ODE FOR AN AGRICULTURAL CELEBRATION. FAR back in the ages, The plough with wreaths was crowned; The hands of kings and sages Entwined the chaplet round; Till men of spoil disdained the toil By which the world was nourished, And dews of blood enriched the soil Where green their laurels flourished: The guilt that stains her story; And weeps her crimes amid the cares That formed her earliest glory. The proud throne shall crumble, The diadem shall wane, The tribes of earth shall humble The pride of those who reign; G The glory earned in deadly fray Honour waits, o'er all the Earth, RIZPAH. And he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them in the hill before the Lord; and they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of the harvest, in the first days, in the beginning of barley-harvest. And Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until the water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest upon them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night. HEAR what the desolate Rizpah said, 2 SAMUEL, xxi. 10. As on Gibeah's rocks she watched the dead. The sons of Michal before her lay, And her own fair children, dearer than they : By a death of shame they all had died, And were stretched on the bare rock, side by side. And Rizpah, once the loveliest of all That bloomed and smiled in the court of Saul, All wasted with watching and famine now, The low, heart-broken, and wailing strain Of a mother that mourns her children slain: "I have made the crags my home, and spread On their desert backs my sackcloth bed; I have eaten the bitter herb of the rocks, I have wept till I could not weep, and the pain Seven blackened corpses before me lie, In the blaze of the sun and the winds of the sky. "Ye were foully murdered, my hapless sons, By the hands of wicked and cruel ones; Ye fell, in your fresh and blooming prime, All innocent, for your father's crime. He sinned-but he paid the price of his guilt "But I hoped that the cottage roof would be A safe retreat for my sons and me; And that while they ripened to manhood fast, They should wean my thoughts from the woes of the past. And my bosom swelled with a mother's pride, As they stood in their beauty and strength by my side, Tall like their sire, with the princely grace Of his stately form, and the bloom of his face. Oh, what an hour for a mother's heart, Is forbid to cover their bones with earth. G 2 |