Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey; Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play? Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is cruci fied, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied. Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes,-they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design. By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track, Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back, And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands; Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn. 'Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers' graves, Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime; Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time? Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that make Plymouth rock sublime? They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free, Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea. They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires, Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar-fires; Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay, From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day? New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key. December, 1845. AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE. WHAT visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair! No more the landscape holds its wealth apart, Making me poorer in my poverty, But mingles with my senses and my heart; In her own reverie the world to steep; Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill, and tree. How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees, Clasped by the faint horizon's languid arms, Each into each, the hazy distances! The softened season all the landscape charms; Those hills, my native village that embay, In waves of dreamier purple roll away, And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms. Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves; The fields seem fields of dream, where Mem ory Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye Of Boaz as the maiden's glow went by, So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives. The cock's shrill trump that tells of scattered Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates, Silently overhead the henhawk sails, With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits. The sobered robin, hunger-silent now, Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer; The squirrel on the shingly shagbark's bough, Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear, Then drops his nut, and, with a chipping bound, Whisks to his winding fastness underground; The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere. O'er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shad OWS Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; The single crow a single caw lets fall; And all around me every bush and tree Says Autumn's here, and Winter soon will be Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all. |