Anti Slavery Poems III, vol 3, part 3 | Page 8

burden of the prophet's vision;?The gathering hosts,--the Valley of Decision,?Dusk with the wings of eagles wheeling o'er.?Day of the Lord, of darkness and not light!?It breaks in thunder and the whirlwind's roar?Even so, Father! Let Thy will be done;?Turn and o'erturn, end what Thou bast begun?In judgment or in mercy: as for me,?If but the least and frailest, let me be?Evermore numbered with the truly free?Who find Thy service perfect liberty!?I fain would thank Thee that my mortal life?Has reached the hour (albeit through care and pain)?When Good and Evil, as for final strife,?Close dim and vast on Armageddon's plain;?And Michael and his angels once again?Drive howling back the Spirits of the Night.?Oh for the faith to read the signs aright?And, from the angle of Thy perfect sight,?See Truth's white banner floating on before;?And the Good Cause, despite of venal friends,?And base expedients, move to noble ends;?See Peace with Freedom make to Time amends,?And, through its cloud of dust, the threshing-floor,?Flailed by the thunder, heaped with chaffless grain?1856.
A SONG, INSCRIBED TO THE FREMONT CLUBS.?Written after the election in 1586, which showed the immense gains of the Free Soil party, and insured its success in 1860.
BENEATH thy skies, November!?Thy skies of cloud and rain,?Around our blazing camp-fires?We close our ranks again.?Then sound again the bugles,?Call the muster-roll anew;?If months have well-nigh won the field,?What may not four years do?
For God be praised! New England?Takes once more her ancient place;?Again the Pilgrim's banner?Leads the vanguard of the race.?Then sound again the bugles, etc.
Along the lordly Hudson,?A shout of triumph breaks;?The Empire State is speaking,?From the ocean to the lakes.?Then sound again the bugles, etc.
The Northern hills are blazing,?The Northern skies are bright;?And the fair young West is turning?Her forehead to the light!?Then sound again the bugles, etc.
Push every outpost nearer,?Press hard the hostile towers!?Another Balaklava,?And the Malakoff is ours!?Then sound again the bugles,?Call the muster-roll anew;?If months have well-nigh won the field,?What may not four years do?
THE PANORAMA.
"A! fredome is a nobill thing!?Fredome mayse man to haif liking.?Fredome all solace to man giffis;?He levys at ese that frely levys?A nobil hart may haif nane ese?Na ellvs nocht that may him plese?Gyff Fredome failythe."?ARCHDEACON BARBOUR.
THROUGH the long hall the shuttered windows shed?A dubious light on every upturned head;?On locks like those of Absalom the fair,?On the bald apex ringed with scanty hair,?On blank indifference and on curious stare;?On the pale Showman reading from his stage?The hieroglyphics of that facial page;?Half sad, half scornful, listening to the bruit?Of restless cane-tap and impatient foot,?And the shrill call, across the general din,?"Roll up your curtain! Let the show begin!"
At length a murmur like the winds that break?Into green waves the prairie's grassy lake,?Deepened and swelled to music clear and loud,?And, as the west-wind lifts a summer cloud,?The curtain rose, disclosing wide and far?A green land stretching to the evening star,?Fair rivers, skirted by primeval trees?And flowers hummed over by the desert bees,?Marked by tall bluffs whose slopes of greenness show?Fantastic outcrops of the rock below;?The slow result of patient Nature's pains,?And plastic fingering of her sun and rains;?Arch, tower, and gate, grotesquely windowed hall,?And long escarpment of half-crumbled wall,?Huger than those which, from steep hills of vine,?Stare through their loopholes on the travelled Rhine;?Suggesting vaguely to the gazer's mind?A fancy, idle as the prairie wind,?Of the land's dwellers in an age unguessed;?The unsung Jotuns of the mystic West.
Beyond, the prairie's sea-like swells surpass?The Tartar's marvels of his Land of Grass,?Vast as the sky against whose sunset shores?Wave after wave the billowy greenness pours;?And, onward still, like islands in that main?Loom the rough peaks of many a mountain chain,?Whence east and west a thousand waters run?From winter lingering under summer's sun.?And, still beyond, long lines of foam and sand?Tell where Pacific rolls his waves a-land,?From many a wide-lapped port and land-locked bay,?Opening with thunderous pomp the world's highway?To Indian isles of spice, and marts of far Cathay.
"Such," said the Showman, as the curtain fell,?"Is the new Canaan of our Israel;?The land of promise to the swarming North,?Which, hive-like, sends its annual surplus forth,?To the poor Southron on his worn-out soil,?Scathed by the curses of unnatural toil;?To Europe's exiles seeking home and rest,?And the lank nomads of the wandering West,?Who, asking neither, in their love of change?And the free bison's amplitude of range,?Rear the log-hut, for present shelter meant,?Not future comfort, like an Arab's tent."
Then spake a shrewd on-looker, "Sir," said he,?"I like your picture, but I fain would see?A sketch of what your promised land will be?When, with electric nerve, and fiery-brained,?With Nature's forces to its chariot chained,?The future grasping, by the past obeyed,?The twentieth century rounds a new decade."
Then said the Showman, sadly: "He who grieves?Over the scattering of the sibyl's leaves?Unwisely mourns. Suffice it, that we know?What needs must ripen from the seed we sow;?That