So spake Esaias: so, in words of flame,Tekoa's prophet-herdsman smote with blameThe 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 profaneLifted to bless the slave-whip and the chain.Once more the old Hebrew tongueBends 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 moreBound, scourged, and crucified in His blameless poor;And shake above our landThe unquenched bolts that blazed in Hosea's hand!Not vainly shalt thou cast upon our yearsThe solemn burdens of the Orient seers,And smite with truth a guilty nation's ears.Mightier was Luther's wordThan Seckingen's mailed arm or Hutton's sword!1858.
Well thought! who would not rather hearThe songs to Love and Friendship sungThan 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 recompenseThat mocked the shorn and blinded slave?The heart has needs beyond the head,And, starving in the plenitudeOf 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 swungIn Wartburg woods, or that poor girl'sWho by the him her spindle whirlsAnd 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 nodHis votaries in and out again!Ply, Vanity, thy winged feet!Ambition, hew thy rocky stair!Who envies him who feeds on airThe icy splendor of his seat?I see your Alps, above me, cutThe dark, cold sky; and dim and loneI 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 grapesAnd fox) I would not if I could.Keep to your lofty pedestals!The safer plain below I chooseWho never wins can rarely lose,Who never climbs as rarely falls.Let such as love the eagle's screamDivide with him his home of iceFor 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.
Read at the Boston celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, 25th 1st mo., 1859. In my absence these lines were read by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
How sweetly come the holy psalmsFrom saints and martyrs down,The waving of triumphal palmsAbove the thorny crownThe choral praise, the chanted prayersFrom 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 floatsThe song of breeze and birdNot less the wonder of the skyThat daisies bloom below;The brook sings on, though loud and highThe cloudy organs blow!And, if the tender ear be jarredThat, haply, hears by turnsThe saintly harp of Olney's bard,The pastoral pipe of Burns,No discord mars His perfect planWho gave them both a tongue;For he who sings the love of manThe love of God hath sung!To-day be every fault forgivenOf him in whom we joyWe take, with thanks, the gold of HeavenAnd leave the earth's alloy.Be ours his music as of spring,His sweetness as of flowers,The songs the bard himself might singIn holier ears than ours.Sweet airs of love and home, the humOf household melodies,Come singing, as the robins comeTo sing in door-yard trees.And, heart to heart, two nations lean,No rival wreaths to twine,But blending in eternal greenThe holly and the pine!
In the fair land o'erwatched by Ischia's mountains,Across the charmed bayWhose blue waves keep with Capri's silver fountainsPerpetual holiday,A king lies dead, his wafer duly eaten,His gold-bought masses given;And Rome's great altar smokes with gums to sweetenHer foulest gift to Heaven.And while all Naples thrills with mute thanksgiving,The court of England's queenFor the dead monster so abhorred while livingIn mourning garb is seen.With a true sorrow God rebukes that feigning;By lone Edgbaston's sideStands 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 neighborThe good deeds of the dead.For him no minster's chant of the immortalsRose from the lips of sin;No mitred priest swung back the heavenly portalsTo let the white soul in.But Age and Sickness framed their tearful facesIn the low hovel's door,And prayers went up from all the dark by-placesAnd Ghettos of the poor.The pallid toiler and the negro chattel,The vagrant of the street,The human dice wherewith in games of battleThe lords of earth compete,Touched with a grief that needs no outward draping,All swelled the long lament,Of grateful hearts, instead of marble, shapingHis 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 steeplesNo crash of brazen wail,The murmurous woe of kindreds, tongues, and peoplesSwept in on every gale.It came from Holstein's birchen-belted meadows,And from the tropic calmsOf Indian islands in the sunlit shadowsOf Occidental palms;From the locked roadsteads of the Bothniaii peasants,And harbors of the Finn,Where war's worn victims saw his gentle presenceCome sailing, Christ-like, in,To seek the lost, to build the old waste places,To link the hostile shoresOf severing seas, and sow with England's daisiesThe moss of Finland's moors.Thanks for the good man's beautiful example,Who in the vilest sawSome sacred crypt or altar of a templeStill vocal with God's law;And heard with tender ear the spirit sighingAs from its prison cell,Praying for pity, like the mournful cryingOf 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 occasionStraight as a line of light.His faith and works, like streams that intermingle,In the same channel ranThe crystal clearness of an eye kept singleShamed all the frauds of man.The very gentlest of all human naturesHe joined to courage strong,And love outreaching unto all God's creaturesWith sturdy hate of wrong.Tender as woman, manliness and meeknessIn him were so alliedThat they who judged him by his strength or weaknessSaw but a single side.Men failed, betrayed him, but his zeal seemed nourishedBy 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 sweetnessNo more shall seem at strife,And death has moulded into calm completenessThe 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 marbleTo shame his modest shade.The forges glow, the hammers all are ringing;Beneath its smoky vale,Hard by, the city of his love is swingingIts clamorous iron flail.
