Two Johns in one, the Harbinger and Seer,
He stood a High Priest by the holy Ark,
Aspiring as the upward-soaring eagle
Quitting the sluggish vapors of the dark,
To drink in heavenward flight the morning breeze,
Clear dews, and golden sunshine of the dawn,
And moist from fountains fresh and salted seas.
He preached with reason lucid as the light
Which flashed o’er chaos at Creation’s birth,
When Eden threw its splendor o’er the night
And the Divine Word said, “Let there be light!”
Chasing foul phantoms from the infant earth;
Strange was the power of that pathetic voice
Whose sympathy made aching hearts rejoice.
The mellow winding of the shepherd’s pipe
Seemed from the fruitful Mount of Olives borne
To ears of gentle women and strong men.
It shamed and hushed the scoffers’ ribald scorn,
It charmed the city’s lucre-loving throng,
And melted all with Calvary’s lofty song.
No painted web of rhetoric he wove;
His speech was all sincerity and love,
But sharp and pointed as a surgeon’s lance.
Tender his touch, and searching his quick glance;
A living faith to every work he brought,
And lived the simple doctrines that he taught.
The Man of Sorrows ever was his theme,
Who taught by Galilee and Jordan’s stream;
So in the Temple Jewish rabbis heard
The wondrous Christ-Child speak his Father’s word.
The admiring world oft tempted him in vain,
And offered greater guerdon than his chair,
In posts of honor and in golden gain,
To him gay bubbles floating on the air.
Far up the Mount he heard the warning cry--
“Excelsior!” the watchword of the sky,
The solemn mandate of Eternity.
After long life of toil he sighed for rest,
Like homing-dove returning to her nest
Crooning her “La Paloma” in her flight--
Duty his pole-star guiding him aright;
He leaned his faint head on his Master’s breast,
And his great soul was happy with the Blessed.
[Illustration: LEONORA]
TO LEONORA.
“One fatal remembrance--one sorrow that throws
Its bleak shade alike o’er our joys and our woes.”
--_Moore._
The troubled spell is o’er,
The wild delirious dream of bliss is broke;
A spirit whispered to me as I woke,
“No more--oh sleep no more,
For love has died upon a dart whose sting
Sped on a feather plucked from his own wing.”
Oh, bright divinity,
Bold and unfettered as the eagle’s wing,
Oh soul of noblest impulses, the spring,
And chainless as the sea,
Why didst thou lend my sky thy glorious light
Only to quench it in a blacker night!
Oh, I have loved to bow
Before thy shrine and burn rich incense there,
Immaculate spirit of the upper air,
Nor rose sincerer vow
Nor sweeter wreaths in Dian’s temples hung,
When on the Paphian myrtles Sappho sung.
Thine is a magic power,
A power the sternest hearts to tame and quell
Thine own to mortal arts invincible,
And glorious is thy dower--
Love’s fire, ambition’s struggle, pity’s tear,
Religion’s hope, and all--save woman’s fear.
Thine is that fearful spell,
In which the Orient poppy gardens steep
The passer’s senses in luxurious sleep,
While dreaming all is well,
Nor knows he that the flower’s delicious breath
Is the lethargic atmosphere of death.
Too late--alas! too late!
My heart once fresh with morning dews of youth,
Dreaming that all the beautiful was truth,
Is seared and desolate;
Love’s star is shrouded in its last eclipse
And its fair fruit is ashes on my lips.
With bitter grief we parted,
On thy dear lips I breathed a last adieu
To peace, to hope, to sweet repose, and you,
And left thee--broken-hearted:
And every star in heaven was wrapped in gloom,
And earth itself became a living tomb.
And like a mourner’s wail
Now piercing shrill, now smothered and half hushed,
Convulsive tears and sobs all madly gushed--
And gushed without avail;
For our fond bosoms bore one stricken heart
Forever wounded by a fatal dart.
The night wind’s plaintive moan
Sighed through the pendant branches of the trees,
Whose leaf-harp’s sweet vibrations filled the breeze,
And the far distant tone
Of the blue waters of La Belle Riviere
Stole in Æolian murmurs on my ear.
The bosom’s quivering throes,
The shuddering frame, the anguish of the heart
Writhing with Love’s immedicable dart;
The unutterable woes
Of those whom destiny has doomed to feel
The agony they never can reveal--
All these were ours--and when
The dying night-winds ceased a while to wake
Leaf in the wood or ripple on the lake
A murmur rose of pain,
Doleful and bitter as the passing cry
Of a lost spirit in its agony.
Mine is the agony
To perish where Elysian apples grow,
To parch with thirst where Eden’s waters flow
To pine--to droop--to die,
Without one hope to ease my bosom’s pain,
To know _I love, am loved, and all in vain_!
