Chapter 10

Where the crystal Ambijejis Stretches broad and clear, And Millnoket's pine-black ridges Hide the browsing deer: Where, through lakes and wide morasses, Or through rocky walls, Swift and strong, Penobscot passes White with foamy falls;

Where, through clouds, are glimpses given Of Katahdin's sides,-- Rock and forest piled to heaven, Torn and ploughed by slides! Far below, the Indian trapping, In the sunshine warm; Far above, the snow-cloud wrapping Half the peak in storm!

Where are mossy carpets better Than the Persian weaves, And than Eastern perfumes sweeter Seem the fading leaves; And a music wild and solemn From the pine-tree's height, Rolls its vast and sea-like volumes On the wind of night;

Not for us the measured ringing From the village spire, Not for us the Sabbath singing Of the sweet-voiced choir Ours the old, majestic temple, Where God's brightness shines Down the dome so grand and ample, Propped by lofty pines!

Keep who will the city's alleys, Take the smooth-shorn plain,-- Give to us the cedar valleys, Rocks and hills of Maine! In our North-land, wild and woody, Let us still have part: Rugged nurse and mother sturdy, Hold us to thy heart!

O, our free hearts beat the warmer For thy breath of snow; And our tread is all the firmer For thy rocks below. Freedom, hand in hand with labor, Walketh strong and brave; On the forehead of his neighbor No man writeth Slave!

Lo, the day breaks! old Katahdin's Pine-trees show its fires, While from these dim forest gardens Rise their blackened spires. Up, my comrades! up and doing! Manhood's rugged play Still renewing, bravely hewing Through the world our way!

BARCLAY OF URY

Up the streets of Aberdeen, By the kick and college green, Rode the Laird of Ury; Close behind him, close beside, Foul of mouth and evil-eyed, Pressed the mob in fury.

Flouted him the drunken churl, Jeered at him the serving-girl, Prompt to please her master; And the begging carlin, late Fed and clothed at Ury's gate, Cursed him as he passed her.

Yet, with calm and stately mien, Up the streets of Aberdeen Came he slowly riding; And, to all he saw and heard, Answering not with bitter word, Turning not for chiding.

Came a troop with broadswords swinging, Bits and bridles sharply ringing, Loose and free and froward; Quoth the foremost, "Ride him down! Push him! prick him! through the town Drive the Quaker coward!"

But from out the thickening crowd Cried a sudden voice and loud "Barclay! Ho! a Barclay!" And the old man at his side Saw a comrade, battle tried, Scarred and sunburned darkly;

Who with ready weapon bare, Fronting to the troopers there, Cried aloud: "God save us, Call ye coward him who stood Ankle deep in Lutzen's blood, With the brave Gustavus?"

"Nay, I do not need thy sword, Comrade mine," said Ury's lord; "Put it up, I pray thee: Passive to His holy will, Trust I in my Master still, Even though He slay me.

"Pledges of thy love and faith, Proved on many a field of death, Not, by me are needed." Marvelled much that henchman bold, That his laud, so stout of old, Now so meekly pleaded.

"Woe's the day!" he sadly said, With a slowly shaking head, And a look of pity; "Ury's honest lord reviled, Mock of knave and sport of child, In his own good city!

"Speak the word, and, master mine, As we charged on Tilly's line, And his Walloon lancers, Smiting through their midst we'll teach Civil look and decent speech To these boyish prancers!"

"Marvel not, mine ancient friend, Like beginning, like the end:" Quoth the Laird of Ury, "Is the sinful servant more Than his gracious Lord who bore Bonds and stripes in Jewry?

"Give me joy that in His name I can bear, with patient frame, All these vain ones offer; While for them He suffereth long, Shall I answer wrong with wrong, Scoffing with the scoffer?

"Happier I, with loss of all, Hunted, outlawed, held in thrall, With few friends to greet me, Than when reeve and squire were seen, Riding out from Aberdeen, With bared heads to meet me.

"When each goodwife, o'er and o'er, Blessed me as I passed her door; And the snooded daughter, Through her casement glancing down, Smiled on him who bore renown From red fields of slaughter.

"Hard to feel the stranger's scoff, Hard the old friend's falling off, Hard to learn forgiving; But the Lord His own rewards, And His love with theirs accords, Warm and fresh and living.

"Through this dark and stormy night Faith beholds a feeble light Up the blackness streaking; Knowing God's own time is best, In a patient hope I rest For the full day-breaking!"

So the Laird of Ury said, Turning slow his horse's head Toward the Tolbooth prison, Where, through iron grates, he heard Poor disciples of the Word Preach of Christ arisen!

Plot in vain, Confessor old, Unto us the tale is told Of thy day of trial; Every age on him who strays From its broad and beaten ways Pours its sevenfold vial.

Happy he whose inward ear Angel comfortings can hear, O'er the rabble's laughter; And, while Hatred's fagots burn, Glimpses through the smoke discern Of the good hereafter.

Knowing this, that never yet Share of Truth was vainly set In the world's wide fallow; After hands shall sow the seed, After hands from hill and mead Reap the harvest yellow.

