If I let fall a word of bitter mirth
When public shames more shameful pardon won, Some have misjudged me, and my service done, If small, yet faithful, deemed of little worth: Through veins that drew their life from Western earth Two hundred years and more my blood hath run In no polluted course from sire to son; And thus was I predestined ere my birth To love the soil wherewith my fibres own Instinctive sympathies; yet love it so As honor would, nor lightly to dethrone Judgment, the stamp of manhood, nor forego The son's right to a mother dearer grown
With growing knowledge and more chaste than snow.
IN CORDIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF HIS EMINENT SERVICE IN HEIGHTENING AND PURIFYING THE TONE
OF OUR POLITICAL THOUGHT,
This Volume
IS DEDICATED.
Readers, it is hoped, will remember that, by his Ode at the Harvard Commemoration, the author had precluded himself from many of the natural outlets of thought and feeling common to such occasions as are celebrated in this little volume.
READ AT THE ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIGHT AT CONCORD
WHO Cometh over the hills, Her garments with morning sweet, The dance of a thousand rills Making music before her feet? Her presence freshens the air; Sunshine steals light from her face; The leaden footstep of Care Leaps to the tune of her pace, Fairness of all that is fair, Grace at the heart of all grace, Sweetener of hut and of hall, Bringer of life out of naught, Freedom, O, fairest of all
The daughters of Time and Thought!
She cometh, cometh to-day : Hark! hear ye not her tread, Sending a thrill through your clay, Under the sod there, ye dead, Her nurslings and champions? Do ye not hear, as she comes, The bay of the deep-mouthed guns,
Tell me, young men, have ye seen, Creature of diviner mien
For true hearts to long and cry for, Manly hearts to live and die for? What hath she that others want? Brows that all endearments haunt, Eyes that make it sweet to dare, Smiles that glad untimely death, Looks that fortify despair,
Tones more brave than trumpet's breath; Tell me, maidens, have ye known Household charm more sweetly rare, Grace of woman ampler blown, Modesty more debonair,
Younger heart with wit full grown ? O for an hour of my prime, The pulse of my hotter years, That I might praise her in rhyme Would tingle your eyelids to tears, Our sweetness, our strength, and our star,
Our hope, our joy, and our trust, Who lifted us out of the dust, And made us whatever we are!
Whiter than moonshine upon snow Her raiment is, but round the hem Crimson stained; and, as to and fro Her sandals flash, we see on them, And on her instep veined with blue, Flecks of crimson, on those fair feet, High-arched, Diana-like, and fleet, Fit for no grosser stain than dew: O, call them rather chrisms than stains,
Sacred and from heroic veins ! For, in the glory-guarded pass, Her haughty and far-shining head She bowed to shrive Leonidas With his imperishable dead; Her, too, Morgarten saw,
Where the Swiss lion fleshed his icy paw; She followed Cromwell's quenchless star Where the grim Puritan tread Shook Marston, Naseby, and Dunbar : Yea, on her feet are dearer dyes Yet fresh, nor looked on with untearful
Our fathers found her in the woods Where Nature meditates and broods, The seeds of unexampled things Which Time to consummation brings Through life and death and man's un- stable moods;
They met her here, not recognized, A sylvan huntress clothed in furs, To whose chaste wants her bow sufficed, Nor dreamed what destinies were hers: She taught them bee-like to create Their simpler forms of Church and State; She taught them to endue
The past with other functions than it knew,
And turn in channels strange the uncertain stream of Fate;
Better than all, she fenced them in their need
With iron-handed Duty's sternest creed, 'Gainst Self's lean wolf that ravens word
Why cometh she hither to-day To this low village of the plain Far from the Present's loud highway, From Trade's cool heart and seething brain?
Why cometh she? She was not far away. Since the soul touched it, not in vain, With pathos of immortal gain, 'Tis here her fondest memories stay. She loves yon pine-bemurmured ridge Where now our broad-browed poet sleeps, Dear to both Englands; near him he Who wore the ring of Canace; But most her heart to rapture leaps Where stood that era-parting bridge, O'er which, with footfall still as dew, The Old Time passed into the New ; Where, as your stealthy river creeps, He whispers to his listening weeds Tales of sublimest homespun deeds. Here English law and English thought 'Gainst the self-will of England fought; And here were men (coequal with their fate),
Who did great things, unconscious they They dreamed not what a die was cast were great. With that first answering shot; what then?
There was their duty; they were men Schooled the soul's inward gospel to obey, Though leading to the lion's den. They felt the habit-hallowed world give way
Beneath their lives, and on went they, Unhappy who was last.
When Buttrick gave the word, That awful idol of the unchallenged Past, Strong in their love, and in their lineage strong,
Fell crashing if they heard it not, Yet the earth heard, Nor ever hath forgot,
As on from startled throne to throne, Where Superstition sate or conscious Wrong,
A shudder ran of some dread birth unknown.
Thrice venerable spot! River more fateful than the Rubicon ! O'er those red planks, to snatch her dia- dem,
Man's Hope, star-girdled, sprang with them,
And over ways untried the feet of Doom strode on.
Think you these felt no charms In their gray homesteads and embowered farms?
In household faces waiting at the door
Their evening step should lighten up no | Where discrowned empires o'er their
In fields their boyish feet had known? In trees their fathers' hands had set, And which with them had grown, Widening each year their leafy coronet? Felt they no pang of passionate regret For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own?
These things are dear to every man that lives,
And life prized more for what it lends than gives.
Yea, many a tie, by iteration sweet, Strove to detain their fatal feet; And yet the enduring half they chose, Whose choice decides a man life's slave or king,
The invisible things of God before the seen and known :
Therefore their memory inspiration blows With echoes gathering on from zone to
And many a thwarted hope wrings its weak hands and weeps,
I hear the voice as of a mighty wind From all heaven's caverns rushing unconfined,
"I, Freedom, dwell with Knowledge : I abide
With men whom dust of faction canuot blind
| To the slow tracings of the Eternal Mind;
With men by culture trained and for
From many a blasted bough
On Yggdrasil's storm-sinewed oak, That once was green, Hope of the West, as thou:
Yet pardon if I tremble while I boast; For I have loved as those who pardon
Away, ungrateful doubt, away! At least she is our own to-day. Break into rapture, my song, Verses, leap forth in the sun, Bearing the joyance along Like a train of fire as ye run! Pause not for choosing of words, Let them but blossom and sing Blithe as the orchards and birds With the new coming of spring! Dance in your jollity, bells; Shout, cannon; cease not, ye drums; Answer, ye hillside and dells; Bow, all ye people! She comes, Radiant, calm-fronted, as when She hallowed that April day. Stay with us! Yes, thou shalt stay, Softener and strengthener of men, Freedom, not won by the vain, Not to be courted in play, Not to be kept without pain. Stay with us! Yes, thou wilt stay, Handmaid and mistress of all, Kindler of deed and of thought, Thou that to hut and to hall Equal deliverance brought! Souls of her martyrs, draw near, Touch our dull lips with your fire, That we may praise without fear Her our delight, our desire, Our faith's inextinguishable star, Our hope, our remembrance, our trust, Our present, our past, our to be, Who will mingle her life with our dust
And makes us deserve to be free!
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