One more fond parting word,
While all my frame with agony is shaken,
And my torn heart of every hope forsaken,
To its far depths is stirred.
A word will haunt me like a funeral knell,
God bless thee, dear Leonora--and farewell!
AT HIS POST.
IN MEMORIAM.
[Midshipman Goldthwaite, Hopkinsville, Ky., who perished with
eleven companions in the battleship Georgia, July 15, 1907.]
Call up, Recording Angel,
The roster of the dead;
Who sleep in vaults or village graves,
Or in the ocean bed.
Call all alike--the wealthy,
The humble or the great;
Tell me how died they, Angel?
How met their various fate?
The Angel called out Marathon,
And Bunker Hill sublime,
Whose glory shall outlast
The temples of old time.
Myriads of true and loyal men
In many a mighty host,
All perished, said the Angel,
Faithfully at their post.
Some to fair science martyrs;
Some to religion’s call;
To truth and duty witnesses,
In faith they perished, all;
And bright, celestial splendor
Shone all around each ghost:
“I died,” proclaimed each pallid shade,
“Faithfully at my post.”
Oh, not in vain you perished,
Goldthwaite, when fate’s sad blow
Struck down the flower of chivalry
And laid its promise low;
Still, with true joy, salute we
Your shade, oh, knightly ghost,
And hail thee, loyal hero,
Who perished at his post.
Thy virtues high in heaven
As stars forever burn;
Long, long shall love bedew with tears
Thy consecrated urn;
In life’s young morn you perished--
Perished, but not in vain;
Your deathless, bright example
Shall cheer young hearts again.
The trumpet voice inspiring sounds
Along the ocean shore;
“Fear God and His commands obey”--
Angels can do no more;
From the ill-fated Georgia’s deck
There booms a solemn roar;
With strength renewed at the sad sound
The country’s eagles soar.
[Illustration: MIDSHIPMAN FAULKNER GOLDTHWAITE]
RECONCILIATION.
[Carriers’ Address, written for the Nashville, Tenn., _Press and
Times_, December 25, 1865.]
The days have dropped, like withered leaves,
From the dead cypress of the year,
And Time, who neither joys nor grieves,
Nor spares, nor pities, nor reprieves,
Has bound the months, twelve ripened sheaves,
Round his completed sphere.
Dread Reaper of the centuries,
The red strokes of whose sickle blade
Clashed oft and harshly on the breeze,
While in long swathes our dead were laid,
And measured out with every blow
That dark Olympiad of woe;
Here, where thy dreadful bugles rang,
With cannon’s roar and saber’s clang,
And answering hell in chorus sang,
Bidding the harvesters of Death
Cut wider still their slippery path.
Withhold thy fatal hand,
And let thy crescent sickle shine
The harvest moon of peace divine,
And to full orb expand;
For blood enough of kindred slain
Has poured in streams of purple rain
And soaked the thirsty sand
To quench each living coal of hate,
Assuage the fury of the State
And reconcile the land.
O, North! O, South! whose children claim
From heroic sires a common fame
More lustrous than the melted gem
Of Cleopatra’s diadem,
Drunk up one night for Antony
In bacchanalian revelry,
Will you a richer pearl betray,
Whose incommunicable splendor
None but a slave would cast away,
None but a craven would surrender?
Tells not each winged wind some story
Of Revolutionary glory,
Worthy of that immortal theme
Which once inspired The Scian’s dream
By blue Ægean’s tide;
How Hayne, to his dear country given,
Stepped from the scaffold up to heaven,
Laureled and deified;
How Lawrence dared the ocean strife--
Breathing with pale and quivering lip
His death cry, “Don’t give up the ship!”--
Then perished in his pride,
And Warren, in the morn of life,
In front of battle died.
O, Christ, whose Orient Star of Love,
Illumed the primal Christmas morning,
What cloud has spread its veil above,
That we no more behold it burning?
Shall we, despite the prayers and tears,
Poured out for near two thousand years,
In never-ending intercession
For fallen humanity’s transgression,
Shall we pluck from the temple’s shelves
And trample under foot the Bible,
Apostates base pronounce ourselves
And Christianity a libel?
Of what avail, if thus we err,
Our gifts of frankincense and myrrh,
Prayers, mummery, and holy water,
To cleanse the air from smell of slaughter,
And psalms, and organ chants sonorous,
With all our damning guilt before us?
Has sharp remorse no power to move
The stronger agony of love
In breasts whose suffering finds at last
The madness of the conflict past,
Which, having ’scaped the shock of steel
In battle’s fearful expiation,
Beside the slain at last shall feel
The glow of reconciliation,
Over the tombs which now conceal
The flower and glory of the nation?
