Discipline of earth and time for freedom and immortality. Four books of an unpublished poem

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DISCIPLINE
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FOUR BOOKS OF AJV UiVPUBLISHED POEM.
BOSTON
185 4-.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the jear 1854, by
JOHN S JI I T H
,
In the Clerk's Office of the Soutlicrn District of New York.
NOV 2 5 1980
r
PREFACE.
When this work, begun several years
ago in the shades of a great forest, y/as as-suming
its form, and without forecasted
plan, developed itself, as the trains of
thought, following the gradual processes of
Nature, grew o.ut of the revolving year, it
could not have been foreseen that the march
of the Slave-despotism in our country would
have been so steady, so remorseless, and so
rapid.
This horrid and monstrous shape sits like
a night-hag on the otherv/ise radiant and
joyous prospect of our destiny. Like hell's
portress, snufdng with delight the smell of
mortal change on earth, this genius of Slav-
IV PREFACE.
ery, filtliy, dread, and vast, looks forth, with
scent of carnage.
" So scented the grim Feature, and upturned
His nostril wide into tlie murky air,
Sagacious of his quarry from so far.
Methinks I feel new strength within me rise,
Wings growing and dominion given me large
Beyond this deep ; whatever draws me on
Or sympathy, or some connatural force
Powerful at greatest distance to unite
"With secret amity things of like kind,
Hy secretest conveyance. Thou, my shade
Inseparable, must with me along.
For Deatu from Sm no power can separate."
The death of our Liberty, our moral and.
national life, is inseparable from the suprem-acy
of this idol-sin of Slavery, which men
are driving like a Juggernaut through, the
land, wliile a mysterious force of degradation
impels multitudes to throw themselves be-neath
its wlieels, and others shout at its pro-gress,
and lay hold of the chains to drag it
forward. The worship of this Dagon, this
Moloch, is enforced at the jDoint of the bay-onet;
our laws for personal freedom are
PREFACE. V
struck down and silenced ; and tlie citizens
of old Massacliusetts permit their own court-house
to be occupied with soldiers, over-awing
the processes of justice, to ensure the
execution of the law of slavery ; while they
quietly suffer the mandate of their own Chief
Justice, under which they could legally have
resisted all this violence, to be contemned,
disregarded, disobeyed, there not being moral
power enough, moral resolution, to compel
their own Governor to respect their own
laws ! Between laws where they had their
choice, they have rejected and broken the
just, and chosen the unjust; trampled on
their own sovereign and righteous State-law,
as old as the earliest life of the free State,
and set above it the new and unjust law,
which, by their own powers as ordained of
God, they might have rendered powerless
and void. In the history of the world there
never was a more shameless, needless, de-graded,
and degrading sacrifice of liberty.
In such occurrences as these mav be found
VI PREFACE.
one of tlie reasons wliicli have induced tlie
separate publication of four books of an un-finished
Poem. These four have a degree
of unity in themselves, even disjointed from
the rest of the work, and therefore they arc
published. If they should have any influ-ence,
the present is the appropriate time for
its exercise, be the circle of minds ever so
small that may be interested. If the author
had the power, he would help infnse into the
very life-blood of our literature an undjdng
and energetic hatred and disgust of slavery,
and a loathing and contempt of the treachery
and meanness of those who choose it for
their god, and sacrifice upon its altar.
Theirs is a true apostolical succession from
the rabble of Jews, who demanded the mur-derer
Barabbas as their Saviour, and cruci-fied
Christ.
BOOK 11.
AEGUMENT.
Divine wisdom in the frame and adornment of this globe for man's
habitation,—Verdure, colors, forms, processes, and powers, a mental
and imaginative discipline.—Sublimity of mountain scenery.—Sun-set
and sunrise among the mountains.—The scenery of Switzerland a
moral gift to the world,—Change of the scene to a primeval forest.
—
Various effects of sun and shade, from morn to eve.—The forest sun-rise
and sunset—Nature's call to prayer.—Advancement of the season
into Autumn.— My Father is the Husbandman.—A rainy day and
night succeeded by a clear sunrising.—Noon in the forest, with the
Sight dappled and chequered by the flying clouds.—God and Heaven
seen through the Word, by the Spirit.—Moral and spiritual teachings
of the volume of Nature.—Clearness of Faith, and blindness of Sense.
BOOK II
With what design and wisdom manifold,
Th' Almighty Maker, when he threw the worlds,
Flaming, into the bosom of the deep,
Tempered this earth to educate our senses,
And form them a refinement for our souls
!
The eye looks forth on beauty, and the ear
Conveys melodious voices from the sea,
The sky, the air, the birds upon the wing,
The thunder-rolling clouds, the cataracts.
The whisjiering rills, the brooks, the mighty wind.
Sweeping the forest as a living harp,
Of many sounding chords. The fragrant breath
Of Nature breathes the balmiest rich perfumes,
And the light falls in soft prismatic show^ers.
In grateful garniture of green, the vales,
Meadows, and mountain slopes, and grassy downs.
Successive rise, and spread, with pleasing change,
Their undulating acres to the sun.
Threaded with wdnding banks of crystal streams,
Blossom-enamelled, and thick strewn with flowers.
1-^
10 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
Trees, slii'ubs, and j^lants, gigantic and minute,
In forms of grace innumerable, combined
With lovely hues more various than the sun
Scatters from broken rainbows, or bright prisms,
Spread in gradations endless.
Clear defined,
Their various verdant tribes and families,
Are ranged distinct, from gnarled towering oak,
Or mountain cedar, whereof spake, antique-,
The Jewish king, poet and naturalist,
To the low flowering hyssop, and soft moss,
Whose blossoms, hid with beauty exquisite,
Demand the well-armed miscroscopic eye.
An endless power of vegetation asks
Only the sun and rain ; for earth is sown
With germs of life perpetual, to the centre
;
Nor frost, nor snow, nor fierce volcanic heat,
Th' exhaustless, deep, prolific energy
Represses nor destroys ; 'tis latent still.
And ceaseless as the restless rolling globe. "o to^
What rich luxuriance in earth's flowing robes,
Endless and grand, whether the sun looks down,
From cloudless skies, on glowing rocks and sands,
With here and there a wild oasis hid ;
Or, veiled with mist, on herbage, moist with rain.
Pastures and downs dotted with flocks of sheep.
And herds of cattle grazing leisurely,
And meadows, hawthorn-hedfrocl. and flower-inlaid.
F i; O M NATURAL B E A U 'J' Y . 11
Fresh streams, and running Lrooks, and bright
cascades,
And shady groves, and green and lovely lanes.
Islands of foliage, desert-skirtecf, pour
Beauty and fragrance to the eager breeze
;
And lines of clustering verdure, tangled, deep.
Follow the rivers, from the shady verge
Of inland lakes, or lowly-bosomed springs ;
And at the base of mighty mountain-ranges.
Primeval woods hang o'er the craggy rocks.
And skirt, with solemn, silent, darkening fringe,
The glittering icy peaks and continents.
And in fair regions nearer to the sun,
What vast majestic forests, vdiose wide reach
Of verdure, as a boundless, living sea,
Eolls off in gloomy, pathless, waving depths,
A wilderness of vegetable forms,
Huge, rank, luxuriant, mighty, all involved,
The lair of roaming, careless animals.
Haughty, and heedless of the monster, man ;
By fire invaded never, nor the axe
Of the strong woodman, nor the deadly crack
Of the unerring rifle, echoing sharp.
Where never human form intelligent
Has marked the mighty process, ages gone.
Like ocean-tides, with annual j)ulse of life.
Retreating and returned, whole generations.
12 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
With years by cycles counted in their sweep
Of lonely growth, and gradual dim decay,
Have risen, flourished, fallen : Nature moves
In her majestic course, indifferent.
Whether a watchful beating heart admires
The wondrous scene, or not. God is well pleased,
His works to him all grateful, perfect, fair.
Yet all for man, earth's favored foster-child,
Cradled amidst such powers magnificent,
To train him for those glorious upper courts,
Of which all scenes of beauty here, and grandeur,
Are but the homely veil ;—or, for the soul,
A hall, dim-lighted, introductory;
Yet how divinely fair, intelligent.
Significant of grand design, and audible.
With voices of sweet gratitude and praise !
The form and structure of this mortal globe.
How shining with the finger-marks of God !
And dead nrust be the heart, and deaf the ear,
And the eye sealed with slumber, if it fail
To hear, and read, and feel, in all these leaves,
Of natural revelation, the bright lines.
Characteristic, of a Father's love.
Perpetual source of rich and pure refreshment,
A discipline imaginative, grand.
Of solemn imagery, with light and shade,
F R M N A T U r. A L BEAUTY. 13
Mountain and vale, imtramplcd space of sea,
A]id pathless wilderness, and desert vast
!
What inN\'ard forms of grand intelligenec.
What aspirations of illumined thought.
What sentiment intuitive and vast,
Of sp)irit-worlds to come, and instinct high.
Of immortality beyond all worlds,
Should breathe from such a dwelling-place a^
man's !
Its airy ministries bear up the soul,
Its restless A'oices breathed inaudil)le,
Its influences dim,- mysterious, hid.
Inspired of God, excite the listening mind.
And unseen angels waft it on their wings,
'Twixt earth and heaven ascending and descending.
Bright golden stairs, with mazy galleries.
And towers with v/indows strange, attract it high,
To vantage of illimitable view.
Where Nature hath a deep baptizing povrer.
And gives discernment to the wakeful sense.
Even as a father lifts his curious child
Over the heads of prostrate crowds, to gaze
On some prodigious fiery spectacle.
Deep calleth unto deep ! Behold the range
Of those perpetual mountains, whose profound,
Dark, dazzling blue, speaks of eternity !
What grand repose, what majesty sublime.
Breathes from their distant outline, as they lie,
14 Sn RITUAL DISCIPLINE
Like sculptured forms, magnificent and vast,
Upon gigantic tombs, colossal raised,
With folded arras, and flowing, rock-hewn robes,
Against an evening sky. Or when the moon,
With melancholy, half-revealing veil
Of silver light, softens their rugged crags.
And seems the eflluence of indwelling soul.
Breathing an inspiration as of thought,
With what impressive, deep, and silent awe.
Their lonely grandeur fills the shadowy air,
In snov/y brilliance flashing to the stars.
With wild, uncertain gleam ! Or when the morn
Pours its full radiance, with what startling power
They flash upon the upward gazing eye,
And call upon the soul to Avorship God !
Types of eternal truths, towering they rise.
Ever, from earth to heaven, serene, sublime.
Unchangeable, whether a cloudless sun
Clothe them with glittering robes of icy splendor.
Intolerably bright, or whirling storms
Sweep them with cataracts of icy sleet.
Or clouds rest on them as a misty sea.
Or lightnings play, and the rebellowing thunders
Splinter their jagged pinnacles, and roll
Enormous crags and avalanches down.
With what vast crash, and thundering roar pre
longed,
Those mighty glittering ridges at the brow
F n O M N A T IT R A r, BEAUTY. 15
Of snowy mountains, hanging in mid-air,
Break from the summit top])ling, with swift ]ilui)ge,
lu rushing frozen torrents ! All the year,
Collecting and suspended, till the weight
Enormous, and the field of such extent,
That it might sweep M'hole villages, becomes
A mountain clmging to a mountain ! Down,
At the air's first concussion, shoots the mass !
A whisper near may startle it, or word,
Or step of daring hunter, or tlie faint,
Far distant echo of the traveller's gun.
With sound of many waters, or the deep,
Tempestuous boom of billows on the beach,
Or rocky coast, flung maddening and rebounding,
Or as the tramp of armies infinite,
Or roar of thousand cataracts in one,
The broken, grinding, mighty crags of ice
Leap swift from perpendicular steep to steep.
Terrace to terrace, with successive crash,
Then for beneath, beyond the reach of sight,
Drop in spent fragments, inaccessible,
Unheard, unvisited, in chaos deep.
There piled and pinnacled, they grimly guard
That wilderness of dripping, horrid caves,
The gloomy womb of those dark struggling
streams.
Let loose by sun and rain, and rushing fierce,
In headlong course, precipitous, to ocean.
16 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
Scenes not unlike, of dreadful grandeur, passed.
Of old, before the prophet's startled sense,
When earthquake, Avhirlwind, and. the raging flarnes.
Of vast devouring fire rushed round the world.
Then at the still, small voice, he hid his face,
And felt, in all his being, God was there
!
And God is here ! These glorious mountains
stand,
Sublime as when he bade their buttressed spires,
And frowning crags, sheeted with glaciers, rise.
These avalanches thunder forth his praise !
JSIajestic bursts of stormy melody.
From mountain streams, rejoiciug in their strength.
And howling hurricanes that shake the earth,
And sweep whole forests prostrate, are the notes.
Faint, yet magnificently awful, of his power !
Thy glorious works, O God, forever praise
Thy name, thy wisdom, and thy love divine !
Who, but must pause, arrested, and adore 1
And yet, insensible and thoughtless man
Sees not the Maker of these shining worlds.
Nor heeds the writing on these radiant walls.
The trifling summer visitors flit by,
Too oft from God and Nature still estranged,
The mountain voice of truths divine unheard.
But native hearts, filled with such scenes sublime
From childhood, and secluded from the haunts
Of fashion, worldliness, and frantic sin,
FllOM NATURAL BEAUTY. 17
And with the Book of God's dear sacred Word
From infancy fixmiliar, know the power
Of daily deep communion with Plis works.
Intense the splendor of the setting sun,
From distant mountains flashing, and the hues
Of lovely changing radiance on the crags.
Snow covered, where the lingering sunbeams rest,
In crimson, warm suffusion of soft light,
Apparent as an angel's dazzling brow,
Encircled Avith a coronet of fire,
While all this lower world is veiled in gloom.
Tliere the flame burns and wavers o'er the snow,
Glowing with beauty indescribable.
Gone, then returning, like a sudden blush
Of ruddy life in the pale face of death.
Then the long twilight, and the wandering stars,
INIidnight communing with those icy peaks.
Motionless glittering in the cold serene,
Till the sun tip- their rosy tops with fire.
And when the watcher on Mount Eighi's bro\v
Beholds the stars dissolving in the dawn.
Then in the vast horizon opposite,
Where high in heaven the icy mountains shine,
And nightly claim dominion with the stars.
Sees their crestslighted by the unrisea sun,
Earth hath no scene more glorious, nor the sky,
With all its lustrous orhs, a sight more fair.
18 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
As if a host of angels had flown round
The wide circumference, with rosy flame,
And at the signal given, had touched those peaks,
And snowy crags and pyramids with fire.
The mighty range of crystal lamps colossal.
Hung in mid-heaven, bursts into radiant blaze,
With crimson colors waving ! seems a dream,
' Inspired from worlds celestial, or a vision,
Caught at the gates of heaven, wide open flung !
How like a new creation, at whose birth.
Again the morning stars might sing together,
And all the sons of God shout with loud joy
!
