Page images
PDF
EPUB

Among the farms and solitary huts,
Hamlets and thinly scattered villages,
Where'er the aged Beggar takes his rounds,
The mild necessity of use compels
To acts of love; and habit does the work
Of reason; yet prepares that after joy
Which reason cherishes. And thus the soul,
By that sweet taste of pleasure unpursued,
Doth find herself insensibly disposed

To virtue and true goodness.

Some there are,

By their good works exalted, lofty minds

And meditative, authors of delight

And happiness, which to the end of time

-Such pleasure is to one kind Being known,
My neighbour, when with punctual care, each week,
Duly as Friday comes, though pressed herself
By her own wants, she from her store of meal
Takes one unsparing handful for the scrip
Of this old Mendicant, and, from her door
Returning with exhilarated heart,

Sits by her fire, and builds her hope in heaven.

Then let him pass, a blessing on his head!
And while in that vast solitude to which
The tide of things has borne him, he appears
To breathe and live but for himself alone,
Unblamed, uninjured, let him bear about
The good which the benignant law of Heaven

Will live, and spread, and kindle: even such minds Has hung around him; and while life is his,

In childhood, from this solitary Being,

Or from like wanderer, haply have received
(A thing more precious far than all that books
Or the solicitudes of love can do!)

'I hat first mild touch of sympathy and thought,
In which they found their kindred with the world
Where want and sorrow were. The easy man

Who sits at his own door,-and, like the pear That overhangs his head from the green wall, Feeds in the sunshine; the robust and young, The prosperous and unthinking, they who live Sheltered, and flourish in a little grove Of their own kindred;-all behold in him A silent monitor, which on their minds Must needs impress a transitory thought Of self-congratulation, to the heart Of each recalling his peculiar boons, His charters and exemptions; and, perchance, Though he to no one give the fortitude And circumspection needful to preserve His present blessings, and to husband up The respite of the season, he, at least, And 'tis no vulgar service, makes them felt. Yet further.Many, I believe, there are Who live a life of virtuous decency, Men who can hear the Decalogue and feel No self-reproach; who of the moral law Established in the land where they abide Are strict observers; and not negligent In acts of love to those with whom they dwell, Their kindred, and the children of their blood. Praise be to such, and to their slumbers peace! -But of the poor man ask, the abject poor; Go, and demand of him, if there be here In this cold abstinence from evil deeds,

And these inevitable charities,

Wherewith to satisfy the human soul?

No-man is dear to man; the poorest poor

Long for some moments in a weary life

Still let him prompt the unlettered villagers
To tender offices and pensive thoughts.
―Then let him pass, a blessing on his head!
And, long as he can wander, let him breathe
The freshness of the valleys; let his blood
Struggle with frosty air and winter snows;
And let the chartered wind that sweeps the heath
Beat his grey locks against his withered face.
Reverence the hope whose vital anxiousness
Gives the last human interest to his heart.
May never HOUSE, misnamed of INDUSTRY,
Make him a captive! for that pent-up din,
Those life-consuming sounds that clog the air,
Be his the natural silence of old age!
Let him be free of mountain solitudes;
And have around him, whether heard or not,
The pleasant melody of woodland birds.
Few are his pleasures: if his eyes have now
Been doomed so long to settle upon earth
That not without some effort they behold
The countenance of the horizontal sun,
Rising or setting, let the light at least
Find a free entrance to their languid orbs.
And let him, where and when he will, sit down
Beneath the trees, or on a grassy bank

Of highway side, and with the little birds
Share his chance-gathered meal: and, finally,
As in the eye of Nature he has lived,
So in the eye of Nature let him die!

A very deep meaning lies in that notion, that a man in search of buried treasure must work in utter silence; must speak not a word, whatever appearance, either terrific or delightful, may present itself. And not less significant is the tradition that one who is on an adventurous pilgrimage to some precious

When they can know and feel that they have been, talisman, through the most lonesome mountain-path,
Themselves, the fathers and the dealers-out
Of some small blessings; have been kind to such
As needed kindness, for this single cause,
That we have all of us one human heart.

or dreary desert, must walk onward without stopping, nor look around him, though fearfully menacing, or sweetly enticing voices follow his footsteps, and sound in his ear.-GOEthe.

depth in the sea; but in the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get the easier the sinking. As for the kindness which Milton and Burns felt for the Devil, I am sure that God thinks of him with pity a thousand times to their once, and the good Origin believ. ed him not incapable of salvation.

