THE LOST STATESMAN.
Written on hearing of the death of Silas Wright of New York.
As they who, tossing midst the storm at night,
While turning shoreward, where a beacon shone,
Meet the walled blackness of the heaven alone,
So, on the turbulent waves of party tossed,
In gloom and tempest, men have seen thy light
Quenched in the darkness. At thy hour of noon,
While life was pleasant to thy undimmed sight,
And, day by day, within thy spirit grew
A holier hope than young Ambition knew,
As through thy rural quiet, not in vain,
Pierced the sharp thrill of Freedom's cry of pain,
Man of the millions, thou art lost too soon
Portents at which the bravest stand aghast,—
The birth-throes of a Future, strange and vast,
Alarm the land; yet thou, so wise and strong,
Suddenly summoned to the burial bed,
Lapped in its slumbers deep and ever long,
Hear'st not the tumult surging overhead.
Who now shall rally Freedom's scattering host?
Who wear the mantle of the leader lost?
Who stay the march of slavery? He whose voice
Hath called thee from thy task-field shall not lack
Yet bolder champions, to beat bravely back
The wrong which, through his poor ones, reaches Him:
Yet firmer hands shall Freedom's torchlights trim,
And wave them high across the abysmal black,
Till bound, dumb millions there shall see them and rejoice.
10th mo., 1847.
THE SLAVES OF MARTINIQUE.
Suggested by a daguerreotype taken from a small French engraving of two negro figures, sent to the writer by Oliver Johnson.
BEAMS of noon, like burning lances, through the tree-tops flash and glisten, As she stands before her lover, with raised face to look and listen.
Dark, but comely, like the maiden in the ancient
Jewish song
Scarcely has the toil of task-fields done her graceful
beauty wrong.
He, the strong one and the manly, with the vassal's
garb and hue,
Holding still his spirit's birthright, to his higher
nature true;
Hiding deep the strengthening purpose of a freeman
in his heart,
As the gregree holds his Fetich from the white
man's gaze apart.
Ever foremost of his comrades, when the driver's
morning horn
Calls away to stifling mill-house, to the fields of
cane and corn.