ODE

READ AT THE ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIGHT AT CONCORD BRIDGE.

19TH APRIL, 1875.

I.

WHO Cometh over the hills,
Her garments with morning sweet,
The dance of a thousand rills
Making music before her feet?
Her presence freshens the air;
Sunshine steals light from her face;
The leaden footstep of Care
Leaps to the tune of her pace,
Fairness of all that is fair,
Grace at the heart of all grace,
Sweetener of hut and of hall,
Bringer of life out of naught,
Freedom, O, fairest of all

The daughters of Time and Thought!

II.

She cometh, cometh to-day:
Hark! hear ye not her tread,
Sending a thrill through your clay,
Under the sod there, ye dead,
Her nurslings and champions?
Do ye not hear, as she comes,
The bay of the deep-mouthed guns,
The gathering buzz of the drums?
The bells that called ye to prayer,
How wildly they clamor on her,
Crying, "She cometh! prepare
Her to praise and her to honor,
That a hundred years ago
Scattered here in blood and tears
Potent seeds wherefrom should grow
Gladness for a hundred years!"

III.

Tell me, young men, have ye seen, Creature of diviner mien

For true hearts to long and cry for, Manly hearts to live and die for? What hath she that others want? Brows that all endearments haunt, Eyes that make it sweet to dare, Smiles that cheer untimely death

Looks that fortify despair,

Tones more brave than trumpet's breath;
Tell me, maidens, have ye known
Household charm more sweetly rare,
Grace of woman ampler blown,
Modesty more debonair,

Younger heart with wit full grown?
O for an hour of my prime,
The pulse of my hotter years,
That I might praise her in rhyme
Would tingle your eyelids to tears,
Our sweetness, our strength, and our star,
Our hope, our joy, and our trust,
Who lifted us out of the dust,
And made us whatever we are!

IV.

Whiter than moonshine upon snow
Her raiment is, but round the hem
Crimson stained; and, as to and fro
Her sandals flash, we see on them,
And on her instep veined with blue,
Flecks of crimson, on those fair feet,
High-arched, Diana-like, and fleet,
Fit for no grosser stain than dew:
O, call them rather chrisms than stains,
Sacred and from heroic veins !
For, in the glory-guarded pass,
Her haughty and far-shining head
She bowed to shrive Leonidas
With his imperishable dead;
Her, too, Morgarten saw,

Where the Swiss lion fleshed his icy paw;
She followed Cromwell's quenchless star
Where the grim Puritan tread
Shook Marston, Naseby, and Dunbar :
Yea, on her feet are dearer dyes

Yet fresh, nor looked on with untearful eyes.

V.

Our fathers found her in the woods
Where Nature meditates and broods,
The seeds of unexampled things
Which Time to consummation brings
Through life and death and man's un-
stable moods;

They met her here, not recognized,
A sylvan huntress clothed in furs,
To whose chaste wants her bow sufficed,

Nor dreamed what destinies were hers: She taught them bee-like to create Their simpler forms of Church and State; She taught them to endue

The past with other functions than it knew,

And turn in channels strange the uncertain stream of Fate;

Better than all, she fenced them in their need

With iron-handed Duty's sternest creed, 'Gainst Self's lean wolf that ravens word and deed.

VI.

Why cometh she hither to-day
To this low village of the plain
Far from the Present's loud highway,
From Trade's cool heart and seething
brain?

Why cometh she? She was not far away.
Since the soul touched it, not in vain,
With pathos of immortal gain,
'Tis here her fondest memories stay.
She loves yon pine-bemurmured ridge
Where now our broad-browed poet sleeps,
Dear to both Englands; near him he
Who wore the ring of Canace;
But most her heart to rapture leaps
Where stood that era-parting bridge,
O'er which, with footfall still as dew,
The Old Time passed into the New;
Where, as your stealthy river creeps,
He whispers to his listening weeds
Tales of sublimest homespun deeds.
Here English law and English thought
'Gainst the self-will of England fought;
And here were men (coequal with their
fate),

Who did great things, unconscious they

were great.

They dreamed not what a die was cast With that first answering shot; what then?

There was their duty; they were men Schooled the soul's inward gospel to obey, Though leading to the lion's den.

They felt the habit-hallowed world give way

Beneath their lives, and on went they, Unhappy who was last.

When Buttrick gave the word,

That awful idol of the unchallenged Past, Strong in their love, and in their lineage

VII.

Think you these felt no charms

In their gray homesteads and embowered farms?

In household faces waiting at the door Their evening step should lighten up no more ?

