OLD IRONSIDES.1

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;

Beneath it rung the battle shout,

And burst the cannon's roar;

The meteor of the ocean air

Shall sweep the clouds no more!

Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,
And waves were white below,

No more shall feel the victor's tread,

Or know the conquered knee,
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!

O better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,

And give her to the god of storms,

The lightning and the gale.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.?

1 The famous American ship of war, the Constitution, was called Old Ironsides, and this poem was suggested by a proposal which was made to break her up and sell the iron and timber.

2 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, son of the Rev. Abiel Holmes,

THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS.

Ir was the schooner Hesperus,

That sailed the wintry sea,

And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,

And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.

The skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,

And he watched how the veering flaw did blow

The smoke now west, now south.

Then up and spake an old sailor,

Had sailed to the Spanish Main,

"I pray thee, put into yonder port, For I fear a hurricane.

"Last night the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see !"

The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.

was born in Cambridge, Mass., in 1809, and graduated at Harvard College in 1829. He studied medicine in Europe, returned to the United States, and accepted the professorship of anatomy in Dartmouth College in 1838. In 1847 he became professor of anatomy in the Harvard Medical School, a position he held till 1882, and after his acceptance of that post he lived in Boston. His name, one of the most distinguished in our literature, is familiar to all Americans as that of a poet, critic, novelist, and humorist. Dr. Holmes died in 1894.

Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the northeast;
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain

The vessel in its strength;

She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my

And do not tremble so;

little daughter,

For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;

He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church-bells ring, what may it be?"

O say,

"'Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!"

And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns, O say, what may it be?"

"Some ship in distress, that cannot live In such an angry sea!"

"O father! I see a gleaming light,

say, what

may it be?"

But the father answered never a word,

A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,

With his face turned to the skies,

The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed That saved she might be;

And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave, On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,

And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,

But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,

To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;

And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!

Christ save us all from a death like this,

On the reef of Norman's Woe.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.1

THE SKELETON IN ARMOR.

"SPEAK! speak! thou fearful guest!
Who, with thy hollow breast
Still in rude armor drest,

Comest to daunt me!

1 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, son of the Hon. Stephen Longfellow, was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, and graduated at Bowdoin College in 1825. He studied law for a short time and was soon after appointed professor of modern Languages at Bowdoin. He then travelled abroad for three years, returning in 1829. In 1835 he was appointed professor of belles-lettres at Harvard College, a position which he resigned in 1854. On his appointment he came to Cambridge, where he passed the rest of his life, and where he died March 24, 1882. He is deservedly among the best known and most popular of modern poets, both in England and in this country, and the selections in this volume are abundant evidence of the skill, grace, and artistic form of his narrative poems.