These simplest thoughts, feelings and experiences, that lie upon the very surface of life, are overlooked by all but uncommon eyes. Most look upon them as mere weeds. Yet a weed, to him that loves it, is a flower; and there are times when we would not part with a sprig of chickweed for a whole continent of lilies. No man thinks his own nature miraculous, while to his neighbour it may give a surfeit of wonder. Let him go where he will, he can find no heart so worth a study as his own. The prime fault of modern poets is, that they are resolved to be peculiar. They are not content that it should come of itself, but they must dig and bore for it, sinking their wells usually through the grave of some buried originality, so that if any water rises it is tainted. Read most volumes of poems, and you are reminded of a French bill of fare, where every thing is á la something else. Even a potato au naturel is a godsend. When will poets learn that a grass-blade of their own raising is worth a barrow-load of flowers from their neighbour's garden?

FROM "LOWELL'S CONVERSATIONS." The earliest poetry of all countries is sacred poetry, or that in which the idea of God predominates and is developed. The first effort at speech which man's nature makes in all tongues is, to proReverence is the nounce the word "Father." foundation of all poetry. From Reverence the spirit climbs on to love, and thence beholds all things. No matter in what Scythian fashion these first recognitions of something above and beyond the soul are uttered, they contain the germs of psalms and prophecies. Whether, for a while, the immortal guest rests satisfied with a Fetish or an Apollo, it has already grasped the clew which leads unerringly to the very highest idea. For reverence is the most keen-eyed and exacting of all the faculties, and, if there be the least flaw in its idol, it will kneel no longer. From wood it rises to gold and ivory; from these, to the yet simpler and more majestic marble; and, planting its foot upon that, it leaps upward to the infinite and invisible. When I assume reverence, then, as the very primal essence and life of poetry, I claim for it a nobler stirp than it has been the fashion to allow it. Beyond Adam runs back its illustrious genealogy. It stood with Uriel in the sun, and looked down over the battlements of heaven with the angelic guards. In short, it is no other than the religious sentiment itself. That is poetry Ah, if we would but pledge ourselves to truth as which makes sorrow lovely, and joy solemn to us, and reveals to us the holiness of things. Faith casts heartily as we do to a real or imaginary mistress, herself upon her neck as upon a sister's. She shows and think life too short only because it abridged our us what glimpses we get of life's spiritual face. time of service, what a new world we should have! What she looks on becomes miraculous, though it Most men pay their vows to her in youth, and go be but the dust of the way-side; and miracles be-up into the bustle of life, with her kiss warm upon come but as dust for their simpleness. There is nothing noble without her; with her there can be nothing mean. What songs the Druids sang within the sacred circuit of Stonehenge we can barely conjecture; but those forlorn stones doubtless echoed with appeals to a higher something; and are not even now without their sanctity, since they chronicle a nation's desire after God. Whether those forestpriests worshipped the strangely beautiful element of fire, or if the pilgrim Belief pitched her tent and rested for a night in some ruder and bleaker creed, there we may yet trace the light footprints of Poesy, as she led her sister onward to fairer fields, and streams flowing nearer to the oracle of God.

their lips, and her blessing lying upon their hearts like dew; but the world has lips less chary, and cheaper benedictions, and if the broken trothplight with their humble village.mistress comes over them sometimes with a pang, she knows how to blandish away remorse, and persuades them, ere old age, that their young enthusiasm was a folly and an in

discretion.

I agree with you that the body is treated with quite too much ceremony and respect. Even religion has vailed its politic hat to it, till, like Christopher Sly, it is metamorphosed, in its own estimation, from a tinker to a duke. Men, who would, without compunction, kick a living beggar, will yet Byron might have made a great poet. As it is, stand in awe of his poor carcass, after all that renhis poetry is the record of a struggle between his dered it truly venerable has fled out of it. We good and his baser nature, in which the latter wins. agree with the old barbarian epitaph which affirmed The fall is great in proportion to the height from that the handfull of dust had been Ninus; as if that which one is hurled. An originally beautiful spirit which convicts us of mortality and weakness could It at the same time endow us with our high prerogabecomes the most degraded when perverted. would fain revenge itself upon that purity from tive of kingship over them. South, in one of his which it is an unhappy and restless exile, and drowns sermons, tells us of certain men whose souls are of its remorse in the drunkenness and vain bluster of no worth, but as salt to keep their bodies from pudefiance. There is a law of neutralization of forces, trifying. I fear that the soul is too often regarded which hinders bodies from sinking beyond a certain in this sutler fashion. Why should men ever be

