“This good work,” declared the captain, “shall be on a holy night!”
It was on a Sunday evening, and before the noon of Monday,
With two sons, and Captain Stephens, fifteen privates—black and white,
Captain Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,
Marched across the bridged Potomac, and knocked the sentry down;
Took the guarded armory-building, and the muskets and the cannon;
Captured all the county majors and the colonels, one by one;
Scared to death each gallant scion of Virginia they ran on,
And before the noon of Monday, I say, the deed was done.
Mad Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,
With his eighteen other crazy men, went in and took the town.
Very little noise and bluster, little smell of powder made he;
It was all done in the midnight, like the Emperor’s _coup d’état_.
“Cut the wires! Stop the rail-cars! Hold the streets and bridges!” said
he,
Then declared the new Republic, with himself for guiding star,—
This Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown;
And the bold two thousand citizens ran off and left the town.
Then was riding and railroading and expressing here and thither;
And the Martinsburg Sharpshooters and the Charlestown Volunteers,
And the Shepherdstown and Winchester Militia hastened whither
Old Brown was said to muster his ten thousand grenadiers.
General Brown!
Osawatomie Brown!!
Behind whose rampant banner all the North was pouring down.
But at last, ’tis said, some prisoners escaped from Old Brown’s durance,
And the effervescent valor of the Chivalry broke out,
When they learned that nineteen madmen had the marvellous assurance—
Only nineteen—thus to seize the place and drive them straight about;
And Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,
Found an army come to take him, encamped around the town.
But to storm, with all the forces I have mentioned, was too risky;
So they hurried off to Richmond for the Government Marines,
Tore them from their weeping matrons, fired their souls with Bourbon
whiskey,
Till they battered down Brown’s castle with their ladders and machines;
And Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,
Received three bayonet stabs, and a cut on his brave old crown.
Tallyho! the old Virginia gentry gather to the baying!
In they rushed and killed the game, shooting lustily away;
And whene’er they slew a rebel, those who came too late for slaying,
Not to lose a share of glory, fired their bullets in his clay;
And Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,
Saw his sons fall dead beside him, and between them laid him down.
How the conquerors wore their laurels; how they hastened on the trial;
How Old Brown was placed, half dying, on the Charlestown court-house
floor;
How he spoke his grand oration, in the scorn of all denial;
What the brave old madman told them,—these are known the country o’er.
“Hang Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,”
Said the judge, “and all such rebels!” with his most judicial frown.
But, Virginians, don’t do it! for I tell you that the flagon,
Filled with blood of Old Brown’s offspring, was first poured by
Southern hands;
And each drop from Old Brown’s life-veins, like the red gore of the
dragon,
May spring up a vengeful Fury, hissing through your slave-worn lands!
And Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,
May trouble you more than ever, when you’ve nailed his coffin down!
NOVEMBER, 1859.
SONNETS.
HOPE DEFERRED.
Bring no more flowers and books and precious things!
O speak no more of our beloved Art,
Of summer haunts,—melodious wanderings
In leafy refuge from this weary mart!
Surely such thoughts were dear unto my heart;
Now every word a newer sadness brings!
Thus oft some forest-bird, caged far apart
From verdurous freedom, droops his careless wings,
Nor craves for more than food from day to day;
So long bereft of wildwood joy and song,
Hopeless of all he dared to hope so long,
The music born within him dies away;
Even the song he loved becomes a pain,
Full-freighted with a yearning all in vain.
A MOTHER’S PICTURE.
She seemed an angel to our infant eyes!
Once, when the glorifying moon revealed
Her who at evening by our pillow kneeled,—
Soft-voiced and golden-haired, from holy skies
Flown to her loves on wings of Paradise,—
We looked to see the pinions half concealed.
The Tuscan vines and olives will not yield
Her back to me, who loved her in this wise,
And since have little known her, but have grown
To see another mother, tenderly
Watch over sleeping children of my own.
