Go, cut down trees in the forest, And trim the straightest boughs; Cut down trees in the forest, And build me a wooden house. Call the people together, The young men and the sires, The digger in the harvest-field, Hireling, and him that hires; And here in a pine state-house They shall choose men to rule In every needful faculty, In church and state and school. Lo, now! if these poor men Can govern the land and sea, And make just laws below the sun, As planets faithful be. And ye shall succor men; 'Tis nobleness to serve; Help them who cannot help again; Beware from right to swerve. I break your bonds and masterships, Free be his heart and hand henceforth I cause from every creature His proper good to flow; As much as he is and doeth, So much he shall bestow. But, laying hands on another, To coin his labor and sweat, He goes in pawn to his victim For eternal years in debt. To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound! Pay ransom to the owner, And fill the bag to the brim. Who is the owner? The slave is owner, And ever was. Pay him. O North! give him beauty for rags, And honor, O South! for his shame; Nevada! coin thy golden crags With Freedom's image and name. Up! and the dusky race That sat in darkness long,— Be swift their feet as antelopes, And as behemoth strong. Come, East and West and North, My will fulfilled shall be, -Ralph Waldo Emerson. TWENTY-EIGHT AND TWENTYNINE. I heard a sick man's dying sigh, Let Sorrow shed her lonely tear Let Revelry hold her ladle; Bring boughs of cypress for the bier- Mutes to wait on the funeral state, A requiem for Twenty-eight, Alas for human happiness! Alas for human sorrow! What else will be our morrow? Must roll through Twenty-nine. Some king will come, in heaven's good time, To the tomb his father came to; Some thief will wade through blood and crime To a crown he has no claim to; Some suffering land will rend in twain The manacles that bound her, And gather the links of the broken chain To fasten them proudly round her; The grand and great will love and hate At a mean inn in German Aarau born, To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn, Tricked out with a Parisian speech and face, Imparting life renewed, old classic grace; Then soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn, A-Kempis! her departing soul outworn, While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place Ah, not the radiant spirit of Greece alone She had-one power, which made her breast its home! In her, like us, there clashed, contending powers, Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome. The strife, the mixture in her soul are ours; Her genius and her glory are her own. -Matthew Arnold. January 4. TO CHARLES DICKENS. On his departure for America, Jan. 4, 1842. Pshaw away with leaf and berry, I would drink a health to Boz! Here's success to all his antics, Since it pleases him to roam, And to paddle o'er Atlantics, After such a sale at home! May he shun all rocks whatever, And each shallow sand that lurks, And his passage be as clever As the best among his works! -Thomas Hood. Wanders-yet still upon the column's height The sacred figure of the old man stands. Now in the unending rain each field be comes A lake, and every furrow is a stream. From the monotonous grey sky pour down, Continuous, the waters obstinate. O Saint, I tremble at the thought of thee. And well I deem the Sun, and all the stars, And wandering birds who now for forty years Have contemplated in the fields of air Thy meagre profile pale, and all the winds Who shook in storms thy venerable beard, White, hoary like the foam o' the sea, and all Nature, have trembled as they looked on thee. |