The rights and liberties affirmed by Magna Charta were deemed of such importance, in the thirteenth century, that the Bishops, twice a year, with tapers burning, and in their pontifical robes, pronounced, in the presence of the king and the representatives of the estates of England, the greater excommunication against the infringer of that instrument. The imposing ceremony took place in the great Hall of Westminster. A copy of the curse, as pronounced in 1253, declares that, "by the authority of Almighty God, and the blessed Apostles and Martyrs, and all the saints in heaven, all those who violate the English liberties, and secretly or openly, by deed, word, or counsel, do make statutes, or observe then being made, against said liberties, are accursed and sequestered from the company of heaven and the sacraments of the Holy Church."
William Penn, in his admirable political pamphlet, England's Present Interest Considered, alluding to the curse of the Charter- breakers, says: "I am no Roman Catholic, and little value their other curses; yet I declare I would not for the world incur this curse, as every man deservedly doth, who offers violence to the fundamental freedom thereby repeated and confirmed."
IN Westminster's royal halls,Robed in their pontificals,England's ancient prelates stoodFor 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 givenKeys 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 headBowed in reverent awe, and thenAll the people said, Amen!
Seven times the bells have tolled,For the centuries gray and old,Since that stoled and mitred bandCursed the tyrants of their land.
Since the priesthood, like a tower,Stood between the poor and power;And the wronged and trodden downBlessed the abbot's shaven crown.
Gone, thank God, their wizard spell,Lost, their keys of heaven and hell;Yet I sigh for men as boldAs those bearded priests of old.
Now, too oft the priesthood waitAt the threshold of the state;Waiting for the beck and nodOf its power as law and God.
Fraud exults, while solemn wordsSanctify his stolen hoards;Slavery laughs, while ghostly lipsBless his manacles and whips.
Not on them the poor rely,Not to them looks liberty,Who with fawning falsehood cowerTo 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 beGod'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 blissOn 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 bringLord and peasant, serf and king;And the Christ of God to findIn 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 midwayHeralding 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 sodRests the City of our God!1848.
This poem indicates the exultation of the anti-slavery party in view of the revolt of the friends of Martin Van Buren in New York, from the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1848.
Now, joy and thanks forevermore!The dreary night has wellnigh passed,The slumbers of the North are o'er,The Giant stands erect at last!
More than we hoped in that dark timeWhen, faint with watching, few and worn,We saw no welcome day-star climbThe 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 kindFell 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 blowTheir breath upon the darkness passed.
A mighty host, on either hand,Stood waiting for the dawn of dayTo 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 nightAre brothers at the dawn of day.
As unto these repentant onesWe open wide our toil-worn ranks,Along our line a murmur runsOf 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 fastLike 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 towerHang, smoking, for a fiercer fall.
Awake! awake! my Fatherland!It is thy Northern light that shines;This stirring march of Freedom's bandThe storm-song of thy mountain pines.
Wake, dwellers where the day expires!And hear, in winds that sweep your lakesAnd fan your prairies' roaring fires,The signal-call that Freedom makes!1848.
Written on learning the terms of the treaty with Mexico.
ACROSS the Stony Mountains, o'er the desert'sdrouth and sand,The circles of our empire touch the western ocean'sstrand;From slumberous Timpanogos, to Gila, wild andfree,Flowing down from Nuevo-Leon to California's sea;And from the mountains of the east, to SantaRosa's shore,The eagles of Mexitli shall beat the air no more.
O Vale of Rio Bravo! Let thy simple childrenweep;Close watch about their holy fire let maids ofPecos keep;Let Taos send her cry across Sierra Madre's pines,And Santa Barbara toll her bells amidst her cornand vines;For lo! the pale land-seekers come, with eager eyesof gain,Wide scattering, like the bison herds on broadSalada's plain.
Let Sacramento's herdsmen heed what sound thewinds bring downOf footsteps on the crisping snow, from coldNevada's crown!Full hot and fast the Saxon rides, with rein oftravel slack,And, bending o'er his saddle, leaves the sunrise athis back;By many a lonely river, and gorge of fir andpine,On many a wintry hill-top, his nightly camp-firesshine.
