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

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 for
Freedom under Fremont's leadership was permitting strong hope of
success,--a hope overshadowed and solemnized by a sense of the
magnitude of the barbaric evil, and a forecast of the unscrupulous and
desperate use 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 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