The transitory vision fades away.
The cold gray dawn, and the white snow, resume
Dominion o'er the rosy-tinted flashes.
That softly burned, with lustre exquisite.
Daylight advances, and the stars are gone.
The visible sun o'erlooks the wide horizon,
And marks the mountain-sides with light and shade.
Black gulfs revealing, inaccessible.
Where all, till then, seemed smooth, continuous,
ice.
Now rise the shadows from the sleeping earth.
Chased backward to the sun ; and the bright mists,
That with soft wing brooded ujDon the lakes,
Fluttering like parent birds scared fi'om the nest,
In the cdear air hover awhile, then vanish
;
Part stealing up the volesi, or crngsy pides
FUOM NAT U UAL E E A U T V . ID
Of steep ravines ; the slow reluctant cloud,
Iinpearling every tree with glittering dews.
Hamlets and villages, and clustered towns.
And woods, and open glades, and forests vast.
Are radiant now Avith light, that o'er the world.
East, Avest, north, south, on mountain height se-rene.
Or broad luxuriant plain, or glittering sea.
Or vale sequestered, pours, magnificent.
Its pure, triumphant, all-revealing flood.
Oh, Svritzcrland ! thou art divinely fair.
So grand, so glorious, m thy bright array.
The treasures of thine icy Palaces,
So like the shining of the gates of Heaven !
Angels might Avorship in thy mountain halls,
Cathedrals of the sounding elements.
Almost too sacred for a mortal's tread.
Yet God has given thee to a gazing Avorld,
For grand and precious discipline ; and they,
Who in the v/alks of nature Avait on Him,
And in his light see light, return from thee,
Mind, heart, imagination richly stored.
With glorious thoughts, and images and dreams
Of brighter worlds, not all in vain for this,
But of celestial, sanctifying power.
Thy children should be angels in the might
Of imsubjectcd freedom, and great thoughts,
Too vast for utterance, and feelings deoj),
20 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
And sense majestic of a present God !
And such there are, whose noble minds pour forth
Like thine own mountains, rivers to the sea.
And thy Geneva, that proud Ararat,
Where Freedom rested, sends once more abroad,
Great voices of awakening for a world. \
Far distant from those wondrous heights sub-lime,
—
Colossal ridges, whose bright icy peaks
Eise glittering, till the eye is lost in heaven,
—
Mid scenes of lowlier beauty now we rove.
The morn is balmy, and invites our steps,
Within these woods primeval, where the shade.
From interlacing foliage at the tops
Of mighty trees, arrests the mid-day sun.
That all beneath is coolness, and the walks,
Dappled with gleams of radiance thrown aslant
From openings in the glades, are moist and fresh.
The soft and tender growth of maple leaves,
From thousand pliant stalks fluttermg outspread,
Veils the dark surface of the forest earth ;
A field of verdure thick, a sea of green,
From which the tall straight trunks of branching
elms,
Lindens, and maples rich, and mightiest pines,
Bear high a waving roof, o'er avenues
Of fretted, long, religious, whispering aisles.
FROM N A T l" R A L B E A U T Y . 21
The air breathes fragrant inoisture, and the wind,
Sweeping the topmost leaves, as Avith the touch
Invisible, of Hying angels, sends
The sound of pouring rain, or rushing sea,
In solemn, gi-and, and thoughtful music down.
How soft the melancholy voiceful sweep
Of sighing breezes through the tasselled pines !
Now dies the wind away, and all is still.
Not a leaf quivers ; hushed the silent air
;
So still, that e'en the fall of tiny spears,
From hemlock boughs, resounds like drops of rain,
Of falling beech-nuts, pattering on the leaves.
The late and early songsters of the woods
Are voiceless now, or absent, and in place
Of warbling melodies, you hear the sharp
"Woodpecker's bill, tapping the lofty tree,
Or sudden whirr of partridge on the wing.
Or chirruj) of the squirrel, with his quirks.
And whistling, sneezing notes, in startled, quick.
And voluble rotation. Down the dell.
And from the neighboring open corn-field, wavers.
Hoarsely, the harsh voice of the flying crow.
Here, laid along the dry and sloping trunk
Of some tall tree, new fallen, I look uj).
And let the leaves against the dee]3 blue sky
Play with quick dappling shadows o'er my face.
Or at the roots of old majestic pines,
22 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
Reclined, and drinking in the effluence
Of soul-like, deep, mysterious, hidden power,
In the sweet forms of Nature, love to scan
The simplest processes and elements.
The lines and motions of the forest-world,
The breath and stirrings of the forest-life,
In every pulse how fresh and beautiful
!
Can there be sight more exquisite than this ?
This round embroidery of trees, leaves, light,
Chequered and interlaced with mingling shades,
Inlaid and woven on, hue behind hue,
Line after line in close perspective drawn !
Fretted and frosted, as some mineral cave,
The pendent roof lets in the gleaming sky,
And shafts of light, misty and cool, stream down,
Along dark branches, and straight trunks, moss-grown,
Or silver gray, and clustered round with green.
The soft pale green seems lit with inward fire,
Or dipped in flame, or dropped with shower of
gold.
Now, as the sun fills nearer the horizon.
And the bright glittering rays, shafted aslant,
Pour down a mellower light, how richly burns
This mazy net-work in the glowing sky !
Meanwhile i' the east, shade deepening upon shade,
With tracery thick, and clustered green recesses,
K n O M N A T LT K A I. ]! E A U T Y . 'J-J
Twigs, boughs, trunks, 1)i'anchcs, fringed with ver-dant
gold.
Festooned with pendent arches, and embowered
With glossy leaves, of many a shape and hue,
Await th' infolding of the twilight gloom.
Dense mass of foliage ! to the evening sky
Transpicuous, and reticulated through.
But ere the dusky veil, involving, falls,
And hides the dewy landscape, indistinct.
What sudden change skirts the rich woodland
scene !
The deep red light crimsons the forest glades,
From the sun's setting beams ; the trunks seem
clad
In scarlet mail ; the old decaying stumps,
Glow ruddy, and the rocks and hedges round,
Gleam as of blossomed rubies ;—but the grove.
Where the eye loses now the sun's broad disc.
Flames with- the richest purple, till the clouds.
Trailing the glories of departing day,
Take up the banners of the setting sun,
Sole objects that retain the hues of heaven.
Hu*hed in the evening stillness, how the trees,
Like thoughtful, listening, grateful beings, stand.
Silent, in holy adoration awed !
Obedient to Jehovah's word. Be still.
And know that I am God, all nature waits
^!4 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
Pervaded by a, solemn harmony,
And calling tlionglitless man to prayer and praise.
A soul of love breathes in these sacred woods,
Nor sound, nor motion, breaks the deep repose,
But when God pleases, he can make them speak.
The wind is up ! The forest roars and surges.
As with the ocean's thunder ! How sublime,
And filled with thoughtful music is the sound !
These hugest trees, magnificent and proud.
Which not ten thousand giant arms could bend.
Swayed to and fro, yield to the elements,
When equinoctial tempests rage abroad,
Rejoicing in the fury of their strength.
How nature's voice, and nature's silence, all.
Intelligent and ceaseless as the light,
Rebukes not sole the atheist in his vfays,
But warns, wakes, reprobates, a prayerless man !
These woods, the wind-harp of a voiceless world,
These winds, that now with softest whispering
touch.
Breathe so divine a harmony, and now,
Burst in fierce crashing thunders through the air,
Vast, viewless, restless messengers of Heaven !
This twilight gloom, these trailing clouds of gold.
These goi'geous, deepening colors in the west.
These glimmering stars, that faintly, one by one.
Steal from the depths of space ;—this solemn hush,
And grateful coolness of the dewy eve,
—
FROM NATUXiAL BEAUTY. 25
Are nature's sacred utterances for God.
All nature speaks of God to sense and soul,-
And when she tells of his Eternal Power,
And shadows forth his Everlasting Godhead,
Calls man to prayer. And can we live and breathe,
And walk, admiring, in a Avorld like this.
And feed this spirit with these setting skies,
And never think of Him who made these heavens,
This thoughtful soul, this sensitive quick frame.
This busy, anxious heart, which only He,
Who strung the harp, can keep in sacred tune,
Or chai-m its discords to eternal rest ?
By prayer, not thought alone, or silent trance
Of admiration, man communes with Heaven.
If words of faith, acknowledgment contrite.
For sins committed, and the fervent plea
Of grace, the purchase of a Saviour's blood,
Be wanting, all is absent ; the desire,
Tliat lowly asks ; the penitential groan.
Trembling, yet prevalent ; the willing mind,
Submissive and obedient, and the love.
That fires the sacrifice of praise in man.
If words be absent, and the sacred plea.
And Advocate, through whom we come to God,
By careless man neglected, or unnamed,
—
He never prays, nor knows the sacred bliss
Of grateful love, the hope of sins forgiven.
Or sense of Heavenly Presence, or the deep
2
26 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
Adoriiig joy of worship iii the soul.
Were he the tree, beneath whose shade he walks,
Or lowing heifer of the herd he milks,
Or babbling stream, that murmurs down the vales.
Or weed, or withered leaf upon the stream,
He could not be so heedless of a God.
There is a venom in the want of prayer,
And he who prays not, hides beneath the veil
Of seeming carelessness, or busy life,
Or thoughts too much preoccupied with sense,
A deadly enmity, that like the cloud.
Involving now the mountam and the vale.
Breaks only with the vivid dreadful flame
Of fierce devouring lightning, and the roar
Of thunder, crashing o'er a frightened world.
What, when he wakes, and finds himself with God,
Will the despiser of his vengeance feel.
Who, through the changes of a long career
Fed full upon the bounty of kind Heaven,
Warned, stirred, and pressed betimes with fear of
death,
Tlie sense of sin, the outcry of the Word,
The voice of Conscience, and the need of grace,
Never in grateful thought, or penitence.
Or humble faith, or sigh of contrite spirit,
Lifted the heart, or bowed the knee, in prayer
!
The season is advancing ; all the day,
FROM NATURAL BEAUTY. 27
The air is filled with smoky, hazy light,
Involving nature in a dream-like trance.
An indolent sleepy calm hangs o'er the scene.
The distant ridges of the mountains lose
Their sharp defined lines, and melt away,
Ridge behind ridge, in dusky grand repose.
And in the vales between, the noon-tide sun,
Pours down a fleecy radiance, like the mist,
That all night long hangs on the dewy mead,
Sleeps with the moonlight in the leafy dells.
And veils each water-course at early morn.
The purple elder-berries now invite
The school-boy, with their tempting ripened
clusters.
Of luscious look, ambitious rivaling
The small round grape of Zante, or the stalk
Of garden currants on their leafy bush.
The juice, of brilliant crimson dye, expressed,
The truant boasts a native Indian ink.
Tlie thistle is in blossom, and its fragrance
Breathes by the road-side. Many a hasty bee.
And rival humming-bird, with slender bill,
Heedless of thorns, buries his little wings
In its blue depths, or, balanced on the air,
Sucks fragrant honey from the careless flow^er.
Though rough, not worthless, e'en the withered burr
Ministers flame to many a joyous life,
So kindly provident of wealth is Nature !
28 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
When the black seed, beneath the fleecy down.
Loose ripens, then th' industrious birds, elated.
With raj^id bill extract the nourishing grain.
The broad, bright sunflower, like a golden shield,
Turns now its yellow, pointed, flaming rim,
With polished ridges of dark ripening seed,
To the great Orb of Day. A homely plant.
The garden Amazon ; yet somethmg dear,
For such a constant worship. Bound the walks,
A few autumnal flowers, with here and there
A group of flaunting faded dahlias stand.
Against a jubilee of summer weeds.
Too busy is the farmer, to preserve
The loveliness that asks an Eve-like care.
From such spontaneous, persevering growth.
And obstinate intrusion of wild herbs.
The faded garden spreads, a rueful scene,
Neglected, melancholy, where the brood
Of cackling barn-door fowls graze undisturbed.
How sad the lesson for our native soil,
A garden thus neglected of its owner,
Left to the empire of the wasteful weeds !
All that is noxious, needs no thought in man.
But springs luxuriant, wanton, waste, and wild.
All that is sweet and useful, and of pure
And delicate beauty, must be so^vn or set.
With gentlest, anxious, fostering love and prayer,
FROM NATURAL BEAUTY. 29
And nourished "by the dews of grace divine ;
The roots enriched with soil of purer mould,
The branches pruned, the weeds plucked ujt with
care.
My Father is the Husbandman ! How dear,
How gracious, condescending, loving, kind,
The work of God in man's rebellious heart
!
He sets the plant from heaven, he tends the growth,
He cuts the withered branch, he prunes the bough,
Dropping with golden fruit, that it may bear
More fruit, and richer, purer, of such life,
As angels gather from th' immortal trees,
By that celestial river, wdiere the Throne
Of God and of the Lamb pours forth the tide,
Divine, eternal, of transcendent love
To all in heaven, and grace to guilty man.
He sets the plant in Christ. O sacred Vine
!
May I but be the smallest living shoot,
In Thee, Iny dying Saviour ! Dying so,
That in thy rising, I might live in Thee,
Thy death, my life, thy life, my death to sin !
May I but be the branch, though tenderest, least,
Most insignificant, but truly thine !
May I but be the object of thy care.
Thy grace creating all in me that lives ;
—
Then shall I live for Tlaee, and never cease
To praise thy name, and labor for thy praise.
Oh, let my soul be ever stayed on Thee,
30 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
111 thee absorb'd, indelDted to tliy love,
Thy dymg love, for every breath of life !
My qnickeiiing from the dreadful endless death
Of trespasses and sins, my holy dawn,
And bright celestial morning of full hoj)e,
Above the night of hell ! Thy dying love,
Down-reaching, drew me from the dread abyss
Of blackness, wrath, and absolute despair !
To-day the sun sinks lowering, and the breezes,
Laden Avith vapor from long gathering clouds,
Wide spreading slowly o'er the dusky east,
Portend a rain, not furious, but serene.
Softly descending, all the live-long day,
With blessings on the needy earth, deep-moistened.
Now miss Ave our accustomed Avoodland walks,
But, quiet at the fireside, lighted now,
Perhaps the first of autumn, love to gaze,
With genial friends conversing, o'er the scene.
The wide, wet, drizzly landscape, hung with mist.
The cattle in the open fields stand still.
And ruminate in indolent enjoyment,
Or taste the dripping verdure, Avhile the steam,
Warm reeking from their sides, ascends in clouds.
How the dense forest trees enjoy the rain.
So gently veiling all the freshened foliage,
Whose motionless leaves, dew-laden, silent, drink
Or seem to drink, the influence from heaA^en,
With grateful, loAvly, SAveet intelligence.
FROM NATURAL BEAUTY. 31
The night shuts down, still raining ; not a star,
Or gleam of azure, breaks the deepening gloom.
But from the west at midnight, a soft wind,
Swift rising, sweeps the sky, and rolls the mist.
