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FROM "LOWELL'S CONVERSATIONS." The earliest poetry of all countries is sacred poetry, or that in which the idea of God predominates and is developed. The first effort at speech which man's nature makes in all tongues is, to pronounce the word "Father." Reverence is the foundation of all poetry. From Reverence the spirit climbs on to love, and thence beholds all things. No matter in what Scythian fashion these first recognitions of something above and beyond the soul are uttered, they contain the germs of psalms and prophecies. Whether, for a while, the immortal guest rests satisfied with a Fetish or an Apollo, it has already grasped the clew which leads unerringly to the very highest idea. For reverence is the most keen-eyed and exacting of all the faculties, and, if there be the least flaw in its idol, it will kneel no longer. From wood it rises to gold and ivory; from these, to the yet simpler and more majestic marble; and, planting its foot upon that, it leaps upward to the infinite and invisible. When I assume reverence, then, as the very primal essence and life of poetry, I claim for it a nobler stirp than it has been the fashion to allow it. Beyond Adam runs back its illustrious genealogy. It stood with Uriel in the sun, and looked down over the battlements of heaven with the angelic guards. In short, it is no other than the religious sentiment itself. That is poetry which makes sorrow lovely, and joy solemn to us, and reveals to us the holiness of things. Faith casts herself upon her neck as upon a sister's. She shows us what glimpses we get of life's spiritual face. What she looks on becomes miraculous, though it be but the dust of the way-side; and miracles become but as dust for their simpleness. There is nothing noble without her; with her there can be nothing mean. What songs the Druids sang within the sacred circuit of Stonehenge we can barely conjecture; but those forlorn stones doubtless echoed with appeals to a higher something; and are not even now without their sanctity, since they chronicle a nation's desire after God. Whether those forestpriests worshipped the strangely beautiful element of fire, or if the pilgrim Belief pitched her tent and rested for a night in some ruder and bleaker creed, there we may yet trace the light footprints of Poesy, as she led her sister onward to fairer fields, and streams flowing nearer to the oracle of God.

depth in the sea; but in the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get the easier the sinking. As for the kindness which Milton and Burns felt for the Devil, I am sure that God thinks of him with pity a thousand times to their once, and the good Origin believ ed him not incapable of salvation.

These simplest thoughts, feelings and experiences, that lie upon the very surface of life, are overlooked by all but uncommon eyes. Most look upon them as mere weeds. Yet a weed, to him that loves it, is a flower; and there are times when we would not part with a sprig of chickweed for a whole continent of lilies. No man thinks his own nature miraculous, while to his neighbour it may give a surfeit of wonder. Let him go where he will, he can find no heart so worth a study as his own. The prime fault of modern poets is, that they are resolved to be peculiar. They are not content that it should come of itself, but they must dig and bore for it, sinking their wells usually through the grave of some buried originality, so that if any water rises it is tainted. Read most volumes of poems, and you are reminded of a French bill of fare, where every thing is á la something else. Even a potato au naturel is a godsend. When will poets learn that a grass-blade of their own raising is worth a barrow-load of flowers from their neighbour's garden?

Ah, if we would but pledge ourselves to truth as heartily as we do to a real or imaginary mistress, and think life too short only because it abridged our time of service, what a new world we should have! Most men pay their vows to her in youth, and go up into the bustle of life, with her kiss warm upon their lips, and her blessing lying upon their hearts like dew; but the world has lips less chary. and cheaper benedictions, and if the broken trothplight with their humble village.mistress comes over them sometimes with a pang, she knows how to blandish away remorse, and persuades them, ere old age, that their young enthusiasm was a folly and an in

discretion.