afraid to die, but that they regard the spirit as secon- | word spoken for her ever fail of some willing and dary to that which is but its mere appendage and fruitful ear. Even under our thin crust of fashion conveniency, its symbol, its word, its means of visi- and frivolity throb the undying fires of the great bility? If the soul lose this poor mansion of hers soul of man, the fountain and centre of all poetry, by the sudden conflagration of disease, or by the and which will one day burst forth to wither like slow decay of age, is she therefore houseless and grass-blades the vain temples and palaces which shelterless? If she cast away this soiled and tat- forms and conventionalities have heaped smothertered garment, is she therefore naked? A child ingly upon it. Behind the blank faces of the weak looks forward to his new suit, and dons it joyfully; and thoughtless, I see, sometimes with a kind of we cling to our rags and foulness. We should wel- dread, this awful and mysterious presence, as I have come Death as one who brings us tidings of the find- seen one of Allston's paintings in a ball-room overing of long-lost titles to a large family estate, and looking with its serene and steadfast eyes the butset out gladly to take possession, though, it may be, terfly throng beneath, and seeming to gaze, from not without a natural tear for the humbler home we these narrow battlements of time, far out into the are leaving. Death always means us a kindness, infinite promise of the future, beholding there the though he has often a gruff way of offering it. Even free, erect, and perfected soul. if the soul never returned from that chartless and unmapped country, which I do not believe, I would take Sir John Davies's reason as a good one :

"But, as Noah's pigeon, which returned no more,
Did show she footing found, for all the flood;
So, when good souls, departed through death's door,
Come not again, it shows their dwelling good."

No sincere desire of doing good need make an enemy of a single human being; for that is a capacity in which he is by nature unfitted to shine. It may, and must, rouse opposition; but that philanthropy has surely a flaw in it, which cannot sympa. thize with the oppressor equally as with the oppressThe realm of Death seems an enemy's country ed. It is the high and glorious vocation of Poesy to most men, on whose shores they are loathly driven as well to make our own daily life and toil more by stress of weather; to the wise man it is the de- beautiful and holy to us by the divine ministerings sired port where he moors his bark gladly, as in of love, as to render us swift to convey the same some quiet haven of the Fortunate Isles; it is the blessing to our brother. Poesy is love's chosen golden west into which his sun sinks, and, sinking, apostle, and the very almoner of God. She is the casts back a glory upon the leaden cloud-rack which the home of the outcast, and the wealth of the needy. had darkly besieged his day. For her the hut becomes a palace, whose halls are guarded by the gods of Phidias, and kept peaceful by the maid-mothers of Raphael. She loves better the poor wanderer whose bare feet know by heart all the freezing stones of the pavement, than the delicate maiden for whose dainty soles Brussels and Turkey have been over-careful; and I doubt not but some remembered scrap of childish song hath often been a truer alms than all the benevolent societies could give. She is the best missionary, knowing when she may knock at the door of the most curmudgeonly hearts, without being turned away unheard. The omnipresence of her spirit is beautifully and touchingly expressed in "The Poet," one of the divisions of a little volume of poems by Cornelius Matthews. Were the whole book as simple in thought and diction as the most of this particular poem, I know few modern volumes that would equal it. Let me read you the passage I alluded to. You will see that the poor slave is not forgotten.

After all, the body is a more expert dialectician than the soul, and buffets it, even to bewilderment, with the empty bladders of logic; but the soul can retire, from the dust and turmoil of such conflict, to the high tower of instinctive faith, and there, in hushed serenity, take comfort of the sympathizing stars. We look at death through the cheap glazed windows of the flesh, and believe him for the monster which the flawed and crooked glass presents him. You say truly that we have wasted time in trying to coax the body into a faith in what, by its very nature, it is incapable of comprehending. Hence, a plethoric, short-winded kind of belief, that can walk at an easy pace over the smooth plain, but loses breath at the first sharp uphill of life. How idle is it to set a sensual bill of fare before the soul, acting over again the old story of the Crane and the Fox!

I know not when we shall hear pure spiritualism preached by the authorized expounders of doctrine. These have suffered the grain to mildew, while they have been wrangling about the husks of form; and the people have stood by, hungry and half-starved, too intent on the issue of the quarrel to be conscious that they were trampling the forgotten and scattered bread of life in the mire. Thank Heaven, they may still pluck ripe ears, of God's own planting and watering, in the fields!

"There sits not on the wilderness's edge,
In the dusk lodges of the wintry North,
Nor couches in the rice fields slimy sedge,
Nor on the cold, wide waters ventures forth,-
Who waits not, in the pauses of his toil,
With hope that spirits in the air may sing;
Who upward turns not, at propitious times,
Breathless, his silent features listening,
In desert and in lodge, on marsh and main,
To feed his hungry heart and conquer pain."