In fleecy sailing clouds, like flying squadrons.
Over the moonlit sea. 'Tis as if angels
Rolled back a veil of space from hidden worlds !
The stars flash forth, fresh as if just created.
Sinking withdrawn in deeper depths of blue,
Sparkling intense o'er the vast firmament.
Now with what boundless radiance breaks the
dawn !
'Twere worth a life of blindness paid, to see.
Were that the j)rice, the vivid and fresh gleam
Of one such opening seal of living splendor.
What words can paint the many-colored sky.
Flush after flush of purple and crimson hues,
Still changing, in those bars of motionless cloud,
Like gold in fire dissolving, passing on.
From hue to hue, through all the rainbow round,
From sapphire flame to amethyst and opal
!
With power renewed, and jDurified, the Day,
After a night of weeping, sends the shafts
Of rosy, glimmering light before the sim,
Gleaming the wet horizon. First, the hills,
Earth's glorious morning altars in a blaze.
Smoke as with incense. Now a golden mist
Steams up from vale and meadow, and the rays
32 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
Of light, fresh falling on the untrodden dew,
Impearl the grass, and kindle, as with flame,
Dense clumi^s of foliage, with their lustrous leaves,
Dropping at every breath in diamond showers.
And now the rounded hills, the trunks of trees,
The cottage on the slope, and the tall spire.
Cast their long shadows, definite and deep.
But every moment shortening, till the sun,
Ascended high, floods the whole world with light.
With new delight and love man goeth forth.
His morning worship to his INIaker given.
Resuming, with glad heart, and quickened strength,
His labors till the evening. O'er the clear,
Tar-echoing morning air, how welcome ring
The voices of the newly-wakened world !
Meanwhile, a-field, the mower's annual work
Is almost ended ; but the verdant mead,
The fields of fragrant clover, and the grounds
Of undulating pasture, all refreshed
With frequent rains and coolness, still disj)lay
A tender grass, soft as the spring's first growth.
The busy reaper passes, and the fields
Put on their russet robe of stubble frieze.
Late waving with abundant varied green.
Rich from the ripened harvest of the year,
The clustered sheaves Corinthian, in full grain,
And stacks of corn pyramidal, in husks,
FROM NATURAL BEAUTY. od
Stand for a season, numerous, neat arranged,
In military ro\y, a gladdening sight,
And of entrancing beauty, -svherc the scene.
Caught by the traveller, in the setting sun.
Upon the sloping side of some broad vale.
Swells upward to the gleam of evening sky.
Now from the sunrise in the open glades.
How sweet to pass beneath these grand old woods,
Into those deep recesses,, where the trees
Cast cool their earliest shadows, and the sun,
Not yet intrusive, throws aslant his beams,
Full on the masses of the topmost boughs.
Majestic trees ! Whole ages in their growth,
What thoughtful forms sublime of forest life !
Pillared, with pendent arch magnificent,
A temple vast, high-towering, solemn, grand.
The clean, colossal, and straight-shafted trunks,
Or ever branch or leaf be visible.
Shoot in prodigious height towards heaven aspiring,
Then toss their lofty foliage to the sky.
The deepening season strikes not yet their pride.
A darker lustrous green in the thick leaves,
O'er the whole forest verging brown or purple.
With indurated gloss, presages near.
The time of changing hues, the frost's domain,
The leaves' sad fall, the mournful wide decay.
And fading glories of the passing year.
2*
34 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
As yet, 'tis beauty all. See how the sun
Chequers with spots of light, that come and go,
Like breathings in the veiy pulse of nature,
The green and leaf-strewn carpet in these woods !
A moment since, 'twas all monotonous shade
;
'
Another, and the glades, within the forest,
Show like the covering of the sj)otted pard.
So the fast flying clouds betray their passage,
Midway in the open sky, across the sun.
Lo now, the radiant beams that broke so sudden.
As smiles upon a merry' maiden's face.
Or dimples on a lake beneath the breeze.
As sudden vanish, cloud pursuing cloud,
As if the earth were some intelligent nature.
And the soft gush of light, and its withdrawal,
The quick experience of moods and feelings.
As swift and changeful as the fleeting wind.
The half-transparent leaves subdue the light.
With fitful pauses in its rapid play.
To their own richness ; and its motions seem
A quick pervading spirit, now revealed,
Now hiding and withdrawing ; now dim shade.
Now dim perspective through the radiant air,
'Midst lines of trees, retreating vast and far.
With interlacing webs of leafy net-work ;
And here and there, far gleaming through the ver-dure,
Colossal trunks, on wliich the sun streams down,
FROM NATURAL BEAUTY. 35
Poured through some unobstructed vista bright.
The mighty shafts seem solid massive silver.
On every side the roving eye runs through,
Cloistered and festooned avenues and arches.
But if the sun withdraw, involved in clouds,
Sudden the magic radiance dies away,
Unsphercd of interspace, and disenchanted.
So when with telescopic glass you view
The for-off landscaj^e, clear, distinct, and radiant,
Start but the tube a line beyond the focus.
And all becomes confused, obscure, and flat
;
Forest, and Avinding dale, and hill and valley,
All glimmering hazy as a half-formed world.
Such revelations, when the deep green woods
Transpicuous rise against the mighty sun.
Baptized in glory borrowed from that light
;
And such withholdings and confused blanks.
Of dim, monotonous hues, and unknown shapes,
If evening drop her curtain o'er the sky.
Or gloomy clouds infold the Orb of Day,
Betray the difference, when we read the Word,
"Whether between the soul and heaven we hold it,
Intently fastened on that world divine.
And through it see the glory of the Lord,
Or if we only gaze upon the letter.
With no informing Spirit shining through
;
Whether we seek for that celestial light,
Inspiring it, and still residing there,
36 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
Felt by the heart, seen by the eye of Faith,
Or, earthward turned, the vision filled with sense,
Find only what the senses might disclose.
Oh leave me not to the sad native blindness.
That through the opening cloud-rifts in the sky
Of truth divine, ne'er looks, or nothing sees.
Believing nothing ! 'Tis a sacred glass.
That, if the eye comes armed with faith and love^
Discloses heaven ; for the enlightening Spirit,
The gift of dying love, to guilty man,
Searches out all things, yea, the depths of God,
Where faith abides. But if the film of death,
Quenching the vision by the love of sin.
Drop o'er the sensual soul, grovelling and dark,
'Tis a dead painting, or dim blinding wall.
Far round the heavenly world, th' inspiring
Word,
Inclosing all th' infinitude of light,
Raised as a vast transparency abides,
A boundless, crystal, and self-opening wall,
A living power, a life in light transmitting ;
And in the night of guilt, the darkened soul.
Wandering outside afar, and gloomy coasting
Those bright enclosures, hopeful, from the depths
Of death and ruin, may look up and live !
That which it seeks to see, it quick beholds.
The wish to live is the first step from death,
FROM NATURAL BEAUTY. o'
The strong desire to find out God, prevails.
Tlie humble, earnest heart, sick with the strife,
The desperate fever, pain, and grief of sin ;
The burdened heart, yearning for heavenly rest
;
Becomes the trusting heart, at sight of Christ.
This sacred thirst and hunger shall be filled ;
'Tis blest of God ; and he who looks may live.
The inward yearning is the power of vision.
The inward vision is the power of Faith ;,
And Christ within the heart, the hope of glory,
Kindles the living Word, lights up its figures.
Reveals the love of God, and with divine.
And sacred ecstasy, o'erwhelms the soul.
The veil was on the heart ; no envious cloud
Hung o'er the portals of the world of light,
Nor darkening censure sealed the Saviour's brow.
Holy of holies, inmost, lies the court,
Wide-opened, and the soul may enter in,
Where God converses from the mercy-seat.
The veil was on the heart ; but when that turns
To Him who speaks, Behold the Lamb of God !
To Him who calls. Look unto me, and live !
The veil '"
i drawn away ; the wondering soul,
Redeemc d from blindness, in the sacred Word
Beholds as in a glass the depths of love,
And light and glory, hidden all before,
Sweetly disclosed in Christ ; and by that sight,
Itself is changed into the same blest image
!
38 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
Foretaste of heaven, the Earnest of the Spirit,
'Tis heaven on earth thus to commune with God.
And Avhat is earth itself, this globe adorned
With splendid hieroglyphics from the hand
Of Him who formed it, but a sacred scroll.
To teach the lessons of a power divine.
Omniscient wisdom, and eternal love 1
It shall wax old, be rolled away, and laid
Aside, for other volumes ; but it needs,
While God displays it, his all-quickening grace.
Raising the soul, his love baptizing it,
With spiritual, fine intelligence,
If man would learn creation's wealth of thought.
For Nature and the Word are but two leaves
In the same volume, the fair book of God,
Taught by the same divine informing Spirit;
Nor will the mind of Nature be revealed.
To aught but a believing, lowly heart.
This earth, with green, refreshing loveliness.
These glorious seasons, grateful in their change,
These forms of light and shade, of space and sub-stance,
These combinations of bright elements.
These wonders of mysterious working powers.
From the deep centre to the surface filled.
Whether in forms of animated life,
Or_ mineral growth, or vegetable, all.
With restless energy, instinct, intense.
FROM NATURAL I! E A U T Y . 30
Whether decay and death, or Ijreathing motion,
And voluntary joy, define the Presence,
Arc one great voice, a sea of many streams.
One utterance of ten thousand harmonics.
One song of an innumerable choir.
Vocal with praise to the Creator God !
Not Nature's forms, but what th' awakened
mind
Sees througli all nature, constitutes the lifo
Of wisdom, truth, and genius high inspired.
The natural man, prose or poetic mind.
With simple vision armed, or microscopic.
Sees natural forms and colors, works of art,
Perspective grace, imaginative spaces.
Clouds, seas, and skies, disclosures beautiful.
And all the principles and laws of taste
Deduces, or combines and imitates.
The man of science sees the hidden springs,
Cross-play and working of the elements.
Chemical agents and affinities.
In subtle, intricate development.
And force prodigious ; all material powers.
Deep-traced and measured ; mathematic thought,
And geometrical intelligence ;—no more.
Tlie man of faith sees attributes divine.
Creative goodness, wisdom infinite,
The ruling, omnipresent, moral mind ;
—
Angelic, providential ministries :
—
40 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
Learns, by the Spirit, the pervading lines
Of vast analogies and counterparts,
Of spiritual scenes, with warnings deep,
Impressive, and the lessons of a world,
Solemn, sphynx-avenued, the portal grand,
Of that eternal temple without space,
—
Receptacle of all immortal minds.
From all worlds gathered, and still crowding on,-
Unlimited, the dwelling-place of God !
Thither from this we pass, and find, serene,
Redeemed from hiward guilt, and undefiled,
Its all-surrounding holiness and light.
Congenial, beatific to the soul
;
Or else, still shrouded in our native sin,
Condemned, remorseful, hardened in despair,
And lost by inward, everlasting hate,
The sphere of love itself, consuming fire !
The ways of God are righteous, and the just
In them shall live forever ; but th' unjust
Fall by the same. Jehovah cannot treat,
Nor please alike, the sinner and the saint.
Within ourselves and by ourselves we choose
What attributes to live with ; love divine
Rules in the soul, redeeming it from guilt,
Or perfect justice vindicates the law.
The kingdom is within us, heaven or hell,
FROM NATURAL BEAUTY. 41
And we in it, o'er which we reign forever.
As the tree ialls, it lies. What we now are,
Predicts the same to-morrow, if we look
No higher than ourselves. And Avhat we are,
When the breath leaves the body, we shall be.
In an eternal character and doom.
Oh ! with such scenes before us, life how short
!
Too short to spend in trifles, wasted, lost,
Nature and grace almost alike unheeded,
And in their sacred influence both unknown
!
Our three score years and ten, a blank with most,
Mole-eyed, and struggling for the means of life.
Or vainly spent in eager, restless chase.
Of pleasure, wealth, and fame, aflbrd but few
Calm meditative seasons, when the soul
At leisure to commune, intuitive.
With th' unseen spirit of this mortal frame,
Can stay the solemn round of imagery.
And study to the full those lessons sweet.
That Nature holds before the thoughtful heart.
Not many setting suns these eyes can see,
Nor many rolling seasons, with the change,
Grand, varied, and delightful, of the year.
Forever new, impressive, beautiful
!
And the last time beheld, how solemn seems,
At noon or eve, by rising sun or setting,
And fondly beautiful, our native world,
42 SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE.
To liim who Lids his endless last fare-svell !
The home of years is SAveet, with early flowers,
And evergreens, perhaps of our own planting.
The simple, modest violet, with its breath
Fragrant of spring, accustomed, asks our stay.
Dear mother Nature loves her dying child.
And when we pass flway, the heart is turned,
Regretful to her glories. Yet on earth,
Nothing is lost to him who enters heaven.
There shall be other suns to light these steps,
And clouds and hues attending, brighter far,
The dawn and sunset in celestial worlds,
Eternal spring, and never withering flowers ;
And other starry spheres, to train the sense
Of the celestial body, and delight,
With endless ecstasy, this active mind.
Unnumbered and unmeasured are the ways,
And glorious inconceivably the forms,
Beyond all thought, of God's eternal power.
And wisdom infinite, reserved, imknown.
In boundless love and grace to occupy,
And fill with rapture every holy soul.
BOOK III.
ELEUTIIERIA AND NEMESIS.
AEGUMENT.
Leaves, a symbol of our passing races.—Indian Tribes, and the
aposUe Eliot.—The resurrection of successive generations.—Forest
sepulchres.—Wanderings in the wilderness.—My squirrel-trap, and
its morality.—The Birth-right of Liberty, imivcrsal.—Blinding power
of Slavery.—Scripture perverted in defending it.—Sophistry of ex-pediency
and gain.—Judgment of God, and eternal law of conscience
and of right. — The great question.—Nemesis bides her time. —
Thanksgiving in New England.—Origin of the Festival with our
Pilgrim Fathers.—Controlling and sanctifying power of the Sabbath.—
Autumnal life, its closing lessons.
BOOK III
Leaves are a symbol of the life of man.
Whole generations fall, as utterly
Forgotten, as the last year's withered foliage,
Under the shade of this. What millions pass,
And in few fleeting years, not one remaining,
Of all earth's myriads, knows, or cares, or asks,
The name, the lot, the character of one
!
Yet all immortal ! Each, a breathing Avorld,
More precious than the Sun ! A sphere eternal,
Of conscious blessing, or continued wo.
In the deep calm of this majestic scene,
Rich with the cultivation of long years
Of industry, and hallowed by the dawn
Of many a peaceful Sabbath, gathering wide
Tlie well-dressed families of hardy frame
Within the House of God, the air benign
Of Heaven's own mercy every day is breathed.
The Sabbath sheds abroad o'er all the week
Its sacred light, through each well-ordered Home,
46 ELEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS.
Familiar with those sanctifying truths,
That guide at once on earth, and fit for Heaven,
The happy households kept beneath their sway.
