravagances of doctrine and conduct?  How
+look they as depicted in the sermons of Dr. South, in the sarcastic pages
+of Hudibras, and the coarse caricatures of the clerical wits of the times
+of the second Charles?  With their own backs scored and their ears
+cropped for the crime of denying the divine authority of church and state
+in England, were they the men to whip Baptists and hang Quakers for doing
+the same thing in Massachusetts?
+
+Of all that is noble and true in the Puritan character we are sincere
+admirers.  The generous and self-denying apostleship of Eliot is, of
+itself, a beautiful page in their history.  The physical daring and
+hardihood with which, amidst the times of savage warfare, they laid the
+foundations of mighty states, and subdued the rugged soil, and made the
+wilderness blossom; their steadfast adherence to their religious
+principles, even when the Restoration had made apostasy easy and
+profitable; and the vigilance and firmness with which, under all
+circumstances, they held fast their chartered liberties and extorted new
+rights and privileges from the reluctant home government,--justly entitle
+them to the grateful remembrance of a generation now reaping the fruits
+of their toils and sacrifices.  But, in expressing our gratitude to the
+founders of New England, we should not forget what is due to truth and
+justice; nor, for the sake of vindicating them from the charge of that
+religious intolerance which, at the time, they shared with nearly all
+Christendom, undertake to defend, in the light of the nineteenth century,
+opinions and practices hostile to the benignant spirit of the gospel and
+subversive of the inherent rights of man.
+
+
+
+
+
+                            MIRTH AND MEDICINE
+
+               A review of Poems by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
+
+IF any of our readers (and at times we fear it is the case with all) need
+amusement and the wholesome alterative of a hearty laugh, we commend
+them, not to Dr. Holmes the physician, but to Dr. Holmes the scholar, the
+wit, and the humorist; not to the scientific medical professor's
+barbarous Latin, but to his poetical prescriptions, given in choice old
+Saxon.  We have tried them, and are ready to give the Doctor certificates
+of their efficacy.
+
+Looking at the matter from the point of theory only, we should say that a
+physician could not be otherwise than melancholy.  A merry doctor!  Why,
+one might as well talk of a laughing death's-head,--the cachinnation of a
+monk's _memento mori_.  This life of ours is sorrowful enough at its best
+estate; the brightest phase of it is "sicklied o'er with the pale cast"
+of the future or the past.  But it is the special vocation of the doctor
+to look only upon the shadow; to turn away from the house of feasting and
+go down to that of mourning; to breathe day after day the atmosphere of
+wretchedness; to grow familiar with suffering; to look upon humanity
+disrobed of its pride and glory, robbed of all its fictitious ornaments,
+--weak, helpless, naked,--and undergoing the last fearful metempsychosis
+from its erect and godlike image, the living temple of an enshrined
+divinity, to the loathsome clod and the inanimate dust.  Of what ghastly
+secrets of moral and physical disease is he the depositary!  There is woe
+before him and behind him; he is hand and glove with misery by
+prescription,--the ex officio gauger of the ills that flesh is heir to.
+He has no home, unless it be at the bedside of the querulous, the
+splenetic, the sick, and the dying.  He sits down to carve his turkey,
+and is summoned off to a post-mortem examination of another sort.  All
+the diseases which Milton's imagination embodied in the lazar-house dog
+his footsteps and pluck at his doorbell.  Hurrying from one place to
+another at their beck, he knows nothing of the quiet comfort of the
+"sleek-headed men who sleep o' nights."  His wife, if he has one, has an
+undoubted right to advertise him as a deserter of "bed and board."  His
+ideas of beauty, the imaginations of his brain, and the affections of his
+heart are regulated and modified by the irrepressible associations of his
+luckless profession.  Woman as well as man is to him of the earth,
+earthy.  He sees incipient disease where the uninitiated see only
+delicacy.  A smile reminds him of his dental operations; a blushing cheek
+of his hectic patients; pensive melancholy is dyspepsia; sentimentalism,
+nervousness.  Tell him of lovelorn hearts, of the "worm I' the bud," of
+the mental impalement upon Cupid's arrow, like that of a giaour upon the
+spear of a janizary, and he can only think of lack of exercise, of
+tightlacing, and slippers in winter.  Sheridan seems to have understood
+all this, if we may judge from the lament of his Doctor, in St.
+Patrick's Day, over his deceased helpmate.  "Poor dear Dolly," says he.
+"I shall never see her like again; such an arm for a bandage!  veins that
+seemed to invite the lancet!  Then her skin,--smooth and white as a
+gallipot; her mouth as round and not larger than that of a penny vial;
+and her teeth,--none of your sturdy fixtures,--ache as they would, it was
+only a small pull, and out they came.  I believe I have drawn half a
+score of her dear pearls.  [Weeps.] But what avails her beauty?  She has
+gone, and left no little babe to hang like a label on papa's neck!"