O countrymen and brothers! that land of lake andplain,Of salt wastes alternating with valleys fat withgrain;Of mountains white with winter, looking downward,cold, serene,On their feet with spring-vines tangled and lappedin softest green;Swift through whose black volcanic gates, o'ermany a sunny vale,Wind-like the Arapahoe sweeps the bison's dustytrail!
Great spaces yet untravelled, great lakes whosemystic shoresThe Saxon rifle never heard, nor dip of Saxon oars;Great herds that wander all unwatched, wild steedsthat none have tamed,Strange fish in unknown streams, and birds theSaxon never named;Deep mines, dark mountain crucibles, where Nature'schemic powersWork out the Great Designer's will; all these yesay are ours!
Forever ours! for good or ill, on us the burdenlies;God's balance, watched by angels, is hung acrossthe skies.Shall Justice, Truth, and Freedom turn the poisedand trembling scale?Or shall the Evil triumph, and robber Wrong prevail?Shall the broad land o'er which our flag in starrysplendor waves,Forego through us its freedom, and bear the treadof slaves?
The day is breaking in the East of which theprophets told,And brightens up the sky of Time the ChristianAge of Gold;Old Might to Right is yielding, battle blade toclerkly pen,Earth's monarchs are her peoples, and her serfsstand up as men;
The isles rejoice together, in a day are nationsborn,And the slave walks free in Tunis, and by Stamboul'sGolden Horn!
Is this, O countrymen of mine! a day for us to sowThe soil of new-gained empire with slavery's seedsof woe?To feed with our fresh life-blood the Old World'scast-off crime,Dropped, like some monstrous early birth, fromthe tired lap of Time?To run anew the evil race the old lost nations ran,And die like them of unbelief of God, and wrongof man?
Great Heaven! Is this our mission? End in thisthe prayers and tears,The toil, the strife, the watchings of our younger,better years?Still as the Old World rolls in light, shall ours inshadow turn,A beamless Chaos, cursed of God, through outerdarkness borne?Where the far nations looked for light, a black-ness in the air?Where for words of hope they listened, the longwail of despair?
The Crisis presses on us; face to face with us itstands,With solemn lips of question, like the Sphinx inEgypt's sands!This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate wespin;This day for all hereafter choose we holiness orsin;Even now from starry Gerizim, or Ebal's cloudycrown,We call the dews of blessing or the bolts of cursingdown!
By all for which the martyrs bore their agony andshame;By all the warning words of truth with which theprophets came;By the Future which awaits us; by all the hopeswhich castTheir faint and trembling beams across the black-ness of the Past;And by the blessed thought of Him who for Earth'sfreedom died,O my people! O my brothers! let us choose therighteous side.
So shall the Northern pioneer go joyful on hisway;To wed Penobseot's waters to San Francisco's bay;To make the rugged places smooth, and sow thevales with grain;And bear, with Liberty and Law, the Bible in histrainThe mighty West shall bless the East, and sea shallanswer sea,And mountain unto mountain call, Praise God, forwe are free1845.
A pleasant print to peddle outIn lands of rice and cotton;The model of that face in doughWould make the artist's fortune.For Fame to thee has come unsought,While others vainly woo her,In proof how mean a thing can makeA 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 gooseSaved Rome from sack of Brennus;The braying of the prophet's assBetrayed the angel's menace!
So when Guy Fawkes, in petticoats,And azure-tinted hose oil,Was twisting from thy love-lorn sheetsThe slow-match of explosion—An earthquake blast that would have tossedThe Union as a feather,Thy instinct saved a perilled landAnd perilled purse together.
Just think of Carolina's sageSent whirling like a Dervis,Of Quattlebum in middle airPerforming 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 disguiseThe danger darkly lurking,And maiden bodice dreaded moreThan 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-jailAdmiring eyes should view it.Or, hung aloft, it well might graceThe nation's senate-chamber—A greedy Northern bottle-flyPreserved in Slavery's amber!1850.