Yet in this scene a savage race once roamed,
Fierce, hardy, fearless, j^roud, implacable.
And ruthless in the dreadful cruelty
Of vast revenge, when opportunity
Laid at their feet the dwellings of their foes,
A nobler race,—had they been taught the God
And loving Sa,viour of the white man's faith,
And not the idols by the white man worshipped,
—
Earth had not nourished, nor the truth made free.
A noble native race ! How grand the port
Of the red children of this forest world.
Ere yet degraded with the drunken herd
Of beasts in civilized society,
Tempted by liquid fire. The raging flame
Devoured and wasted them, as sweeps the trees
A forest conflagration. Kindled wide.
At many a point, it caught them, mmistered
By human demons for the sake of gain.
Helpless they fell, destroyed ; not theirs the first
Aggressive crime, by irritating wiles
Of force, or stratagem, provoking war.
But, overreached by covetous policy,
Th' untrampled soil wrung from them, field by field.
Forest by forest, with vast hunting grounds,
ELEUTHERIAAND NEMESIS. 47
Lavished for strings of beads or helts of \vampuni,
Or on the faith of public promises,
Made only to be broken or despised,
Grasped by the greedy agents of the State,
They were the weak and suffering ; basely wronged
By corporate villainy, they madly turned,
In bootless, undistinguishing revenge.
With fearful massacre and midnight flame.
They swept the infant hamlets of these vales.
The rising smoke now curls in peacefid clouds,
Domestic, on the early morning air.
From dwellings built upon the blackened sites
Of forest habitations burned to earth.
And not one inmate of the household spared.
Those were the days of anxious haggard life,
The glittering tomahawk and whooping yell,
Constant expected, and almost at length
Familiar to the startled watching sense.
The woods were peopled with terrific forflis
Of lurking enemies ; an open glade
The only means of safety, where the fort.
With strong stockade, guarded the dangerous night.
They passed away, as melt the midnight dews
Before the rising sun. Would that each page
Of history could record, np to this hour,
As generous kindly dealing with those tribes,
48 ELEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS.
As firm unbroken faith, and pitying care,
As were our Pilgrim Fathers' ; or a name,
In solemn treaties kept, and rights preserved,
As fair and noble as the honored Penn's !
Or efforts for their souls as ardent, meek.
In fervent prayer, strong faith, and tenderest love.
As Eliot's earnest ministry from Heaven !
Second aj)0stle of the Gentiles, fired
With equal, fliithful, self-denying zeal,
Could Paul himself, Avith sweeter tones have
preached
Of Jesus' dying love, from his own heart.
Or made the wild woods ring with melody
Of song more grateful to the listening heavens 1
He bade the Children of the Forest come,
With bow and arrow, to the feet of Christ,
And drew their minds, amazed, from earth to
heaven.
With simple truth told of the bleeding cross,
Whei'eon that wondrous Saviour deigned to die.
Subdued by grace divine, with contrite hearts.
They came ; the painted warrior with his plumes,
The brave, whose knife had scathed a hundred
scalps,
The young men of their tribes, the wild boy-hunters,
The maidens of the wigwam ;—young and old,
To learn the lesson of Kedeemins Love.
E L E U T 11 E li I A AND NEMESIS. 49
That was a scene that stirred ten thousand wings
In Heaven, Avith sweet celestial ardor fired,
To see on earth a triumph so divine ;
Prophetic gift of his Almighty grace,
Who bade the chariot of salvation roll
Forth from the rising to the setting sun ;
And dawn jorelusive of that day of joy
Foreshadowed by the Spirit in those hearts,
That had been watching, through a stormy night,
The promised glorious morning. From the shores
Of Western Europe, fervent men of God
The keepers of their flocks upon the hills,
Looked up and hailed the brightening radiant light,
Sweet prelude of a Baptism of the Spirit
Upon the waiting nations. Then poured forth,
From longing laboring hearts, anew, the prayer,
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth.
As it is done in Heaven ! Which, what the words,
Divinely taught, may mean, no tongue can tell,
Nor mind conceive, till God himself take up
His lowly dwelling in the contrite heart.
And with the joy divine of sins forgiven.
Tune the sweet voices of whole tribes at once,
In grateful songS to the Redeemer's praise.
Such blessings strengthen faith ; and prayerful
hearts,
In these rich earnests, by the Spirit taught
The wide expanse of the Prophetic Word,
Plead in their vast extent the Promises,
3
50 ELEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS,
And with new confidence in Jesus' blood,
Expect the restoration of a Avorld.
When the last trump, that wakes the dead, shall
sound,
Shattering the forest with its dreadful blast,
A race shall rise beneath these mighty trees.
Their burial place of ages. With them ranked^
And doomed in judgment, rather let me be^
Than drawn with those innumerable files
Of souls, that in the self-same region heard
The invitations of a Saviour's love.
But generation after generation,
Died in their sins, the grace that saves, unknown,
More hardened than the savage. Mother Earth
Covers alike the sons of earth and heaven.
Careful of both, her silent sacred trust,
Tlie ashes of the sinner and the just,
Kept till the last great Eesurrection Morn,
When Time shall be no longer. All around.
What depths of soil from centuries of decay I
Deep solitude of many a forest grave,
The human dust as carelessly laid down.
As these decaying, venerable trunks,
Of ages' growth, piled one above another.
Slow wandering in suggestive moral mood,
Beside such products vast of Time and Nature.
Past ages wake, and people all the gloom.
ELEUTIIERIA AND NEMESIS. 51
One day is with the Lord as thousand years,
A thousand years are as one hasty day.
Familiar with each other, in profound
Unconsciousness and carelessness of Time,
The processes of life and death go on !
Here, covered deep with vegetable mould.
The giant corses of the forest world
Sleep, open sepulchred, in mossy shroud.
'Tis life embracing death, death nourishing life,
New trees forever springing, age to age.
Fresh and majestic from the unctuous loam,
To drop their amaual pall of withered leaves
Over ancestral, prostrate, mouldering trunks,
A grand, impressive, solemn spectacle !
In the deep heart of such a wilderness,
How stilly fall upon the listening ear
The mingled sounds of nature and of man !
The tramp of cattle through the underbrush,
Leisurely browsing on the fresh young shoots,
Is grateful to the sense of solitude.
Deepened and soothed by such an interruption.
The sound of lowing herds, more distant borne,
The busy hammer, or the swinging flail.
Notes of a cheerful, active industry,
In neighboring hamlets, or the open field
;
The noise of sportsman's gun, or shepherd's dog,
Loud barking, or the crowing of the cock.
Or woodman's axe, or the resounding horn.
52 ELEUTHEIilA AND NEMESIS.
Delightful all, bear to the iiiusuig mind,
Through the calm air, deep sense of rural peace,
Security, and wide domain of joy.
The soft low gurgle of the running brook.
Against the stones, murmurs the same sweet tones,
By day and night a restless melody :
Beneath the cool impenetrable shade
Of silent trees, the liquid rippling song
Ne'er lost a moment, through the winding course
Refreshing, of the lowly hidden stream.
Such is the music of a quiet heart,
In the glad household, or the calm retreat,
Or on its course of unobtrusive love,
Amidst the chaos of a heedless world.
In such a sjDot, a playful child, I loved
Among the tresses of the brook to sport.
And watch the darting minnows. In the spring.
We climbed the pines, and with the fragrant bark.
Stripped from the tree, in basket form, brought
home
Delicious ribbons of white jellied juice.
Balmy, and aromatic to the taste.
What happiness to wander through those woods
In autumn, when the hazel-nuts grew ripe.
Or where the groves of spreading beeches hung
Their leafy branches full of rough-burred fruit.
In polished shell triangular and smooth.
With wholesome milky kernel sweet enclosed.
ELEUTIIERIA AND NEMESIS, 53
There, too, in wild excitement of delight,
Wg set our rustic squirrel-trap ; rude Ijox,
Hurtless and safe, contrived to catch alive.
Not kill, nor wound, the nimlDle little creature.
But ah ! the lingering death of a close cage.
To the free children of this forest life,
Where freedom is the instinct and demand.
As of the lungs for air ! Deny the l30on.
And the poor brute, unknowing whence his j^ain.
In restless yearning wears away and dies.
Poor little innocent slave, condemned to play.
Startled, his active pranks, with hasty feet,
Upon the wired, deceitful, whirling wheel.
At length, perhaps his sport ; but yet, methinks,
'Twere greater love to kill ; for what is life,
Imj>risoned in such bondage 1 So he asks.
Instinctive reasoning, and with busy teeth.
Gnaws at his 23rison, mischief-making rogue !
How dear is liberty to life ! Hov/ full
Of anguish and despair is life without it
!
Dear to the worm, dear to the forest-grub.
Dear to the lark, singins; and soarina; hisrh.
Dear to the timid wild-flxwn, darting by.
'Tis instinct in the brute ; in man 'tis light
Of reason, feeling, thought ; a need of heaven.
54 ELEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS.
It is not labor, that makes life a pain ;
Our daily tasks are kindly ministers,
Of God's own discipline, to set us free
From worse dominion, self-imposed, of sin.
The ministry of patience and of love
Is manly, free ; and honest industry.
Of hand, or heart, or head, or all combined,
Quickens and animates the joyous soul.
Elastic, with new health and strength inspired.
The freeman's work is noble, and his sleep
Sweet, with his prattling children clad and fed.
From toil of his own sinews freely wrought.
'Tis freedom strengthens, and love bears him on.
'Tis not the gift of air enough to breathe,
Nor food to eat, nor couch to lay one's frame,
Tired with the labors of the weary day.
That makes a toilsome life endurable.
What is the sunlight, and the breathing air,
And the supply of hunger, to the slave,
Drooping beneath the sense of his dread doom,
Whipped, threatened, rated, dogg'd, and driven
about,
A chattel, like the horse he drives a-field 1
He gets his peck of meal ; for avarice
Will not give cruelty the guiding hand ;
The planter's hog is fattened by the same
Constraining law of selfish policy.
'Tis slavery's finished work, the conquering curse,
ELRUTIIERIA AND NEMESIB. .)0
When the man's trampled soul, all hope erased,
No insurrectionary feeling knows,
Nor higher yearning than the well-fed swine.
The prisoned squirrel bites his wooden trap,
Asserts, as plain as teeth can do, his right
To enjoy the freedom of his native woods.
And who denies it 1 Can the man be found.
To teach him, by perverted holy text.
That if the trap were opened, and the way
Back to his nest untrammelled, he must still
Choose slavery rather, though he may be free 1
What lying smooth traducer of God's Word
Dare tell how Paul sent back Oiicsimus,
And wrote the record for eternal doom,
That every creature must, by Christian law.
Prefer the slave's condition, nor repine.
But once a slave, so shall remain forever !
What code of devilish morals makes it wrong.
If he escape 1 Poor, trembling fugitive !
Am I his master, by such holy right,
In might inexorable, that he owes
Obedience to my will, and at my word
Must stay, and staying, still confirms the right,
Because I give him food, and shelter him ?
Perhaps I build his house with gilded bars.
Spread him a silken rug to sleep upon,
Instead of dry leaves in the open woods,
56 ELEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS.
Or a dark hole beneath some rotten stump.
Is it not costly 1 Shall he prove migrateful ?
Must he not honor me, for such kind care 1
Is he not bound to pay me for my trouble 1
Would it not be a most atrocious theft
Of all he owes me, if he runs away ?
I'll send a marshal for the fugitive.
I'll have the thief, young rascal, though it cost
A thief commissioner, to catch the thief
The poor fool pleads, you say, the higher law
Of God and Nature for his flight. Indeed !
Who taught him such an arrogant proud reach
Of fancy, and fanaticism here ?
The furry-coated, self-complacent, prim,
Loose moralist, high-flown, like him ^n the play,
Walks in the clouds, and scorns the powers that be,
Thinking to have got above all ordinance !
The higher law ! We'll prick his bold balloon.
We'll bring him down, we'll teach him soon to
render
Obedience to Cesar as to God.
O damning slavery ! How it blinds the soul
!
What slavery so dread, as his to gain,
And bold unrighteous law, who holds the escape
Of the poor slave a crime 'gainst God and man,
And abrogates, by wicked human statute,
The good man's right of love, the Christian's claim,
ELEUTIIERIA AND NEMESIS. 57
Mankind's command from God to shelter him,
And speed him in his flight from stripes and
chains !
What bondage and hypocrisy so gross,
As that which, worse than Esau's, for the mess
Of venal pottage, cooked with eager haste,
Denies another's birthright, not his own !
And so corrupts, gangrenes, and bribes the soul.
Palsying the. moral sense, that men shall call
The step from slavery to freedom, theft
!
"Hath history yet a place for shame so deep ?
The page belongs to such a moral Judas,
But the Republic, 'tis averred, must stand :
And that it take no detriment, by law
Of slavery must be preserved in power
Of steadfast union, hurt by every link.
That, broken, lets the fugitive go free.
Oh, venerable form of holy state !
Oh, admirable country, whose whole hope,
Of profitable life hangs on—a slave !
Oh, noble statesmen ! patriotic souls !
Who dare renounce, to save the sinking state,
Tlie law of love, the birthright of mankind,
Tlie truths by which alone fair freedom stands.
Oh, grandest form of self-denying love !
IMartyrs to union ! nobly carry on
3*
58 ELEUTIIEKIA AND NEMESIS.
Your sacrifice of conscience, truth, and right
!
Your Spartan mind shall win a bright renown.
Hear him declaim, his country's demigod !
The man of vast, capacious, reasoning mind,
Gigantic brain, strong frame, black, beetling brows,
Packed Avords, and Demosthenian eloquence.
Confest the first of statesmen, thronging crowds
Admire his eagle gaze and step sujDerb,
And merchant princes watch for his great nod.
As if Jove thundered. Public policy
Is deemed secure, while he is at the helm.
Plis form majestic, and prodigious brow,
The massive throne of mighty intellect.
Proclaim a natural empire o'er his kind,
And freely 'tis accorded. When he speaks,
Full listening senates hang upon his words,
Strong, sinewy, plain, emphatic and compact,
And the reported logic instant dr-aws
Whole nations for his readers. Wondrous power.
By heaven committed to a mortal tongue.
Needing heaven's guidance, and a sterling heart
Resistless in the pulse of liberty.
Bold and perpetual in its exercise.
Sole on the side of right. If he betray
The trust reposed for freedom, who shall stand ?
The crisis comes ! Th' excited nation waits.
And in the throbbing of its anxious heart
E L E U T H E R lA AND NEMESIS. 59
Beats now a deep, foreboding, restless fear,
In solemn, sad, prophetic sympathy,
As if an earthquake wavered through the air.
It comes ! The foremost speaker of the world.
Whose words might rouse an earthquake shout for
freedom,
Beneath all-seeing justice, takes the side
Of the oj)pressor in behalf of wrong !
