And who shall marvel if evil went Step by step with the good intent, And with love and meekness, side by side, Lust of the flesh and spiritual pride?-- That passionate longings and fancies vain Set the heart on fire and crazed the brain?
That over the holy oracles Folly sported with cap and bells?
That goodly women and learned men Marvelling told with tongue and pen How unweaned children chirped like birds Texts of Scripture and solemn words, Like the infant seers of the rocky glens In the Puy de Dome of wild Cevennes Or baby Lamas who pray and preach From Tartir cradles in Buddha's speech?
In the war which Truth or Freedom wages With impious fraud and the wrong of ages, Hate and malice and self-love mar The notes of triumph with painful jar, And the helping angels turn aside Their sorrowing faces the shame to bide.
Never on custom's oiled grooves The world to a higher level moves, But grates and grinds with friction hard On granite boulder and flinty shard.
The heart must bleed before it feels, The pool be troubled before it heals; Ever by losses the right must gain, Every good have its birth of pain; The active Virtues blush to find The Vices wearing their badge behind, And Graces and Charities feel the fire Wherein the sins of the age expire; The fiend still rends as of old he rent The tortured body from which he went.
But Time tests all. In the over-drift And flow of the Nile, with its annual gift, Who cares for the Hadji's relics sunk?
Who thinks of the drowned-out Coptic monk?
The tide that loosens the temple's stones, And scatters the sacred ibis-bones, Drives away from the valley-land That Arab robber, the wandering sand, Moistens the fields that know no rain, Fringes the desert with belts of grain, And bread to the sower brings again.
So the flood of emotion deep and strong Troubled the land as it swept along, But left a result of holier lives, Tenderer-mothers and worthier wives.
The husband and father whose children fled And sad wife wept when his drunken tread Frightened peace from his roof-tree's shade, And a rock of offence his hearthstone made, In a strength that was not his own began To rise from the brute's to the plane of man.
Old friends embraced, long held apart By evil counsel and pride of heart; And penitence saw through misty tears, In the bow of hope on its cloud of fears, The promise of Heaven's eternal years,-- The peace of God for the world's annoy,-- Beauty for ashes, and oil of joy Under the church of Federal Street, Under the tread of its Sabbath feet, Walled about by its basement stones, Lie the marvellous preacher's bones.
No saintly honors to them are shown, No sign nor miracle have they known; But he who passes the ancient church Stops in the shade of its belfry-porch, And ponders the wonderful life of him Who lies at rest in that charnel dim.
Long shall the traveller strain his eye From the railroad car, as it plunges by, And the vanishing town behind him search For the slender spire of the Whitefield Church; And feel for one moment the ghosts of trade, And fashion, and folly, and pleasure laid, By the thought of that life of pure intent, That voice of warning yet eloquent, Of one on the errands of angels sent.
And if where he labored the flood of sin Like a tide from the harbor-bar sets in, And over a life of tune and sense The church-spires lift their vain defence, As if to scatter the bolts of God With the points of Calvin's thunder-rod,-- Still, as the gem of its civic crown, Precious beyond the world's renown, His memory hallows the ancient town!
1859.
THE TRUCE OF PISCATAQUA.
In the winter of 1675-76, the Eastern Indians, who had been making war upon the New Hampshire settlements, were so reduced in numbers by fighting and famine that they agreed to a peace with Major Waldron at Dover, but the peace was broken in the fall of 1676. The famous chief, Squando, was the principal negotiator on the part of the savages. He had taken up the hatchet to revenge the brutal treatment of his child by drunken white sailors, which caused its death.
It not unfrequently happened during the Border wars that young white children were adopted by their Indian captors, and so kindly treated that they were unwilling to leave the free, wild life of the woods; and in some instances they utterly refused to go back with their parents to their old homes and civilization.
RAZE these long blocks of brick and stone, These huge mill-monsters overgrown; Blot out the humbler piles as well, Where, moved like living shuttles, dwell The weaving genii of the bell; Tear from the wild Cocheco's track The dams that hold its torrents back; And let the loud-rejoicing fall Plunge, roaring, down its rocky wall; And let the Indian's paddle play On the unbridged Piscataqua!
