—Wild filly from the mountain-side,
Doomed to the close and chafing thills,
Lend me thy long, untiring stride
To seek with thee thy western hills!
I hear the whispering voice of Spring,
The thrush's trill, the cat-bird's cry,
Like some poor bird with prisoned wing
That sits and sings, but longs to fly.
Oh for one spot of living green,—
One little spot where leaves can grow,—
To love unblamed, to walk unseen,
To dream above, to sleep below!
* * * * *
THE PRESIDENT'S PROPHECY OF PEACE.
There was joy in the national palace on the eve of May-day. The heart of the Chief of Thirty Millions was full of gladness. It was a high holiday at the capital of the nation. Jubilant processions crowded the streets. The boom of cannon told to the heavens that some great event, full of glory and of blessing, was just happily born into the history of the world. Strains of triumphant music at once expressed and stirred afresh the rapture which the new fruition of a deferred and doubting hope had kindled in myriad breasts. Rejoicing multitudes swarmed before the palace gate, and with congratulatory shouts compelled the presence of the Nation's Head. He stood before them proud and happy, and answered to the transports of their joy with a responsive sympathy. He rejoiced in the prospect of the peace and prosperity with which the occasion of this jubilee was to cheer and bless the land in all its borders. His chosen friends and counsellors surrounded him and echoed his prophecies of good. A kindred homage was next paid to the virtuous artificers of the new-wrought blessing, without whose shaping hands it would have perished before the sight, or taken some dreadful form of mischief and of horror. Their words of cheer and exultation, too, swelled the surging tide of patriotic emotion till it overflowed again. Thus with the thunder of artillery, with the animating sound of drum and trumpet, with the more persuasive music of impassioned words, with shoutings and with revelry, these jocund compeers, from the highest to the lowest, mingled into one by the alchemy of a common joy, chased the hours of that memorable night and gave strange welcome to the morn of May.
What great happiness had just befallen, which should thus transport with joy the chief magistrate of a mighty nation, and send an answering pulse of rapture through all the veins of his capital? The armies of the Republic had surely just returned in triumph from some dubious battle joined with a barbarian invader who threatened to trample all her cherished rights, and the institutions which are their safeguard, under his iron heel. Perhaps the Angel of Mercy had at length set again the seals upon some wide-wasting pestilence which had long been walking in darkness, with Terror going before her and Death following after. Or was it the desolating course of Famine that had been stayed, as it swept, gaunt and hungry, over the land, and consumed its inhabitants from off its face? Peradventure, the prayers of holy men had prevailed, and the heavens which had been as brass were melted, and the earth which had been but ashes revived again, a living altar, crowned afresh with flowers, and prophetic of the thank-offerings of harvests. Or it might be that a great discoverer had added a new world to the domain of human happiness, by some invention which should lighten the toils and multiply the innocent satisfactions of mankind. Or had virtue and intelligence won some signal victory over barbarism and ignorance, and blessed with liberty and knowledge regions long abandoned to despotism and to darkness? These had been, indeed, occasions on which the chief ruler of a great people might fitly lead the anthem of a nation's thanksgiving.
