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Title: The Complete Works of Whittier
       The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index

Author: John Greenleaf Whittier

Release Date: October 25, 2003 [eBook #9600]
[Most recently updated: January 14, 2023]

Language: English

Produced by: David Widger

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WHITTIER ***




THE COMPLETE WORKS OF JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

By John Greenleaf Whittier




VOLUME I. NARRATIVE AND LEGENDARY POEMS




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.


     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.




III. 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!"




IV. 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.




V. 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 Murchen, 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 plus POEMS SUBJECTIVE AND REMINISCENT and RELIGIOUS POEMS



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 aeons 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 and SONGS OF LABOR AND REFORM


     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 1865 after the close of
the war, when it was charged with the great question of reconstruction;
the uppermost subject in men's minds was the standing of those who had
recently been in arms against the Union and their relations to the
freedmen.


     O PEOPLE-CHOSEN! are ye not
     Likewise the chosen of the Lord,
     To do His will and speak His word?

     From the loud thunder-storm of war
     Not man alone hath called ye forth,
     But He, the God of all the earth!

     The torch of vengeance in your hands
     He quenches; unto Him belongs
     The solemn recompense of wrongs.

     Enough of blood the land has seen,
     And not by cell or gallows-stair
     Shall ye the way of God prepare.

     Say to the pardon-seekers: Keep
     Your manhood, bend no suppliant knees,
     Nor palter with unworthy pleas.

     Above your voices sounds the wail
     Of starving men; we shut in vain *
     Our eyes to Pillow's ghastly stain. **

     What words can drown that bitter cry?
     What tears wash out the stain of death?
     What oaths confirm your broken faith?

     From you alone the guaranty
     Of union, freedom, peace, we claim;
     We urge no conqueror's terms of shame.

     Alas! no victor's pride is ours;
     We bend above our triumphs won
     Like David o'er his rebel son.

     Be men, not beggars. Cancel all
     By one brave, generous action; trust
     Your better instincts, and be just.

     Make all men peers before the law,
     Take hands from off the negro's throat,
     Give black and white an equal vote.

     Keep all your forfeit lives and lands,
     But give the common law's redress
     To labor's utter nakedness.

     Revive the old heroic will;
     Be in the right as brave and strong
     As ye have proved yourselves in wrong.

     Defeat shall then be victory,
     Your loss the wealth of full amends,
     And hate be love, and foes be friends.

     Then buried be the dreadful past,
     Its common slain be mourned, and let
     All memories soften to regret.

     Then shall the Union's mother-heart
     Her lost and wandering ones recall,
     Forgiving and restoring all,--

     And Freedom break her marble trance
     Above the Capitolian dome,
     Stretch hands, and bid ye welcome home
     November, 1865.

     *  Andersonville prison.
     ** The massacre of Negro troops at Fort Pillow.




THE HIVE AT GETTYSBURG.

     IN the old Hebrew myth the lion's frame,
     So terrible alive,
     Bleached by the desert's sun and wind, became
     The wandering wild bees' hive;
     And he who, lone and naked-handed, tore
     Those jaws of death apart,
     In after time drew forth their honeyed store
     To strengthen his strong heart.

     Dead seemed the legend: but it only slept
     To wake beneath our sky;
     Just on the spot whence ravening Treason crept
     Back to its lair to die,
     Bleeding and torn from Freedom's mountain bounds,
     A stained and shattered drum
     Is now the hive where, on their flowery rounds,
     The wild bees go and come.

     Unchallenged by a ghostly sentinel,
     They wander wide and far,
     Along green hillsides, sown with shot and shell,
     Through vales once choked with war.
     The low reveille of their battle-drum
     Disturbs no morning prayer;
     With deeper peace in summer noons their hum
     Fills all the drowsy air.

     And Samson's riddle is our own to-day,
     Of sweetness from the strong,
     Of union, peace, and freedom plucked away
     From the rent jaws of wrong.
     From Treason's death we draw a purer life,
     As, from the beast he slew,
     A sweetness sweeter for his bitter strife
     The old-time athlete drew!
     1868.




HOWARD AT ATLANTA.

     RIGHT in the track where Sherman
     Ploughed his red furrow,
     Out of the narrow cabin,
     Up from the cellar's burrow,
     Gathered the little black people,
     With freedom newly dowered,
     Where, beside their Northern teacher,
     Stood the soldier, Howard.

