A figure grim and rusty,
Whose doublet plain and plainer hose
Were something worn and dusty.

Now even such men as Nature forms
Merely to fill the street with,
Once turned to ghosts by hungry worms,
Are serious things to meet with;
Your penitent spirits are no jokes,
And, though I'm not averse to
A quiet shade, even they are folks
One cares not to speak first to.

Who knows, thought I, but he has come,
By Charon kindly ferried,
To tell me of a mighty sum
Behind my wainscot buried?
There is a buccaneerish air

About that garb outlandish
Just then the ghost drew up his chair
And said, "My name is Standish.

"I come from Plymouth, deadly bored With toasts, and songs, and speeches, As long and flat as my old sword,

As threadbare as my breeches: They understand us Pilgrims! they, Smooth men with rosy faces, Strength's knots and gnarls all pared away, And varnish in their places!

"We had some toughness in our grain,
The eye to rightly see us is
Not just the one that lights the brain
Of drawing-room Tyrtæuses:
They talk about their Pilgrim blood,
Their birthright high and holy !
A mountain-stream that ends in mud
Methinks is melancholy.

"He had stiff knees, the Puritan,
That were not good at bending;
The homespun dignity of man

He thought was worth defending; He did not, with his pinchbeck ore, His country's shame forgotten, Gild Freedom's coffin o'er and o'er, When all within was rotten.

"These loud ancestral boasts of yours,

How can they else than vex us? Where were your dinner orators When slavery grasped at Texas? Dumb on his knees was every one That now is bold as Cæsar;

"I feel the soul in me draw near
The mount of prophesying;
In this bleak wilderness I hear
A John the Baptist crying;
Far in the east I see upleap

The streaks of first forewarning,
And they who sowed the light shall reap
The golden sheaves of morning.

"Child of our travail and our woe,
Light in our day of sorrow,
Through my rapt spirit I foreknow
The glory of thy morrow;

I hear great steps, that through the shade
Draw nigher still and nigher,

And voices call like that which bade
The prophet come up higher."

I looked, no form mine eyes could find,
I heard the red cock crowing,
And through my window-chinks the wind
A dismal tune was blowing;
Thought I, My neighbor Buckingham
Hath somewhat in him gritty,

Some Pilgrim-stuff that hates all sham, And he will print my ditty.

ON THE CAPTURE OF FUGITIVE SLAVES NEAR WASHINGTON

In a letter to Edward M. Davis written from Elmwood July 24, 1845, Lowell says: "I blew another dolorous and jarring blast' in the Courier the other day, which you will probably see in the Liberator of this week or next. I was impelled to write by the account of the poor fugitives who were taken near Washington. I think it has done some good. At any rate, it has set two gentlemen together by the ears about Dissolution, and they are hammering away at each other in the Courier." The blast was the following stanzas.

LOOK on who will in apathy, and stifle they who can,

The sympathies, the hopes, the words, that make man truly man;

Let those whose hearts are dungeoned up with interest or with ease Consent to hear with quiet pulse of loathsome deeds like these!

Though we break our fathers' promise, we have nobler duties first;

The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed;

Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod,

Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God!

We owe allegiance to the State; but deeper, truer, more,

To the sympathies that God hath set within our spirit's core;

Our country claims our fealty; we grant it so, but then

Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.

He's true to God who's true to man; wherever wrong is done,

To the humblest and the weakest, 'neath the all-beholding sun,

That wrong is also done to us; and they are slaves most base,

Whose love of right is for themselves, and not for all their race.

Then think I of deep shadows on the

grass,

Of meadows where in sun the cattle graze, Where, as the breezes pass,

The gleaming rushes lean a thousand ways, Of leaves that slumber in a cloudy mass, Or whiten in the wind, of waters blue

That from the distance sparkle through Some woodland gap, and of a sky above, Where one white cloud like a stray lamb doth move.

My childhood's earliest thoughts are linked with thee;

The sight of thee calls back the robin's song,

Who, from the dark old tree Beside the door, sang clearly all day long, And I, secure in childish piety, Listened as if I heard an angel sing

With news from heaven, which he could bring

Fresh every day to my untainted ears When birds and flowers and I were happy peers.