In fields their boyish feet had known? In trees their fathers' hands had set, And which with them had grown, Widening each year their leafy coronet? Felt they no pang of passionate regret For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own?

These things are dear to every man that lives,

And life prized more for what it lends than gives.

Yea, many a tie, through iteration sweet, Strove to detain their fatal feet;

And yet the enduring half they chose, Whose choice decides a man life's slave

Maiden half mortal, half divine, We triumphed in thy coming; to the brinks

Our hearts were filled with pride's tu multuous wine;

Better to-day who rather feels than thinks.

Yet will some graver thoughts intrude, And cares of sterner mood;

They won thee: who shall keep thee? From the deeps

Where discrowned empires o'er their ruins brood,

And many a thwarted hope wrings its weak hands and weeps,

I hear the voice as of a mighty wind From all heaven's caverns rushing unconfined,

"I, Freedom, dwell with Knowledge : I abide

The envious Powers of ill nor wink nor sleep:

Be therefore timely wise,

Nor laugh when this one steals, and that one lies,

As if your luck could cheat those sleepless spies,

Till the deaf Fury comes your house to sweep!"

I hear the voice, and unaffrighted bow;
Ye shall not be prophetic now,
Heralds of ill, that darkening fly
Between my vision and the rainbowed
sky,

Or on the left your hoarse forebodings croak

From many a blasted bough

On Yggdrasil's storm-sinewed oak, That once was green, Hope of the West, as thou:

Yet pardon if I tremble while I boast; For I have loved as those who pardon most.

X.

Away, ungrateful doubt, away!
At least she is our own to-day.
Break into rapture, my song,
Verses, leap forth in the sun,
Bearing the joyance along
Like a train of fire as ye run!
Pause not for choosing of words,
Let them but blossom and sing
Blithe as the orchards and birds
With the new coming of spring!
Dance in your jollity, bells;
Shout, cannon; cease not, ye drums;
Answer, ye hillside and dells;
Bow, all ye people! She comes,
Radiant, calm-fronted, as when
She hallowed that April day.

Stay with us! Yes, thou shalt stay,
Softener and strengthener of men,
Freedom, not won by the vain,

Not to be courted in play,

Not to be kept without pain.
Stay with us! Yes, thou wilt stay,
Handmaid and mistress of all,
Kindler of deed and of thought,
Thou that to hut and to hall
Equal deliverance brought !
Souls of her martyrs, draw near,
Touch our dull lips with your fire,
That we may praise without fear
Her our delight, our desire,
Our faith's inextinguishable star,
Our hope, our remembrance, our trust,
Our present, our past, our to be,
Who will mingle her life with our dust
And makes us deserve to be free!

Our grosser minds need this terrestrial hint

To raise long-buried days from tombs of print:

"Here stood he," softly we repeat,
And lo, the statue shrined and still
In that gray minster-front we call the
Past,

Feels in its frozen veins our pulses thrill, Breathes living air and mocks at Death's deceit.

It warms, it stirs, comes down to us at last,

Its features human with familiar light, A man, beyond the historian's art to kill, Or sculptor's to efface with patient chiselblight.

3.

Sure the dumb earth hath memory, nor for naught

Was Fancy given, on whose enchanted loom

Present and Past commingle, fruit and bloom

Of one fair bough, inseparably wrought
Into the seamless tapestry of thought.
So charmed, with undeluded eye we see
In history's fragmentary tale
Bright clews of continuity,

Learn that high natures over Time prevail,

And feel ourselves a link in that entail That binds all ages past with all that are to be.

III.

1.

BENEATH our consecrated elm
A century ago he stood,

Famed vaguely for that old fight in the wood

Whose red surge sought, but could not overwhelm

The life foredoomed to wield our roughhewn helm:

From colleges, where now the gown
To arms had yielded, from the town,
Our rude self-summoned levies flocked

to see

The new-come chiefs and wonder which was he.

No need to question long; close-lipped and tall,

Long trained in murder-brooding forests lone

To bridle others' clamors and his own, Firmly erect, he towered above them all,

The incarnate discipline that was to free

With iron curb that armed democracy.

2.

A motley rout was that which came to stare,

In raiment tanned by years of sun and storm,

Of every shape that was not uniform, Dotted with regimentals here and there; An army all of captains, used to pray And stiff in fight, but serious drill's despair,

Skilled to debate their orders, not obey:

Deacons were there, selectmen, men of note

In half-tamed hamlets ambushed round with woods,

Ready to settle Freewill by a vote,
But largely liberal to its private moods;
Prompt to assert by manners, voice, or

pen,

Or ruder arms, their rights as English