Narrative Poems, part 4, Mable Martin etc | Page 8

heart on fire and crazed the brain??That over the holy oracles?Folly sported with cap and bells??That goodly women and learned men?Marvelling told with tongue and pen?How unweaned children chirped like birds?Texts of Scripture and solemn words,?Like the infant seers of the rocky glens?In the Puy de Dome of wild Cevennes?Or baby Lamas who pray and preach?From Tartir cradles in Buddha's speech?
In the war which Truth or Freedom wages?With impious fraud and the wrong of ages,?Hate and malice and self-love mar?The notes of triumph with painful jar,?And the helping angels turn aside?Their sorrowing faces the shame to bide.?Never on custom's oiled grooves?The world to a higher level moves,?But grates and grinds with friction hard?On granite boulder and flinty shard.?The heart must bleed before it feels,?The pool be troubled before it heals;?Ever by losses the right must gain,?Every good have its birth of pain;?The active Virtues blush to find?The Vices wearing their badge behind,?And Graces and Charities feel the fire?Wherein the sins of the age expire;?The fiend still rends as of old he rent?The tortured body from which be went.
But Time tests all. In the over-drift?And flow of the Nile, with its annual gift,?Who cares for the Hadji's relics sunk??Who thinks of the drowned-out Coptic monk??The tide that loosens the temple's stones,?And scatters the sacred ibis-bones,?Drives away from the valley-land?That Arab robber, the wandering sand,?Moistens the fields that know no rain,?Fringes the desert with belts of grain,?And bread to the sower brings again.?So the flood of emotion deep and strong?Troubled the land as it swept along,?But left a result of holier lives,?Tenderer-mothers and worthier wives.?The husband and father whose children fled?And sad wife wept when his drunken tread?Frightened peace from his roof-tree's shade,?And a rock of offence his hearthstone made,?In a strength that was not his own began?To rise from the brute's to the plane of man.?Old friends embraced, long held apart?By evil counsel and pride of heart;?And penitence saw through misty tears,?In the bow of hope on its cloud of fears,?The promise of Heaven's eternal years,--?The peace of God for the world's annoy,--?Beauty for ashes, and oil of joy?Under the church of Federal Street,?Under the tread of its Sabbath feet,?Walled about by its basement stones,?Lie the marvellous preacher's bones.?No saintly honors to them are shown,?No sign nor miracle have they known;?But be who passes the ancient church?Stops in the shade of its belfry-porch,?And ponders the wonderful life of him?Who lies at rest in that charnel dim.?Long shall the traveller strain his eye?From the railroad car, as it plunges by,?And the vanishing town behind him search?For the slender spire of the Whitefield Church;?And feel for one moment the ghosts of trade,?And fashion, and folly, and pleasure laid,?By the thought of that life of pure intent,?That voice of warning yet eloquent,?Of one on the errands of angels sent.?And if where he labored the flood of sin?Like a tide from the harbor-bar sets in,?And over a life of tune and sense?The church-spires lift their vain defence,?As if to scatter the bolts of God?With the points of Calvin's thunder-rod,--?Still, as the gem of its civic crown,?Precious beyond the world's renown,?His memory hallows the ancient town!?1859.
THE TRUCE OF PISCATAQUA.
In the winter of 1675-76, the Eastern Indians, who had been making war upon the New Hampshire settlements, were so reduced in numbers by fighting and famine that they agreed to a peace with Major Waldron at Dover, but the peace was broken in the fall of 1676. The famous chief, Squando, was the principal negotiator on the part of the savages. He had taken up the hatchet to revenge the brutal treatment of his child by drunken white sailors, which caused its death.
It not unfrequently happened during the Border wars that young white children were adopted by their Indian captors, and so kindly treated that they were unwilling to leave the free, wild life of the woods; and in some instances they utterly refused to go back with their parents to their old homes and civilization.
RAZE these long blocks of brick and stone,?These huge mill-monsters overgrown;?Blot out the humbler piles as well,?Where, moved like living shuttles, dwell?The weaving genii of the bell;?Tear from the wild Cocheco's track?The dams that hold its torrents back;?And let the loud-rejoicing fall?Plunge, roaring, down its rocky wall;?And let the Indian's paddle play?On the unbridged Piscataqua!?Wide over hill and valley spread?Once more the forest, dusk and dread,?With here and there a clearing cut?From the walled shadows round it shut;?Each with its farm-house builded rude,?By English yeoman squared and hewed,?And the grim, flankered block-house bound?With bristling palisades around.?So, haply shall before thine eyes?The dusty veil of centuries rise,?The old, strange scenery overlay?The tamer pictures of to-day,?While, like the actors in a play,?Pass in their ancient guise along?The figures of my border song?What time beside Cocheco's flood?The white man and the red man stood,?With words