Anti Slavery Poems III, vol 3, part 3 | Page 9

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