Come where the slain, all pale and cold,
Sleep ’neath the all-concealing mold,
While evening’s melancholy breeze
With sad voice in the forest lingers,
Thrumming the spray of whispering trees
Like chords beneath a harper’s fingers,
In fitful, sobbing, plaintive tone,
Thrilling the pained air with its moan,
And wailing down the leafless aisles with low and dying groan.
Let pity, warm as Love’s caress,
Strew violets in tenderness
Above our kinsmen dead;
And myrtles clustering o’er their tomb,
Enfold in robes of purple bloom
Their consecrated bed;
And let the fresh-winged morning air
Now waft to heaven the nation’s prayer
To spare the avenging rod,
And weld the golden chain of love
Between all human hearts above
And all beneath the sod.
No more; no more; for overhead
The Christmas star renews its brightness;
Its beams revivify the dead
In garments of celestial whiteness;
By our sad fate, the phantoms say,
By all the griefs that wring the living,
Cast each embittered thought away,
And join the people by forgiving.
Armies of slaughtered men have fed
The Moloch fires of expiation,
Whose blood, like Abel’s madly shed,
Joins in the fervent invocation.
Plead ye for peace? Expect it where
Justice is equal as the air
And vote and count are just and fair,
Nor seek the fruitful olive tree,
On the volcano’s breast of snow,
While the flame-waved Vesuvian sea
Consumes the sapless earth below.
Redeemed from violence and fraud,
All hail the resurrected nation;
The Rights of Man shall be its broad,
Deep and immovable foundation,
And the Philanthropy of God
The corner-stone of Restoration.
OPHELIA
Gaily she struck the sweet guitar,
The maiden fair as a beautiful star;
And her soft voice fell on charmed ears
Like a seraph’s song from the upper spheres
Joyous and blithe is the song she sings,
As the morning lark on his heavenward wings;
Little the list’ners dream that rest
Never again shall dwell in her breast;
Little they dream, while that strain she is waking
That her heart with a secret grief is breaking.
Sweet were the words from her lips that fell,
As the mocking-bird’s song in the hazel dell;
Like the honey of Hybla her words were fraught
With sweets from the choicest flowers sought;
Gloom from her beaming presence fled,
Mirth and joy were around her shed;
Little they know of the poisoned dart
That rankles deep in her bleeding heart;
Little they know that her beaming eye
Tells but a hollow mockery.
Bright were the jewels that flashed on her brow
As the gleam of the stars on the mountain snow,
And the trembling lustre of costly pearls
Beams through the waves of her golden curls,
As with queenly step she passes along,
The loveliest one of that beautiful throng;
But her heart with inward grief is bowed,
And her cheek is as pale as the dead man’s shroud,
And tears will start in her orbs of blue,
Like a rose that weepeth with morning dew.
A gentle heart that she once had known
Had throbbed for her and for her alone.
High and holy in him was her trust--
Alas! it has turned to ashes and dust!
Can she her sacred vows recall,
Can she, can she forget them all?
Never! although with an aching breast
She ever obeys the stern behest,
Yielding with smiles to her bitter lot;
Meekly yielding and murmuring not;
The memory of departed hours
Shall weave her garland of withered flowers,
But the hope that cheered her soul is flown,
And she moves ’mid the throng, alone, alone.
Her lips may smile, but her eye is chill,
And her laugh may ring, but her heart is still;
Her bosom is now the canker’s prey--
She is passing away, passing away.
DEATH OF THE SEASONS.
Last night pealed out the dark Death-angel’s cry--
“Another year is gone!”--and from the sky
A myriad of voices, like a river,
Reëchoed “Gone! forever and forever!”
The deep roll of the night-wind’s muffled drum
Mourned for the dead whose lips are pale and dumb
Within whose pulseless and unconscious breast
Reigns the nepenthe of a dreamless rest.
Scatter sweet flowers on the season’s tomb,
For oh, they perished in their early bloom!
And o’er their dust this requiem be sung--
“Weep not, for Heaven’s best favorites die young”
Oh, Spring was very beautiful and gay
When April mild and rosy-fingered May
Rambled among the many babbling brooks
And gathered wild flowers in their shady nooks,
And waving them in gladness in the air,
Scattered their fragrant dew-drops everywhere
Beneath whose silver spray the delicate bloom
Of Flora filled the air with rich perfume.
Slender and gentle and surpassing fair
Was blue-eyed Summer with her golden hair,
Sweet-voiced as is the murmur of a dove,
Whilst every look was eloquent with love.
