The council with one voice decreed;
All joined to execrate the deed,
"What, steal another's grass!"
The blackest crime their lives could show
Was washed as white as virgin snow;
The victim was-the Ass.
[Born in 1795, died in 1868. His maternal descent was from John Eliot, "the Apostle of the Indians." He engaged in business, acting for several years as agent to the great capitalist Astor.]
RED JACKET, A CHIEF OF THE INDIAN TRIBES, THE
ON LOOKING AT HIS PORTRAIT BY WEIR.
COOPER, whose name is with his country's woven,
First in her files, her Pioneer of mind-
A wanderer now in other climes, has proven
His love for the young land he left behind;'
And throned her in the senate-hall of nations,
Robed like the deluge rainbow, heaven-wrought,
Magnificent as his own mind's creations,
And beautiful as its green world of thought.
And, faithful to the Act of Congress, quoted
As law authority, it passed nem. con. :
He writes that we are, as ourselves have voted,
The most enlightened people ever known;
That all our week is happy as a Sunday
In Paris, full of song, and dance, and laugh;
And that, from Orleans to the Bay of Fundy,
There's not a bailiff or an epitaph.
And furthermore--in fifty years, or sooner,
We shall export our poetry and wine;
And our brave fleet, eight frigates and a schooner,
Will sweep the seas from Zembla to the Line.
If he were with me, King of Tuscarora !
Gazing, as I, upon thy portrait now,
In all its medalled, fringed, and beaded glory,
Its eye's dark beauty, and its thoughtful brow--
Its brow, half martial and half diplomatic,
Its eye, upsoaring like an eagle's wings;
Well might he boast that we, the Democratic,
Outrival Europe, even in our Kings!
1 Red Jacket appeared originally in 1828, soon after the publication of J. Fenimore Cooper's Notions of the Americans.
For thou wast monarch born. Tradition's pages
Tell not the planting of thy parent tree,
But that the forest tribes have bent for ages
To thee, and to thy sires, the subject knee.
Thy name is princely :-if no poet's magic
Could make Red Jacket grace an English rhyme,
Though some one with a genius for the tragic
Hath introduced it in a pantomime,
Yet it is music in the language spoken
Of thine own land, and on her herald roll; As bravely fought for, and as proud a token As Coeur de Lion's of a warrior's soul.
Thy garb-though Austria's bosom-star would frighten
That medal pale, as diamonds the dark mine,
And George the Fourth wore, at his court at Brighton,
A more becoming evening dress than thine;
Yet 'tis a brave one, scorning wind and weather,
And fitted for thy couch on field and flood,
As Rob Roy's tartan for the Highland heather,
Or forest green for England's Robin Hood.
Is strength a monarch's merit, like a whaler's?
Thou art as tall, as sinewy, and as strong,
As earth's first kings-the Argo's gallant sailors,
Heroes in history, and gods in song.
Is beauty?-Thine has with thy youth departed;
But the love-legends of thy manhood's years,
And she who perished, young and broken-hearted,
Are-but I rhyme for smiles and not for tears.
Is eloquence?-Her spell is thine that reaches
The heart, and makes the wisest head its sport; And there's one rare, strange virtue in thy speeches, The secret of their mastery-they are short.
The monarch mind, the mystery of commanding,
The birth-hour gift, the art Napoleon,
Of winning, fettering, moulding, wielding, banding
The hearts of millions till they move as one :
Thou hast it. At thy bidding men have crowded
The road to death as to a festival;
And minstrels, at their sepulchres, have shrouded
With banner-folds of glory the dark pall.
Who will believe? (Not I-for in deceiving
Lies the dear charm of life's delightful dream;
I cannot spare the luxury of believing
That all things beautiful are what they seem)
Who will believe that, with a smile whose blessing Would, like the Patriarch's, soothe a dying hour, With voice as low, as gentle, and caressing,
As e'er won maiden's lip in moonlit bower;
With look, like patient Job's, eschewing evil;
With motions graceful as a bird's in air;
Thou art, in sober truth, the veriest devil
That e'er clenched fingers in a captive's hair?
That in thy breast there springs a poison fountain,
Deadlier than that where bathes the Upas-tree;
And, in thy wrath, a nursing cat-o'-mountain
Is calm as her babe's sleep compared with thee!
