His own mild Keystone State, sedate and prim.
Upon the ghastly foreheads of the crew
The whispers of rebellion, faint and few
At first, but deepening ever till they grew
Into black thoughts of murder: such the throng
Of horrors bound the hero. High the song
Should be that hymns the noble part he played!
Sinking himself—yet ministering aid

To all around him. By a mighty will
Living defiant of the wants that kill,
Because his death would seal his comrades' fate;
Cheering with ceaseless and inventive skill
Those Polar waters, dark and desolate.
Equal to every trial, every fate,

He stands, untril spring, tardy with relief,

Unlocks the icy gate,

And the pale prisoners thread the world once more, To the steep cliffs of Greenland's pastoral shore Bearing their dying chief.

Time was when he should gain his spurs of gold From royal hands, who wooed the knightly state; The knell of old formalities is tolled,

And the world's knights are now self-consecrate. No grander episode doth chivalry hold

In all its annals, back to Charlemagne, Than that lone vigil of unceasing pain, Faithfully kept through hunger and through cold, By the good Christian knight, ELISHA KANE. -Fitz-James O'Brien.

HE element of beauty which in thee

Was a prevailing spirit, pure and high,

And from all guile had made thy being free,
Now seems to whisper thou canst never die !

For nature's priests we shed no idle tear:

Their mantles on a noble lineage fall:

Though thy white locks at length have pressed the bier

Death could not fold thee in oblivion's pall: Majestic forms thy hand in grace arrayed Eternal watch shall keep beside thy tomb, And hues aerial, that thy pencil stayed, Its shades with heaven's radiance illume: Art's meek apostle, holy is thy sway, From the heart's records ne'er to pass away. -Henry Theodore Tuckerman.

W

WHEN, stricken by the freezing blast, A nation's living pillars fall, How rich the storied page, how vast, A word, a whisper, can recall !

No medal lifts its fretted face,

Nor speaking marble cheats your eye;
Yet, while these pictured lines I trace,
A living image passes by:

A roof beneath the mountain pines;
The cloisters of a hill-girt plain;
The front of life's embattled lines;

A mound beside the heaving main.
These are the scenes. A boy appears;
Set life's round dial in the sun,

Count the swift arc of seventy years,

His frame is dust; his task is done.

Yet pause upon the noontide hour,
Ere the declining sun has laid
His bleaching rays on manhood's power,
And look upon the mighty shade.

No gloom that stately shape can hide,
No change uncrown his brow; behold!
dark, calm, large-fronted, lightning-eyed,
Earth has no double from its mold!

Ere from the fields by valor won

The battle smoke had rolled away, And bared the blood-red setting sun, His eyes were opened on the day.

IFE may be given in many ways

As bravely in the closet as the field,
So bountiful is Fate;

But then to stand beside her,
When craven churls deride her,
To front a lie in arms, and not to yield,
This shows, methinks, God's plan
And measure of a stalwart man.
Limbs like the old heroic breeds,

Who stand self-poised on manhood's solid earth, Not forced to frame excuses for his birth, Fed from within with all the strength he needs.

Such was he, our Martyr-Chief,

Whom late the Nation he had led,
With ashes on her head,

Wept with the passion of an angry grief;
Forgive me, if from present things I turn

To speak what in my heart will beat and burn,
And hang my wreath on this world-honored urn.
Nature, they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man

Save on some worn-out plan,
Repeating us by rote;

For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,
And, choosing sweet clay from the breast

Of the unexhausted West,

With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,
Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true!
How beautiful to see

Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed,
Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead;
One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,
Not lured by any cheat of birth,
But by his clear-gained human worth,

And brave old wisdom of sincerity

They knew that outward grace is dust;

They could not choose but trust

In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill;

And supple-tempered will

That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust.
His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind,
Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars,
A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind;
Broad prairie rather genial, level-lined,
Fruitful and friendly for all human kind,
Yet also nigh to heaven, and loved of loftiest stars.
Nothing of Europe here,

Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,
Ere any names of Serf and Peer

Could Nature's equal scheme deface;

Here was a type of the true elder race,

And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face. I praise him not; it were too late;

And some innate weakness there must be
In him who condescends to victory
Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait,
Safe in himself as in a fate.

So always firmly he:

He knew to bide his time,

And can his fame abide,

Still patient in his simple faith sublime,
Till the wise years decide.

Great captains, with their guns and drums,
Disturb our judgment for the hour,

But at last silence comes;

These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, Our children shall behold his fame, The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, New birth of our new soil, the first American. -James Russell Lowell.