Where blooms the wild rose by the mountain spring,
In whose clear waves the robin dips his wing,
Where clustering berries tempt the longing eyes
Like the forbidden fruit of Paradise,
And the sweet mocking-bird, in carol gay,
Enchants the listener with his wondrous lay--
There, in the silence of her shady bowers,
The Summer genius passed the dreamy hours;
Death came and laid his hand upon her brow,
And in eternal night she sleepeth now.
Next Autumn came in robe of gorgeous dyes
And stately step and melancholy eyes--
In mien and look like discrowned Antoinette
A queen--although the Bourbon star had set--
Beholding with a proud, unwavering faith
The scaffold and the officers of death,
Mourning--not her own early doom, for she
Knew well the hollowness of majesty--
But grieving that the beautiful and gay
In her bright train were doomed to pass away.
So Autumn died, but oh, her couch of death
Was balmy with the jasmine’s odorous breath,
And every wind-harp breathed its hollow moan
For the sweet soul that had forever flown.
But lo! whilst mourning for the seasons fled,
A phœnix from the ashes of the dead
Rises in triumph, and the new-born year
Round Time’s vast orb begins his swift career.
The rising sunbeams herald his advance,
And break on every hill a golden lance;
Heaven plants her banners at the Eastern gate,
To greet the monarch as he comes in state,
And the loud harps of ocean and of earth
Resound in strains of revelry and mirth.
Welcome to earth, thou youngest child of Time,
Unwarped by wrong, unspotted by a crime!
Oh, may the blooming vigor of thy youth
Ripen in wisdom, purity and truth.
Spare in thy flight the innocent and gay
And scatter pleasure’s garlands in their way;
Repress the insolence of lawless might,
And make the wrong submissive to the right;
Uphold the patriot and strike down the hand
That waves the traitor’s sword or treason’s brand
And with the hand of charity redress
Each form of human woe and wretchedness,
So that the annals of all coming time
Shall write thee as the Golden Age sublime.
NEW YEAR ODE, 1861.
[CARRIERS’ ADDRESS FOR THE LOUISVILLE JOURNAL.]
Oh, infant year, whose newborn limbs are swathed
And cradled in convulsion--Oh, dread Heaven,
Unsealing o’er this land of many woes
The Apocalyptic vials--Oh, my torn
And bleeding country, by thy sons deflowered
And stricken of thy God--how shall I sing
A festal anthem on a broken lyre--
To ears made dull by sorrow?
From her dreams,
With music lulled, all-queenly, and perfumed
With odors from the Summer’s lips distilled,
The startled nation woke--awoke to hear
Rebellion’s war-cries in her citadel,
By dark and frenzied sentinels invoked--
Singing her dirge, like the volcanic bass
Of Ætna’s organ chiming with the sea
When groans the Titan in immortal pangs--
The trepidation of conflicting hosts,
Mixed with the wild alarm of clamorous bells
The strife--the shout--the wailing of despair.
Time, by whose hands the mouldering dust of death
Is shovelled in the vaults of coffined realms,
What Nemesis insatiate still inspires
The suicide of Empires? In her breast,
Greece nursed the serpent faction, with her blood,
That stung her to the heart. Rebellion’s steel
Pierced the fair bosom of imperial Rome
By foreign foes unconquered; and the land
Of God’s own people drank the fatal cup
Which dark dissension pressed upon her lips.
As midnight’s bell proclaims with double tongue
One year departed and another born,
Swift throng around me with imperial mien
And godlike brow, and eyes of sad reproach,
As angels look in sorrow, the great dead
[Illustration: MRS. ANNIE McRAE MERCER]
Who walked Mount Vernon’s shades and Marshfield’s plains,
And Monticello’s height, and Ashland’s groves
Still vocal with unearthly eloquence,
Statesmen and Chiefs who loved their native land
And led her up to fame. With solemn air
And thrilling voice they point to freedom’s flag
War-rent and laced with sacrificial blood,
By noble martyrs shed; and thus they speak--
“O sons once named Americans, but now
The world-mocked orphans of a nameless land,
Why rush ye to destruction? Happier far
Than ye the tawny tribes your fathers drove
From the primeval forest--the red chiefs
Who bravely perished on their hunting-grounds,
Or passing o’er the mountains of the West,
Went down in gloom, like nature’s final sun,
To rise no more forever. Better thus
Than live the foul dishonor of your sires,
Whose progeny like Lucifer of old
Rebelled against the power that made them Gods,
And perished in their treason. Come, ye winds,
Swift-winged couriers of the tropic sky,
Heralds of death and ruin--come, ye fires
That in volcanic caverns ever burn,
And crush pale cities in your molten jaws--
Come, burning plagues, and ye tempestuous waves,
Who strangle navies in your watery arms--
Earthquakes and lightning-strokes, all earthly ills
Which Heaven inflicts, and trembling men abhor--
Fell bolts in God’s red armory of wrath,
With all your terrors in one stroke combined,
Come; and in mercy blast the land with ruin
Rather than we should see Columbia’s plains
Drenched in a crimson sea of fratricide,
Lust, rapine, malice, treachery, revenge,
The tall and crowning Teneriffe of crime.”
