The era of peace seems breaking with the hand of cruel war. It was night to them, but a glorious day to us.
We close this chapter with this fresh, new poem of the time, by Whittier.
At a time when it was rumored that armed men were drilling by the thousands in Virginia and Maryland, for the invasion of Washington before February, so as to prevent the announcement in congress of Lincoln’s election, in the same issue of the Kennebec Journal, was a poem by John G. Whittier, closing with these lines:—
“The crisis presses on us; face to face with us it stands,
With solemn lips of question, like the sphinx in Egypt’s sands!
This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin;
This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin;
Even now from starry Gerizim, or Ebal’s cloudy crown,
We call the dews of blessing, or the bolts of cursing down.
“By all for which the Martyrs bore their agony and shame;