How long have I in bondage lain,
And languished to be free!
Alas! and must I still complain,
Deprived of liberty?
****
Come, Liberty! thou cheerful sound,
Roll through my ravished ears;
Come, let my grief in joys be drowned,
And drive away my fears.
4. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
A female poet of the same period as Horton wrote in the same strain about freedom:
Make me a grave wher’er you will,
In a lowly plain or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth’s humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.
Like Horton, she lived to see her prayer for freedom answered. Of the Emancipation Proclamation she burst forth in joy:
It shall flash through coming ages,
It shall light the distant years;
And eyes now dim with sorrow
Shall be brighter through their tears.
This slave woman was Frances Ellen Watkins, by marriage Harper. Mrs. Harper attained to a greater popularity than any poet of her race prior to Dunbar. As many as ten thousand copies of some of her poems were in circulation in the middle of the last century. Her success was not unmerited. Many singers of no greater merit have enjoyed greater celebrity. She was thoroughly in the fashion of her times, as Phillis Wheatley was in the yet prevalent fashion of Pope, or, perhaps more accurately, Cowper. The models in the middle of the nineteenth century were Mrs. Hemans, Whittier, and Longfellow. It is in their manner she writes. A serene and beautiful Christian spirit tells a moral tale in fluent ballad stanzas, not without poetic phrasing. In all she beholds, in all she experiences, there is a lesson. There is no grief without its consolation. Serene resignation breathes through all her poems—at least through those written after her freedom was achieved. Illustrations of these traits abound. A few stanzas from Go Work in My Vineyard will suffice. After bitter disappointments in attempting to fulfil the command the “lesson” comes thus sweetly expressed:
F. E. W. Harper