+
+So much for speculation and theory.  In practice it is not so bad after
+all.  The grave-digger in Hamlet has his jokes and grim jests.  We have
+known many a jovial sexton; and we have heard clergymen laugh heartily at
+small provocation close on the heel of a cool calculation that the great
+majority of their fellow-creatures were certain of going straight to
+perdition.  Why, then, should not even the doctor have his fun?  Nay, is
+it not his duty to be merry, by main force if necessary?  Solomon, who,
+from his great knowledge of herbs, must have been no mean practitioner
+for his day, tells us that "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine;"
+and universal experience has confirmed the truth of his maxim.  Hence it
+is, doubtless, that we have so many anecdotes of facetious doctors,
+distributing their pills and jokes together, shaking at the same time the
+contents of their vials and the sides of their patients.  It is merely
+professional, a trick of the practice, unquestionably, in most cases; but
+sometimes it is a "natural gift," like that of the "bonesetters," and
+"scrofula strokers," and "cancer curers," who carry on a sort of guerilla
+war with human maladies.  Such we know to be the case with Dr. Holmes.
+He was born for the "laughter cure," as certainly as Priessnitz was for
+the "water cure," and has been quite as successful in his way, while his
+prescriptions are infinitely more agreeable.
+
+The volume now before us gives, in addition to the poems and lyrics
+contained in the two previous editions, some hundred or more pages of the
+later productions of the author, in the sprightly vein, and marked by the
+brilliant fancy and felicitous diction for which the former were
+noteworthy.  His longest and most elaborate poem, _Urania_, is perhaps
+the best specimen of his powers.  Its general tone is playful and
+humorous; but there are passages of great tenderness and pathos.  Witness
+the following, from a description of the city churchgoers.  The whole
+compass of our literature has few passages to equal its melody and
+beauty.
+
+    "Down the chill street, which winds in gloomiest shade,
+     What marks betray yon solitary maid?
+     The cheek's red rose, that speaks of balmier air,
+     The Celtic blackness of her braided hair;
+     The gilded missal in her kerchief tied;
+     Poor Nora, exile from Killarney's side!
+     Sister in toil, though born of colder skies,
+     That left their azure in her downcast eyes,
+     See pallid Margaret, Labor's patient child,
+     Scarce weaned from home, a nursling of the wild,
+     Where white Katahdin o'er the horizon shines,
+     And broad Penobscot dashes through the pines;
+     Still, as she hastes, her careful fingers hold
+     The unfailing hymn-book in its cambric fold:
+     Six days at Drudgery's heavy wheel she stands,
+     The seventh sweet morning folds her weary hands.
+     Yes, child of suffering, thou mayst well be sure
+     He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor."
+
+This is but one of many passages, showing that the author is capable of
+moving the heart as well as of tickling the fancy.  There is no straining
+for effect; simple, natural thoughts are expressed in simple and
+perfectly transparent language.
+
+_Terpsichore_, read at an annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at
+Cambridge, sparkles throughout with keen wit, quaint conceits, and satire
+so good-natured that the subjects of it can enjoy it as heartily as their
+neighbors.  Witness this thrust at our German-English writers:--
+
+    "Essays so dark, Champollion might despair
+     To guess what mummy of a thought was there,
+     Where our poor English, striped with foreign phrase, Looks like a
+     zebra in a parson's chaise."
+
+Or this at our transcendental friends:--
+
+    "Deluded infants!  will they never know
+     Some doubts must darken o'er the world below
+     Though all the Platos of the nursery trail
+     Their clouds of glory at the go-cart's tail?"
+
+The lines _On Lending a Punch-Bowl_ are highly characteristic.  Nobody
+but Holmes could have conjured up so many rare fancies in connection with
+such a matter.  Hear him:--
+
+"This ancient silver bowl of mine, it tells of good old times,
+Of joyous days, and jolly nights, and merry Christmas chimes;
+They were a free and jovial race, but honest, brave, and true,
+That dipped their ladle in the punch when this old bowl was new.
+
+"A Spanish galleon brought the bar; so runs the ancient tale;
+'T was hammered by an Antwerp smith, whose arm was like a flail;
+And now and then between the strokes, for fear his strength should fail,
+He wiped his brow, and quaffed a cup of good old Flemish ale.
+
+"'T was purchased by an English squire to please his loving dame,
+Who saw the cherubs, and conceived a longing for the same;
+And oft as on the ancient stock another twig was found,
+'T was filled with candle spiced and hot and handed smoking round.
+
+"But, changing hands, it reached at length a Puritan divine,
+Who used to follow Timothy, and take a little wine,
+But hated punch and prelacy; and so it was, perhaps,
+He went to Leyden, where he found conventicles and schnaps.
