Calmly, as to a night's repose,
Like flowers at set of sun.

Come to the bridal-chamber, Death!
Come to the mother's, when she feels,
For the first time, her first-born's breath;
Come when the blessed seals

That close the pestilence are broke,
And crowded cities wail its stroke;
Come in consumption's ghastly form,
The earthquake shock, the ocean storm ;
Come when the heart beats high and warm
With banquet song, and dance, and wine;
And thou art terrible the tear,

The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier,
And all we know, or dream, or fear

Of agony, are thine.

But to the hero, when his sword

Has won the battle for the free,

Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word;
And in its hollow tones are heard
The thanks of millions yet to be.
Come, when his task of fame is wrought-
Come, with her laurel leaf, blood-bought —
Come in her crowning hour and then
Thy sunken eye's unearthly light
To him is welcome as the sight

Of sky and stars to prisoned men ;
Thy grasp is welcome as the hand
Of brother in a foreign land;

Thy summons welcome as the cry
That told the Indian isles were nigh

To the world-seeking Genoese,

When the land wind, from woods of palm,

And orange groves, and fields of balm,
Blew o'er the Haytian seas.

Bozzaris! with the storied brave

Greece nurtured in her glory's time,
Rest thee—there is no prouder grave,
Even in her own proud clime.
She wore no funeral weeds for thee,

Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume
Like torn branch from death's leafless tree
In sorrow's pomp and pageantry,

The heartless luxury of the tomb;

But she remembers thee as one
Long loved and for a season gone;
For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed,

Her marble wrought, her music breathed;
For thee she rings the birthday bells;
Of thee her babe's first lisping tells;
For thine her evening prayer is said.
At palace couch and cottage bed;
Her soldier, closing with the foe,
Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow;
His plighted maiden, when she fears.
For him the joy of her young years,
Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears;
And she, the mother of thy boys,
Though in her eye and faded cheek
Is read the grief she will not speak,
The memory of her buried joys,
And even she who gave thee birth,
Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth,

Talk of thy doom without a sigh;
For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's:
One of the few, the immortal names,

That were not born to die.

5

10

15

20

235

30

JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE

1795-1820

DRAKE was a New Yorker, born and bred. After his first early struggles with poverty, life seemed to open up with shining prospects. He was graduated in medicine, and then traveled abroad for a year or two. He was happily married and he was rising in his profession. He was, Halleck said, the handsomest man in New York. Buoyant spirits brought him many friends, and he was beginning to make a name for himself in letters. But he was smitten with consumption, and died at the age of twenty-five.

Drake began to write verse at a very early age; but it was The Croaker Pieces, which he and Halleck wrote together, that first brought him into literary notice. They first appeared anonymously in the Evening Post, which later on William Cullen Bryant was to edit so long and so brilliantly. These witty verses, with their sly thrusts at well-known men and women of the day, soon became the talk of the town, and created much curiosity as to their authorship.

The longest poem that Drake wrote was The Culprit Fay. It is a conventional tale of some tiny fairies that were supposed to haunt the Hudson River. Drake's purpose in writing the poem was to try to prove to his friends that American streams lent themselves to poetic treatment as readily as the streams of the Old World. It was reserved for Irving, however, at a later day, to show more conclusively in his Sketch Book than Drake did in The Culprit Fay that the spirit of romance really does hover about the Hudson. But Drake's poem contains some pleasing fancies, more or less gracefully told.

To-day the best-remembered poem of Drake's is The American Flag. This may be pitched in too high a key to please the most rigid taste, but its patriotic appeal will probably be lasting.

THE AMERICAN FLAG

WHEN Freedom from her mountain height

Unfurled her standard to the air,

She tore the azure robe of night,

And set the stars of glory there.

She mingled with its gorgeous dyes
The milky baldric of the skies,

And striped its pure celestial white
With streakings of the morning light;
Then from his mansion in the sun
She called her eagle bearer down,
And gave into his mighty hand
The symbol of her chosen land.

Majestic monarch of the cloud, Who rear'st aloft thy regal form, To hear the tempest trumpings loud And see the lightning lances driven,

When strive the warriors of the storm,
And rolls the thunder drum of heaven,
Child of the sun! to thee 'tis given

To guard the banner of the free,
To hover in the sulphur smoke,
To ward away the battle stroke,
And bid its blendings shine afar,
Like rainbows on the cloud of war,
The harbingers of victory!

Flag of the brave! thy folds shall fly,
The sign of hope and triumph high,
When speaks the signal trumpet tone,
And the long line comes gleaming on.
Ere yet the life blood, warm and wet,
Has dimmed the glistening bayonet,
Each soldier eye shall brightly turn
To where thy sky-born glories burn,
And, as his springing steps advance,
Catch war and vengeance from the glance.
And when the cannon mouthings loud
Heave in wild wreaths the battle shroud,

And gory sabers rise and fall
Like shoots of flame on midnight's pall,

Then shall thy meteor glances glow,
And cowering foes shall shrink beneath

Each gallant arm that strikes below
That lovely messenger of death.

Flag of the seas! on ocean wave
Thy stars shall glitter o'er the brave;
When death, careering on the gale,
Sweeps darkly round the bellied sail,
And frighted waves rush wildly back
Before the broadside's reeling rack,
Each dying wanderer of the sea

Shall look at once to heaven and thee,
And smile to see thy splendors fly

In triumph o'er his closing eye.

Flag of the free heart's hope and home!
By angel hands to valor given;
Thy stars have lit the welkin dome,

And all thy hues were born in heaven.
Forever float that standard sheet!

Where breathes the foe but falls before us,

With Freedom's soil beneath our feet,

And Freedom's banner streaming o'er us?

EDWARD COATE PINKNEY

1802-1828

PINKNEY was born in London while his father, William Pinkney of Baltimore, a lawyer and public speaker of distinction, was United States minister to Great Britain. On his return to America, he was put to school in Baltimore, but later entered the navy as a midshipman. He resigned from the navy to enter upon the practice of the law, but his