If ye hear, without a blush,
Deeds to make the roused blood rush
Like red lava through your veins,
For your sisters now in chains,
Answer! are ye fit to be
Mothers of the brave and free?

Is true Freedom but to break
Fetters for our own dear sake,
And, with leathern hearts, forget
That we owe mankind a debt?
No! true freedom is to share
All the chains our brothers wear,
And, with heart and hand, to be
Earnest to make others free!

They are slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think;
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.

COLUMBUS.

THE Cordage creeks and rattles in the wind,

With freaks of sudden hush; the reeling sea

Now thumps like solid rock beneath the stern,

Now leaps with clumsy wrath, strikes short, and, falling Crumbled to whispery foam, slips rustling down

The broad backs of the waves, which jostle and crowd

To ning themselves upon that unknown shore,

Their used familiar since the dawn of time,

Whither this foredoomed life is guided

on

To sway on triumph's hushed, aspiring poise

One glittering moment, then to break fulfilled.

How lonely is the sea's perpetual swing, The melancholy wash of endless waves,

The sigh of some grim monster undescried,

Fear-painted on the canvas of the dark, Shifting on his uneasy pillow of brine! Yet night brings more companions than the day

To this drear waste; new constellations burn,

And fairer stars, with whose calm height my soul

Finds nearer sympathy than with my herd

Of earthen souls, whose vision's scanty ring

Makes me its prisoner to beat my wings Against the cold bars of their unbelief, Knowing in vain my own free heaven beyond.

O God! this world, so crammed with eager life,

That comes and goes and wanders back to silence

Like the idle wind, which yet man's shaping mind

Can make his drudge to swell the longing sails

Of highest endeavor,

thrift world,

this mad, un

Yes, Europe's world Reels on to judgment; there the common need,

Losing God's sacred use, to be a bond "Twixt Me and Thee, sets each one scowlingly

O'er his own selfish hoard at bay; no state,

Knit strongly with eternal fibres up
Of all men's separate and united weals,
Self-poised and sole as stars, yet one as
light,

Holds up a shape of large Humanity
To which by natural instinct every man
Pays loyalty exulting, by which all
Mould their own lives, and feel their
pulses filled

With the red, fiery blood of the general life,

Making them mighty in peace, as now

in war

They are, even in the flush of victory, weak,

Conquering that manhood which should them subdue.

And what gift bring I to this untried world?

Shall the same tragedy be played anew, And the same lurid curtain drop at last On one dread desolation, one fierce crash Of that recoil which on its makers God Lets Ignorance and Sin and Hunger make,

Early or late? Or shall that commonwealth

Whose potent unity and concentric force Can draw these scattered joints and parts of men

Into a whole ideal man once more, Which sucks not from its limbs the life

umph gleams,

O'er the blank ocean beckoning, and all night

My heart flies on before me as I sail; Far on I see my lifelong enterprise, Which rose like Ganges 'mid the freezing snows

Of a world's sordidness, sweep broadening down,

And, gathering to itself a thousand streams,

Grow sacred ere it mingle with the sea; I see the ungated wall of chaos old, With blocks Cyclopean hewn of solid night,

Fade like a wreath of unreturning mist Before the irreversible feet of light ;And lo, with what clear omen in the east

On day's gray threshold stands the eager dawn,

Like young Leander rosy from the sea Glowing at Hero's lattice!

One day more These muttering shoalbrains leave the helm to me :

God, let me not in their dull ooze be stranded;

Let not this one frail bark, to hollow which

I have dug out the pith and sinewy heart

Of my aspiring life's fair trunk, be so Cast up to warp and blacken in the

sun,

Just as the opposing wind 'gins whistle off

His cheek-swollen mates, and from the leaning mast

Fortune's full sail strains forward!

One poor day! — Remember whose and not how short it is !

It is God's day, it is Columbus's. A lavish day! One day, with life and heart, Is more than time enough to find a world.

1844.

AN INCIDENT OF THE FIRE AT HAMBURG.

THE tower of old Saint Nicholas soared upward to the skies,

Like some huge piece of Nature's make, the growth of centuries; You could not deem its crowding spires a work of human art,

They seemed to struggle lightward from a sturdy living heart.

Not Nature's self more freely speaks in crystal or in oak,

Than, through the pious builder's hand, in that gray pile she spoke ; And as from acorn springs the oak, so, freely and alone,

Sprang from his heart this hymn to God, sung in obedient stone.

It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough, A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough;

The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a grove of blasted pines.

Never did rock or stream or tree lay claim with better right