Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/322

290 late. He stretches out the arms of a Father’s love to you—to the vilest sinner—and says: “Come unto me and be saved.”

No event in the history of the anti-slavery struggle so stirred the two hemispheres as did this dreadful sentence. A cry of horror was heard from Europe. In the British House of Lords Brougham and Denman spoke of it with mingled pathos and indignation. Thirteen hundred clergymen and church officers in Great Britain addressed a memorial to the churches of South Carolina against the atrocity. Indeed, so strong was the pressure of the sentiment of abhorrence and disgust that South Carolina yielded to it, and the sentence was commuted to scourging and banishment.

thou who seekest late and long
 * A License from the Holy Book

For brutal lust and fiendish wrong,
 * Man of the Pulpit, look!

Lift up those cold and atheist eyes,
 * This ripe fruit of thy teaching see;

And tell us how to heaven will rise The incense of this sacrifice—
 * This blossom of the gallows tree!

Search out for slavery’s hour of need
 * Some fitting text of sacred writ;

Give heaven the credit of a deed
 * Which shames the nether pit.

Kneel, smooth blasphemer, unto Him
 * Whose truth is on thy lips a lie;

Ask that His bright winged cherubim May bend around that scaffold grim
 * To guard and bless and sanctify.

O champion of the people’s cause!
 * Suspend thy loud and vain rebuke

Of foreign wrong and Old World’s laws,
 * Man of the Senate, look!

Was this the promise of the free,
 * The great hope of our early time,

That slavery’s poison vine should be Upborne by Freedom’s prayer-nursed tree
 * O’erclustered with such fruits of crime?

Send out the summons East and West,
 * And South and North, let all be there

Where he who pitied the oppressed
 * Swings out in sun and air.

Let not a Democratic hand
 * The grisly hangman’s task refuse;

There let each loyal patriot stand, Awaiting slavery’s command,
 * To twist the rope and draw the noose!

But vain is irony—unmeet
 * Its cold rebuke for deeds which start

In fiery and indignant beat
 * The pulses of the heart.

Leave studied wit and guarded phrase
 * For those who think but do not feel;

Let men speak out in words which raise Where’er they fall, an answering blaze
 * Like flints which strike the fire from steel.

Still let a mousing priesthood ply
 * Their garbled text and gloss of sin,

And make the lettered scroll deny
 * Its living soul within:

Still let the place-fed, titled knave
 * Plead robbery’s right with purchased lips,

And tell us that our fathers gave For Freedom’s pedestal, a slave,
 * The frieze and moulding, chains and whips!

But ye who own that Higher Law
 * Whose tablets in the heart are set,

Speak out in words of power and awe
 * That God is living yet!

Breathe forth once more those tones sublime
 * Which thrilled the burdened prophet’s lyre,

And in a dark and evil time Smote down on Israel’s fast of crime
 * And gift of blood, a rain of fire!

Oh, not for us the graceful lay
 * To whose soft measures lightly move

The footsteps of the faun and fay,
 * O’er-locked by mirth and love!

But such a stern and startling strain
 * As Britain’s hunted bards flung down

From Snowden to the conquered plain, Where harshly clanked the Saxon chain
 * On trampled field and smoking town.

By Liberty’s dishonored name,
 * By man’s lost hope and failing trust,

By words and deeds which bow with shame
 * Our foreheads to the dust,

By the exulting strangers’ sneer,
 * Borne to us from the Old World’s thrones,

And by their victims’ grief who hear, In sunless mines and dungeons drear,
 * How Freedom’s land her faith disowns!

Speak out in acts. The time for words
 * Has passed, and deeds suffice alone;