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 hispoetical and prose works as re-arranged and thoroughly revised byhimself or with his cooperation. Mr. Whittier has supplied suchadditional information regarding the subject and occasion of certainpoems as may be stated in brief head-notes, and this edition has beenmuch enriched by the poet's personal comment. So far as practicable thedates of publication of the various articles have been given, and sincethese were originally published soon after composition, the dates oftheir first appearance have been taken as determining the time at whichthey were written. At the request of the Publishers, Mr. Whittier hasallowed his early poems, discarded from previous collections, to beplaced, in the general order of their appearance, in an appendix to thefinal volume of poems. By this means the present edition is made socomplete and retrospective that students of the poet's career willalways find the most abundant material for their purpose. The Publisherscongratulate themselves and the public that the careful attention whichMr. Whittier has been able to give to this revision of his works hasresulted in so comprehensive and well-adjusted a collection. 

The portraits prefixed to the several volumes have been chosen with aview to illustrating successive periods in the poet's life. Theoriginal 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 byS. A. Schoff, in 1888, after a painting by Bass Otis, a pupil ofGilbert 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 noteby way of preface:--

"In these volumes, for the first time, a complete collection of mypoetical writings has been made. While it is satisfactory to know thatthese scattered children of my brain have found a home, I cannot butregret that I have been unable, by reason of illness, to give thatattention to their revision and arrangement, which respect for theopinions of others and my own afterthought and experience demand. 

"That there are pieces in this collection which I would 'willingly letdie, ' I am free to confess. But it is now too late to disown them, and Imust 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 whichthey were written, and the events by which they were suggested. 

"The long poem of Mogg Megone was in a great measure composed in earlylife; and it is scarcely necessary to say that its subject is not suchas the writer would have chosen at any subsequent period. "

After a lapse of thirty years since the above was written, I have beenrequested by my publishers to make some preparation for a new andrevised edition of my poems. I cannot flatter myself that I have addedmuch to the interest of the work beyond the correction of my own errorsand those of the press, with the addition of a few heretoforeunpublished pieces, and occasional notes of explanation which seemednecessary. I have made an attempt to classify the poems under a fewgeneral heads, and have transferred the long poem of Mogg Megone to theAppendix, with other specimens of my earlier writings. I have endeavoredto affix the dates of composition or publication as far as possible. 

In looking over these poems I have not been unmindful of occasionalprosaic lines and verbal infelicities, but at this late day I haveneither strength nor patience to undertake their correction. 

Perhaps a word of explanation may be needed in regard to a class ofpoems written between the years 1832 and 1865. Of their defects from anartistic point of view it is not necessary to speak. They were theearnest and often vehement expression of the writer's thought andfeeling at critical periods in the great conflict between Freedom andSlavery. They were written with no expectation that they would survivethe occasions which called them forth: they were protests, alarmsignals, trumpet-calls to action, words wrung from the writer's heart, forged at white heat, and of course lacking the finish and carefulword-selection which reflection and patient brooding over them mighthave given. Such as they are, they belong to the history of theAnti-Slavery movement, and may serve as way-marks of its progress. Iftheir language at times seems severe and harsh, the monstrous wrong ofSlavery which provoked it must be its excuse, if any is needed. Inattacking it, we did not measure our words. "It is, " said Garrison, "a waste of politeness to be courteous to the devil. " But in truth thecontest was, in a great measure, an impersonal one, --hatred of slaveryand 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 theNotes on Virginia, says "It is impossible to be temperate and pursue thesubject of Slavery. " After the great contest was over, no class of theAmerican people were more ready, with kind words and deprecation ofharsh retaliation, to welcome back the revolted States than theAbolitionists; and none have since more heartily rejoiced at the fastincreasing prosperity of the South. 

Grateful for the measure of favor which has been accorded to mywritings, I leave this edition with the public. It contains all that Icare to re-publish, and some things which, had the matter of choice beenleft 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 theWaldenses disseminated their principles among the Catholic gentry. Theygained access to the house through their occupation as peddlers ofsilks, jewels, and trinkets. "Having disposed of some of their goods, "it is said by a writer who quotes the inquisitor Rainerus Sacco, "theycautiously intimated that they had commodities far more valuable thanthese, inestimable jewels, which they would show if they could beprotected from the clergy. They would then give their purchasers a Bibleor Testament; and thereby many were deluded into heresy. " The poem, under the title Le Colporteur Vaudois, was translated into French byProfessor G. De Felice, of Montauban, and further naturalized byProfessor Alexandre Rodolphe Vinet, who quoted it in his lectures onFrench literature, afterwards published. It became familiar in this formto the Waldenses, who adopted it as a household poem. An Americanclergyman, 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 theinformation. At the banquet which closed the meeting of the synod, themoderator announced the fact, and was instructed in the name of theWaldensian church to write to me a letter of thanks. My letter, writtenin 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 ourAtlantic cities, during the prevalence of the Indian cholera, whilein 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 ofclear water, gushing from the very roots of a venerable oak. It is abouttwo 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 IndiansPentucket, was for nearly seventeen years a frontier town, and duringthirty years endured all the horrors of savage warfare. In the year1708, a combined body of French and Indians, under the command of DeChaillons, and Hertel de Rouville, the famous and bloody sacker ofDeerfield, made an attack upon the village, which at that time containedonly thirty houses. Sixteen of the villagers were massacred, and a stilllarger number made prisoners. About thirty of the enemy also fell, amongthem Hertel de Rouville. The minister of the place, Benjamin Rolfe, waskilled by a shot through his own door. In a paper entitled The BorderWar 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, rudelychiselled from dark gray stone, was found in the town of Bradford, onthe Merrimac. Its origin must be left entirely to conjecture. The factthat the ancient Northmen visited the north-east coast of North Americaand probably New England, some centuries before the discovery of thewestern 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 Agamenticusand Casco Bay, was killed at Windham on Sebago Lake in the spring of1756. After the whites had retired, the surviving Indians "swayed" orbent down a young tree until its roots were upturned, placed the body oftheir chief beneath it, then released the tree, which, in springing backto its old position, covered the grave. The Sokokis were early convertsto the Catholic faith. Most of them, prior to the year 1756, had removedto 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, andD'Aulnay Charnasy, a Catholic, for the possession of Acadia, forms oneof the most romantic passages in the history of the New World. La Tourreceived aid in several instances from the Puritan colony ofMassachusetts. During one of his voyages for the purpose of obtainingarms and provisions for his establishment at St. John, his castle wasattacked by D'Aulnay, and successfully defended by its high-spiritedmistress. 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 thendied 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 fourteenthcentury, speaks of a cypress-tree in Ceylon, universally held sacred bythe natives, the leaves of which were said to fall only at certainintervals, and he who had the happiness to find and eat one of them wasrestored, at once, to youth and vigor. The traveller saw severalvenerable Jogees, or saints, sitting silent and motionless under thetree, 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 foundationabout the year 1660. Thomas Macy was one of the first, if not the firstwhite settler of Nantucket. The career of Macy is briefly but carefullyoutlined 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 ofSalem, who had himself been imprisoned and deprived of nearly all hisproperty for having entertained Quakers at his house, were fined fornon-attendance at church. They being unable to pay the fine, the GeneralCourt issued an order empowering "the Treasurer of the County to sellthe said persons to any of the English nation of Virginia or Barbadoes, to answer said fines. " An attempt was made to carry this order intoexecution, but no shipmaster was found willing to convey them to theWest 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 legendsconnected with the famous General ----, of Hampton, New Hampshire, who was regarded by his neighbors as a Yankee Faust, in league withthe adversary. I give the story, as I heard it when a child, from avenerable 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 adaughter of Passaconaway, the great Pennacook chieftain, in 1662. Thewedding took place at Pennacook (now Concord, N. H. ), and the ceremoniesclosed with a great feast. According to the usages of the chiefs, Passaconaway ordered a select number of his men to accompany thenewly-married couple to the dwelling of the husband, where in turn therewas another great feast. Some time after, the wife of Winnepurkitexpressing 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 shewished to return, her father sent a messenger to Saugus, informing herhusband, and asking him to come and take her away. He returned foranswer that he had escorted his wife to her father's house in a stylethat became a chief, and that now if she wished to return, her fathermust send her back, in the same way. This Passaconaway refused to do, and it is said that here terminated the connection of his daughter withthe 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 wasBarclay of Ury, an old and distinguished soldier, who had fought underGustavus Adolphus, in Germany. As a Quaker, he became the object ofpersecution and abuse at the hands of the magistrates and the populace. None bore the indignities of the mob with greater patience and noblenessof soul than this once proud gentleman and soldier. One of his friends, on an occasion of uncommon rudeness, lamented that he should be treatedso harshly in his old age who had been so honored before. "I find moresatisfaction, " said Barclay, "as well as honor, in being thus insultedfor my religious principles, than when, a few years ago, it was usualfor the magistrates, as I passed the city of Aberdeen, to meet me on theroad and conduct me to public entertainment in their hall, and thenescort 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 someof the incidents at the terrible fight of Buena Vista, mentioned thatMexican women were seen hovering near the field of death, for thepurpose of giving aid and succor to the wounded. One poor woman wasfound surrounded by the maimed and suffering of both armies, ministeringto the wants of Americans as well as Mexicans, with impartialtenderness. 

 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 CharlesSumner), is the subject of a celebrated picture by Tintoretto, of whichMr. Rogers possesses the original sketch. The slave lies on the ground, amid a crowd of spectators, who look on, animated by all the variousemotions of sympathy, rage, terror; a woman, in front, with a child inher arms, has always been admired for the lifelike vivacity of herattitude and expression. The executioner holds up the broken implements;St. Mark, with a headlong movement, seems to rush down from heaven inhaste to save his worshipper. The dramatic grouping in this picture iswonderful; the coloring, in its gorgeous depth and harmony, is, in Mr. Rogers's sketch, finer than in the picture. "--MRS. JAMESON'S Sacred andLegendary 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 fromMargaret Smith's Journal, as the song of a wandering Milesianschoolmaster. In the seventeenth century, slavery in the New World wasby no means confined to the natives of Africa. Political offenders andcriminals were transported by the British government to the plantationsof Barbadoes and Virginia, where they were sold like cattle in themarket. Kidnapping of free and innocent white persons was practised to aconsiderable 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 LochMaree, the waters of which were supposed to effect a miraculous cure ofmelancholy, 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 toBernardin Henri Saint Pierre's Etudes de la Nature. "We arrived at thehabitation 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 tooffer up our devotions. The hermits were reciting the Litanies ofProvidence, which are remarkably beautiful. After we had addressed ourprayers to God, and the hermits were proceeding to the refectory, Rousseau said to me, with his heart overflowing, 'At this moment Iexperience what is said in the gospel: Where two or three are gatheredtogether in my name, there am I in the midst of them. There is here afeeling of peace and happiness which penetrates the soul. ' I said, 'IfFinelon had lived, you would have been a Catholic. ' He exclaimed, withtears in his eyes, 'Oh, if Finelon were alive, I would struggle to getinto his service, even as a lackey!'" In my sketch of Saint Pierre, itwill 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, Ihave by no means exaggerated his own history of his mental condition atthe period of the story. In the fragmentary Sequel to his Studies ofNature, he thus speaks of himself: "The ingratitude of those of whom Ihad deserved kindness, unexpected family misfortunes, the total loss ofmy small patrimony through enterprises solely undertaken for the benefitof my country, the debts under which I lay oppressed, the blasting ofall my hopes, --these combined calamities made dreadful inroads upon myhealth and reason. . . . I found it impossible to continue in a roomwhere there was company, especially if the doors were shut. I could noteven cross an alley in a public garden, if several persons had gottogether in it. When alone, my malady subsided. I felt myself likewiseat ease in places where I saw children only. At the sight of any onewalking up to the place where I was, I felt my whole frame agitated, andretired. I often said to myself, 'My sole study has been to merit wellof mankind; why do I fear them?'"

He attributes his improved health of mind and body to the counsels ofhis friend, J. J. Rousseau. "I renounced, " says he, "my books. I threwmy eyes upon the works of nature, which spake to all my senses alanguage which neither time nor nations have it in their power to alter. Thenceforth my histories and my journals were the herbage of the fieldsand meadows. My thoughts did not go forth painfully after them, as inthe case of human systems; but their thoughts, under a thousand engagingforms, quietly sought me. In these I studied, without effort, the lawsof that Universal Wisdom which had surrounded me from the cradle, but onwhich heretofore I had bestowed little attention. "

Speaking of Rousseau, he says: "I derived inexpressible satisfactionfrom his society. What I prized still more than his genius was hisprobity. He was one of the few literary characters, tried in the furnaceof affliction, to whom you could, with perfect security, confide yourmost secret thoughts. . . . Even when he deviated, and became the victimof himself or of others, he could forget his own misery in devotion tothe welfare of mankind. He was uniformly the advocate of the miserable. There might be inscribed on his tomb these affecting words from thatBook of which he carried always about him some select passages, duringthe last years of his life: 'His sins, which are many, are forgiven, forhe 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 theRevolutionary war bearing the name of Muller doubtless suggested thesomewhat infelicitous title of a New England idyl. The poem had no realfoundation in fact, though a hint of it may have been found in recallingan incident, trivial in itself, of a journey on the picturesque Maineseaboard with my sister some years before it was written. We had stoppedto rest our tired horse under the shade of an apple-tree, and refreshhim with water from a little brook which rippled through the stone wallacross the road. A very beautiful young girl in scantest summer attirewas at work in the hay-field, and as we talked with her we noticed thatshe strove to hide her bare feet by raking hay over them, blushing asshe 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 OldFrench 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, publishedin 1879 by Samuel Roads, Jr. , it is stated that the crew of CaptainIreson, rather than himself, were responsible for the abandonment of thedisabled vessel. To screen themselves they charged their captain withthe crime. In view of this the writer of the ballad addressed thefollowing letter to the historian:--

OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, 5 mo. 18, 1880. MY DEAR FRIEND: I heartily thank thee for a copy of thy History ofMarblehead. I have read it with great interest and think good use hasbeen made of the abundant material. No town in Essex County has a recordmore honorable than Marblehead; no one has done more to develop theindustrial interests of our New England seaboard, and certainly nonehave given such evidence of self-sacrificing patriotism. I am glad thestory of it has been at last told, and told so well. I have now no doubtthat thy version of Skipper Ireson's ride is the correct one. My versewas founded solely on a fragment of rhyme which I heard from one of myearly schoolmates, a native of Marblehead. I supposed the story to whichit referred dated back at least a century. I knew nothing of theparticipators, and the narrative of the ballad was pure fancy. I am gladfor the sake of truth and justice that the real facts are given in thybook. I certainly would not knowingly do injustice to any one, dead orliving. 

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 plantedthe button-wood trees on the bank of the river below the village in theearly part of the seventeenth century. Unfortunately this noble avenueis 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 prevailedin the rural districts of New England. On the death of a member of thefamily, the bees were at once informed of the event, and their hivesdressed in mourning. This ceremonial was supposed to be necessary toprevent 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 befound Anthony Thacher's Narrative of his Shipwreck. Thacher was Avery'scompanion and survived to tell the tale. Mather's Magnalia, III. 2, gives further Particulars of Parson Avery's End, and suggests the titleof 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 madediligent inquiry: . . . He assures me yt it had really two heads, oneat each end; two mouths, two stings or tongues. "--REV. CHRISTOPHERTOPPAN 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 executedfor the alleged crime of witchcraft. Her home was in what is now knownas Pleasant Valley on the Merrimac, a little above the old Ferry way, where, tradition says, an attempt was made to assassinate Sir EdmundAndros on his way to Falmouth (afterward Portland) and Pemaquid, whichwas frustrated by a warning timely given. Goody Martin was the onlywoman hanged on the north side of the Merrimac during the dreadfuldelusion. The aged wife of Judge Bradbury who lived on the other side ofthe Powow River was imprisoned and would have been put to death but forthe collapse of the hideous persecution. 

The substance of the poem which follows was published under the name ofThe Witch's Daughter, in The National Era in 1857. In 1875 my publishersdesired to issue it with illustrations, and I then enlarged it andotherwise altered it to its present form. The principal addition was inthe 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 NewHeaven upon the New Earth, 1697, quoted in Joshua Coffin's History ofNewbury. Judge Sewall's father, Henry Sewall, was one of the pioneersof 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 warupon the New Hampshire settlements, were so reduced in numbers byfighting and famine that they agreed to a peace with Major Waldron atDover, 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 hadtaken up the hatchet to revenge the brutal treatment of his child bydrunken white sailors, which caused its death. 

It not unfrequently happened during the Border wars that young whitechildren were adopted by their Indian captors, and so kindly treatedthat they were unwilling to leave the free, wild life of the woods; andin some instances they utterly refused to go back with their parents totheir 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 thevalley 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 onecultivated man in the neighborhood. His small but well-chosen librarywas placed at my disposal. He is the "wise old doctor" of Snow-Bound. Count Francois de Vipart with his cousin Joseph Rochemont de Poyen cameto the United States in the early part of the present century. They tookup their residence at Rocks Village on the Merrimac, where they bothmarried. The wife of Count Vipart was Mary Ingalls, who as my fatherremembered her was a very lovely young girl. Her wedding dress, asdescribed by a lady still living, was "pink satin with an overdress ofwhite lace, and white satin slippers. " She died in less than a yearafter her marriage. Her husband returned to his native country. He liesburied 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, ingrateful acknowledgment of the strength and inspiration I have found inher friendship and sympathy. The poem in its first form was entitled TheWife: an Idyl of Bearcamp Water, and appeared in The Atlantic Monthlyfor January, 1868. When I published the volume Among the Hills, inDecember of the same year, I expanded the Prelude and filled out alsothe 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 fishermenand explorers to a fabulous country south of Cape Breton, firstdiscovered by Verrazzani in 1524. It was supposed to have a magnificentcity of the same name on a great river, probably the Penobscot. The siteof this barbaric city is laid down on a map published at Antwerp in1570. In 1604 Champlain sailed in search of the Northern Eldorado, twenty-two leagues up the Penobscot from the Isle Haute. He supposed theriver to be that of Norembega, but wisely came to the conclusion thatthose travellers who told of the great city had never seen it. He saw noevidences of anything like civilization, but mentions the finding of across, 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 fromtheir homes on the Gaspereau and Basin of Minas were assigned to theseveral towns of the Massachusetts colony, the children being bound bythe 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 thepersonal influence of William Penn, who in 1677 visited the Continent, and made the acquaintance of an intelligent and highly cultivated circleof Pietists, or Mystics, who, reviving in the seventeenth century thespiritual faith and worship of Tauler and the "Friends of God" in thefourteenth, gathered about the pastor Spener, and the young andbeautiful Eleonora Johanna Von Merlau. In this circle originated theFrankfort Land Company, which bought of William Penn, the Governor ofPennsylvania, a tract of land near the new city of Philadelphia. Thecompany's agent in the New World was a rising young lawyer, FrancisDaniel Pastorius, son of Judge Pastorius, of Windsheim, who, at the ageof seventeen, entered the University of Altorf. He studied law at, Strasburg, Basle, and Jena, and at Ratisbon, the seat of the ImperialGovernment, obtained a practical knowledge of international polity. Successful in all his examinations and disputations, he received thedegree of Doctor of Law at Nuremberg in 1676. In 1679 he was alaw-lecturer at Frankfort, where he became deeply interested in theteachings 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 bewith Von Rodeck feasting and dancing. " In 1683, in company with a smallnumber of German Friends, he emigrated to America, settling upon theFrankfort Company's tract between the Schuylkill and the Delawarerivers. The township was divided into four hamlets, namely, Germantown, Krisheim, Crefield, and Sommerhausen. Soon after his arrival he unitedhimself with the Society of Friends, and became one of its most able anddevoted members, as well as the recognized head and lawgiver of thesettlement. He married, two years after his arrival, Anneke (Anna), daughter of Dr. Klosterman, of Muhlheim. In the year 1688 he drew up amemorial against slaveholding, which was adopted by the GermantownFriends and sent up to the Monthly Meeting, and thence to the YearlyMeeting at Philadelphia. It is noteworthy as the first protest made bya religious body against Negro Slavery. The original document wasdiscovered in 1844 by the Philadelphia antiquarian, Nathan Kite, andpublished in The Friend (Vol. XVIII. No. 16). It is a bold and directappeal to the best instincts of the heart. "Have not, " he asks, "thesenegroes as much right to fight for their freedom as you have to keepthem slaves?" Under the wise direction of Pastorius, the German-townsettlement grew and prospered. The inhabitants planted orchards andvineyards, 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 weretolerated, and lived together in harmony. In 1692 Richard Framepublished, in what he called verse, a Description of Pennsylvania, inwhich 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, ThomasLloyd, Chief Justice Logan, Thomas Story, and other leading men in theProvince 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 ofPennsylvania, which was published at Frankfort and Leipsic in 1700 and1701. His Lives of the Saints, etc. , written in German and dedicated toProfessor Schurmberg, his old teacher, was published in 1690. He leftbehind him many unpublished manuscripts covering a very wide range ofsubjects, most of which are now lost. One huge manuscript folio, entitled Hive Beestock, Melliotropheum Alucar, or Rusca Apium, stillremains, containing one thousand pages with about one hundred lines to apage. It is a medley of knowledge and fancy, history, philosophy, andpoetry, written in seven languages. A large portion of his poetry isdevoted to the pleasures of gardening, the description of flowers, andthe care of bees. The following specimen of his punning Latin isaddressed 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 Pioneerand that able periodical the Penn Monthly, of Philadelphia, I amindebted for many of the foregoing facts in regard to the Germanpilgrims of the New World, thus closes his notice of Pastorius:--"No tombstone, not even a record of burial, indicates where his remainshave found their last resting-place, and the pardonable desire toassociate the homage due to this distinguished man with some visiblememento can not be gratified. There is no reason to suppose that he wasinterred in any other place than the Friends' old burying-ground inGermantown, though the fact is not attested by any definite source ofinformation. After all, this obliteration of the last trace of hisearthly existence is but typical of what has overtaken the times whichhe represents; that Germantown which he founded, which saw him live andmove, is at present but a quaint idyl of the past, almost a myth, barelyremembered and little cared for by the keener race that has succeeded. The Pilgrims of Plymouth have not lacked historian and poet. Justice hasbeen done to their faith, courage, and self-sacrifice, and to the mightyinfluence of their endeavors to establish righteousness on the earth. The Quaker pilgrims of Pennsylvania, seeking the same object bydifferent means, have not been equally fortunate. The power of theirtestimony for truth and holiness, peace and freedom, enforced only bywhat Milton calls "the unresistible might of meekness, " has been feltthrough two centuries in the amelioration of penal severities, theabolition of slavery, the reform of the erring, the relief of the poorand suffering, --felt, in brief, in every step of human progress. But ofthe men themselves, with the single exception of William Penn, scarcelyanything 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 unrecordedgraves. They were not soldiers, like Miles Standish; they had no figureso picturesque as Vane, no leader so rashly brave and haughty asEndicott. No Cotton Mather wrote their Magnalia; they had no awful dramaof supernaturalism in which Satan and his angels were actors; and theonly witch mentioned in their simple annals was a poor old Swedishwoman, who, on complaint of her countrywomen, was tried and acquittedof everything but imbecility and folly. Nothing but common-place officesof civility came to pass between them and the Indians; indeed, theirenemies taunted them with the fact that the savages did not regard themas Christians, but just such men as themselves. Yet it must be apparentto every careful observer of the progress of American civilization thatits two principal currents had their sources in the entirely oppositedirections of the Puritan and Quaker colonies. To use the words of alate writer: (1) "The historical forces, with which no others may becompared in their influence on the people, have been those of thePuritan and the Quaker. The strength of the one was in the confession ofan invisible Presence, a righteous, eternal Will, which would establishrighteousness on earth; and thence arose the conviction of a directpersonal responsibility, which could be tempted by no external splendorand could be shaken by no internal agitation, and could not be evaded ortransferred. The strength of the other was the witness in the humanspirit 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, andwhich yet was the light of the world; and all other voices were silentbefore this, and the solitary path whither it led was more sacred thanthe worn ways of cathedral-aisles. " It will be sufficiently apparent tothe reader that, in the poem which follows, I have attempted nothingbeyond a study of the life and times of the Pennsylvania colonist, --asimple picture of a noteworthy man and his locality. The colors of mysketch are all very sober, toned down to the quiet and dreamy atmospherethrough which its subject is visible. Whether, in the glare and tumultof the present time, such a picture will find favor may well bequestioned. I only know that it has beguiled for me some hours ofweariness, 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 Connecticutrailway, 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, asuspected witch was confined overnight in the attic, which was boltedfast. In the morning when the constable came to take her to Salem fortrial she was missing, although the door was still bolted. Her escapewas doubtless aided by her friends, but at the time it was attributedto 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 Friendswent into the South Church in time of meeting, "in sack-cloth, withashes upon her head, barefoot, and her face blackened, " and delivered"a warning from the great God of Heaven and Earth to the Rulers andMagistrates of Boston. " For the offence she was sentenced to be "whippedat 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 ofthe 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 whenthe old woman who carries the bones on her bamboo tray lowers it fromtime to time, then girls who carry pitchers and brass vessels mournfullyreverse them to show that they are empty; thus the remains are taken tovisit every house in the village, and every dwelling of a friend orrelative for miles, and the inmates come out to mourn and praise thegoodness of the departed; the bones are carried to all the dead man'sfavorite haunts, to the fields he cultivated, to the grove he planted, to the threshing-floor where he worked, to the village dance-room wherehe made merry. At last they are taken to the grave, and buried in anearthen vase upon a store of food, covered with one of those huge stoneslabs which European visitors wonder at in the districts of theaborigines 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 theannals of the city. The interview between Shattuck and the Governor tookplace, I have since learned, in the residence of the latter, and notin the Council Chamber. The publication of the ballad led to somediscussion as to the historical truthfulness of the picture, but I haveseen no reason to rub out any of the figures or alter the lines andcolors. 

 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 saidunto me, 'Ishmael, my son, bless me. ' I answered, 'May it please Thee tomake Thy compassion prevail over Thine anger; may it be revealed aboveThy other attributes; mayest Thou deal with Thy children according toit, and not according to the strict measure of judgment. ' It seemed tome 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 fishingport of Bradore, with the inscription upon it which is given in thepoem. 

 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 wasdedicated to the late Edwin Percy Whipple, to whom more than to anyother person I was indebted for public recognition as one worthy of aplace in American literature, at a time when it required a great degreeof courage to urge such a claim for a pro-scribed abolitionist. Althoughyounger than I, he had gained the reputation of a brilliant essayist, and was regarded as the highest American authority in criticism. His witand wisdom enlivened a small literary circle of young men includingThomas Starr King, the eloquent preacher, and Daniel N. Haskell of theDaily Transcript, who gathered about our common friend dames T. Fieldsat the Old Corner Bookstore. The poem which gave title to the volume Iinscribed to my friend and neighbor Harriet Prescott Spofford, whosepoems 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, ofDover, in 1662. The Quakers, as was their wont, prophesied against him, and saw, as they supposed, the fulfilment of their prophecy when, manyyears 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 theconstable refused to obey it. He was sustained by the town's people, whowere under the influence of Major Robert Pike, the leading man in thelower valley of the Merrimac, who stood far in advance of his time, asan advocate of religious freedom, and an opponent of ecclesiasticalauthority. He had the moral courage to address an able and manly letterto 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 enactedOct. 19, 1658, that "any person or persons of the cursed sect ofQuakers" should, on conviction of the same, be banished, on painof 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. Theballad appeared first in St. Nicholas, whose young readers were advised, while smiling at the absurd superstition, to remember that badcompanionship and evil habits, desires, and passions are more to bedreaded now than the Elves and Trolls who frightened the children ofpast 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 ofPlymouth, and was the first flower that greeted the Pilgrims after theirfearful winter. The name mayflower was familiar in England, as theapplication of it to the historic vessel shows, but it was applied bythe English, and still is, to the hawthorn. Its use in New England inconnection with _Epigma repens _dates from a very early day, someclaiming that the first Pilgrims so used it, in affectionate memory ofthe vessel and its English flower association. 

 Sad Mayflower! watched by winter stars, And nursed by winter gales, With petals of the sleeted spars, And leaves of frozen sails!

 What had she in those dreary hours, Within her ice-rimmed bay, In common with the wild-wood flowers, The first sweet smiles of May?

 Yet, "God be praised!" the Pilgrim said, Who saw the blossoms peer Above the brown leaves, dry and dead, "Behold our Mayflower here!"

 "God wills it: here our rest shall be, Our years of wandering o'er; For us the Mayflower of the sea Shall spread her sails no more. "

 O sacred flowers of faith and hope, As sweetly now as then Ye bloom on many a birchen slope, In many a pine-dark glen. 

 Behind the sea-wall's rugged length, Unchanged, your leaves unfold, Like love behind the manly strength Of the brave hearts of old. 

 So live the fathers in their sons, Their sturdy faith be ours, And ours the love that overruns Its rocky strength with flowers!

 The Pilgrim's wild and wintry day Its shadow round us draws; The Mayflower of his stormy bay, Our Freedom's struggling cause. 

 But warmer suns erelong shall bring To life the frozen sod; And through dead leaves of hope shall spring Afresh the flowers of God!

 1856. 

THE LAST WALK IN AUTUMN. 

 I. O'er the bare woods, whose outstretched hands Plead with the leaden heavens in vain, I see, beyond the valley lands, The sea's long level dim with rain. Around me all things, stark and dumb, Seem praying for the snows to come, And, for the summer bloom and greenness gone, With winter's sunset lights and dazzling morn atone. 

 II. Along the river's summer walk, The withered tufts of asters nod; And trembles on its arid stalk The boar plume of the golden-rod. And on a ground of sombre fir, And azure-studded juniper, The silver birch its buds of purple shows, And scarlet berries tell where bloomed the sweet wild-rose!

 III. With mingled sound of horns and bells, A far-heard clang, the wild geese fly, Storm-sent, from Arctic moors and fells, Like a great arrow through the sky, Two dusky lines converged in one, Chasing the southward-flying sun; While the brave snow-bird and the hardy jay Call to them from the pines, as if to bid them stay. 

 IV. I passed this way a year ago The wind blew south; the noon of day Was warm as June's; and save that snow Flecked the low mountains far away, And that the vernal-seeming breeze Mocked faded grass and leafless trees, I might have dreamed of summer as I lay, Watching the fallen leaves with the soft wind at play. 

 V. Since then, the winter blasts have piled The white pagodas of the snow On these rough slopes, and, strong and wild, Yon river, in its overflow Of spring-time rain and sun, set free, Crashed with its ices to the sea; And over these gray fields, then green and gold, The summer corn has waved, the thunder's organ rolled. 

 VI. Rich gift of God! A year of time What pomp of rise and shut of day, What hues wherewith our Northern clime Makes autumn's dropping woodlands gay, What airs outblown from ferny dells, And clover-bloom and sweetbrier smells, What songs of brooks and birds, what fruits and flowers, Green woods and moonlit snows, have in its round been ours!

 VII. I know not how, in other lands, The changing seasons come and go; What splendors fall on Syrian sands, What purple lights on Alpine snow! Nor how the pomp of sunrise waits On Venice at her watery gates; A dream alone to me is Arno's vale, And the Alhambra's halls are but a traveller's tale. 

 VIII. Yet, on life's current, he who drifts Is one with him who rows or sails And he who wanders widest lifts No more of beauty's jealous veils Than he who from his doorway sees The miracle of flowers and trees, Feels the warm Orient in the noonday air, And from cloud minarets hears the sunset call to prayer!

 IX. The eye may well be glad that looks Where Pharpar's fountains rise and fall; But he who sees his native brooks Laugh in the sun, has seen them all. The marble palaces of Ind Rise round him in the snow and wind; From his lone sweetbrier Persian Hafiz smiles, And Rome's cathedral awe is in his woodland aisles. 

 X. And thus it is my fancy blends The near at hand and far and rare; And while the same horizon bends Above the silver-sprinkled hair Which flashed the light of morning skies On childhood's wonder-lifted eyes, Within its round of sea and sky and field, Earth wheels with all her zones, the Kosmos stands revealed. 

 XI. And thus the sick man on his bed, The toiler to his task-work bound, Behold their prison-walls outspread, Their clipped horizon widen round! While freedom-giving fancy waits, Like Peter's angel at the gates, The power is theirs to baffle care and pain, To bring the lost world back, and make it theirs again!

 XII. What lack of goodly company, When masters of the ancient lyre Obey my call, and trace for me Their words of mingled tears and fire! I talk with Bacon, grave and wise, I read the world with Pascal's eyes; And priest and sage, with solemn brows austere, And poets, garland-bound, the Lords of Thought, draw near. 

 XIII. Methinks, O friend, I hear thee say, "In vain the human heart we mock; Bring living guests who love the day, Not ghosts who fly at crow of cock! The herbs we share with flesh and blood Are better than ambrosial food With laurelled shades. " I grant it, nothing loath, But doubly blest is he who can partake of both. 

 XIV. He who might Plato's banquet grace, Have I not seen before me sit, And watched his puritanic face, With more than Eastern wisdom lit? Shrewd mystic! who, upon the back Of his Poor Richard's Almanac, Writing the Sufi's song, the Gentoo's dream, Links Manu's age of thought to Fulton's age of steam!

 XV. Here too, of answering love secure, Have I not welcomed to my hearth The gentle pilgrim troubadour, Whose songs have girdled half the earth; Whose pages, like the magic mat Whereon the Eastern lover sat, Have borne me over Rhine-land's purple vines, And Nubia's tawny sands, and Phrygia's mountain pines!

 XVI. And he, who to the lettered wealth Of ages adds the lore unpriced, The wisdom and the moral health, The ethics of the school of Christ; The statesman to his holy trust, As the Athenian archon, just, Struck down, exiled like him for truth alone, Has he not graced my home with beauty all his own?

 XVII. What greetings smile, what farewells wave, What loved ones enter and depart! The good, the beautiful, the brave, The Heaven-lent treasures of the heart! How conscious seems the frozen sod And beechen slope whereon they trod The oak-leaves rustle, and the dry grass bends Beneath the shadowy feet of lost or absent friends. 

 XVIII. Then ask not why to these bleak hills I cling, as clings the tufted moss, To bear the winter's lingering chills, The mocking spring's perpetual loss. I dream of lands where summer smiles, And soft winds blow from spicy isles, But scarce would Ceylon's breath of flowers be sweet, Could I not feel thy soil, New England, at my feet!

 XIX. At times I long for gentler skies, And bathe in dreams of softer air, But homesick tears would fill the eyes That saw the Cross without the Bear. The pine must whisper to the palm, The north-wind break the tropic calm; And with the dreamy languor of the Line, The North's keen virtue blend, and strength to beauty join. 

 XX. Better to stem with heart and hand The roaring tide of life, than lie, Unmindful, on its flowery strand, Of God's occasions drifting by Better with naked nerve to bear The needles of this goading air, Than, in the lap of sensual ease, forego The godlike power to do, the godlike aim to know. 

 XXI. Home of my heart! to me more fair Than gay Versailles or Windsor's halls, The painted, shingly town-house where The freeman's vote for Freedom falls! The simple roof where prayer is made, Than Gothic groin and colonnade; The living temple of the heart of man, Than Rome's sky-mocking vault, or many-spired Milan!

 XXII. More dear thy equal village schools, Where rich and poor the Bible read, Than classic halls where Priestcraft rules, And Learning wears the chains of Creed; Thy glad Thanksgiving, gathering in The scattered sheaves of home and kin, Than the mad license ushering Lenten pains, Or holidays of slaves who laugh and dance in chains. 

 XXIII. And sweet homes nestle in these dales, And perch along these wooded swells; And, blest beyond Arcadian vales, They hear the sound of Sabbath bells! Here dwells no perfect man sublime, Nor woman winged before her time, But with the faults and follies of the race, Old home-bred virtues hold their not unhonored place. 

 XXIV. Here manhood struggles for the sake Of mother, sister, daughter, wife, The graces and the loves which make The music of the march of life; And woman, in her daily round Of duty, walks on holy ground. No unpaid menial tills the soil, nor here Is the bad lesson learned at human rights to sneer. 

 XXV. Then let the icy north-wind blow The trumpets of the coming storm, To arrowy sleet and blinding snow Yon slanting lines of rain transform. Young hearts shall hail the drifted cold, As gayly as I did of old; And I, who watch them through the frosty pane, Unenvious, live in them my boyhood o'er again. 

 XXVI. And I will trust that He who heeds The life that hides in mead and wold, Who hangs yon alder's crimson beads, And stains these mosses green and gold, Will still, as He hath done, incline His gracious care to me and mine; Grant what we ask aright, from wrong debar, And, as the earth grows dark, make brighter every star!

 XXVII. I have not seen, I may not see, My hopes for man take form in fact, But God will give the victory In due time; in that faith I act. And lie who sees the future sure, The baffling present may endure, And bless, meanwhile, the unseen Hand that leads The heart's desires beyond the halting step of deeds. 

 XXVIII. And thou, my song, I send thee forth, Where harsher songs of mine have flown; Go, find a place at home and hearth Where'er thy singer's name is known; Revive for him the kindly thought Of friends; and they who love him not, Touched by some strain of thine, perchance may take The hand he proffers all, and thank him for thy sake. 

 1857. 

THE FIRST FLOWERS

 For ages on our river borders, These tassels in their tawny bloom, And willowy studs of downy silver, Have prophesied of Spring to come. 

 For ages have the unbound waters Smiled on them from their pebbly hem, And the clear carol of the robin And song of bluebird welcomed them. 

 But never yet from smiling river, Or song of early bird, have they Been greeted with a gladder welcome Than whispers from my heart to-day. 

 They break the spell of cold and darkness, The weary watch of sleepless pain; And from my heart, as from the river, The ice of winter melts again. 

 Thanks, Mary! for this wild-wood token Of Freya's footsteps drawing near; Almost, as in the rune of Asgard, The growing of the grass I hear. 

 It is as if the pine-trees called me From ceiled room and silent books, To see the dance of woodland shadows, And hear the song of April brooks!

 As in the old Teutonic ballad Of Odenwald live bird and tree, Together live in bloom and music, I blend in song thy flowers and thee. 

 Earth's rocky tablets bear forever The dint of rain and small bird's track Who knows but that my idle verses May leave some trace by Merrimac!

 The bird that trod the mellow layers Of the young earth is sought in vain; The cloud is gone that wove the sandstone, From God's design, with threads of rain!

 So, when this fluid age we live in Shall stiffen round my careless rhyme, Who made the vagrant tracks may puzzle The savants of the coming time;

 And, following out their dim suggestions, Some idly-curious hand may draw My doubtful portraiture, as Cuvier Drew fish and bird from fin and claw. 

 And maidens in the far-off twilights, Singing my words to breeze and stream, Shall wonder if the old-time Mary Were real, or the rhymer's dream!

 1st 3d mo. , 1857. 

THE OLD BURYING-GROUND. 

 Our vales are sweet with fern and rose, Our hills are maple-crowned; But not from them our fathers chose The village burying-ground. 

 The dreariest spot in all the land To Death they set apart; With scanty grace from Nature's hand, And none from that of Art. 

 A winding wall of mossy stone, Frost-flung and broken, lines A lonesome acre thinly grown With grass and wandering vines. 

 Without the wall a birch-tree shows Its drooped and tasselled head; Within, a stag-horned sumach grows, Fern-leafed, with spikes of red. 

 There, sheep that graze the neighboring plain Like white ghosts come and go, The farm-horse drags his fetlock chain, The cow-bell tinkles slow. 

 Low moans the river from its bed, The distant pines reply; Like mourners shrinking from the dead, They stand apart and sigh. 

 Unshaded smites the summer sun, Unchecked the winter blast; The school-girl learns the place to shun, With glances backward cast. 

 For thus our fathers testified, That he might read who ran, The emptiness of human pride, The nothingness of man. 

 They dared not plant the grave with flowers, Nor dress the funeral sod, Where, with a love as deep as ours, They left their dead with God. 

 The hard and thorny path they kept From beauty turned aside; Nor missed they over those who slept The grace to life denied. 

 Yet still the wilding flowers would blow, The golden leaves would fall, The seasons come, the seasons go, And God be good to all. 

 Above the graves the' blackberry hung In bloom and green its wreath, And harebells swung as if they rung The chimes of peace beneath. 

 The beauty Nature loves to share, The gifts she hath for all, The common light, the common air, O'ercrept the graveyard's wall. 

 It knew the glow of eventide, The sunrise and the noon, And glorified and sanctified It slept beneath the moon. 

 With flowers or snow-flakes for its sod, Around the seasons ran, And evermore the love of God Rebuked the fear of man. 

 We dwell with fears on either hand, Within a daily strife, And spectral problems waiting stand Before the gates of life. 

 The doubts we vainly seek to solve, The truths we know, are one; The known and nameless stars revolve Around the Central Sun. 

 And if we reap as we have sown, And take the dole we deal, The law of pain is love alone, The wounding is to heal. 

 Unharmed from change to change we glide, We fall as in our dreams; The far-off terror at our side A smiling angel seems. 

 Secure on God's all-tender heart Alike rest great and small; Why fear to lose our little part, When He is pledged for all?

 O fearful heart and troubled brain Take hope and strength from this, -- That Nature never hints in vain, Nor prophesies amiss. 

 Her wild birds sing the same sweet stave, Her lights and airs are given Alike to playground and the grave; And over both is Heaven. 

 1858

THE PALM-TREE. 

 Is it the palm, the cocoa-palm, On the Indian Sea, by the isles of balm? Or is it a ship in the breezeless calm?

 A ship whose keel is of palm beneath, Whose ribs of palm have a palm-bark sheath, And a rudder of palm it steereth with. 

 Branches of palm are its spars and rails, Fibres of palm are its woven sails, And the rope is of palm that idly trails!

 What does the good ship bear so well? The cocoa-nut with its stony shell, And the milky sap of its inner cell. 

 What are its jars, so smooth and fine, But hollowed nuts, filled with oil and wine, And the cabbage that ripens under the Line?

 Who smokes his nargileh, cool and calm? The master, whose cunning and skill could charm Cargo and ship from the bounteous palm. 

 In the cabin he sits on a palm-mat soft, From a beaker of palm his drink is quaffed, And a palm-thatch shields from the sun aloft!

 His dress is woven of palmy strands, And he holds a palm-leaf scroll in his hands, Traced with the Prophet's wise commands!

 The turban folded about his head Was daintily wrought of the palm-leaf braid, And the fan that cools him of palm was made. 

 Of threads of palm was the carpet spun Whereon he kneels when the day is done, And the foreheads of Islam are bowed as one!

 To him the palm is a gift divine, Wherein all uses of man combine, -- House, and raiment, and food, and wine!

 And, in the hour of his great release, His need of the palm shall only cease With the shroud wherein he lieth in peace. 

 "Allah il Allah!" he sings his psalm, On the Indian Sea, by the isles of balm; "Thanks to Allah who gives the palm!"

 1858. 

THE RIVER PATH. 

 No bird-song floated down the hill, The tangled bank below was still;

 No rustle from the birchen stem, No ripple from the water's hem. 

 The dusk of twilight round us grew, We felt the falling of the dew;

 For, from us, ere the day was done, The wooded hills shut out the sun. 

 But on the river's farther side We saw the hill-tops glorified, --

 A tender glow, exceeding fair, A dream of day without its glare. 

 With us the damp, the chill, the gloom With them the sunset's rosy bloom;

 While dark, through willowy vistas seen, The river rolled in shade between. 

 From out the darkness where we trod, We gazed upon those bills of God, Whose light seemed not of moon or sun. We spake not, but our thought was one. 

 We paused, as if from that bright shore Beckoned our dear ones gone before;

 And stilled our beating hearts to hear The voices lost to mortal ear!

 Sudden our pathway turned from night; The hills swung open to the light;

 Through their green gates the sunshine showed, A long, slant splendor downward flowed. 

 Down glade and glen and bank it rolled; It bridged the shaded stream with gold;

 And, borne on piers of mist, allied The shadowy with the sunlit side!

 "So, " prayed we, "when our feet draw near The river dark, with mortal fear, "And the night cometh chill with dew, O Father! let Thy light break through!

 "So let the hills of doubt divide, So bridge with faith the sunless tide!

 "So let the eyes that fail on earth On Thy eternal hills look forth;

 "And in Thy beckoning angels know The dear ones whom we loved below!"

 1880. 

MOUNTAIN PICTURES. 

 I. FRANCONIA FROM THE PEMIGEWASSET

 Once more, O Mountains of the North, unveil Your brows, and lay your cloudy mantles by And once more, ere the eyes that seek ye fail, Uplift against the blue walls of the sky Your mighty shapes, and let the sunshine weave Its golden net-work in your belting woods, Smile down in rainbows from your falling floods, And on your kingly brows at morn and eve Set crowns of fire! So shall my soul receive Haply the secret of your calm and strength, Your unforgotten beauty interfuse My common life, your glorious shapes and hues And sun-dropped splendors at my bidding come, Loom vast through dreams, and stretch in billowy length From the sea-level of my lowland home!

 They rise before me! Last night's thunder-gust Roared not in vain: for where its lightnings thrust Their tongues of fire, the great peaks seem so near, Burned clean of mist, so starkly bold and clear, I almost pause the wind in the pines to hear, The loose rock's fall, the steps of browsing deer. The clouds that shattered on yon slide-worn walls And splintered on the rocks their spears of rain Have set in play a thousand waterfalls, Making the dusk and silence of the woods Glad with the laughter of the chasing floods, And luminous with blown spray and silver gleams, While, in the vales below, the dry-lipped streams Sing to the freshened meadow-lands again. So, let me hope, the battle-storm that beats The land with hail and fire may pass away With its spent thunders at the break of day, Like last night's clouds, and leave, as it retreats, A greener earth and fairer sky behind, Blown crystal-clear by Freedom's Northern wind!

 II. MONADNOCK FROM WACHUSET. 

 I would I were a painter, for the sake Of a sweet picture, and of her who led, A fitting guide, with reverential tread, Into that mountain mystery. First a lake Tinted with sunset; next the wavy lines Of far receding hills; and yet more far, Monadnock lifting from his night of pines His rosy forehead to the evening star. Beside us, purple-zoned, Wachuset laid His head against the West, whose warm light made His aureole; and o'er him, sharp and clear, Like a shaft of lightning in mid-launching stayed, A single level cloud-line, shone upon By the fierce glances of the sunken sun, Menaced the darkness with its golden spear!

 So twilight deepened round us. Still and black The great woods climbed the mountain at our back; And on their skirts, where yet the lingering day On the shorn greenness of the clearing lay, The brown old farm-house like a bird's-nest hung. With home-life sounds the desert air was stirred The bleat of sheep along the hill we heard, The bucket plashing in the cool, sweet well, The pasture-bars that clattered as they fell; Dogs barked, fowls fluttered, cattle lowed; the gate Of the barn-yard creaked beneath the merry weight Of sun-brown children, listening, while they swung, The welcome sound of supper-call to hear; And down the shadowy lane, in tinklings clear, The pastoral curfew of the cow-bell rung. Thus soothed and pleased, our backward path we took, Praising the farmer's home. He only spake, Looking into the sunset o'er the lake, Like one to whom the far-off is most near: "Yes, most folks think it has a pleasant look; I love it for my good old mother's sake, Who lived and died here in the peace of God!" The lesson of his words we pondered o'er, As silently we turned the eastern flank Of the mountain, where its shadow deepest sank, Doubling the night along our rugged road: We felt that man was more than his abode, -- The inward life than Nature's raiment more; And the warm sky, the sundown-tinted hill, The forest and the lake, seemed dwarfed and dim Before the saintly soul, whose human will Meekly in the Eternal footsteps trod, Making her homely toil and household ways An earthly echo of the song of praise Swelling from angel lips and harps of seraphim. 

 1862. 

THE VANISHERS. 

 Sweetest of all childlike dreams In the simple Indian lore Still to me the legend seems Of the shapes who flit before. 

 Flitting, passing, seen and gone, Never reached nor found at rest, Baffling search, but beckoning on To the Sunset of the Blest. 

 From the clefts of mountain rocks, Through the dark of lowland firs, Flash the eyes and flow the locks Of the mystic Vanishers!

 And the fisher in his skiff, And the hunter on the moss, Hear their call from cape and cliff, See their hands the birch-leaves toss. 

 Wistful, longing, through the green Twilight of the clustered pines, In their faces rarely seen Beauty more than mortal shines. 

 Fringed with gold their mantles flow On the slopes of westering knolls; In the wind they whisper low Of the Sunset Land of Souls. 

 Doubt who may, O friend of mine! Thou and I have seen them too; On before with beck and sign Still they glide, and we pursue. 

 More than clouds of purple trail In the gold of setting day; More than gleams of wing or sail Beckon from the sea-mist gray. 

 Glimpses of immortal youth, Gleams and glories seen and flown, Far-heard voices sweet with truth, Airs from viewless Eden blown;

 Beauty that eludes our grasp, Sweetness that transcends our taste, Loving hands we may not clasp, Shining feet that mock our haste;

 Gentle eyes we closed below, Tender voices heard once more, Smile and call us, as they go On and onward, still before. 

 Guided thus, O friend of mine Let us walk our little way, Knowing by each beckoning sign That we are not quite astray. 

 Chase we still, with baffled feet, Smiling eye and waving hand, Sought and seeker soon shall meet, Lost and found, in Sunset Land. 

 1864. 

THE PAGEANT. 

 A sound as if from bells of silver, Or elfin cymbals smitten clear, Through the frost-pictured panes I hear. 

 A brightness which outshines the morning, A splendor brooking no delay, Beckons and tempts my feet away. 

 I leave the trodden village highway For virgin snow-paths glimmering through A jewelled elm-tree avenue;

 Where, keen against the walls of sapphire, The gleaming tree-bolls, ice-embossed, Hold up their chandeliers of frost. 

 I tread in Orient halls enchanted, I dream the Saga's dream of caves Gem-lit beneath the North Sea waves!

 I walk the land of Eldorado, I touch its mimic garden bowers, Its silver leaves and diamond flowers!

 The flora of the mystic mine-world Around me lifts on crystal stems The petals of its clustered gems!

 What miracle of weird transforming In this wild work of frost and light, This glimpse of glory infinite!

 This foregleam of the Holy City Like that to him of Patmos given, The white bride coming down from heaven!

 How flash the ranked and mail-clad alders, Through what sharp-glancing spears of reeds The brook its muffled water leads!

 Yon maple, like the bush of Horeb, Burns unconsumed: a white, cold fire Rays out from every grassy spire. 

 Each slender rush and spike of mullein, Low laurel shrub and drooping fern, Transfigured, blaze where'er I turn. 

 How yonder Ethiopian hemlock Crowned with his glistening circlet stands! What jewels light his swarthy hands!

 Here, where the forest opens southward, Between its hospitable pines, As through a door, the warm sun shines. 

 The jewels loosen on the branches, And lightly, as the soft winds blow, Fall, tinkling, on the ice below. 

 And through the clashing of their cymbals I hear the old familiar fall Of water down the rocky wall, Where, from its wintry prison breaking, In dark and silence hidden long, The brook repeats its summer song. 

 One instant flashing in the sunshine, Keen as a sabre from its sheath, Then lost again the ice beneath. 

 I hear the rabbit lightly leaping, The foolish screaming of the jay, The chopper's axe-stroke far away;

 The clamor of some neighboring barn-yard, The lazy cock's belated crow, Or cattle-tramp in crispy snow. 

 And, as in some enchanted forest The lost knight hears his comrades sing, And, near at hand, their bridles ring, --

 So welcome I these sounds and voices, These airs from far-off summer blown, This life that leaves me not alone. 

 For the white glory overawes me; The crystal terror of the seer Of Chebar's vision blinds me here. 

 Rebuke me not, O sapphire heaven! Thou stainless earth, lay not on me, Thy keen reproach of purity, If, in this August presence-chamber, I sigh for summer's leaf-green gloom And warm airs thick with odorous bloom!

 Let the strange frost-work sink and crumble, And let the loosened tree-boughs swing, Till all their bells of silver ring. 

 Shine warmly down, thou sun of noontime, On this chill pageant, melt and move The winter's frozen heart with love. 

 And, soft and low, thou wind south-blowing, Breathe through a veil of tenderest haze Thy prophecy of summer days. 

 Come with thy green relief of promise, And to this dead, cold splendor bring The living jewels of the spring!

 1869. 

THE PRESSED GENTIAN. 

 The time of gifts has come again, And, on my northern window-pane, Outlined against the day's brief light, A Christmas token hangs in sight. 

 The wayside travellers, as they pass, Mark the gray disk of clouded glass; And the dull blankness seems, perchance, Folly to their wise ignorance. 

 They cannot from their outlook see The perfect grace it hath for me; For there the flower, whose fringes through The frosty breath of autumn blew, Turns from without its face of bloom To the warm tropic of my room, As fair as when beside its brook The hue of bending skies it took. 

 So from the trodden ways of earth, Seem some sweet souls who veil their worth, And offer to the careless glance The clouding gray of circumstance. They blossom best where hearth-fires burn, To loving eyes alone they turn The flowers of inward grace, that hide Their beauty from the world outside. 

 But deeper meanings come to me, My half-immortal flower, from thee! Man judges from a partial view, None ever yet his brother knew; The Eternal Eye that sees the whole May better read the darkened soul, And find, to outward sense denied, The flower upon its inmost side

 1872. 

A MYSTERY. 

 The river hemmed with leaning trees Wound through its meadows green; A low, blue line of mountains showed The open pines between. 

 One sharp, tall peak above them all Clear into sunlight sprang I saw the river of my dreams, The mountains that I sang!

 No clue of memory led me on, But well the ways I knew; A feeling of familiar things With every footstep grew. 

 Not otherwise above its crag Could lean the blasted pine; Not otherwise the maple hold Aloft its red ensign. 

 So up the long and shorn foot-hills The mountain road should creep; So, green and low, the meadow fold Its red-haired kine asleep. 

 The river wound as it should wind; Their place the mountains took; The white torn fringes of their clouds Wore no unwonted look. 

 Yet ne'er before that river's rim Was pressed by feet of mine, Never before mine eyes had crossed That broken mountain line. 

 A presence, strange at once and known, Walked with me as my guide; The skirts of some forgotten life Trailed noiseless at my side. 

 Was it a dim-remembered dream? Or glimpse through ions old? The secret which the mountains kept The river never told. 

 But from the vision ere it passed A tender hope I drew, And, pleasant as a dawn of spring, The thought within me grew, That love would temper every change, And soften all surprise, And, misty with the dreams of earth, The hills of Heaven arise. 

 1873. 

A SEA DREAM. 

 We saw the slow tides go and come, The curving surf-lines lightly drawn, The gray rocks touched with tender bloom Beneath the fresh-blown rose of dawn. 

 We saw in richer sunsets lost The sombre pomp of showery noons; And signalled spectral sails that crossed The weird, low light of rising moons. 

 On stormy eves from cliff and head We saw the white spray tossed and spurned; While over all, in gold and red, Its face of fire the lighthouse turned. 

 The rail-car brought its daily crowds, Half curious, half indifferent, Like passing sails or floating clouds, We saw them as they came and went. 

 But, one calm morning, as we lay And watched the mirage-lifted wall Of coast, across the dreamy bay, And heard afar the curlew call, And nearer voices, wild or tame, Of airy flock and childish throng, Up from the water's edge there came Faint snatches of familiar song. 

 Careless we heard the singer's choice Of old and common airs; at last The tender pathos of his voice In one low chanson held us fast. 

 A song that mingled joy and pain, And memories old and sadly sweet; While, timing to its minor strain, The waves in lapsing cadence beat. 

 . . . . . 

 The waves are glad in breeze and sun; The rocks are fringed with foam; I walk once more a haunted shore, A stranger, yet at home, A land of dreams I roam. 

 Is this the wind, the soft sea wind That stirred thy locks of brown? Are these the rocks whose mosses knew The trail of thy light gown, Where boy and girl sat down?

 I see the gray fort's broken wall, The boats that rock below; And, out at sea, the passing sails We saw so long ago Rose-red in morning's glow. 

 The freshness of the early time On every breeze is blown; As glad the sea, as blue the sky, -- The change is ours alone; The saddest is my own. 

 A stranger now, a world-worn man, Is he who bears my name; But thou, methinks, whose mortal life Immortal youth became, Art evermore the same. 

 Thou art not here, thou art not there, Thy place I cannot see; I only know that where thou art The blessed angels be, And heaven is glad for thee. 

 Forgive me if the evil years Have left on me their sign; Wash out, O soul so beautiful, The many stains of mine In tears of love divine!

 I could not look on thee and live, If thou wert by my side; The vision of a shining one, The white and heavenly bride, Is well to me denied. 

 But turn to me thy dear girl-face Without the angel's crown, The wedded roses of thy lips, Thy loose hair rippling down In waves of golden brown. 

 Look forth once more through space and time, And let thy sweet shade fall In tenderest grace of soul and form On memory's frescoed wall, A shadow, and yet all!

 Draw near, more near, forever dear! Where'er I rest or roam, Or in the city's crowded streets, Or by the blown sea foam, The thought of thee is home!

 . . . . . 

 At breakfast hour the singer read The city news, with comment wise, Like one who felt the pulse of trade Beneath his finger fall and rise. 

 His look, his air, his curt speech, told The man of action, not of books, To whom the corners made in gold And stocks were more than seaside nooks. 

 Of life beneath the life confessed His song had hinted unawares; Of flowers in traffic's ledgers pressed, Of human hearts in bulls and bears. 

 But eyes in vain were turned to watch That face so hard and shrewd and strong; And ears in vain grew sharp to catch The meaning of that morning song. 

 In vain some sweet-voiced querist sought To sound him, leaving as she came; Her baited album only caught A common, unromantic name. 

 No word betrayed the mystery fine, That trembled on the singer's tongue; He came and went, and left no sign Behind him save the song he sung. 

 1874. 

HAZEL BLOSSOMS. 

 The summer warmth has left the sky, The summer songs have died away; And, withered, in the footpaths lie The fallen leaves, but yesterday With ruby and with topaz gay. 

 The grass is browning on the hills; No pale, belated flowers recall The astral fringes of the rills, And drearily the dead vines fall, Frost-blackened, from the roadside wall. 

 Yet through the gray and sombre wood, Against the dusk of fir and pine, Last of their floral sisterhood, The hazel's yellow blossoms shine, The tawny gold of Afric's mine!

 Small beauty hath my unsung flower, For spring to own or summer hail; But, in the season's saddest hour, To skies that weep and winds that wail Its glad surprisals never fail. 

 O days grown cold! O life grown old No rose of June may bloom again; But, like the hazel's twisted gold, Through early frost and latter rain Shall hints of summer-time remain. 

 And as within the hazel's bough A gift of mystic virtue dwells, That points to golden ores below, And in dry desert places tells Where flow unseen the cool, sweet wells, So, in the wise Diviner's hand, Be mine the hazel's grateful part To feel, beneath a thirsty land, The living waters thrill and start, The beating of the rivulet's heart!

 Sufficeth me the gift to light With latest bloom the dark, cold days; To call some hidden spring to sight That, in these dry and dusty ways, Shall sing its pleasant song of praise. 

 O Love! the hazel-wand may fail, But thou canst lend the surer spell, That, passing over Baca's vale, Repeats the old-time miracle, And makes the desert-land a well. 

 1874. 

SUNSET ON THE BEARCAMP. 

 A gold fringe on the purpling hem Of hills the river runs, As down its long, green valley falls The last of summer's suns. 

 Along its tawny gravel-bed Broad-flowing, swift, and still, As if its meadow levels felt The hurry of the hill, Noiseless between its banks of green From curve to curve it slips; The drowsy maple-shadows rest Like fingers on its lips. 

 A waif from Carroll's wildest hills, Unstoried and unknown; The ursine legend of its name Prowls on its banks alone. Yet flowers as fair its slopes adorn As ever Yarrow knew, Or, under rainy Irish skies, By Spenser's Mulla grew; And through the gaps of leaning trees Its mountain cradle shows The gold against the amethyst, The green against the rose. 

 Touched by a light that hath no name, A glory never sung, Aloft on sky and mountain wall Are God's great pictures hung. How changed the summits vast and old! No longer granite-browed, They melt in rosy mist; the rock Is softer than the cloud; The valley holds its breath; no leaf Of all its elms is twirled The silence of eternity Seems falling on the world. 

 The pause before the breaking seals Of mystery is this; Yon miracle-play of night and day Makes dumb its witnesses. What unseen altar crowns the hills That reach up stair on stair? What eyes look through, what white wings fan These purple veils of air? What Presence from the heavenly heights To those of earth stoops down? Not vainly Hellas dreamed of gods On Ida's snowy crown!

 Slow fades the vision of the sky, The golden water pales, And over all the valley-land A gray-winged vapor sails. I go the common way of all; The sunset fires will burn, The flowers will blow, the river flow, When I no more return. No whisper from the mountain pine Nor lapsing stream shall tell The stranger, treading where I tread, Of him who loved them well. 

 But beauty seen is never lost, God's colors all are fast; The glory of this sunset heaven Into my soul has passed, A sense of gladness unconfined To mortal date or clime; As the soul liveth, it shall live Beyond the years of time. Beside the mystic asphodels Shall bloom the home-born flowers, And new horizons flush and glow With sunset hues of ours. 

 Farewell! these smiling hills must wear Too soon their wintry frown, And snow-cold winds from off them shake The maple's red leaves down. But I shall see a summer sun Still setting broad and low; The mountain slopes shall blush and bloom, The golden water flow. A lover's claim is mine on all I see to have and hold, -- The rose-light of perpetual hills, And sunsets never cold!

 1876

THE SEEKING OF THE WATERFALL. 

 They left their home of summer ease Beneath the lowland's sheltering trees, To seek, by ways unknown to all, The promise of the waterfall. 

 Some vague, faint rumor to the vale Had crept--perchance a hunter's tale-- Of its wild mirth of waters lost On the dark woods through which it tossed. 

 Somewhere it laughed and sang; somewhere Whirled in mad dance its misty hair; But who had raised its veil, or seen The rainbow skirts of that Undine?

 They sought it where the mountain brook Its swift way to the valley took; Along the rugged slope they clomb, Their guide a thread of sound and foam. 

 Height after height they slowly won; The fiery javelins of the sun Smote the bare ledge; the tangled shade With rock and vine their steps delayed. 

 But, through leaf-openings, now and then They saw the cheerful homes of men, And the great mountains with their wall Of misty purple girdling all. 

 The leaves through which the glad winds blew Shared the wild dance the waters knew; And where the shadows deepest fell The wood-thrush rang his silver bell. 

 Fringing the stream, at every turn Swung low the waving fronds of fern; From stony cleft and mossy sod Pale asters sprang, and golden-rod. 

 And still the water sang the sweet, Glad song that stirred its gliding feet, And found in rock and root the keys Of its beguiling melodies. 

 Beyond, above, its signals flew Of tossing foam the birch-trees through; Now seen, now lost, but baffling still The weary seekers' slackening will. 

 Each called to each: "Lo here! Lo there! Its white scarf flutters in the air!" They climbed anew; the vision fled, To beckon higher overhead. 

 So toiled they up the mountain-slope With faint and ever fainter hope; With faint and fainter voice the brook Still bade them listen, pause, and look. 

 Meanwhile below the day was done; Above the tall peaks saw the sun Sink, beam-shorn, to its misty set Behind the hills of violet. 

 "Here ends our quest!" the seekers cried, "The brook and rumor both have lied! The phantom of a waterfall Has led us at its beck and call. "

 But one, with years grown wiser, said "So, always baffled, not misled, We follow where before us runs The vision of the shining ones. 

 "Not where they seem their signals fly, Their voices while we listen die; We cannot keep, however fleet, The quick time of their winged feet. 

 "From youth to age unresting stray These kindly mockers in our way; Yet lead they not, the baffling elves, To something better than themselves?

 "Here, though unreached the goal we sought, Its own reward our toil has brought: The winding water's sounding rush, The long note of the hermit thrush, "The turquoise lakes, the glimpse of pond And river track, and, vast, beyond Broad meadows belted round with pines, The grand uplift of mountain lines!

 "What matter though we seek with pain The garden of the gods in vain, If lured thereby we climb to greet Some wayside blossom Eden-sweet?

 "To seek is better than to gain, The fond hope dies as we attain; Life's fairest things are those which seem, The best is that of which we dream. 

 "Then let us trust our waterfall Still flashes down its rocky wall, With rainbow crescent curved across Its sunlit spray from moss to moss. 

 "And we, forgetful of our pain, In thought shall seek it oft again; Shall see this aster-blossomed sod, This sunshine of the golden-rod, "And haply gain, through parting boughs, Grand glimpses of great mountain brows Cloud-turbaned, and the sharp steel sheen Of lakes deep set in valleys green. 

 "So failure wins; the consequence Of loss becomes its recompense; And evermore the end shall tell The unreached ideal guided well. 

 "Our sweet illusions only die Fulfilling love's sure prophecy; And every wish for better things An undreamed beauty nearer brings. 

 "For fate is servitor of love; Desire and hope and longing prove The secret of immortal youth, And Nature cheats us into truth. 

 "O kind allurers, wisely sent, Beguiling with benign intent, Still move us, through divine unrest, To seek the loveliest and the best!

 "Go with us when our souls go free, And, in the clear, white light to be, Add unto Heaven's beatitude The old delight of seeking good!"

 1878. 

THE TRAILING ARBUTUS

 I wandered lonely where the pine-trees made Against the bitter East their barricade, And, guided by its sweet Perfume, I found, within a narrow dell, The trailing spring flower tinted like a shell Amid dry leaves and mosses at my feet. 

 From under dead boughs, for whose loss the pines Moaned ceaseless overhead, the blossoming vines Lifted their glad surprise, While yet the bluebird smoothed in leafless trees His feathers ruffled by the chill sea-breeze, And snow-drifts lingered under April skies. 

 As, pausing, o'er the lonely flower I bent, I thought of lives thus lowly, clogged and pent, Which yet find room, Through care and cumber, coldness and decay, To lend a sweetness to the ungenial day And make the sad earth happier for their bloom. 

 1879. 

ST. MARTIN'S SUMMER. 

This name in some parts of Europe is given to the season we call IndianSummer, in honor of the good St. Martin. The title of the poem wassuggested by the fact that the day it refers to was the exact date ofthat 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 avolume, in which I noted some of the superstitions and folkloreprevalent in New England. The volume has not been kept in print, butmost of its contents are distributed in my Literary Recreations andMiscellanies. 

 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 toin the poem were my father, mother, my brother and two sisters, and myuncle and aunt both unmarried. In addition, there was the districtschool-master who boarded with us. The "not unfeared, half-welcomeguest" was Harriet Livermore, daughter of Judge Livermore, of NewHampshire, a young woman of fine natural ability, enthusiastic, eccentric, with slight control over her violent temper, which sometimesmade her religious profession doubtful. She was equally ready to exhortin school-house prayer-meetings and dance in a Washington ball-room, while her father was a member of Congress. She early embraced thedoctrine of the Second Advent, and felt it her duty to proclaim theLord's speedy coming. With this message she crossed the Atlantic andspent the greater part of a long life in travelling over Europe andAsia. She lived some time with Lady Hester Stanhope, a woman asfantastic and mentally strained as herself, on the slope of Mt. Lebanon, but finally quarrelled with her in regard to two white horses with redmarks on their backs which suggested the idea of saddles, on which hertitled hostess expected to ride into Jerusalem with the Lord. A friendof mine found her, when quite an old woman, wandering in Syria with atribe of Arabs, who with the Oriental notion that madness isinspiration, accepted her as their prophetess and leader. At the timereferred to in Snow-Bound she was boarding at the Rocks Village abouttwo miles from us. 

In my boyhood, in our lonely farm-house, we had scanty sources ofinformation; few books and only a small weekly newspaper. Our onlyannual was the Almanac. Under such circumstances story-telling was anecessary resource in the long winter evenings. My father when a youngman had traversed the wilderness to Canada, and could tell us of hisadventures with Indians and wild beasts, and of his sojourn in theFrench villages. My uncle was ready with his record of hunting andfishing and, it must be confessed, with stories which he at least halfbelieved, of witchcraft and apparitions. My mother, who was born in theIndian-haunted region of Somersworth, New Hampshire, between Dover andPortsmouth, told us of the inroads of the savages, and the narrow escapeof her ancestors. She described strange people who lived on thePiscataqua and Cocheco, among whom was Bantam the sorcerer. I have in mypossession the wizard's "conjuring book, " which he solemnly opened whenconsulted. It is a copy of Cornelius Agrippa's Magic printed in 1651, dedicated to Dr. Robert Child, who, like Michael Scott, had learned "theart of glammorie In Padua beyond the sea, " and who is famous in theannals of Massachusetts, where he was at one time a resident, as thefirst man who dared petition the General Court for liberty ofconscience. The full title of the book is Three Books of OccultPhilosophy, by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Knight, Doctor of both Laws, Counsellor to Caesar's Sacred Majesty and Judge of the PrerogativeCourt. 

"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 ofthe Sun, but also by our common Wood Fire: and as the Celestial Firedrives 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 recipientof many tokens of esteem. The publishers of the _Atlantic Monthly_ gavea dinner in my name, and the editor of _The Literary World_ gathered inhis paper many affectionate messages from my associates in literatureand the cause of human progress. The lines which follow were written inacknowledgment. 

 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 inashes; and to its former guests these somewhat careless rhymes may be anot unwelcome reminder of pleasant summers and autumns on the banks ofthe Bearcamp and Chocorua. To the author himself they have a specialinterest from the fact that they were written, or improvised, under theeye and for the amusement of a beloved invalid friend whose last earthlysunsets 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. JonathanGreenleaf, in A Genealogy of the Greenleaf Family, says briefly: "Fromall that can be gathered, it is believed that the ancestors of theGreenleaf family were Huguenots, who left France on account of theirreligious principles some time in the course of the sixteenth century, and settled in England. The name was probably translated from the FrenchFeuillevert. "

 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 notexempted from the sectarian contentions which agitated the mothercountry after the downfall of Charles the First, and of the establishedEpiscopacy. The Quakers, Baptists, and Catholics were banished, on painof death, from the Massachusetts Colony. One Samuel Gorton, a bold andeloquent declaimer, after preaching for a time in Boston against thedoctrines of the Puritans, and declaring that their churches were merehuman devices, and their sacrament and baptism an abomination, wasdriven out of the jurisdiction of the colony, and compelled to seek aresidence among the savages. He gathered round him a considerable numberof converts, who, like the primitive Christians, shared all things incommon. His opinions, however, were so troublesome to the leading clergyof the colony, that they instigated an attack upon his "Family" by anarmed force, which seized upon the principal men in it, and brought theminto Massachusetts, where they were sentenced to be kept at hard laborin several towns (one only in each town), during the pleasure of theGeneral Court, they being forbidden, under severe penalties, to utterany of their religious sentiments, except to such ministers as mightlabor for their conversion. They were unquestionably sincere in theiropinions, and, whatever may have been their errors, deserve to be rankedamong 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 talkingagainst thee by the walls and in the doors of the houses, and speak oneto another, every one to his brother, saying, Come, I pray you, and hearwhat is the word that cometh forth from the Lord. And they come untothee as the people cometh, and they sit before thee as my people, andthey hear thy words, but they will not do them: for with their mouththey 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 apleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument: for they hear thywords, but they do them not. And when this cometh to pass, (lo, it willcome, ) 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 visitthe fatherless and widows in, their affliction, and to keep himselfunspotted 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 ananswer and said, "Thy heart hath gone too far in this world, andthinkest 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 weightof the fire or measure me the blast of the wind, or call me again theday 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 beglory 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 thewhole creation; whatsoever we see therein, --sea, earth, air, stars, trees, moral creatures, --yea, whatsoever there is we do not see, --angelsand spiritual powers. Where is evil, and whence comes it, since God theGood hath created all things? Why made He anything at all of evil, andnot rather by His Almightiness cause it not to be? These thoughts Iturned in my miserable heart, overcharged with most gnawing cares. ""And, admonished to return to myself, I entered even into my inmostsoul, Thou being my guide, and beheld even beyond my soul and mind theLight unchangeable. He who knows the Truth knows what that Light is, andhe that knows it knows Eternity! O--Truth, who art Eternity! Love, whoart Truth! Eternity, who art Love! And I beheld that Thou madest allthings good, and to Thee is nothing whatsoever evil. From the angel tothe worm, from the first motion to the last, Thou settest each in itsplace, and everything is good in its kind. Woe is me!--how high art Thouin the highest, how deep in the deepest! and Thou never departest fromus 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 astriking description of the peculiar and melancholy notes of a birdheard 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 poemis 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 AvisKeene, whose very presence was a benediction, a woman lovely in spiritand person, whose words seemed a message of love and tender concern toher hearers; and Sibyl Jones, whose inspired eloquence and rarespirituality impressed all who knew her. In obedience to her apprehendedduty she made visits of Christian love to various parts of Europe, andto 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: offerSoma 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 Andersonto Agassiz for the uses of a summer school of natural history. A largebarn was cleared and improvised as a lecture-room. Here, on the firstmorning of the school, all the company was gathered. "Agassiz hadarranged no programme of exercises, " says Mrs. Agassiz, in LouisAgassiz; his Life and Correspondence, "trusting to the interest of theoccasion to suggest what might best be said or done. But, as he lookedupon his pupils gathered there to study nature with him, by an impulseas natural as it was unpremeditated, he called upon then to join insilently asking God's blessing on their work together. The pause wasbroken by the first words of an address no less fervent than itsunspoken prelude. " This was in the summer of 1873, and Agassiz died theDecember 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 poemby 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 transcribedthe simple faith and life of the Italian peasantry, wrote the narrativepublished with John Ruskin's introduction under the title, _The Story ofIda_. 

 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 ofIndia, as I find them in Mozoomdar's account of the devotional exercisesof that remarkable religious development which has attracted far lessattention and sympathy from the Christian world than it deserves, as afresh revelation of the direct action of the Divine Spirit upon thehuman 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 repentanceto the people. And one morning, sitting by the fire, a great cloud cameover me, and a temptation beset me. And it was said: All things come byNature; and the Elements and the Stars came over me. And as I sat stilland let it alone, a living hope arose in me, and a true Voice whichsaid: There is a living God who made all things. And immediately thecloud and the temptation vanished, and Life rose over all, and my heartwas 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 theplantation "de Libertas, " belonging to M. Bayou. When the rising of thenegroes took place, in 1791, Toussaint refused to join them until he hadaided M. Bayou and his family to escape to Baltimore. The white man haddiscovered in Toussaint many noble qualities, and had instructed him insome of the first branches of education; and the preservation of hislife 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 theConvention with General Maitland for the evacuation of the island by theBritish. From this period, until 1801, the island, under the governmentof Toussaint, was happy, tranquil, and prosperous. The miserableattempt of Napoleon to re-establish slavery in St. Domingo, although itfailed of its intended object, proved fatal to the negro chieftain. Treacherously seized by Leclerc, he was hurried on board a vessel bynight, and conveyed to France, where he was confined in a coldsubterranean dungeon, at Besancon, where, in April, 1803, he died. Thetreatment of Toussaint finds a parallel only in the murder of the DukeD'Enghien. It was the remark of Godwin, in his Lectures, that the WestIndia Islands, since their first discovery by Columbus, could not boastof a single name which deserves comparison with that of ToussaintL'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 onehundred and sixty negro slaves, sailed from Bonny, in Africa, April, 1819. On approaching the line, a terrible malady broke out, --anobstinate disease of the eyes, --contagious, and altogether beyond theresources of medicine. It was aggravated by the scarcity of water amongthe slaves (only half a wine-glass per day being allowed to anindividual), and by the extreme impurity of the air in which theybreathed. By the advice of the physician, they were brought upon deckoccasionally; but some of the poor wretches, locking themselves in eachother's arms, leaped overboard, in the hope, which so universallyprevails among them, of being swiftly transported to their own homes inAfrica. To check this, the captain ordered several who were stopped inthe attempt to be shot, or hanged, before their companions. The diseaseextended to the crew; and one after another were smitten with it, untilonly one remained unaffected. Yet even this dreadful condition did notpreclude calculation: to save the expense of supporting slaves renderedunsalable, and to obtain grounds for a claim against the underwriters, thirty-six of the negroes, having become blind, were thrown into the seaand drowned!" Speech of M. Benjamin Constant, in the French Chamber ofDeputies, June 17, 1820. 

In the midst of their dreadful fears lest the solitary individual, whosesight remained unaffected, should also be seized with the malady, a sailwas discovered. It was the Spanish slaver, Leon. The same disease hadbeen there; and, horrible to tell, all the crew had become blind! Unableto assist each other, the vessels parted. The Spanish ship has neversince 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 tosteer 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 thefreedom which was denied him in his native land, allied himself with theabolitionists, and at a convention of delegates from all the anti-slavery organizations in New England, held at Boston in May, 1834, waschairman of a committee to prepare an address to the people of NewEngland. Toward the close of the address occurred the passage whichsuggested these lines. "The despotism which our fathers could not bearin their native country is expiring, and the sword of justice in herreformed hands has applied its exterminating edge to slavery. Shall theUnited States--the free United States, which could not bear the bonds ofa king--cradle the bondage which a king is abolishing? Shall a Republicbe less free than a Monarchy? Shall we, in the vigor and buoyancy of ourmanhood, 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 fallenfrom Heaven! Hell from beneath is moved for thee, to meet thee at thycoming! The kings of the earth cry out to thee, Aha! Aha! Art thoubecome 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 StreetChapel, 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 ColonizationSociety were demanding that the free blacks should be sent to Africa, and opposing Emancipation unless expatriation followed. See the reportof 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 meetingin Faneuil Hall, August 21, 1835, in which a demand was made for thesuppression of free speech, lest it should endanger the foundation ofcommercial 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 thatcity, it is stated: "The clergy of all denominations attended in a body, lending their sanction to the proceedings, and adding by their presenceto 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 ofRepresentatives, and the passage of Calhoun's "Bill for excluding Paperswritten or printed, touching the subject of Slavery, from the U. S. Post-office, " in the Senate of the United States. Mr. Pinckney'sresolutions were in brief that Congress had no authority to interfere inany way with slavery in the States; that it ought not to interfere withit in the District of Columbia, and that all resolutions to that endshould be laid on the table without printing. Mr. Calhoun's bill made ita 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, touchingthe 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 peoplecame to take their last look at their friend and protector. He diedSeptember 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 thememory of the independent farmer and high-souled statesman, that healone of all the Governors of the Union in 1836 met the insultingdemands and menaces of the South in a manner becoming a freeman andhater 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 metat Brookfield, June 27, 1837, and issued a Pastoral Letter to thechurches under its care. The immediate occasion of it was the profoundsensation produced by the recent public lecture in Massachusetts byAngelina and Sarah Grimke, two noble women from South Carolina, who boretheir testimony against slavery. The Letter demanded that "the perplexedand agitating subjects which are now common amongst us... Should not beforced upon any church as matters for debate, at the hazard ofalienation and division, " and called attention to the dangers nowseeming "to threaten the female character with widespread and permanentinjury. "

 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 Britishemancipation 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 ofsect or party, "that the citizens of Philadelphia should possess a roomwherein the principles of Liberty, and Equality of Civil Rights, couldbe freely discussed, and the evils of slavery fearlessly portrayed. " Onthe evening of the 17th it was burned by a mob, destroying the office ofthe Pennsylvania Freeman, of which I was editor, and with it my booksand 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-workof 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-SlaverySociety, proposed the calling of a world's anti-slavery convention, andthe proposal was promptly seconded by the American Anti-Slavery Society. The call was addressed to "friends of the slave of every nation and ofevery 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 ofNorfolk, Va. , in reference to George Latimer, the alleged fugitiveslave, who was seized in Boston without warrant at the request of JamesB. Grey, of Norfolk, claiming to be his master. The case caused greatexcitement North and South, and led to the presentation of a petition toCongress, signed by more than fifty thousand citizens of Massachusetts, calling for such laws and proposed amendments to the Constitution asshould relieve the Commonwealth from all further participation in thecrime of oppression. George Latimer himself was finally given freepapers 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 theauctioneer recommended the woman on the stand as "A GOOD CHRISTIAN!" Itwas not uncommon to see advertisements of slaves for sale, in which theywere described as pious or as members of the church. In oneadvertisement 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 1844sentenced to death for aiding a young slave woman, whom he loved and hadmarried, to escape from slavery. In pronouncing the sentence JudgeO'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 youdream of it when you stepped into the bar with an air as if you thoughtit was a fine frolic. But the consequences of crime are just such as youare realizing. Punishment often comes when it is least expected. Let meentreat you to take the present opportunity to commence the work ofreformation. Time will be furnished you to prepare for the great changejust before you. Of your past life I know nothing, except what yourtrial furnished. That told me that the crime for which you are to sufferwas the consequence of a want of attention on your part to the duties oflife. The strange woman snared you. She flattered you with her word;and you became her victim. The consequence was, that, led on by a desireto serve her, you committed the offence of aid in a slave to run awayand 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 theremnant of your days in preparing for death. Remember now thy Creator inthe days of thy youth is the language of inspired wisdom. This comeshome appropriately to you in this trying moment. You are young; quitetoo young to be where you are. If you had remembered your Creator inyour past days, you would not now be in a felon's place, to receive afelon's judgment. Still, it is not too late to remember your Creator. Hecalls early, and He calls late. He stretches out the arms of a Father'slove to you--to the vilest sinner--and says: "Come unto me and besaved. " You can perhaps read. If so, read the Scriptures; read themwithout 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 apoor slave said under similar circumstances: "I am glad my Friday hascome. " If you cannot read the Scriptures, the ministers of our holyreligion will be ready to aid you. They will read and explain to youuntil you will be able to understand; and understanding, to call uponthe only One who can help you and save you--Jesus Christ, the Lamb ofGod, who taketh away the sin of the world. To Him I commend you. Andthrough Him may you have that opening of the Day-Spring of mercy fromon high, which shall bless you here, and crown you as a saint in aneverlasting world, forever and ever. The sentence of the law is that yoube taken hence to the place from whence you came last; thence to thejail of Fairfield District; and that there you be closely and securelyconfined until Friday, the 26th day of April next; on which day, betweenthe hours of ten in the forenoon and two in the afternoon, you will betaken to the place of public execution, and there be hanged by the necktill 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 twohemispheres as did this dreadful sentence. A cry of horror was heardfrom Europe. In the British House of Lords, Brougham and Denman spoke ofit with mingled pathos and indignation. Thirteen hundred clergymen andchurch officers in Great Britain addressed a memorial to the churches ofSouth Carolina against the atrocity. Indeed, so strong was the pressureof the sentiment of abhorrence and disgust that South Carolina yieldedto 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 thefriends of freedom in view of the annexation of Texas, with its vastterritory 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 ameeting in Faneuil Hall of the citizens of Massachusetts, withoutdistinction of party, opposed to the annexation of Texas, and theaggressions of South Carolina, and in favor of decisive action againstslavery. 

 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. Phillipshad 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 territoryby the annexation of Texas, even if it should involve a war withEngland, was unwilling to promote the acquisition of Oregon, which wouldenlarge the Northern domain of freedom, and pleaded as an excuse theperil of foreign complications which he had defied when the interestsof 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 of1845. 

 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 severalfugitive slaves at Pensacola, Florida, to carry them in his vessel tothe British West Indies. Although well aware of the great hazard of theenterprise he attempted to comply with the request, but was seized atsea by an American vessel, consigned to the authorities at Key West, andthence sent back to Pensacola, where, after a long and rigorousconfinement in prison, he was tried and sentenced to be branded on hisright hand with the letters "S. S. " (slave-stealer) and amerced in aheavy 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" atConcord, N. H. , to the Hon. M. N. , Jr. , at Washington, giving the resultof the election. The following verses were published in the BostonChronotype in 1846. They refer to the contest in New Hampshire, whichresulted in the defeat of the pro-slavery Democracy, and in the electionof John P. Hale to the United States Senate. Although their authorshipwas not acknowledged, it was strongly suspected. They furnish a specimenof the way, on the whole rather good-natured, in which theliberty-lovers of half a century ago answered the social and politicaloutlawry 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, WarnerMifflin, whom the Girondist statesman, Jean Pierre Brissot, pronounced"an angel of mercy, the best man he ever knew, " was one of the nobleband of Pennsylvania abolitionists, whose bravery was equalled only bytheir gentleness and tenderness. He presided at the great anti-slaverymeeting in Pennsylvania Hall, May 17, 1838, when the Hall was surroundedby a furious mob. I was standing near him while the glass of the windowsbroken by missiles showered over him, and a deputation from the riotersforced its way to the platform, and demanded that the meeting should beclosed at once. Dr. Neall drew up his tall form to its utmost height. "Iam here, " he said, "the president of this meeting, and I will be torn inpieces before I leave my place at your dictation. Go back to those whosent you. I shall do my duty. " Some years after, while visiting hisrelatives in his native State of Delaware, he was dragged from the houseof his friends by a mob of slave-holders and brutally maltreated. Hebore it like a martyr of the old times; and when released, told hispersecutors that he forgave them, for it was not they but Slavery whichhad done the wrong. If they should ever be in Philadelphia and neededhospitality 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 femaleslaves were unusually excited in singing, and I had the curiosity to askmy negro servant, Said, what they were singing about. As many of themwere natives of his own country, he had no difficulty in translating theMandara or Bornou language. I had often asked the Moors to translatetheir songs for me, but got no satisfactory account from them. Said atfirst said, 'Oh, they sing of Rubee' (God). 'What do you mean?' Ireplied, impatiently. 'Oh, don't you know?' he continued, 'they askedGod to give them their Atka?' (certificate of freedom). I inquired, 'Isthat 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: 'Theyremember their country, Bornou, and say, "Bornou was a pleasant country, full of all good things; but this is a bad country, and we aremiserable!"' 'Do they say anything else?' Said: 'No; they repeat thesewords over and over again, and add, "O God! give us our Atka, and let usreturn again to our dear home. "'

"I am not surprised I got little satisfaction when I asked the Moorsabout the songs of their slaves. Who will say that the above words arenot a very appropriate song? What could have been more congeniallyadapted to their then woful condition? It is not to be wondered at thatthese poor bondwomen cheer up their hearts, in their long, lonely, andpainful wanderings over the desert, with words and sentiments likethese; but I have often observed that their fatigue and sufferings weretoo great for them to strike up this melancholy dirge, and many daystheir 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 thewinter 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 thesiege of Yorktown, says: "The labor on the Virginia plantations isperformed altogether by a species of the human race cruelly wrested fromtheir native country, and doomed to perpetual bondage, while theirmasters are manfully contending for freedom and the natural rights ofman. Such is the inconsistency of human nature. " Eighteen hundred slaveswere found at Yorktown, after its surrender, and restored to theirmasters. Well was it said by Dr. Barnes, in his late work on Slavery:"No slave was any nearer his freedom after the surrender of Yorktownthan when Patrick Henry first taught the notes of liberty to echo amongthe 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 twonegro 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 suchimportance, in the thirteenth century, that the Bishops, twice a year, with tapers burning, and in their pontifical robes, pronounced, in thepresence 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. Acopy of the curse, as pronounced in 1253, declares that, "by theauthority of Almighty God, and the blessed Apostles and Martyrs, and allthe saints in heaven, all those who violate the English liberties, andsecretly or openly, by deed, word, or counsel, do make statutes, orobserve then being made, against said liberties, are accursed andsequestered from the company of heaven and the sacraments of the HolyChurch. "

William Penn, in his admirable political pamphlet, England'sPresent Interest Considered, alluding to the curse of the Charter-breakers, says: "I am no Roman Catholic, and little value theirother curses; yet I declare I would not for the world incur thiscurse, as every man deservedly doth, who offers violence to thefundamental 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 ofthe revolt of the friends of Martin Van Buren in New York, from theDemocratic 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 thehead of nine Americans, forty Greeks, and a motley array of Turks andArabs, was one of those feats of hardihood and daring which have in allages attracted the admiration of the multitude. The higher and holierheroism of Christian self-denial and sacrifice, in the humble walks ofprivate 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 inthe North, clergymen urged the prompt execution of the Fugitive SlaveLaw as a Christian duty, and defended the system of slavery as a Bibleinstitution. 

 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 darkesthour in the aggression of slavery which preceded the dawn of a betterday, 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 caseof the arrest and return to bondage of the fugitive slave Thomas Sims itis stated that--"It would have been impossible for the U. S. Marshalthus successfully to have resisted the law of the State, without theassistance of the municipal authorities of Boston, and the countenanceand support of a numerous, wealthy, and powerful body of citizens. Itwas in evidence that 1500 of the most wealthy and respectablecitizens-merchants, bankers, and others--volunteered their services toaid the marshal on this occasion. . . . No watch was kept upon thedoings of the marshal, and while the State officers slept, after themoon had gone down, in the darkest hour before daybreak, the accused wastaken out of our jurisdiction by the armed police of the city ofBoston. "

 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 tosustain 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, wasremanded to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act, and taken down StateStreet to a steamer chartered by the United States Government, underguard of United States troops and artillery, Massachusetts militia andBoston police. Public excitement ran high, a futile attempt to rescueBurns having been made during his confinement, and the streets werecrowded with tens of thousands of people, of whom many came from othertowns 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 thepeople 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 popularmovement of Free State men to occupy the territory of Kansas, and by theuse of the great democratic weapon--an over-powering majority--to settlethe conflict on that ground between Freedom and Slavery. The opponentsof 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 FreeSoil 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 forFreedom under Fremont's leadership was permitting strong hope ofsuccess, --a hope overshadowed and solemnized by a sense of the magnitudeof the barbaric evil, and a forecast of the unscrupulous and desperateuse 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 ofthe 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 theNorthern merchant to conciliate his Southern customer, a publisher wasfound ready thus to mutilate Scheffer's picture. He intended his editionfor use in the Southern States undoubtedly, but copies fell into thehands of those who believed literally in a gospel which was to preachliberty 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 chambera speech on The State of the Union, in which he urged the paramount dutyof 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 ownopinions on this great crisis, it remains only to say, that I shallcheerfully lend to the government my best support in whatever prudentyet energetic efforts it shall make to preserve the public peace, and tomaintain and preserve the Union; advising, only, that it practise, asfar as possible, the utmost moderation, forbearance, and conciliation. 

"This Union has not yet accomplished what good for mankind was manifestlydesigned by Him who appoints the seasons and prescribes the duties ofstates and empires. No; if it were cast down by faction to-day, it wouldrise again and re-appear in all its majestic proportions to-morrow. Itis the only government that can stand here. Woe! woe! to the man thatmadly lifts his hand against it. It shall continue and endure; and men, in after times, shall declare that this generation, which saved theUnion from such sudden and unlooked-for dangers, surpassed inmagnanimity even that one which laid its foundations in the eternalprinciples 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 whichcontained 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 appropriatedivisions. 

 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 theWestern Department, issued a proclamation which contained a clause, famous as the first announcement of emancipation: "The property, " itdeclared, "real and personal, of all persons in the State of Missouri, who shall take up arms against the United States, or who shall bedirectly proven to have taken active part with their enemies in thefield, is declared to be confiscated to the public use; and theirslaves, if any they have, are hereby declared free men. " Mr. Lincolnregarded the proclamation as premature and countermanded it, aftervainly 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 rulingclass, with few exceptions, were either coldly indifferent or hostile tothe party of freedom. Their attitude was illustrated by caricatures ofAmerica, among which was one of a slaveholder and cowhide, with themotto, "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 ofCappadocia, were delivered up to their own slaves, to be carried awaycaptive to Colchis. Athenxus considers this a just punishment for theirwickedness in first introducing the slave-trade into Greece. From thisancient villany of the Chians the proverb arose, "The Chian hath boughthimself 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 GeneralSherman captured Port Royal, and from this point as a basis ofoperations, the neighboring islands between Charleston and Savannah weretaken possession of. The early occupation of this district, where thenegro population was greatly in excess of the white, gave an opportunitywhich was at once seized upon, of practically emancipating the slavesand of beginning that work of civilization which was accepted as thegrave 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 issuedJanuary 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 theAnnual 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 theincident as I had it from respectable and trustworthy sources. It hassince been the subject of a good deal of conflicting testimony, and thestory was probably incorrect in some of its details. It is admitted byall that Barbara Frietchie was no myth, but a worthy and highly esteemedgentlewoman, intensely loyal and a hater of the Slavery Rebellion, holding her Union flag sacred and keeping it with her Bible; that whenthe Confederates halted before her house, and entered her dooryard, shedenounced them in vigorous language, shook her cane in their faces, anddrove them out; and when General Burnside's troops followed close uponJackson's, she waved her flag and cheered them. It is stated that MayQnantrell, a brave and loyal lady in another part of the city, did waveher flag in sight of the Confederates. It is possible that there hasbeen 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 amendmentabolishing slavery. The resolution was adopted by Congress, January 31, 1865. The ratification by the requisite number of states was announcedDecember 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 ofthe war, when it was charged with the great question of reconstruction;the uppermost subject in men's minds was the standing of those who hadrecently been in arms against the Union and their relations to thefreedmen. 

 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 duplicateof the Freedman's Memorial statue erected in Lincoln Square, Washington. The group, which stands in Park Square, represents the figure of aslave, from whose limbs the broken fetters have fallen, kneeling ingratitude at the feet of Lincoln. The group was designed by Thomas Ball, and was unveiled December 9, 1879. These verses were written for theoccasion. 

 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 ofthe officers, gave a series of concerts in the Northern States, for thepurpose of establishing the college on a firmer financial foundation. Their hymns and songs, mostly in a minor key, touched the hearts of thepeople, and were received as peculiarly expressive of a race deliveredfrom 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 greatreformer when himself a young man he was first sounding his trumpet inEssex County. I close with the verses inscribed to him at the end of hisearthly career, May 24, 1879. My poetical service in the cause offreedom is thus almost synchronous with his life of devotion to thesame 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 soto 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 theabolition 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 Brightwere seeking the reform of political evils in Great Britain by peacefuland Christian means. It will be remembered that the Anti-Corn Law Leaguewas 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 aclergyman, giving an account of his attendance upon a criminal (who hadcommitted murder during a fit of intoxication), at the time of hisexecution, in western New York. The writer describes the agony of thewretched being, his abortive attempts at prayer, his appeal for life, his fear of a violent death; and, after declaring his belief that thepoor victim died without hope of salvation, concludes with a warm eulogyupon the gallows, being more than ever convinced of its utility by theawful 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 thisprelude 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 inMassachusetts, a revolutionary pensioner was confined in Charlestownjail for a debt of fourteen dollars, and on the fourth of July was seenwaving 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 philanthropicassociate of Clarkson and Romilly, cannot fail to admire his simple andbeautiful 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 thanone occasion, exposed himself to the censures of his Protestantbrethren, by his strenuous endeavors to procure indemnification for theowners of the convent destroyed near Boston. He defended the cause ofthe 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 thesuffering and starving population of the Catholic island. The severityof his language finds its ample apology in the reluctant confession ofone of the most eminent Romish priests, the eloquent and devoted FatherVentura. 

 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 ofEgypt 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 theshores of Finland, to ascertain the amount of mischief and loss to poorand peaceable sufferers, occasioned by the gun-boats of the alliedsquadrons 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, --theunforgivable thing, --the breaking point between him and them, --has beenthe encouragement and promotion he gave to the officer under whom wereexecuted the slaughters of Perugia. That made the breaking point in manyhonest hearts that had clung to him before. "--HARRIET BEECHER STOWE'SLetters 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 Custerand his entire force were slain, the chief Rain-in-the-Face was one ofthe fiercest leaders of the Indians. In Longfellow's poem on themassacre, 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 toHampton. I fear he is too old, but he desires very much to go. " TheSouthern Workman, the organ of General Armstrong's Industrial School atHampton, Va. , says in a late number:--

"Rain-in-the-Face has applied before to come to Hampton, but his agewould exclude him from the school as an ordinary student. He has shownhimself very much in earnest about it, and is anxious, all say, to learnthe better ways of life. It is as unusual as it is striking to see a manof his age, and one who has had such an experience, willing to give upthe 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 beautifulsonnet of William Wordsworth, addressed to Toussaint L'Ouverture, duringhis 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 againstreceiving petitions of the people on the subject of Slavery. 

Note 3, page 88. There was at the time when this poem was written anAssociation in Liberty County, Georgia, for the religious instruction ofnegroes. One of their annual reports contains an address by the Rev. Josiah Spry Law, in which the following passage occurs: "There is agrowing interest in this community in the religious instruction ofnegroes. There is a conviction that religious instruction promotes thequiet and order of the people, and the pecuniary interest of theowners. "

Note 4, page 117. The book-establishment of the Free-Will Baptists inDover was refused the act of incorporation by the New HampshireLegislature, for the reason that the newspaper organ of that sect andits leading preachers favored abolition. 

Note 5, page 118. The senatorial editor of the Belknap Gazette all alongmanifested a peculiar horror of "niggers" and "nigger parties. "

Note 6, page 118. The justice before whom Elder Storrs was brought forpreaching 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 twocolored scholars, and was in consequence dragged off into a swamp byDemocratic teams. 

Note 8, page 119. "Papers and memorials touching the subject of slaveryshall be laid on the table without reading, debate, or reference. " Soread 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 meetingin Concord, was assailed with stones and brickbats. 

Note 10, page 168. The election of Charles Sumner to the United StatesSenate "followed hard upon" the rendition of the fugitive Sims by theUnited 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 steelby J. A. J. WILCOX in 1888, after a photograph taken by Miss ISA E. GRAYin 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 ofHuman 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 theintrepid editor of the New York Evening Post and afterward of The PlainDealer. His vigorous assault upon the system of slavery brought downupon 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, agedtwenty-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 Americancitizenship, was at an early age driven from his professorship in theUniversity of Jena, and compelled to seek shelter from officialprosecution in Switzerland, on account of his liberal politicalopinions. He became Professor of Civil Law in the University of Basle. The governments of Prussia, Austria, and Russia united in demanding hisdelivery as a political offender; and, in consequence, he leftSwitzerland, and came to the United States. At the time of the formationof the American Anti-Slavery Society he was a Professor in HarvardUniversity, honored for his genius, learning, and estimable character. His love of liberty and hatred of oppression led him to seek aninterview with Garrison and express his sympathy with him. Soon after, he attended a meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. An ablespeech was made by Rev. A. A. Phelps, and a letter of mine addressed tothe Secretary of the Society was read. Whereupon he rose and stated thathis views were in unison with those of the Society, and that afterhearing the speech and the letter, he was ready to join it, and abidethe probable consequences of such an unpopular act. He lost by so doinghis professorship. He was an able member of the Executive Committee ofthe American Anti-Slavery Society. He perished in the ill-fated steamerLexington, which was burned on its passage from New York, January 13, 1840. The few writings left behind him show him to have been a profoundthinker 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 ofJohannes Ronge against the "pious fraud" of the Bishop of Treves. Thebold movement of the young Catholic priest of Prussian Silesia seemed tome full of promise to the cause of political as well as religiousliberty in Europe. That it failed was due partly to the faults of thereformer, but mainly to the disagreement of the Liberals of Germany upona matter of dogma, which prevented them from unity of action. Rouge wasborn in Silesia in 1813 and died in October, 1887. His autobiography wastranslated 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, incompany with my English friend, Joseph Sturge, so well known for hisphilanthropic labors and liberal political opinions, I visited him inhis summer residence in Rhode Island. In recalling the impressions ofthat visit, it can scarcely be necessary to say, that I have noreference to the peculiar religious opinions of a man whose life, beautifully and truly manifested above the atmosphere of sect, is nowthe 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 ofthe British Complete Suffrage Association, died in the 6th month, 1845. She was the colleague, counsellor, and ever-ready helpmate of herbrother in all his vast designs of beneficence. The Birmingham Pilotsays of her: "Never, perhaps, were the active and passive virtues of thehuman character more harmoniously and beautifully blended than in thisexcellent 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 inthe cause of his Divine Master in Great Britain, Russia, and the islandsof the Pacific, died in New York in the spring of 1840, while on areligious 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 mysister and myself. They are inserted here as an expression of ouradmiration of the gifted stranger whom we have since learned to love asa 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 thepeasantry of Scotland. His Corn-law Rhymes contributed not a little tothat overwhelming tide of popular opinion and feeling which resulted inthe repeal of the tax on bread. Well has the eloquent author of TheReforms and Reformers of Great Britain said of him, "Not corn-lawrepealers alone, but all Britons who moisten their scanty bread with thesweat of the brow, are largely indebted to his inspiring lay, for themighty 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 evilconsequences which I felt on reading the seventh of March speech ofDaniel Webster in support of the "compromise, " and the Fugitive SlaveLaw. No partisan or personal enmity dictated it. On the contrary myadmiration of the splendid personality and intellectual power of thegreat 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 Iwrote, with painful clearness its sure results, --the Slave Powerarrogant and defiant, strengthened and encouraged to carry out itsscheme for the extension of its baleful system, or the dissolution ofthe Union, the guaranties of personal liberty in the free States brokendown, and the whole country made the hunting-ground of slave-catchers. In the horror of such a vision, so soon fearfully fulfilled, if onespoke at all, he could only speak in tones of stern and sorrowfulrebuke. But death softens all resentments, and the consciousness of acommon inheritance of frailty and weakness modifies the severity ofjudgment. Years after, in _The Lost Occasion_ I gave utterance to analmost universal regret that the great statesman did not live to see theflag which he loved trampled under the feet of Slavery, and, in view ofthis desecration, make his last days glorious in defence of "Liberty andUnion, 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 thecharacter and passages in the history of the great Hungarian statesmanand orator, which necessarily command the admiration of those, even, whobelieve that no political revolution was ever worth the price of humanblood. 

 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 withWilliam Lloyd Garrison formed the first anti-slavery society in NewEngland. 

 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 inthe Nashville penitentiary, where he was confined for the act of aidingthe 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 GridleyHowe, the well-known philanthropist, who when a young man volunteeredhis 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 RobertRantoul than this: "He died at his post in Congress, and his last wordswere 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 1stmonth, 1854, while engaged in presenting to the governors of the Statesof this Union the address of his religious society on the evils ofslavery. He was the relative and coadjutor of the Buxtons, Gurneys, andFrys; and his whole life, extending al-most to threescore and ten years, was a pore and beautiful example of Christian benevolence. He hadtravelled over Europe, and visited most of its sovereigns, to pleadagainst the slave-trade and slavery; and had twice before made visits tothis country, under impressions of religious duty. He was the father ofthe Right Hon. William Edward Forster. He visited my father's house inHaverhill 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 birthof Robert Burns, 25th 1st mo. , 1859. In my absence these lines were readby 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 buriedin the Protestant cemetery there. The stone over her grave bears thelines, 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 faithfullife 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 afestival 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 selectionsedited 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 MajorStearns in the great struggle between invading slave-holders and thefree 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 invernal green, " May 24, 1859, on the first anniversary of Ellis GrayLoring's death, but did not publish them for some years afterward, whenI first read them, or I could not have made the reference which I did tothe 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 andadmirers. 

 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 MaryGrew, of Philadelphia, before the Boston Radical Club. The reference inthe last stanza is to an essay on Sappho by T. W. Higginson, read at theclub 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 ofconduct, or the maxims of a freeman by the actions of a slave; but, bythe grace of God, I have kept my life unsullied. " --MILTON'S _Defence ofthe 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 ofthe 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 MariaChild in the biographical introduction which I wrote for the volume ofLetters, 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 thebirthday 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 whenthe characters in the tale were realities by the fireside of countlessAmerican 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 banquetat 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 andSalisbury, 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'sboyhood. In 1859 a movement was made for improving its shores as apublic park. At the opening of the park, August 31, 1859, the poem whichgave it the name of Kenoza (in Indian language signifying Pickerel) wasread. 

 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 theFrench Revolution, when a young man travelled extensively in the UnitedStates. He visited the valley of the Merrimac, and speaks in terms ofadmiration of the view from Moulton's hill opposite Amesbury. The"Laurel Party" so called, as composed of ladies and gentlemen in thelower valley of the Merrimac, and invited friends and guests in othersections of the country. Its thoroughly enjoyable annual festivals wereheld in the early summer on the pine-shaded, laurel-blossomed slopes ofthe Newbury side of the river opposite Pleasant Valley in Amesbury. Theseveral poems called out by these gatherings are here printed insequence. 

 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 toCalifornia in 1860 and became a power on the Pacific coast. It was notlong after the opening of the house of worship built for him that hedied. 

 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, andmay 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 itsobject the preservation of the Old South Church famous in Colonial andRevolutionary 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 andSarah 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 Academyin 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 NortonHorsford, who has been one of the most munificent patrons of that nobleinstitution, and who had just published an essay claiming the discoveryof the site of the somewhat mythical city of Norumbega, was opened withappropriate ceremonies, in April, 1886. The following sonnet was writtenfor the occasion, and was read by President Alice E. Freeman, to whom itwas 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 nearit, was the seat of one of the earliest religious houses in Britain. Thetradition that the guilty wife of King Arthur fled thither forprotection forms one of the finest passages in Tennyson's Idyls of theKing. 

 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 Ireckoned with myself in this poetical picnic, Fields the letteredmagnate, and Taylor the free cosmopolite. The long line of sandy beachwhich defines almost the whole of the New Hampshire sea-coast isespecially marked near its southern extremity, by the salt-meadows ofHampton. The Hampton River winds through these meadows, and the readermay, if he choose, imagine my tent pitched near its mouth, where alsowas the scene of the _Wreck of Rivermouth_. The green bluff to thenorthward is Great Boar's Head; southward is the Merrimac, withNewburyport lifting its steeples above brown roofs and green trees onbanks. 

 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 EuniceCole, who for a quarter of a century or more was feared, persecuted, andhated as the witch of Hampton. She lived alone in a hovel a littledistant from the spot where the Hampton Academy now stands, and thereshe died, unattended. When her death was discovered, she was hastilycovered up in the earth near by, and a stake driven through her body, toexorcise the evil spirit. Rev. Stephen Bachiler or Batchelder was one ofthe ablest of the early New England preachers. His marriage late in lifeto a woman regarded by his church as disreputable induced him to returnto England, where he enjoyed the esteem and favor of Oliver Cromwellduring 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 alarge 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, theisle of the little god, was the scene of a tragic incident a hundredyears or more ago, when _The Palatine_, an emigrant ship bound forPhiladelphia, driven off its course, came upon the coast at this point. A mutiny on board, followed by an inhuman desertion on the part of thecrew, had brought the unhappy passengers to the verge of starvation andmadness. Tradition says that wreckers on shore, after rescuing all butone of the survivors, set fire to the vessel, which was driven out tosea before a gale which had sprung up. Every twelvemonth, according tothe same tradition, the spectacle of a ship on fire is visible to theinhabitants 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 puzzlefor many years to our ancestors, but its occurrence brought somethingmore than philosophical speculation into the winds of those who passedthrough it. The incident of Colonel Abraham Davenport's sturdy protestis 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 theInauguration of George Washington as the first President of the UnitedStates. 

 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 ofArabia, and his sufferings in the desert, has been familiar from mychildhood. It has been partially told in the singularly beautiful linesof my friend, Harriet Prescott Spofford, an the occasion of a publiccelebration at the Newburyport Library. To the charm and felicity of herverse, as far as it goes, nothing can be added; but in the followingballad I have endeavored to give a fuller detail of the touchingincident 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, Ifind among such of my unprinted scraps as have escaped the waste-basketand 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 undefiledNone deeper drank than he, the New World's child, Who in the language of their farm-fields spokeThe wit and wisdom of New England folk, Shaming a monstrous wrong. The world-wide laughProvoked thereby might well have shaken halfThe walls of Slavery down, ere yet the ballAnd mine of battle overthrew them all. 

HAVERHILL. 1640-1890. 

Read at the Celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary ofthe 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 hisold parishioners were the pioneer settlers of the new town on theMerrimac. 

 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 inDenver 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 weeksbefore 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 noticeoccasional inaccuracies in respect to persons, places, and dates; and, as a matter of course, will make due allowance for the prevailingprejudices and errors of the period to which it relates. That there arepassages indicative of a comparatively recent origin, and calculated tocast a shade of doubt over the entire narrative, the Editor would be thelast to deny, notwithstanding its general accordance with historicalverities and probabilities. Its merit consists mainly in the fact thatit presents a tolerably lifelike picture of the Past, and introduces usfamiliarly to the hearths and homes of New England in the seventeenthcentury. 

A full and accurate account of Secretary Rawson and his family is aboutto be published by his descendants, to which the reader is referred whowishes to know more of the personages who figure prominently in thisJournal. 

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 havealways in his keeping), when I parted with him nigh unto three monthsago, at mine Uncle Grindall's, that, on coming to this new country, I would, for his sake and perusal, keep a little journal of whatsoeverdid happen both unto myself and unto those with whom I might sojourn;as also, some account of the country and its marvels, and mine owncogitations 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 justlyheld in repute among the learned, but because my heart tells me thatwhat I write, be it ever so faulty, will be read by the partial eye ofmy kinsman, and not with the critical observance of the scholar, andthat his love will not find it difficult to excuse what offends hisclerkly judgment. And, to embolden me withal, I will never forget thatI am writing for mine old playmate at hide-and-seek in the farm-house atHilton, --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 wasthen, I fear, little wiser than his still foolish cousin, who, if shehath not since learned so many new things as himself, hath perhapsremembered more of the old. Therefore, without other preface, I willbegin my record. 

Of my voyage out I need not write, as I have spoken of it in my lettersalready, and it greatly irks me to think of it. Oh, a very long, dismaltime of sickness and great discomforts, and many sad thoughts of allI had left behind, and fears of all I was going to meet in the NewEngland! I can liken it only to an ugly dream. When we got at lastto Boston, the sight of the land and trees, albeit they were exceedingbleak and bare (it being a late season, and nipping cold), was like untoa vision of a better world. As we passed the small wooded islands, which make the bay very pleasant, and entered close upon the town, andsaw the houses; and orchards, and meadows, and the hills beyond coveredwith 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, OIsrael!" 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 AuntRawson 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, whichis here very piercing. Uncle is Secretary of the Massachusetts, andspends a great part of his time in town; and his wife and family arewith him in the winter season, but they spend their summers at hisplantation on the Merrimac River, in Newbury. His daughter, Rebecca, is just about my age, very tall and lady-looking; she is like herbrother John, who was at Uncle Hilton's last year. She hath, moreover, a pleasant wit, and hath seen much goodly company, being greatly admiredby the young men of family and distinction in the Province. She hathbeen very kind to me, telling me that she looked upon me as a sister. I have been courteously entertained, moreover, by many of the principalpeople, both of the reverend clergy and the magistracy. Nor must Iforbear to mention a visit which I paid with Uncle and Aunt Rawson atthe house of an aged magistrate of high esteem and influence in theseparts. He saluted me courteously, and made inquiries concerning ourfamily, and whether I had been admitted into the Church. On my tellinghim 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 ofspiritual adorning than of such gewgaws as these, " and took hold of mylace ruff so hard that I heard the stitches break; and then he pulledout my sleeves, to see how wide they were, though they were only half anell. Madam ventured to speak a word to encourage me, for she saw I wasmuch abashed and flustered, yet he did not heed her, but went on talkingvery loud against the folly and the wasteful wantonness of the times. Poor Madam is a quiet, sickly-looking woman, and seems not a little inawe of her husband, at the which I do not marvel, for he hath a veryimpatient, forbidding way with him, and, I must say, seemed to carryhimself harshly at times towards her. Uncle Rawson says he has had muchto try his temper; that there have been many and sore difficulties inChurch as well as State; and he hath bitter enemies, in some of themembers of the General Court, who count him too severe with the Quakersand other disturbers and ranters. I told him it was no doubt true; butthat I thought it a bad use of the Lord's chastenings to abuse one'sbest friends for the wrongs done by enemies; and, that to be made toatone for what went ill in Church or State, was a kind of vicarioussuffering that, if I was in Madam's place, I should not bear with halfher patience and sweetness. 

Ipswitch, near Agawam, May 12. 

We set out day before yesterday on our journey to Newbury. There wereeight of us, --Rebecca Rawson and her sister, Thomas Broughton, his wife, and their man-servant, my brother Leonard and myself, and young RobertPike, of Newbury, who had been to Boston on business, his father havinggreat 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 shehath in mind and person, in her graceful carriage and pleasantdiscourse, and a certain not unpleasing waywardness, as of a merrychild, that which makes her company sought of all. Our route the firstday lay through the woods and along the borders of great marshes andmeadows on the seashore. We came to Linne at night, and stopped at thehouse of a kinsman of Robert Pike's, --a man of some substance and notein that settlement. We were tired and hungry, and the supper of warmIndian bread and sweet milk relished quite as well as any I ever ate inthe 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 untilthis morning, when we again mounted our horses, and reached this place, after a smart ride of three hours. The weather in the morning was warmand 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 thewind-flowers, and the blue violets and the yellow blooming of thecowslips in the low grounds, were seen on either hand, and the birds allthe time making a great and pleasing melody in the branches, I was gladof heart as a child, and thought if my beloved friends and Cousin Oliverwere 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 mycompanions, I was startled greatly by the sight of an Indian. He wasstanding close to the bridle-path, his half-naked body partly hidden bya clump of white birches, through which he looked out on me with eyeslike two live coals. I cried for my brother and turned my horse, whenRobert Pike came up and bid me be of cheer, for he knew the savage, andthat 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 fairand comely make, and wore a red woollen blanket with beads and smallclam-shells jingling about it. His skin was swarthy, not black like aMoor or Guinea-man, but of a color not unlike that of tarnished coppercoin. He spake but little, and that in his own tongue, very harsh andstrange-sounding to my ear. Robert Pike tells me that he is Chief ofthe Agawams, once a great nation in these parts, but now quite small andbroken. As we rode on, and from the top of a hill got a fair view ofthe 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 ofgrass and bushes of the uplands. 

"There, " said he, "are their summer-houses, which they build near untotheir fishing-grounds and corn-fields. In the winter they go far backinto the wilderness, where game is plenty of all kinds, and there buildtheir wigwams in warm valleys thick with trees, which do serve toshelter them from the winds. "

"Let us look into them, " said I to Cousin Rebecca; "it seems but astone's throw from our way. "

She tried to dissuade me, by calling them a dirty, foul people; butseeing I was not to be put off, she at last consented, and we rode asidedown the hill, the rest following. On our way we had the misfortune toride over their corn-field; at the which, two or three women and as manyboys 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 Jamaicaspirits, with which they seemed vastly pleased. I looked into one oftheir huts; it was made of poles like unto a tent, only it was coveredwith the silver-colored bark of the birch, instead of hempen stuff. Abark mat, braided of many exceeding brilliant colors, covered a goodlypart of the space inside; and from the poles we saw fishes hanging, andstrips of dried meat. On a pile of skins in the corner sat a youngwoman 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 lowand very plaintive melody, I forgot everything save that she was a womanand a mother, and I felt my heart greatly drawn towards her. So, givingmy 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 heldup her little papoose, as she called him, --who, to say truth, I couldnot call very pretty. He seemed to have a wild, shy look, like theoffspring of an untamed, animal. The woman wore a blanket, gaudilyfringed, and she had a string of beads on her neck. She took down abasket, woven of white and red willows, and pressed me to taste of herbread; 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, whichgives it a sweet flavor. She told me, in her broken way, that the wholetribe now numbered only twenty-five men and women, counting out thenumber very fast with yellow grains of corn, on the corner of herblanket. She was, she said, the youngest woman in the tribe; and herhusband, Peckanaminet, was the Indian we had met in the bridlepath. Igave her a pretty piece of ribbon, and an apron for the child; and shethanked me in her manner, going with us on our return to the path; andwhen 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 afine large fish, which he had just caught, in acknowledgment, as Ijudged, 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 soRobert 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 heathenpeople seem not so exceeding bad as they have been reported; they belike unto ourselves, only lacking our knowledge and opportunities, which, indeed, are not our own to boast of, but gifts of God, callingfor humble thankfulness, and daily prayer and watchfulness, that they berightly improved. 

Newbery on the Merrimac, May 14, 1678. 

We were hardly on our way yesterday, from Agawam, when a dashing younggallant 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 andcourtliness, offering especial compliments to Rebecca, to whom he seemedwell 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'sacquaintance, Sir Thomas Hale, a good friend of her father's, and hercousin Margaret, who, like himself, was a new-comer. He replied, thathe should look with favor on any one who was near to her in friendshipor kindred; and, on learning my father's name, said he had seen him athis uncle's, Sir Matthew Hale's, many years ago, and could vouch for himas a worthy man. After some pleasant and merry discoursing with us, heand my brother fell into converse upon the state of affairs in theColony, the late lamentable war with the Narragansett and PequodIndians, together with the growth of heresy and schism in the churches, which latter he did not scruple to charge upon the wicked policy of thehome government in checking the wholesome severity of the laws hereenacted 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 lawswere changed, and that he had often told her that, although thecondemned deserved their punishment, he was not sure that it was thebest way to put down the heresy. If she was ruler, she continued, inher merry way, she would send all the schemers and ranters, and all thesour, crabbed, busybodies in the churches, off to Rhode Island, whereall 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 Broughtonto come up, I found them marvelling at the coming of the younggentleman, 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, yethe 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 hisconfident and bold manner and bearing toward my fair cousin; and he hathmore the likeness of a cast-off dangler at the court, than of a modestand seemly country gentleman, of a staid and well-ordered house. Mistress Broughton says he was not at first accredited in Boston, butthat her father, and Mr. Atkinson, and the chief people there now, didhold him to be not only what he professeth, as respecteth hisgentlemanly lineage, but also learned and ingenious, and well-versed inthe Scriptures, and the works of godly writers, both of ancient andmodern time. I noted that Robert was very silent during the rest of ourjourney, and seemed abashed and troubled in the presence of the gaygentleman; for, although a fair and comely youth, and of good family andestate, and accounted solid and judicious beyond his years, he does, nevertheless, much lack the ease and ready wit with which the lattercommendeth himself to my sweet kinswoman. We crossed about noon a broadstream near to the sea, very deep and miry, so that we wetted our hoseand skirts somewhat; and soon, to our great joy, beheld the pleasantcleared fields and dwellings of the settlement, stretching along for agoodly distance; while, beyond all, the great ocean rolled, blue andcold, under an high easterly wind. Passing through a broad path, withwell-tilled fields on each hand, where men were busy planting corn, andyoung maids dropping the seed, we came at length to Uncle Rawson'splantation, looking wellnigh as fair and broad as the lands of HiltonGrange, with a good frame house, and large barns thereon. Turning upthe lane, we were met by the housekeeper, a respectable kinswoman, whoreceived us with great civility. Sir Thomas, although pressed to stay, excused himself for the time, promising to call on the morrow, and rodeon to the ordinary. I was sadly tired with my journey, and was glad tobe shown to a chamber and a comfortable bed. 

I was awakened this morning by the pleasant voice of my cousin, whoshared my bed. She had arisen and thrown open the window lookingtowards the sunrising, and the air came in soft and warm, and laden withthe sweets of flowers and green-growing things. And when I had gottenmyself ready, I sat with her at the window, and I think I may say it waswith a feeling of praise and thanksgiving that mine eyes wandered up anddown over the green meadows, and corn-fields, and orchards of my newhome. Where, thought I, foolish one, be the terrors of the wilderness, which troubled thy daily thoughts and thy nightly dreams! Where be thegloomy shades, and desolate mountains, and the wild beasts, with theirdismal howlings and rages! Here all looked peaceful, and bespokecomfort and contentedness. Even the great woods which climbed up thehills in the distance looked thin and soft, with their faint youngleaves a yellowish-gray, intermingled with pale, silvery shades, indicating, as my cousin saith, the different kinds of trees, some ofwhich, like the willow, do put on their leaves early, and others late, like the oak, with which the whole region aboundeth. A sweet, quietpicture it was, with a warm sun, very bright and clear, shining over it, and the great sea, glistening with the exceeding light, bounding theview of mine eyes, but bearing my thoughts, like swift ships, to theland of my birth, and so uniting, as it were, the New World with theOld. Oh, thought I, the merciful God, who reneweth the earth and makethit 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, prankand beautify the work of his hands, making the desert places to rejoice, and the wilderness to blossom as the rose. Verily his love is overall, --the Indian heathen as well as the English Christian. And whatabundant cause for thanks have I, that I have been safely landed on ashore so fair and pleasant, and enabled to open mine eyes in peace andlove on so sweet a May morning! And I was minded of a verse which Ilearned 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 theroadway, a great bunch of flowers of many kinds, such as I had neverseen in mine own country, very fresh, and glistening with the dew. Now, when Rebecca took them up, her sister said, "Nay, they are not SirThomas's gift, for young Pike hath just left them. " Whereat, as Ithought, she looked vexed, and ill at ease. "They are yours, then, Cousin Margaret, " said she, rallying, "for Robert and you did ride asideall the way from Agawam, and he scarce spake to me the day long. I seeI 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 sweetcousin hath not so considered It. " She blushed, and looked aside, andfor 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 werecivil to my brother and myself. Mr. Richardson and Leonard fell toconversing about the state of the Church; and Sir Thomas discoursed usin his lively way. After some little tarry, Mr. Sewall asked us to gowith him to Deer's Island, a small way up the river, where he and RobertPike had some men splitting staves for the Bermuda market. As the daywas clear and warm, we did readily agree to go, and forthwith set outfor the river, passing through the woods for nearly a half mile. Whenwe came to the Merrimac, we found it a great and broad stream. We tooka boat, and were rowed up the river, enjoying the pleasing view of thegreen banks, and the rocks hanging over the water, covered with brightmosses, and besprinkled with pale, white flowers. Mr. Sewall pointedout to us the different kinds of trees, and their nature and uses, andespecially the sugar-tree, which is very beautiful in its leaf andshape, and from which the people of this country do draw a sap wellnighas 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 wellcovered with a great growth of trees, mostly evergreen pines andhemlocks which looked exceeding old. We found a good seat on the mossytrunk of one of these great trees, which had fallen from its extremeage, or from some violent blast of wind, from whence we could see thewater breaking into white foam on the rocks, and hear the melodioussound of the wind in the leaves of the pines, and the singing of birdsever and anon; and lest this should seem too sad and lonely, we couldalso hear the sounds of the axes and beetles of the workmen, cleavingthe timber not far off. It was not long before Robert Pike came up andjoined us. He was in his working dress, and his face and hands weremuch discolored by the smut of the burnt logs, which Rebecca playfullyremarking, he said there were no mirrors in the woods, and that must behis 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 thosewho had only to open their mouths, to be fed like young robins, withouttrouble or toil. Such might go as brave as they would, if they wouldonly excuse his necessity. I thought he spoke with some bitterness, which, indeed, was not without the excuse, that the manner of our gayyoung gentleman towards him savored much of pride and contemptuousness. My beloved cousin, who hath a good heart, and who, I must think, apartfrom the wealth and family of Sir Thomas, rather inclineth to her oldfriend and neighbor, spake cheerily and kindly to him, and besought meprivately to do somewhat to help her remove his vexation. So we diddiscourse of many things very pleasantly. Mr. Richardson, on hearingRebecca say that the Indians did take the melancholy noises of thepinetrees 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 memorywell provided with divers readings, both of the poets and other writers, did cite very opportunely some ingenious lines, touching what theheathens do relate of the Sacred Tree of Dodona, the rustling of whoseleaves 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, whichmight well be spoken of the aged and dead tree-trunk, upon which we weresitting. And when we did all desire to know their import, she repeatedthem 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 BrecknockshireWelsh Doctor of Medicine, who had printed a little book not many yearsago. Mr. Richardson said the lines were good, but that he did hold thereading of ballads and the conceits of rhymers a waste of time, to saynothing 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 fromtheir own poets, and did then, in a drolling tone, repeat some verses ofthe 137th Psalm, which he said were the best he had seen in theCambridge 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 overthe Word of God. The writers of our Book of Psalms in metre heldrightly, that God's altar needs no polishing; and truly they haverendered 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 tothe Cambridge version, it was indeed faithful; and that it was no blameto uninspired men, that they did fall short of the beauties and richnessof the Lord's Psalmist. It being now near noon, we crossed over theriver, to where was a sweet spring of water, very clear and bright, running out upon the green bank. Now, as we stood thirsty, having nocup to drink from, seeing some people near, we called to them, andpresently there came running to us a young and modest woman, with abright pewter tankard, which she filled and gave us. I thought hersweet and beautiful, as Rebecca of old, at her father's fountain. Shewas about leaving, when Mr. Richardson said to her, it was a foul shamefor one like her to give heed to the ranting of the Quakers, and badeher be a good girl, and come to the meeting. 

"Nay, " said she, "I have been there often, to small profit. The spiritwhich thou persecutest testifieth against thee and thy meeting. "

Sir Thomas jestingly asked her if the spirit she spoke of was not suchan 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 theyoung maid answered not a word to this, but turning to Rebecca, shesaid, "Thy father hath been hard with us, but thou seemest kind andgentle, and I have heard of thy charities to the poor. The Lord keepthee, for thou walkest in slippery places; there is danger, and thouseest it not; thou trustest to the hearing of the ear and the seeing ofthe 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 comeupon me, and Rebecca's countenance was troubled. As the maiden left us, the minister, looking after said, "There is a deal of poison under thefair outside of yonder vessel, which I fear is fitted for destruction. "

"Peggy Brewster is indeed under a delusion, " answered Robert Pike, "butI know no harm of her. She is kind to all, even to them who evilentreat her. "

"Robert, Robert!" cried the minister, "I fear me you will follow yourhonored father, who has made himself of ill repute, by favoring thesepeople. "--"The Quaker hath bewitched him with her bright eyes, perhaps, "quoth Sir Thomas. "I would she had laid a spell on an uncivil tongue Iwot of, " answered Robert, angrily. Hereupon, Mr. Sewall proposed thatwe should return, and in making ready and getting to the boat, thematter was dropped. 

NEWBURY, June 1, 1678. 

To-day Sir Thomas took his leave of us, being about to go back toBoston. Cousin Rebecca is, I can see, much taken with his outsidebravery and courtliness, yet she hath confessed to me that her soberjudgment doth greatly incline her towards her old friend and neighbor, Robert Pike. She hath even said that she doubted not she could live aquieter 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 theriver side, had disquieted her not a little, inasmuch as they did seemto confirm her own fears and misgivings. But her fancy is so bedazzledwith the goodly show of her suitor, that I much fear he can have her forthe asking, especially as her father, to my knowledge, doth greatlyfavor him. And, indeed, by reason of her gracious manner, witty andpleasant discoursing, excellent breeding, and dignity, she would do nodiscredit to the choice of one far higher than this young gentleman inestate and rank. 

June 10. 

I went this morning with Rebecca to visit Elnathan Stone, a youngneighbor, who has been lying sorely ill for a long time. He was aplaymate of my cousin when a boy, and was thought to be of great promiseas he grew up to manhood; but, engaging in the war with the heathen, hewas wounded and taken captive by them, and after much suffering wasbrought back to his home a few months ago. On entering the house wherehe lay, we found his mother, a careworn and sad woman, spinning in theroom by his bedside. A very great and bitter sorrow was depicted on herfeatures; it was the anxious, unreconciled, and restless look of one whodid 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 daughtertomahawked by the Indians; and now her only son, the hope of her oldage, was on his death-bed. She received us with small civility, tellingRebecca that it was all along of the neglect of the men in authoritythat her son had got his death in the wars, inasmuch as it was the wantof suitable diet and clothing, rather than his wounds, which had broughthim into his present condition. Now, as Uncle Rawson is one of theprincipal magistrates, my sweet cousin knew that the poor afflictedcreature meant to reproach him; but her good heart did excuse andforgive the rudeness and distemper of one whom the Lord had sorelychastened. So she spake kindly and lovingly, and gave her sundry nicedainty fruits and comforting cordials, which she had got from Boston forthe sick man. Then, as she came to his bedside, and took his handlovingly in her own, he thanked her for her many kindnesses, and prayedGod to bless her. He must have been a handsome lad in health, for hehad 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 felthimself growing weaker, and that at times his bodily suffering wasgreat. 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'ssake, he said, more than for his own, he would like to get about oncemore; there were many things he would like to do for her, and for allwho had befriended him; but he knew his Heavenly Father could do moreand 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 orunkindness left towards any one, for all seemed kind to him beyond hisdeserts, and like brothers and sisters. He had much pity for the poorsavages even, although he had suffered sorely at their hands; for he didbelieve that they had been often ill-used, and cheated, and otherwiseprovoked to take up arms against us. Hereupon, Goodwife Stone twirledher spindle very spitefully, and said she would as soon pity the Devilas his children. The thought of her mangled little girl, and of herdying son, did seem to overcome her, and she dropped her thread, andcried out with an exceeding bitter cry, --"Oh, the bloody heathen! Oh, my poor murdered Molly! Oh, my son, my son!"--"Nay, mother, " said thesick man, reaching out his hand and taking hold of his mother's, with asweet smile on his pale face, --"what does Christ tell us about lovingour enemies, and doing good to them that do injure us? Let us forgiveour fellow-creatures, for we have all need of God's forgiveness. I usedto feel as mother does, " he said, turning to us; "for I went into thewar 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 thesight of the poor starving women and children, chased from place toplace like partridges. Even the Indian fighters, I found, had sorrowsof their own, and grievous wrongs to avenge; and I do believe, if we hadfrom the first treated them as poor blinded brethren, and striven ashard to give them light and knowledge, as we have to cheat them intrade, and to get away their lands, we should have escaped many bloodywars, 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 hotskirmish in the woods; the English and the Indians now running forward, and then falling back, firing at each other from behind the trees. Hehad shot off all his powder, and, being ready to faint by reason of awound in his knee, he was fain to sit down against an oak, from whencehe did behold, with great sorrow and heaviness of heart, his companionsoverpowered by the number of their enemies, fleeing away and leaving himto his fate. The savages soon came to him with dreadful whoopings, brandishing their hatchets and their scalping-knives. He thereuponclosed his eyes, expecting to be knocked in the head, and killedoutright. But just then a noted chief coming up in great haste, badehim 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 theSokokis. 

"And were you kindly treated by this chief?" asked Rebecca. 

"I suffered much in moving with him to the Sebago Lake, owing to mywound, " he replied; "but the chief did all in his power to give mecomfort, and he often shared with me his scant fare, choosing rather toendure hunger himself, than to see his son, as he called me, in want offood. And one night, when I did marvel at this kindness on his part, hetold me that I had once done him a great service; asking me if I was notat Black Point, in a fishing vessel, the summer before? I told him Iwas. He then bade me remember the bad sailors who upset the canoe of asquaw, and wellnigh drowned her little child, and that I had threatenedand beat them for it; and also how I gave the squaw a warm coat to wrapup the poor wet papoose. It was his squaw and child that I hadbefriended; and he told me that he had often tried to speak to me, andmake known his gratitude therefor; and that he came once to the garrisonat Sheepscot, where he saw me; but being fired at, notwithstanding hissigns 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 thethought of it made his heart bitter; that he had tried to live peaceablywith 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 hishut, on the shore of the Sebago Lake, Squando, about midnight, began topray 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 signof the Great Spirit's will concerning him. He then told me that someyears ago, near the place where we then lay, he left his wigwam atnight, being unable to sleep, by reason of great heaviness and distemperof mind. It was a full moon, and as he did walk to and fro, he saw afair, tall man in a long black dress, standing in the light on thelake's shore, who spake to him and called him by name. 

"'Squando, ' he said, and his voice was deep and solemn, like the wind inthe hill pines, 'the God of the white man is the God of the Indian, andHe is angry with his red children. He alone is able to make the corngrow 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 andmeadows with beavers. Pray to Him always. Do not hunt on His day, norlet the squaws hoe the corn. Never taste of the strong fire-water, butdrink only from the springs. It, is because the Indians do not worshipHim, that He has brought the white men among them; but if they will praylike the white men, they will grow very great and strong, and theirchildren born in this moon will live to see the English sail back intheir great canoes, and leave the Indians all their fishing-places andhunting-grounds. '

"When the strange man had thus spoken, Squando told me that he wentstraightway up to him, but found where he had stood only the shadow ofa 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. Eversince, he told nee, he had prayed daily to the Great Spirit, had drankno rum, nor hunted on the Sabbath. 

"He said he did for a long time refuse to dig up his hatchet, and makewar upon the whites, but that he could not sit idle in his wigwam, whilehis young men were gone upon their war-path. The spirit of his deadchild did moreover speak to him from the land of souls, and chide himfor not seeking revenge. Once, he told me, he had in a dream seen thechild crying and moaning bitterly, and that when he inquired the causeof its grief, he was told that the Great Spirit was angry with itsfather, and would destroy him and his people unless he did join with theEastern Indians to cut off the English. "

"I remember, " said Rebecca, "of hearing my father speak of thisSquando's kindness to a young maid taken captive some years ago atPresumpscot. "

"I saw her at Cocheco, " said the sick man. "Squando found her in a sadplight, and scarcely alive, took her to his wigwam, where his squaw didlovingly nurse and comfort her; and when she was able to travel, hebrought her to Major Waldron's, asking no ransom for her. He might havebeen made the fast friend of the English at that time, but he scarcelygot civil treatment. "

"My father says that many friendly Indians, by the ill conduct of thetraders, have been made our worst enemies, " said Rebecca. "He thoughtthe bringing in of the Mohawks to help us a sin comparable to that ofthe Jews, who looked for deliverance from the King of Babylon at thehands of the Egyptians. "

"They did nothing but mischief, " said Elnathan Stone; "they killed ourfriends at Newichawannock, Blind Will and his family. "

Rebecca here asked him if he ever heard the verses writ by Mr. Sewallconcerning 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 didrecite 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, whichshe gave to Elnathan's mother, and, seeing strangers by his bedside, wasabout to go out, when he called to her and besought her to stay. As shecame up and spoke to him, I knew her to be the maid we had met at thespring. The young man, with tears in his eyes, acknowledged her greatkindness to him, at which she seemed troubled and abashed. A pure, sweet complexion she hath, and a gentle and loving look, full ofinnocence and sincerity. Rebecca seemed greatly disturbed, for she nodoubt thought of the warning words of this maiden, when we were at thespring. After she had left, Goodwife Stone said she was sure she couldnot tell what brought that Quaker girl to her house so much, unless shemeant to inveigle Elnathan; but, for her part, she would rather see himdead than live to bring reproach upon his family and the Church byfollowing after the blasphemers. I ventured to tell her that I did lookupon it as sheer kindness and love on the young woman's part; at whichElnathan seemed pleased, and said he could not doubt it, and that he didbelieve Peggy Brewster to be a good Christian, although sadly led astrayby the Quakers. His mother said that, with all her meek looks, and kindwords, she was full of all manner of pestilent heresies, and did remindher always of Satan in the shape of an angel of light. 

We went away ourselves soon after this, the sick man thanking us for ourvisit, and hoping that he should see us again. "Poor Elnathan, " saidRebecca, as we walked home, "he will never go abroad again; but he is insuch a good and loving frame of mind, that he needs not our pity, as onewho is without hope. "

"He reminds me, " I said, "of the comforting promise of Scripture, 'Thouwilt 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 wasrejoiced to see mine uncle, more especially as he brought for me apackage of letters, and presents and tokens of remembrance from myfriends on the other side of the water. As soon as I got them, I wentup to my chamber, and, as I read of the health of those who are verydear to me, and who did still regard me with unchanged love, I wept inmy great joy, and my heart overflowed in thankfulness. I read the 22dPsalm, and it did seem to express mine own feelings in view of the greatmercies and blessings vouchsafed to me. "My head is anointed with oil;my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all thedays of my life. "

This morning, Sir Thomas and Uncle Rawson rode over to Hampton, wherethey will tarry all night. Last evening, Rebecca had a long talk withher father concerning Sir Thomas, who hath asked her of him. She cameto bed very late, and lay restless and sobbing; whereupon I pressed herto know the cause of her grief, when she told me she had consented tomarry Sir Thomas, but that her heart was sorely troubled and full ofmisgivings. On my querying whether she did really love the younggentleman, she said she sometimes feared she did not; and that when herfancy 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 heavydisappointment or sorrow. "Sir Thomas, " she said, "was a handsome andwitty young man, and had demeaned himself to the satisfaction and goodrepute of her father and the principal people of the Colony; and hismanner towards her had been exceeding delicate and modest, inasmuch ashe had presumed nothing upon his family or estate, but had sought herwith much entreaty and humility, although he did well know that some ofthe most admired and wealthy Young women in Boston did esteem him not alittle, even to the annoying of herself, as one whom he especiallyfavored. "

"This will be heavy news to Robert Pike, " said I; "and I am sorry forhim, for he is indeed a worthy man. "

"That he is, " quoth she; "but he hath never spoken to me of aught beyondthat friendliness which, as neighbors and school companions, we doinnocently cherish for each other. "

"Nay, " said I, "my sweet cousin knows full well that he entertaineth sostrong 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 sometimeswish I had never seen Sir Thomas. But my choice is made, and I pray GodI may not have reason to repent of it. "

We said no more, but I fear she slept little, for on waking about thebreak 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, shebesought 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 overit. I strove to comfort her, and, after a time, she did, to my greatjoy, fall into a quiet sleep. 

This afternoon, Robert Pike came in, and had a long talk with CousinBroughton, who told him how matters stood between her sister and SirThomas, at which he was vehemently troubled, and would fain have gone toseek Rebecca at once, and expostulate with her, but was hindered onbeing told that it could only grieve and discomfort her, inasmuch as thething was well settled, and could not be broken off. He said he hadknown and loved her from a child; that for her sake he had toiled hardby 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 accusationagainst her, for she had all along treated him rather as a brother thanas a suitor: to which last condition he had indeed not felt himself atliberty to venture, after her honored father, some months ago, had givenhim to understand that he did design an alliance of his daughter with agentleman of estate and family. For himself, he would bear himselfmanfully, and endure his sorrow with patience and fortitude. His onlyfear was, that his beloved friend had been too hasty in deciding thematter; and that he who was her choice might not be worthy of the greatgift of her affection. Cousin Broughton, who has hitherto greatlyfavored the pretensions of Sir Thomas, told me that she wellnigh changedher mind in view of the manly and noble bearing of Robert Pike; and thatif her sister were to live in this land, she would rather see her thewife of him than of any other man therein. 

July 3. 

Sir Thomas took his leave to-day. Robert Pike hath been here to wishRebecca great joy and happiness in her prospect, which he did in so kindand gentle a manner, that she was fain to turn away her head to hide hertears. When Robert saw this, he turned the discourse, and did endeavorto divert her mind in such sort that the shade of melancholy soon lefther sweet face, and the twain talked together cheerfully as had beentheir wont, and as became their years and conditions. 

July 6. 

Yesterday a strange thing happened in the meeting-house. The ministerhad gone on in his discourse, until the sand in the hour-glass on therails before the deacons had wellnigh run out, and Deacon Dole was aboutturning it, when suddenly I saw the congregation all about me give agreat start, and look back. A young woman, barefooted, and with acoarse canvas frock about her, and her long hair hanging loose like aperiwig, and sprinkled with ashes, came walking up the south aisle. Just as she got near Uncle Rawson's seat she stopped, and turning roundtowards the four corners of the house, cried out: "Woe to thepersecutors! Woe to them who for a pretence make long prayers! Humbleyourselves, for this is the day of the Lord's power, and I am sent as asign among you!" As she looked towards me I knew her to be the Quakermaiden, Margaret Brewster. "Where is the constable?" asked Mr. Richardson. "Let the woman be taken out. " Thereupon the wholecongregation arose, and there was a great uproar, men and women climbingthe seats, and many crying out, some one thing and some another. In themidst of the noise, Mr. Sewall, getting up on a bench, begged the peopleto be quiet, and let the constable lead out the poor deluded creature. Mr. Richardson spake to the same effect, and, the tumult a littlesubsiding, I saw them taking the young woman out of the door; and, asmany followed her, I went out also, with my brother, to see what becameof her. 

We found her in the middle of a great crowd of angry people, whoreproached her for her wickedness in disturbing the worship on theLord's day, calling her all manner of foul names, and threatening herwith the stocks and the whipping-post. The poor creature stood stilland quiet; she was deathly pale, and her wild hair and sackcloth frockgave her a very strange and pitiable look. The constable was about totake her in charge until the morrow, when Robert Pike came forward, andsaid he would answer for her appearance at the court the next day, andbesought the people to let her go quietly to her home, which, after someparley, 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 byhis kindness, began to weep, telling him that it had been a sorrowfulcross to her to do as she had done; but that it had been long upon hermind, and that she did feel a relief now that she had found strength forobedience. 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 the12th and 13th verses of Jude, wherein the ranters and disturbers of thepresent day were very plainly spoken of. This morning she hath been hadbefore the magistrates, who, considering her youth and good behaviorhitherto, did not proceed against her so far as many of the peopledesired. A fine was laid upon her, which both she and her father didprofess they could not in conscience pay, whereupon she was ordered tobe set in the stocks; but this Mr. Sewall, Robert Pike, and my brotherwould by no means allow, but paid the fine themselves, so that she wasset at liberty, whereat the boys and rude women were not a littledisappointed, 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 peoplethat 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 thatshe was instigated by her elders; and he therefore counselled the courtthat she should not be whipped, August 1. 

Captain Sewall, R. Pike, and the minister, Mr. Richardson, at our houseto-day. Captain Sewall, who lives mostly at Boston, says that a smallvessel loaded with negroes, taken on the Madagascar coast, came lastweek into the harbor, and that the owner thereof had offered the negroesfor 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 scarcelyalive, by reason of their long voyage and hard fare. He thought it agreat scandal to the Colony, and a reproach to the Church, that theyshould be openly trafficked, like cattle in the market. Uncle Rawsonsaid it was not so formerly; for he did remember the case of CaptainSmith and one Kesar, who brought negroes from Guinea thirty years ago. The General Court, urged thereto by Sir Richard Saltonstall and many ofthe ministers, passed an order that, for the purpose of "bearing awitness against the heinous sin of man-stealing, justly abhorred of allgood and just men, " the negroes should be taken back to their owncountry 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 ofmen from a nation at peace with us, and the taking of captives in war. The Scriptures did plainly warrant the holding of such, and especiallyif they be heathen. 

Captain Sewall said he did, for himself, look upon all slave-holding ascontrary to the Gospel and the New Dispensation. The Israelites had aspecial warrant for holding the heathen in servitude; but he had neverheard any one pretend that he had that authority for enslaving Indiansand blackamoors. 

Hereupon Mr. Richardson asked him if he did not regard Deacon Dole as agodly man; and if he had aught to say against him and other pious menwho held slaves. And he cautioned him to be careful, lest he should becounted an accuser of the brethren. 

Here Robert Pike said he would tell of a matter which had fallen underhis notice. "Just after the war was over, " said be, "owing to the lossof my shallop in the Penobscot Bay, I chanced to be in the neighborhoodof him they call the Baron of Castine, who hath a strong castle, withmuch cleared land and great fisheries at Byguyduce. I was preparing tomake a fire and sleep in the woods, with my two men, when a messengercame from the Baron, saying that his master, hearing that strangers werein the neighborhood, had sent him to offer us food and shelter, as thenight was cold and rainy. So without ado we went with him, and wereshown into a comfortable room in a wing of the castle, where we found agreat fire blazing, and a joint of venison with wheaten loaves on thetable. After we had refreshed ourselves, the Baron sent for me, and Iwas led into a large, fair room, where he was, with Modockawando, whowas 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 goodlyappearance, received me with much courtesy; and when I told him mymisfortune, he said he was glad it was in his power to afford us ashelter. He discoursed about the war, which he said had been a sadthing to the whites as well as the Indians, but that he now hoped thepeace would be lasting. Whereupon, Modockawando, a very grave andserious heathen, who had been sitting silent with his friends, got upand spoke a load speech to me, which I did not understand, but was toldthat he did complain of the whites for holding as slaves sundry Indiancaptives, declaring that it did provoke another war. His own sister'schild, he said, was thus held in captivity. He entreated me to see thegreat Chief of our people (meaning the Governor), and tell him that thecries of the captives were heard by his young men, and that they weretalking 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 Indiansafter 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'scountry, I have urged the giving up of the Indians, and many have beenreleased. Slavery is a hard lot, and many do account it worse thandeath. When in the Barbadoes, I was told that on one plantation, in thespace of five years, a score of slaves had hanged themselves. "

"Mr. Atkinson's Indian, " said Captain Sewall, "whom he bought of aVirginia ship-owner, did, straightway on coming to his house, refusemeat; 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 twobefore he died, sitting wrapped up in his blanket, and muttering tohimself. It was a sad, sight, and I pray God I may never see the likeagain. From that time I have looked upon the holding of men as slavesas a great wickedness. The Scriptures themselves do testify, that hethat leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity. "

After the company had gone, Rebecca sat silent and thoughtful for atime, 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 beensold to pay the cost of her passage, to come to her. She asked her ifshe had aught to complain of in her situation. The poor girl lookedsurprised, but said she had not. "Are you content to live as aservant?" asked Rebecca. "Would you leave me if you could?" She herefell a-weeping, begging her mistress not to speak of her leaving. "Butif I should tell you that you are free to go or stay, as you will, wouldyou 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 toknow that you are from henceforth free, and that if you serve mehereafter, as I trust you will, it will be in love and good will, andfor suitable wages. " The bondswoman did not at the first comprehend thedesign of her mistress, but, on hearing it explained once more, shedropped down on her knees, and clasping Rebecca, poured forth her thanksafter the manner of her people; whereupon Rebecca, greatly moved, badeher rise, as she had only done what the Scriptures did require, ingiving 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. Avery solemn funeral, Mr. Richardson preaching a sermon from the 23dpsalm, 4th verse: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadowof death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thystaff, they comfort me. " Deacon Dole provided the wine and spirits, andUncle Rawson the beer, and bread, and fish for the entertainment, andothers of the neighbors did, moreover, help the widow to sundry mattersof clothing suitable for the occasion, for she was very poor, and, owingto the long captivity and sickness of her son, she hath been muchstraitened at times. I am told that Margaret Brewster hath been like anangel of mercy unto her, watching often with the sick man, and helpingher in her work, so that the poor woman is now fain to confess that shehath a good and kind heart. A little time before Elnathan died, he didearnestly commend the said Margaret to the kindness of Cousin Rebecca, entreating her to make interest with the magistrates, and others inauthority, in her behalf, that they might be merciful to her in heroutgoings, as he did verily think they did come of a sense of duty, albeit mistaken. Mr. Richardson, who hath been witness to her graciousdemeanor and charity, and who saith she does thereby shame many of hisown 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 neverlacketh answer of some sort, being naturally of good parts, and wellread in the Scriptures. 

August 10. 

I find the summer here greatly unlike that of mine own country. Theheat is great, the sun shining very strong and bright; and for more thana month it hath been exceeding dry, without any considerable fall ofrain, so that the springs fail in many places, and the watercourses aredried up, which doth bring to mind very forcibly the language of Job, concerning the brooks which the drouth consumeth: "What time they waxwarm 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 didwear 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 waxold under the intolerable sun. Great locusts sing sharp in the hedgesand bushes, and grasshoppers fly up in clouds, as it were, when onewalks over the dry grass which they feed upon, and at nightfallmosquitoes are no small torment. Whenever I do look forth at noonday, at which time the air is all aglow, with a certain glimmer and dazzlelike that from an hot furnace, and see the poor fly-bitten cattlewhisking their tails to keep off the venomous insects, or standing inthe water of the low grounds for coolness, and the panting sheep lyingtogether under the shade of trees, I must needs call to mind the summerseason of old England, the cool sea air, the soft-dropping showers, thefields so thick with grasses, and skirted with hedge-rows like greenwalls, the trees and shrubs all clean and moist, and the vines andcreepers hanging over walls and gateways, very plenteous and beautifulto 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 summerlong. I shut mine eyes, and lo! it is all before me like a picture; Isee mine uncle's gray hairs beneath the trees, and my good aunt standethin the doorway, and Cousin Oliver comes up in his field-dress, from thecroft or the mill; I can hear his merry laugh, and the sound of hishorse's hoofs ringing along the gravel-way. Our sweet Chaucer tellethof a mirror in the which he that looked did see all his past life; thatmagical mirror is no fable, for in the memory of love, old things doreturn and show themselves as features do in the glass, with a perfectand most beguiling likeness. 

Last night, Deacon Dole's Indian--One-eyed Tom, a surly fellow--brokeinto his master's shop, where he made himself drunk with rum, and, coming to the house, did greatly fright the womenfolk by his threateningwords and gestures. Now, the Deacon coming home late from the church-meeting, and seeing him in this way, wherreted him smartly with hiscane, whereupon he ran off, and came up the road howling and yellinglike an evil spirit. Uncle Rawson sent his Irish man-servant to seewhat caused the ado; but he straightway came running back, screaming"Murther! murther!" at the top of his voice. So uncle himself went tothe gate, and presently called for a light, which Rebecca and I camewith, inasmuch as the Irishman and Effie dared not go out. We found Tomsitting on the horse-block, the blood running down his face, and muchbruised and swollen. He was very fierce and angry, saying that if helived 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 uphis head for him, which she did with her own kerchief. Uncle Rawsonthen bade him go home and get to bed, and in future let alone strongdrink, 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 behavedbadly, for which he did moderately correct him, and that he didthereupon run away, and he feared he should lose him. He bought him, he said, of Captain Davenport, who brought him from the Narragansettcountry, paying ten pounds and six shillings for him, and he could illbear so great a loss. I ventured to tell him that it was wrong to holdany man, even an Indian or Guinea black, as a slave. My uncle, who sawthat my plainness was not well taken, bade me not meddle with mattersbeyond my depth; and Deacon Dole, looking very surly at me, said I was aforward one; that he had noted that I did wear a light and idle look inthe meeting-house; and, pointing with his cane to my hair, he said I didrender myself liable to presentment by the Grand Jury for a breach ofthe statute of the General Court, made the year before, against "theimmodest laying out of the hair, " &c. He then went on to say that hehad lived to see strange times, when such as I did venture to opposethemselves to sober and grave people, and to despise authority, andencourage rebellion and disorder; and bade me take heed lest all suchbe numbered with the cursed children which the Apostle did rebuke: "Who, as natural brute beasts, speak evil of things they understand not, andshall utterly perish in their corruption. " My dear Cousin Rebecca hereput in a word in my behalf, and told the Deacon that Tom's misbehaviordid all grow out of the keeping of strong liquors for sale, and that hewas wrong to beat him so cruelly, seeing that he did himself place thetemptation before him. Thereupon the Deacon rose up angrily, biddinguncle look well to his forward household. "Nay, girls, " quoth mineuncle, after his neighbor had left the house, "you have angered the goodman sorely. "--"Never heed, " said Rebecca, laughing and clapping herhands, "he hath got something to think of more profitable, I trow, thanCousin Margaret's hair or looks in meeting. He has been tything of mintand anise and cummin long enough, and 't is high time for him to lookafter the weightier matters of the law. "

The selling of beer and strong liquors, Mr. Ewall says, hath muchincreased since the troubles of the Colony and the great Indian war. The General Court do take some care to grant licenses only to discreetpersons; but much liquor is sold without warrant. For mine own part, Ithink 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 afitting time to make a little journey by water to the Isles of Shoals, and the Agamenticus, where dwelleth my Uncle Smith, who hath stronglypressed me to visit him. One Caleb Powell, a seafaring man, having agood new boat, with a small cabin, did undertake to convey us. He is adrolling odd fellow, who hath been in all parts of the world, and hathseen and read much, and, having a rare memory, is not ill company, although uncle saith one must make no small allowance for his desire ofmaking his hearers marvel at his stories and conceits. We sailed with agood 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 benow 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 rareplums which do grow upon it), we struck into the open sea, and soon camein sight of the Islands of Shoals. There be seven of them in all, lyingoff the town of Hampton on the mainland, about a league. We landed onthat called the Star, and were hospitably entertained through the dayand night by Mr. Abbott, an old inhabitant of the islands, and largelyemployed in fisheries and trade, and with whom uncle had some business. In the afternoon Mr. Abbott's son rowed us about among the islands, andshowed us the manner of curing the dun-fish, for which the place isfamed. 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 onthe biggest island, and a famous school, to which many of the planterson the main-land do send their children. We noted a great split in therocks, where, when the Indians came to the islands many years ago, andkilled some and took others captive, one Betty Moody did hide herself, and which is hence called Betty Moody's Hole. Also, the pile of rocksset up by the noted Captain John Smith, when he did take possession ofthe Isles in the year 1614. We saw our old acquaintance Peckanaminetand his wife, in a little birch canoe, fishing a short way off. Mr. Abbott says he well recollects the time when the Agawams were wellnighcut off by the Tarratine Indians; for that early one morning, hearing aloud yelling and whooping, he went out on the point of the rocks, andsaw a great fleet of canoes filled with Indians, going back from Agawam, and the noise they made he took to be their rejoicing over theirvictory. 

In the evening a cold easterly wind began to blow, and it brought infrom 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, andof a journey he had made to the Providence plantations. He then askedus if it was true, as he had learned from Mr. Mather, of Boston, thatthere was an house in Newbury dolefully beset by Satan's imps, and thatthe family could get no sleep because of the doings of evil spirits. Uncle Rawson said he did hear something of it, and that Mr. Richardsonhad been sent for to pray against the mischief. Yet as he did countGoody Morse a poor silly woman, he should give small heed to her story;but here was her near neighbor, Caleb Powell, who could doubtless tellmore concerning it. Whereupon, Caleb said it was indeed true that therewas a very great disturbance in Goodman Morse's house; doors opening andshutting, household stuff whisked out of the room, and then falling downthe chimney, and divers other strange things, many of which he hadhimself seen. Yet he did believe it might be accounted for in a naturalway, especially as the old couple had a wicked, graceless boy livingwith them, who might be able to do the tricks by his great subtlety andcunning. Sir Thomas said it might be the boy; but that Mr. Josselin, who had travelled much hereabout, had told him that the Indians didpractise witchcraft, and that, now they were beaten in war, he fearedthey would betake themselves to it, and so do by their devilish wisdomwhat they could not do by force; and verily this did look much like thebeginning of their enchantments. "That the Devil helpeth the heathen inthis matter, I do myself know for a certainty, " said Caleb Powell; "forwhen I was at Port Royal, many years ago, I did see with mine eyes theburning of an old negro wizard, who had done to death many of thewhites, as well as his own people, by a charm which he brought with himfrom the Guinea, country. " Mr. Hull, the minister of the place, who wasa lodger in the house, said he had heard one Foxwell, a reputableplanter at Saco, lately deceased, tell of a strange affair that didhappen to himself, in a voyage to the eastward. Being in a smallshallop, and overtaken by the night, he lay at anchor a little way offthe shore, fearing to land on account of the Indians. Now, it didchance that they were waked about midnight by a loud voice from theland, crying out, Foxwell, come ashore! three times over; whereupon, looking to see from whence the voice did come, they beheld a greatcircle of fire on the beach, and men and women dancing about it in aring. Presently they vanished, and the fire was quenched also. In themorning he landed, but found no Indians nor English, only brands' endscast 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 toldof Passaconaway, the chief of the River Indians, " he continued. "I haveheard 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, whichhad been cast off, as is the wont of the reptile, and making someviolent motions of his body, and calling upon his Familiar, or Demon, hedid presently cast it down upon the rocks, and it became a great blackserpent, which mine informant saw crawl off into some bushes, verynimble. This Passaconaway was accounted by his tribe to be a verycunning conjurer, and they do believe that he could brew storms, makewater 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 themagicians 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 boatsat their will. "

"It may well be, " quoth Mr. Hull, "since Satan is spoken of as theprince 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; butVirgil and Apulius do, if I mistake not, speak of this power over theelements. "

"Do you not remember, father, " said Rebecca, "some verses of Tibullus, in which he speaketh of a certain enchantress? Some one hath renderedthem 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 inwhat these old writers did tell of the magic arts of the sweet-singingsirens, and of Circe and her enchantments, and of the Illyrian maidens, so wonderful in their beauty, who did kill with their looks such as theywere 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 tolive on these islands. "

"Pray, how was that?" asked Sir Thomas. 

"You must know, " answered our host, "that in the early settlement ofthe Shoals, vessels coming for fish upon this coast did here make theirharbor, bringing hither many rude sailors of different nations; and theCourt judged that it was not a fitting place for women, and so did bylaw forbid their dwelling on the islands belonging to theMassachusetts. "

He then asked his wife to get the order of the Court concerning her stayon the islands, remarking that he did bring her over from the Maine indespite 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 theCourt, praying that the law might be put in force in respect to JohnAbbott his wife, the Court do judge it meet, if no further complaintcome against her, that she enjoy the company of her husband. " Whereatwe 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 aworthy gentleman and magistrate is still living. We had MountAgamenticus before us all day, --a fair stately hill, rising up as itwere from the water. Towards night a smart shower came on, withthunderings and lightnings such as I did never see or hear before; andthe wind blowing and a great rain driving upon us, we were for a time inmuch peril; but, through God's mercy, it suddenly cleared up, and wewent into the Agamenticus River with a bright sun. Before dark we gotto the house of my honored uncle, where, he not being at home, his wifeand daughters did receive us kindly. 

September 10. 

I do find myself truly comfortable at this place. My two cousins, Pollyand Thankful, are both young, unmarried women, very kind and pleasant, and, since my Newbury friends left, I have been learning of them manythings pertaining to housekeeping, albeit I am still but a poor scholar. Uncle is Marshall of the Province, which takes him much from home; andaunt, who is a sickly woman, keeps much in her chamber; so that theaffairs of the household and of the plantation do mainly rest upon theyoung women. If ever I get back to Hilton Grange again, I shall havetales to tell of my baking and brewing, of my pumpkin-pies, and breadmade of the flour of the Indian corn; yea, more, of gathering of thewild fruit in the woods, and cranberries in the meadows, milking thecows, and looking after the pigs and barnyard fowls. Then, too, we havehad many pleasant little journeys by water and on horseback, youngMr. 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 bittertowards the Massachusetts and its clergy and government. My uncle, whomeddles little with Church' matters, thinks him a hopeful young man, andnot an ill suitor for his daughter. He hath been in England for hislearning, and is accounted a scholar; but, although intended for theChurch service, he inclineth more to the life of a planter, and takeththe charge of his father's plantation at Spurwink. Polly is notbeautiful and graceful like Rebecca Rawson, but she hath freshness ofyouth and health, and a certain good-heartedness of look and voice, anda sweetness of temper which do commend her in the eyes of all. Thankfulis 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 theNarragansett country two years ago. O these bloody wars. There be fewin these Eastern Provinces who have not been called to mourn the loss ofsome near and dear friend, so that of a truth the land mourns. 

September 18. 

Meeting much disturbed yesterday, --a ranting Quaker coming in andsitting with his hat on in sermon time, humming and groaning, androcking 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 hardnames, and declaring that the whole land stank with their hypocrisy. Uncle spake sharply to him, and bid him hold his peace, but he onlycried out the louder. Some young men then took hold of him, and carriedhim out. They brought him along close to my seat, he hanging like a bagof 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 ofthe jurisdiction. I was told he was no true Quaker; for, although anoisy, brawling hanger-on at their meetings, he is not in fellowshipwith the more sober and discreet of that people. 

Rebecca writes me that the witchcraft in William Morse's house is muchtalked 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 powerin the Massachusetts, since at his instigation the rulers and ministersof the Colony have set themselves, against the true and Gospel order ofthe Church, and do slander and persecute all who will not worship attheir conventicles. 

A Mr. Van Valken, a young gentleman of Dutch descent, and the agent ofMr. Edmund Andross, of the Duke of York's Territory, is now in thisplace, being entertained by Mr. Godfrey, the late Deputy-Governor. Hebrought a letter for me from Aunt Rawson, whom he met in Boston. He isa learned, serious man, hath travelled a good deal, and hath an air ofhigh breeding. The minister here thinks him a Papist, and a Jesuit, especially as he hath not called upon him, nor been to the meeting. Hegoes 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 tothe top of the mountain, which is some miles from the harbor. It is nothard to climb in respect to steepness, but it is so tangled with bushesand vines, that one can scarce break through them. The open places wereyellow 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 downthe hill. When we got upon the top, which is bare and rocky, we had afair view of the coast, with its many windings and its islands, from theCape Ann, near Boston, to the Cape Elizabeth, near Casco, the Piscataquaand Agamenticus rivers; and away in the northwest we could see the peaksof mountains looking like summer clouds or banks of gray fog. Thesemountains lie many leagues off in the wilderness, and are said to beexceeding lofty. 

But I must needs speak of the color of the woods, which did greatlyamaze me, as unlike anything I had ever seen in old England. As far asmine eyes could look, the mighty wilderness, under the bright westerlysun, and stirred by a gentle wind, did seem like a garden in its seasonof flowering; green, dark, and light, orange, and pale yellow, andcrimson leaves, mingling and interweaving their various hues, in amanner truly wonderful to behold. It is owing, I am told, to the suddenfrosts, which in this climate do smite the vegetation in its full lifeand greenness, so that in the space of a few days the colors of theleaves are marvellously changed and brightened. These colors did remindme of the stains of the windows of old churches, and of rich tapestry. The maples were all aflame with crimson, the walnuts were orange, thehemlocks and cedars were wellnigh black; while the slender birches, withtheir pale yellow leaves, seemed painted upon them as pictures are laidupon a dark ground. I gazed until mine eyes grew weary, and a sense ofthe wonderful beauty of the visible creation, and of God's greatgoodness to the children of men therein, did rest upon me, and I said inmine heart, with one of old: "O Lord! how manifold are thy works inwisdom 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, manyyears ago, for the finding of iron. Aunt, who was then just settled inhousekeeping, told me many wonderful stories of the man who caused it tobe digged, a famous doctor of physic, and, as it seems, a great wizardalso. 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 andworking of metals, did promise himself great riches in this new country;but his labors came to nothing, although it was said that Satan helpedhim, in the shape of a little blackamoor man-servant, who was hisconstant familiar. My aunt says she did often see him, wandering aboutamong 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 thegreat mountains, beyond Pigwackett, climbing to the top thereof, wherethe snows lie wellnigh all the year, his way thither lying throughdoleful swamps and lonesome woods. He was a great friend of theIndians, who held him to be a more famous conjurer than their ownpowahs; and, indeed, he was learned in all curious and occult arts, having studied at the great College of Padua, and travelled in all partsof the old countries. He sometimes stopped in his travels at my uncle'shouse, the little blackamoor sleeping in the barn, for my aunt fearedhim, as he was reputed to be a wicked imp. Now it so chanced that onone occasion my uncle had lost a cow, and had searched the woods manydays for her to no purpose, when, this noted doctor coming in, hebesought him to find her out by his skill and learning; but he didstraightway 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 thanany one might attain to by patient study of natural things. But as mineuncle 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 verycareless way. 

Then he made a black dot in the midst, and bade my uncle take heed thathis cow was lying dead in that spot; and my uncle looking at it, said heCould find her, for he now knew where she was, inasmuch as the doctorhad made a fair map of the country round about for many miles. So heset off, and found the cow lying at the foot of a great tree, closebeside a brook, she being quite dead, which thing did show that he was amagician of no Mean sort. 

My aunt further said, that in those days there was great talk of minesof gold and precious stones, and many people spent all their substancein wandering about over the wilderness country seeking a fortune in thisway. There was one old man, who, she remembered, did roam about seekingfor hidden treasures, until he lost his wits, and might be seen fillinga bag with bright stones and shining sand, muttering and laughing tohimself. He was at last missed for some little time, when he was foundlying dead in the woods, still holding fast in his hands his bag ofpebbles. 