     He listened and heard the children
     Of the poor and long-enslaved
     Reading the words of Jesus,
     Singing the songs of David.
     Behold!--the dumb lips speaking,
     The blind eyes seeing!
     Bones of the Prophet's vision
     Warmed into being!

     Transformed he saw them passing
     Their new life's portal
     Almost it seemed the mortal
     Put on the immortal.
     No more with the beasts of burden,
     No more with stone and clod,
     But crowned with glory and honor
     In the image of God!

     There was the human chattel
     Its manhood taking;
     There, in each dark, bronze statue,
     A soul was waking!
     The man of many battles,
     With tears his eyelids pressing,
     Stretched over those dusky foreheads
     His one-armed blessing.

     And he said: "Who hears can never
     Fear for or doubt you;
     What shall I tell the children
     Up North about you?"
     Then ran round a whisper, a murmur,
     Some answer devising:
     And a little boy stood up: "General,
     Tell 'em we're rising!"

     O black boy of Atlanta!
     But half was spoken
     The slave's chain and the master's
     Alike are broken.
     The one curse of the races
     Held both in tether
     They are rising,--all are rising,
     The black and white together!

     O brave men and fair women!
     Ill comes of hate and scorning
     Shall the dark faces only
     Be turned to mourning?--
     Make Time your sole avenger,
     All-healing, all-redressing;
     Meet Fate half-way, and make it
     A joy and blessing!

     1869.




THE EMANCIPATION GROUP.

Moses Kimball, a citizen of Boston, presented to the city a duplicate
of the Freedman's Memorial statue erected in Lincoln Square, Washington.
The group, which stands in Park Square, represents the figure of a
slave, from whose limbs the broken fetters have fallen, kneeling in
gratitude at the feet of Lincoln. The group was designed by Thomas Ball,
and was unveiled December 9, 1879. These verses were written for the
occasion.

     AMIDST thy sacred effigies
     Of old renown give place,
     O city, Freedom-loved! to his
     Whose hand unchained a race.

     Take the worn frame, that rested not
     Save in a martyr's grave;
     The care-lined face, that none forgot,
     Bent to the kneeling slave.

     Let man be free! The mighty word
     He spake was not his own;
     An impulse from the Highest stirred
     These chiselled lips alone.

     The cloudy sign, the fiery guide,
     Along his pathway ran,
     And Nature, through his voice, denied
     The ownership of man.

     We rest in peace where these sad eyes
     Saw peril, strife, and pain;
     His was the nation's sacrifice,
     And ours the priceless gain.

     O symbol of God's will on earth
     As it is done above!
     Bear witness to the cost and worth
     Of justice and of love.

     Stand in thy place and testify
     To coming ages long,
     That truth is stronger than a lie,
     And righteousness than wrong.




THE JUBILEE SINGERS.

A number of students of Fisk University, under the direction of one of
the officers, gave a series of concerts in the Northern States, for the
purpose of establishing the college on a firmer financial foundation.
Their hymns and songs, mostly in a minor key, touched the hearts of the
people, and were received as peculiarly expressive of a race delivered
from bondage.

     VOICE of a people suffering long,
     The pathos of their mournful song,
     The sorrow of their night of wrong!

     Their cry like that which Israel gave,
     A prayer for one to guide and save,
     Like Moses by the Red Sea's wave!

     The stern accord her timbrel lent
     To Miriam's note of triumph sent
     O'er Egypt's sunken armament!

     The tramp that startled camp and town,
     And shook the walls of slavery down,
     The spectral march of old John Brown!

     The storm that swept through battle-days,
     The triumph after long delays,
     The bondmen giving God the praise!

     Voice of a ransomed race, sing on
     Till Freedom's every right is won,
     And slavery's every wrong undone

     1880.




GARRISON.

The earliest poem in this division was my youthful tribute to the great
reformer when himself a young man he was first sounding his trumpet in
Essex County. I close with the verses inscribed to him at the end of his
earthly career, May 24, 1879. My poetical service in the cause of
freedom is thus almost synchronous with his life of devotion to the
same cause.

     THE storm and peril overpast,
     The hounding hatred shamed and still,
     Go, soul of freedom! take at last
     The place which thou alone canst fill.

