Her thrilling voice ceased, and as they silently moved away, a long and sea-like swell of wind arose, and all the leaves tossed and swept in an aspiration of innumerable rushing voices, holier than ever murmured in the dim groves of Dodona.
Answer, answer, answer! Oh, grave at Auburn, green with summer beauty, folding beneath the oak-tree shadows the ashes of the dead chevalier, answer, answer, fading as I gaze! Answer, lone grave in the Adirondacks, fadeless and immortal above the dust of the True Lover who tried to save his country from her slaves, and died that the land of lovers and of friends might be! Answer, graves of the strong score of heroes who flung themselves with the true-loving sword upon the Jacquerie of slavery, and perished for the hope that makes America divine! Answer, graves of all that made the country holy with the passion of their living and their dying for mankind—answer, and tell us that America emerges, the land of lovers and of friends!
It comes! It comes! Clear and sweet are your voices, oh, graves! Raging clamors drown the voices of the living, but clear and sweet are the voices of the dead, and it comes—the bright land comes—the land of lovers and of friends, it comes!
THE END.
NOTE
I am indebted for the sketch of the flight of a fugitive through the Great Pacoudrie (or Cacodrie) Swamp, in the introductory portion of this volume, to a couple of pages in the graphic and affecting narrative entitled “Twelve Years a Slave,” by Mr. Solomon Northup, a free citizen of New York, who was kidnapped in that State, and sold into bondage in Louisiana, from which he was fortunately rescued and restored to his wife and children, after a dozen years of enforced servitude.
Another acknowledgment remains to be made. The reader of the twelfth chapter of this book may already have observed that Harrington, if he had lived, would have been a believer in the theory regarding the origin and purpose of the Shakspeare Drama, as developed in the admirable work by Miss Delia Bacon, entitled “The Philosophy of Shakspeare’s Plays Unfolded,” in which belief I should certainly agree with Harrington. I wish it were in my power to do even the smallest justice to that mighty and eloquent volume, whose masterly comprehension and insight, though they could not save it from being trampled upon by the brutal bison of the British literary press, yet lift it to the dignity, whatever may be its faults, of being the best work ever composed upon the Baconian or Shakspearean writings. It has been scouted by the critics as the product of a distempered ideality. Perhaps it is. But there is a prudent wisdom, says Goethe, and there is a wisdom which does not remind us of prudence; and, in like manner, I may say that there is a sane sense, and there is a sense that does not remind us of sanity. At all events, I am assured that the candid and ingenuous reader Miss Bacon wished for, will find it more to his profit to be insane with her on the subject of Shakspeare, than sane with Dr. Johnson.
I am aware that in even making this acknowledgment, I do something to excite the rancor of the stupid and senseless prejudice which finds no difficulty in assigning the noblest works of the human genius to the fat peasant of Stratford—a man who, as Emerson justly says, lived a profane and vulgar life, and whose biography, collected after the painful labors of more than a century, does not present a single point which bears any relation to, or correspondence with, the holy and heroic pages which bear his name; while, at the same time, this prejudice derides as a mad and monstrous impossibility, the theory which ascribes those pages to Lord Bacon and his compeers—men in whose lives and careers all the Shakspearean conditions are fulfilled, and all the Shakspearealities included. But since I have decided, for reasons, to advance again, though even thus slightly, the theory I refer to, it is only fair to render due credit to its true author. I do so, earnestly wishing that her work might receive the respectful attention it undoubtedly merits; and, though the hand which wrote that glowing iliad of the glory and the genius of the Elizabethan men, will write no more, that justice might be done to the great dead scholar in her grave.