But round his grave are quietude and beauty,And the sweet heaven above,—The fitting symbols of a life of dutyTransfigured into love!1859.
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 goodLong 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.
Helen Waterston died at Naples in her eighteenth year, and lies buried in the Protestant cemetery there. The stone over her grave bears the lines,
Fold her, O Father, in Thine arms,And let her henceforth beA messenger of love betweenOur human hearts and Thee.
I give thee joy!—I know to theeThe dearest spot on earth must beWhere sleeps thy loved one by the summer sea;
Where, near her sweetest poet's tomb,The land of Virgil gave thee roomTo lay thy flower with her perpetual bloom.I know that when the sky shut downBehind thee on the gleaming town,On Baiae's baths and Posilippo's crown;And, through thy tears, the mocking dayBurned Ischia's mountain lines away,And Capri melted in its sunny bay;Through thy great farewell sorrow shotThe sharp pang of a bitter thoughtThat slaves must tread around that holy spot.Thou knewest not the land was blestIn giving thy beloved rest,Holding the fond hope closer to her breast,That every sweet and saintly graveWas freedom's prophecy, and gaveThe pledge of Heaven to sanctify and save.That pledge is answered. To thy earThe unchained city sends its cheer,And, tuned to joy, the muffled bells of fearRing Victor in. The land sits freeAnd happy by the summer sea,And Bourbon Naples now is Italy!She smiles above her broken chainThe languid smile that follows pain,Stretching her cramped limbs to the sun again.Oh, joy for all, who hear her callFrom gray Camaldoli's convent-wallAnd Elmo's towers to freedom's carnival!A new life breathes among her vinesAnd olives, like the breath of pinesBlown downward from the breezy Apennines.Lean, O my friend, to meet that breath,Rejoice as one who witnessethBeauty 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.
Moses Austin Cartland, a dear friend and relation, who led a faithful life as a teacher and died in the summer of 1863.
Oh, thicker, deeper, darker growing,The solemn vista to the tombMust 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 longingTo make the world within our reachSomewhat 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 friendshipsThy genial nature fondly clung;And so the shadow on the dialRan back and left thee always young.And who could blame the generous weaknessWhich, only to thyself unjust,So overprized the worth of others,And dwarfed thy own with self-distrust?All hearts grew warmer in the presenceOf 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 preludeOf 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 fashionLife's plastic newness into graceTo 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, standThe living forms that owe their beautyAnd 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 remainingTo 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 kindredTo join the silent funeral prayers,But all that long sad day of summerMy tears of mourning dropped with theirs.All day the sea-waves sobbed with sorrow,The birds forgot their merry trillsAll day I heard the pines lamentingWith 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 companionsWho thither turn their pilgrim feet,In every mossy line recallingA tender memory sadly sweet.O friend! if thought and sense avail notTo know thee henceforth as thou art,That all is well with thee foreverI 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 shadowTo meet us, but to thee we come,With thee we never can be strangers,And where thou art must still be home.1863.
Mr. Bryant's seventieth birthday, November 3, 1864, was celebrated by a festival to which these verses were sent.