     Confirm the lesson taught of old--
     Life saved for self is lost, while they
     Who lose it in His service hold
     The lease of God's eternal day.

     Not for thyself, but for the slave
     Thy words of thunder shook the world;
     No selfish griefs or hatred gave
     The strength wherewith thy bolts were hurled.

     From lips that Sinai's trumpet blew
     We heard a tender under song;
     Thy very wrath from pity grew,
     From love of man thy hate of wrong.

     Now past and present are as one;
     The life below is life above;
     Thy mortal years have but begun
     Thy immortality of love.

     With somewhat of thy lofty faith
     We lay thy outworn garment by,
     Give death but what belongs to death,
     And life the life that cannot die!

     Not for a soul like thine the calm
     Of selfish ease and joys of sense;
     But duty, more than crown or palm,
     Its own exceeding recompense.

     Go up and on thy day well done,
     Its morning promise well fulfilled,
     Arise to triumphs yet unwon,
     To holier tasks that God has willed.

     Go, leave behind thee all that mars
     The work below of man for man;
     With the white legions of the stars
     Do service such as angels can.

     Wherever wrong shall right deny
     Or suffering spirits urge their plea,
     Be thine a voice to smite the lie,
     A hand to set the captive free!





SONGS OF LABOR AND REFORM




THE QUAKER OF THE OLDEN TIME.

     THE Quaker of the olden time!
     How calm and firm and true,
     Unspotted by its wrong and crime,
     He walked the dark earth through.
     The lust of power, the love of gain,
     The thousand lures of sin
     Around him, had no power to stain
     The purity within.

     With that deep insight which detects
     All great things in the small,
     And knows how each man's life affects
     The spiritual life of all,
     He walked by faith and not by sight,
     By love and not by law;
     The presence of the wrong or right
     He rather felt than saw.

     He felt that wrong with wrong partakes,
     That nothing stands alone,
     That whoso gives the motive, makes
     His brother's sin his own.
     And, pausing not for doubtful choice
     Of evils great or small,
     He listened to that inward voice
     Which called away from all.

     O Spirit of that early day,
     So pure and strong and true,
     Be with us in the narrow way
     Our faithful fathers knew.
     Give strength the evil to forsake,
     The cross of Truth to bear,
     And love and reverent fear to make
     Our daily lives a prayer!

     1838.




DEMOCRACY.

All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so
to them.--MATTHEW vii. 12.


     BEARER of Freedom's holy light,
     Breaker of Slavery's chain and rod,
     The foe of all which pains the sight,
     Or wounds the generous ear of God!

     Beautiful yet thy temples rise,
     Though there profaning gifts are thrown;
     And fires unkindled of the skies
     Are glaring round thy altar-stone.

     Still sacred, though thy name be breathed
     By those whose hearts thy truth deride;
     And garlands, plucked from thee, are wreathed
     Around the haughty brows of Pride.

     Oh, ideal of my boyhood's time!
     The faith in which my father stood,
     Even when the sons of Lust and Crime
     Had stained thy peaceful courts with blood!

     Still to those courts my footsteps turn,
     For through the mists which darken there,
     I see the flame of Freedom burn,--
     The Kebla of the patriot's prayer!

     The generous feeling, pure and warm,
     Which owns the right of all divine;
     The pitying heart, the helping arm,
     The prompt self-sacrifice, are thine.

     Beneath thy broad, impartial eye,
     How fade the lines of caste and birth!
     How equal in their suffering lie
     The groaning multitudes of earth!

     Still to a stricken brother true,
     Whatever clime hath nurtured him;
     As stooped to heal the wounded Jew
     The worshipper of Gerizim.

     By misery unrepelled, unawed
     By pomp or power, thou seest a Man
     In prince or peasant, slave or lord,
     Pale priest, or swarthy artisan.

     Through all disguise, form, place, or name,
     Beneath the flaunting robes of sin,
     Through poverty and squalid shame,
     Thou lookest on the man within.

     On man, as man, retaining yet,
     Howe'er debased, and soiled, and dim,
     The crown upon his forehead set,
     The immortal gift of God to him.

     And there is reverence in thy look;
     For that frail form which mortals wear
     The Spirit of the Holiest took,
     And veiled His perfect brightness there.