'Tis not that wrong is right, but, being set
A fixture in the State, cannot be changed.
Without so great commotion, and expense
Of large material interests, that 'tis passed
By long possession into righteous law.
He pleads that wicked law must be supreme,
And freedom yield her principles to profit,
For the State's benefit, which must have slaves.
'Tis in the unrighteous bond, and being so.
Each hounddike citizen must stand at beck,
Servant of servants, staunch to hunt the slave,
If he escape, with swift alacrity.
His speech draws audience, and a golden meed
Of sweet applause, in palpable plain touch.
From cotton-mongers, proud to save the State,
And keep their consciences from insurrection,
By setting up their principles for sale.
The sophistry prevails, and as a flood.
Let loose among the mountains, sweeping down,
With desolation roars along the vales.
The argument debauches whole domains,
60 ELEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS.
Demoralizing all the public sense
Of retro-active right and present justice.
Repentance, restitution, and reform,
Are inexpedient in so great degree
Attended with such costly sacrifice,
That God doth not require them ! So the heir
Of a huge gainful crime, pockets the price,
And with a brazen conscience fronts the world.
One generation passes to the next
An infamous transaction, and the next.
Shall sanctify the villainy, which stands
No more condemned, but righteous, good, and fair.
Because it is a heritage, and large
Possessions rest upon it, and the j)eace
And comfort of the State are insecure.
Under too rigid question of the stones,
On which the pillars of our wealth repose.
Oh, that my head were waters, and mine eyes
Fountains of tears, that I might weep the wrong,
That strikes down Equity by unjust law.
Ye guardians of the State ! Ye powers that be !
Ordained of God for good, your sacred awe,
Your wisdom, your authority, your strength,
Rest in the righteousness of your decrees,
Void and annulled by sin. Your terror stands
For evil-doers, not the friends of God.
Wo to you, and the kingdom you direct.
If ye prescribe unrighteousness, or write
ELEUTIIEIilA AND NEMESIS. 61
Grievous oppression for the people's guide.
The hand that placed you high can strike yon
down.
The God that made the State, strikes from the
Aveb
Of all your policy, the unjust thread,
As none of his permission or command.
'Tis cancelled all ; and they who dare obey,
Dreaming that human law can sanction ill,
Shall drink the cup of vengeance, when the Judge
In righteousness shall lay the dreaded line
And plummet of his Word across the works
Of their idolatry and blasphemy,
Who make the law of earth supreme, and choose
Poor human favor for the applause of heaven.
The day of doom is coming, their great day,
Who here in proud oppression sat secure ;
The victims of their avarice and pride
Trampled, meanwhile, in strong, remorseless bond-age
With fetters locked upon the soul itself,
To keep their own dominion undisputed,
A dark, perjjetual, hopieless, iron sway.
A little while they triumph in their sin.
Then pass where nations gather, with the crowd
. Innumerable, drawn from rapid crimes.
To a deliberate judgment, with vast room
62 ELEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS.
For tracing the development of evil.
A little while they desolate the earth,
But for themselves provide a dreadful store
Of long consuming vengeance, when the right
Is vindicated, and the arm of God
Breaks them in pieces, and with just revenge.
Gives them to drink the cup themselves had
mingled.
The sword drawn forth to pierce the trembling
wretch,
Fleeing from chains and stripes, shall be returned,
As to its j^roper sheath, into their heart,
That brandish it with curses on the j^oor.
Their wicked plots against the suffering race,
Hereditary objects of their hate,
On their own head shall burst in righteous wrath,
From the great Judge of Nations.
Quiet then, ,
Not fretful, in impatient angry strife,
O toiling sufferer, pour thy bleeding heart
Into the bosom of that righteous Judge.
Fret not thyself because of evil-doers.
Whose prosperous seeming, scorns, as idle fume.
The prophecy of judgment from on high.
God sees their day is coming. They shall pass,
After short triumj)h, to eternal woe.
Like an untimely birth before the sun,
ELEUTIIERIA AND NEMESIS. 63
As Avith a whirlwind, living, and in wrath.
They shall be buried, in that day of doom
!
For judgment shall return to righteousness,
The slave's low wail, the sighing of the needy,
The longing prisoner's tired, despairing groan,
Have entered, from earth rising, to the ear
Of the Lord God of Sabaoth. What can stay
The reddening cloud of vengeance, if the land
Make idols of its sins, and to them cry
These be thy gods, O Israel ! Kiss the calves !
In these thy union and thy safety stand !
God will indict, and strike in fittest time,
Those atheist proud judges, arrogating
Their forms prescribed, of grievousness and wrong,
As sacred by the ordinance of heaven,
And of authority supreme, beyond
Appeal or judgment from the Word divine.
It is the voice of God, not man, they cry,
At every covetous stroke of 2:»olicy,
That raises favored sins to forms of law,
Sirs, by this craft we have our righteous gain.
We and our children ! 'Tis exceeding good,
'Tis wise, 'tis profitable, and it stands.
Ordained by powers, that be ordained of God,
Whose statutes all are thus, by reason clear.
Supreme as God's own will.
64 ELEUTIIERIA AND NEMESIS.
Pernicious lies
!
Too "barefaced, one might deem, for entertainment ?
Yet preached and sanctioned in the house of God,
And spreading poison through the infected State.
But judgment shall return to righteousness.
The wicked throne, (though strong with willing
men,)
That frameth mischief by a law, shall have
No fellowship with God, who doth disclaim
Such forgeries of divine authority.
By men enacting wickedness, and stamping
With sealed weight the violence of their hands.
For public use, with blasj)hemous avowal
That such are counters of the living God.
He will throw back the load of all such guilt.
With all the violent crime that follows it.
Upon the heads of those who dared it first.
And those who lent their purchased consciences.
With full bribed hands, to sanction and sustain it.
Now God be thanked, there is in man a sense
Of Eighteousness, not measured by his gains !
Else would the soj)histry of profit break.
With its tremendous anaconda coil.
And suffocate the strongest principle.
Breathing, pestiferous, a stifling breath,
Into the man's heart, while it strangles him.
There is a sense of righteousness, sublime.
ELEUTIIEUIA AND NEMESIS. G5
Omnipotent, the signature within,
And lightning, of the attributes of God ;
A sense of Moral Right, inflexible,
Absolute Righteousness, immutable,
Supreme, eternal, glorious, and divine.
Not all the profit in the universe
Could answer that Idea, nor present
A counterpart of its reality.
Of circumstances never born, but one
.With God's essential holiness, it bends
As God's own Law, all circumstantial forms
Of doubt or hinderance in the path of Right,
To its own will and guidance. Drawn from God,
To God and to his living Word it leads,
A.nd by his Spirit there confines the soul.
All conscience were but as a dream absurd
Without the deep foundation of this sense,
Immutable, of everlasting justice.
In awful majesty and power supreme.
It overlooks our Immortality,
Shoots through a darkened world its glaring light,
Measures with piercing ray, and line exact.
Each course of crooked policy, each step
Of present seeming gain, and to the bar
Of what is right, not what is profitable.
With searching inquisition brings the ways,
The laws, the habits, and the life of man.
His public ministries, and private schemes,
66 ELEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS.
His compacts, coriDorate, or to one confined,
His bonds, oaths, obligations, etiquette,
Political intrigues and measures, past
Into the form of public legislation.
And thrust in place of conscience on the soul ;—
One question only, God and. the inmost heart
Ask ever, of all forms conceivable
Of conduct national or individual,
Or laws or plans of profit, Is it Eight ?
That question, man shall answer to his God.
If it be wrong, though nations stood upon it,
Wo to his soul, whom selfish policy,
The crooked maxims of dishonest gain,
The fear of man, regard to consequences,
Love of applause, the dread of public scorn,
Or fear of painful singularity,
Persuaded it was right. He makes his gain,
The law of conscience, and the rule of law.
His gains shall bring him to the King of Terrors.
An angry conscience, and the LaAV of Right,
With fierce, inexorable, scorpion rage,
Shall lash him on with torment, when the Day
Of universal Retribution comes.
The ladders he has raised to climb to power,
Over the prostrate forms of Equity,
And claims of Mercy, trodden in the dust,
Shall be thrown back upon him, with recoil.
And just tremendous anguish grinding him,
ELEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS. G7
To uttermost perdition and despair.
For when did vast oppression ever yet
Release its victims, and, sincere, repent ?
The avaricious thirst of hiwless poAver
Is as the shirt of Nessus to the soul
;
A cankering, poisonous, black, gangrening rust
Of mingled cruelty and love of gold,
That deep within kindles a quenchless fire.
For when the drama ends, and men have played
. Their freaks ferocious of tyrannic will
Up to the curtain's flill, and character
With unchanged law has passed to endless fate.
The knotted lash, whose every stroke draws blood,
And lacerates the victim's shrinking flesh.
Would be a gratefid and refreshing balm.
To the strong agony of fierce remorse.
The future fountain of o'ermastering pain,
And hell of passion in the oppressor's heart.
'Tis an inexorable form of sin,
Yet wears th' imposing robe of lofty, large,
And self-denying patriotic zeal,
Enthroning mere Expediency and Power,
To rule the public and the private morals.
The daring teachers of this sweeping scheme,
Wholesale, for making villains, bind their vow
Of blind obedience on the trembling victim.
In peril of his living, if he fail,
To crush the rising mutiny of thought.
68 ELEUTIIERIA AND NEMESIS.
And keep conviction in the hatches bound,
Trimming his vessel for the appointed course,
To act unquestioning his Party's wilL
By unjust human law conscience is throttled, .
And thrown before the gilded Car of State,
As if the sacred, heaven-ordained frame
Of civil Polity were built of God,
A rolling Juggernaut, before whose wheels,
The immolation of the deathless sense.
And conscientious awe of right and wrong,
Were the most glorious patriotic gift,
And sacrifice acceptable to Heaven !
Profane and barefaced sophistry ! whose eggs
Break into vipers, or, like festering grubs,
In healthy plants boring a strange disease,
With poisonous secretion deep infect
The Love of Country with a treacherous
Consuming rot of what belongs to Heaven.
Wo to the Nation, hypocrite and base,
Whose fear of God is taught by fear of Man
!
Faithful to Cesar by denying God,
Virtue itself is but the child of treason.
The Patriot's oath an act of perjury ;
The Jewish Corban for a Parent's claim.
As righteous in God's sight, nor more abhorred
An Idol's fane, nor swine upon the Altar.
As black ichneumon insects hatch their esfgs
ELEUTIIEIilA AND NEMESIS. GO
In others' nests, to eat up, ravenous.
Once broken into life, all within reach,
These principles of Policy for rule,
Profit and Loss, instead of Right eternal,
Consume within the soul all germs of good,
All possibilities of excellence.
He has no other good, whose god is gain.
A wrathful god, whose wages shall be paid,
With compound interest for the least advance,
Acquired by trespass on the line of Right.
Nemesis bides her time : all injuries
Shall have their just revenge : the hour must come.
The law of action and reaction, equal,
Immutable, is not more permanent.
Or better known in nature, than the law
Securing retribution for all ill.
No man can injure others, but he hurts
Himself more deeply. Every fraudful act
Each blow of cruelty, each w^ord of scorn,
Each injury on the feelings, or invasion
Of sacred right in unprotected man.
Each violation of the law of love.
Shall have its retribution, its revenge.
No matter for the color of the skin,
Or the position of degraded caste,
Removed from civilized humanity ;
Serf, Indian, Savage, free, or hired, or bond,
70 ELKUTIIERIA AND NEMESIS.
Cannot be injured, lout the blow recoils,
In an eternal justice, heaven-ordained.
God makes this known, even in providence,
'Tis one of his grand bulwarks for mankind,
'Gainst man's injustice in a selfish world.
Slowly, yet surely, here the thunder breaks,
In partial, dim development, 'tis true,
In an imperfect state, and therefore proving
A full endurance of resvdts, where life
Is but a long experience of the trains
Of consequences endless, and runs on,
Determined by that vast eternal rule.
What a man sows, that shall he also reaip.
Draw near, ye worshij)pers ofMammon ! Hail
!
And know your rich possession ! 'Tis a lease.
Whose terms cannot be broken, nor its end
Forever reached. The payment is secure.
Your debtors may be scattered like the dust,
That waits the resurrection ; but your claims
Shall all be honored, and the bonds all paid.
Ye that have thriven by feeding others' sins
;
Nourished your little ones in luxuries.
The growth of others' guilt, despair, and ruin
;
None of your works are lost, nor your reward
Uncertain nor delayed, but near and sure.
How far removed, by what fair gilded links,
From the calamity may be the cause
;
From you, the spring, to him that drinks the poison,
E L E LT T H E R I A AND K E M K S I S-. 7l
A river, intermediate, underneath.
Might flow to other regions, might run round
The rolling globe, before one droj) of evil
Were tasted by the victim of your trade ;
Yet you and he have met, tempter and tempted
;
Your soul and his, transmitting and receiving,
Are in the bargain whole and principal,
And yours the final reckoning and result.
Ye primal wholesale traffickers in sin !
Who not the bottle, but the puncheon set
Close to your hapless neighbor's thirsty lips !
Your homes are palaces, and your exchange
Is with the merchant princes, by whose books.
And fair certificates, your work of death
Runs on, and is accomplished. Your own hands
Have never touched a cask of your own fire.
Nor drugged a sample. Sober, upright men !
And amiable ! The mixture can't be yours !
Perchance you never visited the hell,
Where the bright licjuid flame is sluiced and bari'ed,
That coins your money. And the homes it bums,
The households turned to madness, and the souls
Damn'd for your gain, shrouded in elements
Of passion which your will has set on fire,
You count not now. Yet these are your estates.
Your harvest, when your work on earth is done,
Your shrinking vats unhooped, your stills uncoiled,
Your palaces and ware-rooms desolate,
72 ELEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS.
And you called forth to encounter, face to face,
And take the curses of the fiends in wo,
You have sent burning through Eternity !
The rolling months have brought to our glad
hearths
And grateful hearts, the joyful, sweet recurrence,
Once more, of that dear festival of praise.
Set by the Pilgrim Pathers, whose high faith
Made it an annual fixture of our life,
Perpetual as the Indian Summer's sun,
And full bright circle of the Harvest year.
No memory political of man.
Nor name of demigod, nor pagan rites.
Nor questionable form of superstition.
Nor fabulous date, assumed, of large event,
Nor birth of nation, in dim ages past,
Nor reputation of its guardian saint.
Inspired the keeping of that hallowed day ;
But earnest, heartfelt, gratitude and prayer.
Out of the depths of grateful piety.
That loves in all things God to recognize.
And recognizing, name, and naming, praise.
Grew this established custom ; honored, dear,
Thanksgiving festival of flowing joy !
In the deep soul of love, when the whole State
Was as one fimily, the day began ;
And by a living love may it be kept,
E L E U T II E U I A AND N E M E 8 I S
.
