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

its
place to tell,
Sandy fissure and sulphurous smell.
With zeal
wing-clipped and white-heat cool,
Moved by the spirit in grooves of
rule,
No longer harried, and cropped, and fleeced,
Flogged by
sheriff and cursed by priest,
But by wiser counsels left at ease
To
settle quietly on his lees,
And, self-concentred, to count as done

The work which his fathers well begun,
In silent protest of letting
alone,
The Quaker kept the way of his own,--
A non-conductor
among the wires,
With coat of asbestos proof to fires.
And quite
unable to mend his pace
To catch the falling manna of grace,
He
hugged the closer his little store
Of faith, and silently prayed for more.

And vague of creed and barren of rite,
But holding, as in his
Master's sight,
Act and thought to the inner light,
The round of his
simple duties walked,
And strove to live what the others talked.
And who shall marvel if evil went
Step by step with the good intent,

And with love and meekness, side by side,
Lust of the flesh and
spiritual pride?--
That passionate longings and fancies vain
Set the
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