The love of the beautiful and truo, like the dewdrop in the heart of the crystal, remains forever True poetry is never out of place, nor will a good clear and liquid in the inmost shrine of man's being,

undrunk.

though all the rest be turned to stone by sorrow and | ing its wings to seek some fairer height. This is degradation. The angel, who has once come down true only when love has been but one of the thouinto the soul, will not be driven thence by any sin sand vizards of selfishness, when we have loved ouror baseness even, much less by any undeserved selves in the beautiful spirit we have knelt to; that oppression or wrong. At the soul's gate sits she is, when we have merely loved the delight we felt silently, with folded hands and downcast eyes; but, in loving. Then it is that the cup we so thirsted at the least touch of nobleness, those patient orbs after tastes bitter or insipid, and we fling it down are serenely uplifted, and the whole spirit is lightDid we empty it, we should find that it ened with their prayerful lustre. Over all life broods was the poor, muddy dregs of self at the bottom, Poesy, like the calm, blue sky with its motherly, which made our gorge rise. If it be God whom we rebuking face. She is the true preacher of the Word, love in loving our elected one, then shall the bright and when, in time of danger and trouble, the es- halo of her spirit expand itself over all existence, tablished shepherds have cast down their crooks and till every human face we look upon shall share in fled, she tenderly careth for the flock. On her calm its transfiguration, and the old forgotten traces of and fearless heart rests weary freedom, when all brotherhood be lit up by it; and our love, instead the world have driven her from the door with scoffs of pining discomforted, shall be lured upward and and mockings. From her white breasts flows the upward by low, angelical voices, which recede bestrong milk which nurses our heroes and martyrs; fore it forever, as it mounts from brightening sumand she blunts the sharp tooth of the fire, makes the mit to summit on the delectable mountains of aspiaxe edgeless, and dignifies the pillory or the gal-rations and resolve and deed. lows. She is the great reformer, and, where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail. The more this love is cultivated and refined, the more do men strive to make their outward lives rhythmical and harmonious, that they may accord with that inward and dominant rhythm by whose key the composition of all noble and worthy deeds is guided. To make one object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life; for, the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful,-the human soul. Love never contracts its circles; they widen by as fixed and sure a law as those around a pebble cast into still water. The angel of love, when, full of sorrow, he followed the first exiles, behind whom the gates of Paradise shut with that mournful clang, of which some faint echo has lingered in the hearts of all their offspring, unwittingly snapped off and brought away in his hand the seed-pod of one of the never-fading flowers which grew there. Into all dreary and desolate places fell some of its blessed kernels; they asked but little soil to root themselves in, and in this narrow patch of our poor clay they sprang most quickly and sturdily. Gladly they grew, and from them all time has been sown with whatever gives a higher hope to the soul, or makes life nobler and more godlike; while, from the overarching sky of poesy, sweet dew forever falls, to nurse and keep them green and fresh from the world's dust.

If any have aught worth hearing to say, let them say it, be they men or women. We have more than enough prating by those who have nothing to tell us. I never heard that the Quaker women were the worse for preaching, or the men for listening to them. If we pardon such exhibitions as those of the dancing-females on the stage, surely our prudery need not bristle in such a hedgehog fashion because a woman in the chaste garb of the Friends dares to plead in public for the downtrodden cause of justice and freedom. Or perhaps it is more modest and maidenly for a woman to expose her body in public than her soul? If we listen and applaud, while, as Coleridge says,

"Heaves the proud harlot her distended breast
In intricacies of laborious song,"

must we esteem it derogatory to our sense of refinement to drink from the fresh brook of a true woman's voice, as it gushes up from a heart throbbing only with tenderness for our neighbour fallen among thieves? Here in Massachusetts we burn Popish nunneries, but we maintain a whole system of Protestant ones. If a woman is to be an Amazon, all the cloisters in the world will not starve or compress her into a Cordelia. There is no sex in noble thoughts, and deeds agreeing with them; and such recruits do equally good service in the army of truth, whether they are brought in by women or men. Out on our Janus-faced virtue, with its one front looking smilingly to the stage, and its other with shame-shut eyes turned frowningly upon the Antislavery Convention! If other reapers be wanting, let women go forth into the harvest-field of God and bind the ripe shocks of grain; the complexion of their souls shall not be tanned or weather-stained, for the sun that shines there only makes the fairer Never was falser doctrine preached than that love's and whiter all that it looks upon. Whatever is in chief delight and satisfaction lies in the pursuit of its place is in the highest place; whatever is right its object, which won, the charm is already flutter-is graceful, noble, expedient; and the universal hiss

God's livery is a very plain one; but its wearers have good reason to be content. If it have not so much gold-lace about it as Satan's, it keeps out foul weather better, and is besides a great deal cheaper.

of the world shall fall upon it as a benediction, and go up to the ear of God as the most moving prayer in its behalf. If a woman be truly chaste, that chastity shall surround her, in speaking to a public assembly, with a ring of protecting and rebuking light, and make the exposed rostrum as private as an oratory; if immodest, there is that in her which can turn the very house of God into a brothel.

