of human liberty, but all unconscious of her impending fate at the hands of those who should be her friends. This impassioned appeal so charged the national heart that the poem was printed as a handbill and scattered broadcast in the streets of Washington. It is not remarkable that the order was rescinded and that after having been rebuilt in 1833, "Old Ironsides" kept her stately course as the historic queen of the American navy until 1855. Now full of honors, revered and loved, she rides in a safe anchorage in the Charlestown navy yard.

OLD IRONSIDES

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;

Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon's roar;
The meteor of the ocean air

Shall sweep the clouds no more.

Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,
And waves were white below,

No more shall feel the victor's tread,
Or know the conquered knee,-

The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea.

Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;

Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,

The lightning, and the gale!

OLD IRONSIDES

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SUGGESTIVE EXERCISES

1. What called forth this poem, and in what spirit was it written?

2. Why not call the vessel by her real name?

3. What feeling seems to possess the soul of the poet in the first stanza? In the second?

4. What characteristic is given the ship in the first stanza? 5. How are you led to think of the ship, as a mass of spars and rigging, or as a living, feeling thing?

6. To what does the second stanza refer?

7. Why should the poet call her an "eagle"?

8. Is a "tattered ensign" one affected merely by action of the wind?

9. In what sense was the frigate's flag a "meteor"?

10. What kind of burial place is the sea?

11. Why is a flag ever "nailed" to the mast?

12. Why does he call the flag “holy”?

13. Why not capitalize the word "god" in the last stanza?

14. What feeling inspired Holmes as he wrote that last stanza!

15. What substitute for dismantling is suggested?

16. Why should such an alternative be preferred?

17. What in this protest has endeared it to the American heart? What higher patriotic sentiment pervades the poem?

REFERENCES

DWIGHT: Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.

DRAKE: American Flag.

CAMPBELL: Ye Mariners of England.

ROCHE: The "Constitution's" Last Fight.

TENNYSON: The Revenge.

LONGFELLOW: The Cumberland.

BROWNING: Hervé Riel.

N°

AN ORDER FOR A PICTURE

ALICE CARY

O poem of Alice Cary's has been more widely studied in the public schools of America. Every school child catches at once the rare delicacy and simplicity of the poem. A child older grown is pleading with the painter to paint her a picture of the old home and its surroundings. A flood of memories crowd in as she details the pictures. Dearer than the memories of the old house itself, or of woods, cornfields, and grazing herds, is the sweet vision of the angel mother, who with two little urchins at her knee must form the central life-group of the picture. All the pleasantest scenes the painter is asked to paint, but that for which the picture is made sacred to the poet's soul, must be left to the imagination. The look of reproachful woe in the eyes of the mother as she looked through the tell-tale faces clear to the lies in the souls of the children she loved this the painter must not paint. It was the look of reproachful woe in the mother's face that had burned out the lie from the soul of a child who, grown, regretted the childish mistake, and who worshiped the sainted mother whose pure life had been an inspiration to noble living.

The child now grown is speaking and giving the painter the order for a picture of her childhood home.

AN ORDER FOR A PICTURE

AN ORDER FOR A PICTURE

Oh, good painter, tell me true,

Has your hand the cunning to draw
Shapes of things that you never saw?
Aye? Well, here is an order for you.
Woods and corn fields, a little brown,-
The picture must not be over bright,
Yet all in the golden and gracious light
Of a cloud, when the summer sun is down.
Alway and alway, night and morn,
Woods upon woods, with fields of corn
Lying between them, not quite sere,
And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom,
When the wind can hardly find breathing-room
Under their tassels,-cattle near,

Biting shorter the short green grass,
And a hedge of sumach and sassafras,
With bluebirds twittering all around,—

(Ah, good painter, you can't paint sound!)—
These, and the house where I was born,

Low and little, and black and old,
With children, many as it can hold,
All at the windows, open wide,-
Heads and shoulders clear outside,
And fair young faces all ablush:
Perhaps you may have seen, some day,
Roses crowding the self-same way,
Out of a wilding, wayside bush.

Listen closer. When you have done

With woods and corn fields and grazing herds,

A lady, the loveliest ever the sun

Looked down upon, you must paint for me:
Oh, if I only could make you see

The clear blue eyes, the tender smile,

The sovereign sweetness, the gentle grace, The woman's soul, and the angel's face That are beaming on me all the while,

167

I need not speak these foolish words:
Yet one word tells you all I would say,—
She is my mother: you will agree
That all the rest may be thrown away.

Two little urchins at her knee
You must paint, sir: one like me,—
The other with a clearer brow,
And the light of his adventurous eyes
Flashing with boldest enterprise:
At ten years old he went to sea,-
God knoweth if he be living now,—
He sailed in the good ship Commodore,
Nobody ever crossed her track

To bring us news, and she never came back.
Ah, it is twenty long years and more
Since that old ship went out of the bay
With my great-hearted brother on her deck:
I watched him till he shrank to a speck,
And his face was toward me all the way.
Bright his hair was, a golden brown,

The time we stood at our mother's knee: That beauteous head, if it did go down, Carried sunshine into the sea!

Out in the fields one summer night
We were together, half afraid

Of the corn-leaves' rustling, and of the shade Of the high hills, stretching so still and far,— Loitering till after the low little light

Of the candle shone through the open door, And over the haystack's pointed top, All of a tremble and ready to drop, The first half-hour the great yellow star, That we, with staring, ignorant eyes,

Had often and often watched to see Propped and held in its place in the skies

By the fork of a tall red mulberry-tree,