Personal Poems II, vol 4, part 2 | Page 8

to it.

Its piquant writer needs from me
No gravely masculine guaranty,

And well might laugh her merriest laugh
At broken spears in her
behalf;
Yet, spite of all the critics tell,
I frankly own I like her well.

It may be that she wields a pen
Too sharply nibbed for
thin-skinned men,
That her keen arrows search and try
The armor

joints of dignity,
And, though alone for error meant,
Sing through
the air irreverent.
I blame her not, the young athlete
Who plants her
woman's tiny feet,
And dares the chances of debate
Where bearded
men might hesitate,
Who, deeply earnest, seeing well
The ludicrous
and laughable,
Mingling in eloquent excess
Her anger and her
tenderness,
And, chiding with a half-caress,
Strives, less for her
own sex than ours,
With principalities and powers,
And points us
upward to the clear
Sunned heights of her new atmosphere.
Heaven mend her faults!--I will not pause
To weigh and doubt and
peck at flaws,
Or waste my pity when some fool
Provokes her
measureless ridicule.
Strong-minded is she? Better so
Than dulness
set for sale or show,
A household folly, capped and belled
In
fashion's dance of puppets held,
Or poor pretence of womanhood,

Whose formal, flavorless platitude
Is warranted from all offence
Of
robust meaning's violence.
Give me the wine of thought whose head

Sparkles along the page I read,--
Electric words in which I find

The tonic of the northwest wind;
The wisdom which itself allies
To
sweet and pure humanities,
Where scorn of meanness, hate of wrong,

Are underlaid by love as strong;
The genial play of mirth that
lights
Grave themes of thought, as when, on nights
Of summer-time,
the harmless blaze
Of thunderless heat-lightning plays,
And tree
and hill-top resting dim
And doubtful on the sky's vague rim,

Touched by that soft and lambent gleam,

Start sharply outlined from
their dream.
Talk not to me of woman's sphere,
Nor point with Scripture texts a
sneer,
Nor wrong the manliest saint of all
By doubt, if he were here,
that Paul
Would own the heroines who have lent
Grace to truth's
stern arbitrament,
Foregone the praise to woman sweet,
And cast
their crowns at Duty's feet;
Like her, who by her strong Appeal

Made Fashion weep and Mammon feel,
Who, earliest summoned to
withstand
The color-madness of the land,
Counted her life-long

losses gain,
And made her own her sisters' pain;
Or her who, in her
greenwood shade,
Heard the sharp call that Freedom made,
And,
answering, struck from Sappho's lyre
Of love the Tyrtman carmen's
fire
Or that young girl,--Domremy's maid
Revived a nobler cause to
aid,--
Shaking from warning finger-tips
The doom of her
apocalypse;
Or her, who world-wide entrance gave
To the log-cabin
of the slave,
Made all his want and sorrow known,
And all earth's
languages his own.
1866.
GEORGE L. STEARNS
No man rendered greater service to the cause of freedom than Major
Stearns in the great struggle between invading slave-holders and the
free settlers of Kansas.
He has done the work of a true man,--
Crown him, honor him, love
him.
Weep, over him, tears of woman,
Stoop manliest brows above
him!
O dusky mothers and daughters,
Vigils of mourning keep for him!

Up in the mountains, and down by the waters,
Lift up your voices and
weep for him,
For the warmest of hearts is frozen,
The freest of hands is still;
And
the gap in our picked and chosen
The long years may not fill.
No duty could overtask him,
No need his will outrun;
Or ever our
lips could ask him,
His hands the work had done.
He forgot his own soul for others,
Himself to his neighbor lending;

He found the Lord in his suffering brothers,
And not in the clouds
descending.
So the bed was sweet to die on,
Whence he saw the doors wide
swung
Against whose bolted iron
The strength of his life was flung.

And he saw ere his eye was darkened
The sheaves of the
harvest-bringing,
And knew while his ear yet hearkened
The voice
of the reapers singing.
Ah, well! The world is discreet;
There are plenty to pause and wait;

But here was a man who set his feet
Sometimes in advance of fate;
Plucked off the old bark when the inner
Was slow to renew it,
And
put to the Lord's work the sinner
When saints failed to do it.
Never rode to the wrong's redressing
A worthier paladin.
Shall he
not hear the blessing,
"Good and faithful, enter in!"
1867
GARIBALDI
In trance and dream of old, God's prophet saw
The casting down of
thrones. Thou, watching lone
The hot Sardinian coast-line,
hazy-hilled,
Where, fringing round Caprera's rocky zone
With foam,
the slow waves gather and withdraw,
Behold'st the vision of the seer
fulfilled,
And hear'st the sea-winds burdened with a sound
Of
falling chains, as, one by one, unbound,
The nations lift their right
hands up and swear
Their oath of freedom. From the chalk-white wall

Of England, from the black Carpathian range,
Along the Danube
and the Theiss, through all
The passes of the Spanish Pyrenees,

And from the Seine's thronged banks, a murmur strange
And glad
floats to thee o'er thy summer seas
On the salt wind that stirs thy
whitening hair,--
The song of freedom's bloodless victories!
Rejoice,
O Garibaldi! Though thy sword
Failed at Rome's gates, and blood
seemed vainly poured
Where, in Christ's name, the crowned infidel

Of France wrought murder with the arms of hell
On that sad
mountain slope whose ghostly dead,
Unmindful of