+
+"And then, of course, you know what's next,--it left the Dutchman's shore
+With those that in the Mayflower came,--a hundred souls and more,--
+Along with all the furniture, to fill their new abodes,--
+To judge by what is still on hand, at least a hundred loads.
+
+"'T was on a dreary winter's eve, the night was closing dim,
+When brave Miles Standish took the bowl, and filled it to the brim;
+The little Captain stood and stirred the posset with his sword,
+And all his sturdy men-at-arms were ranged about the board.
+
+"He poured the fiery Hollands in,--the man that never feared,--
+He took a long and solemn draught, and wiped his yellow beard;
+And one by one the musketeers--the men that fought and prayed--
+All drank as 't were their mother's milk, and not a man afraid.
+
+"That night, affrighted from his nest, the screaming eagle flew,
+He heard the Pequot's ringing whoop, the soldier's wild halloo;
+And there the sachem learned the rule he taught to kith and kin,
+'Run from the white man when you find he smells of Hollands gin!'"
+
+
+In his _Nux Postcoenatica_ he gives us his reflections on being invited
+to a dinner-party, where he was expected to "set the table in a roar" by
+reading funny verses.  He submits it to the judgment and common sense of
+the importunate bearer of the invitation, that this dinner-going, ballad-
+making, mirth-provoking habit is not likely to benefit his reputation as
+a medical professor.
+
+"Besides, my prospects. Don't you know that people won't employ
+A man that wrongs his manliness by laughing like a boy,
+And suspect the azure blossom that unfolds upon a shoot,
+As if Wisdom's oldpotato could not flourish at its root?
+
+"It's a very fine reflection, when you're etching out a smile
+On a copperplate of faces that would stretch into a mile.
+That, what with sneers from enemies and cheapening shrugs from friends,
+It will cost you all the earnings that a month of labor lends."
+
+
+There are, as might be expected, some commonplace pieces in the volume,--
+a few failures in the line of humor.  The _Spectre Pig_, the _Dorchester
+Giant_, the _Height of the Ridiculous_, and one or two others might be
+omitted in the next edition without detriment.  They would do well enough
+for an amateur humorist, but are scarcely worthy of one who stands at the
+head of the profession.
+
+It was said of James Smith, of the Rejected Addresses, that "if he had
+not been a witty man, he would have been a great man."  Hood's humor and
+drollery kept in the background the pathos and beauty of his sober
+productions; and Dr. Holmes, we suspect, might have ranked higher among a
+large class of readers than he now does had he never written his _Ballad
+of the Oysterman_, his _Comet_, and his _September Gale_.  Such lyrics as
+_La Grisette_, the _Puritan's Vision_, and that unique compound of humor
+and pathos, _The Last Leaf_; show that he possesses the power of touching
+the deeper chords of the heart and of calling forth tears as well as
+smiles.  Who does not feel the power of this simple picture of the old
+man in the last-mentioned poem?
+
+              "But now he walks the streets,
+               And he looks at all he meets
+               Sad and wan,
+               And he shakes his feeble head,
+               That it seems as if he said,
+               'They are gone.'
+
+              "The mossy marbles rest
+               On the lips that he has prest
+               In their bloom,
+               And the names he loved to hear
+               Have been carved for many a year
+               On the tomb."
+
+Dr. Holmes has been likened to Thomas Hood; but there is little in common
+between them save the power of combining fancy and sentiment with
+grotesque drollery and humor.  Hood, under all his whims and oddities,
+conceals the vehement intensity of a reformer.  The iron of the world's
+wrongs had entered into his soul; there is an undertone of sorrow in his
+lyrics; his sarcasm, directed against oppression and bigotry, at times
+betrays the earnestness of one whose own withers have been wrung.  Holmes
+writes simply for the amusement of himself and his readers; he deals only
+with the vanity, the foibles, and the minor faults of mankind, good
+naturedly and almost sympathizingly suggesting excuses for the folly
+which he tosses about on the horns of his ridicule.  In this respect he
+differs widely from his fellow-townsman, Russell Lowell, whose keen wit
+and scathing sarcasm, in the famous Biglow Papers, and the notes of
+Parson Wilbur, strike at the great evils of society and deal with the
+rank offences of church and state.  Hosea Biglow, in his way, is as
+earnest a preacher as Habakkuk Mucklewrath or Obadiah Bind-their-kings-
+in-chains-and-their-nobles-in-fetters-of-iron.  His verse smacks of the
+old Puritan flavor.  Holmes has a gentler mission.  His careless, genial
+humor reminds us of James Smith in his _Rejected Addresses_ and of Horace
+in _London_.  Long may he live to make broader the face of our care-
+ridden generation, and to realize for himself the truth of the wise man's
+declaration that a "merry heart is a continual feast."
+
+
+
+
+
+                             FAME AND GLORY.
+
+Notice of an Address before the Literary Society of Amherst College, by
+Charles Sumner.