STANZA S.

BY JOHN G. WHITTIER.

"The despotism which our fathers could not bear in their native country is expiring, and the sword of justice in her reformed hands has applied its exterminating edge to slavery. Shall the United States-the free United States, which could not bear the bonds of a king, cradle the bondage which a king is abolishing? Shall a Republic be less free than a Monarchy? Shall we, in the vigor and buoyancy of our manhood, be less energetic in righteousness than a kingdom in its age Dr. Follen's Address.

"Genius of America !-Spirit of our free institutions !where art thou? How art thou fallen, O Lucifer! son of the morning-how art thou fallen from Heaven! Hell from be. neath is moved for thee, to meet thee at thy coming! The kings of the earth cry out to thee, Aha! Aha!-ART THOU BECOME LIKE UNTO US?"-Speech of Samuel J. May.

Our fellow-countrymen in chains!

Slaves-in a land of light and law! Slaves-crouching on the very plains

Where roll'd the storm of Freedom's war!
A groan from Eutaw's haunted wood-

A wail where Camden's martyrs fell-
By every shrine of patriot blood,
From Moultrie's wall and Jasper's well!

By storied hill and hallow'd grot,

By mossy wood and marshy glen, Whence rang of old the rifle-shot,

And hurrying shout of Marion's men! The groan of breaking hearts is there

The falling lash-the fetter's clank! Slaves-SLAVES are breathing in that air, Which old De Kalb and Sumter drank!

What, ho!-our countrymen in chains!
The whip on WOMAN'S shrinking flesh!
Our soil yet reddening with the stains,
Caught from her scourging, warm and fresh!
What! mothers from their children riven!
What! God's own image bought and sold!
AMERICANS to market driven,

And barter'd as the brute for gold!

Speak! shall their agony of prayer
Come thrilling to our hearts in vain?
To us, whose fathers scorn'd to bear
The paltry menace of a chain;
To us, whose boast is loud and long
Of holy Liberty and Light-

Say, shall these writhing slaves of Wrong,
Plead vainly for their plunder'd Right?

What shall we send, with lavish breath,
Our sympathies across the wave,
Where Manhood, on the field of death,

Strikes for his freedom, or a grave?
Shall prayers go up, and hymns be sung

For Greece, the Moslem fetter spurning, And millions hail with pen and tongue

Our light on all her altars burning?
Shall Belgium feel, and gallant France,
By Vendome's pile and Schoenbrun's wall,
And Poland, gasping on her lance,

The impulse of our cheering call?
And shall the SLAVE, beneath our eye,
Clank o'er our fields his hateful chain?·
And toss his fetter'd arms on high,
And groan for Freedom's gift, in vain?
Oh, say, shall Prussia's banner be

A refuge for the stricken slave?
And shall the Russian serf go free

By Baikal's lake and Neva's wave? And shall the wintry-bosom'd Dane

Relax the iron hand of pride,

And bid his bondmen cast the chain,
From fetter'd soul and limb, aside?
Shall every flap of England's flag

Proclaim that all around are free,
From "farthest Ind" to each blue crag

That beetles o'er the Western Sea? And shall we scoff at Europe's kings,

When Freedom's fire is dim with us, And round our country's altar clings

The damning shade of Slavery's curse?
Go-let us ask of Constantine

To loose his grasp on Poland's throat!
And beg the lord of Mahmoud's line
To spare the struggling Suliote—
Will not the scorching answer come

From turban'd Turk, and fiery Russ:
"Go, loose your fetter'd slaves at home,
Then turn, and ask the like of us!"
Just God! and shall we calmly rest,

The Christian's scorn-the Heathen's mirthContent to live the lingering jest

And by-word of a mocking Earth?

Shall our own glorious land retain

That curse which Europe scorns to bear? Shall our own brethren drag the chain Which not even Russia's menials wear?

Up, then, in Freedom's manly part, From gray-beard eld to fiery youth, And on the nation's naked heart Scatter the living coals of Truth! Up-while ye slumber, deeper yet

The shadow of our fame is growing! Up-while ye pause, our sun may set In blood, around our altars flowing!

« PreviousContinue »