On my querying whether any did find treasures hereabout, my auntlaughed, and said she never heard of but one man who did so, and thatwas old Peter Preble of Saco, who, growing rich faster than hisneighbors, was thought to owe his fortune to the finding of a gold orsilver 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 greatlyin his estate, it was said of him by his neighbors, "He has been workingPeter Preble's mine. "

October 8. 

Mr. Van Valken, the Dutchman, had before Mr. Rishworth, one of theCommissioners of the Province, charged with being a Papist and a Jesuit. He bore himself, I am told, haughtily enough, denying the right to callhim in question, and threatening the interference of his friend andruler, Sir Edmund, on account of the wrong done him. 

My uncle and others did testify that he was a civil and courteousgentleman, not intermeddling with matters of a religious nature; andthat they did regard it as a foul shame to the town that he should bemolested in this wise. But the minister put them to silence, bytestifying 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 itwas written by a monk, and was full of heresy, favoring both the Quakersand the Papists; but Mr. Godfrey told him it had been rendered into theEnglish 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 theminister, "they did see the heresy of the book, and, on their condemningit, the General Court did forbid its sale. " Mr. Rishworth hereupon saidhe did judge the book to be pernicious, and bade the constable burn itin the street, which he did. Mr. Van Valken, after being gravelyadmonished, was set free; and he now saith he is no Papist, but that hewould not have said that much to the Court to save his life, inasmuch ashe did deny its right of arraigning him. Mr. Godfrey says the treatmentwhereof he complains is but a sample of what the people hereaway are tolook for from the Massachusetts jurisdiction. Mr. Jordan, the younger, says his father hath a copy of the condemned book, of the Bostonprinting; 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 wasmade a city in 1642, and took the name of Gorgeana, after that of thelord proprietor, Sir Ferdinando Gorges. The government buildings arespacious, but now falling into decay somewhat. There be a few stonehouses, but the major part are framed, or laid up with square logs. Thelook of the land a little out of the town is rude and unpleasing, beingmuch 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 aspumpkins, squashes, and melons. The war with the Indians, and thetroubles and changes of government, have pressed heavily upon this andother towns of the Maine, so that I am told that there be now fewerwealthy planters here than there were twenty years ago, and littleincrease of sheep or horned cattle. The people do seem to me less soberand grave, in their carriage and conversation, than they of theMassachusetts, --hunting, fishing, and fowling more, and working on theland less. Nor do they keep the Lord's Day so strict; many of the youngpeople going abroad, both riding and walking, visiting each other, anddiverting themselves, especially after the meetings are over. 

October 9. 

Goodwife Nowell, an ancient gossip of mine aunt's, looking in thismorning, and talking of the trial of the Dutchman, Van Valken, spakeof the coming into these parts many years ago of one Sir ChristopherGardiner, who was thought to be a Papist. He sought lodgings at herhouse for one whom he called his cousin, a fair young woman, togetherwith her serving girl, who did attend upon her. She tarried about amonth, seeing no one, and going out only towards the evening, accompanied by her servant. She spake little, but did seem melancholyand exceeding mournful, often crying very bitterly. Sir Christophercame only once to see her, and Good wife Nowell saith she well remembersseeing her take leave of him on the roadside, and come back weeping andsobbing dolefully; and that a little time after, bearing that he hadgotten into trouble in Boston as a Papist and man of loose behavior, shesuddenly took her departure in a vessel sailing for the Massachusetts, leaving to her, in pay for house-room and diet, a few coins, a goldcross, and some silk stuffs and kerchiefs. The cross being such as thePapists do worship, and therefore unlawful, her husband did beat it intoa solid wedge privately, and kept it from the knowledge of the ministerand the magistrates. But as the poor man never prospered after, butlost his cattle and grain, and two of their children dying of measlesthe next year, and he himself being sickly, and near his end, he spaketo her of he golden cross, saying that he did believe it was a great sinto keep it, as he had done, and that it had wrought evil upon him, evenas the wedge of gold, and the shekels, and Babylonish garment did uponAchan, who was stoned, with all his house, in the valley of Achor; andthe minister coming in, and being advised concerning it, he judged thatalthough it might be a sin to keep it hidden from a love of riches, itmight, nevertheless, be safely used to support Gospel preaching andordinances, and so did himself take it away. The goodwife says, thatnotwithstanding her husband died soon after, yet herself and householddid 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 foundin her room after the young woman went away, and she thought they mightyet be in some part of her house, though she had not seen them for ascore of years. Thereupon, I begged of her to look for them, which shepromised to do. 

October 14. 

A strange and wonderful providence! Last night there was a greatcompany of the neighbors at my uncle's, to help him in the husking andstripping of the corn, as is the custom in these parts. The barn-floorwas about half-filled with the corn in its dry leaves; the companysitting down on blocks and stools before it, plucking off the leaves, and throwing the yellow ears into baskets. A pleasant and merry eveningwe had; and when the corn was nigh stripped, I went into the house withCousin 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 camerunning in, crying out, "O Thankful! Thankful! John Gibbins hasappeared to us! His spirit is in the barn!" The plates dropt from mycousin's hand, and, with a faint cry, she fell back against the wall fora 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 clearmoon, 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 barnwill 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: "OJohn, you are alive!"

Then she swooned quite away, and we had a deal to do to bring her tolife again. By this time, the house was full of people, and among therest came John's old mother and his sisters, and we all did weep andlaugh at the same time. As soon as we got a little quieted, John toldus 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 didcome to his senses, and was able to walk; but, falling into the hands ofthe Indians, he was carried off to the French Canadas, where, by reasonof his great sufferings on the way, he fell sick, and lay for a longtime at the point of death. That when he did get about again, thesavage who lodged him, and who had taken him as a son, in the place ofhis own, slain by the Mohawks, would not let him go home, although hedid confess that the war was at an end. His Indian father, he said, whowas feeble and old, died not long ago, and he had made his way home bythe way of Crown Point and Albany. Supper being ready, we all sat down, and the minister, who had been sent for, offered thanks for themarvellous preserving and restoring of the friend who was lost and nowwas found, as also for the blessings of peace, by reason of which everyman could now sit under his own vine and fig-tree, with none to molestor make him afraid, and for the abundance of the harvest, and thetreasures of the seas, and the spoil of the woods, so that our landmight take up the song of the Psalmist: "The Lord doth build upJerusalem; he gathereth the outcasts of Israel; he healeth the broken inheart. Praise thy God, O Zion I For he strengtheneth the bars of thygates, he maketh peace in thy borders, and filleth thee with the finestof wheat. " Oh! a sweet supper we had, albeit little was eaten, for wewere filled fall of joy, and needed not other food. When the companyhad gone, my dear cousin and her betrothed went a little apart, andtalked of all that had happened unto them during their long separation. I left them sitting lovingly together in the light of the moon, and ameasure 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 amorning 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 likethem that dream; our mouth is filled with laughter, and our tongue withsinging; 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 parcelof papers, which she found in the corner of a closet. They are muchstained and smoked, and the mice have eaten them sadly, so that I canmake little of them. They seem to be letters, and some fragments ofwhat did take place in the life of a young woman of quality from theNorth 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 aKnight of Jerusalem. Poorly as I can make out the meaning of thesefragments, I have read enough to make my heart sad, for I gather fromthem that the young woman was in early life betrothed to her cousin, andthat afterwards, owing, as I judge, to the authority of her parents, shedid part with him, he going abroad, and entering into the wars, in thebelief that she was to wed another. But it seemed that the heart of theyoung woman did so plead for her cousin, that she could not be broughtto 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 takepassage in a Boston bound ship. How she did make herself known to SirChristopher, I find no mention made; but, he now being a Knight of theOrder of St. John of Jerusalem, and vowed to forego marriage, as is therule of that Order, and being, moreover, as was thought, a priest orJesuit, her great love and constancy could meet with but a sorrowfulreturn on his part. It does appear, however, that he journeyed toMontreal, 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 encouragementtherein, 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 hiscousin being moreover known, a great and cruel scandal did arise fromit, and he was looked upon as a man of evil life, though I find nothingto warrant such a notion, but much to the contrary thereof. What becameof 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 papercontaining some dry, withered leaves of roses, with these words writtenon it "To Anna, from her loving cousin, Christopher Gardiner, being thefirst rose that hath blossomed this season in the College garden. St. Omer's, June, 1630. " I could but think how many tears had been shedover this little token, and how often, through long, weary years, it didcall to mind the sweet joy of early love, of that fairest blossom of thespring of life of which it was an emblem, alike in its beauty and itsspeedy withering. 

There be moreover among the papers sundry verses, which do seem to havebeen made by Sir Christopher; they are in the Latin tongue, andinscribed to his cousin, bearing date many years before the twain werein this country, and when he was yet a scholar at the Jesuits' Collegeof St. Omer's, in France. I find nothing of a later time, save theverses which I herewith copy, over which there are, in a woman'shandwriting, 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 theynow? Did the knight forego his false worship and his vows, and so marryhis beloved Anna? Or did they part forever, --she going back to herkinsfolk, and he to his companions of Malta? Did he perish at the handsof the infidels, and does the maiden sleep in the family tomb, under herfather's oaks? Alas! who can tell? I must needs leave them, and theirsorrows and trials, to Him who doth not willingly afflict the childrenof men; and whatsoever may have been their sins and their follies, myprayer 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 tothe Piscataqua River, and thence by horse to Newbury. 

Young Mr. Jordan spent yesterday and last night with us. He is a goodlyyouth, of a very sweet and gentle disposition; nor doth he seem to me tolack spirit, although his father (who liketh not his quiet ways and easytemper, so contrary to his own, and who is sorely disappointed in thathe hath chosen the life of a farmer to that of a minister, for which hedid intend him) often accuseth him of that infirmity. Last night we hadmuch pleasant discourse touching the choice he hath made; and when Itold him that perhaps he might have become a great prelate in theChurch, 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 forhis wife to make pudding of, and chop wood to boil her kettle, helaughed right merrily, and said he should never have gotten higher thana curate in a poor parish; and as for Polly, he was sure she was more athome in making puddings than in playing the fine lady. 

"For my part, " he continued, in a serious manner, "I have no notion thatthe pulpit is my place; I like the open fields and sky better than thegrandest churches of man's building; and when the wind sounds in thegreat grove of pines on the hill near our house, I doubt if there be achoir in all England so melodious and solemn. These painted autumnwoods, and this sunset light, and yonder clouds of gold and purple, doseem to me better fitted to provoke devotional thoughts, and to awaken abecoming reverence and love for the Creator, than the stained windowsand lofty arched roofs of old minsters. I do know, indeed, that therebe many of our poor busy planters, who, by reason of ignorance, ill-breeding, and lack of quiet for contemplation, do see nothing in thesethings, save as they do affect their crops of grain or grasses, or theirbodily comforts in one way or another. But to them whose minds havebeen enlightened and made large and free by study and much reflection, and whose eyes have been taught to behold the beauty and fitness ofthings, and whose ears have been so opened that they can hear theravishing harmonies of the creation, the life of a planter is verydesirable even in this wilderness, and notwithstanding the toil andprivation thereunto appertaining. There be fountains gushing up in thehearts of such, sweeter than the springs of water which flow from thehillsides, where they sojourn; and therein, also, flowers of the summerdo blossom all the year long. The brutish man knoweth not this, neitherdoth the fool comprehend it. "

"See, now, " said Polly to me, "how hard he is upon us poor unlearnedfolk. "

"Nay, to tell the truth, " said he, turning towards me, "your cousin hereis to be held not a little accountable for my present inclinations; forshe it was who did confirm and strengthen them. While I had been busyover books, she had been questioning the fields and the woods; and, asif the old fables of the poets were indeed true, she did get answersfrom them, as the priestesses and sibyls did formerly from the rustlingof leaves and trees, and the sounds of running waters; so that she couldteach me much concerning the uses and virtues of plants and shrubs, andof their time of flowering and decay; of the nature and habitudes ofwild animals and birds, the changes of the air, and of the clouds andwinds. My science, so called, had given me little more than the namesof things which to her were familiar and common. It was in her companythat I learned to read nature as a book always open, and full ofdelectable teachings, until my poor school-lore did seem undesirable andtedious, and the very chatter of the noisy blackbirds in the springmeadows more profitable and more pleasing than the angry disputes andthe cavils and subtleties of schoolmen and divines. "

My cousin blushed, and, smiling through her moist eyes at this languageof 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 hadfirst thought of becoming a farmer. And she asked him to repeat some ofthe verses which he had at his tongue's end. He laughed, and said hedid suppose she meant some lines of Horace, which had been thusEnglished:--

 "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 cousinPolly. Her suitor is altogether a worthy young man; and, makingallowances for the uncertainty of all human things, she may well lookforward to a happy life with him. I shall leave behind on the morrowdear friends, who were strangers unto me a few short weeks ago, but inwhose joys and sorrows I shall henceforth always partake, so far as I docome to the knowledge of them, whether or no I behold their faces anymore in this life. 

HAMPTON, October 24, 1678. 

I took leave of my good friends at Agamenticus, or York, as it is nowcalled, on the morning after the last date in my journal, going in aboat with my uncle to Piscataqua and Strawberry Bank. It was a cloudyday, 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 thevoyage in a shorter time than is common. We stopped a little at thehouse of a Mr. Cutts, a man of some note in these parts; but he beingfrom home, and one of the children sick with a quinsy, we went up theriver to Strawberry Bank, where we tarried over night. The woman whoentertained us had lost her husband in the war, and having to see to theordering of matters out of doors in this busy season of harvest, it wasno marvel that she did neglect those within. I made a comfortablesupper of baked pumpkin and milk, and for lodgings I had a straw bed onthe floor, in the dark loft, which was piled wellnigh full with corn-ears, pumpkins, and beans, besides a great deal of old householdtrumpery, wool, and flax, and the skins of animals. Although tired ofmy journey, it was some little time before I could get asleep; and it sofell out, that after the folks of the house were all abed, and still, itbeing, as I judge, nigh midnight, I chanced to touch with my foot apumpkin 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 stirbelow, the woman and her three daughters crying out that the house washaunted. Presently she called to me from the foot of the stairs, andasked me if I did hear anything. I laughed so at all this, that it wassome time before I could speak; when I told her I did hear a thumping onthe 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 sadcry, and they all came fleeing into the corn-loft, the girls bouncingupon my bed, and hiding under the blanket, and the old woman praying andgroaning, and saying that she did believe it was the spirit of her poorhusband. By this time my uncle, who was lying on the settle in the roombelow, hearing the noise, got up, and stumbling over the pumpkin, calledto know what was the matter. Thereupon the woman bade him flee upstairs, 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 Icould speak for laughing, I told the poor creature what it was that sofrightened her; at which she was greatly vexed; and, after she went tobed again, I could hear her scolding me for playing tricks upon honestpeople. 

We were up betimes in the morning, which was bright and pleasant. Unclesoon found a friend of his, a Mr. Weare, who, with his wife, was to goto his home, at Hampton, that day, and who did kindly engage to see methus 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 somemiles through the woods, --getting at times a view of the sea, andpassing some good, thriving plantations. The woods in this country areby no means like those of England, where the ancient trees are keptclear of bushes and undergrowth, and the sward beneath them is shavenclean and close; whereas here they be much tangled with vines, and thedead boughs and logs which have fallen, from their great age or whichthe storms do beat off, or the winter snows and ices do break down. Here, also, through the thick matting of dead leaves, all manner ofshrubs and bushes, some of them very sweet and fair in their flowering, and others greatly prized for their healing virtues, do grow upplenteously. In the season of them, many wholesome fruits abound in thewoods, such as blue and black berries. We passed many trees, wellloaded with walnuts and oilnuts, seeming all alive, as it were, withsquirrels, striped, red, and gray, the last having a large, spreadingtail, 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 somesort like that wonderful shell-fish which transformeth itself into aboat, and saileth on the waves of the sea. We also found grapes, bothwhite and purple, hanging down in clusters from the trees, over whichthe vines did run, nigh upon as large as those which the Jews of oldplucked 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 ofbirds, and the sound of the waves breaking on the beach a littledistance off, and the leaves, at every breath of the wind in the tree-tops, whirling and fluttering down about me, like so many yellow andscarlet-colored birds, made the ride wonderfully pleasant andentertaining. 

Mr. Weare, on the way, told me that there was a great talk of thebewitching of Goodman Morse's house at Newbury, and that the case ofCaleb Powell was still before the Court, he being vehemently suspectedof 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 wastroubled by evil spirits, and even went so far as to doubt that suchthings could be at all. "Yet many wiser men than Caleb Powell do denythe same, " I said. "True, " answered he; "but, as good Mr. Richardson, of Newbury, well saith, there have never lacked Sadducees, who believenot in angel or spirit. " I told the story of the disturbance atStrawberry Bank the night before, and how so silly a thing as a rollingpumpkin did greatly terrify a whole household; and said I did not doubtthis Newbury trouble was something very like it. Hereupon the goodwoman took the matter up, saying she had been over to Newbury, and hadseen with her own eyes, and heard with her own ears; and that she couldsay of it as the Queen of Sheba did of Solomon's glory, "The half hadnot been told her. " She then went on to tell me of many marvellous andtruly unaccountable things, so that I must needs think there is aninvisible hand at work there. 

We reached Hampton about one hour before noon; and riding up the roadtowards the meeting-house, to my great joy, Uncle Rawson, who hadbusiness with the Commissioners then sitting, came out to meet me, bidding me go on to Mr. Weare's house, whither he would follow me whenthe 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 theevening with Mistress Weare and her maiden sister to see a young girl inthe neighborhood, said to be possessed, or bewitched; but for mine ownpart I did see nothing in her behavior beyond that of a vicious andspoiled child, delighting in mischief. Her grandmother, with whom shelives, lays the blame on an ill-disposed woman, named Susy Martin, living in Salisbury. Mr. Pike, who dwells near this Martin, saith sheis no witch, although an arrant scold, as was her mother before her; andas for the girl, he saith that a birch twig, smartly laid on, would cureher 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 beenat work in Hampton; for they did all remember the case of GoodyMarston's child, who was, from as fair and promising an infant as onewould wish to see, changed into the likeness of an ape, to the greatgrief and sore shame of its parents; and, moreover, that when the childdied, there was seen by more than one person a little old woman in ablue cloak, and petticoat of the same color, following on after themourners, and looking very like old Eunice Cole, who was then lockedfast in Ipswich jail, twenty miles off. Uncle Rawson says he has allthe papers in his possession touching the trial of this Cole, and willlet me see them when we get back to Newbury. There was much talk onthis matter, which so disturbed my fancy that I slept but poorly. Thisafternoon we go over to Newbury, where, indeed, I do greatly long to beonce 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 thismorning, telling us that there was a rumor in Boston, brought by way ofthe New York Colony, that a great Papist Plot had been discovered inEngland, 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 oftheir Jesuits so to do; but that, nevertheless, it would be no strangething if it should be found that the Bishops and the Government did setthis rumor a-going, for the excuse and occasion of some new persecutionsof 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 showedthat, as among the heathen nations surrounding the Jews, there weresorcerers, charmers, wizards, and consulters with familiar spirits, whowere an abomination to the Lord, so in our time the heathen nations ofIndians had also their powahs and panisees and devilish wizards, againstwhom the warning of the text might well be raised by the watchmen on thewalls of our Zion. He moreover said that the arts of the Adversary werenow 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 withthe Lord, that they who have made a covenant with hell may be speedilydiscovered in their wickedness, and cut off from the congregation. Anawful discourse, which made many tremble and quake, and did quiteovercome Goodwife Morse, she being a weakly woman, so that she had to becarried 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 tocopy 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 findthat as long ago as the year 1656, this same Eunice Cole was complainedof, and many witnesses did testify to her wickedness. Here followethsome of the evidence on the first trial:--

"The deposition of Goody Marston and Goodwife Susanna Palmer, who, beingsworn, sayeth, that Goodwife Cole saith that she was sure there was awitch in town, and that she knew where he dwelt, and who they are, andthat thirteen years ago she knew one bewitched as Goodwife Marston'schild was, and she was sure that party was bewitched, for it told herso, and it was changed from a man to an ape, as Goody Marston's childwas, and she had prayed this thirteen year that God would discover thatwitch. And further the deponent saith not. 

"Taken on oath before the Commissioners of Hampton, the 8th of the 2ndmo. , 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 hiscalves did eat of her grass, she hoped it would poison them; and it fellout that one never came home again, and the other coming home died soonafter. 

"Henry Morelton's wife and Goodwife Sleeper depose that, talking aboutGoody Cole and Marston's child, they did hear a great scraping againstthe boards of the window, which was not done by a cat or dog. 

"Thomas Coleman's wife testifies that Goody Cole did repeat to anotherthe very words which passed between herself and her husband, in theirown house, in private; and Thomas Ormsby, the constable of Salisbury, testifies, that when he did strip Eunice Cole of her shift, to bewhipped, by the judgment of the Court at Salisbury, he saw a witch'smark under her left breast. Moreover, one Abra. Drake doth depose andsay, that this Goody Cole threatened that the hand of God would beagainst his cattle, and forthwith two of his cattle died, and before theend of summer a third also. "

About five years ago, she was again presented by the Jury for theMassachusetts jurisdiction, for having "entered into a covenant with theDevil, contrary to the peace of our Sovereign Lord the King, his crownand dignity, the laws of God and this jurisdiction"; and much testimonywas brought against her, tending to show her to be an arrant witch. Forit seems she did fix her evil eye upon a little maid named Ann Smith, toentice her to her house, appearing unto her in the shape of a little oldwoman, in a blue coat, a blue cap, and a blue apron, and a whiteneckcloth, and presently changing into a dog, and running up a tree, andthen into an eagle flying in the air, and lastly into a gray cat, speaking to her, and troubling her in a grievous manner. Moreover, theconstable of the town of Hampton testifies, that, having to supply GoodyCole with diet, by order of the town, she being poor, she complainedmuch of him, and after that his wife could bake no bread in the ovenwhich did not speedily rot and become loathsome to the smell, but thesame 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 ofthe bewitched bread, only more loathsome, and plainly diabolical in itsnature, so that, as the constable's wife saith, "she was fain to rise inthe night and desire her husband to go to prayer to drive away theDevil; and he, rising, went to prayer, and after that, the smell wasgone, so that they were not troubled with it. " There is also thetestimony 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 outthe bosom of Eunice Cole down into her lap. For all which, the CountyCourt, 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 learnfrom 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 beenoften whipped and set in the ducking-stool, but whether she was a witchor 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 timemany complain of sickness. Rebecca saith he is one of the excellent ofthe earth, and, like his blessed Lord and Master, delighteth in goingabout doing good, and comforting both soul and body. He hath acheerful, pleasant countenance, and is very active, albeit he is wellstricken in years. He is to preach for Mr. Richardson next Sabhath, andin the mean time lodgeth at my uncle's house. 

This morning the weather is raw and cold, the ground frozen, and somesnow fell before sunrise. A little time ago, Dr. Russ, who was walkingin the garden, came in a great haste to the window where Rebecca and Iwere sitting, bidding us come forth. So, we hurrying out, the good manbade 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 tohatch their broods in the great bogs and on the desolate islands, andfly back again when the cold season approacheth. Our worthy guestimproved the occasion to speak of the care and goodness of God towardshis creation, and how these poor birds are enabled, by their properinstincts, to partake of his bounty, and to shun the evils of adverseclimates. 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 thehawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings toward the south? Doththe 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 thatmutual benevolence was a law of nature, --no one being a whole ofhimself, nor capable of happily subsisting by himself, but rather amember of the great body of mankind, which must dissolve and perish, unless held together and compacted in its various parts by the force ofthat common and blessed law. The wise Author of our being hath mostmanifestly framed and fitted us for one another, and ordained thatmutual charity shall supply our mutual wants and weaknesses, inasmuchas no man liveth to himself, but is dependent upon others, as others beupon him. It hath been said by ingenious men, that in the outward worldall things do mutually operate upon and affect each other; and that itis by the energy of this principle that our solid earth is supported, and the heavenly bodies are made to keep the rhythmic harmonies of theircreation, 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, --mutualbenevolence being the cement and support of families, and churches, andstates, and of the great community and brotherhood of mankind. It dothboth make and preserve all the peace, and harmony, and beauty, whichliken our world in some small degree to heaven, and without it allthings would rush into confusion and discord, and the earth would becomea 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 Lawand the Prophets; and it is like unto the first, and cannot be separatedfrom it; for at the great day of recompense we shall be tried by thesecommandments, and our faithfulness unto the first will be seen andmanifested by our faithfulness unto the last. Yea, by our love of oneanother the Lord will measure our love of himself. "Inasmuch as ye havedone it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it untome. " The grace of benevolence is therefore no small part of ourmeetness for the inheritance of the saints in light; it is the temper ofheaven; the air which the angels breathe; an immortal grace, --for whenfaith which supporteth us here, and hope which is as an anchor to thetossed soul, are no longer needed, charity remaineth forever, for it isnative in heaven, and partaketh of the divine nature, for God himself islove. 

"Oh, my hearers, " said the preacher, his venerable face brightening asif with a light shining from within, "Doth not the Apostle tell us thatskill in tongues and gifts of prophecy, and mysteries of knowledge andfaith, do avail nothing where charity is lacking? What avail greattalents, if they be not devoted to goodness? On the other hand, wherecharity dwelleth, it maketh the weak strong and the uncomely beautiful;it sheddeth a glory about him who possesseth it, like that which didshine on the face of Moses, or that which did sit upon the countenanceof Stephen, when his face was as the face of an angel. Above all, itconformeth us to the Son of God; for through love he came among us, andwent about doing good, adorning his life with miracles of mercy, and atlast laid it down for the salvation of men. What heart can resist hismelting entreaty: 'Even as I have loved you, love ye also one another. '

"We do all, " he continued, "seek after happiness, but too often blindlyand foolishly. The selfish man, striving to live for himself, shuttethhimself up to partake of his single portion, and marvelleth that hecannot enjoy it. The good things he hath laid up for himself fail tocomfort him; and although he hath riches, and wanteth nothing for hissoul 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 agrave. 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 itto the solaces of that pure and sublime entertainment which the angelsdo spread for such as obey the will of their Creator, hath discovered amore subtle alchemy than any of which the philosophers did dream, --forhe transmuteth the enjoyments of others into his own, and his large andopen heart partaketh of the satisfaction of all around him. Are thereany here who, in the midst of outward abundance, are sorrowful ofheart, --who go mourning on their way from some inward discomfort, ---Wholong for serenity of spirit, and cheerful happiness, as the servantearnestly 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 evilhabits, who lack food for both the body and the mind. Thus shall they, in rememering others, forget themselves; the pleasure they afford totheir fellow-creatures shall come back larger and fuller unto their ownbosoms, and they shall know of a truth how much the more blessed it isto give than to receive. In love and compassion, God hath made usdependent upon each other, to the end that by the use of our affectionswe may find true happiness and rest to our souls. He hath united us soclosely with our fellows, that they do make, as it were, a part of ourbeing, and in comforting them we do most assuredly comfort ourselves. Therein doth happiness come to us unawares, and without seeking, as theservant who goeth on his master's errand findeth pleasant fruits andsweet 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 sinfuland froward, and of winning them by love and good will, and making eventheir 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 againstthe Church and the State, and to teach new doctrines, saying thatoftentimes such were sent as a judgment upon the professors of thetruth, who had the form of godliness only, while lacking the powerthereof; and that he did believe that the zeal which had been manifestedagainst such had not always been enough seasoned with charity. It didargue a lack of faith in the truth, to fly into a panic and a great ragewhen it was called in question; and to undertake to become God'savengers, and to torture and burn heretics, was an error of the Papists, which ill became those who had gone out from among them. Moreover, hedid believe that many of these people, who had so troubled the Colony oflate, were at heart simple and honest men and women, whose heads mightindeed 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 theirlives, and the justice of their dealings in outward things. He spakealso somewhat of the Indians, who, he said, were our brethren, andconcerning whom we would have an account to give at the Great Day. Thehand of these heathen people had been heavy upon the Colonies, and manyhad suffered from their cruel slaughterings, and the captivity ofthemselves and their families. Here the aged minister wept, for hedoubtless thought of his son, who was slain in the war; and for a timethe words did seem to die in his throat, so greatly was he moved. Buthe 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 dealingtowards he poor benighted heathen was an offence in the eyes of Him whorespecteth not the persons of men, but who regardeth with an equal eyethe white and the red men, both being the workmanship of His hands. Itis our blessed privilege to labor to bring them to a knowledge of thetrue 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 byconsidering the works do they acknowledge the workmaster, but deem thefire or wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the stars, or theviolent water, or the lights of heaven, to be the gods who govern theworld. 

He counselled against mischief-makers and stirrers up of strife, andsuch as do desire occasion against their brethren. He said that it didseem as if many thought to atone for their own sins by their great heatand zeal to discover wickedness in others; and that he feared such mightbe the case now, when there was much talk of the outward and visibledoings of Satan in this place; whereas, the enemy was most to be fearedwho did work privily in the heart; it being a small thing for him tobewitch a dwelling made of wood and stone, who did so easily possess andenchant the precious souls of men. 

Finally, he did exhort all to keep watch over their own spirits, and toremember that what measure they do mete to others shall be measured tothem again; to lay aside all wrath, and malice, and evil-speaking; tobear one another's burdens, and so make this Church in the wildernessbeautiful and comely, an example to the world of that peace and goodwill to men, which the angels sang of at the birth of the blessedRedeemer. 

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 tosome who did listen to it. Deacon Dole saith it was such a discourse asa Socinian or a Papist might have preached, for the great stress it laidupon works; and Goodwife Matson, a noisy, talking woman, --such an one, no doubt, as those busybodies whom Saint Paul did rebuke forforwardness, and command to keep silence in the church, --says thepreacher 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 withthe discourse. R. Pike saith he does no wise marvel at her complaints;for when she formerly dwelt at the Marblehead fishing-haven, she was oneof the unruly women who did break into Thompson's garrison-house, andbarbarously put to death two Saugus Indians, who had given themselves upfor safe keeping, and who had never harmed any, which thing was a greatgrief and scandal to all well-disposed people. And yet this woman, whoscrupled not to say that she would as lief stick an Indian as a hog, andwho walked all the way from Marblehead to Boston to see the Quaker womanhung, and did foully jest over her dead body, was allowed to have herway in the church, Mr. Richardson being plainly in fear of her illtongue and wicked temper. 

November 13. 

The Quaker maid, Margaret Brewster, came this morning, inquiring for theDoctor, and desiring him to visit a sick man at her father's house, alittle 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, theywere a kind people; for here was Goodman Brewster, whose small estatehad 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. Asfor 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 profanethe holy Sabhath; and though he had sent a petition to the HonorableGovernor and Council, for the remission of the same, it had been to nopurpose. Mr. Russ said he had taken a copy of this petition, with theanswer thereto, intending to make another application himself to theauthorities; for although the petitioner might have been blamable, yethis 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, duringtheir abode at Concord, Captain H. , under pretence of your petitioner'sprofanation of the Sabhath, had sentenced your petitioner to lose afortnight's pay. Now, the thing that was alleged against yourpetitioner 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 andnecessity for his so doing, for his shoes were grown so big, by walkingand riding in the wet and dew, that they galled his feet so that he wasnot able to go without pain; and his cartridges, being in a bag, --wereworn with continual travel, so that they lost the powder out, so that itwas dangerous to carry them; besides, he did not know how soon he shouldbe forced to make use of them, therefore he did account it lawful to dothe same; yet, if it be deemed a breach of the Sabhath, he desires to behumbled before the Lord, and begs the pardon of his people for anyoffence done to them thereby. And doth humbly request the favor of yourHonors 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 hiswages. So shall he forever pray. . . . "

11 Aug. 1676. --"The Council sees no cause to grant the petitioner anyrelief. "

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 inmuch trouble, sitting by the fire, with the Bible open before them, andGoody Morse weeping. Mr. Richardson asked Goodman Morse to tell what hehad seen and heard in the house; which he did, to this effect: Thatthere had been great and strange noises all about the house, a bangingof doors, and a knocking on the boards, and divers other unaccountablesounds; that he had seen his box of tools turn over of itself, and thetools fly about the room; baskets dropping down the chimney, and thepots 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 theboy did confirm. Mr. Russ asked her if she suspected any one of themischief; whereupon she said she did believe it was done by the seamanPowell, a cunning man, who was wont to boast of his knowledge inastrology and astronomy, having been brought tip under one Norwood, who is said to have studied the Black Art. He had wickedly accused hergrandson of the mischief, whereas the poor boy had himself sufferedgreatly from the Evil Spirit, having been often struck with stones andbits of boards, which were flung upon him, and kept awake o' nights bythe diabolical noises. Goodman Morse here said that Powell, coming in, and pretending to pity their lamentable case, told them that if theywould let him have the boy for a day or two, they should be free of thetrouble while he was with him; and that the boy going with him, they hadno disturbance in that time; which plainly showed that this Powell hadthe wicked spirits in his keeping, and could chain them up, or let themout, as he pleased. 

Now, while she was speaking, we did all hear a great thumping on theceiling, and presently a piece of a board flew across the room againstthe chair on which Mr. Richardson was sitting; whereat the two oldpeople set up a dismal groaning, and the boy cried out, "That's thewitch!" Goodman Morse begged of Mr. Richardson to fall to praying, which he presently did; and, when he had done, he asked Mr. Russ tofollow him, who sat silent and musing a little while, and then prayedthat the worker of the disturbance, whether diabolical or human, mightbe discovered and brought to light. After which there was no noisewhile we staid. Mr. Russ talked awhile with the boy, who did stoutlydeny what Caleb Powell charged upon him, and showed a bruise which hegot 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, andcapable beyond his years. Mr. Richardson said he hoped his brother wasnot about to countenance the scoffers and Sadducees, who had all alongtried to throw doubt upon the matter. For himself, he did look upon itas the work of invisible demons, and an awful proof of the existence ofsuch, and of the deplorable condition of all who fall into their bands;moreover, he did believe that God would overrule this malice of theDevil for good, and make it a means of awakening sinners and lukewarmchurch-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 worshipfulMajor Saltonstall, who hath business with Esquire Dummer and othermagistrates of this place. Mr. Saltonstall's lady, who is the daughterof Mr. Ward, sent by her husband and my brother a very kind and pressinginvitation to Rebecca and myself to make a visit to her; and Mr. Saltonstall did also urge the matter strongly. So we have agreed to gowith them the day after to-morrow. Now, to say the truth, I am notsorry to leave Newbury at this time, for there is so much talk of thebewitched house, and such dismal stories told of the power of invisibledemons, added to what I did myself hear and see yesterday, that I canscarce sleep for the trouble and disquiet this matter causeth. Dr. Russ, who left this morning, said, in his opinion, the less that wassaid and done about the witchcraft the better for the honor of theChurch and the peace of the neighborhood; for it might, after all, turnout to be nothing more than an "old wife's fable;" but if it were indeedthe work of Satan, it could, he did believe, do no harm to sincere andgodly people, who lived sober and prayerful lives, and kept themselvesbusy in doing good. The doers of the Word seldom fell into the snare ofthe Devil's enchantments. He might be compared to a wild beast, whodareth not to meddle with the traveller who goeth straightway on hiserrand, but lieth in wait for such as loiter and fall asleep by thewayside. He feared, he said, that some in our day were trying to get agreat character to themselves, as the old monks did, by their skill indiscerning witcherafts, and their pretended conflicts with the Devil inhis bodily shape; and thus, while they were seeking to drive the enemyout of their neighbors' houses, they were letting him into their ownhearts, in the guise of deceit and spiritual pride. Repentance andworks meet for it were the best exorcism; and the savor of a good lifedriveth off Evil Spirits, even as that of the fish of Tobit, atEcbatana, drove the Devil from the chamber of the bride into theuttermost parts of Egypt. "For mine own part, " continued the worthyman, "I believe the Lord and Master, whom I seek to serve, is over allthe powers of Satan; therefore do I not heed them, being afraid only ofmine own accusing conscience and the displeasure of God. "

We are all loath to lose the good Doctor's company. An Israeliteindeed! My aunt, who once tarried for a little time with him for thebenefit of his skill in physic, on account of sickness, tells me thathe is as a father to the people about him, advising them in all theirtemporal concerns, and bringing to a timely and wise settlement alltheir disputes, so that there is nowhere a more prosperous and lovingsociety. Although accounted a learned man, he doth not perplex hishearers, as the manner of some is, with dark and difficult questions, and points of doctrine, but insisteth mainly on holiness of life andconversation. It is said that on one occasion, a famous schoolman anddisputer from abroad, coming to talk with him on the matter of thedamnation of infants, did meet him with a cradle on his shoulder, whichhe was carrying to a young mother in his neighborhood, and when the mantold 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 ofthe 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 theirsouls. " 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 hisneighbors; yet, such is their love and good-will, that in the busyseasons of the hay and corn harvest, they all join together and help himin 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 intohis head many unscriptural notions, and that he will never be of servicein the Church until he casts them off. He saith, moreover, that heshall write to Mr. Ward concerning the errors of the young man. Hiswords troubling me, I straightway discoursed my brother as to the pointsof 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 notunpleasant. Mr. Saltonstall's business calling him that way, we crossedover the ferry to Salisbury, and after a ride of about an hour, got tothe Falls of the Powow River, where a great stream of water rushesviolently down the rocks, into a dark wooded valley, and from thenceruns into the Merrimac, about a mile to the southeast. A wild sight itwas, the water swollen by the rains of the season, foaming and dashingamong the rocks and the trees, which latter were wellnigh stripped oftheir leaves. Leaving this place, we went on towards Haverhill. Justbefore we entered that town, we overtook an Indian, with a fresh wolf'sskin hanging over his shoulder. As soon as he saw us, he tried to hidehimself in the bushes; but Mr. Saltonstall, riding up to him, asked himif he did expect Haverhill folks to pay him forty shillings for killingthat Amesbury wolf? "How you know Amesbury wolf?" asked the Indian. "Oh, " said Mr. Saltonstall, "you can't cheat us again, Simon. You mustbe honest, and tell no more lies, or we will have you whipped for yourtricks. " The Indian thereupon looked sullen enough, but at length hebegged Mr. Saltonstall not to tell where the wolf was killed, as theAmesbury 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 wifesome 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 thisSimon was a bad Indian, who, when in drink, was apt to be saucy andquarrelsome; 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 hillyand broken, but of good quality. Mr. Saltonstall liveth in a statelyhouse for these parts, not far from that of his father-in-law, thelearned Mr. Ward. Madam, his wife, is a fair, pleasing young woman, not unused to society, their house being frequented by many of the firstpeople hereabout, as well as by strangers of distinction from otherparts of the country. We had hardly got well through our dinner (whichwas abundant and savory, being greatly relished by our hunger), when twogentlemen came riding up to the door; and on their coming in, we foundthem to be the young Doctor Clark, of Boston, a son of the old Newburyphysician, and a Doctor Benjamin Thompson, of Roxbury, who I hear is nota little famous for his ingenious poetry and witty pieces on manysubjects. He was, moreover, an admirer of my cousin Rebecca; and onlearning of her betrothal to Sir Thomas did write a most despairingverse to her, comparing himself to all manner of lonesome things, sothat when Rebecca showed it to me, I told her I did fear the poor younggentleman would put an end to himself, by reason of his great sorrow anddisquiet; whereat she laughed merrily, bidding me not fear, for she knewthe writer too well to be troubled thereat, for he loved nobody so wellas himself, and that under no provocation would he need the Apostle'sadvice to the jailer, "Do thyself no harm. " All which I found to betrue, --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 greatlyflattered and sought after. 

The excellent Mr. Ward spent the evening with us; a pleasant, social oldman, much beloved by his people. He told us a great deal about theearly settlement of the town, and of the grievous hardships which manydid undergo the first season, from cold, and hunger, and sickness. Hethought, however, that, with all their ease and worldly prosperity, thepresent generation were less happy and contented than their fathers; forthere was now a great striving to outdo each other in luxury and gayapparel; the Lord's day was not so well kept as formerly; and thedrinking of spirits and frequenting of ordinaries and places of publicresort vastly increased. Mr. Saltonstall said the war did not a littledemoralize the people, and that since the soldiers cause back, there hadbeen much trouble in Church and State. The General Court, two yearsago, had made severe laws against the provoking evils of the times:profaneness, Sabbath-breaking, drinking, and revelling to excess, looseand sinful conduct on the part of the young and unmarried, pride indress, attending Quakers' meetings, and neglect of attendance upondivine worship; but these laws had never been well enforced; and hefeared too many of the magistrates were in the condition of the DutchJustice in the New York Province, who, when a woman was brought beforehim charged with robbing a henroost, did request his brother on thebench to pass sentence upon her; for, said he, if I send her to thewhipping post, the wench will cry out against me as her accomplice. 

Doctor Clark said his friend Doctor Thompson had written a long piece onthis 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 thisgeneration, and shame it by a comparison with that of the generationwhich has passed. Mr. Ward said he was glad to hear of it, and hopedhis ingenious friend had brought the manuscript with him; whereupon, theyoung gentleman said he did take it along with him, in the hope tobenefit it by Mr. Ward's judgment and learning, and with the leave ofthe company he would read the Prologue thereof. To which we allagreeing, 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 dohonor to any writer. 

Rebecca thought the lines concerning the long grace at meat happy, andsaid she was minded of the wife of the good Mr. Ames, who prided herselfon her skill in housewifery and cookery; and on one occasion, seeing anice 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, shefeared they would have small occasion for thankfulness for their spoileddinner. Mr. Ward said he was once travelling in company with Mr. Phillips of Rowley, and Mr. Parker of Newbury, and stopping all night ata poor house near the sea-shore, the woman thereof brought into the roomfor their supper a great wooden tray, full of something nicely coveredup by a clean linen cloth. It proved to be a dish of boiled clams, intheir shells; and as Mr. Phillips was remarkable in his thanks for aptlyciting passages of Scripture with regard to whatsoever food was upon thetable before him, Mr. Parker and himself did greatly wonder what hecould say of this dish; but he, nothing put to it, offered thanks thatnow, as formerly, the Lord's people were enabled to partake of theabundance of the seas, and treasures hid in the sands. "Whereat, " saidMr. Ward, "we did find it so hard to keep grave countenances, that ourgood hostess was not a little disturbed, thinking we were mocking herpoor fare; and we were fain to tell her the cause of our mirth, whichwas indeed ill-timed. "

Doctor Clark spake of Mr. Ward's father, the renowned minister atIpswich, whose book of "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam, " was much admired. Mr. Ward said that some of the witty turns therein did give much offenceat the time of its printing, but that his father could never spoil hisjoke 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 evengreatly angered his old and true friend, Mr. Cotton of Boston. "It fellout in this wise, " said Mr. Ward. "When the arch-heretic and fanaticGorton and his crew were in prison in Boston, my father and Mr. Cottonwent to the jail window to see them; and after some little discoursewith them, he told Gorton that if he had done or said anything which hecould with a clear conscience renounce, he would do well to recant thesame, and the Court, he doubted not, would be merciful; adding, that itwould be no disparagement for him to do so, as the best of men wereliable to err: as, for instance, his brother Cotton here generally didpreach that one year which he publicly repented of before hiscongregation the next year. "

Mr. Saltonstall told another story of old Mr. Ward, which made us allmerry. There was a noted Antinomian, of Boston, who used to go muchabout the country disputing with all who would listen to him, who, coming to Ipswich one night, with another of his sort with him, wouldfain have tarried with Mr. Ward; but he told them that he had scarce hayand grain enough in his barn for the use of his own cattle, and thatthey would do well to take their horses to the ordinary, where theywould be better cared for. But the fellow, not wishing to be so putoff, bade him consider what the Scripture said touching the keeping ofstrangers, as some had thereby entertained angels unawares. "True, my friend, " said Mr. Ward, "but we don't read that the angels camea-horseback!"

The evening passed away in a very pleasant and agreeable manner. We hadrare nuts, and apples, and pears, of Mr. Saltonstall's raising, wonderfully sweet and luscious. Our young gentlemen, moreover, seemedto think the wine and ale of good quality; for, long after we had goneto our beds, we could hear them talking and laughing in the great hallbelow, notwithstanding that Mr. Ward, when he took leave, bade DoctorThompson 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 hisdrinking, inasmuch as the command was, to give wine to those that be ofheavy heart. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember hismisery no more; and, for his part, he had been little better thanmiserable ever since he heard of Rebecca's betrothal. A light, carelessman, but of good parts, and as brave a talker as I have heard since Ihave been in the Colony. 

November 24. 

Mr. Ward's negro girl Dinah came for me yesterday, saying that hermaster 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 hadsent for me to have some discourse in regard to my brother Leonard, whohe did greatly fear was likely to make shipwreck of the faith; and thatMr. Richardson had written him concerning the young man, telling himthat he did visit the Quakers when at Newbury, and even went over totheir conventicle at Hampton, on the Lord's day, in the company of theBrewster family, noted Quakers and ranters. He had the last evening hadsome words with the lad, but with small satisfaction. Being sorelytroubled by this account, I begged him to send for Leonard, which hedid, and, when he did come into the room, Mr. Ward told him that hemight see by the plight of his sister (for I was in tears) what a greatgrief he was like to bring upon his family and friends, by running outinto 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 theQuakers' meeting, on one occasion, to judge for himself concerning thispeople, who are everywhere spoken against; and that he must say he didhear or see nothing in their worship contrary to the Gospel. There was, indeed, but little said, but the words were savory and Scriptural. "Butthey deny the Scriptures, " cried Mr. Ward, "and set above them what theycall the Light, which I take to be nothing better than their ownimaginations. " "I do not so understand them, " said Leonard; "I thinkthey do diligently study the Scripture, and seek to conform their livesto 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 devoutmen of all ages. I do not go to excuse the Quakers in all that theyhave done, nor to defend all their doctrines and practices, many ofwhich I see no warrant in Scripture for, but believe to be perniciousand contrary to good order; yet I must need look upon them as a sober, earnest-seeking people, who do verily think themselves persecuted forrighteousness' sake. " Hereupon Mr. Ward struck his cane smartly on thefloor, and, looking severely at my brother, bade him beware how he didjustify these canting and false pretenders. "They are, " he said, "either sad knaves, or silly enthusiasts, --they pretend to DivineRevelation, and set up as prophets; like the Rosicrucians and Gnostics, they profess to a knowledge of things beyond what plain Scripturereveals. The best that can be said of them is, that they are befooledby their own fancies, and the victims of distempered brains and illhabits of body. Then their ranting against the Gospel order of theChurch, and against the ministers of Christ, calling us all manner ofhirelings, wolves, and hypocrites; belching out their blasphemiesagainst the ordinances and the wholesome laws of the land for thesupport of a sound ministry and faith, do altogether justify the sharptreatment they have met with; so that, if they have not all lost theirears, they may thank our clemency rather than their own worthiness towear them. I do not judge of them ignorantly, for I have dipped intotheir books, where, what is not downright blasphemy and heresy, ismystical and cabalistic. They affect a cloudy and canting style, as ifto keep themselves from being confuted by keeping themselves from beingunderstood. Their divinity is a riddle, a piece of black art; theScripture they turn into allegory and parabolical conceits, and thusobscure and debauch the truth. Argue with them, and they fall todivining; reason with them, and they straightway prophesy. Then theirsilent meetings, so called, in the which they do pretend to justifythemselves by quoting Revelation, 'There was silence in heaven;' whereasthey might find other authorities, --as, for instance in Psalm 115, wherehell is expressed by silence, and in the Gospel, where we read of a dumbdevil. As to persecuting these people, we have been quite toocharitable to them, especially of late, and they are getting bolder inconsequence; as, for example, the behavior of that shameless young wenchin Newbury, who disturbed Brother Richardson's church with her anticsnot long ago. She should have been tied to the cart-tail and whippedall the way to Rhode Island. "

"Do you speak of Margaret Brewster?" asked Leonard, his face alla-crimson, and his lip quivering. "Let me tell you, Mr. Ward, that yougreatly wrong one of Christ's little ones. " And he called me to testifyto 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. TheManichees, and the Pelagians, and Socinians, all did profess greatstrictness and sanctity of life; and there never was heretic yet, fromthey whom the Apostle makes mention of, who fasted from meats, givingheed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils, down to the Quakers, Dippers, and New Lights of this generation who have not, like theirfathers of old, put on the shape of Angels of Light, and lived severeand over-strict lives. I grant that the Quakers are honest in theirdealings, making great show of sobriety and self-denial, and abhor thepractice of scandalous vices, being temperate, chaste, and grave intheir behavior, and thereby they win upon unstable souls, and makeplausible their damnable heresies. I warn you, young man, to take heedof 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 wasdropped, to my great joy. I went back much troubled and disquieted formy brother's sake. 

November 28, 1678. 

Leonard hath left Mr. Ward, and given up the thought of fitting for theministry. This will be a heavy blow for his friends in England. Hetells me that Mr. Ward spake angrily to him after I left, but that, whenhe come to part with him, the old man wept over him, and prayed that theLord would enable him to see his error, and preserve him from theconsequences thereof. I have discoursed with my brother touching hisfuture course of life, and he tells me he shall start in a day or two tovisit the Rhode Island, where he hath an acquaintance, one Mr. Easton, formerly of Newbury. His design is to purchase a small plantationthere, and betake himself to fanning, of the which he hath some littleknowledge, believing that he can be as happy and do as much good to hisfellow-creatures in that employment as in any other. 

Here Cousin Rebecca, who was by, looking up with that sweet archnesswhich doth so well become her, queried with him whether he did think tolive alone on his plantation like a hermit, or whether he had not hiseye upon a certain fair-haired young woman, as suitable to keep himcompany. Whereat he seemed a little disturbed; but she bade him notthink her against his prospect, for she had known for some weeks that hedid favor the Young Brewster woman, who, setting aside her enthusiasticnotions 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 myselfagainst the choice of my brother, which, in all respects save the oneshe had spoken of, she could approve with all her heart. Leonard goesback with us o-morrow to Newbury, so I shall have a chance of knowinghow matters stand with him. The thought of his marrying a Quaker wouldhave been exceedingly grievous to me a few months ago; but this MargaretBrewster hath greatly won upon me by her beauty, gentleness, and hergoodness of heart; and, besides, I know that she is much esteemed by thebest sort of people in her neighborhood. 

Doctor Thompson left this morning, but his friend Doctor Clark goes withus 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 itsmelancholy to heart, for he could assure her that there was no danger ofhis friend's acting on her account the sad part of the lover in the oldsong of Barbara Allen. As a medical man, he could safely warrant him tobe heart-whole; and the company could bear him witness, that the poethimself seemed very little like the despairing one depicted in hisverses. 

The Indian Simon calling this forenoon, Rebecca and I went into thekitchen to see him. He looks fierce and cruel, but he thanked MadainSaltonstall for her gifts of food and clothing, and, giving her inreturn a little basket wrought of curiously stained stuff, he told herthat 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. TheGreat Spirit made it for Indians. He made the great river for them, andbirch-trees to make their canoes of. All the fish in the ponds, and allthe pigeons and deer and squirrels he made for Indians. He made landfor white men too; but they left it, and took Indian's land, because itwas better. My father was a chief; he had plenty meat and corn in hiswigwam. But Simon is a dog. When they fight Eastern Indians, I try tolive in peace; but they say, Simon, you rogue, you no go into woods tohunt; you keep at home. So when squaw like to starve, I shoot one oftheir hogs, and then they whip me. Look!" And he lifted the blanketoff from his shoulder, and showed the marks of the whip thereon. 

"Well, well, Simon, " said Mr. Saltonstall, "you do know that our peoplethen 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 youhave all the woods to yourself to range in; and if you would let alonestrong drink, you would do well. "

"Who makes strong drink?" asked the Indian, with an ugly look. "Whotakes 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 wentoff 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 metus with a shy look, and told her mistress that Mrs. Prudence (uncle'sspinster cousin) had got a braw auld wooer in the east room; and surelyenough we found our ancient kinswoman and Deacon Dole, a widower ofthree years' standing, sitting at the supper-table. We did take notethat the Deacon had on a stiff new coat; and as for Aunt Prudence (forso she was called in the family), she was clad in her bravest, with afine cap on her head. They both did seem a little disturbed by ourcoming, but plates being laid for us, we sat down with them. Aftersupper, Rebecca had a fire kindled in uncle's room, whither we didbetake ourselves; and being very merry at the thought of Deacon Dole'svisit, it chanced to enter our silly heads that it would do no harm tostop the clock in the entry a while, and let the two old folks make along evening of it. After a time Rebecca made an errand into the eastroom, to see how matters went, and coming back, said the twain weresitting on the same settle by the fire, smoking--a pipe of tobaccotogether. Moreover, our foolish trick did work well, for Aunt Prudencecoming at last into the entry to look at the clock, we heard her tellthe Deacon that it was only a little past eight, when in truth it wasnear ten. Not long after there was a loud knocking at the door, and asEffie had gone to bed, Rebecca did open it, when, whom did she see butthe Widow Hepsy Barnet, Deacon Dole's housekeeper, and with her theDeacon's son, Moses, and the minister, Mr. Richardson, with a lantern inhis hand! "Dear me, " says the woman, looking very dismal, "have youseen anything of the Deacon?" By this time we were all at the door, theDeacon and Aunt Prudence among the rest, when Moses, like a great loutas he is, pulled off his woollen cap and tossed it up in the air, cryingout, "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 herborn days see the like of this, a man of the Deacon's years and stationstealing away without letting folks know where to look for him; and thenturning upon poor Mrs. Prudence, she said she had long known that somefolks were sly and artful, and she was glad Mr. Richardson was here tosee for himself. Whereupon Aunt Prudence, in much amazement, said, itwas 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. Hetold Deacon Dole, that seeing Goody Barnet so troubled about him, he hadoffered to go along with her a little way, and that he was glad to findthat the fault was in the clock. The Deacon, who had stood like one ina 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 widowscolding him all the way. Now, as we could scarce refrain fromlaughing, Mr. Richardson, who tarried a moment, shook his head atRebecca, telling her he feared by her looks she was a naughty girl, taking pleasure in other folk's trouble. We did both feel ashamed andsorry enough for our mischief, after it was all over; and poor MistressPrudence is so sorely mortified, that she told Rebecca this morning notto mention Deacon Dole's name to her again, and that Widow Hepsy iswelcome to him, since he is so mean-spirited as to let her rule himas she doth. 

December 8. 

Yesterday I did, at my brother's wish, go with him to Goodman Brewster'shouse, where I was kindly welcomed by the young woman and her parents. After some little tarry, I found means to speak privily with hertouching my brother's regard for her, and to assure her that I did trulyand freely consent thereunto; while I did hope, for his sake as well asher own, that she would, as far as might be consistent with her notionof duty, forbear to do or say anything which might bring her intotrouble with the magistrates and those in authority. She said that shewas very grateful for my kindness towards her, and that what I said wasa great relief to her mind; for when she first met my brother, she didfear that his kindness and sympathy would prove a snare to her; and thatshe had been sorely troubled, moreover, lest by encouraging him sheshould not only do violence to her own conscience, but also bringtrouble and disgrace upon one who was, she did confess, dear unto her, not only as respects outward things, but by reason of what she diddiscern of an innocent and pure inward life in his conversation anddeportment. She had earnestly sought to conform her conduct in this, as in all things, to the mind of her Divine Master; and, as respected mycaution touching those in authority, she knew not what the Lord mightrequire of her, and she could only leave all in His hands, beingresigned 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 kindwords, " she continued, "have removed a great weight from me. The wayseems more open before me. The Lord bless thee for thy kindness. "

She said this with so much tenderness of spirit, and withal with such anengaging 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 herdear sister. 

The family pressing us, we stayed to supper, and sitting down in silenceat the table, I was about to speak to my brother, but he made a sign tocheck me, and I held my peace, although not then knowing wherefore. Sowe all sat still for a little space of time, which I afterwards found isthe manner of these people at their meat. The supper was plain, but ofexceeding good relish: warm rye loaves with butter and honey, and bowlsof sweet milk, and roasted apples. Goodwife Brewster, who appeared muchabove her husband (who is a plain, unlearned man) in her carriage anddiscourse, talked with us very pleasantly, and Margaret seemed to growmore 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 knownMargaret Brewster from a child, and there was scarce her equal in theseparts 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 doneunwisely 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. Thefamily are all abed, and I can hear nothing save the crackling of thefire now burning low on the hearth, and the ticking of the clock in thecorner. The weather being sharp with frost, there is no one stirring inthe streets, and the trees and bushes in the yard, being stripped oftheir leaves, look dismal enough above the white snow with which theground is covered, so that one would think that all things must needsdie with the year. But, from my window, I can see the stars shiningwith marvellous brightness in the clear sky, and the sight thereof dothassure me that God still watcheth over the work of His hands, and thatin due season He will cause the flowers to appear on the earth, and thetime of singing-birds to come, and-the voice of the turtle to be heardin the land. And I have been led, while alone here, to think of themany mercies which have been vouchsafed unto me in my travels andsojourn in a strange land, and a sense of the wonderful goodness of Godtowards me, and they who are dear unto me, both here and elsewhere, hathfilled mine heart with thankfulness; and as of old time they did use toset up stones of memorial on the banks of deliverance, so would I atthis season set up, as it were, in my poor journal, a like pillar ofthanksgiving to the praise and honor of Him who hath so kindly cared forHis unworthy handmaid. 

January 16, 1679. 

Have just got back from Reading, a small town ten or twelve miles out ofBoston, whither I went along with mine Uncle and Aunt Rawson, and manyothers, to attend the ordination of Mr. Brock, in the place of theworthy Mr. Hough, lately deceased. The weather being clear, and thetravelling good, a great concourse of people got together. We stoppedat the ordinary, which we found wellnigh filled; but uncle, by dint ofscolding and coaxing, got a small room for aunt and myself, with a cleanbed, which was more than we had reason to hope for. The ministers, ofwhom there were many and of note (Mr. Mather and Mr. Wilson of Boston, and Mr. Corbet of Ipswich, being among them), were already together atthe house of one of the deacons. It was quite a sight the next morningto see the people coming in from the neighboring towns, and to notetheir odd dresses, which were indeed of all kinds, from silks andvelvets to coarsest homespun woollens, dyed with hemlock, or oil-nutbark, and fitting so ill that, if they had all cast their clothes into aheap, 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, andthe young people especially did look exceeding happy, it being with thema famous holiday. The young men came with their sisters or theirsweethearts riding behind them on pillions; and the ordinary and all thehouses about were soon noisy enough with merry talking and laughter. The meeting-house was filled long before the services did begin. Therewas a goodly show of honorable people in the forward seats, and amongthem 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 notremember, all with their wives and families, bravely apparelled. TheSermon was preached by Mr. Higginson of Salem, the Charge was given byMr. Phillips of Rowley, and the Right Hand of Fellowship by Mr. Corbetof Ipswich. When we got back to our inn, we found a great crowd ofyoung 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 ofspectacles, astride of his nose, where he stood swinging his arms, andpreaching, after the manner of his master, mimicking his tone and mannervery shrewdly, to the great delight and merriment of the young rogueswho did set him on. We stood in the door a while to hear him, and, tosay the truth, he did wonderfully well, being a fellow of good parts andmuch humor. But, just as he was describing the Devil, and telling hisgrinning 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 tocompare me to the Devil. "

"Beg pardon, massa!" said Sam, getting down from his pulpit, and rubbinghis shoulder. "How you think Sam know you? He see nothing; he onlyfeel de lick. "

"You shall feel it again, " said his master, striking at him a greatblow, which Sam dodged. 

"Nay, Brother Corbet, " said Mr. Phillips, who was with him, "Sam'smistake was not so strange after all; for if Satan can transform himselfinto an Angel of Light, why not into the likeness of such unworthyministers as you and I. "

This put the old minister in a good humor, and Sam escaped withoutfarther punishment than a grave admonition to behave more reverently forthe 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 littleabashed. 

The inn being greatly crowded, and not a little noisy, we were notunwilling to accept the invitation of the provider of the ordination-dinner, to sit down with the honored guests thereat. I waited, withothers of the younger class, until the ministers and elderly people hadmade an end of their meal. Among those who sat at the second table wasa pert, talkative lad, a son of Mr. Increase Mather, who, although butsixteen years of age, graduated at the Harvard College last year, andhath the reputation of good scholarship and lively wit. He told somerare stories concerning Mr. Brock, the minister ordained, and of themarvellous efficacy of his prayers. He mentioned, among other things, that, when Mr. Brock lived on the Isles of Shoals, he persuaded thepeople 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 occasiona long season of stormy, rough weather, unsuitable for fishing; and whenthe day came which had been set apart, it proved so exceeding fair, thathis congregation did desire him to put off the meeting, that they mightfish. Mr. Brock tried in vain to reason with them, and show the duty ofseeking first the kingdom of God, when all other things should be addedthereto, but the major part determined to leave the meeting. Thereuponhe 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, andonly five remained behind, and to these he said: "I will pray the Lordfor you, that you may catch fish till you are weary. " And it so fellout, that the thirty toiled all day, and caught only four fishes; whilethe five who stayed at meeting went out, after the worship was over, andcaught five hundred; and ever afterwards the fishermen attended all themeetings of the minister's appointing. At another time, a poor man, whohad made himself useful in carrying people to meeting in his boat, lostthe same in a storm, and came lamenting his loss to Mr. Brock. "Gohome, honest man, " said the minister. "I will mention your case to theLord: you will have your boat again to-morrow. " And surely enough, thevery 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 ingreat 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, tellinghis 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 himthat her old man was none other than Deacon Rogers of Wenham, and asgood and as pious a saint as there was out of heaven; and it did illbecome a young, saucy rake and knave to accuse him of drunkenness, andit would be no more than his deserts if the bears did eat him before hegot to Boston. As it was quite clear that the woman herself had had ataste of the mug, we left them and rode on, she fairly scolding us outof hearing. When we got home, we found Cousin Rebecca, whom we didleave ill with a cold, much better in health, sitting up and awaitingus. 

January 21, 1679. 

Uncle Rawson came home to-day in a great passion, and, calling me tohim, he asked me if I too was going to turn Quaker, and fall toprophesying? Whereat I was not a little amazed; and when I asked himwhat 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 itinto his head that you would make him a proper wife, or company-keeper, for there's never an honest marriage among them. " Then looking sternlyat me, he asked me why I did keep this matter from him, and thus allowthe foolish young man to get entangled in the snares of Satan. WhereatI was so greatly grieved, that I could answer never a word. 

"You may well weep, " said my uncle, "for you have done wickedly. As toyour 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 himnever a whit; and if I do not chastise him myself, it will be becausethe constable can do it better at the cart-tail. As the Lord lives, Ihad 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! Ihave none here now to whom I can speak freely, Rebecca having gone toher sister's at Weymouth. My young cousin Grindall is below, with hiscollege friend, Cotton Mather; but I care not to listen to theirdiscourse, and aunt is busied with her servants in the kitchen, so thatI 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 thegift of young Mr. Jordan, and which I have kept close hidden in mytrunk, hath been no small consolation to me this day, for it aboundethin 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 patienceuntil God ordaineth otherwise. When comfort is taken away, do notpresently despair. Stand with an even mind resigned to the will of God, whatever shall befall, because after winter cometh the summer; after thedark 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; norevery desire pure; nor is what is pleasing to us always pleasant in thesight of God. "

January 23. 

The weather is bitter cold, and a great snow on the ground. By a letterfrom Newbury, brought me by Mr. Sewall, who hath just returned from thatplace, 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 CalebPowell, he hath been set at liberty, there being no proof of his evilpractice. Yet inasmuch as he did give grounds of suspicion by boastingof his skill in astrology and astronomy, the Court declared that hejustly deserves to bear his own shame and the costs of his prosecutionand 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 getthe 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 ProvidencePlantations and Rhode Island, and reporteth well of the prospects of mybrother, who hath a goodly farm, and a house nigh upon finished, theneighbors, being mostly Quakers, assisting him much therein. Mybrother's letter doth confirm this account of his temporal condition, although a great part of it is taken up with a defence of his newdoctrines, for the which he doth ingeniously bring to mind many passagesof 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, wherethe Lord hath spread a table for us in the wilderness. Here is a goodlycompany of Friends, who do seek to know the mind of Truth, and to livethereby, being held in favor and esteem by the rulers of the land, andso left in peace to worship God according to their consciences. Thewhole country being covered with snow, and the weather being extremecold, we can scarce say much of the natural gifts and advantages of ournew 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 Iam told it is a desirable and pleasing place in the warm season. Mysoul is full of thankfulness, and a sweet inward peace is my portion. Hard things are made easy to me; this desert place, with its lonelywoods and wintry snows, is beautiful in mine eyes. For here we be nolonger gazing-stocks of the rude multitude, we are no longer haled fromour meetings, and railed upon as witches and possessed people. Oh, howoften have we been called upon heretofore to repeat the prayer of oneformerly: 'Let me not fall into the hands of man. ' Sweet, beyond thepower of words to express, hath been the change in this respect; and inview of the mercies vouchsafed unto us, what can we do but repeat thelanguage of David, 'Praise is comely yea, a joyful and pleasant thing itis to be thankful. It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, tosing 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 tosee the way of truth, according to our persuasion thereof, and hath beenreceived into fellowship with us. I fear this hath been a trial tothee; but, dear heart, leave it in the hands of the Lord, whose work Ido indeed count it. Nor needest thou to fear that thy brother's regardfor thee will be lessened thereby, for the rather shall it be increasedby a measure of that Divine love which, so far from destroying, doth butpurify and strengthen the natural affections. 

"Think, then, kindly of thy brother, for his love towards thee is verygreat; and of me, also, unworthy as I am, for his sake. And so, withsalutations of love and peace, in which my dear mother joins, I remainthy loving friend, MARGARET BREWSTER. 

"The Morse woman, I hear, is in your jail, to be tried for a witch. Sheis a poor, weak creature, but I know no harm of her, and do believe herto 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 beingold and weakly, and must needs entreat thee to inquire into hercondition. "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 testifyagainst her. Aunt sent the old creature some warm blankets and othernecessaries, which she stood much in need of, and Rebecca and I alteredone of aunt's old gowns for her to wear, as she hath nothing seemly ofher own. Mr. Richardson, her minister, hath visited her twice since shehath been in jail; but he saith she is hardened in her sin, and willconfess nothing thereof. 

February 14. The famous Mr. John Eliot, having business with my uncle, spent the lastnight with us, a truly worthy man, who, by reason of his great laborsamong 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 noteamong his people, very bright and comely, and handsomely apparelledafter the fashion of his tribe. This lad hath a ready wit, readeth andwriteth, and hath some understanding of Scripture; indeed, he did repeatthe Lord's Prayer in a manner edifying to hear. 

The worshipful Major Gookins coming in to sup with us, there was muchdiscourse concerning the affairs of the Province: both the Major and hisfriend Eliot being great sticklers for the rights and liberties of thepeople, and exceeding jealous of the rule of the home government, andin this matter my uncle did quite agree with them. In a special mannerMajor Gookins did complain of the Acts of Trade, as injurious to theinterests 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 justlyreach America. He read a letter which he had from Mr. Stoughton, one ofthe agents of the Colony in England, showing how they had been put offfrom time to time, upon one excuse or another, without being able to geta hearing; and now the Popish Plot did so occupy all minds there, thatPlantation matters were sadly neglected; but this much was certain, thelaws for the regulating of trade must be consented to by theMassachusetts, if we would escape a total breach. My uncle struck hishand hard on the table at this, and said if all were of his mind theywould never heed the breach; adding, that he knew his rights as a free-born Englishman, under Magna Charta, which did declare it the privilegeof such to have a voice in the making of laws; whereas the Massachusettshad 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'sbook on the Christian Commonwealth, which the General Court did makehaste to condemn on the coming in of the king, to be a sound andseasonable treatise, notwithstanding the author himself hath in somesort disowned it. "

"I did truly condemn and deny the false and seditious doctrines chargedupon it, " said Mr. Eliot, "but for the book itself, rightly taken, andmaking allowance for some little heat of discourse and certain hastyand 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 atBoston: 'Whatever form of government may be deduced from Scripture, thatlet us yield to for conscience' sake, not forgetting at the same timethat 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 worthygentleman and a true friend to the liberties of the Colony; and he askedRebecca to read some ingenious verses writ by him in one of hisalmanacs, which she had copied not long ago, wherein he compareth NewEngland to a goodly tree or plant. Whereupon, Rebecca read them asfolloweth:--

 "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 intosome account of his labors and journeys among the Indians, and of theirmanner of life, ceremonies, and traditions, telling him that I was astranger in these parts, and curious concerning such matters. So he didaddress himself to me very kindly, answering such questions as Iventured to put to him. And first, touching the Powahs, of whom I hadheard much, he said they were manifestly witches, and such as hadfamiliar 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 donewickedly, and it was a marvel that the Lord spared his life, and did notstrike him dead with his lightnings. And when I did press him to tellme how he did become a Powah, he said he liked not to speak of it, butwould nevertheless tell me. His grandmother used to tell him manythings concerning the good and bad spirits, and in a special manner ofthe Abomako, or Chepian, who had the form of a serpent, and who was thecause of sickness and pain, and of all manner of evils. And it sochanced that on one occasion, when hunting in the wilderness, threedays' journey from home, he did lose his way, and wandered for a longtime without food, and night coming on, he thought he did hear voices ofmen talking; but, on drawing near to the place whence the noise came, hecould 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, andsnakes, and briers; and being in so sad a plight, he bethought him ofall he had heard of evil demons and of Chepian, who, he doubted not wasthe cause of his trouble. At last, coming to a little knoll in theswamp, he lay down under a hemlock-tree, and being sorely tired, fellasleep. And he dreamed a dream, which was in this wise:--

"He thought he beheld a great snake crawl up out of the marsh, and standupon his tail under a tall maple-tree; and he thought the snake spake tohim, and bade him be of good cheer, for he would guide him safe out ofthe swamp, and make of him a great chief and Powah, if he would pray tohim and own him as his god. All which he did promise to do; and when heawoke in the morning, he beheld before him the maple-tree under which hehad seen the snake in his dream, and, climbing to the top of it, he sawa great distance off the smoke of a wigwam, towards which he went, andfound some of his own people cooking a plentiful meal of venison. Whenhe got back to Patucket, he told his dream to his grandmother, who wasgreatly rejoiced, and went about from wigwam to wigwam, telling thetribe that Chepian had appeared to her grandson. So they had a greatfeast and dance, and he was thenceforth looked upon as a Powah. Shortlyafter, 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 atdivers other times the Devil helped him in his enchantments andwitcheries. "

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 Christiancountries the Old Serpent did commonly find instruments of his craftamong 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 trueGod, who made all things, and of heaven and hell, they would readilyconsent thereto, saying that so their fathers had taught them; but whenhe spake to them of the destruction of the world by fire, and theresurrection of the body, they would not hear to it, for they pretend tohold that the spirit of the dead man goes forthwith, after death, to thehappy hunting-grounds made for good Indians, or to the cold and drearyswamps and mountains, where the bad Indians do starve and freeze, andsuffer 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 alittle humming-bird did come to him and peck at him when he did aughtthat was wrong, and sing sweetly to him when he did a good thing, orspake the right words; which coming to Mr. Eliot's ear, he made himconfess, in the presence of the congregation, that he did only mean, bythe figure of the bird, the sense he had of right and wrong in his ownmind. This fellow was, moreover, exceeding cunning, and did often askquestions hard to be answered touching the creation of the Devil, andthe fall of man. 

I said to him that I thought it must be a great satisfaction to him tobe permitted to witness the fruit of his long labors and sufferings inbehalf of these people, in the hopeful conversion of so many of them tothe light and knowledge of the Gospel; to which he replied that his poorlabors had been indeed greatly blest, but it was all of the Lord'sdoing, and he could truly say he felt, in view of the great wants ofthese wild people, and their darkness and misery, that he had by nomeans done all his duty towards them. He said also, that whenever hewas in danger of being puffed up with the praise of men, or the vanityof his own heart, the Lord had seen meet to abase and humble him, by thefalling back of some of his people to their old heathenish practices. The war, moreover, was a sore evil to the Indian churches, as some fewof their number were enticed by Philip to join him in his burnings andslaughterings, and this did cause even the peaceful and innocent to bevehemently suspected and cried out against as deceivers and murderers. Poor, unoffending old men, and pious women, had been shot at and killedby our soldiers, their wigwams burned, their families scattered, anddriven to seek shelter with the enemy; yea, many Christian Indians, hedid believe, had been sold as slaves to the Barbadoes, which he didaccount a great sin, and a reproach to our people. Major Gookins saidthat a better feeling towards the Indians did now prevail among thepeople; the time having been when, because of his friendliness to them, and his condemnation of their oppressors, he was cried out against andstoned in the streets, to the great hazard of his life. 

So, after some further discourse, our guests left us, Mr. Eliot kindlyinviting me to visit his Indian congregation near Boston, whereby Icould judge for myself of their condition. 

February 22, 1679. 

The weather suddenly changing from a warm rain and mist to sharp, clearcold, the trees a little way from the house did last evening so shinewith a wonderful brightness in the light of the moon, now nigh unto itsfull, that I was fain to go out upon the hill-top to admire them. Andtruly it was no mean sight to behold every small twig becrusted withice, and glittering famously like silver-work or crystal, as the rays ofthe moon did strike upon them. Moreover, the earth was covered withfrozen snow, smooth and hard like to marble, through which the longrushes, the hazels, and mulleins, and the dry blades of the grasses, didstand up bravely, bedight with frost. And, looking upward, there werethe dark tops of the evergreen trees, such as hemlocks, pines, andspruces, starred and bespangled, as if wetted with a great rain ofmolten crystal. After admiring and marvelling at this rareentertainment and show of Nature, I said it did mind me of what theSpaniards and Portuguese relate of the great Incas of Guiana, who had agarden of pleasure in the Isle of Puna, whither they were wont to betakethemselves when they would enjoy the air of the sea, in which they hadall manner of herbs and flowers, and trees curiously fashioned of goldand silver, and so burnished that their exceeding brightness did dazzlethe eyes of the beholders. 

"Nay, " said the worthy Mr. Mather, who did go with us, "it shouldrather, methinks, call to mind what the Revelator hath said of the HolyCity. I never look upon such a wonderful display of the natural worldwithout remembering the description of the glory of that city whichdescended out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, and her lightlike unto a stone most precious, even like unto a jasper stone, clear ascrystal. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper, and the citywas pure gold like unto clear glass. And the twelve gates were twelvepearls, every several gate was of one pearl, and the street of the citywas 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 Godsdesign 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 sealedup, and there be no flowers, nor leaves, nor ruining brooks, to speak ofHis goodness and sing forth His praises. Truly hath it been said, Greatthings 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 ofHis strength. He sealeth up the hand of every man, that all men mayknow His work. Then the beasts go into their dens, and they remain intheir places. Out of the south cometh the whirlwind, and cold out ofthe north. By the breath of God is the frost given, and the breadth ofthe 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 frompain, and much relieved, also, from a tedious cough. In this sickness Ihave not missed the company and kind ministering of my dear CousinRebecca, which was indeed a great comfort. She tells me to-day that thetime hath been fixed upon for her marriage with Sir Thomas, which didnot a little rejoice me, as I am to go back to mine own country in theircompany. I long exceedingly to see once again the dear friends from whomI have been separated by many months of time and a great ocean. 

Cousin Torrey, of Weymouth, coming in yesterday, brought with her a verybright and pretty Indian girl, one of Mr. Eliot's flock, of the Natickpeople. She was apparelled after the English manner, save that she woreleggings, called moccasins, in the stead of shoes, wrought over daintilywith the quills of an animal called a porcupine, and hung about withsmall black and white shells. Her hair, which was exceeding long andblack, 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 andfeathers, which did encircle her head. She speaks the English well, andcan write somewhat, as well as read. Rebecca, for my amusement, didquery much with her regarding the praying Indians; and on her desiringto know whether they did in no wise return to their old practices andworships, Wauwoonemeen (for so she was called by her people) told usthat they did still hold their Keutikaw, or Dance for the Dead; andthat the ministers, although they did not fail to discourage it, had notforbidden it altogether, inasmuch as it was but a civil custom of thepeople, and not a religious rite. This dance did usually take place atthe end of twelve moons after the death of one of their number, andfinished the mourning. The guests invited bring presents to thebereaved family, of wampum, beaver-skins, corn, and ground-nuts, andvenison. These presents are delivered to a speaker, appointed for thepurpose, who takes them, one by one, and hands them over to themourners, with a speech entreating them to be consoled by these tokensof the love of their neighbors, and to forget their sorrows. Afterwhich, they sit down to eat, and are merry together. 

Now it had so chanced that at a Keutikaw held the present winter, twomen 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 harddancing until they were in a great heat, and then running out into thesnow and sharp air to cool themselves, it was thought by many that theywere foully dealt with and poisoned. So two noted old Powahs fromWauhktukook, on the great river Connecticut, were sent for to discoverthe murderers. Then these poor heathen got together in a great wigwam, where the old wizards undertook, by their spells and incantations, toconsult the invisible powers in the matter. I asked Wauwoonemeen if sheknew how they did practise on the occasion; whereupon she said that nonebut men were allowed to be in the wigwam, but that she could hear thebeating of sticks on the ground, and the groans and howlings and dismalmutterings of the Powahs, and that she, with another young woman, venturing to peep through a hole in the back of the wigwam, saw a greatmany people sitting on the ground, and the two Powahs before the fire, jumping and smiting their breasts, and rolling their eyes veryfrightfully. 

"But what came of it?" asked Rebecca. "Did the Evil Spirit whom theythus called upon testify against himself, by telling who were hisinstruments in mischief?"

The girl said she had never heard of any discovery of the poisoners, ifindeed there were such. She told us, moreover, that many of the bestpeople in the tribe would have no part in the business, counting itsinful; 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, thewomen and boys chasing them and beating them with sticks and frozensnow, 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 anapron, whereat she was greatly pleased. We were all charmed with hergood parts, sweetness of countenance, and discourse and ready wit, beingsatisfied thereby that Nature knoweth no difference between Europe andAmerica in blood, birth, and bodies, as we read in Acts 17 that God hathmade of one blood all mankind. I was specially minded of a saying ofthat ingenious but schismatic man, Mr. Roger Williams, in the littlebook 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 learnthe Latin tongue, coming in last evening, and finding Rebecca and Ialone (uncle and aunt being on a visit to Mr. Atkinson's), was exceedingmerry, entertaining us rarely with his stories and songs. Rebecca tellsme he is a learned man, as I can well believe, but that he is too fondof strong drink for his good, having thereby lost the favor of many ofthe first families here, who did formerly employ him. There was oneballad, which he saith is of his own making, concerning the selling ofthe daughter of a great Irish lord as a slave in this land, whichgreatly pleased me; and on my asking for a copy of it, he brought it tome this morning, in a fair hand. I copy it in my Journal, as I knowthat 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 uncleand aunt, Rebecca and Sir Thomas, and Mr. Torrey of Weymouth, and hiswife; Mr. Thacher, the minister of the South Meeting, and Major SimonWillard of Concord, being present also. There was much discourse ofcertain Antinomians, whose loose and scandalous teachings in respect toworks were strongly condemned, although Mr. Thacher thought there mightbe danger, on the other hand, of falling into the error of theSocinians, who lay such stress upon works, that they do not scruple toundervalue and make light of faith. Mr. Torrey told of some of theAntinomians, who, being guilty of scandalous sins, did neverthelessjustify 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 wasa-weary of so much disputation, and began relating somewhat which befellhim in a late visit to the New Haven people. Among other things, hetold us that while he was there, a maid of nineteen years was put upontrial for her life, by complaint of her parents of disobedience of theircommands, and reviling them; that at first the mother of the girl didseem to testify strongly against her; but when she had spoken a fewwords, the accused crying out with a bitter lamentation, that she shouldbe destroyed in her youth by the words of her own mother, the woman didso soften her testimony that the Court, being in doubt upon the matter, had a consultation with the ministers present, as to whether the accusedgirl had made herself justly liable to the punishment prescribed forstubborn and rebellious children in Deut. Xxi. 20, 21. It was thoughtthat this law did apply specially unto a rebellious son, according tothe words of the text, and that a daughter could not be put to deathunder it; to which the Court did assent, and the girl, after beingadmonished, was set free. Thereupon, Sir Thomas told us, she ransobbing into the arms of her mother, who did rejoice over her as oneraised from the dead, and did moreover mightily blame herself forputting her in so great peril, by complaining of her disobedienceto the magistrates. 

Major Willard, a pleasant, talkative man, being asked by Mr. Thachersome questions pertaining to his journey into the New Hampshire, in theyear '52, with the learned and pious Mr. Edward Johnson, in obedience toan order of the General Court, for the finding the northernmost part ofthe river Merrimac, gave us a little history of the same, some parts ofwhich I deemed noteworthy. The company, consisting of the twocommissioners, and two surveyors, and some Indians, as guides andhunters, started from Concord about the middle of July, and followed theriver on which Concord lies, until they came to the great Falls of theMerrimac, at Patucket, where they were kindly entertained at the wigwamof a chief Indian who dwelt there. They then went on to the Falls ofthe Amoskeag, a famous place of resort for the Indians, and encamped atthe foot of a mountain, under the shade of some great trees, where theyspent the next day, it being the Sabhath. Mr. Johnson read a portionof the Word, and a psalm was sung, the Indians sitting on the ground alittle way off, in a very reverential manner. They then went toAnnahookline, where were some Indian cornfields, and thence over a wild, hilly country, to the head of the Merrimac, at a place called by theIndians Aquedahcan, where they took an observation of the latitude, andset their names upon a great rock, with that of the worshipful Governor, John Endicott. Here was the great Lake Winnipiseogee, as large over asan English county, with many islands upon it, very green with trees andvines, and abounding with squirrels and birds. They spent two days atthe lake's outlet, one of them the Sabhath, a wonderfully still, quietday 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 mymusings, I seem to be once more sitting under the beechen trees ofAquedahcan, with my three English friends, and I do verily seem to seethe Indians squatted on the lake shore, round a fire, cooking theirdishes, and the smoke thereof curling about among the trees over theirheads; and beyond them is the great lake and the islands thereof, somebig and others exceeding small, and the mountains that do rise on theother 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, whichdid abound there, and of the strawberries with which the old Indiancornfield near unto us was red, they being then ripe and luscious to thetaste. It seems, also, as if I could hear the bark of my dog, and thechatter of squirrels, and the songs of the birds, in the thick woodsbehind us; and, moreover, the voice of my friend Johnson, as he did callto mind these words of the 104th Psalm: 'Bless the Lord, O my soul! whocoverest thyself with light, as with a garment; who stretchest out theheavens like a curtain; who layeth the beams of his chambers in thewaters; who maketh the clouds his chariot; and walketh upon the wings ofthe 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 inpraise and thanksgiving beside stiller waters and among greener pasturesthan are those of Aquedahcan. "

"He was a shining light, indeed, " said Mr. Mather, "and, in view of hisloss and that of other worthies in Church and State, we may well say, asof 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 NewEngland; or, Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour, " wherein hedid 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 headof the Merrimac, during the journey of which he had spoken, which hadnever been printed, but which did more deserve that honor than much ofthe rhymes with which the land now aboundeth. Mr. Mather said he hadthe piece of bark then in his possession, on which Mr. Johnson didwrite; and, on our desiring to see it, he brought it to us, and, as wecould 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 beTheir 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 giveTo 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, didso set forth the worth and virtue of a syrup of her making, that AuntRawson sent Effie over to the woman's house for a bottle of it. Thewoman sat with us a pretty while, being a lively talking body, althoughnow wellnigh fourscore years of age. She could tell many things of theold people of Boston, for, having been in youth the wife of a man ofsome note and substance, and being herself a notable housewife and ofgood natural parts, she was well looked upon by the better sort ofpeople. After she became a widow, she was for a little time in thefamily of Governor Endicott, at Naumkeag, whom she describeth as a justand goodly man, but exceeding exact in the ordering of his household, and of fiery temper withal. When displeasured, he would pull hard atthe 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 itin the face of one of the assistants, who did profess conscientiousscruples 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 andprovoking strollers and ranters you shall never find than these sameQuakers. They were such a sore trouble to the Governor, that I dobelieve his days were shortened by reason of them. For neither thejail, nor whipping, nor cropping of ears, did suffice to rid him ofthem. At last, when a law was made by the General Court, banishing themon pain of death, the Governor, coming home from Boston, said that henow hoped to have peace in the Colony, and that this sharpness wouldkeep the land free from these troublers. I remember it well, how thenext day he did invite the ministers and chief men, and in what apleasant frame he was. In the morning I had mended his best velvetbreeches for him, and he praised my work not a little, and gave me sixshillings 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 ofZion, and the orderly carrying of matters in Church and State, and henceI know you will be glad to hear that, after much ado, and in spite ofthe strivings of evil-disposed people, the General Court have agreedupon a law for driving the Quakers out of the jurisdiction, on pain ofdeath; so that, if any come after this, their blood be upon their ownheads. 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 maytruly say, with David: "Thou hast given me my heart's desire, and hastnot withholden the prayer of my lips. Thy hand shall find out all thineenemies; thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thineanger; the Lord shall wallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shalldevour them. " You will find these words, Goody Lake, ' says he, 'in the21st Psalm, where what is said of the King will serve for such as be inauthority at this time. ' For you must know, young woman, that theGovernor 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 giftfrom a Portuguese captain, and of rare quality, as I know of mine owntasting, when word was sent to the Governor that a man wished to seehim, whom he bid wait awhile. After dinner was over, he went into thehall, and who should be there but Wharton, the Quaker, who, withoutpulling 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 thewicked, and they that hate the righteous shall be desolate!' Now, whenthe 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 hishorse, saying he would not rest until he had seen forty stripes save onelaid upon that cursed Quaker, and that he should go to the gallows yetfor his sauciness. So they had him to jail, and the next morning he wassoundly whipped, and ordered to depart the jurisdiction. "

I, being curious to know more concerning the Quakers, asked her if shedid 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 ofconscience, and against persecution, and prophesied all manner of evilupon 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 themcertain of their blasphemous books, which the constables burnt in thestreet, as I well remember by this token, that, going near the fire, andseeing one of the books not yet burnt, I stooped to pick it up, when oneof the constables gave me a smart rap with his staff, and snatched itaway. The women being sent to the jail, the Deputy-Governor, Mr. Bellingham, and the Council, thinking they might be witches, were forhaving them searched; and Madam Bellingham naming me and another womanto her husband, he sent for us, and bade us go to the jail and searchthem, 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 oneof them, a young, well-favored woman, did entreat that they might not beput 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 savea mole on the left breast of he younger, into which Goodwife Page thrusther needle, at which the woman did give a cry as of pain, and the bloodflowed; whereas, if it had been witch's mark, she would not have feltthe prick, for would it have caused blood. So, finding nothing that didlook like witchcraft, we left them; and on being brought before theCourt, Deputy-Governor Bellingham asked us what we had to say concerningthe women. Whereupon Goodwife Page, being the oldest of us, told himthat we did find no appearance of witches upon their bodies, save themole on the younger woman's breast (which was but natural), but thatotherwise she was fair as Absalom, who had no blemish from the soles ofhis feet to the crown of his head. Thereupon the Deputy-Governordismissed us, saying that it might be that the Devil did not want themfor witches, because they could better serve him as Quakers: whereat allthe 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 themback to England. But the others that followed fared harder, --somegetting whipped at the cart-tail, and others losing their ears. Thehangman's wife showed me once the ears of three of them, which herhusband cut off in the jail that very morning. "

"This is dreadful!" said I, for I thought of my dear brother and sweetMargaret 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 theystill coming, some were put to death. There were three of them to behanged at one time. I do remember it well, for it was a clear, warm dayabout the last of October, and it was a brave sight to behold. Therewas Marshal Michelson and Captain Oliver, with two hundred soldiersafoot, besides many on horse of our chief people, and among them theminister, Mr. Wilson, looking like a saint as he was, with a pleasantand joyful countenance, and a great multitude of people, men, women, andchildren, not only of Boston, but from he towns round about. I gotearly on to the ground, and when they were going to the gallows I keptas 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, andwho was a merry drolling man, asked her if she was n't ashamed to walkhand in hand between two young men; whereupon, looking upon himsolemnly, she said she was not ashamed, for this was to her an hour ofgreat joy, and that no eye could see, no ear hear, no tongue speak, andno heart understand, the sweet incomes and refreshings of the Lord'sspirit, which she did then feel. This she spake aloud, so that allabout could hear, whereat Captain Oliver bid the drums to beat and drownher voice. Now, when they did come to the gallows ladder, on each sideof which the officers and chief people stood, the two men kept on theirhats, 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 youcome 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 notcatch a word, being outside of the soldiers, and much fretted andworried by the crowd. They were presently turned off, and then thewoman went up the ladder, and they tied her coats down to her feet, andput the halter on her neck, and, lacking a handkerchief to tie over herface, the minister lent the hangman his. Just then your Uncle Rawsoncomes a-riding up to the gallows, waving his hand, and crying out, 'Stop! she is reprieved!' So they took her down, although she said shewas ready to die as her brethren did, unless they would undo theirbloody laws. I heard Captain Oliver tell her it was for her son's sakethat she was spared. So they took her to jail, and after a time senther back to her husband in Rhode Island, which was a favor she did in nowise deserve; but good Governor Endicott, much as he did abhor thesepeople, sought not their lives, and spared no pains to get thempeaceably out the country; but they were a stubborn crew, and must needsrun their necks into the halter, as did this same woman; for, comingback again, under pretence of pleading for the repeal of the lawsagainst 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 boysin the street sing many a time. "

A great number, both men and women, were--"whipped and put in thestocks, " continued the woman, "and I once beheld two of them, one ayoung and the other an aged woman, in a cold day in winter, tied to thetail of a cart, going through Salem Street, stripped to their waists asnaked 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 youngmarried woman, with a little child and her nurse, who, coming toWeymouth, 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 chancedthat 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; andwhen the jailer plucked it from her bosom, she looked round anxiously, and, seeing me, said, 'Good woman, I know thou 't have pity on thebabe, ' and asked me to hold it, which I did. She was then whipped witha threefold whip, with knots in the ends, which did tear sadly into herflesh; and, after it was over, she kneeled down, with her back allbleeding, and prayed for them she called her persecutors. I must say Idid greatly pity her, and I spoke to the jailer's wife, and we washedthe poor creature's back, and put on it some famous ointment, so thatshe soon got healed. "

Aunt Rawson now coming in, the matter was dropped; but, on my speakingto her of it after Nurse Lake had left, she said it was a sore trial tomany, even those in authority, and who were charged with the putting inforce of the laws against these people. She furthermore said, thatUncle Rawson and Mr. Broadstreet were much cried out against by theQuakers and their abettors on both sides of the water, but they did buttheir duty in the matter, and for herself she had always mourned overthe coming of these people, and was glad when the Court did set any ofthem free. When the woman was hanged, my aunt spent the whole day withMadam Broadstreet, who was so wrought upon that she was fain to take toher bed, refusing to be comforted, and counting it the heaviest day ofher life. 

"Looking out of her chamber window, " said Aunt Rawson, "I saw the peoplewho had been to the hanging coming back from the training-field; andwhen Anne Broadstreet did hear the sound of their feet in the road, shegroaned, 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 timethere was scarce a word spoken. At length Madam Broadstreet, turning toher 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; 'butI marvel, Anne, to see you so troubled about her. Her blood is upon herown head, for we did by no means seek her life. She hath trodden underfoot our laws, and misused our great forbearance, so that we could do nootherwise 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 thewarnings of Mr. Norton, and other godly people. '

"'Did she rail at, or cry out against any?' asked his wife. 'Nay, not tomy hearing, ' he said, 'but she carried herself as one who had done noharm, 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 thatpoor misled creature may not rest heavy upon us. '

"Hereupon Mr. Norton lifted up his head, which had been bowed down uponhis hand; and I shall never forget how his pale and sharp features didseem paler than their wont, and his solemn voice seemed deeper andsadder. 'Madam!' he said, 'it may well befit your gentleness andsweetness of heart to grieve over the sufferings even of the froward andungodly, when they be cut off from the congregation of the Lord, as Hisholy and just law enjoineth, for verily I also could weep for thecondemned one, as a woman and a mother; and, since her coming, I havewrestled with the Lord, in prayer and fasting, that I might be Hisinstrument in snatching her as a brand from the burning. But, as awatchman on the walls of Zion, when I did see her casting poison intothe wells of life, and enticing unstable souls into the snares andpitfalls of Satan, what should I do but sound an alarm against her? Andthe magistrate, such as your worthy husband, who is also appointed ofGod, and set for the defence of the truth, and the safety of the Churchand 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 mustgive place unto the duty we do severally owe to God and His Church, andthe government of His appointment. It is a small matter to be judged ofman's judgment, for, though certain people have not scrupled to call mecruel and hard of heart, yet the Lord knows I have wept in secret placesover these misguided men and women. 

"'But might not life be spared?' asked Madam Broadstreet. 'Death is agreat thing. '

"'It is appointed unto all to die, ' said Mr. Norton, 'and after deathcometh 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 thatthese people should suffer than that hundreds of precious souls shouldbe lost through their evil communication. The care of the dear souls ofmy flock lieth heavily upon me, as many sleepless nights and days offasting do bear witness. I have not taken counsel of flesh and blood inthis grave matter, nor yielded unto the natural weakness of my heart. And while some were for sparing these workers of iniquity, even as Saulspared Agag, I have been strengthened, as it were, to hew them in piecesbefore the Lord in Gilgal. O madam, your honored husband can tell youwhat 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 wehave done hath been urged, not by hardness and cruelty of heart, butrather by our love and tenderness towards the Lord's heritage in thisland. Through care and sorrow I have grown old before my time; few andevil 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 humblytrust that the blood of the souls of the flock committed to me will notthen be found upon my garments. '

"Ah, me! I shall never forget these words of that godly man, " continuedmy aunt, "for, as he said, his end was not far off. He died verysuddenly, and the Quakers did not scruple to say that it was God'sjudgment upon him for his severe dealing with their people. They evengo so far as to say that the land about Boston is cursed because of thehangings and whippings, inasmuch as wheat will not now grow here, as itdid formerly, and, indeed, many, not of their way, do believe the samething. "

April 24. 

A vessel from London has just come to port, bringing Rebecca's dressesfor the wedding, which will take place about the middle of June, as Ihear. Uncle Rawson has brought me a long letter from Aunt Grindall, with one also from Oliver, pleasant and lively, like himself. Nospecial news from abroad that I hear of. My heart longs for Old Englandmore and more. 

It is supposed that the freeholders have chosen Mr. Broadstreet fortheir Governor. The vote, uncle says, is exceeding small, very fewpeople 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 mybrother, to the effect that he was now married and settled, and didgreatly desire me to make the journey to his house in the company of hisfriend, John Easton, and his wife's sister. I feared to break thematter to my uncle, but Rebecca hath done so for me, and he hath, to mygreat joy, consented thereto; for, indeed, he refuseth nothing to her. My aunt fears for me, that I shall suffer from the cold, as the weatheris by no means settled, although the season is forward, as compared withthe last; but I shall take good care as to clothing; and John Eastonsaith 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 brisktrot, until we came to the banks of the river, along which we went neara mile before we found a suitable ford, and even there the water was sodeep that we only did escape a wetting by drawing our feet up to thesaddle-trees. About noon, we stopped at a farmer's house, in the hopeof getting a dinner; but the room was dirty as an Indian wigwam, withtwo children in it, sick with the measles, and the woman herself in apoor way, and we were glad to leave as soon as possible, and get intothe 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 goodloaf of Indian bread; so, coming to a spring of excellent water, we gotoff our horses, and, spreading our napkins on the grass and dry leaves, had a comfortable dinner. John's sister is a widow, a lively, merrywoman, and proved rare company for me. Afterwards we rode until the sunwas nigh setting, when we came to a little hut on the shore of a broadlake at a place called Massapog. It had been dwelt in by a white familyformerly, but it was now empty, and much decayed in the roof, and as wedid ride up to it we saw a wild animal of some sort leap out of one ofits windows, and run into the pines. Here Mr. Easton said we must makeshift to tarry through the night, as it was many miles to the house of awhite man. So, getting off our horses, we went into the hut, which hadbut one room, with loose boards for a floor; and as we sat there in thetwilight, it looked dismal enough; but presently Mr. Easton, coming inwith a great load of dried boughs, struck a light in the stonefireplace, and we soon had a roaring fire. His sister broke off somehemlock boughs near the door, and made a broom of them, with which sheswept 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, abouteight of the clock, over the tops of the hills on the easterly side ofthe lake, and shining brightly on the water in a long line of light, asif a silver bridge had been laid across it. Looking out into theforest, we could see the beams of the moon, falling here and therethrough the thick tops of the pines and hemlocks, and showing their talltrunks, like so many pillars in a church or temple. There was awesterly wind blowing, not steadily, but in long gusts, which, soundingfrom a great distance through the pine leaves, did make a solemn and notunpleasing music, to which I listened at the door until the cold droveme 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 thecover of a thick growth of hemlocks, which served to break off the nightwind. 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 theexceeding 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 agreat hole in the roof, and the moonlight streaming through the seams ofthe logs, and mingling with the red glow of the coals on the hearth. Icould hear the horses stamping, just outside, and the sound of the wateron 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 thewind. At last, being sore weary, I fell asleep, and waked not until Ifelt the warm sun shining in my face, and heard the voice of Mr. Eastonbidding me rise, as the horses were ready. 

After riding about two hours we came upon an Indian camp, in the midstof a thick wood of maples. Here were six spacious wigwams; but the menwere away, except two very old and infirm ones. There were five or sixwomen, 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, andwhich, although hungry, I could feel no stomach for; but I bought of oneof the squaws two great cakes of sugar, made from the sap of the mapleswhich abound there, very pure and sweet, and which served me instead oftheir unsavory meat and cakes of pounded corn, of which Mr. Easton andhis sister did not scruple to partake. Leaving them, we had a long andhard ride to a place called Winnicinnit, where, to my great joy, wefound a comfortable house and Christian people, with whom we tarried. The next day we got to the Plantations; and about noon, from the top ofa hill, Mr. Easton pointed out the settlement where my brother dwelt, --a fair, pleasant valley, through which ran a small river, with thehouses of the planters on either side. Shortly after, we came to a newframe house, with a great oak-tree left standing on each side of thegate, and a broad meadow before it, stretching down to the water. HereMr. Easton stopped; and now, who should come hastening down to us but mynew sister, Margaret, in her plain but comely dress, kindly welcomingme; and soon my brother came up from the meadow, where he was busy withhis men. It was indeed a joyful meeting. 

The next day being the Sabhath, I went with my brother and his wife tothe meeting, which was held in a large house of one of their Quakerneighbors. 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 youngwoman, who, I did afterwards learn, had been hardly treated by thePlymouth people, did offer a few words of encouragement and exhortationfrom this portion of the 34th Psalm: "The angel of the Lord encampethround about them that fear him, and delivereth them. " When the meetingwas over, some of the ancient women came and spake kindly to me, inviting me to their houses. In the evening certain of these peoplecame to my brother's, and were kind and loving towards me. There was, nevertheless, a gravity and a certain staidness of deportment which Icould 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 dojudge them to be a worthy and pious people, I like not their manner ofworship, and their great gravity and soberness do little accord with mynatural temper and spirits. 

May 16. 

This place is in what is called the Narragansett country, and abouttwenty miles from Mr. Williams's town of Providence, a place of no smallnote. Mr. Williams, who is now an aged man, more than fourscore, wasthe 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 molestany in worshipping according to conscience; and hence you will see inthe 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, asrespects the decrees, and hath been a bitter reviler of the Quakers, although he hath ofttimes sheltered them from the rigor of theMassachusetts Bay magistrates, who he saith have no warrant to deal inmatters of conscience and religion, as they have done. 

Yesterday came the Governor of the Rhode Island, Nicholas Easton, thefather of John, with his youngest daughter Mary, as fair and as ladylikea person as I have seen for many a day. Both her father and herself domeet with the "Friends, " as they call themselves, at their great houseon the Island, and the Governor sometimes speaks therein, having, as oneof 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 goback with them on the morrow to the Island, but Leonard's business willnot allow it, and I would by no means lose his company while I tarry inthese parts, as I am so soon to depart for home, where a great oceanwill separate us, it may be for many years. Margaret, who hath been tothe Island, saith that the Governor's house is open to all new-comers, who are there entertained with rare courtesy, he being a man ofsubstance, having a great plantation, with orchards and gardens, anda 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 didentertain and lodge no less than fourscore persons, beside his ownfamily and servants. 

Governor Easton, who is a pleasant talker, told a story of a magistratewho had been a great persecutor of his people. On one occasion, afterhe 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 springsof water and green meadows, and rare fruit-trees and vines with ripeclusters thereon, and in the midst thereof flowed a river whose waterswere clearer than crystal. Moreover, he did behold a great multitudewalking on the river's bank, or sitting lovingly in the shade of thetrees 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 hishat on, side by side with a minister then dead, whom the magistrate hadheld in great esteem while living; whereat, feeling his anger stirredwithin him, he went straight and bade the man take off his hat in thepresence of his betters. Howbeit the twain did give no heed to hiswords, but did continue to talk lovingly together as before; whereuponhe 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, andbehold one, with a shining countenance, and clad in raiment so whitethat it did dazzle his eyes to look upon it, stood before him. And theshape 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 worldand 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 whotalked with him, sat under the tree. "Tell me, " said the shape, "if thoucanst, which of the twain is the Quaker and which is the Priest?" Andwhen he could not, but stood in amazement confessing he did see neitherof them, the shape said, "Thou sayest well, for here be neither Priestnor Quaker, Jew nor Gentile, but all are one in the Lord. " Then heawoke, and pondered long upon his dream, and when it was morning he wentstraightway to the jail, and ordered the man to be set free, and hathever 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 agreat wood of oaks and walnuts behind it, and before it many acres ofopen land, where formerly the Indians did plant their corn, much ofwhich is now ploughed and seeded. From the top of the hill one can seethe waters of the great Bay; at the foot of it runs a small rivernoisily over the rocks, making a continual murmur. Going thither thismorning, I found a great rock hanging over the water, on which I satdown, listening to the noise of the stream and the merriment of thebirds in the trees, and admiring the green banks, which were besprinkledwith white and yellow flowers. I call to mind that sweet fancy of thelamented Anne Broadstreet, the wife of the new Governor ofMassachusetts, in a little piece which she nameth "Contemplations, "being written on the banks of a stream, like unto the one whereby I wasthen sitting, in which the writer first describeth the beauties of thewood, and the flowing water, with the bright fishes therein, and thenthe songs of birds in the boughs over her head, in this sweet andpleasing 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, Ilooked 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 notharm me; and Leonard, hearing my cries, now coming up, bade me neverfear the Indian, for he was a harmless creature, who was well known tohim. So he kindly saluted the old man, asking me to shake hands withhim, which I did, when he struck across the field to a little clearedspot 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 somespace of time, and then, getting up, he stretched out his hands towardsthe southwest, as if imploring some one whom I could not see. This herepeated 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 thathe had been to see the graves of his father and his mother, and that hewas glad to find them as he did leave them the last year; for he knewthat the spirits of the dead would be sore grieved, if the white man'shoe touched their bones. 

My brother promised him that the burial-place of his people should notbe disturbed, and that he would find it as now, when he did again visitit. 

"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 islike that tree;" and he pointed, as he spoke, to a birch, which stoodapart in the field, from which the bark had fallen, and which did showno leaf nor bud. 

My brother hereupon spake to him of the great Father of both white andred men, and of his love towards them, and of the measure of light whichhe had given unto all men, whereby they might know good from evil, andby living in obedience to which they might be happy in this life and inthat to come; exhorting him to put his trust in God, who was able tocomfort and sustain him in his old age, and not to follow after lyingPowahs, who did deceive and mislead him. 

"My young brother's talk is good, " said the old man. "The Great Fathersees that his skin is white, and that mine is red. He sees my youngbrother when he sits in his praying-house, and me when me offer him cornand deer's flesh in the woods, and he says good. Umpachee's people haveall gone to one place. If Umpachee go to a praying-house, the GreatFather will send him to the white man's place, and his father and hismother 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 hisown 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 thevalley, and got to the top of the hill on the other side, we, lookingafter him, beheld him standing still a moment, as if bidding farewell tothe graves of his people. 

May 24. 

My brother goes with me to-morrow on my way to Boston. I am not alittle loath to leave my dear sister Margaret, who hath greatly won uponme by her gentleness and loving deportment, and who doth at all times, even when at work in ordering her household affairs, and amidst thecares and perplexities of her new life, show forth that sweetness oftemper and that simplicity wherewith I was charmed when I first saw her. She hath naturally an ingenious mind, and, since her acquaintance withmy brother, hath dipped into such of his studies and readings as she hadleisure and freedom to engage in, so that her conversation is in no wisebeneath her station. Nor doth she, like some of her people, especiallythe more simple and unlearned, affect a painful and melancholy look anda canting tone of discourse, but lacketh not for cheerfulness and acertain natural ease and grace of demeanor; and the warmth and goodnessof 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 sweetestsmile 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 aQuaker 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 wewent as far as a place they call Rehoboth, where we tarried over night, finding but small comfort therein; for the house was so filled, thatLeonard and a friend who came with us were fain to lie all night in thebarn, on the mow before their horses; and, for mine own part, I had tochoose between lying in the large room, where the man of the house andhis wife and two sons, grown men, did lodge, or to climb into the darkloft, where was barely space for a bed, --which last I did make choiceof, although the woman thought it strange, and marvelled not a little atmy 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 nearby, we inquired what it meant, and were told that some people fromProvidence were holding a meeting there, the owner of the house beingaccounted a Quaker. Whereupon, I went thither with Leonard, and foundnigh upon a score of people gathered, and a man with loose hair andbeard speaking to them. My brother whispered to me that he was noFriend, but a noted ranter, a noisy, unsettled man. He screamedexceeding loud, and stamped with his feet, and foamed at the mouth, likeone possessed with an evil spirit, crying against all order in State orChurch, and declaring that the Lord had a controversy with Priests andMagistrates, the prophets who prophesy falsely, and the priests who bearrule by their means, and the people who love to have it so. He spake ofthe Quakers as a tender and hopeful people in their beginning, and whilethe 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 upworldly goods, and speaking evil of the Lord's messengers. They were apart of Babylon, and would perish with their idols; they should drink ofthe wine of God's wrath; the day of their visitation was at hand. Aftergoing on thus for a while, up gets a tall, wild-looking woman, as paleas a ghost, and trembling from head to foot, who, stretching out herlong arms towards the man who had spoken, bade the people take noticethat this was the angel spoken of in Revelation, flying through themidst of heaven, and crying, Woe! woe! to the inhabitants of the earth!with more of the like wicked rant, whereat I was not a littlediscomposed, and, beckoning my brother, left them to foam out theirshame to themselves. 

The next morning, we got upon our horses at an early hour, and after ahard and long ride reached Mr. Torrey's at Weymouth, about an hour afterdark. 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 hisleave of me, going back to the Plantations. My heart is truly sad andheavy with the great grief of parting. 

May 30. 

Went to the South meeting to-day, to hear the sermon preached before theworshipful Governor, Mr. Broadstreet, and his Majesty's Council, itbeing the election day. It was a long sermon, from Esther x. 3. Hadmuch to say concerning the duty of Magistrates to support the Gospel andits 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 lastnight. Mr. Wigglesworth told aunt that he had preached a sermon againstthe wearing of long hair and other like vanities, which he hoped, withGod's blessing, might do good. It was from Isaiah iii. 16, and so onto 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 heoverhearing, turned to me, and bade me never heed, but speak out. So Itold him that I was but a child in years and knowledge, and he a wiseand learned man; but if he would not deem it forward in me, I would fainknow whether the Scripture did anywhere lay down the particular fashionof 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. Thewearing 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 inNumbers vi. 5, upon whose heads, by the appointment of God, no razorwas 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 weaklypeople 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 thehead and neck, it is nowise unlawful. But for healthy, sturdy youngpeople to make this excuse for their sinful vanity doth but add to theircondemnation. If a man go any whit beyond God's appointment and thecomfort of nature, I know not where he will stop, until he grows to bethe veriest ruffian in the world. It is a wanton and shameful thing fora man to liken himself to a woman, by suffering his hair to grow, andcurling and parting it in a seam, as is the manner of too many. Itbetokeneth pride and vanity, and causeth no small offence to godly, sober people. 

"The time hath been, " continued Mr. Wigglesworth, "when God's peoplewere ashamed of such vanities, both in the home country and in theseparts; but since the Bishops and the Papists have had their way, andsuch as feared God are put down from authority, to give place toscorners 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 andordering their hair; and said he could in no wise agree with some of hisbrethren in the ministry that this was a light matter, inasmuch as itdid most plainly appear from Scripture that the pride and haughtiness ofthe daughters of Zion did provoke the judgments of the Lord, not onlyupon them, but upon the men also. Now, the special sin of women ispride 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 inbase things; and hence the conduct of the daughters of Zion does greatlyprovoke his wrath, first against themselves, secondly their fathers andhusbands, and thirdly against the land they do inhabit. 

Rebecca here roguishly pinched my arm, saying apart that, after all, weweaker vessels did seem to be of great consequence, and nobody couldtell 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 Pemaquidcountry, looked in upon us yesterday. Said that since coming to thetown 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 Vaneand 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 cannotget to Boston to the trial of his wife, which is a sore affliction tohim. The trial of the witch is now going on, and uncle saith it looksmuch against her, especially the testimony of the Widow Goodwin abouther child, and of John Gladding about seeing one half of the body ofGoody Morse flying about in the sun, as if she had been cut in twain, oras if the Devil did hide the lower part of her. Robert Pike said suchtestimony ought not to hang a cat, the widow being little more than afool; and as for the fellow Gladding, he was no doubt in his cups, forhe had often seen him in such a plight that he could not have told GoodyMorse 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 withpeople, they being curious to see the witch. The Marshal and theconstables brought her in, and set her in, front of the pulpit; the oldcreature looking round her wildly, as if wanting her wits, and thencovering her face with her dark wrinkled hands; a dismal sight! Theminister took his text in Romans xiii. 3, 4, especially the last clauseof the 4th verse, relating to rulers: For he beareth not the sword invain, &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 showeththat the punishment of witches and such as covenant with the Devil isone 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 1Tim. V. 20: "Them that sin, rebuke before all, that others also mayfear. " The woman was greatly moved, for no doubt the sharp words of thepreacher did prick her guilty conscience, and the terrors of hell didtake hold of her, so that she was carried out, looking scarcely alive. They took her, when the lecture was over, to the Court, where theGovernor did pronounce sentence of death upon her. But uncle tells methere 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 hathlabored much with him to that end, as also hath Major Pike and MajorSaltonstall with the Governor, who himself sent for uncle last night, and they had a long talk together, and looked over the testimony againstthe woman, and neither did feel altogether satisfied with it. Mr. Norton adviseth for the hanging; but Mr. Willard, who has seen much ofthe woman, and hath prayed with her in the jail, thinks she may beinnocent in the matter of witchcraft, inasmuch as her conversation wassuch as might become a godly person in affliction, and the reading ofthe Scripture did seem greatly to comfort her. 

June 9. 

Uncle Rawson being at the jail to-day, a messenger, who had been sent tothe daughter of Goody Morse, who is the wife of one Hate Evil Nutter, onthe Cocheco, to tell her that her mother did greatly desire to see heronce more before she was hanged, coming in, told the condemned womanthat her daughter bade him say to her, that inasmuch as she had soldherself to the Devil, she did owe her no further love or service, andthat she could not complain of this, for as she had made her bed, so shemust lie. Whereat the old creature set up a miserable cry, saying thatto have her own flesh and blood turn against her was more bitter thandeath itself. And she begged Mr. Willard to pray for her, that hertrust in the Lord might not be shaken by this new affliction. 

June 10. 

The condemned woman hath been reprieved by the Governor and theMagistrates 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 theGovernor therein. For mine own part, I do truly rejoice that mercy hathbeen shown to the poor creature; for even if she is guilty, it affordethher a season for repentance; and if she be innocent, it saveth the landfrom a great sin. The sorrowful look of the old creature at the Lecturehath troubled me ever since, so forlorn and forsaken did she seem. Major Pike (Robert's father), coming in this morning, says, next to thesparing of Goody Morse's life, it did please him to see the bloodthirstyrabble so cheated out of their diversion; for example, there was GoodyMatson, who had ridden bare-backed, for lack of a saddle, all the wayfrom Newbury, on Deacon Dole's hard-trotting horse, and was so galledand lame of it that she could scarce walk. The Major said he met her atthe head of King Street yesterday, with half a score more of her sort, scolding and railing about the reprieve of the witch, and prophesyingdreadful judgments upon all concerned in it. He said he bade her shuther mouth and go home, where she belonged; telling her that if he heardany more of her railing, the Magistrates should have notice of it, andshe would find that laying by the heels in the stocks was worse thanriding Deacon Dole's horse. 

June 14. 

Yesterday the wedding took place. It was an exceeding brave one; mostof the old and honored families being at it, so that the great housewherein my uncle lives was much crowded. Among them were GovernorBroadstreet and many of the honorable Magistrates, with Mr. Saltonstalland his worthy lady; Mr. Richardson, the Newbury minister, joining thetwain in marriage, in a very solemn and feeling manner. Sir Thomas wasrichly apparelled, as became one of his rank, and Rebecca in her whitesilk looked comely as an angel. She wore the lace collar I wrought forher last winter, for my sake, although I fear me she had prettier onesof her own working. The day was wet and dark, with an easterly windblowing in great gusts from the bay, exceeding cold for the season. 

Rebecca, or Lady Hale, as she is now called, had invited Robert Piketo her wedding, but he sent her an excuse for not coming, to the effectthat urgent business did call him into the eastern country as far asMonhegan and Pemaquid. His letter, which was full of good wishes forher happiness and prosperity, I noted saddened Rebecca a good deal; andshe was, moreover, somewhat disturbed by certain things that did happenyesterday: the great mirror in the hall being badly broken, and thefamily arms hanging over the fire-place thrown down, so that it wasburned by the coals kindled on the hearth, on account of the dampness;which were looked upon as ill signs by most people. Grindall, athoughtless youth, told his sister of the burning of the arms, and thatnothing was left save the head of the raven in the crest, at which shegrew 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 secretlydid look upon it as an ill omen, especially as I could never greatlyadmire Sir Thomas. My brother's wife, who seemed fully persuaded thathe is an unworthy person, sent by me a message to Rebecca, to thateffect; but I had not courage to speak of it, as matters had gone sofar, and uncle and aunt did seem so fully bent upon making a great ladyof their daughter. 

The vessel in which we are to take our passage is near upon ready forthe sea. The bark is a London one, called "The Three Brothers, " and iscommanded by an old acquaintance of Uncle Rawson. I am happy with thethought of going home, yet, as the time of departure draws nigh, I doconfess some regrets at leaving this country, where I have been sokindly cared for and entertained, and where I have seen so many new andstrange things. The great solemn woods, as wild and natural as theywere thousands of years ago, the fierce suns of the summer season andthe great snows of the winter, and the wild beasts, and the heathenIndians, --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 thesmall islands covered with trees and vines; and many boats and sloopsgoing out with the west wind, to their fishing, do show their whitesails in the offing. How I wish I had skill to paint the picture of allthis 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 brotherand sister, and one to my cousins at York. Mr. Richardson hath justleft us, having come all the way from Newbury to the wedding. Theexcellent Governor Broadstreet hath this morning sent to Lady Hale ahandsome copy of his first wife's book, entitled "Several Poems by aGentlewoman of New England, " with these words on the blank page thereof, from Proverbs xxxi. 30, "A woman that feareth the Lord, she shall bepraised, " written in the Governor's own hand. All the great folkshereabout have not failed to visit my cousin since her marriage; but Ido think she is better pleased with some visits she hath had from poorwidows and others who have been in times past relieved and comforted byher charities and kindness, the gratitude of these people affecting herunto tears. Truly it may be said of her, as of Job: "When the ear heardher then it blessed her, and when the eye saw her it gave witness toher: because she delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, andhim that had none to help him. The blessing of him that was ready toperish 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 thelast pages have been lost. Appended to the manuscript I find a note, inanother handwriting, signed "R. G. , " dated at Malton Rectory, 1747. OneRawson Grindall, M. A. , was curate of Malton at this date, and theinitials are undoubtedly his. The sad sequel to the history of the fairRebecca Rawson is confirmed by papers now on file in the State-House atBoston, 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, OliverGrindall, Esq. , of Hilton Grange, Crowell, in Oxfordshire (both of whomhave within the last ten years departed this life, greatly lamented byall who knew them), having cone into my possession, I have thought itnot amiss to add to them a narrative of what happened to her friend andcousin, 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 andimpostor, deceiving with abominable villany Rebecca Rawson and most ofher friends (although my grandmother was never satisfied with him, as isseen in her journal). When they got, to London, being anxious, onaccount of sea-sickness and great weariness, to leave the vessel as soonas 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 thekeys of her trunks, telling her he would send them up from the vessel inseason for her to dress for dinner. The trunks came, as he said, butafter waiting impatiently for the keys until near the dinner-hour, andher husband not returning, she had them broken open, and, to her griefand astonishment, found nothing therein but shavings and othercombustible matter. Her kinsman forthwith ordered his carriage, andwent with her to the inn where they first stopped on landing from thevessel, where she inquired for Sir Thomas Hale. The landlord told herthere 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 oneThomas Rumsey was at his house, with a young lady, the night before, butshe was not his lawful wife, for he had one already in Kent. At thisastounding news, the unhappy woman swooned outright, and, being takenback to her kinsman's, she lay grievously ill for many days, duringwhich time, by letters from Kent, it was ascertained that this Rumseywas a graceless young spendthrift, who had left his wife and his twochildren three years before, and gone to parts unknown. 

"My grandmother, who affectionately watched over her, and comforted herin 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 prideand vanity, which had led her to discard worthy men for one of greatshow and pretensions, who had no solid merit to boast of. She hadsinned against God, and brought disgrace upon her family, in choosinghim. She begged that his name might never be mentioned again in herhearing, and that she might only be known as a poor relative of herEnglish kinsfolk, and find a home among them until she could seek outsome employment for her maintenance, as she could not think of goingback to Boston, to become the laughing-stock of the thoughtless and thereproach of her father's family. 

"After the marriage of my grandmother, Rebecca was induced to live withher for some years. My great-aunt, Martha Grindall, an ancientspinster, now living, remembers her well at that time, describing her asa young woman of a sweet and gentle disposition, and much beloved by allthe members of the family. Her father, hearing of her misfortunes, wrote to her, kindly inviting her to return to New England, and livewith 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 ofJamaica, 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 alsoin my possession, informing her of her safe arrival, and of her havingseen an old friend, Captain Robert Pike, whose business concerns hadcalled him to the island, who had been very kind and considerate in hisattention to her, offering to take her home in his vessel, which was tosail in a few days. She mentions, in a postscript to her letter, thatshe found Captain Pike to be much improved in his appearance andmanners, --a true natural gentleman; and she does not forget to noticethe fact that he was still single. She had, she said, felt unwilling toaccept his offer of a passage home, holding herself unworthy of suchcivilities 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 thatshe should ever be restored to her father's house. Among the victims ofthe great earthquake which destroyed Port Royal a few days after thedate of her letter, was this unfortunate lady. It was a heavy blow tomy grandmother, who entertained for her cousin the tenderest affection, and, indeed, she seems to have been every way worthy of it, --lovely inperson, amiable in deportment, and of a generous and noble nature. Shewas, especially after her great trouble, of a somewhat pensive andserious habit of mind, contrasting with the playfulness and innocentlight-heartedness of her early life, as depicted in the diary of mygrandmother, yet she was ever ready to forget herself in ministering tothe happiness and pleasures of others. She was not, as I learn, amember of the church, having some scruples in respect to the rituals, aswas natural from her education in New England, among Puritanicschismatics; but she lived a devout life, and her quiet andunostentatious piety exemplified the truth of the language of one of thegreatest of our divines, the Bishop of Down and Connor 'Prayer is thepeace of our spirit, the stillness of our thoughts, the issue of a quietmind, the daughter of charity, and the sister of meekness. ' Optimusanimus 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 wasDr. Singletary, that his case should claim particular attention?

Why, in the first place, Dr. Singletary, as a man born to our commoninheritance of joy and sorrow, earthly instincts and heavenwardaspirations, --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 investedhim with its great solemnity. He is with the immortals. For him thedark curtain has been lifted. The weaknesses, the follies, and therepulsive mental and personal idiosyncrasies which may have kept himwithout the sphere of our respect and sympathy have now fallen off, andhe stands radiant with the transfiguration of eternity, God's child, ourrecognized 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 waslittle known to the public, and is now little missed. The villagenewspaper simply appended to its announcement of his decease thecustomary post mortem compliment, "Greatly respected by all who knewhim;" and in the annual catalogue of his alma mater an asterisk has beenadded to his name, over which perchance some gray-haired survivor of hisclass may breathe a sigh, as he calls up, the image of the fresh-faced, bright-eyed boy, who, aspiring, hopeful, vigorous, started with him onthe journey of life, --a sigh rather for himself than for its unconsciousawakener. 

But, a few years have passed since he left us; yet already wellnigh allthe outward manifestations, landmarks, and memorials of the living manhave passed away or been removed. His house, with its broad, mossy roofsloping down on one side almost to the rose-bushes and lilacs, and withits comfortable little porch in front, where he used to sit of apleasant summer afternoon, has passed into new hands, and has been sadlydisfigured by a glaring coat of white paint; and in the place of thegood 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 oldhorse, as well known as its owner to every man, woman, and child in thevillage, has fallen into the new comer's hands, who (being prepared tomake the most of him, from the fact that he commenced the practice ofthe healing art in the stable, rising from thence to the parlor) hasrubbed him into comparative sleekness, cleaned his mane and tail of theaccumulated burrs of many autumns, and made quite a gay nag of him. Thewagon, too, in which at least two generations of boys and girls haveridden in noisy hilarity whenever they encountered it on their way toschool, has been so smartly painted and varnished, that if its formerowner could look down from the hill-slope where he lies, he wouldscarcely know his once familiar vehicle as it whirls glittering alongthe main road to the village. For the rest, all things go on as usual;the miller grinds, the blacksmith strikes and blows, the cobbler andtailor stitch and mend, old men sit in the autumn sun, old gossips stirtea and scandal, revival meetings alternate with apple-bees andbushings, --toil, pleasure, family jars, petty neighborhood quarrels, courtship, and marriage, --all which make up the daily life of a countryvillage continue as before. The little chasm which his death has madein the hearts of the people where he lived and labored seems nearlyclosed up. There is only one more grave in the burying-ground, --that isall. 

Let nobody infer from what I have said that the good man diedunlamented; for, indeed, it was a sad day with his neighbors when thenews, long expected, ran at last from house to house and from workshopto workshop, "Dr. Singletary is dead!"

He had not any enemy left among them; in one way or another he had beenthe friend and benefactor of all. Some owed to his skill their recoveryfrom sickness; others remembered how he had watched with anxioussolicitude by the bedside of their dying relatives, soothing them, whenall human aid was vain, with the sweet consolations of that Christianhope which alone pierces the great shadow of the grave and shows thesafe stepping-stones above the dark waters. The old missed a cheerfulcompanion and friend, who had taught them much without wounding theirpride by an offensive display of his superiority, and who, while makinga jest of his own trials and infirmities, could still listen with realsympathy to the querulous and importunate complaints of others. For oneday, at least, even the sunny faces of childhood were marked withunwonted thoughtfulness; the shadow of the common bereavement fell overthe play-ground and nursery. The little girl remembered, with tears, how her broken-limbed doll had taxed the surgical ingenuity of hergenial old friend; and the boy showed sorrowfully to his playmates thetop which the good Doctor had given him. If there were few, among themany who stood beside his grave, capable of rightly measuring andappreciating the high intellectual and spiritual nature which formed thebackground of his simple social life, all could feel that no common losshad been sustained, and that the kindly and generous spirit which hadpassed away from them had not lived to himself alone. 

As you follow the windings of one of the loveliest rivers of NewEngland, a few miles above the sea-mart, at its mouth, you can see on ahill, whose grassy slope is checkered with the graceful foliage of thelocust, and whose top stands relieved against a still higher elevation, dark with oaks and walnuts, the white stones of the burying-place. Itis a quiet spot, but without gloom, as befits "God's Acre. " Below isthe village, with its sloops and fishing-boats at the wharves, and itscrescent of white houses mirrored in the water. Eastward is the mistyline of the great sea. Blue peaks of distant mountains roughen thehorizon of the north. Westward, the broad, clear river winds away intoa 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 manyyears before his death. When I visited it last spring, the air about itwas fragrant with the bloom of sweet-brier and blackberry and thebalsamic aroma of the sweet-fern; birds were singing in the birch-treesby the wall; and two little, brown-locked, merry-faced girls were makingwreaths of the dandelions and grasses which grew upon the old man'sgrave. The sun was setting behind the western river-bluffs, floodingthe valley with soft light, glorifying every object and fusing all intoharmony and beauty. I saw and felt nothing to depress or sadden me. Icould have joined in the laugh of the children. The light whistle of ayoung teamster, driving merrily homeward, did not jar upon my ear; forfrom the transfigured landscape, and from the singing birds, and fromsportive childhood, and from blossoming sweetbrier, and from the grassymound before me, I heard the whisper of one word only, and that wordwas PEACE. 

CHAPTER. II. SOME ACCOUNT OF PEEWAWKIN ON THE TOCKETUCK. 

WELL and truly said the wise man of old, "Much study is a weariness tothe flesh. " Hard and close application through the winter had left meill prepared to resist the baleful influences of a New England spring. I shrank alike from the storms of March, the capricious changes ofApril, and the sudden alternations of May, from the blandest ofsouthwest breezes to the terrible and icy eastern blasts which sweep ourseaboard like the fabled sanser, or wind of death. The buoyancy andvigor, the freshness and beauty of life seemed leaving me. The fleshand the spirit were no longer harmonious. I was tormented by anightmare feeling of the necessity of exertion, coupled with a sense ofutter inability. A thousand plans for my own benefit, or the welfare ofthose dear to me, or of my fellow-men at large, passed before me; but Ihad no strength to lay hold of the good angels and detain them untilthey left their blessing. The trumpet sounded in my ears for thetournament of life; but I could not bear the weight of my armor. In themidst of duties and responsibilities which I clearly comprehended, Ifound myself yielding to the absorbing egotism of sickness. I couldwork only when the sharp rowels of necessity were in my sides. 

It needed not the ominous warnings of my acquaintance to convince methat some decisive change was necessary. But what was to be done? Avoyage to Europe was suggested by my friends; but unhappily I reckonedamong them no one who was ready, like the honest laird of Dumbiedikes, to inquire, purse in hand, "Will siller do it?" In casting about forsome other expedient, I remembered the pleasant old-fashioned village ofPeewawkin, on the Tocketuck River. A few weeks of leisure, country air, and exercise, I thought might be of essential service to me. So Iturned my key upon my cares and studies, and my back to the city, andone fine evening of early June the mail coach rumbled over TocketuckBridge, and left me at the house of Dr. Singletary, where I had beenfortunate enough to secure bed and board. 

The little village of Peewawkin at this period was a well-preservedspecimen of the old, quiet, cozy hamlets of New England. No hugefactory threw its evil shadow over it; no smoking demon of an enginedragged its long train through the streets; no steamboat puffed at itswharves, or ploughed up the river, like the enchanted ship of theAncient Mariner, --

 "Against the wind, against the tide, Steadied with upright keel. "

The march of mind had not overtaken it. It had neither printing-pressnor lyceum. As the fathers had done before them, so did its inhabitantsat the time of my visit. There was little or no competition in theirbusiness; there were no rich men, and none that seemed over-anxious tobecome so. Two or three small vessels were annually launched from thecarpenters' yards on the river. It had a blacksmith's shop, with itsclang of iron and roar of bellows; a pottery, garnished with its coarseearthen-ware; a store, where molasses, sugar, and spices were sold onone side, and calicoes, tape, and ribbons on the other. Three or foursmall schooners annually left the wharves for the St. George's andLabrador fisheries. Just back of the village, a bright, noisy stream, gushing out, like a merry laugh, from the walnut and oak woods whichstretched 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 awicked Undine, under the very windows of the brown, lilac-shaded houseof Deacon Warner, the miller, as if to tempt the good man's handsomedaughters to take lessons in dancing. At one end of the littlecrescent-shaped village, at the corner of the main road and the greenlane to Deacon Warner's mill, stood the school-house, --a small, ill-used, Spanish-brown building, its patched windows bearing unmistakableevidence 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 themeeting-house, --old, two story, and full of windows, --its gildedweathercock glistening in the sun. The bell in its belfry had beenbrought from France by Skipper Evans in the latter part of the lastcentury. Solemnly baptized and consecrated to some holy saint, it hadcalled to prayer the veiled sisters of a convent, and tolled heavily inthe masses for the dead. At first some of the church felt misgivings asto the propriety of hanging a Popish bell in a Puritan steeple-house;but their objections were overruled by the minister, who wiselymaintained that if Moses could use the borrowed jewels and ornaments ofthe Egyptians to adorn and beautify the ark of the Lord, it could not beamiss to make a Catholic bell do service in an Orthodox belfry. Thespace between the school and the meeting-house was occupied by somefifteen or twenty dwellings, many-colored and diverse in age andappearance. Each one had its green yard in front, its rose-bushes andlilacs. Great elms, planted a century ago, stretched and interlockedtheir heavy arms across the street. The mill-stream, which found itsway into the Tocketuek, near the centre of the village, was spanned by arickety wooden bridge, rendered picturesque by a venerable and gnarledwhite-oak which hung over it, with its great roots half bared by thewater and twisted among the mossy stones of the crumbling abutment. 

The house of Dr. Singletary was situated somewhat apart from the mainstreet, just on the slope of Blueberry Will, --a great, green swell ofland, stretching far down from the north, and terminating in a steepbluff at the river side. It overlooked the village and the river a longway up and down. It was a brown-looking, antiquated mansion, built bythe Doctor's grandfather in the earlier days of the settlement. Therooms 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, gavepromise 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 wasaccustomed to sit in fine weather with his pipe and his book, or withsuch friends as might call to spend a half hour with him. The lawn infront had scarcely any other ornament than its green grass, croppedshort by the Doctor's horse. A stone wall separated it from the lane, half overrun with wild hop, or clematis, and two noble rock-maplesarched over with their dense foliage the little red gate. Dark belts ofwoodland, smooth hill pasture, green, broad meadows, and fields of cornand rye, the homesteads of the villagers, were seen on one hand; whileon the other was the bright, clear river, with here and there a whitesail, relieved against bold, wooded banks, jutting rocks, or tinyislands, 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 andsuffering. I forgot myself in the pleasing interest which it awakened. Nature's healing ministrations came to me through all my senses. I feltthe medicinal virtues of her sights, and sounds, and aromal breezes. From the green turf of her hills and the mossy carpets of her woodlandsmy 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, hishousekeeper, and an idle slip of a boy, who, when he was not paddlingacross 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 thehorse. Widow Matson was a notable shrill-tongued woman, from whom twolong suffering husbands had obtained what might, under thecircumstances, be well called a comfortable release. She was neat andtidy almost to a fault, thrifty and industrious, and, barring herscolding propensity, was a pattern housekeeper. For the Doctor sheentertained so high a regard that nothing could exceed her indignationwhen any one save herself presumed to find fault with him. Her bark wasworse than her bite; she had a warm, woman's heart, capable of softrelentings; and this the roguish errand-boy so well understood that hebore the daily infliction of her tongue with a good-natured unconcernwhich would have been greatly to his credit had it not resulted from hisconfident expectation that an extra slice of cake or segment of piewould erelong tickle his palate in atonement for the tingling of hisears. 

It must be confessed that the Doctor had certain little peculiaritiesand ways of his own which might have ruffled the down of a smoothertemper than that of the Widow Matson. He was careless and absent-minded. In spite of her labors and complaints, he scattered hissuperfluous clothing, books, and papers over his rooms in "much-admireddisorder. " He gave the freedom of his house to the boys and girls ofhis neighborhood, who, presuming upon his good nature, laughed at herremonstrances and threats as they chased each other up and down thenicely-polished stairway. Worse than all, he was proof against thevituperations and reproaches with which she indirectly assailed him fromthe recesses of her kitchen. He smoked his pipe and dozed over hisnewspaper as complacently as ever, while his sins of omission andcommission were arrayed against him. 

Peewawkin had always the reputation of a healthy town: and if it hadbeen otherwise, Dr. Singletary was the last man in the world totransmute the aches and ails of its inhabitants into gold for his ownpocket. So, at the age of sixty, he was little better off, in point ofworldly substance, than when he came into possession of the smallhomestead of his father. He cultivated with his own hands his corn-field and potato-patch, and trimmed his apple and pear trees, as wellsatisfied 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 theschool committee in his town; and he was a sort of standing reference inall disputes about wages, boundaries, and cattle trespasses in hisneighborhood. He had, nevertheless, a good deal of leisure for reading, errands of charity, and social visits. He loved to talk with hisfriends, Elder Staples, the minister, Deacon Warner, and Skipper Evans. He was an expert angler, and knew all the haunts of pickerel and troutfor many miles around. His favorite place of resort was the hill backof his house, which afforded a view of the long valley of the Tocketuckand the great sea. Here he would sit, enjoying the calm beauty of thelandscape, pointing out to me localities interesting from theirhistorical or traditional associations, or connected in some way withhumorous or pathetic passages of his own life experience. Some of theseautobiographical fragments affected me deeply. In narrating them heinvested familiar and commonplace facts with something of thefascination of romance. "Human life, " he would say, "is the sameeverywhere. If we could but get at the truth, we should find that allthe tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare have been reproduced in thislittle village. God has made all of one blood; what is true of one manis in some sort true of another; manifestations may differ, but theessential elements and spring of action are the same. On the surface, everything about us just now looks prosaic and mechanical; you see onlya sort of bark-mill grinding over of the same dull, monotonous grist ofdaily trifles. But underneath all this there is an earnest life, richand beautiful with love and hope, or dark with hatred, and sorrow, andremorse. That fisherman by the riverside, or that woman at the streambelow, with her wash-tub, --who knows what lights and shadows checkertheir memories, or what present thoughts of theirs, born of heaven orhell, the future shall ripen into deeds of good or evil? Ah, what haveI not seen and heard? My profession has been to me, in some sort, likethe vial genie of the Salamanca student; it has unroofed these houses, and opened deep, dark chambers to the hearts of their tenants, which noeye 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 havefound beautiful, heroic love and self-denial in those who had seemed tome frivolous and selfish. "

So would Dr. Singletary discourse as we strolled over Blueberry Hill, ordrove along the narrow willow-shaded road which follows the windings ofthe river. He had read and thought much in his retired, solitary life, and was evidently well satisfied to find in me a gratified listener. Hetalked well and fluently, with little regard to logical sequence, andwith something of the dogmatism natural to one whose opinions had seldombeen subjected to scrutiny. He seemed equally at home in the mostabstruse questions of theology and metaphysics, and in the morepractical matters of mackerel-fishing, corn-growing, and cattle-raising. It was manifest that to his book lore he had added that patient andclose observation of the processes of Nature which often places theunlettered ploughman and mechanic on a higher level of availableintelligence than that occupied by professors and school men. To himnothing which had its root in the eternal verities of Nature was "commonor unclean. " The blacksmith, subjecting to his will the swart genii ofthe mines of coal and iron; the potter, with his "power over the clay;"the skipper, who had tossed in his frail fishing-smack among theicebergs of Labrador; the farmer, who had won from Nature the occultsecrets of her woods and fields; and even the vagabond hunter andangler, familiar with the habits of animals and the migration of birdsand fishes, --had been his instructors; and he was not ashamed toacknowledge 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 neatfarm-house during one of our morning drives. 

A tall, healthful young woman, in the bloom of matronly beauty, wasfeeding chickens at the door. She uttered an exclamation of delight andhurried towards us. Perceiving a stranger in the wagon she paused, witha 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 talkingof going up to the village to see you, as soon as Robert can get awayfrom his cornfield. You don't know how little Lucy has grown. You muststop and see her. "

"She's coming to see me herself, " replied the Doctor, beckoning to asweet blue-eyed child in the door-way. 

The delighted mother caught up her darling and held her before theDoctor. 

"Does n't she look like Robert?" she inquired. "His very eyes andforehead! Bless me! here he is now. "

A stout, hale young farmer, in a coarse checked frock and broad strawhat, 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, andthe farm is all free and clear. Julia and I have worked hard; but we'renone the worse for it. "

"You look well and happy, I am sure, " said the Doctor. "I don't thinkyou 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 happierthan we are within ten miles of us. I don't know them. Doctor, I'lltell 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 payas long as we live. ' 'I know it, ' says she; 'but Dr. Singletary wantsno 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 menothing. But I must not forget my errand. Poor old Widow Osborne needsa watcher to-night; and she insists upon having Julia Barnet, and nobodyelse. 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 meditationsaloud, --"public opinion is, in nine cases out of ten, public folly andimpertinence. We are slaves to one another. We dare not take counselof our consciences and affections, but must needs suffer popularprejudice and custom to decide for us, and at their bidding aresacrificed love and friendship and all the best hopes of our lives. Wedo not ask, What is right and best for us? but, What will folks say ofit? We have no individuality, no self-poised strength, no sense offreedom. We are conscious always of the gaze of the many-eyed tyrant. We propitiate him with precious offerings; we burn incense perpetuallyto Moloch, and pass through his fire the sacred first-born of ourhearts. How few dare to seek their own happiness by the lights whichGod has given them, or have strength to defy the false pride and theprejudice of the world and stand fast in the liberty of Christians! Cananything be more pitiable than the sight of so many, who should be thechoosers and creators under God of their own spheres of utility andhappiness, self-degraded into mere slaves of propriety and custom, theirtrue natures undeveloped, their hearts cramped and shut up, each afraidof 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 havetaken counsel of their honest affections rather than of the opinions ofthe multitude, and have dared to be true to themselves in defiance ofimpertinent 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 thedaughter of Ensign Atkins, who lived on the mill-road, just above DeaconWarner's. When she was ten years old her mother died; and in a fewmonths afterwards her father married Polly Wiggin, the tailoress, ashrewd, selfish, managing woman. Julia, poor girl! had a sorry time ofit; for the Ensign, although a kind and affectionate man naturally, wastoo weak and yielding to interpose between her and his strong-minded, sharp-tongued wife. She had one friend, however, who was always readyto sympathize with her. Robert Barnet was the son of her next-doorneighbor, about two years older than herself; they had grown up togetheras school companions and playmates; and often in my drives I used tomeet them coming home hand in hand from school, or from the woods withberries and nuts, talking and laughing as if there were no scoldingstep-mothers in the world. 

"It so fell out that when Julia was in her sixteenth year there camea famous writing-master to Peewawkin. He was a showy, dashing fellow, with a fashionable dress, a wicked eye, and a tongue like the oldserpent's when he tempted our great-grandmother. Julia was one of hisscholars, and perhaps the prettiest of them all. The rascal singled herout from the first; and, the better to accomplish his purpose, he leftthe tavern and took lodgings at the Ensign's. He soon saw how mattersstood in the family, and governed himself accordingly, taking specialpains to conciliate the ruling authority. The Ensign's wife hated youngBarnet, and wished to get rid of her step-daughter. The writing-master, therefore, had a fair field. He flattered the poor young girl by hisattentions and praised her beauty. Her moral training had not fittedher to withstand this seductive influence; no mother's love, with itsquick, instinctive sense of danger threatening its object, interposedbetween her and the tempter. Her old friend and playmate--he who couldalone have saved her--had been rudely repulsed from the house by herstep-mother; and, indignant and disgusted, he had retired from allcompetition with his formidable rival. Thus abandoned to her ownundisciplined imagination, with the inexperience of a child and thepassions 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 neighboringtown, left his lodgings and never returned. The last I heard of him, he was the tenant of a western penitentiary. Poor Julia, driven indisgrace from her father's house, found a refuge in the humble dwellingof an old woman of no very creditable character. There I was called tovisit her; and, although not unused to scenes of suffering and sorrow, Ihad never before witnessed such an utter abandonment to grief, shame, and remorse. Alas! what sorrow was like unto her sorrow? The birthhour of her infant was also that of its death. 

"The agony of her spirit seemed greater than she could bear. Her eyeswere opened, and she looked upon herself with loathing and horror. Shewould admit of no hope, no consolation; she would listen to nopalliation or excuse of her guilt. I could only direct her to thatSource of pardon and peace to which the broken and contrite heart neverappeals in vain. 

"In the mean time Robert Barnet shipped on board a Labrador vessel. Thenight 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 ismore to be pitied than blamed. '

"I answered him that I would do all in my power for her; and added, thatI thought far better of her, contrite and penitent as she was, than ofsome who were busy in holding her up to shame and censure. 

"'God bless you for these words!' he said, grasping my hand. 'I shallthink of them often. They will be a comfort to me. '

"As for Julia, God was more merciful to her than man. She rose from hersick-bed thoughtful and humbled, but with hopes that transcended theworld of her suffering and shame. She no longer murmured against hersorrowful allotment, but accepted it with quiet and almost cheerfulresignation as the fitting penalty of God's broken laws and the neededdiscipline of her spirit. She could say with the Psalmist, 'Thejudgments of the Lord are true, justified in themselves. Thou art just, O Lord, and thy judgment is right. ' Through my exertions she obtainedemployment in a respectable family, to whom she endeared herself by herfaithfulness, cheerful obedience, and unaffected piety. 

"Her trials had made her heart tender with sympathy for all inaffliction. She seemed inevitably drawn towards the sick and suffering. In their presence the burden of her own sorrow seemed to fall off. Shewas the most cheerful and sunny-faced nurse I ever knew; and I alwaysfelt sure that my own efforts would be well seconded when I found her bythe bedside of a patient. Beautiful it was to see this poor young girl, whom the world still looked upon with scorn and unkindness, cheering thedesponding, and imparting, as it were, her own strong, healthful life tothe weak and faint; supporting upon her bosom, through weary nights, theheads of those who, in health, would have deemed her touch pollution; orto hear her singing for the ear of the dying some sweet hymn of pioushope or resignation, or calling to mind the consolations of the gospeland the great love of Christ. "

"I trust, " said I, "that the feelings of the community were softenedtowards her. "

"You know what human nature is, " returned the Doctor, "and with whathearty satisfaction we abhor and censure sin and folly in others. It isa luxury which we cannot easily forego, although our own experiencetells us that the consequences of vice and error are evil and bitterenough without the aggravation of ridicule and reproach from without. So you need not be surprised to learn that, in poor Julia's case, thecharity of sinners like herself did not keep pace with the mercy andforgiveness of Him who is infinite in purity. Nevertheless, I will doour people the justice to say that her blameless and self-sacrificinglife 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 mebefore he had even seen his father and mother. He did not mentionJulia; but I saw that his errand with me concerned her. I spoke of herexcellent deportment and her useful life, dwelt upon the extenuatingcircumstances 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 haspassed, 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, ' saidI; 'and if you were my own son, I wouldn't ask for you a better wifethan 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, andI dare say will be disposed to make the best of the matter when theyfind you are decided in your purpose. '

"I did not see him again; but a few days after I learned from hisparents that he had gone on another voyage. It was now autumn, and themost sickly season I had ever known in Peewawkin. Ensign Atkins and hiswife both fell sick; and Julia embraced with alacrity this providentialopportunity to return to her father's house and fulfil the duties of adaughter. Under her careful nursing the Ensign soon got upon his feet;but his wife, whose constitution was weaker, sunk under the fever. Shedied better than she had lived, --penitent and loving, asking forgivenessof Julia for her neglect and unkindness, and invoking blessings on herhead. 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 oftemper, patient endurance, and forgetfulness of herself in her laborsfor others, gradually overcame the scruples and hard feelings of herneighbors. They began to question whether, after all, it wasmeritorious in them to treat one like her as a sinner beyondforgiveness. Elder Staples and Deacon Warner were her fast friends. The Deacon's daughters--the tall, blue-eyed, brown-locked girls younoticed in meeting the other day--set the example among the young peopleof treating her as their equal and companion. The dear good girls!They reminded me of the maidens of Naxos cheering and comforting theunhappy Ariadne. 

"One mid-winter evening I took Julia with me to a poor sick patient ofmine, who was suffering for lack of attendance. The house where shelived was in a lonely and desolate place, some two or three miles belowus, on a sandy level, just elevated above the great salt marshes, stretching far away to the sea. The night set in dark and stormy; afierce northeasterly wind swept over the level waste, driving thicksnow-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 ofthe fireplace. A little after midnight she breathed her last. 

"In the mean time the storm had grown more violent; there was a blindingsnow-fall in the air; and we could feel the jar of the great waves asthey broke upon the beach. 

"'It is a terrible night for sailors on the coast, ' I said, breaking ourlong silence with the dead. 'God grant them sea-room!'

"Julia shuddered as I spoke, and by the dim-flashing firelight I saw shewas weeping. Her thoughts, I knew, were with her old friend andplaymate on the wild waters. 

"'Julia, ' said I, 'do you know that Robert Barnet loves you with all thestrength of an honest and true heart?'

"She trembled, and her voice faltered as she confessed that when Robertwas at home he had asked her to become his wife. 

"'And, like a fool, you refused him, I suppose?--the brave, generousfellow!'

"'O Doctor!' she exclaimed. 'How can you talk so? It is just becauseRobert is so good, and noble, and generous, that I dared not take him athis word. You yourself, Doctor, would have despised me if I had takenadvantage of his pity or his kind remembrance of the old days when wewere children together. I have already brought too much disgrace uponthose dear to me. '

"I was endeavoring to convince her, in reply, that she was doinginjustice to herself and wronging her best friend, whose happinessdepended 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 upthe 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, despairingcry. 

"'Some one is lost, and perishing in the snow, ' said Julia. 'The soundconies in the direction of the beach plum-bushes on the side of themarsh. Let us go at once. '

"She snatched up her hood and shawl, and was already at the door. Ifound and lighted a lantern and soon overtook her. The snow was alreadydeep and badly drifted, and it was with extreme difficulty that we couldforce our way against the storm. We stopped often to take breath andlisten; but the roaring of the wind and waves was alone audible. Atlast 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 fewyards from me. I hastened to her, and found her lifting up the body ofa man who was apparently insensible. The rays of the lantern fell fullupon his face, and we both, at the same instant, recognized RobertBarnet. Julia did not shriek nor faint; but, kneeling in the snow, andstill supporting the body, she turned towards me a look of earnest andfearful inquiry. 

"'Courage!' said I. 'He still lives. He is only overcome with fatigueand cold. '

"With much difficulty-partly carrying and partly dragging him throughthe snow--we succeeded in getting him to the house, where, in a shorttime, he so far recovered as to be able to speak. Julia, who had beenmy prompt and efficient assistant in his restoration, retired into theshadow of the room as soon as he began to rouse himself and look abouthim. He asked where he was and who was with me, saying that his headwas 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 lifeto her. ' He started up and gazed round the room. I beckoned Julia tothe bedside; and I shall never forget the grateful earnestness withwhich he grasped her hand and called upon God to bless her. Some folksthink me a tough-hearted old fellow, and so I am; but that scene wasmore than I could bear without shedding tears. 

"Robert told us that his vessel had been thrown upon the beach a mile ortwo 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 ofhearing the voice of some survivor of the disaster; but I listened onlyto 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 justvisible; and I was gratified to see two of the nearest neighborsapproaching the house. On being informed of the wreck they immediatelystarted 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 Barnetabandoned the sea, and, with the aid of some of his friends, purchasedthe farm where he now lives, and the anniversary of his shipwreck foundhim the husband of Julia. I can assure you I have had every reason tocongratulate myself on my share in the match-making. Nobody ventured tofind fault with it except two or three sour old busybodies, who, asElder Staples well says, 'would have cursed her whom Christ hadforgiven, 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 thatthe Doctor and myself walked homeward from the town poor-house, wherehe had always one or more patients, and where his coming was alwayswelcomed by the poor, diseased, and age-stricken inmates. Dark, miserable faces of lonely and unreverenced age, written over with thegrim records of sorrow and sin, seemed to brighten at his approach aswith an inward light, as if the good man's presence had power to callthe better natures of the poor unfortunates into temporary ascendency. Weary, fretful women--happy mothers in happy homes, perchance, half acentury before--felt their hearts warm and expand under the influence ofhis kind salutations and the ever-patient good-nature with which helistened to their reiterated complaints of real or imaginary suffering. However it might be with others, he never forgot the man or the woman inthe pauper. There was nothing like condescension or consciousness inhis charitable ministrations; for he was one of the few men I have everknown in whom the milk of human kindness was never soured by contemptfor humanity in whatever form it presented itself. Thus it was that hisfaithful performance of the duties of his profession, however repulsiveand disagreeable, had the effect of Murillo's picture of St. Elizabethof Hungary binding up the ulcered limbs of the beggars. The moralbeauty 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 SkipperEvans, who had been driving their cows to pasture, and were nowleisurely strolling back to the village. We toiled together up the hillin the hot sunshine, and, just on its eastern declivity, were glad tofind a white-oak tree, leaning heavily over a little ravine, from thebottom of which a clear spring of water bubbled up and fed a smallrivulet, whose track of darker green might be traced far down the hillto 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 fadedblack coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head onhis silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with hissturdy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coarsestubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost severe expression of hiskeen gray eyes, flashing under their dark penthouse, happily relieved bythe softer lines of his mouth, indicative of his really genial andgenerous nature. A small, sinewy figure, half doubled up, with his chinresting on his rough palms, Skipper Evans sat on a lower projection ofthe rock just beneath him, in an attentive attitude, as at the feet ofGatnaliel. 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 oneof the great trinity of temptations; and, granting him a safedeliverance from the world and the devil, he had very little to fearfrom 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 thelong valley below us; the fresh west wind fluttered the oakleaves above;and the low voice of the water, coaxing or scolding its way over bareroots or mossy stones, was just audible. 

"Doctor, " said I, "this spring, with the oak hanging over it, is, Isuppose, your Fountain of Bandusia. You remember what Horace says ofhis spring, which yielded such cool refreshment when the dog-star hadset the day on fire. What a fine picture he gives us of this charmingfeature of his little farm!"

The Doctor's eye kindled. "I'm glad to see you like Horace; not merelyas a clever satirist and writer of amatory odes, but as a true lover ofNature. How pleasant are his simple and beautiful descriptions of hisyellow, flowing Tiber, the herds and herdsmen, the harvesters, the grapevintage, the varied aspects of his Sabine retreat in the fierce summerheats, or when the snowy forehead of Soracte purpled in winter sunsets!Scattered through his odes and the occasional poems which he addressesto his city friends, you find these graceful and inimitable touches ofrural beauty, each a picture in itself. "

"It is long since I have looked at my old school-day companions, theclassics, " said Elder Staples; "but I remember Horace only as a light, witty, careless epicurean, famous for his lyrics in praise of Falernianwine and questionable women. "

"Somewhat too much of that, doubtless, " said the Doctor; "but to meHorace is serious and profoundly suggestive, nevertheless. Had I laidhim aside on quitting college, as you did, I should perhaps have onlyremembered such of his epicurean lyrics as recommended themselves to thewarns fancy of boyhood. Ah, Elder Staples, there was a time when theLyces and Glyceras of the poet were no fiction to us. They playedblindman's buff with us in the farmer's kitchen, sang with us in themeeting-house, and romped and laughed with us at huskings and quilting-parties. Grandmothers and sober spinsters as they now are, the changein us is perhaps greater than in them. "

"Too true, " replied the Elder, the smile which had just played over hispale face fading into something sadder than its habitual melancholy. "The living companions of our youth, whom we daily meet, are morestrange to us than the dead in yonder graveyard. They alone remainunchanged!"

"Speaking of Horace, " continued the Doctor, in a voice slightly huskywith feeling, "he gives us glowing descriptions of his winter circles offriends, where mirth and wine, music and beauty, charm away the hours, and of summer-day recreations beneath the vine-wedded elms of the Tiberor on the breezy slopes of Soracte; yet I seldom read them without afeeling of sadness. A low wail of inappeasable sorrow, an undertone ofdirges, mingles with his gay melodies. His immediate horizon is brightwith sunshine; but beyond is a land of darkness, the light whereof isdarkness. It is walled about by the everlasting night. The skeletonsits at his table; a shadow of the inevitable terror rests upon all hispleasant pictures. He was without God in the world; he had no clearabiding hope of a life beyond that which was hastening to a close. Eatand drink, he tells us; enjoy present health and competence; alleviatepresent evils, or forget them, in social intercourse, in wine, music, and sensual indulgence; for to-morrow we must die. Death was in hisview no mere change of condition and relation; it was the black end ofall. It is evident that he placed no reliance on the mythology of histime, and that he regarded the fables of the Elysian Fields and theirdim and wandering ghosts simply in the light of convenient poeticfictions for illustration and imagery. Nothing can, in my view, besadder than his attempts at consolation for the loss of friends. Witness his Ode to Virgil on the death of Quintilius. He tells hisillustrious friend simply that his calamity is without hope, irretrievable and eternal; that it is idle to implore the gods torestore the dead; and that, although his lyre may be more sweet thanthat of Orpheus, he cannot reanimate the shadow of his friend norpersuade 'the ghost-compelling god' to unbar the gates of death. Heurges patience as the sole resource. He alludes not unfrequently to hisown death in the same despairing tone. In the Ode to Torquatus, --one ofthe most beautiful and touching of all he has written, --he sets beforehis friend, in melancholy contrast, the return of the seasons, and ofthe moon renewed in brightness, with the end of man, who sinks into theendless dark, leaving nothing save ashes and shadows. He then, in thetrue spirit of his philosophy, urges Torquatus to give his present hourand wealth to pleasures and delights, as he had no assurance ofto-morrow. "

"In something of the same strain, " said I, "Moschus moralizes on thedeath 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 ofEcclesiastes, the mournfulest book of Scripture; because, while thepreacher dwells with earnestness upon the vanity and uncertainty of thethings of time and sense, he has no apparent hope of immortality torelieve the dark picture. Like Horace, he sees nothing better than toeat his bread with joy and drink his wine with a merry heart. It seemsto me the wise man might have gone farther in his enumeration of thefolly and emptiness of life, and pronounced his own prescription for theevil vanity also. What is it but plucking flowers on the banks of thestream which hurries us over the cataract, or feasting on the thin crustof a volcano upon delicate meats prepared over the fires which are soonto ingulf us? Oh, what a glorious contrast to this is the gospel of Himwho brought to light life and immortality! The transition from theKoheleth to the Epistles of Paul is like passing from a cavern, wherethe artificial light falls indeed upon gems and crystals, but iseverywhere circumscribed and overshadowed by unknown and unexploreddarkness, into the warm light and free atmosphere of day. "

"Yet, " I asked, "are there not times when we all wish for some clearerevidence of immortal life than has been afforded us; when we even turnaway unsatisfied from the pages of the holy book, with all themysterious problems of life pressing about us and clamoring forsolution, till, perplexed and darkened, we look up to the still heavens, as if we sought thence an answer, visible or audible, to theirquestionings? We want something beyond the bare announcement of themomentous fact of a future life; we long for a miracle to confirm ourweak faith and silence forever the doubts which torment us. "

"And what would a miracle avail us at such times of darkness and strongtemptation?" said the Elder. "Have we not been told that they whomMoses and the prophets have failed to convince would not believealthough one rose from the dead? That God has revealed no more tous is to my mind sufficient evidence that He has revealed enough. "

"May it not be, " queried the Doctor, "that Infinite Wisdom sees that aclearer and fuller revelation of the future life would render us lesswilling or able to perform our appropriate duties in the presentcondition? Enchanted by a clear view of the heavenly hills, and of ourloved ones beckoning us from the pearl gates of the city of God, couldwe patiently work out our life-task here, or make the necessaryexertions to provide for the wants of these bodies whose encumbrancealone can prevent us from rising to a higher plane of existence?"

"I reckon, " said the Skipper, who had been an attentive, although attimes evidently a puzzled, listener, "that it would be with us prettymuch as it was with a crew of French sailors that I once shipped at theIsle of France for the port of Marseilles. I never had better handsuntil we hove in sight of their native country, which they had n't seenfor 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 handsto help me bring the vessel to her moorings. "

"Your story is quite to the point, Skipper, " said the Doctor. "Ifthings had been ordered differently, we should all, I fear, be disposedto quit work and fall into absurdities, like your French sailors, and sofail of bringing the world fairly into port. "

"God's ways are best, " said the Elder; "and I don't see as we can dobetter than to submit with reverence to the very small part of themwhich He has made known to us, and to trust Him like loving and dutifulchildren for the rest. "

CHAPTER V. THE HILLSIDE. 

THE pause which naturally followed the observation of the Elder wasbroken abruptly by the Skipper. 

"Hillo!" he cried, pointing with the glazed hat with which he had beenfanning himself. "Here away in the northeast. Going down the coast forbetter fishing, I guess. "

"An eagle, as I live!" exclaimed the Doctor, following with his cane thedirection of the Skipper's hat. "Just see how royally he wheels upwardand onward, his sail-broad wings stretched motionless, save anoccasional flap to keep up his impetus! Look! the circle in which hemoves grows narrower; he is a gray cloud in the sky, a point, a merespeck 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 aneagle in the air. '"

"The eagle, " said Elder Staples, "seems to have been a favoriteillustration of the sacred penman. 'They that wait upon the Lord shallrenew their strength; they shall mount upward as on the wings of aneagle. '"

"What think you of this passage?" said the Doctor. "'As when a birdhath 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 theviolent noise and motion thereof, is passed through, and thereinafterward 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 grantedthat no good thing can come home from the Nazareth of the Apocrypha. But where will you find anything more beautiful and cheering than theseverses in connection with that which I just cited?--'The hope of theungodly is like dust that is blown away by the wind; like the thin foamwhich is driven by the storm; like the smoke which is scattered here andthere by the whirlwind; it passeth away like the remembrance of a guestthat tarrieth but a day. But the righteous live forevermore; theirreward also is with the Lord, and the care of them with the Most High. Therefore shall they receive a glorious kingdom and a beautiful crownfrom the Lord's hand; for with his right hand shall He cover them, andwith 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 uncanonicalbooks. "

"Canonical or not, " answered the Doctor, "it is God's truth, and standsin no need of the endorsement of a set of well-meaning but purblindbigots and pedants, who presumed to set metes and bounds to Divineinspiration, and decide by vote what is God's truth and what is theDevil's falsehood. But, speaking of eagles, I never see one of thesespiteful old sea-robbers without fancying that he may be the soul of amad Viking of the middle centuries. Depend upon it, that Italianphilosopher was not far out of the way in his ingenious speculationsupon the affinities and sympathies existing between certain men andcertain animals, and in fancying that he saw feline or canine traits andsimilitudes in the countenances of his acquaintance. "

"Swedenborg tells us, " said I, "that lost human souls in the spiritualworld, as seen by the angels, frequently wear the outward shapes of thelower animals, --for instance, the gross and sensual look like swine, andthe cruel and obscene like foul birds of prey, such as hawks andvultures, --and that they are entirely unconscious of the metamorphosis, imagining themselves marvellous proper men, ' and are quite wellsatisfied 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 inhis madness, ' and plain common sense too. There is one grand andbeautiful idea underlying all his revelations or speculations about thefuture life. It is this: that each spirit chooses its own society, andnaturally finds its fitting place and sphere of action, --following inthe new life, as in the present, the leading of its prevailing loves anddesires, --and that hence none are arbitrarily compelled to be good orevil, happy or miserable. A great law of attraction and gravitationgoverns the spiritual as well as the material universe; but, in obeyingit, the spirit retains in the new life whatever freedom of will itpossessed in its first stage of being. But I see the Elder shakes hishead, as much as to say, I am 'wise above what is written, ' or, at anyrate, meddling with matters beyond my comprehension. Our young friendhere, " he continued, turning to me, "has the appearance of a listener;but I suspect he is busy with his own reveries, or enjoying the freshsights and sounds of this fine morning. I doubt whether our discoursehas edified him. "

"Pardon me, " said I; "I was, indeed, listening to another and olderoracle. "

"Well, tell us what you hear, " said the Doctor. 

"A faint, low murmur, rising and falling on the wind. Now it comesrolling in upon me, wave after wave of sweet, solemn music. There was agrand 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 veryghost of sound. "

"Ah, yes, " said the Doctor; "I understand it is the voice of the pinesyonder, --a sort of morning song of praise to the Giver of life and Makerof beauty. My ear is dull now, and I cannot hear it; but I know it issounding on as it did when I first climbed up here in the bright Junemornings of boyhood, and it will sound on just the same when thedeafness of the grave shall settle upon my failing senses. Did it neveroccur to you that this deafness and blindness to accustomed beauty andharmony is one of the saddest thoughts connected with the great changewhich awaits us? Have you not felt at times that our ordinaryconceptions of heaven itself, derived from the vague hints and Orientalimagery of the Scriptures, are sadly inadequate to our human wants andhopes? How gladly would we forego the golden streets and gates ofpearl, the thrones, temples, and harps, for the sunset lights of ournative valleys; the woodpaths, whose moss carpets are woven with violetsand wild flowers; the songs of birds, the low of cattle, the hum of beesin the apple-blossom, --the sweet, familiar voices of human life andnature! In the place of strange splendors and unknown music, should wenot welcome rather whatever reminded us of the common sights and soundsof our old home?"

"You touch a sad chord, Doctor, " said I. "Would that we could feelassured of the eternity of all we love!"

"And have I not an assurance of it at this very moment?" returned theDoctor. "My outward ear fails me; yet I seem to hear as formerly thesound of the wind in the pines. I close my eyes; and the picture of myhome is still before me. I see the green hill slope and meadows; thewhite shaft of the village steeple springing up from the midst of maplesand elms; the river all afire with sunshine; the broad, dark belt ofwoodland; 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 thesame scene. It is morning as now; but how different! All night has thewhite meteor fallen, in broad flake or minutest crystal, the sport andplaything of winds that have wrought it into a thousand shapes of wildbeauty. Hill and valley, tree and fence, woodshed and well-sweep, barnand pigsty, fishing-smacks frozen tip at the wharf, ribbed monsters ofdismantled hulks scattered along the river-side, --all lie transfiguredin the white glory and sunshine. The eye, wherever it turns, aches withthe cold brilliance, unrelieved save where. The blue smoke of morningfires curls lazily up from the Parian roofs, or where the main channelof the river, as yet unfrozen, shows its long winding line of dark waterglistening like a snake in the sun. Thus you perceive that the spiritsees and hears without the aid of bodily organs; and why may it not beso 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 thatit is separated by no impassable gulf from this fair and goodly earth, and that the pleasant pictures of time linger like sunset clouds alongthe horizon of eternity. When I was younger, I used to be greatlytroubled by the insecure tenure by which my senses held the beauty andharmony of the outward world. When I looked at the moonlight on thewater, or the cloud-shadows on the hills, or the sunset sky, with thetall, black tree-boles and waving foliage relieved against it, or when Iheard a mellow gush of music from the brown-breasted fife-bird in thesummer woods, or the merry quaver of the bobolink in the corn land, thethought of an eternal loss of these familiar sights and sounds wouldsometimes thrill through me with a sharp and bitter pain. I have reasonto thank God that this fear no longer troubles me. Nothing that isreally valuable and necessary for us can ever be lost. The present willlive hereafter; memory will bridge over the gulf between the two worlds;for only on the condition of their intimate union can we preserve ouridentity and personal consciousness. Blot out the memory of this world, and what would heaven or hell be to us? Nothing whatever. Death wouldbe simple annihilation of our actual selves, and the substitutiontherefor of a new creation, in which we should have no more interestthan in an inhabitant of Jupiter or the fixed stars. "

The Elder, who had listened silently thus far, not without an occasionaland apparently involuntary manifestation of dissent, here interposed. 