73
Long as this earth shall echo with the soug
Of a regenerate humanity
!
Through the wide world, to the last hour of life,
Sweet are the childish memories of that day,
To the descendants of the Pilgrim Sires,
And sons of loved New England ; memories filled
With thoughts of happy, dear familiar groups.
Of household gatherings kept from year to year,
And gi'eetings at the fireside ; blind man's buff
"Played by the noisy children ; and the board.
Spread with a harvest-feast, morn, noon, and night.
It was a day festive with healthful sports.
And hearty rural cheer, with portions sent
To many a humble dwelling of the poor.
Nor sacred rites excluded, but with grave
High preparation and solemnity,
Midweek, a holy service intervening,
A glad Half-Sabbath in the House of God,
With an unwonted sermon annual heard.
Discussion high of themes political,
In the exalting light poured down from Heaven ;
The lofty calling of a Christian State
;
The precious heritage of Freedom given
By Heaven to Qiristian sires, with sacred charge
Of duty to transmit it to their sons ;
—
Unwonted anthems by the Village Choir,
Practiced ambitious with imposing force,
Of noisy demonstration, heralded,
4
74 KLEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS.
And followed up the array of stately truth.
Not seldom was the Pastor's patriot zeal
Transmitted hy the Press ; safe burial-place
For Fast-day and Thanksgiving eloqueace.
Such the good cheer at church -. the feast at home,
Occasion for the housewife's proudest skill, .
With treasures of God's bounty to the land,
In tempting, generous, rich abundance spread^
Employment gave to all, and crowned the day
A grateful season of o'erflowing joy.
All honor to the homely jDumpkin pie
!
Albeit unpraised of foreign, or French taste.
Yet to the palate tempting ; capable
Of every grade of luxury, by art
Of seasoning versatile, and flavor new,
But in its wholesome, native sweetness best,
Its ancient, simple, constant qualities.
So passed the festive gladness, bringing back
In short vacation those dear transient guests,
Whom study, care, and business far away
Had banished from the household, yet not weaned
From the simplicity and love of home.
Its power was still upon them, and the seal,
Unbroken, of a mother's fervent love.
Held all united in that sacred bond.
And we, the youngest children of the house,
ELKUTUEEIA AND NEMESIS. 75
Exulting in our gifts and dainties then,
And in the fondness of so many hearts,
Welcomed the coming of that hapj)y day.
How full of faith, and patient suffering,
Endured at God's behest, in toil obscure.
The memory of our sainted Pilgrim sires,
Graven in the sacred story of this day
!
Disease was wasting them, and pinching want
Made them the easy victims of disease.
All their seed-corn committed to the earth,
—
Their whole dependence,—in what absolute,
And prostrate faith, they waited upon God !
Each separate kernel of productive life,
More precious than the fabled jewelled fruit.
Gathered from trees with diamond clusters hung ;
But Power Divine must shelter it, and deign
From death a resurrection manifold.
Weary and sad they waited ;—many graves,
Green sodded, made the burial-place a page
Full of fresh sorrow, and the dead became
More numerous than the living, and despair
Each day grew deeper, as the gazing eye.
Turned eastward o'er the sea, filled of its hope.
No friendly ship, freighted with kind supplies,
Rose on th' horizon ; famine did its work ;
Their knees grew weak with fasting, and they
dropped,
(Their strength unequal to tli' attempted task,)
70 ELEUTIIERIA AND NEMESIS.
Amid the hillocks of unAveeded corn.
And if again the blight was on the fields,
Rotting their unripe harvest, all must die.
And the hot heavens were cloudless, and the sun,
As if in mockery of their toil, poured down
A flood of fire incessant, and the earth,
Dusty and dry, refused its nourishment.
They fasted, wept, and prayed ; and while they
prayed.
The fervent prayer was answered, and the skies
Shed forth their grateful and reviving showers,
To change the face of nature. So they passed
From fear to hope ; and faith continuing firm,
E'en from despair received at length the promise.
And v/hen that harvest spread its golden grain,
Eipe for the reaper's weak and trembling hand.
Emaciate from starvation, then they knew
The mercy of a covenant-keeping God,
Who gives us, day by day, our daily bread.
Seed time and harvest, while the earth remains.
And cold and heat, winter and summer's sun.
And day and night, in kind alternate change,
Are covenanted blessings ; and the bow.
The silent language of the breaking light,
Communing with the tempest, fills the heart
With sweet assurance of a Father's love.
ELEUTIIERIA AND NEMESIS. 77
Costly and precious thus, this sacred day !
Day not of superstition, but of faith,
SAveet festival of gratitude and love !
And God be praised who gave it, and hath sealed
Its love and reverence in the children's hearts.
Close fastened with the fathers'. 'Tis his grace,
That sanctifies the boon, and keeps its power.
Kindred with that of his own hallowed day,
That sacred type of consecrated times,
And source of their authority and i:)raise,
Wherever set apart for God and heaven.
Who loves Thanksgiving Day, loved first the Sab-bath
;
Day of sweet holiness, and rest, and peace,
Of prayer and praise, communing with the skies
And meditation upon angels' themes ;
Day of redemption, freedom, bliss, and power.
Praise be to God for that dear sacred gift,
From tyrants rescued, and the hands profane
Of hierarchies corporate, that trailed
Its holy banners in the dust, abased,
At the mad will of monarchs drunk with pride.
The Sabbath is the safeguard and the tower
Of all our blessings, social and sustained.
Civil, religious, household, personal.
Public and private ; based on heaven's own laAV,
By faithfulness to which we keejj our right
To perfect liberty of thought and word,
78 ELEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS.
And conscientious act towards God or man,
Of worship, or benevolence, or profit,
By tyrant unrestricted, unenforced.
Give God one-seventh, no tyrant can comnaand
One jot or tittle ; conscience in the whole
Is God's, and free ; and thus the Sahhath stands,
By claim of God, the guard divine of man
Th' unconquered keeper of his chartered rights,
That none can steal, corrupt, or hide away
God's bridle on the oppressor, where the soul.
By the seventh link of time, joins all to heaven.
'Tis the controlling, regulating power
Of all our life, harmonious, well-arranged ;
The pendulum of years redeemed for God,
In hearts and households, and a living state.
Set right for him, and running at his wilL^
The mighty swing, and motion all divine,
That regulates the complicated clock.
Otherwise useless, of the social frame ;
The law of organized society.
That cannot wisely be arranged without it.
Nor turned to God, nor animate with heaven,
Nor saved from discord, and perpetual ruin.
If we profane it, with it we are lost.
If we jDreserve it, by its power we stand.
'Tis dear to heaven, and heaven's all-ruling King,
For whom Ave keep the Sabbath, will descend.
And from it, the Shechinah of his love.
ELEUTIIERIA AND NEMESIS. 79
Will thunder forth protection to his friends,
And by his conquering Word subdue his foes.
Autumnal Life ! How sadly are its shades
With melancholy softness round us thrown !
And in the forest-walks, and through the glades,
The curled and rustling foliage, thick bestrewn,
Murmurs a solemn language, not its own.
-The day is like a rohe of pensive thought.
Or spotless, sacrificial, holy veil,
A consecrating robe o'er all the earth.
Silent and still, as if a thoughtful soul
Possessed the breathing air, all nature lies.
From the mild sky a dream-like radiance falls.
Soft through the solemn brooding atmosphere.
The noontide glory of the sun, subdued,
In silvery, shadowy haze, distant suffused
With purple tints, spreads o'er the embrowned
hills.
Piled high in grand majestical repose.
The birds are silent ; not a note is heard ;
But the pert squirrel trolls his chirrup forth,
And plaintive cricket whistles his sad fife.
How quickly now the fitful wind unroofs
The groves, so late our place of noontide rest,
Or quiet evening and sweet morning walks,
So many months impervious to the sun.
Not a leaf loosened by the Wrongest gale !
80 ELEUTHERIA AND NEMESIS.
Pensive to-day, with thin and mottled boughs,
The trees receive the kisses of the wind,
And eveiy breath scatters a thousand leaves.
Hark ! how the murmur sweeps the extreme edge
Of the sere forest ! 'Tis as if a gale
Swept from the sea. And yet, the gentlest breeze
Could not more sweetly stir the noontide air.
And as an angel, spreading his soft wings.
Enfolds an infont cherub to its rest.
The quiet atmosphere lays gently down
Her dying foliage upon Nature's breast.
These gentle lessons tell us we must die.
The Day transmits them to the dusky Eve,
Whose shadows fall, so softly from the sky
Evening repeats them to the solemn Night,
That shrouds the landscape with mysterious hush
Of expectation, and deep brooding thought,
Till the moon rises, and the mist that lay.
Invisible, above the dewy grass,
Turns to a silvery whiteness, and the frost
Glitters serenely, till the morning ray.
From youth to age, we die before we change ;
The summer verdure changes, ere it dies.
We die, that we may change. Our brightest hues
Come first, then settle into sober age.
And when our leaves fall from us, the death-frost
Loosens not them, but us. Another soil
ELEUTIIERIA AND NEMESIS. 81
Receives, translated, all that could not die,
Where plants take root immortal, and bloor </i^
By crystal streams, with verdure ever new,
And sacred fruitage, in eteraal Life.
4*
I
BOOK IV.
LEAF-LESSONS, AND HOUSEHOLD
P'RINCIPLES.
AKGUMENT.
Autumnal Forest changes.—Variety and splendor of the hues.
—
The sober evergreens contrasted.—Leaf-lessons.—Color in character
must spring from life.—Genuine and superficial worth contrasted.
The life of knowledge and the rule of education.—Political atheism
divorcing truth from God.—Our only security, in God's Word.—The
antique spirit of faith and household discipline.—Childhood of Ed-wards,
and his love of nature.—Foreign importations of evil.—^The
first fire in Autumn.—Fires In the woods.—Intimations from Nature
as well as Scripture, of a general conflagration.—Forebodings of the
Judgment.—Power of conscience, and only refuge of the soul.
BOOK IV.
Ere yet the fitful, melancholy winds,
Following the Frost's first silent ministry,
Have stripped the Forests of their bloom, and laid
The leaves to mingle with the moistened soil.
In the year's closing life how beautiful
The prophecy of death, in brilliant play
Of colors like the expiring Dolphin's change
'Tis strange to mark the fond and fiirewell love,
The busy, fluttering tenderness and care,
With which sad Nature decks her splendid shroud,
For the year's dying glories. Brighter hues,
More various, and of rapid nightly change.
To meet the morning sun, Art could not weave,
Nor Poet's rich imagination dream.
A lovely sight, but evanescent all.
Like gorgeous, solemn, funeral pageantry.
With purple gilded pall, and nodding plumes.
In slow procession sweeping to the grave.
Now gleam the Forests in the evenms sun,
86 LEAF-LESSONS,
With thousand glittering dyes of changeful shade,
A few days deepening, till the landscape glows
With scarlet, green, and gold, vermilion pale,
Crimson, and brown, and orange, and the hue
Of richest Tyrian purple, deep, intense.
A splendid scene, but in its gayest form.
And glittering profusion, swift decay
Presaging still ; the work of Death, not Life,
Of chilling Frost, not kindly native heat
Yet burning like the quick, consumptive fire
Of hectic fever in the wasting frame ;,
The pale cheek flushing with unusual glow.
Who now shall count the varying forms of light.
And blending colors, in ten thousand shapes.
And families of trees, shrubs, grasses, flowers ;
Maple, and oak, and elm, the spreading beech.
The broad majestic sycamore, the birch,
And towermg linden, with its cloud of foliage.
All yielding to the transformation strange.
In rich, contrasted, mazy tints bedecked.
The ash, with starry foliage, purple dyed.
The dogwood, every leaf an amethyst
Sumach, with crimson scroll, and scarlet flower.
Thick tufted, richer than Arabia's plumes
The walnut, with its glossy, golden leaves.
Flushed glittering, like the gleaming evening sky
All these and more, intoxicate with hues,
Profuse, intense, and intermuigled all,
AND HOUSEHOLD PRINCIPLES. 87
As showers with thousand rainbows, till the woods
Seem like a cloud of Birds of Paradise
Startled, and rising in united flight.
All hues of every color, shade on shade
As if the sun looked through a forest hung
With golden flowers, and ruby or jasper fruit.
With foliage -mi'ought of twilight, or the rays
Of flame metallic on an emerald sky,
Each tree forth flinging, to the evening breeze,
Its banners of fantastic trailing light,
Till the whole forest seems a waving prism.
The maples soonest change, most sensitive
To earliest touch of Frost, but hold their leaves
Glittering, baptized with red and gold, the longest.
The oaks, like veteran proud field marshals, gleam
In scarlet regimentals. O'er the woods,
In their deep masses scanned, crimson and gold
Meet frequent, but a dark prevailing hue
Of mingled brown and purple veils the scene.
Meanwhile a pale, autumnal, smoky haze
Subdues the gorgeous glitter of the air,
And speaks a sober warning of decay.
Midst all this carnival of masks and hues,
The evergreens in deeper beauty shine.
Dark, permanent, unchanging. Round the woods,
The solemn fir, with sombre, massive verdure.
The ragged, wildered, and fantastic hemlock,
88 LE AF-LESSONB,
The clean and fragrant spruce, with silver buds,
The wavering, whispering, meditative pine,
The juniper, with pencilled foliage soft.
And graceful beauteous cedar, thoughtful stand,
As gravely wondering at such motley show
Of mighty forests, beautiful, but strange.
The sight that, transitory, gleams attractive.
So gay and novel,—lasting, could not please.
A trick in Nature's wild kaleidoscope,
Fantastic, it arrests the eye delighted.
Much wondering at the quick and magic change,
And while we say how beautiful ! 'tis gone.
The woods deep redden in the October sun.
Then shower their faded foliage on the gales.
There's many a moral lesson in these leaves.
Color must grow from life ; art cannot paint
Tlie character with virtue, nor bestow
Accomplishments that live from vital force
Of inward being, if they live at all.
The ostentatious rivalry of shoAvs
Forbodes a withering poverty. Sweet Nature
Ne'er quits her unobtrusive, grateful green.
To wear the many-hued Autumnal robe.
But as of Winter and of Death precursor.
A few bright days she plays the Harlequin,
Not her accustomed wont, then drops the mask,
And in the garb of Winter rules the year.
AND HOUSEHOLD PRINCIPLES. 89
All genuine worth is lasting, but the show
Of gaudy, adventitious circumstance,
The livery of imitative souls,
Argues the want of native nobleness,
Relying on external pomp and pride.
That which is strange, far-fetched, unnatural,
The use and love of foreign ornaments.
Presages or accompanies the loss
Of native loveliness, the quick decay
Of simple, noble, heart-felt, home-born power.
The schools, ambitious, superficial, crowd
Their pupils, unprepared, undisciplined,
Handed from task to task, confused, involved.
In whirl of various accomplishments,
Forgotten like the mazes of a dance.
By dint of mouth stretched wide, and throat
distent.
