They fought as suits the English breed; They came three thousand miles, and died,

To keep the Past upon its throne;
Unheard, beyond the ocean tide,
Their English mother made her moan.

The turf that covers them no thrill
Sends up to fire the heart and brain;
No stronger purpose nerves the will,
No hope renews its youth again :
From farm to farm the Concord glides,
And trails my fancy with its flow;
O'erhead the balanced hen-hawk slides,
Twinned in the river's heaven below.

But go, whose Bay State bosom stirs,
Proud of thy birth and neighbor's right,
Where sleep the heroic villagers
Borne red and stiff from Concord fight;
Thought Reuben, snatching down his
gun,

Or Seth, as ebbed the life away,
What earthquake rifts would shoot and

run

World-wide from that short April fray?

What then? With heart and hand they wrought,

According to their village light;
'T was for the Future that they fought,
Their rustic faith in what was right.
Upon earth's tragic stage they burst
Unsummoned, in the humble sock;
Theirs the fifth act; the curtain first
Rose long ago on Charles's block.

Their graves have voices; if they threw Dice charged with fates beyond their ken,

Yet to their instincts they were true,
And had the genius to be men.
Fine privilege of Freedom's host,
Of even foot-soldiers for the Right! -
For centuries dead, ye are not lost,
Your graves send courage forth, and
might.

When all our good seems bound in sheaves,

And we stand reaped and bare.

Our seasons have no fixed returns, Without our will they come and go; At noon our sudden summer burns, Ere sunset all is snow.

But each day brings less summer cheer,
Crimps more our ineffectual spring,
And something earlier every year
Our singing birds take wing.

As less the olden glow abides,

And less the chillier heart aspires, With drift-wood beached in past springtides

We light our sullen fires.

By the pinched rushlight's starving beam

We cower and strain our wasted sight, To stitch youth's shroud up, seam by

seam,

In the long arctic night.

It was not so we once were youngWhen Spring, to womanly Summer turning,

Her dew-drops on each grass-blade strung,

In the red sunrise burning.

We trusted then, aspired, believed That earth could be remade to-mor

row ;

Ah, why be ever undeceived?
Why give up faith for sorrow?

O thou, whose days are yet all spring, Faith, blighted once, is past retrieving;

Experience is a dumb, dead thing;
The victory's in believing.

To scare the sheep out of the wholesome day?

Yea, what art thou, blind, unconverted Jew,

That with thy idol-volume's covers two Wouldst make a jail to coop the living God?

Thou hear'st not well the mountain organ-tones

By prophet ears from Hor and Sinai caught,

Thinking the cisterns of those Hebrew brains

Drew dry the springs of the All-knower's thought,

Nor shall thy lips be touched with living fire,

Who blow'st old altar-coals with sole desire

To weld anew the spirit's broken chains.

God is not dumb, that he should speak

no more;

If thou hast wanderings in the wilder

ness

KOSSUTH.

A RACE of nobles may die out,
A royal line may leave no heir;
Wise Nature sets no guards about
Her pewter plate and wooden ware.

But they fail not, the kinglier breed,
Who starry diadems attain;
To dungeon, axe, and stake succeed
Heirs of the old heroic strain.

The zeal of Nature never cools,
Nor is she thwarted of her ends;
When gapped and dulled her cheaper
tools,

Then she a saint and prophet spends.

Land of the Magyars! though it be The tyrant may relink his chain, Already thine the victory,

As the just Future measures gain.

Thou hast succeeded, thou hast won The deathly travail's amplest worth; A nation's duty thou hast done, Giving a hero to our earth.

And he, let come what will of woe, Has saved the land he strove to save; No Cossack hordes, no traitor's blow, Can quench the voice shall haunt his grave.

"I Kossuth am: O Future, thou That clear'st the just and blott'st the vile,

O'er this small dust in reverence bow, Remembering what I was erewhile.

"I was the chosen trump wherethrough Our God sent forth awakening breath; Came chains? Came death? The strain He blew

Sounds on, outliving chains and death."

TO LAMARTINE.
1848.

I DID not praise thee when the crowd,
'Witched with the moment's in-
spiration,
Vexed thy still ether with hosannas
loud,

And stamped their dusty adoration; I but looked upward with the rest, And, when they shouted Greatest, whispered Best.

They raised thee not, but rose to thee, Their fickle wreaths about thee flinging;

So on some marble Phoebus the high sea Might leave his worthless seaweed clinging,

But pious hands, with reverent care, Make the pure limbs once more sublimely bare.

Now thou 'rt thy plain, grand self again,

Thou art secure from panegyric,Thou who gav'st politics an epic strain, And actedst Freedom's noblest lyric;

This side the Blessed Isles, no tree Grows green enough to make a wreath for thee.

Nor can blame cling to thee; the snow From swinish footprints takes no staining,

But, leaving the gross soils of earth below,

Its spirit mounts, the skies regaining,

And unresenting falls again,

To beautify the world with dews and rain.

The highest duty to mere man vouch

Who says thy day is o'er? Control,

My heart, that bitter first emotion; While men shall reverence the steadfast soul,

The heart in silent self-devotion Breaking, the mild, heroic mien, Thou 'lt need no prop of marble, Lamartine.

If France reject thee, 't is not thine,

But her own, exile that she utters; Ideal France, the deathless, the divine, Will be where thy white pennon flutters,

As once the nobler Athens went With Aristides into banishment.

No fitting metewand hath To-day

For measuring spirits of thy stature,

Only the Future can reach up to lay

The laurel on that lofty nature, — Bard, who with some diviner art Has touched the bard's true lyre, nation's heart.

Swept by thy hand, the gladdened chords,

Crashed now in discords fierce by others,

Gave forth one note beyond all skill of words,

And chimed together, We ar brothers.

O poem-unsurpassed! it ran

All round the world, unlocking man t.

man.

France is too poor to pay alone

The service of that ample spirit: Paltry seem low dictatorship and throne,

If balanced with thy simple merit. They had to thee been rust and loss; Thy aim was higher, -thou hast climbed a Cross.

TO JOHN G. PALFREY.

THERE are who triumph in a losing

cause,

Who can put on defeat, as 't were a wreath