Thus, with somewhat of the Seer, Must the moral pioneer From the Future borrow; Clothe the waste with dreams of grain, And, on midnight's sky of rain, Paint the golden morrow!

ALL'S WELL

The clouds, which rise with thunder, slake Our thirsty souls with rain; The blow most dreaded falls to break From off our limbs a chain; And wrongs of man to man but make The love of God more plain. As through the shadowy lens of even The eye looks farthest into heaven On gleams of star and depths of blue The glaring sunshine never knew!

RAPHAEL

I shall not soon forget that sight: The glow of autumn's westering day, A hazy warmth, a dreamy light, On Raphael's picture lay.

It was a simple print I saw, The fair face of a musing boy; Yet, while I gazed, a sense of awe Seemed blending with my joy.

A simple print:--the graceful flow Of boyhood's soft and wavy hair, And fresh young lip and cheek, and brow Unmarked and clear, were there.

Yet through its sweet and calm repose I saw the inward spirit shine; It was as if before me rose The white veil of a shrine.

As if, as Gothland's sage has told, The hidden life, the man within, Dissevered from its frame and mould, By mortal eye were seen.

Was it the lifting of that eye, The waving of that pictured hand? Loose as a cloud-wreath on the sky, I saw the walls expand.

The narrow room had vanished,--space, Broad, luminous, remained alone, Through which all hues and shapes of grace And beauty looked or shone.

Around the mighty master came The marvels which his pencil wrought, Those miracles of power whose fame Is wide as human thought.

There drooped thy more than mortal face, O Mother, beautiful and mild! Enfolding in one dear embrace Thy Saviour and thy Child!

The rapt brow of the Desert John; The awful glory of that day When all the Father's brightness shone Through manhood's veil of clay.

And, midst gray prophet forms, and wild Dark visions of the days of old, How sweetly woman's beauty smiled Through locks of brown and gold!

There Fornarina's fair young face Once more upon her lover shone, Whose model of an angel's grace He borrowed from her own.

Slow passed that vision from my view, But not the lesson which it taught; The soft, calm shadows which it threw Still rested on my thought

The truth, that painter, bard, and sage, Even in Earth's cold and changeful clime, Plant for their deathless heritage The fruits and flowers of time.

We shape ourselves the joy or fear Of which the coming life is made, And fill our Future's atmosphere With sunshine or with shade.

The tissue of the Life to be We weave with colors all our own, And in the field of Destiny We reap as we have sown.

Still shall the soul around it call The shadows which it gathered here, And, painted on the eternal wall, The Past shall reappear.

Think ye the notes of holy song On Milton's tuneful ear have died? Think ye that Raphael's angel throng Has vanished from his side?

O no!--We live our life again Or warmly touched, or coldly dim, The pictures of the Past remain,-- Man's works shall follow him!

SEED-TIME AND HARVEST

As o'er his furrowed fields which lie Beneath a coldly-dropping sky, Yet chill with winter's melted snow, The husbandman goes forth to sow,

Thus, Freedom, on the bitter blast The ventures of thy seed we cast, And trust to warmer sun and rain To swell the germ, and fill the grain.

Who calls thy glorious service hard? Who deems it not its own reward? Who, for its trials, counts it less A cause of praise and thankfulness?

It may not be our lot to wield The sickle in the ripened field; Nor ours to hear, on summer eves, The reaper's song among the sheaves.

Yet where our duty's task is wrought In unison with God's great thought, The near and future blend in one, And whatsoe'er is willed, is done!

And ours the grateful service whence Comes, day by day, the recompense; The hope, the trust, the purpose stayed, The fountain and the noonday shade.

And were this life the utmost span, The only end and aim of man, Better the toil of fields like these Than waking dream and slothful ease.

But life, though falling like our grain, Like that revives and springs again; And, early called, how blest are they Who wait in heaven their harvest-day!

THE PROPHECY OF SAMUEL SEWALL

1697

Up and gown the village streets Strange are the forms my fancy meets, For the thoughts and things of to-day are hid, And through the veil of a closed lid The ancient worthies I see again: I hear the tap of the elder's cane, And his awful periwig I see, And the silver buckles of shoe and knee. Stately and slow, with thoughtful air, His black cap hiding his whitened hair, Walks the Judge of the great Assize, Samuel Sewall the good and wise. His face with lines of firmness wrought, He wears the look of a man unbought, Who swears to his hurt and changes not; Yet, touched and softened nevertheless With the grace of Christian gentleness, The face that a child would climb to kiss! True and tender and brave and just, That man might honor and woman trust.

Touching and sad, a tale is told, Like a penitent hymn of the Psalmist old, Of the fast which the good man lifelong kept With a haunting sorrow that never slept, As the circling year brought round the time Of an error that left the sting of crime, When he sat on the bunch of the witchcraft courts, With the laws of Moses and Hales Reports, And spake, in the name of both, the word That gave the witch's neck to the cord, And piled the oaken planks that pressed The feeble life from the warlock's breast! All the day long, from dawn to dawn, His door was bolted, his curtain drawn; No foot on his silent threshold trod, No eye looked on him save that of God, As he baffled the ghosts of the dead with charms Of penitent tears, and prayers, and psalms, And, with precious proofs from the sacred word Of the boundless pity and love of the Lord, His faith confirmed and his trust renewed That the sin of his ignorance, sorely rued, Might be washed away in the mingled flood Of his human sorrow and Christ's dear blood!

