Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/270

238   To her who, in our evil time, Dragged into light the nation’s crime With strength beyond the strength of men, And, mightier than their swords, her pen! To her who world-wide entrance gave To the log-cabin of the slave; Made all his wrongs and sorrows known, And all earth’s languages his own,— North, South, and East and West, made all The common air electrical, Until the o’ercharged bolts of heaven Blazed down, and every chain was riven!


 * Welcome from each and all to her

Whose Wooing of the Minister Revealed the warm heart of the man Beneath the creed-bound Puritan, And taught the kinship of the love Of man below and God above; To her whose vigorous pencil-strokes Sketched into life her Oldtown Folks; Whose fireside stories, grave or gay, In quaint Sam Lawson’s vagrant way, With old New England’s flavor rife, Waifs from her rude idyllic life, Are racy as the legends old By Chaucer or Boccaccio told; To her who keeps, through change of place And time, her native strength and grace, Alike where warm Sorrento smiles, Or where, by birchen-shaded isles, Whose summer winds have shivered o’er The icy drift of Labrador, She lifts to light the priceless Pearl Of Harpswell’s angel-beckoned girl! To her at threescore years and ten Be tributes of the tongue and pen; Be honor, praise, and heart-thanks given, The loves of earth, the hopes of heaven!


 * Ah, dearer than the praise that stirs

The air to-day, our love is hers! She needs no guaranty of fame Whose own is linked with Freedom’s name. Long ages after ours shall keep Her memory living while we sleep; The waves that wash our gray coast lines, The winds that rock the Southern pines, Shall sing of her; the unending years Shall tell her tale in unborn ears. And when, with sins and follies past, Are numbered color-hate and caste, White, black, and red shall own as one The noblest work by woman done.

garden roses long ago
 * Have perished from the leaf-strewn walks;

Their pale, fair sisters smile no more
 * Upon the sweet-brier stalks.

Gone with the flower-time of my life,
 * Spring’s violets, summer’s blooming pride,

And Nature’s winter and my own
 * Stand, flowerless, side by side.

So might I yesterday have sung;
 * To-day, in bleak December’s noon,

Come sweetest fragrance, shapes, and hues,
 * The rosy wealth of June!