Thank God! not yet so vilely can Massachusetts bow,
The spirit of her early time is with her even now.
Dream not, because her Pilgrim blood moves slow, and calm, and cool,
She thus can stoop her chainless neck, a sister's slave and tool!
For ourselves and for our children, the vow which we have given
For Freedom and Humanity, is registered in Heaven.
No slave-hunt in our borders! No pirate on our strand!
No fetters in the Bay State! No slave upon our land!
J.G. WHITTIER.
THE HIGHER LAW.
Man was not made for forms, but forms for man;
And there are times when Law itself must bend
To that clear spirit, that hath still outran
The speed of human justice. In the end,
Potentates, not Humanity, must fall.
Water will find its level; fire will burn;
The winds must blow around this earthly ball;
This earthly ball by day and night must turn.
Freedom is typed in every element.
Man must be free! If not through law, why then
Above the law! until its force be spent,
And justice brings a better. When, O, when,
Father of Light! shall the great reckoning come,
To lift the weak, and strike the oppressor dumb?
C.P. CRANCH.
ON THE SURRENDER OF A FUGITIVE SLAVE.
Look on who will in apathy, and stifle, they who can,
The sympathies, the hopes, the words, that make man truly man;
Let those whose hearts are dungeoned up, with interest or with ease,
Consent to hear, with quiet pulse, of loathsome deeds like these.
I first drew in New England's air, and from her hardy breast
Sucked in the tyrant-hating milk, that will not let me rest;
And if my words seem treason to the dullard and the tame,
'Tis but my Bay State dialect—our fathers spake the same.
Shame on the costly mockery of piling stone on stone
To those who won our liberty! the heroes dead and gone!
While we look coldly on and see law-shielded ruffians slay
The men who fain would win their own! the heroes of to-day!
Are we pledged to craven silence? O, fling it to the wind,
The parchment wall that bars us from the least of human kind!
That makes us cringe, and temporize, and dumbly stand at rest,
While Pity's burning flood of words is red-hot in the breast!
We owe allegiance to the State; but deeper, truer, more,
To the sympathies that God hath set within our spirit's core.
Our country claims our fealty; we grant it so; but then
Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men!