Fill soft and deep, O winter snow!
The sweet azalia's oaken dells,
And hide the bank where roses blow,
And swing the azure bells!
O'erlay the amber violet's leaves,
The purple aster's brookside home,
Guard all the flowers her pencil gives
A life beyond their bloom.
And she, when spring comes round again,
By greening slope and singing flood
Shall wander, seeking, not in vain,
Her darlings of the wood.
I HEARD the train's shrill whistle call,
I saw an earnest look beseech,
And rather by that look than speech
My neighbor told me all.
And, as I thought of Liberty
Marched hand-cuffed down that sworded street,
The solid earth beneath my feet
Reeled fluid as the sea.
I felt a sense of bitter loss
Shame, tearless grief, and stifling wrath,
And loathing fear, as if my path
A serpent stretched across.
All love of home, all pride of place,
All generous confidence and trust,
Sank smothering in that deep disgust
And anguish of disgrace.
Down on my native hills of June,
And home's green quiet, hiding all,
Fell sudden darkness like the fall
Of midnight upon noon !
And Law, an unloosed maniac, strong,
Blood-drunken, through the blackness trod,
Hoarse-shouting in the ear of God
The blasphemy of wrong.
"O, Mother, from thy memories proud,
Thy old renown, dear Commonwealth,
Lend this dead air a breeze of health,
And smite with stars this cloud.
"Mother of Freedom, wise and brave,
Rise awful in thy strength," I said;
Ah, me! I spake but to the dead;
I stood upon her grave!
Sixth month, 1854.
ON THE PASSAGE OF THE BILL TO PROTECT THE RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES OF THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE AGAINST THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT.
I SAID I stood upon thy grave,
My Mother State, when last the moon
Of blossoms clomb the skies of June.
And, scattering ashes on my head,
I wore, undreaming of relief,
The sackcloth of thy shame and grief.
Again that moon of blossoms shines
On leaf and flower and folded wing,
And thou hast risen with the spring!
Once more thy strong maternal arms
Are round about thy children flung-
A lioness that guards her young!
No threat is on thy closed lips,
But in thine eye a power to smite
The mad wolf backward from its light.
Southward the baffled robber's track
Henceforth runs only; hereaway,
The fell lycanthrope finds no prey.
Henceforth, within thy sacred gates,
His first low howl shall downward draw
The thunder of thy righteous law.
Not mindless of thy trade and gain,
But, acting on the wiser plan,
Thou'rt grown conservative of man.
So shalt thou clothe with life the hope,
Dream-painted on the sightless eyes
Of him who sang of Paradise-
The vision of a Christian man,
In virtue as in stature great,
Embodied in a Christian State.
And thou, amidst thy sisterhood
Forbearing long, yet standing fast,
Shalt win their grateful thanks at last;
When North and South shall strive no more.
And all their feuds and fears be lost
In Freedom's holy Pentecost.
Sixth month, 1855.
LAST night, just as the tints of autumn's sky
Of sunset faded from our hills and streams,
I sat, vague listening, lapped in twilight dreams,
To the leaf's rustle, and the cricket's cry.
Then, like that basket, flush with summer fruit,
Dropped by the angels at the Prophet's foot,
Came, unannounced, a gift of clustered sweetness,
-Full-orbed, and glowing with the prisoned beams
Of summery suns, and, rounded to completeness
By kisses of the south wind and the dew.
Thrilled with a glad surprise, methought I knew
The pleasure of the homeward-turning Jew,
When Eschol's clusters on his shoulders lay,
Dropping their sweetness on his desert way.
I said, "This fruit beseems no world of sin,
Its parent vine, rooted in Paradise,
O'ercrept the wall, and never paid the price
Of the great mischief—an ambrosial tree,
Eden's exotic, somehow smuggled in,
To keep the thorns and thistles company."
Perchance our frail, sad mother plucked in haste
A single vine-slip as she passed the gate,
Where the dread sword, alternate paled and
burned,
And the stern angel, pitying her fate, Forgave the lovely trespasser, and turned Aside his face of fire; and thus the waste And fallen world hath yet its annual taste Of primal good, to prove of sin the cost, And show by one gleaned ear the mighty harvest lost.
HERE, while the loom of Winter weaves
The shroud of flowers and fountains,
I think of thee and Summer eves
Among the Northern mountains.
When thunder tolled the twilight's close,
And winds the lake were rude on,
And thou wert singing, Ca' the Yowes,
The bonny yowes of Cluden!
When, close and closer, hushing breath,
Our circle narrowed round thee,
And smiles and tears made up the wreath
Wherewith our silence crowned thee;
And, strangers all, we felt the ties
Of sisters and of brothers;
Ah! whose of all those kindly eyes
Now smile upon another's?
The sport of Time, who still apart
The waifs of life is flinging;
O! never more shall heart to heart
Draw nearer for that singing |
Yet when the panes are frosty-starred,
And twilight's fire is gleaming,
I hear the songs of Scotland's bard
Sound softly through my dreaming!
A song that lends to winter snows
The glow of summer weather-
Again I hear thee ca' the yowes
To Cluden's hills of heather!
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