+
+THE learned and eloquent author of the pamphlet lying before us with the
+above title belongs to a class, happily on the increase in our country,
+who venture to do homage to unpopular truths in defiance of the social
+and political tyranny of opinion which has made so many of our statesmen,
+orators, and divines the mere playthings and shuttlecocks of popular
+impulses for evil far oftener than for good.  His first production, the
+_True Grandeur of Nations_, written for the anniversary of American
+Independence, was not more remarkable for its evidences of a highly
+cultivated taste and wide historical research than for its inculcation of
+a high morality,--the demand for practical Christianity in nations as
+well as individuals.  It burned no incense under the nostrils of an
+already inflated and vain people.  It gratified them by no rhetorical
+falsehoods about "the land of the free and the home of the brave."  It
+did not apostrophize military heroes, nor strut "red wat shod" over the
+plains of battle, nor call up, like another Ezekiel, from the valley of
+vision the dry bones thereof.  It uttered none of the precious scoundrel
+cant, so much in vogue after the annexation of Texas was determined upon,
+about the destiny of the United States to enter in and possess the lands
+of all whose destiny it is to live next us, and to plant everywhere the
+"peculiar institutions" of a peculiarly Christian and chosen people, the
+landstealing propensity of whose progressive republicanism is declared to
+be in accordance with the will and by the grace of God, and who, like the
+Scotch freebooter,--
+
+              "Pattering an Ave Mary
+               When he rode on a border forray,"--
+
+while trampling on the rights of a sister republic, and re-creating
+slavery where that republic had abolished it, talk piously of "the
+designs of Providence" and the Anglo-Saxon instrumentalities thereof in
+"extending the area of freedom."  On the contrary, the author portrayed
+the evils of war and proved its incompatibility with Christianity,--
+contrasting with its ghastly triumphs the mild victories of peace and
+love.  Our true mission, he taught, was not to act over in the New World
+the barbarous game which has desolated the Old; but to offer to the
+nations of the earth, warring and discordant, oppressed and oppressing,
+the beautiful example of a free and happy people studying the things
+which make for peace,--Democracy and Christianity walking hand in hand,
+blessing and being blessed.
+
+His next public effort, an Address before the Literary Society of his
+Alma Mater, was in the same vein.  He improved the occasion of the recent
+death of four distinguished members of that fraternity to delineate his
+beautiful ideal of the jurist, the scholar, the artist, and the
+philanthropist, aided by the models furnished by the lives of such men as
+Pickering, Story, Allston, and Channing.  Here, also, he makes greatness
+to consist of goodness: war and slavery and all their offspring of evil
+are surveyed in the light of the morality of the New Testament.  He looks
+hopefully forward to the coming of that day when the sword shall devour
+no longer, when labor shall grind no longer in the prison-house, and the
+peace and freedom of a realized and acted-out Christianity shall
+overspread the earth, and the golden age predicted by the seers and poets
+alike of Paganism and Christianity shall become a reality.
+
+The Address now before us, with the same general object in view, is more
+direct and practical.  We can scarcely conceive of a discourse better
+adapted to prepare the young American, just issuing from his collegiate
+retirement, for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.  It
+treats the desire of fame and honor as one native to the human heart,
+felt to a certain extent by all as a part of our common being,--a motive,
+although by no means the most exalted, of human conduct; and the lesson
+it would inculcate is, that no true and permanent fame can be founded
+except in labors which promote the happiness of mankind.  To use the
+language of Dr. South, "God is the fountain of honor; the conduit by
+which He conveys it to the sons of men are virtuous and generous
+practices."  The author presents the beautiful examples of St.  Pierre,
+Milton, Howard, and Clarkson,--men whose fame rests on the firm
+foundation of goodness,--for the study and imitation of the young
+candidate for that true glory which belongs to those who live, not for
+themselves, but for their race.  "Neither present fame, nor war, nor
+power, nor wealth, nor knowledge alone shall secure an entrance to the
+true and noble Valhalla.  There shall be gathered only those who have
+toiled each in his vocation for the welfare of others."  "Justice and
+benevolence are higher than knowledge and power It is by His goodness
+that God is most truly known; so also is the great man.  When Moses said
+to the Lord, Show me Thy glory, the Lord said, I will make all my
+goodness pass before thee."