Perchance the years have changed her: yet alone
This picture lingers; still she seems to me
The fair young angel of my infancy.
POEMS WRITTEN IN YOUTH.
POEMS WRITTEN IN YOUTH.
ELFIN SONG.
FROM “THE RIME OF THE ELLE-KING.”
1. Far in the western ocean’s breast
The summer fairies have found a nest;
The heavens ever unclouded smile
Over the breadth of their beautiful isle;
Through it a hundred streamlets flow,
In spangled paths, to the sea below,
And woo the vales that beside them lie
With a low and tremulous minstrelsy.
The elfin brood have homes they love
In the earth below and skies above;
But the haunt which of all they love the best
Is the palm-crowned isle, in the ocean’s breast,
That mortals call Canary;
And many an Ariel, blithesome, airy,
And each laughing Fay and lithesome Fairy,
Know well the mystical way in the West
To the sweet isle of Canary.
2. With an ever-sounding choral chant,
And a clear, cerulean, wild desire
To clasp that fairy island nigher,
The sinuous waves of ocean pant;
For here all natural things are free
To mingle in passionate harmony.
The light from their mirror turns away
With a golden splendor, in the day,
But nightly, when coroneted Even
Marshals the shining queen of heaven,
There gleams a silvery scenery,
From the rim of the great prismatic sea
Around the isle of Canary,
To the central crags of Pisgatiri,
Where the crested eagle builds his eyry,
Scanning the shores of sweet Canary.
3. Lustrously sailing here and there,
Afloat in the beatific air,
Birds, of purple and blue and gold,
Pour out their music manifold;
All day long in the leas they sing,
While the sun-kissed flowers are blossoming;
At eve, when the dew-drop feeds the rose,
And the fragrant water-lilies close,
The marvellous-throated nightingale
With a dying music floods each vale,
Till the seaward breezes, listening, stay
To catch the harmony of his lay
And cool the air of Canary;
And thus the melodies ever vary,
In the vales of the ocean aviary,
In the blissful valleys of sweet Canary.
4. The Elle-King’s palace was builded there
By elves of water and earth and air;
Lovingly worked each loyal sprite,
And it grew to life in a summer night.
Over the sheen of its limpid moat,
Wafted along, in a magic boat,
By fairy wings that fan the sails,
And eddying through enchanted vales,
Through walls of amber and crystal gates,
We come where a fairy warder waits;
And so, by many a winding way
Where sweet bells jingle and fountains play,
To the inmost, royalest room of all,—
The elfin monarch’s reception-hall,
The pearl and pride of Canary!
To guard its fastness the elves are wary,
And no weird thing, of pleasure chary,
Can enter with evil in sweet Canary!
5. All that saddens, and care and pain,
Are banished far from that fair domain;
There forever, by day and night,
Is naught but pleasance and love’s delight;
Daily, the Genii of the flowers
Shade with beauty a hundred bowers;
Nightly, the Gnomes of precious stones
Emblazon and light a hundred thrones;
And the Elves of the field, so swift and mute,
Bring wine and honey and luscious fruit;
And the Sylphs of the air, at noontide, cool
The depths of each bower and vestibule;
And all are gay,—from the tricksome Fay
Who flutters in woodlands far away,
To the best-beloved attendant Elf,
And the royal heart of the King himself,
Who rules in bright Canary;
And the laboring Fairies are blithe and merry,
Who press the juice from the swollen berry
That reddens the vines of sweet Canary.
6. What if there be a fated day
When the Faëry Isle shall pass away,
And its beautiful groves and fountains seem
The myths of a long, delicious dream!
A century’s joys shall first repay
Our hearts, for the evil of that day;
And the Elfin-King has sworn to wed
A daughter of Earth, whose child shall be,
By cross and water hallowéd,
From the fairies’ doom forever free.
What if there be a fated day!
It is far away! it is far away!
Maiden, fair Maiden, I, who sing
Of this summer isle am the island King.