Wide over hill and valley spread Once more the forest, dusk and dread, With here and there a clearing cut From the walled shadows round it shut; Each with its farm-house builded rude, By English yeoman squared and hewed, And the grim, flankered block-house bound With bristling palisades around.
So, haply shall before thine eyes The dusty veil of centuries rise, The old, strange scenery overlay The tamer pictures of to-day, While, like the actors in a play, Pass in their ancient guise along The figures of my border song What time beside Cocheco's flood The white man and the red man stood, With words of peace and brotherhood; When passed the sacred calumet From lip to lip with fire-draught wet, And, puffed in scorn, the peace-pipe's smoke Through the gray beard of Waldron broke, And Squando's voice, in suppliant plea For mercy, struck the haughty key Of one who held, in any fate, His native pride inviolate!
"Let your ears be opened wide!
He who speaks has never lied.
Waldron of Piscataqua, Hear what Squando has to say!
"Squando shuts his eyes and sees, Far off, Saco's hemlock-trees.
In his wigwam, still as stone, Sits a woman all alone,
"Wampum beads and birchen strands Dropping from her careless hands, Listening ever for the fleet Patter of a dead child's feet!
"When the moon a year ago Told the flowers the time to blow, In that lonely wigwam smiled Menewee, our little child.
"Ere that moon grew thin and old, He was lying still and cold; Sent before us, weak and small, When the Master did not call!
"On his little grave I lay; Three times went and came the day, Thrice above me blazed the noon, Thrice upon me wept the moon.
"In the third night-watch I heard, Far and low, a spirit-bird; Very mournful, very wild, Sang the totem of my child.
"'Menewee, poor Menewee, Walks a path he cannot see Let the white man's wigwam light With its blaze his steps aright.
"'All-uncalled, he dares not show Empty hands to Manito Better gifts he cannot bear Than the scalps his slayers wear.'
"All the while the totem sang, Lightning blazed and thunder rang; And a black cloud, reaching high, Pulled the white moon from the sky.
"I, the medicine-man, whose ear All that spirits bear can hear,-- I, whose eyes are wide to see All the things that are to be,--
"Well I knew the dreadful signs In the whispers of the pines, In the river roaring loud, In the mutter of the cloud.
"At the breaking of the day, From the grave I passed away; Flowers bloomed round me, birds sang glad, But my heart was hot and mad.
"There is rust on Squando's knife, From the warm, red springs of life; On the funeral hemlock-trees Many a scalp the totem sees.
"Blood for blood! But evermore Squando's heart is sad and sore; And his poor squaw waits at home For the feet that never come!
"Waldron of Cocheco, hear!
Squando speaks, who laughs at fear; Take the captives he has ta'en; Let the land have peace again!"
As the words died on his tongue, Wide apart his warriors swung; Parted, at the sign he gave, Right and left, like Egypt's wave.
And, like Israel passing free Through the prophet-charmed sea, Captive mother, wife, and child Through the dusky terror filed.
One alone, a little maid, Middleway her steps delayed, Glancing, with quick, troubled sight, Round about from red to white.
Then his hand the Indian laid On the little maiden's head, Lightly from her forehead fair Smoothing back her yellow hair.
"Gift or favor ask I none; What I have is all my own Never yet the birds have sung, Squando hath a beggar's tongue.'
"Yet for her who waits at home, For the dead who cannot come, Let the little Gold-hair be In the place of Menewee!
"Mishanock, my little star!
Come to Saco's pines afar; Where the sad one waits at home, Wequashim, my moonlight, come!"
"What!" quoth Waldron, "leave a child Christian-born to heathens wild?
As God lives, from Satan's hand I will pluck her as a brand!"
"Hear me, white man!" Squando cried; "Let the little one decide.
Wequashim, my moonlight, say, Wilt thou go with me, or stay?"
Slowly, sadly, half afraid, Half regretfully, the maid Owned the ties of blood and race,-- Turned from Squando's pleading face.
Not a word the Indian spoke, But his wampum chain he broke, And the beaded wonder hung On that neck so fair and young.
Silence-shod, as phantoms seem In the marches of a dream, Single-filed, the grim array Through the pine-trees wound away.
Doubting, trembling, sore amazed, Through her tears the young child gazed.
"God preserve her!" Waldron said; "Satan hath bewitched the maid!"