+
+We copy the closing paragraph of the Address, the inspiring sentiment of
+which will find a response in all generous and hopeful hearts:--
+
+"Let us reverse the very poles of the worship of past ages.  Men have
+thus far bowed down before stocks, stones, insects, crocodiles, golden
+calves,--graven images, often of cunning workmanship, wrought with
+Phidian skill, of ivory, of ebony, of marble, but all false gods.  Let
+them worship in future the true God, our Father, as He is in heaven and
+in the beneficent labors of His children on earth.  Then farewell to the
+siren song of a worldly ambition!  Farewell to the vain desire of mere
+literary success or oratorical display!  Farewell to the distempered
+longings for office!  Farewell to the dismal, blood-red phantom of
+martial renown!  Fame and glory may then continue, as in times past, the
+reflection of public opinion; but of an opinion sure and steadfast,
+without change or fickleness, enlightened by those two sons of Christian
+truth,--love to God and love to man.  From the serene illumination of
+these duties all the forms of selfishness shall retreat like evil spirits
+at the dawn of day.  Then shall the happiness of the poor and lowly and
+the education of the ignorant have uncounted friends.  The cause of those
+who are in prison shall find fresh voices; the majesty of peace other
+vindicators; the sufferings of the slave new and gushing floods of
+sympathy.  Then, at last, shall the brotherhood of man stand confessed;
+ever filling the souls of all with a more generous life; ever prompting
+to deeds of beneficence; conquering the heathen prejudices of country,
+color, and race; guiding the judgment of the historian; animating the
+verse of the poet and the eloquence of the orator; ennobling human
+thought and conduct; and inspiring those good works by which alone we may
+attain to the heights of true glory.  Good works!  Such even now is the
+heavenly ladder on which angels are ascending and descending, while weary
+humanity, on pillows of storfe, slumbers heavily at its feet."
+
+We know how easy it is to sneer at such anticipations of a better future
+as baseless and visionary.  The shrewd but narrow-eyed man of the world
+laughs at the suggestion that there car: be any stronger motive than
+selfishness, any higher morality than that of the broker's board.  The
+man who relies for salvation from the consequences of an evil and selfish
+life upon the verbal orthodoxy of a creed presents the depravity and
+weakness of human nature as insuperable obstacles in the way of the
+general amelioration of the condition of a world lying in wickedness.  He
+counts it heretical and dangerous to act upon the supposition that the
+same human nature which, in his own case and that of his associates, can
+confront all perils, overcome all obstacles, and outstrip the whirlwind
+in the pursuit of gain,--which makes the strong elements its servants,
+taming and subjugating the very lightnings of heaven to work out its own
+purposes of self-aggrandizement,--must necessarily, and by an ordination
+of Providence, become weak as water, when engaged in works of love and
+goodwill, looking for the coming of a better day for humanity, with faith
+in the promises of the Gospel, and relying upon Him, who, in calling man
+to the great task-field of duty, has not mocked him with the mournful
+necessity of laboring in vain.  We have been pained more than words can
+express to see young, generous hearts, yearning with strong desires to
+consecrate themselves to the cause of their fellow-men, checked and
+chilled by the ridicule of worldly-wise conservatism, and the solemn
+rebukes of practical infidelity in the guise of a piety which professes
+to love the unseen Father, while disregarding the claims of His visible
+children.  Visionary!  Were not the good St.  Pierre, and Fenelon, and
+Howard, and Clarkson visionaries also?
+
+What was John Woolman, to the wise and prudent of his day, but an amiable
+enthusiast?  What, to those of our own, is such an angel of mercy as
+Dorothea Dix?  Who will not, in view of the labors of such
+philanthropists, adopt the language of Jonathan Edwards: "If these things
+be enthusiasms and the fruits of a distempered brain, let my brain be
+evermore possessed with this happy distemper"?
+
+It must, however, be confessed that there is a cant of philanthropy too
+general and abstract for any practical purpose,--a morbid
+sentimentalism,--which contents itself with whining over real or
+imaginary present evil, and predicting a better state somewhere in the
+future, but really doing nothing to remove the one or hasten the coming
+of the other.  To its view the present condition of things is all wrong;
+no green hillock or twig rises over the waste deluge; the heaven above is
+utterly dark and starless: yet, somehow, out of this darkness which may
+be felt, the light is to burst forth miraculously; wrong, sin, pain, and
+sorrow are to be banished from the renovated world, and earth become a
+vast epicurean garden or Mahometan heaven.
+
+               "The land, unploughed, shall yield her crop;
+               Pure honey from the oak shall drop;
+               The fountain shall run milk;
+               The thistle shall the lily bear;
+               And every bramble roses wear,
+               And every worm make silk."
+
+                    [Ben Jenson's Golden Age Restored.]
+
+There are, in short, perfectionist reformers as well as religionists, who
+wait to see the salvation which it is the task of humanity itself to work
+out, and who look down from a region of ineffable self-complacence on
+their dusty and toiling brethren who are resolutely doing whatsoever
+their hands find to do for the removal of the evils around them.
+
+The emblem of practical Christianity is the Samaritan stooping over the
+wounded Jew.  No fastidious hand can lift from the dust fallen humanity
+and bind up its unsightly gashes.  Sentimental lamentation over evil and
+suffering may be indulged in until it becomes a sort of melancholy
+luxury, like the "weeping for Thammuz" by the apostate daughters of
+Jerusalem.  Our faith in a better day for the race is strong; but we feel
+quite sure it will come in spite of such abstract reformers, and not by
+reason of them.  The evils which possess humanity are of a kind which go
+not out by their delicate appliances.
