Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/479

Rh Some woman set her pale and quivering face,

Firm as a rock, against a man's disgrace;

A little child suffered in silence lest

His savage pain should wound a mother's breast;

Some quiet scholar flung his gauntlet down

And risked, in Truth's great name, the synod's frown;

A civic hero, in the calm realm of laws,

Did that which suddenly drew a world's applause;

And one to the pest his lithe young body gave

That he a thousand thousand lives might save.

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EDWARD EVERETT HALE

BARDS OF BRITAIN (1908)

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