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. 15
The long night dies: the welcome gray
Of dawn we see;
Speed up the heavens thy perfect day,
God of the free!
THE PEACE OF EUROPE-1852.
"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 PEACE OF EUROPE-1852.
The quick-eared spy in hut and hal! !
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!
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!
O! that its voice might pierce the ear
Of princes, trembling while they hear
A cry as of the Hebrew seer:
Repent! God's kingdom draweth near!
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.
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 azalias, intertwined
With roses, over banks inclined
With trembling hare-bells hung!
A charméd 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!
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;
|