Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals
The blast of War's great organ shakes the skies!
But beautiful as songs of the immortals,
The holy melodies of love arise.
WHAT CONSTITUTES A STATE?
WHAT constitutes a State?
Not high-raised battlement or labour'd mound,
Thick wall or moated gate;
Not cities proud, with spires and turrets crown'd:
Not bays, and broad arm'd ports,
Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride;
Not starr'd and spangled courts,
Where low-bred baseness wafts perfume to pride.
No,-Men, high-minded men,
Men, who their duties know;
But know their rights, and knowing dare maintain,
Prevent the long-aim'd blow,
And crush the tyrant, while they rend the chain;
These constitute a state.
THE CHRISTIAN PAUPER'S DEATH BED.
TREAD Softly-bow the head:
In rev'rent silence bow;
No passing bell doth toll,
Yet an immortal soul,
Is passing now.
Stranger! however great,
With lowly rev'rence bow;
There's one in that poor shed-
One by that paltry bed—
Greater than thou.
Beneath that beggar's roof,
Lo! Death doth keep his state :
Enter-no crowds attend;
Enter-no guards defend
This palace gate.
That pavement, damp and cold,
No smiling courtiers tread ;
One silent woman stands,
Lifting with meagre hands
A dying head.
No mingling voices sound-
An infant wail alone;
A sob suppressed—again
That short deep gasp, and then-
The parting groan.
O change!-0 wondrous change!
Burst are the prison bars—
This moment there, so low,
So agonized-and now,
Beyond the stars!
O change!-stupendous change!
There lies the soulless clod;
The sun eternal breaks-
The new immortal wakes
Wakes with his God!
BETWEEN two worlds life hovers like a star,
'Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge;
How little do we know that, which we are!
How less, what we may be! the eternal surge
Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar
Our bubbles; as these burst, new emerge,
Lashed from the foam of ages, while the graves
Of empires heave but like some passing waves.
How wonderful is Death,
Death and his Brother Sleep!
One, pale as yonder waning moon,
With lips of lurid blue;
The other, rosy as the morn
When, throned on ocean's wave,
It blushes o'er the world;
Yet both so passing wonderful!
How beautiful this night! the balmiest sigh,
Which vernal zephyrs breathe in evening's ear,
Were discord to the speaking quietude,
That wraps this moveless scene.
Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy, which love has spread
To curtain her sleeping world. Yon gentle hills,
Robed in a garment of untrodden snow;
Yon darksome rocks, whence icicles depend,
So stainless, that their white and glittering spires
Tinge not the moon's pure beam; yon crested steep,
Whose banner hangeth o'er the time-worn tower
So idly, that rapt fancy deemeth it
A metaphor of peace ;-all form a scene,
Where musing solitude might love to lift
Her soul above this sphere of earthliness;
Where silence undisturbed might watch alone,
So cold, so bright, so still.
O FOR a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war—
Might never reach me more.
My ear is pain'd, My soul is sick with ev'ry day's report
Of wrong and outrage, with which Earth is fill'd.
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,
It does not feel for man; the nat❜ral bond
Of brotherhood is sever'd as the flax,
That falls asunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not color'd like his own; and having pow'r
T'enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause,
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
Lands intersected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other. Mountains interpos'd
Make enemies of nations, who had else
Like kindred drops been mingled into one.
Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys;
And, worse than all, and most to be deplor'd
As human nature's broadest, foulest blot,
Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat
With stripes, that mercy with a bleeding heart
Weeps, when she sees inflicted on a beast.
Then what is man? And what man seeing this,
And having human feelings, does not blush
And hang his head, to think himself a man?
I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me, while I sleep,
And tremble, when I wake, for all the wealth,
That sinews bought and sold have ever earn'd.
No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart's
Just estimation prized above all price,
I had much rather be myself the slave
And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him.
We have no slaves at home. -Then why abroad?
And they themselves once ferried o'er the wave,
That parts us, are emancipate and loosed.
Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free,
They touch our country and their shackles fall.
That's noble, and bespeaks a nation proud
And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then,
And let it circulate through every vein
Of all your empire! that, where Britain's power
Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too.
CATO ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.
IT must be so-Plato, thou reason'st well!
Else, whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or, whence this secret dread, and inward horror,
Of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?—
'Tis the Divinity, that stirs within us,
'Tis Heaven itself, that points out an here-after,
And intimates Eternity to man.
Eternity! thou pleasing dreadful thought!
Through what variety of untried being,
Through what new scenes and changes must we pass !
The wide, the unbounded prospect lies before me;
But shadows, clouds, and darkness, rest upon it.
Here will I hold: If there's a power above us-
And that there is, all nature cries aloud
Through all her works-He must delight in virtue ;
And that which he delights in, must be happy.
But when? or where? This world was made for Cæsar,
I'm weary of conjectures-this must end them,
(LAYING HIS HAND ON HIS SWORD).
Thus I am doubly armed. My death, my life,
My bane and antidote, are both before me.
This in a moment, brings me to an end;
But this informs me I shall never die !
The soul, secured in her existence, smiles
At the drawn dagger, and defies its point.—
The stars shall fade away, the sun himself
Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years;
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
The wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds!
ADDISON.
That fires the arch of heaven !-that dark red smoke
Blotting the silver moon? The stars are quenched
In darkness, and the pure and spangling snow
Gleams faintly through the gloom, that gathers round.
Hark to that roar, whose swift and deafening peals
In countless echoes through the mountains ring,
Startling pale midnight on her starry throne !
Now swells the intermingling din, the jar
Frequent and frightful of the bursting bomb;
The falling beam, the shriek, the groan, the shout,
The ceaseless clangor, and the rush of men
Inebriate with rage:-loud, and more loud
The discord grows; till pale death shuts the scene,
And o'er the conqueror and the conquered draws
His cold and bloody shroud. Of all the men
Whom day's departing beam saw blooming there
In proud and vigorous health; of all the hearts
That beat with anxious life at sunset there;
How few survive, how few are beating now!
All is dark silence, like the fearful calm,
That slumbers in the storm's portentous pause;
Save when the frantic wail of widowed love
Comes shuddering on the blast, or the faint moan
With which some soul burst from the frame of clay
Wrapt round its struggling powers.
HAMLET'S SOLILOQUY ON LIFE AND DEATH.
To be, or not to be,-that is the question :-
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune;
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them?-To die,-to sleep,—
No more ; and, by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks,
That flesh is heir to,-'tis a consummation
To sleep! perchance to dream ;-ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause; there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life :
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
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