The name of Commonwealth is past and gone
O'er the three fractions of the groaning globe;
Venice is crushed, and Holland deigns to own
A sceptre, and endures the purple robe:
If the free Switzer yet bestrides alone
His chainless mountains, 'tis but for a time,
For tyranny of late is cunning grown,
And in its own good season tramples down
The sparkles of our ashes. One great clime,
Whose vigorous offspring by dividing ocean
Are kept apart and nursed in the devotion
Of Freedom, which their fathers fought for, and
Bequeathed a heritage of heart and hand,
And proud distinction from each other land,
Whose sons must bow them at a monarch's motion,
As if his senseless sceptre were a wand
Full of the magic of exploded science —
Still one great clime, in full and free defiance,
Yet rears her crest, unconquered and sublime,
Above the far Atlantic! She has taught
Her Esau-brethren that the haughty flag,
The floating fence of Albion's feebler crag,
May strike to those whose red right hands have bought Rights cheaply earned with blood. Still, still, for ever
Better, though each man's life blood were a river,
That it should flow, and overflow, than creep
Through thousand lazy channels in our veins,
Dammed like the dull canal with locks and chains,
And moving, as a sick man in his sleep,
Three paces, and then faltering: - better be
Where the extinguished Spartans still are free,
In their proud charnel of Thermopylæ,
Than stagnate in our marsh, or o'er the deep
Fly, and one current to the ocean add,
One spirit to the souls our fathers had,
One freeman more, America, to Thee!
SHE had the Asiatic eye,
Such as our Turkish neighborhood
Hath mingled with our Polish blood,
Dark as above us is the sky;
But through it stole a tender light,
Like the first moonrise of midnight;
Large, dark, and swimming in the stream,
Which seemed to melt to its own beam;
All love, half languor, and half fire,
Like saints that at the stake expire,
And lift their raptured looks on high,
As though it were a joy to die.
A brow like a midsummer lake,
Transparent with the sun therein,
When wakes no murmur dare to make,
And heaven beholds her face within.
EXTRACT FROM AN UNPUBLISHED POEM.
COULD I remount the river of my years,
To the first fountain of our smiles and tears,
I would not trace again the stream of hours
Between their outworn banks of withered flowers,
But bid it flow as now
Into the number of the nameless tides.
What is this death? - -a quiet of the heart?
The whole of that which we are a part?
For life is but a vision what I see
Of all which lives alone is life to me,
And being so - the absent are the dead,
Who haunt us from tranquillity, and spread
A dreary shroud around us, and invest
With sad remembrancers our hours of rest.
The absent are the dead- for they are cold,
And ne'er can be what once we did behold;
And they are changed, and cheerless,
The unforgotten do not all forget,
Since thus divided equal must it be
If the deep barrier be of earth, or sea;
It may be both-but one day end it must
In the dark union of insensate dust.
The under-earth inhabitants are they But mingled millions decomposed to clay? The ashes of a thousand ages spread Wherever man has trodden or shall tread?
Or do they in their silent cities dwell,
Each in his incommunicative cell?
Or have they their own language? and a sense
Of breathless being? - darkened and intense
As midnight in her solitude? - Oh Earth!
Where are the past? --and wherefore had they birth; The dead are thy inheritors and we
But bubbles on thy surface; and the key
Of thy profundity is in the grave,
The ebon portal of thy peopled cave,
Where I would walk in spirit, and behold
Our elements resolved to things untold,
And fathom hidden wonders, and explore
The essence of great bosoms now no more.
LINES INTENDED FOR THE OPENING OF
"THE SIEGE OF CORINTH."
In the year since Jesus died for men,
Eighteen hundred years and ten,
We were a gallant company,
Riding o'er land, and sailing o'er sea.
Oh! but we went merrily!
We forded the river and clomb the high hill,
Never our steeds for a day stood still;
Whether we lay in the cave or the shed,
Our sleep fell soft on the hardest bed;
Whether we couched in our rough capote,
On the rougher plank of our gliding boat,
Or stretched on the beach, or our saddles spread
As a pilow beneath the resting head,
Fresh we woke upon the morrow:
All our thoughts and our words had scope,
We had health, and we had hope,
Toil and travel, but no sorrow.
We were all tongues and creeds; ·
Some were those who counted beads,
Some of mosque, and some of church,
And some, or I mis-say, of neither;
Yet through the wide world might ye search,
Nor find a motlier crew nor blither.
But some are dead, and some are gone,
And some are scattered and alone,
And some are rebels on the hills
That look along Epirus' valleys,
Where freedom still at moments rallies,
And pays in blood oppression's ills:
And some are in a far countree,
And some all restlessly at home;
But never more, oh! never we
Shall meet to revel and to roam.
But those hardy days flew checrily,
And when they now fall drearily,
My thoughts, like swallows, skim the main,
And bear my spirit back again
Over the earth, and through the air,
A wild bird, and a wanderer.
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