The voice with persevering squall is trained.
In false, high-screaming, imitative notes
Of operatic music, with the rage
Of lisping French, while English is unknown.
Italian must be learned, and Dante scanned.
While Milton is neglected. The sweet grace
Of modest mien, and shrinking gentleness,
Is out of place ; the manner I'ude at heart
The timid grace of genuine feeling lost
In affectation of familiar ease,
And early habit of society.
The heart is seared and withered ; education.
90 LEAF-LESSONS,
Affected, ostentatious, fashion-bred,
Not home-ljorn, nor parental, forms the mind.
Our children, set to learn from foreign priests,
Or ladies of the Heart of Mary's Love,
Because 'tis liberal, and the French is new,
Smit with romantic tenderness, at length
Run to confessional, and take the veil.
Where are the Mothers for a coming race,
So noble, manly, honest, incorrupt,
That it can keep the bright inheritance
Of freedom, independence, piety,
Industrious life, warm hearts, and homely manners,
Transmitted from our Fathers ? Sacred Trust
Which, who would keep, themselves must trust in
God,
And guard forever, as the primal law
Of a just education. His blest words,
Who drew young children to his arms, and said.
Suffer the little ones to come to me !
Who dare forbid the process, or warn off,
With intermeddling bigotry and scorn.
The artless prattlers, that, approaching, claim
Their birth-right from the Saviour ! Let them hear
Those winning tones of tenderness and grace.
And feel the influence of that sacred love,
A happy presence in each mental mood,
Casting a beam of heaven upon the way,
As the sweet light of childhood's daily life,
AND HOUSEHOLD PRINCIPLES. 91
Through every path of knowledge. So their school
Shall be the place where guardiaa angels dwell,
And in the atmosphere of Love divine,
Each rudiment of natural truth shall wear
A dear fiimiliar grace, a sacred air,
Breathed round the unconscious learner, taught
of Christ.
The stamj:) of a divine relationship,
Not separate from God, but sealed of heaven.
With meaning sacred as his own blest word.
Is on fair Nature's vast intelligence,
U]Don the same commission for the soul
And from the first, in the bright web of thought.
Begun in cliildhood's curious, mental loom,
With ceaseless play of question working on,
The threads of natural science and revealed
Should run together in the same design
And demonstration of a present God.
Behold the lilies of the field, and learn
Who clothed their forms with beauty, and came
down
Himself from heaven to earth, and took the text
Of his own sermons from his lowliest works.
And ever thus, the truths of God's own Word,
And Nature's teachings, sweetly wrought in one.
By right belong, united, to the soul.
Who then shall dare divorce them? Who
presume
92 LEAF-LESSONS,
To shut the page of science from the light
And life of Him who gave it 1 Who forhid
The record of His Name, his attributes
Pervading, shining, omnipresent, fair,
In every syllable of learning taught,
E'en from the earliest intellectual dawn 1
The lisping infant's wooden ABC,
The page with rude engravings syllabled,
Of houses, ships, domestic animals,
The pictured card, big-lettered on the wall.
And childhood's first attempt at perfect words,
And earliest baby sentences, may bear
A moral message. Blind must be the soul.
An atheist fool's, the heart, that would proscribe,
And exorcise the light of truth divine,
(As if it were a bigoted intrusion.
Or emanation of sectarian zeal,)
From aught of letters, or of natural sense.
Or Nature's teaching, in the simplest class
Of universal childhood. Crude and curst
The bigotry that mocks at God's own light,
And to the angel of his sacred Word,
E'en in the play-ground of the village school.
Teaches the children, with precocious rage
Of hoary infidelity to cry.
Go up, thou baldhead, go ! The State is vext
With diabolic cant of such malign
Hypocrisy and hatred of a God,
Assuming, from regard to liberal, large,
AND HOUSEHOLD P U I N G I P L E S . 03
And unsectarian views, to shut out heaven,
Exclude its holy light, shroud its bright orbs.
The life and guide of all our truthful vision.
And in earth's dungeons cultivate the soul
The blind, with aclhing eye balls, madly cry,
Shut out the light, the source of all our pain
Their leaders, blindfold cry, shut out heaven's
light
And demagogues, monopolizing, claim.
To manufacture truth more Catholic,
Sugared with poison, and stuck round with votes.
Shut out the Word of God, and we can clamp
Opinion on the people at our will.
Men's conscience in the keeping of their priests,
And truth divine forbidden, we are safe,
And can make shambles of the common schools
To fit the poor for slaughter ! Thus the Word
Celestial, that blest law of liberty.
Must be proclaimed sectarian, and disowned
Of conscience universal, which admits
No lesson of religion for its guide.
Nor truth fx'om heaven for all, if one object
And this is Freedom ! Anxious and disti*est.
Convulsed with horrid hydrophobic rage.
If but a cup, drawn from the crystal stream
Of Life, forth issuing from the Throne of God,
Stand where an artless child can reach and drink.
94 LEAF-LESSONS,
The Free Academies, and People's Halls,
Must be embargoed, and the truth warned off,
With ban political, and watch-dogs set.
Deep-mouthed, to bay at every holy text
And whisper of the gospel ! Such the cure,
Bethesda, and Millenium of our souls !
The Panacea for the festering sores
Of guilt, corruption, ignorance, and crime,
Deep gendered in the vitals of the State !
Sage legislators for the People's good !
Your wisdom who dare question, while ye bid,
With supercilious sneer and large survey.
The Saviour stand aside, and Science prove
Her province and commission to redeem
The mind from all its blindness, and her power,
(Cleared from all mixture of divine alloy,)
To bless and renovate a sinful world !
Thou Sun, withdraw thy beams, wliile these vain
fools
Light up their winking tapers, for the gas
Is their prerogative, their jDcrquisite,
Of corporate office and monopoly.
But in the rays of heaven it camiot shine.
What deadly enmity to all that's dear,
And precious in the heritage of Freedom,
Bought by our fathersj and baptized in blood I
He that is traitor to his Country's God,
AND HOUSE 11 OLD PUINCIFLES. 95
Is traitor to his Country, ayIiosc defence
Is in the strong arm and believing heart
Of men 'that, fearing God, fear nothing else.
Dear native land ! thy freedom is the truth,
Received from Him, thy lasting, sure defence,
Thy law of life, God's charter in the soul.
There kept, a world in arms could not subdue
Thy courage, nor defraud thee of the right.
What God hath given, God keeps, and He alone.
Faith in his Word destroyed, thy liberty
Is but an empty boast, the song of slaves.
Thy stocks consulted as thy guardian god,
What courage can remain, what noble aim 1
Sappers and miners are at work beneath I
Thine enemies, unnoticed and secure.
Pass on with secret, deadly, deep design,
Corrupting and preparing thee for bondage.
The love of pleasure may destroy the State,
No enemy could conquer, and the base,
Decrepit greed of gain palsy the heart,
And lust of power break up the liberties,
TTie best appointed armies could not shake.
'Tis not the lack of knowledge, but the scorn.
Rejection and neglect of Truth Divine,
That will bring down the dreadful threatened doom,
By which the nations perish. The recoil
Of moral causes hath a forward spring.
Avenging mischief by its own complete
9d lkaf-lessons,
DevelojDinent, and uttermost success.
God's retribution for the fathers' guilt,
Upon their offspring visited, is plain,
The natural law of reaping what is sown.
Themselves prep)are the whirlwind for their sons.
If thou forget for them the law of God,
He will forget thy children, and will change
Thy glory into shame. Thy throne of power,
Thy freedom, thy security, thy strong.
Incessant growth, the work concentrated,
Of ages in a day, shall swiftly fail.
And perish at the Word thou hast despised.
Oh, rather than the heartless reign of Fashion,
The upstart pride of gain, the servitude
Of luxury, and desire of endless wealth.
Bring back the rudeness of the straitened past,
The old laborious forms of social life.
The unworldliness of simple-minded men,
Little desiring, and j)Ossessing less.
Nay, bring the actual daily want and j^eril
Of the first settlers of our native land ;
The rough unsheltered hamlets in the heart
Of unfelled forests vast, with savage tribes
To school the household with perpetual fear.
Nor other lessons taught, but those of strong
Maternal love, God's Word, and daily prayer.
Or, in one generation's short reinove
From the hard wrestlings of tlie Pilgrim life,
AND HOUSEHOLD 1' U I N C I P L K S . 97
Bring back those rural districts, villages,
And rising towns, with rudimcntal schools.
Of plain, unvarnished truth, and manners still
By foreign importations undisturbed.
Of lies, and luxuries, and sanctioned sins.
The public weal stood then in truth and virtue.
Laws were in equity and justice framed,
For righteousness, not profit, nor intrigue
Of artful bidders for official power,
God's Word was the supreme unquestioned rule
Of public as of private policy.
The peojDle all were neighbors, though not nigh ;
Yet better far, kinder, and more fimiliar.
And knit with closer fellowship and love,
Than crammed in city courts, and narrow streets,
Crowded in space, distant in enmity,
Unknowing and unsympathizing each,
In others' wants, or woes, or happiness.
The household life was sacred with the light
Of pure domestic love and Christian truth.
The Catechism and the Primer formed
A knot and circle of celestial themes,
Incomprehensible in length and breadth.
And suitable for mightiest, vastest minds,
Instead of infantile intelligence,
Yet mixt with simplest truth, pure, sweet, and fresh.
Strong meat indeed for babes, but genuine milk
By no means wanting, and foundations laid,
5
98 LEAF-LESSONS,
Whereon, in age mature, the being rose
To grasp of thought, wide reach, and grandest view
Of mountain truths, clOud-capped, and lost in
heaven.
Such infant questions, with the "breath of prayer
Mingled, and by maternal piety.
Sweetly imbued and tempered, ti'ained the mind
Of Edwards, grappling, in its strength mature,
The abstrusest mysteries of free will and fate ;
Yet ever through the deepest gloom upborne
On wings of ardent, pure, seraphic love.
And following, single-eyed, the Word Divine.
Unrivalled intellect, and childlike heart
Submissive, patient, humble, gentle, mild !
What comprehensive generalizing power,
What metaphysic skill intuitive.
And abstract faculty, intense and deep.
Keenly to analyze, and strict pursue,
To the last verge, the subtlest trains of thought
A Poet unsuspected, and deep read.
And filled with love of Nature, he would trace,
While yet a boy, with curious grave intent,
The geometric problems diagram'd.
Across the trees upon the shadowy air,
By Forest Insects, with their fresh bright webs
Waving and glittering in the dewy light
Of a September morning ; then note down,
With careful thought, th' appearance, and the cause.
AND HOUSEHOLD PRINCIPLES. 99
Beneath the open sky, and in the fields,
And shady wild-wood walks, he loved to trace
The glorious majesty and grace of God,
Sweet, awful, omnipresent, and divine.
He heard the music of the spheres, and sung
In low ecstatic voice, his answering hymn
Of quiet adoration, joy, and praise.
Upon the mind thus sensitive, devout,
And watchful unto prayer through every mood,
The sacred Spirit Lreathed by Nature's forms,
A rapturous intelligence and sense.
That like the written Word, divinely proved
The medium of communion sweet with Heaven,
He saw, he felt, creation's fi'ame sublime,
The solitary woods, the sky, the clouds,
The moon, the sunset, and the lovely stars,
The grass, the flowers, the softly running brooks,
The storm, the thunder, and the lightning, all.
Filled with the glory of a present God.
'Twas bliss, to whisper forth his holy name !
'Twas heaven on earth to praise him for his love !
Nought seemed so lovely as the humblest, meek.
Contented soul, enlightened by his grace.
In light and peace, the gentle praying heart
Seemed like the little white flower in the spring.
Lowly and humble on the enamelled ground,
Rejoicing in its rapture, calm and sweet.
Peaceful ,and loving, in the midst of flowers,
All opening, fragrant, to the pleasant sun.
100 LE AF-LE SSONS,
How happy is the man who walks with God !
The sweet experience of a holy soul,
Pinds joy and bliss in all things, and pours forth
Heaven's inward radiance on the outward world.
What strength sublime, when such the native growth
Of the whole people's household discipline !
The consecrating power of faith and prayer
That brooded as a cloud o'er all the home,
Moved as a bright Shechinah through the land.
No mischief tlien, nor waste, nor violence,
Nor robbery, nor wrong, was felt, nor feared.
Crime was so strange, and wide-s2Drcad confidence.
From part to part, so ruled the social state.
That deay and night each house protected stood.
Nor needed bolts nor guns to prove secure.
A lifted latch opened the unbarred door,
Even at midnight, and the household all,
Serenely slept, from Guilt's intrusion free.
Now rather than the luxury and vice
Of old, decaying European life.
Whose light is a phosphoric rottenness.
Would that th' Atlantic wave had rolled a gulf
Of stormy sea, unbridged except by months
Of toil forlorn, and dangerous navigation.
Between this western and the eastern world.
We take the sweepings of society,
In worn-out monarchies, corrupt, diseased,
With plagues a hundred generations old.
AND HOUSEHOLD PRINCIPLES. 101
The flying ships pour forth a legion swarm
Of houseless beggars, grim, unprincipled.
Or gamesters come to hazard their last throw.
Burglars, and villains from the rod of justice,
And pandars to all forms of sensual vice,
And reckless, shameless, low debauchery.
Base men from Christian States, who never knew.
Nor cared for Christian Sabbaths, rush like swine.
To trample on the sacred pearls of Truth,
The fixtures long revered, of Cljristian Life,
Our quiet, hallowed, Sabbath usages.
They make God's Day a jubilee of sin
;
Set up their reeking shambles for the soul,
In groves than INIoloch's worse, with temples where.
In bold contempt alike of God and man.
They pour the streams of deep damnation round.
"What State can onward hold its prosperous course.
Its high example, and its moral worth.
Its vital strength, beneath such ravages ?
What people keep intact their virtuous fire.
Their purity, stability, and peace.
Their energies of freedom and of life,
Unconquered, with such vampire forms of death.
Leeching their vitals 1 If the curse go on.
Not all th' abounding commerce of the globe.
Nor Science deep, nor sage Philosophy,
Nor Art, nor ribs of Californian gold.
Can save the country from wide-wasting ruin.
102 LEAF-LESSONS,
And yet, the ways of Nature still the same
Her loveliness attractive to the soul,
Her plenteous harvests to the varied sense,
Her bounteous hand unchanging through the year.
And rain and sunshine from a Father's love,
Upon the just and unjust kindly falling.
A monster of ingratitude is man !
The very brutes are drawn, intelligent,
In mute, but grateful feeling, to the hand
Of the rough heedless swain that feedeth them.
But hardened, thoughtless, prayerless, sinning man,
Snatches the gifts of God's parental care.
And, covetous of more, appropriates all.
With curses on the Giver's sacred name !
How pleasant, when the season calls, once more,
The scattered household round a blazing hearth.
Glows the first social fire, companion dear
Of solitude, or sweet conversing circle !
