COME TO THE SOUTH.
Come to our hill-sides and come to our prairies,
Broaden our fields with the spade and the plow;
Bring us from Deutsche-land to gardens and dairies,
To household and kitchen the fraulein and frau;
Come from the birth-land of Goethe and Schiller,
Scholar and poet and teacher and priest;
Come where each acre of tilth needs a tiller,
And people the South with the strength of the East;
Bring you the songs and dance of Rhine-land
The legends and sports of your home if you will;
Give us the lays of your forest and vine-land,
With the strong arm of labor the artisan's skill.
Come from the cliffs where the sea-eagle fledges
His brood o'er the wild ocean-storm of the North,
Where the fisher-boats play round the moss-mantled ledges,
Where the sea-kraken sports and the maelstrom has birth;
Leave you the land where the treacherous glacier
Mocks you, blinded and chilled with its pitiless glare,
Where all save the mist-clouded rim of the geyser
In the impotent sunlight lies frozen and bare;
Where Hecla sits mailed like a desolate giant,
With his flame-covered crest and his foot-stool of snow,
O'er the storm-rended realm of the Viking defiant,
And the sea rolling red in his terrible glow.
We call you, O men of the kilt and the tartan,
From highland and lowland, from mountain and mere—
Though you feel for your country the love of a Spartan,
A sunnier home and a welcome is here;
Must you cling to the fields where the gorse and the heather
That bloomed for your grandsires still blossom for you?
Cannot hopes that await you here loosen the tether
Which a birthright descended has cast over you?
There is room, there is work for the peer and the peasant,
From the land of the shamrock, the olive, and vine,
You may lift up unquestioned the cross with the crescent,
Or the lilies of France with the thistle-bloom twine.
No prosy pen could have indited those picturesque and stirring lines.
In his Centennial Hymn, "The Victory of Peace," in "The Blue and the Gray," "Under Two Flags," "Gettysburg" and other poems, his muse dons American colors and echoes the national note of peace and unity.
"Now another flag is o'er us,
And the bitter hate that tore us,
From beneath its shadow falters,
Let us raise the olden altars,
Let us smite the wretch who palters
With the tie that binds forever
Those who lost and won together,
While their banners live in story,
Haloed with a common glory."
GETTYSBURG.
1863
We see those splendid columns sweep
Across the field. Men hold their breath;
Before them frowns the sullen steep,
Before and near is life or death.
* * * * *
They are not such as break and fly,
No laggards droop, no cowards quail,
Those only pause who drop and die
Beneath that storm of leaden hail.
* * * * *
'Tis sunset. For the Blue, a gleam
Of glory fills the dying day;
From clouds above that sunset stream
Another glory for the Gray.