     Not from the shallow babbling fount
     Of vain philosophy thou art;
     He who of old on Syria's Mount
     Thrilled, warmed, by turns, the listener's heart,

     In holy words which cannot die,
     In thoughts which angels leaned to know,
     Proclaimed thy message from on high,
     Thy mission to a world of woe.

     That voice's echo hath not died!
     From the blue lake of Galilee,
     And Tabor's lonely mountain-side,
     It calls a struggling world to thee.

     Thy name and watchword o'er this land
     I hear in every breeze that stirs,
     And round a thousand altars stand
     Thy banded party worshippers.

     Not, to these altars of a day,
     At party's call, my gift I bring;
     But on thy olden shrine I lay
     A freeman's dearest offering.

     The voiceless utterance of his will,--
     His pledge to Freedom and to Truth,
     That manhood's heart remembers still
     The homage of his generous youth.

     Election Day, 1841




THE GALLOWS.

Written on reading pamphlets published by clergymen against the
abolition of the gallows.


     I.
     THE suns of eighteen centuries have shone
     Since the Redeemer walked with man, and made
     The fisher's boat, the cavern's floor of stone,
     And mountain moss, a pillow for His head;
     And He, who wandered with the peasant Jew,
     And broke with publicans the bread of shame,
     And drank with blessings, in His Father's name,
     The water which Samaria's outcast drew,
     Hath now His temples upon every shore,
     Altar and shrine and priest; and incense dim
     Evermore rising, with low prayer and hymn,
     From lips which press the temple's marble floor,
     Or kiss the gilded sign of the dread cross He bore.


     II.
     Yet as of old, when, meekly "doing good,"
     He fed a blind and selfish multitude,
     And even the poor companions of His lot
     With their dim earthly vision knew Him not,
     How ill are His high teachings understood
     Where He hath spoken Liberty, the priest
     At His own altar binds the chain anew;
     Where He hath bidden to Life's equal feast,
     The starving many wait upon the few;
     Where He hath spoken Peace, His name hath been
     The loudest war-cry of contending men;
     Priests, pale with vigils, in His name have blessed
     The unsheathed sword, and laid the spear in rest,
     Wet the war-banner with their sacred wine,
     And crossed its blazon with the holy sign;
     Yea, in His name who bade the erring live,
     And daily taught His lesson, to forgive!
     Twisted the cord and edged the murderous steel;
     And, with His words of mercy on their lips,
     Hung gloating o'er the pincer's burning grips,
     And the grim horror of the straining wheel;
     Fed the slow flame which gnawed the victim's limb,
     Who saw before his searing eyeballs swim
     The image of their Christ in cruel zeal,
     Through the black torment-smoke, held mockingly to him!


     III.
     The blood which mingled with the desert sand,
     And beaded with its red and ghastly dew
     The vines and olives of the Holy Land;
     The shrieking curses of the hunted Jew;
     The white-sown bones of heretics, where'er
     They sank beneath the Crusade's holy spear;
     Goa's dark dungeons, Malta's sea-washed cell,
     Where with the hymns the ghostly fathers sung
     Mingled the groans by subtle torture wrung,
     Heaven's anthem blending with the shriek of hell!
     The midnight of Bartholomew, the stake
     Of Smithfield, and that thrice-accursed flame
     Which Calvin kindled by Geneva's lake;
     New England's scaffold, and the priestly sneer
     Which mocked its victims in that hour of fear,
     When guilt itself a human tear might claim,--
     Bear witness, O Thou wronged and merciful One!
     That Earth's most hateful crimes have in Thy
     name been done!


     IV.
     Thank God! that I have lived to see the time
     When the great truth begins at last to find
     An utterance from the deep heart of mankind,
     Earnest and clear, that all Revenge is Crime,
     That man is holier than a creed, that all
     Restraint upon him must consult his good,
     Hope's sunshine linger on his prison wall,
     And Love look in upon his solitude.
     The beautiful lesson which our Saviour taught
     Through long, dark centuries its way hath wrought
     Into the common mind and popular thought;
     And words, to which by Galilee's lake shore
     The humble fishers listened with hushed oar,
     Have found an echo in the general heart,
     And of the public faith become a living part.


