With a stifled cry of horror straight she turned away her head; With a sad and bitter feeling looked she back upon her dead; But she heard the youth's low moaning, and his struggling breath of pain, And she raised the cooling water to his parching lips again. Whispered low the dying soldier, pressed her hand and faintly smiled; Was that pitying face his mother's? did she watch beside her child? All his stranger words with meaning her woman's heart supplied; With her kiss upon his forehead, 'Mother!' murmured he, and died! Spake the mournful Mexic woman, as she laid him with her dead, And turned to soothe the living, and bind the wounds which bled. Look forth once more, Ximena! 'Like a cloud before the wind Rolls the battle down the mountains, leaving blood and death behind; Ah! they plead in vain for mercy; in the dust the wounded strive; Hide your faces, holy angels! O thou Christ of God, forgive!' Sink, O Night, among thy mountains! let the cool, gray shadows fall; Dying brothers, fighting demons, drop thy curtain over all! Through the thickening winter twilight, wide apart the battle rolled, In the sheath the sabre rested, and the cannon's lips grew cold. 60 But the noble Mexic women still their holy task pursued, Through that long, dark night of sorrow, worn and faint and lacking food. Over weak and suffering brothers, with a tender care they hung, And the dying foeman blessed them in a strange and Northern tongue. Not wholly lost, O Father! is this evil world of ours; Upward, through its blood and ashes, spring afresh the Eden flowers; From its smoking hell of battle, Love and Pity send their prayer, And still thy white-winged angels hover dimly in our air! THE HUSKERS 1847. Ir was late in mild October, and the long autumnal rain Had left the summer harvest-fields all green with grass again; The first sharp frosts had fallen, leaving all the woodlands gay With the hues of summer's rainbow, or the meadow-flowers of May. There, when the snows about us drift, And winter winds are cold, Fair hands the broken grain shall sift, And knead its meal of gold. Let vapid idlers loll in silk Around their costly board; Where'er the wide old kitchen hearth Then shame on all the proud and vain, 70 80 90 1 The 'Lake of the Hills' is Lake Winnipesaukee. One of Whittier's favorite resorts was West Ossipee, at the foot of the Ossipee Mountains, just northeast of the lake. See Pickard's Whittier-Land, pp. 109-115; his Life of Whittier, vol. ii, p. 669; and Whittier's 'Among the Hills' and 'Summer by the Lakeside.' Mt. Chocorua, north of West Ossipee, the most picturesque, though by no means the highest, of the mountains of New England. Its cone is formed of a peculiar reddish stone known as Chocorua granite.' For the legend of the Indian chief from whom it was named, see Thomas Starr King's The White Hills, or Sweetser's White Mountains, p. 341. See also Whittier's How They Climbed Chocorua' in Whittier-Land, pp. 111-114. One of Longfellow's early poems, 'Jeckoyva,' had the Indian chief Chocorua for its hero. The name Winnipesaukee is popularly thought to mean The Smile of the Great Spirit.' Students of the Indian languages, however, agree that its real meaning is Beautiful Water in a High Place.' 1 This poem was the outcome of the surprise and grief and forecast of evil consequences which I felt on reading the Seventh of March speech of Daniel Webster in support of the Compromise,' and the Fugitive Slave Law. No partisan or personal enmity dictated it. On the contrary my admiration of the splendid personality and intellectual power of the great senator was never stronger than when I laid down his speech, and, in one of the saddest moments of my life, penned my protest... But death softens all resentments, and the consciousness of a common inheritance of frailty and weakness modifies the severity of judgment. Years after, in 'The Lost Occasion,' I gave utterance to an almost universal regret that the great statesman did not live to see the flag which he loved trampled under the feet of Slavery, and, in view of this desecration, make his last days glorious in defence of Liberty and Union, one and inseparable.' (WHITTIER.) 'Ichabod' and 'The Lost Occasion' (p. 348) should necessarily be read together. The best possible comment on the two poems, from the point of view of to-day, is that of Professor Carpenter: Those whom Whittier knew best in later life relate that he came eventually to feel that Webster was perhaps right and he wrong; that compromise meant weary years of waiting, but that the further and consistent pursuit of such a policy might have successfully avoided the evils of war and of reconstruction. However that may be, the verses [of 'Ichabod '] are, in their awful scorn, the most powerful that he ever wrote. Right or wrong, he spoke for a great part of the North and West, nay, for the world. For the poem, in much the same fashion as Browning's Lost Leader,' is becoming disassociated with any special name, and may thus remain a most remarkable expression - the most terrible in our literature of the aversion which any mass of people may feel, especially in a democracy, for the once-worshipped leader whose acts and words, in matters of the greatest public weal, seem to retrograde.' (Carpenter's Whittier, pp. 221-222.) Compare Emerson's 'Webster,' p. 61, and the note on it; and Holmes's 'The Statesman's Secret,' and The Birthday of Daniel Webster.' See also Pickard's Life of Whittier, vol. i, pp. 327-328. For the meaning of the title, see 1 Samuel iv, 19-22 : And she named the child Ichabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel.' It may have been sug gested by an anonymous article of Lowell's on Daniel Webster, in the Anti-Slavery Standard (June, 1846), in which he says: Shall not the Recording Angel write Ichabod after the name of this man in the great book of Doom? (Scudder's Life of Lowell, vol. i, p. 201.) |