+
+The author of the Address under consideration is not of this class.  He
+has boldly, and at no small cost, grappled with the great social and
+political wrong of our country,--chattel slavery.  Looking, as we have
+seen, hopefully to the future, he is nevertheless one of those who can
+respond to the words of a true poet and true man:--
+
+              "He is a coward who would borrow
+               A charm against the present sorrow
+               From the vague future's promise of delight
+               As life's alarums nearer roll,
+               The ancestral buckler calls,
+               Self-clanging, from the walls
+               In the high temple of the soul!"
+
+                         [James Russell Lowell.]
+
+
+
+
+
+                               FANATICISM.
+
+THERE are occasionally deeds committed almost too horrible and revolting
+for publication.  The tongue falters in giving them utterance; the pen
+trembles that records them.  Such is the ghastly horror of a late tragedy
+in Edgecomb, in the State of Maine.  A respectable and thriving citizen
+and his wife had been for some years very unprofitably engaged in
+brooding over the mysteries of the Apocalypse, and in speculations upon
+the personal coming of Christ and the temporal reign of the saints on
+earth,--a sort of Mahometan paradise, which has as little warrant in
+Scripture as in reason.  Their minds of necessity became unsettled; they
+meditated self-destruction; and, as it appears by a paper left behind in
+the handwriting of both, came to an agreement that the husband should
+first kill his wife and their four children, and then put an end to his
+own existence.  This was literally executed,--the miserable man striking
+off the heads of his wife and children with his axe, and then cutting his
+own throat.
+
+Alas for man when he turns from the light of reason and from the simple
+and clearly defined duties of the present life, and undertakes to pry
+into the mysteries of the future, bewildering himself with uncertain and
+vague prophecies, Oriental imagery, and obscure Hebrew texts!  Simple,
+cheerful faith in God as our great and good Father, and love of His
+children as our brethren, acted out in all relations and duties, is
+certainly best for this world, and we believe also the best preparation
+for that to come.  Once possessed by the falsity that God's design is
+that man should be wretched and gloomy here in order to obtain rest and
+happiness hereafter; that the mental agonies and bodily tortures of His
+creatures are pleasant to Him; that, after bestowing upon us reason for
+our guidance, He makes it of no avail by interposing contradictory
+revelations and arbitrary commands,--there is nothing to prevent one of a
+melancholic and excitable temperament from excesses so horrible as almost
+to justify the old belief in demoniac obsession.
+
+Charles Brockden Brown, a writer whose merits have not yet been
+sufficiently acknowledged, has given a powerful and philosophical
+analysis of this morbid state of mind--this diseased conscientiousness,
+obeying the mad suggestions of a disordered brain as the injunctions of
+Divinity--in his remarkable story of Wieland.  The hero of this strange
+and solemn romance, inheriting a melancholy and superstitious mental
+constitution, becomes in middle age the victim of a deep, and tranquil
+because deep, fanaticism.  A demon in human form, perceiving his state of
+mind, wantonly experiments upon it, deepening and intensifying it by a
+fearful series of illusions of sight and sound.  Tricks of jugglery and
+ventriloquism seem to his feverish fancies miracles and omens--the eye
+and the voice of the Almighty piercing the atmosphere of supernatural
+mystery in which he has long dwelt.  He believes that he is called upon
+to sacrifice the beloved wife of his bosom as a testimony of the entire
+subjugation of his carnal reason and earthly affections to the Divine
+will.  In the entire range of English literature there is no more
+thrilling passage than that which describes the execution of this baleful
+suggestion.  The coloring of the picture is an intermingling of the
+lights of heaven and hell,--soft shades of tenderest pity and warm tints
+of unextinguishable love contrasting with the terrible outlines of an
+insane and cruel purpose, traced with the blood of murder.  The masters
+of the old Greek tragedy have scarcely exceeded the sublime horror of
+this scene from the American novelist.  The murderer confronted with his
+gentle and loving victim in her chamber; her anxious solicitude for his
+health and quiet; her affectionate caress of welcome; his own relentings
+and natural shrinking from his dreadful purpose; and the terrible
+strength which he supposes is lent him of Heaven, by which he puts down
+the promptings and yearnings of his human heart, and is enabled to
+execute the mandate of an inexorable Being,--are described with an
+intensity which almost stops the heart of the reader.  When the deed is
+done a frightful conflict of passions takes place, which can only be told
+in the words of the author:--
+
+"I lifted the corpse in my arms and laid it on the bed.  I gazed upon it
+with delight.  Such was my elation that I even broke out into laughter.
+I clapped my hands, and exclaimed, 'It is done!  My sacred duty is
+fulfilled!  To that I have sacrificed, O God, Thy last and best gift, my
+wife!'
