Finish what your sires began!
Up, to Faneuil Hall!
TO MASSACHUSETTS.
WHAT though around thee blazes No fiery rallying sign?
From all thy own high places, Give heaven the light of thine!
What though unthrilled, unmoving, The statesman stand apart, And comes no warm approving From Mammon's crowded mart?
Still, let the land be shaken By a summons of thine own!
By all save truth forsaken, Stand fast with that alone!
Shrink not from strife unequal!
With the best is always hope; And ever in the sequel God holds the right side up!
But when, with thine uniting, Come voices long and loud, And far-off hills are writing Thy fire-words on the cloud; When from Penobscot's fountains A deep response is heard, And across the Western mountains Rolls back thy rallying word;
Shall thy line of battle falter, With its allies just in view?
Oh, by hearth and holy altar, My fatherland, be true!
Fling abroad thy scrolls of Freedom Speed them onward far and fast Over hill and valley speed them, Like the sibyl's on the blast!
Lo! the Empire State is shaking The shackles from her hand; With the rugged North is waking The level sunset land!
On they come, the free battalions East and West and North they come, And the heart-beat of the millions Is the beat of Freedom's drum.
"To the tyrant's plot no favor No heed to place-fed knaves!
Bar and bolt the door forever Against the land of slaves!"
Hear it, mother Earth, and hear it, The heavens above us spread!
The land is roused,--its spirit Was sleeping, but not dead!
1844.
NEW HAMPSHIRE.
GOD bless New Hampshire! from her granite peaks Once more the voice of Stark and Langdon speaks.
The long-bound vassal of the exulting South For very shame her self-forged chain has broken; Torn the black seal of slavery from her mouth, And in the clear tones of her old time spoken!
Oh, all undreamed-of, all unhoped-for changes The tyrant's ally proves his sternest foe; To all his biddings, from her mountain ranges, New Hampshire thunders an indignant No!
Who is it now despairs? Oh, faint of heart, Look upward to those Northern mountains cold, Flouted by Freedom's victor-flag unrolled, And gather strength to bear a manlier part All is not lost. The angel of God's blessing Encamps with Freedom on the field of fight; Still to her banner, day by day, are pressing, Unlooked-for allies, striking for the right Courage, then, Northern hearts! Be firm, be true: What one brave State hath done, can ye not also do?
1845.
THE PINE-TREE.
Written on hearing that the Anti-Slavery Resolves of Stephen C. Phillips had been rejected by the Whig Convention in Faneuil Hall, in 1846.
LIFT again the stately emblem on the Bay State's rusted shield, Give to Northern winds the Pine-Tree on our banner's tattered field.
Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board, Answering England's royal missive with a firm, "Thus saith the Lord!"
Rise again for home and freedom! set the battle in array!
What the fathers did of old time we their sons must do to-day.
Tell us not of banks and tariffs, cease your paltry pedler cries; Shall the good State sink her honor that your gambling stocks may rise?
Would ye barter man for cotton? That your gains may sum up higher, Must we kiss the feet of Moloch, pass our children through the fire?
Is the dollar only real? God and truth and right a dream?
Weighed against your lying ledgers must our manhood kick the beam?
O my God! for that free spirit, which of old in Boston town Smote the Province House with terror, struck the crest of Andros down!
For another strong-voiced Adams in the city's streets to cry, "Up for God and Massachusetts! Set your feet on Mammon's lie!
Perish banks and perish traffic, spin your cotton's latest pound, But in Heaven's name keep your honor, keep the heart o' the Bay State sound!"
Where's the man for Massachusetts! Where's the voice to speak her free?
Where's the hand to light up bonfires from her mountains to the sea?
Beats her Pilgrim pulse no longer? Sits she dumb in her despair?
Has she none to break the silence? Has she none to do and dare?
O my God! for one right worthy to lift up her rusted shield, And to plant again the Pine-Tree in her banner's tattered field
1840.
TO A SOUTHERN STATESMAN.
John C. Calhoun, who had strongly urged the extension of slave territory by the annexation of Texas, even if it should involve a war with England, was unwilling to promote the acquisition of Oregon, which would enlarge the Northern domain of freedom, and pleaded as an excuse the peril of foreign complications which he had defied when the interests of slavery were involved.
Is this thy voice whose treble notes of fear Wail in the wind? And dost thou shake to hear, Actieon-like, the bay of thine own hounds, Spurning the leash, and leaping o'er their bounds?
Sore-baffled statesman! when thy eager hand, With game afoot, unslipped the hungry pack, To hunt down Freedom in her chosen land, Hadst thou no fear, that, erelong, doubling back, These dogs of thine might snuff on Slavery's track?
Where's now the boast, which even thy guarded tongue, Cold, calm, and proud, in the teeth o' the Senate flung,
O'er the fulfilment of thy baleful plan, Like Satan's triumph at the fall of man?
How stood'st thou then, thy feet on Freedom planting, And pointing to the lurid heaven afar, Whence all could see, through the south windows slanting, Crimson as blood, the beams of that Lone Star!
The Fates are just; they give us but our own; Nemesis ripens what our hands have sown.
There is an Eastern story, not unknown, Doubtless, to thee, of one whose magic skill Called demons up his water-jars to fill; Deftly and silently, they did his will, But, when the task was done, kept pouring still.
In vain with spell and charm the wizard wrought, Faster and faster were the buckets brought, Higher and higher rose the flood around, Till the fiends clapped their hands above their master drowned So, Carolinian, it may prove with thee, For God still overrules man's schemes, and takes Craftiness in its self-set snare, and makes The wrath of man to praise Him. It may be, That the roused spirits of Democracy May leave to freer States the same wide door Through which thy slave-cursed Texas entered in, From out the blood and fire, the wrong and sin, Of the stormed-city and the ghastly plain, Beat by hot hail, and wet with bloody rain, The myriad-handed pioneer may pour, And the wild West with the roused North combine And heave the engineer of evil with his mine.
1846.
AT WASHINGTON.
Suggested by a visit to the city of Washington, in the 12th month of 1845.