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!
IF I have seemed more prompt to censure wrong
Than praise the right; if seldom to thine ear
My voice hath mingled with the exultant cheer
Borne upon all our Northern winds along;
If I have failed to join the fickle throng
In wide-eyed wonder, that thou standest strong
In victory, surprised in thee to find
Brougham's scathing power with Canning's grace combined;
That he, for whom the ninefold Muses sang,
From their twined arms a giant athlete sprang,
Barbing the arrows of his native tongue
With the spent shafts Latona's archer flung,
To smite the Python of our land and time,
Fell as the monster born of Crissa's slime,
Like the blind bard who in Castalian springs
Tempered the steel that clove the crest of kings,
And on the shrine of England's freedom laid
The gifts of Cuma and of Delphi's shade-
Small need hast thou of words of praise from me.
Thou knowest my heart, dear friend, and well
canst guess
That, even though silent, I have not the less
Rejoiced to see thy actual life agree
With the large future which I shaped for thee,
When, years ago, beside the summer sea,
White in the moon, we saw the long waves fall
Baffled and broken from the rocky wall,
That, to the menace of the brawling flood,
Opposed alone its massive quietude,
Calm as a fate; with not a leaf nor vine
Nor birch-spray trembling in the still moonshine,
Crowning it like God's peace. I sometimes think
That night-scene by the sea prophetical-
(For nature speaks in symbols and in signs, And through her pictures human fate divines)— That rock, wherefrom we saw the billows sink
In murmuring rout, uprising clear and tall In the white light of heaven, the type of one Who, momently by Error's host assailed,
Stands strong as Truth, in greaves of granite mailed;
And, tranquil-fronted, listening over all
The tumult, hears the angels say, Well done!
WE cross the prairie as of old
The pilgrims crossed the sea,
To make the West, as they the East,
The homestead of the free!
We go to rear a wall of men
On Freedom's southern line
And plant beside the cotton-tree
The rugged Northern pine!
We're flowing from our native hills
As our free rivers flow;
The blessing of our Mother-land
Is on us as we go.
We go to plant her common schools
On distant prairie swells,
And give the Sabbaths of the wild
The music of her bells.
Upbearing, like the Ark of old,
The Bible in our van,
We go to test the truth of God
Against the fraud of man.
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