And underneath that face, like summer ocean's,
Its lip as moveless, and its cheek as clear, Slumbers a whirlwind of the heart's emotions, Love, hatred, pride, hope, sorrow-all save fear.
Love for thy land, as if she were thy daughter,
Her pipe in peace, her tomahawk in wars;
Hatred of missionaries and cold water;
Pride-in thy rifle-trophies and thy scars;
Hope that thy wrongs may be, by the Great Spirit, Remembered and revenged when thou art gone; that none are left thee to inherit
Thy name, thy fame, thy passions, and thy throne!
ALNWICK CASTLE.
HOME of the Percy's high-born race,
Home of their beautiful and brave,
Alike their birth and burial place,
Their cradle and their grave!
Still sternly o'er the castle gate
Their house's Lion stands in state,
As in his proud departed hours;
And warriors frown in stone on high,
And feudal banners "flout the sky
Above his princely towers.
A gentle hill its side inclines,
Lovely in England's fadeless green,
To meet the quiet stream which winds
Through this romantic scene
As silently and sweetly still
As when, at evening, on that hill,
While summer's wind blew soft and low,
Seated by gallant Hotspur's side,
His Katherine was a happy bride,
A thousand years ago.
Gaze on the Abbey's ruined pile :
Does not the succouring ivy, keeping
Her watch around it, seem to smile,
As o'er a loved one sleeping?
One solitary turret grey
Still tells, in melancholy glory,
The legend of the Cheviot day,
The Percy's proudest border story.
That day its roof was triumph's arch;
Then rang, from aisle to pictured dome,
The light step of the soldier's march,
The music of the trump and drum;
And babe, and sire, the old, the young,
And the monk's hymn, and minstrel's song,
And woman's pure kiss, sweet and long,
Welcomed her warrior home.
Wild roses by the Abbey towers
Are gay in their young bud and bloom: They were born of a race of funeral flowers That garlanded, in long-gone hours,
A templar's knightly tomb.
He died, the sword in his mailèd hand,
On the holiest spot of the Blessed Land,
Where the Cross was damped with his dying breath,
When blood ran free as festal wine,
And the sainted air of Palestine
Was thick with the darts of death.
Wise with the lore of centuries,
What tales, if there be "tongues in trees,"
Those giant oaks could tell,
Of beings born and buried here!
Tales of the peasant and the peer,
Tales of the bridal and the bier,'
The welcome and farewell,
Since on their boughs the startled bird
First, in her twilight slumbers, heard
The Norman's curfew-bell.
I wandered through the lofty halls
Trod by the Percys of old fame,
And traced upon the chapel walls
Each high heroic name,
From him who once his standard set
Where now, o'er mosque and minaret,`
A Glitter the Sultan's crescent moons;
To him who, when a younger son,
Fought for King George at Lexington,
A major of dragoons.
That last half stanza-it has dashed
From my warm lip the sparkling cup;
The light that o'er my eyebeam flashed,
The power that bore my spirit up
Above this bank-note world-is gone;
And Alnwick's but a market town,
And this, alas! its market day,
And beasts and borderers throng the way;
Oxen and bleating lambs in lots,
Northumbrian boors and plaided Scots,
Men in the coal and cattle line;
From Teviot's bard and hero land,
From royal Berwick's beach of sand,
From Wooller, Morpeth, Hexham, and
Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
These are not the romantic times
So beautiful in Spenser's rhymes,
So dazzling to the dreaming boy:
Ours are the days of fact, not fable,
Of knights, but not of the round table,
Of Bailie Jarvie, not Rob Roy:
'Tis what our President," Monroe,
Has called "the era of good feeling:
The Highlander, the bitterest foe
To modern laws, has felt their blow,
Consented to be taxed, and vote,
And put on pantaloons and coat,
And leave off cattle-stealing:
Lord Stafford mines for coal and salt,
The Duke of Norfolk deals in malt,
The Douglas in red herrings;
And noble name and cultured land,
Palace, and park, and vassal band,
Are powerless to the notes of hand
Of Rothschild or the Barings.
The age of bargaining, said Burke,
Has come to-day the turbaned Turk
|