"Pardon me, my dear friend, " said he; "but I must needs say that I lookupon speculations of this kind, however ingenious or plausible, asunprofitable, and well-nigh presumptuous. For myself, I only know thatI am a weak, sinful man, accountable to and cared for by a just andmerciful God. What He has in reserve for me hereafter I know not, norhave I any warrant to pry into His secrets. I do not know what it is topass from one life to another; but I humbly hope that, when I am sinkingin the dark waters, I may hear His voice of compassion andencouragement, 'It is I; be not afraid. '"

"Amen, " said the Skipper, solemnly. 

"I dare say the Parson is right, in the main, " said the Doctor. "Poorcreatures at the best, it is safer for us to trust, like children, inthe goodness of our Heavenly Father than to speculate too curiously inrespect to the things of a future life; and, notwithstanding all I havesaid, I quite agree with good old Bishop Hall: 'It is enough for me torest in the hope that I shall one day see them; in the mean time, let mebe learnedly ignorant and incuriously devout, silently blessing thepower and wisdom of my infinite Creator, who knows how to honor himselfby 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--shethat 's sick with the measles--half a dozen times, and never so much asleft a spoonful of medicine; and she should like to know what a doctor'sgood for without physic. Besides, she says Lieutenant Brown would havegot well if you'd minded her, and let him have plenty of thoroughworttea, 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 therheumatism; I'll blister her from head to heel. But what else isgoing?"

"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 prayersare 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 TomOsborne. "

"It's too true, " responded the Doctor. "But he's her only son; and youknow, Mrs. Matson, the heart of a mother. "

The widow's hard face softened; a tender shadow passed over it; thememory of some old bereavement melted her; and as she passed into thehouse I saw her put her checked apron to her eyes. 

By this time Skipper Evans, who had been slowly working his way upstreet for some minutes, had reached the gate. 

"Look here!" said he. "Here's a letter that I've got by the Polly Pikefrom one of your old patients that you gave over for a dead man longago. "

"From the other world, of course, " said the Doctor. 

"No, not exactly, though it's from Labrador, which is about the lastplace 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 blisteringare all well enough, may be; but if you want to set a fellow up whenhe'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 seafog to take that nonsense out of him. Now, this chap, " (the Skipperhere gave me a thrust in the ribs by way of designation, ) "if I couldhave him down with me beyond sunset for two or three months, would comeback as hearty as a Bay o' Fundy porpoise. "

Assuring him that I would like to try the experiment, with him asskipper, I begged to know the history of the case he had spoken of. 

The old fisherman smiled complacently, hitched up his pantaloons, took aseat beside us, and, after extracting a jack-knife from one pocket, anda hand of tobacco from the other, and deliberately supplying himselfwith a fresh quid, he mentioned, apologetically, that he supposed theDoctor had heard it all before. 

"Yes, twenty times, " said the Doctor; "but never mind; it's a good storyyet. Go ahead, Skipper. "

"Well, you see, " said the Skipper, "this young Wilson comes down herefrom Hanover College, in the spring, as lean as a shad in dog-days. Hehad 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 womenwith their herbs; but all did no good. At last somebody advised him totry a fishing cruise down East; and so he persuaded me to take himaboard my schooner. I knew he'd be right in the way, and poor companyat the best, for all his Greek and Latin; for, as a general thing, I'venoticed that your college chaps swop away their common sense for theirlarning, and make a mighty poor bargain of it. Well, he brought hisbooks with him, and stuck to them so close that I was afraid we shouldhave to slide him off the plank before we got half way to Labrador. SoI just told him plainly that it would n't do, and that if he 'd a mindto kill himself ashore I 'd no objection, but he should n't do it aboardmy schooner. 'I'm e'en just a mind, ' says I, 'to pitch your booksoverboard. A fishing vessel's no place for 'em; they'll spoil all ourluck. 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, andthe birds; for Natur, ' says I, don't lie nor give hearsays, but isalways as true as the Gospels. '

"But 't was no use talking. There he'd lay in his bunk with his booksabout 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, wehove in sight of the Gannet Rocks. Thinks I to myself, I'll show himsomething now that he can't find in his books. So I goes right downafter him; and when we got on deck he looked towards the northeast, andif ever I saw a chap wonder-struck, he was. Right ahead of us was abold, rocky island, with what looked like a great snow bank on itssouthern slope; while the air was full overhead, and all about, of whatseemed a heavy fall of snow. The day was blazing hot, and there was n'ta cloud to be seen. 

"'What in the world, Skipper, does this mean?' says he. 'We're sailingright 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 inthe 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 sucha fluttering and screaming you can't imagine. The great snow-banksshook, trembled, loosened, and became all alive, whirling away into theair like drifts in a nor'wester. Millions of birds went up, wheelingand zigzagging about, their white bodies and blacktipped wings crossingand recrossing and mixing together into a thick grayish-white haze aboveus. 

"'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 allthat, the poor fellow was so sick, and pale, and peaking, that we allthought we should have to heave him overboard some day or bury him inLabrador 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 hisquid from one cheek to the other, with a sly wink at the Doctor. "Thefact is, after the doctors and the old herb-women had given him up athome, he got cured by a little black-eyed French girl on the Labradorcoast. "

"A very agreeable prescription, no doubt, " quoth the Doctor, turning tome. "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 thevalue 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 theLabrador shore; rainstorms and fogs so thick you could cut 'em up intojunks with your jack-knife. At last we reached a small fishing stationaway down where the sun does n't sleep in summer, but just takes a bitof 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 fewpotatoes and turnips in the short summers, and a tolerable field ofgrass, which kept his two cows alive through the winter. The countryall about was dismal enough; as far as you could see there was nothingbut moss, and rocks, and bare hills, and ponds of shallow water, withnow and then a patch of stunted firs. But it doubtless looked pleasantto 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, allalive with fishermen and Indians hunting seals; and to my notion noplace is very dull where you can see the salt-water and the ships atanchor on it, or scudding over it with sails set in a stiff breeze, andwhere you can watch its changes of lights and colors in fair and foulweather, morning and night. The family was made up of the Frenchman, his wife, and his daughter, --a little witch of a girl, with bright blackeyes 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 doanything for him. He was soon able to walk about; and we used to seehim with the Frenchman's daughter strolling along the shore and amongthe 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 laughringing down to us. 

"We stayed at the station about three weeks; and when we got ready tosail 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 toremain with them, and poor little Lucille would n't hear a word of hisgoing. She said he would be sick and die on board the vessel, but thatif he stayed with them he would soon be well and strong; that theyshould have plenty of milk and eggs for him in the winter; and he shouldride in the dog-sledge with her, and she would take care of him as if hewas 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 youwhat, 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 tillNovember comes, and everything freezes up stiff and dead except whitebears And Ingens, and there's no daylight left to speak of, and you 'llbe sick enough of your choice. You won't live the winter out; and it 'san awful place to die in, where the ground freezes so hard that theycan't bury you. '

"'Lucille says, ' says he, 'that God is as near us in the winter as inthe summer. The fact is, Skipper, I've no nearer relative left in theStates than a married brother, who thinks more of his family andbusiness than of me; and if it is God's will that I shall die, I may aswell 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 hearher prayers, and he would get well. I told her I would n't urge him anymore; for if I was as young as he was, and had such a pretty nurse totake 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 lefthim. When we were getting under way he and Lucille stood on thelanding-place, and I hailed him for the last time, and made signs ofsending the boat for him. The little French girl understood me; sheshook her head, and pointed to her father's house; and then they bothturned back, now and then stopping to wave their handkerchiefs to us. Ifelt sorry to leave him there; but for the life of me I could n't blamehim. "

"I'm sure I don't, " said the Doctor. 

"Well, next year I was at Nitisquam Harbor; and, although I was doingpretty well in the way of fishing, I could n't feel easy without runningaway north to 'Brador to see what had become of my sick passenger. Itwas 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 butyoung 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 spenta happier winter; that he was well and strong, and could fish and huntlike 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 hisyearly visit to the settlements, to marry his daughter. Lucille was aspretty, merry, and happy as ever; and the old Frenchman and his wifeseemed to love Wilson as if he was their son. I've never seen himsince; but he now writes me that he is married, and has prospered inhealth and property, and thinks Labrador would be the finest country inthe world if it only had heavy timber-trees. "

"One cannot but admire, " said the Doctor, "that wise and beneficentordination of Providence whereby the spirit of man asserts its powerover circumstances, moulding the rough forms of matter to its fineideal, bringing harmony out of discord, --coloring, warming, and lightingup everything within the circle of its horizon. A loving heart carrieswith it, under every parallel of latitude, the warmth and light of thetropics. It plants its Eden in the wilderness and solitary place, andsows with flowers the gray desolation of rocks and mosses. Whereverlove goes, there springs the true heart's-ease, rooting itself even inthe polar ices. To the young invalid of the Skipper's story, the drearywaste 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 inan atmosphere of love. Its bare hills, bleak rocks, and misty sky werebut the setting and background of the sweetest picture in the gallery oflife. Apart from this, however, in Labrador, as in every conceivablelocality, the evils of soil and climate have their compensations andalleviations. The long nights of winter are brilliant with moonlight, and the changing colors of the northern lights are reflected on thesnow. The summer of Labrador has a beauty of its own, far unlike thatof more genial climates, but which its inhabitants would not forego forthe warm life and lavish luxuriance of tropical landscapes. The dwarffir-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 suppliedby delicate mosses of the most brilliant colors. The truth is, everyseason and climate has its peculiar beauties and comforts; thefootprints of the good and merciful God are found everywhere; and weshould be willing thankfully to own that 'He has made all thingsbeautiful in their time' if we were not a race of envious, selfish, ungrateful grumblers. "

"Doctor! Doctor!" cried a ragged, dirty-faced boy, running breathlessinto the yard. 

"What's the matter, my lad?" said the Doctor. 

"Mother wants you to come right over to our house. Father's tumbled offthe hay-cart; and when they got him up he didn't know nothing; but theygin him some rum, and that kinder brought him to. "

"No doubt, no doubt, " said the Doctor, rising to go. "Similia similibuscurantur. Nothing like hair of the dog that bites you. "

"The Doctor talks well, " said the Skipper, who had listened ratherdubiously to his friend's commentaries on his story; "but he carries toomuch 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 couldbeat him at preaching. 'Very likely, ' says the Elder, says he; 'for youknow, Skipper, I must stick to my text; but the Doctor's Bible is allcreation. '"

"Yes, " said the Elder, who had joined us a few moments before, "theDoctor 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 littlefoundation in true philosophy as they have warrant in Scripture; but, if he sometimes speculates falsely, he lives truly, which is by farthe most important matter. The mere dead letter of a creed, howevercarefully preserved and reverently cherished, may be of no morespiritual or moral efficacy than an African fetish or an Indianmedicine-bag. What we want is, orthodoxy in practice, --the dry bonesclothed with warm, generous, holy life. It is one thing to hold fastthe robust faith of our fathers, --the creed of the freedom-lovingPuritan and Huguenot, --and quite another to set up the five points ofCalvinism, like so many thunder-rods, over a bad life, in the insanehope 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 ofthe 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 threshingabout all night. I do wonder what ails thee. "

And well she might; for her husband, a well-to-do, portly, middle-agedgentleman, being blessed with an easy conscience, a genial temper, and acomfortable digestion, was able to bear a great deal of sleep, andseldom varied a note in the gamut of his snore from one year's end toanother. 

"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 nothingworse. But what has thee been dreaming about?"

"It's the strangest thing, Hannah, that thee ever heard of, " saidAminadab, settling himself slowly back into his bed. Thee recollectsJones sent me yesterday a sample of castings from the foundry. Well, Ithought I opened the box and found in it a little iron man, inregimentals; with his sword by his side and a cocked hat on, lookingvery much like the picture in the transparency over neighbor O'Neal'soyster-cellar across the way. I thought it rather out of place forJones to furnish me with such a sample, as I should not feel easy toshow 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 thetable, against the wall; and, sitting down opposite, I began to thinkover my business concerns, calculating how much they would increase inprofit in case a tariff man should be chosen our ruler for the next fouryears. Thee knows I am not in favor of choosing men of blood and strifeto bear rule in the land: but it nevertheless seems proper to considerall the circumstances in this case, and, as one or the other of thecandidates of the two great parties must be chosen, to take the least oftwo 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 hislittle metal hands together till he rang over like a bell, 'take theleast of two evils. ' His voice had a sharp, clear, jingling sound, likethat of silver dollars falling into a till. It startled me so that Iwoke up, but finding it only a dream presently fell asleep again. ThenI thought I was down in the Exchange, talking with neighbor Simkinsabout the election and the tariff. 'I want a change in theadministration, but I can't vote for a military chieftain, ' saidneighbor Simkins, 'as I look upon it unbecoming a Christian people toelect men of blood for their rulers. ' 'I don't know, ' said I, 'whatobjection thee can have to a fighting man; for thee 's no Friend, andhas n't any conscientious scruples against military matters. For my ownpart, I do not take much interest in politics, and never attended acaucus in my life, believing it best to keep very much in the quiet, andavoid, as far as possible, all letting and hindering things; but theremay 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 businessmatters. ' 'What!' said neighbor Simkins, 'are you going to vote for aman whose whole life has been spent in killing people?' This vexed me alittle, and I told him there was such a thing as carrying a goodprinciple too far, and that he night live to be sorry that he had thrownaway his vote, instead of using it discreetly. 'Why, there's the ironbusiness, ' said I; but just then I heard a clatter beside me, and, looking round, there was the little iron soldier clapping his hands ingreat glee. 'That's it, Aminadab!' said he; 'business first, conscienceafterwards! Keep up the price of iron with peace if you can, but keepit 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 ofbusiness, ' 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-seatas usual. I tried hard to settle my mind down into a quiet and humblestate; but somehow the cares of the world got uppermost, and, before Iwas well aware of it, I was far gone in a calculation of the chances ofthe election, and the probable rise in the price of iron in the event ofthe choice of a President favorable to a high tariff. Rap, tap, wentsomething on the floor. I opened my eyes, and there was the littleimage, red-hot, as if just out of the furnace, dancing, and chuckling, and clapping his hands. 'That's right, Aminadab!' said he; 'go on asyou have begun; take care of yourself in this world, and I'll promiseyou you'll be taken care of in the next. Peace and poverty, or war andmoney. It's a choice of evils at best; and here's Scripture to decidethe matter: "Be not righteous overmuch. "' Then the wicked-lookinglittle image twisted his hot lips, and leered at me with his blazingeyes, and chuckled and laughed with a noise exactly as if a bag ofdollars had been poured out upon the meeting-house floor. This waked mejust now in such a fright. I wish thee would tell me, Hannah, what theecan make of these three dreams?"

"It don't need a Daniel to interpret them, " answered Hannah. "Thee 'sbeen thinking of voting for a wicked old soldier, because thee caresmore for thy iron business than for thy testimony against wars andfightings. I don't a bit wonder at thy seeing the iron soldier theetells of; and if thee votes to-morrow for a man of blood, it wouldn't bestrange if he should haunt thee all thy life. "

Aminadab Ivison was silent, for his conscience spoke in the words of hiswife. He slept no more that night, and rose up in the morning a wiserand better man. 

When he went forth to his place of business he saw the crowds hurryingto and fro; there were banners flying across the streets, huge placardswere on the walls, and he heard all about him the bustle of the greatelection. 

"Friend Ivison, " said a red-faced lawyer, almost breathless with hishurry, "more money is needed in the second ward; our committees aredoing a great work there. What shall I put you down for? Fiftydollars? If we carry the election, your property will rise twenty percent. Let me see; you are in the iron business, I think?"

Aminadab thought of the little iron soldier of his dream, and excusedhimself. Presently a bank director came tearing into his office. 

"Have you voted yet, Mr. Ivison? It 's time to get your vote in. Iwonder you should be in your office now. No business has so much atstake 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 notbe all you could wish for; but when the question is between him and aworse 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 behindme, Satan!' No, neighbor Discount, " said he, "I've made up my mind. Isee 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 doas you please; but if we are defeated through the ill-timed scruples ofyourself and others, and your business pinches in consequence, you needn'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 thoughtof his dream, and remained steadfast. Presently he heard heavy stepsand the tapping of a cane on the stairs; and as the door opened he sawthe drab surtout of the worthy and much-esteemed friend who sat besidehim 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 wayclear 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 anencourager of home industry. I don't like his wars and fightings betterthan thee does; but I'm told he's an honest man, and that he disapprovesof 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 itreally seems to me thee had better vote. Times have been rather hard, thou knows; and if by voting at this election we can make businessmatters easier, I don't see how we can justify ourselves in staying athome. Thou knows we have a command to be diligent in business as wellas fervent in spirit, and that the Apostle accounted him who providednot for his own household worse than an infidel. I think it importantto maintain on all proper occasions our Gospel testimony against warsand fightings; but there is such a thing as going to extremes, thouknows, and becoming over-scrupulous, as I think thou art in this case. It is said, thou knows, in Ecclesiastes, 'Be not righteous overmuch: whyshouldst thou destroy thyself?'"

"Ah, " said Aminadab to himself, "that's what the little iron soldiersaid in meeting. " So he was strengthened in his resolution, and thepersuasions of his friend were lost upon him. 

At night Aminadab sat by his parlor fire, comfortable alike in his innerand his outer man. "Well, Hannah, " said he, "I've taken thy advice. Idid n't vote for the great fighter to-day. "

"I'm glad of it, " said the good woman, "and I dare say thee feels thebetter for it. "

Aminadab Ivison slept soundly that night, and saw no more of the littleiron 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 of1641, the second year of its settlement, but six dwelling-houses, situated near each other, on the site of the present village. They werehastily constructed of rude logs, small and inconvenient, but one removefrom the habitations of the native dwellers of the wilderness. Aroundeach a small opening had been made through the thick forest, down to themargin of the river, where, amidst the charred and frequent stumps andfragments of fallen trees, the first attempts at cultivation had beenmade. A few small patches of Indian corn, which had now nearly reachedmaturity, exhibited their thick ears and tasselled stalks, bleached bythe frost and sunshine; and, here and there a spot of yellow stubble, still lingering among the rough incumbrances of the soil, told where ascanty crop of common English grain had been recently gathered. Tracesof some of the earlier vegetables were perceptible, the melon, the pea, and the bean. The pumpkin lay ripening on its frosted vines, its sunnyside already changed to a bright golden color; and the turnip spread outits green mat of leaves in defiance of the season. Everything aroundrealized 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, whosevenerable trees had hitherto bowed only to the presence of the storm, the beaver's tooth, and the axe of Time, working in the melancholysilence of natural decay. Before the dwellings of the whiteadventurers, the broad Merrimac rolled quietly onward the piled-upfoliage of its shores, rich with the hues of a New England autumn. The first sharp frosts, the avant couriers of approaching winter, hadfallen, and the whole wilderness was in blossom. It was like some vividpicture of Claude Lorraine, crowded with his sunsets and rainbows, anatural kaleidoscope of a thousand colors. The oak upon the hillsidestood 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 maplebeside it, bright with its peculiar beauty. The solemn shadows of thepine rose high in the hazy atmosphere, checkered, here and there, withthe 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 thesettlement, to his young wife, as they stood in the door of their humbledwelling. "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 acircle, and the hands of the Most High have bended it. Very beautifullyhath 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 moregoodly show than any in Old England. Yet, John, I am sometimes verysorrowful, when I think of our old home, of the little parlor where youand I used to sit of a Sunday evening. The Lord hath been verybountiful to this land, and it may be said of us, as it was said ofIsrael of old, 'How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob! and thy tabernacles, O Israel!' But the people sit in darkness, and the Gentiles know notthe 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 evilhath arisen among us. I tell thee, Alice, it shall be more tolerable inthe day of the Lord, for the Tyre and Sidon, the Sodom and Gomorrah ofthe heathen, than for the schemers, the ranters, the Familists, and theQuakers, who, like Satan of old, are coming among the sons of God. "

"I thought, " said Alice, "that our godly governor had banished these outof the colony. "

"Truly he hath, " answered Mr. Ward, "but the evil seed they have sownhere continues to spring up and multiply. The Quakers have, indeed, nearly ceased to molest us; but another set of fanatics, headed bySamuel Gorton, have of late been very troublesome. Their family hasbeen broken up, and the ring-leaders have been sentenced to be kept athard labor for the colony's benefit; one being allotted to each of theold towns, where they are forbidden to speak on matters of religion. But there are said to be many still at large, who, under theencouragement of the arch-heretic, Williams, of the Providenceplantation, are even now zealously doing the evil work of their master. But, Alice, " he continued, as he saw his few neighbors gathering arounda venerable oak which had been spared in the centre of the clearing, "itis now near our time of worship. Let us join our friends. "

And the minister and his wife entered into the little circle of theirneighbors. No house of worship, with spire and tower, and decoratedpulpit, had as yet been reared on the banks of the Merrimac. The sternsettlers came together under the open heavens, or beneath the shadow ofthe old trees, to kneel before that God, whose works and manifestationswere around them. 

The exercises of the Sabhath commenced. A psalm of the old and homelyversion was sung, with true feeling, if not with a perfect regard tomusical effect and harmony. The brief but fervent prayer was offered, and the good man had just announced the text for his sermon, when asudden tramp of feet, and a confused murmur of human voices, fell on theears of the assembly. 

The minister closed his Bible; and the whole group crowded closertogether. "It is surely a war party of the heathen, " said Mr. Ward, ashe listened intently to the approaching sound. "God grant they mean usno evil!"

The sounds drew nearer. The swarthy figure of an Indian came glidingthrough the brush-wood into the clearing, followed closely by severalEnglishmen. In answer to the eager inquiries of Mr. Ward, CaptainEaton, the leader of the party, stated that he had left Boston atthe command of Governor Winthrop, to secure and disarm the sachem, Passaconaway, who was suspected of hostile intentions towards thewhites. 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 ofhis father. He then proceeded to inform Mr. Ward, that letters had beenreceived from the governor of the settlements of Good Hoop and Piquag, in Connecticut, giving timely warning of a most diabolical plot of theIndians to cut off their white neighbors, root and branch. He pointedout to the notice of the minister a member of his party as one of themessengers who had brought this alarming intelligence. 

He was a tall, lean man, with straight, lank, sandy hair, cut evenly allaround his narrow forehead, and hanging down so as to remind one ofSmollett'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 theLord hath willed to chastise them, " said the messenger, with thatpeculiar nasal inflection of voice, so characteristic of the "unco'guid. " "The great sachem, Miantonimo, chief of the Narragansetts, hathplotted to cut off the Lord's people, just after the time of harvest, toslay 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 agrievous oath to destroy him. The Lord hath done it. One of the bloodyheathens was dreadfully gored by the oxen of our people, and, being ingreat bodily pain and tribulation thereat, he sent for Governor Haines, and told him that the Englishman's god was angry with him for concealingthe plot to kill his people, and had sent the Englishman's cow to killhim. "

"Truly a marvellous providence, " said Mr. Ward; "but what has been donein your settlements in consequence of it?"

"We have fasted many days, " returned the other, in a tone of greatsolemnity, "and our godly men have besought the Lord that he might now, as of old, rebuke Satan. They have, moreover, diligently and earnestlyinquired, Whence cometh this evil? Who is the Achan in the camp of ourIsrael? It hath been greatly feared that the Quakers and the Papistshave been sowing tares in the garden of the true worship. We havetherefore banished these on pain of death; and have made it highly penalfor any man to furnish either food or lodging to any of these hereticsand idolaters. We have ordered a more strict observance of the Sabbathof the Lord, no, one being permitted to walk or run on that day, exceptto and from public worship, and then, only in a reverent and becomingmanner; and no one is allowed to cook food, sweep the house, shave orpare 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 andlicentiousness of the age, in respect to apparel and deportment, andhave forbidden any young man to kiss a maid during the time ofcourtship, as, to their shame be it said, is the manner of many in theold lands. "

"Ye have, indeed, done well for the spiritual, " said Mr. Ward; "whathave you done for your temporal defence?"

"We have our garrisons and our captains, and a goodly store of carnalweapons, " answered the other. "And, besides, we have the good chiefUncas, of the Mohegans, to help us against the bloody Narragansetts. "

"But, my friend, " said the minister, addressing Captain Eaton, "theremust be surely some mistake about Passaconaway. I verily believe him tobe the friend of the white men. And this is his son Wonolanset? I sawhim last year, and remember that he was the pride of the old savage, hisfather. I will speak to him, for I know something of his barbaroustongue. "

"Wonolanset!"

The young savage started suddenly at the word, and rolled his keenbright 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 hisyoung men to take their scalps when the Narragansett bids him?"

The growl of the young bear when roused from his hiding-place is notmore fierce and threatening than were the harsh tones of Wonolanset ashe uttered through his clenched teeth:--

"Nummus quantum. "

"Nay, nay, " said Mr. Ward, turning away from the savage, "his heart isfull of bitterness; he says he is angry, and, verily, I like not hisbearing. I fear me there is evil on foot. But ye have travelled far, and must needs be weary rest yourselves awhile, and haply, while yerefresh your bodies, I may also refresh your spirits with wholesome andcomfortable doctrines. "

The party having acquiesced in this proposal, their captive was securedby 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 minuterdivisions of his sermon, when he was again interrupted by a loud, clearwhistle from the river, and a sudden exclamation of surprise from thosearound him. A single glance sufficed to show him the Indian, disengagedfrom 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 Indianevidently understood the full extent of his danger. He turned suddenlyabout, 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 uswith his father's vengeance. For God's sake keep your fire!" It was toolate. 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 byan Indian and a white man, was seen darting along the shore. Wonolansetbounded on unharmed, and, plunging into the river, he soon reached thecanoe, which was hastily paddled to the opposite bank. Captain Eatonand his party finding it impossible to retake their prisoner, afterlistening to the sermon of Mr. Ward, and partaking of some bodilyrefreshment, took their leave of the settlers of Pentucket, and departedfor Boston. 

The evening, which followed the day whose events we have narrated, wasone of those peculiar seasons of beauty when the climate of New Englandseems preferable to that of Italy. The sun went down in the soft hazeof the horizon, while the full moon was rising at the same time in theeast. Its mellow silver mingled with the deep gold of the sunset. Thesouth-west wind, as warm as that of summer, but softer, was heard, atlong intervals, faintly harping amidst the pines, and blending its lowsighing with the lulling murmurs of the river. The inhabitants ofPentucket had taken the precaution, as night came on, to load theirmuskets carefully, and place them in readiness for instant use, in theevent of an attack from the savages. Such an occurrence, was, indeed, not unlikely, after the rude treatment which the son of old Passaconawayhad received at the settlement. It was well known that the old chiefwas able, at a word, to send every warrior from Pennacook to Naumkeagupon the war-path of Miantonimo; the vengeful character of the Indianswas also understood; and, in the event of an out-breaking of theirresentment, the settlement of Pentucket was, of all others, the mostexposed to danger. 

"Don't go to neighbor Clements's to-night, Mary, " said Alice Ward to heryoung, unmarried sister; "I'm afraid some of the tawny Indians may belurking hereabout. Mr. Ward says he thinks they will be dangerousneighbors 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 Iwould certainly come. I am not afraid of the Indians. There's none ofthem about here except Red Sam, who wanted to buy me of Mr. Ward for hissquaw; and I shall not be afraid of my old spark. "

The girl tripped lightly from the threshold towards the dwelling of herneighbor. She had passed nearly half the distance when the pathway, before open to the moonlight, began to wind along the margin of theriver, overhung with young sycamores and hemlocks. With a beating heartand a quickened step she was stealing through the shadow, when theboughs on the river-side were suddenly parted, and a tall man spranginto the path before her. Shrinking back with terror, she uttered afaint scream. 

"Mary Edmands!" said the stranger, "do not fear me. "

A thousand thoughts wildly chased each other through the mind of theastonished girl. That familiar voice--that knowledge of her name--thattall and well-remembered form! She leaned eagerly forward, and lookedinto the stranger's face. A straggling gleam of moonshine fell acrossits 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 wearymonths I have waited earnestly for such a meeting as this, and, in thattime, I have been in many and grievous perils by the flood and thewilderness, and by the heathen Indians and more heathen persecutorsamong 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 lovedthee ever since thou wast but a child, playing under the cottage treesin old Haverhill, and who hath sacrificed his worldly estate, andperilled his soul's salvation for thy sake. Mary, dear Mary, for of atruth 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 softand 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. Wewill go to the Providence plantations. Passaconaway will assist us inour 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 thatsink of wickedness at Providence? Why don't you go back with me tosister Ward's?"

"Mary Edmands!" said Martin, in a tone of solemn sternness, "it isfitting that I should tell thee all. I have renounced the evildoctrines of thy brother-in-law, and his brethren in false prophecy. Itwas a hard struggle, Mary; the spirit was indeed willing, but the fleshwas weak, exceeding weak, for I thought of thee, Mary, and of thyfriends. But I had a measure of strength given me, whereby I have beenenabled to do the work which was appointed me. "

"Oh, Richard!" said Mary, bursting into tears, "I'm afraid you havebecome a Williamsite, one of them, who, Mr. Ward says, have nothing tohope for in this world or in that to come. "

"The Lord rebuke him!" said Martin, with a loud voice. "Woe to such asspeak evil of the witnesses of the truth. I have seen the utternakedness of the land of carnal professors, and I have obeyed the callto come out from among them and be separate. I belong to thatpersecuted family whom the proud priests and rulers of this colony havedriven from their borders. I was brought, with many others, before thewicked magistrates of Boston, and sentenced to labor, without hire, forthe ungodly. But I have escaped from my bonds; and the Lord has raisedup a friend for his servant, even the Indian Passaconaway, whose son Iassisted, 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 loveme, if you love God's people and his true worship, do come away fromthose 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 thoucallest fanatics. We believe in Christ, but not in man-worship. TheChrist we reverence is the shadow or image of God in man; he wascrucified in Adam of old, and hath been crucified in all men since; hisbirth, his passion, and his death, were but manifestations or figures ofhis sufferings in Adam and his descendants. Faith and Christ are thesame, the spiritual image of God in the heart. We acknowledge no rulebut this Christ, this faith within us, either in temporal or spiritualthings. And the Lord hath blessed us, and will bless us, and truthshall be magnified and exalted in us; and the children of the heathenshall be brought to know and partake of this great redemption whereof wetestify. But woe to the false teachers, and to them who prophesy forhire and make gain of their soothsaying. Their churches are the devicesof Satan, the pride and vanity of the natural Adam. Their baptism isblasphemy; and their sacrament is an abomination, yea, an incantationand a spell. Woe to them who take the shadow for the substance, thatbow down to the altars of human device and cunning workmanship, thatmake idols of their ceremonies! Woe to the high priests and thePharisees, and the captains and the rulers; woe to them who love thewages of unrighteousness!"

The Familist paused from utter exhaustion, so vehemently had he pouredforth the abundance of his zeal. Mary Edmands, overwhelmed by hiseloquence, but still unconvinced, could only urge the disgrace anddanger attending his adherence to such pernicious doctrines. Sheconcluded by telling him, in a voice choked by tears, that she couldnever marry him while a follower of Gorton. 

"Stay then, " said Martin, fiercely dashing her hand from his, "stay andpartake of the curse of the ungodly, even of the curse of Meroz, whocome not up to the help of the Lord, against the mighty Stay, till theLord hath made a threshing instrument of the heathen, whereby the prideof the rulers, and the chief priests, and the captains of this landshall be humbled. Stay, till the vials of His wrath are poured out uponye, and the blood of the strong man, and the maid, and the little childis mingled together!"

The wild language, the fierce tones and gestures of her lover, terrifiedthe unhappy girl. She looked wildly around her, all was dark andshadowy, an undefined fear of violence came over her; and, bursting intotears, she turned to fly. "Stay yet a moment, " said Martin, in a hoarseand subdued voice. He caught hold of her arm. She shrieked as if inmortal jeopardy. 

"Let go the gal, let her go!" said old Job Clements, thrusting the longbarrel of his gun through the bushes within a few feet of the head ofthe Familist. "A white man, as sure as I live! I thought, sartin, 'twas a tarnal In-in. " Martin relinquished his hold, and, the nextinstant, found himself surrounded by the settlers. 

After a brief explanation had taken place between Mr. Ward and hissister-in-law, the former came forward and accosted the Familist. "Richard Martin!" he said, "I little thought to see thee so soon in thenew world, still less to see thee such as thou art. I am exceedingsorry that I cannot greet thee here as a brother, either in a temporalor a spiritual nature. My sister tells me that you are a follower ofthat servant of Satan, Samuel Gorton, and that you have sought to enticeher away with you to the colony of fanatics at Rhode Island, which maybe fitly compared to that city which Philip of Macedonia peopled withrogues and vagabonds, and the offscouring of the whole earth. "

"John Ward, I know thee, " said the unshrinking Familist; "I know theefor a man wise above what is written, a man vain, uncharitable, andgiven to evil speaking. I value neither thy taunts nor thy wit; for theone hath its rise in the bitterness, and the other in the vanity, of thenatural Adam. Those who walk in the true light, and who have given overcrucifying Christ in their hearts, heed not a jot of the reproaches anddespiteful doings of the high and mighty in iniquity. For of us it hathbeen written: 'I have given them thy word and the world hath hated thembecause they are not of the world. If the world hate you, ye know thatit hated me before it hated you. If they have hated me they will hateyou also; if they have persecuted me they will persecute you. ' And, ofthe scoffers and the scorners, the wise ones of this world, whose wisdomand knowledge have perverted them, and who have said in their hearts, There is none beside them, it hath been written, yea, and will befulfilled: The day of the Lord of Hosts shall be upon every one that isproud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up, and he shall bebrought low; and the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and thehaughtiness of man shall be brought low; and the Lord alone shall beexalted in that day; and the idols shall he utterly abolish. ' Of thee, John Ward, and of thy priestly brotherhood, I ask nothing; and for themuch evil I have received, and may yet receive at your hands, may ye berewarded like Alexander the coppersmith, every man according to hisworks. "

"Such damnable heresy, " said Mr. Ward, addressing his neighbors, "mustnot be permitted to spread among the people. My friends, we must sendthis man to the magistrates. "

The Familist placed his hands to his month, and gave a whistle, similarto that which was heard in the morning, and which preceded the escape ofWonolanset. It was answered by a shout from the river; and a score ofIndians came struggling up through the brush-wood. 

"Vile heretic!" exclaimed Mr. Ward, snatching a musket from the hands ofhis neighbor, and levelling it full at the head of Martin; "you havebetrayed us into this jeopardy. "

"Wagh! down um gun, " said a powerful Indian, as he laid his rough handon the shoulder of the minister. "You catch Wonolanset, tie um, shootum, scare squaw. Old sachem come now, me tie white man, shoot um, roastum;" and the old savage smiled grimly and fiercely in the indistinctmoonlight, as he witnessed the alarm and terror of his prisoner. 

"Hold, Passaconaway!" said Martin, in the Indian tongue. "Will thegreat chief forget his promise?"

The sachem dropped his hold on Mr. Ward's arm. "My brother is good, " hesaid; "me no kill um, me make um walk woods like Wonolanset. " Martinspoke a few words in the chief's ear. The countenance of the oldwarrior for an instant seemed to express dissatisfaction; but, yieldingto the powerful influence which the Familist had acquired over him, hesaid, with some reluctance, "My brother is wise, me do so. "

"John Ward, " said the Familist, approaching the minister, "thou hastdevised evil against one who hath never injured thee. But I seek notcarnal revenge. I have even now restrained the anger of this heathenchief 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 andshook that of the minister. 

"For thee, Mary, " he said, "I had hoped to pluck thee from the evilwhich is to come, even as a brand from the burning. I had hoped to leadthee to the manna of true righteousness, but thou last chosen the flesh-pots of Egypt. I had hoped to cherish thee always, but thou hastforgotten me and my love, which brought me over the great waters for thysake. 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 mywearisome pilgrimage is ended, none shall know the grave of RichardMartin; and none but the heathen shall mourn for him. Mary! I forgivethee; may the God of all mercies bless thee! I shall never see theemore. "

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 herneighbors, and fixed tearfully upon that of her lover. A thousandrecollections 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 wereall forgotten. 

"Richard, dear Richard, I am your Mary as much as ever I was. I'll gowith you to the ends of the earth. Your God shall be my God, and whereyou are buried there will I be also. "

Silent in the ecstasy of joyful surprise, the Familist pressed her tohis bosom. Passaconaway, who had hitherto been an unmoved spectator ofthe scene, relaxed the Indian gravity of his features, and murmured, inan undertone, "Good, good. "

"Will my brother go?" he inquired, touching Martin's shoulder; "mysquaws have fine mat, big wigwam, soft samp, for his young woman. "

"Mary, " said Martin, "the sachem is impatient; and we must needs go withhim. " 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 downthe precipitous and ragged bank of the river, followed closely byPassaconaway 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 ofthe shore. "It is too late!" said the minister, as he struggled down tothe water's edge. "Satan hath laid his hands upon her; but I willcontend 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 atmy mill, the one is taken and the other is left. Let us go home, myfriends, 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 theEldorado of the heretic and the persecuted, the colony of RogerWilliams. Passaconaway, ever after, remained friendly to the white men. As civilization advanced he retired before it, to Pennacook, nowConcord, 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 dropsof a dark liquid. His hand shook, as he raised the glass whichcontained them to his lips; and with a strange shuddering, a nervoustremor, as if all the delicate chords of his system were unloosed andtrembling, he turned away from his fearful draught. 

He saw that my eye was upon him; and I could perceive that his mindstruggled desperately with the infirmity of his nature, as if ashamed ofthe utter weakness of its tabernacle. He passed hastily up and down theroom. "You seem somewhat ill, " I said, in the undecided tone of partialinterrogatory. 

He paused, and passed his long thin fingers over his forehead. "I amindeed ill, " he said, slowly, and with that quavering, deep-drawnbreathing, 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 underthe 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 assuredthat you have yet the power to be happy. You have, at least, warmfriends to sympathize with you. But forego, if possible, yourpernicious 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 andannoying to my friends; exquisitely sensible of my true condition, yetwanting the power to change it; cursed with a lively apprehension of allthat I ought now to be, yet totally incapable of even making an effortto be so! My dear sir, I feel deeply the kindness of your motives, butit 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, "thatthe influence of such an excessive use of opium can produce anyalleviation 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, --"Iknow not. If it has not removed the evil, it has at least changed itscharacter. It has diverted my mind from its original grief; and hasbroken up and rendered divergent the concentrated agony which oppressedme. It has, in a measure, substituted imaginary afflictions for realones. I cannot but confess, however, that the relief which it hasafforded has been produced by the counteraction of one pain by another;very much like that of the Russian criminal, who gnaws his own fleshwhile undergoing the punishment of the knout. '"

"For Heaven's sake, " said I, "try to dispossess your mind of such horridimages. There are many, very many resources yet left you. Try theeffect of society; and let it call into exercise those fine talentswhich all admit are so well calculated to be its ornament and pride. At least, leave this hypochondriacal atmosphere, and look out morefrequently upon nature. Your opium, if it be an alleviator, is, by yourown confession, a most melancholy one. It exorcises one demon to giveplace 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 offeatures, a mere muscular movement, with which the eye had no sympathy;for its wild and dreamy expression, the preternatural lustre, withouttransparency, remained unaltered, as if rebuking, with its cold, strangeglare, the mockery around it. He sat before me like a statue, whose eyealone retained its stony and stolid rigidity, while the other featureswere moved by some secret machinery into "a ghastly smile. "

"I am not desirous, even were it practicable, " he said, "to defend theuse of opium, or rather the abuse of it. I can only say, that thesubstitutes you propose are not suited to my condition. The world hasnow no enticements for me; society no charms. Love, fame, wealth, honor, may engross the attention of the multitude; to me they are allshadows; and why should I grasp at them? In the solitude of my ownthoughts, looking on but not mingling in them, I have taken the fullgauge of their hollow vanities. No, leave me to myself, or rather tothat new existence which I have entered upon, to the strange world towhich my daily opiate invites me. In society I am alone, fearfullysolitary; for my mind broods gloomily over its besetting sorrow, and Imake myself doubly miserable by contrasting my own darkness with thelight and joy of all about me; nay, you cannot imagine what a very hardthing it is, at such times, to overcome some savage feelings ofmisanthropy which will present themselves. But when I am alone, andunder the influence of opium, I lose for a season my chief source ofmisery, myself; my mind takes a new and unnatural channel; and I haveoften thought that any one, even that of insanity, would be preferableto its natural one. It is drawn, as it were, out of itself; and Irealize in my own experience the fable of Pythagoras, of two distinctexistences, enjoyed by the same intellectual being. 

"My first use of opium was the consequence of an early and very bitterdisappointment. I dislike to think of it, much more to speak of it. Irecollect, on a former occasion, you expressed some curiosity concerningit. I then repelled that curiosity, for my mind was not in a situationto gratify it. But now, since I have been talking of myself, I think Ican go on with my story with a very decent composure. In complying withyour request, I cannot say that my own experience warrants, in anydegree, the old and commonly received idea that sorrow loses half itspoignancy by its revelation to others. It was a humorous opinion ofSterne, that a blessing which ties up the tongue, and a mishap whichunlooses it, are to be considered equal; and, indeed, I have known somepeople happy under all the changes of fortune, when they could findpatient auditors. Tully wept over his dead daughter, but when hechanced to think of the excellent things he could say on the subject, he considered it, on the whole, a happy circumstance. But, for my ownpart, 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 seenMrs. H------, of -------?" he inquired, somewhat abruptly. I replied inthe affirmative. 

"Do you not think her a fine woman?"

"Yes, certainly, a fine woman. She was once, I am told, verybeautiful. "

"Once? is she not so now?" he asked. "Well, I have heard the samebefore. I sometimes think I should like to see her now, now that themildew of years and perhaps of accusing recollections are upon her; andsee her toss her gray curls as she used to do her dark ones, and actover again her old stratagem of smiles upon a face of wrinkles. JustHeavens! were I revengeful to the full extent of my wrongs, I could wishher 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 themeridian of perfection, from which nothing could be taken, and to whichnothing could be added. There was a very witchery in her smile, trembling, as it did, over her fine Grecian features, like the play ofmoonlight upon a shifting and beautiful cloud. 

"Her voice was music, low, sweet, bewildering. I have heard it athousand times in my dreams. It floated around me, like the tones ofsome rare instrument, unseen by the hearer; for, beautiful as she was, you could not think of her, or of her loveliness, while she wasspeaking; it was that sweetly wonderful voice, seemingly abstracted fromherself, pouring forth the soft current of its exquisite cadence, whichalone absorbed the attention. Like that one of Coleridge's heroines, you could half feel, half fancy, that it had a separate being of itsown, a spiritual presence manifested to but one of the senses; a livingsomething, whose mode of existence was for the ear alone. --(See Memoirsof Maria Eleonora Schoning. )

"But what shall I say of the mind? What of the spirit, the residentdivinity 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, beautifulwithout, 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 thecommon centre in my mind from which all the radii of thought had theirdirection; the nucleus around which I had gathered all that my ardentimagination could conceive, or a memory stored with all the deliciousdreams of poetry and romances could embody, of female excellence andpurity and constancy. 

"It is idle to talk of the superior attractions of intellectual beauty, when compared with mere external loveliness. The mind, invisible andcomplicated and indefinite, does not address itself directly to thesenses. It is comprehended only by its similitude in others. Itreveals itself, even then, but slowly and imperfectly. But the beautyof form and color, the grace of motion, the harmony of tone, are seenand felt and appreciated at once. The image of substantial and materialloveliness once seen leaves an impression as distinct and perfect uponthe retina of memory as upon that of the eyes. It does not rise beforeus in detached and disconnected proportions, like that of spiritualloveliness, but in crowds, and in solitude, and in all the throngfulvarieties of thought and feeling and action, the symmetrical whole, thebeautiful perfection comes up in the vision of memory, and stands, likea bright angel, between us and all other impressions of outward orimmaterial beauty. 

"I saw her, and could not forget her; I sought her society, and wasgratified with it. It is true, I sometimes (in the first stages of myattachment) had my misgivings in relation to her character. I sometimesfeared that her ideas were too much limited to the perishing beauty ofher person. But to look upon her graceful figure yielding to the dance, or reclining in its indolent symmetry; to watch the beautiful play ofcoloring upon her cheek, and the moonlight transit of her smile; tostudy her faultless features in their delicate and even thoughtfulrepose, or when lighted up into conversational vivacity, was to forgeteverything, save the exceeding and bewildering fascination before me. Like the silver veil of Khorassan it shut out from my view the mentaldeformity beneath it. I could not reason with myself about her; I hadno power of ratiocination which could overcome the blinding dazzle ofher beauty. The master-passion, which had wrestled down all others, gave to every sentiment of the mind something of its own peculiarcharacter. 

"I will not trouble you with a connected history of my first love, myboyish love, you may perhaps call it. Suffice it to say, that on therevelation of that love, it was answered by its object warmly andsympathizingly. I had hardly dared to hope for her favor; for I hadmagnified her into something far beyond mortal desert; and to hear fromher own lips an avowal of affection seemed more like the condescensionof a pitying angel than the sympathy of a creature of passion andfrailty like myself. I was miserably self-deceived; and self-deceptionis of a nature most repugnant to the healthy operation of truth. Wesuspect others, but seldom ourselves. The deception becomes a part ofour self-love; we hold back the error even when Reason would pluck itaway from us. 

"Our whole life may be considered as made up of earnest yearnings afterobjects whose value increases with the difficulties of obtaining them, and which seem greater and more desirable, from our imperfect knowledgeof their nature, just as the objects of the outward vision are magnifiedand exalted when seen through a natural telescope of mist. Imaginationfills up and supplies the picture, of which we can only catch theoutlines, with colors brighter, and forms more perfect, than those ofreality. Yet, you may perhaps wonder why, after my earnest desire hadbeen gratified, after my love had found sympathy in its object, I didnot analyze more closely the inherent and actual qualities of her heartand intellect. But living, as I did, at a considerable distance fromher, and seeing her only under circumstances calculated to confirmprevious impressions, I had few advantages, even had I desired to do so, of studying her true character. The world had not yet taught me itsungenerous lesson. I had not yet learned to apply the rack ofphilosophical analysis to the objects around me, and test, by a coldprocess of reasoning, deduced from jealous observation, the reality ofall which wore the outward semblance of innocence and beauty. And itmay be, too, that the belief, nay, the assurance, from her own lips, andfrom the thousand voiceless but eloquent signs which marked ourinterviews, 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 notin human nature, at least it was not in mine, to embitter the deliciousaliment which is offered to our vanity, by admitting any uncomfortabledoubts of the source from which it is derived. 

"And thus it was that I came on, careless and secure, dreaming over andover the same bright dream; without any doubt, without fear, and in theperfect confidence of an unlimited trust, until the mask fell off, allat once; without giving me time for preparation, without warning orinterlude; and the features of cold, heartless, systematic treacheryglared full upon me. 

"I saw her wedded to another. It was a beautiful morning; and never hadthe sun shone down on a gayer assemblage than that which gatheredtogether at the village church. I witnessed the imposing ceremony whichunited the only one being I had ever truly loved to a happy and favored, because more wealthy, rival. As the grayhaired man pronounced theinquiring challenge, 'If any man can show just cause why they may notlawfully be joined together, let him now speak or else forever afterhold his peace, ' I struggled forward, and would have cried out, but thewords 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 thepriest: 'I require and charge ye both, as ye will answer at the dreadfulday of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, thatif either of you know of any impediment why ye may not lawfully bejoined together in matrimony, ye do now confess it; for be ye wellassured, that if any persons are joined together otherwise than as God'sword doth allow, their marriage is not lawful. ' As the solemn tones ofthe old man died away in the church aisles, I almost expected to hear asupernatural voice calling upon him to forbear. But there was no sound. For an instant my eyes met those of the bride; the blood boiled rapidlyto her forehead, and then sank back, and she was as pale as if death hadbeen in the glance I had given her. And I could see the folds of herrich dress tremble, and her beautiful lips quiver; and she turned awayher eyes, and the solemn rites were concluded. 

"I returned to my lodgings. I heeded not the gay smiles and freemerriment of those around me. I hurried along like one who wandersabroad in a dark dream; for I could hardly think of the events of themorning as things of reality. But, when I spurred my horse aside, asthe carriage which contained the newly married swept by me, the terribletruth came upon me like a tangible substance, and one black and evilthought passed over my mind, like the whispered suggestion of Satan. Itwas a feeling of blood, a sensation like that of grasping the stranglingthroat of an enemy. I started from it with horror. For the first timea thought of murder had risen up in my bosom; and I quenched it with thenatural abhorrence of a nature prone to mildness and peace. 

"I reached my chamber, and, exhausted alike in mind and body, I threwmyself upon my bed, but not to sleep. A sense of my utter desolationand loneliness came over me, blended with a feeling of bitter andunmerited wrong. I recollected the many manifestations of affectionwhich I had received from her who had that day given herself, in thepresence of Heaven, to another; and I called to mind the thousandsacrifices I had made to her lightest caprices, to every shade andvariation of her temper; and then came the maddening consciousness ofthe black ingratitude which had requited such tenderness. Then, too, came the thought, bitter to a pride like mine, that the cold world had aknowledge of my misfortunes; that I should be pointed out as adisappointed man, a subject for the pity of some, and the scorn andjestings of others. Rage and shame mingled with the keen agony ofoutraged feeling. 'I will not endure it, ' I said, mentally, springingfrom my bed and crossing the chamber with a flushed brow and a strongstep; 'never!' And I ground my teeth upon each other, while a fiercelight seemed to break in upon my brain; it was the light of theTempter's smile, and I almost laughed aloud as the horrible thought ofsuicide started before me. I felt that I might escape the ordeal ofpublic scorn and pity; that I might bid the world and its falsehooddefiance, and end, by one manly effort, the agony of an existence whoseevery 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, Iseemed gifted with a supernatural firmness, as I made my arrangementsfor the last day of suffering which I was to endure. A few friends hadbeen invited to dine with me, and I prepared to meet them. They came atthe hour appointed with smiling faces and warm and friendly greetings;and I received them as if nothing had happened, with even a moreenthusiastic welcome than was my wont. 

"Oh! it is terrible to smile when the heart is breaking! to talklightly and freely and mirthfully, when every feeling of the mind iswrung with unutterable agony; to mingle in the laugh and in the gayvolleys 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 Ihad pressed their hands as at a common parting, while my heart whisperedan everlasting farewell!

"It was late when they left me. I walked out to look for the last timeupon Nature in her exceeding beauty. I hardly acknowledged to myselfthat such was my purpose; but yet I did feel that it was so; and that Iwas taking an everlasting farewell of the beautiful things around me. The sun was just setting; and the hills, that rose like pillars of theblue horizon, were glowing with a light which was fast deserting thevalleys. It was an evening of summer; everything was still; not a leafstirred in the dark, overshadowing foliage; but, silent and beautiful asa picture, the wide scenery of rock and hill and woodland, stretchedaway before me; and, beautiful as it was, it seemed to possess a newnessand depth of beauty beyond its ordinary appearance, as if to aggravatethe pangs of the last, long farewell. 

"They do not err who believe that man has a sympathy with even inanimateNature, deduced from a common origin; a chain of co-existence andaffinity connecting the outward forms of natural objects with his ownfearful and wonderful machinery; something, in short, manifested in hislove of flowing waters, and soft green shadows, and pleasant blowingflowers, and in his admiration of the mountain, stretching away intoheaven, sublimed and awful in its cloudy distance; the heave and swellof the infinite ocean; the thunder of the leaping cataract; and theonward rush of mighty rivers, which tells of its original source, andbears evidence of its kindred affinities. Nor was the dream of theancient Chaldean 'all a dream. ' The stars of heaven, the beauty and theglory above us, have their influences and their power, not evil andmalignant and partial and irrevocable, but holy and tranquillizing andbenignant, a moral influence, by which all may profit if they will doso. And I have often marvelled at the hard depravity of that humanheart which could sanction a deed of violence and crime in the calmsolitudes of Nature, and surrounded by the enduring evidences of anoverruling Intelligence. I could conceive of crime, growing up rank andmonstrous in the unwholesome atmosphere of the thronged city, amidst thetaint of moral as well as physical pestilence, and surrounded only byman and the works of man. But there is something in the harmony andquiet of the natural world which presents a reproving antagonism to thefiercer passions of the human heart; an eye of solemn reprehension looksout from the still places of Nature, as if the Great Soul of theUniverse had chosen the mute creations of his power to be the witnessesof 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 gentleministrations of Nature; I could feel the fever of my heart cooling, anda softer haze of melancholy stealing over the blackness of my despair;and the fierce passions which had distracted me giving place to the calmof a settled anguish, a profound sorrow, the quiet gloom of anovershadowing woe, in which love and hatred and wrong were swallowed upand lost. I no longer hated the world; but I felt that it had nothingfor me; that I was no longer a part and portion of its harmoniouselements; affliction had shut me out forever from the pale of humanhappiness and sympathy, and hope pointed only to the resting-place ofthe grave!

"I stood steadily gazing at the setting sun. It touched and sat uponthe hill-top like a great circle of fire. I had never before fullycomprehended the feeling of the amiable but misguided Rousseau, who athis death-hour desired to be brought into the open air, that the lastglance of his failing eye might drink in the glory of the sunsetheavens, and the light of his great intellect and that of Nature go outtogether. For surely never did the Mexican idolater mark with deeperemotion the God of his worship, for the last time veiling his awfulcountenance, than did I, untainted by superstition, yet full of perfectlove for the works of Infinite Wisdom, watch over the departure of themost glorious of them all. I felt, even to agony, the truth of theseexquisite 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 frommy sight. It was like receiving the last look of a dying friend. Toothers he might bring life and health and joy, on the morrow; but tomehe would never rise. As this thought came over me, I felt a stiflingsensation in my throat, tears started in my eyes, and my heart almostwavered from its purpose. But the bent bow had only relaxed for asingle instant; it returned again to its strong and abiding tension. 

"I was alone in my chamber once more. A single lamp burned gloomilybefore me; and on the table at my side stood a glass of laudanum. I hadprepared everything. I had written my last letter, and had now only todrink the fatal draught, and lie down to my last sleep. I heard the oldvillage clock strike eleven. 'I may as well do it now as ever, ' I saidmentally, and my hand moved towards the glass. But my courage failedme; my hand shook, and some moments elapsed before I could sufficientlyquiet my nerves to lift the glass containing the fatal liquid. Theblood ran cold upon my heart, and my brain reeled, as again and againI 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 teethand the deed was done!

"'O God, have mercy upon me!' I murmured, as the empty glass fell frommy hand. I threw myself upon the bed, and awaited the awfultermination. An age of unutterable misery seemed crowded into a briefmoment. All the events of my past life, a life, as it then seemed tome, made up of folly and crime, rose distinct before me, like accusingwitnesses, as if the recording angel had unrolled to my view the fulland 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 thoughtof the coffin, the shroud, and the still and narrow grave, into whosedumb and frozen solitude none but the gnawing worm intrudes. And thenmy thoughts wandered away into the vagueness and mystery of eternity, Iwas rushing uncalled for into the presence of a just and pure God, witha spirit unrepenting, unannealed! And I tried to pray and could not;for a heaviness, a dull strange torpor crept over me. Consciousnesswent 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, anunearthly quiet; a suspension or rather oblivion of every mentalaffliction; a condition of the mind betwixt the thoughts of wakefulnessand the dreams of sleep. It seemed to me that the gulf between mind andmatter had been passed over, and that I had entered upon a newexistence. I had no memory, no hope, no sorrow; nothing but a dimconsciousness of a pleasurable and tranquil being. Gradually, however, the delusion vanished. I was sensible of still wearing the fetters ofthe flesh, yet they galled no longer; the burden was lifted from myheart, it beat happily and calmly, as in childhood. As the strongerinfluences of my opiate (for I had really swallowed nothing more, as thedruggist, suspecting from the incoherence of my language, that I wasmeditating some fearful purpose, furnished me with a harmless, thoughnot ineffective draught) passed off, the events of the past came back tome. It was like the slow lifting of a curtain from a picture of which Iwas a mere spectator, about which I could reason calmly, and tracedispassionately its light and shadow. Having satisfied myself that Ihad been deceived in the quantity of opium I had taken, I became alsoconvinced that I had at last discovered the great antidote for whichphilosophy had exhausted its resources, the fabled Lethe, the oblivionof human sorrow. The strong necessity of suicide had passed away; life, even for me, might be rendered tolerable by the sovereign panacea ofopium, the only true minister to a mind diseased, the sought 'kalon'found. 

"From that day I have been habitually an opium eater. I am perfectlysensible that the constant use of the pernicious drug has impaired myhealth; but I cannot relinquish it. Some time since I formed aresolution to abandon it, totally and at once; but had not strengthenough to carry it into practice. The very attempt to do so nearlydrove me to madness. The great load of mental agony which had beenlifted up and held aloof by the daily applied power of opium sank backupon my heart like a crushing weight. Then, too, my physical sufferingswere extreme; an indescribable irritation, a general uneasinesstormented me incessantly. I can only think of it as a totaldisarrangement of the whole nervous system, the jarring of all thethousand chords of sensitiveness, each nerve having its own particularpain. --( Essay on the Effects of Opium, London, 1763. )

"De Quincey, in his wild, metaphysical, and eloquent, yet, in manyrespects, fancy sketch, considers the great evil resulting from the useof opium to be the effect produced upon the mind during the hours ofsleep, the fearful inquietude of unnatural dreams. My own dreams havebeen certainly of a different order from those which haunted me previousto my experience in opium eating. But I cannot easily believe thatopium necessarily introduces a greater change in the mind's sleepingoperations, than in those of its wakefulness. 

"At one period, indeed, while suffering under a general, nervousdebility, from which I am even now but partially relieved, my troubledand broken sleep was overshadowed by what I can only express as'a horror of thick darkness. ' There was nothing distinct or certain inmy visions, all was clouded, vague, hideous; sounds faint and awful, yetunknown; the sweep of heavy wings, the hollow sound of innumerablefootsteps, the glimpse of countless apparitions, and darkness fallinglike a great cloud from heaven. 

"I can scarcely give you an adequate idea of my situation in thesedreams, without comparing it with that of the ancient Egyptians whilesuffering under the plague of darkness. I never read the awfuldescription of this curse, without associating many of its horrors withthose of my own experience. 

"'But they, sleeping the same sleep that night, which was indeedintolerable, and which came upon them out of the bottoms of inevitablehell, "'Were partly vexed with monstrous apparitions, and partly fainted; fora sudden fear and not looked for, came upon them. '

"'For neither might the corner which held them keep them from fear; butnoises, as of waters falling down, sounded about them, and sad visionsappeared unto them, with heavy countenances. 

"'Whether it were a whistling wind, or a melodious voice of birds amongthe spreading branches, or a pleasing fall of water running violently;

"'Or, a terrible sound of stones cast down, or, a running that could notbe seen, of skipping beasts, or a roaring voice of most savage wildbeasts, or a rebounding echo from the hollow mountains: these thingsmade them to swoon for fear. '--(Wisdom of Solomon, chapter xvii. )

"That creative faculty of the eye, upon which Mr. De Quincey dwells sostrongly, I have myself experienced. Indeed, it has been the principalcause of suffering which has connected itself with my habit of opiumeating. It developed itself at first in a recurrence of the childishfaculty of painting upon the darkness whatever suggested itself to themind; anon, those figures which had before been called up only at willbecame the cause, instead of the effect, of the mind's employment; inother 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 ofdarkness round about me, the faces of those whom I had not known foryears, nay, since childhood; faces, too, of the dead, called up, as itwere, from the church-yard and the wilderness and the deep waters, andbetraying nothing of the grave's terrible secrets. And in the same way, some of the more important personages I had read of, in history andromance, glided often before me, like an assembly of apparitions, eachpreserving, amidst the multitudinous combinations of my visions, his ownindividuality and peculiar characteristics. --(Vide Emanuel CountSwedenborg, Nicolai of Berlin's Account of Spectral Illusion, EdinburghPhrenological Journal. )

"These images were, as you may suppose, sufficiently annoying, yet theycame and went without exciting any emotions of terror. But a change atlength came over them, an awful distinctness and a semblance of reality, which, operating upon nerves weakened and diseased, shook the verydepths of my spirit with a superstitious awe, and against which reasonand philosophy, for a time, struggled in vain. 

"My mind had for some days been dwelling with considerable solicitudeupon an intimate friend, residing in a distant city. I had heard thathe was extremely ill, indeed, that his life was despaired of; and I maymention that at this period all my mind's operations were dilatory;there were no sudden emotions; passion seemed exhausted; and when onceany new train of thought had been suggested, it gradually incorporateditself with those which had preceded it, until it finally became soleand predominant, just as certain plants of the tropical islands windabout and blend with and finally take the place of those of anotherspecies. And perhaps to this peculiarity of the mental economy, thegradual concentring of the mind in a channel, narrowing to that point ofcondensation 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 theeasterly light fell in strongly through the parted curtains. I felt, all at once, a strong curiosity, blended with an unaccountable dread, tolook upon a small table which stood near the bedside. I felt certain ofseeing something fearful, and yet I knew not what; there was an awe anda fascination upon me, more dreadful from their very vagueness. I layfor some time hesitating and actually trembling, until the agony ofsuspense became too strong for endurance. I opened my eyes and fixedthem upon the dreaded object. Upon the table lay what seemed to me acorpse, wrapped about in the wintry habiliments of the grave, the corpseof 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; andthe spectre seemed to me a natural reality, at which I might sorrow, butnot wonder. The utter fallacy of this idea was speedily detected; andthen I endeavored to consider the present vision, like those which hadpreceded it, a mere delusion, a part of the phenomena of opium eating. I accordingly closed my eyes for an instant, and then looked again infull expectation that the frightful object would no longer be visible. It was still there; the body lay upon its side; the countenance turnedfull towards me, --calm, quiet, even beautiful, but certainly that ofdeath:

 '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, stillfamiliar features lay evident and manifest to the influx of thestrengthening twilight. A cold agony crept over me; I buried my head inthe bed-clothes, in a child-like fear, and when I again ventured to lookup, the spectre had vanished. The event made a strong impression on mymind; and I can scarcely express the feeling of relief which wasafforded, a few days after, by a letter from the identical friend inquestion, informing me of his recovery of health. 

"It would be a weary task, and one which you would no doubt thank me fordeclining, to detail the circumstances of a hundred similar visitations, most of which were, in fact, but different combinations of the sameillusion. One striking exception I will mention, as it relates to somepassages of my early history which you have already heard. 

"I have never seen Mrs. H since her marriage. Time, and the continuedaction of opium, deadening the old sensibilities of the heart andawakening new ones, have effected a wonderful change in my feelingstowards her. Little as the confession may argue in favor of my earlypassion, I seldom think of her, save with a feeling very closely alliedto indifference. Yet I have often seen her in my spectral illusions, young and beautiful as ever, but always under circumstances which formeda wide contrast between her spectral appearance and all my recollectionsof the real person. The spectral face, which I often saw looking inupon me, in my study, when the door was ajar, and visible only in theuncertain lamplight, or peering over me in the moonlight solitude of mybed-chamber, when I was just waking from sleep, was uniformly subjectto, and expressive of, some terrible hate, or yet more terrible anguish. Its first appearance was startling in the extreme. It was the face ofone of the fabled furies: the demon glared in the eye, the nostril wasdilated, the pale lip compressed, and the brow bent and darkened; yetabove all, and mingled with all, the supremacy of human beauty wasmanifest, as if the dream of Eastern superstition had been realized, anda fierce and foul spirit had sought out and animated into a fiendishexistence some beautiful sleeper of the grave. The other expression ofthe countenance of the apparition, that of agony, I accounted for onrational principles. Some years ago I saw, and was deeply affected by, a series of paintings representing the tortures of a Jew in the HolyInquisition; and the expression of pain in the countenance of the victimI at once recognized in that of the apparition, rendered yet moredistressing by the feminine and beautiful features upon which it rested. 

"I am not naturally superstitious; but, shaken and clouded as my mindhad been by the use of opium, I could not wholly divest it of fear whenthese phantoms beset me. Yet, on all other occasions, save that oftheir immediate presence, I found no difficulty in assigning theirexistence to a diseased state of the bodily organs, and a correspondingsympathy of the mind, rendering it capable of receiving and reflectingthe 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 adoptedby Nicolai of Berlin, when haunted by similar fantasies, was a resort tothe simple process of blood-letting. I accordingly made trial of it, but without the desired effect. Fearful, from the representations of myphysicians, and from some of my own sensations, that the almost dailyrecurrence of my visions might ultimately lead to insanity, I came tothe resolution of reducing my daily allowance of opium; and, confiningmyself, with the most rigid pertinacity, to a quantity not exceeding onethird of what I had formerly taken, I became speedily sensible of a mostessential change in my condition. A state of comparative health, mentaland physical with calmer sleep and a more natural exercise of the organsof vision, succeeded. I have made many attempts at a further reduction, but have been uniformly unsuccessful, owing to the extreme and almostunendurable agony occasioned thereby. 

"The peculiar creative faculty of the eye, the fearful gift of adiseased vision, still remains, but materially weakened and divested ofits former terrors. My mind has recovered in some degree its shaken andsuspended faculties. But happiness, the buoyant and elastic happinessof earlier days, has departed forever. Although, apparently, apractical disciple of Behmen, I am no believer in his visionary creed. Quiet is not happiness; nor can the absence of all strong and painfulemotion compensate for the weary heaviness of inert existence, passionless, dreamless, changeless. The mind requires the excitement ofactive and changeful thought; the intellectual fountain, like the poolof Bethesda, has a more healthful influence when its deep waters aretroubled. There may, indeed, be happiness in those occasional 'sabbathsof the soul, ' when calmness, like a canopy, overshadows it, and themind, for a brief season, eddies quietly round and round, instead ofsweeping onward; but none can exist in the long and weary stagnation offeeling, the silent, the monotonous, neverending calm, broken by neitherhope nor fear. "

THE PROSELYTES. (1833)

THE student sat at his books. All the day he had been poring over anold and time-worn volume; and the evening found him still absorbed inits contents. It was one of that interminable series of controversialvolumes, containing the theological speculations of the ancient fathersof the Church. With the patient perseverance so characteristic of hiscountrymen, he was endeavoring to detect truth amidst the numberlessinconsistencies of heated controversy; to reconcile jarringpropositions; to search out the thread of scholastic argument amidstthe rant of prejudice and the sallies of passion, and the coarsevituperations of a spirit of personal bitterness, but little inaccordance 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 wearystudies, 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 andweary lesson; I have shut out from me the busy and beautiful world; Ihave chastened every youthful impulse; and at an age when the heartshould be lightest and the pulse the freest, I am grave and silent andsorrowful, ' and the frost of a premature age is gathering around myheart. Amidst these ponderous tomes, surrounded by the venerablereceptacles of old wisdom, breathing, instead of the free air of heaven, the sepulchral dust of antiquity, I have become assimilated to theobjects around me; my very nature has undergone a metamorphosis of whichPythagoras never dreamed. I am no longer a reasoning creature, lookingat everything within the circle of human investigation with a clear andself-sustained vision, but the cheated follower of metaphysicalabsurdities, a mere echo of scholastic subtilty. God knows that my aimhas been a lofty and pure one, that I have buried myself in this livingtomb, and counted the health of this His feeble and outward image asnothing in comparison with that of the immortal and inwardrepresentation and shadow of His own Infinite Mind; that I have toiledthrough what the world calls wisdom, the lore of the old fathers andtime-honored philosophy, not for the dream of power and gratifiedambition, not for the alchemist's gold or life-giving elixir, but withan eye single to that which I conceived to be the most fitting object ofa godlike spirit, the discovery of Truth, --truth perfect and unclouded, truth in its severe and perfect beauty, truth as it sits in awe andholiness in the presence of its Original and Source!

"Was my aim too lofty? It cannot be; for my Creator has given me aspirit which would spurn a meaner one. I have studied to act inaccordance with His will; yet have I felt all along like one walking inblindness. I have listened to the living champions of the Church; Ihave pored over the remains of the dead; but doubt and heavy darknessstill rest upon my pathway. I find contradiction where I had looked forharmony; ambiguity where I had expected clearness; zeal taking the placeof 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 bymiserable subtilties and cabalistic mysteries. "

He was interrupted by the entrance of a servant with a letter. Thestudent 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 andeducation, hath visited me at the request of the good Princess Elizabethof the Palatine. He is a preacher of the new faith, a zealous andearnest believer in the gifts of the Spirit, but not like John deLabadie 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 wisdomand salvation. Come, Ernest, and see him; for he hath but a brief hourto tarry with us. Who knoweth but that this stranger may becommissioned to lead us to that which we have so long and anxiouslysought for, --the truth as it is in God. "LEONORA. "

"Now may Heaven bless the sweet enthusiast for this interruption of mybitter reflections!" said the student, in the earnest tenderness ofimpassioned feeling. "She knows how gladly I shall obey her summons;she knows how readily I shall forsake the dogmas of our wisestschoolmen, to obey the slightest wishes of a heart pure and generous ashers. "

He passed hastily through one of the principal streets of the city tothe dwelling of the lady, Eleonora. 

In a large and gorgeous apartment sat the Englishman, his plain andsimple garb contrasting strongly with the richness and luxury aroundhim. He was apparently quite young, and of a tall and commandingfigure. His countenance was calm and benevolent; it bore no traces ofpassion; care had not marked it; there was a holy serenity in itsexpression, which seemed a token of that inward "peace which passeth allunderstanding. "

"And this is thy friend, Eleonora?" said the stranger, as he offered hishand to Ernest. "I hear, " he said, addressing the latter, "thou hastbeen 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 thefountains of philosophy, and from my own brief experience of humanlife. "

"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 heavenand earth for our objects, and marvel that we find them not. The truthwhich is of God, the crown of wisdom, the pearl of exceeding price, demands not this vain-glorious research; easily to be entreated, itlieth within the reach of all. The eye of the humblest spirit maydiscern it. For He who respecteth not the persons of His children hathnot set it afar off, unapproachable save to the proud and lofty; buthath made its refreshing fountains to murmur, as it were, at the verydoor of our hearts. But in the encumbering hurry of the world weperceive it not; in the noise of our daily vanities we hear not thewaters of Siloah which go softly. We look widely abroad; we loseourselves in vain speculation; we wander in the crooked paths of thosewho 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 itsinhabitants, 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, andour ears, and they cannot hear; we turn to books, and they delude us; weseek philosophy, and no response cometh from its dead and silentlearning. 

 (August. Soliloq. Cap. XXXI. "Interrogavi Terram, " etc. )

"It is not in the sky above, nor in the air around, nor in the earthbeneath; it is in our own spirits, it lives within us; and if we wouldfind it, like the lost silver of the woman of the parable, we must lookat home, to the inward temple, which the inward eye discovereth, andwherein the spirit of all truth is manifested. The voice of that spiritis still and small, and the light about it shineth in darkness. Buttruth is there; and if we seek it in low humility, in a patient waitingupon its author, with a giving up of our natural pride of knowledge, aseducing of self, a quiet from all outward endeavor, it will assuredlybe revealed and fully made known. For as the angel rose of old from thealtar of Manoah even so shall truth arise from the humbling sacrifice ofself-knowledge and human vanity, in all its eternal and ineffablebeauty. 

"Seekest thou, like Pilate, after truth? Look thou within. The holyprinciple is there; that in whose light the pure hearts of all time haverejoiced. 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, anddivine power of reason' of Philo. It is the 'unbegotten principle andsource of all light, ' whereof Timmus testifieth; the 'interior guide ofthe soul and everlasting foundation of virtue, ' spoken of by Plutarch. Yea, it was the hope and guide of those virtuous Gentiles, who, doing bynature the things contained in the law, became a law unto themselves. 

"Look to thyself. Turn thine eye inward. Heed not the opinion of theworld. Lean not upon the broken reed of thy philosophy, thy verbalorthodoxy, thy skill in tongues, thy knowledge of the Fathers. Rememberthat truth was seen by the humble fishermen of Galilee, and overlookedby the High Priest of the Temple, by the Rabbi and the Pharisee. Thoucanst not hope to reach it by the metaphysics of Fathers, Councils, Schoolmen, and Universities. It lies not in the high places of humanlearning; it is in the silent sanctuary of thy own heart; for He, whogave thee an immortal soul, hath filled it with a portion of that truthwhich is the image of His own unapproachable light. The voice of thattruth is within thee; heed thou its whisper. A light is kindled in thysoul, which, if thou carefully heedest it, shall shine more and moreeven unto the perfect day. "

The stranger paused, and the student melted into tears. "Stranger!" hesaid, "thou hast taken a weary weight from my heart, and a heavy veilfrom my eyes. I feel that thou hast revealed a wisdom which is not ofthis world. "

"Nay, I am but a humble instrument in the hand of Him who is thefountain of all truth, and the beginning and the end of all wisdom. Maythe 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 hasbeen 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 thyresolution!" said the Preacher, fervently. "Humble yourselves toreceive instruction, and it shall be given you. Turn away now in youryouth from the corrupting pleasures of the world, heed not its hollowvanities, and that peace which is not such as the world giveth, thepeace of God which passeth all understanding, shall be yours. Yet, letnot yours be the world's righteousness, the world's peace, which shutsitself up in solitude. Encloister not the body, but rather shut up thesoul from sin. Live in the world, but overcome it: lead a life ofpurity in the face of its allurements: learn, from the holy principle oftruth within you, to do justly in the sight of its Author, to meetreproach without anger, to live without offence, to love those thatoffend you, to visit the widow and the fatherless, and keep yourselvesunspotted from the world. "

"Eleonora!" said the humbled student, "truth is plain before us; can wefollow 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 inthat lowly path, which the wisdom of the world accounteth foolishness?"

"Yes, Ernest, rejoicingly can I do it!" said the lady; and the brightglow of a lofty purpose gave a spiritual expression to her majesticbeauty. "Glory to God in the highest, that He hath visited us inmercy!"

"Lady!" said the Preacher, "the day-star of truth has arisen in thyheart; follow thou its light even unto salvation. Live an harmoniouslife to the curious make and frame of thy creation; and let the beautyof thy person teach thee to beautify thy mind with holiness, theornament of the beloved of God. Remember that the King of Zion'sdaughter is all-glorious within; and if thy soul excel, thy body willonly set off the lustre of thy mind. Let not the spirit of this world, its cares and its many vanities, its fashions and discourse, prevailover the civility of thy nature. Remember that sin brought the firstcoat, and thou wilt have little reason to be proud of dress or theadorning of thy body. Seek rather the enduring ornament of a meek andquiet spirit, the beauty and the purity of the altar of God's temple, rather than the decoration of its outward walls. For, as the Spartanmonarch said of old to his daughter, when he restrained her from wearingthe rich dresses of Sicily, 'Thou wilt seem more lovely to me withoutthem, ' so shalt thou seem, in thy lowliness and humility, more lovely inthe sight of Heaven and in the eyes of the pure of earth. Oh, preservein their freshness thy present feelings, wait in humble resignation andin patience, even if it be all thy days, for the manifestations of Himwho 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 needsdepart, for I have much work before me. God's peace be with you; andthat love be around you, which has been to me as the green pasture andthe still water, the shadow in a weary land. "

And the stranger went his way; but the lady and her lover, in all theirafter life, and amidst the trials and persecutions which they werecalled to suffer in the cause of truth, remembered with joy andgratitude the instructions of the pure-hearted and eloquent WilliamPenn. 

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 storyof a man who went to sea, leaving behind a sweet young wife and littledaughter. He was cast away on a desert island, where he remainedseveral 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 oldplaymate, a good man, rich and honored, and with whom she was livinghappily. 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 Englandneighborhood, 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 canassure my readers that in its main particulars it is a true tale. 

One bright summer morning, not more than fourscore years ago, DavidMatson, with his young wife and his two healthy, barefooted boys, stoodon the bank of the river near their dwelling. They were waiting forPelatiah Curtis to come round the point with his wherry, and take thehusband and father to the port, a few miles below. The Lively Turtlewas about to sail on a voyage to Spain, and David was to go in her asmate. They stood there in the level morning sunshine talkingcheerfully; but had you been near enough, you could have seen tears inAnna Matson's blue eyes, for she loved her husband and knew there wasalways danger on the sea. And David's bluff, cheery voice trembled alittle now and then, for the honest sailor loved his snug home on theMerrimac, with the dear wife and her pretty boys. But presently thewherry came alongside, and David was just stepping into it, when heturned back to kiss his wife and children once more. 

"In with you, man, " said Pelatiah Curtis. "There is no time for kissingand such fooleries when the tide serves. "

And so they parted. Anna and the boys went back to their home, andDavid to the Port, whence he sailed off in the Lively Turtle. Andmonths passed, autumn followed summer, and winter the autumn, and thenspring came, and anon it was summer on the river-side, and he did notcome back. And another year passed, and then the old sailors andfishermen shook their heads solemnly, and, said that the Lively Turtlewas a lost ship, and would never come back to port. And poor Anna hadher bombazine gown dyed black, and her straw bonnet trimmed in mourningribbons, 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, andMogadore and Sallee, on the Barbary coast, had been for a long time inthe habit of fitting out galleys and armed boats to seize upon themerchant vessels of Christian nations, and make slaves of their crewsand passengers, just as men calling themselves Christians in Americawere sending vessels to Africa to catch black slaves for theirplantations. The Lively Turtle fell into the hands of one of these sea-robbers, and the crew were taken to Algiers, and sold in the marketplace as slaves, poor David Matson among the rest. 

When a boy he had learned the trade of ship-carpenter with his father onthe 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 histhree loaves of bread, and when his clothing was worn out, its place wassupplied by the coarse cloth of wool and camel's hair woven by theBerber women. Three hours before sunset he was released from work, andFriday, which is the Mohammedan Sabhath, was a day of entire rest. Oncea year, at the season called Ramadan, he was left at leisure for a wholeweek. So time went on, --days, weeks, months, and years. His dark hairbecame gray. He still dreamed of his old home on the Merrimac, and ofhis good Anna and the boys. He wondered whether they yet lived, whatthey thought of him, and what they were doing. The hope of ever seeingthem again grew fainter and fainter, and at last nearly died out; and heresigned himself to his fate as a slave for life. 

But one day a handsome middle-aged gentleman, in the dress of one of hisown countrymen, attended by a great officer of the Dey, entered theship-yard, and called up before him the American captives. The strangerwas none other than Joel Barlow, Commissioner of the United States toprocure the liberation of slaves belonging to that government. He tookthe 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, whileothers, with David Matson among them, knelt down on the chips, andthanked God for the great deliverance. 

"This is a very affecting scene, " said the commissioner, wiping hiseyes. "I must keep the impression of it for my 'Columbiad';" anddrawing out his tablet, he proceeded to write on the spot an apostropheto Freedom, which afterwards found a place in his great epic. 

David Matson had saved a little money during his captivity by odd jobsand work on holidays. He got a passage to Malaga, where he bought anice shawl for his wife and a watch for each of his boys. He then wentto the quay, where an American ship was lying just ready to sail forBoston. 

Almost the first man he saw on board was Pelatiah Curtis, who had rowedhim down to the port seven years before. He found that his old neighbordid not know him, so changed was he with his long beard and Moorishdress, whereupon, without telling his name, he began to put questionsabout 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 amDavid 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 sheis mine, and I am not the man to give her up. "

"God is great!" said poor David Matson, unconsciously repeating thefamiliar words of Moslem submission. "His will be done. I loved her, but I shall never see her again. Give these, with my blessing, to thegood woman and the boys, " and he handed over, with a sigh, the littlebundle containing the gifts for his wife and children. 

He shook hands with his rival. "Pelatiah, " he said, looking back as heleft the ship, "be kind to Anna and my boys. "

"Ay, ay, sir!" responded the sailor in a careless tone. He watched thepoor man passing slowly up the narrow street until out of sight. "It'sa hard case for old David, " he said, helping himself to a fresh quid oftobacco, "but I 'm glad I 've seen the last of him. "

When Pelatiah Curtis reached home he told Anna the story of her husbandand laid his gifts in her lap. She did not shriek nor faint, for shewas a healthy woman with strong nerves; but she stole away by herselfand wept bitterly. She lived many years after, but could never bepersuaded to wear the pretty shawl which the husband of her youth hadsent as his farewell gift. There is, however, a tradition that, inaccordance with her dying wish, it was wrapped about her poor oldshoulders in the coffin, and buried with her. 

The little old bull's-eye watch, which is still in the possession of oneof 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 beenbuilt about the time that the Prince of, Orange drove out James theSecond) nestled under a long range of hills which stretched off to thewest. It was surrounded by woods in all directions save to thesoutheast, where a break in the leafy wall revealed a vista of low greenmeadows, picturesque with wooded islands and jutting capes of upland. Through these, a small brook, noisy enough as it foamed, rippled, andlaughed down its rocky falls by our gardenside, wound, silently andscarcely 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 gristmills, the clack of which we could hear in still days across theintervening woodlands, found its way to the great river, and the rivertook it up and bore it down to the great sea. 

I have not much reason for speaking well of these meadows, or ratherbogs, for they were wet most of the year; but in the early days theywere highly prized by the settlers, as they furnished natural mowingbefore the uplands could be cleared of wood and stones and laid down tograss. There is a tradition that the hay-harvesters of two adjoiningtowns quarrelled about a boundary question, and fought a hard battle onesummer morning in that old time, not altogether bloodless, but by nomeans as fatal as the fight between the rival Highland clans, describedby 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 inthe black mire, raking the sharp sickle-edged grass which we used tofeed out to the young cattle in midwinter when the bitter cold gave themappetite 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 totouch with bare feet. There were great black snakes, too, in the ledgesof the neighboring knolls; and on one occasion in early spring I foundmyself in the midst of a score at least of them, --holding their wickedmeeting of a Sabbath morning on the margin of a deep spring in themeadows. One glimpse at their fierce shining beads in the sunshine, asthey roused themselves at my approach, was sufficient to send me at fullspeed towards the nearest upland. The snakes, equally scared, fled inthe same direction; and, looking back, I saw the dark monsters followingclose at my heels, terrible as the Black Horse rebel regiment at BullRun. I had, happily, sense enough left to step aside and let the uglytroop glide into the bushes. 

Nevertheless, the meadows had their redeeming points. In springmornings the blackbirds and bobolinks made them musical with songs; andin the evenings great bullfrogs croaked and clamored; and on summernights we loved to watch the white wreaths of fog rising and drifting inthe moonlight like troops of ghosts, with the fireflies throwing up everand anon signals of their coming. But the Brook was far moreattractive, for it had sheltered bathing-places, clear and white sanded, and weedy stretches, where the shy pickerel loved to linger, and deeppools, where the stupid sucker stirred the black mud with his fins. Ihad followed it all the way from its birthplace among the pleasant NewHampshire hills, through the sunshine of broad, open meadows, and underthe shadow of thick woods. It was, for the most part, a sober, quietlittle river; but at intervals it broke into a low, rippling laugh overrocks and trunks of fallen trees. There had, so tradition said, oncebeen 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 ghostwas once seen bobbing for eels under Country Bridge. It ground our cornand rye for us, at its two grist-mills; and we drove our sheep to it fortheir spring washing, an anniversary which was looked forward to withintense 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 findthe earliest and the latest wild flowers, from the pale blue, three-lobed hepatica, and small, delicate wood-anemone, to the yellow bloom ofthe witch-hazel burning in the leafless October woods. 

Yet, after all, I think the chief attraction of the Brook to my brotherand myself was the fine fishing it afforded us. Our bachelor uncle wholived with us (there has always been one of that unfortunate class inevery generation of our family) was a quiet, genial man, much given tohunting and fishing; and it was one of the great pleasures of our younglife to accompany him on his expeditions to Great Hill, Brandy-browWoods, the Pond, and, best of all, to the Country Brook. We were quitewilling to work hard in the cornfield or the haying-lot to finish thenecessary day's labor in season for an afternoon stroll through thewoods and along the brookside. I remember my first fishing excursion asif it were but yesterday. I have been happy many times in my life, butnever more intensely so than when I received that first fishing-polefrom my uncle's hand, and trudged off with him through the woods andmeadows. It was a still sweet day of early summer; the long afternoonshadows of the trees lay cool across our path; the leaves seemedgreener, the flowers brighter, the birds merrier, than ever before. My uncle, who knew by long experience where were the best haunts ofpickerel, considerately placed me at the most favorable point. I threwout my line as I had so often seen others, and waited anxiously for abite, moving the bait in rapid jerks on the surface of the water inimitation of the leap of a frog. Nothing came of it. "Try again, " saidmy uncle. Suddenly the bait sank out of sight. "Now for it, " thoughtI; "here is a fish at last. " I made a strong pull, and brought up atangle 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 oncemore, " he said. "We fishermen must have patience. "

Suddenly something tugged at my line and swept off with it into deepwater. Jerking it up, I saw a fine pickerel wriggling in the sun. "Uncle!" I cried, looking back in uncontrollable excitement, "I've got afish!" "Not yet, " said my uncle. As he spoke there was a plash in thewater; I caught the arrowy gleam of a scared fish shooting into themiddle of the stream; my hook hung empty from the line. I had lost myprize. 

We are apt to speak of the sorrows of childhood as trifles in comparisonwith those of grown-up people; but we may depend upon it the young folksdon'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 isbroken, 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 thenearest hassock, and for a time refused to be comforted, even by myuncle's assurance that there were more fish in the brook. He refittedmy bait, and, putting the pole again in my hands, told me to try my luckonce more. 

"But remember, boy, " he said, with his shrewd smile, "never brag ofcatching a fish until he is on dry ground. I've seen older folks doingthat in more ways than one, and so making fools of themselves. It 's nouse to boast of anything until it 's done, nor then either, for itspeaks 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 toanticipate the credit which belongs only to actual achievement, I callto mind that scene by the brookside, and the wise caution of my uncle inthat particular instance takes the form of a proverb of universalapplication: "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 noindifference to the movements of that capricious old gentleman known asthe clerk of the weather. I cannot conceal my interest in the behaviorof that patriarchal bird whose wooden similitude gyrates on the churchspire. Winter proper is well enough. Let the thermometer go to zero ifit will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are frozen andunable to flap their stiff wings. Sounds of bells in the keen air, clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of fair moccasined feeton glittering ice pavements; bright eyes glancing above the upliftedmuff like a sultana's behind the folds of her _yashmac_; schoolboyscoasting down street like mad Greenlanders; the cold brilliance ofoblique sunbeams flashing back from wide surfaces of glittering snow orblazing upon ice jewelry of tree and roof. There is nothing in all thisto complain of. A storm of summer has its redeeming sublimities, --itsslow, upheaving mountains of cloud glooming in the western horizon likenew-created volcanoes, veined with fire, shattered by explodingthunders. Even the wild gales of the equinox have their varieties, --sounds of wind-shaken woods and waters, creak and clatter of sign andcasement, hurricane puffs and down-rushing rain-spouts. But this dull, dark autumn day of thaw and rain, when the very clouds seem toospiritless and languid to storm outright or take themselves out of theway of fair weather; wet beneath and above; reminding one of thatrayless atmosphere of Dante's Third Circle, where the infernalPriessnitz 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 theefficacy of a Thompsonian steam-box on a grand scale; no sounds save theheavy plash of muddy feet on the pavements; the monotonous melancholydrip from trees and roofs; the distressful gurgling of waterducts, swallowing the dirty amalgam of the gutters; a dim, leaden-coloredhorizon of only a few yards in diameter, shutting down about one, beyondwhich nothing is visible save in faint line or dark projection; theghost of a church spire or the eidolon of a chimney-pot. He who canextract pleasurable emotions from the alembic of such a day has a trickof alchemy with which I am wholly unacquainted. 

Hark! a rap at my door. Welcome anybody just now. One gains nothing byattempting to shut out the sprites of the weather. They come in at thekeyhole; they peer through the dripping panes; they insinuate themselvesthrough the crevices of the casement, or plump down chimney astride ofthe rain-drops. 

I rise and throw open the door. A tall, shambling, loose-jointedfigure; a pinched, shrewd face, sun-browned and wind-dried; small, quick-winking black eyes. There he stands, the water dripping from hispulpy 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 readwhat purports to be a melancholy account of shipwreck and disaster, tothe particular detriment, loss, and damnification of one Pietro Frugoni, who is, in consequence, sorely in want of the alms of all charitableChristian persons, and who is, in short, the bearer of this veraciousdocument, duly certified and indorsed by an Italian consul in one of ourAtlantic cities, of a high-sounding, but to Yankee organsunpronounceable name. 

Here commences a struggle. Every man, the Mohammedans tell us, has twoattendant angels, --the good one on his right shoulder, the bad on hisleft. "Give, " says Benevolence, as with some difficulty I fish up asmall coin from the depths of my pocket. "Not a cent, " says selfishPrudence; and I drop it from my fingers. "Think, " says the good angel, "of the poor stranger in a strange land, just escaped from the terrorsof the sea-storm, in which his little property has perished, thrownhalf-naked and helpless on our shores, ignorant of our language, andunable to find employment suited to his capacity. " "A vile impostor!"replies the lefthand sentinel. "His paper, purchased from one of thoseready-writers in New York who manufacture beggar-credentials at the lowprice of one dollar per copy, with earthquakes, fires, or shipwrecks, tosuit 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 theebefore. Si, signor, that face of thine has looked at me over a dirtywhite neckcloth, with the corners of that cunning mouth drawn downwards, and those small eyes turned up in sanctimonious gravity, while thou wastoffering to a crowd of halfgrown boys an extemporaneous exhortation inthe capacity of a travelling preacher. Have I not seen it peering outfrom under a blanket, as that of a poor Penobscot Indian, who had lostthe use of his hands while trapping on the Madawaska? Is it not theface of the forlorn father of six small children, whom the "marcurydoctors" 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 toreceive my poor gift? The same, under all disguises, --Stephen Leathers, of Barrington, --him, and none other! Let me conjure him into his ownlikeness:--

"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 himselfunderstood any more than a wild goose. I thought I 'd just start himfor'ard a little. It seemed a marcy to do it. "

Well and shiftily answered, thou ragged Proteus. One cannot be angrywith such a fellow. I will just inquire into the present state of hisGospel 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. Buthe evidently has no'wish to enter into idle conversation. Intent uponhis benevolent errand, he is already clattering down stairs. Involuntarily I glance out of the window just in season to catch asingle 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 gowith him!" He has broken in upon the sombre train of my thoughts andcalled up before me pleasant and grateful recollections. The old farm-house nestling in its valley; hills stretching off to the south andgreen meadows to the east; the small stream which came noisily down itsravine, washing the old garden-wall and softly lapping on fallen stonesand mossy roots of beeches and hemlocks; the tall sentinel poplars atthe gateway; the oak-forest, sweeping unbroken to the northern horizon;the grass-grown carriage-path, with its rude and crazy bridge, --the dearold landscape of my boyhood lies outstretched before me like adaguerreotype from that picture within which I have borne with me in allmy wanderings. I am a boy again, once more conscious of the feeling, half terror, half exultation, with which I used to announce the approachof this very vagabond and his "kindred after the flesh. "

The advent of wandering beggars, or "old stragglers, " as we were wontto call them, was an event of no ordinary interest in the generallymonotonous quietude of our farm-life. Many of them were well known;they had their periodical revolutions and transits; we could calculatethem like eclipses or new moons. Some were sturdy knaves, fat andsaucy; 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, standingthere in their gray wretchedness with a look of heartbreak andforlornness which was never without its effect on our juvenilesensibilities. At times, however, we experienced a slight revulsion offeeling when even these humblest children of sorrow somewhat petulantlyrejected our proffered bread and cheese, and demanded instead a glass ofcider. Whatever the temperance society might in such cases have done, it was not in our hearts to refuse the poor creatures a draught of theirfavorite beverage; and was n't it a satisfaction to see their sad, melancholy faces light up as we handed them the full pitcher, and, onreceiving it back empty from their brown, wrinkled hands, to hear them, half breathless from their long, delicious draught, thanking us for thefavor, as "dear, good children!" Not unfrequently these wandering testsof our benevolence made their appearance in interesting groups of man, woman, and child, picturesque in their squalidness, and manifesting amaudlin affection which would have done honor to the revellers atPoosie-Nansie's, immortal in the cantata of Burns. I remember some whowere evidently the victims of monomania, --haunted and hunted by somedark thought, --possessed by a fixed idea. One, a black-eyed, wild-haired woman, with a whole tragedy of sin, shame, and suffering writtenin her countenance, used often to visit us, warm herself by our winterfire, and supply herself with a stock of cakes and cold meat; but wasnever known to answer a question or to ask one. She never smiled; thecold, 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 uponthe "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 slowway up to our door--used to gather herbs by the wayside and call himselfdoctor. He was bearded like a he goat and used to counterfeit lameness, yet, when he supposed himself alone, would travel on lustily as ifwalking for a wager. At length, as if in punishment of his deceit, hemet with an accident in his rambles and became lame in earnest, hobblingever after with difficulty on his gnarled crutches. Another used to gostooping, like Bunyan's pilgrim, under a pack made of an old bed-sacking, stuffed out into most plethoric dimensions, tottering on a pairof small, meagre legs, and peering out with his wild, hairy face fromunder his burden like a big-bodied spider. That "man with the pack"always inspired me with awe and reverence. Huge, almost sublime, in itstense rotundity, the father of all packs, never laid aside and neveropened, what might there not be within it? With what flesh-creepingcuriosity I used to walk round about it at a safe distance, halfexpecting to see its striped covering stirred by the motions of amysterious life, or that some evil monster would leap out of it, likerobbers from Ali Baba's jars or armed men from the Trojan horse!

There was another class of peripatetic philosophers--half pedler, halfmendicant--who were in the habit of visiting us. One we recollect, alame, unshaven, sinister-eyed, unwholesome fellow, with his basket ofold newspapers and pamphlets, and his tattered blue umbrella, servingrather as a walking staff than as a protection from the rain. He toldus on one occasion, in answer to our inquiring into the cause of hislameness, that when a young man he was employed on the farm of the chiefmagistrate of a neighboring State; where, as his ill-luck would have it, the governor's handsome daughter fell in love with him. He was caughtone day in the young lady's room by her father; whereupon the irascibleold gentleman pitched him unceremoniously out of the window, laming himfor life, on the brick pavement below, like Vulcan on the rocks ofLemnos. As for the lady, he assured us "she took on dreadfully aboutit. " "Did she die?" we inquired anxiously. There was a cun-ingtwinkle 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 acall from Jonathan Plummer, maker of verses, pedler and poet, physicianand parson, --a Yankee troubadour, --first and last minstrel of the valleyof the Merrimac, encircled, to my wondering young eyes, with the verynimbus of immortality. He brought with him pins, needles, tape, andcotton-thread for my mother; jack-knives, razors, and soap for myfather; and verses of his own composing, coarsely printed andillustrated with rude wood-cuts, for the delectation of the youngerbranches of the family. No lovesick youth could drown himself, nodeserted maiden bewail the moon, no rogue mount the gallows, withoutfitting memorial in Plummer's verses. Earthquakes, fires, fevers, andshipwrecks he regarded as personal favors from Providence, furnishingthe raw material of song and ballad. Welcome to us in our countryseclusion as Autolycus to the clown in Winter's Tale, we listened withinfinite satisfaction to his readings of his own verses, or to his readyimprovisation upon some domestic incident or topic suggested by hisauditors. When once fairly over the difficulties at the outset of a newsubject, his rhymes flowed freely, "as if he had eaten ballads and allmen's ears grew to his tunes. " His productions answered, as nearly as Ican remember, to Shakespeare's description of a proper ballad, --"dolefulmatter merrily set down, or a very pleasant theme sung lamentably. " Hewas scrupulously conscientious, devout, inclined to theologicaldisquisitions, and withal mighty in Scripture. He was thoroughlyindependent; flattered nobody, cared for nobody, trusted nobody. Wheninvited to sit down at our dinner-table, he invariably took theprecaution to place his basket of valuables between his legs for safekeeping. "Never mind thy basket, Jonathan, " said my father; "wesha'n't steal thy verses. "--"I'm not sure of that, " returned thesuspicious guest. "It is written, 'Trust ye not in any brother. '"

Thou too, O Parson B------, with thy pale student's brow and rubicundnose, with thy rusty and tattered black coat overswept by white flowinglocks, with thy professional white neckcloth scrupulously preserved wheneven a shirt to thy back was problematical, --art by no means to beoverlooked in the muster-roll of vagrant gentlemen possessing the entreeof our farm-house. Well do we remember with what grave and dignifiedcourtesy he used to step over its threshold, saluting its inmates withthe same air of gracious condescension and patronage with which inbetter days he had delighted the hearts of his parishioners. Poor oldman! He had once been the admired and almost worshipped minister of thelargest church in the town where he afterwards found support in thewinter 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 onlysober 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 ofsound words, and the weakness of the flesh abated nothing of the rigorof his stringent theology. He had been a favorite pupil of the learnedand astute Emmons, and was to the last a sturdy defender of the peculiardogmas of his school. The last time we saw him he was holding a meetingin our district school-house, with a vagabond pedler for deacon andtravelling companion. The tie which united the ill-assorted couple wasdoubtless 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 ofEcclesiastes, furnishing in himself its fitting illustration. The evildays had come; the keepers of the house trembled; the windows of lifewere darkened. A few months later the silver cord was loosened, thegolden bowl was broken, and between the poor old man and the temptationswhich beset him fell the thick curtains of the grave. 

One day we had a call from a "pawky auld carle" of a wanderingScotchman. 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 gaveus Bonny Doon, Highland Mary, and Auld Lang Syne. He had a rich, fullvoice, and entered heartily into the spirit of his lyrics. I have sincelistened to the same melodies from the lips of Dempster, than whom theScottish bard has had no sweeter or truer interpreter; but the skilfulperformance of the artist lacked the novel charm of the gaberlunzie'ssinging in the old farmhouse kitchen. Another wanderer made usacquainted with the humorous old ballad of "Our gude man cam hame ate'en. " He applied for supper and lodging, and the next morning was setat work splitting stones in the pasture. While thus engaged the villagedoctor came riding along the highway on his fine, spirited horse, andstopped 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 theold 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 thebarn or other outbuildings where they had passed the night. I was oncesent to the barn to fodder the cattle late in the evening, and, climbinginto the mow to pitch down hay for that purpose, I was startled by thesudden apparition of a man rising up before me, just discernible in thedim moonlight streaming through the seams of the boards. I made a rapidretreat down the ladder; and was only reassured by hearing the object ofmy terror calling after me, and recognizing his voice as that of aharmless old pilgrim whom I had known before. Our farm-house wassituated in a lonely valley, half surrounded with woods, with noneighbors in sight. One dark, cloudy night, when our parents chanced tobe absent, we were sitting with our aged grandmother in the fading lightof the kitchen-fire, working ourselves into a very satisfactory state ofexcitement and terror by recounting to each other all the dismal storieswe could remember of ghosts, witches, haunted houses and robbers, whenwe were suddenly startled by a loud rap at the door. A stripling offourteen, I was very naturally regarded as the head of the household;so, --with many misgivings, I advanced to the door, which I slowlyopened, holding the candle tremulously above my head and peering outinto the darkness. The feeble glimmer played upon the apparition of agigantic horseman, mounted on a steed of a size worthy of such a rider--colossal, motionless, like images cut out of the solid night. Thestrange visitant gruffly saluted me; and, after making severalineffectual efforts to urge his horse in at the door, dismounted andfollowed me into the room, evidently enjoying the terror which his hugepresence excited. Announcing himself as the great Indian doctor, hedrew 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 intoxicatingliquors; and, on being assured that we had none to give him, he grewangry, threatened to swallow my younger brother alive, and, seizing meby the hair of my head as the angel did the prophet at Babylon, led meabout from room to room. After an ineffectual search, in the course ofwhich he mistook a jug of oil for one of brandy, and, contrary to myexplanations and remonstrances, insisted upon swallowing a portion ofits contents, he released me, fell to crying and sobbing, and confessedthat he was so drunk already that his horse was ashamed of him. Afterbemoaning and pitying himself to his satisfaction he wiped his eyes, andsat down by the side of my grandmother, giving her to understand that hewas very much pleased with her appearance; adding, that if agreeable toher, he should like the privilege of paying his addresses to her. Whilevainly endeavoring to make the excellent old lady comprehend his veryflattering proposition, he was interrupted by the return of my father, who, at once understanding the matter, turned him out of doors withoutceremony. 

On one occasion, a few years ago, on my return from the field atevening, I was told that a foreigner had asked for lodgings during thenight, but that, influenced by his dark, repulsive appearance, my motherhad very reluctantly refused his request. I found her by no meanssatisfied with her decision. "What if a son of mine was in a strangeland?" she inquired, self-reproachfully. Greatly to her relief, Ivolunteered to go in pursuit of the wanderer, and, taking a cross-pathover the fields, soon overtook him. He had just been rejected at thehouse of our nearest neighbor, and was standing in a state of dubiousperplexity in the street. His looks quite justified my mother'ssuspicions. He was an olive-complexioned, black-bearded Italian, withan eye like a live coal, such a face as perchance looks out on thetraveller in the passes of the Abruzzi, --one of those bandit visageswhich Salvator has painted. With some difficulty I gave him tounderstand my errand, when he overwhelmed me with thanks, and joyfullyfollowed 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 hislife and misfortunes, amused us with descriptions of the grape-gatherings and festivals of his sunny clime, edified my mother with arecipe for making bread of chestnuts; and in the morning, when, afterbreakfast, his dark, sullen face lighted up and his fierce eye moistenedwith grateful emotion as in his own silvery Tuscan accent he poured outhis thanks, we marvelled at the fears which had so nearly closed ourdoor against him; and, as he departed, we all felt that he had left withus the blessing of the poor. 

It was not often that, as in the above instance, my mother's prudencegot the better of her charity. The regular "old stragglers" regardedher as an unfailing friend; and the sight of her plain cap was to theman assurance of forthcoming creature-comforts. There was indeed a tribeof lazy strollers, having their place of rendezvous in the town ofBarrington, New Hampshire, whose low vices had placed them beyond eventhe pale of her benevolence. They were not unconscious of their evilreputation; and experience had taught them the necessity of concealing, under well-contrived disguises, their true character. They came to usin all shapes and with all appearances save the true one, with mostmiserable stories of mishap and sickness and all "the ills which fleshis heir to. " It was particularly vexatious to discover, when too late, that our sympathies and charities had been expended upon such gracelessvagabonds as the "Barrington beggars. " An old withered hag, known bythe appellation of Hopping Pat, --the wise woman of her tribe, --was inthe habit of visiting us, with her hopeful grandson, who had "a gift forpreaching" as well as for many other things not exactly compatible withholy orders. He sometimes brought with him a tame crow, a shrewd, knavish-looking bird, who, when in the humor for it, could talk likeBarnaby 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, "--afact going far to confirm the opinions of the Bishop of Exeter and thePuseyites generally, that there can be no priest without tithes andsurplice. 

These people have for several generations lived distinct from the greatmass of the community, like the gypsies of Europe, whom in many respectsthey closely resemble. They have the same settled aversion to labor andthe same disposition to avail themselves of the fruits of the industryof others. They love a wild, out-of-door life, sing songs, tellfortunes, and have an instinctive hatred of "missionaries and coldwater. " It has been said--I know not upon what grounds--that theirancestors were indeed a veritable importation of English gypsyhood; butif so, they have undoubtedly lost a good deal of the picturesque charmof its unhoused and free condition. I very much fear that my friendMary Russell Mitford, --sweetest of England's rural painters, --who has apoet's eye for the fine points in gypsy character, would scarcely allowtheir 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, nophase of our common humanity is altogether unworthy of investigation. Acting upon this belief two or three summers ago, when making, incompany with my sister, a little excursion into the hill-country of NewHampshire, I turned my horse's head towards Barrington for the purposeof seeing these semi-civilized strollers in their own home, andreturning, once for all, their numerous visits. Taking leave of ourhospitable cousins in old Lee with about as much solemnity as we maysuppose Major Laing parted with his friends when he set out in search ofdesert-girdled Timbuctoo, we drove several miles over a rough road, passed the Devil's Den unmolested, crossed a fretful little streamletnoisily working its way into a valley, where it turned a lonely, half-ruinous mill, and climbing a steep hill beyond, saw before us a widesandy level, skirted on the west and north by low, scraggy hills, anddotted here and there with dwarf pitch-pines. In the centre of thisdesolate region were some twenty or thirty small dwellings, groupedtogether as irregularly as a Hottentot kraal. Unfenced, unguarded, opento all comers and goers, stood that city of the beggars, --no wall orpaling between the ragged cabins to remind one of the jealousdistinctions of property. The great idea of its founders seemed visiblein its unappropriated freedom. Was not the whole round world their own?and should they haggle about boundaries and title-deeds? For them, ondistant 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 thesilent mystery of heaven and its stars. That comfortable philosophywhich modern transcendentalism has but dimly shadowed forth--that poeticagrarianism, which gives all to each and each to all--is the real lifeof this city of unwork. To each of its dingy dwellers might be notunaptly applied the language of one who, I trust, will pardon me forquoting 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 thenorth. " The wind has blown away the mists; on the gilded spire of JohnStreet 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 thestorm. In the beautiful present the past is no longer needed. Reverently and gratefully let its volume be laid aside; and when againthe shadows of the outward world fall upon the spirit, may I not lack agood angel to remind me of its solace, even if he comes in the shape ofa 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 windowon this still October air. Hurrying drum-beat, shrill fife-tones, wailing bugle-notes, and, by way of accompaniment, hurrahs from theurchins on the crowded sidewalks. Here come the citizen-soldiers, eachmartial foot beating up the mud of yesterday's storm with the slow, regular, up-and-down movement of an old-fashioned churn-dasher. Keepingtime with the feet below, some threescore of plumed heads bob solemnlybeneath me. Slant sunshine glitters on polished gun-barrels andtinselled uniform. Gravely and soberly they pass on, as if dulyimpressed with a sense of the deep responsibility of their position asself-constituted defenders of the world's last hope, --the United Statesof America, and possibly Texas. They look out with honest, citizenfaces under their leathern visors (their ferocity being mostly the workof the tailor and tinker), and, I doubt not, are at this moment asinnocent of bloodthirstiness as yonder worthy tiller of the TewksburyHills, who sits quietly in his wagon dispensing apples and turnipswithout so much as giving a glance at the procession. Probably there isnot one of them who would hesitate to divide his last tobacco-quid withhis worst enemy. Social, kind-hearted, psalm-singing, sermon-hearing, Sabhath-keeping Christians; and yet, if we look at the fact of thematter, these very men have been out the whole afternoon of thisbeautiful day, under God's holy sunshine, as busily at work as Satanhimself could wish in learning how to butcher their fellow-creatures andacquire the true scientific method of impaling a forlorn Mexican on abayonet, or of sinking a leaden missile in the brain of some unfortunateBriton, urged within its range by the double incentive of sixpence perday in his pocket and the cat-o'-nine-tails on his back!

Without intending any disparagement of my peaceable ancestry for manygenerations, I have still strong suspicions that somewhat of the oldNorman blood, something of the grins Berserker spirit, has beenbequeathed to me. How else can I account for the intense childisheagerness with which I listened to the stories of old campaigners whosometimes 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 thegarrisoned Philistines of Michmash, or with the fierce son of Nunagainst the cities of Canaan? Why was Mr. Greatheart, in Pilgrim'sProgress, my favorite character? What gave such fascination to thenarrative of the grand Homeric encounter between Christian and Apollyonin the valley? Why did I follow Ossian over Morven's battle-fields, exulting in the vulture-screams of the blind scald over his fallenenemies? Still later, why did the newspapers furnish me with subjectsfor hero-worship in the half-demented Sir Gregor McGregor, and Ypsilantiat the head of his knavish Greeks? I can account for it only in thesupposition that the mischief was inhered, --an heirloom from the oldsea-kings of the ninth century. 

Education and reflection have, indeed, since wrought a change in myfeelings. The trumpet of the Cid, or Ziska's drum even, could not nowwaken that old martial spirit. The bull-dog ferocity of a half-intoxicated Anglo-Saxon, pushing his blind way against the convergingcannon-fire from the shattered walls of Ciudad Rodrigo, commends itselfneither to my reason nor my fancy. I now regard the accounts of thebloody passage of the Bridge of Lodi, and of French cuirassiers madlytransfixing themselves upon the bayonets of Wellington's squares, withvery much the same feeling of horror and loathing which is excited by adetail of the exploits of an Indian Thug, or those of a mad Malayrunning a-muck, creese in hand, through the streets of Pulo Penang. Your Waterloo, and battles of the Nile and Baltic, --what are they, insober fact, but gladiatorial murder-games on a great scale, --humanimitations of bull-fights, at which Satan sits as grand alguazil andmaster of ceremonies? It is only when a great thought incarnates itselfin action, desperately striving to find utterance even in sabre-clashand gun-fire, or when Truth and Freedom, in their mistaken zeal anddistrustful of their own powers, put on battle-harness, that I can feelany sympathy with merely physical daring. The brawny butcher-work ofmen 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 norealization of my ideal of true courage. 

Yet I am not conscious of having lost in any degree my early admirationof heroic achievement. The feeling remains; but it has found new andbetter objects. I have learned to appreciate what Milton calls themartyr's "unresistible might of meekness, "--the calm, uncomplainingendurance of those who can bear up against persecution uncheered bysympathy or applause, and, with a full and keen appreciation of thevalue of all which they are called to sacrifice, confront danger anddeath in unselfish devotion to duty. Fox, preaching through his prison-gates or rebuking Oliver Cromwell in the midst of his soldier-courtHenry Vane beneath the axe of the headsman; Mary Dyer on the scaffold atBoston; Luther closing his speech at Worms with the sublime emphasis ofhis "Here stand I; I cannot otherwise; God help me;" William Penndefending the rights of Englishmen from the baledock of the Fleetprison; Clarkson climbing the decks of Liverpool slaveships; Howardpenetrating to infected dungeons; meek Sisters of Charity breathingcontagion in thronged hospitals, --all these, and such as these, now helpme to form the loftier ideal of Christian heroism. 

Blind Milton approaches nearly to my conception of a true hero. What apicture have we of that sublime old man, as sick, poor, blind, andabandoned of friends, he still held fast his heroic integrity, rebukingwith his unbending republicanism the treachery, cowardice, and servilityof his old associates! He had outlived the hopes and beatific visionsof his youth; he had seen the loudmouthed advocates of liberty throwingdown a nation's freedom at the feet of the shameless, debauched, andperjured Charles II. , crouching to the harlot-thronged court of thetyrant, and forswearing at once their religion and their republicanism. The executioner's axe had been busy among his friends. Vane and Hampdenslept in their bloody graves. Cromwell's ashes had been dragged fromtheir resting-place; for even in death the effeminate monarch hated andfeared the conquerer of Naseby and Marston Moor. He was left alone, inage, and penury, and blindness, oppressed with the knowledge that allwhich his free soul abhorred had returned upon his beloved country. Yetthe 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 ofwantons and the jests of buffoons regulated the measures of a governmentwhich had just ability enough to deceive, just religion enough topersecute. " But, while Milton mourned over this disastrous change, no self-reproach mingled with his sorrow. To the last he had strivenagainst the oppressor; and when confined to his narrow alley, a prisonerin his own mean dwelling, like another Prometheus on his rock, he stillturned upon him an eye of unsubdued defiance. Who, that has read hispowerful appeal to his countrymen when they were on the eve of welcomingback the tyranny and misrule which, at the expense of so much blood andtreasure had been thrown off, can ever forget it? How nobly doesLiberty speak through him! "If, " said he, "ye welcome back a monarchy, it will be the triumph of all tyrants hereafter over any people whoshall resist oppression; and their song shall then be to others, 'Howsped the rebellious English?' but to our posterity, 'How sped therebels, 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 shouldhave said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees andstones, and had none to cry to but with the prophet, 'O earth, earth, earth!' to tell the very soil itself what its perverse inhabitants aredeaf to; nay, though what I have spoken should prove (which Thou suffernot, who didst make mankind free; nor Thou next, who didst redeem usfrom being servants of sin) to be the last words of our expiringliberties. "

THE CITY OF A DAY. 

The writer, when residing in Lowell, in 1843 contributed this and thecompanion pieces to 'The Stranger' in Lowell. 

This, then, is Lowell, --a city springing up, like the enchanted palacesof the Arabian tales, as it were in a single night, stretching far andwide its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling the angleof the confluence of the Concord and the Merrimac with the sights andsounds of trade and industry. Marvellously here have art and laborwrought their modern miracles. I can scarcely realize the fact that afew years ago these rivers, now tamed and subdued to the purposes of manand charmed into slavish subjection to the wizard of mechanism, rolledunchecked towards the ocean the waters of the Winnipesaukee and therock-rimmed springs of the White Mountains, and rippled down their fallsin the wild freedom of Nature. A stranger, in view of all thiswonderful change, feels himself, as it were, thrust forward into a newcentury; he seems treading on the outer circle of the millennium ofsteam engines and cotton mills. Work is here the patron saint. Everything bears his image and superscription. Here is no place forthat respectable class of citizens called gentlemen, and their muchvilified brethren, familiarly known as loafers. Over the gateways ofthis 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 ofCharles 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 "Divinelabor, noble, ever fruitful, --the grand, sole miracle of man;" for thisis indeed a city consecrated to thrift, --dedicated, every square rod ofit, to the divinity of work; the gospel of industry preached daily andhourly from some thirty temples, each huger than the Milan Cathedral orthe Temple of Jeddo, the Mosque of St. Sophia or the Chinese pagoda of ahundred bells; its mighty sermons uttered by steam and water-power; itsmusic the everlasting jar of mechanism and the organ-swell of manywaters; scattering the cotton and woollen leaves of its evangel from thewings of steamboats and rail-cars throughout the land; its thousandpriests and its thousands of priestesses ministering around theirspinning-jenny and powerloom altars, or thronging the long, unshadedstreets in the level light of sunset. After all, it may well bequestioned whether this gospel, according to Poor Richard's Almanac, isprecisely calculated for the redemption of humanity. Labor, graduatedto man's simple wants, necessities, and unperverted tastes, is doubtlesswell; but all beyond this is weariness to flesh and spirit. Every webwhich falls from these restless looms has a history more or lessconnected with sin and suffering, beginning with slavery and endingwith overwork and premature death. 

A few years ago, while travelling in Pennsylvania, I encountered asmall, dusky-browed German of the name of Etzler. He was possessed by abelief that the world was to be restored to its paradisiacal state bythe sole agency of mechanics, and that he had himself discovered themeans of bringing about this very desirable consummation. His wholemental atmosphere was thronged with spectral enginery; wheel withinwheel; plans of hugest mechanism; Brobdignagian steam-engines; Niagarasof water-power; wind-mills with "sail-broad vans, " like those of Satanin chaos, by the proper application of which every valley was to beexalted and every hill laid low; old forests seized by their shaggy topsand uprooted; old morasses drained; the tropics made cool; the eternalices melted around the poles; the ocean itself covered with artificialislands, blossoming gardens of the blessed, rocking gently on the bosomof 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 physicalnecessities, ill-gratified desires, and natural yearnings for a betterstate, were to vanish before the millennium of mechanism. "It wouldbe, " said he, "as ridiculous then to dispute and quarrel about the meansof life as it would be now about water to drink by the side of mightyrivers, or about permission to breathe the common air. " To his mind thegreat forces of Nature took the shape of mighty and benignant spirits, sent hitherward to be the servants of man in restoring to him his lostparadise; waiting only for his word of command to apply their giantenergies to the task, but as yet struggling blindly and aimlessly, giving ever and anon gentle hints, in the way of earthquake, fire, andflood, 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 havethought of poor Etzler, and wondered whether he would admit, were hewith me, that his mechanical forces have here found their properemployment of millennium making. Grinding on, each in his iron harness, invisible, yet shaking, by his regulated and repressed power, his hugeprison-house from basement to capstone, is it true that the genii ofmechanism are really at work here, raising us, by wheel and pulley, steam and waterpower, slowly up that inclined plane from whose topstretches the broad table-land of promise?

Many of the streets of Lowell present a lively and neat aspect, and areadorned with handsome public and private buildings; but they lack onepleasant feature of older towns, --broad, spreading shade-trees. Onefeels disposed to quarrel with the characteristic utilitarianism of thefirst settlers, which swept so entirely away the green beauty of Nature. For the last few days it has been as hot here as Nebuchadnezzar'sfurnace or Monsieur Chabert's oven, the sun glaring down from a coppersky upon these naked, treeless streets, in traversing which one istempted 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 andgraceful panorama the stranger looks down upon the Judge's Cave, or thevine-hung pinnacles of West Rock, its tall spires rising white and clearabove the level greenness! or the breezy leafiness of Portland, with itswooded islands in the distance, and itself overhung with verdant beauty, rippling and waving in the same cool breeze which stirs the waters ofthe beautiful Bay of Casco! But time will remedy all this; and, whenLowell shall have numbered half the years of her sister cities, hernewly planted elms and maples, which now only cause us to contrast theirshadeless 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 acluster of fine old oaks lift their sturdy stems and green branches, inclose proximity to the crowded city, blending the cool rustle of theirleaves with the din of machinery. As I look at them in this graytwilight they seem lonely and isolated, as if wondering what has becomeof their old forest companions, and vainly endeavoring to recognize inthe thronged and dusty streets before them those old, gracefulcolonnades of maple and thick-shaded oaken vistas, stretching from riverto river, carpeted with the flowers and grasses of spring, or ankle deepwith leaves of autumn, through whose leafy canopy the sunlight melted inupon wild birds, shy deer, and red Indians. Long may these oaks remainto remind us that, if there be utility in the new, there was beauty inthe old, leafy Puseyites of Nature, calling us back to the past, but, like their Oxford brethren, calling in vain; for neither in polemics norin art can we go backward in an age whose motto is ever "Onward. "

The population of Lowell is constituted mainly of New Englanders; butthere are representatives here of almost every part of the civilizedworld. The good-humored face of the Milesian meets one at almost everyturn; the shrewdly solemn Scotchman, the transatlantic Yankee, blendingthe crafty thrift of Bryce Snailsfoot with the stern religious heroismof Cameron; the blue-eyed, fair-haired German from the towered hillswhich 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 fromthe banks of the Katzback, --the countrymen of Richter, and Goethe, andour own Follen. Here, too, are pedlers from Hamburg, and Bavaria, andPoland, with their sharp Jewish faces, and black, keen eyes. At thismoment, beneath my window are two sturdy, sunbrowned Swiss maidensgrinding music for a livelihood, rehearsing in a strange Yankee land thesimple songs of their old mountain home, reminding me, by their foreigngarb and language, of

 "Lauterbrunnen's peasant girl. "

Poor wanderers, I cannot say that I love their music; but now, as thenotes die away, and, to use the words of Dr. Holmes, "silence comes likea poultice to heal the wounded ear, " I feel grateful for theirvisitation. Away from crowded thoroughfares, from brick walls and dustyavenues, at the sight of these poor peasants I have gone in thought tothe vale of Chamouny, and seen, with Coleridge, the morning star pausingon the "bald, awful head of sovereign Blanc, " and the sun rise and setupon snowy-crested mountains, down in whose valleys the night stilllingers; and, following in the track of Byron and Rousseau, have watchedthe lengthening shadows of the hills on the beautiful waters of theGenevan lake. Blessings, then, upon these young wayfarers, for theyhave "blessed me unawares. " In an hour of sickness and lassitude theyhave wrought for me the miracle of Loretto's Chapel, and, borne me awayfrom the scenes around me and the sense of personal suffering to thatwonderful 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 morningstars 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 Orientallove of hyperbole, and too often a common dislike of cold water and ofthat gem which the fable tells us rests at the bottom of the well, theCeltic elements of their character do not readily accommodate themselvesto those of the hard, cool, self-relying Anglo-Saxon. I am free toconfess to a very thorough dislike of their religious intolerance andbigotry, but am content to wait for the change that time and theattrition of new circumstances and ideas must necessarily make in thisrespect. Meanwhile I would strive to reverence man as man, irrespectiveof his birthplace. A stranger in a strange land is always to me anobject of sympathy and interest. Amidst all his apparent gayety ofheart and national drollery and wit, the poor Irish emigrant has sadthoughts of the "ould mother of him, " sitting lonely in her solitarycabin by the bog-side; recollections of a father's blessing and asister's farewell are haunting him; a grave mound in a distantchurchyard far beyond the "wide wathers" has an eternal greenness in hismemory; for there, perhaps, lies a "darlint child" or a "swate crather"who once loved him. The new world is forgotten for the moment; blueKillarney and the Liffey sparkle before him, and Glendalough stretchesbeneath him its dark, still mirror; he sees the same evening sunshinerest upon and hallow alike with Nature's blessing the ruins of the SevenChurches of Ireland's apostolic age, the broken mound of the Druids, andthe round towers of the Phoenician sun-worshippers; pleasant andmournful recollections of his home waken within him; and the rough andseemingly careless and light-hearted laborer melts into tears. It is nolight thing to abandon one's own country and household gods. Touchingand beautiful was the injunction of the prophet of the Hebrews:

"Ye shall not oppress the stranger; for ye know the heart of thestranger, 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 NewEngland, a paragraph which has ever since haunted my memory, calling upromantic associations of wild Nature and wilder man:--

"The Sachem Wonolanset, who lived by the Groat Falls of Patucket, on theMerrimac. "

It was with this passage in my mind that I visited for the first timethe Rapids of the Merrimac, above Lowell. 

Passing up the street by the Hospital, a large and elegant mansionsurrounded by trees and shrubbery and climbing vines, I found myself, after walking a few rods farther, in full view of the Merrimac. A deepand rocky channel stretched between me and the Dracut shore, along whichrushed the shallow water, --a feeble, broken, and tortuous current, winding its way among splintered rocks, rising sharp and jagged in alldirections. Drained above the falls by the canal, it resembled somemountain streamlet of old Spain, or some Arabian wady, exhausted by ayear's drought. Higher up, the arches of the bridge spanned the quick, troubled water; and, higher still, the dam, so irregular in its outlineas to seem less a work of Art than of Nature, crossed the bed of theriver, a lakelike placidity above contrasting with the foam and murmurof the falls below. And this was all which modern improvements had leftof "the great Patucket Falls" of the olden time. The wild river hadbeen tamed; the spirit of the falls, whose hoarse voice the Indian onceheard in the dashing of the great water down the rocks, had become theslave 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 "twentygoodlie 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 theforest, following the growing murmur of the falls, until at length thebroad, swift river stretched before them, its white spray flashing inthe sun. What cared these sturdy old Puritans for the wild beauty ofthe landscape thus revealed before them? I think I see them standingthere in the golden light of a closing October day, with their sombrebrown doublets and slouched hats, and their heavy matchlocks, --such menas Ireton fronted death with on the battle-field of Naseby, or those whostalked with Cromwell over the broken wall of Drogheda, smiting, "in thename of the Lord, " old and young, "both maid, and little children. "Methinks I see the sunset light flooding the river valley, the westernhills stretching to the horizon, overhung with trees gorgeous andglowing with the tints of autumn, --a mighty flower-garden, blossomingunder the spell of the enchanter, Frost; the rushing river, with itsgraceful water-curves and white foam; and a steady murmur, low, deepvoices of water, the softest, sweetest sound of Nature, blends with thesigh of the south wind in the pine-tops. But these hard-featured saintsof the New Canaan "care for none of these things. " The stout heartswhich beat under their leathern doublets are proof against the sweetinfluences of Nature. They see only "a great and howling wilderness, where be many Indians, but where fish may be taken, and where be meadowsfor ye subsistence of cattle, " and which, on the whole, "is acomfortable place to accommodate a company of God's people upon, whomay, with God's blessing, do good in that place for both church andstate. " (Vide petition to the General Court, 1653. )

In reading the journals and narratives of the early settlers of NewEngland nothing is more remarkable than the entire silence of the worthywriters in respect to the natural beauty or grandeur of the scenery amidwhich their lot was cast. They designated the grand and gloriousforest, broken by lakes and crossed by great rivers, intersected by athousand streams more beautiful than those which the Old World has givento song and romance, as "a desert and frightful wilderness. " The wildlypicturesque Indian, darting his birch canoe down the Falls of theAmoskeag 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; yetthey seem to have been utterly devoid of that poetic feeling or fancywhose subtle alchemy detects the beautiful in the familiar. Their veryhymns 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, whichreminded them of the days of the roistering cavaliers and bedizenedbeauties of the court of "the man Charles, " whose head had fallenbeneath the sword of Puritan justice. Hard, harsh, unlovely, yet withmany 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 noblestof historical epics on the rough soil of New England. They lived atruer poetry than Homer or Virgil wrote. 

The Patuckets, once a powerful native tribe, had their principalsettlements around the falls at the time of the visit of the white menof Concord and Woburn in 1652. Gookin, the Indian historian, statesthat this tribe was almost wholly destroyed by the great pestilence of1612. In 1674 they had but two hundred and fifty males in the wholetribe. Their chief sachem lived opposite the falls; and it was in hiswigwam that the historian, in company with John Eliot, the Indianmissionary, held a "meeting for worshippe on ye 5th of May, 1676, " whereMr. Eliot preached from "ye twenty-second of Matthew. "

The white visitants from Concord and Woburn, pleased with the appearanceof the place and the prospect it afforded for planting and fishing, petitioned the General Court for a grant of the entire tract of land nowembraced in the limits of Lowell and Chelmsford. They made no accountwhatever of the rights of the poor Patuckets; but, considering it"a comfortable place to accommodate God's people upon, " were doubtlessprepared to deal with the heathen inhabitants as Joshua the son of Nundid with the Jebusites and Perizzites, the Hivites and the Hittites, ofold. The Indians, however, found a friend in the apostle Eliot, whopresented a petition in their behalf that the lands lying around thePatucket and Wamesit Falls should be appropriated exclusively for theirbenefit and use. The Court granted the petition of the whites, with theexception of the tract in the angle of the two rivers on which thePatuckets were settled. The Indian title to this tract was not finallyextinguished until 1726, when the beautiful name of Wamesit was lost inthat of Chelmsford, and the last of the Patuckets turned his back uponthe graves of his fathers and sought a new home among the strangeIndians of the North. 

But what has all this to do with the falls? When the rail-cars camethundering through his lake country, Wordsworth attempted to exorcisethem by a sonnet; and, were I not a very decided Yankee, I mightpossibly follow his example, and utter in this connection my protestagainst the desecration of Patucket Falls, and battle with objurgatorystanzas these dams and mills, as Balmawapple shot off his horse-pistolat Stirling Castle. Rocks and trees, rapids, cascades, and other water-works are doubtless all very well; but on the whole, considering ourseven months of frost, are not cotton shirts and woollen coats stillbetter? As for the spirits of the river, the Merrimac Naiads, orwhatever may be their name in Indian vocabulary, they have no goodreason for complaint; inasmuch as Nature, in marking and scooping outthe channel of their stream, seems to have had an eye to the usefulrather than the picturesque. After a few preliminary antics andyouthful vagaries up among the White Hills, the Merrimac comes down tothe seaboard, a clear, cheerful, hard-working Yankee river. Itsnumerous falls and rapids are such as seem to invite the engineer'slevel rather than the pencil of the tourist; and the mason who piles upthe huge brick fabrics at their feet is seldom, I suspect, troubled withsentimental remorse or poetical misgivings. Staid and matter of fact asthe Merrimac is, it has, nevertheless, certain capricious and eccentrictributaries; the Powow, for instance, with its eighty feet fall in a fewrods, and that wild, Indian-haunted Spicket, taking its wellnighperpendicular leap of thirty feet, within sight of the village meeting-house, kicking up its Pagan heels, Sundays and all, in sheer contempt ofPuritan tithing-men. This latter waterfall is now somewhat modified bythe hand of Art, but is still, as Professor Hitchcock's "ScenographicalGeology" says of it, "an object of no little interest. " My friend T. , favorably known as the translator of "Undine" and as a writer of fineand delicate imagination, visited Spicket Falls before the sound of ahammer or the click of a trowel had been heard beside them. His journalof "A Day on the Merrimac" gives a pleasing and vivid description oftheir original appearance as viewed through the telescope of a poeticfancy. The readers of "Undine" will thank me for a passage or two fromthis sketch:--

"The sound of the waters swells more deeply. Something supernatural intheir confused murmur; it makes me better understand and sympathize withthe 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 theair. See that spray and vapor rolling up the evergreen on my left Thetwo side precipices, one hundred feet apart and excluding objects ofinferior moment, darken and concentrate the view. The waters betweenpour over the right-hand and left-hand summit, rushing down and unitingamong 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, --nothingbut the merest miniature; and yet they assist me in forming someconception of that glorious expanse. 

"A fragment of an oak, struck off by lightning, struggles with thecurrent midway down; while the shattered trunk frowns above thedesolation, majestic in ruin. This is near the southern cliff. Farthernorth a crag rises out of the stream, its upper surface covered withgreen clover of the most vivid freshness. Not only all night, but allday, has the dew lain upon its purity. With my eye attaining theuppermost margin, where the waters shoot over, I look away into thewestern sky, and discern there (what you least expect) a cow chewing hercud with admirable composure, and higher up several sheep and lambsbrowsing celestial buds. They stand on the eminence that forms thebackground of my present view. The illusion is extremely picturesque, --such as Allston himself would despair of producing. 'Who can paint likeNature'?"

To a population like that of Lowell, the weekly respite from monotonousin-door toil afforded by the first day of the week is particularlygrateful. Sabbath comes to the weary and overworked operativeemphatically as a day of rest. It opens upon him somewhat as it didupon 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 theassurance of physical comfort and freedom. It is something to be ableto doze out the morning from daybreak to breakfast in that luxuriousstate between sleeping and waking in which the mind eddies slowly andpeacefully round and round instead of rushing onward, --the future ablank, the past annihilated, the present but a dim consciousness ofpleasurable existence. Then, too, the satisfaction is by no meansinconsiderable of throwing aside the worn and soiled habiliments oflabor and appearing in neat and comfortable attire. The moral influenceof dress has not been overrated even by Carlyle's Professor in hisSartor Resartus. William Penn says that cleanliness is akin togodliness. A well-dressed man, all other things being equal, is nothalf as likely to compromise his character as one who approximates toshabbiness. Lawrence Sterne used to say that when he felt himselfgiving way to low spirits and a sense of depression and worthlessness, --a sort of predisposition for all sorts of little meannesses, --heforthwith shaved himself, brushed his wig, donned his best dress and hisgold rings, and thus put to flight the azure demons of his unfortunatetemperament. There is somehow a close affinity between moral purity andclean linen; and the sprites of our daily temptation, who seem to findeasy access to us through a broken hat or a rent in the elbow, aremanifestly baffled by the "complete mail" of a clean and decent dress. I recollect on one occasion hearing my mother tell our family physicianthat a woman in the neighborhood, not remarkable for her tidiness, hadbecome a church-member. "Humph!" said the doctor, in his quick, sarcastic way, "What of that? Don't you know that no unclean thing canenter the kingdom of heaven?"

"If you would see" Lowell "aright, " as Walter Scott says of MelroseAbbey, one must be here of a pleasant First day at the close of what iscalled the "afternoon service. " The streets are then blossoming like aperipatetic flower-garden; as if the tulips and lilies and roses of myfriend W. 's nursery, in the vale of Nonantum, should take it into theirheads to promenade for exercise. Thousands swarm forth who during week-days are confined to the mills. Gay colors alternate with snowywhiteness; extremest fashion elbows the plain demureness of old-fashioned Methodism. 

Fair pale faces catch a warmer tint from the free sunshine and freshair. The languid step becomes elastic with that "springy motion of thegait" which Charles Lamb admired. Yet the general appearance of thecity is that of quietude; the youthful multitude passes on calmly, itsvoices subdued to a lower and softened tone, as if fearful of breakingthe repose of the day of rest. A stranger fresh from the gayly spentSabbaths of the continent of Europe would be undoubtedly amazed at thedecorum and sobriety of these crowded streets. 

I am not over-precise in outward observances; but I nevertheless welcomewith joy unfeigned this first day of the week, --sweetest pause in ourhard life-march, greenest resting-place in the hot desert we aretreading. The errors of those who mistake its benignant rest for theiron rule of the Jewish Sabbath, and who consequently hedge it aboutwith penalties and bow down before it in slavish terror, should notrender us less grateful for the real blessing it brings us. As a daywrested in some degree from the god of this world, as an opportunityafforded for thoughtful self-communing, let us receive it as a good giftof our heavenly Parent in love rather than fear. 

In passing along Central Street this morning my attention was directedby the friend who accompanied me to a group of laborers, with coats offand sleeves rolled up, heaving at levers, smiting with sledge-hammers, in full view of the street, on the margin of the canal, just aboveCentral Street Bridge. I rubbed my eyes, half expecting that I was thesubject of mere optical illusion; but a second look only confirmed thefirst. Around me were solemn, go-to-meeting faces, --smileless andawful; and close at hand were the delving, toiling, mud-begrimedlaborers. Nobody seemed surprised at it; nobody noticed it as a thingout of the common course of events. And this, too, in a city where theSabbath proprieties are sternly insisted upon; where some twenty pulpitsdeal out anathemas upon all who "desecrate the Lord's day;" where simplenotices of meetings for moral purposes even can scarcely be read; wheremany count it wrong to speak on that day for the slave, who knows noSabbath of rest, or for the drunkard, who, imbruted by his appetites, cannot enjoy it. Verily there are strange contradictions in ourconventional morality. Eyes which, looking across the Atlantic on thegay Sabbath dances of French peasants are turned upward with horror, aresomehow blind to matters close at home. What would be sin pastrepentance in an individual becomes quite proper in a corporation. True, the Sabbath is holy; but the canals must be repaired. Everybodyought 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 thefact that a class of persons, who wink at this sacrifice of Sabhathsanctities to the demon of gain, look at the same time with sterndisapprobation upon everything partaking of the character of amusement, however innocent and healthful, on this day. But for myself, lookingdown through the light of a golden evening upon these quietly passinggroups, I cannot find it in my heart to condemn them for seeking on thistheir sole day of leisure the needful influences of social enjoyment, unrestrained exercise, and fresh air. I cannot think any essentialservice to religion or humanity would result from the conversion oftheir day of rest into a Jewish Sabbath, and their consequentconfinement, like so many pining prisoners, in close and crowdedboarding-houses. Is not cheerfulness a duty, a better expression of ourgratitude for God's blessings than mere words? And even under the oldlaw of rituals, what answer had the Pharisees to the question, "Is itnot lawful to do good on the Sabbath day?"

I am naturally of a sober temperament, and am, besides, a member of thatsect which Dr. More has called, mistakenly indeed, "the most melancholyof 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-showeringblessings, and painful restraint of the better feelings of our naturemay befit a Hindoo fakir, or a Mandan medicine man with buffalo skullsstrung to his lacerated muscles; but they look to me sadly out of placein a believer of the glad evangel of the New Testament. The life of thedivine Teacher affords no countenance to this sullen and gloomysaintliness, shutting up the heart against the sweet influences of humansympathy and the blessed ministrations of Nature. To the horror andclothes-rending astonishment of blind Pharisees He uttered thesignificant truth, that "the Sabhath was made for man, and not man forthe Sabhath. " From the close air of crowded cities, from throngedtemples and synagogues, --where priest and Levite kept up a show ofworship, drumming upon hollow ceremonials the more loudly for theiremptiness of life, as the husk rustles the more when the grain is gone, --He led His disciples out into the country stillness, under clearEastern 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 parablessuggested by the objects around Him or the cheerful incidents of socialhumanity, --the vineyard, the field-lily, the sparrow in the air, thesower in the seed-field, the feast and the marriage. Thus gently, thussweetly kind and cheerful, fell from His lips the gospel of humanity;love the fulfilling of every law; our love for one another measuring andmanifesting our love of Him. The baptism wherewith He was baptized wasthat of divine fulness in the wants of our humanity; the deep waters ofour sorrows went over Him; ineffable purity sounding for our sakes thedark abysm of sin; yet how like a river of light runs that serene andbeautiful life through the narratives of the evangelists! He brokebread with the poor despised publican; He sat down with the fishermen bythe Sea of Galilee; He spoke compassionate words to sin-sick Magdalen;He sanctified by His presence the social enjoyments of home andfriendship in the family of Bethany; He laid His hand of blessing on thesunny brows of children; He had regard even to the merely animal wantsof the multitude in the wilderness; He frowned upon none of life'ssimple and natural pleasures. The burden of His Gospel was love; and inlife and word He taught evermore the divided and scattered children ofone great family that only as they drew near each other could theyapproach Him who was their common centre; and that while no ostentationof prayer nor rigid observance of ceremonies could elevate man toheaven, the simple exercise of love, in thought and action, could bringheaven down to man. To weary and restless spirits He taught the greattruth, that happiness consists in making others happy. No cloister foridle genuflections and bead counting, no hair-cloth for the loins norscourge for the limbs, but works of love and usefulness under thecheerful sunshine, making the waste places of humanity glad and causingthe heart's desert to blossom. Why, then, should we go searching afterthe 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 theunspeakable gift of His life have evermore an undertone of funeralwailing? What! shall we go murmuring and lamenting, looking coldly onone another, seeing no beauty, nor light, nor gladness in this goodworld, wherein we have the glorious privilege of laboring in God'sharvest-field, with angels for our task companions, blessing and beingblessed?

To him who, neglecting the revelations of immediate duty, looksregretfully behind and fearfully before him, life may well seem a solemnmystery, for, whichever way he turns, a wall of darkness rises beforehim; but down upon the present, as through a skylight between theshadows, falls a clear, still radiance, like beams from an eye ofblessing; and, within the circle of that divine illumination, beauty andgoodness, truth and love, purity and cheerfulness blend like primalcolors into the clear harmony of light. The author of ProverbialPhilosophy has a passage not unworthy of note in this connection, whenhe 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 forlighting the mills for night-labor; and I have just returned fromwitnessing for the first time the effect of the new illumination. 

Passing over the bridge, nearly to the Dracut shore, I had a fine viewof the long line of mills, the city beyond, and the broad sweep of theriver from the falls. The light of a tranquil and gorgeous sunset wasslowly fading from river and sky, and the shadows of the trees on theDracut slopes were blending in dusky indistinctness with the greatshadow of night. Suddenly gleams of light broke from the black massesof masonry on the Lowell bank, at first feeble and scattered, flittingfrom window to window, appearing and disappearing, like will-o'-wisps ina forest or fireflies in a summer's night. Anon tier after tier ofwindows became radiant, until the whole vast wall, stretching far up theriver, from basement to roof, became checkered with light reflected withthe starbeams from the still water beneath. With a little effort offancy, one could readily transform the huge mills, thus illuminated, into palaces lighted up for festival occasions, and the figures of theworkers, passing to and fro before the windows, into forms of beauty andfashion, moving in graceful dances. 

Alas! this music of the shuttle and the daylong dance to it are notaltogether of the kind which Milton speaks of when he invokes the "softLydian airs" of voluptuous leisure. From this time henceforward forhalf a weary year, from the bell-call of morning twilight to half-pastseven in the evening, with brief intermissions for two hasty meals, theoperatives will be confined to their tasks. The proverbial facility ofthe Yankees in despatching their dinners in the least possible timeseems to have been taken advantage of and reduced to a system on theLowell corporations. Strange as it may seem to the uninitiated, theworking-men and women here contrive to repair to their lodgings, makethe necessary preliminary ablutions, devour their beef and pudding, andhurry 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 averagethroughout 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 greatlybenefited by the general adoption of the "ten-hour system, " although theone might suffer a slight diminution in daily wages and the other inyearly profits. Yet it is difficult to see how this most desirablechange is to be effected. The stronger and healthier portion of theoperatives might themselves object to it as strenuously as the distantstockholder who looks only to his semi-annual dividends. Health is toooften 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 ofVermont, to quiet farm-houses on the head-waters of the Connecticut andMerrimac, and to old familiar homes along the breezy seaboard of NewEngland, whence they have been urged by the knowledge that here they canearn a larger amount of money in a given time than in any other place oremployment. They come here for gain, not for pleasure; for high wages, not for the comforts that cluster about home. Here are poor widowstoiling to educate their children; daughters hoarding their wages toredeem mortgaged paternal homesteads or to defray the expenses of sickand infirm parents; young betrothed girls, about to add their savings tothose of their country lovers. Others there are, of maturer age, lonelyand poor, impelled hither by a proud unwillingness to test to its extentthe charity of friends and relatives, and a strong yearning for the"glorious privilege of being independent. " All honor to them! Whatevermay have closed against them the gates of matrimony, whether their ownobduracy or the faithlessness or indifference of others, instead ofshutting themselves up in a nunnery or taxing the good nature of theirfriends by perpetual demands for sympathy and support, like weak vines, putting out their feelers in every direction for something to twineupon, is it not better and wiser for them to go quietly at work, to showthat woman has a self-sustaining power; that she is something in and ofherself; that she, too, has a part to bear in life, and, in common withthe self-elected "lords of creation, " has a direct relation to absolutebeing? To such the factory presents the opportunity of taking the firstand essential step of securing, within a reasonable space of time, acomfortable competency. 

There are undoubtedly many evils connected with the working of thesemills; yet they are partly compensated by the fact that here, more thanin any other mechanical employment, the labor of woman is placedessentially upon an equality with that of man. Here, at least, one ofthe many social disabilities under which woman as a distinct individual, unconnected with the other sex, has labored in all time is removed; thework of her hands is adequately rewarded; and she goes to her daily taskwith the consciousness that she is not "spending her strength fornaught. "

'The Lowell Offering', which has been for the last four years publishedmonthly in this city, consisting entirely of articles written by femalesemployed in the mills, has attracted much attention and obtained a widecirculation. This may be in part owing to the novel circumstances ofits publication; but it is something more and better than a merenovelty. In its volumes may be found sprightly delineations of homescenes and characters, highly wrought imaginative pieces, tales ofgenuine 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 intoa sort of "lion's mouth, " provided for the purpose of insuring theauthors from detection, were read for the amusement and criticism ofthe company. This circle is still in existence; and I owe to myintroduction to it some of the most pleasant hours I have passed inLowell. 

The manner in which the 'Offering' has been generally noticed in thiscountry has not, to my thinking, been altogether in accordance with goodtaste or self-respect. It is hardly excusable for men, who, whatevermay be their present position, have, in common with all of us, brothers, sisters, or other relations busy in workshop and dairy, and who havescarcely washed from their own professional hands the soil of labor, tomake very marked demonstrations of astonishment at the appearance of amagazine whose papers are written by factory girls. As if thecompatibility of mental cultivation with bodily labor and the equalityand brotherhood of the human family were still open questions, dependingfor their decision very much on the production of positive proof thatessays may be written and carpets woven by the same set of fingers!

The truth is, our democracy lacks calmness and solidity, the repose andself-reliance which come of long habitude and settled conviction. Wehave not yet learned to wear its simple truths with the graceful easeand quiet air of unsolicitous assurance with which the titled Europeandoes his social fictions. As a people, we do not feel and live out ourgreat Declaration. We lack faith in man, --confidence in simplehumanity, 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 andpapers and the close air of dwellings into the open fields, and underthe soft, warm sunshine, and the softer light of a full moon. Theloveliest season of the whole year--that transient but delightfulinterval between the storms of the "wild equinox, with all their wet, "and the dark, short, dismal days which precede the rigor of winter--isnow with us. The sun rises through a soft and hazy atmosphere; thelight mist-clouds melt gradually away before him; and his noontide lightrests warm and clear on still woods, tranquil waters, and grasses greenwith the late autumnal rains. The rough-wooded slopes of Dracut, overlooking the falls of the river; Fort Hill, across the Concord, wherethe red man made his last stand, and where may still be seen the trenchwhich he dug around his rude fortress; the beautiful woodlands on theLowell and Tewksbury shores of the Concord; the cemetery; the PatucketFalls, --all within the reach of a moderate walk, --offer at this seasontheir latest and loveliest attractions. 

One fine morning, not long ago, I strolled down the Merrimac, on theTewksbury shore. I know of no walk in the vicinity of Lowell soinviting as that along the margin of the river for nearly a mile fromthe village of Belvidere. The path winds, green and flower-skirted, among beeches and oaks, through whose boughs you catch glimpses ofwaters sparkling and dashing below. Rocks, huge and picturesque, jut out into the stream, affording beautiful views of the river andthe distant city. 

Half fatigued with my walk, I threw myself down upon the rocky slopeof the bank, where the panorama of earth, sky, and water lay clear anddistinct about me. Far above, silent and dim as a picture, was thecity, 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, baresummit against the sky; before me the river went dashing down its ruggedchannel, sending up its everlasting murmur; above me the birch-tree hungits tassels; and the last wild flowers of autumn profusely fringed therocky rim of the water. Right opposite, the Dracut woods stretchedupwards from the shore, beautiful with the hues of frost, glowing withtints richer and deeper than those which Claude or Poussin mingled, asif the rainbows of a summer shower had fallen among them. At a littledistance 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 pebblesat them from a projecting shelf of rock. Over all a warm but softenedsunshine 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 atfull length, with his face literally rooted into the gravel. A littleboy, five or six years of age, clean and healthful, with his fair brownlocks and blue eyes, stood on the bank above, gazing down upon him withan 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 bloatedand filthy countenance of a drunkard. He made two or three efforts toget 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 thebright heaven, --an imbruted man. The holy harmonies of Nature, thesounds of gushing waters, the rustle of the leaves above him, the wildflowers, the frost-bloom of the woods, --what were they to him?Insensible, deaf, and blind, in the stupor of a living death, he laythere, literally realizing that most bitterly significant Easternmalediction, "May you eat dirt!"

In contrasting the exceeding beauty and harmony of inanimate Nature withthe human degradation and deformity before me, I felt, as I confess Ihad 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 hasno citizen. The beauty of Nature must ever be universal and mockinguntil the landscape has human figures as good as itself. Man is fallen;Nature is erect. "--(Emerson. ) As I turned once more to the calm bluesky, the hazy autumnal hills, and the slumberous water, dream-tinted bythe foliage of its shores, it seemed as if a shadow of shame and sorrowfell over the pleasant picture; and even the west wind which stirred thetree-tops above me had a mournful murmur, as if Nature felt thedesecration of her sanctities and the discord of sin and folly whichmarred her sweet harmonies. 

God bless the temperance movement! And He will bless it; for it is Hiswork. It is one of the great miracles of our times. Not Father Mathewin Ireland, nor Hawkins and his little band in Baltimore, but He whosecare is over all the works of His hand, and who in His divine love andcompassion "turneth the hearts of men as the rivers of waters areturned, " 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, indiscoursing upon truth, remarked that a mixture of a lie doth ever addpleasure. "Doth any man doubt, " he asks, "that if there were taken outof men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, andimaginations, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor, shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing tothemselves?" This admitted tendency of our nature, this love of thepleasing intoxication of unveracity, exaggeration, and imagination, mayperhaps account for the high relish which children and nations yet inthe childhood of civilization find in fabulous legends and tales ofwonder. The Arab at the present day listens with eager interest to thesame tales of genii and afrits, sorcerers and enchanted princesses, which delighted his ancestors in the times of Haroun al Raschid. Thegentle, church-going Icelander of our time beguiles the long night ofhis winter with the very sagas and runes which thrilled with notunpleasing 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 asideprimer and spelling-book for stolen ethnographical studies of dwarfs, and giants? Even in our own country and time old superstitions andcredulities still cling to life with feline tenacity. Here and there, oftenest in our fixed, valley-sheltered, inland villages, --slumberousRip Van Winkles, unprogressive and seldom visited, --may be found thesame old beliefs in omens, warnings, witchcraft, and supernatural charmswhich 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 inimitabledescription which Burns gives of similar practices in his Halloween maynot in all respects apply to these domestic conjurations; but thefollowing 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 womangoes down into the cellar, or into a dark room, with a mirror in herhand, and looking in it, sees the face of her future husband peering ather through the darkness, --the mirror being, for the time, as potent asthe famous Cambuscan glass of which Chaucer discourses. A neighbor ofmine, in speaking of this conjuration, adduces a case in point. One ofher schoolmates made the experiment and saw the face of a strange man inthe glass; and many years afterwards she saw the very man pass herfather's door. He proved to be an English emigrant just landed, and indue time became her husband. Burns alludes to something like the spellabove 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, thatthis amusing juvenile glammary has seen its best days in New England. The schoolmaster has been abroad to some purpose. Not without resultshave our lyceum lecturers and travels of Peter Parley brought everythingin heaven above and in the earth below to the level of childhood'scapacities. In our cities and large towns children nowadays passthrough the opening acts of life's marvellous drama with as littlemanifestation of wonder and surprise as the Indian does through thestreets of a civilized city which he has entered for the first time. Yet Nature, sooner or later, vindicates her mysteries; voices from theunseen penetrate the din of civilization. The child philosopher andmaterialist often becomes the visionary of riper years, running intoilluminism, magnetism, and transcendentalism, with its inspired priestsand 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 ofmind. There, too, are huskings, and apple-bees, and quilting parties, and huge old-fashioned fireplaces piled with crackling walnut, flingingits rosy light over happy countenances of youth and scarcely less happyage. If it be true that, according to Cornelius Agrippa, "a wood firedoth drive away dark spirits, " it is, nevertheless, also true thataround it the simple superstitions of our ancestors still love tolinger; and there the half-sportful, half-serious charms of which I havespoken are oftenest resorted to. It would be altogether out of place tothink of them by our black, unsightly stoves, or in the dull and darkmonotony of our furnace-heated rooms. Within the circle of the light ofthe open fire safely might the young conjurers question destiny; fornone but kindly and gentle messengers from wonderland could ventureamong them. And who of us, looking back to those long autumnal eveningsof childhood when the glow of the kitchen-fire rested on the belovedfaces of home, does not feel that there is truth and beauty in what thequaint old author just quoted affirms? "As the spirits of darkness growstronger in the dark, so good spirits, which are angels of light, aremultiplied and strengthened, not only by the divine light of the sun andstars, but also by the light of our common wood-fires. " Even LordBacon, in condemning the superstitious beliefs of his day, admits thatthey 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 thelittle people, and an irreverent English bishop has sung their requiem. It never had much hold upon the Yankee mind, our superstitions beingmostly of a sterner and less poetical kind. The Irish Presbyterians whosettled in New Hampshire about the year 1720 brought indeed with them, among other strange matters, potatoes and fairies; but while the formertook root and flourished among us, the latter died out, after lingeringa few years in a very melancholy and disconsolate way, lookingregretfully back to their green turf dances, moonlight revels, andcheerful nestling around the shealing fires of Ireland. The last thathas been heard of them was some forty or fifty years ago in a tavernhouse in S-------, New Hampshire. The landlord was a spiteful littleman, whose sour, pinched look was a standing libel upon the state of hislarder. He made his house so uncomfortable by his moroseness thattravellers even at nightfall pushed by his door and drove to the nexttown. Teamsters and drovers, who in those days were apt to be verythirsty, learned, even before temperance societies were thought of, topractice total abstinence on that road, and cracked their whips andgoaded on their teams in full view of a most tempting array of bottlesand glasses, from behind which the surly little landlord glared out uponthem 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 matterof necessity, to "keep the cold out of his stomach, " occasionally awayfarer 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 afraidto open his mouth, lest the red-hot flip iron should be plunged down hisgullet. 

As a matter of course, poverty came upon the house and its tenants likean armed man. Loose clapboards rattled in the wind; rags fluttered fromthe 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 hisabsence, managed to keep, as she said, her "own heart whole, " althoughthe same could scarcely be said of her children's trousers and her ownfrock of homespun. She confidently predicted that "a betther day wascoming, " being, in fact, the only thing hopeful about the premises. Andit did come, sure enough. Not only all the regular travellers on theroad made a point of stopping at the tavern, but guests from all theadjacent towns filled its long-deserted rooms, --the secret of which was, that it had somehow got abroad that a company of fairies had taken uptheir abode in the hostelry and daily held conversation with each otherin the capacious parlor. I have heard those who at the time visited thetavern say that it was literally thronged for several weeks. Small, squeaking voices spoke in a sort of Yankee-Irish dialect, in the hauntedroom, to the astonishment and admiration of hundreds. The inn, ofcourse, was blessed by this fairy visitation; the clapboards ceasedtheir racket, clear panes took the place of rags in the sashes, and thelittle till under the bar grew daily heavy with coin. The magicalinfluence extended even farther; for it was observable that the landlordwore 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 thenature of the case, continue long. It was too late in the day and onthe wrong side of the water. As the novelty wore off, people began todoubt and reason about it. Had the place been traversed by a ghost ordisturbed by a witch they could have acquiesced in it very quietly; butthis outlandish belief in fairies was altogether an overtask for Yankeecredulity. As might have been expected, the little strangers, unable tobreathe in an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, soon took their leave, shaking off the dust of their elfin feet as a testimony against anunbelieving generation. It was, indeed, said that certain rude fellowsfrom the Bay State pulled away a board from the ceiling and disclosed toview the fairies in the shape of the landlady's three slatternlydaughters. But the reader who has any degree of that charity whichthinks no evil will rather credit the statement of the fairiesthemselves, as reported by the mistress of the house, "that they weretired of the new country, and had no pace of their lives among theYankees, and were going back to Ould Ireland. "

It is a curious fact that the Indians had some notion of a race ofbeings corresponding in many respects to the English fairies. Schoolcraft describes them as small creatures in human shape, inhabitingrocks, crags, and romantic dells, and delighting especially in points ofland jutting into lakes and rivers and which were covered withpinetrees. They were called Puckweedjinees, --little vanishers. 

In a poetical point of view it is to be regretted that our ancestors didnot think it worth their while to hand down to us more of the simple andbeautiful traditions and beliefs of the "heathen round about" them. Some hints of them we glean from the writings of the missionary Mayhewand the curious little book of Roger Williams. Especially would onelike to know more of that domestic demon, Wetuomanit, who presided overhousehold affairs, assisted the young squaw in her first essay atwigwam-keeping, gave timely note of danger, and kept evil spirits at adistance, --a kind of new-world brownie, gentle and useful. 

Very suggestive, too, is the story of Pumoolah, --a mighty spirit, whosehome is on the great Katahdin Mountain, sitting there with his earthlybride (a beautiful daughter of the Penobscots transformed into animmortal by her love), in serenest sunshine, above the storm whichcrouches and growls at his feet. None but the perfectly pure and goodcan reach his abode. Many have from time to time attempted it in vain;some, after almost reaching the summit, have been driven back bythunderbolts or sleety whirlwinds. 

Not far from my place of residence are the ruins of a mill, in a narrowravine fringed with trees. Some forty years ago the mill was supposedto be haunted; and horse-shoes, in consequence, were nailed over itsdoors. One worthy man, whose business lay beyond the mill, was afraidto pass it alone; and his wife, who was less fearful of supernaturalannoyance, used to accompany him. The little old white-coated miller, who there ground corn and wheat for his neighbors, whenever he made aparticularly early visit to his mill, used to hear it in fulloperation, --the water-wheel dashing bravely, and the old ricketybuilding clattering to the jar of the stones. Yet the moment his handtouched the latch or his foot the threshold all was hushed save themelancholy drip of water from the dam or the low gurgle of the smallstream eddying amidst willow roots and mossy stones in the ravine below. 

This haunted mill has always reminded me of that most beautiful ofScottish ballads, the Song of the Elfin Miller, in which fairies arerepresented 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 leftbehind him a ballad on the Indian legend of the black fox which hauntedSalmon River, a tributary of the Connecticut. Its wild and picturesquebeauty causes us to regret that more of the still lingering traditionsof 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 thevalley of the Connecticut. It is supposed that shad are led from theGulf of Mexico to the Connecticut by a kind of Yankee bogle in the shapeof 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 classof superstitions have doubtless often induced the moralist to hesitatein exposing their absurdity, and, like Burns in view of his nationalthistle, to:

 "Turn the weeding hook aside And spare the symbol dear. "

But the age has fairly outgrown them, and they are falling away by anatural process of exfoliation. The wonderland of childhood musthenceforth be sought within the domains of truth. The strange facts ofnatural history, and the sweet mysteries of flowers and forests, andhills and waters, will profitably take the place of the fairy lore ofthe past, and poetry and romance still hold their accustomed seats inthe circle of home, without bringing with them the evil spirits ofcredulity and untruth. Truth should be the first lesson of the childand the last aspiration of manhood; for it has been well said that theinquiry 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 theenjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature. 

MAGICIANS AND WITCH FOLK. 

FASCINATION, saith Henry Cornelius Agrippa, in the fiftieth chapter ofhis first book on Occult Philosophy, "is a binding which comes of thespirit of the witch through the eyes of him that is bewitched, enteringto his heart; for the eye being opened and intent upon any one, with astrong imagination doth dart its beams, which are the vehiculum of thespirit, into the eyes of him that is opposite to her; which tenderspirit strikes his eyes, stirs up and wounds his heart, and infects hisspirit. Whence Apuleius saith, 'Thy eyes, sliding down through my eyesinto my inmost heart, stirreth up a most vehement burning. ' And wheneyes are reciprocally intent upon each other, and when rays are joinedto rays, and lights to lights, then the spirit of the one is joined tothat of the other; so are strong ligations made and vehement lovesinflamed. " Taking this definition of witchcraft, we sadly fear it isstill practised to a very great extent among us. The best we can say ofit is, that the business seems latterly to have fallen into youngerhands; its victims do not appear to regard themselves as especialobjects of compassion; and neither church nor state seems inclined tointerfere with it. 

As might be expected in a shrewd community like ours, attempts are notunfrequently made to speculate in the supernatural, --to "make gain ofsooth-saying. " In the autumn of last year a "wise woman" dreamed, orsomnambulized, that a large sum of money, in gold and silver coin, layburied in the centre of the great swamp in Poplin, New Hampshire;whereupon an immediate search was made for the precious metal. Underthe bleak sky of November, in biting frost and sleet rain, some twentyor more grown men, graduates of our common schools, and liable, everymother's son of them, to be made deacons, squires, and general courtmembers, and such other drill officers as may be requisite in the marchof mind, might be seen delving in grim earnest, breaking the frozenearth, uprooting swamp-maples and hemlocks, and waking, with sledge andcrowbar, unwonted echoes in a solitude which had heretofore onlyanswered to the woodman's axe or the scream of the wild fowl. The snowsof December put an end to their labors; but the yawning excavation stillremains, a silent but somewhat expressive commentary upon the age ofprogress. 

Still later, in one of our Atlantic cities, an attempt was made, partially at least, successful, to form a company for the purpose ofdigging 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 thosesomnambulic voyages of discovery in which the traveller, like Satan inchaos, --

 "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 hiseyes gladdened by the sight of a huge chest packed with Spanish coins, the spoil, doubtless, of some rich-freighted argosy, or Carthagenagalleon, in the rare days of Queen Elizabeth's Christian buccaneers. 

During the last quarter of a century, a colored woman in one of thevillages on the southern border of New Hampshire has been consulted byhundreds of anxious inquirers into the future. Long experience in herprofession has given her something of that ready estimate of character, that quick and keen appreciation of the capacity, habits, and wishes ofher visitors, which so remarkably distinguished the late famous MadameLe Normand, of Paris; and if that old squalid sorceress, in her crampedParisian attic, redolent of garlic and bestrewn with the greasyimplements of sorry housewifery, was, as has been affirmed, consulted bysuch personages as the fair Josephine Beauharnois, and the "man ofdestiny, " Napoleon himself, is it strange that the desire to lift theveil of the great mystery before us should overcome in some degree ourpeculiar and most republican prejudice against color, and reconcile usto the disagreeable necessity of looking at futurity through a blackmedium?

Some forty years ago, on the banks of the pleasant little creekseparating Berwick, in Maine, from Somersworth, in New Hampshire, withinsight of my mother's home, dwelt a plain, sedate member of the societyof Friends, named Bantum. He passed throughout a circle of severalmiles as a conjurer and skilful adept in the art of magic. To himresorted farmers who had lost their cattle, matrons whose householdgear, silver spoons, and table-linen had been stolen, or young maidenswhose lovers were absent; and the quiet, meek-spirited old man receivedthem all kindly, put on his huge iron-rimmed spectacles, opened his"conjuring book, " which my mother describes as a large clasped volume instrange language and black-letter type, and after due reflection andconsideration gave the required answers without money and without price. The curious old volume is still in the possession of the conjurer'sfamily. Apparently inconsistent as was this practice of the black artwith the simplicity and truthfulness of his religious profession, I havenot been able to learn that he was ever subjected to censure on accountof it. It may be that our modern conjurer defended himself on groundssimilar to those assumed by the celebrated knight of Nettesheim, in thepreface to his first Book of Magic: "Some, " says he, "may crie oute thatI teach forbidden arts, sow the seed of heresies, offend pious ears, andscandalize excellent wits; that I am a sorcerer, superstitious anddevilish, who indeed am a magician. To whom I answer, that a magiciandoth not among learned men signifie a sorcerer or one that issuperstitious or devilish, but a wise man, a priest, a prophet, and thatthe sibyls prophesied most clearly of Christ; that magicians, as wisemen, by the wonderful secrets of the world, knew Christ to be born, andcame to worship him, first of all; and that the name of magicke isreceived by philosophers, commended by divines, and not unacceptable tothe Gospel. "

The study of astrology and occult philosophy, to which many of thefinest minds of the Middle Ages devoted themselves without molestationfrom the Church, was never practised with impunity after theReformation. The Puritans and Presbyterians, taking the Bible for theirrule, "suffered not a witch to live;" and, not content with burning thebooks of those who "used curious arts" after the manner of theEphesians, 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 escapedthe vigilance of our modern Doctors of the Mosaic Law. Dr. Robert Childcame to this country about the year 1644, and took up his residence inthe Massachusetts colony. He was a man of wealth, and owned plantationsat Nashaway, now Lancaster, and at Saco, in Maine. He was skilful inmineralogy and metallurgy, and seems to have spent a good deal of moneyin searching for mines. He is well known as the author of the firstdecided movement for liberty of conscience in Massachusetts, his namestanding at the head of the famous petition of 1646 for a modificationof the laws in respect to religious worship, and complaining in strongterms of the disfranchisement of persons not members of the Church. Atremendous excitement was produced by this remonstrance; clergy andmagistrates joined in denouncing it; Dr. Child and his associates werearrested, tried for contempt of government, and heavily fined. TheCourt, in passing sentence, assured the Doctor that his crime was onlyequalled by that of Korah and his troop, who rebelled against Moses andAaron. He resolved to appeal to the Parliament of England, and madearrangements for his departure, but was arrested, and ordered to be kepta prisoner in his own house until the vessel in which he was to sail hadleft Boston. He was afterwards imprisoned for a considerable length oftime, and on his release found means to return to England. The Doctor'strunks were searched by the Puritan authorities while he was in prison;but it does not appear that they detected the occult studies to whichlie was addicted, to which lucky circumstance it is doubtless owing thatthe first champion of religious liberty in the New World was not hungfor a wizard. 