We

I agree with you that the body is treated with quite too much ceremony and respect. Even religion has vailed its politic hat to it, till, like Christopher Sly, it is metamorphosed, in its own estimation, from a tinker to a duke. Men, who would, without compunction, kick a living beggar, will yet Byron might have made a great poet. As it is, stand in awe of his poor carcass, after all that renhis poetry is the record of a struggle between his dered it truly venerable has fled out of it. good and his baser nature, in which the latter wins. agree with the old barbarian epitaph which affirmed The fall is great in proportion to the height from that the handfull of dust had been Ninus; as if that which one is hurled. An originally beautiful spirit which convicts us of mortality and weakness could becomes the most degraded when perverted. It at the same time endow us with our high prerogawould fain revenge itself upon that purity from tive of kingship over them. South, in one of his which it is an unhappy and restless exile, and drowns sermons, tells us of certain men whose souls are of its remorse in the drunkenness and vain bluster of no worth, but as salt to keep their bodies from pudefiance. There is a law of neutralization of forces, trifying. I fear that the soul is too often regarded which hinders bodies from sinking beyond a certain in this sutler fashion. Why should men ever be

fruitful ear. Even under our thin crust of fashion and frivolity throb the undying fires of the great soul of man, the fountain and centre of all poetry, and which will one day burst forth to wither like grass-blades the vain temples and palaces which forms and conventionalities have heaped smotheringly upon it. Behind the blank faces of the weak and thoughtless, I see, sometimes with a kind of dread, this awful and mysterious presence, as I have

afraid to die, but that they regard the spirit as secon- | word spoken for her ever fail of some willing and dary to that which is but its mere appendage and conveniency, its symbol, its word, its means of visibility? If the soul lose this poor mansion of hers by the sudden conflagration of disease, or by the slow decay of age, is she therefore houseless and shelterless? If she cast away this soiled and tattered garment, is she therefore naked? A child looks forward to his new suit, and dons it joyfully; we cling to our rags and foulness. We should welcome Death as one who brings us tidings of the find-seen one of Allston's paintings in a ball-room overing of long-lost titles to a large family estate, and set out gladly to take possession, though, it may be, not without a natural tear for the humbler home we are leaving. Death always means us a kindness, though he has often a gruff way of offering it. Even if the soul never returned from that chartless and unmapped country, which I do not believe, I would take Sir John Davies's reason as a good one:

looking with its serene and steadfast eyes the butterfly throng beneath, and seeming to gaze, from these narrow battlements of time, far out into the infinite promise of the future, beholding there the free, erect, and perfected soul.

No sincere desire of doing good need make an enemy of a single human being; for that is a capacity in which he is by nature unfitted to shine. It "But, as Noah's pigeon, which returned no more, may, and must, rouse opposition; but that philanDid show she footing found, for all the flood; thropy has surely a flaw in it, which cannot sympaSo, when good souls, departed through death's door, Come not again, it shows their dwelling good." thize with the oppressor equally as with the oppressThe realm of Death seems an enemy's country ed. It is the high and glorious vocation of Poesy to most men, on whose shores they are loathly driven as well to make our own daily life and toil more by stress of weather; to the wise man it is the de- beautiful and holy to us by the divine ministerings sired port where he moors his bark gladly, as in of love, as to render us swift to convey the same Poesy is love's chosen some quiet haven of the Fortunate Isles; it is the blessing to our brother. golden west into which his sun sinks, and, sinking, apostle, and the very almoner of God. She is the casts back a glory upon the leaden cloud-rack which the home of the outcast, and the wealth of the needy. had darkly besieged his day. For her the hut becomes a palace, whose halls are guarded by the gods of Phidias, and kept peaceful by the maid-mothers of Raphael. She loves better the poor wanderer whose bare feet know by heart all the freezing stones of the pavement, than the delicate maiden for whose dainty soles Brussels and Turkey have been over-careful; and I doubt not but some remembered scrap of childish song hath

After all, the body is a more expert dialectician than the soul, and buffets it, even to bewilderment, with the empty bladders of logic; but the soul can retire, from the dust and turmoil of such conflict, to the high tower of instinctive faith, and there, in hushed serenity, take comfort of the sympathizing stars. We look at death through the cheap glazed windows of the flesh, and believe him for the monster which the flawed and crooked glass presents him. You say truly that we have wasted time in trying to coax the body into a faith in what, by its very nature, it is incapable of comprehending. Hence, a plethoric, short-winded kind of belief, that can walk at an easy pace over the smooth plain, but loses breath at the first sharp uphill of life. How idle is it to set a sensual bill of fare before the soul, acting over again the old story of the Crane and the

Fox!

