Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 13.djvu/503

1864]

Of block and lash and overseer,

And dark, mild faces pale with fear,

Of baying hell-hounds panting near.

But then the gentle story told

My childhood, in the days of old,

Rang out its lessons manifold.

O prodigal, and lost! arise

And read the welcome blest that lies

In a kind Father&rsquo;s patient eyes!

Thy elder brother grudges not

The lost and found should share his lot,

And wrong in concord be forgot.

Thus mused I, as the hours went by,

Till the relieving guard drew nigh,

And then was challenge and reply.

And as I hastened back to line,

It seemed an omen half divine

That &ldquo;Concord&rdquo; was the countersign.

 

'!T is among the possibilities of the far-reaching in its anticipations as it is future, that, in due course of time, the deep-rooted in its recollections. Quan- United States of America shall become turn radice in Tartara, tantum vertice to England what England has become to ad auras, if we may invert the poet's Saxony. We cannot be sure, it is true, words. An American millionnaire may that the mother-country will live, a pros- be anxious about the condition of his perous and independent kingdom, to see grandchildren, but a peer whose ancestors the full maturity of her gigantic offspring, came in with the Conqueror looks ahead We have no right to assume it as a mat- at least as far as the end of the twentieth ter of course, that the Western Autocracy century. The royal astrologers have cast will fill up, unbroken, the outline traced the horoscope of the nationality born be- for it by Nature and history. But Eng- neath the evening-star, and report it as land, forced as her civilization must be being ominous for that which finds its na- considered ever since the Conquest, has tivity in the House of Leo. a reasonable chance for another vigorous Every dynasty sees a natural enemy century, and the Union, the present storm in a self- governing state. Its dread of once weathered, does not ask a longer that enemy is in exact proportion to the time than this to become, according to the amount of liberty enjoyed by its own prediction of the London " Times," the people. Freedom is the ferment of Free- master-power of the planet. dom. The moistened sponge drinks up The class that guides the destinies of water greedily ; the dry one sheds it. Rus- Great Britain and her dependencies is sia has no popular legislation, and her