Dr. Child was a graduate of the renowned University of Padua, and hadtravelled 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 Continentalwork on astrology and magic, printed in 1651 "at the sign of the ThreeBibles, " that his "sublime hermeticall and theomagicall lore" iscompared to that of Hermes and Agrippa. He is complimented as a masterof the mysteries of Rome and Germany, and as one who had pursued hisinvestigations among the philosophers of the Old World and the Indiansof the New, "leaving no stone unturned, the turning whereof mightconduce to the discovery of what is occult. "

There was still another member of the Friends' society in Vermont, ofthe name of Austin, who, in answer, as he supposed, to prayer and along-cherished desire to benefit his afflicted fellow-creatures, received, as he believed, a special gift of healing. For several yearsapplicants from nearly all parts of New England visited him with thestory of their sufferings and praying for a relief, which, it isaverred, was in many instances really obtained. Letters from the sickwho were unable to visit him, describing their diseases, were sent him;and many are yet living who believe that they were restored miraculouslyat the precise period of time when Austin was engaged in reading theirletters. One of my uncles was commissioned to convey to him a largenumber of letters from sick persons in his neighborhood. He found theold man sitting in his plain parlor in the simplest garb of his sect, --grave, thoughtful, venerable, --a drab-coated Prince Hohenlohe. Hereceived the letters in silence, read them slowly, casting them oneafter another upon a large pile of similar epistles in a corner of theapartment. 

Half a century ago nearly every neighborhood in New England was favoredwith one or more reputed dealers in magic. Twenty years later therewere two poor old sisters who used to frighten school urchins and"children of a larger growth" as they rode down from New Hampshire ontheir gaunt skeleton horses, strung over with baskets for theNewburyport market. They were aware of the popular notion concerningthem, and not unfrequently took advantage of it to levy a sort of blackmail upon their credulous neighbors. An attendant at the funeral of oneof these sisters, who when living was about as unsubstantial as Ossian'sghost, through which the stars were visible, told me that her coffin wasso heavy that four stout men could barely lift it. 

One, of my earliest recollections is that of an old woman, residingabout two miles from the place of my nativity, who for many years hadborne the unenviable reputation of a witch. She certainly had the lookof one, --a combination of form, voice, and features which would havemade the fortune of an English witch finder in the days of Matthew Parisor the Sir John Podgers of Dickens, and insured her speedy conviction inKing James's High Court of Justiciary. She was accused of divers ill-doings, --such as preventing the cream in her neighbor's churn frombecoming 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 unfortunatereputation that she took the trouble to go before a justice of thepeace, and made solemn oath that she was a Christian woman, and nowitch. 

Not many years since a sad-visaged, middle-aged man might be seen in thestreets of one of our seaboard towns at times suddenly arrested in themidst of a brisk walk and fixed motionless for some minutes in the busythoroughfare. No effort could induce him to stir until, in his opinion, the spell was removed and his invisible tormentor suffered him toproceed. He explained his singular detention as the act of a wholefamily of witches whom he had unfortunately offended during a visit downEast. It was rumored that the offence consisted in breaking off amatrimonial engagement with the youngest member of the family, --asorceress, perhaps, in more than one sense of the word, like that"winsome wench and walie" in Tam O'Shanter's witch-dance at KirkAlloway. His only hope was that he should outlive his persecutors; andit is said that at the very hour in which the event took place heexultingly assured his friends that the spell was forever broken, andthat the last of the family of his tormentors was no more. 

When a boy, I occasionally met, at the house of a relative in anadjoining 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 abirch-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 theshelf near him. Although he seldom opened his lips save to assent tosome 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 uswith interesting details of his early experiences in "the Ohio country. "

There was, however, one chapter in these experiences which he usuallyheld in reserve, and with which "the stranger intermeddled not. " He wasnot willing to run the risk of hearing that which to him was a frightfulreality turned into ridicule by scoffers and unbelievers. The substanceof it, as I received it from one of his neighbors, forms as clever atale 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 foundhimself in one of the old French settlements on the Ohio River. Here heprocured employment on the farm of a widow; and being a smart, activefellow, and proving highly serviceable in his department, he rapidlygained favor in the eyes of his employer. Ere long, contrary to theadvice of the neighbors, and in spite of somewhat discouraging hintstouching certain matrimonial infelicities experienced by the latehusband, he resolutely stepped into the dead man's shoes: the mistressbecame the wife, and the servant was legally promoted to the head of thehousehold. --

For a time matters went on cosily and comfortably enough. He was nowlord 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, henaturally enough congratulated himself upon his good fortune and laughedat the sinister forebodings of his neighbors. But with the long wintermonths came a change over his "love's young dream. " An evil andmysterious influence seemed to be at work in his affairs. Whatever hedid after consulting his wife or at her suggestion resulted favorablyenough; but all his own schemes and projects were unaccountably marredand defeated. If he bought a horse, it was sure to prove spavined orwind-broken. His cows either refused to give down their milk, or, giving it, perversely kicked it over. A fine sow which he had bargainedfor repaid his partiality by devouring, like Saturn, her own children. By degrees a dark thought forced its way into his mind. Comparing hisrepeated mischances with the ante-nuptial warnings of his neighbors, heat 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 fellowin the Arabian tale who discovered that he had married a ghoul in theguise of a young and blooming princess, was scarcely in a more sorrowfulpredicament. He grew nervous and fretful. Old dismal nursery storiesand all the witch lore of boyhood came back to his memory; and he creptto his bed like a criminal to the gallows, half afraid to fall asleeplest his mysterious companion should take a fancy to transform him intoa 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 toincrease just in proportion as his troubles thickened upon him. Sheaggravated him with all manner of caresses and endearments. This wasthe drop too much. The poor husband recoiled from her as from a wakingnightmare. His thoughts turned to New England; he longed to see oncemore the old homestead, with its tall well-sweep and butternut-trees bythe roadside; and he sighed amidst the rich bottom-lands of his new homefor his father's rocky pasture, with its crop of stinted mulleins. Soone cold November day, finding himself out of sight and hearing of hiswife, he summoned courage to attempt an escape, and, resolutely turninghis back on the West, plunged into the wilderness towards the sunrise. After a long and hard journey he reached his birthplace, and was kindlywelcomed by his old friends. Keeping a close mouth with respect to hisunlucky adventure in Ohio, he soon after married one of his schoolmates, and, by dint of persevering industry and economy, in a few years foundhimself 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 wifefrom Ohio! She came riding up the street on her old white horse, with apillion behind the saddle. Accosting him in a kindly tone, yet notwithout something of gentle reproach for his unhandsome desertion ofher, she informed him that she had come all the way from Ohio to takehim back again. 

It was in vain that he pleaded his later engagements; it was in vainthat his new wife raised her shrillest remonstrances, not unmingled withexpressions of vehement indignation at the revelation of her husband'sreal position; the witch wife was inexorable; go he must, and thatspeedily. Fully impressed with a belief in her supernatural power ofcompelling obedience, and perhaps dreading more than witchcraft itselfthe effects of the unlucky disclosure on the temper of his New Englandhelpmate, he made a virtue of the necessity of the case, bade farewellto the latter amidst a perfect hurricane of reproaches, and mounted thewhite 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 theunfortunate husband, when he once more made his appearance in his nativevillage. He was not disposed to be very communicative; but for onething, at least, he seemed willing to express his gratitude. His Ohiowife, having no spell against intermittent fever, had paid the debt ofnature, and had left him free; in view of which, his surviving wife, after manifesting a due degree of resentment, consented to take him backto her bed and board; and I could never learn that she had cause toregret 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 forhimself, seldom meets with anything in the world of realities worthy ofcomparison with the ideal of his fancy, which, like the bird in theArabian tale, glides perpetually before him, always near yet neverovertaken. He was half humorously, half seriously, complaining of thelack of beauty in the faces and forms that passed us on the crowdedsidewalk. Some defect was noticeable in all: one was too heavy, anothertoo angular; here a nose was at fault, there a mouth put a set ofotherwise fine features out of countenance; the fair complexions had redhair, and glossy black locks were wasted upon dingy ones. In one way oranother all fell below his impossible standard. 

The beauty which my friend seemed in search of was that of proportionand coloring; mechanical exactness; a due combination of soft curves andobtuse angles, of warm carnation and marble purity. Such a man, foraught I can see, might love a graven image, like the girl of Florencewho pined into a shadow for the Apollo Belvidere, looking coldly on herwith stony eyes from his niche in the Vatican. One thing is certain, --he will never find his faultless piece of artistical perfection bysearching for it amidst flesh-and-blood realities. Nature does not, as far as I can perceive, work with square and compass, or lay on hercolors by the rules of royal artists or the dunces of the academies. She eschews regular outlines. She does not shape her forms by a commonmodel. Not one of Eve's numerous progeny in all respects resembles herwho first culled the flowers of Eden. To the infinite variety andpicturesque inequality of Nature we owe the great charm of her uncloyingbeauty. Look at her primitive woods; scattered trees, with moist swardand bright mosses at their roots; great clumps of green shadow, wherelimb intwists with limb and the rustle of one leaf stirs a hundredothers, --stretching up steep hillsides, flooding with green beauty thevalleys, or arching over with leaves the sharp ravines, every tree andshrub 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 Frenchgardens, where every tree stands stiff and regular, clipped and trimmedinto unvarying conformity, like so many grenadiers under review? Whowants eternal sunshine or shadow? Who would fix forever the loveliestcloudwork of an autumn sunset, or hang over him an everlastingmoonlight? If the stream had no quiet eddying place, could we so admireits cascade over the rocks? Were there no clouds, could we so hail thesky shining through them in its still, calm purity? Who shall ventureto ask our kind Mother Nature to remove from our sight any one of herforms or colors? Who shall decide which is beautiful, or otherwise, initself 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 faultor other to find with Nature and Providence, seeming to considerthemselves especially ill used because the one does not always coincidewith their taste, nor the other with their narrow notions of personalconvenience. In one of his early poems, Coleridge has well expressed atruth, which is not the less important because it is not generallyadmitted. The idea is briefly this: that the mind gives to all thingstheir coloring, their gloom, or gladness; that the pleasure we derivefrom 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 existsin their own spirits. They set up certain models of perfection in theirimaginations, and then go about the world in the vain expectation offinding them actually wrought out according to pattern; veryunreasonably calculating that Nature will suspend her everlasting lawsfor the purpose of creating faultless prodigies for their especialgratification. 

The authors of Gayeties and Gravities give it as their opinion that noobject of sight is regarded by us as a simple disconnected form, butthat--an instantaneous reflection as to its history, purpose, orassociations converts it into a concrete one, --a process, they shrewdlyremark, which no thinking being can prevent, and which can only beavoided by the unmeaning and stolid stare of "a goose on the common or acow on the green. " The senses and the faculties of the understandingare so blended with and dependent upon each other that not one of themcan exercise its office alone and without the modification of someextrinsic interference or suggestion. Grateful or unpleasantassociations cluster around all which sense takes cognizance of; thebeauty which we discern in an external object is often but thereflection of our own minds. 

What is beauty, after all? Ask the lover who kneels in homage to onewho has no attractions for others. The cold onlooker wonders that hecan call that unclassic combination of features and that awkward formbeautiful. Yet so it is. He sees, like Desdemona, her "visage in hermind, " or her affections. A light from within shines through theexternal uncomeliness, --softens, irradiates, and glorifies it. Thatwhich to others seems commonplace and unworthy of note is to him, in thewords 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 thelanguage of Primrose in the play when addressing her daughters. Theworthy matron was right. Would that all my female readers who aresorrowing foolishly because they are not in all respects like Dubufe'sEve, or that statue of the Venus "which enchants the world, " could bepersuaded to listen to her. What is good looking, as Horace Smithremarks, but looking good? Be good, be womanly, be gentle, --generous inyour sympathies, heedful of the well-being of all around you; and, myword for it, you will not lack kind words of admiration. Loving andpleasant associations will gather about you. Never mind the uglyreflection 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 whichpasseth show, rests over it, softening and mellowing its features justas the full calm moonlight melts those of a rough landscape intoharmonious loveliness. "Hold up your heads, girls!" I repeat afterPrimrose. Why should you not? Every mother's daughter of you can bebeautiful. You can envelop yourselves in an atmosphere of moral andintellectual beauty, through which your otherwise plain faces will lookforth like those of angels. Beautiful to Ledyard, stiffening in thecold of a northern winter, seemed the diminutive, smokestained women ofLapland, who wrapped him in their furs and ministered to his necessitieswith kindness and gentle words of compassion. Lovely to the homesickheart of Park seemed the dark maids of Sego, as they sung their low andsimple song of welcome beside his bed, and sought to comfort the whitestranger, who had "no mother to bring him milk and no wife to grind himcorn. " Oh, talk as we may of beauty as a thing to be chiselled frommarble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors andoutlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? Theheart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outwardenvironment, it discovers a deeper and more real loveliness. 

This was well understood by the old painters. In their pictures ofMary, the virgin mother, the beauty which melts and subdues the gazer isthat of the soul and the affections, uniting the awe and mystery of thatmother's miraculous allotment with the irrepressible love, theunutterable tenderness, of young maternity, --Heaven's crowning miraclewith Nature's holiest and sweetest instinct. And their pale Magdalens, holy with the look of sins forgiven, --how the divine beauty of theirpenitence sinks into the heart! Do we not feel that the only realdeformity is sin, and that goodness evermore hallows and sanctifies itsdwelling-place? When the soul is at rest, when the passions and desiresare 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 peacesat brooding. " In that simple and beautiful record of a holy life, theJournal of John Woolman, there is a passage of which I have been morethan once reminded in my intercourse with my fellow-beings: "Someglances of real beauty may be seen in their faces who dwell in truemeekness. There is a harmony in the sound of that voice to which divinelove gives utterance. "

Quite the ugliest face I ever saw was that of a woman whom the worldcalls beautiful. Through its "silver veil" the evil and ungentlepassions looked out hideous and hateful. On the other hand, there arefaces which the multitude at the first glance pronounce homely, unattractive, and such as "Nature fashions by the gross, " which I alwaysrecognize with a warm heart-thrill; not for the world would I have onefeature changed; they please me as they are; they are hallowed by kindmemories; they are beautiful through their associations; nor are theyany the less welcome that with my admiration of them "the strangerintermeddleth 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 Adventcamp-meeting!"

Accustomed as I begin to feel to the ordinary sights and sounds of thisbusy city, I was, I confess, somewhat startled by this business-likeannunciation from the driver of a stage, who stood beside his horsesswinging his whip with some degree of impatience: "Seventy-five cents tothe Second Advent camp-ground!"

The stage was soon filled; the driver cracked his whip and went rattlingdown the street. 

The Second Advent, --the coming of our Lord in person upon this earth, with signs, and wonders, and terrible judgments, --the heavens robingtogether as a scroll, the elements melting with fervent heat! Themighty consummation of all things at hand, with its destruction and itstriumphs, sad wailings of the lost and rejoicing songs of the glorified!From this overswarming hive of industry, --from these crowded treadmillsof gain, --here were men and women going out in solemn earnestness toprepare for the dread moment which they verily suppose is only a fewmonths distant, --to lift up their warning voices in the midst ofscoffers and doubters, and to cry aloud to blind priests and carelesschurches, "Behold, the Bridegroom cometh!"

It was one of the most lovely mornings of this loveliest season of theyear; a warm, soft atmosphere; clear sunshine falling on the city spiresand roofs; the hills of Dracut quiet and green in the distance, withtheir white farm-houses and scattered trees; around me the continualtread of footsteps hurrying to the toils of the day; merchants spreadingout their wares for the eyes of purchasers; sounds of hammers, the sharpclink of trowels, the murmur of the great manufactories subdued bydistance. How was it possible, in the midst of so much life, in thatsunrise light, and in view of all abounding beauty, that the idea of thedeath of Nature--the baptism of the world in fire--could take such apractical shape as this? Yet here were sober, intelligent men, gentleand pious women, who, verily believing the end to be close at hand, hadleft their counting-rooms, and workshops, and household cares to publishthe great tidings, and to startle, if possible, a careless andunbelieving generation into preparation for the day of the Lord and forthat blessed millennium, --the restored paradise, --when, renovated andrenewed by its fire-purgation, the earth shall become as of old thegarden of the Lord, and the saints alone shall inherit it. 

Very serious and impressive is the fact that this idea of a radicalchange in our planet is not only predicted in the Scriptures, but thatthe Earth herself, in her primitive rocks and varying formations, onwhich are lithographed the history of successive convulsions, darklyprophesies of others to come. The old poet prophets, all the worldover, have sung of a renovated world. A vision of it haunted thecontemplations of Plato. It is seen in the half-inspired speculationsof the old Indian mystics. The Cumaean sibyl saw it in her trances. The apostles and martyrs of our faith looked for it anxiously andhopefully. Gray anchorites in the deserts, worn pilgrims to the holyplaces of Jewish and Christian tradition, prayed for its coming. Itinspired the gorgeous visions of the early fathers. In every age sincethe Christian era, from the caves, and forests, and secluded "upperchambers" of the times of the first missionaries of the cross, from theGothic temples of the Middle Ages, from the bleak mountain gorges of theAlps, where the hunted heretics put up their expostulation, "How long, O Lord, how long?" down to the present time, and from this Derrycampground, have been uttered the prophecy and the prayer for itsfulfilment. 

How this great idea manifests itself in the lives of the enthusiasts ofthe days of Cromwell! Think of Sir Henry Vane, cool, sagaciousstatesman as he was, waiting with eagerness for the foreshadowings ofthe millennium, and listening, even in the very council hall, for theblast of the last trumpet! Think of the Fifth Monarchy Men, weary withwaiting for the long-desired consummation, rushing out with drawn swordsand loaded matchlocks into the streets of London to establish at oncethe rule of King Jesus! Think of the wild enthusiasts at Munster, verily imagining that the millennial reign had commenced in their madcity! Still later, think of Granville Sharpe, diligently laboring inhis vocation of philanthropy, laying plans for the slow but beneficentamelioration of the condition of his country and the world, and at thesame time maintaining, with the zeal of Father Miller himself, that theearth was just on the point of combustion, and that the millennium wouldrender all his benevolent schemes of no sort of consequence!

And, after all, is the idea itself a vain one? Shall to-morrow be asto-day? Shall the antagonism of good and evil continue as heretoforeforever? Is there no hope that this world-wide prophecy of the humansoul, uttered in all climes, in all times, shall yet be fulfilled? Whoshall say it may not be true? Nay, is not its truth proved by itsuniversality? The hope of all earnest souls must be realized. Thatwhich, through a distorted and doubtful medium, shone even upon themartyr enthusiasts of the French revolution, --soft gleams of heaven'slight rising over the hell of man's passions and crimes, --the gloriousideal of Shelley, who, atheist as he was through early prejudice anddefective education, saw the horizon of the world's future kindling withthe 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 anddead, cannot be in vain. 

I do not, I confess, sympathize with my Second Advent friends in theirlamentable depreciation of Mother Earth even in her present state. Ifind it extremely difficult to comprehend how it is that this goodly, green, sunlit home of ours is resting under a curse. It really does notseem to me to be altogether like the roll which the angel bore in theprophet's vision, "written within and without with mourning, lamentation, and woe. " September sunsets, changing forests, moonriseand cloud, sun and rain, --I for one am contented with them. They fillmy heart with a sense of beauty. I see in them the perfect work ofinfinite 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 itschanges of seasons as so many visible manifestations of God's curse, andthat in the millennium, as in the days of Adam's innocence, all thesepicturesque inequalities would be levelled nicely away, and the flatsurface laid handsomely down to grass. 

As might be expected, the effect of this belief in the speedydestruction of the world and the personal coming of the Messiah, actingupon a class of uncultivated, and, in some cases, gross minds, is notalways in keeping with the enlightened Christian's ideal of the betterday. 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, "--minglewith the beautiful and soothing promises of the prophets. There areindeed occasionally to be found among the believers men of refined andexalted spiritualism, who in their lives and conversation remind one ofTennyson's Christian knight-errant in his yearning towards the hope setbefore 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, wasmentioned to me not long since. A fashionable young woman in thewestern part of this State became an enthusiastic believer in thedoctrine. On the day which had been designated as the closing one oftime she packed all her fine dresses and toilet valuables in a largetrunk, 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 andchattels would of necessity follow. 

Three or four years ago, on my way eastward, I spent an hour or two at acamp-ground of the Second Advent in East Kingston. The spot was wellchosen. A tall growth of pine and hemlock threw its melancholy shadowover the multitude, who were arranged upon rough seats of boards andlogs. Several hundred--perhaps a thousand people--were present, andmore were rapidly coming. Drawn about in a circle, forming a backgroundof snowy whiteness to the dark masses of men and foliage, were the whitetents, and back of them the provision-stalls and cook-shops. When Ireached the ground, a hymn, the words of which I could not distinguish, was pealing through the dim aisles of the forest. I could readilyperceive that it had its effect upon the multitude before me, kindlingto higher intensity their already excited enthusiasm. The preacherswere placed in a rude pulpit of rough boards, carpeted only by the deadforest-leaves and flowers, and tasselled, not with silk and velvet, butwith the green boughs of the sombre hemlocks around it. One of themfollowed the music in an earnest exhortation on the duty of preparingfor the great event. Occasionally he was really eloquent, and hisdescription of the last day had the ghastly distinctness of Anelli'spainting of the End of the World. 

Suspended from the front of the rude pulpit were two broad sheets ofcanvas, upon one of which was the figure of a man, the head of gold, thebreast and arms of silver, the belly of brass, the legs of iron, andfeet of clay, --the dream of Nebuchadnezzar. On the other were depictedthe wonders of the Apocalyptic vision, --the beasts, the dragons, thescarlet woman seen by the seer of Patmos, Oriental types, figures, andmystic symbols, translated into staring Yankee realities, and exhibitedlike the beasts of a travelling menagerie. One horrible image, with itshideous heads and scaly caudal extremity, reminded me of the tremendousline of Milton, who, in speaking of the same evil dragon, describes himas

 "Swinging the scaly horrors of his folded tail. "

To an imaginative mind the scene was full of novel interest. The whitecircle of tents; the dim wood arches; the upturned, earnest faces; theloud voices of the speakers, burdened with the awful symbolic languageof the Bible; the smoke from the fires, rising like incense, --carried meback to those days of primitive worship which tradition faintly whispersof, when on hill-tops and in the shade of old woods Religion had herfirst altars, with every man for her priest and the whole universe forher temple. 

Wisely and truthfully has Dr. Channing spoken of this doctrine of theSecond Advent in his memorable discourse in Berkshire a little beforehis death:--

"There are some among us at the present moment who are waiting for thespeedy coming of Christ. They expect, before another year closes, tosee Him in the clouds, to hear His voice, to stand before His judgment-seat. These illusions spring from misinterpretation of Scripturelanguage. Christ, in the New Testament, is said to come whenever Hisreligion breaks out in new glory or gains new triumphs. He came in theHoly Spirit in the day of Pentecost. He came in the destruction ofJerusalem, which, by subverting the old ritual law and breaking thepower 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 fouryears ago, when, through His religion, eight hundred thousand men wereraised from the lowest degradation to the rights, and dignity, andfellowship of men. Christ's outward appearance is of little momentcompared with the brighter manifestation of His spirit. The Christian, whose inward eyes and ears are touched by God, discerns the coming ofChrist, hears the sound of His chariot-wheels and the voice of Histrumpet, when no other perceives them. He discerns the Saviour's adventin the dawning of higher truth on the world, in new aspirations of theChurch after perfection, in the prostration of prejudice and error, inbrighter expressions of Christian love, in more enlightened and intenseconsecration of the Christian to the cause of humanity, freedom, andreligion. Christ comes in the conversion, the regeneration, theemancipation, of the world. "

THE HEROINE OF LONG POINT. (1869. )

LOOKING at the Government Chart of Lake Erie, one sees the outlines of along, narrow island, stretching along the shore of Canada West, oppositethe point where Loudon District pushes its low, wooded wedge into thelake. This is Long Point Island, known and dreaded by the navigators ofthe inland sea which batters its yielding shores, and tosses intofantastic shapes its sandheaps. The eastern end is some twenty milesfrom the Canada shore, while on the west it is only separated from themainland by a narrow strait known as "The Cut. " It is a sandy, desolateregion, broken by small ponds, with dreary tracts of fenland, its ridgescovered with a low growth of pine, oak, beech, and birch, in the midstof which, in its season, the dogwood puts out its white blossoms. Wildgrapes trail over the sand-dunes and festoon the dwarf trees. Here andthere are almost impenetrable swamps, thick-set with white cedars, intertwisted and contorted by the lake winds, and broken by the weightof snow and ice in winter. Swans and wild geese paddle in the shallow, reedy bayous; raccoons and even deer traverse the sparsely woodedridges. The shores of its creeks and fens are tenanted by minks andmuskrats. The tall tower of a light-house rises at the easternextremity of the island, the keeper of which is now its solitaryinhabitant. 

Fourteen years ago, another individual shared the proprietorship of LongPoint. This was John Becker, who dwelt on the south side of the island, near its westerly termination, in a miserable board shanty nestledbetween naked sand-hills. He managed to make a poor living by trappingand spearing muskrats, the skins of which he sold to such boatmen andsmall-craft skippers as chanced to land on his forlorn territory. Hiswife, a large, mild-eyed, patient young woman of some twenty-six years, kept her hut and children as tidy as circumstances admitted, assistedher husband in preparing the skins, and sometimes accompanied him on histrapping excursions. 

On that lonely coast, seldom visited in summer, and wholly cut off fromhuman communication in winter, they might have lived and died with aslittle recognition from the world as the minks and wildfowl with whomthey were tenants in common, but for a circumstance which called intoexercise unsuspected qualities of generous courage and heroic self-sacrifice. 

The dark, stormy close of November, 1854, found many vessels on LakeErie, but the fortunes of one alone have special interest for us. Aboutthat time the schooner Conductor, owned by John McLeod, of theProvincial Parliament, a resident of Amherstburg, at the mouth of theDetroit River, entered the lake from that river, bound for PortDalhousie, at the mouth of the Welland Canal. 

She was heavily loaded with grain. Her crew consisted of CaptainHackett, a Highlander by birth, and a skilful and experienced navigator, and six sailors. At nightfall, shortly after leaving the head of thelake, one of those terrific storms, with which the late autumnalnavigators of that "Sea of the Woods" are all too familiar, overtookthem. The weather was intensely cold for the season; the air was filledwith snow and sleet; the chilled water made ice rapidly, encumbering theschooner, and loading down her decks and rigging. As the galeincreased, the tops of the waves were shorn off by the fierce blasts, clouding the whole atmosphere with frozen spray, or what the sailorscall "spoondrift, " rendering it impossible to see any object a few rodsdistant. Driving helplessly before the wind, yet in the direction ofher place of destination, the schooner sped through the darkness. Atlast, near midnight, running closer than her crew supposed to theCanadian shore, she struck on the outer bar off Long Point Island, beatheavily across it, and sunk in the deeper water between it and the innerbar. The hull was entirely submerged, the waves rolling in heavily, anddashing over the rigging, to which the crew betook themselves. Lashedthere, numb with cold, drenched by the pitiless waves, and scourged bythe showers of sleet driven before the wind, they waited for morning. The slow, dreadful hours wore away, and at length the dubious anddoubtful gray of a morning of tempest succeeded to the utter darkness ofnight. 

Abigail Becker chanced at that time to be in her hut with none but heryoung children. Her husband was absent on the Canada shore, and she wasleft the sole adult occupant of the island, save the light-keeper, atits lower end, some fifteen miles off. Looking out at daylight on thebeach 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 thatdangerous coast needed nothing more to convince her that somewhere inher neighborhood human life had been, or still was, in peril. Shefollowed the southwesterly trend of the island for a little distance, and, peering through the gloom of the stormy morning, discerned thespars of the sunken schooner, with what seemed to be human formsclinging to the rigging. The heart of the strong woman sunk within her, as she gazed upon those helpless fellow-creatures, so near, yet sounapproachable. She had no boat, and none could have lived on that wildwater. After a moment's reflection she went back to her dwelling, putthe smaller children in charge of the eldest, took with her an ironkettle, tin teapot, and matches, and returned to the beach, at thenearest point to the vessel; and, gathering up the logs and drift-woodalways abundant, on the coast, kindled a great fire, and, constantlywalking back and forth between it and the water, strove to intimate tothe sufferers that they were at least not beyond human sympathy. As thewrecked sailors looked shoreward, and saw, through the thick haze ofsnow and sleet, the red light of the fire and the tall figure of thewoman passing to and fro before it, a faint hope took the place of theutter despair which had prompted them to let go their hold and drop intothe seething waters, that opened and closed about them like the jaws ofdeath. But the day wore on, bringing no abatement of the storm thattore through the frail spars, and clutched at and tossed them as itpassed, and drenched them with ice-cold spray, --a pitiless, unrelentinghorror of sight, sound, and touch! At last the deepening gloom toldthem that night was approaching, and night under such circumstances wasdeath. 

All day long Abigail Becker had fed her fire, and sought to induce thesailors by signals--for even her strong voice could not reach them--tothrow themselves into the surf, and trust to Providence and her forsuccor. In anticipation of this, she had her kettle boiling over thedrift-wood, and her tea ready made for restoring warmth and life to thehalf-frozen survivors. But either they did not understand her, or thechance of rescue seemed too small to induce them to abandon thetemporary safety of the wreck. They clung to it with the desperateinstinct of life brought face to face with death. Just at nightfallthere was a slight break in the west; a red light glared across thethick air, as if for one instant the eye of the storm looked out uponthe ruin it had wrought, and closed again under lids of cloud. Takingadvantage of this, the solitary watcher ashore made one more effort. She waded out into the water, every drop of which, as it struck thebeach, became a particle of ice, and stretching out and drawing in herarms, invited, by her gestures, the sailors to throw themselves into thewaves, and strive to reach her. Captain Hackett understood her. Hecalled to his mate in the rigging of the other mast: "It is our lastchance. I will try! If I live, follow me; if I drown, stay where youare!" 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. AbigailBecker, breast-deep in the surf, awaited him. He was almost within herreach, when the undertow swept him back. By a mighty exertion shecaught 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 copiousdraughts of hot tea. The mate, who had watched the rescue, nowfollowed, 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 bothaway, 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 insuccession, and were all rescued in the same way. 

A few days after, Captain Hackett and his crew were taken off Long Pointby a passing vessel; and Abigail Becker resumed her simple daily dutieswithout dreaming that she had done anything extraordinary enough to winfor her the world's notice. In her struggle every day for food andwarmth for her children, she had no leisure for the indulgence of self-congratulation. Like the woman of Scripture, she had only "done whatshe could, " in the terrible exigency that had broken the dreary monotonyof her life. 

It so chanced, however, that a gentleman from Buffalo, E. P. Dorr, whohad, 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 LongPoint Island. Here he met an old shipmate, Captain Davis, whose vesselhad gone ashore at a more favorable point, and who related to him thecircumstances of the wreck of the Conductor. Struck by the account, Captain Dorr procured a sleigh and drove across the frozen bay to theshanty of Abigail Becker. He found her with her six children, allthinly clad and barefooted in the bitter cold. She stood there six feetor more of substantial womanhood, --not in her stockings, for she hadnone, --a veritable daughter of Anak, broad-bosomed, large-limbed, withgreat, patient blue eyes, whose very smile had a certain pathos, as ifone saw in it her hard and weary life-experience. She might have passedfor any amiable giantess, or one of those much--developed maids of honorwho tossed Gulliver from hand to hand in the court of Brobdingnag. Thething that most surprised her visitor was the childlike simplicity ofthe woman, her utter unconsciousness of deserving anything for an actionthat seemed to her merely a matter of course. When he expressed hisadmiration with all the warmth of a generous nature, she only opened herwide blue eyes still wider with astonishment. 

"Well, I don't know, " she said, slowly, as if pondering the matter forthe first time, --"I don't know as I did more 'n I'd ought to, nor more'nI'd do again. "

Before Captain Dorr left, he took the measure of her own and herchildren's feet, and on his return to Buffalo sent her a box containingshoes, stockings, and such other comfortable articles of clothing asthey most needed. He published a brief account of his visit to theheroine of Long Point, which attracted the attention of some members ofthe Provincial Parliament, and through their exertions a grant of onehundred acres of land, on the Canada shore, near Port Rowan, was made toher. Soon after she was invited to Buffalo, where she naturally excitedmuch interest. A generous contribution of one thousand dollars, tostock her farm, was made by the merchants, ship-owners and masters ofthe city, and she returned to her family a grateful and, in her ownview, a rich woman. 

When the story of her adventure reached New York, the Life-SavingBenevolent Association sent her a gold medal with an appropriateinscription, and a request that she would send back a receipt in her ownname. As she did not know how to write, Captain Dorr hit upon theexpedient of having her photograph taken with the medal in her hand, andsent that in lieu of her autograph. 

In a recent letter dictated at Walsingham, where Abigail Becker nowlives, --a widow, cultivating with her own hands her little farm in thewilderness, --she speaks gratefully of the past and hopefully of thefuture. She mentions a message received from Captain Hackett, who shefeared had almost forgotten her, that he was about to make her a visit, adding with a touch of shrewdness: "After his second shipwreck lastsummer, I think likely that I must have recurred very fresh to him. "

The strong lake winds now blow unchecked over the sand-hills where oncestood the board shanty of Abigail Becker. But the summer tourist of thegreat lakes, who remembers her story, will not fail to give her a placein his imagination with Perry's battle-line and the Indian heroines ofCooper and Longfellow. Through her the desolate island of Long Point isrichly dowered with the interest which a brave and generous action givesto 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? Whohas not laid at night his young head on the pillow, to paint on thewalls of darkness pictures of the Wicket Gate and the Archers, the Hillof Difficulty, the Lions and Giants, Doubting Castle and Vanity Fair, the sunny Delectable Mountains and the Shepherds, the Black River andthe wonderful glory beyond it; and at last fallen asleep, to dream overthe strange story, to hear the sweet welcomings of the sisters at theHouse Beautiful, and the song of birds from the window of that "upperchamber which opened towards the sunrising?" And who, looking back tothe green spots in his childish experiences, does not bless the goodTinker 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 thesoul, has not reason to bless the author for some timely warning orgrateful encouragement? Where is the scholar, the poet, the man of tasteand 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 simplebut wonderful piece of autobiography, entitled Grace abounding to theChief of Sinners, from the pen of the author of Pilgrim's Progress. Itis the record of a journey more terrible than that of the ideal Pilgrim;"truth stranger than fiction;" the painful upward struggling of a spiritfrom the blackness of despair and blasphemy, into the high, pure air ofHope and Faith. More earnest words were never written. It is the entireunveiling of a human heart; the tearing off of the fig-leaf covering ofits sin. The voice which speaks to us from these old pages seems not somuch that of a denizen of the world in which we live, as of a soul at thelast solemn confessional. Shorn of all ornament, simple and direct asthe contrition and prayer of childhood, when for the first time theSpectre of Sin stands by its bedside, the style is that of a man dead toself-gratification, careless of the world's opinion, and only desirous toconvey to others, in all truthfulness and sincerity, the lesson of hisinward trials, temptations, sins, weaknesses, and dangers; and to giveglory 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 ShiningOnes walked in the brightness of the not distant Heaven. In theintroductory pages he says "he could have dipped into a style higher thanthis in which I have discoursed, and could have adorned all things morethan here I have seemed to do; but I dared not. God did not play intempting me; neither did I play when I sunk, as it were, into abottomless pit, when the pangs of hell took hold on me; wherefore, I maynot play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down thething 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 hisministry. " In his introduction he tells them, that, although taken fromthem, and tied up, "sticking, as it were, between the teeth of the lionsof the wilderness, " he once again, as before, from the top of Shemer andHermon, so now, from the lion's den and the mountain of leopards, wouldlook after then with fatherly care and desires for their everlastingwelfare. "If, " said he, "you have sinned against light; if you aretempted to blaspheme; if you are drowned in despair; if you think Godfights against you; or if Heaven is hidden from your eyes, remember itwas 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 theman, as he worked, and ate, and drank, and lodged, of his neighbors andcontemporaries, of all he saw and heard of the world about him, we haveonly an occasional glimpse, here and there, in his narrative. It is thestory of his inward life only that he relates. What had time and placeto do with one who trembled always with the awful consciousness of animmortal nature, and about whom fell alternately the shadows of hell andthe splendors of heaven? We gather, indeed, from his record, that he wasnot an idle on-looker in the time of England's great struggle forfreedom, but a soldier of the Parliament, in his young years, among thepraying sworders and psalm-singing pikemen, the Greathearts and Holdfastswhom he has immortalized in his allegory; but the only allusion which hemakes to this portion of his experience is by way of illustration of thegoodness of God in preserving him on occasions of peril. 

He was born at Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in 1628; and, to use his ownwords, his "father's house was of that rank which is the meanest and mostdespised of all the families of the land. " His father was a tinker, andthe son followed the same calling, which necessarily brought him intoassociation with the lowest and most depraved classes of English society. The estimation in which the tinker and his occupation were held, in theseventeenth century, may be learned from the quaint and humorousdescription of Sir Thomas Overbury. "The tinker, " saith he, "is amovable, for he hath no abiding in one place; he seems to be devout, forhis life is a continual pilgrimage, and sometimes, in humility, goesbarefoot, therein making necessity a virtue; he is a gallant, for hecarries all his wealth upon his back; or a philosopher, for he bears allhis substance with him. He is always furnished with a song, to which hishammer, 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, sincethe terrible statute, has recanted gypsyism, and is turned pedlaress. Somarches he all over England, with his bag and baggage; his conversationis irreprovable, for he is always mending. He observes truly thestatutes, and therefore had rather steal than beg. He is so strong anenemy of idleness, that in mending one hole he would rather make threethan want work; and when he hath done, he throws the wallet of his faultsbehind him. His tongue is very voluble, which, with canting, proves hima linguist. He is entertained in every place, yet enters no farther thanthe door, to avoid suspicion. To conclude, if he escape Tyburn andBanbury, he dies a beggar. "

Truly, but a poor beginning for a pious life was the youth of JohnBunyan. As might have been expected, he was a wild, reckless, swearingboy, as his father doubtless was before him. "It was my delight, " sayshe, "to be taken captive by the Devil. I had few equals, both forcursing and swearing, lying and blaspheming. " Yet, in his ignorance anddarkness, his powerful imagination early lent terror to the reproaches ofconscience. He was scared, even in childhood, with dreams of hell andapparitions of devils. Troubled with fears of eternal fire, and themalignant demons who fed it in the regions of despair, he says that heoften wished either that there was no hell, or that he had been born adevil himself, that he might be a tormentor rather than one of thetormented. 

At an early age he appears to have married. His wife was as poor ashimself, for he tells us that they had not so much as a dish or spoonbetween them; but she brought with her two books on religious subjects, the reading of which seems to have had no slight degree of influence onhis mind. He went to church regularly, adored the priest and all thingspertaining to his office, being, as he says, "overrun with superstition. "On one occasion, a sermon was preached against the breach of the Sabbathby sports or labor, which struck him at the moment as especially designedfor himself; but by the time he had finished his dinner he was preparedto "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 ofcat, and having struck it one blow from the hole, just as I was about tostrike it a second time, a voice did suddenly dart from Heaven into mysoul, which said, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thysins 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 itwas as if I had, with the eyes of my understanding, seen the Lord Jesuslook down upon me, as being very hotly displeased with me, and as if Hedid severely threaten me with some grievous punishment for those andother ungodly practices. 

"I had no sooner thus conceived in my mind, but suddenly this conclusionfastened on my spirit, (for the former hint did set my sins again beforemy face, ) that I had been a great and grievous sinner, and that it wasnow too late for me to look after Heaven; for Christ would not forgive menor pardon my transgressions. Then, while I was thinking of it, andfearing lest it should be so, I felt my heart sink in despair, concludingit 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 canbut be damned; and if I must be so, I had as good be damned for many sinsas be damned for few. "

The reader of Pilgrim's Progress cannot fail here to call to mind thewicked suggestions of the Giant to Christian, in the dungeon of DoubtingCastle. 

"I returned, " he says, "desperately to my sport again; and I wellremember, that presently this kind of despair did so possess my soul, that I was persuaded I could never attain to other comfort than what Ishould get in sin; for Heaven was gone already, so that on that I mustnot think; wherefore, I found within me great desire to take my fill ofsin, that I might taste the sweetness of it; and I made as much haste asI could to fill my belly with its delicates, lest I should die before Ihad my desires; for that I feared greatly. In these things, I protestbefore God, I lie not, neither do I frame this sort of speech; these werereally, strongly, and with all my heart, my desires; the good Lord, whosemercy is unsearchable, forgive my transgressions. "

One day, while standing in the street, cursing and blaspheming, he metwith a reproof which startled him. The woman of the house in front ofwhich the wicked young tinker was standing, herself, as he remarks, "avery loose, ungodly wretch, " protested that his horrible profanity madeher tremble; that he was the ungodliest fellow for swearing she had everheard, and able to spoil all the youth of the town who came in hiscompany. Struck by this wholly unexpected rebuke, he at once abandonedthe practice of swearing; although previously he tells us that "he hadnever known how to speak, unless he put an oath before and anotherbehind. "

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 fromprodigious profaneness to something like a moral life and sober man. Now, therefore, they began to praise, to commend, and to speak well ofme, both to my face and behind my back. Now I was, as they said, becomegodly; now I was become a right honest man. But oh! when I understoodthose were their words and opinions of me, it pleased me mighty well; forthough as yet I was nothing but a poor painted hypocrite, yet I loved tobe 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 bymen; and thus I continued for about a twelvemonth or more. "

The tyranny of his imagination at this period is seen in the followingrelation of his abandonment of one of his favorite sports. 

"Now, you must know, that before this I had taken much delight inringing, but my conscience beginning to be tender, I thought suchpractice was but vain, and therefore forced myself to leave it; yet mymind hankered; wherefore, I would go to the steeple-house and look on, though I durst not ring; but I thought this did not become religionneither; yet I forced myself, and would look on still. But quicklyafter, I began to think, 'How if one of the bells should fall?' Then Ichose to stand under a main beam, that lay overthwart the steeple, fromside 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 standin the steeple door; and now, thought I, I am safe enough; for if a bellshould then fall, I can slip out behind these thick walls, and so bepreserved notwithstanding. 

"So after this I would yet go to see them ring, but would not go anyfarther than the steeple-door. But then it came in my head, 'How if thesteeple 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 Idurst 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 ofemployment, he chanced to see three or four poor old women sitting at adoor, in the evening sun, and, drawing near them, heard them converseupon the things of God; of His work in their hearts; of their naturaldepravity; of the temptations of the Adversary; and of the joy ofbelieving, and of the peace of reconciliation. The words of the agedwomen found a response in the soul of the listener. "He felt his heartshake, " to use his own words; he saw that he lacked the true tokens of aChristian. He now forsook the company of the profane and licentious, andsought that of a poor man who had the reputation of piety, but, to hisgrief, he found him "a devilish ranter, given up to all manner ofuncleanness; he would laugh at all exhortations to sobriety, and denythat there was a God, an angel, or a spirit. "

"Neither, " he continues, "was this man only a temptation to me, but, mycalling lying in the country, I happened to come into several people'scompany, who, though strict in religion formerly, yet were also drawnaway by these ranters. These would also talk with me of their ways, andcondemn me as illegal and dark; pretending that they only had attained toperfection, that they could do what they would, and not sin. Oh! thesetemptations were suitable to my flesh, I being but a young man, and mynature in its prime; but God, who had, as I hope, designed me for betterthings, kept me in the fear of His name, and did not suffer me to acceptsuch cursed principles. "

At this time he was sadly troubled to ascertain whether or not he hadthat faith which the Scriptures spake of. Travelling one day from Elstowto Bedford, after a recent rain, which had left pools of water in thepath, he felt a strong desire to settle the question, by commanding thepools to become dry, and the dry places to become pools. Going under thehedge, to pray for ability to work the miracle, he was struck with thethought 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, andwent on his way, to use his own forcible language, "tossed up and downbetween the Devil and his own ignorance. "

Soon after, he had one of those visions which foreshadowed the wonderfuldream of his Pilgrim's Progress. He saw some holy people of Bedford onthe sunny side of an high mountain, refreshing themselves in the pleasantair and sunlight, while he was shivering in cold and darkness, amidstsnows and never-melting ices, like the victims of the Scandinavian hell. A wall compassed the mountain, separating him from the blessed, with onesmall gap or doorway, through which, with great pain and effort, he wasat last enabled to work his way into the sunshine, and sit down with thesaints, 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 ofthose great questions which have always perplexed and baffled humaninquiry, and upon which much has been written to little purpose. He wastortured with anxiety to know whether, according to the Westminsterformula, he was elected to salvation or damnation. His old adversaryvexed his soul with evil suggestions, and even quoted Scripture toenforce them. "It may be you are not elected, " said the Tempter; and thepoor tinker thought the supposition altogether too probable. "Why, then, " said Satan, "you had as good leave off, and strive no farther; forif, indeed, you should not be elected and chosen of God, there is no hopeof your being saved; for it is neither in him that willeth nor in himthat runneth, but in God who showeth mercy. " At length, when, as hesays, he was about giving up the ghost of all his hopes, this passagefell with weight upon his spirit: "Look at the generations of old, andsee; did ever any trust in God, and were confounded?" Comforted by thesewords, he opened his Bible took note them, but the most diligent searchand inquiry of his neighbors failed to discover them. At length his eyefell upon them in the Apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus. This, he says, somewhat doubted him at first, as the book was not canonical; but in theend he took courage and comfort from the passage. "I bless God, " hesays, "for that word; it was good for me. That word doth stilloftentimes 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 Christto call me. Gold! could it have been gotten by gold, what would I havegiven for it. Had I a whole world, it had all gone ten thousand timesover for this, that my soul might have been in a converted state. Howlovely now was every one in my eyes, that I thought to be converted menand women. They shone, they walked like a people who carried the broadseal of Heaven with them. "

With what force and intensity of language does he portray in thefollowing passage the reality and earnestness of his agonizingexperience:--

"While I was thus afflicted with the fears of my own damnation, therewere two things would make me wonder: the one was, when I saw old peoplehunting after the things of this life, as if they should live herealways; the other was, when I found professors much distressed and castdown, when they met with outward losses; as of husband, wife, or child. Lord, thought I, what seeking after carnal things by some, and what griefin others for the loss of them! If they so much labor after and shed somany 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 mysoul but in a good condition, and were I but sure of it, ah I how richshould I esteem myself, though blessed but with bread and water! Ishould count these but small afflictions, and should bear them as littleburdens. 'A wounded spirit who can bear!'"

He looked with envy, as he wandered through the country, upon the birdsin 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 asleep. He felt himself alienated from God, a discord in the harmonies ofthe universe. The very rooks which fluttered around the old church spireseemed more worthy of the Creator's love and care than himself. A visionof the infernal fire, like that glimpse of hell which was afforded toChristian by the Shepherds, was continually before him, with its"rumbling noise, and the cry of some tormented, and the scent ofbrimstone. " Whithersoever he went, the glare of it scorched him, and itsdreadful sound was in his ears. His vivid but disturbed imagination lentnew terrors to the awful figures by which the sacred writers conveyed theidea of future retribution to the Oriental mind. Bunyan's World of Woe, if it lacked the colossal architecture and solemn vastness of Milton'sPandemonium, was more clearly defined; its agonies were within the paleof human comprehension; its victims were men and women, with the samekeen sense of corporeal suffering which they possessed in life; and who, to use his own terrible description, had "all the loathed variety of hellto grapple with; fire unquenchable, a lake of choking brimstone, eternalchains, darkness more black than night, the everlasting gnawing of theworm, the sight of devils, and the yells and outcries of the damned. "

His mind at this period was evidently shaken in some degree from itsbalance. He was troubled with strange, wicked thoughts, confused bydoubts and blasphemous suggestions, for which he could only account bysupposing 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, hefelt, as he supposed, Satan behind him, pulling his clothes, and tellinghim to have done, and break off; suggesting that he had better pray tohim, 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 andclouded state, he was enabled to see the "vile and abominable thingsfomented by the Quakers, " to be errors. Gradually, the shadow wherein hehad 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 hissalvation from Heaven, with many golden seals thereon hanging in hissight. " But, ere long, other temptations assailed him. A strangesuggestion haunted him, to sell or part with his Saviour. His ownaccount of this hallucination is too painfully vivid to awaken any otherfeeling than that of sympathy and sadness. 

"I could neither eat my food, stoop for a pin, chop a stick, or cast mineeye to look on this or that, but still the temptation would come, SellChrist for this, or sell Christ for that; sell him, sell him. 

"Sometimes it would run in my thoughts, not so little as a hundred timestogether, Sell him, sell him; against which, I may say, for whole hourstogether, I have been forced to stand as continually leaning and forcingmy spirit against it, lest haply, before I were aware, some wickedthought might arise in my heart, that might consent thereto; andsometimes the tempter would make me believe I had consented to it; butthen 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, Isay, consent thereto, and be overcome therewith, that, by the very forceof my mind, my very body would be put into action or motion, by way ofpushing or thrusting with my hands or elbows; still answering, as fast asthe destroyer said, Sell him, I will not, I will not, I will not; no, notfor thousands, thousands, thousands of worlds; thus reckoning, lest Ishould set too low a value on him, even until I scarce well knew where Iwas, or how to be composed again. 

"But to be brief: one morning, as I did lie in my bed, I was, as at othertimes, most fiercely assaulted with this temptation, to sell and partwith 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 myheart, Let him go if he will; and I thought also, that I felt my heartfreely consent thereto. Oh, the diligence of Satan! Oh, thedesperateness of man's heart!

"Now was the battle won, and down fell I, as a bird that is shot from thetop of a tree, into great guilt, and fearful despair. Thus getting outof my bed, I went moping into the field; but God knows with as heavy aheart as mortal man, I think, could bear; where, for the space of twohours, 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 wasrejected; for he found no place for repentance, though he sought itcarefully with tears. "

For two years and a half, as he informs us, that awful scripture soundedin his ears like the knell of a lost soul. He believed that he hadcommitted they unpardonable sin. His mental anguish 'was united withbodily illness and suffering. His nervous system became fearfullyderanged; his limbs trembled; and he supposed this visible tremulousnessand agitation to be the mark of Cain. 'Troubled with pain anddistressing sensations in his chest, he began to fear that his breast-bone would split open, and that he should perish like Judas Iscariot. Hefeared that the tiles of the houses would fall upon him as he walked inthe streets. He was like his own Man in the Cage at the House of theInterpreter, shut out from the promises, and looking forward to certainjudgment. "Methought, " he says, "the very sun that shineth in heaven didgrudge to give me light. " And still the dreadful words, "He found noplace for repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears, " soundedin the depths of his soul. They were, he says, like fetters of brass tohis legs, and their continual clanking followed him for months. Regarding himself elected and predestined for damnation, he thought thatall things worked for his damage and eternal overthrow, while all thingswrought for the best and to do good to the elect and called of God untosalvation. God and all His universe had, he thought, conspired againsthim; the green earth, the bright waters, the sky itself, were writtenover with His irrevocable curse. 

Well was it said by Bunyan's contemporary, the excellent Cudworth, in hiseloquent sermon before the Long Parliament, that "We are nowherecommanded to pry into the secrets of God, but the wholesome advice givenus is this: 'To make our calling and election sure. ' We have no warrantfrom Scripture to peep into the hidden rolls of eternity, to spell outour names among the stars. " "Must we say that God sometimes, to exerciseHis uncontrollable dominion, delights rather in plunging wretched soulsdown into infernal night and everlasting darkness? What, then, shall wemake the God of the whole world? Nothing but a cruel and dreadful_Erinnys_, with curled fiery snakes about His head, and firebrands in Hishand; thus governing the world! Surely, this will make us eithersecretly think there is no God in the world, if He must needs be such, orelse to wish heartily there were none. " It was thus at times withBunyan. He was tempted, in this season of despair, to believe that therewas no resurrection and no judgment. 

One day, he tells us, a sudden rushing sound, as of wind or the wings ofangels, came to him through the window, wonderfully sweet and pleasant;and it was as if a voice spoke to him from heaven words of encouragementand hope, which, to use his language, commanded, for the time, "a silencein his heart to all those tumultuous thoughts that did use, likemasterless hell-hounds, to roar and bellow and make a hideous noisewithin him. " About this time, also, some comforting passages ofScripture were called to mind; but he remarks, that whenever he strove toapply 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 comethto me, I will in no wise cast out" was the chief instrumentality inrestoring his lost peace. He says of it: "If ever Satan and I did strivefor 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 forthis in John, I say, that we did so tug and strive; he pulled, and Ipulled, 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 sixthchapter of John!" Who does not here call to mind the struggle betweenChristian and Apollyon in the valley!

That was no fancy sketch; it was the narrative of the author's owngrapple with the Spirit of Evil. Like his ideal Christian, he "conqueredthrough Him that loved him. " Love wrought the victory the Scripture ofForgiveness overcame that of Hatred. 

He never afterwards relapsed into that state of religious melancholy fromwhich he so hardly escaped. He speaks of his deliverance as the wakingout of a troublesome dream. His painful experience was not lost uponhim; for it gave him, ever after, a tender sympathy for the weak, thesinful, the ignorant, and desponding. In some measure, he had been"touched with the feeling of their infirmities. " He could feel for thosein the bonds of sin and despair, as bound with them. Hence his power asa preacher; hence the wonderful adaptation of his great allegory to allthe variety of spiritual conditions. Like Fearing, he had lain a monthin the Slough of Despond, and had played, like him, the long melancholybass of spiritual heaviness. With Feeble-mind, he had fallen into thehands of Slay-good, of the nature of Man-eaters: and had limped along hisdifficult way upon the crutches of Ready-to-halt. Who better thanhimself could describe the condition of Despondency, and his daughterMuch-afraid, in the dungeon of Doubting Castle? Had he not also fallenamong thieves, like Little-faith?

His account of his entering upon the solemn duties of a preacher of theGospel is at once curious and instructive. He deals honestly withhimself, exposing all his various moods, weaknesses, doubts, andtemptations. "I preached, " he says, "what I felt; for the terrors of thelaw and the guilt of transgression lay heavy on my conscience. I havebeen as one sent to them from the dead. I went, myself in chains, topreach to them in chains; and carried that fire in my conscience which Ipersuaded them to beware of. " At times, when he stood up to preach, blasphemies and evil doubts rushed into his mind, and he felt a strongdesire to utter them aloud to his congregation; and at other seasons, when he was about to apply to the sinner some searching and fearful textof Scripture, he was tempted to withhold it, on the ground that itcondemned himself also; but, withstanding the suggestion of the Tempter, to use his own simile, he bowed himself like Samson to condemn sinwherever he found it, though he brought guilt and condemnation uponhimself thereby, choosing rather to die with the Philistines than to denythe truth. 

Foreseeing the consequences of exposing himself to the operation of thepenal laws by holding conventicles and preaching, he was deeply afflictedat the thought of the suffering and destitution to which his wife andchildren might be exposed by his death or imprisonment. Nothing can bemore touching than his simple and earnest words on this point. They showhow warm and deep were him human affections, and what a tender and lovingheart he laid as a sacrifice on the altar of duty. 

"I found myself a man compassed with infirmities; the parting with mywife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pullingthe flesh from the bones; and also it brought to my mind the manyhardships, miseries, and wants, that my poor family was like to meetwith, should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, wholay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, the thoughts of the hardships Ithought 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 portionin this world! thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the windshould blow upon thee. But yet, thought I, I must venture you all withGod, though it goeth to the quick to leave you: oh! I saw I was as a manwho 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 Godinto 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 thyfatherless children, I will preserve them alive; and let thy widows trustin me;' and again, 'The Lord said, verily it shall go well with thyremnant; verily I will cause the enemy to entreat them well in the timeof evil. '"

He was arrested in 1660, charged with "devilishly and perniciouslyabstaining from church, " and of being "a common upholder ofconventicles. " At the Quarter Sessions, where his trial seems to havebeen conducted somewhat like that of Faithful at Vanity Fair, he wassentenced to perpetual banishment. This sentence, however, was neverexecuted, but he was remanded to Bedford jail, where he lay a prisonerfor twelve years. 

Here, shut out from the world, with no other books than the Bible andFox's Martyrs, he penned that great work which has attained a wider andmore stable popularity than any other book in the English tongue. It isalike the favorite of the nursery and the study. Many experiencedChristians hold it only second to the Bible; the infidel himself wouldnot willingly let it die. Men of all sects read it with delight, as inthe main a truthful representation of the 'Christian pilgrimage, withoutindeed assenting to all the doctrines which the author puts in the monthof his fighting sermonizer, Great-heart, or which may be deduced fromsome other portions of his allegory. A recollection of his fearfulsufferings, from misapprehension of a single text in the Scriptures, relative to the question of election, we may suppose gave a milder toneto the theology of his Pilgrim than was altogether consistent with theCalvinism of the seventeenth century. "Religion, " says Macaulay, "hasscarcely 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 thefact, that, in his life-and-death struggle with Satan for the blessedpromise recorded by the Apostle of Love, the adversary was generallyfound on the Genevan side of the argument. Little did the short-sightedpersecutors of Bunyan dream, when they closed upon him the door ofBedford jail, that God would overrule their poor spite and envy to Hisown glory and the worldwide renown of their victim. In the solitude ofhis prison, the ideal forms of beauty and sublimity, which had longflitted before him vaguely, like the vision of the Temanite, took shapeand coloring; and he was endowed with power to reduce them to order, andarrange them in harmonious groupings. His powerful imagination, nolonger self-tormenting, but under the direction of reason and grace, expanded his narrow cell into a vast theatre, lighted up for the displayof its wonders. To this creative faculty of his mind might have beenaptly 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 thewandering Patriarch. He saw angels ascending and descending. The HouseBeautiful rose up before him, and its holy sisterhood welcomed him. Helooked, with his Pilgrim, from the Chamber of Peace. The Valley ofHumiliation lay stretched out beneath his eye, and he heard "the curious, melodious note of the country birds, who sing all the day long in thespring time, when the flowers appear, and the sun shines warm, and makethe woods and groves and solitary places glad. " Side by side with thegood Christiana and the loving Mercy, he walked through the green andlowly valley, "fruitful as any the crow flies over, " through "meadowsbeautiful 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 peacefullybefore him, fringed "on either side with green trees, with all manner offruit, " and leaves of healing, with "meadows beautified with lilies, andgreen all the year long;" he saw the Delectable Mountains, glorious withsunshine, overhung with gardens and orchards and vineyards; and beyondall, the Land of Beulah, with its eternal sunshine, its song of birds, its music of fountains, its purple clustered vines, and groves throughwhich walked the Shining Ones, silver-winged and beautiful. 

What were bars and bolts and prison-walls to him, whose eyes wereanointed to see, and whose ears opened to hear, the glory and therejoicing of the City of God, when the pilgrims were conducted to itsgolden gates, from the black and bitter river, with the soundingtrumpeters, the transfigured harpers with their crowns of gold, the sweetvoices of angels, the welcoming peal of bells in the holy city, and thesongs of the redeemed ones? In reading the concluding pages of the firstpart of Pilgrim's Progress, we feel as if the mysterious glory of theBeatific Vision was unveiled before us. We are dazzled with the excessof light. We are entranced with the mighty melody; overwhelmed by thegreat anthem of rejoicing spirits. It can only be adequately describedin the language of Milton in respect to the Apocalypse, as "a seven-foldchorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies. "

Few who read Bunyan nowadays think of him as one of the brave old Englishconfessors, whose steady and firm endurance of persecution baffled and inthe end overcame the tyranny of the Established Church in the reign ofCharles 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 andpoorest of his disciples at Bedford. When first arrested and thrown intoprison, he supposed he should be called to suffer death for his faithfultestimony to the truth; and his great fear was, that he should not meethis fate with the requisite firmness, and so dishonor the cause of hisMaster. And when dark clouds came over him, and he sought in vain for asufficient evidence that in the event of his death it would be well withhim, he girded up his soul with the reflection, that, as he suffered forthe word and way of God, he was engaged not to shrink one hair's breadthfrom it. "I will leap, " he says, "off the ladder blindfold intoeternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. Lord Jesus, if thou wiltcatch me, do; if not, I will venture in thy name!"

The English revolution of the seventeenth century, while it humbled thefalse and oppressive aristocracy of rank and title, was prodigal in thedevelopment of the real nobility of the mind and heart. Its history isbright with the footprints of men whose very names still stir the heartsof freemen, the world over, like a trumpet peal. Say what we may of itsfanaticism, laugh as we may at its extravagant enjoyment of newlyacquired religious and civil liberty, who shall now venture to deny thatit was the golden age of England? Who that regards freedom aboveslavery, will now sympathize with the outcry and lamentation of thoseinterested in the continuance of the old order of things, against theprevalence of sects and schism, but who, at the same time, as Miltonshrewdly intimates, dreaded more the rending of their pontifical sleevesthan the rending of the Church? Who shall now sneer at Puritanism, withthe Defence of Unlicensed Printing before him? Who scoff at Quakerismover the Journal of George Fox? Who shall join with debauched lordlingsand fat-witted prelates in ridicule of Anabaptist levellers and dippers, after rising from the perusal of Pilgrim's Progress? "There were giantsin 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 highmerit as an author there is no longer any question. The Edinburgh Reviewexpressed the common sentiment of the literary world, when it declaredthat the two great creative minds of the seventeenth century were thosewhich produced Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress. 

THOMAS ELLWOOD. 

Commend us to autobiographies! Give us the veritable notchings ofRobinson Crusoe on his stick, the indubitable records of a life longsince swallowed up in the blackness of darkness, traced by a hand thevery dust of which has become undistinguishable. The foolishest egotistwho ever chronicled his daily experiences, his hopes and fears, poorplans 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 ourPresent, is in no mean sort our benefactor, and commands our attention, in spite of his folly. We are thankful for the very vanity whichprompted him to bottle up his poor records, and cast them into the greatsea of Time, for future voyagers to pick up. We note, with the deepestinterest, that in him too was enacted that miracle of a consciousexistence, the reproduction of which in ourselves awes and perplexes us. He, too, had a mother; he hated and loved; the light from old-quenchedhearths shone over him; he walked in the sunshine over the dust of thosewho had gone before him, just as we are now walking over his. Theserecords of him remain, the footmarks of a long-extinct life, not of mereanimal organism, but of a being like ourselves, enabling us, by studyingtheir hieroglyphic significance, to decipher and see clearly into themystery of existence centuries ago. The dead generations live again inthese old self-biographies. Incidentally, unintentionally, yet in thesimplest and most natural manner, they make us familiar with all thephenomena of life in the bygone ages. We are brought in contact withactual flesh-and-blood men and women, not the ghostly outline figureswhich pass for such, in what is called History. The horn lantern of thebiographer, by the aid of which, with painful minuteness, he chronicled, from day to day, his own outgoings and incomings, making visible to ushis pitiful wants, labors, trials, and tribulations of the stomach and ofthe conscience, sheds, at times, a strong clear light uponcontemporaneous activities; what seemed before half fabulous, rises up indistinct and full proportions; we look at statesmen, philosophers, andpoets, with the eyes of those who lived perchance their next-doorneighbors, and sold them beer, and mutton, and household stuffs, hadaccess to their kitchens, and took note of the fashion of their wigs andthe color of their breeches. Without some such light, all history wouldbe just about as unintelligible and unreal as a dimly remembered dream. 

The journals of the early Friends or Quakers are in this respectinvaluable. Little, it is true, can be said, as a general thing, oftheir literary merits. Their authors were plain, earnest men and women, chiefly intent upon the substance of things, and having withal a strongtestimony to bear against carnal wit and outside show and ornament. Yet, even the scholar may well admire the power of certain portions of GeorgeFox'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; thelogical acuteness of Barclay; the honest truthfulness of Sewell; the witand humor of John Roberts, (for even Quakerism had its apostolic jokersand drab-coated Robert Halls;) and last, not least, the simple beauty ofWoolman'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 ahardly used Philadelphia reprint, bearing date of 1775. The original waspublished some sixty years before. It is not a book to be found infashionable libraries, or noticed in fashionable reviews, but is none theless 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 acommission of the peace under Charles I. One of his most intimatefriends was Isaac Pennington, a gentleman of estate and good reputation, whose wife, the widow of Sir John Springette, was a lady of superiorendowments. Her only daughter, Gulielma, was the playmate and companionof Thomas. On making this family a visit, in 1658, in company with hisfather, he was surprised to find that they had united with the Quakers, asect then little known, and everywhere spoken against. Passing throughthe vista of nearly two centuries, let us cross the threshold, and lookwith the eyes of young Ellwood upon this Quaker family. It willdoubtless give us a good idea of the earnest and solemn spirit of thatage 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 nowreceived us with, did not a little amuse us, and disappointed ourexpectations of such a pleasant visit as we had promised ourselves. 

"For my part, I sought, and at length found, means to cast myself intothe company of the daughter, whom I found gathering flowers in thegarden, attended by her maid, also a Quaker. But when I addressed herafter my accustomed manner, with intention to engage her in discourse onthe foot of our former acquaintance, though she treated me with acourteous mien, yet, as young as she was, the gravity of her looks andbehavior struck such an awe upon me, that I found myself not so muchmaster of myself as to pursue any further converse with her. 

"We staid dinner, which was very handsome, and lacked nothing torecommend it to me but the want of mirth and pleasant discourse, which wecould neither have with them, nor, by reason of them, with one another;the weightiness which was upon their spirits and countenances keepingdown the lightness that would have been up in ours. "

Not long after, they made a second visit to their sober friends, spendingseveral days, during which they attended a meeting, in a neighboringfarmhouse, where we are introduced by Ellwood to two remarkablepersonages, Edward Burrough, the friend and fearless reprover ofCromwell, and by far the most eloquent preacher of his sect and JamesNayler, whose melancholy after-history of fanaticism, cruel sufferings, and beautiful repentance, is so well known to the readers of Englishhistory under the Protectorate. Under the preaching of these men, andthe influence of the Pennington family, young Ellwood was brought intofellowship with the Quakers. Of the old Justice's sorrow and indignationat 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, itis now scarcely worth while to speak. Let us step forward a few years, to 1662, considering meantime how matters, political and spiritual, arechanged in that brief period. Cromwell, the Maccabeus of Puritanism, isno longer among men; Charles the Second sits in his place; profane andlicentious cavaliers have thrust aside the sleek-haired, painful-facedIndependents, who used to groan approval to the Scriptural illustrationsof Harrison and Fleetwood; men easy of virtue, without sincerity, eitherin religion or politics, occupying the places made honorable by theMiltons, Whitlocks, and Vanes of the Commonwealth. Having this change inview, the light which the farthing candle of Ellwood sheds upon one ofthese illustrious names will not be unwelcome. In his intercourse withPenn, and other learned Quakers, he had reason to lament his owndeficiencies in scholarship, and his friend Pennington undertook to puthim in a way of remedying the defect. 

"He had, " says Ellwood, "an intimate acquaintance with Dr. Paget, aphysician of note in London, and he with John Milton, a gentleman ofgreat note for learning throughout the learned world, for the accuratepieces he had written on various subjects and occasions. 

"This person, having filled a public station in the former times, lived aprivate and retired life in London, and, having lost his sight, keptalways a man to read for him, which usually was the son of some gentlemanof his acquaintance, whom, in kindness, he took to improve in hislearning. 

"Thus, by the mediation of my friend Isaac Pennington with Dr. Paget, andthrough him with John Milton, was I admitted to come to him, not as aservant to him, nor to be in the house with him, but only to have theliberty of coming to his house at certain hours when I would, and read tohim what books he should appoint, which was all the favor I desired. 

"He received me courteously, as well for the sake of Dr. Paget, whointroduced me, as of Isaac Pennington, who recommended me, to both ofwhom he bore a good respect. And, having inquired divers things of me, with respect to my former progression in learning, he dismissed me, toprovide myself with such accommodations as might be most suitable to mystudies. 

"I went, therefore, and took lodgings as near to his house (which wasthen in Jewen Street) as I conveniently could, and from thenceforwardwent 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 theLatin tongue as he pleased to have me read. 

"He perceiving with what earnest desire I had pursued learning, gave menot only all the encouragement, but all the help he could. For, having acurious ear, he understood by my tone when I understood what I read andwhen I did not, and accordingly would stop me, examine me, and open themost 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 immediatecause of this onslaught upon quiet worshippers was the famous plot of theFifth Monarchy men, grim old fanatics, who (like the Millerites of thepresent day) had been waiting long for the personal reign of Christ andthe saints upon earth, and in their zeal to hasten such a consummationhad sallied into London streets with drawn swords and loaded matchlocks. The government took strong measures for suppressing dissenters' meetingsor "conventicles;" and the poor Quakers, although not at all implicatedin the disturbance, suffered more severely than any others. Let us lookat the "freedom of conscience and worship" in England under thatirreverent Defender of the Faith, Charles II. Ellwood says: "He thatcommanded the party gave us first a general charge to come out of theroom. But we, who came thither at God's requiring to worship Him, (likethat 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 hissoldiers among us, with command to drag or drive us out, which they didroughly enough. " Think of it: grave men and women, and modest maidens, sitting there with calm, impassive countenances, motionless as death, thepikes 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 theDevil's uproar; Christian endurance and calm persistence in the exerciseof your rights as Englishmen and men to the hot fury of impatienttyranny! From your day down to this, the world has been the better foryour faithfulness. 

Ellwood and some thirty of his friends were marched off to prison in OldBridewell, which, as well as nearly all the other prisons, was alreadycrowded with Quaker prisoners. One of the rooms of the prison was usedas a torture chamber. "I was almost affrighted, " says Ellwood, "by thedismalness of the place; for, besides that the walls were all laid overwith black, from top to bottom, there stood in the middle a greatwhipping-post. 

"The manner of whipping there is, to strip the party to the skin, fromthe waist upward, and, having fastened him to the whipping-post, (so thathe can neither resist nor shun the strokes, ) to lash his naked body withlong, slender twigs of holly, which will bend almost like thongs aroundthe body; and these, having little knots upon them, tear the skin andflesh, and give extreme pain. "

To this terrible punishment aged men and delicately nurtured youngfemales were often subjected, during this season of hot persecution. 

From the Bridewell, Ellwood was at length removed to Newgate, and thrustin, with other "Friends, " amidst the common felons. He speaks of thisprison, with its thieves, murderers, and prostitutes, its over-crowdedapartments and loathsome cells, as "a hell upon earth. " In a closet, adjoining the room where he was lodged, lay for several days thequartered bodies of Phillips, Tongue, and Gibbs, the leaders of the FifthMonarchy rising, frightful and loathsome, as they came from the bloodyhands of the executioners! These ghastly remains were at length obtainedby the friends of the dead, and buried. The heads were ordered to beprepared for setting up in different parts of the city. Read this grimpassage of description:--

"I saw the heads when they were brought to be boiled. The hangmanfetched them in a dirty basket, out of some by-place, and, setting themdown among the felons, he and they made sport of them. They took them bythe hair, flouting, jeering, and laughing at them; and then giving themsome ill names, boxed them on their ears and cheeks; which done, thehangman put them into his kettle, and parboiled them with bay-salt andcummin-seed: that to keep them from putrefaction, and this to keep offthe fowls from seizing upon them. The whole sight, as well that of thebloody quarters first as this of the heads afterwards, was both frightfuland loathsome, and begat an abhorrence in my nature. "

At the next session of the municipal court at the Old Bailey, Ellwoodobtained his discharge. After paying a visit to "my Master Milton, " hemade his way to Chalfont, the home of his friends the Penningtons, wherehe was soon after engaged as a Latin teacher. Here he seems to have hadhis trials and temptations. Gulielma Springette, the daughter ofPennington's wife, his old playmate, had now grown to be "a fair woman ofmarriageable age, " and, as he informs us, "very desirable, whether regardwas had to her outward person, which wanted nothing to make hercompletely comely, or to the endowments of her mind, which were every wayextraordinary, or to her outward fortune, which was fair. " From allwhich, we are not surprised to learn that "she was secretly and openlysought for by many of almost every rank and condition. " "To whom, "continues Thomas, "in their respective turns, (till he at length came forwhom she was reserved, ) she carried herself with so much evenness oftemper, such courteous freedom, guarded by the strictest modesty, that asit gave encouragement or ground of hope to none, so neither did itadminister any matter of offence or just cause of complaint to any. "

Beautiful and noble maiden! How the imagination fills up this outlinelimning by her friend, and, if truth must be told, admirer! Serene, courteous, healthful; a ray of tenderest and blandest light, shiningsteadily in the sober gloom of that old household! Confirmed Quaker asshe is, shrinking from none of the responsibilities and dangers of herprofession, and therefore liable at any time to the penalties of prisonand whipping-post, under that plain garb and in spite of that "certaingravity of look and behavior, "--which, as we have seen, on one occasionawed young Ellwood into silence, --youth, beauty, and refinement asserttheir prerogatives; love knows no creed; the gay, and titled, and wealthycrowd 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 isunited with that of one worthy even of her, the world-renowned WilliamPenn. 

Meantime, one cannot but feel a good degree of sympathy with youngEllwood, her old schoolmate and playmate, placed, as he was, in the samefamily with her, enjoying her familiar conversation and unreservedconfidence, and, as he says, the "advantageous opportunities of ridingand walking abroad with her, by night as well as by day, without anyother company than her maid; for so great, indeed, was the confidencethat her mother had in me, that she thought her daughter safe, if I waswith 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 whichshone 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 seemsto have fully understood his own position in respect to her; although, touse his own words, "others, measuring him by the propensity of their owninclinations, concluded he would steal her, run away with her, and marryher. " Little did these jealous surmisers know of the true and reallyheroic spirit of the young Latin master. His own apology and defence ofhis conduct, under circumstances of temptation which St. Anthony himselfcould have scarcely better resisted, will not be amiss. 

"I was not ignorant of the various fears which filled the jealous headsof some concerning me, neither was I so stupid nor so divested of allhumanity as not to be sensible of the real and innate worth and virtuewhich adorned that excellent dame, and attracted the eyes and hearts ofso many, with the greatest importunity, to seek and solicit her; nor wasI so devoid of natural heat as not to feel some sparklings of desire, aswell as others; but the force of truth and sense of honor suppressedwhatever would have risen beyond the bounds of fair and virtuousfriendship. For I easily foresaw that, if I should have attempted anything in a dishonorable way, by fraud or force, upon her, I should havethereby brought a wound upon mine own soul, a foul scandal upon myreligious profession, and an infamous stain upon mine honor, which wasfar more dear unto me than my life. Wherefore, having observed how someothers 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 hernatural temper) to be the effect of a singular regard and peculiaraffection 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, therebypreserving a fair reputation with my friends, and enjoying as much of herfavor and kindness, in a virtuous and firm friendship, as was fit for herto 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 admirationof "the fair Guli" needs, however, no excuse. Poor human nature, guardit as one may, with strictest discipline and painfully crampingenvironment, will sometimes act out itself; and, in thy case, not evenGeorge Fox himself, knowing thy beautiful young friend, (and doubtlessadmiring her too, for he was one of the first to appreciate and honor theworth and dignity or woman, ) could have found it in his heart to censurethee!

At this period, as was indeed most natural, our young teacher solacedhimself with occasional appeals to what he calls "the Muses. " There isreason to believe, however, that the Pagan sisterhood whom he ventured toinvoke seldom graced his study with their personal attendance. In theserhyming efforts, scattered up and down his Journal, there are occasionalsparkles of genuine wit, and passages of keen sarcasm, tersely and fitlyexpressed. Others breathe a warm, devotional feeling; in the followingbrief prayer, for instance, the wants of the humble Christian arecondensed 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 ofhis friend Pennington's son is trite, but not inaptly or inelegantlyexpressed:--

 "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 calledQuakers, " prohibiting their meetings, with the penalty of banishment forthe third offence! The burden of the prosecution which followed fellupon the Quakers of the metropolis, large numbers of whom were heavilyfined, imprisoned, and sentenced to be banished from their native land. Yet, in time, our worthy friend Ellwood came in for his own share oftrouble, in consequence of attending the funeral of one of his friends. An evil-disposed justice of the county obtained information of the Quakergathering; 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 uponus with the constables and a rabble of rude fellows whom he had gatheredtogether, and, having his drawn sword in his hand, struck one of theforemost of the bearers with it, commanding them to set down the coffin. But the Friend who was so stricken, being more concerned for the safetyof the dead body than for his own, lest it should fall, and any indecencythereupon follow, held the coffin fast; which the justice observing, andbeing enraged that his word was not forthwith obeyed, set his hand to thecoffin, 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 fellupon us, and drew some and drove others into the inn. Of those thustaken, " continues Ellwood, "I was one. They picked out ten of us, andsent us to Aylesbury jail. 

"They caused the body to lie in the open street and cartway, so that alltravellers that passed, whether horsemen, coaches, carts, or wagons, werefain to break out of the way to go by it, until it was almost night. Andthen, having caused a grave to be made in the unconsecrated part of whatis called the Churchyard, they forcibly took the body from the widow, andburied it there. "

He remained a prisoner only about two months, during which period hecomforted himself by such verse-making as follows, reminding us ofsimilar 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 ofhis young companion and reader, sitting lonely in his small dining-room, in Jewen Street. It is now the year 1665; is not the pestilence inLondon? A sinful and godless city, with its bloated bishops fawningaround the Nell Gwyns of a licentious and profane Defender of the Faith;its swaggering and drunken cavaliers; its ribald jesters; its obsceneballad-singers; its loathsome prisons, crowded with Godfearing men andwomen: is not the measure of its iniquity already filled up? Three yearsonly have passed since the terrible prayer of Vane went upward from thescaffold on Tower Hill: "When my blood is shed upon the block, let it, OGod, have a voice afterward!" Audible to thy ear, O bosom friend of themartyr! has that blood cried from earth; and now, how fearfully is itanswered! Like the ashes which the Seer of the Hebrews cast towardsHeaven, it has returned in boils and blains upon the proud and oppressivecity. John Milton, sitting blind in Jewen Street, has heard the toll ofthe death-bells, and the nightlong rumble of the burial-carts, and theterrible summons, "Bring out your dead!" The Angel of the Plague, inyellow mantle, purple-spotted, walks the streets. Why should he tarry ina doomed city, forsaken of God! Is not the command, even to him, "Ariseand flee, for thy life"? In some green nook of the quiet country, he mayfinish the great work which his hands have found to do. He bethinks himof his old friends, the Penningtons, and his young Quaker companion, thepatient and gentle Ellwood. "Wherefore, " says the latter, "some littletime before I went to Aylesbury jail, I was desired by my quondam MasterMilton to take an house for him in the neighborhood where I dwelt, thathe might go out of the city for the safety of himself and his family, thepestilence then growing hot in London. I took a pretty box for him inGiles Chalfont, a mile from me, of which I gave him notice, and intendedto have waited on him and seen him well settled, but was prevented bythat imprisonment. But now being released and returned home, I soon madea visit to him, to welcome him into the country. After some commondiscourse had passed between us, he called for a manuscript of his, which, having brought, he delivered to me, bidding me take it home withme 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 coatpocket across the dikes and hedges and through the green lanes of GilesChalfont that autumn day? Let us look farther "When I came home, and hadset myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which heentitled _Paradise Lost_. After I had, with the best attention, read itthrough, I made him another visit; and, returning his book with dueacknowledgment of the favor he had done me in communicating it to me, heasked me how I liked it and what I thought of it, which I modestly butfreely told him; and, after some farther discourse about it, I pleasantlysaid to him, 'Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost; what hast thouto say of Paradise Found?' He made me no answer, but sat some time in amuse; then brake off that discourse, and fell upon another subject. "

"I modestly but freely told him what I thought" of Paradise Lost! Whathe told him remains a mystery. One would like to know more preciselywhat the first critical reader of that song "of Man's first disobedience"thought of it. Fancy the young Quaker and blind Milton sitting, somepleasant afternoon of the autumn of that old year, in "the pretty box" atChalfont, the soft wind through the open window lifting the thin hair ofthe glorious old Poet! Back-slidden England, plague-smitten, andaccursed with her faithless Church and libertine King, knows little ofpoor "Master Milton, " and takes small note of his Puritanic verse-making. Alone, with his humble friend, he sits there, conning over that poemwhich, he fondly hoped, the world, which had grown all dark and strangeto the author, "would not willingly let die. " The suggestion in respectto Paradise Found, to which, as we have seen, "he made no answer, but satsome time in a muse, " seems not to have been lost; for, "after thesickness was over, " continues Ellwood, "and the city well cleansed, andbecome safely habitable again, he returned thither; and when afterwards Iwaited on him there, which I seldom failed of doing whenever my occasionsdrew 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 putit into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont, which before Ihad not thought of. '"

Golden days were these for the young Latin reader, even if it be true, aswe suspect, that he was himself very far from appreciating the gloriousprivilege which he enjoyed, of the familiar friendship and confidence ofMilton. But they could not last. His amiable host, Isaac Pennington, a blameless and quiet country gentleman, was dragged from his house by amilitary force, and lodged in Aylesbury jail; his wife and familyforcibly ejected from their pleasant home, which was seized upon by thegovernment as security for the fines imposed upon its owner. The plaguewas in the village of Aylesbury, and in the very prison itself; but thenoble-hearted Mary Pennington followed her husband, sharing with him thedark 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, wassuspected by the Dogberry of a justice of being a Jesuit trolling overhis Latin, ) was arrested, and committed to Wiccomb House of Correction. 

This was a time of severe trial for the sect with which Ellwood hadconnected himself. In the very midst of the pestilence, when thousandsperished weekly in London, fifty-four Quakers were marched through thealmost deserted streets, and placed on board a ship, for the purpose ofbeing conveyed, according to their sentence of banishment, to the WestIndies. The ship lay for a long time, with many others similarlysituated, a helpless prey to the pestilence. Through that terribleautumn, the prisoners sat waiting for the summons of the ghastlyDestroyer; 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 twodays out, and carried the prisoners to North Holland, where they were setat liberty. The condition of the jails in the city, where were largenumbers of Quakers, was dreadful in the extreme. Ill ventilated, crowded, and loathsome with the accumulated filth of centuries, theyinvited the disease which daily decimated their cells. "Go on!" saysPennington, writing to the King and bishops from his plague-infected cellin the Aylesbury prison: "try it out with the Spirit of the Lord! Comeforth 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 Lordloveth He can save at His pleasure. Hath He begun to break our bonds anddeliver us, and shall we now distrust Him? Are we in a worse conditionthan Israel was when the sea was before them, the mountains on eitherside, 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 toeye with you in respect to all your testimonies and beliefs, in order torecognize your claim to gratitude and admiration. For, in an age ofhypocritical hollowness and mean self-seeking, when, with nobleexceptions, the very Puritans of Cromwell's Reign of the Saints weretaking profane lessons from their old enemies, and putting on an outsideshow of conformity, for the sake of place or pardon, ye maintained theaustere dignity of virtue, and, with King and Church and Parliamentarrayed against you, vindicated the Rights of Conscience, at the cost ofhome, fortune, and life. English liberty owes more to your unyieldingfirmness than to the blows stricken for her at Worcester and Naseby. 

In 1667, we find the Latin teacher in attendance at a great meeting ofFriends, in London, convened at the suggestion of George Fox, for thepurpose of settling a little difficulty which had arisen among theFriends, even under the pressure of the severest persecution, relative tothe very important matter of "wearing the hat. " George Fox, in his loveof truth and sincerity in word and action, had discountenanced thefashionable doffing of the hat, and other flattering obeisances towardsmen holding stations in Church or State, as savoring of man-worship, giving to the creature the reverence only due to the Creator, asundignified and wanting in due self-respect, and tending to supportunnatural and oppressive distinctions among those equal in the sight ofGod. But some of his disciples evidently made much more of this "hattestimony" than their teacher. One John Perrott, who had just returnedfrom an unsuccessful attempt to convert the Pope, at Rome, (where thatdignitary, after listening to his exhortations, and finding him in nocondition 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 wasnot 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 thisnotion, which appears to have been the occasion of a good deal ofdissension and scandal. Under these circumstances, to save truth fromreproach, and an important testimony to the essential equality of mankindfrom running into sheer fanaticism, Fox summoned his tried and faithfulfriends together, from all parts of the United Kingdom, and, as itappears, with the happiest result. Hat-revelations were discountenanced, good order and harmony reestablished, and John Perrott's beaver and thecrazy head under it were from thenceforth powerless for evil. Let thosewho are disposed to laugh at this notable "Ecumenical Council of the Hat"consider that ecclesiastical history has brought down to us the recordsof many larger and more imposing convocations, wherein grave bishops andlearned fathers took each other by the beard upon matters of far lesspractical importance. 

In 1669, we find Ellwood engaged in escorting his fair friend, Gulielma, to her uncle's residence in Sussex. Passing through London, and takingthe Tunbridge road, they stopped at Seven Oak to dine. The Duke of Yorkwas on the road, with his guards and hangers-on, and the inn was filledwith a rude company. "Hastening, " says Ellwood, "from a place where wefound nothing but rudeness, the roysterers who swarmed there, besides thedamning oaths they belched out against each other, looked very sourlyupon us, as if they grudged us the horses which we rode and the clotheswe wore. " They had proceeded but a little distance, when they wereovertaken by some half dozen drunken rough-riding cavaliers, of theWildrake stamp, in full pursuit after the beautiful Quakeress. One ofthem impudently attempted to pull her upon his horse before him, but washeld at bay by Ellwood, who seems, on this occasion, to have reliedsomewhat upon his "stick, " in defending his fair charge. Calling upGulielma's servant, he bade him ride on one side of his mistress, whilehe guarded her on the other. "But he, " says Ellwood, "not thinking itperhaps decent to ride so near his mistress, left room enough for anotherto ride between. " In dashed the drunken retainer, and Gulielma was oncemore in peril. It was clearly no time for exhortations andexpostulations; "so, " says Ellwood, "I chopped in upon him, by a nimbleturn, and kept him at bay. I told him I had hitherto spared him, butwished him not to provoke me further. This I spoke in such a tone asbespoke an high resentment of the abuse put upon us, and withal pressedhim so hard with my horse that I suffered him not to come up again toGuli. " By this time, it became evident to the companions of theruffianly assailant that the young Quaker was in earnest, and theyhastened to interfere. "For they, " says Ellwood, "seeing the contestrise so high, and probably fearing it would rise higher, not knowingwhere it might stop, came in to part us; which they did by taking himaway. "

Escaping from these sons of Belial, Ellwood and his fair companion rodeon through Tunbridge Wells, "the street thronged with men, who lookedvery earnestly at them, but offered them no affront, " and arrived, lateat night, in a driving rain, at the mansion-house of Herbert Springette. The fiery old gentleman was so indignant at the insult offered to hisniece, that he was with difficulty dissuaded from demanding satisfactionat the hands of the Duke of York. 

This seems to have been his last ride with Gulielma. She was soon aftermarried to William Penn, and took up her abode at Worminghurst, inSussex. How blessed and beautiful was that union may be understood fromthe following paragraph of a letter, written by her husband, on the eveof his departure for America to lay the foundations of a Christiancolony:--

 "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 atChalfont was destined for another, turned his attention towards a "youngFriend, named Mary Ellis. " He had been for several years acquainted withher, but now he "found his heart secretly drawn and inclining towardsher. " "At length, " he tells us, "as I was sitting all alone, waitingupon 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 aVoice which said, Go, and prevail! and faith springing in my heart at theword, I immediately rose and went, nothing doubting. " On arriving at herresidence, he states that he "solemnly opened his mind to her, which wasa great surprisal to her, for she had taken in an apprehension, as othershad 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 Powerwent along with the words, and fixed the matter expressed by them so fastin her breast, that, as she afterwards acknowledged to me, she could notshut it out. "

"I continued, " he says, "my visits to my best-beloved Friend until wemarried, which was on the 28th day of the eighth month, 1669. We tookeach other in a select meeting of the ancient and grave Friends of thatcountry. A very solemn meeting it was, and in a weighty frame of spiritwe were. " His wife seems to have had some estate; and Ellwood, with thatnice sense of justice which marked all his actions, immediately made hiswill, securing to her, in case of his decease, all her own goods andmoneys, as well as all that he had himself acquired before marriage. "Which, " he tells, "was indeed but little, yet, by all that little, morethan I had ever given her ground to expect with me. " His father, who wasyet unreconciled to the son's religious views, found fault with hismarriage, on the ground that it was unlawful and unsanctioned by priestor liturgy, and consequently refused to render him any pecuniaryassistance. Yet, in spite of this and other trials, he seems to havepreserved his serenity of spirit. After an unpleasant interview with hisfather, 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 showthe 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, undercolor or pretence of any exercise of religion, in other manner thanaccording to the liturgy and practice of the Church of England, "shouldbe liable to fines of from five to ten shillings; and any personpreaching at or giving his house for the meeting, to a fine of twentypounds: one third of the fines being received by the informer orinformers. " As a natural consequence of such a law, the vilestscoundrels in the land set up the trade of informers and heresy-hunters. Wherever a dissenting meeting or burial took place, there was sure to bea mercenary spy, ready to bring a complaint against all in attendance. The Independents and Baptists ceased, in a great measure, to hold publicmeetings, yet even they did not escape prosecution. Bunyan, forinstance, in these days, was dreaming, like another Jacob, of angelsascending and descending, in Bedford prison. But upon the poor Quakersfell, as usual, the great force of the unjust enactment. Some of thesespies or informers, men of sharp wit, close countenances, pliant tempers, and skill in dissimulation, took the guise of Quakers, Independents, orBaptists, as occasion required, thrusting themselves into the meetings ofthe proscribed sects, ascertaining the number who attended, their rankand condition, and then informing against them. Ellwood, in his Journalfor 1670, describes several of these emissaries of evil. One of themcame to a Friend's house, in Bucks, professing to be a brother in thefaith, but, overdoing his counterfeit Quakerism, was detected anddismissed by his host. Betaking himself to the inn, he appeared in histrue character, drank and swore roundly, and confessed over his cups thathe had been sent forth on his mission by the Rev. Dr. Mew, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. Finding little success in counterfeitingQuakerism, he turned to the Baptists, where, for a time, he met withbetter success. Ellwood, at this time, rendered good service to hisfriends, by exposing the true character of these wretches, and bringingthem 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 littleleisure for controversy with each other; but, as was natural, theabatement of their mutual suffering and danger was the signal forrenewing their suspended quarrels. The Baptists fell upon the Quakers, with pamphlet and sermon; the latter replied in the same way. One of themost 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. Hischief art lay in tickling the humor of rude, unlearned, and injudicioushearers. "

The following piece of Ellwood's, entitled "An Epitaph for Jeremy Ives, "will serve to show that wit and drollery were sometimes found even amongthe 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 andpeace. He wrote, at intervals, many pamphlets in defence of his Society, and in favor of Liberty of Conscience. At his hospitable residence, theleading spirits of the sect were warmly welcomed. George Fox and WilliamPenn seem to have been frequent guests. We find that, in 1683, he wasarrested for seditious publications, when on the eve of hastening to hisearly friend, Gulielma, who, in the absence of her husband, GovernorPenn, had fallen dangerously ill. On coming before the judge, "I toldhim, " says Ellwood, "that I had that morning received an express out ofSussex, that William Penn's wife (with whom I had an intimateacquaintance and strict friendship, _ab ipsis fere incunabilis_, atleast, _a teneris unguiculis_) lay now ill, not without great danger, andthat she had expressed her desire that I would come to her as soon as Icould. " The judge said "he was very sorry for Madam Penn's illness, " ofwhose virtues he spoke very highly, but not more than was her due. Thenhe told me, "that, for her sake, he would do what he could to further myvisit to her. " Escaping from the hands of the law, he visited hisfriend, 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 upto the year of his death, which took place in 1713. One of hisproductions, a poetical version of the Life of David, may be still metwith, in the old Quaker libraries. On the score of poetical merit, it isabout on a level with Michael Drayton's verses on the same subject. Asthe history of one of the firm confessors of the old struggle forreligious freedom, of a genial-hearted and pleasant scholar, the friendof Penn and Milton, and the suggester of Paradise Regained, we trust ourhurried sketch has not been altogether without interest; and that, whatever may be the religious views of our readers, they have not failedto 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 remarkableHistory of the French Revolution with its brilliant and startling word-pictures still flashing before us. To some extent this wish has beenrealized in the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Yet we confessthat the perusal of these volumes has disappointed us. Instead of givinghimself free scope, as in his French Revolution, and transferring to hiscanvas all the wild and ludicrous, the terrible and beautiful phases ofthat moral phenomenon, he has here concentrated all his artistic skillupon a single figure, whom he seems to have regarded as the embodimentand hero of the great event. All else on his canvas is subordinated tothe grim image of the colossal Puritan. Intent upon presenting him asthe fitting object of that "hero-worship, " which, in its blind admirationand adoration of mere abstract Power, seems to us at times nothing lessthan devil-worship, he dwarfs, casts into the shadow, nay, in someinstances caricatures and distorts, the figures which surround him. Toexcuse Cromwell in his usurpation, Henry Vane, one of those exalted andnoble characters, upon whose features the lights held by historicalfriends or foes detect no blemish, is dismissed with a sneer and anutterly unfounded imputation of dishonesty. To reconcile, in somedegree, the discrepancy between the declarations of Cromwell, in behalfof freedom of conscience, and that mean and cruel persecution which theQuakers suffered under the Protectorate, the generally harmlessfanaticism of a few individuals bearing that name is gravely urged. Nay, the fact that some weak-brained enthusiasts undertook to bring about themillennium, by associating together, cultivating the earth, and "dibblingbeans" for the New Jerusalem market, is regarded by our author as the"germ of Quakerism;" and furnishes an occasion for sneering at "my poorfriend Dryasdust, lamentably tearing his hair over the intolerance ofthat old time to Quakerism and such like. "

The readers of this (with all its faults) powerfully written Biographycannot 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 tragicinsanity enacting its involuntary comedy, and making us smile through ourtears. 

In another portion of the work, a brief account is given of the trial andsentence of Nayler, also in the serio-comic view; and the poor man isdismissed with the simple intimation, that after his punishment he"repented, and confessed himself mad. " It was no part of the author'sbusiness, we are well aware, to waste time and words upon the history ofsuch a man as Nayler; he was of no importance to him, otherwise than asone of the disturbing influences in the government of the Lord Protector. But in our mind the story of James Nayler has always been one ofinterest; and in the belief that it will prove so to others, who, likeCharles 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. Hisfather was a substantial farmer, of good repute and competent estate andbe, in consequence, received a good education: At the age of twenty-two, he married and removed to Wakefield parish, which has since been madeclassic ground by the pen of Goldsmith. Here, an honest, God-fearingfarmer, he tilled his soil, and alternated between cattle-markets andIndependent conventicles. In 1641, he obeyed the summons of "my LordFairfax" and the Parliament, and joined a troop of horse composed ofsturdy Independents, doing such signal service against "the man ofBelial, Charles Stuart, " that he was promoted to the rank ofquartermaster, in which capacity he served under General Lambert, in hisScottish campaign. Disabled at length by sickness, he was honorablydismissed from the service, and returned to his family in 1649. 

For three or four years, he continued to attend the meetings of theIndependents, as a zealous and devout member. But it so fell out, thatin the winter of 1651, George Fox, who had just been released from acruel imprisonment in Derby jail, felt a call to set his face towardsYorkshire. "So travelling, " says Fox, in his Journal, "through thecountries, to several places, preaching Repentance and the Word of Life, I came into the parts about Wakefield, where James Navler lived. " Theworn and weary soldier, covered with the scars of outward battle, received, as he believed, in the cause of God and his people, againstAntichrist and oppression, welcomed with thankfulness the veteran ofanother warfare; who, in conflict with a principalities and powers, andspiritual wickedness in high places, had made his name a familiar one inevery English hamlet. "He and Thomas Goodyear, " says Fox, "came to me, and were both convinced, and received the truth. " He soon after joinedthe Society of Friends. In the spring of the next year he was in hisfield following his plough, and meditating, as he was wont, on the greatquestions of life and duty, when he seemed to hear a voice bidding him goout from his kindred and his father's house, with an assurance that theLord would be with him, while laboring in his service. Deeply impressed, he left his employment, and, returning to his house, made immediatepreparations for a journey. But hesitation and doubt followed; he becamesick from anxiety of mind, and his recovery, for a time, was exceedinglydoubtful. On his restoration to bodily health, he obeyed what heregarded as a clear intimation of duty, and went forth a preacher of thedoctrines he had embraced. The Independent minister of the society towhich he had formerly belonged sent after him the story that he was thevictim of sorcery; that George Fox carried with him a bottle, out ofwhich he made people drink; and that the draught had the power to changea Presbyterian or Independent into a Quaker at once; that, in short, theArch-Quaker, Fox, was a wizard, and could be seen at the same moment oftime riding on the same black horse, in two places widely separated. Hehad scarcely commenced his exhortations, before the mob, excited by suchstories, assailed him. In the early summer of the year we hear of him inAppleby jail. On his release, he fell in company with George Fox. AtWalney Island, he was furiously assaulted, and beaten with clubs andstones; the poor priest-led fishermen being fully persuaded that theywere dealing with a wizard. The spirit of the man, under thesecircumstances, may be seen in the following extract from a letter to hisfriends, dated at "Killet, in Lancashire, the 30th of 8th Month, 1652:"--

"Dear friends! Dwell in patience, and wait upon the Lord, who will dohis own work. Look not at man who is in the work, nor at any manopposing it; but rest in the will of the Lord, that so ye may befurnished with patience, both to do and to suffer what ye shall be calledunto, that your end in all things may be His praise. Meet oftentogether; take heed of what exalteth itself above its brother; but keeplow, and serve one another in love. "

Laboring thus, interrupted only by persecution, stripes, andimprisonment, he finally came to London, and spoke with great power andeloquence in the meetings of Friends in that city. Here he for the firsttime found himself surrounded by admiring and sympathizing friends. Hesaw and rejoiced in the fruits of his ministry. Profane and drunkencavaliers, intolerant Presbyters, and blind Papists, owned the truthswhich he uttered, and counted themselves his disciples. Women, too, intheir deep trustfulness and admiring reverence, sat at the feet of theeloquent stranger. Devout believers in the doctrine of the inward lightand manifestation of God in the heart of man, these latter, at length, thought they saw such unmistakable evidences of the true life in JamesNayler, that they felt constrained to declare that Christ was, in anespecial manner, within him, and to call upon all to recognize inreverent adoration this new incarnation of the divine and heavenly. Thewild enthusiasm of his disciples had its effect on the teacher. Weak inbody, worn with sickness, fasting, stripes, and prison-penance, andnaturally credulous and imaginative, is it strange that in some measurehe yielded to this miserable delusion? Let those who would harshly judgehim, or ascribe his fall to the peculiar doctrines of his sect, think ofLuther, engaged in personal combat with the Devil, or conversing with himon points of theology in his bed-chamber; or of Bunyan at actualfisticuffs with the adversary; or of Fleetwood and Vane and Harrisonmillennium-mad, and making preparations for an earthly reign of KingJesus. It was an age of intense religious excitement. Fanaticism hadbecome epidemic. Cromwell swayed his Parliaments by "revelations" andScripture phrases in the painted chamber; stout generals and sea-captainsexterminated the Irish, and swept Dutch navies from the ocean, with oldJewish war-cries, and hymns of Deborah and Miriam; country justicescharged juries in Hebraisms, and cited the laws of Palestine oftener thanthose of England. Poor Nayler found himself in the very midst of thisseething and confused moral maelstrom. He struggled against it for atime, 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 withoutsolemn admonition and rebuke from Francis Howgill and Edward Burrough, who at that period were regarded as the most eminent and gifted of theSociety's ministers, he bent his steps towards Exeter. Here, inconsequence of the extravagance of his language and that of hisdisciples, he was arrested and thrown into prison. Several infatuatedwomen surrounded the jail, declaring that "Christ was in prison, " and onbeing admitted to see him, knelt down and kissed his feet, exclaiming, "Thy name shall be no more called James Nayler, but Jesus!" Let us pityhim and them. They, full of grateful and extravagant affection for theman whose voice had called them away from worldly vanities to what theyregarded as eternal realities, whose hand they imagined had for themswung back the pearl gates of the celestial city, and flooded theiratmosphere with light from heaven; he, receiving their homage (not asoffered to a poor, weak, sinful Yorkshire trooper, but rather to thehidden 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 degreemanifested between the Catholic enthusiast and her confessor; such as thecareful observer may at times take note of in our Protestant revivals andcamp meetings. 

How Nayler was released from Exeter jail does not appear, but the next wehear of him is at Bristol, in the fall of the year. His entrance intothat city shows the progress which he and his followers had made in theinterval. Let us look at Carlyle's description of it: "A procession ofeight persons one, a man on horseback riding single, the others, men andwomen partly riding double, partly on foot, in the muddiest highway inthe wettest weather; singing, all but the single rider, at whose bridlewalk and splash two women, 'Hosannah! Holy, holy! Lord God of Sabaoth, 'and other things, 'in a buzzing tone, ' which the impartial hearer couldnot make out. The single rider is a raw-boned male figure, 'with lankhair reaching below his cheeks, ' hat drawn close over his brows, 'noserising slightly in the middle, ' of abstruse 'down look, ' and largedangerous jaws strictly closed: he sings not, sits there covered, and issung to by the others bare. Amid pouring deluges and mud knee-deep, 'sothat the rain ran in at their necks and vented it at their hose andbreeches: 'a spectacle to the West of England and posterity! Singing asabove; answering no question except in song. From Bedminster toRatcliffgate, along the streets to the High Cross of Bristol: at the HighCross they are laid hold of by the authorities: turn out to be JamesNayler and Company. "

Truly, a more pitiful example of "hero-worship" is not well to beconceived of. Instead of taking the rational view of it, however, andmercifully shutting up the actors in a mad-house, the authorities of thatday, conceiving it to be a stupendous blasphemy, and themselves God'savengers in the matter, sent Nayler under strong guard up to London, tobe examined before the Parliament. After long and tedious examinationsand cross-questionings, and still more tedious debates, some portion ofwhich, not uninstructive to the reader, may still be found in Burton'sDiary, the following horrible resolution was agreed upon:--

"That James Nayler be set in the pillory, with his head in the pillory inthe Palace Yard, Westminster, during the space of two hours on Thursdaynext; and be whipped by the hangman through the streets from Westminsterto the Old Exchange, and there, likewise, be set in the pillory, with hishead in the pillory for the space of two hours, between eleven and one, on Saturday next, in each place wearing a paper containing a descriptionof his crimes; and that at the Old Exchange his tongue be bored throughwith a hot iron, and that he be there stigmatized on the forehead withthe letter 'B;' and that he be afterwards sent to Bristol, to be conveyedinto and through the said city on horseback with his face backward, andthere, also, publicly whipped the next market-day after he comes thither;that from thence he be committed to prison in Bridewell, London, andthere restrained from the society of people, and there to labor harduntil he shall be released by Parliament; and during that time bedebarred the use of pen, ink, and paper, and have no relief except whathe earns by his daily labor. "

Such, neither more nor less, was, in the opinion of Parliament, requiredon their part to appease the divine vengeance. The sentence waspronounced on the 17th of the twelfth month; the entire time of theParliament for the two months previous having been occupied with thecase. The Presbyterians in that body were ready enough to make the mostof an offence committed by one who had been an Independent; theIndependents, to escape the stigma of extenuating the crimes of one oftheir quondam brethren, vied with their antagonists in shrieking over theatrocity of Nayler's blasphemy, and in urging its severe punishment. Here and there among both classes were men disposed to leniency, and morethan one earnest plea was made for merciful dealing with a man whosereason was evidently unsettled, and who was, therefore, a fitting objectof compassion; whose crime, if it could indeed be called one, wasevidently the result of a clouded intellect, and not of wilful intentionof evil. On the other hand, many were in favor of putting him to deathas 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 therefusal 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, " saidSir 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 twohours, in the chill winter air, and was then stripped and scourged by thehangman at the tail of a cart through the streets. Three hundred and tenstripes 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 inthe crowd. He bore all with uncomplaining patience; but was so farexhausted by his sufferings, that it was found necessary to postpone theexecution of the residue of the sentence for one week. The terribleseverity of his sentence, and his meek endurance of it, had in the meantime powerfully affected many of the humane and generous of all classesin the city; and a petition for the remission of the remaining part ofthe penalty was numerously signed and presented to Parliament. A debateensued upon it, but its prayer was rejected. Application was then madeto Cromwell, who addressed a letter to the Speaker of the House, inquiring into the affair, protesting an "abhorrence and detestation ofgiving or occasioning the least countenance to such opinions andpractices" as were imputed to Nayler; "yet we, being intrusted in thepresent government on behalf of the people of these nations, and notknowing how far such proceeding entered into wholly without us may extendin the consequence of it, do hereby desire the House may let us know thegrounds and reasons whereon they have proceeded. " From this, it is notunlikely that the Protector might have been disposed to clemency, and tolook with a degree of charity upon the weakness and errors of one of hisold and tried soldiers who had striven like a brave man, as he was, forthe rights and liberties of Englishmen; but the clergy here interposed, and vehemently, in the name of God and His Church, demanded that theexecutioner should finish his work. Five of the most eminent of them, names well known in the Protectorate, Caryl, Manton, Nye, Griffith, andReynolds, were deputed by Parliament to visit the mangled prisoner. Areasonable request was made, that some impartial person might be present, that justice might be done Nayler in the report of his answers. This wasrefused. It was, however, agreed that the conversation should be writtendown and a copy of it left with the jailer. He was asked if he was sorryfor his blasphemies. He said he did not know to what blasphemies theyalluded; that he did believe in Jesus Christ; that He had taken up Hisdwelling 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 anyman's heart. " "I know no such Christ, " rejoined the prisoner; "theChrist I witness to fills Heaven and Earth, and dwells in the hearts ofall true believers. " On being asked why he allowed the women to adoreand worship him, he said he "denied bowing to the creature; but if theybeheld the power of Christ, wherever it was, and bowed to it, he couldnot resist it, or say aught against it. "

After some further parley, the reverend visitors grew angry, threw thewritten record of the conversation in the fire, and left the prison, toreport the prisoner incorrigible. 

On the 27th of the month, he was again led out of his cell and placedupon the pillory. Thousands of citizens were gathered around, many ofthem earnestly protesting against the extreme cruelty of his punishment. Robert Rich, an influential and honorable merchant, followed him up tothe pillory with expressions of great sympathy, and held him by the handwhile the red-hot iron was pressed through his tongue and the brand wasplaced on his forehead. He was next sent to Bristol, and publiclywhipped through the principal streets of that city; and again broughtback to the Bridewell prison, where he remained about two years, shut outfrom all intercourse with his fellow-beings. At the expiration of thisperiod, he was released by order of Parliament. In the solitude of hiscell, the angel of patience had been with him. 

Through the cloud which had so long rested over him, the clear light oftruth shone in upon his spirit; the weltering chaos of a disorderedintellect settled into the calm peace of a reconciliation with God andman. His first act on leaving prison was to visit Bristol, the scene ofhis melancholy fall. There he publicly confessed his errors, in theeloquent earnestness of a contrite spirit, humbled in view of the past, yet full of thanksgiving and praise for the great boon of forgiveness. Awriter who was present says, the "assembly was tendered, and broken intotears; there were few dry eyes, and many were bowed in their minds. "

In a paper which he published soon after, he acknowledges his lamentabledelusion. "Condemned forever, " he says, "be all those false worshipswith 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 todishonor the Lord, or draw the minds of any from the measure of ChristJesus in themselves, to look at flesh, which is as grass, or to ascribethat to the visible which belongs to Him. Darkness came over methrough want of watchfulness and obedience to the pure Eye of God. I wastaken captive from the true light; I was walking in the Night, as awandering bird fit for a prey. And if the Lord of all my mercies had notrescued me, I had perished; for I was as one appointed to death anddestruction, and there was none to deliver me. "

"It is in my heart to confess to God, and before men, my folly andoffence in that day; yet there were many things formed against me inthat day, to take away my life and bring scandal upon the truth, ofwhich I was not guilty at all. " "The provocation of that Time ofTemptation was exceeding great against the Lord, yet He left me not; forwhen Darkness was above, and the Adversary so prevailed that all thingswere turned and perverted against my right seeing, hearing, orunderstanding, only a secret hope and faith I had in my God, whom I hadserved, that He would bring me through it and to the end of it, and thatI should again see the day of my redemption from under it all, --thisquieted my soul in its greatest tribulation. " He concludes hisconfession with these words: "He who hath saved my soul from death, whohath lifted my feet up out of the pit, even to Him be glory forever; andlet 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 onlyallow 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 oftrial, when I was beset in darkness, when I was cast out as a wanderingbird; when I was assaulted with strong temptations, then Thy presence, insecret, did preserve me, and in a low state I felt Thee near me; when myway was through the sea, when I passed under the mountains, there wastThou present with me; when the weight of the hills was upon me, Thouupheldest 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 mywork was in the furnace, and I passed through the fire, by Thee I was notconsumed; when I beheld the dreadful visions, and was among the fieryspirits, Thy faith staid me, else through fear I had fallen. I saw Thee, and believed, so that the enemy could not prevail. " After speaking ofhis humiliation and sufferings, which Divine Mercy had overruled for hisspiritual 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 tothe captive; Thou calledst my acquaintances near me; they to whom I hadbeen a wonder looked upon me; and in Thy love I obtained favor with thosewho had deserted me. Then did gladness swallow up sorrow, and I forsookmy 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, untilThou makest man known unto himself, and has slain the boaster, and shownhim the vanity which vexeth Thy spirit. "

All honor to the Quakers of that day, that, at the risk ofmisrepresentation and calumny, they received back to their communiontheir greatly erring, but deeply repentant, brother. His life, everafter, 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'sfriend, Pennington. Ellwood's father held a discourse with the twoQuakers on their doctrine of free and universal grace. "James Nailer, "says Ellwood, "handled the subject with so much perspicuity and cleardemonstration, that his reasoning seemed to be irresistible. As forEdward Burrough, he was a brisk young Man, of a ready Tongue, and mighthave been for aught I then knew, a Scholar, which made me less admire hisWay of Reasoning. But what dropt from James Nailer had the greater Forceupon me, because he lookt like a simple Countryman, having the appearanceof an Husbandman or Shepherd. "

In the latter part of the eighth month, 1660, he left London on foot, tovisit his wife and children in Wakefield. As he journeyed on, the senseof a solemn change about to take place seemed with him; the shadow of theeternal world fell over him. As he passed through Huntingdon, a friendwho saw him describes him as "in an awful and weighty frame of mind, asif he had been redeemed from earth, and a stranger on it, seeking abetter 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 afriend, who lived not far distant. He died shortly after, expressing hisgratitude for the kindness of his attendants, and invoking blessings uponthem. About two hours before his death, he spoke to the friend at hisbedside these remarkable words, solemn as eternity, and beautiful as thelove which fills it:--

"There is a spirit which I feel which delights to do no evil, nor toavenge any wrong; but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy itsown in the end; its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and toweary out all exultation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contraryto itself. It sees to the end of all temptations; as it bears no evil initself, 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 ofGod. Its crown is meekness; its life is everlasting love unfeigned; ittakes its kingdom with entreaty, and not with contention, and keeps it bylowliness of mind. In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regardit, or can own its life. It is conceived in sorrow, and brought forthwith none to pity it; nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression. Itnever rejoiceth but through sufferings, for with the world's joy it ismurdered. I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellowship thereinwith them who lived in dens and desolate places of the earth, who throughdeath 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 hetouches upon this case in his _Anguis Flagellatus_: "Let none insult, buttake 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 ofintense mental activity, when political and religious rights and dutieswere thoroughly discussed by strong and earnest statesmen andtheologians, --that of Andrew Marvell, the friend of Milton, and LatinSecretary of Cromwell, deserves honorable mention. The magnificent proseof Milton, long neglected, is now perhaps as frequently read as his greatepic; but the writings of his friend and fellow secretary, devoted likehis own to the cause of freedom and the rights of the people, arescarcely known to the present generation. It is true that Marvell'spolitical pamphlets were less elaborate and profound than those of theauthor of the glorious _Defence of Unlicensed Printing_. He was light, playful, witty, and sarcastic; he lacked the stern dignity, the terribleinvective, the bitter scorn, the crushing, annihilating retort, the grandand solemn eloquence, and the devout appeals, which render immortal thecontroversial works of Milton. But he, too, has left his foot-prints onhis age; he, too, has written for posterity that which they "will notwillingly let die. " As one of the inflexible defenders of Englishliberty, sowers of the seed, the fruits of which we are now reaping, hehas a higher claim on the kind regards of this generation than his meritsas a poet, by no means inconsiderable, would warrant. 

Andrew Marvell was born in Kingston-upon-Hull, in 1620. At the age ofeighteen he entered Trinity College, whence he was enticed by theJesuits, then actively seeking proselytes. After remaining with them ashort time, his father found him, and brought him back to his studies. On leaving college, he travelled on the Continent. At Rome he wrote hisfirst satire, a humorous critique upon Richard Flecknoe, an EnglishJesuit and verse writer, whose lines on Silence Charles Lamb quotes inone of his Essays. It is supposed that he made his first acquaintancewith Milton in Italy. 

At Paris he made the Abbot de Manihan the subject of another satire. TheAbbot pretended to skill in the arts of magic, and used to prognosticatethe fortunes of people from the character of their handwriting. At whatperiod he returned from his travels we are not aware. It is stated, bysome of his biographers, that he was sent as secretary of a Turkishmission. In 1653, he was appointed the tutor of Cromwell's nephew; and, four years after, doubtless through the instrumentality of his friendMilton, he received the honorable appointment of Latin Secretary of theCommonwealth. In 1658, he was selected by his townsmen of Hull torepresent them in Parliament. In this service he continued until 1663, when, notwithstanding his sturdy republican principles, he was appointedsecretary to the Russian embassy. On his return, in 1665, he was againelected to Parliament, and continued in the public service until theprorogation of the Parliament of 1675. 

The boldness, the uncompromising integrity and irreproachable consistencyof Marvell, as a statesman, have secured for him the honorableappellation of "the British Aristides. " Unlike too many of his oldassociates under the Protectorate, he did not change with the times. Hewas a republican in Cromwell's day, and neither threats of assassination, nor flatteries, nor proffered bribes, could make him anything else inthat of Charles II. He advocated the rights of the people at a time whenpatriotism was regarded as ridiculous folly; when a general corruption, spreading downwards from a lewd and abominable Court, had madelegislation a mere scramble for place and emolument. English historypresents no period so disgraceful as the Restoration. To use the wordsof Macaulay, it was "a day of servitude without loyalty and sensualitywithout love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise ofcold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The principles of liberty were the scoff of everygrinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. " Itis the peculiar merit of Milton and Marvell, that in such an age theyheld fast their integrity, standing up in glorious contrast with clericalapostates and traitors to the cause of England's liberty. 

In the discharge of his duties as a statesman Marvell was as punctual andconscientious as our own venerable Apostle of Freedom, John Quincy Adams. He corresponded every post with his constituents, keeping them fullyapprised of all that transpired at Court or in Parliament. He spoke butseldom, but his great personal influence was exerted privately upon themembers of the Commons as well as upon the Peers. His wit, accomplishedmanners, and literary eminence made him a favorite at the Court itself. The voluptuous and careless monarch laughed over the biting satire of therepublican poet, and heartily enjoyed his lively conversation. It issaid that numerous advances were made to him by the courtiers of CharlesII. , but he was found to be incorruptible. The personal compliments ofthe King, the encomiums of Rochester, the smiles and flatteries of thefrail but fair and high-born ladies of the Court; nay, even the goldenoffers of the King's treasurer, who, climbing with difficulty to hisobscure retreat on an upper floor of a court in the Strand, laid atempting bribe of L1, 000 before him, on the very day when he had beencompelled 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 afair 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 thatthe supreme magistrate should be vested with power to govern and conductthe consciences of subjects in affairs of religion. Princes may withless hazard give liberty to men's vices and debaucheries than to theirconsciences. " And, speaking of the various sects of Non-conformists, hecounsels princes and legislators that "tenderness and indulgence to suchmen is to nourish vipers in their own bowels, and the most sottishneglect of our quiet and security. " Marvell replied to him in a severelysatirical pamphlet, which provoked a reply from the Doctor. Marvellrejoined, with a rare combination of wit and argument. The effect of hissarcasm on the Doctor and his supporters may be inferred from ananonymous note sent him, in which the writer threatens by the eternal Godto cut his throat, if he uttered any more libels upon Dr. Parker. BishopBurnet remarks that "Marvell writ in a burlesque strain, but with sopeculiar and so entertaining a conduct 'that from the King down to thetradesman his books were read with great pleasure, and not only humbledParker, but his whole party, for Marvell had all the wits on his side. '"The Bishop further remarks that Marvell's satire "gave occasion to theonly piece of modesty with which Dr. Parker was ever charged, namely, ofwithdrawing 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 hasbeen. "

Dean Swift, in commenting upon the usual fate of controversial pamphlets, which seldom live beyond their generation, says: "There is indeed anexception, when a great genius undertakes to expose a foolish piece; sowe still read Marvell's answer to Parker with pleasure, though the bookit answers be sunk long ago. "

Perhaps, in the entire compass of our language, there is not to be founda finer piece of satirical writing than Marvell's famous parody of thespeeches of Charles II. , in which the private vices and publicinconsistencies of the King, and his gross violations of his pledges oncoming to the throne, are exposed with the keenest wit and the mostlaugh-provoking irony. Charles himself, although doubtless annoyed byit, could not refrain from joining in the mirth which it excited at hisexpense. 

The friendship between Marvell and Milton remained firm and unbroken tothe last. The former exerted himself to save his illustrious friend frompersecution, and omitted no opportunity to defend him as a politician andto eulogize him as a poet. In 1654 he presented to Cromwell Milton'snoble tract in _Defence of the People of England_, and, in writing to theauthor, says of the work, "When I consider how equally it teems and riseswith so many figures, it seems to me a Trajan's column, in whose windingascent we see embossed the several monuments of your learned victories. "He was one of the first to appreciate _Paradise Lost_, and to commend itin some admirable lines. One couplet is exceedingly beautiful, in itsreference 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 ofpastoral description worthy of Milton himself, feeble lines and hackneyedphrases occur. His _Nymph lamenting the Death of her Fawn_ is a finishedand elaborate piece, full of grace and tenderness. _Thoughts in aGarden_ 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 admirabledescription, 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 ofthe 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 thefollowing 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 BoatSong_:--

 "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 agreat portion of it referred to persons and events no longer of generalinterest. The satire on Holland is an exception. There is nothing inits way superior to it in our language. Many of his best pieces wereoriginally written in Latin, and afterwards translated by himself. Thereis a splendid Ode to Cromwell--a worthy companion of Milton's glorioussonnet--which is not generally known, and which we transfer entire to ourpages. Its simple dignity and the melodious flow of its versificationcommend themselves more to our feelings than its eulogy of war. It isenergetic and impassioned, and probably affords a better idea of theauthor, as an actor in the stirring drama of his time, than the "softLydian 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 bachelorshave done the most to exalt women into a divinity, might have quoted hisextravagant 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 defendersto ridicule the great men of the Commonwealth, the sturdy republicans ofEngland, as sour-featured, hard-hearted ascetics, enemies of the finearts and polite literature. The works of Milton and Marvell, the prose-poem of Harrington, and the admirable discourses of Algernon Sydney are asufficient answer to this accusation. To none has it less applicationthan to the subject of our sketch. He was a genial, warmhearted man, anelegant scholar, a finished gentleman at home, and the life of everycircle which he entered, whether that of the gay court of Charles II. , amidst such men as Rochester and L'Estrange, or that of the republicanphilosophers who assembled at Miles's Coffee House, where he discussedplans of a free representative government with the author of Oceana, andCyriack Skinner, that friend of Milton, whom the bard has immortalized inthe sonnet which so pathetically, yet heroically, alludes to his ownblindness. 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 gracefulwreaths to his shoulders, dark eyes, full of expression and fire, afinely chiselled chin, and a mouth whose soft voluptuousness scarcelygave token of the steady purpose and firm will of the inflexiblestatesman: these, added to the prestige of his genius, and the respectwhich a lofty, self-sacrificing patriotism extorts even from those whowould fain corrupt and bribe it, gave him a ready passport to thefashionable society of the metropolis. He was one of the few who mingledin 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 ownparaphrase 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 hisold constituents at Hull. His health had previously been remarkablygood; and it was supposed by many that he was poisoned by some of hispolitical or clerical enemies. His monument, erected by his gratefulconstituency, 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 ofAmericans as well as Englishmen. His example commends itself in anespecial manner to the legislators of our Republic. Integrity andfidelity to principle are as greatly needed at this time in our halls ofCongress as in the Parliaments of the Restoration; men are required whocan feel, with Milton, that "it is high honor done them from God, and aspecial mark of His favor, to have been selected to stand upright andsteadfast in His cause, dignified with the defence of Truth and publicliberty. "

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 inthe middle centuries. The dim cell-lamp of the somewhat apocryphalJocelin of Brakelond becomes in his hands a huge Drummond-light, shiningover the Dark Ages like the naphtha-fed cressets over Pandemonium, proving, as he says in his own quaint way, that "England in the year 1200was no dreamland, but a green, solid place, which grew corn and severalother things; the sun shone on it; the vicissitudes of seasons and humanfortunes were there; cloth was woven, ditches dug, fallow fieldsploughed, 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 presentgeneration that the Past is not a confused dream of thrones and battle-fields, creeds and constitutions, but a reality, substantial as hearthand home, harvest-field and smith-shop, merry-making and death, couldmake it, we shall not wholly waste our time and that of our readers ininviting them to look with us at the rural life of England two centuriesago, 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 itspicturesque array of italics and capital letters, ) is to be found only ina few of our old Quaker libraries. It opens with some account of thefamily. The father of the elder Roberts "lived reputably, on a littleestate of his own, " and it is mentioned as noteworthy that he married asister of a gentleman in the Commission of the Peace. Coming of ageabout the beginning of the civil wars, John and one of his youngneighbors enlisted in the service of Parliament. Hearing thatCirencester had been taken by the King's forces, they obtained leave ofabsence to visit their friends, for whose safety they naturally feltsolicitous. The following account of the reception they met with fromthe drunken and ferocious troopers of Charles I. , the "bravos of Alsatiaand the pages of Whitehall, " throws a ghastly light upon the horrors ofcivil war:--

"As they were passing by Cirencester, they were discovered, and pursuedby two soldiers of the King's party, then in possession of the town. Seeing themselves pursued, they quitted their horses, and took to theirheels; 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 andslashing his hands and arms, which he held up to save his head; as themarks upon them did long after testify. At length it pleased theAlmighty 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 andprick him about the jaws, till they thought him dead. Then they lefthim, and pursued his neighbor, whom they presently overtook and killed. Soon after they had left my father, it was said in his heart, _Rise, andflee 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 asteep hill, and through a river which ran at the bottom of it; thoughwith exceeding difficulty, his boots filling with water, and his woundsbleeding 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 hisbleeding patient that if he had met him in the street he would havekilled him himself, but now he was willing to cure him. On his recovery, young Roberts again entered the army, and continued in it until theoverthrow, 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 ChiefJustice 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 ofthe Puritan yeomanry of England can be adduced than the fact that, of thefifty thousand soldiers who were discharged on the accession of CharlesII. , and left to shift for themselves, comparatively few, if any, becamechargeable to their parishes, although at that very time one out of sixof the English population were unable to support themselves. Theycarried into their farm-fields and workshops the strict habits ofCromwell's discipline; and, in toiling to repair their wasted fortunes, they manifested the same heroic fortitude and self-denial which in warhad made them such formidable and efficient "Soldiers of the Lord. " Withfew exceptions, they remained steadfast in their uncompromising non-conformity, abhorring Prelacy and Popery, and entertaining no veryorthodox notions with respect to the divine right of Kings. From themthe Quakers drew their most zealous champions; men who, in renouncing the"carnal weapons" of their old service, found employment for habitualcombativeness in hot and wordy sectarian warfare. To this day thevocabulary of Quakerism abounds in the military phrases and figures whichwere in use in the Commonwealth's time. Their old force and significanceare now in a great measure lost; but one can well imagine that, in theassemblies of the primitive Quakers, such stirring battle-cries andwarlike tropes, even when employed in enforcing or illustrating thedoctrines 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 tothe ranks of Ireton and Lambert, and causing him to hear, in the place ofthe 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 lethis enemies be scattered!"

Of this class was John Roberts. He threw off his knapsack, and went backto his small homestead, contented with the privilege of supportinghimself and family by daily toil, and grumbling in concert with his oldcampaign brothers at the new order of things in Church and State. To hisapprehension, the Golden Days of England ended with the parade onBlackheath to receive the restored King. He manifested no reverence forBishops and Lords, for he felt none. For the Presbyterians he had nogood will; they had brought in the King, and they denied the liberty ofprophesying. John Milton has expressed the feeling of the Independentsand Anabaptists towards this latter class, in that famous line in whichhe defines Presbyter as "old priest writ large. " Roberts was by no meansa gloomy fanatic; he had a great deal of shrewdness and humor, loved aquiet joke; and every gambling priest and swearing magistrate in theneighborhood stood in fear of his sharp wit. It was quite in course forsuch a man to fall in with the Quakers, and he appears to have done so atthe first opportunity. 

In the year 1665, "it pleased the Lord to send two women Friends out ofthe North to Cirencester, " who, inquiring after such as feared God, weredirected to the house of John Roberts. He received them kindly, and, inviting in some of his neighbors, sat down with them, whereupon "theFriends spake a few words, which had a good effect. " After the meetingwas over, he was induced to visit a "Friend" then confined in Banburyjail, whom he found preaching through the grates of his cell to thepeople in the street. On seeing Roberts he called to mind the story ofZaccheus, and declared that the word was now to all who were seekingChrist by climbing the tree of knowledge, "Come down, come down; for thatwhich is to be known of God is manifested within. " Returning home, hewent soon after to the parish meeting-house, and, entering with his haton, the priest noticed him, and, stopping short in his discourse, declared that he could not go on while one of the congregation wore hishat. He was thereupon led out of the house, and a rude fellow, stealingup behind, struck him on the back with a heavy stone. "Take that forGod's sake, " said the ruffian. "So I do, " answered Roberts, withoutlooking back to see his assailant, who the next day came and asked hisforgiveness 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 proceedingsof 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 stonedoublet. There's many an honester man than you hanged. "

"It may be so, " said Roberts, "but what becomes of such as hang honestmen?"

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 tumultoccurs, I 'll come and cut your throat with my own sword. " A warrant wasmade out, and he was forthwith sent to the jail. In the evening, JusticeSollis, his uncle, released him, on condition of his promise to appear atthe next Sessions. He returned to his home, but in the night followinghe was impressed with a belief that it was his duty to visit JusticeStephens. Early in the morning, with a heavy heart, without eating ordrinking, he mounted his horse and rode towards the residence of hisenemy. When he came in sight of the house, he felt strong misgivingsthat his uncle, Justice Sollis, who had so kindly released him, and hisneighbors generally, would condemn him for voluntarily running intodanger, and drawing down trouble upon himself and family. He alightedfrom his horse, and sat on the ground in great doubt and sorrow, when avoice seemed to speak within him, "Go, and I will go with thee. " TheJustice met him at the door. "I am come, " said Roberts, "in the fearand 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 terriblesummons awed the Justice; he made Roberts sit down on his couch besidehim, declaring that he received the message from God, and askedforgiveness for the wrong he had done him. 

The parish vicar of Siddington at this time was George Bull, afterwardsBishop of St. David's, whom Macaulay speaks of as the only rural parishpriest who, during the latter part of the seventeenth century, was notedas a theologian, or Who possessed a respectable library. Roberts refusedto pay the vicar his tithes, and the vicar sent him to prison. It wasthe priest's "Short Method with Dissenters. " While the sturdy Non-conformist lay in prison, he was visited by the great woman of theneighborhood, Lady Dunch, of Down Amney. "What do you lie in jail for?"inquired the lady. Roberts replied that it was because he could not putbread into the mouth of a hireling priest. The lady suggested that hemight let somebody else satisfy the demands of the priest; and that shehad a mind to do this herself, as she wished to talk with him onreligious subjects. To this Roberts objected; there were poor people whoneeded her charities, which would be wasted on such devourers as thepriests, who, like Pharaoh's lean kine, were eating up the fat and thegoodly, without looking a whit the better. But the lady, who seems tohave been pleased and amused by the obstinate prisoner, paid the titheand the jail fees, and set him at liberty, making him fix a day when hewould visit her. At the time appointed he went to Down Amney, and wasovertaken on the way by the priest of Cirencester, who had been sent forto meet the Quaker. They found the lady ill in bed; but she had thembrought to her chamber, being determined not to lose the amusement ofhearing a theological discussion, to which she at once urged them, declaring that it would divert her and do her good. The parson began byaccusing the Quakers of holding Popish doctrines. The Quaker retortedby telling him that if he would prove the Quakers like the Papists in onething, by the help of God, he would prove him like them in ten. After abrief and sharp dispute, the priest, finding his adversary's wit too keenfor his comfort, hastily took his leave. 

The next we hear of Roberts he is in Gloucester Castle, subjected to thebrutal usage of a jailer, who took a malicious satisfaction in thrustingdecent and respectable Dissenters, imprisoned for matters of conscience, among felons and thieves. A poor vagabond tinker was hired to play atnight on his hautboy, and prevent their sleeping; but Roberts spoke tohim in such a manner that the instrument fell from his hand; and he toldthe jailer that he would play no more, though he should hang him up atthe door for it. 

How he was released from jail does not appear; but the narrative tells usthat some time after an apparitor came to cite him to the Bishop's Courtat Gloucester. When he was brought before the Court, Bishop Nicholson, akind-hearted and easy-natured prelate, asked him the number of hischildren, 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 inOliver's days, when Bishops were out of fashion. "

The Bishop and the Court laughed at this sally, and proceeded to questionhim touching his views of baptism. Roberts admitted that John had aDivine commission to baptize with water, but that he never heard ofanybody else that had. The Bishop reminded him that Christ's disciplesbaptized. "What 's that to me?" responded Roberts. "Paul says he wasnot 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 hislabor as thou hast for thine; and I would willingly know who sent thee tobaptize?"

The Bishop evaded this home question, and told him he was there to answerfor not coming to church. Roberts denied the charge; sometimes he wentto church, and sometimes it came to him. "I don't call that a churchwhich 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 wasbuilt for that purpose. " The Bishop here told him he might go for thepresent; he would take another opportunity to convince him of his errors. 

The next person called was a Baptist minister, who, seeing that Robertsrefused to put off his hat, kept on his also. The Bishop sternlyreminded him that he stood before the King's Court, and therepresentative of the majesty of England; and that, while some regardmight be had to the scruples of men who made a conscience of putting offthe hat, such contempt could not be tolerated on the part of one whocould put it off to every mechanic be met. The Baptist pulled off hishat, and apologized, on the ground of illness. 

We find Roberts next following George Fox on a visit to Bristol. On hisreturn, reaching his house late in the evening, he saw a man standing inthe 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! Thosewho lie in wait for you are my Lord Bishop's bailiffs; they are mercilessrogues. Ever, my master, while you live, please a knave, for an honestman 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. Confrontingthe Bishop in his own hall, he told him that he had come to know why hewas hunting after him with his bailiffs, and why he was his adversary. "The King is your adversary, " said the Bishop; "you have broken theKing'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 ishigh time wiser men were chosen, to make better laws. "

The discourse turning upon the Book of Common Prayer, Roberts asked theBishop if the sin of idolatry did not consist in worshipping the work ofmen's hands. The Bishop admitted it, as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar'simage. 

"Then, " said Roberts, "whose hands made your Prayer Book? It could notmake itself. "

"Do you compare our Prayer Book to Nebuchadnezzar's image?" cried theBishop. 

"Yes, " returned Roberts, "that was his image; this is thine. I no moredare bow to thy Common-Prayer Book than the Three Children toNebuchadnezzar's image. "

"Yours is a strange upstart religion, " said the Bishop. 

Roberts told him it was older than his by several hundred years. At thisclaim of antiquity the prelate was greatly amused, and told Roberts thatif 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'sdays, when thy Common-Prayer Book was as little regarded as an oldalmanac, and your priests, with a few honest exceptions, turned with thetide, and if Oliver had put mass in their mouths would have conformed toit for the sake of their bellies. "

"What would you have us do?" asked the Bishop. "Would you have hadOliver cut our throats?"

"No, " said Roberts; "but what sort of religion was that which you wereafraid to venture your throats for?"

The Bishop interrupted him to say, that in Oliver's days he had neverowned any other religion than his own, although he did not dare to openlymaintain it as he then did. 

"Well, " continued Roberts, "if thou didst not think thy religion worthventuring thy throat for then, I desire thee to consider that it is notworth 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 acare how we cut men's throats. "

The following colloquy throws some light on the condition and characterof the rural clergy at this period, and goes far to confirm thestatements of Macaulay, which many have supposed exaggerated. Baxter'searly religious teachers were more exceptionable than even the maudlinmummer 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 onthe strength of that title officiated at the desk and altar; and afterhim came an attorney's clerk, who had tippled himself into so greatpoverty that he had no other way to live than to preach. "

J. ROBERTS. I was bred up under a Common-Prayer Priest; and a poordrunken old Man he was. Sometimes he was so drunk he could not say hisPrayers, and at best he could but say them; though I think he was by fara 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 everlastingCovenant; but the present Priest of the Parish is George Bull. 

BISHOP. Do you say that drunken old Man was better than Mr. Bull? Itell you, I account Mr. Bull as sound, able, and orthodox a Divine as anywe have among us. 

J. ROBERT. I am sorry for that; for if he be one of the best of you, Ibelieve 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 toswear against me wrongfully. His Servants themselves have confessed tomy Servants, that I might have their Ears; for their Master made themdrunk, and then told them they were set down in the List as Witnessesagainst me, and they must swear to it: And so they did, and broughttreble Damages. They likewise owned they took Tithes from my Servants, threshed them out, and sold them for their Master. They have alsoseveral Times took my Cattle out of my Grounds, drove them to Fairs andMarkets, 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 dohim any good to have him in jail, he would voluntarily go and deliverhimself up to the keeper of Gloucester Castle. The good-natured prelaterelented at this, and said he should not be molested or injured, andfurther manifested his good will by ordering refreshments. One of theBishop's friends who was present was highly offended by the freedom ofRoberts with his Lordship, and undertook to rebuke him, but was soreadily answered that he flew into a rage. "If all the Quakers inEngland, " said he, "are not hanged in a month's time, I 'll be hanged forthem. " "Prithee, friend, " quoth Roberts, "remember and be as good as thyword!"

Good old Bishop Nicholson, it would seem, really liked his incorrigibleQuaker neighbor, and could enjoy heartily his wit and humor, even whenexercised at the expense of his own ecclesiastical dignity. He admiredhis blunt honesty and courage. Surrounded by flatterers and self-seekers, he found satisfaction in the company and conversation of onewho, setting aside all conventionalisms, saw only in my Lord Bishop apoor fellow-probationer, and addressed him on terms of consciousequality. The indulgence which he extended to him naturally enoughprovoked many of the inferior clergy, who had been sorely annoyed by thesturdy Dissenter's irreverent witticisms and unsparing ridicule. VicarBull, of Siddington, and Priest Careless, of Cirencester, in particular, urged the Bishop to deal sharply with him. The former accused him ofdealing in the Black Art, and filled the Bishop's ear with certainmarvellous stories of his preternatural sagacity and discernment indiscovering cattle which were lost. The Bishop took occasion to inquireinto these stories; and was told by Roberts that, except in a singleinstance, the discoveries were the result of his acquaintance with thehabits of animals and his knowledge of the localities where they werelost. The circumstance alluded to, as an exception, will be best relatedin his own words. 

"I had a poor Neighbor, who had a Wife and six Children, and whom thechief men about us permitted to keep six or seven Cows upon the Waste, which were the principal Support of the Family, and preserved them frombecoming chargeable to the Parish. One very stormy night the Cattle wereleft in the Yard as usual, but could not be found in the morning. TheMan and his Sons had sought them to no purpose; and, after they had beenlost 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 goa begging in our old age! We have lost all our Cows. My Husband and theBoys have been round the country, and can hear nothing of them. I'lldown on my bare knees, if you'll stand our Friend!' I desired she wouldnot be in such an agony, and told her she should not down on her knees tome; 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 Sonsmay hear of them to-day; if not, let thy Husband get a horse, and come tome 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, thathe would be pleased to make me instrumental in his Hand, for the help ofthe poor Family. In the Morning early comes the old Man. In the Name ofGod, says he, which way shall we go to seek them? I, being deeplyconcerned 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; andsaid (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 muchtroubled lest they should not prove true. It was very early, and thefirst Man we saw, I asked him if he had seen any stray Milch Cowsthereabouts. What manner of Cattle are they? said he. And the old Mandescribing their Mark and Number, he told us there were some stoodchewing their Cuds in the Horse-Fair; but thinking they belonged to somein the Neighborhood, he did not take particular Notice of them. When wecame to the Place, the old Man found them to be his; but suffered hisTransports 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 severaltimes, till he raised the Neighbors out of their Beds to see what was theMatter. 'O!' said he, 'I had lost my Cows four or five days ago, andthought I should never see them again; and this honest Neighbor of minetold me this Morning, by his own Fire's Side, nine Miles off, that hereI 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 bethankful; as indeed I was, being reverently bowed in my Spirit before theLord, 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 hasbeen related, that dignitary, with the Lord Chancellor, in their coaches, and about twenty clergymen on horseback, made a call at the humbledwelling of Roberts, on their way to Tedbury, where the Bishop was tohold a Visitation. "I could not go out of the country without seeingyou, " said the prelate, as the farmer came to his coach door and pressedhim to alight. 

"John, " asked Priest Evans, the Bishop's kinsman, "is your house free toentertain such men as we are?"

"Yes, George, " said Roberts; "I entertain honest men, and sometimesothers. "

"My Lord, " said Evans, turning to the Bishop, "John's friends are thehonest men, and we are the others. "

The Bishop told Roberts that they could not then alight, but would gladlydrink with him; whereupon the good wife brought out her best beer. "I commend you, John, " quoth the Bishop, as he paused from his heartydraught; "you keep a cup of good beer in your house. I have not drankany that has pleased me better since I left home. " The cup passed nextto the Chancellor, and finally came to Priest Bull, who thrust it aside, declaring that it was full of hops and heresy. As to hops, Robertsreplied, he could not say, but as for heresy, he bade the priest takenote that the Lord Bishop had drank of it, and had found no heresy in thecup. 

The Bishop leaned over his coach door and whispered: "John, I advise youto take care you don't offend against the higher Powers. I have heardgreat complaints against you, that you are the Ringleader of the Quakersin this Country; and that, if you are not suppressed, all will signifynothing. Therefore, pray, John, take care, for the future, you don'toffend 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, howeveradvanced in this World, are but the lower Power; and it is only because Iendeavor to be obedient to the will of the higher Powers, that the lowerPowers are angry with me. But I hope, with the assistance of God, totake thy Counsel, and be subject to the higher Powers, let the lowerPowers do with me as it may please God to suffer them. "

The Bishop then said he would like to talk with him further, andrequested him to meet him at Tedbury the next day. At the timeappointed, Roberts went to the inn where the Bishop lodged, and wasinvited to dine with him. After dinner was over, the prelate told himthat he must go to church, and leave off holding conventicles at hishouse, 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 offriendship, he should betray him and send him to prison, he, who hadhitherto commended him for his moderation, would put his name in print, and cause it to stink before all sober people. It was the priests, hetold him, who set him on; but, instead of hearkening to them, he shouldcommend them to some honest vocation, and not suffer them to rob theirhonest neighbors, and feed on the fruits of other men's toil, likecaterpillars. 

"Whom do you call caterpillars?" cried Priest Rich, of North Surrey. 

"We farmers, " said Roberts, "call those so who live on other men'sfields, and by the sweat of other men's brows; and if thou dost so, thoumayst be one of them. "

This reply so enraged the Bishop's attendants that they could only beappeased 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 ofthe blunt farmer; and the Christian virtue of forbearance, even inBishops, has its limits. 

The constable, obeying the summons, came to the inn, at the door of whichthe landlady met him. "What do you here!" cried the good woman, "whenhonest John is going to be sent to prison? Here, come along with me. "The constable, nothing loath, followed her into a private room, where sheconcealed him. Word was sent to the Bishop, that the constable was notto be found; and the prelate, telling Roberts he could send him to jailin the afternoon, dismissed him until evening. At the hour appointed, the latter waited upon the Bishop, and found with him only one priest anda lay gentleman. The priest begged the Bishop to be allowed to discoursewith the prisoner; and, leave being granted, he began by telling Robertsthat the knowledge of the Scriptures had made him mad, and that it was agreat pity he had ever seen them. 

"Thou art an unworthy man, " said the Quaker, "and I 'll not dispute withthee. If the knowledge of the Scriptures has made me mad, the knowledgeof the sack-pot hath almost made thee mad; and if we two madmen shoulddispute about religion, we should make mad work of it. "

"An 't please you, my Lord, " said the scandalized priest, "he says I 'mdrunk. "

The Bishop asked Roberts to repeat his words; and, instead ofreprimanding him, as the priest expected, was so much amused that he heldup his hands and laughed; whereupon the offended inferior took a hastyleave. The Bishop, who was evidently glad to be rid of him, now turnedto Roberts, and complained that he had dealt hardly with him, in tellinghim, before so many gentlemen, that he had sought to betray him byprofessions 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 anencourager of the Quakers. "But now, John, " said the good prelate, "I'llburn the warrant against you before your face. " "You know, Mr. Burnet, "he continued, addressing his attendant, "that a Ring of Bells may be madeof 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 thypipe. "

The inferior clergy were by no means so lenient as the Bishop. Theyregarded Roberts as the ringleader of Dissent, an impracticable, obstinate, contumacious heretic, not only refusing to pay them titheshimself, but encouraging others to the same course. Hence, they thoughtit necessary to visit upon him the full rigor of the law. His crops weretaken from his field, and his cattle from his yard. He was oftencommitted to the jail, where, on one occasion, he was kept, with manyothers, for a long time, through the malice of the jailer, who refused toput the names of his prisoners in the Calendar, that they might have ahearing. But the spirit of the old Commonwealth's man remainedsteadfast. When Justice George, at the Ram in Cirencester, told him hemust conform, and go to church, or suffer the penalty of the law, hereplied that he had heard indeed that some were formerly whipped out ofthe 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, askedhim what that was. "Thou mayst call it a daw-house, " answered theincorrigible Quaker. "Dost thou not see how the jackdaws flock aboutit?"

Sometimes it happened that the clergyman was also a magistrate, andunited in his own person the authority of the State and the zeal of theChurch. Justice Parsons, of Gloucester, was a functionary of this sort. He wielded the sword of the Spirit on the Sabbath against Dissenters, andon week days belabored them with the arm of flesh and the constable'sstaff. At one time he had between forty and fifty of them locked up inGloucester Castle, among them Roberts and his sons, on the charge ofattending conventicles. But the troublesome prisoners baffled hisvigilance, and turned their prison into a meeting-house, and held theirconventicles in defiance of him. The Reverend Justice pounced upon themon one occasion, with his attendants. An old, gray-haired man, formerlya strolling fencing-master, was preaching when he came in. The Justicelaid hold of him by his white locks, and strove to pull him down, but thetall 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 noone answered him. A voice (we fancy it was that of our old friendRoberts) called out: "The Devil must be hard put to it to have hisdrudgery done, when the Priests must leave their pulpits to turninformers against poor prisoners. " The Justice obtained a list of thenames of the prisoners, made out on their commitment, and, taking it forgranted that all were still present, issued warrants for the collectionof fines by levies upon their estates. Among the names was that of apoor widow, who had been discharged, and was living, at the time theclerical magistrate swore she was at the meeting, twenty miles distantfrom the prison. 

Soon after this event, our old friend fell sick. He had been dischargedfrom prison, but his sons were still confined. The eldest had leave, however, to attend him in his illness, and he bears his testimony thatthe Lord was pleased to favor his father with His living presence in hislast moments. In keeping with the sturdy Non-conformist's life, he wasinterred at the foot of his own orchard, in Siddington, a spot he hadselected for a burial-ground long before, where neither the foot of apriest nor the shadow of a steeple-house could rest upon his grave. 

In closing our notice of this pleasant old narrative, we may remark thatthe light it sheds upon the antagonistic religious parties of the time iscalculated to dissipate prejudices and correct misapprehensions, commonalike to Churchmen and Dissenters. The genial humor, sound sense, andsterling virtues of the Quaker farmer should teach the one class thatpoor James Nayler, in his craziness and folly, was not a fairrepresentative of his sect; while the kind nature, the heartyappreciation of goodness, and the generosity and candor of BishopNicholson should convince the other class that a prelate is notnecessarily, and by virtue of his mitre, a Laud or a Bonner. TheDissenters of the seventeenth century may well be forgiven for theasperity of their language; men whose ears had been cropped because theywould not recognize Charles I. As a blessed martyr, and his scandalousson as the head of the Church, could scarcely be expected to makediscriminations, or suggest palliating circumstances, favorable to anyclass of their adversaries. To use the homely but apt simile ofMcFingal, "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'scardinal, they did not die without a sign. They branded, by their fierceepithets, the foreheads of their persecutors more deeply than thesheriff's hot iron did their own. If they lost their ears, they enjoyedthe satisfaction of making those of their oppressors tingle. Knowingtheir persecutors to be in the wrong, they did not always inquire whetherthey themselves had been entirely right, and had done no unrequired worksof supererogation by the way of "testimony" against their neighbors' modecf worship. And so from pillory and whipping-post, from prison andscaffold, they sent forth their wail and execration, their miserere andanathema, and the sound thereof has reached down to our day. May itnever wholly die away until, the world over, the forcing of conscience isregarded as a crime against humanity and a usurpation of God'sprerogative. But abhorring, as we must, persecution under whateverpretext it is employed, we are not, therefore, to conclude that allpersecutors were bad and unfeeling men. Many of their severities, uponwhich we now look back with horror, were, beyond a question, the resultof an intense anxiety for the well-being of immortal souls, endangered bythe poison which, in their view, heresy was casting into the waters oflife. Coleridge, in one of the moods of a mind which traversed inimagination the vast circle of human experience, reaches this point inhis Table-Talk. "It would require, " says he, "stronger arguments thanany 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 fromteaching or countenancing doctrines which they believe to be damnable, and even to punish with death those who violate such prohibition. " Itwould not be very difficult for us to imagine a tender-hearted Inquisitorof this stamp, stifling his weak compassion for the shrieking wretchunder bodily torment by his strong pity for souls in danger of perditionfrom the sufferer's heresy. We all know with what satisfaction thegentle-spirited Melanethon heard of the burning of Servetus, and withwhat zeal he defended it. The truth is, the notion that an intellectualrecognition of certain dogmas is the essential condition of salvationlies at the bottom of all intolerance in matters of religion. Under thisimpression, men are too apt to forget that the great end of Christianityis love, and that charity is its crowning virtue; they overlook thebeautiful significance of the parable of the heretic Samaritan and theorthodox Pharisee: and thus, by suffering their speculative opinions ofthe next world to make them uncharitable and cruel in this, they arereally the worse for them, even admitting them to be true. 

SAMUEL HOPKINS. 

Three quarters of a century ago, the name of Samuel Hopkins was asfamiliar as a household word throughout New England. It was a spellwherewith to raise at once a storm of theological controversy. Thevenerable minister who bore it had his thousands of ardent youngdisciples, as well as defenders and followers of mature age andacknowledged talent; a hundred pulpits propagated the dogmas which he hadengrafted on the stock of Calvinism. Nor did he lack numerous andpowerful antagonists. The sledge ecclesiastic, with more or less effect, was unceasingly plied upon the strong-linked chain of argument which heslowly and painfully elaborated in the seclusion of his parish. Thepress groaned under large volumes of theological, metaphysical, andpsychological disquisition, the very thought of which is now "a wearinessto the flesh;" in rapid succession pamphlet encountered pamphlet, horned, beaked, and sharp of talon, grappling with each other in mid-air, likeMilton's angels. That loud controversy, the sound whereof went overChristendom, awakening responses from beyond the Atlantic, has now diedaway; its watchwords no longer stir the blood of belligerent sermonizers;its very terms and definitions have well-nigh become obsolete andunintelligible. The hands which wrote and the tongues which spoke inthat day are now all cold and silent; even Emmons, the brave oldintellectual athlete of Franklin, now sleeps with his fathers, --the lastof the giants. Their fame is still in all the churches; effeminateclerical dandyism still affects to do homage to their memories; theearnest young theologian, exploring with awe the mountainous debris oftheir controversial lore, ponders over the colossal thoughts entombedtherein, as he would over the gigantic fossils of an early creation, andendeavors in vain to recall to the skeleton abstractions before him thewarm and vigorous life wherewith they were once clothed; butHopkinsianism, as a distinct and living school of philosophy, theology, and metaphysics, no longer exists. It has no living oracles left; andits memory survives only in the doctrinal treatises of the elder andyounger Edwards, Hopkins, Bellamy, and Emmons. 

It is no part of our present purpose to discuss the merits of the systemin question. Indeed, looking at the great controversy which divided NewEngland Calvinism in the eighteenth century, from a point of view whichsecures our impartiality and freedom from prejudice, we find itexceedingly difficult to get a precise idea of what was actually atissue. To our poor comprehension, much of the dispute hinges upon namesrather than things; on the manner of reaching conclusions quite as muchas upon the conclusions themselves. Its origin may be traced to thegreat religious awakening of the middle of the past century, when thedogmas of the Calvinistic faith were subjected to the inquiry of acuteand earnest minds, roused up from the incurious ease and passiveindifference of nominal orthodoxy. Without intending it, it broke downsome of the barriers which separated Arminianism and Calvinism; itsproduct, Hopkinsianism, while it pushed the doctrine of the Genevanreformer on the subject of the Divine decrees and agency to that extremepoint where it well-nigh loses itself in Pantheism, held at the same timethat guilt could not be hereditary; that man, being responsible for hissinful acts, and not for his sinful nature, can only be justified by apersonal holiness, consisting not so much in legal obedience as in thatdisinterested benevolence which prefers the glory of God and the welfareof universal being above the happiness of self. It had the merit, whatever it may be, of reducing the doctrines of the Reformation to aningenious and scholastic form of theology; of bringing them boldly to thetest of reason and philosophy. Its leading advocates were not mereheartless reasoners and closet speculators. They taught that sin wasselfishness, and holiness self-denying benevolence, and they endeavoredto practise accordingly. Their lives recommended their doctrines. Theywere 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 onthe subject of human rights, Hopkins and the younger Edwards lifted uptheir voices for the slave. And twelve years ago, when Abolitionism waseverywhere spoken against, and the whole land was convulsed with mobs tosuppress it, the venerable Emmons, burdened with the weight of ninetyyears, 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 toit that they do not fall behind them in practical righteousness andfaithfulness 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 hewas placed under the care of a neighboring clergyman, preparatory forcollege, which he entered about a year after. In 1740, the celebratedWhitefield visited New Haven, and awakened there, as elsewhere, seriousinquiry on religious subjects. He was followed the succeeding spring byGilbert Tennent, the New Jersey revivalist, a stirring and powerfulpreacher. A great change took place in the college. All the phenomenawhich President Edwards has described in his account of the Northamptonawakening were reproduced among the students. The excellent DavidBrainard, then a member of the college, visited Hopkins in his apartment, and, by a few plain and earnest words, convinced him that he was astranger to vital Christianity. In his autobiographical sketch, hedescribes in simple and affecting language the dark and desolate state ofhis mind at this period, and the particular exercise which finallyafforded him some degree of relief, and which he afterwards appears tohave regarded as his conversion from spiritual death to life. When hefirst heard Tennent, regarding him as the greatest as well as the best ofmen, he made up his mind to study theology with him; but just before thecommencement at which he was to take his degree, the elder Edwardspreached at New Haven. Struck by the power of the great theologian, heat once resolved to make him his spiritual father. In the winterfollowing, he left his father's house on horseback, on a journey ofeighty 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 themansion, and encouraged to remain during the winter. Still doubtful inrespect to his own spiritual state, he was, he says, "very gloomy, andretired most of the time in his chamber. " The kind heart of his amiablehostess was touched by his evident affliction. After some days she cameto his chamber, and, with the gentleness and delicacy of a true woman, inquired into the cause of his unhappiness. The young student disclosedto her, without reserve, the state of his feelings and the extent of hisfears. "She told me, " says the Doctor, "that she had had peculiarexercises respecting me since I had been in the family; that she trustedI should receive light and comfort, and doubted not that God intended yetto 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 atSheffield, (now Great Barrington') in the western part of Massachusetts. There were at the time only about thirty families in the town. He saysit was a matter of great regret to him to be obliged to settle so farfrom his spiritual guide and tutor but seven years after he was relievedand gratified by the removal of Edwards to Stockbridge, as the Indianmissionary at that station, seven miles only from his own residence; andfor several years the great metaphysician and his favorite pupil enjoyedthe privilege of familiar intercourse with each other. The removal ofthe former in 1758 to Princeton, New Jersey, and his death, which soonfollowed, are mentioned in the diary of Hopkins as sore trials andafflictive dispensations. 

Obtaining a dismissal from his society in Great Barrington in 1769, he was installed at Newport the next year, as minister of the firstCongregational church in that place. Newport, at this period, was, insize, wealth, and commercial importance, the second town in New England. It was the great slave mart of the North. Vessels loaded with stolen menand women and children, consigned to its merchant princes, lay at itswharves; immortal beings were sold daily in its market, like cattle at afair. The soul of Hopkins was moved by the appalling spectacle. Astrong conviction of the great wrong of slavery, and of its utterincompatibility with the Christian profession, seized upon his mind. While at Great Barrington, he had himself owned a slave, whom he had soldon leaving the place, without compunction or suspicion in regard to therightfulness of the transaction. He now saw the origin of the system inits true light; he heard the seamen engaged in the African trade tell ofthe horrible scenes of fire and blood which they had witnessed, and inwhich they had been actors; he saw the half-suffocated wretches broughtup from their noisome and narrow prison, their squalid countenances andskeleton forms bearing fearful evidence of the suffering attendant uponthe transportation from their native homes. The demoralizing effects ofslaveholding everywhere forced themselves upon his attention, for theevil had struck its roots deeply in the community, and there were fewfamilies 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 ofall professions, clergymen and church-members, consulted only theirinterest and convenience as to their purchase or sale. The magnitude ofthe 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 incontemplation of the consequences to be apprehended from an attack uponit. Slavery and slave-trading were at that time the principal source ofwealth to the island; his own church and congregation were personallyinterested in the traffic; all were implicated in its guilt. He stoodalone, as it were, in its condemnation; with here and there an exception, all Christendom maintained the rightfulness of slavery. No movement hadyet been made in England against the slave-trade; the decision ofGranville 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 anddecidedly 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 emphatictestimony against the sin of slavery. In contrast with the unselfish anddisinterested benevolence which formed in his mind the essential elementof Christian holiness, he held up the act of reducing human beings to thecondition of brutes, to minister to the convenience, the luxury, andlusts of the owner. He had expected bitter complaint and opposition fromhis hearers, but was agreeably surprised to find that in most cases hissermon only excited astonishment in their minds that they themselves hadnever before looked at the subject in the light in which he presented it. Steadily and faithfully pursuing the matter, he had the satisfaction tocarry with him his church, and obtain from it, in the midst of aslaveholding and slavetrading community, a resolution every way worthy ofnote in this day of cowardly compromise with the evil on the part of ourleading ecclesiastical bodies:--

"Resolved, That the slave-trade and the slavery of the Africans, as ithas existed among us, is a gross violation of the righteousness andbenevolence which are so much inculcated in the Gospel, and therefore wewill not tolerate it in this church. "

There are few instances on record of moral heroism superior to that ofSamuel Hopkins, in thus rebuking slavery in the time and place of itspower. 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 menwill 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 daythe angels of God, in their wide survey of His universe, looked upon anobler spectacle than that of the minister of Newport, rising up beforehis slaveholding congregation, and demanding, in the name of the Highest, the "deliverance of the captive, and the opening of prison doors to themthat were bound. "

Dr. Hopkins did not confine his attention solely to slaveholding in hisown church and congregation. He entered into correspondence with theearly Abolitionists of Europe as well as his own country. He laboredwith his brethren in the ministry to bring then to his own view of thegreat 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 thesubject kindly but earnestly upon his attention. Dr. Bellamy urged theusual arguments in favor of slavery. Dr. Hopkins refuted them in themost successful manner, and called upon his friend to do an act of simplejustice, in giving immediate freedom to his slave. Dr. Bellamy, thushardly pressed, said that the slave was a most judicious and faithfulfellow; that, in the management of his farm, he could trust everything tohis discretion; that he treated him well, and he was so happy in hisservice that he would refuse his freedom if it were offered him. 

"Will you, " said Hopkins, "consent to his liberation, if he reallydesires 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 hismaster 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 hesupposed was a complete triumph over his anti-slavery brother. But thepertinacious 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 arefree. "

Dr. Hopkins was a poor man, but one of his first acts, after becomingconvinced of the wrongfulness of slavery, was to appropriate the very sumwhich, in the days of his ignorance, he had obtained as the price of hisslave to the benevolent purpose of educating some pious colored men inthe town of Newport, who were desirous of returning to their nativecountry as missionaries. In one instance he borrowed, on his ownresponsibility, the sum requisite to secure the freedom of a slave inwhom he became interested. One of his theological pupils was NewportGardner, who, twenty years after the death of his kind patron, leftBoston as a missionary to Africa. He was a native African, and was heldby Captain Gardner, of Newport, who allowed him to labor for his ownbenefit, whenever by extra diligence he could gain a little time for thatpurpose. The poor fellow was in the habit of laying up his smallearnings on these occasions, in the faint hope of one day obtainingthereby the freedom of himself and his family. But time passed on, andthe hoard of purchase-money still looked sadly small. He concluded totry the efficacy of praying. Having gained a day for himself, by severelabor, and communicating his plan only to Dr. Hopkins and two or threeother Christian friends, he shut himself up in his humble dwelling, andspent the time in prayer for freedom. Towards the close of the day, hismaster sent for him. He was told that this was his gained time, and thathe was engaged for himself. "No matter, " returned the master, "I mustsee him. " Poor Newport reluctantly abandoned his supplications, and cameat his master's bidding, when, to his astonishment, instead of areprimand, he received a paper, signed by his master, declaring him andhis family from thenceforth free. He justly attributed this signalblessing to the all-wise Disposer, who turns the hearts of men as therivers of water are turned; but it cannot be doubted that the labors andarguments of Dr. Hopkins with his master were the human instrumentalityin effecting it. 

In the year 1773, in connection with Dr. Ezra Stiles, he issued an appealto the Christian community in behalf of a society which he had beeninstrumental in forming, for the purpose of educating missionaries forAfrica. In the desolate and benighted condition of that unhappycontinent he had become painfully interested, by conversing with theslaves brought into Newport. Another appeal was made on the subject in1776. 

The war of the Revolution interrupted, for a time, the philanthropicplans of Dr. Hopkins. The beautiful island on which he lived was at anearly period exposed to the exactions and devastations of the enemy. Allwho could do so left it for the mainland. Its wharves were no longerthronged with merchandise; its principal dwellings stood empty; the verymeeting houses were in a great measure abandoned. Dr. Hopkins, who hadtaken the precaution, at the commencement of hostilities, to remove hisfamily to Great Barrington, remained himself until the year 1776, whenthe British took possession of the island. During the period of itsoccupation, he was employed in preaching to destitute congregations. He spent the summer of 1777 at Newburyport, where his memory is stillcherished 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 wealthychurch 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 amore advantageous position, he sat himself down once more in the midst ofhis reduced and impoverished parishioners, and, with no regular salary, dependent entirely on such free-will offerings as from time to time weremade him, he remained with them until his death. 

In 1776, Dr. Hopkins published his celebrated "Dialogue concerning theSlavery of the Africans; showing it to be the Duty and Interest of theAmerican States to Emancipate all their Slaves. " This he dedicated tothe Continental Congress, the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. It was republished in 1785, by the New York Abolition Society, and waswidely circulated. A few years after, on coming unexpectedly intopossession of a few hundred dollars, he devoted immediately one hundredof it to the society for ameliorating the condition of the Africans. 

He continued to preach until he had reached his eighty-third year. Hislast sermon was delivered on the 16th of the tenth month, 1803, and hisdeath took place in the twelfth month following. He died calmly, in thesteady 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 allthings, and the best interest of His kingdom promoted, whatever becomesof me or my interest. " To a young friend, who visited him three daysbefore his death, he said, "I am feeble and cannot say much. I have saidall I can say. With my last words, I tell you, religion is the one thingneedful. " "And now, " he continued, affectionately pressing the hand ofhis 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 triedfriend, Dr. Hart, of Connecticut, that when either was called home, thesurvivor should preach the funeral sermon of the deceased. The venerableDr. Hart accordingly came, true to his promise, preaching at the funeralfrom 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 gratefultestimony to the beauty and holiness of his life and conversation, wasWilliam Ellery Channing. Widely as he afterwards diverged from the creedof his early teacher, it contained at least one doctrine to the influenceof which the philanthropic devotion of his own life to the welfare of manbears witness. He says, himself, that there always seemed to himsomething very noble in the doctrine of disinterested benevolence, thecasting of self aside, and doing good, irrespective of personalconsequences, in this world or another, upon which Dr. Hopkins sostrongly insisted, as the all-essential condition of holiness. 