     V.
     Who shall arrest this tendency? Bring back
     The cells of Venice and the bigot's rack?
     Harden the softening human heart again
     To cold indifference to a brother's pain?
     Ye most unhappy men! who, turned away
     From the mild sunshine of the Gospel day,
     Grope in the shadows of Man's twilight time,
     What mean ye, that with ghoul-like zest ye brood,
     O'er those foul altars streaming with warm blood,
     Permitted in another age and clime?
     Why cite that law with which the bigot Jew
     Rebuked the Pagan's mercy, when he knew
     No evil in the Just One? Wherefore turn
     To the dark, cruel past? Can ye not learn
     From the pure Teacher's life how mildly free
     Is the great Gospel of Humanity?
     The Flamen's knife is bloodless, and no more
     Mexitli's altars soak with human gore,
     No more the ghastly sacrifices smoke
     Through the green arches of the Druid's oak;
     And ye of milder faith, with your high claim
     Of prophet-utterance in the Holiest name,
     Will ye become the Druids of our time
     Set up your scaffold-altars in our land,
     And, consecrators of Law's darkest crime,
     Urge to its loathsome work the hangman's hand?
     Beware, lest human nature, roused at last,
     From its peeled shoulder your encumbrance cast,
     And, sick to loathing of your cry for blood,
     Rank ye with those who led their victims round
     The Celt's red altar and the Indian's mound,
     Abhorred of Earth and Heaven, a pagan brotherhood!

     1842.




SEED-TIME AND HARVEST.

     As o'er his furrowed fields which lie
     Beneath a coldly dropping sky,
     Yet chill with winter's melted snow,
     The husbandman goes forth to sow,

     Thus, Freedom, on the bitter blast
     The ventures of thy seed we cast,
     And trust to warmer sun and rain
     To swell the germs and fill the grain.

     Who calls thy glorious service hard?
     Who deems it not its own reward?
     Who, for its trials, counts it less.
     A cause of praise and thankfulness?

     It may not be our lot to wield
     The sickle in the ripened field;
     Nor ours to hear, on summer eves,
     The reaper's song among the sheaves.

     Yet where our duty's task is wrought
     In unison with God's great thought,
     The near and future blend in one,
     And whatsoe'er is willed, is done!

     And ours the grateful service whence
     Comes day by day the recompense;
     The hope, the trust, the purpose stayed,
     The fountain and the noonday shade.

     And were this life the utmost span,
     The only end and aim of man,
     Better the toil of fields like these
     Than waking dream and slothful ease.

     But life, though falling like our grain,
     Like that revives and springs again;
     And, early called, how blest are they
     Who wait in heaven their harvest-day!

     1843.




TO THE REFORMERS OF ENGLAND.

This poem was addressed to those who like Richard Cobden and John Bright
were seeking the reform of political evils in Great Britain by peaceful
and Christian means. It will be remembered that the Anti-Corn Law League
was in the midst of its labors at this time.


     GOD bless ye, brothers! in the fight
     Ye 're waging now, ye cannot fail,
     For better is your sense of right
     Than king-craft's triple mail.

     Than tyrant's law, or bigot's ban,
     More mighty is your simplest word;
     The free heart of an honest man
     Than crosier or the sword.

     Go, let your blinded Church rehearse
     The lesson it has learned so well;
     It moves not with its prayer or curse
     The gates of heaven or hell.

     Let the State scaffold rise again;
     Did Freedom die when Russell died?
     Forget ye how the blood of Vane
     From earth's green bosom cried?

     The great hearts of your olden time
     Are beating with you, full and strong;
     All holy memories and sublime
     And glorious round ye throng.

     The bluff, bold men of Runnymede
     Are with ye still in times like these;
     The shades of England's mighty dead,
     Your cloud of witnesses!

     The truths ye urge are borne abroad
     By every wind and every tide;
     The voice of Nature and of God
     Speaks out upon your side.

     The weapons which your hands have found
     Are those which Heaven itself has wrought,
     Light, Truth, and Love; your battle-ground
     The free, broad field of Thought.

     No partial, selfish purpose breaks
     The simple beauty of your plan,
     Nor lie from throne or altar shakes
     Your steady faith in man.

     The languid pulse of England starts
     And bounds beneath your words of power,
     The beating of her million hearts
     Is with you at this hour!