I come from its joys to make thee mine:
Half of my kingdom shall be thine;
Our horses of air and ocean wait—
Then hasten, and share the Elle-King’s state
In the sweet isle of Canary;
And many an Ariel, blithesome, airy,
And each laughing Fay and lithesome Fairy,
Shall rovingly hover around and over thee,
And the love of a king shall evermore cover thee,
Nightly and daily in sweet Canary.
1850.
AMAVI.
I loved: and in the morning sky,
A magic castle upward grew!
Cloud-haunted turrets pointing high
Forever to the dreamy blue;
Bright fountains leaping through and through
The golden sunshine; on the air
Gay banners streaming;—never drew
Painter or poet scene more fair.
And in that castle I would live,
And in that castle I would die;
And there, in curtained bowers, would give
Heart-warm responses, sigh for sigh;
There, when but one sweet face was nigh,
The hours should lightly move along,
And ripple, as they glided by,
Like stanzas of an antique song.
O foolish heart! O young romance,
That faded with the noonday sun!
Alas, for gentle dalliance,
For life-long pleasures never won!
O for a season dead and gone!
A wizard time, which then did seem
Only a prelude, leading on
To sweeter portions of the dream.
She died,—nor wore my orange flowers:—
No longer, in the morning sky,
That magic castle lifts its towers
Which shone, awhile, so lustrously.
Torn are the bannerols, and dry
The silver fountains in its halls;
But the drear sea, with endless sigh,
Moans round and over the crumbled walls.
Let the winds blow! let the white surge
Ever among those ruins wail!
Its moaning is a welcome dirge
For wishes that could not avail.
Let the winds blow! a fiercer gale
Is wild within me! what may quell
That sullen tempest? I must sail
Whither, O whither, who can tell!
ODE TO PASTORAL ROMANCE.
“_Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not._”
THE TEMPEST.
I.
Queen of the shadowy clime!
Thou of the fairy-spell and wondrous lay:
Sweet Romance! breathe upon my way,
Not with the breath of this degenerate time,
But of that age when life was summer play,
When Nature wore a verdurous hue,
And Earth kept holiday;
When on the ground Chaldæan shepherds lay,
Gazing all night, with calm, creative view,
Into the overhanging blue,
And found, amid the many-twinkling stars,
Warriors and maidens fair,
Heroes of marvellous deeds and direful wars,
Serpents and flaming hair,
The Dragon and the Bear,
A silvery Venus and a lurid Mars.
II.
Come at thy lover’s call,
Thou, that, with embraces kind,
Throwing thy tendrils round the lives of all,
Something in all to beautify dost find!
So thine own ivy, on the Gothic wall,
Or pendent from the arms
Of gnarléd oaks, where’er its clusters fall,
Clings to adorn and adds perennial charms.
And therefore, Romance, would I greet
Thee by the fairest of fair names,
Calling thee debonair and sweet;
For sweet thou art—inspiring Manhood’s dreams,
When all aweary of the actual life;
And sweet thy influence seems
To Woman, shrinking from the strife,
The sordid tumult of the wrangling mart.
But doubly sweet thou art,
Leading the tender child by gentle streams,
Among the lilies of our flowery Youth;
Filling his all-believing heart
With thoughts that glorify the common truth;
Building before him, in the lustrous air,
Ethereal palaces and castles fair.
III.
With such mild innocence the Earth
Received thy blessings at her birth;
And in the pastoral days of yore,
To Man’s enchanted gaze,
Nature was fair—O, how much more
Than in our wiser days!
Then deities of sylvan form,
While yet the hearts of men were young and warm,
Like shepherds wandered through the arching groves,
Or sang aloud, the listening flocks among,
Sweet legends of their loves;
Then Cupid and fair Psyche breathed their vows,—
He with the feathered darts and bow unstrung,
And garlands on his brows;
She folding gently to her bosom doves
Snow-white, forever, as their mistress, young;
And, as they sighed together, peerless Joy
Enwreathed the maiden and the raptured boy!