How like a prodigal doth nature seem, When thou, for all thy gold, so common art! Thou teachest me to deem

More sacredly of every human heart,
Since each reflects in joy its scanty gleam
Of heaven, and could some wondrous secret
show,

Did we but pay the love we owe,
And with a child's undoubting wisdom
look

On all these living pages of God's book.

THE GHOST-SEER

This poem was printed March 8, 1845, in the Broadway Journal, edited by C. F. Briggs. In a letter accompanying the poem Lowell confesses his dissatisfaction with the execution as compared with the conception, and adds: "Written in the metre which I have chosen it

is perhaps too long, but the plot would have sufficed for quite a long and elaborate poem, into which a good deal of reflection and experience might have been compressed."

YE who, passing graves by night,
Glance not to the left or right,
Lest a spirit should arise,

Cold and white, to freeze your eyes,

Some weak phantom, which your doubt
Shapes upon the dark without
From the dark within, a guess
At the spirit's deathlessness,
Which ye entertain with fear
In your self-built dungeon here,
Where ye sell your God-given lives
Just for gold to buy you gyves,
Ye without a shudder meet
In the city's noonday street,
Spirits sadder and more dread
Than from out the clay have fled,
Buried, beyond hope of light,
In the body's haunted night!
See ye not that woman pale?
There are bloodhounds on her trail !
Bloodhounds two, all gaunt and lean,
(For the soul their scent is keen,)
Want and Sin, and Sin is last,
They have followed far and fast;
Want gave tongue, and, at her howl,
Sin awakened with a growl.
Ah, poor girl! she had a right
To a blessing from the light;
Title-deeds to sky and earth
God gave to her at her birth;
But, before they were enjoyed,
Poverty had made them void,
And had drunk the sunshine up
From all nature's ample cup,
Leaving her a first-born's share
In the dregs of darkness there.
Often, on the sidewalk bleak,
Hungry, all alone, and weak,
She has seen, in night and storm,
Rooms o'erflow with firelight warm,
Which, outside the window-glass,
Doubled all the cold, alas!
Till each ray that on her fell
Stabbed her like an icicle,
And she almost loved the wail
Of the bloodhounds on her trail.
Till the floor becomes her bier,
She shall feel their pantings near,
Close upon her very heels,
Spite of all the din of wheels;
Shivering on her pallet poor,
She shall hear them at the door
Whine and scratch to be let in,
Sister bloodhounds, Want and Sin!

Hark! that rustle of a dress,
Stiff with lavish costliness!

Here comes one whose cheek would flush
But to have her garment brush

'Gainst the girl whose fingers thin Wove the weary broidery in, Bending backward from her toil, Lest her tears the silk might soil, And, in midnights chill and murk, Stitched her life into the work, Shaping from her bitter thought Heart's-ease and forget-me-not, Satirizing her despair

With the emblems woven there. Little doth the wearer heed Of the heart-break in the brede; A hyena by her side Skulks, down-looking, it is Pride. He digs for her in the earth, Where lie all her claims of birth, With his foul paws rooting o'er Some long-buried ancestor, Who perhaps a statue won By the ill deeds he had done, By the innocent blood he shed, By the desolation spread Over happy villages, Blotting out the smile of peace. There walks Judas, he who sold Yesterday his Lord for gold, Sold God's presence in his heart For a proud step in the mart; He hath dealt in flesh and blood; At the bank his name is good; At the bank, and only there, 'T is a marketable ware. In his eyes that stealthy gleam Was not learned of sky or stream, But it has the cold, hard glint Of new dollars from the mint. Open now your spirit's eyes, Look through that poor clay disguise Which has thickened, day by day, Till it keeps all light at bay, And his soul in pitchy gloom Gropes about its narrow tomb, From whose dank and slimy walls Drop by drop the horror falls. Look! a serpent lank and cold Hugs his spirit fold on fold; From his heart, all day and night, It doth suck God's blessed light. Drink it will, and drink it must, Till the cup holds naught but dust; All day long he hears it hiss, Writhing in its fiendish bliss; All night long he sees its eyes Flicker with foul ecstasies, As the spirit ebbs away