How widely apart, as mere theologians, stood Hopkins and Channing! Yethow harmonious their lives and practice! Both could forget the poorinterests of self, in view of eternal right and universal humanity. Bothcould appreciate the saving truth, that love to God and His creation isthe fulfilling of the divine law. The idea of unselfish benevolence, which they held in common, clothed with sweetness and beauty the sternand repulsive features of the theology of Hopkins, and infused a sublimespirit of self-sacrifice and a glowing humanity into the indecisive andless robust faith of Charming. What is the lesson of this but thatChristianity consists rather in the affections than in the intellect;that it is a life rather than a creed; and that they who diverge thewidest 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 asa theologian. Let those who prefer to contemplate the narrow sectarianrather than the universal man dwell upon his controversial works, andextol the ingenuity and logical acumen with which he defended his owndogmas and assailed those of others. We honor him, not as the founder ofa new sect, but as the friend of all mankind, --the generous defender ofthe poor and oppressed. Great as unquestionably were his powers ofargument, his learning, and skill in the use of the weapons of theologicwarfare, these by no means constitute his highest title to respect andreverence. As the product of an honest and earnest mind, his doctrinaldissertations have at least the merit of sincerity. They were put forthin behalf of what he regarded as truth; and the success which they metwith, while it called into exercise his profoundest gratitude, onlyserved to deepen the humility and self-abasement of their author. As theutterance of what a good man believed and felt, as a part of the historyof a life remarkable for its consecration to apprehended duty, thesewritings cannot be without interest even to those who dissent from theirarguments and deny their assumptions; but in the time now, we trust, nearat hand, when distracted and divided Christendom shall unite in a newEvangelical union, in which orthodoxy in life and practice shall beestimated 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 andthe fearless rebuker of popular sin rather than as the champion of aprotracted sectarian war. Even now his writings, so popular in theirday, are little known. The time may come when no pilgrim of sectarianismshall visit his grave. But his memory shall live in the hearts of thegood and generous; the emancipated slave shall kneel over his ashes, andbless 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 helabored and lay down to rest, while rejecting the doctrinal views of thetheologian, 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 inhis judicial robes, sitting in judgment upon the venerable RichardBaxter, brought before him to answer to an indictment, setting; forththat the said "Richardus Baxter, persona seditiosa et factiosa pravaementis, impiae, inquietae, turbulent disposition et conversation; falsoillicte, injuste nequit factiose seditiose, et irreligiose, fecit, composuit, scripsit quendam falsum, seditiosum, libellosum, factiosum etirreligiosum librum, " is so remarkable that the attention of the mostcareless reader is at once arrested. Who was that old man, wasted withdisease 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 theirvery titles and ponderous folios the modern ecclesiastical student fromtheir perusal, his hold upon the present generation is limited to a fewpractical treatises, which, from their very nature, can never becomeobsolete. The _Call to the Unconverted_ and the _Saints' EverlastingRest_ belong to no time or sect. They speak the universal language ofthe wants and desires of the human soul. They take hold of the awfulverities of life and death, righteousness and judgment to come. Throughthem the suffering and hunted minister of Kidderminster has spoken inwarning, entreaty, and rebuke, or in tones of tenderest love and pity, tothe hearts of the generations which have succeeded him. Hiscontroversial works, his confessions of faith, his learned disputations, and his profound doctrinal treatises are no longer read. Their authorhimself, towards the close of his life, anticipated, in respect to thesefavorite productions, the children of his early zeal, labor, andsuffering, the judgment of posterity. "I perceive, " he says, "that mostof the doctrinal controversies among Protestants are far more aboutequivocal words than matter. Experience since the year 1643 to this year1675 hath loudly called me to repent of my own prejudices, sidings, andcensurings of causes and persons not understood, and of all themiscarriages of my ministry and life which have been thereby caused; andto make it my chief work to call men that are within my bearing to morepeaceable thoughts, affections, and practices. "

Richard Baxter was born at the village of Eton Constantine, in 1615. Hereceived from officiating curates of the little church such literaryinstruction as could be given by men who had left the farmer's flail, thetailor's thimble, and the service of strolling stage-players, to performchurch drudgery under the parish incumbent, who was old and well-nighblind. At the age of sixteen, he was sent to a school at Wroxeter, wherehe spent three years, to little purpose, so far as a scientific educationwas concerned. His teacher left him to himself mainly, and following thebent of his mind, even at that early period, he abandoned the exactsciences for the perusal of such controversial and metaphysical writingsof the schoolmen as his master's library afforded. The smattering ofLatin which he acquired only served in after years to deform histreatises with barbarous, ill-adapted, and erroneous citations. "As tomyself, " said he, in his letter written in old age to Anthony Wood, whohad inquired whether he was an Oxonian graduate, "my faults are nodisgrace to a university, for I was of none; I have but little but what Ihad out of books and inconsiderable help of country divines. Weaknessand pain helped me to study how to die; that set me a-studying how tolive; and that on studying the doctrine from which I must fetch mymotives 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 theEstablished Church, his early sufferings from that complication ofdiseases with which his whole life was tormented, of the still keenerafflictions of a mind whose entire outlook upon life and nature wasdiscolored and darkened by its disordered bodily medium, and of thestruggles between his Puritan temperament and his reverence for Episcopalformulas, much might be profitably said, did the limits we have assignedourselves admit. Nor can we do more than briefly allude to the religiousdoubts and difficulties which darkened and troubled his mind at an earlyperiod. 

He tells us at length in his Life how he struggled with these spiritualinfirmities and temptations. The future life, the immortality of thesoul, and the truth of the Scriptures were by turns questioned. "Inever, " says he in a letter to Dr. More, inserted in the _SadducisimusTriumphatus_, "had so much ado to overcome a temptation as that to theopinion of Averroes, that, as extinguished candles go all out in anilluminated 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. Hisfaith, when once established, remained unshaken to the last; and althoughalways solemn, reverential, and deeply serious, he was never the subjectof religious melancholy, or of that mournful depression of soul whicharises from despair of an interest in the mercy and paternal love of ourcommon 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 hismore sober parishioners, and his fear of their appeal to the LongParliament, then busy in its task of abating church nuisances, had agreedto give him sixty pounds per year, in the place of a poor tipplingcurate, 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 theirreverent license and careless good humor of his predecessor by no meanscommended him to the favor of a large class of his parishioners. Sabbathmerry-makers missed the rubicund face and maudlin jollity of their oldvicar; the ignorant and vicious disliked the new preacher's rigidmorality; the better informed revolted at his harsh doctrines, austerelife, and grave manner. Intense earnestness characterized all hisefforts. Contrasting human nature with the Infinite Purity and Holiness, he was oppressed with the sense of the loathsomeness and deformity ofsin, and afflicted by the misery of his fellow-creatures separated fromthe divine harmony. He tells us that at this period he preached theterrors of the Law and the necessity of repentance, rather than the joysand consolations of the Gospel, upon which he so loved to dwell in hislast years. He seems to have felt a necessity laid upon him to startlemen from false hope and security, and to call for holiness of life andconformity to the divine will as the only ground of safety. Powerful andimpressive as are the appeals and expostulations contained in his writtenworks, they probably convey but a faint idea of the force and earnestnessof those which he poured forth from his pulpit. As he advanced in years, these appeals were less frequently addressed to the fears of hisauditors, for he had learned to value a calm and consistent life ofpractical goodness beyond any passionate exhibition of terrors, fervors, and transports. Having witnessed, in an age of remarkable enthusiasm andspiritual awakening, the ill effects of passional excitements andreligious melancholy, he endeavored to present cheerful views ofChristian life and duty, and made it a special object to repress morbidimaginations and heal diseased consciences. Thus it came to pass that noman of his day was more often applied to for counsel and relief bypersons laboring under mental depression than himself. He has leftbehind him a very curious and not uninstructive discourse, which heentitled The Cure of Melancholy, by Faith and Physick, in which he showsa great degree of skill in his morbid mental anatomy. He had studiedmedicine to some extent for the benefit of the poor of his parish, andknew something of the intimate relations and sympathy of the body andmind; he therefore did not hesitate to ascribe many of the spiritualcomplaints of his applicants to disordered bodily functions, nor toprescribe pills and powders in the place of Scripture texts. More thanthirty years after the commencement of his labors at Kidderminster hethus writes: "I was troubled this year with multitudes of melancholypersons from several places of the land; some of high quality, some oflow, some exquisitely learned, and some unlearned. I know not how itcame to pass, but if men fell melancholy I must hear from them or seethem, more than any physician I knew. " He cautions against ascribingmelancholy phantasms and passions to the Holy Spirit, warns the youngagainst licentious imaginations and excitements, and ends by advising allto take heed how they make of religion a matter of "fears, tears, andscruples. " "True religion, " he remarks, "doth principally consist inobedience, love, and joy. "

At this early period of his ministry, however, he had all of Whitefield'sintensity and fervor, added to reasoning powers greatly transcendingthose of the revivalist of the next century. Young in years, he was eventhen old in bodily infirmity and mental experience. Believing himselfthe victim of a mortal disease, he lived and preached in the constantprospect of death. His memento mori was in his bed-chamber, and sat byhim at his frugal meal. The glory of the world was stained to hisvision. He was blind to the beauty of all its "pleasant pictures. " Nomonk of Mount Athos or silent Chartreuse, no anchorite of Indiansuperstition, ever more completely mortified the flesh, or turned hisback more decidedly upon the "good things" of this life. A solemn andfuneral atmosphere surrounded him. He walked in the shadows of thecypress, and literally "dwelt among the tombs. " Tortured by incessantpain, he wrestled against its attendant languor and debility, as a sinfulwasting of inestimable time; goaded himself to constant toil anddevotional exercise, and, to use his own words, "stirred up his sluggishsoul to speak to sinners with compassion, as a dying man to dying men. "

Such entire consecration could not long be without its effect, even uponthe "vicious rabble, " as Baxter calls them. His extraordinaryearnestness, self-forgetting concern for the spiritual welfare of others, his rigid life of denial and sacrifice, if they failed of bringing men tohis feet as penitents, could not but awaken a feeling of reverence andawe. In Kidderminster, as in most other parishes of the kingdom, therewere at this period pious, sober, prayerful people, diligent readers ofthe Scriptures, who were derided by their neighbors as Puritans, precisians, and hypocrites. These were naturally drawn towards the newpreacher, and he as naturally recognized them as "honest seekers of theword and way of God. " Intercourse with such men, and the perusal of thewritings of certain eminent Non-conformists, had the effect to abate, insome degree, his strong attachment to the Episcopal formula and polity. He began to doubt the rightfulness of making the sign of the cross inbaptism, and to hesitate about administering the sacrament to profaneswearers and tipplers. 

But while Baxter, in the seclusion of his parish, was painfully weighingthe arguments for and against the wearing of surplices, the use ofmarriage rings, and the prescribed gestures and genuflections of hisorder, tithing with more or less scruple of conscience the mint and aniseand cummin of pulpit ceremonials, the weightier matters of the law, freedom, justice, and truth were claiming the attention of Pym andHampden, Brook and Vane, in the Parliament House. The controversybetween King and Commons had reached the point where it could only bedecided by the dread arbitrament of battle. The somewhat equivocalposition of the Kidderminster preacher exposed him to the suspicion ofthe adherents of the King and Bishops. The rabble, at that periodsympathizing with the party of license in morals and strictness inceremonials, insulted and mocked him, and finally drove him from hisparish. 

On the memorable 23d of tenth month, 1642, he was invited to occupy afriend'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 tothe stern battle-piece of revolution. On the morrow, Baxter hurried tothe scene of action. "I was desirous, " he says, "to see the field. Ifound the Earl of Essex keeping the ground, and the King's army facingthem on a hill about a mile off. There were about a thousand dead bodiesin the field between them. " Turning from this ghastly survey, thepreacher mingled with the Parliamentary army, when, finding the surgeonsbusy with the wounded, he very naturally sought occasion for the exerciseof his own vocation as a spiritual practitioner. He attached himself tothe army. So far as we can gather from his own memoirs and the testimonyof his contemporaries, he was not influenced to this step by any of thepolitical motives which actuated the Parliamentary leaders. He was norevolutionist. He was as blind and unquestioning in his reverence forthe King's person and divine right, and as hearty in his hatred ofreligious toleration and civil equality, as any of his clerical brethrenwho officiated in a similar capacity in the ranks of Goring and PrinceRupert. He seems only to have looked upon the soldiers as a new set ofparishioners, whom Providence had thrown in his way. The circumstancesof 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 placeof safety, nor had I anything to satisfy them for diet andentertainment. " He accepted an offer to live in the Governor's house atCoventry, and preach to the soldiers of the garrison. Here his skill inpolemics was called into requisition, in an encounter with two NewEngland Antinomians, and a certain Anabaptist tailor who was making morerents in the garrison's orthodoxy than he mended in their doublets andbreeches. Coventry seems at this time to have been the rendezvous of alarge body of clergymen, who, as Baxter says, were "for King andParliament, "--men who, in their desire for a more spiritual worship, mostunwillingly found themselves classed with the sentries whom they regardedas troublers and heretics, not to be tolerated; who thought the King hadfallen into the hands of the Papists, and that Essex and Cromwell werefighting to restore him; and who followed the Parliamentary forces to seeto it that they were kept sound in faith, and free from the heresy ofwhich the Court News-Book accused them. Of doing anything to overturnthe order of Church and State, or of promoting any radical change in thesocial and political condition of the people, they had no intentionwhatever. They looked at the events of the time, and upon their dutiesin respect to them, not as politicians or reformers, but simply asecclesiastics and spiritual teachers, responsible to God for thereligious beliefs and practices of the people, rather than for theirtemporal welfare and happiness. They were not the men who struck downthe solemn and imposing prelacy of England, and vindicated the divineright of men to freedom by tossing the head of an anointed tyrant fromthe scaffold at Whitehall. It was the so-called schismatics, ranters, and levellers, the disputatious corporals and Anabaptist musketeers, thedread and abhorrence alike of prelate and presbyter, who, under the leadof 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 hadfriends in the Parliamentary forces, wishing, as he says, to be assuredof their safety, passed over to the stricken field, and spent a nightwith them. He was afflicted and confounded by the information which theygave him, that the victorious army was full of hot-headed schemers andlevellers, who were against King and Church, prelacy and ritual, and whowere 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 thanthe pikes of Jacob Astley, or the daggers of the roysterers who followedthe mad charge of Rupert. Hastening back to Coventry, he called togetherhis clerical brethren, and told them "the sad news of the corruption ofthe army. " After much painful consideration of the matter, it was deemedbest for Baxter to enter Cromwell's army, nominally as its chaplain, butreally as the special representative of orthodoxy in politics andreligion, against the democratic weavers and prophesying tailors whotroubled it. He joined Whalley's regiment, and followed it through manya hot skirmish and siege. Personal fear was by no means one of Baxter'scharacteristics, and he bore himself through all with the coolness of anold campaigner. Intent upon his single object, he sat unmoved under thehail of cannon-shot from the walls of Bristol, confronted the well-pliedculverins of Sherburne, charged side by side with Harrison upon Goring'smusketeers at Langford, and heard the exulting thanksgiving of that grimenthusiast, when "with a loud voice he broke forth in praises of God, asone in rapture;" and marched, Bible in hand, with Cromwell himself, tothe storming of Basing-House, so desperately defended by the Marquis ofWinchester. In truth, these storms of outward conflict were to him ofsmall moment. He was engaged in a sterner battle with spiritualprincipalities and powers, struggling with Satan himself in the guise ofpolitical levellers and Antinomian sowers of heresy. No antagonist wastoo high and none too low for him. Distrusting Cromwell, he sought toengage him in a discussion of certain points of abstract theology, wherein his soundness seemed questionable; but the wary chief baffled offthe young disputant by tedious, unanswerable discourses about free grace, which Baxter admits were not unsavory to others, although the speakerhimself had little understanding of the matter. At other times, herepelled his sad-visaged chaplain with unwelcome jests and rough, soldierly merriment; for he had "a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity asanother 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 midstof such an army, he could not lack abundant opportunity for the exerciseof his peculiar powers of argumentation. At Amersham, he had a sort ofpitched battle with the contumacious soldiers. "When the public talkingday came, " says he, "I took the reading-pew, and Pitchford's cornet andtroopers took the gallery. There did the leader of the Chesham menbegin, and afterwards Pitchford's soldiers set in; and I alone disputedwith them from morning until almost night; for I knew their trick, thatif I had gone out first, they would have prated what boasting words theylisted, and made the people believe that they had baffled me, or got thebest; therefore I stayed it out till they first rose and went away. " Asusual in such cases, both parties claimed the victory. Baxter got thanksonly from the King's adherents; "Pitchford's troops and the leader of theChesham men" retired from their hard day's work, to enjoy the countenanceand favor of Cromwell, as men after his own heart, faithful to the Housesand the Word, against kingcraft and prelacy. 

Laughed at and held at arm's length by Cromwell, shunned by Harrison andBerry and other chief officers, opposed on all points by shrewd, earnestmen, as ready for polemic controversy as for battle with the King'smalignants, and who set off against his theological and metaphysicaldistinctions their own personal experiences and spiritual exercises, hehad little to encourage him in his arduous labors. Alone in such amultitude, flushed with victory and glowing with religious enthusiasm, he earnestly begged his brother ministers to come to his aid. "If thearmy, " said he, "had only ministers enough, who could have done suchlittle as I did, all their plot might have been broken, and King, Parliament, and Religion might have been preserved. " But no onevolunteered to assist him, and the "plot" of revolution went on. 

After Worcester fight he returned to Coventry, to make his report to theministers assembled there. He told them of his labors and trials, of thegrowth of heresy and levelling principles in the army, and of the evidentdesign of its leaders to pull down Church, King, and Ministers. Heassured 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, anddraw away their soldiers from them. For himself, he was willing to goback to the army, and labor there until the crisis of which he spoke hadarrived. "Whereupon, " says he, "they all voted me to go yet longer. "

Fortunately for the cause of civil and religious freedom, the great bodyof the ministers, who disapproved of the ultraism of the victorious army, and sympathized with the defeated King, lacked the courage anddevotedness of Baxter. Had they promptly seconded his efforts, althoughthe restoration of the King might have been impossible at that lateperiod, the horrors of civil war must have been greatly protracted. Asit was, they preferred to remain at home, and let Baxter have the benefitof their prayers and good wishes. He returned to the army with thesettled purpose, of causing its defection from Cromwell; but, by one ofthose dispensations which the latter used to call "births of Providence, "he was stricken down with severe sickness. Baxter's own comments uponthis passage in his life are not without interest. He says, Godprevented his purposes in his last and chiefest opposition to the army;that he intended to take off or seduce from their officers the regimentwith which he was connected, and then to have tried his persuasion uponthe others. He says he afterwards found that his sickness was a mercy tohimself, "for they were so strong and active, and I had been likely tohave had small success in the attempt, and to have lost my life amongthem in their fury. " He was right in this last conjecture; OliverCromwell would have had no scruples in making an example of a plottingpriest; and "Pitchford's soldiers" might have been called upon tosilence, with their muskets, the tough disputant who was proof againsttheir tongues. 

After a long and dubious illness, Baxter was so far restored as to beable to go back to his old parish at Kidderminster. Here, under theProtectorate of Cromwell, he remained in the full enjoyment of thatreligious liberty which he still stoutly condemned in its application toothers. 

He afterwards candidly admits, that, under the "Usurper, " as he stylesCromwell, "he had such liberty and advantage to preach the Gospel withsuccess, as he could not have under a King, to whom he had sworn andperformed true subjection and obedience. " Yet this did not prevent himfrom preaching and printing, "seasonably and moderately, " against theProtector. "I declared, " said he, "Cromwell and his adherents to beguilty of treason and rebellion, aggravated by perfidiousness andhypocrisy. But yet I did not think it my duty to rave against him in thepulpit, or to do this so unseasonably and imprudently as might irritatehim to mischief. And the rather, because, as he kept up his approbationof a godly life in general, and of all that was good, except that whichthe interest of his sinful cause engaged him to be against. So Iperceived that it was his design to do good in the main, and to promotethe Gospel and the interests of godliness more than any had done beforehim. "

Cromwell, if he heard of his diatribes against him, appears to have caredlittle for them. Lords Warwick and Broghill, on one occasion, broughthim to preach before the Lord Protector. He seized the occasion topreach against the sentries, to condemn all who countenanced them, and toadvocate the unity of the Church. Soon after, he was sent for byCromwell, who made "a long and tedious speech" in the presence of threeof his chief men, (one of whom, General Lambert, fell asleep the while, )asserting that God had owned his government in a signal manner. Baxterboldly replied to him, that he and his friends regarded the ancientmonarchy as a blessing, and not an evil, and begged to know how thatblessing was forfeited to England, and to whom that forfeiture was made. Cromwell, with some heat, made answer that it was no forfeiture, but thatGod had made the change. They afterwards held a long conference withrespect to freedom of conscience, Cromwell defending his liberal policy, and Baxter opposing it. No one can read Baxter's own account of theseinterviews, without being deeply impressed with the generous andmagnanimous spirit of the Lord Protector in tolerating the utmost freedomof speech on the part of one who openly denounced him as a traitor andusurper. Real greatness of mind could alone have risen above personalresentment under such circumstances of peculiar aggravation. 

In the death of the Protector, the treachery of Monk, and the restorationof the King, Baxter and his Presbyterian friends believed that they sawthe hand of a merciful Providence preparing the way for the best good ofEngland and the Church. Always royalists, they had acted with the partyopposed to the King from necessity rather than choice. Considering allthat followed, one can scarcely avoid smiling over the extravagantjubilations of the Presbyterian divines, on the return of the royaldebauchee to Whitehall. They hurried up to London with congratulationsof formidable length and papers of solemn advice and counsel, to allwhich the careless monarch listened, with what patience he was master of. Baxter was one of the first to present himself at Court, and it iscreditable to his heart rather than his judgment and discrimination thathe seized the occasion to offer a long address to the King, expressive ofhis expectation that his Majesty would discountenance all sin and promotegodliness, support the true exercise of Church discipline and cherish andhold up the hands of the faithful ministers of the Church. To all whichCharles 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 thatthe profligate King avenged himself as soon as the backs of his unwelcomevisitors were fairly turned, by coarse jests and ribaldry, directedagainst a class of men whom he despised and hated, but towards whomreasons of policy dictated a show of civility and kindness?

There is reason to believe that Charles II. , had he been able to effecthis purpose, would have gone beyond Cromwell himself in the matter ofreligious toleration; in other words, he would have taken, in the outsetof his reign, the very steps which cost his successor his crown, andprocured the toleration of Catholics by a declaration of universalfreedom in religion. But he was not in a situation to brave theopposition alike of Prelacy and Presbyterianism, and foiled in a schemeto which he was prompted by that vague, superstitious predilection forthe Roman Catholic religion which at times struggled with his habitualscepticism, his next object was to rid himself of the importunities ofsentries and the trouble of religious controversies by reestablishing theliturgy, and bribing or enforcing conformity to it on the part of thePresbyterians. The history of the successful execution of this purposeis familiar to all the readers of the plausible pages of Clarendon on theone 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, dividedcounsels, and self-seeking of the Nonconformists. Seduction on one handand threats on the other, the bribe of bishoprics, hatred of Independentsand Quakers, and the terror of penal laws, broke the strength ofPresbyterianism. 

Baxter's whole conduct, on this occasion, bears testimony to his honestyand sincerity, while it shows him to have been too intolerant to securehis own religious freedom at the price of toleration for Catholics, Quakers, and Anabaptists; and too blind in his loyalty to perceive thatpure and undefiled Christianity had nothing to hope for from a scandalousand depraved King, surrounded by scoffing, licentious courtiers and ahaughty, revengeful prelacy. To secure his influence, the Court offeredhim the bishopric of Hereford. Superior to personal considerations, hedeclined the honor; but somewhat inconsistently, in his zeal for theinterests of his party, he urged the elevation of at least three of hisPresbyterian friends to the Episcopal bench, to enforce that very liturgywhich they condemned. He was the chief speaker for the Presbyterians atthe famous Savoy Conference, summoned to advise and consult upon the Bookof Common Prayer. His antagonist was Dr. Gunning, ready, fluent, andimpassioned. "They spent, " as Gilbert Burnet says, "several days inlogical arguing, to the diversion of the town, who looked upon them as acouple of fencers, engaged in a discussion which could not be brought toan end. " In themselves considered, many of the points at issue seemaltogether 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 momentousinterest and importance, as things unlawful in the worship of God. Hestruggled desperately, but unavailingly. Presbyterianism, in itseagerness for peace and union and a due share of State support, hadalready 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 thelie to the liberal declarations of Breda and Whitehall, drove Baxter fromhis sorrowing parishioners of Kidderminster, and added the evils ofpoverty and persecution to the painful bodily infirmities under which hewas 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 ofgentle birth, named Charlton, who, with her daughter Margaret, occupied ahouse in his neighborhood. The daughter was a brilliant girl, of"strangely vivid wit, " and "in early youth, " he tells us, "pride, andromances, and company suitable thereunto, did take her up. " But erelong, Baxter, who acted in the double capacity of spiritual and temporalphysician, was sent for to visit her, on an occasion of sickness. Heministered to her bodily and mental sufferings, and thus secured hergratitude and confidence. On her recovery, under the influence of hiswarnings and admonitions, the gay young girl became thoughtful andserious, abandoned her light books and companions, and devoted herself tothe duties of a Christian profession. Baxter was her counsellor andconfidant. She disclosed to him all her doubts, trials, and temptations, and he, in return, wrote her long letters of sympathy, consolation, andencouragement. He began to feel such an unwonted interest in the moraland spiritual growth of his young disciple, that, in his daily walksamong his parishioners, he found himself inevitably drawn towards hermother's dwelling. In her presence, the habitual austerity of his mannerwas softened; his cold, close heart warmed and expanded. He began torepay her confidence with his own, disclosing to her all his plans ofbenevolence, soliciting her services, and waiting, with deference, forher judgment upon them. A change came over his habits of thought and hisliterary tastes; the harsh, rude disputant, the tough, dry logician, found himself addressing to his young friend epistles in verse ondoctrinal points and matters of casuistry; Westminster Catechism inrhyme; the Solemn League and Covenant set to music. A miracle alonecould have made Baxter a poet; the cold, clear light of reason "paled theineffectual fires" of his imagination; all things presented themselves tohis vision "with hard outlines, colorless, and with no surroundingatmosphere. " That he did, nevertheless, write verses, so creditable asto justify a judicious modern critic in their citation and approval, canperhaps be accounted for only as one of the phenomena of that subtle andtransforming influence to which even his stern nature was unconsciouslyyielding. 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 lifehad been one long fast and penance. Even in youth he had never known aschoolboy's love for cousin or playmate. He had resolutely closed up hisheart against emotions which he regarded as the allurements of time andsense. He had made a merit of celibacy, and written and publishedagainst the entanglement of godly ministers in matrimonial engagementsand family cares. It is questionable whether he now understood his owncase, or attributed to its right cause the peculiar interest which hefelt in Margaret Charlton. Left to himself, it is more than probablethat he might never have discovered the true nature of that interest, orconjectured that anything whatever of earthly passion or sublunaryemotion had mingled with his spiritual Platonism. Commissioned and setapart to preach repentance to dying men, penniless and homeless, wornwith bodily pain and mental toil, and treading, as he believed, on thevery margin of his grave, what had he to do with love? What power had heto inspire that tender sentiment, the appropriate offspring only ofyouth, 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 theheart of Margaret. To her grateful appreciation of the condescension ofa great and good man--grave, learned, and renowned--to her youth andweakness, and to her enthusiastic admiration of his intellectual powers, devoted to the highest and holiest objects, succeeded naturally enoughthe tenderly suggestive pity of her woman's heart, as she thought of hislonely home, his unshared sorrows, his lack of those sympathies andkindnesses which make tolerable the hard journey of life. Did she notowe to him, under God, the salvation of body and mind? Was he not hertruest and most faithful friend, entering with lively interest into allher joys and sorrows? Had she not seen the cloud of his habitual sadnessbroken by gleams of sunny warmth and cheerfulness, as they conversedtogether? Could she do better than devote herself to the pleasing taskof making his life happier, of comforting him in seasons of pain andweariness, encouraging him in his vast labors, and throwing over the coldand hard austerities of his nature the warmth and light of domesticaffection? Pity, reverence, gratitude, and womanly tenderness, herfervid imagination and the sympathies of a deeply religious nature, combined to influence her decision. Disparity of age and conditionrendered it improbable that Baxter would ever venture to address her inany other capacity than that of a friend and teacher; and it was left toherself to give the first intimation of the possibility of a moreintimate relation. 

It is easy to imagine with what mixed feelings of joy, surprise, andperplexity Baxter must have received the delicate avowal. There was muchin the circumstances of the case to justify doubt, misgiving, and closesearchings of heart. He must have felt the painful contrast which thatfair girl in the bloom of her youth presented to the worn man of middleyears, whose very breath was suffering, and over whom death seemed alwaysimpending. Keenly conscious of his infirmities of temper, he must havefeared for the happiness of a loving, gentle being, daily exposed totheir manifestations. From his well-known habit of consulting what heregarded as the divine will in every important step of his life, therecan be no doubt that his decision was the result quite as much of aprayerful and patient consideration of duty as of the promptings of hisheart. Richard Baxter was no impassioned Abelard; his pupil in theschool of his severe and self-denying piety was no Heloise; but whattheir union lacked in romantic interest was compensated by its purity anddisinterestedness, and its sanction by all that can hallow human passion, and harmonize the love of the created with the love and service of theCreator. 

Although summoned by a power which it would have been folly to resist, the tough theologian did not surrender at discretion. "From the firstthoughts yet many changes and stoppages intervened, and long delays, " hetells us. The terms upon which he finally capitulated are perfectly inkeeping with his character. "She consented, " he says, "to threeconditions of our marriage. 1st. That I should have nothing that beforeour marriage was hers; that I, who wanted no earthly supplies, might notseem to marry her from selfishness. 2d. That she would so alter heraffairs that I might be entangled in no lawsuits. 3d. That she shouldexpect none of my time which my ministerial work should require. "

As was natural, the wits of the Court had their jokes upon this singularmarriage; and many of his best friends regretted it, when they called tomind what he had written in favor of ministerial celibacy, at a timewhen, as he says, "he thought to live and die a bachelor. " But Baxterhad no reason to regret the inconsistency of his precept and example. How much of the happiness of the next twenty years of his life resultedfrom his union with a kind and affectionate woman he has himselftestified, in his simple and touching Breviate of the Life of the lateMrs. Baxter. Her affections were so ardent that her husband confesseshis fear that he was unable to make an adequate return, and that she musthave been disappointed in him in consequence. He extols her pleasantconversation, her active benevolence, her disposition to aid him in allhis labors, and her noble forgetfulness of self, in ministering to hiscomfort, in sickness and imprisonment. "She was the meetest helper Icould have had in the world, " is his language. "If I spoke harshly orsharply, it offended her. If I carried it (as I am apt) with too muchnegligence of ceremony or humble compliment to any, she would modestlytell me of it. If my looks seemed not pleasant, she would have me amendthem (which my weak, pained state of body indisposed me to do). " Headmits she had her failings, but, taken as a whole, the Breviate is anexalted eulogy. 

His history from this time is marked by few incidents of a publiccharacter. During that most disgraceful period in the annals of England, the reign of the second Charles, his peculiar position exposed him to thepersecutions of prelacy and the taunts and abuse of the sentries, standing as he did between these extremes, and pleading for a moderateEpiscopacy. He was between the upper millstone of High Church and thenether one of Dissent. To use his own simile, he was like one who seeksto fill with his hand a cleft in a log, and feels both sides close uponhim with pain. All parties and sects had, as they thought, grounds ofcomplaint against him. There was in him an almost childish simplicity ofpurpose, a headlong earnestness and eagerness, which did not allow him toconsider how far a present act or opinion harmonized with what he hadalready done or written. His greatest admirers admit his lack ofjudgment, his inaptitude for the management of practical matters. Hisutter incapacity to comprehend rightly the public men and measures of hisday is abundantly apparent; and the inconsistencies of his conduct andhis writings are too marked to need comment. He suffered persecution fornot conforming to some trifling matters of Church usage, while headvocated the doctrine of passive obedience to the King or ruling power, and the right of that power to enforce conformity. He wrote againstconformity while himself conforming; seceded from the Church, and yetheld stated communion with it; begged for the curacy of Kidderminster, and declined the bishopric of Hereford. His writings were many of themdirectly calculated to make Dissenters from the Establishment, but he wasinvariably offended to find others practically influenced by them, andquarrelled with his own converts to Dissent. The High Churchmen ofOxford burned his Holy Commonwealth as seditious and revolutionary; whileHarrington and the republican club of Miles's Coffee House condemned itfor its hostility to democracy and its servile doctrine of obedience tokings. He made noble pleas for liberty of conscience and bitterlycomplained of his own suffering from Church courts, yet maintained thenecessity of enforcing conformity, and stoutly opposed the tolerantdoctrines of Penn and Milton. Never did a great and good man so entanglehimself with contradictions and inconsistencies. The witty and wickedSir Roger L'Estrange compiled from the irreconcilable portions of hisworks a laughable Dialogue between Richard and Baxter. The Antinomiansfound him guilty of Socinianism; and one noted controversialist undertookto show, not without some degree of plausibility, that he was by turns aQuaker and a Papist!

Although able to suspend his judgment and carefully weigh evidence, uponmatters which he regarded as proper subjects of debate and scrutiny, hepossessed the power to shut out and banish at will all doubt andmisgiving in respect to whatever tended to prove, illustrate, or enforcehis settled opinions and cherished doctrines. His credulity at timesseems boundless. Hating the Quakers, and prepared to believe all mannerof evil of them, he readily came to the conclusion that their leaderswere disguised Papists. He maintained that Lauderdale was a good andpious man, in spite of atrocities in Scotland which entitle him to aplace with Claverhouse; and indorsed the character of the infamousDangerfield, the inventor of the Meal-tub Plot, as a worthy convert frompopish errors. To prove the existence of devils and spirits, hecollected the most absurd stories and old-wives' fables, of soldiersscared from their posts at night by headless bears, of a young witchpulling 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 offhis legs by an invisible hand! Cotton Mather's marvellous account of hiswitch 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 thetimes, was an unsettled one. He first took a house at Moorfields, thenremoved to Acton, where he enjoyed the conversation of his neighbor, SirMatthew Hale; from thence he found refuge in Rickmansworth, and afterthat in divers other places. "The women have most of this trouble, " heremarks, "but my wife easily bore it all. " When unable to preach, hisrapid pen was always busy. Huge folios of controversial and doctrinallore followed each other in quick succession. He assailed Popery and theEstablishment, Anabaptists, ultra Calvinists, Antinomians, Fifth Monarchymen, and Quakers. His hatred of the latter was only modified by hiscontempt. He railed rather than argued against the "miserablecreatures, " 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 tothe congregation, when I had liberty to preach Christ's Gospel, and criedout 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 shaltperish as a deceiver. ' They have stood in the market-place, and under mywindow, year after year, crying to the people, 'Take heed of yourpriests, they deceive your souls;' and if any one wore a lace or neatclothing, they cried out to me, 'These are the fruits of your ministry. '"

At Rickmansworth, he found himself a neighbor of William Penn, whom hecalls "the captain of the Quakers. " Ever ready for battle, Baxterencountered him in a public discussion, with such fierceness andbitterness as to force from that mild and amiable civilian the remark, that he would rather be Socrates at the final judgment than RichardBaxter. Both lived to know each other better, and to entertainsentiments of mutual esteem. Baxter himself admits that the Quakers, bytheir perseverance in holding their religious meetings in defiance ofpenal laws, took upon themselves the burden of persecution which wouldotherwise have fallen upon himself and his friends; and makes specialmention of the noble and successful plea of Penn before the Recorder'sCourt in London, based on the fundamental liberties of Englishmen and therights of the Great Charter. 

The intolerance of Baxter towards the Separatists was turned against himwhenever he appealed to the King and Parliament against the proscriptionof himself and his friends. "They gathered, " he complains, "out of mineand other men's books all that we had said against liberty for Popery andQuakers railing against ministers in open congregation, and applied it asagainst the toleration of ourselves. " It was in vain that he explainedthat he was only in favor of a gentle coercion of dissent, a moderateenforcement of conformity. His plan for dealing with sentries remindsone of old Isaak Walton's direction to his piscatorial readers, to impalethe 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 theKing's chaplains in ordinary, for holding religious services in hisfamily with more than five strangers present. He was cast intoClerkenwell jail, whither his faithful wife followed him. On hisdischarge, he sought refuge in the hamlet of Totteridge, where he wroteand published that Paraphrase on the New Testament which was made theground of his prosecution and trial before Jeffreys. 

On the 14th of the sixth month, 1681, he was called to endure thegreatest affliction of his life. His wife died on that day, after abrief illness. She who had been his faithful friend, companion, andnurse for twenty years was called away from him in the time of hisgreatest need of her ministrations. He found consolation in dwelling onher virtues and excellences in the Breviate of her life; "a papermonument, " he says, "erected by one who is following her even at the doorin some passion indeed of love and grief. " In the preface to hispoetical pieces he alludes to her in terms of touching simplicity andtenderness: "As these pieces were mostly written in various passions, sopassion hath now thrust them out into the world. God having taken awaythe dear companion of the last nineteen years of my life, as her sorrowsand 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 tobe passionate in the sight of all. "

The circumstances of his trial before the judicial monster, Jeffreys, aretoo well known to justify their detail in this sketch. He was sentencedto pay a fine of five hundred marks. Seventy years of age, and reducedto poverty by former persecutions, he was conveyed to the King's Benchprison. Here for two years he lay a victim to intense bodily suffering. When, through the influence of his old antagonist, Penn, he was restoredto freedom, he was already a dying man. But he came forth from prison ashe entered it, unsubdued in spirit. 

Urged to sign a declaration of thanks to James II. , his soul put on theathletic habits of youth, and he stoutly refused to commend an act oftoleration which had given freedom not to himself alone, but to Papistsand sentries. Shaking off the dust of the Court from his feet, heretired to a dwelling in Charter-House Square, near his friendSylvester's, and patiently awaited his deliverance. His death was quietand peaceful. "I have pain, " he said to his friend Mather; "there is noarguing against sense; but I have peace. I have peace. " On being askedhow he did, he answered, in memorable words, "Almost well!"

He was buried in Christ Church, where the remains of his wife and hermother had been placed. An immense concourse attended his funeral, ofall ranks and parties. Conformist and Non-conformist forgot thebitterness of the controversialist, and remembered only the virtues andthe piety of the man. Looking back on his life of self-denial andfaithfulness to apprehended duty, the men who had persecuted him whileliving wept over his grave. During the last few years of his life, theseverity of his controversial tone had been greatly softened; he lamentedhis former lack of charity, the circle of his sympathies widened, hissocial affections grew stronger with age, and love for his fellow-menuniversally, and irrespective of religious differences, increased withinhim. In his Narrative, written in the long, cool shadows of the eveningof life, he acknowledges with extraordinary candor this change in hisviews and feelings. He confesses his imperfections as a writer andpublic teacher. 

"I wish, " he says, "all over-sharp passages were expunged from mywritings, and I ask forgiveness of God and man. " He tells us thatmankind appear more equal to him; the good are not so good as he oncethought, nor the bad so evil; and that in all there is more for grace tomake advantage of, and more to testify for God and holiness, than he oncebelieved. "I less admire, " he continues, "gifts of utterance, and thebare profession of religion, than I once did, and have now much morecharity for those who, by want of gifts, do make an obscurer profession. "

He laments the effects of his constitutional irritability and impatienceupon his social intercourse and his domestic relations, and that hisbodily infirmities did not allow him a free expression of the tendernessand love of his heart. Who does not feel the pathos and inconsolableregret which dictated the following paragraph?

"When God forgiveth me, I cannot forgive myself, especially for my rashwords and deeds by which I have seemed injurious and less tender and kindthan I should have been to my near and dear relations, whose loveabundantly obliged me. When such are dead, though we never differed inpoint of interest or any other matter, every sour or cross or provokingword which I gave them maketh me almost irreconcilable to myself, andtells me how repentance brought some of old to pray to the dead whom theyhad wronged to forgive them, in the hurry of their passion. "

His pride as a logician and skilful disputant abated in the latter andbetter portion of his life he had more deference to the judgment ofothers, and more distrust of his own. "You admire, " said he to acorrespondent who had lauded his character, "one you do not know;knowledge will cure your error. " In his Narrative he writes: "I am muchmore sensible than heretofore of the breadth and length and depth of theradical, universal, odious sin of selfishness, and therefore have writtenso much against it; and of the excellency and necessity of self-denialand of a public mind, and of loving our neighbors as ourselves. " Againstmany difficulties and discouragements, both within himself and in hisoutward circumstances, he strove to make his life and conversation anexpression of that Christian love whose root, as he has said with equaltruth 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 anyauthor of his time, it would ill become us to speak with confidence. Weare familiar only with some of the best of his practical works, and ourestimate of the vast and appalling series of his doctrinal, metaphysicaland controversial publications would be entitled to small weight, as theresult of very cursory examination. Many of them relate to obsoletequestions and issues, monumental of controversies long dead, and ofdisputatious doctors otherwise forgotten. Yet, in respect to even these, we feel justified in assenting to the opinion of one abundantly capableof 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 theimpress of his genius. Many of them contain sentiments which happilyfind favor with few in our time: philosophical and psychologicaldisquisitions, which look oddly enough in the light of the intellectualprogress 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 andearnest love of truth. He wrote under a solemn impression of duty, allowing neither pain, nor weakness, nor the claims of friendship, northe social enjoyments of domestic affection, to interfere with hissleepless intensity of purpose. He stipulated with his wife, beforemarriage, that she should not expect him to relax, even for her society, the severity of his labors. He could ill brook interruption, anddisliked the importunity of visitors. "We are afraid, sir, we break inupon your time, " said some of his callers to him upon one occasion. "Tobe 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-eightvolumes. He seems to have relished, however, the wit of others, especially when directed against what he looked upon as error. Marvell'sinimitable reply to the High-Church pretensions of Parker fairly overcamehis habitual gravity, and he several times alludes to it with markedsatisfaction; but, for himself, he had no heart for pleasentry. Hiswritings, like his sermons, were the earnest expostulations of a dyingman with dying men. He tells us of no other amusement or relaxation thanthe singing of psalms. "Harmony and melody, " said he, "are the pleasureand elevation of my soul. It was not the least comfort that I had in theconverse of my late dear wife, that our first act in the morning and lastin bed at night was a psalm of praise. "

It has been fashionable to speak of Baxter as a champion of civil andreligious freedom. He has little claim to such a reputation. He was thestanch advocate of monarchy, and of the right and duty of the State toenforce conformity to what he regarded as the essentials of religiousbelief and practice. No one regards the prelates who went to the Tower, under James II. , on the ground of conscientious scruples against readingthe King's declaration of toleration to Dissenters, as martyrs in thecause of universal religious freedom. Nor can Baxter, although he wrotemuch against the coercion and silencing of godly ministers, and sufferedimprisonment himself for the sake of a good conscience, be looked upon inthe light of an intelligent and consistent confessor of liberty. He didnot deny the abstract right of ecclesiastical coercion, but complained ofits exercise upon himself and his friends as unwarranted and unjust. 

One of the warmest admirers and ablest commentators of Baxter designatesthe leading and peculiar trait of his character as unearthliness. In ourview, this was its radical defect. He had too little of humanity, hefelt too little of the attraction of this world, and lived tooexclusively in the spiritual and the unearthly, for a full and healthfuldevelopment of his nature as a man, or of the graces, charities, andloves of the Christian. He undervalued the common blessings and joys oflife, and closed his eyes and ears against the beauty and harmony ofoutward nature. Humanity, in itself considered, seemed of small momentto him; "passing away" was written alike on its wrongs and its rights, its pleasures and its pains; death would soon level all distinctions; andthe sorrows or the joys, the poverty or the riches, the slavery or theliberty, of the brief day of its probation seemed of too littleconsequence to engage his attention and sympathies. Hence, while he wasalways ready to minister to temporal suffering wherever it came to hisnotice, he made no efforts to remove its political or social causes. In this respect he differed widely from some of his illustriouscontemporaries. Penn, while preaching up and down the land, and writingtheological folios and pamphlets, could yet urge the political rights ofEnglishmen, mount the hustings for Algernon Sydney, and plead forunlimited religious liberty; and Vane, while dreaming of a comingmillennium and reign of the saints, and busily occupied in defending hisAntinomian doctrines, could at the same time vindicate, with tongue andpen, the cause of civil and religious freedom. But Baxter overlooked theevils and oppressions which were around him, and forgot the necessitiesand duties of the world of time and sense in his earnest aspirationstowards the world of spirits. It is by no means an uninstructive fact, that with the lapse of years his zeal for proselytism, doctrinaldisputations, and the preaching of threats and terrors visibly declined, while love for his fellow-men and catholic charity greatly increased, andhe was blessed with a clearer perception of the truth that God is bestserved through His suffering children, and that love and reverence forvisible humanity is an indispensable condition of the appropriate worshipof the Unseen God. 

But, in taking leave of Richard Baxter, our last words must not be thoseof censure. Admiration and reverence become us rather. He was an honestman. So far as we can judge, his motives were the highest and best whichcan influence human action. He had faults and weaknesses, and committedgrave errors, but we are constrained to believe that the prayer withwhich he closes his Saints' Rest and which we have chosen as the fittingtermination of our article, was the earnest aspiration of his life:--

"O merciful Father of Spirits! suffer not the soul of thy unworthyservant to be a stranger to the joys which he describes to others, butkeep me while I remain on earth in daily breathing after thee, and in abelieving affectionate walking with thee! Let those who shall read thesepages not merely read the fruits of my studies, but the breathing of myactive hope and love; that if my heart were open to their view, theymight there read thy love most deeply engraven upon it with a beam fromthe face of the Son of God; and not find vanity or lust or pride withinwhere the words of life appear without, that so these lines may notwitness against me, but, proceeding from the heart of the writer, beeffectual through thy grace upon the heart of the reader, and so be thesavor 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 beforeher execution, she is said to have turned towards the statue of Liberty, --which, strangely enough, had been placed near the guillotine, as itspatron saint, --with the exclamation, "O Liberty! what crimes have beencommitted in thy name!" It is with a feeling akin to that which promptedthis memorable exclamation of Madame Roland that the sincere lover ofhuman freedom and progress is often compelled to regard Americandemocracy. 

For democracy, pure and impartial, --the self-government of the whole;equal rights and privileges, irrespective of birth or complexion; themorality of the Gospel of Christ applied to legislation; Christianityreduced to practice, and showering the blessings of its impartial loveand equal protection upon all, like the rain and dews of heaven, --we havethe sincerest love and reverence. So far as our own governmentapproaches this standard--and, with all its faults, we believe it does somore nearly than any other--it has our hearty and steadfast allegiance. We complain of and protest against it only where, in its originalframework or actual administration, it departs from the democraticprinciple. Holding, with Novalis, that the Christian religion is theroot of all democracy and the highest fact in the rights of man, weregard the New Testament as the true political text-book; and believethat, 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 lifeas well as the future, their institutions, social arrangements, and formsof government will approximate to the democratic model. We believe inthe ultimate complete accomplishment of the mission of Him who came "topreach deliverance to the captive, and the opening of prison doors tothem that are bound. " We look forward to the universal dominion of Hisbenign humanity; and, turning from the strife and blood, the slavery, andsocial and political wrongs of the past and present, anticipate therealization in the distant future of that state when the song of theangels at His advent shall be no longer a prophecy, but the jubilantexpression of a glorious reality, --"Glory to God in the highest! Peaceon earth, and good will to man!"

For the party in this country which has assumed the name of Democracy, asa party, we have had, we confess, for some years past, very littlerespect. It has advocated many salutary measures, tending to equalize theadvantages of trade and remove the evils of special legislation. But ifit has occasionally lopped some of the branches of the evil tree ofoppression, so far from striking at its root, it has suffered itself tobe made the instrument of nourishing and protecting it. It has alloweditself to be called, by its Southern flatterers, "the natural ally ofslavery. " It has spurned the petitions of the people in behalf offreedom under its feet, in Congress and State legislatures. Nominallythe advocate of universal suffrage, it has wrested from the coloredcitizens of Pennsylvania that right of citizenship which they had enjoyedunder a Constitution framed by Franklin and Rush. Perhaps the mostshameful exhibition of its spirit was made in the late Rhode Islandstruggle, when the free suffrage convention, solemnly calling heaven andearth 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 ofvoting. In the Constitutional Conventions of Michigan and Iowa, the sameparty declared all men equal, and then provided an exception to this rulein the case of the colored inhabitants. Its course on the question ofexcluding slavery from Texas is a matter of history, known and read ofall. 

After such exhibitions of its practice, its professions have lost theirpower. The cant of democracy upon the lips of men who are living downits principles is, to an earnest mind, well nigh insufferable. Pertinentwere the queries of Eliphaz the Temanite, "Shall a man utter vainknowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind? Shall he reason withunprofitable talk, or with speeches wherewith he can do no good?" Enoughof wearisome talk we have had about "progress, " the rights of "themasses, " the "dignity of labor, " and "extending the area of freedom"!"Clear your mind of cant, sir, " said Johnson to Boswell; and no betteradvice could be now given to a class of our democratic politicians. Workout your democracy; translate your words into deeds; away with yoursentimental generalizations, and come down to the practical details ofyour duty as men and Christians. What avail your abstract theories, yourhopeless virginity of democracy, sacred from the violence of meanings?A democracy which professes to hold, as by divine right, the doctrine ofhuman equality in its special keeping, and which at the same time givesits direct countenance and support to the vilest system of oppression onwhich the sun of heaven looks, has no better title to the name itdisgraces than the apostate Son of the Morning has to his old place inheaven. We are using strong language, for we feel strongly on thissubject. Let those whose hypocrisy we condemn, and whose sins againsthumanity we expose, remember that they are the publishers of their ownshame, and that they have gloried in their apostasy. There is a cuttingseverity in the answer which Sophocles puts in the mouth of Electra, injustification 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, whoare still hoping that the antagonism which slavery presents to democracywill be perceived by the people, in spite of the sophistry and appeals toprejudice by which interested partisans have hitherto succeeded indeceiving them. We believe with such that the mass of the democraticvoters of the free States are in reality friends of freedom, and hateslavery in all its forms; and that, with a full understanding of thematter, they could never consent to be sold to presidential aspirants, bypolitical speculators, in lots to suit purchasers, and warranted to beuseful in putting down free discussion, perpetuating oppression, andstrengthening the hands of modern feudalism. They are beginning alreadyto see that, under the process whereby men of easy virtue obtain officesfrom the general government, as the reward of treachery to freeprinciples, 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 amonopoly of these to a few selfish and heartless party managers, they arenot prepared to give up the distinctive principles of democracy, andsubstitute in their place the doctrines of the Satanic school ofpolitics. They will not much longer consent to stand before the world asthe slavery party of the United States, especially when policy andexpediency, as well as principle, unite in recommending a position morecongenial to the purposes of their organization, the principles of thefathers of their political faith, the spirit of the age, and theobligations of Christianity. 

The death-blow of slavery in this country will be given by the very powerupon which it has hitherto relied with so much confidence. Abused andinsulted Democracy will, erelong, shake off the loathsome burden underwhich it is now staggering. In the language of the late TheodoreSedgwiek, of Massachusetts, a consistent democrat of the old school:"Slavery, in all its forms, is anti-democratic, --an old poison left inthe veins, fostering the worst principles of aristocracy, pride, andaversion to labor; the natural enemy of the poor man, the laboring man, the oppressed man. The question is, whether absolute dominion over anycreature 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 thesame body politic. Whatever may be present appearances, and by whatevername party may choose to call things, this question must finally besettled by the democracy of the country. "

This prediction was made eight years ago, at a time when all the facts inthe case seemed against the probability of its truth, and when only hereand there the voice of an indignant freeman protested against theexulting claims of the slave power upon the democracy as its "naturalally. " 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 EmpireState, a new spirit is moving. Democracy, like Balaam upon Zophim, hasfelt the divine _afflatus_, and is blessing that which it was summoned tocurse. 

The present hopeful state of things is owing, in no slight degree, to theself-sacrificing exertions of a few faithful and clear-sighted men, foremost among whom was the late William Leggett; than whom no one haslabored more perseveringly, or, in the end, more successfully, to bringthe practice of American democracy into conformity with its professions. 

William Leggett! Let our right hand forget its cunning, when that nameshall fail to awaken generous emotions and aspirations for a higher andworthier manhood! True man and true democrat; faithful always toLiberty, following wherever she led, whether the storm beat in his faceor on his back; unhesitatingly counting her enemies his own, whether inthe guise of Whig monopoly and selfish expediency, or democraticservility north of Mason and Dixon's line towards democratic slaveholdingsouth of it; poor, yet incorruptible; dependent upon party favor, as aparty editor, yet risking all in condemnation of that party, when in thewrong; a man of the people, yet never stooping to flatter the people'sprejudices, --he is the politician, of all others, whom we would hold upto the admiration and imitation of the young men of our country. WhatFletcher of Saltoun is to Scotland, and the brave spirits of the oldCommonwealth 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 formedon these sturdy democratic models. Had he lived in their day, he wouldhave scraped with old Andrew Marvell the bare blade-bone of poverty, oreven laid his head on the block with Vane, rather than forego hisindependent 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 Westernwilderness, then a midshipman in the navy, then a denizen of New York;exposed to sore hardships and perilous temptations, he worked his way bythe force of his genius to the honorable position of associate editor ofthe Evening Post, the leading democratic journal of our great commercialmetropolis. Here he became early distinguished for his ultraism indemocracy. His whole soul revolted against oppression. He was forliberty everywhere and in all things, in thought, in speech, in vote, inreligion, in government, and in trade; he was for throwing off allrestraints upon the right of suffrage; regarding all men as brethren, helooked with disapprobation upon attempts to exclude foreigners from therights of citizenship; he was for entire freedom of commerce; hedenounced a national bank; he took the lead in opposition to the monopolyof incorporated banks; he argued in favor of direct taxation, andadvocated a free post-office, or a system by which letters should betransported, as goods and passengers now are, by private enterprise. Inall this he was thoroughly in earnest. That he often erred throughpassion and prejudice cannot be doubted; but in no instance was he foundturning aside from the path which he believed to be the true one, frommerely selfish considerations. He was honest alike to himself and thepublic. Every question which was thrown up before him by the waves ofpolitical or moral agitation he measured by his standard of right andtruth, and condemned or advocated it in utter disregard of prevailingopinions, of its effect upon his pecuniary interest, or of his standingwith his party. The vehemence of his passions sometimes betrayed himinto violence of language and injustice to his opponents; but he had thatrare and manly trait which enables its possessor, whenever he becomesconvinced of error, to make a prompt acknowledgment of the conviction. 

In the summer of 1834, a series of mobs, directed against theAbolitionists, who had organized a national society, with the city of NewYork as its central point, followed each other in rapid succession. Thehouses of the leading men in the society were sacked and pillaged;meeting-houses broken into and defaced; and the unoffending coloredinhabitants of the city treated with the grossest indignity, andsubjected, in some instances, to shameful personal outrage. It wasemphatically a "Reign of Terror. " The press of both political partiesand of the leading religious sects, by appeals to prejudice and passion, and by studied misrepresentation of the designs and measures of theAbolitionists, fanned the flame of excitement, until the fury of demonspossessed the misguided populace. To advocate emancipation, or defendthose who did so, in New York, at that period, was like preachingdemocracy in Constantinople or religious toleration in Paris on the eveof St. Bartholomew. Law was prostrated in the dust; to be suspected ofabolitionism was to incur a liability to an indefinite degree of insultand indignity; and the few and hunted friends of the slave who in thosenights of terror laid their heads upon the pillow did so with the prayerof the Psalmist on their lips, "Defend me from them that rise up againstme; save me from bloody men. "

At this period the New York Evening Post spoke out strongly incondemnation of the mob. William Leggett was not then an Abolitionist;he had known nothing of the proscribed class, save through the cruelmisrepresentations of their enemies; but, true to his democratic faith, he maintained the right to discuss the question of slavery. Theinfection of cowardly fear, which at that time sealed the lips ofmultitudes who deplored the excesses of the mob and sympathized with itsvictims, never reached him. Boldly, indignantly, he demanded that themob should be put down at once by the civil authorities. He declared theAbolitionists, even if guilty of all that had been charged upon them, fully entitled to the privileges and immunities of American citizens. Hesternly reprimanded the board of aldermen of the city for rejecting withcontempt the memorial of the Abolitionists to that body, explanatory oftheir principles and the measures by which they had sought to disseminatethem. Referring to the determination, expressed by the memorialists inthe rejected document, not to recant or relinquish any principle whichthey had adopted, but to live and die by their faith, he said: "In this, however mistaken, however mad, we may consider their opinions in relationto the blacks, what honest, independent mind can blame them? Where isthe man so poor of soul, so white-livered, so base, that he would do lessin relation to any important doctrine in which he religiously believed?Where is the man who would have his tenets drubbed into him by the clubsof 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 papersand pamphlets as they judged to be "incendiary;" in other words, such asadvocated the application of the democratic principle to the condition ofthe slaves of the South. These papers were addressed, not to the slave, but to the master. They contained nothing which had not been said andwritten by Southern men themselves, the Pinkneys, Jeffersons, Henrys, andMartins, of Maryland and Virginia. The example set at Charleston did notlack imitators. Every petty postmaster south of Mason and Dixon's linebecame ex officio a censor of the press. The Postmaster-General, writingto his subordinate at Charleston, after stating that the post-officedepartment had "no legal right to exclude newspapers from the mail, orprohibit their carriage or delivery, on account of their character ortendency, real or supposed, " declared that he would, nevertheless, giveno aid, directly or indirectly, in circulating publications of anincendiary or inflammatory character; and assured the perjuredfunctionary, who had violated his oath of office, that, while he couldnot sanction, he would not condemn his conduct. Against this virtualencouragement of a flagrant infringement of a constitutional right, thislicensing of thousands of petty government officials to sit in their mailoffices--to use the figure of Milton--cross-legged, like so many enviousJunos, in judgment upon the daily offspring of the press, taking counselof 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 eitheropenly approved of the conduct of the Postmaster-General or silentlyacquiesced 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 thegovernment, who was a favorite of the President and a sharer of hispopularity, did not hesitate as to the course which consistency and dutyrequired at his hands. He took his stand for unpopular truth, at a timewhen a different course on his part could not have failed to secure himthe favor and patronage of his party. In the great struggle with theBank of the United States, his services had not been unappreciated by thePresident and his friends. Without directly approving the course of theadministration on the question of the rights of the Abolitionists, byremaining silent in respect to it, he might have avoided all suspicion ofmental and moral independence incompatible with party allegiance. Theimpracticable honesty of Leggett, never bending from the erectness oftruth for the sake of that "thrift which follows fawning, " dictated amost severe and scorching review of the letter of the Postmaster-General. "More monstrous, more detestable doctrines we have never heardpromulgated, " he exclaimed in one of his leading editorials. "With whatface, after this, can the Postmaster-General punish a postmaster for anyexercise of the fearfully dangerous power of stopping and destroying anyportion of the mails?" "The Abolitionists do not deserve to be placed onthe same footing with a foreign enemy, nor their publications as thesecret despatches of a spy. They are American citizens, in the exerciseof their undoubted right of citizenship; and however erroneous theirviews, however fanatic their conduct, while they act within the limits ofthe law, what official functionary, be he merely a subordinate or thehead of the post-office department, shall dare to abridge them of theirrights as citizens, and deny them those facilities of intercourse whichwere instituted for the equal accommodation of all? If the Americanpeople will submit to this, let us expunge all written codes, and resolvesociety into its original elements, where the might of the strong isbetter than the right of the weak. "

A few days after the publication of this manly rebuke, he wrote anindignantly sarcastic article upon the mobs which were at this timeeverywhere summoned to "put down the Abolitionists. " The next day, the4th of the ninth month, 1835, he received a copy of the Address of theAmerican Anti-Slavery Society to the public, containing a full andexplicit avowal of all the principles and designs of the association. Hegave it a candid perusal, weighed its arguments, compared its doctrineswith those at the foundation of his own political faith, and rose up fromits examination an Abolitionist. He saw that he himself, misled by thepopular clamor, had done injustice to benevolent and self-sacrificingmen; and he took the earliest occasion, in an article of great power andeloquence, to make the amplest atonement. He declared his entireconcurrence with the views of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with thesingle exception of a doubt which rested, on his mind as to the abolitionof slavery in the District of Columbia. We quote from the concludingparagraph of this article:--

"We assert without hesitation, that, if we possessed the right, we shouldnot scruple to exercise it for the speedy annihilation of servitude andchains. The impression made in boyhood by the glorious exclamation ofCato, "'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 ardentlytrust that the day will yet arrive when the clank of the bondman'sfetters will form no part of the multitudinous sounds which our countrysends up to Heaven, mingling, as it were, into a song of praise for ournational prosperity. We yearn with strong desire for the day whenfreedom shall no longer wave

 "Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves. '"

A few days after, in reply to the assaults made upon him from allquarters, he calmly and firmly reiterated his determination to maintainthe right of free discussion of the subject of slavery. 

"The course we are pursuing, " said he, "is one which we entered upon aftermature deliberation, and we are not to be turned from it by a species ofopposition, the inefficacy of which we have seen displayed in so manyformer 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 adeplorable evil and curse, in whatever light it is viewed; if to yearnfor the day which shall break the fetters of three millions of humanbeings, and restore to them their birthright of equal freedom; if to bewilling, in season and out of season, to do all in our power to promoteso desirable a result, by all means not inconsistent with higher duty: ifthese sentiments constitute us Abolitionists, then are we such, and gloryin the name. "

"The senseless cry of 'Abolitionist' shall never deter us, nor the moresenseless 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 hismaster, and shall endeavor to fulfil towards both the obligations of anequal humanity. "

The generation which, since the period of which we are speaking, haverisen into active life can have but a faint conception of the boldness ofthis movement on the part of William Leggett. To be an Abolitionist thenwas to abandon all hope of political preferment or party favor; to bemarked and branded as a social outlaw, under good society's interdict offood and fire; to hold property, liberty, and life itself at the mercy oflawless mobs. All this William Leggett clearly saw. He knew how ruggedand thorny was the path upon which, impelled by his love of truth and theobligations of humanity, he was entering. From hunted and proscribedAbolitionists and oppressed and spirit-broken colored men, the Pariahs ofAmerican democracy, he could alone expect sympathy. The Whig journals, with a few honorable exceptions, exulted over what they regarded as thefall of a formidable opponent; and after painting his abolitionism in themost hideous colors, held him up to their Southern allies as a specimenof the radical disorganizers and democratic levellers of the North. Hisown party, in consequence, made haste to proscribe him. Governmentadvertising was promptly withdrawn from his paper. The official journalsof Washington and Albany read him out of the pale of democracy. FatherRitchie scolded and threatened. The democratic committee issued its bullagainst him from Tammany Hall. The resolutions of that committee werelaid before him when he was sinking under a severe illness. Rallying hisenergies, he dictated from his sick-bed an answer marked by all hisaccustomed vigor and boldness. Its tone was calm, manly, self-relying;the language of one who, having planted his feet hard down on the rock ofprinciple, stood there like Luther at Worms, because he "could nototherwise. " Exhausted nature sunk under the effort. A weary sickness ofnearly a year's duration followed. In this sore affliction, deserted ashe was by most of his old political friends, we have reason to know thathe was cheered by the gratitude of those in whose behalf he had well-nighmade a martyr's sacrifice; and that from the humble hearths of his poorcolored fellow-citizens fervent prayers went up for his restoration. 

His work was not yet done. Purified by trial, he was to stand forth oncemore in vindication of the truths of freedom. As soon as his health wassufficiently reestablished, he commenced the publication of anindependent political and literary journal, under the expressive title ofThe Plaindealer. In his first number he stated, that, claiming the rightof absolute freedom of discussion, he should exercise it with no otherlimitations than those of his own judgment. A poor man, he admitted thathe established the paper in the expectation of deriving from it alivelihood, but that even for that object he could not trim its sails tosuit the varying breeze of popular prejudice. "If, " said he, "a paperwhich makes the Right, and not the Expedient, its cardinal object, willnot 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 aninfluential press, if its influence is not exerted to promote the causeof truth. " He was true to his promise. The free soul of a free, strongman spoke out in his paper. How refreshing was it, after listening tothe inanities, the dull, witless vulgarity, the wearisome commonplace ofjournalists, who had no higher aim than to echo, with parrot-likeexactness, current prejudices and falsehoods, to turn to the great andgenerous thoughts, the chaste and vigorous diction, of the Plaindealer!No man ever had a clearer idea of the duties and responsibilities of aconductor of the public press than William Leggett, and few have evercombined so many of the qualifications for their perfect discharge: anice sense of justice, a warm benevolence, inflexible truth, honestydefying temptation, a mind stored with learning, and having at commandthe treasures of the best thoughts of the best authors. As was said ofFletcher of Saltoun, he was "a gentleman steady in his principles; ofnice honor, abundance of learning; bold as a lion; a sure friend; a manwho would lose his life to serve his country, and would not do a basething to save it. "

He had his faults: his positive convictions sometimes took the shapeof a proud and obstinate dogmatism; he who could so well appeal to thejudgment and the reason of his readers too often only roused theirpassions by invective and vehement declamation. Moderate men werestartled and pained by the fierce energy of his language; and he notunfrequently made implacable enemies of opponents whom he might haveconciliated and won over by mild expostulation and patient explanation. It must be urged in extenuation, that, as the champion of unpopulartruths, he was assailed unfairly on all sides, and indecentlymisrepresented and calumniated to a degree, as his friend Sedgwick justlyremarks, unprecedented even in the annals of the American press; and thathis errors in this respect were, in the main, errors of retaliation. 

In the Plaindealer, in common with the leading moral and politicalsubjects of the day, that of slavery was freely discussed in all itsbearings. It is difficult, in a single extract, to convey an adequateidea of the character of the editorial columns of a paper, where terseand concentrated irony and sarcasm alternate with eloquent appeal anddiffuse commentary and labored argument. We can only offer at random thefollowing passages from a long review of a speech of John C. Calhoun, inwhich that extraordinary man, whose giant intellect has been shut out ofits appropriate field of exercise by the very slavery of which he is thechampion, undertook to maintain, in reply to a Virginia senator, thatchattel slavery was not an evil, but "a great good. "

"We have Mr. Calhoun's own warrant for attacking his position with allthe fervor which a high sense of duty can give, for we do hold, from thebottom of our soul, that slavery is an evil, --a deep, detestable, damnable evil; evil in all its aspects to the blacks, and a greater evilto the whites; an evil moral, social, and political; an evil which showsitself in the languishing condition of agriculture where it exists, inparalyzed commerce, and in the prostration of the mechanic arts; an evilwhich stares you in the face from uncultivated fields, and howls in yourears through tangled swamps and morasses. Slavery is such an evil thatit withers what it touches. Where it is once securely established theland becomes desolate, as the tree inevitably perishes which the sea-hawkchooses for its nest; while freedom, on the contrary, flourishes like thetannen, 'on the loftiest and least sheltered rocks, ' and clothes with itsrefreshing verdure what, without it, would frown in naked and incurablesterility. 

"If any one desires an illustration of the opposite influences of slaveryand 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 translucentwaters reveal, through nearly the whole breadth, the sandy bottom overwhich they sparkle, how different are they in all the respects over whichman has control! On the one hand the air is vocal with the mingledtumult of a vast and prosperous population. Every hillside smiles withan abundant harvest, every valley shelters a thriving village, the clickof a busy mill drowns the prattle of every rivulet, and all themultitudinous sounds of business denote happy activity in every branchof social occupation. 

"This is the State which, but a few years ago, slept in the unbrokensolitude of nature. The forest spread an interminable canopy of shadeover the dark soil on which the fat and useless vegetation rotted atease, and through the dusky vistas of the wood only savage beasts andmore savage men prowled in quest of prey. The whole land now blossomslike a garden. The tall and interlacing trees have unlocked their hold, and bowed before the woodman's axe. The soil is disencumbered of themossy trunks which had reposed upon it for ages. The rivers flash in thesunlight, and the fields smile with waving harvests. This is Ohio, andthis is what freedom has done for it. 

"Now, let us turn to Kentucky, and note the opposite influences ofslavery. A narrow and unfrequented path through the close and sultrycanebrake conducts us to a wretched hovel. It stands in the midst of anunweeded field, whose dilapidated enclosure scarcely protects it from thelowing and hungry kine. Children half clad and squalid, and destitute ofthe buoyancy natural to their age, lounge in the sunshine, while theirparent saunters apart, to watch his languid slaves drive the ill-appointed team afield. This is not a fancy picture. It is a true copyof one of the features which make up the aspect 'of the State, and ofevery State where the moral leprosy of slavery covers the people with itsnoisome scales; a deadening lethargy benumbs the limbs of the bodypolitic; a stupor settles on the arts of life; agriculture reluctantlydrags the plough and harrow to the field, only when scourged bynecessity; the axe drops from the woodman's nerveless hand the moment hisfire is scantily supplied with fuel; and the fen, undrained, sends up itsnoxious exhalations, to rack with cramps and agues the frame already toomuch enervated by a moral epidemic to creep beyond the sphere of thematerial miasm. "

The Plaindealer was uniformly conducted with eminent ability; but itseditor was too far in advance of his contemporaries to find generalacceptance, or even toleration. In addition to pecuniary embarrassments, his health once more failed, and in the autumn of 1837 he was compelledto suspend the publication of his paper. One of the last articles whichhe wrote for it shows the extent to which he was sometimes carried by theintensity and depth of his abhorrence of oppression, and the fervency ofhis adoration of liberty. Speaking of the liability of being called uponto aid the master in the subjection of revolted slaves, and in replacingtheir cast-off fetters, he thus expresses himself: "Would we comply withsuch a requisition? No! Rather would we see our right arm lopped fromour body, and the mutilated trunk itself gored with mortal wounds, thanraise a finger in opposition to men struggling in the holy cause offreedom. The obligations of citizenship are strong, but those ofjustice, humanity, and religion, stronger. We earnestly trust that thegreat contest of opinion which is now going on in this country mayterminate in the enfranchisement of the slaves, without recourse to thestrife of blood; but should the oppressed bondmen, impatient of the tardyprogress of truth, urged only in discussion, attempt to burst theirchains by a more violent and shorter process, they should never encounterour arm nor hear our voice in the ranks of their opponents. We shouldstand a sad spectator of the conflict; and, whatever commiseration wemight feel for the discomfiture of the oppressors, we should pray thatthe battle might end in giving freedom to the oppressed. "

With the Plain dealer, his connection with the public, in a greatmeasure, ceased. His steady and intimate friend, personal as well aspolitical, Theodore Sedgwick, Jun. , a gentleman who has, on manyoccasions, proved himself worthy of his liberty-loving ancestry, thusspeaks of him in his private life at this period: "Amid the reverses offortune, harassed by pecuniary embarrassments, during the tortures of adisease which tore away his life piecemeal, hee ever maintained the samemanly and unaltered front, the same cheerfulness of disposition, the samedignity of conduct. No humiliating solicitation, no weak complaint, escaped him. " At the election in the fall of 1838, the noble-spiriteddemocrat was not wholly forgotten. A strenuous effort, which was well-nigh successful, was made to secure his nomination as a candidate forCongress. 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 everpenned by a candidate for popular favor. The following extracts willshow 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 tooearnest zeal, will place me in a false position on the subject ofslavery. I am an Abolitionist. I hate slavery in all its forms, degrees, and influences; and I deem myself bound, by the highest moraland political obligations, not to let that sentiment of hate lie dormantand smouldering in my own breast, but to give it free vent, and let itblaze forth, that it may kindle equal ardor through the whole sphere ofmy influence. I would not have this fact disguised or mystified for anyoffice the people have it in their power to give. Rather, a thousandtimes rather, would I again meet the denunciations of Tammany Hall, andbe stigmatized with all the foul epithets with which the anti-abolitionvocabulary 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 toexpose its hideous evils in all their bearings, --moral, social, andpolitical, --as of infinitely higher importance than to carry fifty sub-treasury bills. That I should discharge this duty temperately; that Ishould not let it come in collision with other duties; that I should notlet my hatred of slavery transcend the express obligations of theConstitution, or violate its clear spirit, I hope and trust you thinksufficiently well of me to believe. But what I fear is, (not from you, however, ) that some of my advocates and champions will seek to recommendme to popular support by representing me as not an Abolitionist, which isfalse. All that I have written gives the lie to it. All I shall writewill give the lie to it. 

"And here, let me add, (apart from any consideration already advertedto, ) that, as a matter of mere policy, I would not, if I could, have myname disjoined from abolitionism. To be an Abolitionist now is to be anincendiary; as, three years ago, to be an anti-monopolist was to be aleveller and a Jack Cade. See what three short years have done ineffecting the anti-monopoly reform; and depend upon it that the nextthree years, or, if not three, say three times three, if you please, willwork a greater revolution on the slavery question. The stream of publicopinion now sets against us; but it is about to turn, and theregurgitation will be tremendous. Proud in that day may well be the manwho can float in triumph on the first refluent wave, swept onward by thedeluge which he himself, in advance of his fellows, has largely shared inoccasioning. Such be my fate; and, living or dead, it will, in somemeasure, be mine! I have written my name in ineffaceable letters on theabolition record; and whether the reward ultimately come in the shape ofhonors to the living man, or a tribute to the memory of a departed one, Iwould 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 hadendeavored to propitiate popular prejudice by representing him as noAbolitionist, he says:--

"Keep them, for God's sake, from committing any such fooleries for thesake of getting me into Congress. Let others twist themselves into whatshapes they please, to gratify the present taste of the people; as forme, 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 oftheir 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 ofan honest man! Amidst the heartlessness, the double-dealing, theevasions, the prevarications, the shameful treachery and falsehood, ofpolitical men of both parties, in respect to the question of slavery, howrefreshing is it to listen to words like these! They renew our failingfaith in human nature. They reprove our weak misgivings. We rise upfrom their perusal stronger and healthier. With something of the spiritwhich dictated them, we renew our vows to freedom, and, with manlierenergy, gird up our souls for the stern struggle before us. 

As might have been expected, and as he himself predicted, the efforts ofhis friends to procure his nomination failed; but the same generousappreciators of his rare worth were soon after more successful in theirexertions in his behalf. He received from President Van Buren theappointment of the mission to Guatemala, --an appointment which, inaddition to honorable employment in the service of his country, promisedhim the advantages of a sea voyage and a change of climate, for therestoration of his health. The course of Martin Van Buren on the subjectof slavery in the District of Columbia forms, in the estimation of manyof his best friends, by no means the most creditable portion of hispolitical history; but it certainly argues well for his magnanimity andfreedom from merely personal resentment that he gave this appointment tothe 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 greetedhis inaugural. But, however well intended, it came too late. In themidst of the congratulations of his friends on the brightening prospectbefore him, the still hopeful and vigorous spirit of William Leggett wassummoned away by death. Universal regret was awakened. Admiration ofhis intellectual power, and that generous and full appreciation of hishigh moral worth which had been in too many instances withheld from theliving man by party policy and prejudice, were now freely accorded to thedead. The presses of both political parties vied with each other inexpressions of sorrow at the loss of a great and true man. TheDemocracy, through all its organs, hastened to canonize him as one of thesaints of its calendar. The general committee, in New York, expungedtheir resolutions of censure. The Democratic Review, at that period themost respectable mouthpiece of the democratic party, made him the subjectof exalted eulogy. His early friend and co-editor, William CullenBryant, laid upon his grave the following tribute, alike beautiful andtrue:--

 "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, ofpolitical meanness, of the common arts and stratagems of demagogues, comes up from his grave! How the cheek of mercenary selfishness crimsonsat the thought of his incorruptible integrity! How heartless and hollowpretenders, who offer lip service to freedom, while they give their handsto whatever work their slaveholding managers may assign them; who sit inchains 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 hischaracter! What a comment on their own condition is the memory of a manwho could calmly endure the loss of party favor, the reproaches of hisfriends, the malignant assaults of his enemies, and the fretting evils ofpoverty, 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 aretheir own condemnation. Every stone which they pile upon his grave iswritten over with the record of their hypocrisy. 

We have written rather for the living than the dead. As one of thatproscribed and hunted band of Abolitionists, whose rights were so bravelydefended by William Leggett, we should, indeed, be wanting in ordinarygratitude not to do honor to his memory; but we have been actuated at thepresent time mainly by a hope that the character, the lineaments of whichwe have so imperfectly sketched, may awaken a generous emulation in thehearts of the young democracy of our country. Democracy such as WilliamLeggett believed and practised, democracy in its full and all-comprehensive significance, is destined to be the settled political faithof this republic. Because the despotism of slavery has usurped its name, and offered the strange incense of human tears and blood on its profanedaltars, shall we, therefore, abandon the only political faith whichcoincides with the Gospel of Jesus, and meets the aspirations and wantsof humanity? No. The duty of the present generation in the UnitedStates is to reduce this faith to practice, to make the beautiful ideal afact. 

"Every American, " says Leggett, "who in any way countenances slavery isderelict to his duty, as a Christian, a patriot, a man; and every onedoes countenance and authorize it who suffers any opportunity ofexpressing his deep abhorrence of its manifold abominations to passunimproved. " The whole world has an interest in this matter. Theinfluence of our democratic despotism is exerted against the liberties ofEurope. Political reformers in the Old World, who have testified totheir love of freedom by serious sacrifices, hold but one language onthis point. They tell us that American slavery furnishes kings andaristocracies with their most potent arguments; that it is a perpetualdrag on the wheel of political progress. 

We have before us, at this time, a letter from Seidensticker, one of theleaders of the patriotic movement in behalf of German liberty in 1831. It was written from the prison of Celle, where he had been confined foreight years. The writer expresses his indignant astonishment at thespeeches of John C. Calhoun, and others in Congress, on the slaveryquestion, and deplores the disastrous influence of our greatinconsistency upon the cause of freedom throughout the world, --aninfluence which paralyzes the hands of the patriotic reformer, while itstrengthens those of his oppressor, and deepens around the living martyrsand confessors of European democracy the cold shadow of their prisons. 

Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham, the President of the British Free SuffrageUnion, and whose philanthropy and democracy have been vouched for by theDemocratic Review in this country, has the following passage in anaddress to the citizens of the United States: "Although an admirer of theinstitutions of your country, and deeply lamenting the evils of my owngovernment, I find it difficult to reply to those who are opposed to anyextension of the political rights of Englishmen, when they point toAmerica, and say that where all have a control over the legislation butthose 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 anonward movement in favor of its extinction, not only in England andFrance, but in Cuba and Brazil, American legislators cling to thisenormous evil, without attempting to relax or mitigate its horrors. "

How long shall such appeals, from such sources, be wasted upon us? Shallour baleful example enslave the world? Shall the tree of democracy, which our fathers intended for "the healing of the nations, " be to themlike 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 tosay whether the present wellnigh intolerable evil shall continue toincrease its boundaries, and strengthen its hold upon the government, thepolitical parties, and the religious sects of our country. Interest andhonor, present possession and future hope, the memory of fathers, theprospects of children, gratitude, affection, the still call of the dead, the cry of oppressed nations looking hitherward for the result of alltheir hopes, the voice of God in the soul, in revelation, and in Hisprovidence, all appeal to them for a speedy and righteous decision. Atthis moment, on the floor of Congress, Democracy and Slavery have met ina death-grapple. The South stands firm; it allows no party division onthe slave question. One of its members has declared that "the slaveStates have no traitors. " Can the same be said of the free? Now, as inthe time of the fatal Missouri Compromise, there are, it is to be feared, political peddlers among our representatives, whose souls are in themarket, and whose consciences are vendible commodities. Through theirmeans, the slave power may gain a temporary triumph; but may not the verybaseness of the treachery arouse the Northern heart? By driving the freeStates to the wall, may it not compel them to turn and take an aggressiveattitude, clasp hands over the altar of their common freedom, and sweareternal hostility to slavery?

Be the issue of the present contest what it may, those who are faithfulto freedom should allow no temporary reverse to shake their confidence inthe ultimate triumph of the right. The slave will be free. Democracy inAmerica will yet be a glorious reality; and when the topstone of thattemple of freedom which our fathers left unfinished shall be broughtforth 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 herwelfare, I too have my charter and freehold of rejoicing to me and myheirs. "

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 theloss of his literary friends, sang Wordsworth. We well remember withwhat freshness and vividness these simple lines came before us, onhearing, last autumn, of the death of the warm-hearted and gifted friendwhose name heads this article; for there was much in his character andgenius to remind us of the gentle author of Elia. He had the latter'sgenial humor and quaintness; his nice and delicate perception of thebeautiful and poetic; his happy, easy diction, not the result, as in thecase of that of the English essayist, of slow and careful elaboration, but the natural, spontaneous language in which his conceptions at onceembodied themselves, apparently without any consciousness of effort. AsMark Antony talked, he wrote, "right on, " telling his readers often what"they themselves did know, " yet imparting to the simplest commonplaces oflife interest and significance, and throwing a golden haze of poetry overthe rough and thorny pathways of every-day duty. Like Lamb, he loved hisfriends without stint or limit. The "old familiar faces" haunted him. Lamb loved the streets and lanes of London--the places where he oftenestcame in contact with the warm, genial heart of humanity--better than thecountry. Rogers loved the wild and lonely hills and valleys of NewHampshire none the less that he was fully alive to the enjoyments ofsociety, and could enter with the heartiest sympathy into all the joysand sorrows of his friends and neighbors. 

In another point of view, he was not unlike Elia. He had the same loveof home, and home friends, and familiar objects; the same fondness forcommon sights and sounds; the same dread of change; the same shrinkingfrom the unknown and the dark. Like him, he clung with a child's love tothe living present, and recoiled from a contemplation of the great changewhich awaits us. Like him, he was content with the goodly green earthand human countenances, and would fain set up his tabernacle here. Hehad less of what might be termed self-indulgence in this feeling thanLamb. He had higher views; he loved this world not only for its ownsake, but for the opportunities it afforded of doing good. Like thePersian seer, he beheld the legions of Ormuzd and Ahriman, of Light andDarkness, contending for mastery over the earth, as the sunshine andshadow of a gusty, half-cloudy day struggled on the green slopes of hisnative mountains; and, mingled with the bright host, he would fain havefought on until its banners waved in eternal sunshine over the lasthiding-place of darkness. He entered into the work of reform with theenthusiasm and chivalry of a knight of the crusades. He had faith inhuman progress, --in the ultimate triumph of the good; millennial lightsbeaconed up all along his horizon. In the philanthropic movements of theday; in the efforts to remove the evils of slavery, war, intemperance, and sanguinary laws; in the humane and generous spirit of much of ourmodern poetry and literature; in the growing demand of the religiouscommunity, of all sects, for the preaching of the gospel of love andhumanity, he heard the low and tremulous prelude of the great anthem ofuniversal harmony. "The world, " said he, in a notice of the music of theHutchinson family, "is out of tune now. But it will be tuned again, andall will become harmony. " In this faith he lived and acted; working, notalways, as it seemed to some of his friends, wisely, but bravely, truthfully, earnestly, cheering on his fellow-laborers, and imparting tothe dullest and most earthward looking of them something of his own zealand loftiness of purpose. 

"Who was he?" does the reader ask? Naturally enough, too, for his namehas never found its way into fashionable reviews; it has never beenassociated with tale, or essay, or poem, to our knowledge. Our friendGriswold, who, like another Noah, has launched some hundreds of Americanpoets and prose writers on the tide of immortality in his two huge arksof rhyme and reason, has either overlooked his name, or deemed itunworthy of preservation. Then, too, he was known mainly as the editorof a proscribed and everywhere-spoken-against anti-slavery paper. It hadfew readers of literary taste and discrimination; plain, earnest men andwomen, intent only upon the thought itself, and caring little for theclothing of it, loved the _Herald of Freedom_ for its honestness andearnestness, and its bold rebukes of the wrong, its all-surrenderinghomage to what its editor believed to be right. But the literary worldof authors and critics saw and heard little or nothing of him or hiswritings. "I once had a bit of scholar-craft, " he says of himself on oneoccasion, "and had I attempted it in some pitiful sectarian or party orliterary sheet, I should have stood a chance to get quoted into theperiodicals. Now, who dares quote from the _Herald of Freedom_?" Hewrote for humanity, as his biographer justly says, not for fame. "Hewrote because he had something to say, and true to nature, for to himnature was truth; he spoke right on, with the artlessness and simplicityof 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 atDartmouth College, he studied law with Hon. Richard Fletcher, ofSalisbury, New Hampshire, now of Boston, and commenced the practice of itin 1819, in his native village. He was diligent and successful in hisprofession, although seldom known as a pleader. About the year 1833, hebecame interested in the anti-slavery movement. His was one of the fewvoices of encouragement and sympathy which greeted the author of thissketch on the publication of a pamphlet in favor of immediateemancipation. He gave us a kind word of approval, and invited us to hismountain home, on the banks of the Pemigewasset, --an invitation which, two years afterwards, we accepted. In the early autumn, in company withGeorge Thompson, (the eloquent reformer, who has since been elected amember of the British Parliament from the Tower Hamlets, ) we drove up thebeautiful valley of the White Mountain tributary of the Merrimac, and, just as a glorious sunset was steeping river, valley, and mountain in itshues of heaven, were welcomed to the pleasant home and family circle ofour friend Rogers. We spent two delightful evenings with him. Hiscordiality, his warm-hearted sympathy in our object, his keen wit, inimitable humor, and childlike and simple mirthfulness, his fullappreciation of the beautiful in art and nature, impressed us with theconviction that we were the guests of no ordinary man; that we werecommuning with unmistakable genius, such an one as might have added tothe wit and eloquence of Ben Jonson's famous club at the _Mermaid_, orthat which Lamb and Coleridge and Southey frequented at the _Salutationand 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 Plymouthupon the mountains of the North, Moosehillock and the Haystacks, and tookup his residence at Concord, for the purpose of editing the _Herald ofFreedom_, an anti-slavery paper which had been started some three or fouryears before. John Pierpont, than whom there could not be a morecompetent witness, in his brief and beautiful sketch of the life andwritings of Rogers, does not overestimate the ability with which theHerald 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 wellwill agree with us that he was not excelled by any editor in thecountry. " He was not a profound reasoner: his imagination and brilliantfancy played the wildest tricks with his logic; yet, considering the wayby which he reached them, it is remarkable that his conclusions were sooften correct. The tendency of his mind was to extremes. A zealousCalvinistic church-member, he became an equally zealous opponent ofchurches and priests; a warm politician, he became an ultra non-resistantand no-government man. In all this, his sincerity was manifest. If, inthe indulgence of his remarkable powers of sarcasm, in the free antics ofa humorous fancy, upon whose graceful neck he had flung loose the reins, he sometimes did injustice to individuals, and touched, in irreverentsport, the hem of sacred garments, it had the excuse, at least, of agenerous 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, --hastyeditorials, flung off without care or revision, the offspring of suddenimpulse frequently; always free, artless, unstudied; the languagetransparent as air, exactly expressing the thought. He loved the common, simple dialect of the people, --the "beautiful strong old Saxon, --the talkwords. " He had an especial dislike of learned and "dictionary words. "He used to recommend Cobbett's Works to "every young man and woman whohas 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 hiswritings as would convey to our readers an adequate idea of his thoughtand manner. His descriptions of natural scenery glow with life. One canalmost see the sunset light flooding the Franconia Notch, and glorifyingthe peaks of Moosehillock, and hear the murmur of the west wind in thepines, and the light, liquid voice of Pemigewasset sounding up from itsrocky channel, through its green hem of maples, while reading them. Wegive a brief extract from an editorial account of an autumnal trip toVermont:

"We have recently journeyed through a portion of this, free State; and itis not all imagination in us that sees, in its bold scenery, itsuninfected inland position, its mountainous but fertile and verdantsurface, the secret of the noble predisposition of its people. They arelocated for freedom. Liberty's home is on their Green Mountains. Theirfarmer republic nowhere touches the ocean, the highway of the world'scrimes, as well as its nations. It has no seaport for the importation ofslavery, or the exportation of its own highland republicanism. Shouldslavery ever prevail over this nation, to its utter subjugation, the lastlingering footsteps of retiring Liberty will be seen, not, as DanielWebster said, in the proud old Commonwealth of Massachusetts, aboutBunker Hill and Faneuil Hall; but she will be found wailing, likeJephthah's daughter, among the 'hollows' and along the sides of the GreenMountains. 

"Vermont shows gloriously at this autumn season. Frost has gently laidhands on her exuberant vegetation, tinging her rock-maple woods withoutabating the deep verdure of her herbage. Everywhere along her peopledhollows and her bold hillslopes and summits the earth is alive withgreen, while her endless hard-wood forests are uniformed with all thehues of early fall, richer than the regimentals of the kings thatglittered in the train of Napoleon on the confines of Poland, when helingered there, on the last outposts of summer, before plunging into thesnow-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. Vegetationtouched, but not dead, or, if killed, not bereft yet of 'signs of life. ''Decay's effacing fingers' had not yet 'swept the hills' 'where beautylingers. ' All looked fresh as growing foliage. Vermont frosts don't seemto be 'killing frosts. ' They only change aspects of beauty. The mountainpastures, verdant to the peaks, and over the peaks of the high, steephills, were covered with the amplest feed, and clothed with countlesssheep; the hay-fields heavy with second crop, in some partly cut andabandoned, as if in very weariness and satiety, blooming withhoneysuckle, contrasting strangely with the colors on the woods; the fatcattle and the long-tailed colts and close-built Morgans wallowing in itup to the eyes, or the cattle down to rest, with full bellies, by ten inthe morning. Fine but narrow roads wound along among the hills, freealmost entirely of stone, and so smooth as to be safe for the most rapiddriving, made of their rich, dark, powder-looking soil. Beautifulvillages or scattered settlements breaking upon the delighted view, onthe meandering way, making the ride a continued scene of excitement andadmiration. The air fresh, free, and wholesome; the road almost deadlevel for miles and miles, among mountains that lay over the land likethe great swells of the sea, and looking in the prospect as though therecould be no passage. "

To this autumnal limning, the following spring picture may be a fittingaccompaniment:--

"At last Spring is here in full flush. Winter held on tenaciously andmercilessly, but it has let go. The great sun is high on his northernjourney, and the vegetation, and the bird-singing, and the loud frog-chorus, the tree budding and blowing, are all upon us; and the gloriousgrass--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 theploughed ground, hardly lifting his crank wings to a level with his back, so self-important is he in his admonitions. The earlier birds have goneto housekeeping, and have disappeared from the spray. There has beenbrief 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 groundwill be yellow with dandelions. 

"I incline to thank Heaven this glorious morning of May 16th for thepleasant home from which we can greet the Spring. Hitherto we have hadto 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 uglymeeting-house, which an enterprising neighbor relieved us of by plantinga dwelling-house, right before our eyes, (on his own land, and he had aright to, ) which relieved us also of all prospect whatever. And therevival spirit of habitation which has come over Concord is clapping up ahouse between every two in the already crowded town; and the prospect is, it will be soon all buildings. They are constructing, in quite goodtaste though, small, trim, cottage-like. But I had rather be where I canbreathe air, and see beyond my own features, than be smothered among theprettiest houses ever built. We are on the slope of a hill; it is allsand, be sure, on all four sides of us, but the air is free, (and thesand, too, at times, ) and our water, there is danger of hard drinking tolive by it. Air and water, the two necessaries of life, and high, freeplay-ground for the small ones. There is a sand precipice hard by, highenough, were it only rock and overlooked the ocean, to be as sublime asany of the Nahant cliffs. As it is, it is altogether a safer haunt fordaring childhood, which could hardly break its neck by a descent of somehundreds 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 andwet, but is almost all redeemed by the translation into it of the highhills of sand. It must have been a terrible place for frogs, judgingfrom what remains of it. Bits of water from the springs hard by lay hereand there about the low ground, which are peopled as full of singers asever the gallery of the old North Meeting-house was, and quite asmelodious ones. Such performers I never heard, in marsh or pool. Theyare not the great, stagnant, bull-paddocks, fat and coarse-noted likeParson, but clear-water frogs, green, lively, and sweet-voiced. Ipassed 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 nowand then, but not discordantly, with the loud, quick hallo, thatresembles the cry of the tree-toad. 'There are the Hutchinsons, ' criedthe lad. 'The Rainers, ' responded I, glad to remember enough of myancient Latin to know that Rana, or some such sounding word, stood forfrog. But it was a 'band of music, ' as the Miller friends say. Likeother singers, (all but the Hutchinsons, ) these are apt to sing too much, all the time they are awake, constituting really too much of a goodthing. I have wondered if the little reptiles were singing in concert, or whether every one peeped on his own hook, their neighbor hood onlymaking it a chorus. I incline to the opinion that they are performingtogether, that they know the tune, and each carries his part, self-selected, in free meeting, and therefore never discordant. The hour ruleof Congress might be useful, though far less needed among the frogs thanamong the profane croakers of the fens at Washington. "

Here is a sketch of the mountain scenery of New Hampshire, as seen fromthe Holderness Mountain, or North Hill, during a visit which he made tohis 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 themountain circle was as smoky as Vesuvius or Etna in their recess oferuption. The little village of Plymouth lay right at our feet, with itsbeautiful expanse of intervale opening on the eye like a lake among thewoods and hills, and the Pemigewasset, bordered along its crooked waywith rows of maples, meandering from upland to upland through themeadows. Our young footsteps had wandered over these localities. Timehad cast it all far back that Pemigewasset, with its meadows and bordertrees; that little village whitening in the margin of its inter vale; andthat one house which we could distinguish, where the mother that watchedover and endured our wayward childhood totters at fourscore!

"To the south stretched a broken, swelling upland country, but champaignfrom the top of North Hill, patched all over with grain-fields and greenwood-lots, the roofs of the farm-houses shining in the sun. Southwest, the Cardigan Mountain showed its bald forehead among the smokes of athousand fires, kindled in the woods in the long drought. Westward, Moosehillock heaved up its long back, black as a whale; and turning theeye on northward, glancing down the while on the Baker's River valley, dotted over with human dwellings like shingle-bunches for size, youbehold the great Franconia Range, its Notch and its Haystacks, theElephant Mountain on the left, and Lafayette (Great Haystack) on theright, shooting its peak in solemn loneliness high up into the desertsky, and overtopping all the neighboring Alps but Mount Washingtonitself. The prospect of these is most impressive and satisfactory. Wedon't believe the earth presents a finer mountain display. The Haystacksstand there like the Pyramids on the wall of mountains. One of thememinently has this Egyptian shape. It is as accurate a pyramid to theeye as any in the old valley of the Nile, and a good deal bigger than anyof those hoary monuments of human presumption, of the impious tyranny ofmonarchs and priests, and of the appalling servility of the erectingmultitude. Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh does not more finely resemble asleeping lion than the huge mountain on the left of the Notch does anelephant, with his great, overgrown rump turned uncivilly toward the gapwhere the people have to pass. Following round the panorama, you come tothe Ossipees and the Sandwich Mountains, peaks innumerable and nameless, and of every variety of fantastic shape. Down their vast sides aredisplayed the melancholy-looking slides, contrasting with the fathomlesswoods. 

"But the lakes, --you see lakes, as well as woods and mountains, from thetop 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 smallblue 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, andthe Little Squam, a beautiful dark sheet of deep, blue water, about twomiles long, stretched an id the green hills and woods, with a charminglittle beach at its eastern end, and without an island. And then theGreat Squam, connected with it on the east by a short, narrow stream, thevery queen of ponds, with its fleet of islands, surpassing in beauty allthe foreign waters we have seen, in Scotland or elsewhere, --the islandscovered with evergreens, which impart their hue to the mass of the lake, as it stretches seven miles on east from its smaller sister, towards thepeerless Winnipesaukee. Great Squam is as beautiful as water and islandcan 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 forlittle towns, and others not bigger than a swan or a wild duck swimmingon its surface of glass. "

His wit and sarcasm were generally too good-natured to provoke even theirunfortunate objects, playing all over his editorials like the thunderlesslightnings which quiver along the horizon of a night of summer calmness;but at times his indignation launched them like bolts from heaven. Takethe following as a specimen. He is speaking of the gag rule of Congress, and commending Southern representatives for their skilful selection of aproper person to do their work:--

"They have a quick eye at the South to the character, or, as they wouldsay, the points of a slave. They look into him shrewdly, as an oldjockey does into a horse. They will pick him out, at rifle-shotdistance, among a thousand freemen. They have a nice eye to detectshades of vassalage. They saw in the aristocratic popinjay strut of acounterfeit Democrat an itching aspiration to play the slaveholder. Theybeheld it in 'the cut of his jib, ' and his extreme Northern position madehim the very tool for their purpose. The little creature has struck atthe right of petition. A paltrier hand never struck at a noble right. The Eagle Right of Petition, so loftily sacred in the eyes of theConstitution that Congress can't begin to 'abridge' it, in its pride ofplace, is hawked at by this crested jay-bird. A 'mousing owl' would haveseen 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 pinesin the winter. What an ignominious death to the lofty right, were it todie 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 bythe South--done proudly, and in slaveholding style, by the hand of avassal. 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 'freenigger' North. "

Or this description--not very flattering to the "Old Commonwealth"--ofthe treatment of the agent of Massachusetts in South Carolina:--

"Slavery may perpetrate anything, and New England can't see it. It canhorsewhip the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and spit in hergovernmental face, and she will not recognize it as an offence. She senther agent to Charleston on a State embassy. Slavery caught him, and senthim ignominiously home. The solemn great man came back in a hurry. Hereturned in a most undignified trot. He ran; he scampered, --the statelyofficial. The Old Bay State actually pulled foot, cleared, dug, as theysay, 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 ofbeing flogged at school for stealing apples, came back from Carolina uponthe 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 shewould if lightning had struck him. He was sent back 'by the visitationof God;' and if they had lynched him to death, and stained the streets ofCharleston with his blood, a Boston jury, if they could have held inquestover him, would have found that he 'died by the visitation of God. ' Andit would have been crowner's quest law, Slavery's crowners. "

Here is a specimen of his graceful blending of irony and humor. He isexpostulating with his neighbor of the New Hampshire Patriot, assuringhim that he cannot endure the ponderous weight of his arguments, beggingfor a little respite, and, as a means of obtaining it, urging the editorto travel. He advises him to go South, to the White Sulphur Springs, andthinks that, despite of his dark complexion, he would be safe there frombeing sold for jail fees, as his pro-slavery merits would more thancounterbalance his colored liabilities, which, after all, were only primafacie evidence against him. He suggests Texas, also, as a place where"patriots" of a certain class "most do congregate, " and continues asfollows:--

"There is Arkansas, too, all glorious in new-born liberty, fresh andunsullied, like Venus out of the ocean, --that newly discovered star, inthe 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 goand replenish his soul at her fountains. The newly evacuated lands ofthe 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 ofthe expatriated Indians; a land all smoking with the red man's departingcurse, --a malediction that went to the centre. Yes, and Florida, --blossoming and leafy Florida, yet warm with the life-blood of Osceola andhis warriors, shed gloriously under flag of truce. Why should a patriotof such a fancy for nature immure himself in the cells of the city, andforego such an inviting and so broad a landscape? Ite viator. Go forth, traveller, and leave this mouldy editing to less elastic fancies. Wewould 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, --theweathercock, that denotes and answers the shifting wind, --a thing oftail, nearly all tail, moved by the tail and by the wind, with smallheading, and that corresponding implicitly in movement with the broadsail-like stern, which widens out behind to catch the rum-fraught breathof 'the Brotherhood. ' As that turns, it turns; when that stops, it stops;and in calmish weather looks as steadfast and firm as though it wasriveted to the centre. The wind blows, and the little popularity-huntinghead dodges this way and that, in endless fluctuation. Such is Congress, or a great portion of it. It will point to the northwest heavens ofLiberty, whenever the breezes bear down irresistibly upon it, from theregions of political fair weather. It will abolish slavery at theCapitol, when it has already been doomed to abolition and deatheverywhere 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 thehouse-tops from the beginning. We have striven from the outset to writethe whole matter cloud-high in the heavens, that the utmost South mightread it. We have cast an arc upon the horizon, like the semicircle ofthe polar lights, and upon it have bent our motto, 'ImmediateEmancipation, ' glorious as the rainbow. We have engraven it there, onthe blue table of the cold vault, in letters tall enough for the readingof the nations. And why has the far South not read and believed beforethis? Because a steam has gone up--a fog--from New England's pulpit andher 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 thosewho, without the excuse of education and habit, and prompted only by aselfish consideration of political or sectarian advantage, apologized forthe wrong, and discountenanced the anti-slavery movement. "We havenothing to say, " said he, "to the slave. He is no party to his ownenslavement, --he is none to his disenthralment. We have nothing to sayto the South. The real holder of slaves is not there. He is in theNorth, the free North. The South alone has not the power to hold theslave. It is the character of the nation that binds and holds him. Itis the Republic that does it, the efficient force of which is north ofMason and Dixon's line. By virtue of the majority of Northern hearts andvoices, slavery lives in the South!"

In 1840, he spent a few weeks in England, Ireland, and Scotland. He hasleft behind a few beautiful memorials of his tour. His Ride over theBorder, Ride into Edinburgh, Wincobank hall, Ailsa Craig, gave his paperan interest in the eyes of many who had no sympathy with his politicaland religious views. 

Scattered all over his editorials, like gems, are to be found beautifulimages, sweet touches of heartfelt pathos, --thoughts which the readerpauses over with surprise and delight. We subjoin a few specimens, takenalmost at random from the book before us:--

"A thunder-storm, --what can match it for eloquence and poetry? That rushfrom heaven of the big drops, in what multitude and succession, and howthey sound as they strike! How they play on the old home roof and thethick tree-tops! What music to go to sleep by, to the tired boy, as helies under the naked roof! And the great, low bass thunder, as it rollsoff over the hills, and settles down behind them to the very centre, andyou can feel the old earth jar under your feet!"

"There was no oratory in the speech of the _Learned Blacksmith_, in theordinary sense of that word, no grace of elocution, but mighty thoughtsradiating off from his heated mind, like sparks from the glowing steel ofhis own anvil. "

"The hard hands of Irish labor, with nothing in them, --they ring likeslabs 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 anation 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 themurderous gun, but men cannot be shot. "

"It is coming to that (abolition of war) the world over; and when it doescome to it, oh what a long breath of relief the tired world will draw, asit stretches itself for the first time out upon earth's greensward, andlearns the meaning of repose and peaceful sleep!"

"He who vests his labor in the faithful ground is dealing directly withGod; human fraud or weakness do not intervene between him and hisrequital. No mechanic has a set of customers so trustworthy as God andthe elements. No savings bank is so sure as the old earth. "

"Literature is the luxury of words. It originates nothing, it doesnothing. It talks hard words about the labor of others, and is reckonedmore meritorious for it than genius and labor for doing what learning canonly descant upon. It trades on the capital of unlettered minds. Itstruts in stolen plumage, and it is mere plumage. A learned manresembles an owl in more respects than the matter of wisdom. Like thatsolemn bird, he is about all feathers. "

"Our Second Advent friends contemplate a grand conflagration about thefirst of April next. I should be willing there should be one, if itcould be confined to the productions of the press, with which the earthis absolutely smothered. Humanity wants precious few books to read, butthe great living, breathing, immortal volume of Providence. Life, --reallife, --how to live, how to treat one another, and how to trust God inmatters beyond our ken and occasion, --these are the lessons to learn, andyou find little of them in libraries. "

"That accursed drum and fife! How they have maddened mankind! And thedeep bass boom of the cannon, chiming in in the chorus of battle, thattrumpet and wild charging bugle, --how they set the military devil in aman, and make him into a soldier! Think of the human family falling uponone another at the inspiration of music! How must God feel at it, to seethose harp-strings he meant should be waked to a love bordering ondivine, strung and swept to mortal hate and butchery!"

"Leave off being Jews, " (he is addressing Major Noah with regard to hisappeal to his brethren to return to Judaea, ) "and turn mankind. Therocks and sands of Palestine have been worshipped long enough. Connecticut River or the Merrimac are as good rivers as any Jordan thatever run into a dead or live sea, and as holy, for that matter. InHumanity, as in Christ Jesus, as Paul says, 'there is neither Jew norGreek. ' And there ought to be none. Let Humanity be reverenced with thetenderest devotion; suffering, discouraged, down-trodden, hard-handed, haggard-eyed, care-worn mankind! Let these be regarded a little. Wouldto God I could alleviate all their sorrows, and leave them a chance tolaugh! They are, miserable now. They might be as happy as the blackbirdon the spray, and as full of melody. "

"I am sick as death at this miserable struggle among mankind for aliving. Poor devils! were they born to run such a gauntlet after themeans of life? Look about you, and see your squirming neighbors, writhing and twisting like so many angleworms in a fisher's bait-box, orthe wriggling animalculae seen in the vinegar drop held to the sun. Howthey look, how they feel, how base it makes them all!"

"Every human being is entitled to the means of life, as the trout is tohis brook or the lark to the blue sky. Is it well to put a human 'youngone' here to die of hunger, thirst, and nakedness, or else be preservedas 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 inthe firmament to the music of the spheres, are they all great shiningpoor-houses?"

"The divines always admit things after the age has adopted them. Theyare as careful of the age as the weathercock is of the wind. You mightas well catch an old experienced weathercock, on some ancient Orthodoxsteeple, standing all day with its tail east in a strong out wind, as thedivines at odds with the age. "

But we must cease quoting. The admirers of Jean Paul Richter might findmuch of the charm and variety of the "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces" inthis newspaper collection. They may see, perhaps, as we do, some thingswhich they cannot approve of, the tendency of which, however intended, isvery questionable. But, with us, they will pardon something to thespirit of liberty, much to that of love and humanity which breathesthrough all. 

Disgusted and heart-sick at the general indifference of Church and clergyto the temporal condition of the people, --at their apologies for anddefences of slavery, war, and capital punishment, --Rogers turnedProtestant, 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 notendure to see Christianity and Humanity divorced. He longed to see thebeautiful life of Jesus--his sweet humanities, his brotherly love, hisabounding sympathies--made the example of all men. Thoroughlydemocratic, in his view all men were equal. Priests, stripped of theirsacerdotal tailoring, were in his view but men, after all. He pitiedthem, he said, for they were in a wrong position, --above life's comfortsand sympathies, --"up in the unnatural cold, they had better come downamong men, and endure and enjoy with them. " "Mankind, " said he, "wantthe 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 afamiliar letter to a friend, he thus describes his farewell view of themountain 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 Isaw 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 amongthose Alps, and never without a kindling of wildest enthusiasm in mywoodland blood. But I never saw them till last Thursday. They neverloomed distinctly to my eye before, and the sun never shone on them fromheaven till then. They were so near me, I could seem to hear the voiceof their cataracts, as I could count their great slides, streaming adowntheir lone and desolate sides, --old slides, some of them overgrown withyoung woods, like half-healed scars on the breast of a giant. The greatrains had clothed the valleys of the upper Pemigewasset in the darkestand deepest green. The meadows were richer and more glorious in theirthick 'fall feed' than Queen Anne's Garden, as I saw it from the windowsof Windsor Castle. And the dark hemlock and hackmatack woods were yetdarker after the wet season, as they lay, in a hundred wildernesses, inthe mighty recesses of the mountains. But the peaks, --the eternal, thesolitary, the beautiful, the glorious and dear mountain peaks, my ownMoosehillock and my native Haystacks, --these were the things on which eyeand 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 ahigh point on the Thornton road. It was about four in the afternoon. Ithad rained among the hills about the Notch, and cleared off. The sun, there sombred at that early hour, as towards his setting, was pouring hismost glorious light upon the naked peaks, and they casting their mightyshadows far down among the inaccessible woods that darken the hollowsthat stretch between their bases. A cloud was creeping up to perch andrest awhile on the highest top of Great Haystack. Vulgar folks havecalled it Mount Lafayette, since the visit of that brave old Frenchman in1825 or 1826. If they had asked his opinion, he would have told them thenames of mountains couldn't be altered, and especially names like that, so appropriate, so descriptive, and so picturesque. A little hard whitecloud, that looked like a hundred fleeces of wool rolled into one, wasclimbing rapidly along up the northwestern ridge, that ascended to thelonely top of Great Haystack. All the others were bare. Four or five ofthem, --as distinct and shapely as so many pyramids; some topped out withnaked cliff, on which the sun lay in melancholy glory; others clothedthick all the way up with the old New Hampshire hemlock or the daringhackmatack, --Pierpont's hackmatack. You could see their shadowsstretching many and many a mile, over Grant and Location, away beyond theinvading foot of Incorporation, --where the timber-hunter has scarcelyexplored, and where the moose browses now, I suppose, as undisturbed ashe did before the settlement of the State. I wish our young friend andgenius, Harrison Eastman, had been with me, to see the sunlight as itglared on the tops of those woods, and to see the purple of themountains. I looked at it myself almost with the eye of a painter. If apainter looked with mine, though, he never could look off upon his canvaslong 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 Itravelled on down, and the sun sunk lower and lower towards the summit ofthe western ridge, the clouds came up and formed an Alpine range in theevening heavens above it, --like other Haystacks and Moosehillocks, --sodark and dense that fancy could easily mistake them for a higher Alps. There were the peaks and the great passes; the Franconia Notches amongthe cloudy cliffs, and the great White Mountain Gap. "

His health, never robust, had been gradually failing for some timeprevious to his death. He needed more repose and quiet than his dutiesas an editor left him; and to this end he purchased a small and pleasantfarm in his loved Pennigewasset valley, in the hope that he might thererecruit his wasted energies. In the sixth month of the year of hisdeath, in a letter to us, he spoke of his prospects in language whicheven then brought moisture to our eyes:--

"I am striving to get me an asylum of a farm. I have a wife and sevenchildren, every one of them with a whole spirit. I don't want to beseparated from any of them, only with a view to come together again. Ihave a beautiful little retreat in prospect, forty odd miles north, whereI imagine I can get potatoes and repose, --a sort of haven or port. I amamong the breakers, and 'mad for land. ' If I get this home, --it is a mileor two in among the hills from the pretty domicil once visited byyourself and glorious Thompson, --I am this moment indulging the fancythat I may see you at it before we die. Why can't I have you come andsee me? You see, dear W. , I don't want to send you anything short of afull epistle. Let me end as I begun, with the proffer of my hand ingrasp of yours extended. My heart I do not proffer, --it was yoursbefore, --it shall be yours while I am N. P. ROGERS. "

Alas! the haven of a deeper repose than he had dreamed of was close athand. He lingered until the middle of the tenth month, suffering much, yet calm and sensible to the last. Just before his death, he desired hischildren to sing at his bedside that touching song of Lover's, _TheAngel's Whisper_. Turning his eyes towards the open window, throughwhich the leafy glory of the season he most loved was visible, helistened 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; thevery spot he would have chosen, for he looked upon trees with somethingakin to human affection. "They are, " he said, "the beautiful handiworkand architecture of God, on which the eye never tires. Every one isa feather in the earth's cap, a plume in her bonnet, a tress on herforehead, --a comfort, a refreshing, and an ornament to her. " Spring hashung over him her buds, and opened beside him her violets. Summer haslaid her green oaken garland on his grave, and now the frost-blooms ofautumn drop upon it. Shall man cast a nettle on that mound? He lovedhumanity, --shall it be less kind to him than Nature? Shall the bigotryof sect, and creed, and profession, drive its condemnatory stake into hisgrave? God forbid. The doubts which he sometimes unguardedly expressedhad relation, we are constrained to believe, to the glosses ofcommentators and creed-makers and the inconsistency of professors, ratherthan to those facts and precepts of Christianity to which he gave theconstant assent of his practice. He sought not his own. His heartyearned with pity and brotherly affection for all the poor and sufferingin the universe. Of him, the angel of Leigh Hunt's beautiful allegorymight have written, in the golden book of remembrance, as he did of thegood Abou Ben Adhem, "He loved his fellow-men. "

ROBERT DINSMORE. 

The great charm of Scottish poetry consists in its simplicity, andgenuine, unaffected sympathy with the common joys and sorrows of dailylife. It is a home-taught, household melody. It calls to mind thepastoral bleat on the hillsides, the kirkbells of a summer Sabbath, thesong 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 comehame" at gloaming. Meetings at fair and market, blushing betrothments, merry weddings, the joy of young maternity, the lights and shades ofdomestic 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 sweetballads of the Ettrick Shepherd and Allan Cunningham, and the rusticdrama of Ramsay. It is the poetry of home, of nature, and theaffections. 

All this is sadly wanting in our young literature. We have no songs;American domestic life has never been hallowed and beautified by thesweet and graceful and tender associations of poetry. We have no Yankeepastorals. Our rivers and streams turn mills and float rafts, and areotherwise as commendably useful as those of Scotland; but no quaintballad or simple song reminds us that men and women have loved, met, andparted on their banks, or that beneath each roof within their valleys thetragedy and comedy of life have been enacted. Our poetry is cold andimitative; it seems more the product of over-strained intellects than thespontaneous outgushing of hearts warm with love, and stronglysympathizing with human nature as it actually exists about us, with thejoys and griefs of the men and women whom we meet daily. Unhappily, theopinion prevails that a poet must be also a philosopher, and hence it isthat much of our poetry is as indefinable in its mysticism as an IndianBrahmin's commentary on his sacred books, or German metaphysics subjectedto homeopathic dilution. It assumes to be prophetical, and itsutterances are oracular. It tells of strange, vague emotions andyearnings, painfully suggestive of spiritual "groanings which cannot beuttered. " If it "babbles o' green fields" and the common sights andsounds of nature, it is only for the purpose of finding some vagueanalogy between them and its internal experiences and longings. Itleaves the warm and comfortable fireside of actual knowledge and humancomprehension, and goes wailing and gibbering like a ghost about theimpassable 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 ashrewd, practical people? Is it that real life in New England lacksthose conditions of poetry and romance which age, reverence, andsuperstition 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 themanufacture of wooden ware and pedler notions, than for romanticassociations and legendary interest? That our huge, unshapely shinglestructures, blistering in the sun and glaring with windows, wereevidently never reared by the spell of pastoral harmonies, as the wallsof Thebes rose at the sound of the lyre of Amphion? That the habits ofour people are too cool, cautious, undemonstrative, to furnish the warpand woof of song and pastoral, and that their dialect and figures ofspeech, however richly significant and expressive in the autobiography ofSam Slick, or the satire of Hosea Biglow and Ethan Spike, form a veryawkward medium of sentiment and pathos? All this may be true. But theYankee, 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, whetherconscious of it or not, he also stands relieved against the background ofNature's beauty or sublimity. There is a poetical side to thecommonplace of his incomings and outgoings; study him well, and you mayframe an idyl of some sort from his apparently prosaic existence. Ourpoets, we must needs think, are deficient in that shiftiness, readyadaptation to circumstances, and ability of making the most of things, for which, as a people, we are proverbial. Can they make nothing of ourThanksgiving, that annual gathering of long-severed friends? Do theyfind nothing to their purpose in our apple-bees, buskings, berry-pickings, summer picnics, and winter sleigh-rides? Is there nothingavailable in our peculiarities of climate, scenery, customs, andpolitical institutions? Does the Yankee leap into life, shrewd, hard, and speculating, armed, like Pallas, for a struggle with fortune? Arethere not boys and girls, school loves and friendship, courtings andmatch-makings, hope and fear, and all the varied play of human passions, --the keen struggles of gain, the mad grasping of ambition, --sin andremorse, tearful repentance and holy aspirations? Who shall say that wehave not all the essentials of the poetry of human life and simplenature, of the hearth and the farm-field? Here, then, is a mineunworked, a harvest ungathered. Who shall sink the shaft and thrust inthe sickle?

And here let us say that the mere dilettante and the amateur ruralist mayas well keep their hands off. The prize is not for them. He who wouldsuccessfully strive for it must be himself what he sings, --part andparcel of the rural life of New England, --one who has grown strong amidstits healthful influences, familiar with all its details, and capable ofdetecting whatever of beauty, humor, or pathos pertain to it, --one whohas added to his book-lore the large experience of an activeparticipation in the rugged toil, the hearty amusements, the trials, andthe pleasures he describes. 

We have been led to these reflections by an incident which has called upbefore us the homespun figure of an old friend of our boyhood, who hadthe good sense to discover that the poetic element existed in the simplehome life of a country farmer, although himself unable to give a verycreditable expression of it. He had the "vision, " indeed, but the"faculty divine" was wanting; or, if he possessed it in any degree, asThersites says of the wit of Ajax, "it would not out, but lay coldly inhim like fire in the flint. "

While engaged this morning in looking over a large exchange list ofnewspapers, a few stanzas of poetry in the Scottish dialect attracted ourattention. As we read them, like a wizard's rhyme they seemed to havethe power of bearing us back to the past. They had long ago graced thecolumns of that solitary sheet which once a week diffused happiness overour fireside circle, making us acquainted, in our lonely nook, with thegoings-on of the great world. The verses, we are now constrained toadmit, are not remarkable in themselves, truth and simple nature only;yet how our young hearts responded to them! Twenty years ago there werefewer verse-makers than at present; and as our whole stock of lightliterature consisted of Ellwood's _Davideis_ and the selections of_Lindley Murray's English Reader_, it is not improbable that we were in acondition to overestimate the contributions to the poet's corner of ourvillage newspaper. Be that as it may, we welcome them as we would theface of an old friend, for they somehow remind us of the scent ofhaymows, the breath of cattle, the fresh greenery by the brookside, themoist earth broken by the coulter and turned up to the sun and winds ofMay. This particular piece, which follows, is entitled _The Sparrow_, and was occasioned by the crushing of a bird's-nest by the author whileploughing among his corn. It has something of the simple tenderness ofBurns. 

 "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 ofPresbyterians of Scotch descent, from the north of Ireland, emigrated tothe New World. In the spring of 1719, the inhabitants of Haverhill, onthe Merrimac, saw them passing up the river in several canoes, one ofwhich unfortunately upset in the rapids above the village. The followingfragment of a ballad celebrating this event has been handed down to thepresent time, and may serve to show the feelings even then of the oldEnglish 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 theUncanoonuc Hills, on the present site of Manchester, proceeded inland toBeaver Pond. Charmed with the appearance of the country, they resolvedhere to terminate their wanderings. Under a venerable oak on the marginof 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 andframe dwellings and a large and commodious meeting-house; wealth hadaccumulated around them, and they had everywhere the reputation of ashrewd and thriving community. They were the first in New England tocultivate the potato, which their neighbors for a long time regarded as apernicious root, altogether unfit for a Christian stomach. Every loverof that invaluable esculent has reason to remember with gratitude thesettlers of Londonderry. 

Their moral acclimation in Ireland had not been without its effect upontheir character. Side by side with a Presbyterianism as austere as thatof John Knox had grown up something of the wild Milesian humor, love ofconvivial excitement and merry-making. Their long prayers and fiercezeal in behalf of orthodox tenets only served, in the eyes of theirPuritan neighbors, to make more glaring still the scandal of their markedsocial irregularities. It became a common saying in the region roundabout that "the Derry Presbyterians would never give up a pint ofdoctrine or a pint of rum. " Their second minister was an old scarredfighter, who had signalized himself in the stout defence of Londonderry, when James II. And his Papists were thundering at its gates. Agreeablyto his death-bed directions, his old fellow-soldiers, in their leatherndoublets and battered steel caps, bore him to his grave, firing over himthe same rusty muskets which had swept down rank after rank of the men ofAmalek at the Derry siege. 

Erelong the celebrated Derry fair was established, in imitation of thosewith which they had been familiar in Ireland. Thither annually came allmanner of horse-jockeys and pedlers, gentlemen and beggars, fortune-tellers, wrestlers, dancers and fiddlers, gay young farmers and buxommaidens. Strong drink abounded. They who had good-naturedly wrestledand joked together in the morning not unfrequently closed the day with afight, 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, riotousmerry-making, --a sort of Protestant carnival, relaxing the grimness ofPuritanism 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, aboutthe middle of the last century. His paternal ancestor, John, younger sonof a Laird of Achenmead, who left the banks of the Tweed for the greenfertility of Northern Ireland, had emigrated to New England some fortyyears before, and, after a rough experience of Indian captivity in thewild woods of Maine, had settled down among his old neighbors inLondonderry. Until nine years of age, Robert never saw a school. He wasa short time under the tuition of an old British soldier, who had strayedinto the settlement after the French war, "at which time, " he says in aletter to a friend, "I learned to repeat the shorter and largercatechisms. These, with the Scripture proofs annexed to them, confirmedme in the orthodoxy of my forefathers, and I hope I shall ever remain anevidence of the truth of what the wise man said, 'Train up a child in theway he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. '" Heafterwards took lessons with one Master McKeen, who used to spend much ofhis time in hunting squirrels with his pupils. He learned to read andwrite; and the old man always insisted that he should have done well atciphering also, had he not fallen in love with Molly Park. At the age ofeighteen he enlisted in the Revolutionary army, and was at the battle ofSaratoga. On his return he married his fair Molly, settled down as afarmer in Windham, formerly a part of Londonderry, and before he wasthirty years of age became an elder in the church, of the creed andobservances of which he was always a zealous and resolute defender. Fromoccasional passages in his poems, it is evident that the instructionswhich he derived from the pulpit were not unlike those which Burnssuggested as needful for the unlucky lad whom he was commending to hisfriend Hamilton:--

 "Ye 'll catechise him ilka quirk, An' shore him weel wi' hell. "

In a humorous poem, entitled Spring's Lament, he thus describes theconsternation produced in the meeting-house at sermon time by a dog, who, in search of his mistress, rattled and scraped at the "west porchdoor:"--

 "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 longrainy days and winter evenings with homely rhyme. Most of his pieceswere written in the dialect of his ancestors, which was well understoodby his neighbors and friends, the only audience upon which he couldventure to calculate. He loved all old things, old language, oldcustoms, 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 sorrowunder domestic calamity, or to give expression to his own. With littleof that delicacy of taste which results from the attrition of fastidiousand refined society, and altogether too truthful and matter-of-fact tocall in the aid of imagination, he describes in the simplest and mostdirect terms the circumstances in which he found himself, and theimpressions which these circumstances had made on his own mind. He callsthings by their right names; no euphuism or transcendentalism, --theplainer and commoner the better. He tells us of his farm life, itsjoys and sorrows, its mirth and care, with no embellishment, with noconcealment of repulsive and ungraceful features. Never having seen anightingale, he makes no attempt to describe the fowl; but he has seenthe 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 thebarn-yard and pigsty. Nothing which was necessary to the comfort andhappiness of his home and avocation was to him "common or unclean. "Take, for instance, the following, from a poem written at the close ofautumn, 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 honestas Nature herself. An old and lonely man looks back upon the young yearsof his wedded life. Can we not look with him? The sunlight of a summermorning 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, andmingling her songs with the pleasant murmurings of gliding water! Alas!as the old man looks, he hears that voice, which perpetually sounds to usall from the past--no more!

Let us look at him in his more genial mood. Take the opening lines ofhis Thanksgiving Day. What a plain, hearty picture of substantialcomfort!

 "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 hisdaughter 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 soberdecorum of his verses. In an epistle to his friend Betton, high sheriffof 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 asad 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 littleaffected 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 andParson McGregore, evidently "birds o' ane feather, " is still inexistence. 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 someidea 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 mynative village, swapping potatoes and onions and pumpkins for tea, coffee, molasses, and, if the truth be told, New England rum. Threescoreyears 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 "allthe airts that blow, " and his white hair flowing in patriarchal glorybeneath his felt hat. A genial, jovial, large-hearted old man, simple asa child, and betraying, neither in look nor manner, that he wasaccustomed to

 "Feed on thoughts which voluntary move Harmonious numbers. "

Peace to him! A score of modern dandies and sentimentalists could illsupply the place of this one honest man. In the ancient burial-ground ofWindham, by the side of his "beloved Molly, " and in view of the oldmeeting-house, there is a mound of earth, where, every spring, greengrasses tremble in the wind and the warm sunshine calls out the flowers. There, gathered like one of his own ripe sheaves, the farmer poet sleepswith his fathers. 

PLACIDO, THE SLAVE POET. (1845. )

I have been greatly interested in the fate of Juan Placido, the blackrevolutionist of Cuba, who was executed in Havana, as the allegedinstigator and leader of an attempted revolt on the part of the slaves inthat 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 treatedhim with great kindness, and taught him to read. When he was twelveyears of age she died, and he fell into other and less compassionatehands. At the age of eighteen, on seeing his mother struck with a heavywhip, he for the first time turned upon his tormentors. To use his ownwords, "I felt the blow in my heart. To utter a loud cry, and from adowncast boy, with the timidity of one weak as a lamb, to become all atoffice like a raging lion, was a thing of a moment. " He was, however, subdued, and the next morning, together with his mother, a tenderlynurtured and delicate woman, severely scourged. On seeing his motherrudely stripped and thrown down upon the ground, he at first with tearsimplored 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 thanalive. 

After suffering all the vicissitudes of slavery, --hunger, nakedness, stripes; after bravely and nobly bearing up against that slow, dreadfulprocess which reduces the man to a thing, the image of God to a piece ofmerchandise, until he had reached his thirty-eighth year, he wasunexpectedly 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 suchother 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 comparisonwith most of the productions of modern Spanish literature. The style isbold, free, energetic. Some of the pieces are sportive and graceful;such is the address to _The Cucuya_, or Cuban firefly. This beautifulinsect is sometimes fastened in tiny nets to the light dresses of theCuban ladies, a custom to which the writer gallantly alludes in thefollowing 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 touchingmanner upon the scenes of his early years. It is addressed to hisbrother Florence, who was a slave near Matanzas, while the author was inthe same condition at Havana. There is a plaintive and melancholysweetness in these lines, a natural pathos, which finds its way to theheart:--

 "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 theplace of his birth. The valley of Matanzas lies beneath him, hallowed bythe 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 theChristian poet. His _Ode to Religion_ contains many admirable lines. Speaking of the martyrs of the early days of Christianity, he saysfinely:--

 "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 theoccasion of Dr. Madden's departure from the island, and presented to thatgentleman. It was never published in Cuba, as its sentiments would havesubjected the author to persecution. It breathes a lofty spirit ofpatriotism, and an indignant sense of the wrongs inflicted upon his race. Withal, it has something of the grandeur and stateliness of the oldSpanish 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 wellknown. Betrayed, and driven into premature collision with theiroppressors, the insurrectionists were speedily crushed into subjection. Placido was arrested, and after a long hearing was condemned to beexecuted, and consigned to the Chapel of the Condemned. 

How far he was implicated in the insurrectionary movement it is nowperhaps impossible to ascertain. The popular voice at Havana pronouncedhim its leader and projector, and as such he was condemned. His ownbitter wrongs; the terrible recollections of his life of servitude; thesad condition of his relatives and race, exposed to scorn, contumely, andthe heavy hand of violence; the impunity with which the most dreadfuloutrages upon the persons of slaves were inflicted, --acting upon a mindfully capable of appreciating the beauty and dignity of freedom, --furnished abundant incentives to an effort for the redemption of his raceand the humiliation of his oppressors. The Heraldo, of Madrid speaks ofhim as "the celebrated poet, a man of great natural genius, and belovedand appreciated by the most respectable young men of Havana. " It accuseshim of wild and ambitious projects, and states that he was intended to bethe chief of the black race after they had thrown off the yoke ofbondage. 

He was executed at Havana in the seventh month, 1844. According to thecustom in Cuba with condemned criminals, he was conducted from prison tothe Chapel of the Doomed. He passed thither with singular composure, amidst a great concourse of people, gracefully saluting his numerousacquaintances. The chapel was hung with black cloth, and dimly lighted. He was seated beside his coffin. Priests in long black robes stoodaround him, chanting in sepulchral voices the service of the dead. It isan ordeal under which the stoutest-hearted and most resolute have beenfound to sink. After enduring it for twenty-four hours he was led out toexecution. He came forth calm and undismayed; holding a crucifix in hishand, he recited in a loud, clear voice a solemn prayer in verse, whichhe had composed amidst the horrors of the Chapel. The following is animperfect rendering of a poem which thrilled the hearts of all who heardit:--

 "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, withhis back to the soldiers. The multitude recollected that in someaffecting lines, written by the conspirator in prison, he had said thatit would be useless to seek to kill him by shooting his body, --that hisheart must be pierced ere it would cease its throbbings. At the lastmoment, just as the soldiers were about to fire, he rose up and gazed foran instant around and above him on the beautiful capital of his nativeland and its sail-flecked bay, on the dense crowds about him, the bluemountains in the distance, and the sky glorious with summer sunshine. "Adios, mundo!" (Farewell, world!) he said calmly, and sat down. Theword was given, and five balls entered his body. Then it was that, amidst the groans and murmurs of the horror-stricken spectators, he roseup once more, and turned his head to the shuddering soldiers, his facewearing an expression of superhuman courage. "Will no one pity me?" hesaid, laying his hand over his heart. "Here, fire here!" While he yetspake, two balls entered his heart, and he fell dead. 

Thus perished the hero poet of Cuba. He has not fallen in vain. Hisgenius and his heroic death will doubtless be regarded by his race asprecious legacies. To the great names of L'Ouverture and Petion thecolored 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. Hiswife was leaning on his arm, --young, loving, and beautiful; the heartthat saw them blessed them. Since that time, we have known him as a mostenergetic and zealous advocate of the anti-slavery cause. He had finetalents, improved by learning and observation, a clear, intensely activeintellect, and a heart full of sympathy and genial humanity. It was withstrange and bitter feelings that we bent over his coffin and looked uponhis still face. The pity which we had felt for him in his longsufferings gave place to indignation against his murderers. Hatefulbeyond the power of expression seemed the tyranny which had murdered himwith the slow torture of the dungeon. May God forgive us, if for themoment we felt like grasping His dread prerogative of vengeance. As wepassed out of the hall, a friend grasped our hand hard, his eye flashingthrough its tears, with a stern reflection of our own emotions, while hewhispered through his pressed lips: "It is enough to turn every anti-slavery heart into steel. " Our blood boiled; we longed to see the wickedapologists of slavery--the blasphemous defenders of it in Church andState--led up to the coffin of our murdered brother, and there made tofeel that their hands had aided in riveting the chain upon those stilllimbs, and in shutting out from those cold lips the free breath ofheaven. 

A long procession followed his remains to their resting-place at MountAuburn. A monument to his memory will be raised in that cemetery, in themidst of the green beauty of the scenery which he loved in life, and sideby side with the honored dead of Massachusetts. Thither let the friendsof humanity go to gather fresh strength from the memory of the martyr. There let the slaveholder stand, and as he reads the record of theenduring marble commune with his own heart, and feel that sorrow whichworketh repentance. 

The young, the beautiful, the brave!--he is safe now from the malice ofhis enemies. Nothing can harm him more. His work for the poor andhelpless was well and nobly done. In the wild woods of Canada, aroundmany a happy fireside and holy family altar, his name is on the lips ofGod's poor. He put his soul in their souls' stead; he gave his life forthose who had no claim on his love save that of human brotherhood. Howpoor, how pitiful and paltry, seem our labors! How small and mean ourtrials and sacrifices! May the spirit of the dead be with us, and infuseinto our hearts something of his own deep sympathy, his hatred ofinjustice, his strong faith and heroic endurance. May that spirit begladdened in its present sphere by the increased zeal and faithfulness ofthe 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 ofthe Massachusetts Historical Society to be present at a special meetingof the Society for the purpose of paying a tribute to the memory of ourlate illustrious associate, Edward Everett. 

It is a matter of deep regret to me that the state of my health will notpermit me to be with you on an occasion of so much interest. 

It is most fitting that the members of the Historical Society ofMassachusetts should add their tribute to those which have been alreadyoffered by all sects, parties, and associations to the name and fame oftheir late associate. He was himself a maker of history, and part andparcel of all the noble charities and humanizing influences of his Stateand time. 

When the grave closed over him who added new lustre to the old andhonored name of Quincy, all eyes instinctively turned to Edward Everettas the last of that venerated class of patriotic civilians who, outlivingall dissent and jealousy and party prejudice, held their reputation bythe secure tenure of the universal appreciation of its worth as a commontreasure of the republic. It is not for me to pronounce his eulogy. Others, better qualified by their intimate acquaintance with him, havedone and will do justice to his learning, eloquence, varied culture, andsocial virtues. My secluded country life has afforded me fewopportunities of personal intercourse with him, while my pronouncedradicalism on the great question which has divided popular feelingrendered our political paths widely divergent. Both of us early saw thedanger which threatened the country. In the language of the prophet, we"saw the sword coming upon the land, " but while he believed in thepossibility of averting it by concession and compromise, I, on thecontrary, as firmly believed that such a course could only strengthen andconfirm what I regarded as a gigantic conspiracy against the rights andliberties, 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 inthe matter of opinion, I am saddened by the reflection that through thevery intensity of my convictions I may have done injustice to the motivesof those with whom I differed. As respects Edward Everett, it seems tome 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 ofconsecration to the union, freedom, and glory of his country, he not onlycommanded respect and reverence, but concentrated upon himself in a mostremarkable degree the love of all loyal and generous hearts. We haveseen, in these years of trial, very great sacrifices offered upon thealtar of patriotism, --wealth, ease, home, love, life itself. But EdwardEverett did more than this: he laid on that altar not only his time, talents, and culture, but his pride of opinion, his long-cherished viewsof policy, his personal and political predilections and prejudices, hisconstitutional fastidiousness of conservatism, and the carefullyelaborated symmetry of his public reputation. With a rare and noblemagnanimity, he met, without hesitation, the demand of the greatoccasion. Breaking away from all the besetments of custom andassociation, he forgot the things that are behind, and, with an eyesingle to present duty, pressed forward towards the mark of the highcalling of Divine Providence in the events of our time. All honor tohim! If we mourn that he is now beyond the reach of our poor humanpraise, 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 ofMassachusetts, his look of health and vigor seemed to promise us manyyears of his wisdom and usefulness. On greeting him I felt impelled toexpress my admiration and grateful appreciation of his patriotic labors;and I shall never forget how readily and gracefully he turned attentionfrom himself to the great cause in which we had a common interest, andexpressed 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 handswere pure. The shadow of suspicion never fell on him. If he erred inhis opinions (and that he did so he had the Christian grace and courageto own), no selfish interest weighed in the scale of his judgment againsttruth. 

As our thoughts follow him to his last resting-place, we are sadlyreminded 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 andtriumph:--

 "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 ofthe great objects of our associate's labors, --the peace and permanentunion of our country, --

I am very truly thy friend. 

LEWIS TAPPAN. (1873. )

One after another, those foremost in the antislavery conflict of the lasthalf century are rapidly passing away. The grave has just closed overall that was mortal of Salmon P. Chase, the kingliest of men, a statesmansecond 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 mightenvy, --and now the telegraph brings us the tidings of the death of LewisTappan, of Brooklyn, so long and so honorably identified with the anti-slavery cause, and with every philanthropic and Christian enterprise. Hewas a native of Massachusetts, born at Northampton in 1788, of Puritanlineage, --one of a family remarkable for integrity, decision ofcharacter, and intellectual ability. At the very outset, in company withhis brother Arthur, he devoted his time, talents, wealth, and socialposition to the righteous but unpopular cause of Emancipation, andbecame, in consequence, a mark for the persecution which followed suchdevotion. His business was crippled, his name cast out as evil, hisdwelling 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 thecheerfullest of men, he was strong where others were weak, hopeful whereothers despaired. He was wise in counsel, and prompt in action; likeTennyson'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 whichformed the American Anti-Slavery Society, where I chanced to sit by himas one of the secretaries. Myself young and inexperienced, I rememberhow profoundly I was impressed by his cool self-possession, clearness ofperception, and wonderful executive ability. Had he devoted himself toparty politics with half the zeal which he manifested in behalf of thosewho had no votes to give and no honors to bestow, he could have reachedthe highest offices in the land. He chose his course, knowing all thathe 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 haspassed onward to the higher life, having outlived here all hatred, abuse, and misrepresentation, having seen the great work of Emancipationcompleted, and white men and black men equal before the law. I saw himfor the last time three years ago, when he was preparing his valuablebiography of his beloved brother Arthur. Age had begun to tell upon hisconstitution, but his intellectual force was not abated. The old, pleasant laugh and playful humor remained. He looked forward to theclose of life hopefully, even cheerfully, as he called to mind the dearfriends who had passed on before him, to await his coming. 

Of the sixty-three signers of the Anti-Slavery Declaration at thePhiladelphia Convention in 1833, probably not more than eight or ten arenow 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, andto mingle his voice of thanksgiving with the bells that rang in the dayof 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 the10th instant, but my heart responds to any testimonial appreciative ofthe intellectual achievements and the noble and manly life of BayardTaylor. More than thirty years have intervened between my first meetinghim in the fresh bloom of his youth and hope and honorable ambition, andmy last parting with him under the elms of Boston Common, after our visitto Richard H. Dana, on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of thathonored father of American poetry, still living to lament the death ofhis younger disciple and friend. How much he has accomplished in theseyears! The most industrious of men, slowly, patiently, under manydisadvantages, 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 satisfiedwith no half tasks. He finished as he went, and always said and did hisbest. 

It is perhaps too early to assign him his place in American literature. His picturesque books of travel, his Oriental lyrics, his Pennsylvanianidyls, his Centennial ode, the pastoral beauty and Christian sweetness ofLars, and the high argument and rhythmic marvel of Deukalion are suretiesof the permanence of his reputation. But at this moment my thoughtsdwell 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 andloved 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 seehis face no more, and long for "the touch of a vanished hand, and thesound 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 thegreat and good man whose memory, outliving all prejudices of creed, sect, and party, is the common legacy of Christendom. As the years go on, thevalue of that legacy will be more and more felt; not so much, perhaps, indoctrine as in spirit, in those utterances of a devout soul which areabove and beyond the affirmation or negation of dogma. 

His ethical severity and Christian tenderness; his hatred of wrong andoppression, with love and pity for the wrong-doer; his noble pleas forself-culture, temperance, peace, and purity; and above all, his preceptand example of unquestioning obedience to duty and the voice of God inhis soul, can never become obsolete. It is very fitting that his memoryshould be especially cherished with that of Hopkins and Berkeley in thebeautiful island to which the common residence of those worthies has lentadditional 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 andSalisbury in the memorial services on the occasion of the death of ourlamented President. But in heart and sympathy I am with you. I sharethe great sorrow which overshadows the land; I fully appreciate theirretrievable loss. But it seems to me that the occasion is one forthankfulness as well as grief. 

Through all the stages of the solemn tragedy which has just closed withthe death of our noblest and best, I have felt that the Divine Providencewas overruling the mighty affliction, --that the patient sufferer atWashington was drawing with cords of sympathy all sections and partiesnearer to each other. And now, when South and North, Democrat andRepublican, Radical and Conservative, lift their voices in one unbrokenaccord of lamentation; when I see how, in spite of the greed of gain, thelust of office, the strifes and narrowness of party politics, the greatheart of the nation proves sound and loyal, I feel a new hope for therepublic, I have a firmer faith in its stability. It is said that no manliveth and no man dieth to himself; and the pure and noble life ofGarfield, and his slow, long martyrdom, so bravely borne in view of all, are, I believe, bearing for us as a people "the peaceable fruits ofrighteousness. " We are stronger, wiser, better, for them. 

With him it is well. His mission fulfilled, he goes to his grave by theLakeside honored and lamented as man never was before. The whole worldmourns him. There is no speech nor language where the voice of hispraise is not heard. About his grave gather, with heads uncovered, thevast brotherhood of man. 

And with us it is well, also. We are nearer a united people than everbefore. We are at peace with all; our future is full of promise; ourindustrial and financial condition is hopeful. God grant that, while ourmaterial interests prosper, the moral and spiritual influence of theoccasion may be permanently felt; that the solemn sacrament of Sorrow, whereof we have been made partakers, may be blest to the promotion of therighteousness 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 deemedthat a brief biographical introduction was necessary; and as a labor oflove 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 citizenof that town. Her brother, Convers Francis, afterwards theologicalprofessor in Harvard College, was some years older than herself, andassisted her in her early home studies, though, with the perversity of anelder brother, he sometimes mystified her in answering her questions. Once, when she wished to know what was meant by Milton's "raven down ofdarkness, " which was made to smile when smoothed, he explained that itwas only the fur of a black cat, which sparkled when stroked! Later inlife this brother wrote of her, "She has been a dear, good sister to mewould that I had been half as good a brother to her. " Her earliestteacher 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 herdrinking out of the nose of her tea-kettle. Her school was in herbedroom, always untidy, and she was a constant chewer of tobacco but thechildren were fond of her, and Maria and her father always carried her agood Sunday dinner. Thomas W. Higginson, in _Eminent Women of the Age_, mentions in this connection that, according to an established custom, onthe night before Thanksgiving "all the humble friends of the Francishousehold--Marm Betty, the washerwoman, wood-sawyer, and journeymen, sometwenty 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-fashionedkitchen, and went away loaded with crackers and bread and pies, notforgetting 'turnovers' for the children. Such plain application of thedoctrine that it is more blessed to give than receive may have done moreto mould the character of Lydia Maria Child of maturer years than all thefaithful labors of good Dr. Osgood, to whom she and her brother used torepeat the Assembly's catechism once a month. "

Her education was limited to the public schools, with the exception ofone year at a private seminary in her native town. From a note by herbrother, Dr. Francis, we learn that when twelve years of age she went toNorridgewock, Maine, where her married sister resided. At Dr. Brown's, in Skowhegan, she first read _Waverley_. She was greatly excited, andexclaimed, as she laid down the book, "Why cannot I write a novel?"She remained in Norridgewock and vicinity for several years, and on herreturn to Massachusetts took up her abode with her brother at Watertown. He encouraged her literary tastes, and it was in his study that shecommenced her first story, _Hobomok_, which she published in the twenty-first year of her age. The success it met with induced her to give tothe public, soon after, _The Rebels: a Tale of the Revolution_, which wasat once received into popular favor, and ran rapidly through severaleditions. Then followed in close succession _The Mother's Book_, runningthrough eight American editions, twelve English, and one German, _TheGirl's Book_, the _History of Women_, and the _Frugal Housewife_, ofwhich thirty-five editions were published. Her _Juvenile Miscellany_ wascommenced in 1826. 

It is not too much to say that half a century ago she was the mostpopular literary woman in the United States. She had publishedhistorical novels of unquestioned power of description andcharacterization, and was widely and favorably known as the editor of the_Juvenile Miscellany_, which was probably the first periodical in theEnglish tongue devoted exclusively to children, and to which she was byfar the largest contributor. Some of the tales and poems from her penwere extensively copied and greatly admired. It was at this period thatthe _North American Review_, the highest literary authority of thecountry, said of her, "We are not sure that any woman of our countrycould outrank Mrs. Child. This lady has been long before the public asan author with much success. And she well deserves it, for in all herworks nothing can be found which does not commend itself, by its tone ofhealthy morality and good sense. Few female writers, if any, have donemore or better things for our literature in the lighter or graverdepartments. "

Comparatively young, she had placed herself in the front rank of Americanauthorship. Her books and her magazine had a large circulation, and wereaffording her a comfortable income, at a time when the rewards ofauthorship were uncertain and at the best scanty. 

In 1828 she married David Lee Child, Esq. , a young and able lawyer, andtook up her residence in Boston. In 1831-32 both became deeplyinterested in the subject of slavery, through the writings and personalinfluence of William Lloyd Garrison. Her husband, a member of theMassachusetts legislature and editor of the _Massachusetts Journal_, had, at an earlier date, denounced the project of the dismemberment of Mexicofor the purpose of strengthening and extending American slavery. He wasone of the earliest members of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, andhis outspoken hostility to the peculiar institution greatly andunfavorably affected his interests as a lawyer. In 1832 he addressed aseries of able letters on slavery and the slave-trade to Edward S. Abdy, a prominent English philanthropist. In 1836 he published in Philadelphiaten strongly written articles on the same subject. He visited Englandand France in 1837, and while in Paris addressed an elaborate memoir tothe Societe pour l'Abolition d'Esclavage, and a paper on the same subjectto the editor of the _Eclectic Review_, in London. To his facts andarguments John Quincy Adams was much indebted in the speeches which hedelivered in Congress on the Texas question. 

In 1833 the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed by a convention inPhiladelphia. Its numbers were small, and it was everywhere spokenagainst. It was at this time that Lydia Maria Child startled the countryby the publication of her noble _Appeal in Behalf of that Class ofAmericans called Africans_. It is quite impossible for any one of thepresent generation to imagine the popular surprise and indignation whichthe book called forth, or how entirely its author cut herself off fromthe favor and sympathy of a large number of those who had previouslydelighted to do her honor. Social and literary circles, which had beenproud of her presence, closed their doors against her. The sale of herbooks, the subscriptions to her magazine, fell off to a ruinous extent. She knew all she was hazarding, and made the great sacrifice, preparedfor all the consequences which followed. In the preface to her book shesays, "I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I haveundertaken; 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 Ihave not even the most transient interest; but this book will be abroadon its mission of humanity long after the hand that wrote it is minglingwith the dust. Should it be the means of advancing, even one singlehour, the inevitable progress of truth and justice, I would not exchangethe consciousness for all Rothschild's wealth or Sir Walter's fame. "

Thenceforth her life was a battle; a constant rowing hard against thestream of popular prejudice and hatred. And through it all--pecuniaryprivation, loss of friends and position, the painfulness of beingsuddenly thrust from "the still air of delightful studies" into thebitterest and sternest controversy of the age--she bore herself withpatience, fortitude, and unshaken reliance upon the justice and ultimatetriumph of the cause she had espoused. Her pen was never idle. Whereverthere was a brave word to be spoken, her voice was heard, and neverwithout effect. It is not exaggeration to say that no man or woman atthat period rendered more substantial service to the cause of freedom, ormade such a "great renunciation" in doing it. 

A practical philanthropist, she had the courage of her convictions, andfrom the first was no mere closet moralist or sentimental bewailer of thewoes of humanity. She was the Samaritan stooping over the wounded Jew. She calmly and unflinchingly took her place by the side, of the despisedslave and free man of color, and in word and act protested against thecruel prejudice which shut out its victims from the rights and privilegesof American citizens. Her philanthropy had no taint of fanaticism;throughout the long struggle, in which she was a prominent actor, shekept her fine sense of humor, good taste, and sensibility to thebeautiful 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 anespecial manner, she was by no means a reformer of one idea, but herinterest was manifested in every question affecting the welfare ofhumanity. Peace, temperance, education, prison reform, and equality ofcivil rights, irrespective of sex, engaged her attention. Under all thedisadvantages of her estrangement from popular favor, her charming Greekromance of _Philothea_ and her _Lives of Madame Roland_ and the _Baronessde Stael_ proved that her literary ability had lost nothing of itsstrength, and that the hand which penned such terrible rebukes had stillkept its delicate touch, and gracefully yielded to the inspiration offancy and art. While engaged with her husband in the editorialsupervision of the _Anti-Slavery Standard_, she wrote her admirable_Letters from New York_; humorous, eloquent, and picturesque, but stillhumanitarian in tone, which extorted the praise of even a pro-slaverycommunity. Her great work, in three octavo volumes, _The Progress ofReligious Ideas_, belongs, in part, to that period. It is an attempt torepresent in a candid, unprejudiced manner the rise and progress of thegreat religions of the world, and their ethical relations to each other. She availed herself of, and carefully studied, the authorities at thattime accessible, and the result is creditable to her scholarship, industry, and conscientiousness. If, in her desire to do justice to thereligions of Buddha and Mohammed, in which she has been followed byMaurice, Max Muller, and Dean Stanley, she seems at times to dwell uponthe best and overlook the darker features of those systems, herconcluding reflections should vindicate her from the charge ofundervaluing the Christian faith, or of lack of reverent appreciation ofits founder. In the closing chapter of her work, in which the largecharity and broad sympathies of her nature are manifest, she thus turnswith words of love, warm from the heart, to Him whose Sermon on the Mountincludes most that is good and true and vital in the religions andphilosophies of the world:--

"It was reserved for Him to heal the brokenhearted, to preach a gospel tothe poor, to say, 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she lovedmuch. ' Nearly two thousand years have passed away since these words oflove 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 toman; but, above all, I thank Thee for Him, thy beloved Son! Pure lilyblossom of the centuries, taking root in the lowliest depths, andreceiving the light and warmth of heaven in its golden heart! All thatthe pious have felt, all that poets have said, all that artists havedone, with their manifold forms of beauty, to represent the ministry ofJesus, are but feeble expressions of the great debt we owe Him who iseven now curing the lame, restoring sight to the blind, and raising thedead 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. Herportrayal of this extraordinary man, so brave, so humorous, so tender andfaithful to his convictions of duty, is one of the most readable piecesof biography in English literature. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in adiscriminating paper published in 1869, speaks of her eight years'sojourn in New York as the most interesting and satisfactory period ofher whole life. "She was placed where her sympathetic nature foundabundant outlet and occupation. Dwelling in a house wheredisinterestedness and noble labor were as daily breath, she had greatopportunities. There was no mere alms-giving; but sin and sorrow mustbe brought home to the fireside and the heart; the fugitive slave, thedrunkard, 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 regardedher only from a literary point of view. She was wise in counsel; and menlike Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, Salmon P. Chase, and Governor Andrewavailed themselves of her foresight and sound judgment of men andmeasures. Her pen was busy with correspondence, and whenever a true manor a good cause needed encouragement, she was prompt to give it. Herdonations for benevolent causes and beneficent reforms were constant andliberal; and only those who knew her intimately could understand thecheerful and unintermitted self-denial which alone enabled her to makethem. She did her work as far as possible out of sight, without noise orpretension. Her time, talents, and money were held not as her own, but atrust from the Eternal Father for the benefit of His suffering children. Her plain, cheap dress was glorified by the generous motive for which shewore it. Whether in the crowded city among the sin-sick and starving, oramong the poor and afflicted in the neighborhood of her country home, nostory of suffering and need, capable of alleviation, ever reached herwithout immediate sympathy and corresponding action. Lowell, one of herwarmest admirers, in his _Fable for Critics_ has beautifully portrayedher 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 residencein the rural town of Wayland, Mass. Their house, plain andunpretentious, had a wide and pleasant outlook; a flower garden, carefully tended by her own hands, in front, and on the side a fruitorchard and vegetable garden, under the special care of her husband. Thehouse was always neat, with some appearance of unostentatious decoration, evincing at once the artistic taste of the hostess and the conscientiouseconomy which forbade its indulgence to any great extent. Her home wassomewhat apart from the lines of rapid travel, and her hospitality was ina great measure confined to old and intimate friends, while her visits tothe city were brief and infrequent. A friend of hers, who had ampleopportunities for a full knowledge of her home-life, says, "The domestichappiness of Mr. And Mrs. Child seemed to me perfect. Their sympathies, their admiration of all things good, and their hearty hatred of allthings mean and evil were in entire unison. Mr. Child shared his wife'senthusiasms, and was very proud of her. Their affection, never paraded, was always manifest. After Mr. Child's death, Mrs. Child, in speaking ofthe future life, said, 'I believe it would be of small value to me if Iwere not united to him. '"

In this connection I cannot forbear to give an extract from somereminiscences of her husband, which she left among her papers, which, better than any words of mine, will convey an idea of their simple andbeautiful 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 servingeach other, and dependent upon each other for intellectual companionship. I always depended on his richly stored mind, which was able and ready tofurnish needed information on any subject. He was my walking dictionaryof many languages, my Universal Encyclopaedia. 

"In his old age he was as affectionate and devoted as when the lover ofmy youth; nay, he manifested even more tenderness. He was oftensinging, --

 "'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 myhead and murmur, 'Carum caput. ' . . . But what I remember with themost tender gratitude is his uniform patience and forbearance with myfaults. . . . He never would see anything but the bright side of mycharacter. He always insisted upon thinking that whatever I said was thewisest and the wittiest, and that whatever I did was the best. Thesimplest 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 asCroesus, ' I answered, 'You are Croesus, for you are king of Lydia. ' Howoften he used to quote that!

"His mind was unclouded to the last. He had a passion for philology, andonly eight hours before he passed away he was searching out thederivation of a word. "

Her well-stored mind and fine conversational gifts made her companyalways desirable. No one who listened to her can forget the earnesteloquence with which she used to dwell upon the evidences, from history, tradition, and experience, of the superhuman and supernatural; or withwhat eager interest she detected in the mysteries of the old religions ofthe world the germs of a purer faith and a holier hope. She loved tolisten, 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 ourFather has nowhere left his children without some witness of Himself. She loved the old mystics, and lingered with curious interest andsympathy over the writings of Bohme, Swedenborg, Molinos, and Woolman. Yet this marked speculative tendency seemed not in the slightest degreeto affect her practical activities. Her mysticism and realism ran inclose parallel lines without interfering with each other. 

With strong rationalistic tendencies from education and conviction, shefound herself in spiritual accord with the pious introversion of Thomasa Kempis and Madame Guion. She was fond of Christmas Eve stories, ofwarnings, signs, and spiritual intimations, her half belief in whichsometimes 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 thatthe misguided but noble old man lay desperately wounded in prison, aloneand unfriended, she wrote him a letter, under cover of one to GovernorWise, asking permission to go and nurse and care for him. The expectedarrival of Captain Brown's wife made her generous offer unnecessary. Theprisoner wrote her, thanking her, and asking her to help his family, arequest with which she faithfully complied. With his letter came onefrom Governor Wise, in courteous reproval of her sympathy for John Brown. To this she responded in an able and effective manner. Her reply foundits 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 theinfamous Fugitive Slave Law, wrote her a vehement letter, commencing withthreats of future damnation, and ending with assuring her that "noSoutherner, after reading her letter to Governor Wise, ought to read aline of her composition, or touch a magazine which bore her name in itslist of contributors. " To this she wrote a calm, dignified reply, declining to dwell on the fierce invectives of her assailant, and wishingher well here and hereafter. She would not debate the specific merits ordemerits of a man whose body was in charge of the courts, and whosereputation was sure to be in charge of posterity. "Men, " she continues, "are of small consequence in comparison with principles, and theprinciple for which John Brown died is the question at issue between us. "These letters were soon published in pamphlet form, and had the immensecirculation of 300, 000 copies. 

In 1867 she published _A Romance of the Republic_, a story of the days ofslavery; powerful in its delineation of some of the saddest as well asthe most dramatic conditions of master and slave in the Southern States. Her husband, who had been long an invalid, died in 1874. After his deathher home, in winter especially, became a lonely one, and in 1877 shebegan to spend the cold months in Boston. 

Her last publication was in 1878, when her _Aspirations of the World_, abook of selections, on moral and religious subjects, from the literatureof all nations and times, was given to the public. The introduction, occupying fifty pages, shows, at threescore and ten, her mental vigorunabated, and is remarkable for its wise, philosophic tone and felicityof diction. It has the broad liberality of her more elaborate work onthe same subject, and in the mellow light of life's sunset her words seemtouched with a tender pathos and beauty. "All we poor mortals, " shesays, "are groping our way through paths that are dim with shadows; andwe are all striving, with steps more or less stumbling, to follow someguiding star. As we travel on, beloved companions of our pilgrimagevanish from our sight, we know not whither; and our bereaved hearts uttercries of supplication for more light. We know not where HermesTrismegistus lived, or who he was; but his voice sounds plaintivelyhuman, 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 oursorrows and limitations, in our aspirations and hopes, surely we oughtnot to be separated in our sympathies. However various the names bywhich we call the Heavenly Father, if they are set to music by brotherlylove, they can all be sung together. "

Her interest in the welfare of the emancipated class at the South and ofthe ill-fated Indians of the West remained unabated, and she watched withgreat satisfaction the experiment of the education of both classes inGeneral Armstrong's institution at Hampton, Va. She omitted noopportunity of aiding the greatest social reform of the age, which aimsto make the civil and political rights of women equal to those of men. Her sympathies, to the last, went out instinctively to the wronged andweak. She used to excuse her vehemence in this respect by laughinglyquoting 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 followingimpressions of her life in that place:--

"On one of the last beautiful Indian summer afternoons, closing the pastyear, I drove through Wayland, and was anew impressed with the charm ofour friend's simple existence there. The tender beauty of the fadingyear seemed a reflection of her own gracious spirit; the lovely autumn ofher life, whose golden atmosphere the frosts of sorrow and advancing agehad only clarified and brightened. 

"My earliest recollection of Mrs. Child in Wayland is of a gentle faceleaning from the old stage window, smiling kindly down on the childishfigures beneath her; and from that moment her gracious motherly presencehas been closely associated with the charm of rural beauty in thatvillage, which until very lately has been quite apart from the line oftravel, and unspoiled by the rush and worry of our modern steam-car modeof living. 

"Mrs. Child's life in the place made, indeed, an atmosphere of its own, abenison of peace and good-will, which was a noticeable feature to all whowere 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 whichcould be chronicled of her residence there, were we permitted to do so;and numberless are the lives that have gathered their onward impulse fromher helping hand. But it was all a confidence which she hardly betrayedto her inmost self, and I will not recall instances which might be hergrandest eulogy. Her monument is builded in the hearts which knew herbenefactions, and it will abide with 'the power that makes forrighteousness. '

"One of the pleasantest elements of her life in Wayland was the highregard she won from the people of the village, who, proud of her literaryattainment, valued yet more the noble womanhood of the friend who dweltso modestly among them. The grandeur of her exalted personal characterhad, in part, eclipsed for them the qualities which made her fame withthe 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 wellsymbolize her gentle spirit, is a sacred pool to her townsfolk. Butperhaps the most fitting similitude of her life in Wayland was the quietflow of the river, whose gentle curves make green her meadows, but whosepowerful energy, joining the floods from distant mountains, moves, withresistless might, the busy shuttles of a hundred mills. She was tootruthful to affect to welcome unwarrantable invaders of her peace, but noweary traveller on life's hard ways ever applied to her in vain. Thelittle garden plot before her door was a sacred enclosure, not to berudely intruded upon; but the flowers she tended with maternal care wereno selfish possession, for her own enjoyment only, and many are the livestheir sweetness has gladdened forever. So she lived among a singularlypeaceful and intelligent community as one of themselves, industrious, wise, and happy; with a frugality whose motive of wider benevolence wasin itself a homily and a benediction. "

In my last interview with her, our conversation, as had often happenedbefore, turned upon the great theme of the future life. She spoke, as Iremember, calmly and not uncheerfully, but with the intense earnestnessand reverent curiosity of one who felt already the shadow of the unseenworld resting upon her. 

Her death was sudden and quite unexpected. For some months she had beentroubled with a rheumatic affection, but it was by no means regarded asserious. A friend, who visited her a few days before her departure, found her in a comfortable condition, apart from lameness. She talked ofthe coming election with much interest, and of her plans for the winter. On the morning of her death (October 20, 1880) she spoke of feelingremarkably well. Before leaving her chamber she complained of severepain in the region of the heart. Help was called by her companion, butonly reached her to witness her quiet passing away. 

The funeral was, as befitted one like her, plain and simple. Many of herold friends were present, and Wendell Phillips paid an affecting andeloquent tribute to his old friend and anti-slavery coadjutor. Hereferred to the time when she accepted, with serene self-sacrifice, theobloquy which her _Appeal_ had brought upon her, and noted, as one of themany ways in which popular hatred was manifested, the withdrawal from herof the privileges of the Boston Athenaeum. Her pallbearers were elderly, plain farmers in the neighborhood; and, led by the old white-hairedundertaker, 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 herintimate friends knew, always delighted by the sight of rainbows, andused to so arrange prismatic glasses as to throw the colors on the wallsof her room. Just after her body was consigned to the earth, amagnificent 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 largecorrespondence. They have been gathered up and arranged by the hands ofdear relatives and friends as a fitting memorial of one who wrote fromthe heart as well as the head, and who held her literary reputationsubordinate always to her philanthropic aim to lessen the sum of humansuffering, and to make the world better for her living. If theysometimes show the heat and impatience of a zealous reformer, they maywell be pardoned in consideration of the circumstances under which theywere written, and of the natural indignation of a generous nature in viewof wrong and oppression. If she touched with no very reverent hand thegarment hem of dogmas, and held to the spirit of Scripture rather thanits letter, it must be remembered that she lived in a time when the Biblewas cited in defence of slavery, as it is now in Utah in support ofpolygamy; and she may well be excused for some degree of impatience withthose who, in the tithing of mint and anise and cummin, neglected theweightier matters of the law of justice and mercy. 

Of the men and women directly associated with the beloved subject of thissketch, but few are now left to recall her single-hearted devotion toapprehended duty, her unselfish generosity, her love of all beauty andharmony, and her trustful reverence, free from pretence and cant. It isnot unlikely that the surviving sharers of her love and friendship mayfeel the inadequateness of this brief memorial, for I close it with theconsciousness of having failed to fully delineate the picture which mymemory holds of a wise and brave, but tender and loving woman, of whom itmight 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 wisephilosopher, if Dr. Holmes does not, at the present time, hold in popularestimation the first place in American literature, his rare versatilityis the cause. In view of the inimitable prose writer, we forget thepoet; in our admiration of his melodious verse, we lose sight of _ElsieVenner_ and _The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_. We laugh over his witand 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 equalledby that of Sterne's sick Lieutenant. He is Montaigne and Bacon under onehat. His varied qualities would suffice for the mental furnishing ofhalf a dozen literary specialists. 

To those who have enjoyed the privilege of his intimate acquaintance, theman himself is more than the author. His genial nature, entire freedomfrom jealousy or envy, quick tenderness, large charity, hatred of sham, pretence, and unreality, and his reverent sense of the eternal andpermanent have secured for him something more and dearer than literaryrenown, --the love of all who know him. I might say much more: I couldnot 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 thecommittee to be present at the unveiling of the bust of Longfellow on the27th instant, or to write anything worthy of the occasion in metricalform. 

The gift of the Westminster Abbey committee cannot fail to add anotherstrong tie of sympathy between two great English-speaking peoples. Andnever was gift more fitly bestowed. The city of Portland--the poet'sbirthplace, "beautiful for situation, " looking from its hills on thescenery he loved so well, Deering's Oaks, the many-islanded bay and farinland mountains, delectable in sunset--needed this sculpturedrepresentation of her illustrious son, and may well testify her joy andgratitude at its reception, and repeat in so doing the words of theHebrew 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 the250th anniversary of the settlement of old Newbury. Although I canhardly call myself a son of the ancient town, my grandmother, SarahGreenleaf, of blessed memory, was its daughter, and I may therefore claimto be its grandson. Its genial and learned historian, Joshua Coffin, wasmy first school-teacher, and all my life I have lived in sight of itsgreen hills and in hearing of its Sabbath bells. Its wealth of naturalbeauty has not been left unsung by its own poets, Hannah Gould, Mrs. Hopkins, George Lunt, and Edward A. Washburn, while Harriet PrescottSpofford'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 itsold worthies, whose descendants have helped to people a continent, andwho have carried the name and memories of their birthplace to the Mexicangulf and across the Rocky Mountains to the shores of the Pacific. Theywere the best and selectest of Puritanism, brave, honest, God-fearing menand women; and if their creed in the lapse of time has lost something ofits vigor, the influence of their ethical righteousness still endures. The prophecy of Samuel Sewall that Christians should be found in Newburyso long as pigeons shall roost on its oaks and Indian corn grows inOldtown fields remains still true, and we trust will always remain so. Yet, as of old, the evil personage sometimes intrudes himself intocompany too good for him. It was said in the witchcraft trials of 1692that Satan baptized his converts at Newbury Falls, the scene, probably, of one of Hawthorne's weird _Twice Told Tales_; and there is a traditionthat, in the midst of a heated controversy between one of Newbury'spainful ministers and his deacon, who (anticipating Garrison by acentury) ventured to doubt the propriety of clerical slaveholding, theAdversary made his appearance in the shape of a black giant stalkingthrough Byfield. It was never, I believe, definitely settled whether hewas drawn there by the minister's zeal in defence of slavery or thedeacon's irreverent denial of the minister's right and duty to curseCanaan in the person of his negro. 

Old Newbury has sometimes been spoken of as ultra-conservative andhostile to new ideas and progress, but this is not warranted by itshistory. More than two centuries ago, when Major Pike, just across theriver, stood up and denounced in open town meeting the law againstfreedom of conscience and worship, and was in consequence fined andoutlawed, some of Newbury's best citizens stood bravely by him. The towntook no part in the witchcraft horror, and got none of its old women andtown charges hanged for witches, "Goody" Morse had the spirit rappings inher house two hundred years earlier than the Fox girls did, and somewhatlater a Newbury minister, in wig and knee-buckles, rode, Bible in hand, over to Hampton to lay a ghost who had materialized himself and wasstamping up and down stairs in his military boots. 