     O ye who, with undoubting eyes,
     Through present cloud and gathering storm,
     Behold the span of Freedom's skies,
     And sunshine soft and warm;

     Press bravely onward! not in vain
     Your generous trust in human-kind;
     The good which bloodshed could not gain
     Your peaceful zeal shall find.

     Press on! the triumph shall be won
     Of common rights and equal laws,
     The glorious dream of Harrington,
     And Sidney's good old cause.

     Blessing the cotter and the crown,
     Sweetening worn Labor's bitter cup;
     And, plucking not the highest down,
     Lifting the lowest up.

     Press on! and we who may not share
     The toil or glory of your fight
     May ask, at least, in earnest prayer,
     God's blessing on the right!

     1843.




THE HUMAN SACRIFICE.

Some leading sectarian papers had lately published the letter of a
clergyman, giving an account of his attendance upon a criminal (who had
committed murder during a fit of intoxication), at the time of his
execution, in western New York. The writer describes the agony of the
wretched being, his abortive attempts at prayer, his appeal for life,
his fear of a violent death; and, after declaring his belief that the
poor victim died without hope of salvation, concludes with a warm eulogy
upon the gallows, being more than ever convinced of its utility by the
awful dread and horror which it inspired.


     I.
     FAR from his close and noisome cell,
     By grassy lane and sunny stream,
     Blown clover field and strawberry dell,
     And green and meadow freshness, fell
     The footsteps of his dream.
     Again from careless feet the dew
     Of summer's misty morn he shook;
     Again with merry heart he threw
     His light line in the rippling brook.
     Back crowded all his school-day joys;
     He urged the ball and quoit again,
     And heard the shout of laughing boys
     Come ringing down the walnut glen.
     Again he felt the western breeze,
     With scent of flowers and crisping hay;
     And down again through wind-stirred trees
     He saw the quivering sunlight play.
     An angel in home's vine-hung door,
     He saw his sister smile once more;
     Once more the truant's brown-locked head
     Upon his mother's knees was laid,
     And sweetly lulled to slumber there,
     With evening's holy hymn and prayer!

     II.
     He woke. At once on heart and brain
     The present Terror rushed again;
     Clanked on his limbs the felon's chain
     He woke, to hear the church-tower tell
     Time's footfall on the conscious bell,
     And, shuddering, feel that clanging din
     His life's last hour had ushered in;
     To see within his prison-yard,
     Through the small window, iron barred,
     The gallows shadow rising dim
     Between the sunrise heaven and him;
     A horror in God's blessed air;
     A blackness in his morning light;
     Like some foul devil-altar there
     Built up by demon hands at night.
     And, maddened by that evil sight,
     Dark, horrible, confused, and strange,
     A chaos of wild, weltering change,
     All power of check and guidance gone,
     Dizzy and blind, his mind swept on.
     In vain he strove to breathe a prayer,
     In vain he turned the Holy Book,
     He only heard the gallows-stair
     Creak as the wind its timbers shook.
     No dream for him of sin forgiven,
     While still that baleful spectre stood,
     With its hoarse murmur, "Blood for Blood!"
     Between him and the pitying Heaven.

     III.
     Low on his dungeon floor he knelt,
     And smote his breast, and on his chain,
     Whose iron clasp he always felt,
     His hot tears fell like rain;
     And near him, with the cold, calm look
     And tone of one whose formal part,
     Unwarmed, unsoftened of the heart,
     Is measured out by rule and book,
     With placid lip and tranquil blood,
     The hangman's ghostly ally stood,
     Blessing with solemn text and word
     The gallows-drop and strangling cord;
     Lending the sacred Gospel's awe
     And sanction to the crime of Law.

     IV.
     He saw the victim's tortured brow,
     The sweat of anguish starting there,
     The record of a nameless woe
     In the dim eye's imploring stare,
     Seen hideous through the long, damp hair,--
     Fingers of ghastly skin and bone
     Working and writhing on the stone!
     And heard, by mortal terror wrung
     From heaving breast and stiffened tongue,
     The choking sob and low hoarse prayer;
     As o'er his half-crazed fancy came
     A vision of the eternal flame,
     Its smoking cloud of agonies,
     Its demon-worm that never dies,
     The everlasting rise and fall
     Of fire-waves round the infernal wall;
     While high above that dark red flood,
     Black, giant-like, the gallows stood;
     Two busy fiends attending there
     One with cold mocking rite and prayer,
     The other with impatient grasp,
     Tightening the death-rope's strangling clasp.