But the joy which thus overflowed the hearts of President and people at the metropolis of our politics, and which has sprinkled with its cordial drops kindred spirits scattered far and wide over the land, welled up from no wholesome sources such as these. It was no deliverance from barbarous enemies, from pestilential disease, from meagre famine, that moved those raptures,—no joy at ignorance dissipated, barbarism dispelled, or tyranny put down. The "peace" and the "prosperity," the prophecy of which was so sweet to the souls that took sweet counsel together on that night, were of a kind which only souls tuned to such unison and so subtly trained could fully comprehend and rightly estimate. This gentle peace, thus joyfully presaged, is to be won by the submission of an inchoate State to a form of government subjecting its inhabitants to institutions abhorrent to their souls and fatal to their prosperity, forced upon them at the point of the bowie-knife and the muzzle of the revolver by hordes of sordid barbarians from a hostile soil, their natural and necessary enemies. And the sweet harbinger of this blessed peace, the halcyon which broods over the stormy waves and tells of the calm at hand, is a bribe so cunningly devised that its contrivers firmly believe it will buy up the souls of these much-injured men, and reconcile them to the shame and infamy of trading away their lights and their honor as the boot of a dirty bargain in the land-market. And the "prosperity" which is to wait upon this happy "peace" glows with a like golden promise. It is a prosperity that shall bless Kansas into a Virginia or a North Carolina by virtue of the same means which has crowned the Slave-country with the wealth, the civilization, and the intelligence it has to brag of. It is such a prosperity as ever follows after the footsteps of Slavery,—a prosperity which is to blight the soil, degrade the minds, debauch the morals, impoverish the substance, and subvert the independence of a loathing population, if the joy of the President and his directors is to be made full. Such is the message of peace and good-will which thrilled with prophetic raptures the hearts which flowed together on that happy night, and such the blessed prospects which made the air of Washington vocal with the ecstasies of triumph.
The history of the world is full enough of illustrations of "the Art of making a Great Kingdom a Small One." The art of degrading the imperial idea of a true republic from its just preeminence among the polities of mankind, of quenching the principles of eternal right which are the star-points of its divine crown, of trailing the shining whiteness of its robes in the dust, and making it an object of contempt rather than of adoration, has never been taught more emphatically than in the examples furnished by our own later annals. If Mr. Buchanan and his predecessor had set themselves to work, of good set purpose, to bring republican institutions into derision, and to prove that the American experiment was a dead failure, they could not have proceeded more cunningly with their task. Their aim has been, as it has seemed, to give the lie to all the principles on which it has been assumed that these institutions rest, and to show that their real object is to subject the many to the government of the few, as the manner is of the nations round about. The thin veil of decent falsehood, under which the caution of earlier time had decorously hid this fact, has been torn aside by the rude intrepidity of assurance which long-continued success had fostered. The problem to be solved being to prove the chief axiom of our political science, that the people have a right to self-government and to the choice of their own institutions, to be a lie, it is worked out in the presence of an admiring world, after this fashion.
The old Ordinance—which set limits to Slavery, and which, as it preceded the Constitution, should in honor and equity be taken as a condition precedent to it, and the later pledge of the South, that this contract should be sacredly kept on the other side of a certain parallel of latitude, having both been infamously violated for the sake of extending the domain of Slavery into regions solemnly dedicated to Liberty, the entire energies of the General Government and of the political party it represented were put forth to crystallize this double lie into the institutions of Kansas, and thus take it out of the category of theory and reduce it into that of fact. The reluctance of the inhabitants of the young Territory went for nothing, and provision was soon effectually made to overcome their resistance. Every form of terrorism, to which tyrants all alike instinctively resort to disarm resistance to their will, was launched at the property, the lives, and the happiness of the defenceless settlers. Hordes of barbarians, as we have said before, from every part of the Southern hive, but especially from the savage tribes of the bordering Missouri, poured themselves over the devoted land. Murder, arson, robbery, every outrage that could be offered to man or woman, waited on their footsteps and stalked abroad with them in their forays against Freedom. When the first steps were to be taken towards the organization of a government, they precipitated themselves upon the Territory in fiercer numbers. They made themselves masters of the polling-places; they drove away by violence and threats the peaceable inhabitants and lawful voters, and by open force and unblushing fraud elected themselves or their creatures the lawgivers of the commonwealth about to be created. So outrageous were the crimes of these miscreants at this and subsequent periods, that even the very creatures of Pierce and Buchanan, chosen especially for their supposed fitness to assist in these villanies, turned away, one after another, sickened at the sight of them, and forfeited forever the favor of their masters by shrinking from an unqualified and unhesitating obedience.