I hear a passing bell--the muffled drum
Rolls its sepulchral echoes on the night
Which spreads across the sky the starless pall
Of desolation. And upon my ear
Falls the wild burden of a dismal song
Like that of mocking fiends in revelry.
THE DISUNION BANNER.
Fiends who in the lurid gloom
Of Hell do ply the fatal loom,
Weave a banner of despair
For Columbia’s tainted air,
Like the boding raven’s wing
All the land o’ershadowing.
In the murky woof embroider
Darkness, death, and Hell’s disorder.
On the fatal standard show
Every form of guilt and woe--
Murder drinking deep of blood,
Rolling round him like a flood,
All the fetid gall that drips
From the land’s infected lips,
In the murky woof embroider
Darkness, death, and Hell’s disorder.
Weave ye in the magic loom
Piles of slain without a tomb,
Cities lit with midnight fires,
Crashing walls and toppling spires,
Famine’s sunken, ghastly cheek,
Outraged woman’s helpless shriek,
Hoary age and infancy
Plunged in one wide misery;
In the murky woof embroider
Darkness, death, and Hell’s disorder.
Let the banner’s fold be bound
With a fiery serpent round;
Eden’s destroyer shall recall
The new temptation, sin, and fall.
We have changed the stripes of flame
To the burning blush of shame,
And the streaks of spotless white
To the pallor of affright,
And the stars which blazoned all
To Wormwood in its endless fall.
The song of treason ceased--the phantoms fled,
And as I mused in the dark bitterness
Of grief to this sad prophecy of woe,
I heard a sound, as when the ocean moves
His moist battalions to the tempest’s march,
To storm the fortress of the rocky isles,
And hosts innumerable thronged around
In panoply of war. From every height
And every valley rolled the martial drum,
And bugles calling to the gory charge
The loyal and the bold, while streamed on high
Gay banners glittering with the hues of heaven.
“We come, oh, bleeding country,” was their cry,
“To beat aside the parricidal steel,
And shield the snowy breast that gave us life.”
New England’s seamen swelled the rallying cry
Along the coasts; the Middle States replied
From thronging marts; the echoes leaped along
The Mississippi Valley, whose vast floods
Throb like the pulses of the Nation’s heart,
And pale Virginia, all besprinkled now
With War’s red baptism, to Kentucky spoke;
Kentucky, tried but faithful unto death,
To sad Missouri called; Missouri passed
The kindling watchword to the vast Northwest,
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Who louder sang than Niagara’s roar
To the unconquered heights of Tennessee;
Hoarse echoes, like the low sepulchral moan
Of subterranean fires, disturbed the Gulf--
The bleeding Gulf betrayed and overawed--
Then swelling loud as an Archangel’s trump,
Or shrill winds piping o’er the stormy flood,
It thundered back from far Pacific’s coast.
Come to the tombs by mourning millions thronged
Beneath the oak of weeping. Glorious dead,
Fame’s cemetery holds no hero dust
More dearly honored in sublime repose.
Pale ashes, with a nation’s tears bedewed,
And fanned by sighs as numerous as the winds,
The laurels that you nurture shall be green
And bloom forever round the precious urns
Of Baker and Lyon. Fortune smiled
Upon them, casting from her ample lap,
Her lavish stores of fame and wealth and ease,
And wooed them to repose. Though sweet her song,
She sang unheeded. Honor, fortune, life
They offered freely on their country’s shrine,
In the red heat and fury of the fight,
Deeming the dearest jewels of the world
Were nought when weighed against the nation’s life.
DIRGE.
He who led our faltering ranks
Up the ambuscaded banks--
He who poured his heart’s red rain
Over Springfield’s stormy plain,
Heeding not the volleys deadly
Nor the life’s blood running redly,
Cold in death shall lead no more
Where our country’s eagles soar.
Such, oh War, thy fearful pleasure,
Priceless blood and costliest treasure,
Still the victims whom thou smitest
Are the loveliest and the brightest.
But the martyrs shall be glorious
When our flag returns victorious;
Death, who seals such patriot eyes,
Opens them in Paradise.