I know not when we shall hear pure spiritualism preached by the authorized expounders of doctrine. These have suffered the grain to mildew, while they have been wrangling about the husks of form; and the people have stood by, hungry and half-starved, too intent on the issue of the quarrel to be conscious that they were trampling the forgotten and scattered bread of life in the mire. Thank Heaven, they may still pluck ripe ears, of God's own planting and watering, in the fields!

often been a truer alms than all the benevolent soci

eties could give. She is the best missionary, know-
ing when she may knock at the door of the most
curmudgeonly hearts, without being turned away
unheard. The omnipresence of her spirit is beauti-
fully and touchingly expressed in "The Poet," one
of the divisions of a little volume of poems by Cor-
nelius Matthews. Were the whole book as simple
in thought and diction as the most of this particular
poem, I know few modern volumes that would equal
it. Let me read you the passage I alluded to.
will see that the poor slave is not forgotten.

"There sits not on the wilderness's edge,

In the dusk lodges of the wintry North,
Nor couches in the rice-fields slimy sedge,
Nor on the cold, wide waters ventures forth,-
Who waits not, in the pauses of his toil,
With hope that spirits in the air may sing;
Who upward turns not, at propitious times,
Breathless, his silent features listening,
In desert and in lodge, on marsh and main,
To feed his hungry heart and conquer pain."

You

The love of the beautiful and truo, like the dewdrop in the heart of the crystal, remains forever True poetry is never out of place, nor will a good clear and liquid in the inmost shrine of man's being,

VOICES OF THE TRUE-HEARTED.

undrunk.

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though all the rest be turned to stone by sorrow and
degradation. The angel, who has once come down
into the soul, will not be driven thence by any sin
or baseness even, much less by any undeserved
oppression or wrong. At the soul's gate sits she
silently, with folded hands and downcast eyes; but,
at the least touch of nobleness, those patient orbs
are serenely uplifted, and the whole spirit is light-
ened with their prayerful lustre. Over all life broods
Poesy, like the calm, blue sky with its motherly,
rebuking face. She is the true preacher of the Word,
and when, in time of danger and trouble, the es-
tablished shepherds have cast down their crooks and
fled, she tenderly careth for the flock. On her calm
and fearless heart rests weary freedom, when all
the world have driven her from the door with scoffs
and mockings. From her white breasts flows the
strong milk which nurses our heroes and martyrs;
and she blunts the sharp tooth of the fire, makes the
axe edgeless, and dignifies the pillory or the gal-rations and resolve and deed.
lows. She is the great reformer, and, where the
love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and
wrong cannot long prevail. The more this love is cul-
tivated and refined, the more do men strive to make
their outward lives rhythmical and harmonious,
that they may accord with that inward and domi-
nant rhythm by whose key the composition of all
noble and worthy deeds is guided. To make one
object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a
single heart is reward enough for a life; for, the
more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is
beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy
for that which is most beautiful,-the human soul.
Love never contracts its circles: they widen by as
fixed and sure a law as those around a pebble cast
into still water. The angel of love, when, full of
sorrow, he followed the first exiles, behind whom
the gates of Paradise shut with that mournful clang,
of which some faint echo has lingered in the hearts
of all their offspring, unwittingly snapped off and
brought away in his hand the seed-pod of one of the
never-fading flowers which grew there. Into all
dreary and desolate places fell some of its blessed
kernels; they asked but little soil to root them-
selves in, and in this narrow patch of our poor clay
they sprang most quickly and sturdily. Gladly they
grew, and from them all time has been sown with
whatever gives a higher hope to the soul, or makes
life nobler and more godlike; while, from the over-
arching sky of poesy, sweet dew forever falls, to
nurse and keep them green and fresh from the world's
dust.

