THOMAS STARR KING
Published originally as a prelude to the posthumous volume of selections edited by Richard Frothingham.
The great work laid upon his twoscore years Is done, and well done. If we drop our tears, Who loved him as few men were ever loved, We mourn no blighted hope nor broken plan With him whose life stands rounded and approved In the full growth and stature of a man.
Mingle, O bells, along the Western slope, With your deep toll a sound of faith and hope!
Wave cheerily still, O banner, half-way down, From thousand-masted bay and steepled town!
Let the strong organ with its loftiest swell Lift the proud sorrow of the land, and tell That the brave sower saw his ripened grain.
O East and West! O morn and sunset twain No more forever!--has he lived in vain Who, priest of Freedom, made ye one, and told Your bridal service from his lips of gold?
1864.
LINES ON A FLY-LEAF.
I need not ask thee, for my sake, To read a book which well may make Its way by native force of wit Without my manual sign to it.
Its piquant writer needs from me No gravely masculine guaranty, And well might laugh her merriest laugh At broken spears in her behalf; Yet, spite of all the critics tell, I frankly own I like her well.
It may be that she wields a pen Too sharply nibbed for thin-skinned men, That her keen arrows search and try The armor joints of dignity, And, though alone for error meant, Sing through the air irreverent.
I blame her not, the young athlete Who plants her woman's tiny feet, And dares the chances of debate Where bearded men might hesitate, Who, deeply earnest, seeing well The ludicrous and laughable, Mingling in eloquent excess Her anger and her tenderness, And, chiding with a half-caress, Strives, less for her own sex than ours, With principalities and powers, And points us upward to the clear Sunned heights of her new atmosphere.
Heaven mend her faults!--I will not pause To weigh and doubt and peck at flaws, Or waste my pity when some fool Provokes her measureless ridicule.
Strong-minded is she? Better so Than dulness set for sale or show, A household folly, capped and belled In fashion's dance of puppets held, Or poor pretence of womanhood, Whose formal, flavorless platitude Is warranted from all offence Of robust meaning's violence.
Give me the wine of thought whose head Sparkles along the page I read,-- Electric words in which I find The tonic of the northwest wind; The wisdom which itself allies To sweet and pure humanities, Where scorn of meanness, hate of wrong, Are underlaid by love as strong; The genial play of mirth that lights Grave themes of thought, as when, on nights Of summer-time, the harmless blaze Of thunderless heat-lightning plays, And tree and hill-top resting dim And doubtful on the sky's vague rim, Touched by that soft and lambent gleam, Start sharply outlined from their dream.
Talk not to me of woman's sphere, Nor point with Scripture texts a sneer, Nor wrong the manliest saint of all By doubt, if he were here, that Paul Would own the heroines who have lent Grace to truth's stern arbitrament, Foregone the praise to woman sweet, And cast their crowns at Duty's feet; Like her, who by her strong Appeal Made Fashion weep and Mammon feel, Who, earliest summoned to withstand The color-madness of the land, Counted her life-long losses gain, And made her own her sisters' pain; Or her who, in her greenwood shade, Heard the sharp call that Freedom made, And, answering, struck from Sappho's lyre Of love the Tyrtman carmen's fire Or that young girl,--Domremy's maid Revived a nobler cause to aid,-- Shaking from warning finger-tips The doom of her apocalypse; Or her, who world-wide entrance gave To the log-cabin of the slave, Made all his want and sorrow known, And all earth's languages his own.
1866.
GEORGE L. STEARNS
No man rendered greater service to the cause of freedom than Major Stearns in the great struggle between invading slave-holders and the free settlers of Kansas.
He has done the work of a true man,-- Crown him, honor him, love him.
Weep, over him, tears of woman, Stoop manliest brows above him!
O dusky mothers and daughters, Vigils of mourning keep for him!
Up in the mountains, and down by the waters, Lift up your voices and weep for him,
For the warmest of hearts is frozen, The freest of hands is still; And the gap in our picked and chosen The long years may not fill.
No duty could overtask him, No need his will outrun; Or ever our lips could ask him, His hands the work had done.
He forgot his own soul for others, Himself to his neighbor lending; He found the Lord in his suffering brothers, And not in the clouds descending.
So the bed was sweet to die on, Whence he saw the doors wide swung Against whose bolted iron The strength of his life was flung.
And he saw ere his eye was darkened The sheaves of the harvest-bringing, And knew while his ear yet hearkened The voice of the reapers singing.
Ah, well! The world is discreet; There are plenty to pause and wait; But here was a man who set his feet Sometimes in advance of fate;
Plucked off the old bark when the inner Was slow to renew it, And put to the Lord's work the sinner When saints failed to do it.
Never rode to the wrong's redressing A worthier paladin.
Shall he not hear the blessing, "Good and faithful, enter in!"
1867
GARIBALDI
In trance and dream of old, God's prophet saw The casting down of thrones. Thou, watching lone The hot Sardinian coast-line, hazy-hilled, Where, fringing round Caprera's rocky zone With foam, the slow waves gather and withdraw, Behold'st the vision of the seer fulfilled, And hear'st the sea-winds burdened with a sound Of falling chains, as, one by one, unbound, The nations lift their right hands up and swear Their oath of freedom. From the chalk-white wall Of England, from the black Carpathian range, Along the Danube and the Theiss, through all The passes of the Spanish Pyrenees, And from the Seine's thronged banks, a murmur strange And glad floats to thee o'er thy summer seas On the salt wind that stirs thy whitening hair,-- The song of freedom's bloodless victories!
Rejoice, O Garibaldi! Though thy sword Failed at Rome's gates, and blood seemed vainly poured Where, in Christ's name, the crowned infidel Of France wrought murder with the arms of hell On that sad mountain slope whose ghostly dead, Unmindful of the gray exorcist's ban, Walk, unappeased, the chambered Vatican, And draw the curtains of Napoleon's bed!
God's providence is not blind, but, full of eyes, It searches all the refuges of lies; And in His time and way, the accursed things Before whose evil feet thy battle-gage Has clashed defiance from hot youth to age Shall perish. All men shall be priests and kings, One royal brotherhood, one church made free By love, which is the law of liberty.
1869.
TO LYDIA MARIA CHILD,
ON READING HER POEM IN "THE STANDARD."
Mrs. Child wrote her lines, beginning, "Again the trees are clothed in vernal green," May 24, 1859, on the first anniversary of Ellis Gray Loring's death, but did not publish them for some years afterward, when I first read them, or I could not have made the reference which I did to the extinction of slavery.
The sweet spring day is glad with music, But through it sounds a sadder strain; The worthiest of our narrowing circle Sings Loring's dirges o'er again.
O woman greatly loved! I join thee In tender memories of our friend; With thee across the awful spaces The greeting of a soul I send!
What cheer hath he? How is it with him?
Where lingers he this weary while?
Over what pleasant fields of Heaven Dawns the sweet sunrise of his smile?
Does he not know our feet are treading The earth hard down on Slavery's grave?
That, in our crowning exultations, We miss the charm his presence gave?