Newbury's ingenious citizen, Jacob Perkins, in drawing out diseases withhis metallic tractors, was quite as successful as modern "faith and mind"doctors. The Quakers, whipped at Hampton on one hand and at Salem on theother, went back and forth unmolested in Newbury, for they could make noimpression on its iron-clad orthodoxy. Whitefield set the example, sincefollowed by the Salvation Army, of preaching in its streets, and now liesburied under one of its churches with almost the honors of sainthood. William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newbury. The town must be regarded asthe Alpha and Omega of anti-slavery agitation, beginning with itsabolition deacon and ending with Garrison. Puritanism, here aselsewhere, had a flavor of radicalism; it had its humorous side, and itsministers did not hesitate to use wit and sarcasm, like Elijah before thepriests of Baal. As, for instance, the wise and learned clergyman, Puritan of the Puritans, beloved and reverenced by all, who has just laiddown the burden of his nearly one hundred years, startled and shamed hisbrother ministers who were zealously for the enforcement of the FugitiveSlave Law, by preparing for them a form of prayer for use while engagedin catching runaway slaves. 

I have, I fear, dwelt too long upon the story and tradition of the oldtown, which will doubtless be better told by the orator of the day. Thetheme is to me full of interest. Among the blessings which I wouldgratefully own is the fact that my lot has been cast in the beautifulvalley 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 townwill unite: Joshua Coffin, historian of Newbury, teacher, scholar, andantiquarian, and one of the earliest advocates of slave emancipation. Mayhis memory be kept green, to use the words of Judge Sewall, "so long asPlum 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 receivingyour carefully prepared and beautiful Haverhill Academy Album, containingthe photographs of a large number of my old friends and schoolmates. Iknow of nothing which could have given me more pleasure. If the facesrepresented are not so unlined and ruddy as those which greeted eachother 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 beenhard with us, but has touched us gently. The hieroglyphics he has tracedupon us may, indeed, reveal something of the cares, trials, and sorrowsincident to humanity, but they also tell of generous endeavor, beneficentlabor, developed character, and the slow, sure victories of patience andfortitude. I turn to them with the proud satisfaction of feeling that Ihave been highly favored in my early companions, and that I have not beendisappointed in my school friendships. The two years spent at theacademy I have always reckoned among the happiest of my life, though Ihave 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 witnesswonderful changes since we conned our lessons together. How little wethen dreamed of the steam car, electric telegraph, and telephone! Westudied the history and geography of a world only half explored. Ourcountry was an unsolved mystery. "The Great American Desert" was anawful blank on our school maps. We have since passed through theterrible ordeal of civil war, which has liberated enslaved millions, andmade the union of the States an established fact, and no longer adoubtful theory. If life is to be measured not so much by years as bythoughts, emotion, knowledge, action, and its opportunity of a freeexercise of all our powers and faculties, we may congratulate ourselvesupon really outliving the venerable patriarchs. For myself, I would notexchange 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 haveinterested themselves in the preparation of the Academy Album, and assureyou 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 asurprise, and in his case I was not prepared for it by knowing of anyserious failure of his health. With the possible exception of Lowell andMatthew Arnold, he was the ablest critical essayist of his time, and theplace he has left will not be readily filled. 

Scarcely inferior to Macaulay in brilliance of diction and graphicportraiture, he was freer from prejudice and passion, and more loyal tothe truth of fact and history. He was a thoroughly honest man. He wrotewith conscience always at his elbow, and never sacrificed his realconvictions for the sake of epigram and antithesis. He instinctivelytook the right side of the questions that came before him for decision, even when by so doing he ranked himself with the unpopular minority. Hehad the manliest hatred of hypocrisy and meanness; but if his languagehad at times the severity of justice, it was never merciless. He "setdown naught in malice. "

Never blind to faults, he had a quick and sympathetic eye for any realexcellence or evidence of reserved strength in the author underdiscussion. 

He was a modest man, sinking his own personality out of sight, and healways seemed to me more interested in the success of others than in hisown. Many of his literary contemporaries have had reason to thank himnot only for his cordial recognition and generous praise, but for thefirm and yet kindly hand which pointed out deficiencies and errors oftaste and judgment. As one of those who have found pleasure and profitin his writings in the past, I would gratefully commend them to thegeneration which survives him. His _Literature of the Age of Elizabeth_is deservedly popular, but there are none of his Essays which will notrepay a careful study. "What works of Mr. Baxter shall I read?" askedBoswell of Dr. Johnson. "Read any of them, " was the answer, "for theyare all good. "

He will have an honored place in the history of American literature. ButI cannot now dwell upon his authorship while thinking of him as thebeloved member of a literary circle now, alas sadly broken. I recall thewise, genial companion and faithful friend of nearly half a century, thememory 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 awayon the right hand and the left with increasing frequency, until we arecompelled to ask with Wordsworth, --

 "Who next shall fall and disappear?"

But in the case of him who has just passed from us, we have thesatisfaction of knowing that his life-work has been well and faithfullydone, 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 onthe slavery question is that in which an attempt is made to hold up toscorn 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 smallbreeder of human cattle in Virginia and Maryland who can spell the nameof O'Connell in his newspaper, these republican brokers in blood fear andhate the eloquent Irishman. But their contempt, forsooth! Talk of thesheep-stealer's contempt for the officer of justice who nails his ears tothe pillory, or sets the branding iron on his forehead!

After denouncing the abolitionists for gratuitously republishing theadvertisements for runaway slaves, the Kentucky orator says:--

"And like a notorious agitator upon another theatre, they would hunt downand proscribe from the pale of civilized society the inhabitants of thatentire section. Allow me, Mr. President, to say that whilst I recognizein the justly wounded feelings of the Minister of the United States atthe Court of St. James much to excuse the notice which he was provoked totake of that agitator, in my humble opinion he would better haveconsulted the dignity of his station and of his country in treating himwith contemptuous silence. He would exclude us from European society, hewho himself, can only obtain a contraband admission, and is received withscornful repugnance into it! If he be no more desirous of our societythan we are of his, he may rest assured that a state of perpetual non-intercourse will exist between us. Yes, sir, I think the AmericanMinister would best have pursued the dictates of true dignity byregarding the language of the member of the British House of Commons asthe malignant ravings of the plunderer of his own country, and thelibeller of a foreign and kindred people. "

The recoil of this attack "followed hard upon" the tones ofcongratulation and triumph of partisan editors at the consummate skilland dexterity with which their candidate for the presidency had absolvedhimself from the suspicion of abolitionism, and by a master-stroke ofpolicy secured the confidence of the slaveholding section of theUnion. But the late Whig defeat in New York has put an end to thesepremature rejoicings. "The speech of Mr. Clay in reference to the Irishagitator has been made use of against us with no small success, " say theNew York papers. "They failed, " says the Daily Evening Star, "toconvince the Irish voters that Daniel O'Connell was the 'plunderer of hiscountry, ' 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 nosmall degree of alarm among the adherents of the Kentucky orator. Inthis city, the delicate _Philadelphia Gazette_ comes magnanimously to theaid 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 wayof the man's "impudence" and "falsehoods" and "cowardice, " etc. ; andfinally, with a modesty and gravity which we cannot but admire, assuresus 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 meetingin Chestnut Street a committee was appointed to collect, collate, andpublish the correspondence between Andrew Stevenson and O'Connell, and somuch 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 hashad the impudence to intermeddle with the "patriarchal institutions" ofour country, and with the "domestic relations" of Kentucky and Virginiaslave-traders. 

We wait impatiently for the fruits of the labors of this sagaciouscommittee. We should like to see those eloquent and thrilling appeals tothe sense of shame and justice and honor of America republished. Weshould like to see if any Irishman, not wholly recreant to the interestsand welfare of the Green Island of his birth, will in consequence of thispublication give his vote to the slanderer of Ireland's best and noblestchampion. 

But who is Daniel O'Connell? "A demagogue--a ruffian agitator!" say theTory journals of Great Britain, quaking meantime with awe andapprehension before the tremendous moral and political power which he iswielding, --a power at this instant mightier than that of any potentate ofEurope. "A blackguard"--a fellow who "obtains contraband admission intoEuropean society"--a "malignant libeller"--a "plunderer of his country"--a man whose "wind should be stopped, " say the American slaveholders, andtheir apologists, Clay, Stevenson, Hamilton, and the PhiladelphiaGazette, and the Democratic Whig Association. 

But who is Daniel O'Connell? Ireland now does justice to him, the worldwill do so hereafter. No individual of the present age has done more forhuman liberty. His labors to effect the peaceable deliverance of his ownoppressed countrymen, and to open to the nations of Europe a new andpurer and holier pathway to freedom unstained with blood and unmoistenedby tears, and his mighty instrumentality in the abolition of Britishcolonial slavery, have left their impress upon the age. They will beremembered and felt beneficially long after the miserable slanders ofTory envy and malignity at home, and the clamors of slaveholders abroad, detected in their guilt, and writhing in the gaze of Christendom, shallhave perished forever, --when the Clays and Calhouns, the Peels andWellingtons, the opponents of reform in Great Britain and the enemies ofslave emancipation in the United States, shall be numbered with those whoin all ages, to use the words of the eloquent Lamartine, have "sinnedagainst the Holy Ghost in opposing the improvement of things, --in anegotistical and stupid attempt to draw back the moral and social worldwhich God and nature are urging forward. "

The character and services of O'Connell have never been fully appreciatedin this country. Engrossed in our own peculiar interests, and in theplenitude of our self-esteem; believing that "we are the people, and thatwisdom will perish with us, " that all patriotism and liberality offeeling are confined to our own territory, we have not followed theuntitled Barrister of Derrynane Abbey, step by step, through thedevelopment of one of the noblest experiments ever made for the causeof liberty and the welfare of man. 

The revolution which O'Connell has already partially effected in hisnative land, and which, from the evident signs of cooperation in Englandand Scotland, seems not far from its entire accomplishment, will form anew era in the history of the civilized world. Heretofore the patriothas relied more upon physical than moral means for the regeneration ofhis country and its redemption from oppression. His revolutions, howeverpure in principle, have ended in practical crime. The great truth wasyet to be learned that brute force is incompatible with a pure love offreedom, inasmuch as it is in itself an odious species of tyranny--therelic of an age of slavery and barbarism--the common argument ofdespotism--a game

 "which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at. "

But the revolution in which O'Connell is engaged, although directedagainst the oppression of centuries, relies with just confidence upon theunited moral energies of the people: a moral victory of reason overprejudice, of justice over oppression; the triumph of intellectual energywhere the brute appeal to arms had miserably failed; the vindication ofman's eternal rights, not by the sword fleshed in human hearts, but byweapons 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, thistriumphant reliance upon moral and intellectual power for the reform ofpolitical abuses, for the overthrowing of tyranny and the pulling down ofthe strongholds of arbitrary power. The emancipation of the Catholic ofGreat Britain from the thrall of a century, in 1829, prepared the way forthe bloodless triumph of English reform in 1832. The CatholicAssociation was the germ of those political unions which compelled, bytheir mighty yet peaceful influence, the King of England to yieldsubmissively 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 totheir centre, yet polluted with no blood and sullied by no crime, wereeffected by the salutary agitations of the public mind, first set inmotion by the masterspirit of O'Connell, and spreading from around him toevery portion of the British empire like the undulations from thedisturbed centre of a lake. 

The Catholic question has been but imperfectly understood in thiscountry. Many have allowed their just disapprobation of the Catholicreligion to degenerate into a most unwarrantable prejudice against itsconscientious followers. The cruel persecutions of the dissenters fromthe Romish Church, the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day, the horrors ofthe Inquisition, the crusades against the Albigenses and the simpledwellers of the Vaudois valleys, have been regarded as atrocitiespeculiar to the believers in papal infallibility, and the necessaryconsequences of their doctrines; and hence they have looked upon theconstitutional agitation of the Irish Catholics for relief from grieveousdisabilities and unjust distinctions as a struggle merely for supremacyor power. 

Strange, that the truth to which all history so strongly testifies shouldthus be overlooked, --the undeniable truth that religious bigotry andintolerance have been confined to no single sect; that the persecuted ofone 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 NewEngland the Catholic, the Quaker, and the Baptist were banished on painof death, and where some even suffered that dreadful penalty, in CatholicMaryland, under the Catholic Lord Baltimore, perfect liberty ofconscience was established, and Papist and Protestant went quietlythrough the same streets to their respective altars. 

At the commencement of O'Connell's labors for emancipation he found thepeople of Ireland divided into three great classes, --the Protestant orChurch party, the Dissenters, and the Catholics: the Church partyconstituting about one tenth of the population, yet holding in possessionthe 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, andconsequently wholly devoted to her interest; the Dissenters, probablytwice as numerous as the Church party, mostly engaged in trade andmanufactures, --sustained by their own talents and industry, Irish infeeling, partaking in no small degree of the oppression of their Catholicbrethren, and among the first to resist that oppression in 1782; theCatholics constituting at least two thirds of the whole population, andalmost the entire peasantry of the country, forming a large proportionof the mercantile interest, yet nearly excluded from the possession oflanded property by the tyrannous operation of the penal laws. Justly hasa celebrated Irish patriot (Theobald Wolfe Tone) spoken of these laws as"an execrable and infamous code, framed with the art and malice of demonsto plunder and degrade and brutalize the Catholics of Ireland. There wasno disgrace, no injustice, no disqualification, moral, political, orreligious, civil or military, which it has not heaped upon them. "

The following facts relative to the disabilities under which theCatholics of the United Kingdom labored previous to the emancipation of1829 will serve to show in some measure the oppressive operation of thoselaws which placed the foot of one tenth of the population of Ireland uponthe necks of the remainder. 

A Catholic peer could not sit in the House of Peers, nor a Catholiccommoner in the House of Commons. A Catholic could not be LordChancellor, or Keeper, or Commissioner of the Great Seal; Master orKeeper 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 atLaw; Member of the King's Council; Master in Chancery, nor Chairman ofSessions for the County of Dublin. He could not be the Recorder of acity or town; an advocate in the spiritual courts; Sheriff of a county, city, or town; Sub-Sheriff; Lord Lieutenant, Lord Deputy, or othergovernor of Ireland; Lord High Treasurer; Governor of a county; PrivyCouncillor; Postmaster General; Chancellor of the Exchequer or Secretaryof State; Vice Treasurer, Cashier of the Exchequer; Keeper of the PrivySeal or Auditor General; Provost or Fellow of Dublin University; nor LordMayor or Alderman of a corporate city or town. He could not be a memberof a parish vestry, nor bequeath any sum of money or any lands for themaintenance 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 strongconviction that nothing short of the united exertions of the Irish peoplecould overthrow the power of the existing government, and that a union ofaction could only be obtained by the establishment of something likeequality between the different religious parties. Discarding all otherthan peaceful means for the accomplishment of his purpose, he placedhimself and his followers beyond the cognizance of unjust and oppressivelaws. Wherever he poured the oil of his eloquence upon the maddenedspirits of his wronged and insulted countrymen, the mercenary soldieryfound no longer an excuse for violence; and calm, firm, and united, theCatholic Association remained secure in the moral strength of its pureand peaceful purpose, amid the bayonets of a Tory administration. Hisinfluence was felt in all parts of the island. Wherever an unlawfulassociation existed, his great legal knowledge enabled him at once todetect its character, and, by urging its dissolution, to snatch itsdeluded members from the ready fangs of their enemies. In his presencethe Catholic and the Protestant shook hands together, and the wild Irishclansman forgot his feuds. He taught the party in power, and whotrembled at the dangers around them, that security and peace could onlybe obtained by justice and kindness. He entreated his oppressed Catholicbrethren to lay aside their weapons, and with pure hearts and naked handsto stand firmly together in the calm but determined energy of men, toohumane for deeds of violence, yet too mighty for the patient endurance ofwrong. 

The spirit of the olden time was awakened, of the day when Floodthundered and Curran lightened; the light which shone for a moment in thedarkness of Ireland's century of wrong burned upwards clearly andsteadily from all its ancient altars. Shoulder to shoulder gatheredaround him the patriot spirits of his nation, --men unbribed by the goldenspoils of governmental patronage Shiel with his ardent eloquence, O'Dwyerand Walsh, and Grattan and O'Connor, and Steel, the Protestant agitator, wearing around him the emblem of national reconciliation, of the reunionof Catholic and Protestant, --the sash of blended orange and green, soiledand defaced by his patriotic errands, stained with the smoke of cabins, and the night rains and rust of weapons, and the mountain mist, and thedroppings of the wild woods of Clare. He united in one mighty andresistless mass the broken and discordant factions, whose desultorystruggles against tyranny had hitherto only added strength to itsfetters, and infused into that mass his own lofty principles of action, until the solemn tones of expostulation and entreaty, bursting at oncefrom the full heart of Ireland, were caught up by England and echoed backfrom Scotland, and the language of justice and humanity was wrung fromthe reluctant lips of the cold and remorseless oppressor of his nativeland, at once its disgrace and glory, --the conqueror of Napoleon; and, inthe words of his own Curran, the chains of the Catholic fell from aroundhim, and he stood forth redeemed and disenthralled by the irresistiblegenius of Universal Emancipation. 

On the passage of the bill for Catholic emancipation, O'Connell took hisseat in the British Parliament. The eyes of millions were upon him. Ireland--betrayed so often by those in whom she had placed herconfidence; brooding in sorrowful remembrance over the noble names andbrilliant reputations sullied by treachery and corruption, the long anddark catalogue of her recreant sons, who, allured by British gold andBritish patronage, had sacrificed on the altar of their ambition Irishpride and Irish independence, and lifted their parricidal arms againsttheir sorrowing mother, "crownless and voiceless in her woe"--now hungwith breathless eagerness over the ordeal to which her last greatchampion was subjected. 

The crisis in O'Connell's destiny had come. 

The glitter of the golden bribe was in his eye; the sound of titledmagnificence was in his ear; the choice was before him to sit high amongthe honorable, the titled, and the powerful, or to take his humble seatin the hall of St. Stephen's as the Irish demagogue, the agitator, theKerry representative. He did not hesitate in his choice. On the firstoccasion that offered he told the story of Ireland's wrongs, and demandedjustice in the name of his suffering constituents. He had put his handto the plough of reform, and he could not relinquish his hold, for hisheart was with it. 

Determined to give the Whig administration no excuse for neglecting theredress of Irish grievances, he entered heart and soul into the greatmeasure of English reform, and his zeal, tact, and eloquence contributednot a little to its success. Yet even his friends speak of his firstefforts in the House of Commons as failures. The Irish accent; the harshavowal of purposes smacking of rebellion; the eccentricities and floweryluxuriance of an eloquence nursed in the fervid atmosphere of Irelandsuddenly transplanted to the cold and commonplace one of St. Stephen's;the great and illiberal prejudices against him scarcely abated from whatthey were when, as the member from Clare, he was mobbed on his way toLondon, for a time opposed a barrier to the influence of his talents andpatriotism. 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 BritishParliament; one whose aid has been courted and whose rebuke has beenfeared by the ablest of England's representatives. Amid the sneers ofderision and the clamor of hate and prejudice he has triumphed, --on thatvery arena so fatal to Irish eloquence and Irish fame, where even Grattanfailed to sustain himself, and the impetuous spirit of Flood was strickendown. 

No subject in which Ireland was not directly interested has received agreater share of O'Connell's attention than that of the abolition ofcolonial slavery. Utterly detesting tyranny of all kinds, he pouredforth his eloquent soul in stern reprobation of a system full at once ofpride and misery and oppression, and darkened with blood. His speech onthe motion of Thomas Fowell Buxton for the immediate emancipation of theslaves gave a new tone to the discussion of the question. He enteredinto no petty pecuniary details; no miserable computation of theshillings and pence vested in beings fashioned in the image of God. Hedid not talk of the expediency of continuing the evil because it hadgrown monstrous. To use his own words, he considered "slavery a crime tobe abolished; not merely an evil to be palliated. " He left Sir RobertPeel and the Tories to eulogize the characters and defend the interestsof the planters, in common with those of a tithe-reaping priesthood, building their houses by oppression and their chambers by wrong, andspoke of the negro's interest, the negro's claim to justice; demandingsympathy for the plundered as well as the plunderers, for the slave aswell as his master. He trampled as dust under his feet the blasphemythat obedience to the law of eternal justice is a principle to beacknowledged in theory only, because unsafe in practice. He would, he said, enter into no compromise with slavery. He cared not what castor creed or color it might assume, whether personal or political, intellectual or spiritual; he was for its total, immediate abolition. Hewas for justice, --justice in the name of humanity and according to therighteous law of the living God. 

Ardently admiring our free institutions, and constantly pointing to ourglorious political exaltation as an incentive to the perseverance of hisown countrymen in their struggle against oppression, he has yet omittedno opportunity of rebuking our inexcusable slave system. An enthusiasticadmirer of Jefferson, he has often regretted that his practice shouldhave so illy accorded with his noble sentiments on the subject ofslavery, which so fully coincided with his own. In truth, wherever manhas been oppressed by his fellow-man, O'Connell's sympathy has beendirected: to Italy, chained above the very grave of her ancientliberties; to the republics of Southern America; to Greece, dashing thefoot of the indolent Ottoman from her neck; to France and Belgium; andlast, not least, to Poland, driven from her cherished nationality, anddragged, like his own Ireland, bleeding and violated, to the deadlyembrace of her oppressor. American slavery but shares in his commondenunciation of all tyranny; its victims but partake of his common pityfor the oppressed and persecuted and the trodden down. 

In this hasty and imperfect sketch we cannot enter into the details ofthat cruel disregard of Irish rights which was manifested by a ReformedParliament, convoked, to use the language of William IV. , "to ascertainthe sense of the people. " It is perhaps enough to say that O'Connell'sindignant refusal to receive as full justice the measure of reform metedout to Ireland was fully justified by the facts of the case. The IrishReform Bill gave Ireland, with one third of the entire population of theUnited Kingdoms, only one sixth of the Parliamentary delegation. Itdiminished instead of increasing the number of voters; in the towns andcities it created a high and aristocratic franchise; in many boroughs itestablished so narrow a basis of franchise as to render them liable tocorruption and abuse as the rotten boroughs of the old system. It threwno new power into the hands of the people; and with no little justice hasO'Connell himself termed it an act to restore to power the Orangeascendancy in Ireland, and to enable a faction to trample with impunityon the friends of reform and constitutional freedom. (Letters to theReformers 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 theFrench convention, he "rent away the veil" which Hume and Atwood had onlypartially lifted. He held up before the people of Great Britain the newindignities which had been added to the long catalogue of Ireland'swrongs; he appealed to their justice, their honor, their duty, forredress, and cast down before the Whig administration the gauntlet of hiscountry's defiance and scorn. There is a fine burst of indignant Irishfeeling in the concluding paragraphs of his fourth letter:--

"I have demonstrated the contumelious injuries inflicted upon us by thisReform Bill. My letters are long before the public. They have beenunrefuted, uncontradicted in any of their details. And with this case ofatrocious injustice to Ireland placed before the reformers of GreatBritain, what assistance, what sympathy, do we receive? Why, I have gotsome half dozen drivelling letters from political unions and politicalcharacters, asking me whether I advise them to petition or bestirthemselves in our behalf!

"Reformers of Great Britain! I do not ask you either to petition or besilent. I do not ask you to petition or to do any other act in favor ofthe 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, obtainedfreedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself. She has shakenoff the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out itsfolly and its falsehoods. She can, and she will, obtain for herselfjustice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at Britishneglect and ingratitude, there is no sound of despair in that sigh, norany want of moral energy on her part to attain her own rights bypeaceable and legal means. "

The tithe system, unutterably odious and full of all injustice, hadprepared the way for this expression of feeling on the part of thepeople. Ireland had never, in any period of her history, bowed her neckpeaceably to the ecclesiastical yoke. From the Canon of Cashel, preparedby English deputies in the twelfth century, decreeing for the first timethat tithes should be paid in Ireland, down to the present moment, theChurch 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 DublinSynod, under Archbishop Comyn, in 1185, could only be enforced within thepale of the English settlement. The attempts of Henry VIII. Also failed. Without the pale all endeavors to collect tithes were met by sternopposition. And although from the time of William III. The tithe systemhas been established in Ireland, yet at no period has it been regardedotherwise than as a system of legalized robbery by seven eighths of thepeople. 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 enduredby any people on the face of the earth, least of all by Irishmen. Tithesto 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 herpopulation as their hearers; and wrung, too, in an undue proportion, fromthe Catholic counties. (See Dr. Doyle's Evidence before Hon. E. G. Stanley. ) In the southern and middle counties, almost entirely inhabitedby the Catholic peasantry, every thing they possess is subject to thetithe: the cow is seized in the hovel, the potato in the barrel, the coateven 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 IrishChurch Establishment are as follows: the Primacy L140, 000; DerryL120, 000; Kilmore L100, 000; Clogher L100, 000; Waterford L70, 000. Comparethese enormous sums with that paid by Scotland for the maintenance of theChurch, namely L270, 000. Yet that Church has 2, 000, 000 souls under itscare, while that of Ireland has not above 500, 000. Nor are theseprincely livings expended in Ireland by their possessors. The bishopricsof Cloyne and Meath have been long held by absentees, --by men who know nomore of their flocks than the non-resident owner of a West Indiaplantation did of the miserable negroes, the fruits of whose thanklesslabor were annually transmitted to him. Out of 1289 benefited clergymenin Ireland, between five and six hundred are non-residents, spending inBath and London, or in making the fashionable tour of the Continent, thewealth forced from the Catholic peasant and the Protestant dissenter bythe bayonets of the military. Scorching and terrible was the sarcasm ofGrattan applied to these locusts of the Church: "A beastly and pompouspriesthood, political potentates and Christian pastors, full of falsezeal, full of worldly pride, and full of gluttony, empty of the truereligion, to their flocks oppressive, to their inferior clergy brutal, totheir king abject, and to their God impudent and familiar, --they stand onthe altar as a stepping-stone to the throne, glorying in the ear ofprinces, whom they poison with crooked principles and heated advice; afaction against their king when they are not his slaves, --ever the dirtunder his feet or a poniard to his heart. "

For the evils of absenteeism, the non-residence of the wealthylandholders, draining from a starving country the very necessaries oflife, a remedy is sought in a repeal of the union, and the provisions ofa domestic parliament. In O'Connell's view, a restoration of such aparliament can alone afford that adequate protection to the nationalindustry so loudly demanded by thousands of unemployed laborers, starvingamid the ruins of deserted manufactories. During the brief period ofpartial Irish liberty which followed the pacific revolution of '82, themanufactures of the country revived and flourished; and the smile ofcontented industry was visible all over the land. In 1797 there were15, 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 theIrish Parliament which yielded up in a moment of treachery and terror thedearest interests of the country to the legislation of an EnglishParliament and the tender mercies of Castlereagh, --of that Castlereaghwho, when accused by Grattan of spending L15, 000 in purchasing votes forthe Union, replied with the rare audacity of high-handed iniquity, "Wedid spend L15, 000, and we would have spent L15, 000, 000 if necessary tocarry the Union; "that Castlereagh who, when 707, 000 Irishmen petitionedagainst the Union and 300, 000 for it, maintained that the latterconstituted the majority! Well has it been said that the deep vengeancewhich 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 thefearful retribution. The great body of the Irish people never assentedto the Union. The following extract from a speech of Earl (then Mr. )Grey, in 1800, upon the Union question, will show what means were madeuse of to drag Ireland, while yet mourning over her slaughtered children, to the marriage altar with England: "If the Parliament of Ireland hadbeen left to itself, untempted and unawed, it would without hesitationhave rejected the resolutions. Out of the 300 members, 120 strenuouslyopposed the measure, 162 voted for it: of these, 116 were placemen; someof them were English generals on the staff, without a foot of ground inIreland, and completely dependent on government. " "Let us reflect uponthe arts made use of since the last session of the Irish Parliament topack a majority, for Union, in the House of Commons. All persons holdingoffices under government, if they hesitated to vote as directed, werestripped of all their employments. A bill framed for preserving thepurity of Parliament was likewise abused, and no less than 63 seats werevacated by their holders having received nominal offices. "

The signs of the times are most favorable to the success of the IrishLiberator. The tremendous power of the English political unions isbeginning to develop itself in favor of Ireland. A deep sympathy isevinced for her sufferings, and a general determination to espouse hercause. Brute force cannot put down the peaceable and legal agitation ofthe question of her rights and interests. The spirit of the age forbidsit. The agitation will go on, for it is spreading among men who, to usethe words of the eloquent Shiel, while looking out upon the ocean, andgazing upon the shore, which Nature has guarded with so many of herbulwarks, can hear the language of Repeal muttered in the dashing of thevery waves which separate them from Great Britain by a barrier of God'sown creation. Another bloodless victory, we trust, awaits O'Connell, --avictory worthy of his heart and intellect, unstained by one drop of humanblood, unmoistened by a solitary tear. 

Ireland will be redeemed and disenthralled, not perhaps by a repeal ofthe Union, but by the accomplishment of such a thorough reform in thegovernment and policy of Great Britain as shall render a repealunnecessary and impolitic. 

The sentiments of O'Connell in regard to the means of effecting hisobject of political reform are distinctly impressed upon all his appealsto the people. In his letter of December, 1832, to the Dublin TradesUnion, he says: "The Repealers must not have our cause stained withblood. Far indeed from it. We can, and ought to, carry the repeal onlyin the total absence of offence against the laws of man or crime in thesight of God. The best revolution which was ever effected could not beworth one drop of human blood. " In his speech at the public dinner givenhim by--the citizens of Cork, we find a yet more earnest avowal ofpacific principles. "It may be stated, " said he, "to countervail ourefforts, that this struggle will involve the destruction of life andproperty; that it will overturn the framework of civil society, and givean 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 whohave always believed that any political change is too dearly purchased bya single drop of blood, and who think that any political superstructurebased upon other opinion is like the sand-supported fabric, --beautiful inthe brief hour of sunshine, but the moment one drop of rain touches thearid basis melting away in wreck and ruin! I am an accountable being; Ihave a soul and a God to answer to, in another and better world, for mythoughts and actions in this. I disclaim here any act of mine whichwould sport with the lives of my fellow-creatures, any amelioration ofour 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 notsincerely and firmly believe that the amelioration I desire could beeffected without violence, without any change in the relative scale ofranks in the present social condition of Ireland, except that changewhich all must desire, making each better than it was before, andcementing all in one solid irresistible mass, I would at once give up thestruggle which I have always kept with tyranny. I would withdraw fromthe contest which I have hitherto waged with those who would perpetuateour thraldom. I would not for one moment dare to venture for that whichin costing one human life would cost infinitely too dear. But it willcost no such price. Have we not had within my memory two great politicalrevolutions? And had we them not without bloodshed or violence to thesocial compact? Have we not arrived at a period when physical force andmilitary power yield to moral and intellectual energy. Has not the timeof '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; thatreason and intellect are destined, under God, to do that for the nationsof the earth which the physical force of centuries and the red sacrificeof a thousand battle-fields have failed to accomplish. Glorious beyondall others will be the day when "nation shall no more rise up againstnation;" when, as a necessary consequence of the universal acknowledgmentof the rights of man, it shall no longer be in the power of an individualto drag millions into strife, for the unholy gratification of personalprejudice and passion. The reformed governments of Great Britain andFrance, resting, as they do, upon a popular basis, are already tending tothis consummation, for the people have suffered too much from the warlikeambition of their former masters not to have learned that the gains ofpeaceful industry are better than the wages of human butchery. 

Among the great names of Ireland--alike conspicuous, yet widelydissimilar--stand Wellington and O'Connell. The one smote down themodern Alexander upon Waterloo's field of death, but the page of hisreputation is dim with the tears of the widow and the orphan, and darkwith the stain of blood. The other, armed only with the weapons of truthand reason, has triumphed over the oppression of centuries, and opened apeaceful pathway to the Temple of Freedom, through which its Goddess maybe seen, no longer propitiated with human sacrifices, like some foul idolof the East, but clothed in Christian attributes, and smiling in thebeauty of holiness upon the pure hearts and peaceful hands of itsvotaries. The bloodless victories of the latter have all the sublimitywith none of the criminality which attaches itself to the triumphs of theformer. To thunder high truths in the deafened ear of nations, to rousethe better spirit of the age, to soothe the malignant passions of. Assembled and maddened men, to throw open the temple doors of justice tothe abused, enslaved, and persecuted, to unravel the mysteries of guilt, and hold up the workers of iniquity in the severe light of truth strippedof their disguise and covered with the confusion of their own vileness, --these are victories more glorious than any which have ever reddened theearth 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 canread the English periodicals and papers without perceiving that O'Connellis, at this moment, the leading politician, the master mind of theBritish empire. Attempts have been made to prejudice the American mindagainst him by a republication on this side of the water of the false andfoul slanders of his Tory enemies, in reference to what is called the"O'Connell rent, " a sum placed annually in his hands by a gratefulpeople, and which he has devoted scrupulously to the great object ofIreland's political redemption. He has acquired no riches by hispolitical efforts his heart and soul and mind and strength have beendirected to his suffering country and the cause of universal freedom. For this he has deservedly a place in the heart and affections of everyson of Ireland. One million of ransomed slaves in the Britishdependencies will teach their children to repeat the name of O'Connellwith that of Wilberforce and Clarkson. And when the stain and caste ofslavery shall have passed from our own country, he will be regarded asour friend and benefactor, whose faithful rebukes and warnings andeloquent appeals to our pride of character, borne to us across theAtlantic, 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 thesevolumes an admirable example of history made easy. Had they beenpublished in his time, they might have found favor in the eyes of thepoet Gray, who declared that his ideal of happiness was "to lie on a sofaand 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 thework, when viewed as a mere detail of historical facts. Its sparklingrhetoric is not the safest medium of truth to the simple-minded inquirer. A discriminating and able critic has done the author no injustice insaying that, in attempting to give effect and vividness to his thoughtsand diction, he is often overstrained and extravagant, and that hisepigrammatic style seems better fitted for the glitter of paradox thanthe sober guise of truth. The intelligent and well-informed reader ofthe volume before us will find himself at times compelled to reverse thedecisions of the author, and deliver some unfortunate personage, sect, orclass from the pillory of his rhetoric and the merciless pelting of hisridicule. There is a want of the repose and quiet which we look for ina narrative of events long passed away; we rise from the perusal of thebook pleased and excited, but with not so clear a conception of theactual realities of which it treats as would be desirable. We cannothelp feeling that the author has been somewhat over-scrupulous inavoiding the dulness of plain detail, and the dryness of dates, names, and statistics. The freedom, flowing diction, and sweeping generality ofthe reviewer and essayist are maintained throughout; and, with oneremarkable exception, the _History of England_ might be divided intopapers of magazine length, and published, without any violence topropriety, as a continuation of the author's labors in that department ofliterature in which he confessedly stands without a rival, --historicalreview. 

That exception is, however, no unimportant one. In our view, it is thecrowning excellence of the first volume, --its distinctive feature andprincipal attraction. We refer to the third chapter of the volume, frompage 260 to page 398, --the description of the condition of England at theperiod of the accession of James II. We know of nothing like it in theentire range of historical literature. The veil is lifted up from theEngland of a century and a half ago; its geographical, industrial, social, and moral condition is revealed; and, as the panorama passesbefore us of lonely heaths, fortified farm-houses, bands of robbers, rude country squires doling out the odds and ends of their coarse fareto clerical dependents, --rough roads, serviceable only for horsebacktravelling, --towns with unlighted streets, reeking with filth and offal, --and prisons, damp, loathsome, infected with disease, and swarming withvermin, --we are filled with wonder at the contrast which it presents tothe England of our day. We no longer sigh for "the good old days. " Themost confirmed grumbler is compelled to admit that, bad as things noware, they were far worse a few generations back. Macaulay, in thiselaborate and carefully prepared chapter, has done a good service tohumanity in disabusing well-intentioned ignorance of the melancholynotion that the world is growing worse, and in putting to silence thecant of blind, unreasoning conservatism. 

In 1685 the entire population of England our author estimates at fromfive millions to five millions five hundred thousand. Of the eighthundred thousand families at that period, one half had animal food twicea week. The other half ate it not at all, or at most not oftener thanonce a week. Wheaten, loaves were only seen at the tables of thecomparatively wealthy. Rye, barley, and oats were the food of the vastmajority. The average wages of workingmen was at least one half lessthan is paid in England for the same service at the present day. Onefifth of the people were paupers, or recipients of parish relief. Clothing and bedding were scarce and dear. Education was almost unknownto the vast majority. The houses and shops were not numbered in thecities, for porters, coachmen, and errand-runners could not read. Theshopkeeper distinguished his place of business by painted signs andgraven images. Oxford and Cambridge Universities were little better thanmodern grammar and Latin school in a provincial village. The countrymagistrate used on the bench language too coarse, brutal, and vulgar fora modern tap-room. Fine gentlemen in London vied with each other in thelowest ribaldry and the grossest profanity. The poets of the time, fromDryden to Durfey, ministered to the popular licentiousness. The mostshameless indecency polluted their pages. The theatre and the brothelwere in strict unison. The Church winked at the vice which opposeditself to the austere morality or hypocrisy of Puritanism. The superiorclergy, with a few noble exceptions, were self-seekers and courtiers; theinferior were idle, ignorant hangerson upon blaspheming squires andknights of the shire. The domestic chaplain, of all men living, held themost unenviable position. "If he was permitted to dine with the family, he was expected to content himself with the plainest fare. He might fillhimself with the corned beef and carrots; but as soon as the tarts andcheese-cakes made their appearance he quitted his seat, and stood alooftill he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, from a great partof which he had been excluded. "

Beyond the Trent the country seems at this period to have been in a stateof barbarism. The parishes kept bloodhounds for the purpose of huntingfreebooters. The farm-houses were fortified and guarded. So dangerouswas the country that persons about travelling thither made their wills. Judges and lawyers only ventured therein, escorted by a strong guard ofarmed men. 

The natural resources of the island were undeveloped. The tin mines ofCornwall, which two thousand years before attracted the ships of themerchant princes of Tyre beyond the Pillars of Hercules, were indeedworked to a considerable extent; but the copper mines, which now yieldannually fifteen thousand tons, were entirely neglected. Rock salt wasknown to exist, but was not used to any considerable extent; and only apartial supply of salt by evaporation was obtained. The coal and iron ofEngland are at this time the stable foundations of her industrial andcommercial greatness. But in 1685 the great part of the iron used wasimported. Only about ten thousand tons were annually cast. Now eighthundred thousand is the average annual production. Equally great hasbeen the increase in coal mining. "Coal, " says Macaulay, "though verylittle used in any species of manufacture, was already the ordinary fuelin some districts which were fortunate enough to possess large beds, andin the capital, which could easily be supplied by water carriage. Itseems reasonable to believe that at least one half of the quantity thenextracted from the pits was consumed in London. The consumption ofLondon seemed to the writers of that age enormous, and was oftenmentioned by them as a proof of the greatness of the imperial city. Theyscarcely hoped to be believed when they affirmed that two hundred andeighty thousand chaldrons--that is to say, about three hundred and fiftythousand tons-were, in the last year of the reign of Charles II. , broughtto the Thames. At present near three millions and a half of tons arerequired yearly by the metropolis; and the whole annual produce cannot, on the most moderate computation, be estimated at less than twentymillions of tons. "

After thus passing in survey the England of our ancestors five or sixgenerations back, the author closes his chapter with some eloquentremarks upon the progress of society. Contrasting the hardness andcoarseness of the age of which he treats with the softer and more humanefeatures of our own, he says: "Nowhere could be found that sensitive andrestless compassion which has in our time extended powerful protection tothe factory child, the Hindoo widow, to the negro slave; which pries intothe stores and water-casks of every emigrant ship; which winces at everylash laid on the back of a drunken soldier; which will not suffer thethief in the hulks to be ill fed or overworked; and which has repeatedlyendeavored to save the life even of the murderer. The more we study theannals of the past, the more shall we rejoice that we live in a mercifulage, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even whendeserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty. Everyclass, doubtless, has gained largely by this great moral change; but theclass which has gained most is the poorest, the most dependent, and themost defenceless. "

The history itself properly commences at the close of this chapter. Opening with the deathscene of the dissolute Charles II. , it presents aseries of brilliant pictures of the events succeeding: The miserable fateof Oates and Dangerfield, the perjured inventors of the Popish Plot; thetrial of Baxter by the infamous Jeffreys; the ill-starred attempt of theDuke of Monmouth; the battle of Sedgemoor, and the dreadful atrocities ofthe king's soldiers, and the horrible perversion of justice by the king'schief judge in the "Bloody Assizes;" the barbarous hunting of the ScotchDissenters by Claverbouse; the melancholy fate of the brave and nobleDuke of Argyle, --are described with graphic power unknown to Smollett orHume. Personal portraits are sketched with a bold freedom which at timesstartles us. The "old familiar faces, " as we have seen them through thedust of a century and a half, start before us with lifelike distinctnessof outline and coloring. Some of them disappoint us; like the ghost ofHamlet's father, they come in a "questionable shape. " Thus, forinstance, in his sketch of William Penn, the historian takes issue withthe world on his character, and labors through many pages of disingenuousinnuendoes and distortion of facts to transform the saint of history intoa pliant courtier. 

The second volume details the follies and misfortunes, the decline andfall, of the last of the Stuarts. All the art of the author's splendidrhetoric is employed in awakening, by turns, the indignation and contemptof the reader in contemplating the character of the wrong-headed king. In portraying that character, he has brought into exercise all thosepowers of invective and merciless ridicule which give such a savagerelish to his delineation of Barrere. To preserve the consistency ofthis character, he denies the king any credit for whatever was reallybeneficent and praiseworthy in his government. He holds up the royaldelinquent in only two lights: the one representing him as a tyranttowards his people; the other as the abject slave of foreign priests, --a man at once hateful and ludicrous, of whom it is difficult to speakwithout an execration or a sneer. 

The events which preceded the revolution of 1688; the undisguisedadherence of the king to the Church of Rome; the partial toleration ofthe despised Quakers and Anabaptists; the gradual relaxation of theseverity of the penal laws against Papists and Dissenters, preparing theway for the royal proclamation of entire liberty of conscience throughoutthe British realm, allowing the crop-eared Puritan and the Papist priestto build conventicles and mass houses under the very eaves of the palacesof Oxford and Canterbury; the mining and countermining of Jesuits andprelates, are detailed with impartial minuteness. The secret springs ofthe great movements of the time are laid bare; the mean and paltryinstrumentalities are seen at work in the under world of corruption, prejudice, and falsehood. No one, save a blind, unreasoning partisan ofCatholicism or Episcopacy, can contemplate this chapter in Englishhistory without a feeling of disgust. However it may have been overruledfor good by that Providence which takes the wise in their own craftiness, the revolution of 1688, in itself considered, affords just as littlecause for self-congratulation on the part of Protestants as thesubstitution of the supremacy of the crowned Bluebeard, Henry VIII. , forthat of the Pope, in the English Church. It had little in common withthe revolution of 1642. The field of its action was the closet ofselfish intrigue, --the stalls of discontented prelates, --the chambers ofthe wanton and adulteress, --the confessional of a weak prince, whosemind, originally narrow, had been cramped closer still by the strait-jacket of religious bigotry and superstition. The age of nobility andheroism had well-nigh passed away. The pious fervor, the self-denial, and the strict morality of the Puritanism of the days of Cromwell, andthe blunt honesty and chivalrous loyalty of the Cavaliers, had bothmeasurably given place to the corrupting influences of the licentious andinfidel court of Charles II. ; and to the arrogance, intolerance, andshameless self-seeking of a prelacy which, in its day of triumph andrevenge, had more than justified the terrible denunciations and scathinggibes of Milton. 

Both Catholic and Protestant writers have misrepresented James II. Hedeserves neither the execrations of the one nor the eulogies of theother. The candid historian must admit that he was, after all, a betterman than his brother Charles II. He was a sincere and bigoted Catholic, and was undoubtedly honest in the declaration, which he made in thatunlucky letter which Burnet ferreted out on the Continent, that he wasprepared 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 ofthe cruel temper of his time. He was at once ascetic and sensual, alternating between the hair-shirt of penance and the embraces ofCatharine Sedley. His situation was one of the most difficult andembarrassing which can be conceived of. He was at once a bigoted Papistand a Protestant pope. He hated the French domination to which hisbrother had submitted; yet his pride as sovereign was subordinated to hisallegiance to Rome and a superstitious veneration for the wily priestswith which Louis XIV. Surrounded him. As the head of Anglican heretics, he was compelled to submit to conditions galling alike to the sovereignand the man. He found, on his accession, the terrible penal laws againstthe Papists in full force; the hangman's knife was yet warm with itsghastly butcher-work of quartering and disembowelling suspected Jesuitsand victims of the lie of Titus Oates; the Tower of London had scarcelyceased to echo the groans of Catholic confessors stretched on the rack byProtestant inquisitors. He was torn by conflicting interests andspiritual and political contradictions. The prelates of the EstablishedChurch must share the responsibility of many of the worst acts of theearly part of his reign. Oxford sent up its lawned deputations to minglethe voice of adulation with the groans of tortured Covenanters, andfawning ecclesiastics burned the incense of irreverent flattery under thenostrils of the Lord's anointed, while the blessed air of England wastainted by the carcasses of the ill-fated followers of Monmouth, rottingon a thousand gibbets. While Jeffreys was threatening Baxter and hisPresbyterian friends with the pillory and whipping-post; while Quakersand Baptists were only spared from extermination as game preserves forthe sport of clerical hunters; while the prisons were thronged with theheads of some fifteen thousand beggared families, and Dissenters of everyname and degree were chased from one hiding-place to another, like Davidamong the cliffs of Ziph and the rocks of the wild goats, --thethanksgivings and congratulations of prelacy arose in an unbroken strainof laudation from all the episcopal palaces of England. What mattered itto men, in whose hearts, to use the language of John Milton, "the sourleaven of human traditions, mixed with the poisonous dregs of hypocrisy, lay basking in the sunny warmth of wealth and promotion, hatchingAntichrist, " that the privileges of Englishmen and the rights secured bythe great charter were violated and trodden under foot, so long asusurpation enured to their own benefit? But when King James issued hisDeclaration of Indulgence, and stretched his prerogative on the side oftolerance and charity, the zeal of the prelates for preserving theintegrity of the British constitution and the limiting of the royal powerflamed up into rebellion. They forswore themselves without scruple: thedisciples of Laud, the asserters of kingly infallibility and divineright, talked of usurped power and English rights in the strain of thevery schismatics whom they had persecuted to the death. There is noreason to believe that James supposed that, in issuing his declarationsuspending the penal laws, he had transcended the rightful prerogative ofhis throne. The power which he exercised had been used by hispredecessors for far less worthy purposes, and with the approbation ofmany of the very men who now opposed him. His ostensible object, expressed in language which even those who condemn his policy cannot butadmire, was a laudable and noble one. "We trust, " said he, "that it willnot be vain that we have resolved to use our utmost endeavors toestablish liberty of conscience on such just and equal foundations aswill render it unalterable, and secure to all people the free exercise oftheir religion, by which future ages may reap the benefit of what is soundoubtedly the general good of the whole kingdom. " Whatever may havebeen the motive of this declaration, --even admitting the suspicions ofhis enemies to have been true, that he advocated universal toleration asthe only means of restoring Roman Catholics to all the rights andprivileges of which the penal laws deprived them, --it would seem thatthere could have been no very serious objection on the part of realfriends of religious toleration to the taking of him at his word andplacing Englishmen of every sect on an equality before the law. TheCatholics were in a very small minority, scarcely at that time asnumerous as the Quakers and Anabaptists. The army, the navy, and ninetenths 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 thegreat truth, which is even now but imperfectly recognized throughoutChristendom, that religious opinions rest between man and his Maker, andnot between man and the magistrate, and that the domain of conscience issacred, was almost unknown to the statesmen and schoolmen of theseventeenth century. Milton--ultra liberal as he was--excepted theCatholics from his plan of toleration. Locke, yielding to the prejudicesof the time, took the same ground. The enlightened latitudinarianministers of the Established Church--men whose talents and Christiancharity redeem in some measure the character of that Church in the day ofits greatest power and basest apostasy--stopped short of universaltoleration. The Presbyterians excluded Quakers, Baptists, and Papistsfrom the pale of their charity. With the single exception of the sect ofwhich William Penn was a conspicuous member, the idea of complete andimpartial toleration was novel and unwelcome to all sects and classes ofthe English people. Hence it was that the very men whose liberties andestates had been secured by the declaration, and who were therebypermitted to hold their meetings in peace and quietness, used their newlyacquired freedom in denouncing the king, because the same key which hadopened 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 byextending the same favor to Jesuits and Ranters. Bunyan disliked theQuakers next to the Papists; and it greatly lessened his satisfaction athis release from Bedford jail that it had been brought about by theinfluence of the former at the court of a Catholic prince. Dissentersforgot the wrongs and persecutions which they had experienced at thehands of the prelacy, and joined the bishops in opposition to thedeclaration. They almost magnified into Christian confessors theprelates who remonstrated against the indulgence, and actually plottedagainst 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 onlysecurity against the heavier one of Papist supremacy. In a far differentmanner the cleareyed and plain-spoken John Milton met the claims anddemands of the hierarchy in his time. "They entreat us, " said he, "thatwe be not weary of the insupportable grievances that our shoulders havehitherto cracked under; they beseech us that we think them fit to be ourjustices of peace, our lords, our highest officers of state. They prayus that it would please us to let them still haul us and wrong us withtheir bandogs and pursuivants; and that it would please the Parliamentthat they may yet have the whipping, fleecing, and flaying of us in theirdiabolical courts, to tear the flesh from our bones, and into our widewounds, instead of balm, to pour in the oil of tartar, vitriol, andmercury. Surely a right, reasonable, innocent, and soft-heartedpetition! O the relenting bowels of the fathers!"

Considering the prominent part acted by William Penn in the reign ofJames II. , and his active and influential support of the obnoxiousdeclaration which precipitated the revolution of 1688, it could hardlyhave been otherwise than that his character should suffer from theunworthy suspicions and prejudices of his contemporaries. His views ofreligious toleration were too far in advance of the age to be receivedwith favor. They were of necessity misunderstood and misrepresented. All his life he had been urging them with the earnestness of one whoseconvictions were the result, not so much of human reason as of what heregarded as divine illumination. What the council of James yielded upongrounds 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 inauthority for universal toleration and charity. On a sudden, on theaccession of James, the friend of himself and his family, he foundhimself the most influential untitled citizen in the British realm. He had free access to the royal ear. Asking nothing for himself or hisrelatives, he demanded only that the good people of England should be nolonger despoiled of liberty and estate for their religious opinions. James, as a Catholic, had in some sort a common interest with hisdissenting subjects, and the declaration was for their common relief. Penn, conscious of the rectitude of his own motives and thoroughlyconvinced of the Christian duty of toleration, welcomed that declarationas the precursor of the golden age of liberty and love and good-will tomen. He was not the man to distrust the motives of an act so fully inaccordance with his lifelong aspirations and prayers. He was charitableto a fault: his faith in his fellow-men was often stronger than a clearerinsight of their characters would have justified. He saw the errors ofthe king, and deplored them; he denounced Jeffreys as a butcher who hadbeen let loose by the priests; and pitied the king, who was, he thought, swayed by evil counsels. He remonstrated against the interference of theking with Magdalen College; and reproved and rebuked the hopes and aimsof the more zealous and hot-headed Catholics, advising them to be contentwith simple toleration. But the constitution of his mind fitted himrather 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 Puritanreformers. He disliked their violence and harshness; while, on the otherhand, he was attracted and pleased by the gentle disposition and mildcounsels of Locke, and Tillotson, and the latitudinarians of the EnglishChurch. He was the intimate personal and political friend of AlgernonSydney; sympathized with his republican theories, and shared hisabhorrence of tyranny, civil and ecclesiastical. He found in him a manafter his own heart, --genial, generous, and loving; faithful to duty andthe instincts of humanity; a true Christian gentleman. His sense ofgratitude was strong, and his personal friendships sometimes clouded hisjudgment. In giving his support to the measures of James in behalf ofliberty of conscience, it must be admitted that he acted in consistencywith his principles and professions. To have taken ground against them, he must have given the lie to his declarations from his youth upward. Hecould not disown and deny his own favorite doctrine because it came fromthe lips of a Catholic king and his Jesuit advisers; and in thus risingabove the prejudices of his time, and appealing to the reason andhumanity of the people of England in favor of a cordial indorsement onthe part of Parliament of the principles of the declaration, he believedthat he was subserving the best interests of his beloved country andfulfilling the solemn obligations of religious duty. The downfall ofJames exposed Penn to peril and obloquy. Perjured informers endeavoredto swear away his life; and, although nothing could be proved against himbeyond the fact that he had steadily supported the great measure oftoleration, he was compelled to live secluded in his private lodgings inLondon for two or three years, with a proclamation for his arrest hangingover his head. At length, the principal informer against him having beenfound guilty of perjury, the government warrant was withdrawn; and LordsSidney, Rochester, and Somers, and the Duke of Buckingham, publicly boretestimony that nothing had been urged against him save by impostors, andthat "they had known him, some of them, for thirty years, and had neverknown him to do an ill thing, but many good offices. " It is a matter ofregret that one professing to hold the impartial pen of history shouldhave given the sanction of his authority to the slanderous and falseimputations of such a man as Burnet, who has never been regarded as anauthentic chronicler. The pantheon of history should not be lightlydisturbed. A good man's character is the world's common legacy; andhumanity is not so rich in models of purity and goodness as to be able tosacrifice such a reputation as that of William Penn to the point of anantithesis 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 theMerrimac River, was occupied a century and a half ago by some thirtydwellings, 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 tocomparatively spacious and commodious habitations, framed and coveredwith sawed boards, and cloven clapboards, or shingles. They were, manyof them, two stories in front, with the roof sloping off behind to asingle one; the windows few and small, and frequently so fitted as to beopened with difficulty, and affording but a scanty supply of light andair. Two or three of the best constructed were occupied as garrisons, where, in addition to the family, small companies of soldiers werequartered. On the high grounds rising from the river stood the mansionsof the well-defined aristocracy of the little settlement, --larger andmore imposing, with projecting upper stories and carved cornices. On thefront of one of these, over the elaborately wrought entablature of thedoorway, might be seen the armorial bearings of the honored family ofSaltonstall. Its hospitable door was now closed; no guests filled itsspacious hall or partook of the rich delicacies of its ample larder. Death had been there; its venerable and respected occupant had just beenborne by his peers in rank and station to the neighboring graveyard. Learned, affable, intrepid, a sturdy asserter of the rights and libertiesof the Province, and so far in advance of his time as to refuse to yieldto the terrible witchcraft delusion, vacating his seat on the bench andopenly expressing his disapprobation of the violent and sanguinaryproceedings of the court, wise in council and prompt in action, --not hisown townsmen alone, but the people of the entire Province, had reason tomourn the loss of Nathaniel Saltonstall. 

Four years before the events of which we are about to speak, the Indianallies of the French in Canada suddenly made their appearance in thewesterly part of the settlement. At the close of a midwinter day sixsavages rushed into the open gate of a garrison-house owned by oneBradley, who appears to have been absent at the time. A sentinel, stationed in the house, discharged his musket, killing the foremostIndian, 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 theassailants, scalding one of them severely, and was only captured aftersuch a resistance as can scarcely be conceived of by the delicatelyframed and tenderly nurtured occupants of the places of our great-grandmothers. After plundering the house, the Indians started on theirlong 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 groundwas covered with deep snow, and the captives were compelled to carryheavy burdens of their plundered household-stuffs; while for many days insuccession they had no other sustenance than bits of hide, ground-nuts, the bark of trees, and the roots of wild onions, and lilies. In thissituation, in the cold, wintry forest, and unattended, the unhappy youngwoman gave birth to a child. Its cries irritated the savages, whocruelly treated it and threatened its life. To the entreaties of themother they replied, that they would spare it on the condition that itshould be baptized after their fashion. She gave the little innocentinto their hands, when with mock solemnity they made the sign of thecross upon its forehead, by gashing it with their knives, and afterwardsbarbarously put it to death before the eyes of its mother, seeming toregard the whole matter as an excellent piece of sport. Nothing sostrongly excited the risibilities of these grim barbarians as the tearsand cries of their victims, extorted by physical or mental agony. Capricious alike in their cruelties and their kindnesses, they treatedsome of their captives with forbearance and consideration and tormentedothers apparently without cause. One man, on his way to Canada, waskilled 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, whowas suffering greatly from the effects of the scalding soap, was deridedand mocked as a "fool who had let a squaw whip him;" while on the otherhand the energy and spirit manifested by Goodwife Bradley in her defencewas a constant theme of admiration, and gained her so much respect amongher captors as to protect her from personal injury or insult. On herarrival in Canada she was sold to a French farmer, by whom she was kindlytreated. 

In the mean time her husband made every exertion in his power toascertain her fate, and early in the next year learned that she was aslave in Canada. He immediately set off through the wilderness on foot, accompanied only by his dog, who drew a small sled, upon which he carriedsome provisions for his sustenance, and a bag of snuff, which theGovernor of the Province gave him as a present to the Governor of Canada. After encountering almost incredible hardships and dangers with aperseverance which shows how well he appreciated the good qualities ofhis stolen helpmate, he reached Montreal and betook himself to theGovernor's residence. Travel-worn, ragged, and wasted with cold andhunger, he was ushered into the presence of M. Vaudreuil. The courtlyFrenchman civilly received the gift of the bag of snuff, listened to thepoor fellow's story, and put him in a way to redeem his wife withoutdifficulty. The joy of the latter on seeing her husband in the strangeland 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 ofIndian captivity. The late Dr. Abiel Abbott, in his manuscript of JudithWhiting's _Recollections of the Indian Wars_, states that she hadpreviously been a prisoner, probably before her marriage. After herreturn she lived quietly at the garrison-house until the summer of thenext year. One bright moonlit-night a party of Indians were seensilently and cautiously approaching. The only occupants of the garrisonat that time were Bradley, his wife and children, and a servant. Thethree adults armed themselves with muskets, and prepared to defendthemselves. Goodwife Bradley, supposing the Indians had come with theintention of again capturing her, encouraged her husband to fight to thelast, declaring that she had rather die on her own hearth than fall intotheir hands. The Indians rushed upon the garrison, and assailed thethick oaken door, which they forced partly open, when a well-aimed shotfrom Goodwife Bradley laid the foremost dead on the threshold. The lossof their leader so disheartened them that they made a hasty retreat. 

The year 1707 passed away without any attack upon the exposed frontiersettlement. A feeling of comparative security succeeded to the almostsleepless anxiety and terror of the inhabitants; and they were beginningto congratulate each other upon the termination of their long and bittertrials. But the end was not yet. 

Early in the spring of 1708, the principal tribes of Indians in alliancewith the French held a great council, and agreed to furnish three hundredwarriors 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 thenobility, adventurous and unscrupulous. The Sieur de Chaillons, andHertel 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 generalorders of La Perriere. A Catholic priest accompanied them. De Ronville, with the French troops and a portion of the Indians, took the route bythe River St. Francois about the middle of summer. La Perriere, with theFrench Mohawks, crossed Lake Champlain. The place of rendezvous was LakeNickisipigue. On the way a Huron accidentally killed one of hiscompanions; whereupon the tribe insisted on halting and holding acouncil. It was gravely decided that this accident was an evil omen, andthat the expedition would prove disastrous; and, in spite of theendeavors of the French officers, the whole band deserted. Next theMohawks became dissatisfied, and refused to proceed. To the entreatiesand promises of their French allies they replied that an infectiousdisease had broken out among them, and that, if they remained, it wouldspread through the whole army. The French partisans were not deceived bya falsehood so transparent; but they were in no condition to enforceobedience; and, with bitter execrations and reproaches, they saw theMohawks turn back on their warpath. The diminished army pressed on toNickisipigue, 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 theEastern tribes had broken their pledge of cooperation. Under thesecircumstances a council was held; and the original design of theexpedition, namely, the destruction of the whole line of frontier towns, beginning with Portsmouth, was abandoned. They had still a sufficientforce for the surprise of a single settlement; and Haverhill, on theMerrimac, was selected for conquest. 

In the mean time, intelligence of the expedition, greatly exaggerated inpoint of numbers and object, had reached Boston, and Governor Dudley haddespatched troops to the more exposed out posts of the Provinces ofMassachusetts and New Hampshire. Forty men, under the command of MajorTurner and Captains Price and Gardner, were stationed at Haverhill in thedifferent garrison-houses. At first a good degree of vigilance wasmanifested; but, as days and weeks passed without any alarm, theinhabitants relapsed into their old habits; and some even began tobelieve that the rumored descent of the Indians was only a pretext forquartering upon them two-score of lazy, rollicking soldiers, whocertainly seemed more expert in making love to their daughters, anddrinking their best ale and cider, than in patrolling the woods orputting the garrisons into a defensible state. The grain and hay harvestended without disturbance; the men worked in their fields, and the womenpursued their household avocations, without any very serious apprehensionof danger. 

Among the inhabitants of the village was an eccentric, ne'er-do-wellfellow, named Keezar, who led a wandering, unsettled life, oscillating, like a crazy pendulum, between Haverhill and Amesbury. He had asmattering of a variety of trades, was a famous wrestler, and for a mugof ale would leap over an ox-cart with the unspilled beverage in hishand. On one occasion, when at supper, his wife complained that she hadno 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 thecity, and returned with his ware by sunrise the next morning, passingover a distance of between sixty and seventy miles. The tradition of hisstrange habits, feats of strength, and wicked practical jokes is stillcommon in his native town. On the morning of the 29th of the eighthmonth he was engaged in taking home his horse, which, according to hiscustom, he had turned into his neighbor's rich clover field the eveningprevious. By the gray light of dawn he saw a long file of men marchingsilently towards the town. He hurried back to the village and gave thealarm by firing a gun. Previous to this, however, a young man belongingto a neighboring town, who had been spending the night with a young womanof the village, had met the advance of the war-party, and, turning backin extreme terror and confusion, thought only of the safety of hisbetrothed, and passed silently through a considerable part of the villageto her dwelling. After he had effectually concealed her he ran out togive the alarm. But it was too late. Keezar's gun was answered by theterrific yells, whistling, and whooping of the Indians. House afterhouse was assailed and captured. Men, women, and children weremassacred. The minister of the town was killed by a shot through hisdoor. Two of his children were saved by the courage and sagacity of hisnegro slave Hagar. She carried them into the cellar and covered themwith tubs, and then crouched behind a barrel of meat just in time toescape the vigilant eyes of the enemy, who entered the cellar andplundered it. She saw them pass and repass the tubs under which thechildren lay and take meat from the very barrel which concealed herself. Three soldiers were quartered in the house; but they made no defence, andwere killed while begging for quarter. 

The wife of Thomas Hartshorne, after her husband and three sons hadfallen, took her younger children into the cellar, leaving an infant on abed in the garret, fearful that its cries would betray her place ofconcealment if she took it with her. The Indians entered the garret andtossed the child out of the window upon a pile of clapboards, where itwas afterwards found stunned and insensible. It recovered, nevertheless, and became a man of remarkable strength and stature; and it used to be astanding joke with his friends that he had been stinted by the Indianswhen they threw him out of the window. Goodwife Swan, armed with a longspit, successfully defended her door against two Indians. While themassacre went on, the priest who accompanied the expedition, with some ofthe French officers, went into the meeting-house, the walls of which wereafterwards found written over with chalk. At sunrise, Major Turner, witha portion of his soldiers, entered the village; and the enemy made arapid retreat, carrying with them seventeen, prisoners. They werepursued and overtaken just as they were entering the woods; and a severeskirmish took place, in which the rescue of some of the prisoners waseffected. Thirty of the enemy were left dead on the field, including theinfamous Hertel de Rouville. On the part of the villagers, Captains Ayerand Wainwright and Lieutenant Johnson, with thirteen others, were killed. The intense heat of the weather made it necessary to bury the dead on thesame 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 ofhis wife and child, sleep in another part of the burial-ground, where maystill be seen a rude monument with its almost llegible inscription:--

"_Clauditur hoc tumulo corpus Reverendi pii doctique viri D. BenjaminRolfe, ecclesiae Christi quae est in Haverhill pastoris fidelissimi; quidomi suae ab hostibus barbare trucidatus. A laboribus suis requievitmane diei sacrae quietis, Aug. XXIX, anno Dom. MDCCVIII. AEtatis suaeXLVI_. "

Of the prisoners taken, some escaped during the skirmish, and two orthree were sent back by the French officers, with a message to theEnglish soldiers, that, if they pursued the party on their retreat toCanada, the other prisoners should be put to death. One of them, asoldier stationed in Captain Wainwright's garrison, on his return fouryears after, published an account of his captivity. He was compelled tocarry 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 theIndians shaved one side of his head, and greased the other, and paintedhis face. At a fort nine miles from Montreal a council was held in orderto decide his fate; and he had the unenviable privilege of listening to aprotracted discussion upon the expediency of burning him. The fire wasalready kindled, and the poor fellow was preparing to meet his doom withfirmness, when it was announced to him that his life was spared. Thisresult of the council by no means satisfied the women and boys, who hadanticipated rare sport in the roasting of a white man and a heretic. Onesquaw assailed him with a knife and cut off one of his fingers; anotherbeat him with a pole. The Indians spent the night in dancing andsinging, compelling their prisoner to go round the ring with them. Inthe morning one of their orators made a long speech to him, and formallydelivered him over to an old squaw, who took him to her wigwam andtreated him kindly. Two or three of the young women who were carriedaway captive married Frenchmen in Canada and never returned. Instancesof this kind were by no means rare during the Indian wars. The simplemanners, gayety, and social habits of the French colonists among whom thecaptives were dispersed seem to have been peculiarly fascinating to thedaughters of the grave and severe Puritans. 

At the beginning of the present century, Judith Whiting was the solitarysurvivor of all who witnessed the inroad of the French and Indians in1708. She was eight years of age at the time of the attack, and hermemory 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 hadbeen 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 thesublime, the grotesque and the pathetic, jostle each other on the stage;the jester, with his cap and bells, struts alongside of the hero; thelord mayor's pageant loses itself in the mob around Punch and Judy; thepomp and circumstance of war become mirth-provoking in a militia muster;and the majesty of the law is ridiculous in the mock dignity of ajustice's court. The laughing philosopher of old looked on one side oflife and his weeping contemporary on the other; but he who has an eye toboth must often experience that contrariety of feeling which Sternecompares 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 ofthe 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 partand parcel of its history in the northeastern section of Massachusetts. 

About midway between Salem and the ancient town of Newburyport, thetraveller on the Eastern Railroad sees on the right, between him and thesea, a tall church-spire, rising above a semicircle of brown roofs andvenerable elms; to which a long scalloping range of hills, sweeping offto the seaside, forms a green background. This is Ipswich, the ancientAgawam; one of those steady, conservative villages, of which a few arestill left in New England, wherein a contemporary of Cotton Mather andGovernor Endicott, were he permitted to revisit the scenes of his painfulprobation, 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 itspicturesque stone bridge; and beyond is the famous female seminary, whereAndover theological students are wont to take unto themselves wives ofthe daughters of the Puritans. An air of comfort and quiet broods overthe whole town. Yellow moss clings to the seaward sides of the roofs;one's eyes are not endangered by the intense glare of painted shinglesand clapboards. The smoke of hospitable kitchens curls up through theovershadowing elms from huge-throated chimneys, whose hearth-stones havebeen worn by the feet of many generations. The tavern was once renownedthroughout New England, and it is still a creditable hostelry. Duringcourt time it is crowded with jocose lawyers, anxious clients, sleepyjurors, and miscellaneous hangers on; disinterested gentlemen, who haveno particular business of their own in court, but who regularly attendits sessions, weighing evidence, deciding upon the merits of a lawyer'splea or a judge's charge, getting up extempore trials upon the piazza orin the bar-room of cases still involved in the glorious uncertainty ofthe law in the court-house, proffering gratuitous legal advice toirascible plaintiffs and desponding defendants, and in various other waysseeing that the Commonwealth receives no detriment. In the autumn oldsportsmen make the tavern their headquarters while scouring the marshesfor sea-birds; and slim young gentlemen from the city return thither withempty game-bags, as guiltless in respect to the snipes and wagtails asWinkle was in the matter of the rooks, after his shooting excursion atDingle Dell. Twice, nay, three times, a year, since third parties havebeen in fashion, the delegates of the political churches assemble inIpswich to pass patriotic resolutions, and designate the candidates whomthe good people of Essex County, with implicit faith in the wisdom of theselection, are expected to vote for. For the rest there are pleasantwalks and drives around the picturesque village. The people are notedfor their hospitality; in summer the sea-wind blows cool over its healthyhills, and, take it for all in all, there is not a better preserved orpleasanter specimen of a Puritan town remaining in the ancientCommonwealth. 

The 21st of April, 1775, witnessed an awful commotion in the littlevillage of Ipswich. Old men, and boys, (the middle-aged had marched toLexington some days before) and all the women in the place who were notbedridden or sick, came rushing as with one accord to the green in frontof the meeting-house. A rumor, which no one attempted to trace orauthenticate, spread from lip to lip that the British regulars had landedon the coast and were marching upon the town. A scene of indescribableterror and confusion followed. Defence was out of the question, as theyoung and able-bodied men of the entire region round about had marched toCambridge and Lexington. The news of the battle at the latter place, exaggerated in all its details, had been just received; terrible storiesof the atrocities committed by the dreaded "regulars" had been related;and it was believed that nothing short of a general extermination of thepatriots--men, women, and children--was contemplated by the Britishcommander. --Almost simultaneously the people of Beverly, a village a fewmiles distant, were smitten with the same terror. How the rumor wascommunicated no one could tell. It was there believed that the enemy hadfallen upon Ipswich, and massacred the inhabitants without regard to ageor sex. 

It was about the middle of the afternoon of this day that the people ofNewbury, ten miles farther north, assembled in an informal meeting, atthe town-house to hear accounts from the Lexington fight, and to considerwhat action was necessary in consequence of that event. Parson Carey wasabout opening the meeting with prayer when hurried hoof-beats sounded upthe street, and a messenger, loose-haired and panting for breath, rushedup the staircase. "Turn out, turn out, for God's sake, " he cried, "oryou will be all killed! The regulars are marching onus; they are atIpswich now, cutting and slashing all before them!" Universalconsternation was the immediate result of this fearful announcement;Parson Carey's prayer died on his lips; the congregation dispersed overthe town, carrying to every house the tidings that the regulars had come. Men on horseback went galloping up and down the streets, shouting thealarm. Women and children echoed it from every corner. The panic becameirresistible, uncontrollable. Cries were heard that the dreaded invadershad reached Oldtown Bridge, a little distance from the village, and thatthey 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 threwtheir silver and pewter ware and other valuables into wells. Largenumbers crossed the Merrimac, and spent the night in the deserted housesof Salisbury, whose inhabitants, stricken by the strange terror, had fledinto New Hampshire, to take up their lodgings in dwellings also abandonedby their owners. A few individuals refused to fly with the multitude;some, unable to move by reason of sickness, were left behind by theirrelatives. One old gentleman, whose excessive corpulence renderedretreat on his part impossible, made a virtue of necessity; and, seatinghimself in his doorway with his loaded king's arm, upbraided his morenimble neighbors, advising them to do as he did, and "stop and shoot thedevils. " Many ludicrous instances of the intensity of the terror mightbe related. One man got his family into a boat to go to Ram Island forsafety. He imagined he was pursued by the enemy through the dusk of theevening, and was annoyed by the crying of an infant in the after part ofthe boat. "Do throw that squalling brat overboard, " he called to hiswife, "or we shall be all discovered and killed!" A poor woman ran fouror five miles up the river, and stopped to take breath and nurse herchild, when she found to her great horror that she had brought off thecat instead of the baby!

All through that memorable night the terror swept onward towards thenorth with a speed which seems almost miraculous, producing everywherethe same results. At midnight a horseman, clad only in shirt andbreeches, dashed by our grandfather's door, in Haverhill, twenty miles upthe river. "Turn out! Get a musket! Turn out!" he shouted; "theregulars are landing on Plum Island!" "I'm glad of it, " responded theold gentleman from his chamber window; "I wish they were all there, andobliged to stay there. " When it is understood that Plum Island is littlemore than a naked sand-ridge, the benevolence of this wish can be readilyappreciated. 

All the boats on the river were constantly employed for several hours inconveying across the terrified fugitives. Through "the dead waste andmiddle of the night" they fled over the border into New Hampshire. Somefeared to take the frequented roads, and wandered over wooded hills andthrough swamps where the snows of the late winter had scarcely melted. They heard the tramp and outcry of those behind them, and fancied thatthe sounds were made by pursuing enemies. Fast as they fled, the terror, by some unaccountable means, outstripped them. They found housesdeserted and streets strewn with household stuffs, abandoned in the hurryof escape. Towards morning, however, the tide partially turned. Grownmen began to feel ashamed of their fears. The old Anglo-Saxon hardihoodpaused 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 toretrace their steps. In the mean time such of the good people of Ipswichas were unable or unwilling to leave their homes became convinced thatthe terrible rumor which had nearly depopulated their settlement wasunfounded. 

Among those who had there awaited the onslaught of the regulars was ayoung man from Exeter, New Hampshire. Becoming satisfied that the wholematter was a delusion, he mounted his horse and followed after theretreating multitude, undeceiving all whom he overtook. Late at nighthe reached Newburyport, greatly to the relief of its sleeplessinhabitants, and hurried across the river, proclaiming as he rode thewelcome tidings. The sun rose upon haggard and jaded fugitives, wornwith excitement and fatigue, slowly returning homeward, theirsatisfaction at the absence of danger somewhat moderated by an unpleasantconsciousness of the ludicrous scenes of their premature night flitting. 

Any inference which might be drawn from the foregoing narrativederogatory to the character of the people of New England at that day, onthe score of courage, would be essentially erroneous. It is true, theywere not the men to court danger or rashly throw away their lives for themere glory of the sacrifice. They had always a prudent and wholesomeregard to their own comfort and safety; they justly looked upon soundheads and limbs as better than broken ones; life was to them too seriousand important, and their hard-gained property too valuable, to be lightlyhazarded. They never attempted to cheat themselves by under-estimatingthe difficulty to be encountered, or shutting their eyes to its probableconsequences. Cautious, wary, schooled in the subtle strategy of Indianwarfare, where self-preservation is by no means a secondary object, theyhad little in common with the reckless enthusiasm of their French allies, or the stolid indifference of the fighting machines of the Britishregular army. When danger could no longer be avoided, they met it withfirmness and iron endurance, but with a very vivid appreciation of itsmagnitude. Indeed, it must be admitted by all who are familiar with thehistory of our fathers that the element of fear held an important placeamong their characteristics. It exaggerated all the dangers of theirearthly pilgrimage, and peopled the future with shapes of evil. Theirfear of Satan invested him with some of the attributes of Omnipotence, and almost reached the point of reverence. The slightest shock of anearthquake filled all hearts with terror. Stout men trembled by theirhearths with dread of some paralytic old woman supposed to be a witch. And when they believed themselves called upon to grapple with theseterrors and endure the afflictions of their allotment, they brought tothe trial a capability of suffering undiminished by the chloroform ofmodern philosophy. They were heroic in endurance. Panics like the onewe have described might bow and sway them like reeds in the wind; butthey stood up like the oaks of their own forests beneath the thunder andthe hail of actual calamity. 

It was certainly lucky for the good people of Essex County that no wickedwag 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 Chepatchetdemonstration in Rhode Island, and the "Sauk fuss" of Wisconsin, itremains to this day "unsyllabled, unsung;" and the fast-fading memory ofage 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 inGreat Britain, with the new cardinal, Dr. Wiseman, at its head, seems tohave revived an old popular custom, a grim piece of Protestant sport, which, since the days of Lord George Gordon and the "No Popery" mob, hadvery generally fallen into disuse. On the 5th of the eleventh month ofthis present year all England was traversed by processions and lighted upwith bonfires, in commemoration of the detection of the "gunpowder plot"of Guy Fawkes and the Papists in 1605. Popes, bishops, and cardinals, instraw and pasteboard, were paraded through the streets and burned amidthe shouts of the populace, a great portion of whom would have doubtlessbeen quite as ready to do the same pleasant little office for the Bishopof Exeter or his Grace of Canterbury, if they could have carted about andburned in effigy a Protestant hierarchy as safely as a Catholic one. 

In this country, where every sect takes its own way, undisturbed by legalrestrictions, each ecclesiastical tub balancing itself as it best may onits own bottom, and where bishops Catholic and bishops Episcopal, bishopsMethodist and bishops Mormon, jostle each other in our thoroughfares, itis not to be expected that we should trouble ourselves with the matter atissue between the rival hierarchies on the other side of the water. Itis a very pretty quarrel, however, and good must come out of it, as itcannot fail to attract popular attention to the shallowness of thespiritual pretensions of both parties, and lead to the conclusion that ahierarchy of any sort has very little in common with the fishermen andtent-makers of the New Testament. 

Pope Night--the anniversary of the discovery of the Papal incendiary GuyFawkes, booted and spurred, ready to touch fire to his powder-train underthe Parliament House--was celebrated by the early settlers of NewEngland, and doubtless afforded a good deal of relief to the youngerplants of grace in the Puritan vineyard. In those solemn old days, therecurrence of the powder-plot anniversary, with its processions, hideousimages of the Pope and Guy Fawkes, its liberal potations of strongwaters, and its blazing bonfires reddening the wild November hills, musthave been looked forward to with no slight degree of pleasure. For onenight, at least, the cramped and smothered fun and mischief of theyounger generation were permitted to revel in the wild extravaganceof a Roman saturnalia or the Christmas holidays of a slave plantation. Bigotry--frowning upon the May-pole, with its flower wreaths and sportiverevellers, and counting the steps of the dancers as so many steps towardsperdition--recognized in the grim farce of Guy Fawkes's anniversarysomething of its own lineaments, smiled complacently upon the riotousyoung actors, and opened its close purse to furnish tar-barrels to roastthe Pope, and strong water to moisten the throats of his noisy judges andexecutioners. 

Up to the time of the Revolution the powder plot was duly commemoratedthroughout New England. At that period the celebration of it wasdiscountenanced, and in many places prohibited, on the ground that it wasinsulting to our Catholic allies from France. In Coffin's History ofNewbury it is stated that, in 1774, the town authorities of Newburyportordered "that no effigies be carried about or exhibited only in thedaytime. " The last public celebration in that town was in the followingyear. Long before the close of the last century the exhibitions of PopeNight had entirely ceased throughout the country, with, as far as we canlearn, a solitary exception. The stranger who chances to be travellingon the road between Newburyport and Haverhill, on the night of the 5th ofNovember, may well fancy that an invasion is threatened from the sea, orthat an insurrection is going on inland; for from all the high hillsoverlooking the river tall fires are seen blazing redly against the cold, dark, autumnal sky, surrounded by groups of young men and boys busilyengaged in urging them with fresh fuel into intenser activity. To feedthese bonfires, everything combustible which could be begged or stolenfrom the neighboring villages, farm-houses, and fences is put inrequisition. Old tar-tubs, purloined from the shipbuilders of theriver-side, and flour and lard barrels from the village-traders, arestored away for days, and perhaps weeks, in the woods or in the rain-gullies of the hills, in preparation for Pope Night. From the earliestsettlement of the towns of Amesbury and Salisbury, the night of thepowder plot has been thus celebrated, with unbroken regularity, down tothe present time. The event which it once commemorated is probably nowunknown to most of the juvenile actors. The symbol lives on fromgeneration to generation after the significance is lost; and we have seenthe children of our Catholic neighbors as busy as their Protestantplaymates in collecting, "by hook or by crook, " the materials for Pope-Night bonfires. We remember, on one occasion, walking out with a giftedand learned Catholic friend to witness the fine effect of theillumination on the hills, and his hearty appreciation of its picturesqueand wild beauty, --the busy groups in the strong relief of the fires, andthe play and corruscation of the changeful lights on the bare, brownhills, naked trees, and autumn clouds. 

In addition to the bonfires on the hills, there was formerly a processionin the streets, bearing grotesque images of the Pope, his cardinals andfriars; and behind them Satan himself, a monster with huge ox-horns onhis head, and a long tail, brandishing his pitchfork and goading themonward. The Pope was generally furnished with a movable head, whichcould be turned round, thrown back, or made to bow, like that of a china-ware mandarin. An aged inhabitant of the neighborhood has furnished uswith some fragments of the songs sung on such occasions, probably thesame which our British ancestors trolled forth around their bonfires twocenturies 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, suchas regaled the senses of the Virgin Queen or Bloody Mary, which entirelyreconciles us to their disuse at the present time. 

It should be the fervent prayer of all good men that the evil spirit ofreligious hatred and intolerance, which on the one hand prompted thegunpowder plot, and which on the other has ever since made it theoccasion of reproach and persecution of an entire sect of professingChristians, may be no longer perpetuated. In the matter of exclusivenessand 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 thehymns of Cowper and the Confessions of Augustine, the humane philosophyof Channing and the devout meditations of Thomas a Kempis, the simpleessays of Woolman and the glowing periods of Bossuet, shall be regardedas 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 seventeenthcentury, was a frontier settlement, occupying an advanced position in thegreat 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 fournorthwardly was occupied by scattered settlers, while in the centre ofthe town a compact village had grown up. In the immediate vicinity therewere but few Indians, and these generally peaceful and inoffensive. Onthe breaking out of the Narragansett war, the inhabitants had erectedfortifications and taken other measures for defence; but, with thepossible 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 theyear 1689 that the safety of the settlement was seriously threatened. Three persons were killed in that year. In 1690 six garrisons wereestablished in different parts of the town, with a small company ofsoldiers attached to each. Two of these houses are still standing. Theywere built of brick, two stories high, with a single outside door, sosmall and narrow that but one person could enter at a time; the windowsfew, and only about two and a half feet long by eighteen inches withthick diamond glass secured with lead, and crossed inside with bars ofiron. The basement had but two rooms, and the chamber was entered by aladder instead of stairs; so that the inmates, if driven thither, couldcut off communication with the rooms below. Many private houses werestrengthened and fortified. We remember one familiar to our boyhood, --a venerable old building of wood, with brick between the weather boardsand ceiling, with a massive balustrade over the door, constructed of oaktimber and plank, with holes through the latter for firing uponassailants. The door opened upon a stone-paved hall, or entry, leadinginto the huge single room of the basement, which was lighted by two smallwindows, the ceiling black with the smoke of a century and a half; a hugefireplace, calculated for eight-feet wood, occupying one entire side;while, overhead, suspended from the timbers, or on shelves fastened tothem, were household stores, farming utensils, fishing-rods, guns, bunches of herbs gathered perhaps a century ago, strings of dried applesand pumpkins, links of mottled sausages, spareribs, and flitches ofbacon; the firelight of an evening dimly revealing the checked woollencoverlet of the bed in one far-off corner, while in another "the pewterplates on the dresser Caught and reflected the flame as shields of armiesthe sunshine. "

Tradition has preserved many incidents of life in the garrisons. Intimes of unusual peril the settlers generally resorted at night to thefortified houses, taking thither their flocks and herds and suchhousehold valuables as were most likely to strike the fancy or ministerto the comfort or vanity of the heathen marauders. False alarms werefrequent. The smoke of a distant fire, the bark of a dog in the deepwoods, a stump or bush taking in the uncertain light of stars and moonthe appearance of a man, were sufficient to spread alarm through theentire settlement, and to cause the armed men of the garrison to passwhole nights in sleepless watching. It is said that at Haselton'sgarrison-house the sentinel on duty saw, as he thought, an Indian insideof the paling which surrounded the building, and apparently seeking togain an entrance. He promptly raised his musket and fired at theintruder, alarming thereby the entire garrison. The women and childrenleft their beds, and the men seized their guns and commenced firing onthe suspicious object; but it seemed to bear a charmed life, and remainedunharmed. As the morning dawned, however, the mystery was solved by thediscovery of a black quilted petticoat hanging on the clothes-line, completely riddled with balls. 

As a matter of course, under circumstances of perpetual alarm andfrequent peril, the duty of cultivating their fields, and gathering theirharvests, and working at their mechanical avocations was dangerous anddifficult to the settlers. One instance will serve as an illustration. At the garrison-house of Thomas Dustin, the husband of the far-famed MaryDustin, (who, while a captive of the Indians, and maddened by the murderof her infant child, killed and scalped, with the assistance of a youngboy, the entire band of her captors, ten in number, ) the business ofbrick-making was carried on. The pits where the clay was found were onlya few rods from the house; yet no man ventured to bring the clay to theyard within the enclosure without the attendance of a file of soldiers. An anecdote relating to this garrison has been handed down to the presenttune. Among its inmates were two young cousins, Joseph and MaryWhittaker; the latter a merry, handsome girl, relieving the tedium ofgarrison 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 faircousin, who was not inclined to encourage him. Growing desperate, hethreatened one evening to throw himself into the garrison well. Histhreat only called forth the laughter of his mistress; and, bidding herfarewell, he proceeded to put it in execution. On reaching the well hestumbled over a log; whereupon, animated by a happy idea, he dropped thewood into the water instead of himself, and, hiding behind the curb, awaited the result. Mary, who had been listening at the door, and whohad not believed her lover capable of so rash an act, heard the suddenplunge of the wooden Joseph. She ran to the well, and, leaning over thecurb and peering down the dark opening, cried out, in tones of anguishand remorse, "O Joseph, if you're in the land of the living, I 'll haveyou!" "I'll take ye at your word, " answered Joseph, springing up fromhis hiding-place, and avenging himself for her coyness and coldness by ahearty embrace. 

Our own paternal ancestor, owing to religious scruples in the matter oftaking arms even for defence of life and property, refused to leave hisundefended house and enter the garrison. The Indians frequently came tohis house; and the family more than once in the night heard themwhispering under the windows, and saw them put their copper faces to theglass to take a view of the apartments. Strange as it may seen, theynever offered any injury or insult to the inmates. 

In 1695 the township was many times molested by Indians, and severalpersons were killed and wounded. Early in the fall a small party madetheir appearance in the northerly part of the town, where, finding twoboys at work in an open field, they managed to surprise and capture them, and, without committing further violence, retreated through the woods totheir homes on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. Isaac Bradley, agedfifteen, was a small but active and vigorous boy; his companion incaptivity, Joseph Whittaker, was only eleven, yet quite as large in size, and heavier in his movements. After a hard and painful journey theyarrived at the lake, and were placed in an Indian family, consisting of aman and squaw and two or three children. Here they soon acquired asufficient knowledge of the Indian tongue to enable them to learn fromthe conversation carried on in their presence that it was designed totake them to Canada in the spring. This discovery was a painful one. Canada, the land of Papist priests and bloody Indians, was the especialterror of the New England settlers, and the anathema maranatha of Puritanpulpits. Thither the Indians usually hurried their captives, where theycompelled them to work in their villages or sold them to the Frenchplanters. Escape from thence through a deep wilderness, and across lakesand mountains and almost impassable rivers, without food or guide, wasregarded as an impossibility. The poor boys, terrified by the prospectof being carried still farther from their home and friends, began todream of escaping from their masters before they started for Canada. Itwas now winter; it would have been little short of madness to have chosenfor flight that season of bitter cold and deep snows. Owing to exposureand want of proper food and clothing, Isaac, the eldest of the boys, wasseized with a violent fever, from which he slowly recovered in the courseof the winter. His Indian mistress was as kind to him as hercircumstances permitted, --procuring medicinal herbs and roots for herpatient, and tenderly watching over him in the long winter nights. Spring came at length; the snows melted; and the ice was broken up on thelake. The Indians began to make preparations for journeying to Canada;and Isaac, who had during his sickness devised a plan of escape, saw thatthe time of putting it in execution had come. On the evening before hewas to make the attempt he for the first time informed his youngercompanion 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 inthe wigwam, in the midst of the family. Joseph soon fell asleep; butIsaac, fully sensible of the danger and difficulty of the enterprisebefore him, lay awake, watchful for his opportunity. About midnight herose, cautiously stepping over the sleeping forms of the family, andsecuring, as he went, his Indian master's flint, steel, and tinder, and asmall quantity of dry moose-meat and cornbread. He then carefullyawakened his companion, who, starting up, forgetful of the cause of hisdisturbance, asked aloud, "What do you want?" The savages began to stir;and Isaac, trembling with fear of detection, lay down again and pretendedto be asleep. After waiting a while he again rose, satisfied, from theheavy breathing of the Indians, that they were all sleeping; and fearingto awaken Joseph a second time, lest he should again hazard all by histhoughtlessness, he crept softly out of the wigwam. He had proceeded buta few rods when he heard footsteps behind him; and, supposing himselfpursued, he hurried into the woods, casting a glance backward. What washis joy to see his young companion running after him! They hastened onin a southerly direction as nearly as they could determine, hoping toreach their distant home. When daylight appeared they found a largehollow log, into which they crept for concealment, wisely judging thatthey would be hotly pursued by their Indian captors. 

Their sagacity was by no means at fault. The Indians, missing theirprisoners in the morning, started off in pursuit with their dogs. As theyoung boys lay in the log they could hear the whistle of the Indians andthe barking of dogs upon their track. It was a trying moment; and eventhe stout heart of the elder boy sank within him as the dogs came up tothe log and set up a loud bark of discovery. But his presence of mindsaved him. He spoke in a low tone to the dogs, who, recognizing hisfamiliar voice, wagged their tails with delight and ceased barking. Hethen 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. Theboys 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 boyslooked after them and saw them disappear in the thick woods. Theyremained in their covert until night, when they started again on theirlong journey, taking a new route to avoid the Indians. At daybreak theyagain concealed themselves, but travelled the next night and day withoutresting. By this time they had consumed all the bread which they hadtaken, and were fainting from hunger and weariness. Just at the close ofthe third day they were providentially enabled to kill a pigeon and asmall 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 theystruck upon an old Indian path, and, following it until night, camesuddenly 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 oflogs and brushwood was burning; and around it the Indians sat, eatingtheir moose-meat and smoking their pipes. 

The poor fugitives, starving, weary, and chilled by the cold springblasts, gazed down upon the ample fire; and the savory meats which thesquaws were cooking by it, but felt no temptation to purchase warmth andfood by surrendering themselves to captivity. Death in the forest seemedpreferable. They turned and fled back upon their track, expecting everymoment to hear the yells of pursuers. The morning found them seated onthe bank of a small stream, their feet torn and bleeding, and theirbodies emaciated. The elder, as a last effort, made search for roots, and fortunately discovered a few ground-nuts, (glicine apios) whichserved 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 ofwater, and that to the sea and the white settlements near it; and heresolved to follow it. They again began their painful march; the daypassed, and the night once more overtook them. When the eighth morningdawned, the younger of the boys found himself unable to rise from his bedof leaves. Isaac endeavored to encourage him, dug roots, and procuredwater for him; but the poor lad was utterly exhausted. He had no longerheart or hope. The elder boy laid him on leaves and dry grass at thefoot of a tree, and with a heavy heart bade him farewell. Alone heslowly and painfully proceeded down the stream, now greatly increased insize by tributary rivulets. On the top of a hill, he climbed withdifficulty into a tree, and saw in the distance what seemed to be aclearing and a newly raised frame building. Hopeful and rejoicing, heturned back to his young companion, told him what he had seen, and, afterchafing his limbs awhile, got him upon his feet. Sometimes supportinghim, and at others carrying him on his back, the heroic boy staggeredtowards the clearing. On reaching it he found it deserted, and wasobliged to continue his journey. Towards night signs of civilizationbegan to appear, --the heavy, continuous roar of water was heard; and, presently emerging from the forest, he saw a great river dashing in whitefoam down precipitous rocks, and on its bank the gray walls of a hugestone building, with flankers, palisades, and moat, over which theBritish flag was flying. This was the famous Saco Fort, built byGovernor 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; butIsaac 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 ofthe electric wire conveys a new subject for thought or action to ageneration as eager as the ancient Athenians for some new thing, simplelegends of the past like that which we have transcribed have undoubtedlylost in a great degree their interest. The lore of the fireside isbecoming obsolete, and with the octogenarian few who still linger amongus 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 ourattention to a matter which has been very carefully kept out of sight byorators and toast-drinkers. We allude to the participation of coloredmen in the great struggle for American freedom. It is not in accordancewith our taste or our principles to eulogize the shedders of blood evenin a cause of acknowledged justice; but when we see a whole nation doinghonor to the memories of one class of its defenders to the total neglectof another class, who had the misfortune to be of darker complexion, wecannot forego the satisfaction of inviting notice to certain historicalfacts which for the last half century have been quietly elbowed aside, as no more deserving of a place in patriotic recollection than thedescendants of the men to whom the facts in question relate have to aplace in a Fourth of July procession. 

Of the services and sufferings of the colored soldiers of the Revolutionno attempt has, to our knowledge, been made to preserve a record. Theyhave had no historian. With here and there an exception, they have allpassed away; and only some faint tradition of their campaigns underWashington and Greene and Lafayette, and of their cruisings under Decaturand Barry, lingers among their, descendants. Yet enough is known to showthat the free colored men of the United States bore their full proportionof the sacrifices and trials of the Revolutionary War. 

The late Governor Eustis, of Massachusetts, --the pride and boast of thedemocracy of the East, himself an active participant in the war, andtherefore a most competent witness, --Governor Morrill, of New Hampshire, Judge Hemphill, of Pennsylvania, and other members of Congress, in thedebate on the question of admitting Missouri as a slave State into theUnion, bore emphatic testimony to the efficiency and heroism of the blacktroops. Hon. Calvin Goddard, of Connecticut, states that in the littlecircle of his residence he was instrumental in securing, under the act of1818, the pensions of nineteen colored soldiers. "I cannot, " he says, "refrain from mentioning one aged black man, Primus Babcock, who proudlypresented to me an honorable discharge from service during the war, datedat the close of it, wholly in the handwriting of George Washington; norcan I forget the expression of his feelings when informed, after hisdischarge had been sent to the War Department, that it could not bereturned. At his request it was written for, as he seemed inclined tospurn the pension and reclaim the discharge. " There is a touchinganecdote related of Baron Stenben on the occasion of the disbandment ofthe American army. A black soldier, with his wounds unhealed, utterlydestitute, stood on the wharf just as a vessel bound for his distant homewas getting under way. The poor fellow gazed at the vessel with tears inhis eyes, and gave himself up to despair. The warm-hearted foreignerwitnessed his emotion, and, inquiring into the cause of it, took his lastdollar from his purse and gave it to him, with tears of sympathytrickling down his cheeks. Overwhelmed with gratitude, the poor woundedsoldier hailed the sloop and was received on board. As it moved out fromthe wharf, he cried back to his noble friend on shore, "God Almightybless you, Master Baron!"

"In Rhode Island, " says Governor Eustis in his able speech againstslavery in Missouri, 12th of twelfth month, 1820, "the blacks formed anentire 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 berecollected that four hundred men met and repulsed, after a terrible andsanguinary struggle, fifteen hundred Hessian troops, headed by CountDonop. The glory of the defence of Red Bank, which has been pronouncedone of the most heroic actions of the war, belongs in reality to blackmen; yet who now hears them spoken of in connection with it? Among thetraits which distinguished the black regiment was devotion to theirofficers. In the attack made upon the American lines near Croton Riveron the 13th of the fifth month, 1781, Colonel Greene, the commander ofthe regiment, was cut down and mortally wounded; but the sabres of theenemy only reached him through the bodies of his faithful guard ofblacks, who hovered over him to protect him, every one of whom waskilled. The late Dr. Harris, of Dunbarton, New Hampshire, aRevolutionary veteran, stated, in a speech at Francistown, New Hampshire, some years ago, that on one occasion the regiment to which he wasattached was commanded to defend an important position, which the enemythrice assailed, and from which they were as often repulsed. "Therewas, " said the venerable speaker, "a regiment of blacks in the samesituation, --a regiment of negroes fighting for our liberty andindependence, not a white man among them but the officers, --in the samedangerous and responsible position. Had they been unfaithful or givenway before the enemy, all would have been lost. Three times insuccession were they attacked with most desperate fury by well-disciplined and veteran troops; and three times did they successfullyrepel the assault, and thus preserve an army. They fought thus throughthe war. They were brave and hardy troops. "

In the debate in the New York Convention of 1821 for amending theConstitution of the State, on the question of extending the right ofsuffrage to the blacks, Dr. Clarke, the delegate from Delaware County, and other members, made honorable mention of the services of the coloredtroops in the Revolutionary army. 

The late James Forten, of Philadelphia, well known as a colored man ofwealth, intelligence, and philanthropy, enlisted in the American navyunder Captain Decatur, of the Royal Louis, was taken prisoner during hissecond cruise, and, with nineteen other colored men, confined on boardthe horrible Jersey prison-ship; All the vessels in the American serviceat that period were partly manned by blacks. The old citizens ofPhiladelphia to this day remember the fact that, when the troops of theNorth marched through the city, one or more colored companies wereattached to nearly all the regiments. 

Governor Eustis, in the speech before quoted, states that the freecolored soldiers entered the ranks with the whites. The time of thosewho were slaves was purchased of their masters, and they were induced toenter the service in consequence of a law of Congress by which, oncondition of their serving in the ranks during the war, they were madefreemen. This hope of liberty inspired them with courage to oppose theirbreasts to the Hessian bayonet at Red Bank, and enabled them to endurewith fortitude the cold and famine of Valley Forge. The anecdote of theslave of General Sullivan, of New Hampshire, is well known. When hismaster told him that they were on the point of starting for the army, tofight for liberty, he shrewdly suggested that it would be a greatsatisfaction to know that he was indeed going to fight for his liberty. Struck with the reasonableness and justice of this suggestion, GeneralSullivan at once gave him his freedom. 

The late Tristam Burgess, of Rhode Island, in a speech in Congress, firstmonth, 1828, said "At the commencement of the Revolutionary War, RhodeIsland had a number of slaves. A regiment of them were enlisted into theContinental service, and no braver men met the enemy in battle; but notone of them was permitted to be a soldier until he had first been made afreeman. "

The celebrated Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, in his speech on theMissouri question, and in defence of the slave representation of theSouth, made the following admissions:--

"They (the colored people) were in numerous instances the pioneers, andin all the laborers, of our armies. To their hands were owing thegreatest part of the fortifications raised for the protection of thecountry. Fort Moultrie gave, at an early period of the inexperienced anduntried valor of our citizens, immortality to the American arms; and inthe Northern States numerous bodies of them were enrolled, and foughtside 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 GreatBritain, and see whether the whites enjoyed a monopoly of patriotism atthat 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 thewar 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 thelast 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 ofthem were with Perry, and helped to gain the brilliant victory of LakeErie. A whole battalion of them were distinguished for their orderlyappearance. "

Dr. Clarke, in the convention which revised the Constitution of New Yorkin 1821, speaking of the colored inhabitants of the State, said:--

"In your late war they contributed largely towards some of your mostsplendid victories. On Lakes Erie and Champlain, where your fleetstriumphed over a foe superior in numbers and engines of death, they weremanned 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 thebranches of your government, authorizing the governor to accept theservices of a corps of two thousand free people of color. Sir, thesewere times which tried men's souls. In these times it was no sportingmatter to bear arms. These were times when a man who shouldered hismusket did not know but he bared his bosom to receive a death-wound fromthe enemy ere he laid it aside; and in these times these people werefound 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 hadplaced them beyond your compulsory power. But there was no necessity forits exercise; they were volunteers, --yes, sir, volunteers to defend thatvery country from the inroads and ravages of a ruthless and vindictivefoe which had treated them with insult, degradation, and slavery. "

On the capture of Washington by the British forces, it was judgedexpedient to fortify, without delay, the principal towns and citiesexposed to similar attacks. The Vigilance Committee of Philadelphiawaited upon three of the principal colored citizens, namely, JamesForten, Bishop Allen, and Absalom Jones, soliciting the aid of the peopleof color in erecting suitable defences for the city. Accordingly, twenty-five hundred colored then assembled in the State-House yard, andfrom thence marched to Gray's Ferry, where they labored for two daysalmost without intermission. Their labors were so faithful and efficientthat a vote of thanks was tendered them by the committee. A battalion ofcolored troops was at the same time organized in the city under anofficer of the United States army; and they were on the point of marchingto the frontier when peace was proclaimed. 

General Jackson's proclamations to the free colored inhabitants ofLouisiana 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 inestimableblessings. As Americans, your country looks with confidence to heradopted children for a valorous support. As fathers, husbands, andbrothers, you are summoned to rally round the standard of the eagle, todefend all which is dear in existence. "

The second proclamation is one of the highest compliments ever paid by amilitary 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 youpossessed qualities most formidable to an invading enemy. I knew withwhat fortitude you could endure hunger, and thirst, and all the fatiguesof a campaign. I knew well how you loved your native country, and thatyou, as well as ourselves, had to defend what man holds most dear, --hisparents, wife, children, and property. You have done more than Iexpected. In addition to the previous qualities I before knew you topossess, I found among you a noble enthusiasm, which leads to theperformance of great things. 

"Soldiers! the President of the United States shall hear how praiseworthywas your conduct in the hour of danger, and the Representatives of theAmerican 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 theRevolution" and the volunteers in "the second war for independence" is tobe divided between the white and the colored man. We have dwelt uponthis subject at length, not because it accords with our principles orfeelings, for it is scarcely necessary for us to say that we are one ofthose who hold that

 "Peace hath her victories No less renowned than war, "

and certainly far more desirable and useful; but because, in popularestimation, the patriotism which dares and does on the battle-field takesa higher place than the quiet exercise of the duties of peacefulcitizenship; and we are willing that colored soldiers, with theirdescendants, should have the benefit, if possible, of a public sentimentwhich has so extravagantly lauded their white companions in arms. Ifpulpits must be desecrated by eulogies of the patriotism of bloodshed, wesee no reason why black defenders of their country in the war for libertyshould not receive honorable mention as well as white invaders of aneighboring republic who have volunteered in a war for plunder andslavery extension. For the latter class of "heroes" we have very littlerespect. The patriotism of too many of them forcibly reminds us of Dr. Johnson's definition of that much-abused term "Patriotism, sir! 'T isthe last refuge of a scoundrel. "

"What right, I demand, " said an American orator some years ago, "have thechildren of Africa to a homestead in the white man's country?" Theanswer will in part be found in the facts which we have presented. Theirright, like that of their white fellow-citizens, dates back to the dreadarbitrament of battle. Their bones whiten every stricken field of theRevolution; their feet tracked with blood the snows of Jersey; their toilbuilt up every fortification south of the Potomac; they shared the famineand nakedness of Valley Forge and the pestilential horrors of the oldJersey prisonship. Have they, then, no claim to an equal participationin the blessings which have grown out of the national independence forwhich they fought? Is it just, is it magnanimous, is it safe, even, tostarve the patriotism of such a people, to cast their hearts out of thetreasury of the Republic, and to convert them, by politicaldisfranchisement 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 bygeographical boundaries. Flashing hope into the dark places of theearth, far down among the poor and long oppressed, or startling theoppressor in his guarded chambers like that mountain of fire which fellinto the sea at the sound of the apocalyptic trumpet, it agitated theworld. 

The arguments of Condorcet, the battle-words of Mirabeau, the fierce zealof St. Just, the iron energy of Danton, the caustic wit of CamilleDesmoulins, and the sweet eloquence of Vergniaud found echoes in alllands, and nowhere more readily than in Great Britain, the ancient foeand rival of France. The celebrated Dr. Price, of London, and the stillmore distinguished Priestley, of Birmingham, spoke out boldly in defenceof 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 thepurpose of disseminating liberal appeals and arguments throughout theUnited Kingdom. 

In Scotland an auxiliary society was formed, under the name of Friends ofthe People. Thomas Muir, young in years, yet an elder in the Scottishkirk, a successful advocate at the bar, talented, affable, eloquent, anddistinguished for the purity of his life and his enthusiasm in the causeof freedom, was its principal originator. In the twelfth month of 1792 aconvention of reformers was held at Edinburgh. The government becamealarmed, and a warrant was issued for the arrest of Muir. He escaped toFrance; but soon after, venturing to return to his native land, wasrecognized and imprisoned. He was tried upon the charge of lending booksof republican tendency, and reading an address from Theobald Wolfe Toneand the United Irishmen before the society of which he was a member. Hedefended himself in a long and eloquent address, which concluded in thefollowing manly strain:--

"What, then, has been my crime? Not the lending to a relation a copy ofThomas Paine's works, --not the giving away to another a few numbers of aninnocent and constitutional publication; but my crime is, for havingdared to be, according to the measure of my feeble abilities, a strenuousand an active advocate for an equal representation of the people in theHouse of the people, --for having dared to accomplish a measure by legalmeans which was to diminish the weight of their taxes and to put an endto the profusion of their blood. Gentlemen, from my infancy to thismoment I have devoted myself to the cause of the people. It is a goodcause: it will ultimately prevail, --it will finally triumph. "

He was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, and was removed tothe Edinburgh jail, from thence to the hulks, and lastly to thetransport-ship, containing eighty-three convicts, which conveyed him toBotany Bay. 

The next victim was Palmer, a learned and highly accomplished Unitarianminister in Dundee. He was greatly beloved and respected as a polishedgentleman and sincere friend of the people. He was charged withcirculating a republican tract, and was sentenced to seven years'transportation. 

But the Friends of the People were not quelled by this summary punishmentof two of their devoted leaders. In the tenth month, 1793, delegateswere called together from various towns in Scotland, as well as fromBirmingham, Sheffield, and other places in England. Gerrald and Margarotwere sent up by the London society. After a brief sitting, theconvention was dispersed by the public authorities. Its sessions wereopened and closed with prayer, and the speeches of its members manifestedthe pious enthusiasm of the old Cameronians and Parliament-men of thetimes of Cromwell. Many of the dissenting clergy were present. WilliamSkirving, the most determined of the band, had been educated for theministry, and was a sincerely religious man. Joseph Gerrald was a youngman of brilliant talents and exemplary character. When the sheriffentered the hall to disperse the friends of liberty, Gerrald knelt inprayer. 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 thescaffold, just before his execution. It is the prayer of universalhumanity, which God will yet hear and answer. 

"O thou Governor of the universe, we rejoice that, at all times and inall circumstances, we have liberty to approach Thy throne, and that weare assured that no sacrifice is more acceptable to Thee than that whichis made for the relief of the oppressed. In this moment of trial andpersecution 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 ourfathers of old, to enlighten and direct us; and to our enemies a pillarof cloud, and darkness, and confusion. 

"Thou art Thyself the great Patron of liberty. Thy service is perfectfreedom. Prosper, we beseech Thee, every endeavor which we make topromote Thy cause; for we consider the cause of truth, or every causewhich tends to promote the happiness of Thy creatures, as Thy cause. 

"O thou merciful Father of mankind, enable us, for Thy name's sake, toendure persecution with fortitude; and may we believe that all trials andtribulations of life which we endure shall work together for good to themthat love Thee; and grant that the greater the evil, and the longer itmay be continued, the greater good, in Thy holy and adorable providence, may be produced therefrom. And this we beg, not for our own merits, butthrough the merits of Him who is hereafter to judge the world inrighteousness and mercy. "

He ceased, and the sheriff, who had been temporarily overawed by theextraordinary scene, enforced the warrant, and the meeting was broken up. The delegates descended to the street in silence, --Arthur's Seat andSalisbury Crags glooming in the distance and night, --an immense andagitated multitude waiting around, over which tossed the flaringflambeaux 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 triedin the first month, 1794, and sentenced, as Muir and Palmer hadpreviously been, to transportation. Their conduct throughout was worthyof their great and holy cause. Gerrald's defence was that of freedomrather than his own. Forgetting himself, he spoke out manfully andearnestly for the poor, the oppressed, the overtaxed, and starvingmillions of his countrymen. That some idea may be formed of this nobleplea for liberty, I give an extract from the concluding paragraphs:--

"True religion, like all free governments, appeals to the understandingfor its support, and not to the sword. All systems, whether civil ormoral, can only be durable in proportion as they are founded on truth andcalculated to promote the good of mankind. This will account to us whygovernments suited to the great energies of man have always outlived theperishable things which despotism has erected. Yes, this will account tous why the stream of Time, which is continually washing away thedissoluble fabrics of superstitions and impostures, passes without injuryby the adamant of Christianity. 

"Those who are versed in the history of their country, in the history ofthe human race, must know that rigorous state prosecutions have alwayspreceded the era of convulsion; and this era, I fear, will be acceleratedby the folly and madness of our rulers. If the people are discontented, the proper mode of quieting their discontent is, not by institutingrigorous and sanguinary prosecutions, but by redressing their wrongs andconciliating their affections. Courts of justice, indeed, may be calledin to the aid of ministerial vengeance; but if once the purity of theirproceedings is suspected, they will cease to be objects of reverence tothe nation; they will degenerate into empty and expensive pageantry, andbecome the partial instruments of vexatious oppression. Whatever maybecome of me, my principles will last forever. Individuals may perish;but truth is eternal. The rude blasts of tyranny may blow from everyquarter; but freedom is that hardy plant which will survive the tempestand strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil. 

"Gentlemen, I am in your hands. About my life I feel not the slightestanxiety: if it would promote the cause, I would cheerfully make thesacrifice; for if I perish on an occasion like the present, out of myashes will arise a flame to consume the tyrants and oppressors of mycountry. "

Years have passed, and the generation which knew the persecuted reformershas given place to another. And now, half a century after WilliamSkirving, as he rose to receive his sentence, declared to his judges, "You may condemn us as felons, but your sentence shall yet be reversed bythe people, " the names of these men are once more familiar to Britishlips. The sentence has been reversed; the prophecy of Skirving hasbecome history. On the 21st of the eighth month, 1853, the corner-stoneof a monument to the memory of the Scottish martyrs--for whichsubscriptions had been received from such men as Lord Holland, the Dukesof Bedford and Norfolk; and the Earls of Essex and Leicester--was laidwith imposing ceremonies in the beautiful burial-place of Calton Hill, Edinburgh, by the veteran reformer and tribune of the people, JosephHume, M. P. After delivering an appropriate address, the aged radicalclosed the impressive scene by reading the prayer of Joseph Gerrald. Atthe banquet which afterwards took place, and which was presided over byJohn Dunlop, Esq. , addresses were made by the president and Dr. Ritchie, and by William Skirving, of Kirkaldy, son of the martyr. The CompleteSuffrage Association of Edinburgh, to the number of five hundred, walkedin procession to Calton Hill, and in the open air proclaimed unmolestedthe very principles for which the martyrs of the past century hadsuffered. 

The account of this tribute to the memory of departed worth cannot failto awaken in generous hearts emotions of gratitude towards Him who hasthus signally vindicated His truth, showing that the triumph of theoppressor is but for a season, and that even in this world a lie cannotlive 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 itcannot solace those brave hearts which, slowly broken by the long agonyof colonial servitude, are now cold in strange graves? It is, indeed, astriking illustration of the truth that he who would benefit his fellow-man must "walk by faith, " sowing his seed in the morning, and in theevening withholding not his hand; knowing only this, that in God's goodtime the harvest shall spring up and ripen, if not for himself, yet forothers, who, as they bind the full sheaves and gather in the heavyclusters, may perchance remember him with gratitude and set up stones ofmemorial on the fields of his toil and sacrifices. We may regret that inthis stage of the spirit's life the sincere and self-denying worker isnot always permitted to partake of the fruits of his toil or receive thehonors of a benefactor. We hear his good evil spoken of, and his noblestsacrifices counted as naught; we see him not only assailed by the wicked, but discountenanced and shunned by the timidly good, followed on his hotand dusty pathway by the execrations of the hounding mob and thecontemptuous pity of the worldly wise and prudent; and when at last thehorizon of Time shuts down between him and ourselves, and the placeswhich have known him know him no more forever, we are almost ready to saywith 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 heartwherein he hath labored under the sun?" But is this the end? Has God'suniverse no wider limits than the circle of the blue wall which shuts inour nestling-place? Has life's infancy only been provided for, andbeyond this poor nursery-chamber of Time is there no playground for thesoul's youth, no broad fields for its manhood? Perchance, could we butlift the curtains of the narrow pinfold wherein we dwell, we might seethat our poor friend and brother whose fate we have thus deplored has byno means lost the reward of his labors, but that in new fields of duty heis cheered even by the tardy recognition of the value of his services inthe old. The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onwardand is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the samewaters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made gladby 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 ofTime. Who shall say that the mournful and repentant love with which thebenefactors of our race are at length regarded may not be to them, intheir new condition of being, sweet and grateful as the perfume of long-forgotten flowers, or that our harvest-hymns of rejoicing may not reachthe ears of those who in weakness and suffering scattered the seeds ofblessing?

The history of the Edinburgh reformers is no new one; it is that of allwho seek to benefit their age by rebuking its popular crimes and exposingits cherished errors. The truths which they told were not believed, andfor that very reason were the more needed; for it is evermore the casethat 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 wrongand insolent oppression, is rashly inclined to throw himself at once intothat great conflict which the Persian seer not untruly represented as awar between light and darkness--would do well to count the cost in theoutset. If he can live for Truth alone, and, cut off from the generalsympathy, regard her service as its "own exceeding great reward;" if hecan bear to be counted a fanatic and crazy visionary; if, in all goodnature, he is ready to receive from the very objects of his solicitudeabuse and obloquy in return for disinterested and self-sacrificingefforts for their welfare; if, with his purest motives misunderstood andhis best actions perverted and distorted into crimes, he can still holdon his way and patiently abide the hour when "the whirligig of Time shallbring about its revenges;" if, on the whole, he is prepared to be lookedupon as a sort of moral outlaw or social heretic, under good society'sinterdict of food and fire; and if he is well assured that he can, through all this, preserve his cheerfulness and faith in man, --let himgird up his loins and go forward in God's name. He is fitted for hisvocation; he has watched all night by his armor. Whatever his trial maybe, he is prepared; he may even be happily disappointed in respect to it;flowers of unexpected refreshing may overhang the hedges of his straitand narrow way; but it remains to be true that he who serves hiscontemporaries in faithfulness and sincerity must expect no wages fromtheir gratitude; for, as has been well said, there is, after all, but oneway of doing the world good, and unhappily that way the world does notlike; for it consists in telling it the very thing which it does not wishto hear. 

Unhappily, in the case of the reformer, his most dangerous foes are thoseof his own household. True, the world's garden has become a desert andneeds renovation; but is his own little nook weedless? Sin aboundswithout; but is his own heart pure? While smiting down the giants anddragons which beset the outward world, are there no evil guests sittingby his own hearth-stone? Ambition, envy, self-righteousness, impatience, dogmatism, and pride of opinion stand at his door-way ready to enterwhenever he leaves it unguarded. Then, too, there is no small danger offailing to discriminate between a rational philanthropy, with itsadaptation of means to ends, and that spiritual knight-errantry whichundertakes the championship of every novel project of reform, scouringthe world in search of distressed schemes held in durance by common senseand vagaries happily spellbound by ridicule. He must learn that, although the most needful truth may be unpopular, it does not follow thatunpopularity is a proof of the truth of his doctrines or the expediencyof his measures. He must have the liberality to admit that it is barelypossible for the public on some points to be right and himself wrong, andthat the blessing invoked upon those who suffer for righteousness is notavailable to such as court persecution and invite contempt; for folly hasits martyrs as well as wisdom; and he who has nothing better to show ofhimself than the scars and bruises which the popular foot has left uponhim is not even sure of winning the honors of martyrdom as somecompensation for the loss of dignity and self-respect involved in theexhibition of its pains. To the reformer, in an especial manner, comeshome the truth that whoso ruleth his own spirit is greater than he whotaketh a city. Patience, hope, charity, watchfulness unto prayer, --howneedful are all these to his success! Without them he is in danger ofingloriously giving up his contest with error and prejudice at the firstrepulse; or, with that spiteful philanthropy which we sometimes witness, taking a sick world by the nose, like a spoiled child, and endeavoring toforce down its throat the long-rejected nostrums prepared for its relief. 

What then? Shall we, in view of these things, call back young, generousspirits just entering upon the perilous pathway? God forbid! Welcome, thrice welcome, rather. Let them go forward, not unwarned of the dangersnor unreminded of the pleasures which belong to the service of humanity. Great is the consciousness of right. Sweet is the answer of a goodconscience. He who pays his whole-hearted homage to truth and duty, whoswears his lifelong fealty on their altars, and rises up a Nazariteconsecrated to their holy service, is not without his solace andenjoyment when, to the eyes of others, he seems the most lonely andmiserable. He breathes an atmosphere which the multitude know not of;"a serene heaven which they cannot discern rests over him, glorious inits purity and stillness. " Nor is he altogether without kindly humansympathies. All generous and earnest hearts which are brought in contactwith his own beat evenly with it. All that is good, and truthful, andlovely in man, whenever and wherever it truly recognizes him, must sooneror later acknowledge his claim to love and reverence. His faithovercomes all things. The future unrolls itself before him, with itswaving harvest-fields springing up from the seed he is scattering; and helooks forward to the close of life with the calm confidence of one whofeels that he has not lived idle and useless, but with hopeful heart andstrong arm has labored with God and Nature for the best. 

And not in vain. In the economy of God, no effort, however small, putforth for the right cause, fails of its effect. No voice, howeverfeeble, lifted up for truth, ever dies amidst the confused noises oftime. Through discords of sin and sorrow, pain and wrong, it rises adeathless melody, whose notes of wailing are hereafter to be changed tothose of triumph as they blend with the great harmony of a reconcileduniverse. The language of a transatlantic reformer to his friends isthen as true as it is hopeful and cheering: "Triumph is certain. We haveespoused no losing cause. In the body we may not join our shout with thevictors; but in spirit we may even now. There is but an interval of timebetween us and the success at which we aim. In all other respects thelinks of the chain are complete. Identifying ourselves with immortal andimmutable principles, we share both their immortality and immutability. The vow which unites us with truth makes futurity present with us. Ourbeing resolves itself into an everlasting now. It is not so correct tosay that we shall be victorious as that we are so. When we will inunison with the supreme Mind, the characteristics of His will become, insome sort, those of ours. What He has willed is virtually done. It maytake ages to unfold itself; but the germ of its whole history is wrappedup in His determination. When we make His will ours, which we do when weaim 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 itsbeing. Ours, therefore, is a perpetual triumph. Our deeds are, all ofthem, 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 landingof the Pilgrims at Plymouth, December 22, 1870. 

No one can appreciate more highly than myself the noble qualities of themen and women of the Mayflower. It is not of them that I, a descendantof the "sect called Quakers, " have reason to complain in the matter ofpersecution. A generation which came after them, with less piety andmore bigotry, is especially responsible for the little unpleasantnessreferred to; and the sufferers from it scarcely need any presentchampionship. They certainly did not wait altogether for the revenges ofposterity. If they lost their ears, it is satisfactory to remember thatthey made those of their mutilators tingle with a rhetoric more sharpthan polite. 

A worthy New England deacon once described a brother in the church as avery good man Godward, but rather hard man-ward. It cannot be deniedthat some very satisfactory steps have been taken in the latterdirection, at least, since the days of the Pilgrims. Our age is tolerantof creed and dogma, broader in its sympathies, more keenly sensitive totemporal 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 degradationto equality with man before the law. Our criminal codes no longer embodythe maxim of barbarism, "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, " buthave regard not only for the safety of the community, but to the reformand well-being of the criminal. All the more, however, for this amiabletenderness do we need the counterpoise of a strong sense of justice. With our sympathy for the wrong-doer we need the old Puritan and Quakerhatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions arighteous abhorrence of sin. All the more for the sweet humanities andChristian liberalism which, in drawing men nearer to each other, areincreasing the sum of social influences for good or evil, we need thebracing atmosphere, healthful, if austere, of the old moralities. Individual and social duties are quite as imperative now as when theywere minutely specified in statute-books and enforced by penalties nolonger admissible. It is well that stocks, whipping-post, and ducking-stool are now only matters of tradition; but the honest reprobation ofvice 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 excellenceof constitution and laws can avail much if the people lack purity andintegrity. Culture, art, refinement, care for our own comfort and thatof others, are all well, but truth, honor, reverence, and fidelity toduty are indispensable. 

The Pilgrims were right in affirming the paramount authority of the lawof God. If they erred in seeking that authoritative law, and passed overthe Sermon on the Mount for the stern Hebraisms of Moses; if theyhesitated in view of the largeness of Christian liberty; if they seemedunwilling to accept the sweetness and light of the good tidings, let usnot forget that it was the mistake of men who feared more than they daredto hope, whose estimate of the exceeding awfulness of sin caused them todwell upon God's vengeance rather than his compassion; and whose dread ofevil was so great that, in shutting their hearts against it, theysometimes shut out the good. It is well for us if we have learned tolisten to the sweet persuasion of the Beatitudes; but there are crises inall lives which require also the emphatic "Thou shalt not" or theDecalogue which the founders wrote on the gate-posts of theircommonwealth. 

Let us then be thankful for the assurances which the last few years haveafforded 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 couldshake, in heroic self-sacrifice, in entire consecration to duty. Thefathers have lived in their sons. Have we not all known the Winthropsand Brewsters, the Saltonstalls and Sewalls, of old times, ingubernatorial chairs, in legislative halls, around winter camp-fires, inthe slow martyrdoms of prison and hospital? The great struggle throughwhich we have passed has taught us how much we owe to the men and womenof the Plymouth Colony, --the noblest ancestry that ever a people lookedback to with love and reverence. Honor, then, to the Pilgrims! Let theirmemory be green forever!

GOVERNOR ENDICOTT. 

I am sorry that I cannot respond in person to the invitation of the EssexInstitute to its commemorative festival on the 18th. I especially regretit, because, though a member of the Society of Friends, and, as such, regarding with abhorrence the severe persecution of the sect under theadministration of Governor Endicott, I am not unmindful of the otherwisenoble qualities and worthy record of the great Puritan, whose misfortuneit 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 honestlythought that every convert to Quakerism became by virtue of thatconversion a child of perdition; and, as the head of the Commonwealth, responsible for the spiritual as well as temporal welfare of itsinhabitants, he felt it his duty to whip, banish, and hang heretics tosave his people from perilous heresy. 

The extravagance of some of the early Quakers has been grosslyexaggerated. Their conduct will compare in this respect favorably withthat of the first Anabaptists and Independents; but it must be admittedthat many of them manifested a good deal of that wild enthusiasm whichhas always been the result of persecution and the denial of the rights ofconscience and worship. Their pertinacious defiance of laws enactedagainst them, and their fierce denunciations of priests and magistrates, must have been particularly aggravating to a man as proud and hightempered as John Endicott. He had that free-tongued neighbor of his, Edward Wharton, smartly whipped at the cart-tail about once a month, butit may be questioned whether the governor's ears did not suffer as muchunder Wharton's biting sarcasm and "free speech" as the latter's back didfrom the magisterial whip. 

Time has proved that the Quakers had the best of the controversy; andtheir descendants can well afford to forget and forgive an error whichthe 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 issuggested that I may furnish a poem for the occasion of its meeting atThe Willows on the 22d. I would be glad to make the implied probabilitya 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 EssexCounty, who adds to her modern culture and rare poetical gifts the bestspirit of her Puritan ancestry, has lent the interest of her verse to theoccasion. 

It was a happy thought of the Institute to select for its first meetingof the season the day and the place of the landing of the great and goodgovernor, and permit me to say, as thy father's old friend, that itschoice for orator, of the son of him whose genius, statesmanship, andeloquence honored the place of his birth, has been equally happy. As Ilook over the list of the excellent worthies of the first emigrations, Ifind no one who, in all respects, occupies a nobler place in the earlycolonial history of Massachusetts than John Winthrop. Like Vane andMilton, he was a gentleman as well as a Puritan, a cultured andenlightened statesman as well as a God-fearing Christian. It was notunder his long and wise chief magistracy that religious bigotry andintolerance hung and tortured their victims, and the terrible delusion ofwitchcraft darkened the sun at noonday over Essex. If he had not quitereached 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 charityand forbearance far in advance of his generation. 

I am sorry that I must miss an occasion of so much interest. I hope youwill not lack the presence of the distinguished citizen who inherits thebest 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 inNew England, where we all acknowledge it to be an evil. Because such anacknowledgment is not enough on our part. It is doing no more than theslave-master and the slave-trader. "We have found, " says James Monroe, in his speech on the subject before the Virginia Convention, "that thisevil has preyed upon the very vitals of the Union; and has beenprejudicial to all the states in which it has existed. " All the statesin their several Constitutions and declarations of rights have made asimilar statement. And what has been the consequence of this generalbelief in the evil of human servitude? Has it sapped the foundations ofthe infamous system? No. Has it decreased the number of its victims?Quite the contrary. Unaccompanied by philanthropic action, it has beenin 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 oursympathies. Sympathy the sympathy of the Priest and the Levite, lookingon, and acknowledging, but holding itself aloof from mortal suffering. Can such hollow sympathy reach the broken of heart, and does the blessingof those who are ready to perish answer it? Does it hold back the lashfrom the slave, or sweeten his bitter bread? One's heart and soul arebecoming weary of this sympathy, this heartless mockery of feeling; sickof the common cant of hypocrisy, wreathing the artificial flowers ofsentiment over unutterable pollution and unimaginable wrong. It iswhite-washing the sepulchre to make us forget its horrible deposit. Itis scattering flowers around the charnel-house and over the yet festeringgrave to turn away our thoughts "from the dead men's bones and alluncleanness, " 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 longerstrive to forget it; let us no more dare to palliate it. It is better tomeet it here with repentance than at the bar of God. The cry of theoppressed, of the millions who have perished among us as the bruteperisheth, shut out from the glad tidings of salvation, has gone therebefore us, to Him who as a father pitieth all His children. Their bloodis upon us as a nation; woe unto us, if we repent not, as a nation, indust and ashes. Woe unto us if we say in our hearts, "The Lord shall notsee, 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, andis 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 inhis sins, and yet not responsible! Joining hands with crime, covenantingwith oppression, leaguing with pollution, and yet not responsible!Palliating the evil, hiding the evil, voting for the evil, do we notparticipate 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 theshame, the sin against our brother, and the sin against our God, all theiniquity of slavery which is revealed to man, and all which crieth in theear, or is manifested to the eye of Jehovah, will assuredly be visitedupon all our people. Why, then, should we stretch out our hands towardsour Southern brethren, and like the Pharisee thank God we are not likethem? For so long as we practically recognize the infernal principlethat "man can hold property in man, " God will not hold us guiltless. Solong as we take counsel of the world's policy instead of the justice ofheaven, so long as we follow a mistaken political expediency inopposition to the express commands of God, so long will the wrongs of theslaves 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 overthe beautiful Carolinas, or the consecrated soil of Virginia, New Englandwould be called upon to arrest the progress of rebellion, --to tread outwith the armed heel of her soldiery that spirit of freedom, which knowsno distinction of cast or color; which has been kindled in the heart ofthe black as well as in that of the white. 

And what is this system which we are thus protecting and upholding? Asystem which holds two millions of God's creatures in bondage, whichleaves one million females without any protection save their own feeblestrength, and which makes even the exercise of that strength inresistance to outrage punishable with death! which considers rational, immortal beings as articles of traffic, vendible commodities, merchantable property, --which recognizes no social obligations, nonatural relations, --which tears without scruple the infant from themother, the wife from the husband, the parent from the child. In thestrong but just language of another: "It is the full measure of pure, unmixed, unsophisticated wickedness; and scorning all competition orcomparison, it stands without a rival in the secure, undisputedpossession of its detestable preeminence. "

So fearful an evil should have its remedies. The following are among themany which have been from time to time proposed:--

1. Placing the slaves in the condition of the serfs of Poland andRussia, fixed to the soil, and without the right on the part of themaster to sell or remove them. This was intended as a preliminary tocomplete emancipation at some remote period, but it is impossible toperceive either its justice or expediency. 

2. Gradual abolition, an indefinite term, but which is understood toimply the draining away drop by drop, of the great ocean of wrong;plucking off at long intervals some, straggling branches of the moralUpas; holding out to unborn generations the shadow of a hope which thepresent may never feel gradually ceasing to do evil; gradually refrainingfrom robbery, lust, and murder: in brief, obeying a short-sighted andcriminal policy rather than the commands of God. 

3. Abstinence on the part of the people of the free states from the useof the known products of slave labor, in order to render that laborprofitless. Beyond a doubt the example of conscientious individuals mayhave a salutary effect upon the minds of some of the slave-holders; I butso long as our confederacy exists, a commercial intercourse with slavestates 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 tothe second article of its constitution, is to colonize the free people ofcolor residing among us, in Africa or such other place as Congress maydirect. Steadily adhering to this object it has nothing to do withslavery; and I allude to it as a remedy only because some of its friendshave in view an eventual abolition or an amelioration of the evil. 

Let facts speak. The Colonization Society was organized in 1817. It hastwo hundred and eighteen auxiliary societies. The legislatures offourteen states have recommended it. Contributions have poured into itstreasury from every quarter of the United States. Addresses in its favorhave been heard from all our pulpits. It has been in operation sixteenyears. During this period nearly one million human beings have died inslavery: 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 inconveying the slaves to Africa; in other words, abolishing slavery. Inthis very charitable occupation it has carried away of manumitted slaves613

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 bloodyas the code of Draco, violating the laws of Cod and the unalienablerights of His children?--(It will be seen that the society approves ofthese laws. )--But why talk of amelioration? Amelioration of what? ofsin, of crime unutterable, of a system of wrong and outrage horrible inthe eye of God Why seek to mark the line of a selfish policy, a carnalexpediency between the criminality of hell and that repentance and itsfruits enjoined of heaven?

For the principles and views of the society we must look to its ownstatements and admissions; to its Annual Reports; to those of itsauxiliaries; to the speeches and writings of its advocates; and to itsorgan, the African Repository. 

1. It excuses slavery and apologizes for slaveholders. 

Proof. "Slavery is an evil entailed upon the present generation ofslave-holders, which they must suffer, whether they will or not!" "Theexistence of slavery among us, though not at all to be objected to ourSouthern brethren as a fault, " etc? "It (the society) condemns no manbecause he is a slave-holder. " "Recognizing the constitutional andlegitimate existence of slavery, it seeks not to interfere, eitherdirectly or indirectly, with the rights it creates. Acknowledging thenecessity by which its present continuance and the rigorous provisionsfor 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 unsubstantialtheory 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 bedistinctly understood upon this point. From the beginning they havedisavowed, and they do yet disavow, that their object is the emancipationof slaves. "--(Speech of James S. Green, Esq. , First Annual Report of theNew Jersey Colonization Society. )

"This institution proposes to do good by a single specific course ofmeasures. Its direct and specific purpose is not the abolition ofslavery, or the relief of pauperism, or the extension of commerce andcivilization, or the enlargement of science, or the conversion of theheathen. The single object which its constitution prescribes, and towhich all its efforts are necessarily directed, is African colonizationfrom America. It proposes only to afford facilities for the voluntaryemigration of free people of color from this country to the country oftheir 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 orgeneral. "

"The Colonization Society, as such, have renounced wholly the name andthe characteristics of abolitionists. On this point they have beenunjustly and injuriously slandered. Into their accounts the subject ofemancipation does not enter at all. "

"From its origin, and throughout the whole period of its existence, ithas constantly disclaimed all intention of interfering, in the smallestdegree, with the rights of property, or the object of emancipation, gradual or immediate. " . . . "The society presents to the Americanpublic no project of emancipation. "--( Mr. Clay's Speech, Idem, vol. Vi. Pp. 13, 17. )

"The emancipation of slaves or the amelioration of their condition, withthe moral, intellectual, and political improvement of people of colorwithin the United States, are subjects foreign to the powers of thissociety. "

"The society, as a society, recognizes no principles in reference to theslave system. It says nothing, and proposes to do nothing, respectingit. " . . . "So far as we can ascertain, the supporters of thecolonization policy generally believe that slavery is in this country aconstitptional 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 prosecutionof this work, has never interfered or evinced even a disposition tointerfere in any way with the rights of proprietors of slaves. "

"To the slave-holder, who has charged upon them the wicked design ofinterfering with the rights of property under the specious pretext ofremoving a vicious and dangerous free population, they address themselvesin 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 detestedsystem of slavery, to remove the fears of the slave-holder, and increasethe value of his stock of human beings. 

Proof. "They (the Southern slave-holders) will contribute moreeffectually to the continuance and strength of this system (slavery) byremoving those now free than by any or all other methods which canpossibly be devised. "

"So far from being connected with the abolition of slavery, the measureproposed would be one of the greatest securities to enable the master tokeep in possession his own property. "--(Speech of John Randolph at thefirst 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 evilconsequences growing out of the present threefold mixture of ourpopulation. "

"There was but one way (to avert danger), but that might be madeeffectual, fortunately. It was to provide and keep open a drain for theexcess beyond the occasions of profitable employment. Mr. Archer hadbeen stating the case in the supposition, that after the present class offree blacks had been exhausted, by the operation of the plan he wasrecommending, others would be supplied for its action, in the proportionof the excess of colored population it would be necessary to throw off, by the process of voluntary manumission or sale. This effect must resultinevitably from the depreciating value of the slaves, ensuing theirdisproportionate multiplication. The depreciation would be relieved andretarded at the same time by the process. The two operations would aidreciprocally, and sustain each other, and both be in the highest degreebeneficial. It was on the ground of interest, therefore, the mostindisputable pecuniary interest, that he addressed himself to the peopleand legislatures of the slave-holding states. "

"The slave-holder, who is in danger of having his slaves contaminated bytheir 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 prejudiceagainst a portion of our fellow-creatures. 

Proof. "The managers consider it clear that causes exist and areoperating to prevent their (the blacks) improvement and elevation to anyconsiderable extent as a class, in this country, which are fixed, notonly beyond the control of the friends of humanity, but of any humanpower. Christianity will not do for them here what it will do for themin 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 lawsof Nature!"--(Last Annual Report of the American Colonization Society. )

"The habits, the feelings, all the prejudices of society--prejudiceswhich neither refinement, nor argument, nor education, nor religionitself, can subdue--mark the people of color, whether bond or free, asthe subjects of a degradation inevitable and incurable. The African inthis country belongs by birth to the very lowest station in society, andfrom that station he can never rise, be his talents, his enterprise, hisvirtues what they may. . . . They constitute a class by themselves, aclass out of which no individual can be elevated, and below which nonecan be depressed. "

"Is it not wise, then, for the free people of color and their friends toadmit, what cannot reasonably be doubted, that the people of color must, in this country, remain for ages, probably forever, a separate andinferior 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 asuseless as well as dangerous. 

Proof. "If the free colored people were generally taught to read itmight be an inducement to them to remain in this country (that is, intheir 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 (theslaves) to be kept ignorant and uninstructed. "

"It is the business of the free (their safety requires it) to keep theslaves in ignorance. But a few days ago a proposition was made in thelegislature of Georgia to allow them so much instruction as to enablethem to read the Bible; which was promptly rejected by a largemajority. "--(Proceedings of New York State Colonization Society at itssecond anniversary. )

E. B. Caldwell, the first Secretary of the American Colonization Society, in his speech at its formation, recommended them to be kept "in thelowest state of ignorance and degradation, for (says he) the nearer youbring them to the condition of brutes, the better chance do you give themof possessing their apathy. "

My limits will not admit of a more extended examination. To thedocuments from whence the above extracts have been made I would call theattention of every real friend of humanity. I seek to do theColonization Society no injustice, but I wish the public generally tounderstand its character. 

The tendency of the society to abolish the slave-trade by means of itsAfrican colony has been strenuously urged by its friends. But thefallacy of this is now admitted by all: witness the following from thereports of the society itself:--

"Some appalling facts in regard to the slave-trade have come to theknowledge of the Board of Managers during the last year. Withundiminished atrocity and activity is this odious traffic now carried onall along the African coast. Slave factories are established in theimmediate vicinity of the colony; and at the Gallinas (between Liberiaand Sierra Leone) not less than nine hundred slaves were shipped duringthe last summer, in the space of three weeks. "

April 6, 1832, the House of Commons of England ordered the printing of adocument entitled "Slave-Trade, Sierra Leone, " containing officialevidence of the fact that the pirates engaged in the African slave-tradeare supplied from the stores of Sierra Leone and Liberia with sucharticles as the infernal traffic demands! An able English writer on thesubject 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 tosupport it, because, in all commerce, the supply is more or lessproportioned to the demand. The demand exists in negro slavery; thesupply arises from the African slave-trade. And what greater conveniencecould the African slave-traders desire than shops well stored along thecoast with the very articles which their trade demands. That the Africanslave-traders do get thus supplied at Sierra Leone and Liberia is matterof official evidence; and we know, from the nature of human things, thatthey will get so supplied, in defiance of all law or precaution, as longas the demand calls for the supply, and there are free shops stored withall they want at hand. The shopkeeper, however honest, would find itimpossible always to distinguish between the African slave-trader or hisagents and other dealers. And how many shopkeepers are there anywherethat would be over scrupulous in questioning a customer with a fullpurse?"

But we are told that the Colonization Society is to civilize andevangelize Africa. 

"Each emigrant, " says Henry Clay, the ablest advocate which the societyhas yet found, "is a missionary, carrying with him credentials in theholy 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 AfricanRepository, 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. "--(AfricanRepository, vol. Vii. P. 230. )

"Of all classes of our population the most vicious is that of the freecolored. "--(Tenth Annual Report of the Colonization Society. )

I might go on to quote still further from the "credentials" which thefree 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 greattruth, that man cannot hold property in man; an immediate surrender ofbaneful prejudice to Christian love; an immediate practical obedience tothe command of Jesus Christ: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do untoyou, do ye even so to them. "

A correct understanding of what is meant by immediate abolition mustconvince 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 remedyfor the evils of the slave system. 

The term immediate is used in contrast with that of gradual. Earnestlyas I wish it, I do not expect, no one expects, that the tremendous systemof oppression can be instantaneously overthrown. The terrible andunrebukable indignation of a free people has not yet been sufficientlyconcentrated against it. The friends of abolition have not forgotten thepeculiar organization of our confederacy, the delicate division of powerbetween the states and the general government. They see the manyobstacles in their pathway; but they know that public opinion canovercome them all. They ask no aid of physical coercion. They seek toobtain their object not with the weapons of violence and blood, but withthose of reason and truth, prayer to God, and entreaty to man. 

They seek to impress indelibly upon every human heart the true doctrinesof the rights of man; to establish now and forever this great andfundamental truth of human liberty, that man cannot hold property in hisbrother; for they believe that the general admission of this truth willutterly destroy the system of slavery, based as that system is upon adenial or disregard of it. To make use of the clear exposition of aneminent advocate of immediate abolition, our plan of emancipation issimply this: "To promulgate the true doctrine of human rights in highplaces and low places, and all places where there are human beings; towhisper 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 pulpitand the press; to raise it up with all the food of the inner man, frominfancy to gray hairs; to give 'line upon line, and precept uponprecept, ' till it forms one of the foundation principles and partsindestructible of the public soul. Let those who contemn this planrenounce, if they have not done it already, the gospel plan of convertingthe world; let them renounce every plan of moral reformation, and everyplan whatsoever, which does not terminate in the gratification of theirown animal natures. "

The friends of emancipation would urge in the first instance an immediateabolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and in the Territoriesof Florida and Arkansas. 

The number of slaves in these portions of the country, coming under thedirect 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 imageof God, the fitted temples of His Holy Spirit, held by the government inthe abhorrent chains of slavery. The power to emancipate them is clear. It is indisputable. It does not depend upon the twenty-five slave votesin 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 thatman shall no longer hold his fellow-man in bondage, a beast of burden, anarticle of traffic, within the governmental domain. God and truth andeternal justice demand this. The very reputation of our fathers, thehonor of our land, every principle of liberty, humanity, expediency, demand it. A sacred regard to free principles originated ourindependence, not the paltry amount of practical evil complained of. Andalthough our fathers left their great work unfinished, it is our duty tofollow out their principles. Short of liberty and equality we cannotstop without doing injustice to their memories. If our fathers intendedthat slavery should be perpetual, that our practice should forever givethe lie to our professions, why is the great constitutional compact soguardedly silent on the subject of human servitude? If state necessitydemanded this perpetual violation of the laws of God and the rights ofman, this continual solecism in a government of freedom, why is it notmet as a necessity, incurable and inevitable, and formally and distinctlyrecognized as a settled part of our social system? State necessity, thatimperial tyrant, seeks no disguise. In the language of Sheridan, "Whathe does, he dares avow, and avowing, scorns any other justification thanthe great motives which placed the iron sceptre in his grasp. "

Can it be possible that our fathers felt this state necessity strong uponthem? No; for they left open the door for emancipation, they left us thelight of their pure principles of liberty, they framed the great charterof American rights, without employing a term in its structure to which inaftertimes of universal freedom the enemies of our country could pointwith accusation or reproach. 

What, then, is our duty?

To give effect to the spirit of our Constitution; to plant ourselves uponthe great declaration and declare in the face of all the world thatpolitical, religious, and legal hypocrisy shall no longer cover as withloathsome leprosy the features of American freedom; to loose at once thebands of wickedness; to undo the heavy burdens, and let the oppressed gofree. 

We have indeed been authoritatively told in Congress and elsewhere thatour brethren of the South and West will brook no further agitation of thesubject of slavery. What then! shall we heed the unrighteousprohibition? No; by our duty as Christians, as politicians, by our dutyto ourselves, to our neighbor, and to God, we are called upon to agitatethis subject; to give slavery no resting-place under the hallowed aegisof a government of freedom; to tear it root and branch, with all itsfruits 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 isimperative; the spirit of the Constitution should be maintained withinthe exclusive jurisdiction of the government. If we cannot "provide forthe general welfare, " if we cannot "guarantee to each of the states arepublican form of government, " let us at least no longer legislate for afree nation within view of the falling whip, and within hearing of theexecrations of the task-master and the prayer of his slave!

I deny the right of the slave-holder to impose silence on his brother ofthe North in reference to slavery. What! compelled to maintain thesystem, to keep up the standing army which protects it, and yet be deniedthe poor privilege of remonstrance! Ready, at the summons of the masterto put down the insurrections of his slaves, the outbreaking of thatrevenge which is now, and has been, in all nations, and all times, theinevitable consequence of oppression and wrong, and yet like automata toact but not speak! Are we to be denied even the right of a slave, theright to murmur?

I am not unaware that my remarks may be regarded by many as dangerous andexceptionable; that I may be regarded as a fanatic for quoting thelanguage of eternal truth, and denounced as an incendiary formaintaining, in the spirit as well as the letter, the doctrines ofAmerican Independence. But if such are the consequences of a simpleperformance of duty, I shall not regard them. If my feeble appeal butreaches the hearts of any who are now slumbering in iniquity; if it shallhave power given it to shake down one stone from that foul temple wherethe blood of human victims is offered to the Moloch of slavery; if underProvidence it can break one fetter from off the image of God, and enableone suffering African

"To feelThe weight of human misery less, and glideUngroaning 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 wormwoodwaters of sectional prejudice. No; I desire peace, the peace ofuniversal love, of catholic sympathy, the peace of a common interest, acommon feeling, a common humanity. But so long as slavery is tolerated, no such peace can exist. Liberty and slavery cannot dwell in harmonytogether. There will be a perpetual "war in the members" of thepolitical Mezentius between the living and the dead. God and man haveplaced between them an everlasting barrier, an eternal separation. Nomatter under what name or law or compact their union is attempted, theordination of Providence has forbidden it, and it cannot stand. Peace!there can be no peace between justice and oppression, between robbery andrighteousness, truth and falsehood, freedom and slavery. 

The slave-holding states are not free. The name of liberty is there, butthe spirit is wanting. They do not partake of its invaluable blessings. Wherever slavery exists to any considerable extent, with the exception ofsome recently settled portions of the country, and which have not yetfelt in a great degree the baneful and deteriorating influences of slavelabor, we hear at this moment the cry of suffering. We are told ofgrass-grown streets, of crumbling mansions, of beggared planters andbarren plantations, of fear from without, of terror within. The oncefertile fields are wasted and tenantless, for the curse of slavery, theimprovidence of that labor whose hire has been kept back by fraud, hasbeen there, poisoning the very earth beyond the reviving influence of theearly and the latter rain. A moral mildew mingles with and blasts theeconomy of nature. It is as if the finger of the everlasting God hadwritten upon the soil of the slave-holder the language of Hisdispleasure. 

Let, then, the slave-holding states consult their present interest bybeginning without delay the work of emancipation. If they fear not, andmock at the fiery indignation of Him, to whom vengeance belongeth, lettemporal interest persuade them. They know, they must know, that thepresent state of things cannot long continue. Mind is the sameeverywhere, no matter what may be the complexion of the frame which itanimates: 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 thethreshold and his knife at the throat of the planter. Horrible andindiscriminate will be his vengeance. Where, then, will be the pride, the beauty, and the chivalry of the South? The smoke of her torment willrise 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 laborerhave his hire. Bind him no longer by the cords of slavery, but withthose of kindness and brotherly love. Watch over him for his good. Prayfor him; instruct him; pour light into the darkness of his mind. 

Let this be done, and the horrible fears which now haunt the slumbers ofthe slave-holder will depart. Conscience will take down its racks andgibbets, and his soul will be at peace. His lands will no longerdisappoint his hopes. Free labor will renovate them. 

Historical facts; the nature of the human mind; the demonstrated truthsof political economy; the analysis of cause and effect, all concur inestablishing:

1. That immediate abolition is a safe and just and peaceful remedy forthe evils of the slave system. 

2. That free labor, its necessary consequence, is more productive, andmore advantageous to the planter than slave labor. 

In proof of the first proposition it is only necessary to state theundeniable fact that immediate emancipation, whether by an individual ora community, has in no instance been attended with violence and disorderon the part of the emancipated; but that on the contrary it has promotedcheerfulness, industry, and laudable ambition in the place of sullendiscontent, indolence, and despair. 

The case of St. Domingo is in point. Blood was indeed shed on thatisland like water, but it was not in consequence of emancipation. It wasshed in the civil war which preceded it, and in the iniquitous attempt torestore the slave system in 1801. It flowed on the sanguine altar ofslavery, not on the pure and peaceful one of emancipation. No; there, asin all the world and in all time, the violence of oppression engenderedviolence on the part of the oppressed, and vengeance followed only uponthe iron footsteps of wrong. When, where, did justice to the injuredwaken their hate and vengeance? When, where, did love and kindness andsympathy irritate and madden the persecuted, the broken-hearted, thefoully wronged?

In September, 1793, the Commissioner of the French National Conventionissued his proclamation giving immediate freedom to all the slaves of St. Domingo. Did the slaves baptize their freedom in blood? Did they fightlike unchained desperadoes because they had been made free? Did theymurder their emancipators? No; they acted, as human beings must act, under similar circumstances, by a law as irresistible as those of theuniverse: kindness disarmed them, justice conciliated them, freedomennobled them. No tumult followed this wide and instantaneousemancipation. It cost not one drop of blood; it abated not one tittle ofthe wealth or the industry of the island. Colonel Malenfant, a slaveproprietor residing at the time on the island, states that after thepublic act of abolition, the negroes remained perfectly quiet; they hadobtained all they asked for, liberty, and they continued to work upon allthe plantations. --(Malenfant in Memoirs for a History of St. Domingo byGeneral Lecroix, 1819. )

"There were estates, " he says, "which had neither owners nor managersresident upon them, yet upon these estates, though abandoned, the negroescontinued their labors where there were any, even inferior, agents toguide them; and on those estates where no white men were left to directthem, they betook themselves to the planting of provisions; but upon allthe plantations where the whites resided the blacks continued to labor asquietly as before. " Colonel Malenfant says that when many of hisneighbors, proprietors or managers, were in prison, the negroes of theirplantations came to him to beg him to direct them in their work. "If youwill take care not to talk to them of the restoration of slavery, buttalk to them of freedom, you may with this word chain them down to theirlabor. How did Toussaint succeed? How did I succeed before his time inthe plain of the Cul-de-Sac on the plantation of Gouraud, during morethan eight months after liberty had been granted to the slaves? Letthose who knew me at that time, let the blacks themselves be asked. Theywill all reply that not a single negro upon that plantation, consistingof more than four hundred and fifty laborers, refused to work; and yetthis plantation was thought to be under the worst discipline and theslaves the most idle of any in the plain. I inspired the same activityinto three other plantations of which I had the management. If all thenegroes had come from Africa within six months, if they had the love ofindependence that the Indians have, I should own that force must beemployed; but ninety-nine out of a hundred of the blacks are aware thatwithout 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 ofemancipation, we are told that the colony was flourishing underToussaint, that the whites lived happily and peaceably on their estates, and the blacks continued to work for them. Up to 1801 the same happystate of things continued. The colony went on as by enchantment;cultivation made day by day a perceptible progress, under therecuperative energies of free labor. 

In 1801 General Vincent, a proprietor of estates in the island, was sentby Toussaint to Paris for the purpose of laying before the Directory thenew Constitution which had been adopted at St. Domingo. He reachedFrance just after the peace of Amiens, when Napoleon was fitting out hisill-starred armament for the insane purpose of restoring slavery in theisland. General Vincent remonstrated solemnly and earnestly against anexpedition so preposterous, so cruel and unnecessary; undertaken at amoment when all was peace and quietness in the colony, when theproprietors were in peaceful possession of their estates, whencultivation was making a rapid progress, and the blacks were industriousand happy beyond example. He begged that this beautiful state of thingsmight not be reversed. The remonstrance was not regarded, and theexpedition proceeded. Its issue is well known. Threatened once morewith the horrors of slavery, the peaceful and quiet laborer becametransformed into a demon of ferocity. The plough-share and the pruning-hook gave way to the pike and the dagger. The white invaders were drivenback by the sword and the pestilence; and then, and not till then, wasthe property of the planters seized upon by the excited and infuriatedblacks. 

In 1804 Dessalines was proclaimed Emperor of Hayti. The black troopswere in a great measure disbanded, and they immediately returned to thecultivation of the plantations. From that period up to the present therehas 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 "Itwas an interesting sight to behold this class of the Haytiens, now inpossession of their freedom, coming in groups to the market nearest whichthey resided, bringing the produce of their industry there for sale; andafterwards returning, carrying back the necessary articles of livingwhich the disposal of their commodities had enabled them to purchase; allevidently cheerful and happy. Nor could it fail to occur to the mindthat their present condition furnished the most satisfactory answer tothat objection to the general emancipation of slaves founded on theiralleged unfitness to value and improve the benefits of liberty. . . . As they would not suffer, so they do not require, the attendance of oneacting in the capacity of a driver with the instrument of punishment inhis hand. As far as I had an opportunity of ascertaining from what fellunder my own observation, and from what I gathered from other Europeanresidents, I am persuaded of one general fact, which on account of itsimportance I shall state in the most explicit terms, namely, that theHaytiens employed in cultivating the plantations, as well as the rest ofthe population, perform as much work in a given time as they wereaccustomed to do during their subjection to the French. And if we mayjudge of their future improvement by the change which has been alreadyeffected, it may be reasonably anticipated that Hayti will erelongcontain a population not inferior in their industry to that of anycivilized nation in the world. . . . Every man had some calling tooccupy his attention; instances of idleness or intemperance were of rareoccurrence; the most perfect subordination prevailed, and all appearedcontented and happy. A foreigner would have found it difficult topersuade himself, on his first entering the place, that the people he nowbeheld so submissive, industrious, and contented, were the same peoplewho 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 resourcesample, its prosperity and happiness general, its crimes few, its laborcrowned with abundance, with no paupers save the decrepit and aged, itspeople hospitable, respectful, orderly, and contented. 

The manumitted slaves, who to the number of two thousand were settled inNova Scotia by the British Government at the close of the RevolutionaryWar, "led a harmless life, and gained the character of an honest, industrious people from their white neighbors. " Of the free laborers ofTrinidad we have the same report. At the Cape of Good Hope, threethousand negroes received their freedom, and with scarce a singleexception betook themselves to laborious employments. 

But we have yet stronger evidence. The total abolishment of slavery inthe southern republics has proved beyond dispute the safety and utilityof immediate abolition. The departed Bolivar indeed deserves hisglorious title of Liberator, for he began his career of freedom bystriking 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. GeorgeCanning, the superiority of free over slave labor is clearly demonstratedby 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 governmentalinterference, not even from motives of humanity, but from an irresistibleconviction on the part of the planters that their pecuniary interestdemanded it. 

5. The result has proved the entire correctness of this conviction; andthe planters would now be as unwilling as the blacks themselves to returnto the old system. 

Let our Southern brethren imitate this example. It is in vain, in theface of facts like these, to talk of the necessity of maintaining theabominable system, operating as it does like a double curse upon plantersand slaves. Heaven and earth deny its necessity. It is as necessary asother robberies, and no more. 

Yes, putting aside altogether the righteous law of the living God--thesame yesterday, to-day, and forever--and shutting out the clearestpolitical truths ever taught by man, still, in human policy selfishexpediency would demand of the planter the immediate emancipation of hisslaves. 

Because slave labor is the labor of mere machines; a mechanical impulseof body and limb, with which the mind of the laborer has no sympathy, andfrom which it constantly and loathingly revolts. 

Because slave labor deprives the master altogether of the incalculablebenefit of the negro's will. That does not cooperate with the forcedtoil of the body. This is but the necessary consequence of all laborwhich does not benefit the laborer. It is a just remark of that profoundpolitical economist, Adam Smith, that "a slave can have no other interestthan 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 thereis a solemn and warning moral. 

They seem the evidence of the displeasure of Him who created man afterHis 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, theavarice, the lusts of another; at that utter violation of the design ofHis merciful Providence, whereby the entire dependence of millions of Hisrational creatures is made to centre upon the will, the existence, theability, of their fellow-mortals, instead of resting under the shadow ofHis 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 superintendentof several military works in the French West Indies, gives it as hisopinion, that the slaves do not perform more than one third of the laborwhich they would do, provided they were urged by their own interests andinclinations instead of brute force. 

2. A plantation in Barbadoes in 1780 was cultivated by two hundred andeighty-eight slaves ninety men, eighty-two women, fifty-six boys, andsixty girls. In three years and three months there were on thisplantation fifty-seven deaths, and only fifteen births. A change wasthen made in the government of the slaves. The use of the whip wasdenied; all severe and arbitrary punishments were abolished; the laborersreceived wages, and their offences were all tried by a sort of negrocourt established among themselves: in short, they were practically free. Under this system, in four years and three months there were forty-fourbirths, and but forty-one deaths; and the annual net produce of theplantation was more than three times what it had been before. --(EnglishQuarterly 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 thoughthe negroes were allowed only the afternoon of one day in a week, theywould do as much work in that afternoon, when employed for their ownbenefit, as in the whole day when employed in their master's service. ""Now after this confession, " said Mr. Pitt, "the house might burn all itscalculations relative to the negro population. A negro, if he worked forhimself, could no doubt do double work. By an improvement, then, in themode of labor, the work in the islands could be doubled. "

4. "In coffee districts it is usual for the master to hire his peopleafter they have done the regular task for the day, at a rate varying from10d. 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 ofSt. Lucia, in 1822, it is stated, in proof of the intimacy between theslaves and the free blacks, that "many small plantations of the latter, and occupied by only one man and his wife, are better cultivated and havemore land in cultivation than those of the proprietors of many slaves, and that the labor on them is performed by runaway slaves;" thus clearlyproving that even runaway slaves, under the all-depressing fears ofdiscovery and oppression, labor well, because the fruits of their laborare immediately their own. 

Let us look at this subject from another point of view. The large sum ofmoney necessary for stocking a plantation with slaves has an inevitabletendency to place the agriculture of a slave-holding communityexclusively in the hands of the wealthy, a tendency at war with practicalrepublicanism 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 withthe beautiful system of free labor as exhibited in New England, whereevery young laborer, with health and ordinary prudence, may acquire byhis labor on the farms of others, in a few years, a farm of his own, andthe stock necessary for its proper cultivation; where on a hard andunthankful soil independence and competence may be attained by all. 

Free labor is perfectly in accordance with the spirit of ourinstitutions; slave labor is a relic of a barbarous, despotic age. Theone, like the firmament of heaven, is the equal diffusion of similarlights, manifest, harmonious, regular; the other is the fierypredominance of some disastrous star, hiding all lesser luminaries aroundit in one consuming glare. 

Emancipation would reform this evil. The planter would no longer beunder the necessity of a heavy expenditure for slaves. He would only paya very moderate price for his labor; a price, indeed, far less than thecost of the maintenance of a promiscuous gang of slaves, which thepresent system requires. 

In an old plantation of three hundred slaves, not more than one hundredeffective laborers will be found. Children, the old and superannuated, the sick and decrepit, the idle and incorrigibly vicious, will be foundto constitute two thirds of the whole number. The remaining thirdperform only about one third as much work as the same number of freelaborers. 

Now disburden the master of this heavy load of maintenance; let himemploy free able, industrious laborers only, those who feel conscious ofa personal interest in the fruits of their labor, and who does not seethat such a system would be vastly more safe and economical than thepresent?

The slave states are learning this truth by fatal experience. Most ofthem are silently writhing under the great curse. Virginia has utteredher complaints aloud. As yet, however, nothing has been done even there, save a small annual appropriation for the purpose of colonizing the freecolored inhabitants of the state. Is this a remedy?

But it may be said that Virginia will ultimately liberate her slaves oncondition of their colonization in Africa, peacefully if possible, forcibly if necessary. 

Well, admitting that Virginia may be able and willing at some remoteperiod to rid herself of the evil by commuting the punishment of herunoffending colored people from slavery to exile, will her fearful remedyapply to some of the other slaveholding states?

It is a fact, strongly insisted upon by our Southern brethren as a reasonfor the perpetuation of slavery, that their climate and peculiaragriculture will not admit of hard labor on the part of the whites; thatamidst the fatal malaria of the rice plantations the white man is almostannually visited by the country fever; that few of the white overseers ofthese plantations reach the middle period of ordinary life; that theowners are compelled to fly from their estates as the hot seasonapproaches, without being able to return until the first frosts havefallen. But we are told that the slaves remain there, at their work, mid-leg in putrid water, breathing the noisome atmosphere, loaded withcontagion, and underneath the scorching fervor of a terrible sun; thatthey indeed suffer; but, that their habits, constitutions, and their longpractice enable them to labor, surrounded by such destructive influences, with comparative safety. 

The conclusive answer, therefore, to those who in reality cherish thevisionary hope of colonizing all the colored people of the United Statesin Africa or elsewhere, is this single, all-important fact: The labor ofthe blacks will not and cannot be dispensed with by the planter of theSouth. 

To what remedy, then, can the friends of humanity betake themselves butto that of emancipation?

And nothing but a strong, unequivocal expression of public sentiment isneeded to carry into effect this remedy, so far as the general governmentis concerned. 

And when the voice of all the non-slave-holding states shall be heard onthis question, a voice of expostulation, rebuke, entreaty--when the fulllight of truth shall break through the night of prejudice, and reveal allthe foul abominations of slavery, will Delaware still cling to the cursewhich is wasting her moral strength, and still rivet the fetters upon herthree or four thousand slaves? Let Delaware begin the work, and Marylandand Virginia must follow; the example will be contagious; and the greatobject of universal emancipation will be attained. Freemen, Christians, lovers of truth and justice Why stand ye idle? Ours is a government ofopinion, and slavery is interwoven with it. Change the current ofopinion, and slavery will be swept away. Let the awful sovereignty ofthe people, a power which is limited only by the sovereignty of Heaven, arise and pronounce judgment against the crying iniquity. Let eachindividual remember that upon himself rests a portion of thatsovereignty; a part of the tremendous responsibility of its exercise. The burning, withering concentration of public opinion upon the slavesystem is alone needed for its total annihilation. God has given us thepower to overthrow it; a power peaceful, yet mighty, benevolent, yeteffectual, "awful without severity, " a moral strength equal to theemergency. 

"How does it happen, " inquires an able writer, "that whenever duty is namedwe begin to hear of the weakness of human nature? That same nature whichoutruns the whirlwind in the chase of gain, which rages like a maniac atthe trumpet call of glory, which laughs danger and death to scorn whenits least passion is awakened, becomes weak as childhood when reminded ofthe 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 possessesinfluence; and upon him as well as upon the proudest rests theresponsibility of its rightful exercise and proper direction. Theoverthrow of a great national evil like that of slavery can only beeffected by the united energies of the great body of the people. Shoulder must be put to shoulder and hand linked with hand, the wholemass must be put in motion and its entire strength applied, until thefabric of oppression is shaken to its dark foundations and not one stoneis 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 thatin vain is the tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin, if the weihtiermatters of the law, judgment, mercy, and truth, are forgotten. Let himremember that all along the clouded region of slavery the truths of theeverlasting gospel are not spoken, that the ear of iniquity is lulled, that those who minister between the "porch and the altar" dare not speakout the language of eternal justice: "Is not this the fast which I havechosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, andto let the oppressed go free?" (Isa. Viii. 6. ) "He that stealeth a manand selleth him; or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put todeath. " (Exod. Xxi. 16. 1) Yet a little while and the voice of impartialprayer for humanity will be heard no more in the abiding place ofslavery. The truths of the gospel, its voice of warning and exhortation, will be denounced as incendiary? The night of that infidelity, whichdenies God in the abuse and degradation of man, will settle over theland, to be broken only by the upheaving earthquake of eternalretribution. 

To the members of the religious Society of Friends, I would earnestlyappeal. They have already done much to put away the evil of slavery inthis country and Great Britain. The blessings of many who were ready toperish have rested upon them. But their faithful testimony must be stillsteadily upborne, for the great work is but begun. Let them not relaxtheir exertions, nor be contented with a lifeless testimony, a formalprotestation against the evil. Active, prayerful, unwearied exertion isneeded for its overthrow. But above all, let them not aid in excusingand palliating it. Slavery has no redeeming qualities, no feature ofbenevolence, nothing pure, nothing peaceful, nothing just. Let themcarefully keep themselves aloof from all societies and all schemes whichhave a tendency to excuse or overlook its crying iniquity. True to adoctrine founded on love and mercy, "peace on earth and good will tomen, " they should regard the suffering slave as their brother, andendeavor to "put their souls in his soul's stead. " They may earnestlydesire the civilization of Africa, but they cannot aid in building up thecolony of Liberia so long as that colony leans for support upon the armof military power; so long as it proselytes to Christianity under themuzzles of its cannon; and preaches the doctrines of Christ whilepractising those of Mahomet. When the Sierra Leone Company was formed inEngland, not a member of the Society of Friends could be prevailed uponto engage in it, because the colony was to be supplied with cannon andother military stores. Yet the Foreign Agent of the Liberia ColonySociety, to which the same insurmountable objection exists, is a memberof the Society of Friends, and I understand has been recently employed inproviding gunpowder, etc. , for the use of the colony. There must be anawakening on this subject; other Woolmans and other Benezets must ariseand speak the truth with the meek love of James and the fervent sincerityof 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 berequired at the last dread tribunal; and never in the strongest terms ofhuman eulogy was woman's influence overrated. Sisters, daughters, wives, and mothers, your influence is felt everywhere, at the fireside, and inthe halls of legislation, surrounding, like the all-encirclingatmosphere, brother and father, husband and son! And by your love ofthem, by every holy sympathy of your bosoms, by every mournful appealwhich comes up to you from hearts whose sanctuary of affections has beenmade waste and desolate, you are called upon to exert it in the cause ofredemption from wrong and outrage. 

Let the patriot, the friend of liberty and the Union of the States, nolonger shut his eyes to the great danger, the master-evil before whichall others dwindle into insignificance. Our Union is tottering to itsfoundation, and slavery is the cause. Remove the evil. Dry up at theirsource the bitter waters. In vain you enact and abrogate your tariffs;in vain is individual sacrifice, or sectional concession. The accursedthing is with us, the stone of stumbling and the rock of offence remains. Drag, then, the Achan into light; and let national repentance atone fornational sin. 