We praise not now the poet's art,The rounded beauty of his song;Who weighs him from his life apartMust do his nobler nature wrong.Not for the eye, familiar grownWith charms to common sight denied,The marvellous gift he shares aloneWith 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-dayThe 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 keysIts 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 therebyOur country may be saved and freed!1864.
Published originally as a prelude to the posthumous volume of selections edited by Richard Frothingham.
The great work laid upon his twoscore yearsIs 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 planWith him whose life stands rounded and approvedIn 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 swellLift the proud sorrow of the land, and tellThat the brave sower saw his ripened grain.O East and West! O morn and sunset twainNo more forever!—has he lived in vainWho, priest of Freedom, made ye one, and toldYour bridal service from his lips of gold?1864.
I need not ask thee, for my sake,To read a book which well may makeIts way by native force of witWithout my manual sign to it.Its piquant writer needs from meNo gravely masculine guaranty,And well might laugh her merriest laughAt 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 penToo sharply nibbed for thin-skinned men,That her keen arrows search and tryThe armor joints of dignity,And, though alone for error meant,Sing through the air irreverent.I blame her not, the young athleteWho plants her woman's tiny feet,And dares the chances of debateWhere bearded men might hesitate,Who, deeply earnest, seeing wellThe ludicrous and laughable,Mingling in eloquent excessHer 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 clearSunned heights of her new atmosphere.Heaven mend her faults!—I will not pauseTo weigh and doubt and peck at flaws,Or waste my pity when some foolProvokes her measureless ridicule.Strong-minded is she? Better soThan dulness set for sale or show,A household folly, capped and belledIn fashion's dance of puppets held,Or poor pretence of womanhood,Whose formal, flavorless platitudeIs warranted from all offenceOf robust meaning's violence.Give me the wine of thought whose headSparkles along the page I read,—Electric words in which I findThe tonic of the northwest wind;The wisdom which itself alliesTo sweet and pure humanities,Where scorn of meanness, hate of wrong,Are underlaid by love as strong;The genial play of mirth that lightsGrave themes of thought, as when, on nightsOf summer-time, the harmless blazeOf thunderless heat-lightning plays,And tree and hill-top resting dimAnd 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 allBy doubt, if he were here, that PaulWould own the heroines who have lentGrace 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 AppealMade Fashion weep and Mammon feel,Who, earliest summoned to withstandThe 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 lyreOf love the Tyrtman carmen's fireOr that young girl,—Domremy's maidRevived a nobler cause to aid,—Shaking from warning finger-tipsThe doom of her apocalypse;Or her, who world-wide entrance gaveTo the log-cabin of the slave,Made all his want and sorrow known,And all earth's languages his own.1866.
No man rendered greater service to the cause of freedom than Major Stearns in the great struggle between invading slave-holders and the free settlers of Kansas.
He has done the work of a true man,—Crown him, honor him, love him.Weep, over him, tears of woman,Stoop manliest brows above him!O dusky mothers and daughters,Vigils of mourning keep for him!Up in the mountains, and down by the waters,Lift up your voices and weep for him,For the warmest of hearts is frozen,The freest of hands is still;And the gap in our picked and chosenThe 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 swungAgainst whose bolted ironThe strength of his life was flung.And he saw ere his eye was darkenedThe sheaves of the harvest-bringing,And knew while his ear yet hearkenedThe 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 feetSometimes in advance of fate;Plucked off the old bark when the innerWas slow to renew it,And put to the Lord's work the sinnerWhen saints failed to do it.Never rode to the wrong's redressingA worthier paladin.Shall he not hear the blessing,"Good and faithful, enter in!"1867
In trance and dream of old, God's prophet sawThe casting down of thrones. Thou, watching loneThe hot Sardinian coast-line, hazy-hilled,Where, fringing round Caprera's rocky zoneWith foam, the slow waves gather and withdraw,Behold'st the vision of the seer fulfilled,And hear'st the sea-winds burdened with a soundOf falling chains, as, one by one, unbound,The nations lift their right hands up and swearTheir oath of freedom. From the chalk-white wallOf England, from the black Carpathian range,Along the Danube and the Theiss, through allThe passes of the Spanish Pyrenees,And from the Seine's thronged banks, a murmur strangeAnd glad floats to thee o'er thy summer seasOn the salt wind that stirs thy whitening hair,—The song of freedom's bloodless victories!Rejoice, O Garibaldi! Though thy swordFailed at Rome's gates, and blood seemed vainly pouredWhere, in Christ's name, the crowned infidelOf France wrought murder with the arms of hellOn 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 thingsBefore whose evil feet thy battle-gageHas clashed defiance from hot youth to ageShall perish. All men shall be priests and kings,One royal brotherhood, one church made freeBy love, which is the law of liberty.1869.
