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Rh And wove his forest dreams into quaint prose,
 * Our sires his heroes, where, in holy strife,

They treacherously war with friends and foes;
 * Where meek religion wears the assassin’s knife,

And “bids the desert blossom like the rose,”
 * By sprinkling earth with blood of Indian life,

And rears her altars o’er the indignant bones Of murdered maidens, wives, and little ones.

of Galilee’s babe-butchering deed
 * Lives not on history’s blushing page alone;

Our skies, it seems, have seen like victims bleed,
 * And our own Ramahs echoed groan for groan:

The fiends of France, whose cruelties decreed
 * Those dextrous drownings in the Loire and Rhone,

Were at their worst, but copyists second-hand Of our shrined, sainted sires, the Plymouth pilgrim-band,

Or else fibs. Kindred wolves have bayed
 * Truth’s moon in chorus, but believe them not!

Beneath the dark trees that the Lethe shade,
 * Be he, his folios, followers, facts, forgot;

And let his perishing monument be made
 * Of his own unsold volumes: ’tis the lot