+
+"For a while I thus soared above frailty.  I imagined I had set myself
+forever beyond the reach of selfishness.  But my imaginations were false.
+This rapture quickly subsided.  I looked again at my wife.  My joyous
+ebullitions vanished.  I asked myself who it was whom I saw.  Methought
+it could not be my Catharine; it could not be the woman who had lodged
+for years in my heart; who had slept nightly in my bosom; who had borne
+in her womb and fostered at her breast the beings who called me father;
+whom I had watched over with delight and cherished with a fondness ever
+new and perpetually growing.  It could not be the same!
+
+"The breath of heaven that sustained me was withdrawn, and I sunk into
+mere man.  I leaped from the floor; I dashed my head against the wall; I
+uttered screams of horror; I panted after torment and pain.  Eternal fire
+and the bickerings of hell, compared with what I felt, were music and a
+bed of roses.
+
+"I thank my God that this was transient; that He designed once more to
+raise me aloft.  I thought upon what I had done as a sacrifice to duty,
+and was calm.  My wife was dead; but I reflected that, although this
+source of human consolation was closed, others were still open.  If the
+transports of the husband were no more, the feelings of
+the father had still scope for exercise.  When remembrance of their
+mother should excite too keen a pang, I would look upon my children and
+be comforted.
+
+"While I revolved these things new warmth flowed in upon my heart.  I was
+wrong.  These feelings were the growth of selfishness.  Of this I was not
+aware; and, to dispel the mist that obscured my perceptions, a new light
+and a new mandate were necessary.
+
+"From these thoughts I was recalled by a ray which was shot into the
+room.  A voice spoke like that I had before heard: 'Thou hast done well;
+but all is not done--the sacrifice is incomplete--thy children must be
+offered--they must perish with their mother!'"
+
+The misguided man obeys the voice; his children are destroyed in their
+bloom and innocent beauty.  He is arrested, tried for murder, and
+acquitted as insane.  The light breaks in upon him at last; he discovers
+the imposture which has controlled him; and, made desperate by the full
+consciousness of his folly and crime, ends the terrible drama by suicide.
+
+Wieland is not a pleasant book.  In one respect it resembles the modern
+tale of Wuthering Heights: it has great strength and power, but no
+beauty. Unlike that, however, it has an important and salutary moral.  It
+is a warning to all who tamper with the mind and rashly experiment upon
+its religious element.  As such, its perusal by the sectarian zealots of
+all classes would perhaps be quite as profitable as much of their present
+studies.
+
+
+
+
+
+                         THE POETRY OF THE NORTH.
+
+THE Democratic Review not long since contained a singularly wild and
+spirited poem, entitled the Norseman's Ride, in which the writer appears
+to have very happily blended the boldness and sublimity of the heathen
+saga with the grace and artistic skill of the literature of civilization.
+The poetry of the Northmen, like their lives, was bold, defiant, and full
+of a rude, untamed energy.  It was inspired by exhibitions of power
+rather than of beauty.  Its heroes were beastly revellers or cruel and
+ferocious plunderers; its heroines unsexed hoidens, playing the ugliest
+tricks with their lovers, and repaying slights with bloody revenge,--very
+dangerous and unsatisfactory companions for any other than the fire-
+eating Vikings and redhanded, unwashed Berserkers.  Significant of a
+religion which reverenced the strong rather than the good, and which
+regarded as meritorious the unrestrained indulgence of the passions, it
+delighted to sing the praises of some coarse debauch or pitiless
+slaughter.  The voice of its scalds was often but the scream of the
+carrion-bird, or the howl of the wolf, scenting human blood:--
+
+              "Unlike to human sounds it came;
+               Unmixed, unmelodized with breath;
+               But grinding through some scrannel frame,
+               Creaked from the bony lungs of Death."
+
+Its gods were brutal giant forces, patrons of war, robbery, and drunken
+revelry; its heaven a vast cloud-built ale-house, where ghostly warriors
+drank from the skulls of their victims; its hell a frozen horror of
+desolation and darkness,--all that the gloomy Northern imagination could
+superadd to the repulsive and frightful features of arctic scenery:
+volcanoes spouting fire through craters rimmed with perpetual frost,
+boiling caldrons flinging their fierce jets high into the air, and huge
+jokuls, or ice-mountains, loosened and upheaved by volcanic agencies,
+crawling slowly seaward, like misshapen monsters endowed with life,--a
+region of misery unutterable, to be avoided only by diligence in robbery
+and courage in murder.
+
+What a work had Christianity to perform upon such a people as the
+Icelanders, for instance, of the tenth century!--to substitute in rude,
+savage minds the idea of its benign and gentle Founder for that of the
+Thor and Woden of Norse mythology; the forgiveness, charity, and humility
+of the Gospel for the revenge, hatred, and pride inculcated by the Eddas.