Mrs. Child wrote her lines, beginning, "Again the trees are clothed in vernal green," May 24, 1859, on the first anniversary of Ellis Gray Loring's death, but did not publish them for some years afterward, when I first read them, or I could not have made the reference which I did to the extinction of slavery.
The sweet spring day is glad with music,But through it sounds a sadder strain;The worthiest of our narrowing circleSings Loring's dirges o'er again.O woman greatly loved! I join theeIn tender memories of our friend;With thee across the awful spacesThe 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 HeavenDawns the sweet sunrise of his smile?Does he not know our feet are treadingThe 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 whisperFrom him to tell us all is well?Why to our flower-time comes no tokenOf 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 questionThe 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 comingWhere rapt ghost sits from ghost apart;Homeward we go to Heaven's thanksgiving,The harvest-gathering of the heart.1870.
This poem was written on the death of Alice Cary. Her sister Phoebe, heart-broken by her loss, followed soon after. Noble and richly gifted, lovely in person and character, they left behind them only friends and admirers.
Years since (but names to me before),Two sisters sought at eve my door;Two song-birds wandering from their nest,A gray old farm-house in the West.How fresh of life the younger one,Half smiles, half tears, like rain in sun!Her gravest mood could scarce displaceThe dimples of her nut-brown face.Wit sparkled on her lips not lessFor quick and tremulous tenderness;And, following close her merriest glance,Dreamed through her eyes the heart's romance.Timid and still, the elder hadEven then a smile too sweetly sad;The crown of pain that all must wearToo early pressed her midnight hair.Yet ere the summer eve grew long,Her modest lips were sweet with song;A memory haunted all her wordsOf clover-fields and singing birds.Her dark, dilating eyes expressedThe broad horizons of the west;Her speech dropped prairie flowers; the goldOf harvest wheat about her rolled.Fore-doomed to song she seemed to meI queried not with destinyI 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? RebukeThe 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 nameA pleasant household word becameAll felt behind the singer stoodA sweet and gracious womanhood.Her life was earnest work, not play;Her tired feet climbed a weary way;And even through her lightest strainWe 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 loveThat 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 stirsHad moved that woman's heart of hers,And men who toiled in storm and sunFound her their meet companion.Our converse, from her suffering bedTo healthful themes of life she ledThe out-door world of bud and bloomAnd light and sweetness filled her room.Yet evermore an underthoughtOf loss to come within us wrought,And all the while we felt the strainOf the strong will that conquered pain.God giveth quietness at last!The common way that all have passedShe went, with mortal yearnings fond,To fuller life and love beyond.Fold the rapt soul in your embrace,My dear ones! Give the singer placeTo 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 streamsWake, laughing, from their winter dreams,And tremble in the April showersThe tassels of the maple flowers.But not for her has spring renewedThe sweet surprises of the wood;And bird and flower are lost to herWho was their best interpreter.What to shut eyes has God revealed?What hear the ears that death has sealed?What undreamed beauty passing showRequites 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 outgrowWhat it is waiting to bestow!O white soul! from that far-off shoreFloat some sweet song the waters o'er.Our faith confirm, our fears dispel,With the old voice we loved so well!1871.
