The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier

The spear is beaten to hooks of pruning, | Sing on! bring down, O lowland river, The share is the sword the soldier The joy of the hills to the waiting

save

When Peace brings Freedom in her And, smiting through this Red Sea

train,

Let happy lips his songs rehearse ;

wave,

Make broad a pathway for the slave !

Comes faintly in, and silent chorus lends To the pervading symphony of peace.

No time is this for hands long over

Of years that did the work of centuries Have ceased, and we can draw our breath once more

Freely and full. So, as yon harvesters Make glad their nooning underneath the elms

With tale and riddle and old snatch of song,

I lay aside grave themes, and idly turn The leaves of memory's sketch-book, dreaming o'er

Old summer pictures of the quiet hills, And human life, as quiet, at their feet.

And yet not idly all. A farmer's son, Proud of field-lore and harvest craft, and feeling

All their fine possibilities, how rich
And restful even poverty and toil
Become when beauty, harmony, and love
Sit at their humble hearth as angels sat
At evening in the patriarch's tent, when

man

Makes labor noble, and his farmer's frock

The symbol of a Christian chivalry
Tender and just and generous to her

Who clothes with grace all duty; still, | For them the song-sparrow and the

I know

whose panes

Fluttered the signal rags of shiftlessness; Within, the cluttered kitchen-floor, unwashed

(Broom-clean I think they called it); the best room

Stifling with cellar damp, shut from the
air

In hot midsummer, bookless, pictureless
Save the inevitable sampler hung
Over the fireplace, or a mourning piece,
A green-haired woman, peony-cheeked,
beneath

Impossible willows; the wide-throated
hearth

Bristling with faded pine-boughs half concealing

The piled-up rubbish at the chimney's back;

And, in sad keeping with all things about them,

Shrill, querulous women, sour and sullen

bobolink

Sang not, nor winds made music in the leaves;

For them in vain October's holocaust
Burned, gold and crimson, over all the
hills,

The sacramental mystery of the woods.
Church-goers, fearful of the unseen
Powers,

But grumbling over pulpit-tax and pew-
rent,

Saving, as shrewd economists, their souls
And winter pork with the least possible
outlay

Of salt and sanctity; in daily life
Showing as little actual comprehension
Of Christian charity and love and duty,
As if the Sermon on the Mount had been
Outdated like a last year's almanac :
Rich in broad woodlands and in half-
tilled fields,

And yet so pinched and bare and com-
fortless,

The veriest straggler limping on his
rounds,

The sun and air his sole inheritance,
Laughed at a poverty that paid its taxes,
And hugged his rags in self-compla-
cency!

Not such should be the homesteads of
a land

Where whoso wisely wills and acts may dwell

As king and lawgiver, in broad-acred state,

With beauty, art, taste, culture, books,
to make

His hour of leisure richer than a life
Of fourscore to the barons of old time,
Our yeoman should be equal to his home
Set in the fair, green valleys, purple
walled,

A man to match his mountains, not to

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