The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

IN Ocean's wide domains,
Half buried in the sands,
Lie skeletons in chains,

THE WITNESSES.

With shackled feet and hands.
Beyond the fall of dews,

Deeper than plummet lies,
Float ships with all their crews,
No more to sink nor rise.
There the black Slave-ship swims,
Freighted with human forms,
Whose fettered, fleshless limbs

Are not the sport of storms.
These are the bones of Slaves;
They gleam from the abyss;
They cry, from yawning waves,
"We are the Witnesses!"

Within Earth's wide domains
Are markets for men's lives;
Their necks are galled with chains,
Their wrists are cramped with gyves.
Dead bodies, that the kite

In deserts makes its prey;
Murders, that with affright
Scare schoolboys from their play!
All evil thoughts and deeds;
Anger, and lust, and pride;
The foulest, rankest weeds,

That choke Life's groaning tide!
These are the woes of Slaves;
They glare from the abyss ;
They cry from unknown graves,
"We are the Witnesses!"

THE WARNING.

BEWARE! The Israelite of old, who tore
The lion in his path,-when, poor and blind,
He saw the blessed light of heaven no more,
Shorn of his noble strength and forced to grind
In prison, and at last led forth to be

A pander to Philistine revelry,

Upon the pillars of the temple laid

His desperate hands, and in its overthrow
Destroyed himself, and with him those who made
A cruel mockery of his sightless woe;

The poor, blind Slave, the scoff and jest of all,
Expired, and thousands perished in the fall!

There is a poor, blind Samson in this land,

Shorn of his strength, and bound in bonds of steel,
Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,
And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,
Till the vast Temple of our liberties

A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.

There are marks of age,

There are thumb-marks on thy margin,

Thou recallest homes

Where thy songs of love and friendship Made the gloomy Northern winter Bright as summer.

Once some ancient Scald,

In his bleak, ancestral Iceland,
Chanted staves of these old ballads
To the Vikings.

Once in Elsinore,

At the court of old King Hamlet,

Made by hands that clasped thee rudely Yorick and his boon companions

At the alehouse.

Selled and dull thou art;

Tellow are thy time-worn pages,
As the russet, rain-molested

Leaves of autumn.
Thou art stained with wine
Sattered from bilarious goblets,
As the leaves with the libations

Of Olympus.
Yet dost thou recall
Days departed, half-forgotten,
When in dreamy youth I wandered

By the Baltic,

Sang these ditties.

Once Prince Frederick's Guard

Sang them in their smoky barracks ;-
Suddenly the English cannon
Joined the chorus !

Peasants in the field,

Sailors on the roaring ocean,

Students, tradesmen, pale mechanics,
All have sung them.

Thou hast been their friend;
They, alas, have left thee friendless!
Yet at least by one warm fireside
Art thou welcome.

And, as swallows build

In these wide, old-fashioned chimneys,
So thy twittering songs shall nestle
In my bosom,-

Quiet, close, and warm,
Sheltered from all molestation,
And recalling by their voices
Youth and travel.

VOGELWEID the Minnesinger,

When he left this world of ours, Laid his body in the cloister,

Under Würtzburg's minster towers. And he gave the monks his treasures, Gave them all with this behest : They should feed the birds at noontide Daily on his place of rest; Saying, "From these wandering minstrels I have learned the art of song; Let me now repay the lessons

They have taught so well and long." Thus the bard of love departed; And, fulfilling his desire, On his tomb the birds were feasted By the children of the choir. Day by day, o'er tower and turret, In foul weather and in fair, Day by day, in vaster numbers, Flocked the poets of the air. On the tree whose heavy branches Overshadowed all the place, On the pavement, on the tombstone, On the poet's sculptured face, On the cross-bars of each window, On the lintel of each door,

They renewed the War of Wartburg,
Which the bard had fought before.
There they sang their merry carols,

Sang their lauds on every side;
And the name their voices uttered
Was the name of Vogelweid.
Till at length the portly abbot

Murmured, "Why this waste of food Be it changed to loaves henceforward For our fasting brotherhood."

