THE BIRTH OF A NATION. Why come they? Read it in each face, To-night unchains their suffering race! And should they slumber now? Long years of bitter, burning pain, Of heart-corroding wo, Were theirs; and long they wore the chain, And, free as hill-side rivulet, Each slumbering pulse beat on. Hark! hark! the tones of midnight bell Of childhood's funeral. Ye tell no tale of wo or pain: Ye call a race to life again, As from the sepulchre. Above that throng those notes have flown, In silence bended low, Save when the short half-stifled moan Told of the hearts o'erflow. 23 They rise—the father and the son, The mother in her tears, The child, whose life hast just begun, The sire of eighty years. One shout-the loosened heart's pure gush, To toil in fetters by her side, Oh! every thought the heart can know Of more than earthly bliss, Is quickened to diviner glow In such an hour as this. Sing on, ye freed ones! life for you Shall wear a brighter charm; TO THE OLD YEAR. PEACE to thee! dying year! The winds, that, sad as widowed mother's sigh And o'er the frozen earth and heaving sea, Peace! though we may not say, Peace to the stormy passions stored within Though thou art flown, yet still we feel them here, Yes! written on the heart With fiery pen, their record sears it now, The links that bind him down; though we may die, 'T were effort vain from goading thought to fly. Ay! 't is a bitter thing To read the record of our short life's years, And love, thrown shower-like to a niggard world, Methinks our life should be, Short as it is, as blithe as summer-day, Which lighted up its darkness cheerily. But 't is not so;—for lives, e'er lived there one, Without his sorrows 'neath the all-seeing sun? O, silver-headed year! Could'st thou declare all that beneath thy eye Could mortal hear, With brain unturned, the history of wo, Before undreamed, unimaged here below? TO THE OLD YEAR. 27 Thou hast seen murder done, In dungeons dark, where not a single ray In his swift course; and thou hast seen a brother Strike brother down, perchance son slay his mother. Thou hast seen many die; And many a mother weeping o'er her child, And fraught with meaning, and its eye Waxed dim and meaningless, and its young bloom Grew fit to moulder in the damp cold tomb. And thou hast seen the maiden, With eyes more eloquent than sweetest words, And voice as musical as song of birds, Who stood like young Spring, laden With flowers; round whom as gladly they went by, The zephyrs lingered-such hast thou seen die. And thou hast seen the youth, Standing "like Hermes on a heaven-kissing hill," Girt for life's journey, strong in heart and will, |