Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/336

304   He held his slaves, yet made withal
 * No false and vain pretences,

Nor paid a lying priest to seek
 * For Scriptural defences.

His harshest words of proud rebuke,
 * His bitterest taunt and scorning,

Fell fire-like on the Northern brow
 * That bent to him in fawning.

He held his slaves; yet kept the while
 * His reverence for the Human;

In the dark vassals of his will
 * He saw but Man and Woman!

No hunter of God’s outraged poor
 * His Roanoke valley entered;

No trader in the souls of men
 * Across his threshold ventured.

And when the old and wearied man
 * Lay down for his last sleeping,

And at his side, a slave no more,
 * His brother-man stood weeping,

His latest thought, his latest breath,
 * To Freedom’s duty giving,

With failing tongue and trembling hand
 * The dying blest the living.

Oh, never bore his ancient State
 * A truer son or braver!

None trampling with a calmer scorn
 * On foreign hate or favor.

He knew her faults, yet never stooped
 * His proud and manly feeling

To poor excuses of the wrong
 * Or meanness of concealing.

But none beheld with clearer eye
 * The plague-spot o’er her spreading,

None heard more sure the steps of Doom
 * Along her future treading.

For her as for himself he spake,
 * When, his gaunt frame upbracing,

He traced with dying hand “Remorse!”
 * And perished in the tracing.

As from the grave where Henry sleeps,
 * From Vernon’s weeping willow,

And from the grassy pall which hides
 * The Sage of Monticello,

So from the leaf-strewn burial-stone
 * Of Randolph’s lowly dwelling,

Virginia! o’er thy land of slaves
 * A warning voice is swelling!

And hark! from thy deserted fields
 * Are sadder warnings spoken,

From quenched hearths, where thy exiled sons
 * Their household gods have broken.

The curse is on thee,—wolves for men,
 * And briers for corn-sheaves giving!

Oh, more than all thy dead renown
 * Were now one hero living!

they who, tossing midst the storm at night,
 * While turning shoreward, where a beacon shone,
 * Meet the walled blackness of the heaven alone,

So, on the turbulent waves of party tossed, In gloom and tempest, men have seen thy light
 * Quenched in the darkness. At thy hour of noon,

While life was pleasant to thy undimmed sight, And, day by day, within thy spirit grew A holier hope than young Ambition knew, As through thy rural quiet, not in vain, Pierced the sharp thrill of Freedom’s cry of pain,
 * Man of the millions, thou art lost too soon!

Portents at which the bravest stand aghast,— The birth-throes of a Future, strange and vast,
 * Alarm the land; yet thou, so wise and strong,

Suddenly summoned to the burial bed,
 * Lapped in its slumbers deep and ever long,

Hear’st not the tumult surging overhead. Who now shall rally Freedom’s scattering host? Who wear the mantle of the leader lost? Who stay the march of slavery? He whose voice