Whether a driving desolate cold rain
Beats on the well-closed shutters, or, of late.
The starry sky glitters with northern gleam
At evening, while the Frost, with silent touch,
From sparkling air serene, like flash electric.
Crisps the last autumn flowers, and o'er the grass
Drops a soft, silvery, dewy-fretted veil.
Each blade with hoary rime enamelling.
Morning and evening, friendly to the sense
Of grateful comfort, and of household bliss,
AND HOUSEHOLD PRINCIPLES. 103
The clear wood fire buviis brightly. Seems itself,
Joining In mora or nightly worship there,
A silent listener in the happy group,
Drawn round its pleasant blaze. The ashes flill,
How silently, attractive of deej) thought,
And the sa]) sings in harmony a note
Responsive to the cheerful hissing urn,
That from the book or busy needle calls
The social circle to the evening meal.
The days grow shorter now ; the cold gray dawn
Lingers reluctant in the dreaming East,
With nipping chillness in the atmosphere,
Yet cordial, clear, and bracing in its tone.
The air of early morning strikes the sense
Like salutation of an old dear friend.
Long tried, serene, and steadfast. Slowly now
The rising sun strikes through, the frosty mist.
With cheerful warmth and brightness, and the day
At noon presents the enchanting loveliness,
Of the sweet Indian Summer's transient reign.
Mingling the mildness of an early Spring,
With the last breath of Autumn. Lovely scene,
Of quiet saddening beauty, like the strains
Of melancholy music through the night,
Or distant song, floating across the sea,
Or mountain echo, dying far away.
How exquisite the language of the light,
104 LEAF-LESSONS,
And of each quality of form and shade,
In slow, progressive, gradual, ceaseless change,
From morn to eve, from twilight to the dawn,
_
From month to month, through each revolvmg
season
Happy, who can discern, though but in part,
The permeating power of hidden causes,
And motion of each secret living spring.
With thousand imperceptible soft tones
Of voice and color blending delicate
The native idioms of the rolling year
An elemental soul breathes o'er the sense,
As in this day of such entrancing beauty.
With finest subtle influence, as of thought.
Revealing in each transitory month
Of Summer, Autumn, Winter, and the Spring,
A character distinct as that in minds
The secret mystery of each brooding season
In some selected day concentrating
Its whole and varied efiluence for the type
Of its peculiar loveliness and power.
What wondrous combinations of design.
And hidden harmony significant.
Developed in the touches of the air
Upon this mortal frame intelligent.
O'er which, as on a harp of finest strings^
All nature plays her music for the soul
Never in more profoundly thoughtful strains,
Than in the changes of the dying year.
AND HOUSEHOLD PRINCIPLES. 105
Each season hath its grace, each month its power,
Its idiomatic dialect, and tone,
A beauty and a meaning of its own,
Its private signals of suggestive thought,
Tor each observant meditative soul.
Now frosty nights and gusty days successive
Sweep rapidly the fading woodlands bare ;
The garden walks are filled with withered leaves,
Stre^vn by the eddying winds, and playful stirred.
Fluttering and rustling in the forest paths.
How like the riches of an orient clime,
The fragrant quince trees hang their golden fruit.
Clustered amidst thick foliage, dark and green,
Not one leaf fall'ii or faded. Here and there,
A clump of apple-trees in homely guise.
Antique and rough, attracts the roving eye.
Naked of leaves, but Avith nngathcred fruit.
Still mellowing on the aged mossy boughs.
Bright, ruddy, tempting, latest of the year.
The riches of the fields are not yet housed.
Among the dry husks of the standing corn.
Big,' yellow pumpkins shine on withered vines,
In the bare trampled farrows. O'er the scene
A lazy, listless spell predominant
Hangs like a trance of dreaming life diffused.
The distant woods now smoke with raging fires,
Set careless for the clearing. But the steed
5*
106 LEAF-LESSONS,
Oftimes escapes his master ; and the flame,
Kindled at first for use, licks up whole forests,
Crackling and hissing in a sea of fire,
Whose waves, high-crested, toss their burning foam.
And direful desolate the country round. •
At midnight fiercely glares the whole horizon.
Earth roars and trembles like a wide volcano.
O'er fences, fxrms, roads, trenches, vales, and hills,
The flames leap revelling, like lunatic,
Broke loose from rock-ribbed cell and iron fetters.
With maddening haste, and strong terrific fury,
The fiery whirlwind sweeps devouring on,
The wealth of countries shrivelling as a scroll.
The growth of ages jDrostrate in an hour.
When the wide globe is burning, who shall standi
The doom is fixed, the coming day of God,
That dreadful day of wrath, swift, sudden, near.
When least expected by a trifling world.
Atheists shall scoff", and ask, blaspheming, where
The boasted promise of His coming ? Lo !
All things remain as in their primal form,
And shall to endless time, as now, endure.
To-morrow as to-day, but more abundant,
By new device of pleasure and of sin.
But when earth's revelling millions dream secure,
In storm of fire shall burst the dreaded morn !
Shrouded in sheets of flame, all nature reels.
AND HOUSEHOLD PRINCIPLES. 107
All things on earth shall be dissolved with fire,
The heavens with hideous noise shall pass away,
The universe shall melt with fervent heat.
Ocean, and earth, and air, one vortex vast,
Englobed, of selfconsuming elements,
In general conflagration shall expire.
Tis the behest of Him who made the world,
And garnished it with loveliness for man.
This cradle of his being, when the frame
Hath served its purposes of discipline,
May well be laid aside, if God shall choose
To furnish forth these heavens with other worlds.
Nor hath he left to dim intelligence
Of human thought to guess the great design,
Which mind created never could have scanned
But in his written volume plain set down,
It stands among the firm decrees revealed,
Of wisdom infinite and power divine ;
And being so revealed, there are not wanting.
In nature and in providence, some signs.
The counterpart of such stupendous truth.
The witnesses for such sublime disclosures.
Far in the untrodden realms of boundless space,
Where science wings her theoretic flight.
The soul, awe-stricken at the solemn view.
Has watched the glow of planet-worlds on fire,
A few nights reddening in the mighty deep,
108 LEAF-LESSONS,
Then glimmering pale, and from their native sky
Forever disappearing. By such light,
Prodigious, awful, of extinguished Avorlds,
The silent universe unfolds God's plan,
And orbs of power divine illustrative,
May prophesy sublime th' Almighty's wilh
Man may deny the manner, but the vast
And dread reality of judgment holds
The soul beneath its brooding certainty,
Convinced, unquestioning, without, within.
'Tis fear, not disbelief, persuades a doubt.
The troubled conscience thunders. Men may sleep,
But still the dreadful sound is in their ears.
The dwellers by the sea heed not the roar
Of its unceasing billows. Inland far,
The thunder of the cataract is lost
On the insensible accustomed ear,
Close on its mighty verge. Habit subdues
And veils attention, as if sense were deaf.
Beneath those restless warning projDhecies,
Powers of the world to come, whose voice divine,
Constant and deep, broods ceaseless o'er the soul,
The din of business, and the fitful strife
Of eager, feverish passion, may repress
The moral consciousness and listening sense.
But the foreboding angry wail is there.
And slow reluctant muttering of the storm.
AND HOUSEHOLD rRINOIPLES. 1-09
The distant gathering clouds roll on apaee,
Gloomily Looming o'er the troul)led surge
Of man's immortal being, fearfully,
And wonderfully made. The thought of God,
Though 'mid the noise and revelry of sin,
Expelled and dreaded hy the guilty mind,
Beats like a gong in subterranean caverns,
A never-ceasing, solemn, muffled roar,
Beneath the secret chambers of the soul.
The questioners of God's Omniscient Being,
Though fools at heart, cannot deny their own
Affirming mind, themselves o'ermastering ;
Or if they do, Conscience upbraids the lie.
And oft, in seasons of prophetic sense.
Inwardly active, answering to the flame
Of the eternal pyre before them burning,
They read iilcaustic scripture on their souls,
Intuitive and undeniable,
Responding to the very words of God.
Over the deep foundations of our being.
In immortality and consciousness
Of duty and accountability,
T':^ cca of feeling and belief rolls on.
Swayed to and fro by bright celestial orbs
Of truth divine, incessantly impelling
The restless answering tides of thought profound.
110 LEAF-LESSONS,
Powers are before us, whose dim rising forms
Need only tlie advancement of a step
Within the line of Faith's enlightened vision,
And all things else are vanity and weakness.
We sit as children in a darkened room
Waiting and whispering, till the curtain rises,
Unveiling sudden to the awe-struck sense.
Some bright transparency, or solemn show.
'Tis dark and gloomy here, for unbelief
Draws its black pall before us, and around.
Suggesting evil, and with mournful hue,
The promises themselves in sack-cloth veiling.
Our sins have gone before, and hid themselves,
As midnight murderers to await our coming,
Behind the lonely way we have to travel.
Sure at the appointed signal to break forth,
And plunge their daggers in us. Even now.
Faces scowl on us from the darkness, known
By the dread sense, that tells us they are there.
Most men inhabit, as a rayless dungeon.
This vestibule of their eternal being.
What is beyond, they see not, nor can tell.
If, when the veil is lifted, they shall know.
As their own endless habitation there,
A world of love and glory infinite.
Filled with the bliss of God, or pass at once
To depths of terror and despair in guilt.
AND HOUSEHOLD PKINCIPLES. Ill
Unchanged, inieliangeaT:>le, to weep and wail
Heaven lost, hell realized, in endless wo !
Powers of the world to coinc, imnintahle
What dreadful, vast, and grand significance,
Attends your rising on th' immortal mind !
Your strong command, your adamantine hold,
Upon the soul of man through all its depths.
Resides in an eternity disclosed.
Infinite bliss, or woe unchangeable.
Tlie Infinite, Immutable, Eternal
Names of the glorious attributes of God,
Exponents of our future destiny !
To what a depth from immortality
To brutishness and madness man must pass,
To keep at bay those awful powers of thought.
To stand, unmoved amidst such presences,
Insensible to all the solemn weight.
Of all those boundless, vast, and dread ideas,
By which the soul, excited, warned, and roused,
Is purified, arid raised from earth to heaven.
The merest, maddest vanities of time
Outweigh the interests of eternity.
'Tis nearness gives importance to the view.
Shadows outrun the substance, and deceive
The soul that dwells beneath them. Present
things.
Expel the glories of celestial worlds.
To Avhich the god of this world blinds the mind,
112 LEAF-LESSONS,
And veils it from the glory of the Cross.
The basest shilling held before the eye,
Shall shut the visible heaven and earth from sight.
As in the glasses of the telescope
A single fly, imprisoned, unobserved.
Covers the orb of day, so shall the soul
In its whole vast horizon be confined
Within th' experience of earthly sense.
That burdens, shrouds, and suffocates the mind.
Th' immediate interest of to-day held close,
Or joy of sensual revels hard pursued.
The eager hunter rides o'er heaven and hell.
God, Christ, Eternity, with all the forms
Of worship or of warning from the skies,
No more prevail to arrest his headlong course.
Than cobwebs, floating in the morning air.
Or dewy net-work on the sparkling grass,
Can tri]) the steed careering through the fields.
Yet, when he pleases, God can point one word.
Till then repeated by the careless soul.
With scorning, or profoundest unconcern,
As a sharp arrow to the inmost heart.
Then is the curtain lifted, and the gates.
Before fist barred, fly open, as the key
In God's own hand, with skill inscrutable,
Touches each bolt, and in the armed mind.
By wards and springs invisible, commands
Entrance and access for eternal things.
AND HOUSEHOLD PRINCIPLES, 113
That now come sweeping on th' amazed soul,
Like bannered armies thronging. Then are stirred
The ocean tides tumultuous of the being,
AVhilc consciousness of guilt, and gloomy dread
To meet a holy, just, offended God,
With deep conviction of the coming doom.
Drive to the verge of madness or despair
The sinner, unprepared to see the Judge,
Whom without holiness no man can see,
Or know, unsprinkled with the blood of Christ,
But in experience of consuming fire.
For who, in guilt can bear Jehovah's presence,
Or meet the blazing glories of his thi-one ?
Whole cities have poured forth in agony,
Their wailing multitudes, when God came near ;
When earthquakes, comets, or the sun's eclipse.
Or signs portentous of dissolving worlds,
Such as men might suppose would usher in
The wreck of Nature, and the day of doom,
Have rung the peal of judgment o'er the soul.
Then might you see the strong man armed, o'ei
mastered,
Thought paralyzed, all business suspended,
The ordinary tides of feeling turned.
Men shiveri'.ig and pale with expectation.
Unrighteous and ill-gotten gains relinquished.
As midnight robbers drojD their hasty spoil.
At rattle heard, or sight of sudden justice.
114 LEAF-LESSONS,
Then might you know what pale uncovered cowards
Sin makes of men before the King of Terrors,
Whose form intrusive summons them to God.
Then might you see the infidel in prayer,
And mocking scoffers trembling on their knees ;
Men's failing hearts, and faces gathering blackness
Astonishment, anxiety, dismay.
Swaying the streets ; some dead- of sudden fright,
And some insane ; such overwhelming terror
Attends eternal, long-neglected truths, '
When suddenly they peer upon the sight.
With proof of scorn'd or disregarded judgment,
Just bursting o'er a guilty, dreaming world.
Conscience, loud thundering with her muffled drum.
Beats down the strongest giant in despair.
Oh, then what would the guilty votaries give.
Of pleasure, passion, vanity, and power,
For but one day's re^^rieve from meeting God!
The idlers of a gay, luxurious world.
When Death confronts them, in a moment fall,
O'erwhelmed, and utterly consumed with terrors.
Yet might they meet him as their kindest friend,
Heaven shining through the skeleton grim form.
As through the window bars of gloomy prison,
The sunset blazes, or the opening morn.
JNIight meet him as a messenger angelic,
Robed with celestial light, and radiant winged.
AND HOUSEHOLD PRINCIPLES. 115
To take them gently by the hand, and lead
Through a dark gate, to realms of endless day.
Might welcome him with joy, at the sweet word
Of Love Divine, that calls the children home.
Here for a season disciplined at school.
Might welcome him in Christ ! But ah, the guilt
Sorrow, and madness, and self-wrought despair.
In moody, resolute, grim unbelief^
Or heedless ignorance, rejecting, blind.
The only refuge of sin-ruined souls !
Oh, would they but consider, and be wise.
In busy, glaring day, amidst life's cares,
AVith half the wisdom that the Night of Death
Impresses on the soul, one hour so given.
Were worth whole ages ! Then the blinding mists
Of earthly scenes and passions pass away.
And the soul sees disclosed, in heaven or hell,
Its own worth infinite, reflected clear
Whether the glory of that state reveal
The priceless bliss of endless love possessed.
Or misery of this, ^VV^J t^^® g^^'^^g*^?
In demonstration of the death of sin,
Eternal, unendurable, endured.
Nor tongue can