Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/45

ALICE OF MONMOUTH And the Pilgrim blood in the people's veins

Is pure as the wealth of their mountain ores?

Spirits of sons who, side by side,

In a hundred battles fought and fell,

Whom now no East and West divide,

In the isles where the shades of heroes dwell;

Say, has it reached your glorious rest,

And ruffled the calm which crowns you there,—

The shame that recreants have confest,

The plot that floats in the troubled air?

Sons of New England, here and there,

Wherever men are still holding by

The honor our fathers left so fair!

Say, do you hear the cowards' cry?

Crouching among her grand old crags,

Lightly our mother heeds their noise,

With her fond eyes fixed on distant flags;

But you—do you hear it, Yankee boys?

Washington, January 19, 1863.

ALICE OF MONMOUTH

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of Monmouth shore,

His fame still rings the county o'er!

The stock that he raised, the stallion he rode,

The fertile acres his farmers sowed;

The dinners he gave; the yacht which lay

At his fishing-dock in the Lower Bay;

The suits he waged, through many a year,

For a rood of land behind his pier,— 15