Then in vain o'er tower and turret,

Foam the walls and woodland nests, When the minster bell rang noontide, Gathered the unwelcome guests. Then in vain, with cries discordant, Clamorous round the Gothic spire, Screamed the feathered Minnesingers

For the children of the choir.

Time has long effaced the inscriptions
On the cloister's funeral stones,
And tradition only tells us

Where repose the poet's bones.
But around the vast cathedral,

By sweet echoes multiplied, Still the birds repeat the legend, And the name of Vogelweid.

Walter von der Vogelweid, or Bird-Meadow, was one of the principal Minnesingers of the thirteenth century. He triumphed over Heinrich von Ofterdingen in that poetic contest at Wartburg Castle, known in literary history as the "War of Wartburg."

THE DAY IS DONE.

THE day is done, and the darkness Falls from the wings of Night, As a feather is wafted downward From an eagle in his flight.

I see the lights of the village

Gleam through the rain and the mist,

Life's endless toil and endeavour;
And to-night I long for rest.
Read from some humbler poet,

Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start;

And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me, Who, through long days of labour,

That my soul cannot resist:

A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.

Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.
Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.
For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest

And nights devoid of ease,
Still heard in his soul the music

Of wonderful melodies.

Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.

Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice,
And lend to the rhyme of the poet

The beauty of thy voice.

And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.

From the tumbling surf, that buries

The Orkneyan skerries, Answering the hoarse Hebrides; And from wrecks of ships, and drifting Spars, uplifting

On the desolate, rainy seas;—

Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
On the shifting

Currents of the restless main;
Till in sheltered coves, and reaches
Of sandy beaches,

All have found repose again.

So when storms of wild emotion
Strike the ocean

Of the poet's soul, ere long
From each cave and rocky fastness,
In its vastness,

Floats some fragment of a song:

From the far-off isles enchanted,
Heaven has planted

With the golden fruit of Truth;
From the flashing surf, whose vision
Gleams Elysian

In the tropic clime of Youth;

From the strong Will and the Endeavour
That for ever

Wrestle with the tides of Fate;
From the wreck of Hopes far-scattered,
Tempest-shattered,

Floating waste and desolate ;-
Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
On the shifting

Currents of the restless heart;
Till at length in books recorded,
They, like hoarded
Household words, no more depart.

DRINKING SONG.

INSCRIPTION FOR AN ANTIQUE PITCHER.

COME, old friend! sit down and listen! From the pitcher placed between us, How the waters laugh and glisten

In the head of old Silenus!

Old Silenus, bloated, drunken,

Led by his inebriate Satyrs;
On his breast his head is sunken,
Vacantly he leers and chatters.
Fauns with youthful Bacchus follow;
Ivy crowns that brow supernal
As the forehead of Apollo,

And possessing youth eternal.
Round about him, fair Bacchantes,
Bearing cymbals, flutes, and thyrses,
Wild from Naxian groves, or Zante's

Vineyards, sing delirious verses.
Thus he won, through all the nations,
Bloodless victories, and the farmer
Bore, as trophies and oblations,
Vines for banners, ploughs for armour.
Judged by no o'er-zealous rigour,

Much this mystic throng expresses:
Bacchus was the type of vigour,
And Silenus of excesses.

These are ancient ethnic revels,

Of a faith long since forsaken; Now the Satyrs, changed to devils, Frighten mortals wine-o'ertaken. Now to rivulets from the mountains

Point the rods of fortune-tellers; Youth perpetual dwells in fountains,— Not in flasks, and casks and cellars. Claudius, though he sang of flagons And huge flagons filled with Rhenish, From that fiery blood of dragons

Never would his own replenish.
Even Redi, though he chaunted
Bacchus in the Tuscan valleys,
Never drank the wine he vaunted
In his dithyrambic sallies.
Then with water fill the pitcher
Wreathed about with classic fables;
Ne'er Falernian threw a richer
Light upon Lucullus' tables.

Come, old friend, sit down and listen!
As it passes thus between us,
How its wavelets laugh and glisten
In the head of old Silenus!

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