These lines were in answer to an invitation to hear a lecture of Mary Grew, of Philadelphia, before the Boston Radical Club. The reference in the last stanza is to an essay on Sappho by T. W. Higginson, read at the club the preceding month.
With wisdom far beyond her years,And graver than her wondering peers,So strong, so mild, combining stillThe tender heart and queenly will,To conscience and to duty true,So, up from childhood, Mary Grew!Then in her gracious womanhoodShe 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 comesTo her from women's weary homes;The wronged and erring find in herTheir censor mild and comforter.The world were safe if but a fewCould 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 tellThe silver-voiced oracleWho lately through her parlors spokeAs through Dodona's sacred oak,A wiser truth than any toldBy Sappho's lips of ruddy gold,—The way to make the world anew,Is just to grow—as Mary Grew.1871.
"I am not one who has disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct, or the maxims of a freeman by the actions of a slave; but, by the grace of God, I have kept my life unsullied." —MILTON'SDefence of the People of England.
O Mother State! the winds of MarchBlew chill o'er Auburn's Field of God,Where, slow, beneath a leaden archOf sky, thy mourning children trod.And now, with all thy woods in leaf,Thy fields in flower, beside thy deadThou 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 bellsIn all thy steeple-towers are rung.And I, obedient to thy will,Have come a simple wreath to lay,Superfluous, on a grave that stillIs 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 lovedIs 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 seerA clearer voice of duty came.God said: "Break thou these yokes; undoThese heavy burdens. I ordainA 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 fellThe 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 sakeThe beak-torn Titan's lingering pain!The fixed star of his faith, through allLoss, 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 sawThe 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 rockOn which his forward feet were set.The subtlest scheme of compromiseWas folly to his purpose bold;The strongest mesh of party liesWeak to the simplest truth he told.One language held his heart and lip,Straight onward to his goal he trod,And proved the highest statesmanshipObedience 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 careTo lift the foe he fought so well.For there was nothing base or smallOr 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 statelierHe 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 gaveThe 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 keptIts grandeur wheresoe'er he trod,As if from Plutarch's gallery steppedThe 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 ownThe slight defects he never hid,The surface-blemish in the stoneOf the tall, stately pyramid.Suffice it that he never broughtHis 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 prideOf power in noble use, too trueWith thin humilities to hideThe work he did, the lore he knew?Was he not just? Was any wrongedBy 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 pageThrough which he still shall warm and wakeThe hearts of men from age to age.Ah! who shall blame him now becauseHe 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 oilOn 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 hintsA 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 blessAnd sweeten life, and loved his friendsWith most unworldly tenderness.But still his tired eyes rarely learnedThe glad relief by Nature brought;Her mountain ranges never turnedHis current of persistent thought.The sea rolled chorus to his speechThree-banked like Latium's' tall trireme,With laboring oars; the grove and beachWere Forum and the Academe.The sensuous joy from all things fairHis strenuous bent of soul repressed,And left from youth to silvered hairFew hours for pleasure, none for rest.For all his life was poor without,O Nature, make the last amendsTrain all thy flowers his grave about,And make thy singing-birds his friends!Revive again, thou summer rain,The broken turf upon his bedBreathe, summer wind, thy tenderest strainOf low, sweet music overhead!With calm and beauty symbolizeThe 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 solicitudesMade weak his life's great argument;Small leisure his for frames and moodsWho followed Duty where she went.The broad, fair fields of God he sawBeyond the bigot's narrow bound;The truths he moulded into lawIn 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 heavenWhose mercy to His suffering poorWas 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 wellThe trust he neither shunned nor sought.If for one moment turned thy face,O Mother, from thy son, not longHe waited calmly in his placeThe sure remorse which follows wrong.Forgiven be the State he lovedThe one brief lapse, the single blot;Forgotten be the stain removed,Her righted record shows it not!The lifted sword above her shieldWith jealous care shall guard his fame;The pine-tree on her ancient fieldTo all the winds shall speak his name.The marble image of her sonHer loving hands shall yearly crown,And from her pictured PantheonHis 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'erShall longest pause at Sumner's name!1874.