IV.
Yes! on romantic pilgrimage,
To the calm piety of Nature’s shrine,
Through summer-paths, thou ledst our human-kind,
With influence divine.
In that orient, elden age,
Ere man had learned to wage
Dispassionate war against his natural mind,
Thy voice of mystery,
Reading aloud the Earth’s extended page,
Bade human aspirations find
In the cool fountain and the forest-tree
A sentient imagery;
The flowing river and the murmuring wind,
The land—the sea—
Were all informed by thee!
V.
Through coral grottoes wandering and singing,
The merry Nereid glided to her cave;
Anon, with warm, luxurious motion flinging
Her sinuous form above the moonlit wave,
To the charmed mariner gave
A glimpse of snowy arms and amber tresses,
While on his startled ear
The sea-nymph’s madrigal fell clear;
Then to the far recesses,
Where drowsy Neptune wears the emerald crown,
Serenely floated down,
Leaving the mariner all amort with fear.
In the under-opening wood,
What time the Gods had crowned the full-grown year,
The Dryad and the Hamadryad stood
Among the fallow deer;
Bending the languid branches of their trees,
With every breeze,
To view their image in the fountains near:—
The fountains! whence the white-limbed Naiads sang,
Pouring upon the air melodious trills,
And, while the echoes through the forest rang,
The white-limbed Naiads of a thousand rills
Far o’er the Arcadian vales a pæan spread.
Led by Diana, in the dewy dawn,
The Oread sisters chased the dappled fawn
Through all the coverts of their native hills;
Home, with the spoils, at sultry noon they fled,—
Home to their shaded bowers,
Where, with the ivy, and those sacred flowers
That now have faded from the weary earth,
Each laughing Oread crowned an Oread’s head.
The mountains echoed back their maiden mirth,
Rousing old Pan, who, from a secret lair,
Shook the wild tangles of his frosty hair,
And laid him down again with sullen roar:
But now the frightened nymphs like statues stand,
One balancing her body half in air,
Dreading to hear again that tumult sore;
One, with a liquid tremor in her eye,
Waving above her head a glimmering hand;
Till suddenly, like dreams, away they fly,
Leaving the forest stiller than before!
VI.
Such was thy power, O Pastoral Romance!
In that ambrosial age of classic fame,
The spirit to entrance.
Fain would I whisper of the latter days,
When, in thy royal name,
The mailéd knights encountered lance to lance,
All for sweet Romance and fair ladies’ praise;
But no! I bowed the knee
And vowed allegiance to thee,
As I beheld thee in thy golden prime,
And now from thy demesne must haste away:
Perchance that of the aftertime,
Of nodding plumes and chivalrous array,
In aftertime I sing a roundelay.
VII.
Fair Spirit of ethereal birth,
In whom such mysteries and beauties blend!
Still from thine ancient dwelling-place descend
And idealize our too material earth;
Still to the Bard thy chaste conceptions lend,
To him thine early purity renew;
Round every image grace majestic throw!
Till rapturously the living song shall glow
With inspiration as thy being true,
And Poesy’s creations, decked by thee,
Shall wake the tuneful thrill of sensuous ecstasy.
1850.
ALICE OF MONMOUTH, AN _IDYL OF THE GREAT WAR_; AND OTHER POEMS.
1864.
This Volume
IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY
OF
C. F. S.
DIED: MAY 13, 1863.
ALICE OF MONMOUTH.
I.
1. Hendrick Van Ghelt of Monmouth shore,
His fame still rings the county o’er!
The stock that he raised, the stallion he rode,
The fertile acres his farmers sowed;
The dinners he gave; the yacht which lay
At his fishing-dock in the Lower Bay;
The suits he waged, through many a year,
For a rood of land behind his pier,—
Of these the chronicles yet remain
From Navesink Heights to Freehold Plain.
