So to us who walk in summer through the cool and sea-blown town,

From the childhood of its people comes the solemn legend down.

Not in vain the ancient fiction, in whose moral lives the youth

And the fitness and the freshness of an undecaying truth.

Soon or late to all our dwellings come the spectres of the mind,

Doubts and fears and dread forebodings, in the darkness undefined; Round us throng the grim projections of the heart and of the brain, And our pride of strength is weakness, and the cunning hand is vain.

THE PIPES AT LUCKNOW1

PIPES of the misty moorlands,

Voice of the glens and hills;
The droning of the torrents,
The treble of the rills!
Not the braes of bloom and heather,
Nor the mountains dark with rain,
Nor maiden bower, nor border tower,
Have heard your sweetest strain !

Dear to the Lowland reaper,
And plaided mountaineer,
To the cottage and the castle

The Scottish pipes are dear;
Sweet sounds the ancient pibroch
O'er mountain, loch, and glade;
But the sweetest of all music

The pipes at Lucknow played.

1 An incident of the Siege of Lucknow, during the mutiny of the native troops in India, 1857. See Tennyson's superb ballad, The Relief of Lucknow.'

Day by day the Indian tiger
Louder yelled, and nearer crept;
Round and round the jungle-serpent
Near and nearer circles swept.
'Pray for rescue, wives and mothers,
Pray to-day!' the soldier said;
'To-morrow, death 's between us
And the wrong and shame we dread.'

Oh, they listened, looked, and waited,
Till their hope became despair;
And the sobs of low bewailing

-

Filled the pauses of their prayer.
Then up spake a Scottish maiden,
With her ear unto the ground:
'Dinna ye hear it? dinna ye hear it?
The pipes o' Havelock sound!'

Hushed the wounded man his groaning:
Hushed the wife her little ones;
Alone they heard the drum-roll
And the roar of Sepoy guns.
But to sounds of home and childhood
The Highland ear was true;
As her mother's cradle-crooning
The mountain pipes she knew.

Like the march of soundless music
Through the vision of the seer,
More of feeling than of hearing,

Of the heart than of the ear,
She knew the droning pibroch,
She knew the Campbell's call:
'Hark! hear ye no MacGregor's,
The grandest o' them all!'

20

30

40

1 It is in strict accordance with the facts of the rescue. In the distance the beleaguered garrison heard the stern and vengeful slogan of the MacGregors, but when the troops of Havelock came in view of the English flag still floating from the Residency, the pipers struck up the immortal air of Burns, Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot.' (WHITTIER, in a letter to Lowell, April 10, 1858.)

2 A remarkable custom, brought from the Old Country, formerly prevailed in the rural districts of New England. On the death of a member of the family, the bees were at once informed of the event, and their hives dressed in mourning. This ceremonial was supposed to be necessary to prevent the swarms from leaving their hives and seeking a new home. (WHITTIER.)

The place Whittier had in mind in writing 'Telling the Bees' was his birthplace. There were bee-hives on the garden terrace near the well-sweep, occupied perhaps by the descendants of Thomas Whittier's bees. The approach to the house from over the northern shoulder of Job's Hill by a path that was in constant use in his boyhood and is still in existence, is accurately described in the poem. The gap in the old wall' is still to be seen, and the stepping-stones in the shallow brook' are still in use. His sister's garden was down by the brook-side in front of the house, and her daffodils are perpetuated and may now be found in their season each year in that place. The red-barred gate, the poplars, the cattle yard with the white horns tossing above the wall,' these were all part of Whittier's boy life on the old farm. (Pickard's Life of Whittier, vol. ii, pp. 414-415.)

See also Pickard's Whittier-Land, pp. 17-18.

Before them, under the garden wall,
Forward and back,

Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
Draping each hive with a shred of black.

Trembling, I listened: the summer sun 41 Had the chill of snow;

That death seems but a covered way

Which opens into light, Wherein no blinded child can stray Beyond the Father's sight;

That care and trial seem at last,
Through Memory's sunset air,
Like mountain-ranges overpast,
In purple distance fair;

That all the jarring notes of life
Seem blending in a psalm,
And all the angles of its strife
Slow rounding into calm.

And so the shadows fall apart,
And so the west-winds play;
And all the windows of my heart
I open to the day.

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50

60

1859.

BROWN OF OSSAWATOMIE

JOHN BROWN of Ossawatomie spake on his dying day:

'I will not have to shrive my soul a priest in Slavery's pay.

But let some poor slave-mother whom I have striven to free,

With her children, from the gallows-stair put up a prayer for me!'

John Brown of Ossawatomie, they led him out to die;

And lo! a poor slave-mother with her little child pressed nigh.

Then the bold, blue eye grew tender, and the old harsh face grew mild, As he stooped between the jeering ranks and kissed the negro's child!

The shadows of his stormy life that moment fell apart;

And they who blamed the bloody hand forgave the loving heart.

That kiss from all its guilty means redeemed the good intent,

And round the grisly fighter's hair the martyr's aureole bent!

Perish with him the folly that seeks through evil good!

Long live the generous purpose unstained with human blood!

Not the raid of midnight terror, but the
thought which underlies;
Not the borderer's pride of daring, but the
Christian's sacrifice.

Mingles, reluctant, with my large content,
I cannot censure what was nobly meant.
But, while constrained to hold even Union
less

Than Liberty and Truth and Righteousness,
I thank thee in the sweet and holy name
Of peace, for wise calm words that put to
shame

Passion and party. Courage may be shown
Not in defiance of the wrong alone;
He may be bravest who, unweaponed, bears

2 On the 12th of January, 1861, Mr. Seward delivered in the Senate chamber a speech on The State of the Union,' in which he urged the paramount duty of preserving the Union, and went as far as it was possible to go, without surrender of principles, in concessions to the Southern party. (WHITTIER.)