+And is it not one of the strongest proofs of the divine life and power of
+that Gospel, that, under its influence, the hard and cruel Norse heart
+has been so softened and humanized that at this moment one of the best
+illustrations of the peaceful and gentle virtues which it inculcates is
+afforded by the descendants of the sea-kings and robbers of the middle
+centuries?  No one can read the accounts which such travellers as Sir
+George Mackenzie and Dr. Henderson have given us of the peaceful
+disposition, social equality, hospitality, industry, intellectual
+cultivation, morality, and habitual piety of the Icelanders, without a
+grateful sense of the adaptation of Christianity to the wants of our
+race, and of its ability to purify, elevate, and transform the worst
+elements of human character.  In Iceland Christianity has performed its
+work of civilization, unobstructed by that commercial cupidity which has
+caused nations more favored in respect to soil and climate to lapse into
+an idolatry scarcely less debasing and cruel than that which preceded the
+introduction of the Gospel.  Trial by combat was abolished in 1001, and
+the penalty of the imaginary crime of witchcraft was blotted from the
+statutes of the island nearly half a century before it ceased to disgrace
+those of Great Britain.  So entire has been the change wrought in the
+sanguinary and cruel Norse character that at the present day no Icelander
+can be found who, for any reward, will undertake the office of
+executioner.  The scalds, who went forth to battle, cleaving the skulls
+of their enemies with the same skilful hands which struck the harp at the
+feast, have given place to Christian bards and teachers, who, like
+Thorlakson, whom Dr. Henderson found toiling cheerfully with his beloved
+parishioners in the hay-harvest of the brief arctic summer, combine with
+the vigorous diction and robust thought of their predecessors the warm
+and genial humanity of a religion of love and the graces and amenities of
+a high civilization.
+
+But we have wandered somewhat aside from our purpose, which was simply to
+introduce the following poem, which, in the boldness of its tone and
+vigor of language, reminds us of the Sword Chant, the Wooing Song, and
+other rhymed sagas of Motherwell.
+
+
+          THE NORSEMAN'S RIDE.
+
+          BY BAYARD TAYLOR.
+
+          The frosty fires of northern starlight
+          Gleamed on the glittering snow,
+          And through the forest's frozen branches
+          The shrieking winds did blow;
+          A floor of blue and icy marble
+          Kept Ocean's pulses still,
+          When, in the depths of dreary midnight,
+          Opened the burial hill.
+
+          Then, while the low and creeping shudder
+
+          Thrilled upward through the ground,
+          The Norseman came, as armed for battle,
+          In silence from his mound,--
+          He who was mourned in solemn sorrow
+          By many a swordsman bold,
+          And harps that wailed along the ocean,
+          Struck by the scalds of old.
+
+          Sudden a swift and silver shadow
+          Came up from out the gloom,--
+          A charger that, with hoof impatient,
+          Stamped noiseless by the tomb.
+          "Ha! Surtur,!* let me hear thy tramping,
+          My fiery Northern steed,
+          That, sounding through the stormy forest,
+          Bade the bold Viking heed!"
+
+          He mounted; like a northlight streaking
+          The sky with flaming bars,
+          They, on the winds so wildly shrieking,
+          Shot up before the stars.
+          "Is this thy mane, my fearless Surtur,
+          That streams against my breast?
+
+          [*The name of the Scandinavian god of fire.]
+
+          Is this thy neck, that curve of moonlight
+          Which Helva's hand caressed?
+          "No misty breathing strains thy nostril;
+          Thine eye shines blue and cold;
+          Yet mounting up our airy pathway
+          I see thy hoofs of gold.
+          Not lighter o'er the springing rainbow
+          Walhalla's gods repair
+          Than we in sweeping journey over
+          The bending bridge of air.
+
+          "Far, far around star-gleams are sparkling
+          Amid the twilight space;
+          And Earth, that lay so cold and darkling,
+          Has veiled her dusky face.
+          Are those the Normes that beckon onward
+          As if to Odin's board,
+          Where by the hands of warriors nightly
+          The sparkling mead is poured?
+
+          "'T is Skuld:* I her star-eye speaks the glory
+          That wraps the mighty soul,
+          When on its hinge of music opens
+          The gateway of the pole;
+          When Odin's warder leads the hero
+          To banquets never o'er,
+          And Freya's** glances fill the bosom
+          With sweetness evermore.
+
+          "On! on! the northern lights are streaming
+          In brightness like the morn,
+          And pealing far amid the vastness
+          I hear the gyallarhorn ***
+          The heart of starry space is throbbing
+          With songs of minstrels old;
+          And now on high Walhalla's portal
+          Gleam Surtur's hoofs of gold."
+
+* The Norne of the future.
+
+** Freya, the Northern goddess of love.
+
+*** The horn blown by the watchers on the rainbow, the bridge over which
+the gods pass in Northern mythology.
+
+
+
+
+
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