ing its wings to seek some fairer height. This is
true only when love has been but one of the thou
sand vizards of selfishness, when we have loved our-
selves in the beautiful spirit we have knelt to; that
is, when we have merely loved the delight we felt
in loving. Then it is that the cup we so thirsted
after tastes bitter or insipid, and we fling it down
Did we empty it, we should find that it
was the poor, muddy dregs of self at the bottom,
which made our gorge rise. If it be God whom we
love in loving our elected one, then shall the bright
halo of her spirit expand itself over all existence,
till every human face we look upon shall share in
its transfiguration, and the old forgotten traces of
brotherhood be lit up by it; and our love, instead
of pining discomforted, shall be lured upward and
upward by low, angelical voices, which recede be-
fore it forever, as it mounts from brightening sum-
mit to summit on the delectable mountains of aspi-

If any have aught worth hearing to say, let them say it, be they men or women. We have more than enough prating by those who have nothing to tell us. I never heard that the Quaker women were the worse for preaching, or the men for listening to them. If we pardon such exhibitions as those of the dancing-females on the stage, surely our prudery need not bristle in such a hedgehog fashion because a woman in the chaste garb of the Friends dares to plead in public for the downtrodden cause of justice and freedom. Or perhaps it is more modest and maidenly for a woman to expose her body in public than her soul? If we listen and applaud, while, as Coleridge says,

"Heaves the proud harlot her distended breast
In intricacies of laborious song,"

must we esteem it derogatory to our sense of refinement to drink from the fresh brook of a true woman's voice, as it gushes up from a heart throbbing only with tenderness for our neighbour fallen among thieves? Here in Massachusetts we burn Popish nunneries, but we maintain a whole system of Protestant ones. If a woman is to be an Amazon, all the cloisters in the world will not starve or compress her into a Cordelia. There is no sex in noble thoughts, and deeds agreeing with them; and such recruits do equally good service in the army of truth, whether they are brought in by women or men. Out on our Janus-faced virtue, with its one front looking smilingly to the stage, and its other with shame-shut eyes turned frowningly upon the Antislavery Convention! If other reapers be wanting, let women go forth into the harvest-field of God and bind the ripe shocks of grain; the complexion of their souls shall not be tanned or weather-stained, for the sun that shines there only makes the fairer Never was falser doctrine preached than that love's and whiter all that it looks upon. Whatever is in chief delight and satisfaction lies in the pursuit of its place is in the highest place; whatever is right its object, which won, the charm is already flutter-is graceful, noble, expedient; and the universal hiss

God's livery is a very plain one; but its wearers have good reason to be content. If it have not so much gold-lace about it as Satan's, it keeps out foul weather better, and is besides a great deal cheaper.

of the world shall fall upon it as a benediction, and go up to the ear of God as the most moving prayer in its behalf. If a woman be truly chaste, that chastity shall surround her, in speaking to a public assembly, with a ring of protecting and rebuking light, and make the exposed rostrum as private as an oratory; if immodest, there is that in her which can turn the very house of God into a brothel.

STANZA S.

BY JOHN G. WHITTIER.

"The despotism which our fathers could not bear in their native country is expiring, and the sword of justice in her reformed hands has applied its exterminating edge to slavery. Shall the United States-the free United States, which could not bear the bonds of a king, cradle the bondage which a king is abolishing? Shall a Republic be less free than a Monar chy? Shall we, in the vigor and buoyancy of our manhood, be less energetic in righteousness than a kingdom in its age?"Dr. Follen's Address.