2. The Shrewsbury people in autumn help
Their sandy toplands with marl and kelp,
And their peach and apple orchards fill
The gurgling vats of the cross-road mill.
They tell, as each twirls his tavern-can,
Wonderful tales of that stanch old man,
And they boast, of the draught they have tasted and smelt,
“’Tis good as the still of Hendrick Van Ghelt!”
3. Were he alive, and at his prime,
In this, our boisterous modern time,
He would surely be, as he could not then,
A stalwart leader of mounted men,—
A ranger, shouting his battle-cry,
Who knew how to fight and dared to die;
And the fame which a county’s limit spanned
Might have grown a legend throughout the land.
4. He would have scoured the Valley through,
Doing as now our bravest do;
Would have tried rough-riding on the border,
Punishing raider and marauder;
With bearded Ashby crossing swords
As he took the Shenandoah fords;
Giving bold Stuart a bloody chase
Ere he reached again his trysting-place.
Horse and horseman of the foe
The blast of his bugle-charge should know,
And his men should water their steeds, at will,
From the banks of Southern river and rill.
5. How many are there of us, in this
Discordant social wilderness,
Whose thriftiest scions the power gain,
Through meet conditions of sun and rain,
To yield, on the fairest blossoming shoot,
A mellow harvest of perfect fruit?
Fashioned after so rare a type,
How should his life grow full and ripe,
There, in the passionless haunts of Peace,
Through trade, and tillage, and wealth’s increase?
6. But at his manor-house he dwelt,
And royally bore the name Van Ghelt;
Nor found a larger part to play
Than such as a county magnate may:
Ruling the hustings as he would,
Lord of the rustic neighborhood;
With potent wishes and quiet words
Holding an undisputed sway.
The broadest meadows, the fattest herds,
The fleetest roadsters, the warmest cheer,—
These were old Hendrick’s many a year.
Daughters unto his hearthstone came,
And a son—to keep the ancient name.
7. Often, perchance, the old man’s eye
From a seaward casement would espy,
Scanning the harborage in the bay,
A ship which idly at anchor lay;
Watching her as she rose and fell,
Up and down, with the evening swell,
Her cordage slackened, her sails unbent,
And all her proud life somnolent.
And perchance he thought—“My life, it seems,
Like her, unfreighted with aught but dreams;
Yet I feel within me a strength to dare
Some outward voyage, I know not where!”
But the forceful impulse wore away
In the common life of every day,
And for Hendrick Van Ghelt no timely hour
Ruffled the calm of that hidden power;
Yet in the prelude of my song
His storied presence may well belong,
As a Lombardy poplar, lithe and hoar,
Stands at a Monmouth farmer’s door,
Set like a spire against the sky,
Marking the hours, while lover and maid
Linger long in its stately shade,
And round its summit the swallows fly.
II.
1. Nature a devious by-way finds: solve me her secret whim,
That the seed of a gnarled oak should sprout to a sapling straight and
prim;
That a russet should grow on the pippin stock, on the garden-rose a
brier;
That a stalwart race, in old Hendrick’s son, should smother its wonted
fire.
Hermann, fond of his book, and shirking the brawny out-door sports;
Sent to college, and choosing for life the law with her mouldy courts;
Proud, and of tender honor, as well became his father’s blood,
But with cold and courtly self-restraint weighing the ill and good;
Wed to a lady whose delicate veins that molten azure held,
Ichor of equal birth, wherewith our gentry their couplings weld;
Viewing his father’s careless modes with half a tolerant eye,
As one who honors, regretting not, old fashions passing by.
After a while the moment came when, unto the son and heir,
A son and heir was given in turn,—a moment of joy and prayer;
For the angel who guards the portals twain oped, in the self-same breath,
To the child the pearly gate of life, to the mother the gate of death.
Father, and son, and an infant plucking the daisies over a grave:
The swell of a boundless surge keeps on, wave following after wave;
Ever the tide of life sets toward the low invisible shore:
Whence had the current its distant source? when shall it flow no more?