The conflicting interests of free and slave labor furnish the only groundfor fear in relation to the permanency of the Union. The line ofseparation between them is day by day growing broader and deeper;geographically and politically united, we are already, in a moral pointof view, a divided people. But a few months ago we were on the veryverge of civil war, a war of brothers, a war between the North and theSouth, between the slave-holder and the free laborer. The danger hasbeen delayed for a time; this bolt has fallen without mortal injury tothe 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 interestis prepared to resist any legislation on the part of the generalgovernment which is supposed to have a tendency, directly or indirectly, to encourage and invigorate free labor; and that it is determined tocharge upon its opposite interest the infliction of all those evils whichnecessarily attend its own operation, "the primeval curse of Omnipotenceupon slavery. "

We have already felt in too many instances the extreme difficulty ofcherishing in one common course of national legislation the oppositeinterests of republican equality and feudal aristocracy and servitude. The truth is, we have undertaken a moral impossibility. These interestsare from their nature irreconcilable. The one is based upon the pureprinciples of rational liberty; the other, under the name of freedom, revives the ancient European system of barons and villains, nobles andserfs. Indeed, the state of society which existed among our Anglo-Saxonancestors was far more tolerable than that of many portions of ourrepublican confederacy. For the Anglo-Saxon slaves had it in their powerto purchase their freedom; and the laws of the realm recognized theirliberation 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 atvariance with the great Declaration of American freedom should be theearnest endeavor of every patriotic statesman. Nothing unconstitutional, nothing violent, should be attempted; but the true doctrine of the rightsof man should be steadily kept in view; and the opposition to slaveryshould be inflexible and constantly maintained. The almost dailyviolations of the Constitution in consequence of the laws of some of theslave states, subjecting free colored citizens of New England andelsewhere, who may happen to be on board of our coasting vessels, toimprisonment immediately on their arrival in a Southern port should beprovided against. Nor should the imprisonment of the free coloredcitizens of the Northern and Middle states, on suspicion of beingrunaways, subjecting them, even after being pronounced free, to the costsof their confinement and trial, be longer tolerated; for if we continueto 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 fullyconsidering the nature of slavery, that it can much longer maintain apeaceable existence among us. A day of revolution must come, and it isour duty to prepare for it. Its threatened evil may be changed into anational blessing. The establishment of schools for the instruction ofthe slave children, a general diffusion of the lights of Christianity, and the introduction of a sacred respect for the social obligations ofmarriage and for the relations between parents and children, among ourblack population, would render emancipation not only perfectly safe, butalso of the highest advantage to the country. Two millions of freemenwould be added to our population, upon whom in the hour of danger wecould safely depend; "the domestic foe" would be changed into a firmfriend, faithful, generous, and ready to encounter all dangers in ourdefence. It is well known that during the last war with Great Britain, wherever the enemy touched upon our Southern coast, the slaves inmultitudes hastened to join them. On the other hand, the free blackswere highly serviceable in repelling them. So warm was the zeal of thelatter, so manifest their courage in the defence of Louisiana, that thepresent Chief Magistrate of the United States publicly bestowed upon themone 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 becausethe laws of the land tolerate and sanction it. But a short time ago theslave-trade was protected by laws and treaties, and sanctioned by theexample of men eminent for the reputation of piety and integrity. Yetpublic opinion broke over these barriers; it lifted the curtain andrevealed the horrors of that most abominable traffic; and unrighteous lawand ancient custom and avarice and luxury gave way before itsirresistible authority. It should never be forgotten that human lawcannot change the nature of human action in the pure eye of infinitejustice; and that the ordinances of man cannot annul those of God. Theslave system, as existing in this country, can be considered in no otherlight than as the cause of which the foul traffic in human flesh is thelegitimate consequence. It is the parent, the fosterer, the solesupporter of the slave-trade. It creates the demand for slaves, and theforeign supply will always be equal to the demand of consumption. Itkeeps the market open. It offers inducements to the slave-trader whichno severity of law against his traffic can overcome. By our laws histrade is piracy; while slavery, to which alone it owes its existence, isprotected and cherished, and those engaged in it are rewarded by anincrease of political power proportioned to the increase of their stockof human beings! To steal the natives of Africa is a crime worthy of anignominious death; but to steal and enslave annually nearly one hundredthousand of the descendants of these stolen natives, born in thiscountry, is considered altogether excusable and proper! For my own part, I know no difference between robbery in Africa and robbery at home. Icould with as quiet a conscience engage in the one as the other. 

"There is not one general principle, " justly remarks Lord Nugent, "onwhich the slave-trade is to be stigmatized which does not impeach slaveryitself. " Kindred in iniquity, both must fall speedily, fall together, and be consigned to the same dishonorable grave. The spirit which isthrilling through every nerve of England is awakening America from hersleep of death. Who, among our statesmen, would not shrink from thebaneful reputation of having supported by his legislative influence theslave-trade, the traffic in human flesh? Let them then beware; for thetime is near at hand when the present defenders of slavery will sinkunder the same fatal reputation, and leave to posterity a memory whichwill blacken through all future time, a legacy of infamy. 

"Let us not betake us to the common arts and stratagems of nations, butfear 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 befollowed in the present. An intense and powerful feeling is working inthe mighty heart of England; it is speaking through the lips of Broughamand Buxton and O'Connell, and demanding justice in the name of humanityand according to the righteous law of God. The immediate emancipation ofeight hundred thousand slaves is demanded with an authority which cannotmuch longer be disputed or trifled with. That demand will be obeyed;justice will be done; the heavy burdens will be unloosed; the oppressedset free. It shall go well for England. 

And when the stain on our own escutcheon shall be seen no more; when theDeclaration of our Independence and the practice of our people shallagree; when truth shall be exalted among us; when love shall take theplace of wrong; when all the baneful pride and prejudice of caste andcolor shall fall forever; when under one common sun of political libertythe slave-holding portions of our republic shall no longer sit, like theEgyptians of old, themselves mantled in thick darkness, while all aroundthem is glowing with the blessed light of freedom and equality, then, andnot 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 briefnotice of a pamphlet, which I have recently published on the subject ofslavery. 

From an occasional perusal of your paper, I have formed a favorableopinion of your talent and independence. Compelled to dissent from someof your political sentiments, I still give you full credit for the loftytone of sincerity and manliness with which these sentiments are avowedand defended. 

I perceive that since the adjustment of the tariff question a new subjectof discontent and agitation seems to engross your attention. 

The "accursed tariff" has no sooner ceased to be the stone of stumblingand the rock of offence, than the "abolition doctrines of the Northernenthusiasts, " as you are pleased to term the doctrines of your ownJefferson, furnish, in your opinion, a sufficient reason for poising the"Ancient Dominion" on its sovereignty, and rousing every slaveowner tomilitary preparations, until the entire South, from the Potomac to theGulf, shall bristle with bayonets, "like quills upon the fretfulporcupine. "

In proof of a conspiracy against your "vested rights, " you have commencedpublishing copious extracts from the pamphlets and periodicals of theabolitionists of New England and New York. An extract from my ownpamphlet you have headed "The Fanatics, " and in introducing it to yourreaders you inform them that "it exhibits, in strong colors, the morbidspirit of that false and fanatical philanthropy, which is at work in theNorthern states, and, to some extent, in the South. "

Gentlemen, so far as I am personally concerned in the matter, I feel nodisposition to take exceptions to any epithets which you may see fit toapply to me or my writings. A humble son of New England--a tiller of herrugged soil, and a companion of her unostentatious yeomanry--it matterslittle, in any personal consideration of the subject, whether the voiceof praise or opprobrium reaches me from beyond the narrow limits of myimmediate neighborhood. 

But when I find my opinions quoted as the sentiment of New England, andthen denounced as dangerous, "false and fanatical;" and especially when Isee them made the occasion of earnest appeals to the prejudices andsectional jealousies of the South, it becomes me to endeavor to establishtheir truths, and defend them from illegitimate influences and unjustsuspicions. 

In the first place, then, let me say, that if it be criminal to publiclyexpress a belief that it is in the power of the slave states toemancipate their slaves, with profit and safety to themselves, and thatsuch is their immediate duty, a majority of the people of New England arewholly guiltless. Of course, all are nominally opposed to slavery; butupon the little band of abolitionists should the anathemas of the slave-holder be directed, for they are the agitators of whom you complain, menwho are acting under a solemn conviction of duty, and who are bendingevery energy of their minds to the accomplishment of their object. 

And that object is the overthrow of slavery in the United States, by suchmeans only as are sanctioned by law, humanity, and religion. 

I shall endeavor, gentlemen, as briefly as may be, to give you some ofour reasons for opposing slavery and seeking its abolition; and, secondly, to explain our mode of operation; to disclose our plan ofemancipation, fully and entirely. We wish to do nothing darkly; frankrepublicans, we acknowledge no double-dealing. At this busy season ofthe year, I cannot but regret that I have not leisure for such adeliberate examination of the subject as even my poor ability mightwarrant. My remarks, penned in the intervals of labor, must necessarilybe 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 yourselvesmembers of the Bible Society, and bestow warm and deserved encomiums onthe "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 opposingslavery by a reference to the volume of inspiration:

"Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you doye 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 ofwickedness; to undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free, andthat ye break every yoke?"

"If a man be found stealing any of his brethren, and maketh merchandiseof 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 hishands, he shall surely be put to death. "

2. Because it is an open violation of all human equality, of the laws ofNature and of nations. 

The fundamental principle of all equal and just law is contained in thefollowing extract from Blackstone's Commentaries, Introduction, sec. 2. 

"The rights which God and Nature have established, and which aretherefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty, need not theaid of human laws to be more effectually vested in every man than theyare; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared bymunicipal laws to be inviolable: on the contrary, no human legislationhas power to abridge or destroy there, unless the owner shall himselfcommit some act that amounts to a forfeiture. "

Has the negro committed such offence? Above all, has his infant childforfeited its unalienable right?

Surely it can be no act of the innocent child. 

Yet you must prove the forfeiture, or no human legislation can deprivethat child of its freedom. 

Its black skin constitutes the forfeiture!

What! throw the responsibility upon God! Charge the common Father of thewhite and the black, He, who is no respecter of persons, with plunderingHis unoffending children of all which makes the boon of existencedesirable; 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, wereproclaimed free, by the delegates of the people of those states assembledin their highest sovereign capacity. 

For more than half a century we have openly violated that solemndeclaration. 

3. Because it renders nugatory the otherwise beneficial example of ourfree institutions, and exposes us to the scorn and reproach of theliberal and enlightened of other nations. 

"Chains clank and groans echo around the walls of their spotlessCongress. "--(Francis Jeffrey. )

"Man to be possessed by man! Man to be made property of! The image ofthe Deity to be put under the yoke! Let these usurpers show us theirtitle-deeds!"--(Simon Boliver. )

"When I am indulging in my views of American prospects and Americanliberty, it is mortifying to be told that in that very country a largeportion of the people are slaves! It is a dark spot on the face of thenation. Such a state of things cannot always exist. "--(Lafayette. )

"I deem it right to raise my humble voice to convince the citizens ofAmerica that the slaveholding states are held in abomination by all thosewhose opinion ought to be valuable. Man is the property of man in aboutone half of the American States: let them not therefore dare to prate oftheir institutions or of their national freedom, while they hold theirfellow-men in bondage! Of all men living, the American citizen who isthe owner of slaves is the most despicable. He is a political hypocriteof the very worst description. The friends of humanity and liberty inEurope 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 ofrepublican rites, with the presence and the sufferings of human beings inchains and slavery!'"--(Daniel O'Connell. )

4. Because it subjects one portion of our American brethren to theunrestrained violence and unholy passions of another. 

Here, gentlemen, I might summon to my support a cloud of witnesses, ahost of incontrovertible, damning facts, the legitimate results of asystem whose tendency is to harden and deprave the heart. But I will notdescend to particulars. I am willing to believe that the majority of themasters of your section of the country are disposed to treat theirunfortunate slaves with kindness. But where the dreadful privilege ofslave-holding is extended to all, in every neighborhood, there must beindividuals 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 hourlyabused. 

Will the evidence of your own Jefferson, on this point, be admissible?

"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise, ofthe most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the onepart, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, andlearn to imitate it. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches thelineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smallerslaves, gives loose to the worst of passions; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot fail to be stamped by it withodious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain hismorals and manners undepraved by such circumstances. "--(Notes onVirginia, p. 241. )

"Il n'existe a la verite aucune loi qui protege l'esclave le mauvaistraitement 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 lawlimiting 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 appliesalike to master and slave. True; but will you point out instances ofmasters 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 aslave 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 thelanguage of Georgia and North Carolina, "died of moderate correction, "has been repealed. But, although the letter of the law is changed, itspractice remains the same. In proof of this, I would refer toBrockenborough and Holmes' Virginia Cases, p. 258. 

In Georgia and North Carolina the murder of a slave is tolerated andjustified by law, provided that in the opinion of the court he died "ofmoderate correction!"

In South Carolina the following clause of a law enacted in 1740 is stillin force:--

"If any slave shall suffer in his life, limbs, or members, when no whiteperson shall be present, or being present shall neglect or refuse to giveevidence concerning the same, in every such case the owner or otherperson who shall have the care and government of the slave shall bedeemed and taken to be guilty of such offence; unless such owner or otherperson can make the contrary appear by good and sufficient evidence, orshall by his own oath clear and exculpate himself, which oath every courtwhere such offence shall be tried is hereby empowered to administer andto acquit the offender accordingly, if clear proof of the offence be notmade by two witnesses at least, any law, usage, or custom to the contrarynotwithstanding. "

Is not this offering a reward for perjury? And what shall we think ofthat 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 ofnecessity a struggle between the opposing interests of free and slavelabor, and threatens the integrity of the Union. 

That sectional jealousies do exist, the tone of your paper, gentlemen, isof itself an evidence, if indeed any were needed. The moral sentiment ofthe free states is against slavery. The freeman has declared hisunwillingness that his labor should be reduced to a level with that ofslaves. Harsh epithets and harsh threats have been freely exchanged, until the beautiful Potomac, wherever it winds its way to the ocean, hasbecome 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 wasagitated? What but a few months ago arrayed in arms a state against theUnion, 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 andprosperity. 

Political economy has been the peculiar study of Virginia. But there aresome important truths connected with this science which she has hithertooverlooked or wantonly disregarded. 

Population increasing with the means of subsistence is a fair test ofnational wealth. 

By reference to the several censuses of the United States, it will beseen that the white population increases nearly twice as fast in stateswhere there are few or no slaves as in the slave states. 

Again, in the latter states the slave population has increased twice asfast 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 threeof 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 trueinterests of the country, are very manifest. 

A large proportion of the free inhabitants of the United States aredependent upon their labor for subsistence. The forced, unnatural systemof slavery in some of the states renders the demand for free laborersless urgent; they are not so readily and abundantly supplied with themeans of subsistence as those of their own class in the free states, andas the necessaries of life diminish population also diminishes. 

There is yet another cause for the decline of the white population. Inthe free states labor is reputable. The statesman, whose eloquence haselectrified a nation, does not disdain in the intervals of the publicservice to handle the axe and the hoe. And the woman whose beauty, talents, and accomplishments have won the admiration of all deems it nodegradation 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 tolabor, side by side, with the low, despised, miserable black man. Wretched must be the condition of the poorer classes of whites in aslave-holding community! Compelled to perform the despised offices ofthe slave, they can hardly rise above his level. They become the pariahsof society. No wonder, then, that the tide of emigration flows from theslave-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 entirepopulation, with the exception of those engaged in mercantile affairs, the professional classes, and a very few moneyed idlers, are working menand women. If that of the South were equally employed (and slaveryapart, there is no reason why they should not be), how large an additionwould be annually made to the wealth of the country? The truth is, avery considerable portion of the national wealth produced by Northernlabor is taxed to defray the expenses of twenty-five representatives ofSouthern property in Congress, and to maintain an army mainly for theprotection of the slave-master against the dangerous tendencies of thatproperty. 

In the early and better days of the Roman Republic, the ancient warriorsand statesmen cultivated their fields with their own hands; but so soonas their agriculture was left to the slaves, it visibly declined, theonce fertile fields became pastures, and the inhabitants of that gardenof the world were dependent upon foreign nations for the necessaries oflife. The beautiful villages, once peopled by free contented laborers, became tenantless, and, over the waste of solitude, we see, here andthere, at weary distances, the palaces of the master, contrastingpainfully with the wretched cottages and subterranean cells of the slave. In speaking of the extraordinary fertility of the soil in the early timesof the Republic, Pliny inquires, "What was the cause of these abundantharvests? It was this, that men of rank employed themselves in theculture of the fields; whereas now it is left to wretches loaded withfetters, who carry in their countenances the shameful evidence of theirslavery. "

And what was true in the days of the Roman is now written legibly uponthe soil of your own Virginia. A traveller in your state, incontemplating the decline of its agriculture, has justly remarked that, "if the miserable condition of the negro had left his mind forreflection, he would laugh in his chains to see how slavery has strickenthe land with ugliness. "

Is the rapid increase of a population of slaves in itself no evil? Inall the slave states the increase of the slaves is vastly more rapid thanthat of the whites or free blacks. When we recollect that they are underno natural or moral restraint, careless of providing food or clothing forthemselves or their children; when, too, we consider that they are raisedas an article of profitable traffic, like the cattle of New England andthe hogs of Kentucky; that it is a matter of interest, of dollars andcents, to the master that they should multiply as fast as possible, thereis 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 slavestates are alike involved in the guilt of maintaining slavery, and thecitizens of the former are liable, at any moment, to be called upon toaid the latter in suppressing, at the point of the bayonet, theinsurrection of the slaves. 

Slavery is, at the best, an unnatural state. And Nature, when hereternal principles are violated, is perpetually struggling to restorethem to their first estate. 

All history, ancient and modern, is full of warning on this point. NeedI refer to the many revolts of the Roman and Grecian slaves, the bloodyinsurrection 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 theuntold horrors of St. Domingo, when that island, under the curse of itsservile war, glowed redly in the view of earth and heaven, --an open hell?Have our own peculiar warnings gone by unheeded, --the frequent slaveinsurrections of the South? One horrible tragedy, gentlemen, must stillbe fresh in your recollection, --Southampton, with its fired dwellings andghastly dead! Southampton, with its dreadful associations, of the deathstruggle with the insurgents, the groans of the tortured negroes, thelamentations of the surviving whites over woman in her innocence andbeauty, and childhood, and hoary age!

"The hour of emancipation, " said Thomas Jefferson, "is advancing in themarch of time. It will come. If not brought on by the generous energyof 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 buta 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 greatevil, moral and political, --an evil which, if left to itself for even afew years longer, will give the entire South into the hands of theblacks. 

The terms of the national compact compel us to consider more than twomillions of our fellow-beings as your property; not, indeed, morally, really, de facto, but still legally your property! We acknowledge thatyou have a power derived from the United States Constitution to hold this"property, " but we deny that you have any moral right to take advantageof that power. For truth will not allow us to admit that any human lawor compact can make void or put aside the ordinance of the living God andthe eternal laws of Nature. 

We therefore hold it to be the duty of the people of the slave-holdingstates to begin the work of emancipation now; that any delay must bedangerous to themselves in time and eternity, and full of injustice totheir slaves and to their brethren of the free states. 

Because the slave has never forfeited his right to freedom, and thecontinuance of his servitude is a continuance of robbery; and because, inthe event of a servile war, the people of the free states would be calledupon to take a part in its unutterable horrors. 

New England would obey that call, for she will abide unto death by theConstitution of the land. Yet what must be the feelings of her citizens, while engaged in hunting down like wild beasts their fellow-men--brutaland black it may be, but still oppressed, suffering human beings, struggling madly and desperately for their liberty, if they feel and knowthat the necessity of so doing has resulted from a blind fatality on thepart of the oppressor, a reckless disregard of the warnings of earth andheaven, an obstinate perseverance in a system founded and sustained byrobbery and wrong?

All wars are horrible, wicked, inexcusable, and truly and solemnly hasJefferson himself said that, in a contest of this kind, between the slaveand the master, "the Almighty has no attribute which could take side withus. "

Understand us, gentlemen. We only ask to have the fearful necessitytaken away from us of sustaining the wretched policy of slavery by moralinfluence or physical force. We ask alone to be allowed to wash ourhands of the blood of millions of your fellow-beings, the cry of whom isrising up as a swift witness unto God against us. 

8. Because all the facts connected with the subject warrant us in a mostconfident belief that a speedy and general emancipation might be madewith entire safety, and that the consequences of such an emancipationwould 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, asoul redeemed from the all-polluting influences of slavery, and againstwhich the cry of the laborer whose hire has been kept back by fraud doesnot ascend. Nor will I rest the defence of my position upon the factthat it can never be unsafe to obey the commands of God. These are theold and common arguments of "fanatics" and "enthusiasts, " melting awaylike frost-work in the glorious sunshine of expediency and utility. Inthe light of these modern luminaries, then, let us reason together. 

A long and careful examination of the subject will I think fully justifyme in advancing this general proposition. 

Wherever, whether in Europe, the East and West Indies, South America, orin our own country, a fair experiment has been made of the comparativeexpense of free and slave labor, the result has uniformly been favorableto 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 ofexpediency, 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 supposedconsequences, bloodshed, rapine, promiscuous massacre!

The facts, gentlemen! In God's name, bring out your facts! If slaveryis to cast over the prosperity of our country the thick shadow of aneverlasting curse, because emancipation is dreaded as a remedy worse thanthe disease itself, let us know the real grounds of your fear. 

Do you find them in the emancipation of the South American Republics? InHayti? In the partial experiments of some of the West India Islands?Does history, ancient or modern, justify your fears? Can you find anyexcuse for them in the nature of the human mind, everywhere maddened byinjury and conciliated by kindness? No, gentlemen; the dangers ofslavery 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 incorroboration of your fears. You cannot point to the stain of a singledrop 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 nextletter I shall explain our method of opposition, and I trust I shall beable 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. Inattacking the system of slavery, they have never recommended any measureor measures conflicting with the Constitution of the United States. 

They have never sought to excite or encourage a spirit of rebellion amongthe slaves: on the contrary, they would hold any such attempt, bywhomsoever 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 warwhatever can compensate for the sacrifice of one human life by violence. 

Consequently, they would be the first to deprecate any physicalinterference with your slave system on the part of the generalgovernment. 

They are, without exception, opposed to any political interposition ofthe government, in regard to slavery as it exists in the states. For, although they feel and see that the canker of the moral disease isaffecting all parts of the confederacy, they believe that the remedy lieswith yourselves alone. Any such interference they would considerunlawful and unconstitutional; and the exercise of unconstitutionalpower, although sanctioned by the majority of a republican government, they believe to be a tyranny as monstrous and as odious as the despotismof a Turkish Sultan. 

Having made this disclaimer on the part of myself and my friends, let meinquire from whence this charge of advocating the interference of thegeneral government with the sovereign jurisdiction of the states hasarisen? Will you, gentlemen, will the able editors of the United StatesTelegraph and the Columbian Telescope, explain? For myself, I havesought in vain among the writings of our "Northern Enthusiasts, " andamong the speeches of the Northern statesmen and politicians, for somegrounds for the accusation. 

The doctrine, such as it is, does not belong to us. I think it may betraced home to the South, to Virginia, to her Convention of 1829, to thespeech of Ex-President Monroe, on the white basis question. 

"As to emancipation, " said that distinguished son of your state, "if everthat should take place, it cannot be done by the state; it must be doneby the Union. "

Again, "If emancipation can ever be effected, it can only be done withthe aid of the general government. "

Gentlemen, you are welcome to your doctrine. It has no advocates amongthe abolitionists of New England. 

We aim to overthrow slavery by the moral influence of an enlightenedpublic sentiment;

By a clear and fearless exposition of the guilt of holding property inman;

By analyzing the true nature of slavery, and boldly rebuking sin;

By a general dissemination of the truths of political economy, in regardto 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 theprinciple of slavery by such means as are consistent with our obligationsto law, religion, and humanity;

By elevating, by means of education and sympathy, the character of thefree people of color among us. 

Our testimony against slavery is the same which has uniformly, and withso much success, been applied to prevailing iniquity in all ages of theworld, the truths of divine revelation. 

Believing that there can be nothing in the Providence of God to which Hisholy and eternal law is not strictly applicable, we maintain that nocircumstances can justify the slave-holder in a continuance of hissystem. 

That the fact that this system did not originate with the presentgeneration is no apology for retaining it, inasmuch as crime cannot beentailed; and no one is under a necessity of sinning because others havedone so before him;

That the domestic slave-trade is as repugnant to the laws of God, andshould 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 entailedarticle of property;" and that the white man who makes of that child aslave is a thief and a robber, stealing the child as the sea pirate stolehis father!

We do not talk of gradual abolition, because, as Christians, we find noauthority for advocating a gradual relinquishment of sin. We say toslaveholders, "Repent now, to-day, immediately;" just as we say to theintemperate, "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 andthe West Indies, and found wanting. It has been in operation in ourslave states ever since the Declaration of Independence, and its resultsare before the nation. Let us see. 

THE ABOLITIONISTS 79

In 1790 there were in the slave states south of the Potomac and the Ohio20, 415 free blacks. Their increase for the ten years following was atthe rate of sixty per cent. , their number in 1800 being 32, 604. In 1810there were 58, 046, an increase of seventy-five per cent. Thiscomparatively large increase was, in a great measure, owing to the freediscussions going on in England and in this country on the subject of theslave-trade and the rights of man. The benevolent impulse extended tothe slave-masters, and manumissions were frequent. But the salutaryimpression died away; the hand of oppression closed again upon itsvictims; 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 theten years from 1800 to 1810. And this is the practical result of themuch-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 wholeslave 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 spiritof fraternal duty we point to your notice the commands of God; if we urgeyou by every cherished remembrance of common sacrifices upon a commonaltar, by every consideration of humanity, justice, and expediency, tobegin now, without a moment's delay, to break away from your miserablesystem, --to begin the work of moral reformation, as God commands you tobegin, not as selfishness, or worldly policy, or short-sighted politicalexpediency, may chance to dictate. 

Such is our doctrine of immediate emancipation. A doctrine founded onGod's eternal truth, plain, simple, and perfect, --the doctrine ofimmediate, unprocrastinated repentance applied to the sin of slavery. 

Of this doctrine, and of our plan for crrrying it into effect, I havegiven an exposition, with the most earnest regard to the truth. Doeseither embrace anything false, fanatical, or unconstitutional? Do theyafford a reasonable protext for your fierce denunciations of yourNorthern brethren? Do they furnish occasion for your newspaper chivalry, your stereotyped demonstrations of Southern magnanimity and Yankeemeanness?--things, let me say, unworthy of Virginians, degrading toyourselves, insulting to us. 

Gentlemen, it is too late for Virginia, with all her lofty intellect andnobility of feeling, to defend and advocate the principle of slavery. The death-like silence which for nearly two centuries brooded over herexecrable system has been broken; light is pouring in upon the minds ofher citizens; truth is abroad, "searching out and overturning the lies ofthe age. " A moral reformation has been already awakened, and it cannotnow be drugged to sleep by the sophistries of detected sin. A thousandintelligences are at work in her land; a thousand of her noblest heartsare glowing with the redeeming spirit of that true philanthropy, which ismoving all the world. No, gentlemen; light is spreading from the hillsof Western Virginia to the extremest East. You cannot arrest itsprogress. 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 theprofitless fern and thistle have sprung up under the heel of slavery;from every falling mansion of the master, through whose windows the foxmay look out securely, and over whose hearth-stone the thin grass iscreeping, a warning voice is sinking deeply into all hearts not imbrutedby avarice, indolence, and the lust of power. 

Abolitionist as I am, the intellectual character of Virginia has nowarmer admirer than myself. Her great names, her moral trophies, theglories of her early day, the still proud and living testimonials of hermental power, I freely acknowledge and strongly appreciate. And, believeme, it is with no other feelings than those of regret and heartfeltsorrow that I speak plainly of her great error, her giant crime, a crimewhich is visibly calling down upon her the curse of an offended Deity. But I cannot forget that upon some of the most influential and highlyfavored of her sons rests the responsibility at the present time ofsustaining this fearful iniquity. Blind to the signs of the times, careless of the wishes of thousands of their white fellow-citizens and ofthe 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 theirshoulders. 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 oftalents the great names of Virginia, the friends of civil liberty turnedtheir eyes towards it in the earnest hope and confidence that it wouldadopt some measures in regard to slavery worthy of the high character ofits members and of the age in which they lived. I need not say how deepand bitter was our disappointment. Western Virginia indeed spoke on thatoccasion, through some of her delegates, the words of truth and humanity. But their counsels and warnings were unavailing; the majority turned awayto listen to the bewildering eloquence of Leigh and Upshur and Randolph, as they desecrated their great intellects to the defence of that systemof oppression under which the whole land is groaning. The memorial ofthe citizens of Augusta County, bearing the signatures of many slave-holders, placed the evils of slavery in a strong light before theconvention. Its facts and arguments could only be arbitrarily thrustaside and wantonly disregarded; they could not be disproved. 

"In a political point of view, " says the memorial, "we esteem slavery anevil greater than the aggregate of all the other evils which beset us, and we are perfectly willing to bear our proportion of the burden ofremoving it. We ask, further, What is the evil of any such alarm as ourproposition may excite in minds unnecessarily jealous compared with thatof the fatal catastrophe which ultimately awaits our country, and thegeneral depravation of manners which slavery has already produced and isproducing?"

I cannot forbear giving one more extract from this paper. Thememorialists 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 agiven number of the former than of the latter; that the employment of theformer necessarily excludes that of the latter; that hence ourpopulation, white and black, averages seventeen, when it ought, and wouldunder other circumstances, average, as in New England, at least sixty toa square mile; that the possession and management of slaves form a sourceof endless vexation and misery in the house, and of waste and ruin on thefarm; that the youth of the country are growing up with a contempt ofsteady industry as a low and servile thing, which contempt inducesidleness and all its attendant effeminacy, vice, and worthlessness; thatthe waste of the products of the land, nay, of the land itself, isbringing poverty on all its inhabitants; that this poverty and thesparseness of population either prevent the institution of schoolsthroughout the country, or keep them in a most languid and inefficientcondition; and that the same causes most obviously paralyze all ourschemes and efforts for the useful improvement of the country. "

Gentlemen, you have only to look around you to know that this picture hasbeen drawn with the pencil of truth. What has made desolate and sterileone of the loveliest regions of the whole earth? What mean the signs ofwasteful neglect, of long improvidence around you: the half-finishedmansion already falling into decay, the broken-down enclosures, the weed-grown garden the slave hut open to the elements, the hillsides galled andnaked, the fields below them run over with brier and fern? Is all thisin the ordinary course of nature? Has man husbanded well the good giftsof God, and are they nevertheless passing from him, by a process ofdeterioration over which he has no control? No, gentlemen. For morethan two centuries the cold and rocky soil of New England has yielded itsannual tribute, and it still lies green and luxuriant beneath the sun ofour brief summer. The nerved and ever-exercised arm of free labor haschanged a landscape wild and savage as the night scenery of Salvator Rosainto one of pastoral beauty, --the abode of independence and happiness. Under a similar system of economy and industry, how would Virginia, richwith Nature's prodigal blessings, have worn at this time over all herterritory the smiles of plenty, the charms of rewarded industry! What achange would have been manifest in your whole character! Freemen in theplace of slaves, industry, reputable economy, a virtue, dissipationdespised, 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 evilin the vitals of your state, the desolation widening day by day. No, itis not too late. There are elements in the Virginian character capableof meeting the danger, extreme as it is, and turning it aside. Could youbut forget for a time partisan contest and unprofitable politicalspeculations, you might successfully meet the dangerous exigencies ofyour state with those efficient remedies which the spirit of the agesuggests; you might, and that too without pecuniary loss, relinquish yourclaims to human beings as slaves, and employ them as free laborers, undersuch restraint and supervision as their present degraded condition mayrender necessary. In the language of one of your own citizens, "it isuseless for you to attempt to linger on the skirts of the age which isdeparted. The action of existing causes and principles is steady andprogressive. It cannot be retarded, unless you would blow out all themoral lights around you; and if you refuse to keep up with it, you willbe towed in the wake, whether you will or not. "--(Speech in Virginialegislature, 1832. )

The late noble example of the eloquent statesman of Roanoke, themanumission of his slaves, speaks volumes to his political friends. Inthe last hour of existence, when his soul was struggling from his brokentenement, his latest effort was the confirmation of this generous act ofa former period. Light rest the turf upon him beneath his ownpatrimonial oaks! The prayers of many hearts made happy by hisbenevolence shall linger over his grave and bless it. 

Gentlemen, in concluding these letters, let me once more assure you thatI entertain towards you and your political friends none other than kindlyfeelings. If I have spoken at all with apparent harshness, it has beenof principles rather than of men. But I deprecate no censure. Consciousof the honest and patriotic motives which have prompted their avowal, Icheerfully leave my sentiments to their fate. Despised and contemned asthey may be, I believe they cannot be gainsaid. Sustained by the truthas it exists in Nature and Revelation, sanctioned by the prevailingspirit of the age, they are yet destined to work out the political andmoral regeneration of our country. The opposition which they meet withdoes not dishearten me. In the lofty confidence of John Milton, Ibelieve that "though all the winds of doctrine be let loose upon theearth, so Truth be among them, we need not fear. Let her and Falsehoodgrapple; whoever knew her to be put to the worst in a free and openencounter?"

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 notallow 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, heartand soul, in the cause of abolition; the abolition not of physicalslavery alone, abhorrent and monstrous as it is, but of that intellectualslavery, the bondage of corrupt and mistaken opinion, which has fetteredas with iron the moral energies and intellectual strength of New England. 

For what is slavery, after all, but fear, --fear, forcing mind and bodyinto unnatural action? And it matters little whether it be the terror ofthe slave-whip on the body, or of the scourge of popular opinion upon theinner man. 

We all know how often the representatives of the Southern division of thecountry have amused themselves in Congress by applying the opprobriousname of "slave" to the free Northern laborer. And how familiar have thesignificant epithets of "white slave" and "dough-face" become!

I fear these epithets have not been wholly misapplied. Have we not beentold here, gravely and authoritatively, by some of our learned judges, divines, and politicians, that we, the free people of New England, haveno right to discuss the subject of slavery? Freemen, and no right tosuggest the duty or the policy of a practical adherence to the doctrinesof that immortal declaration upon which our liberties are founded!Christians, enjoying perfect liberty of conscience, yet possessing noright to breathe one whisper against a system of adultery and blood, which is filling the whole land with abomination and blasphemy! And thiscraven sentiment is echoed by the very men whose industry is taxed todefray the expenses of twenty-five representatives of property, vested inbeings fashioned in the awful image of their Maker; by men whose hardearnings aid in supporting a standing army mainly for the protection ofslaveholding indolence; by men who are liable at any moment to be calledfrom the field and workshop to put down by force the ever upwardtendencies 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 thebroken chain is riveted anew and the thrown-off fetter replaced. 

I am for the abolition of this kind of slavery. It must be accomplishedbefore we can hope to abolish the negro slavery of the country. Thepeople of the free states, with a perfect understanding of their ownrights and a sacred respect for the rights of others, must put theirstrong shoulders to the work of moral reform, and our statesmen, orators, and politicians will follow, floating as they must with the tendency ofthe current, the mere indices of popular sentiment. They cannot beexpected to lead in this matter. They are but instruments in the handsof 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 turnthe tide of popular feeling into the pure channels of justice; to breakup the sinful silence of the nation; to bring the vaunted Christianity ofour age and country to the test of truth; to try the strength and purityof our republicanism. If the Christianity we profess has not power topull down the strongholds of prejudice, and overcome hate, and melt theheart of oppression, it is not of God. If our republicanism is based onother foundation than justice and humanity, let it fall forever. 

No better evidence is needed of the suicidal policy of this nation thanthe death-like silence on the subject of slavery which pervades itspublic documents. Who that peruses the annual messages of the nationalexecutive would, from their perusal alone, conjecture that such an evilas slavery had existence among us? Have the people reflected upon thecause of this silence? The evil has grown to be too monstrous to bequestioned. 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 aremet with one grave objection. We are told that the system which we areconscientiously opposing is recognized and protected by the Constitution. For all the benefits of our fathers' patriotism--and they are neither fewnor trifling--let us be grateful to God and to their memories. But itshould not be forgotten that the same constitutional compact which nowsanctions slavery guaranteed protection for twenty years to the foreignslave-trade. It threw the shield of its "sanctity" around the nowuniversally branded pirate. It legalized the most abhorrent system ofrobbery which ever cursed the family of man. 

During those years of sinful compromise the crime of man-robbery lessatrocious than at present? Because the Constitution permitted, in thatsingle crime, the violation of all the commandments of God, was thatviolation less terrible to earth or offensive to heaven?

No one now defends that "constitutional" slavetrade. Loaded with thecurse of God and man, it stands amidst minor iniquities, like Satan inPandemonium, 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 thusblackening under the execration of all the world, who shall measure thedreadful amount of infamy which must finally settle on the cause itself?The titled ecclesiastic and the ambitious statesman should have theirwarning on this point. They should know that public opinion is steadilyturning to the light of truth. The fountains are breaking up around us, and the great deep will soon be in motion. A stern, uncompromising, andsolemn spirit of inquiry is abroad. It cannot be arrested, and itsresult may be easily foreseen. It will not long be popular to talk ofthe legality of soul-murder, the constitutionality of man-robbery. 

One word in relation to our duty to our Southern brethren. If we detesttheir system of slavery in our hearts, let us not play the hypocrite withour lips. Let us not pay so poor a compliment to their understandings asto suppose that we can deceive them into a compliance with our views ofjustice by ambiguous sophistry, and overcome their sinful practices andestablished prejudices by miserable stratagem. Let us not first doviolence to our consciences by admitting their moral right to property inman, and then go to work like so many vagabond pedlers to cheat them outof it. They have a right to complain of such treatment. It is mean, andwicked, and dishonorable. Let us rather treat our Southern friends asintelligent 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 commonsacrifices and mutual benefits, let us seek to expostulate with themearnestly and openly, to gain at least their confidence in our sincerity, to appeal to their consciences, reason, and interests; and, using noother weapons than those of moral truth, contend fearlessly with the evilsystem they are cherishing. And if, in an immediate compliance with thestrict demands of justice, they should need our aid and sympathy, let usopen 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 nomore mining and countermining, no more blending of apology withdenunciation, no more Janus-like systems of reform, with one face for theSouth and another for the North. 

If we steadily adhere to the principles upon which we have heretoforeacted, if we present our naked hearts to the view of all, if we meet thethreats and violence of our misguided enemies with the bare bosom andweaponless hand of innocence, may we not trust that the arm of ourHeavenly Father will be under us, to strengthen and support us? Andalthough we may not be able to save our country from the awful judgmentshe is provoking, though the pillars of the Union fall and all theelements of her greatness perish, still let it be our part to rallyaround the standard of truth and justice, to wash our hands of evil, tokeep our own souls unspotted, and, bearing our testimony and lifting ourwarning voices to the last, leave the event in the hands of a righteousGod. 

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 theQuincy (Mass. ) 'Patriot'. Notwithstanding the great importance of thesubjects which they discuss, the intense interest which they arecalculated to awaken throughout this commonwealth and the whole country, and the exalted reputation of their author as a profound statesman andpowerful writer, they are as yet hardly known beyond the limits of theconstituency to whom they are particularly addressed. The reason of thisis sufficiently obvious. John Quincy Adams belongs to neither of theprominent political parties, fights no partisan battles, and cannot beprevailed upon to sacrifice truth and principle upon the altar of partyexpediency and interest. Hence neither party is interested in defendinghis course, or in giving him an opportunity to defend himself. Buthowever systematic may be the efforts of mere partisan presses tosuppress and hold back from the public eye the powerful and triumphantvindication of the Right of Petition, the graphic delineation of theslavery spirit in Congress, and the humbling disclosure of Northerncowardice and treachery, contained in these letters, they are destined toexert a powerful influence upon the public mind. They will constituteone of the most striking pages in the history of our times. They will beread with avidity in the North and in the South, and throughout Europe. Apart from the interest excited by the subjects under discussion, andviewed only as literary productions, they may be ranked among the highestintellectual 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 theReformers of Great Britain'. They are the offspring of an intellectunshorn of its primal strength, and combining the ardor of youth with theexperience of age. 

The disclosure made in these letters of the slavery influence exerted inCongress over the representatives of the free states, of the manner inwhich the rights of freemen have been bartered for Southern votes, orbasely yielded to the threats of men educated in despotism, and stampedby the free indulgence of unrestrained tyranny with the "odiouspeculiarities" of slavery, is painful and humiliating in the extreme. Itwill be seen that, in the great struggle for and against the Right ofPetition, an account of which is given in the following pages, theirauthor stood, in a great measure, alone and unsupported by his Northerncolleagues. 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 andoverwhelmed a less sturdy and determined spirit. 

We need not solicit for these letters, and the speech which accompaniesthem, a thorough perusal. They deserve, and we trust will receive, acirculation throughout the entire country. They will meet a cordialwelcome from every lover of human liberty, from every friend of justiceand the rights of man, irrespective of color or condition. Theprinciples which they defend, the sentiments which they express, arethose of Massachusetts, as recently asserted, almost unanimously, by herlegislature. In both branches of that body, during the discussion of thesubject of slavery and the right of petition, the course of the ex-President was warmly and eloquently commended. Massachusetts willsustain her tried and faithful representative; and the time is not fardistant when the best and worthiest citizens of the entire North willproffer him their thanks for his noble defence of their rights asfreemen, 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 inthe Roman world, at the time of our Saviour, was similar in all essentialfeatures to American slavery at the present day; and the third andconcluding part is devoted to an examination of the apostolicaldirections to slaves and masters, as applicable to the same classes inthe United States. He thinks the command to give to servants that whichis just and equal means simply that the masters should treat their slaveswith equity, and that while the servant is to be profitable to themaster, the latter is bound in "a fair and equitable manner to providefor the slave's subsistence and happiness. " Although he professes tobelieve that a faithful adherence to Scriptural injunctions on this pointwould eventually terminate in the emancipation of the slaves, he thinksit 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 mayhave been the motives of the writer, the effect of his publication, sofar as it is at all felt, will be to strengthen the oppressor in hisguilt, and hold him back from the performance of his immediate duty inrespect to his slaves, and to shield his conscience from the reproofs ofthat class who, according to "Evangelicus, " have "no personalacquaintance with the actual domestic state or the social and politicalconnections of their Southern fellow-citizens. " We look upon it only asanother vain attempt to strike a balance between Christian duty andcriminal policy, to reconcile Christ and Belial, the holy philanthropy ofHim who went about doing good with the most abhorrent manifestation ofhuman selfishness, lust, and hatred which ever provoked the divinedispleasure. There is a grave-stone coldness about it. The authormanifests 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 thegrave of Lazarus

 "Wept, and forgot His power to save;"

no outburst of that indignant reproof with which the Divine Masterrebuked the devourers of widows' houses and the oppressors of the poor iscalled 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 NewTestament does not tolerate slavery as a permanent institution. " Andthis is said when the entire slave-holding church has sheltered itsabominations under the pretended sanction of the gospel; when slavery, including within itself a violation of every command uttered amidst thethunders of Sinai, a system which has filled the whole South with theoppression of Egypt and the pollutions of Sodom, is declared to be aninstitution of the Most High. With all due deference to the author, wetell him, and we tell the church, North and South, that this questionmust be met. Once more we repeat the solemn inquiry which has beenalready made in our columns, "Is the Bible to enslave the world?" Has itbeen but a vain dream of ours that the mission of the Author of thegospel was to undo the heavy burdens, to open the prison doors, and tobreak the yoke of the captive? Let Andover and Princeton answer. If thegospel does sanction the vilest wrong which man can inflict upon hisfellow-man, if it does rivet the chains which humanity, left to itself, would otherwise cast off, then, in humanity's name, let it perish foreverfrom the face of the earth. Let the Bible societies dissolve; let notanother sheet issue from their presses. Scatter not its leaves abroadover the dark places of the earth; they are not for the healing of thenations. Leave rather to the Persian his Zendavesta, to the Mussulmanhis Koran. We repeat it, this question must be met. Already we haveheard infidelity exulting over the astute discoveries of bespectacledtheological professors, that the great Head of the Christian Churchtolerated the horrible atrocities of Roman slavery, and that His mostfavored apostle combined slave-catching with his missionary labors. Andwhy should it not exult? Fouler blasphemy than this was never uttered. A more monstrous libel upon the Divine Author of Christianity was neverpropagated by Paine or Voltaire, Kneeland or Owen; and we are constrainedto regard the professor of theology or the doctor of divinity who taskshis sophistry and learning in an attempt to show that the Divine Mindlooks with complacency upon chattel slavery as the most dangerous enemywith which Christianity has to contend. The friends of pure andundefiled religion must awake to this danger. The Northern church mustshake itself clean from its present connection with blasphemers andslave-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 theLiberty Party in New Bedford on the 2d of next month. Believe me, it iswith no ordinary feelings of regret that I find myself under thenecessity 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 youhave my hearty sympathy. 

I am with the Liberty Party because it is the only party in the countrywhich is striving openly and honestly to reduce to practice the greattruths which lie at the foundation of our republic: all men createdequal, endowed with rights inalienable; the security of these rights theonly just object of government; the right of the people to alter ormodify government until this great object is attained. Precious andglorious truths! Sacred in the sight of their Divine Author, gratefuland beneficent to suffering humanity, essential elements of that ultimateand universal government of which God is laying the strong and widefoundations, turning and overturning, until He whose right it is shallrule. 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 firstlifted up the standard of the Liberty Party: "He calls upon us to sustainthese truths in the recorded voice of the holy of ancient times. Hecalls us to sustain them in the sound as of many waters and mightythunderings rising from the fields of Europe, converted into one vastAceldama by the exertions of despots to suppress them; in the persuasivehistory of the best thoughts and boldest deeds of all our brave, self-sacrificing ancestors; in the tender, heart-reaching whispers of ourchildren, preparing to suffer or enjoy the future, as we leave it forthem; in the broken and disordered but moving accents of half our raceyet groping in darkness and galled by the chains of bondage. He callsupon us to sustain them by the solemn and considerate use of all thepowers with which He has invested us. " In a time of almost universalpolitical scepticism, in the midst of a pervading and growing unbelief inthe great principles enunciated in the revolutionary declaration, theLiberty Party has dared to avow its belief in these truths, and to carrythem into action as far as it has the power. It is a protest against thepolitical infidelity of the day, a recurrence to first principles, asummons once more to that deserted altar upon which our fathers laidtheir offerings. 

It may be asked why it is that a party resting upon such broad principlesis directing its exclusive exertions against slavery. "Are there notother great interests?" ask all manner of Whig and Democrat editors andpoliticians. "Consider, for instance, " say the Democrats, "the mightyquestion which is agitating us, whether a 'Northern man with Southernprinciples' or a Southern man with the principles of a Nero or Caligulashall be President. " "Or look at us, " say the Whigs, "deprived of ourinalienable right to office by this Tyler-Calhoun administration. Andbethink you, gentlemen, how could your Liberty Party do better than tovote with us for a man who, if he does hold some threescore of slaves, and maintain that 'two hundred years of legislation has sanctioned andsanctified negro slavery, ' is, at the same time, the champion of Greekliberty, 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 onesixth part of our entire population are slaves, and that you, with yoursubtreasuries and national banks, propose no relief for them. Nay, farther, it is because both of you, when in power, have used yourauthority to rivet closer the chains of unhappy millions, that we havebeen compelled to abandon you, and form a liberty party having for itsfirst object the breaking of these chains. 

What is slavery? For upon the answer to this question must the LibertyParty depend for its justification. 

The slave laws of the South tell us that it is the conversion of men intoarticles of property; the transformation of sentient immortal beings into"chattels personal. " The principle of a reciprocity of benefits, whichto some extent characterizes all other relations, does not exist in thatof master and slave. The master holds the plough which turns the soil ofhis plantation, the horse which draws it, and the slave who guides it byone and the same tenure. The profit of the master is the great end ofthe slave's existence. For this end he is fed, clothed, and prescribedfor in sickness. He learns nothing, acquires nothing, for himself. Hecannot use his own body for his own benefit. His very personality isdestroyed. He is a mere instrument, a means in the hands of another forthe 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 awfuldistinction between a person and a thing is annihilated: he is thrustdown from the place which God and Nature assigned him, from the equalcompanionship of rational intelligence's, --a man herded with beasts, animmortal nature classed with the wares of the merchant!

The relations of parent and child, master and apprentice, government andsubject, are based upon the principle of benevolence, reciprocalbenefits, and the wants of human society; relations which sacredlyrespect the rights and legacies which God has given to all His rationalcreatures. But slavery exists only by annihilating or monopolizing theserights and legacies. In every other modification of society, man'spersonal ownership remains secure. He may be oppressed, deprived ofprivileges, loaded with burdens, hemmed about with legal disabilities, his liberties restrained. But, through all, the right to his own bodyand soul remains inviolate. He retains his inherent, original possessionof himself. Even crime cannot forfeit it, for that law which destroyshis personality makes void its own claims upon him as a moral agent; andthe power to punish ceases with the accountability of the criminal. Hemay suffer and die under the penalties of the law, but he suffers as aman, he perishes as a man, and not as a thing. To the last moments ofhis existence the rights of a moral agent are his; they go with him tothe grave; they constitute the ground of his accountability at the bar ofinfinite justice, --rights fixed, eternal, inseparable; attributes of allrational intelligence in time and eternity; the same in essence, anddiffering in degree only, with those of the highest moral being, of Godhimself. 

Slavery alone lays its grasp upon the right of personal ownership, thatfoundation right, the removal of which uncreates the man; a right whichGod himself could not take away without absolving the being thus deprivedof 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, thecrowning horror of slavery, that which lifts it above all otheriniquities, is not that it usurps the prerogatives of Deity, but that itattempts that which even He who has said, "All souls are mine, " cannotdo, without breaking up the foundations of His moral government. Slaveryis, in fact, a struggle with the Almighty for dominion over His rationalcreatures. It is leagued with the powers of darkness, in wresting manfrom his Maker. It is blasphemy lifting brazen brow and violent hand toheaven, attempting a reversal of God's laws. Man claiming the right touncreate his brother; to undo that last and most glorious work, which Godhimself pronounced good, amidst the rejoicing hosts of heaven! Manarrogating to himself the right to change, for his own selfish purposes, the beautiful order of created existences; to pluck the crown of animmortal nature, scarce lower than that of angels, from the brow of hisbrother; to erase the God-like image and superscription stamped upon himby the hand of his Creator, and to write on the despoiled and desecratedtablet, "A chattel personal!"

This, then, is slavery. Nature, with her thousand voices, cries outagainst it. Against it, divine revelation launches its thunders. Thevoice of God condemns it in the deep places of the human heart. The woesand wrongs unutterable which attend this dreadful violation of naturaljustice, the stripes, the tortures, the sunderings of kindred, thedesolation of human affections, the unchastity and lust, the toiluncompensated, the abrogated marriage, the legalized heathenism, theburial of the mind, are but the mere incidentals of the first grandoutrage, that seizure of the entire man, nerve, sinew, and spirit, whichrobs him of his body, and God of his soul. These are but the naturalresults and outward demonstrations of slavery, the crystallizations fromthe chattel principle. 

It is against this system, in its active operation upon three millions ofour countrymen, that the Liberty Party is, for the present, directing allits efforts. With such an object well may we be "men of one idea. " Nordo we neglect "other great interests, " for all are colored and controlledby slavery, and the removal of this disastrous influence would mosteffectually benefit them. 

Political action is the result and immediate object of moral suasion onthis subject. Action, action, is the spirit's means of progress, itssole test of rectitude, its only source of happiness. And should notdecided action follow our deep convictions of the wrong of slavery?Shall we denounce the slave-holders of the states, while we retain ourslavery in the District of Columbia? Shall we pray that the God of theoppressed will turn the hearts of "the rulers" in South Carolina, whilewe, the rulers of the District, refuse to open the prisons and break upthe slave-markets on its ten miles square? God keep us from suchhypocrisy! Everybody now professes to be opposed to slavery. Theleaders of the two great political parties are grievously concerned lestthe purity of the antislavery enterprise will suffer in its connectionwith politics. In the midst of grossest pro-slavery action, they arefull 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 afaithless priest nor politician will oppose us; abandon action, andforsooth we can have an abolition millennium; the wolf shall lie downwith the lamb, while slavery in practice clanks, in derision, its threemillions of unbroken chains. Our opponents have no fear of the harmlessspectre of an abstract idea. They dread it only when it puts on theflesh and sinews of a practical reality, and lifts its right arm in thestrength which God giveth to do as well as theorize. 

As honest men, then, we must needs act; let us do so as becomes menengaged in a great and solemn cause. Not by processions and idle paradesand spasmodic enthusiasms, by shallow tricks and shows and artifices, cana cause like ours be carried onward. Leave these to parties contendingfor office, as the "spoils of victory. " We need no disguises, nor falsepretences, nor subterfuges; enough for us to present before our fellow-countrymen the holy truths of freedom, in their unadorned and nativebeauty. Dark as the present may seem, let us remember with heartyconfidence that truth and right are destined to triumph. Let us blot outthe word "discouragement" from the anti-slavery vocabulary. Let theenemies of freedom be discouraged; let the advocates of oppressiondespair; but let those who grapple with wrong and falsehood, in the nameof 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 thosewhich chastised the nations in the Apocalyptic vision, are smoking evennow, above its "habitations of cruelty. " It can no longer be borne withby Heaven. Universal humanity cries out against it. Let us work, then, to hasten its downfall, doing whatsoever our hands find to do, "with allour might. "

October, 1843. 

DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. (1843. )

THE great leader of American Democracy, Thomas Jefferson, was anultra-abolitionist in theory, while from youth to age a slave-holder inpractice. With a zeal which never abated, with a warmth which the frostof years could not chill, he urged the great truths, that each man shouldbe the guardian of his own weal; that one man should never have absolutecontrol over another. He maintained the entire equality of the race, theinherent right of self-ownership, the equal claim of all to a fairparticipation 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 ownplantation, was inconsistent with this doctrine. His early efforts foremancipation in Virginia failed of success; but he next turned hisattention to the vast northwestern territory, and laid the foundation ofthat ordinance of 1787, which, like the flaming sword of the angel at thegates of Paradise, has effectually guarded that territory against theentrance of slavery. Nor did he stop here. He was the friend andadmirer of the ultra-abolitionists of revolutionary France; he warmlyurged his British friend, Dr. Price, to send his anti-slavery pamphletsinto Virginia; he omitted no opportunity to protest against slavery asanti-democratic, unjust, and dangerous to the common welfare; and in hisletter to the territorial governor of Illinois, written in old age, hebequeathed, in earnest and affecting language, the cause of negroemancipation to the rising generation. "This enterprise, " said he, "isfor 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 oldman. "

Such was Thomas Jefferson, the great founder of American Democracy, theadvocate of the equality of human rights, irrespective of any conditionsof birth, or climate, or color. His political doctrines, it is strangeto say, found their earliest recipients and most zealous admirers in theslave states of the Union. The privileged class of slaveholders, whoserank and station "supersede the necessity of an order of nobility, "became earnest advocates of equality among themselves--the democracy ofaristocracy. With the misery and degradation of servitude always beforethem, in the condition of their own slaves, an intense love of personalindependence, and a haughty impatience of any control over their actions, prepared them to adopt the democratic idea, so far as it might be appliedto their own order. Of that enlarged and generous democracy, the love, not of individual freedom alone, but of the rights and liberties of allmen, the unselfish desire to give to others the privileges which all menvalue for themselves, we are constrained to believe the great body ofThomas Jefferson's slave-holding admirers had no adequate conception. They were just such democrats as the patricians of Rome and thearistocracy of Venice; lords over their own plantations, a sort of "holyalliance" of planters, admitting and defending each other's divine rightof mastership. 

Still, in Virginia, Maryland, and in other sections of the slave states, truer exponents and exemplifiers of the idea of democracy, as it existedin the mind of Jefferson, were not wanting. In the debate on thememorials presented to the first Congress of the United States, prayingfor the abolition of slavery, the voice of the Virginia delegation inthat body was unanimous in deprecation of slavery as an evil, social, moral, and political. In the Virginia constitutional convention--of 1829there were men who had the wisdom to perceive and the firmness to declarethat slavery was not only incompatible with the honor and prosperity ofthe state, but wholly indefensible on any grounds which could beconsistently taken by a republican people. In the debate on the samesubject in the legislature in 1832, universal and impartial democracyfound utterance from eloquent lips. We might say as much of Kentucky, the child of Virginia. But it remains true that these were exceptions tothe general rule. With the language of universal liberty on their lips, and moved by the most zealous spirit of democratic propagandism, thegreater number of the slave-holders of the Union seem never to haveunderstood the true meaning, or to have measured the length and breadthof that doctrine which they were the first to adopt, and of which theyhave claimed all along to be the peculiar and chosen advocates. 

The Northern States were slow to adopt the Democratic creed. Theoligarchy of New England, and the rich proprietors and landholders of theMiddle States, turned with alarm and horror from the levelling doctrinesurged upon them by the "liberty and equality" propagandists of the South. The doctrines of Virginia were quite as unpalatable to Massachusetts atthe beginning of the present century as those of Massachusetts now are tothe Old Dominion. Democracy interfered with old usages and time-honoredinstitutions, and threatened to plough up the very foundations of thesocial fabric. It was zealously opposed by the representatives of NewEngland in Congress and in the home legislatures; and in many pulpitshands were lifted to God in humble entreaty that the curse and bane ofdemocracy, an offshoot of the rabid Jacobinism of revolutionary France, might not be permitted to take root and overshadow the goodly heritage ofPuritanism. The alarmists of the South, in their most fervid pictures ofthe evils to be apprehended from the prevalence of anti-slavery doctrinesin 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 contemplatingthe inroads of Jeffersonian democracy upon the politics, religion, andproperty of the North. 

But great numbers of the free laborers of the Northern States, themechanics and small farmers, took a very different view of the matter. The doctrines of Jefferson were received as their political gospel. Itwas in vain that federalism denounced with indignation the impertinentinconsistency of slave-holding interference in behalf of liberty in thefree states. Come the doctrine from whom it might, the people felt it tobe true. State after state revolted from the ranks of federalism, andenrolled itself on the side of democracy. The old order of things wasbroken up; equality before the law was established, religious tests andrestrictions of the right of suffrage were abrogated. TakeMassachusetts, for example. There the resistance to democraticprinciples was the most strenuous and longest continued. Yet, at thistime, there is no state in the Union more thorough in its practicaladoption of them. No property qualifications or religious tests prevail;all distinctions of sect, birth, or color, are repudiated, and suffrageis universal. The democracy, which in the South has only been held in astate of gaseous abstraction, hardened into concrete reality in the coldair of the North. The ideal became practical, for it had found lodgmentamong men who were accustomed to act out their convictions and test alltheir theories by actual experience. 

While thus making a practical application of the new doctrine, the peopleof the free states could not but perceive the incongruity of democracyand slavery. 

Selleck Osborn, who narrowly escaped the honor of a Democratic martyr inConnecticut, denounced slave-holding, in common with other forms ofoppression. Barlow, fresh from communion with Gregoire, Brissot, andRobespierre, devoted to negro slavery some of the most vigorous andtruthful lines of his great poem. Eaton, returning from his romanticachievements in Tunis for the deliverance of white slaves, improved theoccasion to read a lecture to his countrymen on the inconsistency andguilt of holding blacks in servitude. In the Missouri struggle of 1819-20, the people of the free states, with a few ignoble exceptions, tookissue with the South against the extension of slavery. Some ten yearslater, the present antislavery agitation commenced. It originated, beyond a question, in the democratic element. With the words ofJefferson on their lips, young, earnest, and enthusiastic men called theattention of the community to the moral wrong and political reproach ofslavery. In the name and spirit of democracy, the moral and politicalpowers of the people were invoked to limit, discountenance, and put anend to a system so manifestly subversive of its foundation principles. It was a revival of the language of Jefferson and Page and Randolph, anecho of the voice of him who penned the Declaration of Independence andoriginated the ordinance of 1787. 

Meanwhile the South had wellnigh forgotten the actual significance of theteachings of its early political prophets, and their renewal in the shapeof abolitionism was, as might have been expected, strange and unwelcome. Pleasant enough it had been to hold up occasionally these democraticabstractions for the purpose of challenging the world's admiration andcheaply 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 consistentas these democratic slaveowners, whose admiration of liberty increased inexact ratio with its distance from their own plantations. They had notcalculated upon seeing their doctrine clothed with life and power, apractical reality, pressing for application to their slaves as well as tothemselves. They had not taken into account the beautiful ordination ofProvidence, that no man can vindicate his own rights, without directly orimpliedly including in that vindication the rights of all other men. Thehaughty and oppressive barons who wrung from their reluctant monarch theGreat Charter at Runnymede, acting only for themselves and their class, little dreamed of the universal application which has since been made oftheir guaranty of rights and liberties. As little did the nobles of theparliament of Paris, when strengthening themselves by limiting the kinglyprerogative, dream of the emancipation of their own serfs, by arevolution to which they were blindly giving the first impulse. God'struth 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, andthat in one half of the states of the Republic it is more hazardous toact upon the presumption that "all men are created free and equal" thanit would be in Austria or Russia, the lavish expression of sympathy andextravagant jubilation with which, as a people, we are accustomed togreet movements in favor of freedom abroad are not a little remarkable. We almost went into ecstasies over the first French revolution; we filledour papers with the speeches of orator Hunt and the English radicals; wefraternized with the United Irishmen; we hailed as brothers in the causeof freedom the very Mexicans whom we have since wasted with fire andsword; our orators, North and South, grew eloquent and classic over theGreek and Polish revolutions. In short, long ere this, if the walls ofkingcraft and despotism had been, like those of Jericho, destined to beoverthrown by sound, our Fourth of July cannon-shootings and bell-ringings, together with our fierce, grandiloquent speech-makings in andout of Congress, on the occasions referred to, would have left no stoneupon another. 

It is true that an exception must be made in the case of Hayti. We firedno guns, drank no toasts, made no speeches in favor of the establishmentof that new republic in our neighborhood. The very mention of thepossibility that Haytien delegates might ask admittance to the congressof the free republics of the New World at Panama "frightened from theirpropriety" the eager propagandists of republicanism in the Senate, andgave a death-blow to their philanthropic projects. But as Hayti is arepublic of blacks who, having revolted from their masters as well asfrom the mother country, have placed themselves entirely without the paleof Anglo-Saxon sympathy by their impertinent interference with themonopoly of white liberty, this exception by no means disproves thegeneral fact, that in the matter of powder-burning, bell-jangling, speech-making, toast-drinking admiration of freedom afar off and in theabstract 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 ofthe French people over Charles X. And his ministers, as a matter ofcourse acted with great effect upon our national susceptibility. We allthrew up our hats in excessive joy at the spectacle of a king dashed downheadlong from his throne and chased out of his kingdom by his long-suffering and oppressed subjects. We took half the credit of theperformance to ourselves, inasmuch as Lafayette was a principal actor init. Our editors, from Passamaquoddy to the Sabine, indited paragraphsfor a thousand and one newspapers, congratulating the Parisian patriots, and prophesying all manner of evil to holy alliances, kings, andaristocracies. The National Intelligencer for September 27, 1830, contains a full account of the public rejoicings of the good people ofWashington on the occasion. Bells were rung in all the steeples, gunswere fired, and a grand procession was formed, including the President ofthe United States, the heads of departments, and other publicfunctionaries. Decorated with tricolored ribbons, and with tricoloredflags mingling with the stripes and stars over their heads, and gazeddown upon by bright eyes from window and balcony, the "generalsympathizers" moved slowly and majestically through the broad avenuetowards the Capitol to celebrate the revival of French liberty in amanner becoming the chosen rulers of a free people. 

What a spectacle was this for the representatives of European kingcraftat our seat of government! How the titled agents of Metternich andNicholas must have trembled, in view of this imposing demonstration, forthe safety of their "peculiar institutions!"

Unluckily, however, the moral effect of this grand spectacle was marredsomewhat by the appearance of another procession, moving in a contrarydirection. It was a gang of slaves! Handcuffed in pairs, with thesullen sadness of despair in their faces, they marched wearily onward tothe music of the driver's whip and the clanking iron on their limbs. Think of it! Shouts of triumph, rejoicing bells, gay banners, andglittering cavalcades, in honor of Liberty, in immediate contrast withmen and women chained and driven like cattle to market! The editor ofthe American Spectator, a paper published at Washington at that time, speaking of this black procession of slavery, describes it as "drivenalong by what had the appearance of a man on horseback. " The miserablewretches who composed it were doubtless consigned to a slave-jail toawait their purchase and transportation to the South or Southwest; andperhaps formed a part of that drove of human beings which the same editorstates that he saw on the Saturday following, "males and females chainedin couples, starting from Robey's tavern, on foot, for Alexandria, toembark 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 adead stand. "Sit down, brother, " said old Father Kyle, the one-eyedabolition preacher; "it's no use to try; you can't preach with twentynegroes sticking in your throat!" It strikes us that our country is verymuch 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 evangelicalalliances; makes a farce of its Fourth of July celebrations; and, as inthe case of the grand Washington procession of 1830, sadly mars theeffect of its rejoicings in view of the progress of liberty abroad. There is a stammer in all our exhortations; our moral and politicalhomilies are sure to run into confusions and contradictions; and theresponse which comes to us from the nations is not unlike that of FatherKyle to the planter's attempt at sermonizing: "It's no use, brotherJonathan; you can't preach liberty with three millions of slaves in yourthroat!"

A CHAPTER OF HISTORY. (1844. )

THE theory which a grave and learned Northern senator has recentlyannounced in Congress, that slavery, like the cotton-plant, is confinedby natural laws to certain parallels of latitude, beyond which it can byno possibility exist, however it may have satisfied its author and itsauditors, has unfortunately no verification in the facts of the case. Slavery is singularly cosmopolitan in its habits. The offspring ofpride, and lust, and avarice, it is indigenous to the world. Rooted inthe human heart, it defies the rigors of winter in the steppes of Tartaryand the fierce sun of the tropics. It has the universal acclimation ofsin. 

The first account we have of negro slaves in New England is from the penof John Josselyn. Nineteen years after the landing at Plymouth, thisinteresting traveller was for some time the guest of Samuel Maverick, whothen dwelt, like a feudal baron, in his fortalice on Noddle's Island, surrounded by retainers and servants, bidding defiance to his Indianneighbors behind his strong walls, with "four great guns" mountedthereon, 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 herown country language and tune sang very loud and shrill. Going out toher, she used a great deal of respect towards me, and would willinglyhave expressed her grief in English had she been able to speak thelanguage; but I apprehended it by her countenance and deportment. Whereupon I repaired to my host to learn of him the cause, and resolvedto entreat him in her behalf; for I had understood that she was a queenin her own country, and observed a very dutiful and humble garb usedtowards her by another negro, who was her maid. Mr. Maverick wasdesirous to have a breed of negroes; and therefore, seeing she would notyield by persuasions to company with a negro young man he had in hishouse, he commanded him, willed she, nilled she, to go to her bed, whichwas no sooner done than she thrust him out again. This she took in highdisdain beyond her slavery; and this was the cause of her grief. "

That the peculiar domestic arrangements and unfastidious economy of thisslave-breeding settler were not countenanced by the Puritans of thatearly time we have sufficient evidence. It is but fair to suppose, fromthe silence of all other writers of the time with respect to negroes andslaves, that this case was a marked exception to the general habits andusage of the Colonists. At an early period a traffic was commencedbetween the New England Colonies and that of Barbadoes; and it is notimprobable that slaves were brought to Boston from that island. Thelaws, however, discouraged their introduction and purchase, givingfreedom to all held to service at the close of seven years. 

In 1641, two years after Josselyn's adventure on Noddle's Island, thecode of laws known by the name of the Body of Liberties was adopted bythe Colony. It was drawn up by Nathaniel Ward, the learned and ingeniousauthor of the 'Simple Cobbler of Agawarn', the earliest poetical satireof New England. One of its provisions was as follows:--

"There shall be never any bond slaverie, villainage, or captivitieamongst us, unless it be lawfull captives taken in just warres and suchstrangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us. And theseshall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of Godestablished in Israel doth morally require. "

In 1646, Captain Smith, a Boston church-member, in connection with oneKeeser, brought home two negroes whom he obtained by the surprise andburning of a negro village in Africa and the massacre of many of itsinhabitants. Sir Richard Saltonstall, one of the assistants, presented apetition to the General Court, stating the outrage thereby committed asthreefold 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 beconsidered 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 notupon ourselves. "

Upon this petition the General Court passed the following order, eminently worthy of men professing to rule in the fear and according tothe law of God, --a terror to evil-doers, and a praise to them that dowell:--

"The General Court, conceiving themselves bound by the first opportunityto bear witness against the heinous and crying sin of man-stealing, asalso to prescribe such timely redress for what has passed, and such a lawfor the future as may sufficiently deter all others belonging to us tohave to do in such vile and odious courses, justly abhorred of all goodand just men, do order that the negro interpreter, and others unlawfullytaken, be by the first opportunity, at the charge of the country for thepresent, sent to his native country, Guinea, and a letter with him of theindignation of the Court thereabout, and justice thereof, desiring ourhonored Governor would please put this order in execution. "

There is, so far as we know, no historical record of the actual return ofthese stolen men to their home. A letter is extant, however, addressedin behalf of the General Court to a Mr. Williams on the Piscataqua, bywhom one of the negroes had been purchased, requesting him to send theman forthwith to Boston, that he may be sent home, "which this Court doresolve to send back without delay. "

Three years after, in 1649, the following law was placed upon thestatute-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 intoNew England were opposed by severe laws and by that strong popularsentiment in favor of human liberty which characterized the Christianradicals who laid the foundations of the Colonies. It was not the rigorof her Northern winter, nor the unkindly soil of Massachusetts, whichdiscouraged the introduction of slavery in the first half-century of herexistence as a colony. It was the Puritan's recognition of thebrotherhood of man in sin, suffering, and redemption, his estimate of theawful responsibilities and eternal destinies of humanity, his hatred ofwrong and tyranny, and his stern sense of justice, which led him toimpose upon the African slave-trader the terrible penalty of the Mosaiccode. 

But that brave old generation passed away. The civil contentions in themother country drove across the seas multitudes of restless adventurersand 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 tofind that Josselyn, in his second visit to New England, some twenty-fiveyears after his first, speaks of the great increase of servants andnegroes. In 1680 Governor Bradstreet, in answer to the inquiries of hisMajesty's Privy Council, states that two years before a vessel fromMadagasca "brought into the Colony betwixt forty and fifty negroes, mostly women and children, who were sold at a loss to the owner of thevessel. " "Now and then, " he continues, "two or three negroes are broughtfrom Barbadoes and other of his Majesty's plantations and sold for twentypounds apiece; so that there may be within the government about onehundred or one hundred and twenty, and it may be as many Scots, broughthither and sold for servants in the time of the war with Scotland, andabout half as many Irish. "

The owning of a black or white slave, or servant, at this period wasregarded as an evidence of dignity and respectability; and hencemagistrates and clergymen winked at the violation of the law by themercenary traders, and supplied themselves without scruple. Indianslaves were common, and are named in old wills, deeds, and inventories, with horses, cows, and household furniture. As early as the year 1649 wefind William Hilton, of Newbury, sells to George Carr, "for one quarterpart 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 andother Indian wars; others were brought from South Carolina and theSpanish Main. It is an instructive fact, as illustrating the retributivedealings of Providence, that the direst affliction of the MassachusettsColony--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 thearrest of a Jerseyman who had been engaged in enticing Indians andnegroes to leave their masters. He was charged before the court withsaying 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 escapeto Canada and join the French, and return and lay waste and plunder theirmasters. They were to come back with five hundred Indians and threehundred Canadians; and the place of crossing the Merrimac River, and ofthe 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 ofslaves in the settlement, the excitement into which the inhabitants werethrown by this absurd rumor of conspiracy seems not very unlike that of aconvocation of small planters in a backwoods settlement in South Carolinaon finding an anti-slavery newspaper in their weekly mail bag. 

In 1709 Colonel Saltonstall, of Haverhill, had several negroes, and amongthem a high-spirited girl, who, for some alleged misdemeanor, wasseverely chastised. The slave resolved upon revenge for her injury, andsoon found the means of obtaining it. The Colonel had on hand, forservice 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 toescape to the farm-house before the explosion took place, shattering thestately mansion into fragments. Saltonstall and his wife were carried ontheir bed a considerable distance, happily escaping serious injury. Somesoldiers stationed in the house were scattered in all directions; but nolives were lost. The Colonel, on recovering from the effects of hissudden overturn, hastened to the farm-house and found his servants all upsave the author of the mischief, who was snug in bed and apparently in aquiet sleep. 

In 1701 an attempt was made in the General Court of Massachusetts toprevent the increase of slaves. Judge Sewall soon after published apamphlet against slavery, but it seems with little effect. Bostonmerchants and ship-owners became, to a considerable extent, involved inthe slave-trade. Distilleries, established in that place and in RhodeIsland, furnished rum for the African market. The slaves were usuallytaken to the West Indies, although occasionally part of a cargo found itsway to New England, where the wholesome old laws against man-stealing hadbecome a dead letter on the statute-book. 

In 1767 a bill was brought before the Legislature of Massachusetts toprevent "the unwarrantable and unnatural custom of enslaving mankind. "The Council of Governor Bernard sent it back to the House greatly changedand curtailed, and it was lost by the disagreement of the two branches. Governor Bernard threw his influence on the side of slavery. In 1774 abill prohibiting the traffic in slaves passed both Houses; but GovernorHutchinson withheld his assent and dismissed the Legislature. Thecolored men sent a deputation of their own to the Governor to solicit hisconsent to the bill; but he told them his instructions forbade him. Asimilar committee waiting upon General Gage received the same answer. 

In the year 1770 a servant of Richard Lechmere, of Cambridge, stimulatedby the general discussion of the slavery question and by the advice ofsome of the zealous advocates of emancipation, brought an action againsthis master for detaining him in bondage. The suit was decided in hisfavor two years before the similar decision in the case of Somerset inEngland. The funds necessary for carrying on this suit were raised amongthe blacks themselves. Other suits followed in various parts of theProvince; and the result was, in every instance, the freedom of theplaintiff. In 1773 Caesar Hendrick sued his master, one Greenleaf, ofNewburyport, for damages, laid at fifty pounds, for holding him as aslave. 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 ofthe facts above stated, the principal grounds upon which the counsel ofthe masters depended were, that the negroes were purchased in openmarket, and included in the bills of sale like other property; thatslavery was sanctioned by usage; and, finally, that the laws of theProvince recognized its existence by making masters liable for themaintenance 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 hisliberty but by the judgment of his peers, were effectually pleaded. Theearly laws of the Province prohibited slavery, and no subsequentlegislation had sanctioned it; for, although the laws did recognize itsexistence, they did so only to mitigate and modify an admitted evil. 

The present state constitution was established in 1780. The firstarticle of the Bill of Rights prohibited slavery by affirming thefoundation truth of our republic, that "all men are born free and equal. "The Supreme Court decided in 1783 that no man could hold another asproperty without a direct violation of that article. 

In 1788 three free black citizens of Boston were kidnapped and sold intoslavery in one of the French islands. An intense excitement followed. Governor Hancock took efficient measures for reclaiming the unfortunatemen. The clergy of Boston petitioned the Legislature for a totalprohibition of the foreign slave-trade. The Society of Friends, and theblacks generally, presented similar petitions; and the same year an actwas passed prohibiting the slave-trade and granting relief to personskidnapped or decoyed out of the Commonwealth. The fear of a burden tothe state from the influx of negroes from abroad led the Legislature, inconnection with this law, to prevent those who were not citizens of thestate or of other states from gaining a residence. 

The first case of the arrest of a fugitive slave in Massachusetts underthe 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 letteragainst the fugitive slave law. The populace at the trial aided theslave to escape, and nothing further was done about it. 

The arrest of George Latimer as a slave, in Boston, and his illegalconfinement in jail, in 1842, led to the passage of the law of 1843 forthe "protection of personal liberty, " prohibiting state officers fromarresting or detaining persons claimed as slaves, and the use of thejails of the Commonwealth for their confinement. This law was strictlyin accordance with the decision of the supreme judiciary, in the case ofPrigg vs. The State of Pennsylvania, that the reclaiming of fugitives wasa matter exclusively belonging to the general government; yet that thestate officials might, if they saw fit, carry into effect the law ofCongress on the subject, "unless prohibited by state legislation. "

It will be seen by the facts we have adduced that slavery inMassachusetts never had a legal existence. The ermine of the judiciaryof the Puritan state has never been sullied by the admission of itsdetestable claims. It crept into the Commonwealth like other evils andvices, but never succeeded in clothing itself with the sanction andauthority of law. It stood only upon its own execrable foundation ofrobbery and wrong. 

With a history like this to look back upon, is it strange that the peopleof Massachusetts at the present day are unwilling to see their time-honored defences of personal freedom, the good old safeguards of Saxonliberty, overridden and swept away after the summary fashion of "theFugitive Slave Bill;" that they should loathe and scorn the task whichthat bill imposes upon them of aiding professional slave-hunters inseizing, fettering, and consigning to bondage men and women accused onlyof that which commends them to esteem and sympathy, love of liberty andhatred of slavery; that they cannot at once adjust themselves to"constitutional duties" which in South Carolina and Georgia are reservedfor 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 atWashington will grant her some little respite, some space for turning, some opportunity for conquering her prejudices, before letting loose thedogs of war upon her. Let them give her time, and treat with forbearanceher 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 theywould do better under the surveillance of the army and navy of the UnitedStates is a question which we leave with the President and his Secretaryof 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 "forwardmarch;" not a broad beaver wheeled at his word of command; no handunclosed 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 tobelieve that any attempt on the part of the Commander-in-chief of ourarmy and navy to convert the good people of Massachusetts into expertslave-catchers, under the discipline of West Point and Norfolk, wouldprove 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 theunmistakable impress of the Anglo-German peculiarities of Thomas Carlyle, entitled, 'An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question', which would beinteresting as a literary curiosity were it not in spirit and tendency sounspeakably wicked as to excite in every rightminded reader a feeling ofamazement and disgust. With a hard, brutal audacity, a blasphemousirreverence, and a sneering mockery which would do honor to the devil ofFaust, it takes issue with the moral sense of mankind and the precepts ofChristianity. Having ascertained that the exports of sugar and spicesfrom the West Indies have diminished since emancipation, --and that thenegroes, having worked, as they believed, quite long enough withoutwages, now refuse to work for the planters without higher pay than thelatter, with the thriftless and evil habits of slavery still clinging tothem, can afford to give, --the author considers himself justified indenouncing negro emancipation as one of the "shams" which he wasspecially sent into this world to belabor. Had he confned himself tosimple abuse and caricature of the self-denying and Christianabolitionists of England--"the broad-brimmed philanthropists of ExeterHall"--there would have been small occasion for noticing his spleneticand 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 ofshows 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. Imposturesand frauds of all kinds deserve nothing better than detection andexposure. Let him blow them up to his heart's content, as Daniel did theimage of Bell and the Dragon. 

But our author, in this matter of negro slavery, has undertaken to applyhis explosive pitch and rosin, not to the affectation of humanity, but tohumanity itself. He mocks at pity, scoffs at all who seek to lessen theamount of pain and suffering, sneers at and denies the most sacredrights, and mercilessly consigns an entire class of the children of hisHeavenly Father to the doom of compulsory servitude. He vituperates thepoor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to aMississippi slave-driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle onthe banks of the Potomac. His rhetoric has a flavor of the slave-pen andauction-block, vulgar, unmanly, indecent, a scandalous outrage upon goodtaste and refined feeling, which at once degrades the author and insultshis readers. 

He assumes (for he is one of those sublimated philosophers who reject theBaconian system of induction and depend upon intuition without recourseto facts and figures) that the emancipated class in the West IndiaIslands are universally idle, improvident, and unfit for freedom; thatGod created them to be the servants and slaves of their "born lords, " thewhite men, and designed them to grow sugar, coffee, and spices for theirmasters, instead of raising pumpkins and yams for themselves; and that, if they will not do this, "the beneficent whip" should be again employedto compel them. He adopts, in speaking of the black class, the lowestslang of vulgar prejudice. "Black Quashee, " sneers the gentlemanlyphilosopher, --"black Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out thespices, will get himself made a slave again (which state will be a littleless ugly than his present one), and with beneficent whip, since othermethods avail not, will be compelled to work. "

It is difficult to treat sentiments so atrocious and couched in suchoffensive language with anything like respect. Common sense andunperverted conscience revolt instinctively against them. The doctrinethey inculcate is that which underlies all tyranny and wrong of mantowards man. It is that under which "the creation groaneth andtravaileth unto this day. " It is as old as sin; the perpetual argumentof strength against weakness, of power against right; that of the Greekphilosopher, that the barbarians, being of an inferior race, were born tobe slaves to the Greeks; and of the infidel Hobbes, that every man, beingby nature at war with every other man, has a perpetual right to reducehim to servitude if he has the power. It is the cardinal doctrine ofwhat John Quincy Adams has very properly styled the Satanic school ofphilosophy, --the ethics of an old Norse sea robber or an Arab plundererof caravans. It is as widely removed from the sweet humanities andunselfish benevolence of Christianity as the faith and practice of theEast India Thug or the New Zealand cannibal. 

Our author does not, however, take us altogether by surprise. He hasbefore given no uncertain intimations of the point towards which hisphilosophy was tending. In his brilliant essay upon 'Francia ofParaguay', for instance, we find him entering with manifest satisfactionand admiration into the details of his hero's tyranny. In his 'Lettersand Speeches of Oliver Cromwell'--in half a dozen pages of savage andalmost diabolical sarcasm directed against the growing humanity of theage, the "rose-pink sentimentalisms, " and squeamishness which shudders atthe sight of blood and infliction of pain--he prepares the way for ajustification of the massacre of Drogheda. More recently he hasintimated that the extermination of the Celtic race is the best way ofsettling the Irish question; and that the enslavement and forcibletransportation of her poor, to labor under armed taskmasters in thecolonies, is the only rightful and proper remedy for the political andsocial evils of England. In the 'Discourse on Negro Slavery' we see thisdevilish philosophy in full bloom. The gods, he tells us, are with thestrong. Might has a divine right to rule, --blessed are the crafty ofbrain and strong of hand! Weakness is crime. "Vae victis!" as Brennussaid when he threw his sword into the scale, --Woe to the conquered! Thenegro is weaker in intellect than his "born lord, " the white man, and hasno 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 theoppressor there is power;" let him use it without mercy, and hold fleshand blood to the grindstone with unrelenting rigor. Humanity issqueamishness; pity for the suffering mere "rose-pink sentimentalism, "maudlin and unmanly. The gods (the old Norse gods doubtless) laugh toscorn alike the complaints of the miserable and the weak compassions and"philanthropisms" of those who would relieve them. This is the substanceof Thomas Carlyle's advice; this is the matured fruit of his philosophichusbandry, --the grand result for which he has been all his life soundingunfathomable abysses or beating about in the thin air ofTranscendentalism. Such is the substitute which he offers us for theSermon on the Mount. 

He tells us that the blacks have no right to use the islands of the WestIndies for growing pumpkins and garden stuffs for their own use andbehoof, because, but for the wisdom and skill of the whites, theseislands would have been productive only of "jungle, savagery, and swampmalaria. " The negro alone could never have improved the islands orcivilized himself; and therefore their and his "born lord, " the whiteman, 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 andhis labor because he owes his partial civilization to others! And prayhow has it been with the white race, for whom our philosopher claims thedivine prerogative of enslaving? Some twenty and odd centuries ago, apair of half-naked savages, daubed with paint, might have been seenroaming among the hills and woods of the northern part of the Britishisland, subsisting on acorns and the flesh of wild animals, with anoccasional relish of the smoked hams and pickled fingers of someunfortunate stranger caught on the wrong side of the Tweed. Thisinteresting couple reared, as they best could, a family of children, who, in turn, became the heads of families; and some time about the beginningof the present century one of their descendants in the borough ofEcclefechan 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 raveagainst the West India negro's incapacity for self-civilization? Unaidedby the arts, sciences, and refinements of the Romans, he might have been, at this very day, squatted on his naked haunches in the woods ofEcclefechan, painting his weather-hardened epidermis in the sun like hisPiet ancestors. Where, in fact, can we look for unaided self-improvementand spontaneous internal development, to any considerable extent, on thepart 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 ofraising sugar and coffee and spice for the whites, being mainly carefulto provide for their own household and till their own gardens fordomestic comforts and necessaries. The exports have fallen off somewhat. And what does this prove? Only that the negro is now a consumer ofproducts, 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 reasonto believe that the charge is not sustained. If unthrifty habits andlack of prudence on the part of the owners of estates, combined with therepeal of duties on foreign sugars by the British government, have placedit out of their power to pay just and reasonable wages for labor, who canblame the blacks if they prefer to cultivate their own garden plotsrather than raise sugar and spice for their late masters upon termslittle better than those of their old condition, the "beneficent whip"always excepted? The despatches of the colonial governors agree inadmitting that the blacks have had great cause for complaint anddissatisfaction, owing to the delay or non-payment of their wages. SirC. E. Gray, writing from Jamaica, says, that "in a good many instancesthe payment of the wages they have earned has been either veryirregularly made, or not at all, probably on account of the inability ofthe employers. " He says, moreover:--

"The negroes appear to me to be generally as free from rebellioustendencies or turbulent feelings and malicious thoughts as any race oflaborers I ever saw or heard of. My impression is, indeed, that under asystem of perfectly fair dealing and of real justice they will come to bean admirable peasantry and yeomanry; able-bodied, industrious, and hard-working, frank, and well-disposed. "

It must, indeed, be admitted that, judging by their diminished exportsand the growing complaints of the owners of estates, the condition of theislands, in a financial point of view, is by no means favorable. Animmediate cause of this, however, must be found in the unfortunate SugarAct of 1846. The more remote, but for the most part powerful, cause ofthe present depression is to be traced to the vicious and unnaturalsystem of slavery, which has been gradually but surely preparing the wayfor ruin, bankruptcy, and demoralization. Never yet, by a community oran individual, have the righteous laws of God been violated withimpunity. Sooner or later comes the penalty which the infinite justicehas affixed to sin. Partial and temporary evils and inconveniences haveundoubtedly resulted from the emancipation of the laborers; and manyyears must elapse before the relations of the two heretofore antagonisticclasses can be perfectly adjusted and their interests brought into entireharmony. But that freedom is not to be held mainly accountable for thedepression of the British colonies is obvious from the fact that DutchSurinam, where the old system of slavery remains in its original rigor, is in an equally depressed condition. The 'Paramaribo Neuws enAdvertentie Blad', quoted in the Jamaica Gazette, says, under date ofJanuary 2, 1850: "Around us we hear nothing but complaints. People seekand find matter in everything to picture to themselves the lot of theplace in which they live as bitterer than that of any other country. Ofa large number of flourishing plantations, few remain that can now becalled such. So deteriorated has property become within the last fewyears, that many of these estates have not been able to defray theirweekly expenses. The colony stands on the brink of a yawning abyss, intowhich it must inevitably plunge unless some new and better system isspeedily adopted. It is impossible that our agriculture can any longerproceed on its old footing; our laboring force is dying away, and thesocial 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 decidedlypreferable to that of Surinam, where the old slave system has continuedin force, and insists that the Dutch government must follow the exampleof Great Britain. The actual condition of the British colonies sinceemancipation is perfectly well known in Surinam: three of them, Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice, being its immediate neighbors, whateverevils and inconveniences have resuited from emancipation must be wellunderstood by the Dutch slave-holders; yet we find them looking towardsemancipation as the only prospect of remedy for the greater evils oftheir own system. 

This fact is of itself a sufficient answer to the assumption of Carlyleand others, that what they call "the ruin of the colonies" has beenproduced 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, blackand 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 itmay 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 ofslave-holding in this country might find in this discourse matter ofencouragement, and that our anti-christian prejudices against the coloredman might be strengthened and confirmed by its malignant vituperation andsarcasm. On this point we have sympathized with the forebodings of aneloquent writer in the London Enquirer:--

"We cannot imagine a more deadly moral poison for the American peoplethan his (Carlyle's) last composition. Every cruel practice of socialexclusion will derive from it new sharpness and venom. The slave-holder, of course, will exult to find himself, not apologized for, butenthusiastically cheered, upheld, and glorified, by a writer of Europeancelebrity. But it is not merely the slave who will feel Mr. Carlyle'shand in the torture of his flesh, the riveting of his fetters, and thedenial of light to his mind. The free black will feel him, too, in themore contemptuous and abhorrent scowl of his brother man, who will easilyderive from this unfortunate essay the belief that his inhuman feelingsare of divine ordination. It is a true work of the Devil, the fosteringof a tyrannical prejudice. Far and wide over space, and long into thefuture, 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, inall the haunts of men, --their influence will be felt in a perennialgrowth of hate and scorn, and suffering and resentment. Amongst thesufferers will be many to whom education has given every refinedsusceptibility that makes contempt and exclusion bitter. Men and women, faithful and diligent, loving and worthy to be loved, and bearing, it maybe, no more than an almost imperceptible trace of African descent, willcontinue 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 writerof genius has lent the weight of his authority and his fame, if not ofhis power, to the perpetuation of a prejudice which Christianity wasundermining. "

A more recent production, 'Latter Day Pamphlets', in which man'scapability of self-government is more than doubted, democracy somewhatcontemptuously sneered at, and the "model republic" itself stigmatized asa "nation of bores, " may have a salutary effect in restraining ouradmiration and in lessening our respect for the defender and eulogist ofslavery. The sweeping impartiality with which in this latter productionhe applies the principle of our "peculiar institution" to the laboringpoor man, irrespective of color, recognizing as his only inalienableright "the right of being set to labor" for his "born lords, " will, weimagine, go far to neutralize the mischief of his Discourse upon NegroSlavery. It is a sad thing to find so much intellectual power as Carlylereally possesses so little under the control of the moral sentiments. Insome of his earlier writings--as, for instance, his beautiful tribute tothe Corn Law Rhymer--we thought we saw evidence of a warm and generoussympathy with the poor and the wronged, a desire to ameliorate humansuffering, which would have done credit to the "philanthropisms of ExeterHall" and the "Abolition of Pain Society. " Latterly, however, likeMoliere's quack, he has "changed all that;" his heart has got upon thewrong side; or rather, he seems to us very much in the condition of thecoal-burner in the German tale, who had swapped his heart of flesh for acobblestone. 

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 accompanyingcircular, inviting me to attend the commemoration of the thirtiethanniversary of the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society, atPhiladelphia. It is with the deepest regret that I am compelled, by thefeeble state of my health, to give up all hope of meeting thee and myother old and dear friends on an occasion of so much interest. How muchit costs me to acquiesce in the hard necessity thy own feelings will tellthee better than any words of mine. 

I look back over thirty years, and call to mind all the circumstances ofmy journey to Philadelphia, in company with thyself and the excellent Dr. Thurston of Maine, even then, as we thought, an old man, but stillliving, and true as ever to the good cause. I recall the early graymorning when, with Samuel J. May, our colleague on the committee toprepare a Declaration of Sentiments for the convention, I climbed to thesmall "upper chamber" of a colored friend to hear thee read the firstdraft of a paper which will live as long as our national history. I seethe members of the convention, solemnized by the responsibility, rise oneby one, and solemnly affix their names to that stern pledge of fidelityto freedom. Of the signers, many have passed away from earth, a few havefaltered and turned back, but I believe the majority still live torejoice over the great triumph of truth and justice, and to devote whatremains of time and strength to the cause to which they consecrated theiryouth and manhood thirty years ago. 

For while we may well thank God and congratulate one another on theprospect of the speedy emancipation of the slaves of the United States, we must not for a moment forget that, from this hour, new and mightyresponsibilities devolve upon us to aid, direct, and educate thesemillions, left free, indeed, but bewildered, ignorant, naked, andfoodless in the wild chaos of civil war. We have to undo the accumulatedwrongs 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 fairfield for development and improvement; and to tread under our feet thelast vestige of that hateful prejudice which has been the strongestexternal support of Southern slavery. We must lift ourselves at once tothe true Christian altitude where all distinctions of black and white areoverlooked in the heartfelt recognition of the brotherhood of man. 

I must not close this letter without confessing that I cannot besufficiently thankful to the Divine Providence which, in a great measurethrough thy instrumentality, turned me away so early from what RogerWilliams calls "the world's great trinity, pleasure, profit, and honor, "to take side with the poor and oppressed. I am not insensible toliterary reputation. I love, perhaps too well, the praise and good-willof my fellow-men; but I set a higher value on my name as appended to theAnti-Slavery Declaration of 1833 than on the title-page of any book. Looking over a life marked by many errors and shortcomings, I rejoicethat 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 ofour own or the new generation, who may assemble on the occasion ofcommemoration. There is work yet to be done which will task the bestefforts of us all. For thyself, I need not say that the love and esteemof 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 brutalassault upon Secretary Seward slavery has made another revelation ofitself. Perhaps it was needed. In the magnanimity of assured victory wewere perhaps disposed to overlook, not so much the guilty leaders andmisguided masses of the great rebellion as the unutterable horror and sinof slavery which prompted it. 

How slowly we of the North have learned the true character of this mightymischief! How our politicians bowed their strong shoulders under itsburthens! How our churches reverenced it! How our clergy contrasted theheresy-tolerating North with the purely orthodox and Scriptural type ofslave-holding Christianity! How all classes hunted down, not merely thefugitive slave, but the few who ventured to give him food and shelter anda Godspeed in his flight from bondage! How utterly ignored was thenegro's claim of common humanity! How readily was the decision of theslave-holding chief justice acquiesced in, that "the black man had norights which the white man is bound to respect"!

We saw a senator of the United States, world-known and honored for hislearning, talents, and stainless integrity, beaten down and all butmurdered at his official desk by a South Carolina slave-holder, for thecrime of speaking against the extension of slavery; and we heard thedastardly deed applauded throughout the South, while its brutalperpetrator was rewarded with orations and gifts and smiles of beauty asa chivalrous gentleman. We saw slavery enter Kansas, with bowieknife inhand and curses on its lips; we saw the life of the Union struck at bysecession and rebellion; we heard of the bones of sons and brothers, fallen in defence of freedom and law, dug up and wrought into ornamentsfor the wrists and bosoms of slave-holding women; we looked into the openhell of Andersonville, upon the deliberate, systematic starvation ofhelpless prisoners; we heard of Libby Prison underlaid with gunpowder, for the purpose of destroying thousands of Union prisoners in case of theoccupation of Richmond by our army; we saw hundreds of prisonersmassacred in cold blood at Fort Pillow, and the midnight sack of Lawrenceand the murder of its principal citizens. The flames of our merchantvessels, seized by pirates, lighted every sea; we heard of officers ofthe rebel army and navy stealing into our cities, firing hotels filledwith sleeping occupants, and laying obstructions on the track of railcars, for the purpose of killing and mangling their passengers. Yet inspite of these revelations of the utterly barbarous character of slaveryand its direful effect upon all connected with it, we were on the verypoint of trusting to its most criminal defenders the task ofreestablishing the state governments of the South, leaving the real Unionmen, white as well as black, at the mercy of those who have made hatred areligion and murder a sacrament. The nation needed one more terriblelesson. It has it in the murder of its beloved chief magistrate and theattempted assassination of its honored prime minister, the two men of allothers prepared to go farthest to smooth the way of defeated rebellionback to allegiance. 

Even now the lesson of these terrible events seems but half learned. Inthe public utterances I hear much of punishing and hanging leadingtraitors, fierce demands for vengeance, and threats of the summarychastisement of domestic sympathizers with treason, but comparativelylittle is said of the accursed cause, the prolific mother ofabominations, slavery. The government is exhorted to remember that itdoes not bear the sword in vain, the Old Testament is ransacked for textsof Oriental hatred and examples of the revenges of a semi-barbarousnation; but, as respects the four millions of unmistakably loyal peopleof the South, the patient, the long-suffering, kind-hearted victims ofoppressions, only here and there a voice pleads for their endowment withthe same rights of citizenship which are to be accorded to the rank andfile of disbanded rebels. The golden rule of the Sermon on the Mount isnot applied to them. Much is said of executing justice upon rebels;little of justice to loyal black men. Hanging a few ringleaders oftreason, it seems to be supposed, is all that is needed to restore andreestablish the revolted states. The negro is to be left powerless inthe hands of the "white trash, " who hate him with a bitter hatred, exceeding that of the large slave-holders. In short, four years ofterrible chastisement, of God's unmistakable judgments, have not taughtus, as a people, their lesson, which could scarcely be plainer if it hadbeen written in letters of fire on the sky. Why is it that we are soslow to learn, so unwilling to confess that slavery is the accursed thingwhich whets the knife of murder, and transforms men, with the exterior ofgentlemen and Christians, into fiends? How pitiful is our exultationover the capture of the wretched Booth and his associates! The greatcriminal, of whom he and they were but paltry instruments, still stalksabroad in the pine woods of Jersey, where the state has thrown around himher legislative sanction and protection. He is in Pennsylvania, thrusting the black man from public conveyances. Wherever God's childrenare despised, insulted, and abused on account of their color, there isthe real assassin of the President still at large. I do not wonder atthe indignation which has been awakened by the late outrage, for I havepainfully shared it. But let us see to it that it is rightly directed. The hanging of a score of Southern traitors will not restore AbrahamLincoln nor atone for the mighty loss. In wreaking revenge upon thesemiserable men, we must see to it that we do not degrade ourselves and dodishonor 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 amurderer from the beginning" is consumed from the face of the earth. Asthe people stand by the grave of Lincoln, let them lift their right handsto heaven and take a solemn vow upon their souls to give no sleep totheir eyes nor slumber to their eyelids until slavery is hunted from itslast shelter, and every man, black and white, stands equal before thelaw. 

In dealing with the guilty leaders and instigators of the rebellion weshould beware how we take counsel of passion. Hatred has no place besidethe calm and awful dignity of justice. Human life is still a very sacredthing; Christian forbearance and patience are still virtues. For my ownpart, I should be satisfied to see the chiefs of the great treason go outfrom 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 oursoldiers. Let them live. Perhaps that is, after all, the most terriblepenalty. For wherever they hide themselves the story of their acts willpursue them; they can have no rest nor peace save in that deep repentancewhich, through the mercy of God, is possible for all. 

I have no disposition to stand between these men and justice. Ifarrested, they can have no claim to exemption from the liabilities ofcriminals. But it is not simply a question of deserts that is to beconsidered; we are to take into account our own reputation as a Christianpeople, the wishes of our best friends abroad, and the humane instinctsof the age, which forbid all unnecessary severity. Happily we are notcalled upon to take counsel of our fears. Rabbinical writers tell usthat evil spirits who are once baffled in a contest with human beingslose from thenceforth all power of further mischief. The defeated rebelsare in the precise condition of these Jewish demons. Deprived ofslavery, they are like wasps that have lost their stings. 

As respects the misguided masses of the South, the shattered and crippledremnants of the armies of treason, the desolate wives, mothers, andchildren mourning for dear ones who have fallen in a vain and hopelessstruggle, it seems to me our duty is very plain. We must forgive theirpast treason, and welcome and encourage their returning loyalty. Nonebut cowards will insult and taunt the defeated and defenceless. We mustfeed and clothe the destitute, instruct the ignorant, and, bearingpatiently with the bitterness and prejudice which will doubtless for atime thwart our efforts and misinterpret our motives, aid them inrebuilding their states on the foundation of freedom. Our sole enemy wasslavery, and slavery is dead. We have now no quarrel with the people ofthe South, who have really more reason than we have to rejoice over thedownfall of a system which impeded their material progress, pervertedtheir religion, shut them out from the sympathies of the world, andridged their land with the graves of its victims. 

We are victors, the cause of all this evil and suffering is removedforever, and we can well afford to be magnanimous. How better can weevince our gratitude to God for His great mercy than in doing good tothose who hated us, and in having compassion on those who havedespitefully used us? The hour is hastening for us all when our soleground of dependence will be the mercy and forgiveness of God. Let usendeavor so to feel and act in our relations to the people of the Souththat we can repeat in sincerity the prayer of our Lord: "Forgive us ourtrespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, " reverentlyacknowledging that He has indeed "led captivity captive and receivedgifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that the Lord God mightdwell among them. "

CHARLES SUMNER AND THE STATE-DEPARTMENT. (1868. )

THE wise reticence of the President elect in the matter of his cabinethas left free course to speculation and conjecture as to its composition. That he fully comprehends the importance of the subject, and that he willcarefully weigh the claims of the possible candidates on the score ofpatriotic services, ability, and fitness for specific duties, no one whohas studied his character, and witnessed his discretion, clear insight, and wise adaptation of means to ends, under the mighty responsibilitiesof his past career, can reasonably doubt. 

It is not probable that the distinguished statesman now at the head ofthe State Department will, under the circumstances, look for acontinuance in office. History will do justice to his eminent servicesin 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 thepresent chief magistrate seems to preclude the idea of his retention inthe new cabinet. In looking over the list of our public men in search ofa successor, General Grant is not likely to be embarrassed by the numberof individuals fitted by nature, culture, and experience for such animportant post. The newspaper press, in its wide license of conjectureand suggestion, has, as far as I have seen, mentioned but three or fournames in this connection. Allusions have been made to Senator Fessendenof Maine, ex-Minister Motley, General Dix, ex-Secretary Stanton, andCharles Sumner of Massachusetts. 

Without disparaging in any degree his assumed competitors, the last-namedgentleman is unquestionably preeminently fitted for the place. He hashad a lifelong education for it. The entire cast of his mind, the bentof his studies, the habit and experience of his public life, his profoundknowledge of international law and the diplomatic history of his own andother countries, his well-earned reputation as a statesman andconstitutional lawyer, not only at home, but wherever our country hasrelations of amity and commerce, the honorable distinction which heenjoys of having held a foremost place in the great conflict betweenfreedom and slavery, union and rebellion, all mark him as the man for theoccasion. There seems, indeed, a certain propriety in assigning to theman who struck the heaviest blows at secession and slavery in thenational Senate the first place under him who, in the field, made themhenceforth impossible. The great captain and the great senator united inwar should not be dissevered in peace. 

I am not unaware that there are some, even in the Republican party, whohave failed to recognize in Senator Sumner the really wise and practicalstatesmanship which a careful review of his public labors cannot but makemanifest. It is only necessary to point such to the open record of hissenatorial career. Few men have had the honor of introducing anddefending with exhaustive ability and thoroughness so many measures ofacknowledged practical importance to his immediate constituents, thecountry at large, and the wider interests of humanity and civilization. In what exigency has he been found wanting? What legislative act ofpublic 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 timeand place must be admitted by all parties. It was shrewdly said by Burkethat "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 shownhimself as capable of thoroughly comprehending and digesting the eventstranspiring before his eyes as of pronouncing judgment upon thoserecorded in history. Far in advance of most of his contemporaries, hesaw and enunciated the true doctrine of reconstruction, the earlyadoption of which would have been of incalculable service to the country. One of the ablest statesmen and jurists of the Democratic party has hadthe rare magnanimity to acknowledge that in this matter the Republicansenator was right, and himself and his party wrong. 

The Republicans of Massachusetts will make no fractious or importunatedemand upon the new President. They are content to leave to his unbiasedand impartial judgment the selection of his cabinet. But if, looking tothe best interests of the country, he shall see fit to give theirdistinguished fellow-citizen the first place in it, they will feel nosolicitude as to the manner in which the duties of the office will bedischarged. They will feel that "the tools are with him who can usethem. " Nothing more directly affects the reputation of a country thanthe character of its diplomatic correspondence and its foreignrepresentatives. We have suffered in times past from sad mismanagementabroad, and intelligent Americans have too often been compelled to hangtheir heads with shame to see the flag of their country floating over theconsular offices of worthless, incompetent agents. There can be noquestion that so far as they are entrusted to Senator Sumner's hands, theinterest, honor, and dignity of the nation will be safe. 

In a few weeks Charles Summer will be returned for his fourth term in theUnited States Senate by the well-nigh unanimous vote of both branches ofthe legislature of Massachusetts. Not a syllable of opposition to hisreelection is heard from any quarter. There is not a Republican in thelegislature who could have been elected unless he had been virtuallypledged to his support. No stronger evidence of the popular estimate ofhis ability and integrity than this could be offered. As a matter ofcourse, 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 hishonest search after truth all the lights of his learning and experience, may, at times, have brought him into unpleasant relations with some ofhis colleagues; but no one, friend or foe, has questioned his ability andpatriotism, or doubted his fidelity to principle. He has lent himself tono schemes of greed. While so many others have taken advantage of thefacilities of their official stations to fill, directly or indirectly, their own pockets or those of their relatives and retainers, it is to thehonor of Massachusetts that her representatives in the Senate have notonly "shaken their hands from the holding of bribes, " but have so bornethemselves that no shadow of suspicion has ever rested on them. 

In this connection it may be proper to state that, in the event of achange in the War Department, the claims of General Wilson, to whoseservices in the committee on military affairs the country is deeplyindebted, may be brought under consideration. In that case Massachusettswould not, if it were in her power, discriminate between her senators. Both have deserved well of her and of the country. In expressing thusbriefly my opinion, I do not forget that after all the choice andresponsibility rest with General Grant alone. There I am content toleave them. I am very far from urging any sectional claim. Let thecountry but have peace after its long discord, let its good faith andfinancial credit be sustained, and all classes of its citizens everywhereprotected in person and estate, and it matters very little to me whetherMassachusetts is represented at the Executive Council board, or not. Personally, Charles Sumner would gain nothing by a transfer from theSenate Chamber to the State Department. He does not need a place in theAmerican cabinet any more than John Bright does in the British. Thehighest ambition might well be satisfied with his present position, fromwhich, looking back upon an honorable record, he might be justified inusing Milton's language of lofty confidence in the reply to Salmasius: "Iam 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 graceof 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. Askingmy opinion of your present duty as colored voters in the choice betweenGeneral Grant and Horace Greeley for the presidency. You state that youhave been confused by the contradictory advice given you by such friendsof your people as Charles Sumner on one hand, and William L. Garrison andWendell Phillips on the other; and you ask me, as one whom you arepleased to think "free from all bias, " to add my counsel to theirs. 

I thank you for the very kind expression of your confidence and yourgenerous reference to my endeavors to serve the cause of freedom; but Imust own that I would fain have been spared the necessity of adding tothe already too long list of political epistles. I have felt it my dutyin times past to take an active part--often very distasteful to me--inpolitical matters, having for my first object the deliverance of mycountry from the crime and curse of slavery. That great question beingnow settled forever, I have been more than willing to leave to youngerand stronger hands the toils and the honors of partisan service. Painedand saddened by the bitter and unchristian personalities of the canvassnow in progress, I have hitherto held myself aloof from it as far aspossible, unwilling to sanction in the slightest degree the criminationsand recriminations of personal friends whom I have every reason to loveand respect, and in whose integrity I have unshaken confidence. In thepresent condition of affairs I have not been able to see that any specialaction as an abolitionist was required at my hands. Both of the greatparties, heretofore widely separated, have put themselves onsubstantially the same platform. The Republican party, originallypledged only to the non-extension of slavery, and whose most illustriousrepresentative, President Lincoln, avowed his willingness to save theUnion without abolishing slavery, has been, under Providence, mainlyinstrumental in the total overthrow of the detestable system; while theDemocratic party, composed largely of slave-holders, and, even at theNorth, scarcely willing to save the Union at the expense of the slaveinterest upon which its success depended, shattered and crippled by thecivil war and its results, has at last yielded to the inexorable logic ofevents, abandoned a position no longer tenable, and taken its "newdeparture" with an abolitionist as its candidate. As a friend of thelong-oppressed colored man, and for the sake of the peace and prosperityof the country, I rejoice at this action of the Democratic party. Theunderlying motives of this radical change are doubtless somewhat mixedand contradictory, honest conviction on the part of some, and partyexpediency and desire of office on the part of others; but the changeitself is real and irrevocable; the penalty of receding would be swiftand irretrievable ruin. In any point of view the new order of things isdesirable; and nothing more fully illustrates "the ways that are dark andthe tricks that are vain" of party politics than the attempt of professedfriends of the Union and equal rights for all to counteract it by givingaid and comfort to a revival of the worst characteristics of the oldparty in the shape of a straight-out Democratic convention. 

As respects the candidates now before us, I can see no good reason whycolored voters as such should oppose General Grant, who, though not anabolitionist and not even a member of the Republican party previous tohis nomination, has faithfully carried out the laws of Congress in theirbehalf. Nor, on the other hand, can I see any just grounds for distrustof such a man as Horace Greeley, who has so nobly distinguished himselfas the advocate of human rights irrespective of race or color, and who bythe instrumentality of his press has been for thirty years the educatorof the people in the principles of justice, temperance, and freedom. Both of these men have, in different ways, deserved too well of thecountry to be unnecessarily subjected to the brutalities of apresidential canvass; and, so far as they are personally concerned, itwould doubtless have been better if the one had declined a second term ofuncongenial duties, and the other continued to indite words of wisdom inthe shades of Chappaqua. But they have chosen otherwise; and I amwilling, for one, to leave my colored fellow-citizens to the unbiasedexercise of their own judgment and instincts in deciding between them. The Democratic party labors under the disadvantage of antecedents notcalculated to promote a rapid growth of confidence; and it is no matterof surprise that the vote of the emancipated class is likely to belargely against it. But if, as will doubtless be the case, that voteshall be to some extent divided between the two candidates, it will havethe effect of inducing politicians of the rival parties to treat withrespect and consideration this new element of political power, from self-interest if from no higher motive. The fact that at this time bothparties are welcoming colored orators to their platforms, and that, inthe South, old slave-masters and their former slaves fraternize at caucusand barbecue, and vote for each other at the polls, is full ofsignificance. If, in New England, the very men who thrust FrederickDouglass from car and stage-coach, and mobbed and hunted him like a wildbeast, now crowd to shake his hand and cheer him, let us not despair ofseeing even the Ku-Klux tarried into decency, and sitting "clothed intheir right minds" as listeners to their former victims. The colored manis to-day the master of his own destiny. No power on earth can deprivehim of his rights as an American citizen. And it is in the light ofAmerican citizenship that I choose to regard my colored friends, as menhaving a common stake in the welfare of the country; mingled with, andnot separate from, their white fellow-citizens; not herded together as adistinct class to be wielded by others, without self-dependence andincapable of self-determination. Thanks to such men as Sumner and Wilsonand their compeers, nearly all that legislation can do for them hasalready been done. We can now only help them to help themselves. Industry, economy, temperance, self-culture, education for theirchildren, --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 Idecline to undertake to decide for you the question of your politicalduty as respects the candidates for the presidency, --a question which youhave probably already settled in your own minds. If it had been apparentto me that your rights and liberties were really in danger from thesuccess of either candidate, your letter would not have been needed tocall forth my opinion. In the long struggle of well-nigh forty years, Ican honestly say that no consideration of private interest, nor mynatural love of peace and retirement and the good-will of others, havekept me silent when a word could be fitly spoken for human rights. Ihave not so long acted with the class to which you belong withoutacquiring respect for your intelligence and capacity for judging wiselyfor yourselves. I shall abide your decision with confidence, andcheerfully 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 indenouncing 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 doingforget 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 theparties with which you are connected to respect your feelings towardsyour 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 forthe purpose of noticing a charge which has been brought against thepetitioners for rescinding the resolutions of the late extra sessionvirtually censuring the Hon. Charles Sumner. It is intimated that theaction of these petitioners evinces a lack of appreciation of theservices of the soldiers of the Union, and that not to censure CharlesSumner is to censure the volunteers of Massachusetts. 

As a matter of fact, the petitioners express no opinion as to the policyor expediency of the senator's proposition. Some may believe it not onlyright in itself, but expedient and well-timed; others that it wasinexpedient or premature. None doubt that, sooner or later, the thingwhich it contemplates must be done, if we are to continue a unitedpeople. What they feel and insist upon is that the proposition is onewhich implies no disparagement of the soldiers of Massachusetts and theUnion; that it neither receives nor merits the "unqualified condemnationof the people" of the state; and that it furnishes no ground whatever forlegislative interference or censure. A single glance at the names of thepetitioners is a sufficient answer to the insinuation that they areunmindful of that self-sacrifice and devotion, the marble and granitememorials of which, dotting the state from the Merrimac to theConnecticut, 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 forsuch censure of the brave and loyal statesman who was the bosom friendand confidant of Secretary Stanton (the great war-minister, second, if atall, only to Carnot) and of John A. Andrew, dear to the heart of everyMassachusetts soldier, and whose tender care and sympathy reached themwherever they struggled or died for country and freedom. The proposal ofSenator Sumner, instead of being an "insult, " was, in fact, the highestcompliment which could be paid to brave men; for it implied that theycherished no vindictive hatred of fallen foes; that they were too proudlysecure of the love and gratitude of their countrymen to need above theirheads the flaunting blazon of their achievements; that they were asmagnanimous in peace and victory as they were heroic and patient throughthe dark and doubtful arbitrament of war. As such they understand it. Ishould be sorry to think there existed a single son of Massachusetts weakenough to believe that his reputation and honor as a soldier needed thiscensure of Charles Sumner. I have before me letters from men, rankingfrom orderly sergeant to general, who have looked at death full in theface on every battlefield where the flag of Massachusetts floated, andthey all thank me for my efforts to rescind this uncalled-for censure, and pledge me their hearty support. They cordially indorse the nobleletter of Vice-President Wilson offering his signature to the petitionfor rescinding the obnoxious resolutions; and if these resolutions arenot annulled, it will not be the fault of Massachusetts volunteers, butrather of the mistaken zeal of men more familiar with the drill of thecaucus than with that of the camp. 

I am no blind partisan of Charles Sumner. I have often differed from himin opinion. I regretted deeply the position which he thought it his dutyto take during the late presidential campaign. He felt the atmosphereabout him thick and foul with corruption and bribery and greed; he sawthe treasury ringed about like Saturn with unscrupulous combinations andcorporations; and it is to be regretted more than wondered at if hestruck out wildly in his indignation, and that his blows fell sometimesupon the wrong object. But I did not intend to act the part of hisapologist. The twenty years of his senatorial life are crowded withmemorials of his loyalty to truth and free dom and humanity, which willbe enduring as our history. He is no party to this movement, in which myname has been more prominent than I could have wished, and no word of hisprompted or suggested it. From its inception to the present time he hasremained silent in his chamber of pain, waiting to bequeath, like thetestator 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 beforeour legislature is of far less consequence to him than to us. To use thewords 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 willvindicate the illustrious statesman to whom Massachusetts, the country, and humanity owe so much, but the state can ill afford the damage to itsown 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, adear friend of mine, residing in Boston, made his appearance at the oldfarm-house in East Haverhill. He had been deputed by the abolitionistsof the city, William L. Garrison, Samuel E. Sewall, and others, toinform me of my appointment as a delegate to the Convention about to beheld in Philadelphia for the formation of an American Anti-SlaverySociety, and to urge upon me the necessity of my attendance. 

Few words of persuasion, however, were needed. I was unused totravelling; 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, theirpersons threatened, and in some instances a price set on their heads bySouthern legislators. Pennsylvania was on the borders of slavery, and itneeded small effort of imagination to picture to one's self the breakingup of the Convention and maltreatment of its members. This latterconsideration I do not think weighed much with me, although I was betterprepared for serious danger than for anything like personal indignity. Ihad read Governor Trumbull's description of the tarring and feathering ofhis hero MacFingal, when, after the application of the melted tar, thefeather-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 bestfriends could scarcely refrain from laughing at. But a summons like thatof Garrison's bugle-blast could scarcely be unheeded by one who, frombirth and education, held fast the traditions of that earlierabolitionism which, under the lead of Benezet and Woolman, had effacedfrom the Society of Friends every vestige of slave-holding. I had thrownmyself, with a young man's fervid enthusiasm, into a movement whichcommended itself to my reason and conscience, to my love of country, andmy sense of duty to God and my fellow-men. My first venture inauthorship was the publication, at my own expense, in the spring of 1833, of a pamphlet entitled Justice and Expediency, on the moral and politicalevils of slavery, and the duty of emancipation. Under such circumstancesI could not hesitate, but prepared at once for my journey. It wasnecessary that I should start on the morrow, and the intervening time, with a small allowance for sleep, was spent in providing for the care ofthe farm and homestead during my absence. 

So the next morning I took the stage for Boston, stopping at the ancienthostelry known as the Eastern Stage Tavern; and on the day following, incompany with William Lloyd Garrison, I left for New York. At that citywe were joined by other delegates, among them David Thurston, aCongregational minister from Maine. On our way to Philadelphia, we took, as a matter of necessary economy, a second-class conveyance, and foundourselves, in consequence, among rough and hilarious companions, whoselanguage was more noteworthy for strength than refinement. Our worthyfriend the clergyman bore it awhile in painful silence, but at last feltit his duty to utter words of remonstrance and admonition. The leader ofthe young roisterers listened with a ludicrous mock gravity, thanked himfor his exhortation, and, expressing fears that the extraordinary efforthad exhausted his strength, invited him to take a drink with him. FatherThurston buried his grieved face in his cloak-collar, and wisely left theyoung reprobates to their own devices. 

On reaching Philadelphia, we at once betook, ourselves to the humbledwelling on Fifth Street occupied by Evan Lewis, a plain, earnest man andlifelong abolitionist, who had been largely interested in preparing theway for the Convention. In one respect the time of our assembling seemedunfavorable. The Society of Friends, upon whose cooperation we hadcounted, had but recently been rent asunder by one of those unhappycontroversies which so often mark the decline of practical righteousness. The martyr-age of the society had passed, wealth and luxury had taken theplace of the old simplicity, there was a growing conformity to the maximsof the world in trade and fashion, and with it a correspondingunwillingness to hazard respectability by the advocacy of unpopularreforms. Unprofitable speculation and disputation on one hand, and avain attempt on the other to enforce uniformity of opinion, hadmeasurably lost sight of the fact that the end of the gospel is love, andthat charity is its crowning virtue. After a long and painful strugglethe disruption had taken place; the shattered fragments, under the nameof 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 friendLewis, and, after some general conversation, Lewis Tappan was asked topreside over an informal meeting, preparatory to the opening of theConvention. A handsome, intellectual-looking man, in the prime of life, responded to the invitation, and in a clear, well-modulated voice, thefirm tones of which inspired hope and confidence, stated the objects ofour preliminary council, and the purpose which had called us together, inearnest and well-chosen words. In making arrangements for theConvention, it was thought expedient to secure, if possible, the servicesof some citizen of Philadelphia, of distinction and high social standing, to preside over its deliberations. Looking round among ourselves in vainfor some titled civilian or doctor of divinity, we were fain to confessthat to outward seeming we were but "a feeble folk, " sorely needing theshield of a popular name. A committee, of which I was a member, wasappointed to go in search of a president of this description. We visitedtwo prominent gentlemen, known as friendly to emancipation and of highsocial standing. They received us with the dignified courtesy of the oldschool, declined our proposition in civil terms, and bowed us out with acool politeness equalled only by that of the senior Winkle towards theunlucky deputation of Pickwick and his unprepossessing companions. As weleft their doors we could not refrain from smiling in each other's facesat the thought of the small inducement our proffer of the presidency heldout to men of their class. Evidently our company was not one forrespectability to march through Coventry with. 

On the following morning we repaired to the Adelphi Building, on FifthStreet, below Walnut, which had been secured for our use. Sixty-twodelegates 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 andeloquent speaker. He had already made himself known to us as a resoluteand self-sacrificing abolitionist. Lewis Tappan and myself took ourplaces at his side as secretaries, on the elevation at the west end ofthe hall. 

Looking over the assembly, I noticed that it was mainly composed ofcomparatively young men, some in middle age, and a few beyond thatperiod. They were nearly all plainly dressed, with a view to comfortrather than elegance. Many of the faces turned towards me wore a look ofexpectancy and suppressed enthusiasm; all had the earnestness which mightbe expected of men engaged in an enterprise beset with difficulty andperhaps with peril. The fine, intellectual head of Garrison, prematurelybald, was conspicuous; the sunny-faced young man at his side, in whom allthe beatitudes seemed to find expression, was Samuel J. May, mingling inhis veins the best blood of the Sewalls and Quincys, --a man soexceptionally pure and large-hearted, so genial, tender, and loving, thathe 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 somewhatmartial figure the Quaker coat seemed a little out of place, was LindleyCoates, known in all eastern Pennsylvania as a stern enemy of slavery;that slight, eager man, intensely alive in every feature and gesture, wasThomas Shipley, who for thirty years had been the protector of the freecolored people of Philadelphia, and whose name was whispered reverentlyin the slave cabins of Maryland as the friend of the black man, one of aclass 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 fromno sacrifice. Braver men the world has not known. Beside him, differingin creed, but united with him in works of love and charity, sat ThomasWhitson, of the Hicksite school of Friends, fresh from his farm inLancaster County, dressed in plainest homespun, his tall form surmountedby a shock of unkempt hair, the odd obliquity of his vision contrastingstrongly with he clearness and directness of his spiritual insight. Elizur Wright, the young professor of a Western college, who had lost hisplace by his bold advocacy of freedom, with a look of sharp concentrationin keeping with an intellect keen as a Damascus blade, closely watchedthe proceedings through his spectacles, opening his mouth only to speakdirectly to the purpose. The portly form of Dr. Bartholomew Russell, thebeloved physician, from that beautiful land of plenty and peace whichBayard Taylor has described in his Story of Kennett, was not to beoverlooked. Abolitionist in heart and soul, his house was known as theshelter of runaway slaves, and no sportsman ever entered into the chasewith such zest as he did into the arduous and sometimes dangerous work ofaiding their escape and baffling their pursuers. The youngest manpresent was, I believe, James Miller McKim, a Presbyterian minister fromColumbia, 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 hermountains Orson S. Murray, a man terribly in earnest, with a zeal thatbordered on fanaticism, and who was none the more genial for the mob-violence to which he had been subjected. In front of me, awakeningpleasant associations of the old homestead in Merrimac valley, sat myfirst school-teacher, Joshua Coffin, the learned and worthy antiquarianand historian of Newbury. A few spectators, mostly of the Hicksitedivision 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 declarationof principles to be signed by the members. Dr. A. L. Cox of New York, while these committees were absent, read something from my pen eulogisticof William Lloyd Garrison; and Lewis Tappan and Amos A. Phelps, aCongregational clergyman of Boston, afterwards one of the most devotedlaborers in the cause, followed in generous commendation of the zeal, courage, and devotion of the young pioneer. The president, after callingJames McCrummell, one of the two or three colored members of theConvention, to the chair, made some eloquent remarks upon those editorswho had ventured to advocate emancipation. At the close of his speech ayoung 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 thePennsylvania delegates. "Robert Purvis, of this city, a colored man, "was the answer. He began by uttering his heart-felt thanks to thedelegates who had convened for the deliverance of his people. He spokeof Garrison in terms of warmest eulogy, as one who had stirred the heartof the nation, broken the tomblike slumber of the church, and compelledit to listen to the story of the slave's wrongs. He closed by declaringthat the friends of colored Americans would not be forgotten. "Theirmemories, " he said, "will be cherished when pyramids and monuments shallhave crumbled in dust. The flood of time which is sweeping away therefuge of lies is bearing on the advocates of our cause to a gloriousimmortality. "

The committee on the constitution made their report, which afterdiscussion was adopted. It disclaimed any right or intention ofinterfering, otherwise than by persuasion and Christian expostulation, with slavery as it existed in the states, but affirming the duty ofCongress to abolish it in the District of Columbia and territories, andto put an end to the domestic slave-trade. A list of officers of the newsociety was then chosen: Arthur Tappan of New York, president, and ElizurWright, Jr. , William Lloyd Garrison, and A. L. Cox, secretaries. Amongthe vice-presidents was Dr. Lord of Dartmouth College, then professedlyin favor of emancipation, but who afterwards turned a moral somersault, aself-inversion which left him ever after on his head instead of his feet. 

He became a querulous advocate of slavery as a divine institution, anddenounced woe upon the abolitionists for interfering with the will andpurpose of the Creator. As the cause of freedom gained ground, the poorman's heart failed him, and his hope for church and state grew fainterand fainter. A sad prophet of the evangel of slavery, he testified inthe unwilling ears of an unbelieving generation, and died at lastdespairing of a world which seemed determined that Canaan should nolonger 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 thedocument. But little progress being made, it was finally decided toentrust the matter to a sub-committee, consisting of William L. Garrison, S. J. May, and myself; and after a brief consultation andcomparison of each other's views, the drafting of the important paper wasassigned to the former gentleman. We agreed to meet him at his lodgingsin the house of a colored friend early the next morning. It was stilldark when we climbed up to his room, and the lamp was still burning bythe 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 thelarge committee, who unanimously agreed to report it to the Convention. 

The paper was read to the Convention by Dr. Atlee, chairman of thecommittee, 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 worldtheir Declaration of Independence, --based on the self-evident truths ofhuman equality and rights, --and appealed to arms for its defence, itspoke of the new enterprise as one "without which that of our fathers isincomplete, " and as transcending theirs in magnitude, solemnity, andprobable results as much "as moral truth does physical force. " It spokeof the difference of the two in the means and ends proposed, and of thetrifling grievances of our fathers compared with the wrongs andsufferings of the slaves, which it forcibly characterized as unequalledby any others on the face of the earth. It claimed that the nation wasbound to repent at once, to let the oppressed go free, and to admit themto all the rights and privileges of others; because, it asserted, no manhas a right to enslave or imbrute his brother; because liberty isinalienable; because there is no difference, in principle, between slave-holding and man-stealing, which the law brands as piracy; and because nolength of bondage can invalidate man's claim to himself, or render slavelaws anything but "an audacious usurpation. "

It maintained that no compensation should be given to plantersemancipating slaves, because that would be a surrender of fundamentalprinciples; "slavery is a crime, and is, therefore, not an article to besold;" because slave-holders are not just proprietors of what they claim;because emancipation would destroy only nominal, not real property; andbecause compensation, if given at all, should be given to the slaves. 

It declared any "scheme of expatriation" to be "delusive, cruel, anddangerous. " It fully recognized the right of each state to legislateexclusively on the subject of slavery within its limits, and concededthat Congress, under the present national compact, had no right tointerfere; though still contending that it had the power, and shouldexercise it, "to suppress the domestic slave-trade between the severalstates, " and "to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and inthose portions of our territory which the Constitution has placed underits exclusive jurisdiction. "

After clearly and emphatically avowing the principles underlying theenterprise, and guarding with scrupulous care the rights of persons andstates under the Constitution, in prosecuting it, the declaration closedwith these eloquent words:--

We also maintain that there are, at the present time, the highestobligations resting upon the people of the free states to remove slaveryby moral and political action, as prescribed in the Constitution of theUnited States. They are now living under a pledge of their tremendousphysical force to fasten the galling fetters of tyranny upon the limbs ofmillions in the Southern states; they are liable to be called at anymoment to suppress a general insurrection of the slaves; they authorizethe slave-owner to vote on three fifths of his slaves as property, andthus enable him to perpetuate his oppression; they support a standingarmy at the South for its protection; and they seize the slave who hasescaped into their territories, and send him back to be tortured by anenraged master or a brutal driver. This relation to slavery is criminaland 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 plantourselves upon the Declaration of Independence and the truths of divinerevelation 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, ofwarning, of entreaty and rebuke. 

"We shall circulate unsparingly and extensively anti-slavery tracts andperiodicals. 

"We shall enlist the pulpit and the press in the cause of the sufferingand the dumb. 

"We shall aim at a purification of the churches from all participation inthe guilt of slavery. 

"We shall encourage the labor of freemen over that of the slaves, bygiving a preference to their productions; and

"We shall spare no exertions nor means to bring the whole nation tospeedy repentance. 

"Our trust for victory is solely in God. We may be personally defeated, but our principles never. Truth, justice, reason, humanity, must andwill gloriously triumph. Already a host is coming up to the help of theLord against the mighty, and the prospect before us is full ofencouragement. 

"Submitting this declaration to the candid examination of the people ofthis country, and of the friends of liberty all over the world, we herebyaffix our signatures to it; pledging ourselves that, under the guidanceand by the help of Almighty God, we will do all that in us lies, consistently with this declaration of our principles, to overthrow themost execrable system of slavery that has ever been witnessed upon earth, to deliver our land from its deadliest curse, to wipe out the fouleststain which rests upon our national escutcheon, and to secure to thecolored population of the United States all the rights and privilegeswhich belong to them as men and as Americans, come what may to ourpersons, our interests, or our reputations, whether we live to witnessthe triumph of justice, liberty, and humanity, or perish untimely asmartyrs in this great, benevolent, and holy cause. "

The reading of the paper was followed by a discussion which lastedseveral hours. A member of the Society of Friends moved its immediateadoption. "We have, " he said, "all given it our assent: every heart hereresponds to it. It is a doctrine of Friends that these strong and deepimpressions should be heeded. " The Convention, nevertheless, deemed itimportant to go over the declaration carefully, paragraph by paragraph. During the discussion, one of the spectators asked leave to say a fewwords. A beautiful and graceful woman, in the prime of life, with a facebeneath her plain cap as finely intellectual as that of Madame Roland, offered some wise and valuable suggestions, in a clear, sweet voice, thecharm of which I have never forgotten. It was Lucretia Mott ofPhiladelphia. The president courteously thanked her, and encouraged herto take a part in the discussion. On the morning of the last day of oursession, the declaration, with its few verbal amendments, carefullyengrossed on parchment, was brought before the Convention. Samuel J. Mayrose to read it for the last time. His sweet, persuasive voice falteredwith the intensity of his emotions as he repeated the solemn pledges ofthe concluding paragraphs. After a season of silence, David Thurston ofMaine rose as his name was called by one of the secretaries, and affixedhis name to the document. One after another passed up to the platform, signed, and retired in silence. All felt the deep responsibility of theoccasion the shadow and forecast of a life-long struggle rested uponevery countenance. 

Our work as a Convention was now done. President Green arose to make theconcluding address. The circumstances under which it was uttered mayhave lent it an impressiveness not its own; but as I now recall it, itseems to me the most powerful and eloquent speech to which I have everlistened. He passed in review the work that had been done, theconstitution of the new society, the declaration of sentiments, and theunion and earnestness which had marked the proceedings. His closingwords will never be forgotten by those who heard them:--

"Brethren, it has been good to be here. In this hallowed atmosphere Ihave been revived and refreshed. This brief interview has more thanrepaid me for all that I have ever suffered. I have here met congenialminds; I have rejoiced in sympathies delightful to the soul. Heart hasbeat responsive to heart, and the holy work of seeking to benefit theoutraged and despised has proved the most blessed employment. 

"But now we must retire from these balmy influences and breathe anotheratmosphere. The chill hoar-frost will be upon us. The storm and tempestwill rise, and the waves of persecution will dash against our souls. Letus be prepared for the worst. Let us fasten ourselves to the throne ofGod as with hooks of steel. If we cling not to Him, our names to thatdocument will be but as dust. 

"Let us court no applause, indulge in no spirit of vain boasting. Let usbe assured that our only hope in grappling with the bony monster is in anArm that is stronger than ours. Let us fix our gaze on God, and walk inthe 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 entwinedaround the very fibres of our hearts. Let our hearts grow to it, so thatnothing but death can sunder the bond. "

He ceased, and then, amidst a silence broken only by the deep-drawnbreath of emotion in the assembly, lifted up his voice in a prayer toAlmighty God, full of fervor and feeling, imploring His blessing andsanctification upon the Convention and its labors. And with thesolemnity of this supplication in our hearts we clasped hands infarewell, and went forth each man to his place of duty, not knowing thethings that should befall us as individuals, but with a confidence, nevershaken by abuse and persecution, in the certain triumph of our cause. 

KANSAS

Read at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the state ofKansas. 

 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 anniversarycelebration of the first settlement of Kansas. It would give me greatpleasure to visit your state on an occasion of such peculiar interest, and to make the acquaintance of its brave and self-denying pioneers, butI have not health and strength for the journey. It is very fitting thatthis anniversary should be duly recognized. No one of your sister stateshas such a record as yours, --so full of peril and adventure, fortitude, self-sacrifice, and heroic devotion to freedom. Its baptism of martyrblood not only saved the state to liberty, but made the abolition ofslavery everywhere possible. Barber and Stillwell and Colpetzer andtheir associates did not die in vain. All through your long, hardstruggle I watched the course of events in Kansas with absorbinginterest. I rejoiced, while I marvelled at the steady courage which nodanger could shake, at the firm endurance which outwearied thebrutalities of your slaveholding invaders, and at that fidelity to rightand duty which the seduction of immediate self-interest could not swerve, nor the military force of a proslavery government overawe. All mysympathies were with you in that stern trial of your loyalty to God andhumanity. And when, in the end, you had conquered peace, and the last ofthe baffled border ruffians had left your territory, I felt that the doomof the accursed institution was sealed, and that its abolition was but aquestion of time. A state with such a record will, I am sure, be true toits noble traditions, and will do all in its power to aid the victims ofprejudice and oppression who may be compelled to seek shelter within itsborders. I will not for a moment distrust the fidelity of Kansas to herfoundation principle. God bless and prosper her! Thanking you for thekind terms of your invitation, I am, gentlemen, very truly your friend. 

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

An Introduction to Oliver Johnson's "William Lloyd Garrison and hisTimes. "

 (1879. )

I no not know that any word of mine can give additional interest to thismemorial of William Lloyd Garrison from the pen of one of his earliestand most devoted friends, whose privilege it has been to share hisconfidence and his labors for nearly half a century; but I cannot wellforego the opportunity afforded me to add briefly my testimony to thetribute to the memory of the great Reformer, whose friendship I haveshared, and with whom I have been associated in a common cause from youthto age. 

My acquaintance with him commenced in boyhood. My father was asubscriber to his first paper, the Free Press, and the humanitarian toneof his editorials awakened a deep interest in our little household, whichwas increased by a visit which he made us. When he afterwards edited theJournal of the Times, at Bennington, Vt. , I ventured to write him aletter of encouragement and sympathy, urging him to continue his laborsagainst slavery, and assuring him that he could "do great things, " anunconscious prophecy which has been fulfilled beyond the dream of myboyish enthusiasm. The friendship thus commenced has remained unbrokenthrough half a century, confirming my early confidence in his zeal anddevotion, and in the great intellectual and moral strength which hebrought to the cause with which his name is identified. 

During the long and hard struggle in which the abolitionists wereengaged, and amidst the new and difficult questions and side-issues whichpresented themselves, it could scarcely be otherwise than thatdifferences of opinion and action should arise among them. The leaderand his disciples could not always see alike. My friend, the author ofthis 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 ofcitizenship at the ballot-box in the cause of liberty, while Garrison, with equal sincerity, judged and counselled otherwise. Each acted undera sense of individual duty and responsibility, and our personal relationswere undisturbed. If, at times, the great anti-slavery leader failed todo justice to the motives of those who, while in hearty sympathy with hishatred of slavery, did not agree with some of his opinions and methods, it was but the pardonable and not unnatural result of his intensity ofpurpose, and his self-identification with the cause he advocated; and, while compelled to dissent, in some particulars, from his judgment of menand measures, the great mass of the antislavcry people recognized hismoral leadership. The controversies of old and new organization, nonresistance and political action, may now be looked upon by the partiesto them, who still survive, with the philosophic calmness which followsthe subsidence of prejudice and passion. We were but fallible men, anddoubtless often erred in feeling, speech, and action. Ours was but thecommon 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, witha feeling of gratitude to God, to recall the great happiness of laboringwith the noble company of whom Garrison was the central figure. I loveto think of him as he seemed to me, when in the fresh dawn of manhood hesat with me in the old Haverhill farmhouse, revolving even then schemesof benevolence; or, with cheery smile, welcoming me to his frugal meal ofbread and milk in the dingy Boston printing-room; or, as I found him inthe gray December morning in the small attic of a colored man, inPhiladelphia, finishing his night-long task of drafting his immortalDeclaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society; or, as Isaw him in the jail of Leverett Street, after his almost miraculousescape from the mob, playfully inviting me to share the safe lodgingswhich the state had provided for him; and in all the varied scenes andsituations where we acted together our parts in the great endeavor andsuccess of Freedom. 

The verdict of posterity in his case may be safely anticipated. With thetrue reformers and benefactors of his race he occupies a place inferiorto none other. The private lives of many who fought well the battles ofhumanity have not been without spot or blemish. But his privatecharacter, like his public, knew no dishonor. No shadow of suspicionrests upon the white statue of a life, the fitting garland of whichshould be the Alpine flower that symbolizes noble purity. 

ANTI-SLAVERY ANNIVERSARY. 

Read at the semi-centennial celebration of the American Anti-SlaverySociety 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 ofthe American Anti-Slavery Society. I am, I regret to say, quite unableto gratify this wish, and can only represent myself by a letter. 

Looking back over the long years of half a century, I can scarcelyrealize 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, pressand pulpit, business interests, literature, and fashion were prostrate atits feet. Our convention, with few exceptions, was composed of menwithout influence or position, poor and little known, strong only intheir convictions and faith in the justice of their cause. To onlookersour endeavor to undo the evil work of two centuries and convert a nationto the "great renunciation" involved in emancipation must have seemedabsurd in the last degree. Our voices in such an atmosphere found noecho. We could look for no response but laughs of derision or themissiles 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, andenthusiasm, and did our work, nothing doubting, amidst a generation whofirst despised and then feared and hated us. For myself I have neverceased to be grateful to the Divine Providence for the privilege oftaking a part in that work. 

And now for more than twenty years we have had a free country. No slavetreads its soil. The anticipated dangerous consequences of completeemancipation have not been felt. The emancipated class, as a whole, havedone wisely, and well under circumstances of peculiar difficulty. Themasters have learned that cotton can be raised better by free than byslave labor, and nobody now wishes a return to slave-holding. Sectionalprejudices are subsiding, the bitterness of the civil war is slowlypassing away. We are beginning to feel that we are one people, with noreally clashing interests, and none more truly rejoice in the growingprosperity of the South than the old abolitionists, who hated slavery asa curse to the master as well as to the slave. 

In view of this commemorative semi-centennial occasion, many thoughtscrowd upon me; memory recalls vanished faces and voices long hushed. Ofthose who acted with me in the convention fifty years ago nearly all havepassed into another state of being. We who remain must soon follow; wehave seen the fulfilment of our desire; we have outlived scorn andpersecution; the lengthening shadows invite us to rest. If, in lookingback, we feel that we sometimes erred through impatient zeal in ourcontest with a great wrong, we have the satisfaction of knowing that wewere influenced by no merely selfish considerations. The low light ofour setting sun shines over a free, united people, and our last prayershall 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-willwhich reached me on my birthday, none have touched me more deeply thanthe proceedings of the great meeting of the colored citizens of thenation's capital, of which you are the representatives. The resolutionsof that meeting came to me as the voice of millions of my fellow-countrymen. That voice was dumb in slavery when, more than half acentury 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, Godbe praised, it speaks from your great meeting in Washington and from allthe colleges and schools where the youth of your race are taught. Iscarcely expected then that the people for whom I pleaded would ever knowof my efforts in their behalf. I cannot be too thankful to the DivineProvidence that I have lived to hear their grateful response. 

I stand amazed at the rapid strides which your people have made sinceemancipation, at your industry, your acquisition of property and land, your zeal for education, your self-respecting but unresentful attitudetoward those who formerly claimed to be your masters, your pathetic butmanly appeal for just treatment and recognition. I see in all this thepromise that the time is not far distant when, in common with the whiterace, you will have the free, undisputed rights of American citizenshipin all parts of the Union, and your rightful share in the honors as wellas the protection of the government. 

Your letter would have been answered sooner if it had been possible. Ihave been literally overwhelmed with letters and telegrams, which, owingto 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 heartfeltthanks, and the assurance that while life lasts you will find me, as Ihave been heretofore, under more difficult circumstances, your faithfulfriend. 

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 countryalso, whose constitutional conservatism inclines them to regard anyorganic change in the government of a state or the social condition ofits people with suspicion and distrust. They admit, perhaps, the evilsof the old state of things; but they hold them to be inevitable, thealloy necessarily mingled with all which pertains to fallible humanity. Themselves generally enjoying whatever of good belongs to the politicalor social system in which their lot is cast, they are disposed to lookwith philosophic indifference upon the evil which only afflicts theirneighbors. They wonder why people are not contented with theirallotments; they see no reason for change; they ask for quiet and peacein their day; being quite well satisfied with that social condition whichan 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 theworld's future, constitution builders, and believers in progress. Theyare satisfied; the world at least goes well enough with them; they sit ascomfortable in it as Lafontaine's rat in the cheese; and why should thosewho would turn it upside down come hither also? Why not let well enoughalone? Why tinker creeds, constitutions, and laws, and disturb the goodold-fashioned order of things in church and state? The idea of makingthe world better and happier is to them an absurdity. He who entertainsit is a dreamer and a visionary, destitute of common sense and practicalwisdom. His project, whatever it may be, is at once pronounced to beimpracticable folly, or, as they are pleased to term it, _Utopian. _

The romance of Sir Thomas More, which has long afforded to theconservatives of church and state a term of contempt applicable to allreformatory schemes and innovations, is one of a series of fabulouswritings, in which the authors, living in evil times and unable toactualize their plans for the well-being of society, have resorted tofiction as a safe means of conveying forbidden truths to the popularmind. Plato's "Timaeus, " the first of the series, was written after thedeath of Socrates and the enslavement of the author's country. In thisare described the institutions of the Island of Atlantis, --the writer'sideal of a perfect commonwealth. Xenophon, in his "Cyropaedia, " has alsodepicted an imaginary political society by overlaying with fictionhistorical traditions. At a later period we have the "New Atlantis" ofLord Bacon, and that dream of the "City of the Sun" with which Campanellasolaced himself in his long imprisonment. 

The "Utopia" of More is perhaps the best of its class. It is the work ofa profound thinker, the suggestive speculations and theories of one whocould

 "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 ofEuropean governments, and the political truths of his imaginary state arenow practically recognized in our own democratic system. As might beexpected, in view of the times in which the author wrote, and theexceedingly limited amount of materials which he found ready to his handsfor the construction of his social and political edifice, there is a wantof proportion and symmetry in the structure. Many of his theories are nodoubt impracticable and unsound. But, as a whole, the work is anadmirable one, striding in advance of the author's age, and prefiguring agovernment of religious toleration and political freedom. The followingextract from it was doubtless regarded in his day as something worse thanfolly or the dream of a visionary enthusiast:--

"He judged it wrong to lay down anything rashly, and seemed to doubtwhether these different forms of religion might not all come from God, who might inspire men in a different manner, and be pleased with thevariety. He therefore thought it to be indecent and foolish for any manto threaten and terrify another, to make him believe what did not strikehim as true. "

Passing by the "Telemachus" of Fenelon, we come to the political romanceof Harrington, written in the time of Cromwell. "Oceana" is the name bywhich the author represents England; and the republican plan ofgovernment which he describes with much minuteness is such as he wouldhave recommended for adoption in case a free commonwealth had beenestablished. It deals somewhat severely with Cromwell's usurpation; yetthe 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 gentlemanneed not think to cheat him of his power and authority; for what he hadwon with the sword he would never suffer himself to be scribbled out of. "

Notwithstanding the liberality and freedom of his speculations upongovernment and religion in his Utopia, it must be confessed that SirThomas More, in after life, fell into the very practices of intoleranceand bigotry which he condemned. When in the possession of the great sealunder that scandal of kingship, Henry VIII. , he gave his countenance tothe persecution of heretics. Bishop Burnet says of him, that he caused agentleman of the Temple to be whipped and put to the rack in hispresence, in order to compel him to discover those who favored hereticalopinions. In his Utopia he assailed the profession of the law withmerciless satire; yet the satirist himself finally sat upon thechancellor's woolsack; and, as has been well remarked by Horace Smith, "if, from this elevated seat, he ever cast his eyes back upon his pastlife, he must have smiled at the fond conceit which could imagine apermanent Utopia, when he himself, certainly more learned, honest, andconscientious than the mass of men has ever been, could in the course ofone short life fall into such glaring and frightful rebellion against hisown doctrines. "

Harrington, on the other hand, as became the friend of Milton and Marvel, held fast, through good and evil report, his republican faith. Hepublished his work after the Restoration, and defended it boldly and ablyfrom the numerous attacks made upon it. Regarded as too dangerous anenthusiast to be left at liberty, he was imprisoned at the instance ofLord Chancellor Hyde, first in the Tower, and afterwards on the Island ofSt. Nicholas, where disease and imprudent remedies brought on a partialderangement, from which he never recovered. 

Bernardin St. Pierre, whose pathetic tale of "Paul and Virginia" hasfound admirers in every language of the civilized world, in a fragment, entitled "Arcadia, " attempted to depict an ideal republic, withoutpriest, noble, or slave, where all are so religious that each man is thepontiff 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 suchpersons as servants. The plan of it was suggested by his friend Rousseauduring their pleasant walking excursions about the environs of Paris, inwhich the two enthusiastic philosophers, baffled by the evil passions andintractable materials of human nature as manifested in existing society, comforted themselves by appealing from the actual to the possible, fromthe real to the imaginary. Under the chestnut-trees of the Bois deBoulogne, through long summer days, the two friends, sick of the noisyworld about them, yet yearning to become its benefactors, --gladlyescaping from it, yet busy with schemes for its regeneration andhappiness, --at once misanthropes and philanthropists, --amused and solacedthemselves by imagining a perfect and simple state of society, in whichthe lessons of emulation and selfish ambition were never to be taught;where, on the contrary, the young were to obey their parents, and toprefer 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 andluxury, without columns, triumphal arches, hospitals, prisons, orgibbets; but presenting to view bridges over torrents, wells on the aridplain, groves of fruit-trees, and houses of shelter for the traveller indesert places, attesting everywhere the sentiment of humanity. Religionwas to speak to all hearts in the eternal language of Nature. Death wasno longer to be feared; perspectives of holy consolation were to openthrough the cypress shadows of the tomb; to live or to die was to beequally an object of desire. 

The plan of the "Arcadia" of St. Pierre is simply this: A learned youngEgyptian, educated at Thebes by the priests of Osiris, desirous ofbenefiting humanity, undertakes a voyage to Gaul for the purpose ofcarrying thither the arts and religion of Egypt. He is shipwrecked onhis return in the Gulf of Messina, and lands upon the coast, where he isentertained by an Arcadian, to whom he relates his adventures, and fromwhom he receives in turn an account of the simple happiness and peace ofArcadia, the virtues and felicity of whose inhabitants are beautifullyexemplified in the lives and conversation of the shepherd and hisdaughter. This pleasant little prose poem closes somewhat abruptly. Although inferior in artistic skill to "Paul and Virginia" or the "IndianCottage", there is not a little to admire in the simple beauty of itspastoral descriptions. The closing paragraph reminds one of Bunyan'supper chamber, where the weary pilgrim's windows opened to the sunrisingand the singing of birds:--

"Tyrteus conducted his guests to an adjoining chamber. It had a windowshut by a curtain of rushes, through the crevices of which the islands ofthe Alpheus might be seen in the light of the moon. There were in thischamber two excellent beds, with coverlets of warm and light wool. 

"Now, as soon as Amasis was left alone with Cephas, he spoke with joy ofthe delight and tranquillity of the valley, of the goodness of theshepherd, and the grace of his young daughter, to whom he had seen noneworthy to be compared, and of the pleasure which he promised himself thenext day, at the festival on Mount Lyceum, of beholding a whole people ashappy as this sequestered family. Converse so delightful might havecharmed away the night without the aid of sleep, had they not beeninvited to repose by the mild light of the moon shining through thewindow, the murmuring wind in the leaves of the poplars, and the distantnoise of the Achelous, which falls roaring from the summit of MountLyceum. "

The young patrician wits of Athens doubtless laughed over Plato's idealrepublic. Campanella's "City of the Sun" was looked upon, no doubt, asthe distempered vision of a crazy state prisoner. Bacon's college, inhis "New Atlantis, " moved the risibles of fat-witted Oxford. More's"Utopia, " as we know, gave to our language a new word, expressive of thevagaries and dreams of fanatics and lunatics. The merciless wits, clerical and profane, of the court of Charles II. Regarded Harrington'sromance as a perfect godsend to their vocation of ridicule. The gaydames and carpet knights of Versailles made themselves merry with theprose pastoral of St. Pierre; and the poor old enthusiast went down tohis grave without finding an auditory for his lectures upon naturalsociety. 

The world had its laugh over these romances. When unable to refute theirtheories, it could sneer at the authors, and answer them to thesatisfaction of the generation in which they lived, at least by a generalcharge of lunacy. Some of their notions were no doubt as absurd as thoseof the astronomer in "Rasselas", who tells Imlac that he has for fiveyears possessed the regulation of the weather, and has got the secret ofmaking to the different nations an equal and impartial dividend of rainand sunshine. But truth, even when ushered into the world through themedium of a dull romance and in connection with a vast progeny of errors, however ridiculed and despised at first, never fails in the end offinding a lodging-place in the popular mind. The speculations of thepolitical 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 politicalfabrics of Europe and America. The prophecies of imagination have beenfulfilled; the dreams of romance have become familiar realities. 

What is the moral suggested by this record? Is it not that we shouldlook with charity and tolerance upon the schemes and speculations of thepolitical and social theorists of our day; that, if unprepared to ventureupon new experiments and radical changes, we should at least considerthat what was folly to our ancestors is our wisdom, and that anothergeneration may successfully put in practice the very theories which nowseem to us absurd and impossible? Many of the evils of society have beenmeasurably removed or ameliorated; yet now, as in the days of theApostle, "the creation groaneth and travaileth in pain;" and althoughquackery and empiricism abound, is it not possible that a properapplication of some of the remedies proposed might ameliorate the generalsuffering? Rejecting, as we must, whatever is inconsistent with orhostile to the doctrines of Christianity, on which alone rests our hopefor humanity, it becomes us to look kindly upon all attempts to applythose doctrines to the details of human life, to the social, political, and industrial relations of the race. If it is not permitted us tobelieve all things, we can at least hope them. Despair is infidelity anddeath. Temporally and spiritually, the declaration of inspiration holdsgood, "We are saved by hope. "

PECULIAR INSTITUTIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS. (1851. )

BERNARDIN ST. PIERRE, in his Wishes of a Solitary, asks for his countryneither wealth, nor military glory, nor magnificent palaces andmonuments, nor splendor of court nobility, nor clerical pomp. "Rather, "he says, "O France, may no beggar tread thy plains, no sick or sufferingman ask in vain for relief; in all thy hamlets may every young woman finda lover and every lover a true wife; may the young be trained arightlyand guarded from evil; may the old close their days in the tranquil hopeof those who love God and their fellow-men. "

We are reminded of the amiable wish of the French essayist--a wish evenyet very far from realization, we fear, in the empire of Napoleon III. --by the perusal of two documents recently submitted to the legislature ofthe State of Massachusetts. They indicate, in our view, the real gloryof a state, and foreshadow the coming of that time when Milton'sdefinition of a true commonwealth shall be no longer a prophecy, but thedescription of an existing fact, --"a huge Christian personage, a mightygrowth and stature of an honest man, moved by the purpose of a love ofGod and of mankind. "

Some years ago, the Legislature of Massachusetts, at the suggestion ofseveral benevolent gentlemen whose attention had been turned to thesubject, appointed a commission to inquire into the condition of theidiots of the Commonwealth, to ascertain their numbers, and whetheranything could be done in their behalf. 

The commissioners were Dr. Samuel G. Howe, so well and honorably knownfor 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 practicaladaptation of means to ends which have made him so efficient in hisvaried schemes of benevolence. On the 26th of the second month, 1848, afull report of the results of this labor was made to the Governor, accompanied by statistical tables and minute details. One hundred townshad been visited by the chairman or his reliable agent, in which fivehundred and seventy-five persons in a state of idiocy were discovered. These were examined carefully in respect to their physical as well asmental condition, no inquiry being omitted which was calculated to throwlight upon the remote or immediate causes of this mournful imperfectionin the creation of God. The proximate causes Dr. Howe mentions are to befound in the state of the bodily organization, deranged anddisproportioned by some violation of natural law on the part of theparents or remoter ancestors of the sufferers. Out of 420 cases ofidiocy, he had obtained information respecting the condition of theprogenitors of 359; and in all but four of these eases he found that oneor the other, or both, of their immediate progenitors had in some waydeparted widely from the condition of health; they were scrofulous, orpredisposed to affections of the brain, and insanity, or had intermarriedwith blood-relations, or had been intemperate, or guilty of sensualexcesses. 

Of the 575 cases, 420 were those of idiocy from birth, and 155 of idiocyafterwards. Of the born idiots, 187 were under twenty-five years of age, and all but 13 seemed capable of improvement. Of those above twenty-fiveyears of age, 73 appeared incapable of improvement in their mentalcondition, being helpless as children at seven years of age; 43 out ofthe 420 seemed as helpless as children at two years of age; 33 were inthe condition of mere infants; and 220 were supported at the publiccharge in almshouses. A large proportion of them were found to be givenover to filthy and loathsome habits, gluttony, and lust, and constantlysinking lower towards the condition of absolute brutishness. 

Those in private houses were found, if possible, in a still moredeplorable state. Their parents were generally poor, feeble in mind andbody, and often of very intemperate habits. Many of them seemed scarcelyable to take care of themselves, and totally unfit for the training ofordinary children. It was the blind leading the blind, imbecilityteaching imbecility. Some instances of the experiments of parentalignorance upon idiotic offspring, which fell under the observation of Dr. Howe, are related in his report Idiotic children were found with theirheads covered over with cold poultices of oak-bark, which the foolishparents supposed would tan the brain and harden it as the tanner does hisox-hides, and so make it capable of retaining impressions and rememberinglessons. In other cases, finding that the child could not be made tocomprehend anything, the sagacious heads of the household, on thesupposition that its brain was too hard, tortured it with hot poulticesof bread and milk to soften it. Others plastered over their children'sheads with tar. Some administered strong doses of mercury, to "solder upthe openings" in the head and make it tight and strong. Othersencouraged the savage gluttony of their children, stimulating theirunnatural and bestial appetites, on the ground that "the poor creatureshad nothing else to enjoy but their food, and they should have enough ofthat!"

In consequence of this report, the legislature, in the spring of 1848, made an annual appropriation of twenty-five hundred dollars, for threeyears, for the purpose of training and teaching ten idiot children, to beselected by the Governor and Council. The trustees of the Asylum for theBlind, under the charge of Dr. Howe, made arrangements for receivingthese pupils. The school was opened in the autumn of 1848; and its firstannual report, addressed to the Governor and printed by order of theSenate, is now before us. 

Of the ten pupils, it appears that not one had the usual command ofmuscular motion, --the languid body obeyed not the service of the imbecilewill. Some could walk and use their limbs and hands in simple motions;others could make only make slight use of their muscles; and two werewithout any power of locomotion. 

One of these last, a boy six years of age, who had been stupefied on theday of his birth by the application of hot rum to his head, couldscarcely see or notice objects, and was almost destitute of the sense oftouch. He could neither stand nor sit upright, nor even creep, but wouldlie on the floor in whatever position he was placed. He could not feedhimself nor chew solid food, and had no more sense of decency than aninfant. His intellect was a blank; he had no knowledge, no desires, noaffections. A more hopeless object for experiment could scarcely havebeen selected. 

A year of patient endeavor has nevertheless wrought a wonderful change inthe condition of this miserable being. Cold bathing, rubbing of thelimbs, exercise of the muscles, exposure to the air, and other applianceshave enabled him to stand upright, to sit at table and feed himself, andchew his food, and to walk about with slight assistance. His habits areno longer those of a brute; he observes decency; his eye is brighter; hischeeks glow with health; his countenance, is more expressive of thought. He has learned many words and constructs simple sentences; his affectionsbegin to develop; and there is every prospect that he will be so farrenovated as to be able to provide for himself in manhood. 

In the case of another boy, aged twelve years, the improvement has beenequally remarkable. The gentleman who first called attention to him, ina recent note to Dr. Howe, published in the report, thus speaks of hispresent condition: "When I remember his former wild and almost franticdemeanor when approached by any one, and the apparent impossibility ofcommunicating with him, and now see him standing in his class, playingwith his fellows, and willingly and familiarly approaching me, examiningwhat I gave him, --and when I see him already selecting articles named byhis teacher, and even correctly pronouncing words printed on cards, --improvement does not convey the idea presented to my mind; it iscreation; it is making him anew. "

All the pupils have more or less advanced. Their health and habits haveimproved; and there is no reason to doubt that the experiment, at theclose of its three years, will be found to have been quite as successfulas its most sanguine projectors could have anticipated. Dr. Howe hasbeen ably seconded by an accomplished teacher, James B. Richards, who hasdevoted his whole time to the pupils. Of the nature and magnitude oftheir task, an idea may be formed only by considering the utterlistlessness of idiocy, the incapability of the poor pupil to fix hisattention upon anything, and his general want of susceptibility toimpressions. All his senses are dulled and perverted. Touch, hearing, sight, smell, are all more or less defective. His gluttony isunaccompanied with the gratification of taste, --the most savory viandsand the offal which he shares with the pigs equally satisfy him. Hismental state is still worse than his physical. Thought is painful andirksome to him. 

His teacher can only engage his attention by strenuous efforts, loud, earnest tones, gesticulations and signs, and a constant presentation ofsome visible object of bright color and striking form. The eye wanders, and the spark of consciousness and intelligence which has been fannedinto momentary brightness darkens at the slightest relaxation of theteacher's exertions. The names of objects presented to him mustsometimes be repeated hundreds of times before he can learn them. Yetthe patience and enthusiasm of the teacher are rewarded by a progress, slow and unequal, but still marked and manifest. Step by step, oftencompelled to turn back and go over the inch of ground he had gained, theidiot is still creeping forward; and by almost imperceptible degrees hissick, cramped, and prisoned spirit casts off the burden of its body ofdeath, breath as from the Almighty--is breathed into him, and he becomesa living soul. 

After the senses of the idiot are trained to take noteof their appropriate objects, the various perceptive faculties are nextto be exercised. The greatest possible number of facts are to begathered up through the medium of these faculties into the storehouse ofmemory, from whence eventually the higher faculties of mind may draw thematerial of general ideas. It has been found difficult, if notimpossible, to teach the idiot to read by the letters first, as in theordinary 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 thecomplex sign of the word hat, made by uniting the three. 

The moral nature of the idiot needs training and development as well ashis physical and mental. All that can be said of him is, that he has thelatent capacity for moral development and culture. Uninstructed and leftto himself, he has no ideas of regulated appetites and propensities, ofdecency and delicacy of affection and social relations. The germs ofthese ideas, which constitute the glory and beauty of humanity, undoubtedly exist in him; but there can be no growth without patient andpersevering culture. Where this is afforded, to use the language of thereport, "the idiot may learn what love is, though he may not know theword which expresses it; he may feel kindly affections while unable tounderstand the simplest virtuous principle; and he may begin to liveacceptably 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 uponsome of the dark pages of God's providence, and it is seen that thesuffering and shame of idiocy are the result of sin, of a violation ofthe merciful laws of God and of the harmonies of His benign order. Thepenalties which are ordained for the violators of natural laws areinexorable and certain. For the transgressor of the laws of life thereis, as in the case of Esau, "no place for repentance, though he seek itearnestly and with tears. " The curse cleaves to him and his children. In this view, how important becomes the subject of the hereditarytransmission of moral and physical disease and debility! and hownecessary it is that there should be a clearer understanding of, and awilling obedience, at any cost, to the eternal law which makes the parentthe blessing or the curse of the child, giving strength and beauty, andthe capacity to know and do the will of God, or bequeathingloathsomeness, deformity, and animal appetite, incapable of therestraints of the moral faculties! Even if the labors of Dr. Howe andhis benevolent associates do not materially lessen the amount of presentactual evil and suffering in this respect, they will not be put forth invain if they have the effect of calling public attention to the greatlaws of our being, the violation of which has made this goodly earth avast lazarhouse of pain and sorrow. 

The late annual message of the Governor of Massachusetts invites ourattention to a kindred institution of charity. The chief magistratecongratulates the legislature, in language creditable to his mind andheart, 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 crimepunishable by imprisonment other than such an offence as is punished byimprisonment for life, he may be, at the discretion of the court orjustice, sent to the State Reform School, or sentenced to suchimprisonment as the law now provides for his offence. The school isplaced under the care of trustees, who may either refuse to receive a boythus sent there, or, after he has been received, for reasons set forth inthe act, may order him to be committed to prison under the previous penallaw of the state. They are also authorized to apprentice the boys, attheir discretion, to inhabitants of the Commonwealth. And whenever anyboy shall be discharged, either as reformed or as having reached the ageof 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 inpiety and morality, and in branches of useful knowledge, in some regularcourse of labor, mechanical, agricultural, or horticultural, and suchother trades and arts as may be best adapted to secure the amendment, reformation, and future benefit of the boys. The class of offenders forwhom this act provides are generally the offspring of parents depraved bycrime or suffering from poverty and want, --the victims often ofcircumstances of evil which almost constitute a necessity, --issuing fromhomes polluted and miserable, from the sight and hearing of loathsomeimpurities and hideous discords, to avenge upon society the ignorance, and destitution, and neglect with which it is too often justlychargeable. In 1846 three hundred of these youthful violators of lawwere sentenced to jails and other places of punishment in Massachusetts, where they incurred the fearful liability of being still more thoroughlycorrupted by contact with older criminals, familiar with atrocity, androlling their loathsome vices "as a sweet morsel under the tongue. " Inview of this state of things the Reform School has been established, twenty-two thousand dollars having been contributed to the state for thatpurpose by an unknown benefactor of his race. The school is located inWestboro', on a fine farm of two hundred acres. The buildings are in theform 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 ofthe loveliest of the small lakes which form a pleasing feature in NewEngland scenery. From this place the atmosphere and associations of theprison 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 soundsand healthful influences of Nature. One would almost suppose that thepoetical dream of Coleridge, in his tragedy of Remorse, had found itsrealization in the Westboro' School, and that, weary of the hopelessnessand cruelty of the old penal system, our legislators had embodied intheir 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 haveonly to look back but a single century to be able to appreciate theimmense gain for humanity in the treatment of criminals which has beensecured in that space of time. Then the use of torture was commonthroughout Europe. Inability to comprehend and believe certain religiousdogmas was a crime to be expiated by death, or confiscation of estate, orlingering imprisonment. Petty offences against property furnishedsubjects for the hangman. The stocks and the whipping-post stood by theside of the meeting-house. Tongues were bored with redhot irons and earsshorn off. The jails were loathsome dungeons, swarming with vermin, unventilated, unwarmed. A century and a half ago the populace ofMassachusetts were convulsed with grim merriment at the writhings of amiserable woman scourged at the cart-tail or strangling in the ducking-stool; crowds hastened to enjoy the spectacle of an old man enduring theunutterable torment of the 'peine forte et dare, '--pressed slowly todeath under planks, --for refusing to plead to an indictment forwitchcraft. What a change from all this to the opening of the StateReform 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 tooverlook the true interest and reformation of the criminal, nor to forgetthat the magistrate, in the words of the Apostle, is to be indeed "theminister of God to man for good!"

LORD ASHLEY AND THE THIEVES. 

