Volume Ii Part 12 (1/2)

BY MARTIN FARQUHAR TUP----R.

I hold it good--as who shall hold it bad?

To lave Columbia in the boiling tears I shed for Freedom when my soul is sad, And having shed proceed to shed again: For _human sadness sad to all appears_, And tears men sometimes shed are shed by men.

The normal nation lives until it dies, As men may die when they have ceased to live; But when abnormal, by a foe's surprise, It may not reach its first-appointed goal; For _what we have not is not ours to give_, And if we miss it all we miss the whole.

Columbia, young, a giant baby born, Aimed at a manhood ere the child had been, And slipping downward in a strut forlorn, Learns, to its sorrow, what 'tis good to know, That _babes who walk too soon, too soon begin To walk_ in this dark vale of life below.

When first the State of Charleston did secede, And Morrill's tariff was declared repealed, The soul of Freedom everywhere did bleed For that which, having seen, it sadly saw; So true it is, _death-wounds are never healed_, And law defied is not unquestioned law.

The mother-poet, England, sadly viewed The strife unnatural across the wave, And with maternal tenderness renewed Her sweet a.s.surances of neutral love; _A mother's love may not its offspring save; But mother's love is still a mother's love._

Learn thou, Columbia, in thine agony, That England loves thee, with a love as deep As my ”Proverbial Philosophy”

Has won for me from her approving breast; _The love that never slumbers cannot sleep_, And all for highest good is for the best.

Thy Freedom fattens on the work of slaves, Her Grace of Sutherland informeth me; And all thy South Amboy is full of graves, Where tortured bondmen s.n.a.t.c.h a dread repose; Learn, then, the _race enslaved is never free_, And in thy woes incurred, behold thy woes.

Thy pride is humbled, humbled is thy pride, And now misfortunes come upon thee, thick With dark reproaches for the right defied, And cloud thy banner in a dim eclipse; _Sic transit gloria gloria transic sic_, The mouth that speaketh useth its own lips.

Thus speeds the world, and thus our planet speeds; What is, must be; and what can't be, is not; Our acts unwise are not our wisest deeds, And what we do is what ourselves have done; _Mistakes remembered are not faults forgot_, And we must wait for day to see the sun.

I looked up at Smith-Brown, my boy, and says I:

”What does he mean by the 'State of Charleston,' my fat friend?”

”Why,” says he, ”that's a poetic license, or American geography diluted by the Atlantic. And here we have something by the gifted hauthor of 'Locksley Hall,' which it is somewhat in that vein:

AMERICA.

BY ALFRED TEN----N.

Westward, westward flies the eagle, westward with the setting sun, To an eyrie growing golden in a morning just begun; Where the world is new in promise of a virgin nation's love.

And the grand results of ages germs of n.o.bler ages prove;

Where a prophecy of greatness runs through all the soul of youth, And the miracle of Freedom blesses in a living truth; Where the centuries unnumbered narrow to a single night, And their trophies are but planets wheeling round a central light.

Where the headlands breast the Ocean sweeping round creation's East, And the prairies roll in blossoms to the Ocean of the West; Where the voices of the seas are blended o'er a nation's birth, In the harmony of Nature's hymn to Liberty on earth.

Land of Promise! Revelation of a loyalty that springs From a grander depth of purple than the heritage of kings-- From the inner purple cherished at the thrones of lives sublime, Cast in glorious consecration 'neath the plough of Father Time--

Home of Freedom, hope of millions born and slain and yet to be, Shall the spirit of the bondless, caught from heaven, fail in thee?

Shall the watching world behold thee falling from thy starry height?

Like a meteor, in thine ending leaving only darker night?

Oh! my kinsmen, Oh! my brothers--fellow-heirs of Saxon hearts, Lo the Eagle quits his eyrie swifter than a swallow darts, And the lurid flame of battle burns within his angry eye, Glowing like a living ember cast in vengeance from the sky.