2. Nature’s serene renewals, that make the scion by one remove
Bear the ancestral blossom and thrive as the forest wilding throve!
Roseate stream of life, which hides the course its ducts pursue,
To rise, like that Sicilian fount, in far-off springs anew!
For the grandsire’s vigor, rude and rare, asleep in the son had lain,
To waken in Hugh, the grandson’s frame, with the ancient force again;
And ere the boy, said the Monmouth wives, had grown to his seventh year,
Well could you tell whose mantling blood swelled in his temples clear.
Tall, and bent in the meeting brows; swarthy of hair and face;
Shoulders parting square, but set with the future huntsman’s grace;
Eyes alive with a fire which yet the old man’s visage wore
At times, like the flash of a thunder-cloud when the storm is almost
o’er.
3. Toward the mettled stripling, then, the heart of the old man yearned;
And thus—while Hermann Van Ghelt once more, with a restless hunger,
turned
From the grave of her who died so young, to his books and lawyer’s gown,
And the ceaseless clangor of mind with mind in the close and wrangling
town—
They two, the boy and the grandsire, lived at the manor-house, and grew,
The one to all manly arts apace, the other a youth anew—
Pleased with the boy’s free spirit, and teaching him, step by step, to
wield
The mastery over living things, and the craft of flood and field.
Apt, indeed, was the scholar; and born with a subtle art to gain
The love of all dumb creatures at will; now lifting himself, by the mane,
Over the neck of the three-year colt, for a random bareback ride,
Now chasing the waves on the rifted beach at the turn of the evening
tide.
Proud, in sooth, was the master: the youngster, he oft and roundly swore,
Was fit for the life a gentleman led in the lusty days of yore!
And he took the boy wherever he drove,—to a county fair or race;
Gave him the reins and watched him guide the span at a spanking pace;
Taught him the sportsman’s keen delight: to swallow the air of morn,
And start the whistling quail that hides and feeds in the dewy corn;
Or in clear November underwoods to bag the squirrels, and flush
The brown-winged, mottled partridge a-whir from her nest in the tangled
brush;
Taught him the golden harvest laws, and the signs of sun and shower,
And the thousand beautiful secret ways of graft and fruit and flower;
Set him straight in his saddle, and cheered him galloping over the sand;
Sailed with him to the fishing-shoals and placed the helm in his hand.
Often the yacht, with all sail spread, was steered by the fearless twain
Around the beacon of Sandy Hook, and out in the open main;
Till the great sea-surges rolling in, as south-by-east they wore,
Lifted the bows of the dancing craft, and the buoyant hearts she bore.
But in dreamy hours, which young men know, Hugh loved with the tide to
float
Far up the deep, dark-channeled creeks, alone in his two-oared boat;
While a fiery woven tapestry o’erhung the waters low,
The warp of the frosted chestnut, the woof with maple and birch aglow;
Picking the grapes which dangled down; or watching the autumn skies,
The osprey’s slow imperial swoop, the scrawny heron’s rise;
Nursing a longing for larger life than circled a rural home,
An instinct of leadership within, and of action yet to come.
4. Curtain of shifting seasons dropt on moor and meadow and hall,
Open your random vistas of changes that come with time to all!
Hugh grown up to manhood; foremost, searching the county through,
Of the Monmouth youth, in birth and grace, and the strength to will
and do.
The father, past the prime of life, and his temples flecked with toil,
A bookman still, and leaving to Hugh the care of stock and soil.
Hendrick Van Ghelt, a bowed old man in a fireside-corner chair,
Counting the porcelain Scripture tiles which frame the chimney there,—
The shade of the stalwart gentleman the people used to know,
Forgetful of half the present scenes, but mindful of long-ago;
Aroused, mayhap, by growing murmurs of Southern feud, that came
And woke anew in his fading eyes a spark of their ancient flame.