"THEY that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick, " wasthe significant answer of our Lord to the self-righteous Pharisees whotook offence at his companions, --the poor, the degraded, the weak, andthe sinful. "Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, andnot sacrifice; for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners torepentance. "

The great lesson of duty inculcated by this answer of the Divine Teacherhas been too long overlooked by individuals and communities professedlygoverned by His maxims. The phylacteries of our modern Pharisees are asbroad as those of the old Jewish saints. The respectable Christiandetests his vicious and ill-conditioned neighbors as heartily as theIsraelite did the publicans and sinners of his day. He folds his robe ofself-righteousness closely about him, and denounces as little better thansinful weakness all commiseration for the guilty; and all attempts torestore and reclaim the erring violators of human law otherwise than bypains and penalties as wicked collusion with crime, dangerous to thestability and safety of society, and offensive in the sight of God. Andyet nothing is more certain than that, just in proportion as the exampleof our Lord has been followed in respect to the outcast and criminal, theeffect has been to reform and elevate, --to snatch as brands from theburning souls not yet wholly given over to the service of evil. Thewonderful influence for good exerted over the most degraded and recklesscriminals of London by the excellent and self-denying Elizabeth Fry, thehappy results of the establishment of houses of refuge, and reformation, and Magdalen asylums, all illustrate the wisdom of Him who went aboutdoing good, in pointing out the morally diseased as the appropriatesubjects of the benevolent labors of His disciples. No one is to bedespaired of. We have no warrant to pass by any of our fellow-creaturesas beyond the reach of God's grace and mercy; for, beneath the mostrepulsive and hateful outward manifestation, there is always aconsciousness of the beauty of goodness and purity, and of theloathsomeness of sin, --one chamber of the heart as yet not whollyprofaned, whence at times arises the prayer of a burdened and miserablespirit for deliverance. Deep down under the squalid exterior, unparticipative in the hideous merriment and recklessness of thecriminal, there is another self, --a chained and suffering inner man, --crying out, in the intervals of intoxication and brutal excesses, likeJonah from the bosom of hell. To this lingering consciousness thesympathy and kindness of benevolent and humane spirits seldom appeal invain; for, whatever may be outward appearances, it remains true that theway of the transgressor is hard, and that sin and suffering areinseparable. Crime is seldom loved or persevered in for its own sake;but, when once the evil path is entered upon, a return is in realityextremely difficult to the unhappy wanderer, and often seems as well nighimpossible. The laws of social life rise up like insurmountable barriersbetween him and escape. As he turns towards the society whose rights hehas outraged, its frown settles upon him; the penalties of the laws hehas violated await him; and he falls back despairing, and suffers thefetters of the evil habit to whose power he has yielded himself to befastened closer and heavier upon him. O for some good angel, in the formof 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 itsbody of death!

We have been led into these remarks by an account, given in the LondonWeekly Chronicle, of a most remarkable interview between the professionalthieves of London and Lord Ashley, --a gentleman whose best patent ofnobility is to be found in his generous and untiring devotion to theinterests of his fellow-men. It appears that a philanthropic gentlemanin London had been applied to by two young thieves, who had relinquishedtheir evil practices and were obtaining a precarious but honestlivelihood by picking up bones and rags in the streets, their loss ofcharacter closing against them all other employments. He had just beenreading an address of Lord Ashley's in favor of colonial emigration, andhe 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 thegentleman was sent for to visit one of those obscure and ruinous courtsof 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, whodeclared themselves extremely anxious to know whether any hope could beheld out to them of obtaining an honest living, however humble, in thecolonies, as their only reason for continuing in their criminal coursewas the impossibility of extricating themselves. He gave them suchadvice and encouragement as he was able, and invited them to assembleagain, with such of their companions as they could persuade to do so, atthe room of the Irish Free School, for the purpose of meeting LordAshley. On the 27th of the seventh month last the meeting took place. At the hour appointed, Lord Ashley and five or six other benevolentgentlemen, interested in emigration as a means of relief and reformationto the criminal poor, entered the room, which was already well-nighfilled. Two hundred and seven professed thieves were present. "Severalof the most experienced thieves were stationed at the door to prevent theadmission of any but thieves. Some four or five individuals, who werenot at first known, were subjected to examination, and only allowed toremain on stating that they were, and being recognized as, members of thedishonest fraternity; and before the proceedings of the evening commencedthe question was very carefully put, and repeated several times, whetherany one was in the room of whom others entertained doubts as to who hewas. 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 theircrimes, to ascertain if any who might betray them were present; andanother intention of this scrutiny was, to give those assembled, whonaturally would feel considerable fear, a fuller confidence in openingtheir minds. "

What a novel conference between the extremes of modern society! All thatis beautiful in refinement and education, moral symmetry and Christiangrace, contrasting with the squalor, the ignorance, the lifelongdepravity of men living "without God in the world, "--the pariahs ofcivilization, --the moral lepers, at the sight of whom decency covers itsface, and cries out, "Unclean!" After a prayer had been offered, LordAshley spoke at considerable length, making a profound impression on hisstrange auditory as they listened to his plans of emigration, whichoffered them an opportunity to escape from their miserable condition andenter upon a respectable course of life. The hard heart melted and thecold and cruel eye moistened. With one accord the wretched felonsresponded to the language of Christian love and good-will, and declaredtheir readiness to follow the advice of their true friend. They lookedup to him as to an angel of mercy, and felt the malignant spirits whichhad so long tormented them disarmed of all power of evil in the presenceof simple goodness. He stood in that felon audience like Spenser's Unaamidst the satyrs; unassailable and secure in the "unresistible might ofmeekness, " and panoplied in that "noble grace which dashed brute violencewith sudden adoration and mute awe. "

Twenty years ago, when Elizabeth Fry ventured to visit those "spirits inprison, "--the female tenants of Newgate, --her temerity was regarded withastonishment, and her hope of effecting a reformation in the miserableobjects of her sympathy was held to be wholly visionary. Her personalsafety and the blessed fruits of her labors, nevertheless, confirmed thelanguage of her Divine Master to His disciples when He sent them forth aslambs among wolves: "Behold, I give unto you power over all the power ofthe enemy. " The still more unpromising experiment of Lord Ashley, thusfar, has been equally successful; and we hail it as the introduction of anew and more humane method of dealing with the victims of sin andignorance, and the temptations growing out of the inequalities and vicesof 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 behalfof Woman's Suffrage, at Newport, R. I. , on the 25th inst. I do not seehow 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 themeeting as would relieve me from the responsibility of seeming tosanction anything in its action which might conflict with my own views ofduty or policy. Yet I should do myself great injustice if I did notembrace this occasion to express my general sympathy with the movement. I have seen no good reason why mothers, wives, and daughters should nothave 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 womenof my own religious communion who have been accustomed to something likeequality in rights as well as duties; my experience as a co-worker withnoble and self-sacrificing women, as graceful and helpful in theirhousehold duties as firm and courageous in their public advocacy ofunpopular truth; the steady friendships which have inspired andstrengthened me, and the reverence and respect which I feel for humannature, irrespective of sex, compel me to look with something more thanacquiescence on the efforts you are making. I frankly confess that I amnot able to forsee all the consequences of the great social and politicalchange proposed, but of this I am, at least, sure, it is always safe todo right, and the truest expediency is simple justice. I can understand, without sharing, the misgivings of those who fear that, when the votedrops from woman's hand into the ballot-box, the beauty and sentiment, the bloom and sweetness, of womankind will go with it. But in thismatter it seems to me that we can trust Nature. Stronger than statutesor conventions, she will be conservative of all that the true man lovesand honors in woman. Here and there may be found an equivocal, unsexedChevalier 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 whenthey meet on terms of equality before the law. 

On the other hand, I do not see that the exercise of the ballot by womanwill prove a remedy for all the evils of which she justly complains. Itis her right as truly as mine, and when she asks for it, it is somethingless than manhood to withhold it. But, unsupported by a more practicaleducation, higher aims, and a deeper sense of the responsibilities oflife and duty, it is not likely to prove a blessing in her hands any morethan 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 onthe 12th instant for the celebration of Italian Unity, the emancipationof Rome, and its occupation as the permanent capital of the nation. 

For many years I have watched with deep interest and sympathy the popularmovement on the Italian peninsula, and especially every effort for thedeliverance of Rome from a despotism counting its age by centuries. Ilooked at these struggles of the people with little reference to theirecclesiastical or sectarian bearings. Had I been a Catholic instead of aProtestant, I should have hailed every symptom of Roman deliverance fromPapal rule, occupying, as I have, the standpoint of a republican radical, desirous that all men, of all creeds, should enjoy the civil libertywhich I prized so highly for myself. 

I lost all confidence in the French republic of 1849, when it forfeitedits own right to exist by crushing out the newly formed Roman republicunder Mazzini and Garibaldi. From that hour it was doomed, and theexpiation of its monstrous crime is still going on. My sympathies arewith Jules Favre and Leon Gambetta in their efforts to establish andsustain a republic in France, but I confess that the investment of Parisby King William seems to me the logical sequence of the bombardment ofRome by Oudinot. And is it not a significant fact that the terriblechassepot, which made its first bloody experiment upon the halfarmedItalian patriots without the walls of Rome, has failed in the hands ofFrench republicans against the inferior needle-gun of Prussia? It wassaid of a fierce actor in the old French Revolution that he demoralizedthe guillotine. The massacre at Mentana demoralized the chassepot. 

It is a matter of congratulation that the redemption of Rome has beeneffected so easily and bloodlessly. The despotism of a thousand yearsfell at a touch in noiseless rottenness. The people of Rome, fifty toone, cast their ballots of condemnation like so many shovelfuls of earthupon its grave. Outside of Rome there seems to be a very generalacquiescence in its downfall. No Peter the Hermit preaches a crusade inits behalf. No one of the great Catholic powers of Europe lifts a fingerfor it. Whatever may be the feelings of Isabella of Spain and thefugitive son of King Bomba, they are in no condition to come to itsrescue. It is reserved for American ecclesiastics, loud-mouthed inprofessions of democracy, to make solemn protest against what they callan "outrage, " which gives the people of Rome the right of choosing theirown government, and denies the divine right of kings in the person of PioNono. 

The withdrawal of the temporal power of the Pope will prove a blessing tothe Catholic Church, as well as to the world. Many of its most learnedand devout priests and laymen have long seen the necessity of such achange, which takes from it a reproach and scandal that could no longerbe excused or tolerated. A century hence it will have as few apologistsas the Inquisition or the massacre of St. Bartholomew. 

In this hour of congratulation let us not forget those whose sufferingand self-sacrifice, in the inscrutable wisdom of Providence, prepared theway for the triumph which we celebrate. As we call the long, illustriousroll of Italian patriotism--the young, the brave, and beautiful; thegray-haired, saintly confessors; the scholars, poets, artists, who, shutout from human sympathy, gave their lives for God and country in theslow, dumb agony of prison martyrdom--let us hope that they also rejoicewith us, and, inaudible to earthly ears, unite in our thanksgiving:"Alleluia! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth! He hath avenged theblood of his servants!"

In the belief that the unity of Italy and the overthrow of Papal rulewill strengthen the cause of liberty throughout the civilized' world, Iam very truly thy friend. 

INDIAN CIVILIZATION. 

THE present condition and future prospects of the remnants of theaboriginal inhabitants of this continent can scarcely be a matter ofindifference to any class of the people of the United States. Apart fromall considerations of justice and duty, a purely selfish regard to ourown well-being would compel attention to the subject. The irreversiblelaws of God's moral government, and the well-attested maxims of politicaland social economy, leave us in no doubt that the suffering, neglect, andwrong of one part of the community must affect all others. A commonresponsibility rests upon each and all to relieve suffering, enlightenignorance, and redress wrong, and the penalty of neglect in this respectno nation has ever escaped. 

It is only within a comparatively recent period that the term IndianCivilization could be appropriately used in this country. Very littlereal progress bad been made in this direction, up to the time whenCommissioner Lang in 1844 visited the tribes now most advanced. Solittle had been done, that public opinion had acquiesced in theassumption that the Indians were not susceptible of civilization andprogress. The few experiments had not been calculated to assure asuperficial observer. 

The unsupported efforts of Elliot in New England were counteracted by theimprisonment, and in some instances the massacre of his "prayingIndians, " by white men under the exasperation of war with hostile tribes. The salutary influence of the Moravians and Friends in Pennsylvania wasgreatly weakened by the dreadful massacre of the unarmed and blamelessconverts of Gnadenhutten. But since the first visit of CommissionerLang, 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 beenpractically solved. 

The nomadic habits and warlike propensities of the native tribes areindeed formidable but not insuperable difficulties in the way of theirelevation. The wildest of them may compare not unfavorably with thoseNorthern barbarian hordes that swooped down upon Christian Europe, andwho were so soon the docile pupils and proselytes of the peoples they hadconquered. The Arapahoes and Camanches of our day are no further removedfrom the sweetness and light of Christian culture than were theScandinavian Sea Kings of the middle centuries, whose gods were patronsof rapine and cruelty, their heaven a vast, cloud-built ale-house, whereghostly warriors drank from the skulls of their victims, and whose hellwas a frozen horror of desolation and darkness, to be avoided only bydiligence in robbery and courage in murder. The descendants of thesehuman butchers are now among the best exponents of the humanizinginfluence of the gospel of Christ. The report of the Superintendent ofthe remnants of the once fierce and warlike Six Nations, now peaceableand prosperous in Canada, shows that the Indian is not inferior to theNorse ancestors of the Danes and Norwegians of our day in capability ofimprovement. 

It is scarcely necessary to say, what is universally conceded, that thewars waged by the Indians against the whites have, in nearly everyinstance, been provoked by violations of solemn treaties and systematicdisregard of their rights of person, property, and life. The letter ofBishop 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 searchinginvestigation of the subject: "That the Indian goes to war is notastonishing: he is often compelled to do so: wrongs are borne by him insilence, 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 pioneersettlers on the extreme borders of civilization, upon whom the blindvengeance of the wronged and hunted Indians falls oftener than upon thereal wrong-doers. They point to terrible and revolting cruelties asproof that nothing short of the absolute extermination of the race canprevent their repetition. But a moment's consideration compels us toadmit that atrocious cruelty is not peculiar to the red man. "All warsare cruel, " said General Sherman, and for eighteen centuries Christendomhas been a great battle-field. What Indian raid has been more dreadfulthan the sack of Magdeburg, the massacre of Glencoe, the namelessatrocities of the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands, the murders of St. Bartholomew's day, the unspeakable agonies of the South of France underthe demoniac rule of revolution! All history, black with crime and redwith blood, is but an awful commentary upon "man's inhumanity to man, "and it teaches us that there is nothing exceptional in the Indian'sferocity and vindictiveness, and that the alleged reasons for hisextermination would, at one time or another, have applied with equalforce to the whole family of man. 

A late lecture of my friend, Stanley Pumphrey, comprises more of valuableinformation and pertinent suggestions on the Indian question than I havefound in any equal space; and I am glad of the opportunity to add to itmy hearty endorsement, and to express the conviction that its generalcirculation could not fail to awaken a deeper and more kindly interest inthe condition of the red man, and greatly aid in leading the public mindto a fuller appreciation of the responsibility which rests upon us as apeople to rectify, as far as possible, past abuses, and in our futurerelations to the native owners of the soil to "deal justly and lovemercy. "

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 thyclass at the Institution for the Blind have the opportunity afforded themto read through the sense of touch some of my writings, and thus holdwhat I hope will prove a pleasant communion with me. Very glad I shallbe if the pen-pictures of nature, and homely country firesides, which Ihave tried to make, are understood and appreciated by those who cannotdiscern them by natural vision. I shall count it a great privilege tosee for them, or rather to let them see through my eyes. It is the mindafter all that really sees, shapes, and colors all things. What visionsof beauty and sublimity passed before the inward and spiritual sight ofblind Milton and Beethoven!

I have an esteemed friend, Morrison Hendy, of Kentucky, who is deaf andblind; yet under these circumstances he has cultivated his mind to a highdegree, and has written poems of great beauty, and vivid descriptions ofscenes which have been witnessed only by the "light within. "

I thank thee for thy letter, and beg of thee to assure the students thatI am deeply interested in their welfare and progress, and that my prayeris that their inward and spiritual eyes may become so clear that they canwell dispense with the outward and material ones. 

THE INDIAN QUESTION. 

Read at the meeting in Boston, May, 1883, for the consideration of thecondition of the Indians in the United States. 

AMESBURY, 4th mo. , 1883. 

I REGRET that I cannot be present at the meeting called in reference tothe pressing question of the day, the present condition and futureprospects of the Indian race in the United States. The old policy, however well intended, of the government is no longer available. Thewestward setting tide of immigration is everywhere sweeping over thelines of the reservations. There would seem to be no power in thegovernment to prevent the practical abrogation of its solemn treaties andthe crowding out of the Indians from their guaranteed hunting grounds. Outbreaks of Indian ferocity and revenge, incited by wrong and robbery onthe part of the whites, will increasingly be made the pretext ofindiscriminate massacres. The entire question will soon resolve itselfinto the single alternative of education and civilization orextermination. 

The school experiments at Hampton, Carlisle, and Forest Grove in Oregonhave proved, if such proof were ever needed, that the roving Indian canbe enlightened and civilized, taught to work and take interest anddelight in the product of his industry, and settle down on his farm or inhis workshop, as an American citizen, protected by and subject to thelaws of the republic. What is needed is that not only these schoolsshould be more liberally supported, but that new ones should be openedwithout delay. The matter does not admit of procrastination. The workof education and civilization must be done. The money needed must becontributed with no sparing hand. The laudable example set by theFriends and the American Missionary Association should be followed byother sects and philanthropic societies. Christianity, patriotism, andenlightened self interest have a common stake in the matter. Great anddifficult 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 ofthe Essex Club on the 14th inst. I should be glad to meet my oldRepublican friends and congratulate them on the results of the electionin Massachusetts, and especially in our good old county of Essex. 

Some of our friends and neighbors, who have been with us heretofore, lastyear saw fit to vote with the opposite party. I would be the last todeny their perfect right to do so, or to impeach their motives, but Ithink they were mistaken in expecting that party to reform the abuses andevils which they complained of. President Cleveland has proved himselfbetter than his party, and has done and said some good things which Igive him full credit for, but the instincts of his party are against him, and must eventually prove too strong for him, and, instead of hiscarrying the party, it will be likely to carry him. It has alreadycompelled him to put his hands in his pockets for electioneeringpurposes, and travel all the way from Washington to Buffalo to give hisvote for a spoilsman and anti-civil service machine politician. I wouldnot like to call it a case of "offensive partisanship, " but it looks agood deal like it. 

As a Republican from the outset, I am proud of the noble record of theparty, but I should rejoice to see its beneficent work taken up by theDemocratic party and so faithfully carried on as to make our organizationno longer necessary. But, as far as we can see, the Republican party hasstill its mission and its future. When labor shall everywhere have itsjust reward, and the gains of it are made secure to the earners; wheneducation shall be universal, and, North and South, all men shall havethe free and full enjoyment of civil rights and privileges, irrespectiveof color or former condition; when every vice which debases the communityshall be discouraged and prohibited, and every virtue which elevates itfostered and strengthened; when merit and fitness shall be the conditionsof office; and when sectional distrust and prejudice shall give place towell-merited confidence in the loyalty and patriotism of all, then willthe work of the Republican party, as a party, be ended, and all politicalrivalries be merged in the one great party of the people, with no otheraim than the common welfare, and no other watchwords than peace, liberty, and union. Then may the language which Milton addressed to hiscountrymen two centuries ago be applied to the United States, "Go on, hand in hand, O peoples, never to be disunited; be the praise and heroicsong of all posterity. Join your invincible might to do worthy andgodlike deeds; and then he who seeks to break your Union, a cleavingcurse be his inheritance. "

OUR DUMB RELATIONS. (1886. )

IT was said of St. Francis of Assisi, that he had attained, through thefervor of his love, the secret of that deep amity with God and Hiscreation which, in the language of inspiration, makes man to be in leaguewith the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field to be at peacewith him. The world has never been without tender souls, with whom thegolden rule has a broader application than its letter might seem towarrant. The ancient Eastern seers recognized the rights of the brutecreation, and regarded the unnecessary taking of the life of the humblestand meanest as a sin; and in almost all the old religions of the worldthere are legends of saints, in the depth of whose peace with God andnature 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 thatstories and anecdotes of reciprocal kindness and affection between menand animals are always listened to with interest and approval. Howpleasant to think of the Arab and his horse, whose friendship has beencelebrated in song and romance. Of Vogelwied, the Minnesinger, and hisbequest to the birds. Of the English Quaker, visited, wherever he went, by flocks of birds, who with cries of joy alighted on his broad-brimmedhat and his drab coat-sleeves. Of old Samuel Johnson, when half-blindand infirm, groping abroad of an evening for oysters for his cat. OfWalter Scott and John Brown, of Edinburgh, and their dogs. Of our ownThoreau, instinctively recognized by bird and beast as a friend. Emersonsays of him: "His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fullerrecords of Butler, the apologist, that either he had told the beesthings, or the bees had told him. Snakes coiled round his legs; thefishes swam into his hand; he pulled the woodchuck out of his hole by histail, and took foxes under his protection from the hunters. "

In the greatest of the ancient Hindu poems--the sacred book of theMahabharata--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 allfallen 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 kingthinks of his friends who have fallen on the way, and declines to go inwithout 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 enterthe gate. Indra refuses, and thereupon the king declares that to abandonhis 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, andstraightway descends, as he supposes, thither. But his virtue andfaithfulness change his destination to heaven, and he finds himselfsurrounded by his old friends, and in the presence of the gods, who thushonor and reward his humanity and unselfish love. 

INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION. 

Read at the reception in Boston of the English delegation representingmore than two hundred members of the British Parliament who favorinternational arbitration. 

AMESBURY, 11th Mo. , 9, 1887. 

IT is a very serious disappointment to me not to be able to be present atthe welcome of the American Peace Society to the delegation of more thantwo hundred members of the British Parliament who favor internationalarbitration. Few events have more profoundly impressed me than thepresentation of this peaceful overture to the President of the UnitedStates. It seems to me that every true patriot who seeks the bestinterests of his country and every believer in the gospel of Christ mustrespond to the admirable address of Sir Lyon Playfair and that of hiscolleagues who represented the workingmen of England. We do not need tobe told that war is always cruel, barbarous, and brutal; whether used byprofessed Christians with ball and bayonet, or by heathen with club andboomerang. We cannot be blind to its waste of life and treasure and thedemoralization which follows in its train; nor cease to wonder at thespectacle of Christian nations exhausting all their resources inpreparing to slaughter each other, with only here and there a voice, likeCount Tolstoi's in the Russian wilderness, crying in heedless ears thatthe gospel of Christ is peace, not war, and love, not hatred. 

The overture which comes to us from English advocates of arbitration is acheering assurance that the tide of sentiment is turning in favor ofpeace among English speaking peoples. I cannot doubt that whatever stumporators and newspapers may say for party purposes, the heart of Americawill respond to the generous proposal of our kinsfolk across the water. No two nations could be more favorably conditioned than England and theUnited States for making the "holy experiment of arbitration. "

In our associations and kinship, our aims and interests, our commonclaims in the great names and achievements of a common ancestry, we areessentially one people. Whatever other nations may do, we at leastshould be friends. God grant that the noble and generous attempt shallnot be in vain! May it hasten the time when the only rivalry between usshall be the peaceful rivalry of progress and the gracious interchange ofgood. 

 "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 beable to be present at the fortieth anniversary of the Woman's SuffrageAssociation. But, as that is not possible, I can only reiterate myhearty sympathy with the object of the association, and bid it take heartand assurance in view of all that has been accomplished. There is noeasy royal road to a reform of this kind, but if the progress has beenslow there has been no step backward. The barriers which at first seemedimpregnable in the shape of custom and prejudice have been undermined andtheir fall is certain. A prophecy of your triumph at no distant day isin the air; your opponents feel it and believe it. They know that yoursis a gaining and theirs a losing cause. The work still before youdemands on your part great patience, steady perseverance, a firm, dignified, and self-respecting protest against the injustice of which youhave so much reason to complain, and of serene confidence which is notdiscouraged by temporary checks, nor embittered by hostile criticism, norprovoked to use any weapons of retort, which, like the boomerang, fallback on the heads of those who use them. You can affordin your consciousness of right to be as calm and courteous as thearchangel Michael, who, we are told in Scripture in his controversy withSatan himself, did not bring a railing accusation against him. A wiseadaptation of means to ends is no yielding of principle, but care shouldbe taken to avoid all such methods as have disgraced political andreligious parties of the masculine sex. Continue to make it manifestthat all which is pure and lovely and of good repute in womanhood isentirely compatible with the exercise of the rights of citizenship, andthe performance of the duties which we all owe to our homes and ourcountry. Confident that you will do this, and with no doubt or misgivingas to your success, I bid you Godspeed. I find I have written to theassociation rather than to thyself, but as one of the principaloriginators and most faithful supporters, it was very natural that Ishould identify thee with it. 

THE INNER LIFE

THE AGENCY OF EVIL. 

From the Supernaturalism of New England, in the Democratic Review for1843. 

IN this life of ours, so full of mystery, so hung about with wonders, sowritten over with dark riddles, where even the lights held by prophetsand inspired ones only serve to disclose the solemn portals of a futurestate of being, leaving all beyond in shadow, perhaps the darkest andmost difficult problem which presents itself is that of the origin ofevil, --the source whence flow the black and bitter waters of sin andsuffering and discord, --the wrong which all men see in others and feelin themselves, --the unmistakable facts of human depravity and misery. Asuperficial philosophy may attempt to refer all these dark phenomena ofman's existence to his own passions, circumstances, and will; but thethoughtful observer cannot rest satisfied with secondary causes. Thegrossest materialism, at times, reveals something of that latent dreadof an invisible and spiritual influence which is inseparable from ournature. Like Eliphaz the Temanite, it is conscious of a spirit passingbefore its face, the form whereof is not discerned. 

It is indeed true that our modern divines and theologians, as if to atonefor the too easy credulity of their order formerly, have unceremoniouslyconsigned the old beliefs of Satanic agency, demoniacal possession, andwitchcraft, to Milton's receptacle of exploded follies and detectedimpostures, "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 routineof their vocation, they have become the most thorough sceptics andunbelievers among us. Yet it must be owned that, if they have not themarvellous themselves, they are the cause of it in others. In certainstates of mind, the very sight of a clergyman in his sombre professionalgarb is sufficient to awaken all the wonderful within us. Imaginationgoes wandering back to the subtle priesthood of mysterious Egypt. Wethink of Jannes and Jambres; of the Persian magi; dim oak groves, withDruid altars, and priests, and victims, rise before us. For what is thepriest even of our New England but a living testimony to the truth of thesupernatural and the reality of the unseen, --a man of mystery, walking inthe shadow of the ideal world, --by profession an expounder of spiritualwonders? Laugh he may at the old tales of astrology and witchcraft anddemoniacal possession; but does he not believe and bear testimony to hisfaith in the reality of that dark essence which Scripture more than hintsat, which has modified more or less all the religious systems andspeculations of the heathen world, --the Ahriman of the Parsee, the Typhonof the Egyptian, the Pluto of the Roman mythology, the Devil of Jew, Christian, and Mussulman, the Machinito of the Indian, --evil in theuniverse of goodness, darkness in the light of divine intelligence, --initself the great and crowning mystery from which by no unnatural processof imagination may be deduced everything which our forefathers believedof the spiritual world and supernatural agency? That fearful being withhis tributaries and agents, --"the Devil and his angels, "--how awfully herises before us in the brief outline limning of the sacred writers! Howhe glooms, "in shape and gesture proudly eminent, " on the immortal canvasof Milton and Dante! What a note of horror does his name throw into thesweet Sabbath psalmody of our churches. What strange, dark fancies areconnected with the very language of common-law indictments, when grandjuries 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 withwhich I used especially to horrify myself in an old copy of Pilgrim'sProgress. Horned, hoofed, scaly, and fire-breathing, his caudalextremity twisted tight with rage, I remember him, illustrating thetremendous encounter of Christian in the valley where "Apollyon straddledover the whole breadth of the way. " There was another print of the enemywhich made no slight impression upon me. It was the frontispiece of anold, smoked, snuff-stained pamphlet, the property of an elderly lady, (who had a fine collection of similar wonders, wherewith she was kindenough to edify her young visitors, ) containing a solemn account of thefate of a wicked dancing-party in New Jersey, whose irreverentdeclaration, that they would have a fiddler if they had to send to thelower regions after him, called up the fiend himself, who forthwithcommenced playing, while the company danced to the music incessantly, without the power to suspend their exercise, until their feet and legswere worn off to the knees! The rude wood-cut represented the demonfiddler and his agonized companions literally stumping it up and down in"cotillons, jigs, strathspeys, and reels. " He would have answered verywell to the description of the infernal piper in Tam O'Shanter. 

To this popular notion of the impersonation of the principle of evil weare doubtless indebted for the whole dark legacy of witchcraft andpossession. Failing in our efforts to solve the problem of the origin ofevil, we fall back upon the idea of a malignant being, --the antagonism ofgood. Of this mysterious and dreadful personification we find ourselvesconstrained to speak with a degree of that awe and reverence which arealways associated with undefined power and the ability to harm. "TheDevil, " says an old writer, "is a dignity, though his glory be somewhatfaded and wan, and is to be spoken of accordingly. "

The evil principle of Zoroaster was from eternity self-created andexistent, and some of the early Christian sects held the same opinion. The gospel, however, affords no countenance to this notion of a dividedsovereignty of the universe. The Divine Teacher, it is true, indiscoursing of evil, made use of the language prevalent in His time, andwhich was adapted to the gross conceptions of His Jewish bearers; but Henowhere presents the embodiment of sin as an antagonism to the absolutepower and perfect goodness of God, of whom, and through whom, and to whomare all things. Pure himself, He can create nothing impure. Evil, therefore, has no eternity in the past. The fact of its present actualexistence is indeed strongly stated; and it is not given us to understandthe secret of that divine alchemy whereby pain, and sin, and discordbecome the means to beneficent ends worthy of the revealed attributes ofthe Infinite Parent. Unsolved by human reason or philosophy, the darkmystery remains to baffle the generations of men; and only to the eye ofhumble 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 atall. "

"Do you not believe in the Devil?" some one once asked the Non-conformistRobinson. "I believe in God, " was the reply; "don't you?"

Henry of Nettesheim says "that it is unanimously maintained that devilsdo wander up and down in the earth; but what they are, or how they are, ecclesiasticals have not clearly expounded. " Origen, in his Platonicspeculations on this subject, supposed them to be spirits who, byrepentance, might be restored, that in the end all knees might be bowedto the Father of spirits, and He become all in all. Justin Martyr was ofthe opinion that many of them still hoped for their salvation; and theCabalists held that this hope of theirs was well founded. One isirresistibly reminded here of the closing verse of the _Address to theDeil_, 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 hisministers have bodies in some sort material, subject to passions andliable to injury and pain. Origen has a curious notion that any evilspirit who, in a contest with a human being, is defeated, loses fromthenceforth all his power of mischief, and may be compared to a wasp whohas lost his sting. 

"The Devil, " said Samson Occum, the famous Indian preacher, in adiscourse on temperance, "is a gentleman, and never drinks. "Nevertheless it is a remarkable fact, and worthy of the seriousconsideration of all who "tarry long at the wine, " that, in that state ofthe drunkard's malady known as delirium tremens, the adversary, in someshape or other, is generally visible to the sufferers, or at least, asWinslow says of the Powahs, "he appeareth more familiarly to them than toothers. " I recollect a statement made to me by a gentleman who has hadbitter experience of the evils of intemperance, and who is at this timedevoting his fine talents to the cause of philanthropy and mercy, as theeditor of one of our best temperance journals, which left a most vividimpression on my mind. He had just returned from a sea-voyage; and, forthe sake of enjoying a debauch, unmolested by his friends, took up hisabode in a rum-selling tavern in a somewhat lonely location on theseaboard. Here he drank for many days without stint, keeping himself thewhole time in a state of semi-intoxication. One night he stood leaningagainst a tree, looking listlessly and vacantly out upon the ocean; thewaves breaking on the beach, and the white sails of passing vesselsvaguely impressing him like the pictures of a dream. He was startled bya voice whispering hoarsely in his ear, _"You have murdered a man; theofficers of justice are after you; you must fly for your life!"_ Everysyllable was pronounced slowly and separately; and there was something inthe hoarse, gasping sound of the whisper which was indescribablydreadful. He looked around him, and seeing nothing but the clearmoonlight on the grass, became partially sensible that he was the victimof illusion, and a sudden fear of insanity thrilled him with a momentaryhorror. Rallying himself, he returned to the tavern, drank another glassof brandy, and retired to his chamber. He had scarcely lain his head onthe pillow when he heard that hoarse, low, but terribly distinct whisper, repeating the same words. He describes his sensations at this time asinconceivably fearful. Reason was struggling with insanity; but amidstthe confusion and mad disorder one terrible thought evolved itself. Hadhe 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!" Hewalked forward in the direction of the sound, through a long entry, tothe head of the staircase, where he paused for a moment, when again heheard the whisper, half-way down the stairs, "Follow me!"

Trembling with terror, he passed down two flights of stairs, and foundhimself 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 himonward; and, groping after it, his hand touched an upright post, againstwhich he leaned for a moment. He heard it again, apparently only two orthree yards in front of him "You have murdered a man; the officers areclose behind you; follow me!" Putting one foot forward while his handstill grasped the post, it fell upon empty air, and he with difficultyrecovered himself. Stooping down and feeling with his hands, he foundhimself on the very edge of a large uncovered cistern, or tank, fillednearly to the top with water. The sudden shock of this discovery brokethe horrible enchantment. The whisperer was silent. He believed, at thetime, that he had been the subject, and well-nigh the victim, of adiabolical delusion; and he states that, even now, with the recollectionof that strange whisper is always associated a thought of the universaltempter. 

Our worthy ancestors were, in their own view of the matter, the advanceguard and forlorn hope of Christendom in its contest with the bad angel. The New World, into which they had so valiantly pushed the outposts ofthe Church militant, was to them, not God's world, but the Devil's. Theystood there on their little patch of sanctified territory like thegamekeeper of Der Freischutz in the charmed circle; within were prayerand fasting, unmelodious psalmody and solemn hewing of heretics, "beforethe Lord in Gilgal;" without were "dogs and sorcerers, red children ofperdition, Powah wizards, " and "the foul fiend. " In their grand oldwilderness, broken by fair, broad rivers and dotted with loveliest lakes, hanging with festoons of leaf, and vine, and flower, the steep sides ofmountains whose naked tops rose over the surrounding verdure like altarsof a giant world, --with its early summer greenness and the many-coloredwonder of its autumn, all glowing as if the rainbows of a summer showerhad fallen upon it, under the clear, rich light of a sun to which themisty day of their cold island was as moonlight, --they saw no beauty, they recognized no holy revelation. It was to them terrible as theforest which Dante traversed on his way to the world of pain. Everyadvance step they made was upon the enemy's territory. And one has onlyto read the writings of the two Mathers to perceive that that enemy wasto them no metaphysical abstraction, no scholastic definition, no figmentof a poetical fancy, but a living, active reality, alternating betweenthe sublimest possibilities of evil and the lowest details of meanmischief; now a "tricksy spirit, " disturbing the good-wife's platters orsoiling her newwashed linen, and anon riding the storm-cloud and pointingits thunder-bolts; for, as the elder Mather pertinently inquires, "howelse is it that our meeting-houses are burned by the lightning?" Whatwas it, for instance, but his subtlety which, speaking through the lipsof Madame Hutchinson, confuted the "judges of Israel" and put to theirwits' end the godly ministers of the Puritan Zion? Was not his evilfinger manifested in the contumacious heresy of Roger Williams? Who elsegave the Jesuit missionaries--locusts from the pit as they were--such ahold on the affections of those very savages who would not have scrupledto hang the scalp of pious Father Wilson himself from their girdles? Tothe vigilant eye of Puritanism was he not alike discernible in the lightwantonness of the May-pole revellers, beating time with the cloven footto the vain music of obscene dances, and in the silent, hat-canopiedgatherings of the Quakers, "the most melancholy of the sects, " as Dr. Moore calls them? Perilous and glorious was it, under thesecircumstances, for such men as Mather and Stoughton to gird up theirstout loins and do battle with the unmeasured, all-surrounding terror. Let no man lightly estimate their spiritual knight-errantry. The heroesof old romance, who went about smiting dragons, lopping giants' heads, and otherwise pleasantly diverting themselves, scarcely deserve mentionin comparison with our New England champions, who, trusting not to carnalsword and lance, in a contest with principalities and powers, "spiritsthat live throughout, Vital in every part, not as frail man, "--encountered their enemies with weapons forged by the stern spiritualarmorer of Geneva. The life of Cotton Mather is as full of romance asthe legends of Ariosto or the tales of Beltenebros and Florisando inAmadis de Gaul. All about him was enchanted ground; devils glared on himin his "closet wrestlings;" portents blazed in the heavens above him;while he, commissioned and set apart as the watcher, and warder, andspiritual champion of "the chosen people, " stood ever ready for battle, with open eye and quick ear for the detection of the subtle approaches ofthe enemy. No wonder is it that the spirits of evil combined againsthim; that they beset him as they did of old St. Anthony; that they shutup the bowels of the General Court against his long-cherished hope of thepresidency of Old Harvard; that they even had the audacity to lay handson his anti-diabolical manuscripts, or that "ye divil that was in ye girlflewe at and tore" his grand sermon against witches. How edifying is hisaccount of the young bewitched maiden whom he kept in his house for thepurpose of making experiments which should satisfy all "obstinateSadducees"! How satisfactory to orthodoxy and confounding to heresy isthe nice discrimination of "ye divil in ye girl, " who was choked inattempting to read the Catechism, yet found no trouble with a pestilentQuaker pamphlet; who was quiet and good-humored when the worthy Doctorwas idle, but went into paroxysms of rage when he sat down to indite hisdiatribes 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 hisdemons; but little matter of laughter was it to the victims on SalemHill; to the prisoners in the jails; to poor Giles Corey, tortured withplanks upon his breast, which forced the tongue from his mouth and hislife from his old, palsied body; to bereaved and quaking families; to awhole community, priest-ridden and spectresmitten, gasping in the sickdream of a spiritual nightmare and given over to believe a lie. We maylaugh, for the grotesque is blended with the horrible; but we must alsopity and shudder. The clear-sighted men who confronted that delusion inits 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 thebenefactors of their race. It is true they were branded through life asinfidels and "damnable Sadducees;" but the truth which they utteredlived after them, and wrought out its appointed work, for it had a Divinecommission 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 ofmotiveless malignity, presents itself to the imagination. The onceimposing and solemn rite of exorcism has become obsolete in the Church. Men are no longer, in any quarter of the world, racked or pressed underplanks to extort a confession of diabolical alliance. The heretic nowlaughs to scorn the solemn farce of the Church which, in the name of theAll-Merciful, formally delivers him over to Satan. And for the sake ofabused and long-cheated humanity let us rejoice that it is so, when weconsider how for long, weary centuries the millions of professedChristendom stooped, awestricken, under the yoke of spiritual andtemporal despotism, grinding on from generation to generation in adespair which had passed complaining, because superstition, in alliancewith tyranny, had filled their upward pathway to freedom with shapes ofterror, --the spectres of God's wrath to the uttermost, the fiend, andthat torment the smoke of which rises forever. Through fear of a Satanof the future, --a sort of ban-dog of priestcraft, held in its leash andready to be let loose upon the disputers of its authority, --our toilingbrothers of past ages have permitted their human taskmasters to convertGod's beautiful world, so adorned and fitted for the peace and happinessof all, into a great prison-house of suffering, filled with the actualterrors which the imagination of the old poets gave to the realm ofRhadamanthus. And hence, while I would not weaken in the slightestdegree the influence of that doctrine of future retribution, --theaccountability of the spirit for the deeds done in the body, --the truthof which reason, revelation, and conscience unite in attesting as thenecessary result of the preservation in another state of existence of thesoul's individuality and identity, I must, nevertheless, rejoice that themany are no longer willing to permit the few, for their especial benefit, to convert our common Father's heritage into a present hell, where, inreturn for undeserved suffering and toil uncompensated, they can havegracious and comfortable assurance of release from a future one. Betteris the fear of the Lord than the fear of the Devil; holier and moreacceptable the obedience of love and reverence than the submission ofslavish terror. The heart which has felt the "beauty of holiness, " whichhas been in some measure attuned to the divine harmony which now, as ofold in the angel-hymn of the Advent, breathes of "glory to God, peace onearth, and good-will to men, " in the serene atmosphere of that "perfectlove which casteth out fear, " smiles at the terrors which throng the sickdreams of the sensual, which draw aside the nightcurtains of guilt, andstartle with whispers of revenge the oppressor of the poor. 

There is a beautiful moral in one of Fouque's miniature romances, --_DieKohlerfamilie_. The fierce spectre, which rose giant-like, in itsbloodred mantle, before the selfish and mercenary merchant, everincreasing in size and, terror with the growth of evil and impure thoughtin the mind of the latter, subdued by prayer, and penitence, and patientwatchfulness over the heart's purity, became a loving and gentlevisitation of soft light and meekest melody; "a beautiful radiance, attimes hovering and flowing on before the traveller, illuminating thebushes and foliage of the mountain-forest; a lustre strange and lovely, such as the soul may conceive, but no words express. He felt its powerin the depths of his being, --felt it like the mystic breathing of theSpirit of God. "

The excellent Baxter and other pious men of his day deprecated in allsincerity and earnestness the growing disbelief in witchcraft anddiabolical agency, fearing that mankind, losing faith in a visible Satanand in the supernatural powers of certain paralytic old women, woulddiverge into universal skepticism. It is one of the saddest of sights tosee these good men standing sentry at the horn gate of dreams; attemptingagainst the most discouraging odds to defend their poor fallacies fromprofane and irreverent investigation; painfully pleading doubtfulScripture and still more doubtful tradition in behalf of detected andconvicted superstitions tossed on the sharp horns of ridicule, stretchedon the rack of philosophy, or perishing under the exhausted receiver ofscience. A clearer knowledge of the aspirations, capacities, andnecessities of the human soul, and of the revelations which the infiniteSpirit makes to it, not only through the senses by the phenomena ofoutward nature, but by that inward and direct communion which, underdifferent names, has been recognized by the devout and thoughtful ofevery religious sect and school of philosophy, would have saved them muchanxious labor and a good deal of reproach withal in their hopelesschampionship of error. The witches of Baxter and "the black man" ofMather have vanished; belief in them is no longer possible on the part ofsane men. But this mysterious universe, through which, half veiled inits own shadow, our dim little planet is wheeling, with its star worldsand thought-wearying spaces, remains. Nature's mighty miracle is stillover and around us; and hence awe, wonder, and reverence remain to be theinheritance of humanity; still are there beautiful repentances and holydeathbeds; and still over the soul's darkness and confusion rises, starlike, the great idea of duty. By higher and better influences thanthe poor spectres of superstition, man must henceforth be taught toreverence the Invisible, and, in the consciousness of his own weakness, and sin, and sorrow, to lean with childlike trust on the wisdom and mercyof an overruling Providence, --walking by faith through the shadow andmystery, and cheered by the remembrance that, whatever may be hisapparent 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 andits "reasonable service" of devotion transformed by fanaticism andcredulity into superstitious terror and wild extravagance; but, ifpossible, there is one still sadder. It is that of men in our own timeregarding with satisfaction such evidences of human weakness, andprofessing to find in them new proofs of their miserable theory of agodless universe, and new occasion for sneering at sincere devotion ascant, and humble reverence as fanaticism. Alas! in comparison withsuch, the religious enthusiast, who in the midst of his delusion stillfeels that he is indeed a living soul and an heir of immortality, to whomGod speaks from the immensities of His universe, is a sane man. Betteris it, in a life like ours, to be even a howling dervis or a dancingShaker, confronting imaginary demons with Thalaba's talisman of faith, than to lose the consciousness of our own spiritual nature, and look uponourselves as mere brute masses of animal organization, --barnacles on adead universe; looking into the dull grave with no hope beyond it; earthgazing into earth, and saying to corruption, "Thou art my father, " and tothe worm, "Thou art my sister. "

HAMLET AMONG THE GRAVES. (1844. )

AN amiable enthusiast, immortal in his beautiful little romance of Pauland Virginia, has given us in his Miscellanies a chapter on the Pleasuresof Tombs, --a title singular enough, yet not inappropriate; for the meek-spirited and sentimental author has given, in his own flowing andeloquent language, its vindication. "There is, " says he, "a voluptuousmelancholy arising from the contemplation of tombs; the result, likeevery other attractive sensation, of the harmony of two oppositeprinciples, --from the sentiment of our fleeting life and that of ourimmortality, which unite in view of the last habitation of mankind. Atomb is a monument erected on the confines of two worlds. It firstpresents to us the end of the vain disquietudes of life and the image ofeverlasting repose; it afterwards awakens in us the confused sentiment ofa blessed immortality, the probabilities of which grow stronger andstronger in proportion as the person whose memory is recalled was avirtuous 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 thathave been lovely excite so much pleasing regret; for the attractions oflove arise entirely out of the appearances of virtue. Hence it is thatwe are moved at the sight of the small hillock which covers the ashes ofan infant, from the recollection of its innocence; hence it is that weare melted into tenderness on contemplating the tomb in which is laid torepose a young female, the delight and the hope of her family by reasonof her virtues. In order to give interest to such monuments, there is noneed of bronzes, marbles, and gildings. The more simple they are, themore energy they communicate to the sentiment of melancholy. Theyproduce a more powerful effect when poor rather than rich, antique ratherthan modern, with details of misfortune rather than titles of honor, withthe attributes of virtue rather than with those of power. It is in thecountry principally that their impression makes itself felt in a verylively manner. A simple, unornamented grave there causes more tears toflow than the gaudy splendor of a cathedral interment. There it is thatgrief assumes sublimity; it ascends with the aged yews in the churchyard;it extends with the surrounding hills and plains; it allies itself withall the effects of Nature, --with the dawning of the morning, with themurmuring of wind, with the setting of the sun, and with the darkness ofthe night. "

Not long since I took occasion to visit the cemetery near this city. Itis a beautiful location for a "city of the dead, "--a tract of some fortyor fifty acres on the eastern bank of the Concord, gently undulating, andcovered with a heavy growth of forest-trees, among which the white oak isconspicuous. The ground beneath has been cleared of undergrowth, and ismarked here and there with monuments and railings enclosing "familylots. " It is a quiet, peaceful spot; the city, with its crowded mills, its busy streets and teeming life, is hidden from view; not even asolitary farm-house attracts the eye. All is still and solemn, as befitsthe place where man and nature lie down together; where leaves of thegreat lifetree, shaken down by death, mingle and moulder with the frostedfoliage of the autumnal forest. 

Yet the contrast of busy life is not wanting. The Lowell and BostonRailroad crosses the river within view of the cemetery; and, standingthere in the silence and shadow, one can see the long trains rushingalong their iron pathway, thronged with living, breathing humanity, --theyoung, the beautiful, the gay, --busy, wealth-seeking manhood of middleyears, the child at its mother's knee, the old man with whitened hairs, hurrying on, on, --car after car, --like the generations of man sweepingover 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 favoriteresort. The young, the buoyant, the light-hearted, come and linger amongthese flower-sown graves, watching the sunshine falling in broken lightupon these cold, white marbles, and listening to the song of birds inthese leafy recesses. Beautiful and sweet to the young heart is thegentle shadow of melancholy which here falls upon it, soothing, yet sad, --a sentiment midway between joy and sorrow. How true is it, that, in thelanguage 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 decoratedtheir grave-grounds with shrubs and sweet flowers, as places of popularresort. The Turks have their graveyards planted with trees, throughwhich the sun looks in upon the turban stones of the faithful, andbeneath which the relatives of the dead sit in cheerful converse throughthe long days of summer, in all the luxurious quiet and happyindifference of the indolent East. Most of the visitors whom I met atthe 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 thestern and solemn lesson which is taught even by these flower-garlandedmounds. But, for myself, I confess that I am always awed by the presenceof the dead. I cannot jest above the gravestone. My spirit is silencedand 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 remindme that there are those beneath who have looked on the same green leavesand sunshine, felt the same soft breeze upon their cheeks, and listenedto the same wild music of the woods for the last time. Then, too, comesthe saddening reflection, to which so many have given expression, thatthese trees will put forth their leaves, the slant sunshine still fallupon green meadows and banks of flowers, and the song of the birds andthe ripple of waters still be heard after our eyes and ears have closedforever. It is hard for us to realize this. We are so accustomed tolook upon these things as a part of our life environment that it seemsstrange that they should survive us. Tennyson, in his exquisitemetaphysical poem of the Two Voices, has given utterance to thissentiment:--

 "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 theIdumean, seer, there are many who "rejoice exceedingly and are glad whenthey can find the grave;" who long for it "as the servant earnestlydesireth 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 ourcommon mother. Welcome to the tired ear, stunned and confused withlife's jarring discords, the everlasting silence; grateful to the wearyeyes which "have seen evil, and not good, " the everlasting shadow. 

Yet over all hangs the curtain of a deep mystery, --a curtain lifted onlyon one side by the hands of those who are passing under its solemnshadow. No voice speaks to us from beyond it, telling of the unknownstate; no hand from within puts aside the dark drapery to reveal themysteries towards which we are all moving. "Man giveth up the ghost; andwhere is he?"

Thanks to our Heavenly Father, He has not left us altogether without ananswer to this momentous question. Over the blackness of darkness alight is shining. The valley of the shadow of death is no longer "a landof darkness and where the light is as darkness. " The presence of aserene and holy life pervades it. Above its pale tombs and crowdedburial-places, above the wail of despairing humanity, the voice of Himwho awakened life and beauty beneath the grave-clothes of the tomb atBethany is heard proclaiming, "I am the Resurrection and the Life. " Weknow not, it is true, the conditions of our future life; we know not whatit is to pass fromm this state of being to another; but before us in thatdark passage has gone the Man of Nazareth, and the light of His footstepslingers in the path. Where He, our Brother in His humanity, our Redeemerin His divine nature, has gone, let us not fear to follow. He whoordereth all aright will uphold with His own great arm the frail spiritwhen its incarnation is ended; and it may be, that, in language which Ihave 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 isalmost ready to regard Lowell as a sort of sacred city of Mammon, --theBenares 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, unrelievedby awe and reverence, --a selfish, earthward-looking devotion to the"least-erected spirit that fell from paradise. " I grow weary of seeingman and mechanism reduced to a common level, moved by the same impulse, answering to the same bell-call. A nightmare of materialism broods overall. I long at times to hear a voice crying through the streets likethat of one of the old prophets proclaiming the great first truth, --thatthe Lord alone is God. 

Yet is there not another side to the picture? High over soundingworkshops spires glisten in the sun, --silent fingers pointing heavenward. The workshops themselves are instinct with other and subtler processesthan cotton-spinning or carpet-weaving. Each human being who watchesbeside jack or power loom feels more or less intensely that it is asolemn thing to live. Here are sin and sorrow, yearnings for lost peace, outgushing gratitude of forgiven spirits, hopes and fears, which stretchbeyond the horizon of time into eternity. Death is here. The graveyardutters its warning. Over all bends the eternal heaven in its silence andmystery. Nature, even here, is mightier than Art, and God is above all. Underneath the din of labor and the sounds of traffic, a voice, feltrather than beard, reaches the heart, prompting the same fearfulquestions which stirred the soul of the world's oldest poet, --"If a mandie, 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 agonizinginquiry, "What shall I do to be saved?" "Who shall deliver me from thebody of this death?"

As a matter of course, in a city like this, composed of all classes ofour many-sided population, a great variety of religious sects have theirrepresentatives in Lowell. The young city is dotted over with "steeplehouses, " most of them of the Yankee order of architecture. TheEpiscopalians have a house of worship on Merrimac Street, --a pile of darkstone, with low Gothic doors and arched windows. A plat of grass liesbetween it and the dusty street; and near it stands the dwelling-houseintended for the minister, built of the same material as the church andsurrounded by trees and shrubbery. The attention of the stranger is alsoattracted by another consecrated building on the hill slope ofBelvidere, --one of Irving's a "shingle palaces, " painted in imitation ofstone, --a great wooden sham, "whelked and horned" with pine spires andturrets, a sort of whittled representation of the many-beaded beast ofthe Apocalypse. 

In addition to the established sects which have reared their visiblealtars in the City of Spindles, there are many who have not yet markedthe boundaries or set up the pillars and stretched out the curtains oftheir sectarian tabernacles; who, in halls and "upper chambers" and inthe solitude of their own homes, keep alive the spirit of devotion, and, wrapping closely around them the mantles of their order, maintain theintegrity of its peculiarities in the midst of an unbelieving generation. 

Not long since, in company with a friend who is a regular attendant, Ivisited the little meeting of the disciples of Emanuel Swedenborg. Passing over Chapel Hill and leaving the city behind us, we reached thestream which winds through the beautiful woodlands at the Powder Millsand mingles its waters with the Concord. The hall in which the followersof the Gothland seer meet is small and plain, with unpainted seats, likethose of "the people called Quakers, " and looks out upon the still woodsand 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, filledthe place usually occupied by the pulpit, which was here only a plaindesk, placed modestly by the side of it. The congregation have noregular preacher, but the exercises of reading the Scriptures, prayers, and selections from the Book of Worship were conducted by one of the laymembers. A manuscript sermon, by a clergyman of the order in Boston, wasread, and apparently listened to with much interest. It was well writtenand deeply imbued with the doctrines of the church. I was impressed bythe gravity and serious earnestness of the little audience. There werehere no circumstances calculated to excite enthusiasm, nothing of thepomp of religious rites and ceremonies; only a settled conviction of thetruth of the doctrines of their faith could have thus brought themtogether. 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 verycentre and heart of our mechanical civilization, were devoted andundoubting believers in the mysterious and wonderful revelations of theSwedish prophet, --revelations which look through all external and outwardmanifestations to inward realities; which regard all objects in the worldof sense only as the types and symbols of the world of spirit; literallyunmasking the universe and laying bare the profoundest mysteries of life. 

The character and writings of Emanuel Swedenborg constitute one of thepuzzles and marvels of metaphysics and psychology. A man remarkable forhis practical activities, an ardent scholar of the exact sciences, versedin all the arcana of physics, a skilful and inventive mechanician, he hasevolved from the hard and gross materialism of his studies a system oftranscendent spiritualism. From his aggregation of cold and apparentlylifeless practical facts beautiful and wonderful abstractions start forthlike blossoms on the rod of the Levite. A politician and a courtier, aman of the world, a mathematician engaged in the soberest details of thescience, he has given to the world, in the simplest and most naturallanguage, a series of speculations upon the great mystery of being:detailed, matter-of-fact narratives of revelations from the spiritualworld, which at once appall us by their boldness, and excite our wonderat their extraordinary method, logical accuracy, and perfect consistency. These remarkable speculations--the workings of a mind in which a powerfulimagination allied itself with superior reasoning faculties, themarvellous current of whose thought ran only in the diked and guardedchannels of mathematical demonstration--he uniformly speaks of as"facts. " His perceptions of abstractions were so intense that they seemto have reached that point where thought became sensible to sight as wellas feeling. What he thought, that he saw. 

He relates his visions of the spiritual world as he would the incidentsof 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-headedcane" which his London host describes as his inseparable companion inwalking. His graphic descriptions have always an air of naturalness andprobability; yet there is a minuteness of detail at times almostbordering on the ludicrous. In his Memorable Relations he manifestsnothing of the imagination of Milton, overlooking the closed gates ofparadise, or following the "pained fiend" in his flight through chaos;nothing of Dante's terrible imagery appalls us; we are led on from heavento heaven very much as Defoe leads us after his shipwrecked Crusoe. Wecan scarcely credit the fact that we are not traversing our lower planet;and the angels seem vastly like our common acquaintances. We seem torecognize the "John Smiths, " and "Mr. Browns, " and "the old familiarfaces" of our mundane habitation. The evil principle in Swedenborg'spicture is, not the colossal and massive horror of the Inferno, nor thatstern wrestler with fate who darkens the canvas of Paradise Lost, but anaggregation of poor, confused spirits, seeking rest and finding none savein the unsavory atmosphere of the "falses. " These small fry of devilsremind us only of certain unfortunate fellows whom we have known, whoseem incapable of living in good and wholesome society, and who aremanifestly 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 thematerial one. 

In this hurried paper I have neither space nor leisure to attempt ananalysis of the great doctrines which underlie the "revelations" ofSwedenborg. His remarkably suggestive books are becoming familiar to thereading and reflecting portion of the community. They are not unworthyof study; but, in the language of another, I would say, "EmulateSwedenborg in his exemplary life, his learning, his virtues, hisindependent thought, his desire for wisdom, his love of the good andtrue; aim to be his equal, his superior, in these things; but call no manyour 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 theQuarterly Review. 

He who is infinite in love as well as wisdom has revealed to us the factof a future life, and the fearfully important relation in which thepresent stands to it. The actual nature and conditions of that life Hehas hidden from us, --no chart of the ocean of eternity is given us, --nocelestial guidebook or geography defines, localizes, and prepares us forthe wonders of the spiritual world. Hence imagination has a wide fieldfor its speculations, which, so long as they do not positively contradictthe revelation of the Scriptures, cannot be disproved. 

We naturally enough transfer to our idea of heaven whatever we love andreverence on earth. Thither the Catholic carries in his fancy theimposing rites and time-honored solemnities of his worship. There theMethodist sees his love-feasts and camp-meetings in the groves and by thestill waters and green pastures of the blessed abodes. The Quaker, inthe stillness of his self-communing, remembers that there was "silence inheaven. "

The Churchman, listening to the solemn chant of weal music or the deeptones of the organ, thinks of the song of the elders and the golden harpsof the New Jerusalem. 

The heaven of the northern nations of Europe was a gross and sensualreflection of the earthly life of a barbarous and brutal people. 

The Indians of North America had a vague notion of a sunset land, abeautiful paradise far in the west, mountains and forests filled withdeer and buffalo, lakes and streams swarming with fishes, --the happyhunting-ground of souls. In a late letter from a devoted missionaryamong the Western Indians (Paul Blohm, a converted Jew) we have noticed abeautiful illustration of this belief. Near the Omaha mission-house, ona high luff, was a solitary Indian grave. "One evening, "says the missionary, "having come home with some cattle which I had beenseeking, I heard some one wailing; and, looking in the direction fromwhence I proceeded, I found it to be from the grave near our house. In amoment after a mourner rose up from a kneeling or lying posture, and, turning to the setting sun, stretched forth his arms in prayer andsupplication with an intensity and earnestness as though he would detainthe splendid luminary from running his course. With his body leaningforward and his arms stretched towards the sun, he presented a moststriking figure of sorrow and petition. It was solemnly awful. Heseemed to me to be one of the ancients come forth to teach me how topray. "

A venerable and worthy New England clergyman, on his death-bed, justbefore the close of his life, declared that he was only conscious of anawfully solemn and intense curiosity to know the great secret of deathand eternity. 

The excellent Dr. Nelson, of Missouri, was one who, while on earth, seemed to live another and higher life in the contemplation of infinitepurity and happiness. A friend once related an incident concerning himwhich made a deep impression upon my mind. They had been travellingthrough a summer's forenoon in the prairie, and had lain down to restbeneath a solitary tree. The Doctor lay for a long time, silentlylooking upwards through the openings of the boughs into the stillheavens, when he repeated the following lines, in a low tone, as ifcommuning 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 betterland 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 instore for the righteous. Heaven is described as a quiet habitation, --arest remaining for the people of God. Tears shall be wiped away from alleyes; there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neithershall there be any more pain. To how many death-beds have these wordsspoken peace! How many failing hearts have gathered strength from themto pass through the dark valley of shadows!

Yet we should not forget that "the kingdom of heaven is within;" that itis 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 ofeternity. What is really momentous and all-important with us is thepresent, by which the future is shaped and colored. A mere change oflocality cannot alter the actual and intrinsic qualities of the soul. Guilt and remorse would make the golden streets of Paradise intolerableas the burning marl of the infernal abodes; while purity and innocencewould transform hell itself into heaven. 

DORA GREEN WELL. 

First published as an introduction to an American edition of thatauthor's _The Patience of Hope_. 

THERE are men who, irrespective of the names by which they are called inthe Babel confusion of sects, are endeared to the common heart ofChristendom. Our doors open of their own accord to receive them. For inthem we feel that in some faint degree, and with many limitations, theDivine is again manifested: something of the Infinite Love shines out ofthem; their very garments have healing and fragrance borrowed from thebloom of Paradise. So of books. There are volumes which perhaps containmany things, in the matter of doctrine and illustration, to which ourreason does not assent, but which nevertheless seem permeated with acertain sweetness and savor of life. They have the Divine seal andimprimatur; they are fragrant with heart's-ease and asphodel; tonic withthe leaves which are for the healing of the nations. The meditations ofthe devout monk of Kempen are the common heritage of Catholic andProtestant; our hearts burn within us as we walk with Augustine underNumidian fig-trees in the gardens of Verecundus; Feuelon from hisbishop's palace and John Woolman from his tailor's shop speak to us inthe same language. The unknown author of that book which Luther lovednext to his Bible, the Theologia Germanica, is just as truly at home inthis present age, and in the ultra Protestantism of New England, as inthe heart of Catholic Europe, and in the fourteenth century. For suchbooks know no limitations of time or place; they have the perpetualfreshness and fitness of truth; they speak out of profound experienceheart answers to heart as we read them; the spirit that is in man, andthe inspiration that giveth understanding, bear witness to them. Thebent and stress of their testimony are the same, whether written in thisor a past century, by Catholic or Quaker: self-renunciation, --reconcilement to the Divine will through simple faith in the Divinegoodness, and the love of it which must needs follow its recognition, thelife of Christ made our own by self-denial and sacrifice, and thefellowship of His suffering for the good of others, the indwellingSpirit, leading into all truth, the Divine Word nigh us, even in ourhearts. They have little to do with creeds, or schemes of doctrine, orthe partial and inadequate plans of salvation invented by humanspeculation and ascribed to Him who, it is sufficient to know, is able tosave unto the uttermost all who trust in Him. They insist upon simplefaith and holiness of life, rather than rituals or modes of worship; theyleave the merely formal, ceremonial, and temporal part of religion totake care of itself, and earnestly seek for the substantial, thenecessary, and the permanent. 

With these legacies of devout souls, it seems to me, the little volumeherewith presented is not wholly unworthy of a place. It assumes thelife and power of the gospel as a matter of actual experience; it bearsunmistakable evidence of a realization, on the part of its author, of thetruth, that Christianity is not simply historical and traditional, butpresent and permanent, with its roots in the infinite past and itsbranches in the infinite future, the eternal spring and growth of Divinelove; not the dying echo of words uttered centuries ago, never to berepeated, but God's good tidings spoken afresh in every soul, --theperennial fountain and unstinted outflow of wisdom and goodness, foreverold and forever new. It is a lofty plea for patience, trust, hope, andholy confidence, under the shadow, as well as in the light, of Christianexperience, whether the cloud seems to rest on the tabernacle, or movesguidingly forward. It is perhaps too exclusively addressed to those whominister in the inner sanctuary, to be entirely intelligible to thevaster number who wait in the outer courts; it overlooks, perhaps, toomuch the solidarity and oneness of humanity;' but all who read it willfeel its earnestness, and confess to the singular beauty of its style, the strong, steady march of its argument, and the wide and variedlearning 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 ofnature here and there shine out from its lines, --a charm wanting whichmeditative writing always seems to have a defect; beautiful gleams, too, there are of the choicest things of art, and frequent allusions by theway 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 beautifulhills, and winding away from beneath the sunshine of gladness and beautyinto the dense, mysterious forest of human existence, that loves to sing, amid the shadow of human darkness and anguish, its music of heavenbornconsolation; bringing, too, its pure waters of cleansing and healing, yetevermore making its praise of holy affection and gladness; while it isstill haunted by the spirits of prophet, saint, and poet, repeatingsnatches of their strains, and is led on, as by a spirit from above, tojoin 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 forrefreshing water will drink eagerly of these sweet and refreshing words. To thoughtful men and women, especially such as have learnt any of thepatience of hope in the experiences of sorrow and trial, we commend thislittle volume most heartily and earnestly. "

_The Patience of Hope_ fell into my hands soon after its publication inEdinburgh, some two years ago. I was at once impressed by itsextraordinary richness of language and imagery, --its deep and solemn toneof meditation in rare combination with an eminently practical tendency, --philosophy warm and glowing with love. It will, perhaps, be less thefault of the writer than of her readers, if they are not always able toeliminate from her highly poetical and imaginative language the subtlemetaphysical verity or phase of religious experience which she seeks toexpress, or that they are compelled to pass over, without appropriation, many things which are nevertheless profoundly suggestive as vaguepossibilities of the highest life. All may not be able to find in someof her Scriptural citations the exact weight and significance so apparentto her own mind. She startles us, at times, by her novel applications offamiliar texts, by meanings reflected upon them from her own spiritualintuitions, making the barren Baca of the letter a well. If therendering be questionable, the beauty and quaint felicity of illustrationand comparison are unmistakable; and we call to mind Augustine's saying, that two or more widely varying interpretations of Scripture may be aliketrue in themselves considered. "When one saith, Moses meant as I do, 'and another saith, 'Nay, but as I do, ' I ask, more reverently, 'Why notrather as both, if both be true?"

Some minds, for instance, will hesitate to assent to the use of certainScriptural passages as evidence that He who is the Light of men, the Wayand 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 humanweakness, to the selfishness which seeks a sign for itself, to evilimaginations indulged, to the taint and burden of some secret sin, or tosome disease and exaggeration of the conscience, growing out of bodilyinfirmity, rather than to any purpose on the part of our Heavenly Fatherto perplex and mislead His children. The sun does not shine the lessbecause one side of our planet is in darkness. To borrow the words ofAugustine "Thou, Lord, forsakest nothing thou hast made. Thou alone artnear to those even who remove far from thee. Let them turn and seekthee, for not as they have forsaken their Creator hast thou forsaken thycreation. " It is only by holding fast the thought of Infinite Goodness, and interpreting doubtful Scripture and inward spiritual experience bythe light of that central idea, that we can altogether escape thedreadful conclusion of Pascal, that revelation has been given us indubious cipher, contradictory and mystical, in order that some, throughmiraculous aid, may understand it to their salvation, and others bemystified by it to their eternal loss. 

I might mention other points of probable divergence between reader andwriter, and indicate more particularly my own doubtful parse andhesitancy over some of these pages. But it is impossible for me to makeone to whom I am so deeply indebted an offender for a word or aScriptural rendering. On the grave and awful themes which she discusses, I have little to say in the way of controversy. I would listen, ratherthan criticise. The utterances of pious souls, in all ages, are to meoften like fountains in a thirsty land, strengthening and refreshing, yetnot without an after-taste of human frailty and inadequateness, a slightbitterness of disappointment and unsatisfied quest. Who has not felt attimes that the letter killeth, that prophecies fail, and tongues cease toedify, and been ready to say, with the author of the Imitation of Christ:"Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. Let not Moses nor the prophetsspeak to me, but speak thou rather, who art the Inspirer and Enlightenerof all. I am weary with reading and hearing many things; let allteachers hold their peace; let all creatures keep silence: speak thoualone 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 thoughtfulChristians, in a little volume entitled, A Present Heaven. She hasrecently published a collection of poems, of which so competent a judgeas 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, throughsuch deep and subtile thought, and through affection and godliness stilldeeper and more quick, has charmed and soothed them, will not besurprised to learn that she is not only poetical, but, what is more, apoet, and one as true as George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, or our ownCowper; for, with all our admiration of the searching, fearlessspeculation, the wonderful power of speaking clearly upon dark and allbut unspeakable subjects, the rich outcome of 'thoughts that wanderthrough eternity, ' which increases every time we take up that wonderfullittle book, we confess we were surprised at the kind and the amount oftrue poetic _vis_ in these poems, from the same fine and strong hand. There is a personality and immediateness, a sort of sacredness andprivacy, as if they were overheard rather than read, which gives to theseremarkable productions a charm and a flavor all their own. With noeffort, no consciousness of any end but that of uttering the inmostthoughts and desires of the heart, they flow out as clear, as living, asgladdening as the wayside well, coming from out the darkness of thecentral depths, filtered into purity by time and travel. The waters arecopious, sometimes to overflowing; but they are always limpid andunforced, singing their own quiet tune, not saddening, though sometimessad, and their darkness not that of obscurity, but of depth, like that ofthe deep sea. 

"This is not a book to criticise or speak about, and we give no extractsfrom the longer, and in this case, we think, the better poems. Inreading this Cardiphonia set to music, we have been often reminded, notonly of Herbert and Vaughan, but of Keble, --a likeness of the spirit, notof the letter; for if there is any one poet who has given a bent to hermind, it is Wordsworth, --the greatest of all our century's poets, both inhimself and in his power of making poets. "

In the belief that whoever peruses the following pages will besufficiently interested in their author to be induced to turn back andread over again, with renewed pleasure, extracts from her metricalwritings, I copy from the volume so warmly commended a few brief piecesand 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 liberalquotations. Apart from their literary merit, they have a specialinterest for the readers of The Patience of Hope, as more fullyillustrating the writer's personal experience and aspirations. 

It has been suggested by a friend that it is barely possible that anobjection may be urged against the following treatise, as against allbooks of a like character, that its tendency is to isolate the individualfrom his race, and to nourish an exclusive and purely selfish personalsolicitude; that its piety is self-absorbent, and that it does not takesufficiently into account active duties and charities, and the love ofthe neighbor so strikingly illustrated by the Divine Master in His lifeand teachings. This objection, if valid, would be a fatal one. For, ofa truth, there can be no meaner type of human selfishness than thatafforded by him who, unmindful of the world of sin and suffering abouthim, occupies himself in the pitiful business of saving his own soul, inthe very spirit of the miser, watching over his private hoard while hisneighbors starve for lack of bread. But surely the benevolent unrest, the far-reaching sympathies and keen sensitiveness to the suffering ofothers, which so nobly distinguish our present age, can have nothing tofear from a plea for personal holiness, patience, hope, and resignationto the Divine will. "The more piety, the more compassion, " says IsaacTaylor; and this is true, if we understand by piety, not self-concentredasceticism, but the pure religion and undefiled which visits the widowand the fatherless, and yet keeps itself unspotted from the world, --whichdeals 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 tothe reformer and philanthropist. The spiritual warrior, like the youngcandidate for knighthood, may be none the worse for his preparatoryordeal of watching all night by his armor. 

Tauler in mediaeval times and Woolman in the last century are among themost earnest teachers of the inward life and spiritual nature ofChristianity, yet both were distinguished for practical benevolence. They did not separate the two great commandments. Tauler strove withequal intensity of zeal to promote the temporal and the spiritual welfareof men. In the dark and evil time in which he lived, amidst the untoldhorrors of the "Black Plague, " he illustrated by deeds of charity andmercy his doctrine of disinterested benevolence. Woolman's whole lifewas a nobler Imitation of Christ than that fervid rhapsody of monasticpiety which bears the name. 

How faithful, yet, withal, how full of kindness, were his rebukes ofthose who refused labor its just reward, and ground the faces of thepoor? How deep and entire was his sympathy with overtasked and ill-paidlaborers; with wet and illprovided sailors; with poor wretchesblaspheming in the mines, because oppression had made them mad; with thedyers 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 significancethere was in his vision of the "dull, gloomy mass" which appeared beforehim, darkening half the heavens, and which he was told was "human beingsin 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 separatebeing"! His saintliness was wholly unconscious; he seems never to havethought himself any nearer to the tender heart of God than the mostmiserable sinner to whom his compassion extended. As he did notlive, so neither did he die to himself. His prayer upon his death-bedwas for others rather than himself; its beautiful humility and simpletrust were marred by no sensual imagery of crowns and harps and goldenstreets, and personal beatific exaltations; but tender and touchingconcern for suffering humanity, relieved only by the thought of thepaternity of God, and of His love and omnipotence, alone found utterancein ever-memorable words. 

In view of the troubled state of the country and the intensepreoccupation of the public mind, I have had some hesitation in offeringthis volume to its publishers. But, on further reflection, it has seemedto me that it might supply a want felt by many among us; that, in thechaos of civil strife and the shadow of mourning which rests over theland, the contemplation of "things unseen which are eternal" might not beunwelcome; that, when the foundations of human confidence are shaken, andthe trust in man proves vain, there might be glad listeners to a voicecalling from the outward and the temporal to the inward and thespiritual; from the troubles and perplexities of time, to the eternalquietness which God giveth. I cannot but believe that, in the heat andglare through which we are passing, this book will not invite in vain tothe calm, sweet shadows of holy meditation, grateful as the green wingsof the bird to Thalaba in the desert; and thus afford something ofconsolation to the bereaved, and of strength to the weary. For surelynever was the Patience of Hope more needed; never was the inner sanctuaryof prayer more desirable; never was a steadfast faith in the Divinegoodness more indispensable, nor lessons of self-sacrifice andrenunciation, and that cheerful acceptance of known duty which shifts notits proper responsibility upon others, nor asks for "peace in its day" atthe expense of purity and justice, more timely than now, when the solemnwords of ancient prophecy are as applicable to our own country as to thatof the degenerate Jew, --"Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thybacksliding reprove thee; know, therefore, it is an evil thing, andbitter, that thou bast forsaken the Lord, and that my fear is not inthee, "--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 whoseright it is shall reign, "--until, not without rending agony, the evilplant which our Heavenly Father hath not planted, whose roots have woundthemselves about altar and hearth-stone, and whose branches, like thetree Al-Accoub in Moslem fable, bear the accursed fruit of oppression, rebellion, and all imaginable crime, shall be torn up and destroyedforever. 

AMESBURY, 1st 6th mo. , 1862. 

THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS. 

The following letters were addressed to the Editor of the Friends' Reviewin Philadelphia, in reference to certain changes of principle andpractice in the Society then beginning to be observable, but which havesince 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 anindifferent, spectator of the movements now going on in our religiousSociety. Perhaps from lack of faith, I have been quite too solicitousconcerning them, and too much afraid that in grasping after new things wemay let go of old things too precious to be lost. Hence I have beenpleased to see from time to time in thy paper very timely and fittingarticles upon a _Hired Ministry_ and _Silent Worship_. 

The present age is one of sensation and excitement, of extreme measuresand opinions, of impatience of all slow results. The world about usmoves with accelerated impulse, and we move with it: the rest we haveenjoyed, whether true or false, is broken; the title-deeds of ouropinions, the reason of our practices, are demanded. Our very right toexist as a distinct society is questioned. Our old literature--theprecious journals and biographies of early and later Friends--iscomparatively neglected for sensational and dogmatic publications. Webear complaints of a want of educated ministers; the utility of silentmeetings is denied, and praying and preaching regarded as matters of willand option. There is a growing desire for experimenting upon the dogmasand expedients and practices of other sects. I speak only of admittedfacts, and not for the purpose of censure or complaint. No one has lessright than myself to indulge in heresy-hunting or impatience of minordifferences of opinion. If my dear friends can bear with me, I shall notfind it a hard task to bear with them. 

But for myself I prefer the old ways. With the broadest possibletolerance for all honest seekers after truth! I love the Society ofFriends. My life has been nearly spent in laboring with those of othersects in behalf of the suffering and enslaved; and I have never felt likequarrelling with Orthodox or Unitarians, who were willing to pull withme, side by side, at the rope of Reform. A very large proportion of mydearest personal friends are outside of our communion; and I have learnedwith John Woolman to find "no narrowness respecting sects and opinions. "But after a kindly and candid survey of them all, I turn to my ownSociety, 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. Icheerfully recognize and bear testimony to the good works and lives ofthose who widely differ in faith and practice; but I have seen no truertypes of Christianity, no better men and women, than I have known andstill know among those who not blindly, but intelligently, hold thedoctrines and maintain the testimonies of our early Friends. I am notblind to the shortcomings of Friends. I know how much we have lost bynarrowness and coldness and inactivity, the overestimate of externalobservances, the neglect of our own proper work while acting asconscience-keepers for others. We have not, as a society, been activeenough in those simple duties which we owe to our suffering fellow-creatures, in that abundant labor of love and self-denial which is neverout of place. Perhaps our divisions and dissensions might have beenspared us if we had been less "at ease in Zion. " It is in the decline ofpractical righteousness that men are most likely to contend with eachother for dogma and ritual, for shadow and letter, instead of substanceand spirit. Hence I rejoice in every sign of increased activity in doinggood among us, in the precious opportunities afforded of working with theDivine Providence for the Freedmen and Indians; since the more we do, inthe true spirit of the gospel, for others, the more we shall really dofor ourselves. There is no danger of lack of work for those who, with aneye 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 thisworld of ours, now full of sin and suffering, shall take up, in jubilantthanksgiving, 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 inwhich we live, that there is a repression of individuality and manlinessamong us. I am not prepared to deny it in certain respects. But, if welook at the matter closely, we shall see that the cause is not in thecentral truth of Quakerism, but in a failure to rightly comprehend it; inan attempt to fetter with forms and hedge about with dogmas that greatlaw of Christian liberty, which I believe affords ample scope for thehighest spiritual aspirations and the broadest philanthropy. If we didbut 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 "exceedingbroad. " As interpreted by Penn and Barclay it is the most liberal andcatholic of faiths. If we are not free, generous, tolerant, if we arenot up to or above the level of the age in good works, in culture andlove of beauty, order and fitness, if we are not the ready recipients ofthe truths of science and philosophy, --in a word, if we are not full-grown men and Christians, the fault is not in Quakerism, but inourselves. We shall gain nothing by aping the customs and trying toadjust ourselves to the creeds of other sects. By so doing we make atthe 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, forinstance, I could bring myself to believe a hired ministry and a writtencreed essential to my moral and spiritual well-being, I think I shouldprefer to sit down at once under such teachers as Bushnell and Beecher, the like of whom in Biblical knowledge, ecclesiastical learning, andintellectual power, we are not likely to manufacture by half a century oftheological manipulation in a Quaker "school of the prophets. " If I mustgo into the market and buy my preaching, I should naturally seek the bestarticle 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 Ibear 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 thepractices, forms, and creeds of more demonstrative sects. The greatapparent activity of these sects seems to them to contrast very stronglywith our quietness and reticence; and they do not always pause to inquirewhether the result of this activity is a truer type of practicalChristianity than is found in our select gatherings. I think Iunderstand 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 ingoing back to the "beggarly elements" from which our worthy ancestorscalled the people of their generation; not in will-worship; not insetting the letter above the spirit; not in substituting type and symbol, and oriental figure and hyperbole for the simple truths they wereintended to represent; not in schools of theology; not in much speakingand noise and vehemence, nor in vain attempts to make the "plainlanguage" of Quakerism utter the Shibboleth of man-made creeds: but inheeding more closely the Inward Guide and Teacher; in faith in Christ notmerely in His historical manifestation of the Divine Love to humanity, but in His living presence in the hearts open to receive Him; in love forHim 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 visitthe fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himselfunspotted from the world. "

In conclusion, let me say that I have given this expression of myopinions with some degree of hesitation, being very sensible that I haveneither the right nor the qualification to speak for a society whosedoctrines and testimonies commend themselves to my heart and head, whosehistory is rich with the precious legacy of holy lives, and of whoseusefulness as a moral and spiritual Force in the world I am fullyassured. 

II. 

Having received several letters from dear friends in various sectionssuggested by a recent communication in thy paper, and not having time orhealth to answer them in detail, will thou permit me in this way toacknowledge them, and to say to the writers that I am deeply sensible ofthe Christian love and personal good-will to myself, which, whether incommendation or dissent, they manifest? I think I may say in truth thatmy letter was written in no sectarian or party spirit, but simply toexpress a solicitude, which, whether groundless or not, was neverthelessreal. I am, from principle, disinclined to doctrinal disputations andso-called religious controversies, which only tend to separate anddisunite. We have had too many divisions already. I intended no censureof dear brethren whose zeal and devotion command my sympathy, notwithstanding I may not be able to see with them in all respects. Thedomain of individual conscience is to me very sacred; and it seems thepart of Christian charity to make a large allowance for varyingexperiences; mental characteristics, and temperaments, as well as forthat youthful enthusiasm which, if sometimes misdirected, has often beeninstrumental in infusing a fresher life into the body of religiousprofession. It is too much to expect that we can maintain an entireuniformity in the expression of truths in which we substantially agree;and we should be careful that a rightful concern for "the form of soundwords" does not become what William Penn calls "verbal orthodoxy. " Wemust consider that the same accepted truth looks somewhat differentlyfrom different points of vision. Knowing our own weaknesses andlimitations, we must bear in mind that human creeds, speculations, expositions, and interpretations of the Divine plan are but the faint andfeeble 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 indeedhave the "mind of Christ, " we shall rejoice in whatever of good is reallyaccomplished, although by somewhat different instrumentalities than thosewhich we feel ourselves free to make use of, remembering that our Lordrebuked the narrowness and partisanship of His disciples by assuring themthat they that were not against Him were for Him. 

It would, nevertheless, give me great satisfaction to know, as thy kindlyexpressed editorial comments seem to intimate, that I have somewhatoverestimated the tendencies of things in our Society. I have no prideof opinion which would prevent me from confessing with thankfulness myerror of judgment. In any event, it can, I think, do no harm to repeatmy deep conviction that we may all labor, in the ability given us, forour own moral and spiritual well-being, and that of our fellow-creatures, without laying aside the principles and practice of our religiousSociety. I believe so much of liberty is our right as well as ourprivilege, and that we need not really overstep our bounds for theperformance of any duty which may be required of us. When truly calledto contemplate broader fields of labor, we shall find the walls about us, like the horizon seen from higher levels, expanding indeed, but nowherebroken. 

I believe that the world needs the Society of Friends as a testimony anda standard. I know that this is the opinion of some of the best and mostthoughtful members of other Christian sects. I know that any seriousdeparture from the original foundation of our Society would give pain tomany who, outside of our communion, deeply realize the importance of ourtestimonies. They fail to read clearly the signs of the times who do notsee that the hour is coming when, under the searching eye of philosophyand the terrible analysis of science, the letter and the outward evidencewill not altogether avail us; when the surest dependence must be upon theLight of Christ within, disclosing the law and the prophets in our ownsouls, and confirming the truth of outward Scripture by inwardexperience; when smooth stones from the brook of present revelationshall' prove mightier than the weapons of Saul; when the doctrine of theHoly Spirit, as proclaimed by George Fox and lived by John Woolman, shallbe recognized as the only efficient solvent of doubts raised by an age ofrestless inquiry. In this belief my letter was written. I am sorry itdid not fall to the lot of a more fitting hand; and can only hope that noconsideration of lack of qualification on the part of its writer maylessen 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 ofthe Proceedings of the late First-day School Conference in Philadelphia, where, with some things which I am compelled to pause over, and regret, Ifind much with which I cordially unite, and which seems to indicate aprovidential opening for good. I confess to a lively and tender sympathywith my younger brethren and sisters who, in the name of Him who "wentabout doing good, " go forth into the highways and byways to gather up thelost, feed the hungry, instruct the ignorant, and point the sinsick andsuffering to the hopes and consolations of Christian faith, even if, attimes, their zeal goes beyond "reasonable service, " and although theimportance of a particular instrumentality may be exaggerated, and lovelose sight of its needful companion humility, and he that putteth on hisarmor boast like him who layeth it off. Any movement, however irregular, which indicates life, is better than the quiet of death. In theoverruling providence of God, the troubling may prepare the way forhealing. 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 difficultof explanation than the strength of moral influence often exerted byobscure and uneventful lives. Some great reform which lifts the world toa higher level, some mighty change for which the ages have waited inanxious expectancy, takes place before our eyes, and, in seeking to traceit back to its origin, we are often surprised to find the initial link inthe chain of causes to be some comparatively obscure individual, thedivine commission and significance of whose life were scarcely understoodby his contemporaries, and perhaps not even by himself. The little onehas become a thousand; the handful of corn shakes like Lebanon. "Thekingdom of God cometh not by observation;" and the only solution of themystery is in the reflection that through the humble instrumentalityDivine power was manifested, and that the Everlasting Arm was beneath thehuman one. 

The abolition of human slavery now in process of consummation throughoutthe world furnishes one of the most striking illustrations of this truth. A far-reaching moral, social, and political revolution, undoing the evilwork of centuries, unquestionably owes much of its original impulse tothe life and labors of a poor, unlearned workingman of New Jersey, whosevery existence was scarcely known beyond the narrow circle of hisreligious society. 

It is only within a comparatively recent period that the journal andethical essays of this remarkable man have attracted the attention towhich they are manifestly entitled. In one of my last interviews withWilliam Ellery Channing, he expressed his very great surprise that theywere so little known. He had himself just read the book for the firsttime, and I shall never forget how his countenance lighted up as hepronounced it beyond comparison the sweetest and purest autobiography inthe language. He wished to see it placed within the reach of all classesof 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 BernardBarton, became acquainted with it, and on more than one occasion, in hisletters and Essays of Elia, refers to it with warm commendation. EdwardIrving pronounced it a godsend. Some idea of the lively interest whichthe fine literary circle gathered around the hearth of Lamb felt in thebeautiful simplicity of Woolman's pages may be had from the Diary ofHenry Crabb Robinson, one of their number, himself a man of wide andvaried culture, the intimate friend of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. In his notes for First Month, 1824, he says, after a reference to asermon of his friend Irving, which he feared would deter rather thanpromote belief:

"How different this from John Woolman's Journal I have been reading atthe same time! A perfect gem! His is a _schone Seele_, a beautifulsoul. An illiterate tailor, he writes in a style of the most exquisitepurity and grace. His moral qualities are transferred to his writings. Had he not been so very humble, he would have written a still betterbook; for, fearing to indulge in vanity, he conceals the events in whichhe was a great actor. His religion was love. His whole existence andall his passions were love. If one could venture to impute to his creed, and not to his personal character, the delightful frame of mind heexhibited, one could not hesitate to be a convert. His Christianity ismost inviting, it is fascinating! One of the leading British reviews afew years ago, referring to this Journal, pronounced its author the manwho, in all the centuries since the advent of Christ, lived nearest tothe Divine pattern. The author of The Patience of Hope, whose authorityin devotional literature is unquestioned, says of him: 'John Woolman'sgift was love, a charity of which it does not enter into the naturalheart of man to conceive, and of which the more ordinary experiences, even of renewed nature, give but a faint shadow. Every now and then, inthe world's history, we meet with such men, the kings and priests ofHumanity, on whose heads this precious ointment has been so poured forththat it has run down to the skirts of their clothing, and extended overthe whole of the visible creation; men who have entered, like Francis ofAssisi, into the secret of that deep amity with God and with Hiscreatures 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 thatcomes and goes in showers and gleams and sunbursts. Its springs are deepand constant, its rising is like that of a mighty river, its veryoverflow calm and steady, leaving life and fertility behind it. '"

After all, anything like personal eulogy seems out of place in speakingof one who in the humblest self-abasement sought no place in the world'sestimation, content to be only a passive instrument in the hands of hisMaster; and who, as has been remarked, through modesty concealed theevents in which he was an actor. A desire to supply in some sort thisdeficiency in his Journal is my especial excuse for this introductorypaper. 

It is instructive to study the history of the moral progress ofindividuals or communities; to mark the gradual development of truth; towatch the slow germination of its seed sown in simple obedience to thecommand of the Great Husbandman, while yet its green promise, as well asits golden fruition, was hidden from the eyes of the sower; to go back tothe well-springs and fountain-heads, tracing the small streamlet from itshidden source, and noting the tributaries which swell its waters, as itmoves onward, until it becomes a broad river, fertilizing and gladdeningour present humanity. To this end it is my purpose, as briefly aspossible, to narrate the circumstances attending the relinquishment ofslave-holding by the Society of Friends, and to hint at the effect ofthat act of justice and humanity upon the abolition of slavery throughoutthe world. 

At an early period after the organization of the Society, members of itemigrated 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 ablessing. Andrew Marvell, the inflexible republican statesman, in someof the sweetest and tenderest lines in the English tongue, has happilydescribed 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 thecolonists around them. No positive condemnation of the evil system hadthen been heard in the British islands. Neither English prelates norexpounders at dissenting conventicles had aught to say against it. Fewcolonists doubted its entire compatibility with Christian profession andconduct. Saint and sinner, ascetic and worldling, united in itspractice. Even the extreme Dutch saints of Bohemia Manor community, thepietists of John de Labadie, sitting at meat with hats on, and pausingever and anon with suspended mouthfuls to bear a brother's or sister'sexhortation, and sandwiching prayers between the courses, were waitedupon by negro slaves. Everywhere men were contending with each otherupon 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 mistsof custom and prejudice something of the lineaments of absolute truth, and who, like the Hebrew lawgiver, bear with them, from a higher andpurer atmosphere, the shining evidence of communion with the DivineWisdom. He saw slavery in its mildest form among his friends, but hisintuitive sense of right condemned it. He solemnly admonished those whoheld slaves to bear in mind that they were brethren, and to train them upin the fear of God. "I desired, also, " he says, "that they would causetheir overseers to deal gently and mildly with their negroes, and not usecruelty 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, revisitedBarbadoes, and once more bore testimony against the unjust treatment ofslaves. He was accused of endeavoring to excite an insurrection amongthe blacks, and was brought before the Governor on the charge. It wasprobably during this journey that he addressed a remonstrance to friendsin Maryland and Virginia on the subject of holding slaves. It is one ofthe first emphatic and decided testimonies on record against negroslavery as incompatible with Christianity, if we except the Papal bullsof Urban and Leo the Tenth. 

Thirteen years after, in 1688, a meeting of German Quakers, who hademigrated from Kriesbeim, and settled at Germantown, Pennsylvania, addressed a memorial against "the buying and keeping of negroes" to theYearly Meeting for the Pennsylvania and New Jersey colonies. Thatmeeting took the subject into consideration, but declined giving judgmentin the case. In 1696, the Yearly Meeting advised against "bringing inany more negroes. " In 1714, in its Epistle to London Friends, itexpresses a wish that Friends would be "less concerned in buying orselling slaves. " The Chester Quarterly Meeting, which had taken a higherand clearer view of the matter, continued to press the Yearly Meeting toadopt some decided measure against any traffic in human beings. 

The Society gave these memorials a cold reception. The love of gain andpower was too strong, on the part of the wealthy and influential plantersand merchants who had become slaveholders, to allow the scruples of theChester meeting to take the shape of discipline. The utmost that couldbe obtained of the Yearly Meeting was an expression of opinion adverse tothe importation of negroes, and a desire that "Friends generally do, asmuch as may be, avoid buying such negroes as shall hereafter be broughtin, rather than offend any Friends who are against it; yet this is onlycaution, and not censure. "

In the mean time the New England Yearly Meeting was agitated by the samequestion. Slaves were imported into Boston and Newport, and Friendsbecame purchasers, and in some instances were deeply implicated in theforeign traffic. In 1716, the monthly meetings of Dartmouth andNantucket suggested that it was "not agreeable to truth to purchaseslaves and keep them during their term of life. " Nothing was done in theYearly Meeting, however, until 1727, when the practice of importingnegroes was censured. That the practice was continued notwithstanding, for many years afterwards, is certain. In 1758, a rule was adoptedprohibiting Friends within the limits of New England Yearly Meeting fromengaging in or countenancing the foreign slave-trade. 

In the year 1742 an event, simple and inconsiderable in itself, was madethe instrumentality of exerting a mighty influence upon slavery in theSociety of Friends. A small storekeeper at Mount Holly, in New Jersey, amember of the Society, sold a negro woman, and requested the young man inhis 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 inhis mind. The thought of writing an instrument of slavery for one of hisfellow-creatures oppressed him. God's voice against the desecration ofHis image spoke in the soul. He yielded to the will of his employer, but, while writing the instrument, he was constrained to declare, both tothe buyer and the seller, that he believed slave-keeping inconsistentwith the Christian religion. This young man was John Woolman. Thecircumstance above named was the starting-point of a life-long testimonyagainst slavery. In the year 1746 he visited Maryland, Virginia, andNorth Carolina. He was afflicted by the prevalence of slavery. Itappeared to him, in his own words, "as a dark gloominess overhanging theland. " On his return, he wrote an essay on the subject, which waspublished in 1754. Three years after, he made a second visit to theSouthern meetings of Friends. Travelling as a minister of the gospel, hewas compelled to sit down at the tables of slaveholding planters, whowere accustomed to entertain their friends free of cost, and who couldnot comprehend the scruples of their guest against receiving as a giftfood and lodging which he regarded as the gain of oppression. He was apoor man, but he loved truth more than money. He therefore either placedthe 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 hadopportunity. Wherever he went, he found his fellow-professors entangledin the mischief of slavery. Elders and ministers, as well as the youngerand less high in profession, had their house servants and field hands. He found grave drab-coated apologists for the slave-trade, who quoted thesame Scriptures, in support of oppression and avarice, which have sincebeen cited by Presbyterian doctors of divinity, Methodist bishops; andBaptist preachers for the same purpose. He found the meetings generallyin 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 ofdominion. "

 (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 toconvince the masters of their error, and to awaken a degree of sympathyfor the enslaved. 

At this period, or perhaps somewhat earlier, a remarkable personage tookup his residence in Pennsylvania. He was by birthright a member of theSociety of Friends, but having been disowned in England for someextravagances of conduct and language, he spent several years in the WestIndies, where he became deeply interested in the condition of the slaves. His violent denunciations of the practice of slaveholding excited theanger of the planters, and he was compelled to leave the island. He cameto Philadelphia, but, contrary to his expectations, he found the sameevil existing there. He shook off the dust of the city, and took up hisabode in the country, a few miles distant. His dwelling was a naturalcave, with some slight addition of his own making. His drink was thespring-water flowing by his door; his food, vegetables alone. Hepersistently refused to wear any garment or eat any food purchased at theexpense of animal life, or which was in any degree the product of slavelabor. Issuing from his cave, on his mission of preaching "deliveranceto the captive, " he was in the habit of visiting the various meetings forworship and bearing his testimony against slaveholders, greatly to theirdisgust and indignation. On one occasion he entered the Market StreetMeeting, and a leading Friend requested some one to take him out. Aburly blacksmith volunteered to do it, leading him to the gate andthrusting him out with such force that he fell into the gutter of thestreet. There he lay until the meeting closed, telling the bystandersthat he did not feel free to rise himself. "Let those who cast me hereraise me up. It is their business, not mine. "

His personal appearance was in remarkable keeping with his eccentriclife. A figure only four and a half feet high, hunchbacked, withprojecting chest, legs small and uneven, arms longer than his legs; ahuge head, showing only beneath the enormous white hat large, solemn eyesand a prominent nose; the rest of his face covered with a snowysemicircle of beard falling low on his breast, --a figure to recall theold legends of troll, brownie, and kobold. Such was the irrepressibleprophet who troubled the Israel of slave-holding Quakerism, clinging likea rough chestnut-bur to the skirts of its respectability, and settlinglike 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, theunwelcome figure of Benjamin Lay, wrapped in his long white overcoat, was seen passing up the aisle. Stopping midway, he exclaimed, "Youslaveholders! 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 outergarment, he disclosed to the astonished assembly a military coatunderneath and a sword dangling at his heels. Holding in one hand alarge book, he drew his sword with the other. "In the sight of God, " hecried, "you are as guilty as if you stabbed your slaves to the heart, asI do this book!" suiting the action to the word, and piercing a smallbladder filled with the juice of poke-weed (playtolacca decandra), whichhe had concealed between the covers, and sprinkling as with fresh bloodthose who sat near him. John Woolman makes no mention of thiscircumstance in his Journal, although he was probably present, and itmust have made a deep impression on his sensitive spirit. The violenceand harshness of Lay's testimony, however, had nothing in common withthe tender and sorrowful remonstrances and appeals of the former, exceptthe 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, AnthonyBenezet, a man of uncommon tenderness of feeling, began to write andspeak against slavery. How far, if at all, he was moved thereto by theexample of Woolman is not known, but it is certain that the latter foundin him a steady friend and coadjutor in his efforts to awaken theslumbering moral sense of his religious brethren. The Marquis deChastellux, author of _De la Felicite Publique_, describes him as asmall, eager-faced man, full of zeal and activity, constantly engaged inworks 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 NovaScotia, and landed penniless and despairing among strangers in tongue andreligion, found in him a warm and untiring friend, through whose aid andsympathy their condition was rendered more comfortable than that of theirfellow-exiles in other colonies. 

The annual assemblage of the Yearly Meeting in 1758 at Philadelphia mustever be regarded as one of the most important religious convocations inthe history of the Christian church. The labors of Woolman and his fewbut earnest associates had not been in vain. A deep and tender interesthad been awakened; and this meeting was looked forward to with variedfeelings of solicitude by all parties. All felt that the time had comefor some definite action; conservative and reformer stood face to face inthe Valley of Decision. John Woolman, of course, was present, --a manhumble and poor in outward appearance, his simple dress of undyedhomespun cloth contrasting strongly with the plain but rich apparel ofthe representatives of the commerce of the city and of the large slave-stocked plantations of the country. Bowed down by the weight of hisconcern for the poor slaves and for the well-being and purity of theSociety, he sat silent during the whole meeting, while other matters wereunder discussion. "My mind, " he says, "was frequently clothed withinward prayer; and I could say with David that 'tears were my meat anddrink, day and night. ' The case of slave-keeping lay heavy upon me; nordid I find any engagement, to speak directly to any other matter beforethe meeting. " When the important subject came up for consideration, manyfaithful Friends spoke with weight and earnestness. No one openlyjustified slavery as a system, although some expressed a concern lest themeeting should go into measures calculated to cause uneasiness to manymembers of the Society. It was also urged that Friends should waitpatiently until the Lord in His own time should open a way for thedeliverance of the slave. This was replied to by John Woolman. "Mymind, " he said, "is led to consider the purity of the Divine Being, andthe justice of His judgments; and herein my soul is covered withawfulness. I cannot forbear to hint of some cases where people have notbeen treated with the purity of justice, and the event has been mostlamentable. Many slaves on this continent are oppressed, and their crieshave entered into the ears of the Most High. Such are the purity andcertainty of His judgments that He cannot be partial in our favor. Ininfinite love and goodness He hath opened our understandings from onetime to another, concerning our duty towards this people; and it is not atime for delay. Should we now be sensible of what He requires of us, andthrough a respect to the private interest of some persons, or through aregard to some friendships which do not stand upon an immutablefoundation, neglect to do our duty in firmness and constancy, stillwaiting 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 membersexpressed their willingness that a strict rule of discipline should beadopted against dealing in slaves for the future. To this it wasanswered that the root of the evil would never be reached effectuallyuntil a searching inquiry was made into the circumstances and motives ofsuch as held slaves. At length the truth in a great measure triumphedover all opposition; and, without any public dissent, the meeting agreedthat the injunction of our Lord and Saviour to do to others as we wouldthat others should do to us should induce Friends who held slaves "to setthem at liberty, making a Christian provision for them, " and fourFriends--John Woolman, John Scarborough, Daniel Stanton, and John Sykes--were approved of as suitable persons to visit and treat with such as keptslaves, within the limits of the meeting. 

This painful and difficult duty was faithfully performed. In thatmeekness and humility of spirit which has nothing in common with the"fear of man, which bringeth a snare, " the self-denying followers oftheir Divine Lord and Master "went about doing good. " In the city ofPhiladelphia, and among the wealthy planters of the country, they foundoccasion often to exercise a great degree of patience, and to keep awatchful guard over their feelings. In his Journal for this importantperiod of his life John Woolman says but little of his own services. Howarduous and delicate they were may be readily understood. The number ofslaves held by members of the Society was very large. Isaac Jackson, inhis report of his labors among slave-holders in a single QuarterlyMeeting, states that he visited the owners of more than eleven hundredslaves. From the same report may be gleaned some hints of thedifficulties which presented themselves. One elderly man says he haswell brought up his eleven slaves, and "now they must work to maintainhim. " Another owns it is all wrong, but "cannot release his slaves; histender wife under great concern of mind" on account of his refusal. Athird has fifty slaves; knows it to be wrong, but can't see his way clearout of it. "Perhaps, " the report says, "interest dims his vision. " Afourth is full of "excuses and reasonings. " "Old Jos. Richison hasforty, and is determined to keep them. " Another man has fifty, and"means to keep them. " Robert Ward "wants to release his slaves, but hiswife and daughters hold back. " Another "owns it is wrong, but says hewill not part with his negroes, --no, not while he lives. " The fargreater number, however, confess the wrong of slavery, and agree to takemeasures 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 boththe nature of the service in which he was engaged and the frame of mindin 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 ofour visit, but in some places our way was more difficult. I often sawthe necessity of keeping down to that root from whence our concernproceeded, and have cause in reverent thankfulness humbly to bow downbefore the Lord who was near to me, and preserved my mind in calmnessunder some sharp conflicts, and begat a spirit of sympathy and tendernessin me towards some who were grievously entangled by the spirit of thisworld. "

"1st month, 1759. --Having found my mind drawn to visit some of the moreactive members of society at Philadelphia who had slaves, I met my friendJohn Churchman there by agreement, and we continued about a week in thecity. We visited some that were sick, and some widows and theirfamilies; and the other part of the time was mostly employed in visitingsuch as had slaves. It was a time of deep exercise; but looking often tothe Lord for assistance, He in unspeakable kindness favored us with theinfluence of that spirit which crucifies to the greatness and splendor ofthis world, and enabled us to go through some heavy labors, in which wefound peace. "

These labors were attended with the blessing of the God of the poor andoppressed. Dealing in slaves was almost entirely abandoned, and many whoheld slaves set them at liberty. But many members still continuing thepractice, a more emphatic testimony against it was issued by the YearlyMeeting in 1774; and two years after the subordinate meetings weredirected to deny the right of membership to such as persisted in holdingtheir fellow-men as property. 

A concern was now felt for the temporal and religious welfare of theemancipated slaves, and in 1779 the Yearly Meeting came to the conclusionthat some reparation was due from the masters to their former slaves forservices rendered while in the condition of slavery. The following is anextract from an epistle on this subject:

"We are united in judgment that the state of the oppressed people whohave been held by any of us, or our predecessors, in captivity andslavery, calls for a deep inquiry and close examination how far we areclear of withholding from them what under such an exercise may open toview as their just right; and therefore we earnestly and affectionatelyentreat our brethren in religious profession to bring this matter home, and that all who have let the oppressed go free may attend to the furtheropenings of duty. 

"A tender Christian sympathy appears to be awakened in the minds of manywho are not in religious profession with us, who have seriouslyconsidered the oppressions and disadvantages under which those peoplehave long labored; and whether a pious care extended to their offspringis not justly due from us to them is a consideration worthy our seriousand deep attention. "

Committees to aid and advise the colored people were accordinglyappointed in the various Monthly Meetings. Many former owners of slavesfaithfully paid the latter for their services, submitting to the awardand 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 ofFriends!

John Woolman, in his Journal for 1769, states, that having some yearsbefore, as one of the executors of a will, disposed of the services of anegro boy belonging to the estate until he should reach the age of thirtyyears, he became uneasy in respect to the transaction, and, although hehad himself derived no pecuniary benefit from it, and had simply acted asthe agent of the heirs of the estate to which the boy belonged, heexecuted a bond, binding himself to pay the master of the young man forfour years and a half of his unexpired term of service. 

The appalling magnitude of the evil against which he felt himselfespecially called to contend was painfully manifest to John Woolman. Atthe outset, all about him, in every department of life and humanactivity, 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 amongthe foundations of society. Yet he seems never to have doubted for amoment the power of simple truth to eradicate it, nor to have hesitatedas to his own duty in regard to it. There was no groping like Samson inthe gloom; no feeling in blind wrath and impatience for the pillars ofthe temple of Dagon. "The candle of the Lord shone about him, " and hispath lay clear and unmistakable before him. He believed in the goodnessof God that leadeth to repentance; and that love could reach the witnessfor itself in the hearts of all men, through all entanglements of customand every barrier of pride and selfishness. No one could have a morehumble estimate of himself; but as he went forth on his errand of mercyhe felt the Infinite Power behind him, and the consciousness that he hadknown a preparation from that Power "to stand as a trumpet through whichthe Lord speaks. " The event justified his confidence; wherever he wenthard hearts were softened, avarice and love of power and pride of opiniongave way before his testimony of love. 

The New England Yearly Meeting then, as now, was held in Newport, onRhode Island. In the year 1760 John Woolman, in the course of areligious visit to New England, attended that meeting. He saw thehorrible traffic in human beings, --the slave-ships lying at the wharvesof the town, the sellers and buyers of men and women and childrenthronging the market-place. The same abhorrent scenes which a few yearsafter stirred the spirit of the excellent Hopkins to denounce the slave-trade and slavery as hateful in the sight of God to his congregation atNewport were enacted in the full view and hearing of the annualconvocation of Friends, many of whom were themselves partakers in theshame and wickedness. "Understanding, " he says, "that a large number ofslaves had been imported from Africa into the town, and were then on saleby 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 bellytrembled, my lips quivered; I trembled in myself, that I might rest inthe day of trouble. ' I had many cogitations, and was sorely distressed. "He prepared a memorial to the Legislature, then in session, for thesignatures of Friends, urging that body to take measures to put an end tothe importation of slaves. His labors in the Yearly Meeting appear tohave been owned and blessed by the Divine Head of the church. The LondonEpistle for 1758, condemning the unrighteous traffic in men, was read, and the substance of it embodied in the discipline of the meeting; andthe following query was adopted, to be answered by the subordinatemeetings:--

"Are Friends clear of importing negroes, or buying them when imported;and do they use those well, where they are possessed by inheritance orotherwise, endeavoring to train them up in principles of religion?"

At the close of the Yearly Meeting, John Woolman requested those membersof the Society who held slaves to meet with him in the chamber of thehouse for worship, where he expressed his concern for the well-being ofthe slaves, and his sense of the iniquity of the practice of dealing inor holding them as property. His tender exhortations were not lost uponhis auditors; his remarks were kindly received, and the gentle and lovingspirit in which they were offered reached many hearts. 

In 1769, at the suggestion of the Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting, theYearly Meeting expressed its sense of the wrongfulness of holding slaves, and appointed a large committee to visit those members who wereimplicated in the practice. The next year this committee reported thatthey had completed their service, "and that their visits mostly seemed tobe kindly accepted. Some Friends manifested a disposition to set such atliberty as were suitable; some others, not having so clear a sight ofsuch an unreasonable servitude as could be desired, were unwilling tocomply with the advice given them at present, yet seemed willing to takeit into consideration; a few others manifested a disposition to keep themin 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 notcomplying with the advice of this meeting. "

In 1773 the following minute was made: "It is our sense and judgment thattruth not only requires the young of capacity and ability, but likewisethe 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 thebrutes that perish. "

In 1782 no slaves were known to be held in the New England YearlyMeeting. The next year it was recommended to the subordinate meetings toappoint committees to effect a proper and just settlement between themanumitted slaves and their former masters, for their past services. In1784 it was concluded by the Yearly Meeting that any former slave-holderwho refused to comply with the award of these committees should, afterdue care and labor with him, be disowned from the Society. This waseffectual; settlements without disownment were made to the satisfactionof all parties, and every case was disposed of previous to the year 1787. 

In the New York Yearly Meeting, slave-trading was prohibited about themiddle of the last century. In 1771, in consequence of an Epistle fromthe Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, a committee was appointed to visit thosewho held slaves, and to advise with them in relation to emancipation. In1776 it was made a disciplinary offence to buy, sell, or hold slaves uponany condition. In 1784 but one slave was to be found in the limits ofthe meeting. In the same year, by answers from the several subordinatemeetings, it was ascertained that an equitable settlement for pastservices had been effected between the emancipated negroes and theirmasters in all save three cases. 

In the Virginia Yearly Meeting slavery had its strongest hold. Itsmembers, living in the midst of slave-holding communities, werenecessarily exposed to influences adverse to emancipation. I havealready alluded to the epistle addressed to them by William Edmondson, and to the labors of John Woolman while travelling among them. In 1757the Virginia Yearly Meeting condemned the foreign slave-trade. In 1764it 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 purchasingany more slaves. In 1773 it earnestly recommended the immediatemanumission of all slaves held in bondage, after the females had reachedeighteen and the males twenty-one years of age. At the same time it wasadvised that committees should be appointed for the purpose ofinstructing the emancipated persons in the principles of morality andreligion, and for advising and aiding them in their temporal concerns. 

I quote a single paragraph from the advice sent down to the subordinatemeetings, as a beautiful manifestation of the fruits of true repentance:--

"It is the solid sense of this meeting, that we of the present generationare under strong obligations to express our love and concern for theoffspring of those people who by their labors have greatly contributedtowards the cultivation of these colonies under the afflictivedisadvantage of enduring a hard bondage, and the benefit of whose toilmany among us are enjoying. "

In 1784, the different Quarterly Meetings having reported that many stillheld slaves, notwithstanding the advice and entreaties of their friends, the Yearly Meeting directed that where endeavors to convince thoseoffenders of their error proved ineffectual, the Monthly Meetings shouldproceed to disown them. We have no means of ascertaining the precisenumber of those actually disowned for slave-holding in the VirginiaYearly Meeting, but it is well known to have been very small. In almostall cases the care and assiduous labors of those who had the welfare ofthe Society and of humanity at heart were successful in inducingoffenders to manumit their slaves, and confess their error in resistingthe wishes of their friends and bringing reproach upon the cause oftruth. 

So ended slavery in the Society of Friends. For three quarters of acentury the advice put forth in the meetings of the Society at statedintervals, that Friends should be "careful to maintain their testimonyagainst slavery, " has been adhered to so far as owning, or even hiring, aslave is concerned. Apart from its first-fruits of emancipation, thereis a perennial value in the example exhibited of the power of truth, urged patiently and in earnest love, to overcome the difficulties in theway of the eradication of an evil system, strengthened by long habit, entangled with all the complex relations of society, and closely alliedwith 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 beenconfined to the religious society of which he was a member. It may betraced wherever a step in the direction of emancipation has been taken inthis country or in Europe. During the war of the Revolution many of thenoblemen and officers connected with the French army became, as theirjournals abundantly testify, deeply interested in the Society of Friends, and took back to France with them something of its growing anti-slaverysentiment. Especially was this the case with Jean Pierre Brissot, thethinker and statesman of the Girondists, whose intimacy with WarnerMifflin, a friend and disciple of Woolman, so profoundly affected hiswhole after life. He became the leader of the "Friends of the Blacks, "and carried with him to the scaffold a profound hatred, of slavery. Tohis efforts may be traced the proclamation of emancipation in Hayti bythe commissioners of the French convention, and indirectly the subsequentuprising of the blacks and their successful establishment of a freegovernment. The same influence reached Thomas Clarkson and stimulatedhis early efforts for the abolition of the slave-trade; and in after lifethe volume of the New Jersey Quaker was the cherished companion ofhimself and his amiable helpmate. It was in a degree, at least, theinfluence of Stephen Grellet and William Allen, men deeply imbued withthe spirit of Woolman, and upon whom it might almost be said his mantlehad fallen, that drew the attention of Alexander I. Of Russia to theimportance of taking measures for the abolition of serfdom, an object theaccomplishment 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 countryevidences of the same original impulse of humanity are not wanting. In1790 memorials against slavery from the Society of Friends were laidbefore the first Congress of the United States. Not content withclearing their own skirts of the evil, the Friends of that day took anactive part in the formation of the abolition societies of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Jacob Lindley, ElishaTyson, Warner Mifflin, James Pemberton, and other leading Friends wereknown throughout the country as unflinching champions of freedom. One ofthe earliest of the class known as modern abolitionists was BenjaminLundy, a pupil in the school of Woolman, through whom William LloydGarrison became interested in the great work to which his life has beenso faithfully and nobly devoted. Looking back to the humble workshop atMount Holly from the stand-point of the Proclamation of PresidentLincoln, how has the seed sown in weakness been raised up in power!

The larger portion of Woolman's writings is devoted to the subjects ofslavery, uncompensated labor, and the excessive toil and suffering of themany to support the luxury of the few. The argument running through themis searching, and in its conclusions uncompromising, but a tender lovefor the wrong-doer as well as the sufferer underlies all. They aim toconvince the judgment and reach the heart without awakening prejudice andpassion. To the slave-holders of his time they must have seemed like thevoice of conscience speaking to them in the cool of the day. One feels, in reading them, the tenderness and humility of a nature redeemed fromall pride of opinion and self-righteousness, sinking itself out of sight, and intent only upon rendering smaller the sum of human sorrow and sin bydrawing men nearer to God, and to each other. The style is that of a manunlettered, but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters into his language. There is no attemptat fine writing, not a word or phrase for effect; it is the simpleunadorned diction of one to whom the temptations of the pen seem to havebeen wholly unknown. He wrote, as he believed, from an inward spiritualprompting; and with all his unaffected humility he evidently felt thathis 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 Browneexpresses it, to "order the finger of the Almighty to His will andpleasure, but to sit still under the soft showers of Providence. " Verywise are these essays, but their wisdom is not altogether that of thisworld. They lead one away from all the jealousies, strifes, andcompetitions of luxury, fashion, and gain, out of the close air ofparties 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 "thepure reason;" a rest from all self-seeking, and where no man's interestor activity conflicts with that of another. Beauty they certainly have, but it is not that which the rules of art recognize; a certainindefinable purity pervades them, making one sensible, as he reads, of asweetness as of violets. "The secret of Woolman's purity of style, " saidDr. Channing, "is that his eye was single, and that conscience dictatedhis words. "

Of course we are not to look to the writings of such a man for tricks ofrhetoric, the free play of imagination, or the unscrupulousness ofepigram and antithesis. He wrote as he lived, conscious of "the greatTask-master's eye. " With the wise heathen Marcus Aurelius Antoninus hehad learned to "wipe out imaginations, to check desire, and let thespirit 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 theentire writings appended to the old edition of the Journal, inasmuch asthey mainly refer to a system which happily on this continent is nolonger a question at issue. I content myself with throwing together afew passages from them which touch subjects of present interest. 

"Selfish men may possess the earth: it is the meek alone who inherit itfrom the Heavenly Father free from all defilements and perplexities ofunrighteousness. "

"Whoever rightly advocates the cause of some thereby promotes the good ofthe whole. "

"If one suffer by the unfaithfulness of another, the mind, the most noblepart of him that occasions the discord, is thereby alienated from itstrue happiness. "

"There is harmony in the several parts of the Divine work in the heartsof men. He who leads them to cease from those gainful employments whichare carried on in the wisdom which is from beneath delivers also from thedesire of worldly greatness, and reconciles to a life so plain that alittle suffices. "

"After days and nights of drought, when the sky hath grown dark, andclouds like lakes of water have hung over our heads, I have at timesbeheld with awfulness the vehement lightning accompanying the blessingsof the rain, a messenger from Him to remind us of our duty in a right useof 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 theoutward supply of life is a gift from our Heavenly Father, and that weshould not venture to use or apply that gift in a way contrary to purereason. "

"Oppression in the extreme appears terrible; but oppression in morerefined appearances remains to be oppression. To labor for a perfectredemption from the spirit of it is the great business of the wholefamily of Jesus Christ in this world. "

"In the obedience of faith we die to self-love, and, our life being 'hidwith Christ in God, ' our hearts are enlarged towards mankind universally;but many in striving to get treasures have departed from this true lightof life and stumbled on the dark mountains. That purity of life whichproceeds from faithfulness in following the pure spirit of truth, thatstate in which our minds are devoted to serve God and all our wants arebounded by His wisdom, has often been opened to me as a place ofretirement for the children of the light, in which we may be separatedfrom that which disordereth and confuseth the affairs of society, and mayhave 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 indifferent places and ages bath had different names; it is, however, pure, and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms ofreligion nor excluded from any, when the heart stands in perfectsincerity. In whomsoever this takes root and grows, they becomebrethren. "

"The necessity of an inward stillness hath appeared clear to my mind. Intrue 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 inoutward living, opposite to worldly honor, becomes truly acceptable tous. In the desire after outward gain the mind is prevented from aperfect attention to the voice of Christ; yet being weaned from allthings, except as they may be enjoyed in the Divine will, the pure lightshines into the soul. Where the fruits of the spirit which is of thisworld are brought forth by many who profess to be led by the Spirit oftruth, and cloudiness is felt to be gathering over the visible church, the sincere in heart, who abide in true stillness, and are exercisedtherein before the Lord for His name's sake, have knowledge of Christ inthe fellowship of His sufferings; and inward thankfulness is felt attimes, that through Divine love our own wisdom is cast out, and thatforward, active part in us is subjected, which would rise and dosomething without the pure leadings of the spirit of Christ. 

"While aught remains in us contrary to a perfect resignation of ourwills, it is like a seal to the book wherein is written 'that good andacceptable and perfect will of God' concerning us. But when our mindsentirely yield to Christ, that silence is known which followeth theopening of the last of the seals. In this silence we learn to abide inthe Divine will, and there feel that we have no cause to promote exceptthat alone in which the light of life directs us. "

Occasionally, in Considerations on the Keeping of? Negroes, the intenseinterest of his subject gives his language something of passionateelevation, as in the following extract:--

"When trade is carried on productive of much misery, and they who sufferby it are many thousand miles off, the danger is the greater of notlaying their sufferings to heart. In procuring slaves on the coast ofAfrica, many children are stolen privately; wars are encouraged among thenegroes, but all is at a great distance. Many groans arise from dyingmen which we hear not. Many cries are uttered by widows and fatherlesschildren which reach not our ears. Many cheeks are wet with tears, andfaces sad with unutterable grief, which we see not. Cruel tyranny isencouraged. The hands of robbers are strengthened. 

"Were we, for the term of one year only, to be eye-witnesses of whatpasseth in getting these slaves; were the blood that is there shed to besprinkled on our garments; were the poor captives, bound with thongs, andheavily laden with elephants' teeth, to pass before our eyes on their wayto the sea; were their bitter lamentations, day after day, to ring in ourears, 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 bedeeply affected with sorrow!"

"It is good for those who live in fulness to cultivate tenderness ofheart, and to improve every opportunity of being acquainted with thehardships and fatigues of those who labor for their living, and thus tothink seriously with themselves: Am I influenced by true charity infixing all my demands? Have I no desire to support myself in expensivecustoms, because my acquaintances live in such customs?

"If a wealthy man, on serious reflection, finds a witness in his ownconscience that he indulges himself in some expensive habits, which mightbe omitted, consistently with the true design of living, and which, werehe to change places with those who occupy his estate, he would desire tobe discontinued by them, --whoever is thus awakened will necessarily findthe injunction binding, 'Do ye even so to them. ' Divine Love imposeth norigorous or unreasonable commands, but graciously points out the spiritof brotherhood and the way to happiness, in attaining which it isnecessary that we relinquish all that is selfish. 

"Our gracious Creator cares and provides for all His creatures; Histender mercies are over all His works, and so far as true love influencesour minds, so far we become interested in His workmanship, and feel adesire to make use of every opportunity to lessen the distresses of theafflicted, and to increase the happiness of the creation. Here we have aprospect of one common interest from which our own is inseparable, sothat to turn all we possess into the channel of universal love becomesthe 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 inwardsupport from above, by which all vicious inclinations are made subject;who love God sincerely, and prefer the real good of mankind universallyto their own private interest, --though these, through the strength ofeducation and tradition, may remain under some great speculative errors, it would be uncharitable to say that therefore God rejects them. Theknowledge and goodness of Him who creates, supports, and givesunderstanding to all men are superior to the various states andcircumstances of His creatures, which to us appear the most difficult. Idolatry indeed is wickedness; but it is the thing, not the name, whichis so. Real idolatry is to pay that adoration to a creature which isknown to be due only to the true God. 

"He who professeth to believe in one Almighty Creator, and in His SonJesus Christ, and is yet more intent on the honors, profits, andfriendships of the world than he is, in singleness of heart, to standfaithful to the Christian religion, is in the channel of idolatry; whilethe Gentile, who, notwithstanding some mistaken opinions, is establishedin the true principle of virtue, and humbly adores an Almighty Power, maybe of the number that fear God and work righteousness. "

Nowhere has what is called the "Labor Question, " which is now agitatingthe world, been discussed more wisely and with a broader humanity than inthese essays. His sympathies were with the poor man, yet the rich tooare his brethren, and he warns them in love and pity of the consequencesof luxury and oppression:--

"Every degree of luxury, every demand for money inconsistent with theDivine order, hath connection with unnecessary labors. "

"To treasure up wealth for another generation, by means of the immoderatelabor of those who in some measure depend upon us, is doing evil atpresent, without knowing that wealth thus gathered may not be applied toevil purposes when we are gone. To labor hard, or cause others to do so, that we may live conformably to customs which our Redeemerdiscountenanced 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 isno place, and the poor are thereby straitened, though this is done bybargain and purchase, yet so far as it stands distinguished fromuniversal love, so far that woe predicted by the prophet will accompanytheir proceedings. As He who first founded the earth was then the trueproprietor of it, so He still remains, and though He hath given it to thechildren of men, so that multitudes of people have had their sustenancefrom it while they continued here, yet He bath never alienated it, butHis right is as good as at first; nor can any apply the increase of theirpossessions contrary to universal love, nor dispose of lands in a waywhich they know tends to exalt some by oppressing others, without beingjustly chargeable with usurpation. "

It will not lessen the value of the foregoing extracts in the minds ofthe true-disciples of our Divine Lord, that they are manifestly notwritten to subserve the interests of a narrow sectarianism. They mighthave been penned by Fenelon in his time, or Robertson in ours, dealing asthey do with Christian practice, --the life of Christ manifesting itselfin purity and goodness, --rather than with the dogmas of theology. Theunderlying thought of all is simple obedience to the Divine word in thesoul. "Not every one that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into thekingdom 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 isintimated that objections had been raised to the Journal on the groundthat it had so little to say of doctrines and so much of duties. One mayeasily understand that this objection might have been forcibly felt bythe slave-holding religious professors of Woolman's day, and that it maystill be entertained by a class of persons who, like the Cabalists, attach a certain mystical significance to words, names, and titles, andwho in consequence question the piety which hesitates to flatter theDivine ear by "vain repetitions" and formal enumeration of sacredattributes, dignities, and offices. Every instinct of his tenderlysensitive nature shrank from the wordy irreverence of noisy profession. His very silence is significant: the husks of emptiness rustle in everywind; the full corn in the ear holds up its golden fruit noiselessly tothe Lord of the harvest. John Woolman's faith, like the Apostle's, ismanifested by his labors, standing not in words but in the demonstrationof 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 waitingupon God, and in that untiring benevolence, that quiet but deepenthusiasm 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 maypresent to the trained eyes of theological adepts, the heart has noquestions to ask, but at once owns and reveres it. Shall we regret thathe 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 thefaith and hope that were in him this testimony of a life, rather than anyform of words, however sound? A true life is at once interpreter andproof of the gospel, and does more to establish its truth in the heartsof men than all the "Evidences" and "Bodies of Divinity" which haveperplexed the world with more doubts than they solved. Shall we ventureto account it a defect in his Christian character, that, under an abidingsense of the goodness and long-suffering of God, he wrought his work ingentleness and compassion, with the delicate tenderness which comes of adeep sympathy with the trials and weaknesses of our nature, neverallowing himself to indulge in heat or violence, persuading rather thanthreatening? Did he overestimate that immeasurable Love, themanifestation of which in his own heart so reached the hearts of others, revealing everywhere unsuspected fountains of feeling and secret longingsafter purity, as the rod of the diviner detects sweet, cool water-springsunder the parched surfaces of a thirsty land? And, looking at thepurity, wisdom, and sweetness of his life, who shall say that his faithin the teaching of the Holy Spirit--the interior guide and light--was amistaken one? Surely it was no illusion by which his feet were so guidedthat all who saw him felt that, like Enoch, he walked with God. "Withoutthe actual inspiration of the Spirit of Grace, the inward teacher andsoul of our souls, " says Fenelon, "we could neither do, will, nor believegood. We must silence every creature, we must silence ourselves also, tohear in a profound stillness of the soul this inexpressible voice ofChrist. The outward word of the gospel itself without this livingefficacious word within would be but an empty sound. " "Thou Lord, " saysAugustine in his Meditations, "communicatest thyself to all: thouteachest the heart without words; thou speakest to it without articulatesounds. "

 "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 worldis still better and richer for its sake, and the fragrance of it comesdown to us through a century, still sweet and precious. 

It will be noted throughout the Journal and essays that in his lifelongtestimony against wrong he never lost sight of the oneness of humanity, its common responsibility, its fellowship of suffering and communion ofsin. Few have ever had so profound a conviction of the truth of theApostle's declaration that no man liveth and no man dieth to himself. Sin was not to him an isolated fact, the responsibility of which beganand ended with the individual transgressor; he saw it as a part of a vastnetwork and entanglement, and traced the lines of influence convergingupon it in the underworld of causation. Hence the wrong and discordwhich pained him called out pity, rather than indignation. The firstinquiry which they awakened was addressed to his own conscience. How faram I in thought, word, custom, responsible for this? Have none of myfellow-creatures an equitable right to any part which is called mine?Have the gifts and possessions received by me from others been conveyedin a way free from all unrighteousness? "Through abiding in the law ofChrist, " he says, "we feel a tenderness towards our fellow-creatures, anda concern so to walk that our conduct may not be the means ofstrengthening them in error. " He constantly recurs to the importance ofa 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 ofrighteousness. " His eyes were anointed to see the common point ofdeparture from the Divine harmony, and that all the varied growths ofevil had their underlying root in human selfishness. He saw that everysin of the individual was shared in greater or less degree by all whoselives were opposed to the Divine order, and that pride, luxury, andavarice in one class gave motive and temptation to the grosser forms ofevil in another. How gentle, and yet how searching, are his rebukes ofself-complacent respectability, holding it responsible, in spite of allits decent seemings, for much of the depravity which it condemned withPharisaical harshness! In his Considerations on the True Harmony ofMankind be dwells with great earnestness upon the importance ofpossessing "the mind of Christ, " which removes from the heart the desireof superiority and worldly honors, incites attention to the DivineCounsellor, and awakens an ardent engagement to promote the happiness ofall. "This state, " he says, "in which every motion from the selfishspirit yieldeth to pure love, I may acknowledge with gratitude to theFather 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 ofrighteousness, the instructions I have received under these exercises inregard to the true use of the outward gifts of God have made deep andlasting impressions on my mind. I have beheld how the desire to providewealth and to uphold a delicate life has greviously entangled many, andhas been like a snare to their offspring; and though some have beenaffected with a sense of their difficulties, and have appeared desirousat times to be helped out of them, yet for want of abiding under thehumbling 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 thatwe may embrace the means appointed for our healing; may know that removedwhich now ministers cause for the cries of many to ascend to Heavenagainst their oppressors; and that thus we may see the true harmonyrestored!--a restoration of that which was lost at Babel, and which willbe, as the prophet expresses it, 'the returning of a pure language!'"

It is easy to conceive how unwelcome this clear spiritual insight musthave been to the superficial professors of his time busy in tithing mint, anise, and cummin. There must have been something awful in the presenceof one endowed with the gift of looking through all the forms, shows, andpretensions of society, and detecting with certainty the germs of evilhidden beneath them; a man gentle and full of compassion, clothed in "theirresistible might of meekness, " and yet so wise in spiritualdiscernment, "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 tome a labor of love, I am not unmindful of the wide difference between theappreciation of a pure and true life and the living of it, and am willingto own that in delineating a character of such moral and spiritualsymmetry I have felt something like rebuke from my own words. I havebeen awed and solemnized by the presence of a serene and beautiful spiritredeemed of the Lord from all selfishness, and I have been made thankfulfor the ability to recognize and the disposition to love him. I leavethe book with its readers. They may possibly make large deductions frommy estimate of the author; they may not see the importance of all hisself-denying testimonies; they may question some of his scruples, andsmile over passages of childlike simplicity; but I believe they will allagree 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 ofthe Society of Friends can regard without deep interest. It would giveme great pleasure to be with you on the 27th inst. , but the years restheavily upon me, and I have scarcely health or strength for such ajourney. 

It was my privilege to visit Haverford in 1838, in "the day of smallbeginnings. " The promise of usefulness which it then gave has been morethan fulfilled. It has grown to be a great and well-establishedinstitution, and its influence in thorough education and moral traininghas been widely felt. If the high educational standard presented in thescholastic treatise of Barclay and the moral philosophy of Dymond hasbeen lowered or disowned by many who, still retaining the name ofQuakerism, have lost faith in the vital principle wherein precioustestimonials of practical righteousness have their root, and have goneback to a dead literalness, and to those materialistic ceremonials forleaving which our old confessors suffered bonds and death, Haverford, atleast, has been in a good degree faithful to the trust committed to it. 

Under circumstances of more than ordinary difficulty, it has endeavoredto maintain the Great Testimony. The spirit of its culture has not beena narrow one, nor could it be, if true to the broad and catholicprinciples of the eminent worthies who founded the State ofPennsylvania, Penn, Lloyd, Pastorius, Logan, and Story; men who weremasters of the scientific knowledge and culture of their age, hospitableto all truth, and open to all light, and who in some instancesanticipated the result of modern research and critical inquiry. 

It was Thomas Story, a minister of the Society of Friends, and member ofPenn's Council of State, who, while on a religious visit to England, wrote to James Logan that he had read on the stratified rocks ofScarborough, as from the finger of God, proofs of the immeasurable ageof our planet, and that the "days" of the letter of Scripture couldonly 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 thestillness of their souls the inexpressible voice of Christ. " Holdingfast the mighty truth of the Divine Immanence, the Inward Light andWord, a Quaker college can have no occasion to renew the disastrousquarrel of religion with science. Against the sublime faith which shallyet dominate the world, skepticism has no power. No possibleinvestigation of natural facts; no searching criticism of letter andtradition can disturb it, for it has its witness in all human hearts. 

That Haverford may fully realize and improve its great opportunities asan approved seat of learning and the exponent of a Christian philosophywhich can never be superseded, which needs no change to fit it foruniversal acceptance, and which, overpassing the narrow limits of sect, is giving new life and hope to Christendom, and finding its witnesses inthe Hindu revivals of the Brahmo Somaj and the fervent utterances ofChunda 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 lackof which British reviewers have so long reproached us. Selecting thesubject of all others best calculated for his purpose, --the expulsion ofthe French settlers of Acadie from their quiet and pleasant homes aroundthe Basin of Minas, one of the most sadly romantic passages in thehistory of the Colonies of the North, --the author has succeeded inpresenting a series of exquisite pictures of the striking and peculiarfeatures of life and nature in the New World. The range of thesedelineations extends from Nova Scotia on the northeast to the spurs ofthe 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, theIndian summer of our northern latitudes, the scenery of the Ohio andMississippi Rivers, the bayous and cypress forests of the South, themocking-bird, the prairie, the Ozark hills, the Catholic missions, andthe wild Arabs of the West, roaming with the buffalo along the banks ofthe Nebraska. The hexameter measure he has chosen has the advantage of aprosaic freedom of expression, exceedingly well adapted to a descriptiveand narrative poem; yet we are constrained to think that the story ofEvangeline would have been quite as acceptable to the public taste had itbeen told in the poetic prose of the author's Hyperion. 

In reading it and admiring its strange melody we were not without fearsthat the success of Professor Longfellow in this novel experiment mightprove the occasion of calling out a host of awkward imitators, leading usover weary wastes of hexameters, enlivened neither by dew, rain, norfields of offering. 

Apart from its Americanism, the poem has merits of a higher and universalcharacter. It is not merely a work of art; the pulse of humanity throbswarmly through it. The portraits of Basil the blacksmith, the oldnotary, Benedict Bellefontaine, and good Father Felician, fairly glowwith life. The beautiful Evangeline, loving and faithful unto death, isa heroine worthy of any poet of the present century. 

The editor of the Boston Chronotype, in the course of an appreciativereview of this poem, urges with some force a single objection, which weare induced to notice, as it is one not unlikely to present itself to theminds of other readers:--

"We think Mr. Longfellow ought to have expressed a much deeperindignation at the base, knavish, and heartless conduct of the Englishand Colonial persecutors than he has done. He should have put far bolderand deeper tints in the picture of suffering. One great, if not thegreatest, end of poetry is rhadamanthine justice. The poet should meteout their deserts to all his heroes; honor to whom honor, and infamy towhom infamy, is due. 

"It is true that the wrong in this case is in a great degree fatheredupon our own Massachusetts; and it maybe said that it is afoul bird thatpollutes its own nest. We deny the applicability of the rather mustyproverb. All the worse. Of not a more contemptible vice is what iscalled American literature guilty than this of unmitigated self-laudation. If we persevere in it, the stock will become altogether toosmall for the business. It seems that no period of our history has beenexempt from materials for patriotic humiliation and national self-reproach; and surely the present epoch is laying in a large store of thatsort. Had our poets always told us the truth of ourselves, perhaps itwould now be otherwise. National self-flattery and concealment of faultsmust of course have their natural results. "

We must confess that we read the first part of Evangeline with somethingof the feeling so forcibly expressed by Professor Wright. The naturaland honest indignation with which, many years ago, we read for the firsttime that dark page of our Colonial history--the expulsion of the Frenchneutrals--was reawakened by the simple pathos of the poem; and we longedto 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 ofthe sad suffering of the Acadian peasants should have permitted theauthors of that suffering to escape without censure. The outburst of thestout 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, wewere quite reconciled to the author's forbearance. The design of thepoem is manifestly incompatible with stern "rhadamanthine justice" andindignant denunciation of wrong. It is a simple story of quiet pastoralhappiness, of great sorrow and painful bereavement, and of the enduranceof a love which, hoping and seeking always, wanders evermore up and downthe wilderness of the world, baffled at every turn, yet still retainingfaith in God and in the object of its lifelong quest. It was no part ofthe writer's object to investigate the merits of the question at issuebetween the poor Acadians and their Puritan neighbors. Looking at thematerials before him with the eye of an artist simply, he has arrangedthem to suit his idea of the beautiful and pathetic, leaving to somefuture historian the duty of sitting in judgment upon the actors in theatrocious outrage which furnished them. With this we are content. Thepoem now has unity and sweetness which might have been destroyed byattempting to avenge the wrongs it so vividly depicts. It is a psalm oflove and forgiveness: the gentleness and peace of Christian meekness andforbearance breathe through it. Not a word of censure is directlyapplied to the marauding workers of the mighty sorrow which it describesjust as it would a calamity from the elements, --a visitation of God. Thereader, however, cannot fail to award justice to the wrong-doers. Theunresisting acquiescence of the Acadians only deepens his detestation ofthe cupidity and religious bigotry of their spoilers. Even in thelanguage of the good Father Felician, beseeching his flock to submit tothe strong hand which had been laid upon them, we see and feel themagnitude 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 "deepdamnation 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 theself-laudations of their own writers the point may doubtless be foundfrom whence an impartial estimate of their character may be formed. Theyhad noble qualities: the firmness and energy which they displayed in thecolonization of New England must always command admiration. We would notrob them, were it in our power to do so, of one jot or tittle of theirrightful honor. But, with all the lights which we at present possess, wecannot allow their claim of saintship without some degree ofqualification. How they seemed to their Dutch neighbors at NewNetherlands, and their French ones at Nova Scotia, and to the poorIndians, hunted from their fisheries and game-grounds, we can very wellconjecture. It may be safely taken for granted that their gospel claimto the inheritance of the earth was not a little questionable to theCatholic fleeing for his life from their jurisdiction, to the banishedBaptist shaking off the dust of his feet against them, and to themartyred Quaker denouncing woe and judgment upon them from the steps ofthe gallows. Most of them were, beyond a doubt, pious and sincere; butwe are constrained to believe that among them were those who wore thelivery of heaven from purely selfish motives, in a community wherechurch-membership was an indispensable requisite, the only open sesamebefore which the doors of honor and distinction swung wide to needy orambitious aspirants. Mere adventurers, men of desperate fortunes, bankrupts in character and purse, contrived to make gain of godlinessunder the church and state government of New England, put on the austereexterior of sanctity, quoted Scripture, anathematized heretics, whippedQuakers, exterminated Indians, burned and spoiled the villages of theirCatholic neighbors, and hewed down their graven images and "houses ofRimmon. " It is curious to observe how a fierce religious zeal againstheathen and idolaters went hand in hand with the old Anglo-Saxon love ofland and plunder. Every crusade undertaken against the Papists of theFrench colonies had its Puritan Peter the Hermit to summon the saints tothe wars of the Lord. At the siege of Louisburg, ten years before theonslaught upon the Acadian settlers, one minister marched with theColonial troops, axe in hand, to hew down the images in the Frenchchurches; while another officiated in the double capacity of drummer andchaplain, --a "drum ecclesiastic, " as Hudibras has it. 

At the late celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims in New York, theorator of the day labored at great length to show that the charge ofintolerance, as urged against the colonists of New England, is unfoundedin fact. The banishment of the Catholics was very sagaciously passedover in silence, inasmuch as the Catholic Bishop of New York was one ofthe invited guests, and (hear it, shade of Cotton Mather!) one of theregular toasts was a compliment to the Pope. The expulsion of RogerWilliams was excused and partially justified; while the whipping, ear-cropping, tongue-boring, and hanging of the Quakers was defended, as theonly effectual method of dealing with such devil-driven heretics, asMather calls them. The orator, in the new-born zeal of his amateurPuritanism, stigmatizes the persecuted class as "fanatics and ranters, foaming forth their mad opinions;" compares them to the Mormons and thecrazy followers of Mathias; and cites an instance of a poor enthusiast, named Eccles, who, far gone in the "tailor's melancholy, " took it intohis head that he must enter into a steeple-house pulpit and stitchbreeches "in singing time, "--a circumstance, by the way, which took placein Old England, --as a justification of the atrocious laws of theMassachusetts Colony. We have not the slightest disposition to deny thefanaticism and folly of some few professed Quakers in that day; and hadthe Puritans treated them as the Pope did one of their number whom hefound crazily holding forth in the church of St. Peter, and consignedthem to the care of physicians as religious monomaniacs, no sane mancould have blamed them. Every sect, in its origin, and especially in itstime of persecution, has had its fanatics. The early Christians, if wemay credit the admissions of their own writers or attach the slightestcredence to the statements of pagan authors, were by no means exempt fromreproach and scandal in this respect. Were the Puritans themselves themen to cast stones at the Quakers and Baptists? Had they not, in theview at least of the Established Church, turned all England upside downwith their fanaticisms and extravagances of doctrine and conduct? Howlook they as depicted in the sermons of Dr. South, in the sarcastic pagesof Hudibras, and the coarse caricatures of the clerical wits of the timesof the second Charles? With their own backs scored and their earscropped for the crime of denying the divine authority of church and statein England, were they the men to whip Baptists and hang Quakers for doingthe same thing in Massachusetts?

Of all that is noble and true in the Puritan character we are sincereadmirers. The generous and self-denying apostleship of Eliot is, ofitself, a beautiful page in their history. The physical daring andhardihood with which, amidst the times of savage warfare, they laid thefoundations of mighty states, and subdued the rugged soil, and made thewilderness blossom; their steadfast adherence to their religiousprinciples, even when the Restoration had made apostasy easy andprofitable; and the vigilance and firmness with which, under allcircumstances, they held fast their chartered liberties and extorted newrights and privileges from the reluctant home government, --justly entitlethem to the grateful remembrance of a generation now reaping the fruitsof their toils and sacrifices. But, in expressing our gratitude to thefounders of New England, we should not forget what is due to truth andjustice; nor, for the sake of vindicating them from the charge of thatreligious intolerance which, at the time, they shared with nearly allChristendom, undertake to defend, in the light of the nineteenth century, opinions and practices hostile to the benignant spirit of the gospel andsubversive 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) needamusement and the wholesome alterative of a hearty laugh, we commendthem, not to Dr. Holmes the physician, but to Dr. Holmes the scholar, thewit, and the humorist; not to the scientific medical professor'sbarbarous Latin, but to his poetical prescriptions, given in choice oldSaxon. We have tried them, and are ready to give the Doctor certificatesof their efficacy. 

Looking at the matter from the point of theory only, we should say that aphysician could not be otherwise than melancholy. A merry doctor! Why, one might as well talk of a laughing death's-head, --the cachinnation of amonk's _memento mori_. This life of ours is sorrowful enough at its bestestate; 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 doctorto look only upon the shadow; to turn away from the house of feasting andgo down to that of mourning; to breathe day after day the atmosphere ofwretchedness; to grow familiar with suffering; to look upon humanitydisrobed of its pride and glory, robbed of all its fictitious ornaments, --weak, helpless, naked, --and undergoing the last fearful metempsychosisfrom its erect and godlike image, the living temple of an enshrineddivinity, to the loathsome clod and the inanimate dust. Of what ghastlysecrets of moral and physical disease is he the depositary! There is woebefore him and behind him; he is hand and glove with misery byprescription, --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, thesplenetic, the sick, and the dying. He sits down to carve his turkey, and is summoned off to a post-mortem examination of another sort. Allthe diseases which Milton's imagination embodied in the lazar-house doghis footsteps and pluck at his doorbell. Hurrying from one place toanother 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 anundoubted right to advertise him as a deserter of "bed and board. " Hisideas of beauty, the imaginations of his brain, and the affections of hisheart are regulated and modified by the irrepressible associations of hisluckless profession. Woman as well as man is to him of the earth, earthy. He sees incipient disease where the uninitiated see onlydelicacy. A smile reminds him of his dental operations; a blushing cheekof his hectic patients; pensive melancholy is dyspepsia; sentimentalism, nervousness. Tell him of lovelorn hearts, of the "worm I' the bud, " ofthe mental impalement upon Cupid's arrow, like that of a giaour upon thespear of a janizary, and he can only think of lack of exercise, oftightlacing, and slippers in winter. Sheridan seems to have understoodall 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 thatseemed to invite the lancet! Then her skin, --smooth and white as agallipot; 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 wasonly a small pull, and out they came. I believe I have drawn half ascore of her dear pearls. (Weeps. ) But what avails her beauty? She hasgone, 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 afterall. The grave-digger in Hamlet has his jokes and grim jests. We haveknown many a jovial sexton; and we have heard clergymen laugh heartily atsmall provocation close on the heel of a cool calculation that the greatmajority of their fellow-creatures were certain of going straight toperdition. Why, then, should not even the doctor have his fun? Nay, isit not his duty to be merry, by main force if necessary? Solomon, who, from his great knowledge of herbs, must have been no mean practitionerfor his day, tells us that "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine;"and universal experience has confirmed the truth of his maxim. Hence itis, doubtless, that we have so many anecdotes of facetious doctors, distributing their pills and jokes together, shaking at the same time thecontents of their vials and the sides of their patients. It is merelyprofessional, a trick of the practice, unquestionably, in most cases; butsometimes it is a "natural gift, " like that of the "bonesetters, " and"scrofula strokers, " and "cancer curers, " who carry on a sort of guerillawar 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 forthe "water cure, " and has been quite as successful in his way, while hisprescriptions are infinitely more agreeable. 

The volume now before us gives, in addition to the poems and lyricscontained in the two previous editions, some hundred or more pages of thelater productions of the author, in the sprightly vein, and marked by thebrilliant fancy and felicitous diction for which the former werenoteworthy. His longest and most elaborate poem, _Urania_, is perhapsthe best specimen of his powers. Its general tone is playful andhumorous; but there are passages of great tenderness and pathos. Witnessthe following, from a description of the city churchgoers. The wholecompass of our literature has few passages to equal its melody andbeauty. 

 "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 ofmoving the heart as well as of tickling the fancy. There is no strainingfor effect; simple, natural thoughts are expressed in simple andperfectly transparent language. 

_Terpsichore_, read at an annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society atCambridge, sparkles throughout with keen wit, quaint conceits, and satireso good-natured that the subjects of it can enjoy it as heartily as theirneighbors. 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. Nobodybut Holmes could have conjured up so many rare fancies in connection withsuch 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 invitedto a dinner-party, where he was expected to "set the table in a roar" byreading funny verses. He submits it to the judgment and common sense ofthe importunate bearer of the invitation, that this dinner-going, ballad-making, mirth-provoking habit is not likely to benefit his reputation asa 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 _DorchesterGiant_, the _Height of the Ridiculous_, and one or two others might beomitted in the next edition without detriment. They would do well enoughfor an amateur humorist, but are scarcely worthy of one who stands at thehead of the profession. 

It was said of James Smith, of the Rejected Addresses, that "if he hadnot been a witty man, he would have been a great man. " Hood's humor anddrollery kept in the background the pathos and beauty of his soberproductions; and Dr. Holmes, we suspect, might have ranked higher among alarge class of readers than he now does had he never written his _Balladof the Oysterman_, his _Comet_, and his _September Gale_. Such lyrics as_La Grisette_, the _Puritan's Vision_, and that unique compound of humorand pathos, _The Last Leaf_; show that he possesses the power of touchingthe deeper chords of the heart and of calling forth tears as well assmiles. Who does not feel the power of this simple picture of the oldman 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 commonbetween them save the power of combining fancy and sentiment withgrotesque drollery and humor. Hood, under all his whims and oddities, conceals the vehement intensity of a reformer. The iron of the world'swrongs had entered into his soul; there is an undertone of sorrow in hislyrics; his sarcasm, directed against oppression and bigotry, at timesbetrays the earnestness of one whose own withers have been wrung. Holmeswrites simply for the amusement of himself and his readers; he deals onlywith the vanity, the foibles, and the minor faults of mankind, goodnaturedly and almost sympathizingly suggesting excuses for the follywhich he tosses about on the horns of his ridicule. In this respect hediffers widely from his fellow-townsman, Russell Lowell, whose keen witand scathing sarcasm, in the famous Biglow Papers, and the notes ofParson Wilbur, strike at the great evils of society and deal with therank offences of church and state. Hosea Biglow, in his way, is asearnest a preacher as Habakkuk Mucklewrath or Obadiah Bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-their-nobles-in-fetters-of-iron. His verse smacks of theold Puritan flavor. Holmes has a gentler mission. His careless, genialhumor reminds us of James Smith in his _Rejected Addresses_ and of Horacein _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'sdeclaration that a "merry heart is a continual feast. "

FAME AND GLORY. 

Notice of an Address before the Literary Society of Amherst College, byCharles Sumner. 

THE learned and eloquent author of the pamphlet lying before us with theabove title belongs to a class, happily on the increase in our country, who venture to do homage to unpopular truths in defiance of the socialand political tyranny of opinion which has made so many of our statesmen, orators, and divines the mere playthings and shuttlecocks of popularimpulses for evil far oftener than for good. His first production, the_True Grandeur of Nations_, written for the anniversary of AmericanIndependence, was not more remarkable for its evidences of a highlycultivated taste and wide historical research than for its inculcation ofa high morality, --the demand for practical Christianity in nations aswell as individuals. It burned no incense under the nostrils of analready inflated and vain people. It gratified them by no rhetoricalfalsehoods about "the land of the free and the home of the brave. " Itdid not apostrophize military heroes, nor strut "red wat shod" over theplains of battle, nor call up, like another Ezekiel, from the valley ofvision the dry bones thereof. It uttered none of the precious scoundrelcant, 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 landsof all whose destiny it is to live next us, and to plant everywhere the"peculiar institutions" of a peculiarly Christian and chosen people, thelandstealing propensity of whose progressive republicanism is declared tobe in accordance with the will and by the grace of God, and who, like theScotch freebooter, --

 "Pattering an Ave Mary When he rode on a border forray, "--

while trampling on the rights of a sister republic, and re-creatingslavery where that republic had abolished it, talk piously of "thedesigns of Providence" and the Anglo-Saxon instrumentalities thereof in"extending the area of freedom. " On the contrary, the author portrayedthe evils of war and proved its incompatibility with Christianity, --contrasting with its ghastly triumphs the mild victories of peace andlove. Our true mission, he taught, was not to act over in the New Worldthe barbarous game which has desolated the Old; but to offer to thenations of the earth, warring and discordant, oppressed and oppressing, the beautiful example of a free and happy people studying the thingswhich 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 hisAlma Mater, was in the same vein. He improved the occasion of the recentdeath of four distinguished members of that fraternity to delineate hisbeautiful ideal of the jurist, the scholar, the artist, and thephilanthropist, aided by the models furnished by the lives of such men asPickering, Story, Allston, and Channing. Here, also, he makes greatnessto consist of goodness: war and slavery and all their offspring of evilare surveyed in the light of the morality of the New Testament. He lookshopefully forward to the coming of that day when the sword shall devourno longer, when labor shall grind no longer in the prison-house, and thepeace and freedom of a realized and acted-out Christianity shalloverspread the earth, and the golden age predicted by the seers and poetsalike of Paganism and Christianity shall become a reality. 

The Address now before us, with the same general object in view, is moredirect and practical. We can scarcely conceive of a discourse betteradapted to prepare the young American, just issuing from his collegiateretirement, for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. Ittreats 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 lessonit would inculcate is, that no true and permanent fame can be foundedexcept in labors which promote the happiness of mankind. To use thelanguage of Dr. South, "God is the fountain of honor; the conduit bywhich He conveys it to the sons of men are virtuous and generouspractices. " The author presents the beautiful examples of St. Pierre, Milton, Howard, and Clarkson, --men whose fame rests on the firmfoundation of goodness, --for the study and imitation of the youngcandidate for that true glory which belongs to those who live, not forthemselves, but for their race. "Neither present fame, nor war, norpower, nor wealth, nor knowledge alone shall secure an entrance to thetrue and noble Valhalla. There shall be gathered only those who havetoiled each in his vocation for the welfare of others. " "Justice andbenevolence are higher than knowledge and power It is by His goodnessthat God is most truly known; so also is the great man. When Moses saidto the Lord, Show me Thy glory, the Lord said, I will make all mygoodness pass before thee. "

We copy the closing paragraph of the Address, the inspiring sentiment ofwhich will find a response in all generous and hopeful hearts:--

"Let us reverse the very poles of the worship of past ages. Men havethus far bowed down before stocks, stones, insects, crocodiles, goldencalves, --graven images, often of cunning workmanship, wrought withPhidian skill, of ivory, of ebony, of marble, but all false gods. Letthem worship in future the true God, our Father, as He is in heaven andin the beneficent labors of His children on earth. Then farewell to thesiren song of a worldly ambition! Farewell to the vain desire of mereliterary success or oratorical display! Farewell to the distemperedlongings for office! Farewell to the dismal, blood-red phantom ofmartial renown! Fame and glory may then continue, as in times past, thereflection of public opinion; but of an opinion sure and steadfast, without change or fickleness, enlightened by those two sons of Christiantruth, --love to God and love to man. From the serene illumination ofthese duties all the forms of selfishness shall retreat like evil spiritsat the dawn of day. Then shall the happiness of the poor and lowly andthe education of the ignorant have uncounted friends. The cause of thosewho are in prison shall find fresh voices; the majesty of peace othervindicators; the sufferings of the slave new and gushing floods ofsympathy. Then, at last, shall the brotherhood of man stand confessed;ever filling the souls of all with a more generous life; ever promptingto deeds of beneficence; conquering the heathen prejudices of country, color, and race; guiding the judgment of the historian; animating theverse of the poet and the eloquence of the orator; ennobling humanthought and conduct; and inspiring those good works by which alone we mayattain to the heights of true glory. Good works! Such even now is theheavenly ladder on which angels are ascending and descending, while wearyhumanity, on pillows of storfe, slumbers heavily at its feet. "

We know how easy it is to sneer at such anticipations of a better futureas baseless and visionary. The shrewd but narrow-eyed man of the worldlaughs at the suggestion that there car: be any stronger motive thanselfishness, any higher morality than that of the broker's board. Theman who relies for salvation from the consequences of an evil and selfishlife upon the verbal orthodoxy of a creed presents the depravity andweakness of human nature as insuperable obstacles in the way of thegeneral amelioration of the condition of a world lying in wickedness. Hecounts it heretical and dangerous to act upon the supposition that thesame human nature which, in his own case and that of his associates, canconfront all perils, overcome all obstacles, and outstrip the whirlwindin the pursuit of gain, --which makes the strong elements its servants, taming and subjugating the very lightnings of heaven to work out its ownpurposes of self-aggrandizement, --must necessarily, and by an ordinationof Providence, become weak as water, when engaged in works of love andgoodwill, looking for the coming of a better day for humanity, with faithin the promises of the Gospel, and relying upon Him, who, in calling manto the great task-field of duty, has not mocked him with the mournfulnecessity of laboring in vain. We have been pained more than words canexpress to see young, generous hearts, yearning with strong desires toconsecrate themselves to the cause of their fellow-men, checked andchilled by the ridicule of worldly-wise conservatism, and the solemnrebukes of practical infidelity in the guise of a piety which professesto love the unseen Father, while disregarding the claims of His visiblechildren. Visionary! Were not the good St. Pierre, and Fenelon, andHoward, and Clarkson visionaries also?

What was John Woolman, to the wise and prudent of his day, but an amiableenthusiast? What, to those of our own, is such an angel of mercy asDorothea Dix? Who will not, in view of the labors of suchphilanthropists, adopt the language of Jonathan Edwards: "If these thingsbe enthusiasms and the fruits of a distempered brain, let my brain beevermore possessed with this happy distemper"?

It must, however, be confessed that there is a cant of philanthropy toogeneral and abstract for any practical purpose, --a morbidsentimentalism, --which contents itself with whining over real orimaginary present evil, and predicting a better state somewhere in thefuture, but really doing nothing to remove the one or hasten the comingof 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 isutterly dark and starless: yet, somehow, out of this darkness which maybe felt, the light is to burst forth miraculously; wrong, sin, pain, andsorrow are to be banished from the renovated world, and earth become avast 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, whowait to see the salvation which it is the task of humanity itself to workout, and who look down from a region of ineffable self-complacence ontheir dusty and toiling brethren who are resolutely doing whatsoevertheir hands find to do for the removal of the evils around them. 

The emblem of practical Christianity is the Samaritan stooping over thewounded Jew. No fastidious hand can lift from the dust fallen humanityand bind up its unsightly gashes. Sentimental lamentation over evil andsuffering may be indulged in until it becomes a sort of melancholyluxury, like the "weeping for Thammuz" by the apostate daughters ofJerusalem. Our faith in a better day for the race is strong; but we feelquite sure it will come in spite of such abstract reformers, and not byreason of them. The evils which possess humanity are of a kind which gonot out by their delicate appliances. 

The author of the Address under consideration is not of this class. Hehas boldly, and at no small cost, grappled with the great social andpolitical wrong of our country, --chattel slavery. Looking, as we haveseen, hopefully to the future, he is nevertheless one of those who canrespond 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 revoltingfor publication. The tongue falters in giving them utterance; the pentrembles that records them. Such is the ghastly horror of a late tragedyin Edgecomb, in the State of Maine. A respectable and thriving citizenand his wife had been for some years very unprofitably engaged inbrooding over the mysteries of the Apocalypse, and in speculations uponthe personal coming of Christ and the temporal reign of the saints onearth, --a sort of Mahometan paradise, which has as little warrant inScripture as in reason. Their minds of necessity became unsettled; theymeditated self-destruction; and, as it appears by a paper left behind inthe handwriting of both, came to an agreement that the husband shouldfirst kill his wife and their four children, and then put an end to hisown existence. This was literally executed, --the miserable man strikingoff the heads of his wife and children with his axe, and then cutting hisown throat. 

Alas for man when he turns from the light of reason and from the simpleand clearly defined duties of the present life, and undertakes to pryinto the mysteries of the future, bewildering himself with uncertain andvague prophecies, Oriental imagery, and obscure Hebrew texts! Simple, cheerful faith in God as our great and good Father, and love of Hischildren as our brethren, acted out in all relations and duties, iscertainly best for this world, and we believe also the best preparationfor that to come. Once possessed by the falsity that God's design isthat man should be wretched and gloomy here in order to obtain rest andhappiness hereafter; that the mental agonies and bodily tortures of Hiscreatures are pleasant to Him; that, after bestowing upon us reason forour guidance, He makes it of no avail by interposing contradictoryrevelations and arbitrary commands, --there is nothing to prevent one of amelancholic and excitable temperament from excesses so horrible as almostto justify the old belief in demoniac obsession. 

Charles Brockden Brown, a writer whose merits have not yet beensufficiently acknowledged, has given a powerful and philosophicalanalysis of this morbid state of mind--this diseased conscientiousness, obeying the mad suggestions of a disordered brain as the injunctions ofDivinity--in his remarkable story of Wieland. The hero of this strangeand solemn romance, inheriting a melancholy and superstitious mentalconstitution, becomes in middle age the victim of a deep, and tranquilbecause deep, fanaticism. A demon in human form, perceiving his state ofmind, wantonly experiments upon it, deepening and intensifying it by afearful series of illusions of sight and sound. Tricks of jugglery andventriloquism seem to his feverish fancies miracles and omens--the eyeand the voice of the Almighty piercing the atmosphere of supernaturalmystery in which he has long dwelt. He believes that he is called uponto sacrifice the beloved wife of his bosom as a testimony of the entiresubjugation of his carnal reason and earthly affections to the Divinewill. In the entire range of English literature there is no morethrilling passage than that which describes the execution of this balefulsuggestion. The coloring of the picture is an intermingling of thelights of heaven and hell, --soft shades of tenderest pity and warm tintsof unextinguishable love contrasting with the terrible outlines of aninsane and cruel purpose, traced with the blood of murder. The mastersof the old Greek tragedy have scarcely exceeded the sublime horror ofthis scene from the American novelist. The murderer confronted with hisgentle and loving victim in her chamber; her anxious solicitude for hishealth and quiet; her affectionate caress of welcome; his own relentingsand natural shrinking from his dreadful purpose; and the terriblestrength which he supposes is lent him of Heaven, by which he puts downthe promptings and yearnings of his human heart, and is enabled toexecute the mandate of an inexorable Being, --are described with anintensity which almost stops the heart of the reader. When the deed isdone a frightful conflict of passions takes place, which can only be toldin the words of the author:--

"I lifted the corpse in my arms and laid it on the bed. I gazed upon itwith delight. Such was my elation that I even broke out into laughter. I clapped my hands, and exclaimed, 'It is done! My sacred duty isfulfilled! To that I have sacrificed, O God, Thy last and best gift, mywife!'

"For a while I thus soared above frailty. I imagined I had set myselfforever beyond the reach of selfishness. But my imaginations were false. This rapture quickly subsided. I looked again at my wife. My joyousebullitions vanished. I asked myself who it was whom I saw. Methoughtit could not be my Catharine; it could not be the woman who had lodgedfor years in my heart; who had slept nightly in my bosom; who had bornein 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 evernew and perpetually growing. It could not be the same!

"The breath of heaven that sustained me was withdrawn, and I sunk intomere man. I leaped from the floor; I dashed my head against the wall; Iuttered screams of horror; I panted after torment and pain. Eternal fireand the bickerings of hell, compared with what I felt, were music and abed of roses. 

"I thank my God that this was transient; that He designed once more toraise 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 thissource of human consolation was closed, others were still open. If thetransports of the husband were no more, the feelings ofthe father had still scope for exercise. When remembrance of theirmother should excite too keen a pang, I would look upon my children andbe comforted. 

"While I revolved these things new warmth flowed in upon my heart. I waswrong. These feelings were the growth of selfishness. Of this I was notaware; and, to dispel the mist that obscured my perceptions, a new lightand a new mandate were necessary. 

"From these thoughts I was recalled by a ray which was shot into theroom. 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 beoffered--they must perish with their mother!'"

The misguided man obeys the voice; his children are destroyed in theirbloom and innocent beauty. He is arrested, tried for murder, andacquitted as insane. The light breaks in upon him at last; he discoversthe imposture which has controlled him; and, made desperate by the fullconsciousness of his folly and crime, ends the terrible drama by suicide. 

Wieland is not a pleasant book. In one respect it resembles the moderntale of Wuthering Heights: it has great strength and power, but nobeauty. Unlike that, however, it has an important and salutary moral. Itis a warning to all who tamper with the mind and rashly experiment uponits religious element. As such, its perusal by the sectarian zealots ofall classes would perhaps be quite as profitable as much of their presentstudies. 

THE POETRY OF THE NORTH. 

THE Democratic Review not long since contained a singularly wild andspirited poem, entitled the Norseman's Ride, in which the writer appearsto have very happily blended the boldness and sublimity of the heathensaga with the grace and artistic skill of the literature of civilization. The poetry of the Northmen, like their lives, was bold, defiant, and fullof a rude, untamed energy. It was inspired by exhibitions of powerrather than of beauty. Its heroes were beastly revellers or cruel andferocious plunderers; its heroines unsexed hoidens, playing the ugliesttricks with their lovers, and repaying slights with bloody revenge, --verydangerous and unsatisfactory companions for any other than the fire-eating Vikings and redhanded, unwashed Berserkers. Significant of areligion which reverenced the strong rather than the good, and whichregarded as meritorious the unrestrained indulgence of the passions, itdelighted to sing the praises of some coarse debauch or pitilessslaughter. The voice of its scalds was often but the scream of thecarrion-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 drunkenrevelry; its heaven a vast cloud-built ale-house, where ghostly warriorsdrank from the skulls of their victims; its hell a frozen horror ofdesolation and darkness, --all that the gloomy Northern imagination couldsuperadd 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 hugejokuls, or ice-mountains, loosened and upheaved by volcanic agencies, crawling slowly seaward, like misshapen monsters endowed with life, --aregion of misery unutterable, to be avoided only by diligence in robberyand courage in murder. 

What a work had Christianity to perform upon such a people as theIcelanders, for instance, of the tenth century!--to substitute in rude, savage minds the idea of its benign and gentle Founder for that of theThor and Woden of Norse mythology; the forgiveness, charity, and humilityof 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 ofthat Gospel, that, under its influence, the hard and cruel Norse hearthas been so softened and humanized that at this moment one of the bestillustrations of the peaceful and gentle virtues which it inculcates isafforded by the descendants of the sea-kings and robbers of the middlecenturies? No one can read the accounts which such travellers as SirGeorge Mackenzie and Dr. Henderson have given us of the peacefuldisposition, social equality, hospitality, industry, intellectualcultivation, morality, and habitual piety of the Icelanders, without agrateful sense of the adaptation of Christianity to the wants of ourrace, and of its ability to purify, elevate, and transform the worstelements of human character. In Iceland Christianity has performed itswork of civilization, unobstructed by that commercial cupidity which hascaused nations more favored in respect to soil and climate to lapse intoan idolatry scarcely less debasing and cruel than that which preceded theintroduction of the Gospel. Trial by combat was abolished in 1001, andthe penalty of the imaginary crime of witchcraft was blotted from thestatutes of the island nearly half a century before it ceased to disgracethose of Great Britain. So entire has been the change wrought in thesanguinary and cruel Norse character that at the present day no Icelandercan be found who, for any reward, will undertake the office ofexecutioner. The scalds, who went forth to battle, cleaving the skullsof their enemies with the same skilful hands which struck the harp at thefeast, have given place to Christian bards and teachers, who, likeThorlakson, whom Dr. Henderson found toiling cheerfully with his belovedparishioners in the hay-harvest of the brief arctic summer, combine withthe vigorous diction and robust thought of their predecessors the warmand genial humanity of a religion of love and the graces and amenities ofa high civilization. 

But we have wandered somewhat aside from our purpose, which was simply tointroduce the following poem, which, in the boldness of its tone andvigor of language, reminds us of the Sword Chant, the Wooing Song, andother 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 whichthe gods pass in Northern mythology.