     V.
     The unfelt rite at length was done,
     The prayer unheard at length was said,
     An hour had passed: the noonday sun
     Smote on the features of the dead!
     And he who stood the doomed beside,
     Calm gauger of the swelling tide
     Of mortal agony and fear,
     Heeding with curious eye and ear
     Whate'er revealed the keen excess
     Of man's extremest wretchedness
     And who in that dark anguish saw
     An earnest of the victim's fate,
     The vengeful terrors of God's law,
     The kindlings of Eternal hate,
     The first drops of that fiery rain
     Which beats the dark red realm of pain,
     Did he uplift his earnest cries
     Against the crime of Law, which gave
     His brother to that fearful grave,
     Whereon Hope's moonlight never lies,
     And Faith's white blossoms never wave
     To the soft breath of Memory's sighs;
     Which sent a spirit marred and stained,
     By fiends of sin possessed, profaned,
     In madness and in blindness stark,
     Into the silent, unknown dark?
     No, from the wild and shrinking dread,
     With which he saw the victim led
     Beneath the dark veil which divides
     Ever the living from the dead,
     And Nature's solemn secret hides,
     The man of prayer can only draw
     New reasons for his bloody law;
     New faith in staying Murder's hand
     By murder at that Law's command;
     New reverence for the gallows-rope,
     As human nature's latest hope;
     Last relic of the good old time,
     When Power found license for its crime,
     And held a writhing world in check
     By that fell cord about its neck;
     Stifled Sedition's rising shout,
     Choked the young breath of Freedom out,
     And timely checked the words which sprung
     From Heresy's forbidden tongue;
     While in its noose of terror bound,
     The Church its cherished union found,
     Conforming, on the Moslem plan,
     The motley-colored mind of man,
     Not by the Koran and the Sword,
     But by the Bible and the Cord.

     VI.
     O Thou at whose rebuke the grave
     Back to warm life its sleeper gave,
     Beneath whose sad and tearful glance
     The cold and changed countenance
     Broke the still horror of its trance,
     And, waking, saw with joy above,
     A brother's face of tenderest love;
     Thou, unto whom the blind and lame,
     The sorrowing and the sin-sick came,
     And from Thy very garment's hem
     Drew life and healing unto them,
     The burden of Thy holy faith
     Was love and life, not hate and death;
     Man's demon ministers of pain,
     The fiends of his revenge, were sent
     From thy pure Gospel's element
     To their dark home again.
     Thy name is Love! What, then, is he,
     Who in that name the gallows rears,
     An awful altar built to Thee,
     With sacrifice of blood and tears?
     Oh, once again Thy healing lay
     On the blind eyes which knew Thee not,
     And let the light of Thy pure day
     Melt in upon his darkened thought.
     Soften his hard, cold heart, and show
     The power which in forbearance lies,
     And let him feel that mercy now
     Is better than old sacrifice.

     VII.
     As on the White Sea's charmed shore,
     The Parsee sees his holy hill (10)
     With dunnest smoke-clouds curtained o'er,
     Yet knows beneath them, evermore,
     The low, pale fire is quivering still;
     So, underneath its clouds of sin,
     The heart of man retaineth yet
     Gleams of its holy origin;
     And half-quenched stars that never set,
     Dim colors of its faded bow,
     And early beauty, linger there,
     And o'er its wasted desert blow
     Faint breathings of its morning air.
     Oh, never yet upon the scroll
     Of the sin-stained, but priceless soul,
     Hath Heaven inscribed "Despair!"
     Cast not the clouded gem away,
     Quench not the dim but living ray,--
     My brother man, Beware!
     With that deep voice which from the skies
     Forbade the Patriarch's sacrifice,
     God's angel cries, Forbear.

     1843





SONGS OF LABOR.




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.

     1849.




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 hard 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


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.




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


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, plus PERSONAL SKETCHES AND TRIBUTES and HISTORICAL PAPERS



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, plus POLITICS AND REFORM, THE INNER LIFE and CRITICISM



     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 Delphus 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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