γου

OU lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier, You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace, Broad for the self-complacent British sneer,

His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face,

His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair, His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease,

His lack of all we prize as debonair,

Of power or will to shine, of art to please;

You, whose smart pen backed up the pencil's laugh, Judging each step as though the way were plain, Reckless, so it could point its paragraph,

Of chief's perplexity, or people's pain:

Beside this corpse, that bears for winding sheet
The Stars and Stripes he lived to rear anew,
Between the mourners at his head and feet,
Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you?

Yes; he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
To lame my pencil, and confute my pen;
To make me own this hind of princes peer,
This rail-splitter a true-born king of men.

*This tribute appeared in the London "Punch," which, up to the time of the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, had ridiculed and maligned him with all its well-known powers of pen and pencil.

My shallow judgment I had learned to rue,
Noting how to occasion's height he rose;
How his quaint wit made home-truths seem more true;
How, iron-like, his temper grew by blows.
How humble, yet how hopeful, he could be;
How, in good fortune and in ill, the same;
Nor bitter in success, nor boastful he,

Thirsty for gold, nor feverish for fame.

He went about his work-such work as few
Ever had laid on head and heart and hand-
As one who knows, where there's a task to do, [mand;
Man's honest will must Heaven's good grace com-
Who trusts the strength will with the burden grow,
That God makes instruments to work his will,

If but that will we can arrive to know,
Nor tamper with the weights of good and ill.

So he went forth to battle, on the side

That he felt clear was Liberty's and Right's,

As in his peasant boyhood he had plied

His warfare with rude Nature's thwarting mights;

The uncleared forest, the unbroken soil,

The iron-bark that turns the lumberer's ax,
The rapid, that o'erbears the boatman's toil,
The prairie, hiding the mazed wanderer's tracks;

The ambushed Indian, and the prowling bear

Such were the deeds that helped his youth to train. Rough culture, but such trees large fruit may bear, If but their stocks be of right girth and grain.

So he grew up, a destined work to do,

And lived to do it; four long suffering years, Ill-fate, ill-feeling, ill-report, lived through,

And then he heard the hisses changed to cheers.

'HY error, Fremont, simply was to act

THX

A brave man's part, without the statesman's
tact,

And, taking counsel but of common sense,
To strike at cause as well as consequence.
O, never yet since Roland wound his horn
At Roncesvalles has a blast been blown
Far-heard, wide-echoed, startling as thine own,
Heard from the van of freedom's hope forlorn!
It had been safer, doubtless, for the time,
To flatter treason, and avoid offense

To that Dark Power whose underlying crime
Heaves upward its perpetual turbulence.
But, if thine be the fate of all who break

The ground for truth's seed, or forerun their years

Till lost in distance, or with stout hearts make

A lane for freedom through the level spears,

Still take thou courage! God has spoken through thee,

Irrevocable, the mighty words, Be free!

The land shakes with them, and the slave's dull ear
Turns from the rice swamp stealthily to hear.
Who would recall them now must first arrest
The winds that blow down from the free North-
west,

Ruffling the Gulf; or like a scroll roll back
The Mississippi to its upper springs.
Such words fulfill their prophecy, and lack
But the full time to harden into things.

-John Greenleaf Whittier.

HAT! Irving! thrice welcome, warm heart and
fine brain!

You bring back the happiest spirit from Spain,
And the gravest sweet humor that ever was there
Since Cervantes met death in his gentle despair.
Nay, don't be embarrasssed, nor look so beseeching,
I shan't run directly against my own preaching,
And, having just laughed at their Raphaels and Dantes,
Go to setting you up beside matchless Cervantes;
But allow me to speak what I honestly feel;-
To a true poet-heart the fun of Dick Steele,

[will,

Throw in all of Addison minus the chill,
With the whole of that partnership's stock and good
Mix well, and, while stirring, hum o'er, as a spell,
The "fine old English gentleman;"-simmer it well:
Sweeten just to your own private liking, then strain,
That only the finest and clearest remain;

Let stand out of doors till a soul it receives
From the warm lazy sun loitering down through green
leaves;

And you'll find a choice nature, not wholly deserving A name either English or Yankee-just Irving.

H

WOW beautiful it was, that one bright day

In the long week of rain!

Though all its splendor could not chase away The omnipresent pain.

The lovely town was white with apple-blooms, And the great elms o'erhead

Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms,

Shot through with golden thread.