Green forever the memory be Of the Judge of the old Theocracy, Whom even his errors glorified, Like a far-seen, sunlit mountain-side By the cloudy shadows which o'er it glide! Honor and praise to the Puritan Who the halting step of his age outran, And, seeing the infinite worth of man In the priceless gift the Father gave, In the infinite love that stooped to save, Dared not brand his brother a slave! "Who doth such wrong," he was wont to say, In his own quaint, picture-loving way, "Flings up to Heaven a hand-grenade Which God shall cast down upon his head!"

Widely as heaven and hell, contrast That brave old jurist of the past And the cunning trickster and knave of courts Who the holy features of Truth distorts,-- Ruling as right the will of the strong, Poverty, crime, and weakness wrong; Wide-eared to power, to the wronged and weak Deaf as Egypt's gods of leek; Scoffing aside at party's nod, Order of nature and law of God; For whose dabbled ermine respect were waste, Reverence folly, and awe misplaced; Justice of whom 't were vain to seek As from Koordish robber or Syrian Sheik! O, leave the wretch to his bribes and sins; Let him rot in the web of lies he spins! To the saintly soul of the early day, To the Christian judge, let us turn and say "Praise and thanks for an honest man!-- Glory to God for the Puritan!"

I see, far southward, this quiet day, The hills of Newbury rolling away, With the many tints of the season gay, Dreamily blending in autumn mist Crimson, and gold, and amethyst. Long and low, with dwarf trees crowned, Plum Island lies, like a whale aground, A stone's toss over the narrow sound. Inland, as far as the eye can go, The hills curve round like a bonded bow; A silver arrow from out them sprung, I see the shine of the Quasycung; And, round and round, over valley and hill, Old roads winding, as old roads will, Here to a ferry, and there to a mill; And glimpses of chimneys and gabled eaves, Through green elm arches and maple leaves,-- Old homesteads sacred to all that can Gladden or sadden the heart of man,-- Over whose thresholds of oak and stone Life and Death have come and gone! There pictured tiles in the fireplace show, Great beams sag from the ceiling low, The dresser glitters with polished wares, The long clock ticks on the foot-worn stairs, And the low, broad chimney shows the crack By the earthquake made a century back. Lip from their midst springs the collage spire With the crest of its cock in the sun afire; Beyond are orchards and planting lands, And great salt marshes and glimmering sands, And, where north and south the coast-lines run, The blink of the sea in breeze and sun!

I see it all like a chart unrolled, But my thoughts are full of the past and old, I hear the tales of my boyhood told; And the shadows and shapes of early days Flit dimly by in the veiling haze, With measured movement and rhythmic chime Weaving like shuttles my web of rhyme. I think of the old man wise and good Who once on yon misty hillsides stood, (A poet who never measured rhyme, A seer unknown to his dull-eared time,) And, propped on his staff of age, looked down, With his boyhood's love, on his native town, Where, written, as if on its hills and plains, His burden of prophecy yet remains, For the voices of wood, and wave, and wind To read in the ear of the musing mind:--

"As long as Plum Island, to guard the coast As God appointed, shall keep its post; As long as a salmon shall haunt the deep Of Merrimack River, or sturgeon leap; As long as pickerel swift and slim, Or red-backed perch, in Crane Pond swim; As long as the annual sea-fowl know Their time to come and their time to go; As long as cattle shall roam at will The green, grass meadows by Turkey Hill; As long as sheep shall look from the side Of Oldtown Hill on marishes wide, And Parker River, and salt-sea tide; As long as a wandering pigeon shall search The fields below from his white-oak perch, When the barley-harvest is ripe and shorn, And the dry husks fall from the standing corn; As long as Nature shall not grow old, Nor drop her work from her doting hold, And her care for the Indian corn forget, And the yellow rows in pairs to set;-- So long shall Christians here be born, Grow up and ripen as God's sweet corn!-- By the beak of bird, by the breath of frost Shall never a holy ear be lost, But husked by Death in the Planter's sight, Be sown again m the fields of light!"

The Island still is purple with plums, Up the river the salmon comes, The sturgeon leaps, and the wild-fowl feeds On hillside berries and marish seeds,-- All the beautiful signs remain, From spring-time sowing to autumn rain The good man's vision returns again! And let us hope, as well we can, That the Silent Angel who garners man May find some grain as of old he found In the human cornfield ripe and sound, And the Lord of the Harvest deign to own The precious seed by the fathers sown!

SKIPPER IRESON'S RIDE

Of all the rides since the birth of time, Told in story or sung in rhyme,-- On Apuleius's Golden Ass, Or one-eyed Calendar's horse of brass, Witch astride of a human back, Islam's prophet on Al-Borak,-- The strangest ride that ever was sped Was Ireson's, out from Marblehead! Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart By the women of Marblehead!