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ever, trampling on her ancient path,

       Cankered by treachery or inflamed by wrath,

       With smooth "Resolves" or with discordant cries,

       The mad Briareus of disunion rise,

       Chiefs of New England! by your sires' renown,

       Dash the red torches of the rebel down!

       Flood his black hearthstone till its flames expire,

       Though your old Sachem fanned his council-fire!

      But if at last, her fading cycle run,

       The tongue must forfeit what the arm has won,

       Then rise, wild Ocean! roll thy surging shock

       Full on old Plymouth's desecrated rock!

       Scale the proud shaft degenerate hands have hewn,

       Where bleeding Valor stained the flowers of June!

       Sweep in one tide her spires and turrets down,

       And howl her dirge above Monadnock's crown!

      List not the tale; the Pilgrim's hallowed shore,

       Though strewn with weeds, is granite at the core;

       Oh, rather trust that He who made her free

       Will keep her true as long as faith shall be!

       Farewell! yet lingering through the destined hour,

       Leave, sweet Enchantress, one memorial flower!

      An Angel, floating o'er the waste of snow

       That clad our Western desert, long ago,

       (The same fair spirit who, unseen by day,

       Shone as a star along the Mayflower's way,)—

       Sent, the first herald of the Heavenly plan,

       To choose on earth a resting-place for man—

       Tired with his flight along the unvaried field,

       Turned to soar upwards, when his glance revealed

       A calm, bright bay enclosed in rocky bounds,

       And at its entrance stood three sister mounds.

      The Angel spake: "This threefold hill shall be

       The home of Arts, the nurse of Liberty!

       One stately summit from its shaft shall pour

       Its deep-red blaze along the darkened shore;

       Emblem of thoughts that, kindling far and wide,

       In danger's night shall be a nation's guide.

       One swelling crest the citadel shall crown,

       Its slanted bastions black with battle's frown,

       And bid the sons that tread its scowling heights

       Bare their strong arms for man and all his rights!

       One silent steep along the northern wave

       Shall hold the patriarch's and the hero's grave;

       When fades the torch, when o'er the peaceful scene

       The embattled fortress smiles in living green,

       The cross of Faith, the anchor staff of Hope,

       Shall stand eternal on its grassy slope;

       There through all time shall faithful Memory tell,

       'Here Virtue toiled, and Patriot Valor fell;

       Thy free, proud fathers slumber at thy side;

       Live as they lived, or perish as they died!'"

AN AFTER-DINNER POEM

       Table of Contents

      (TERPSICHORE)

      Read at the Annual Dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at

       Cambridge, August 24, 1843.

      IN narrowest girdle, O reluctant Muse,

       In closest frock and Cinderella shoes,

       Bound to the foot-lights for thy brief display,

       One zephyr step, and then dissolve away!

      … … . …

      Short is the space that gods and men can spare

       To Song's twin brother when she is not there.

       Let others water every lusty line,

       As Homer's heroes did their purple wine;

       Pierian revellers! Know in strains like these

       The native juice, the real honest squeeze—

       Strains that, diluted to the twentieth power,

       In yon grave temple might have filled an hour.

       Small room for Fancy's many-chorded lyre,

       For Wit's bright rockets with their trains of fire,

       For Pathos, struggling vainly to surprise

       The iron tutor's tear-denying eyes,

       For Mirth, whose finger with delusive wile

       Turns the grim key of many a rusty smile,

       For Satire, emptying his corrosive flood

       On hissing Folly's gas-exhaling brood,

       The pun, the fun, the moral, and the joke,

       The hit, the thrust, the pugilistic poke—

       Small space for these, so pressed by niggard Time,

       Like that false matron, known to nursery rhyme—

       Insidious Morey—scarce her tale begun,

       Ere listening infants weep the story done.

      Oh, had we room to rip the mighty bags

       That Time, the harlequin, has stuffed with rags!

       Grant us one moment to unloose the strings,

       While the old graybeard shuts his leather wings.

       But what a heap of motley trash appears

       Crammed in the bundles of successive years!

       As the lost rustic on some festal day

       Stares through the concourse in its vast array—

       Where in one cake a throng of faces runs,

       All stuck together like a sheet of buns—

       And throws the bait of some unheeded name,

       Or shoots a wink with most uncertain aim,

       So roams my vision, wandering over all,

       And strives to choose, but knows not where to fall.

      Skins of flayed authors, husks of dead reviews,

       The turn-coat's clothes, the office-seeker's shoes,

       Scraps from cold feasts, where conversation runs

       Through mouldy toasts to oxidated puns,

       And grating songs a listening crowd endures,

       Rasped from the throats of bellowing amateurs;

       Sermons, whose writers played such dangerous tricks

       Their own heresiarchs called them heretics,

       (Strange that one term such distant poles should link,

       The Priestleyan's copper and the Puseyan's zinc);

       Poems that shuffle with superfluous legs

       A blindfold minuet over addled eggs,

       Where all the syllables that end in ed,

      

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