"Genius of America!-Spirit of our free institutions !-where art thou? How art thou fallen, O Lucifer! son of the morning-how art thou fallen from Heaven! Hell from be. neath is moved for thee, to meet thee at thy coming! The kings of the earth cry out to thee, Aha! Aha!-ART THOU BECOME LIKE UNTO US?"-Speech of Samuel J. May.

Our fellow-countrymen in chains!

Slaves-in a land of light and law!
Slaves-crouching on the very plains

Where roll'd the storm of Freedom's war!
A groan from Eutaw's haunted wood-
A wail where Camden's martyrs fell-
By every shrine of patriot blood,
From Moultrie's wall and Jasper's well!

By storied hill and hallow'd grot,

By mossy wood and marshy glen, Whence rang of old the rifle-shot,

And hurrying shout of Marion's men!
The groan of breaking hearts is there-

The falling lash-the fetter's clank!
Slaves-SLAVES are breathing in that air,
Which old De Kalb and Sumter drank!
What, ho!—our countrymen in chains!
The whip on WOMAN'S shrinking flesh!
Our soil yet reddening with the stains,
Caught from her scourging, warm and fresh!
What! mothers from their children riven!

What! God's own image bought and sold!
AMERICANS to market driven,

And barter'd as the brute for gold!

Speak! shall their agony of prayer

Come thrilling to our hearts in vain?
To us, whose fathers scorn'd to bear
The paltry menace of a chain;
To us, whose boast is loud and long
Of holy Liberty and Light-

Say, shall these writhing slaves of Wrong,
Plead vainly for their plunder'd Right?

What shall we send, with lavish breath,
Our sympathies across the wave,
Where Manhood, on the field of death,

Strikes for his freedom, or a grave?
Shall prayers go up, and hymns be sung

For Greece, the Moslem fetter spurning, And millions hail with pen and tongue

Our light on all her altars burning?

Shall Belgium feel, and gallant France,
By Vendome's pile and Schoenbrun's wall,
And Poland, gasping on her lance,

The impulse of our cheering call?
And shall the SLAVE, beneath our eye,
Clank o'er our fields his hateful chain?
And toss his fetter'd arms on high,
And groan for Freedom's gift, in vain?
Oh, say, shall Prussia's banner be
A refuge for the stricken slave?
And shall the Russian serf go free

By Baikal's lake and Neva's wave?
And shall the wintry-bosom'd Dane
Relax the iron hand of pride,

And bid his bondmen cast the chain,
From fetter'd soul and limb, aside?
Shall every flap of England's flag

Proclaim that all around are free,
From farthest Ind" to each blue crag

That beetles o'er the Western Sea? And shall we scoff at Europe's kings,

When Freedom's fire is dim with us, And round our country's altar clings

The damning shade of Slavery's curse? Go-let us ask of Constantine

To loose his grasp on Poland's throat! And beg the lord of Mahmoud's line

To spare the struggling Suliote— Will not the scorching answer come

From turban'd Turk, and fiery Russ : "Go, loose your fetter'd slaves at home, Then turn, and ask the like of us!" Just God! and shall we calmly rest,

The Christian's scorn-the Heathen's mirthContent to live the lingering jest

And by-word of a mocking Earth? Shall our own glorious land retain

That curse which Europe scorns to bear?
Shall our own brethren drag the chain
Which not even Russia's menials wear?

Up, then, in Freedom's manly part,
From gray-beard eld to fiery youth,
And on the nation's naked heart

Scatter the living coals of Truth!
Up-while ye slumber, deeper yet

The shadow of our fame is growing! Up-while ye pause, our sun may set In blood, around our altars flowing!

Oh! rouse ye, ere the storm comes forth-
The gather'd wrath of God and man—
Like that which wasted Egypt's earth,
When hail and fire above it ran.
Hear ye no warnings in the air?

Feel ye no earthquake underneath?
Up-up-why will ye slumber where
The sleeper only wakes in death?

Up now for Freedom!-not in strife
Like that your sterner fathers saw-
The awful waste of human life-

The glory and the guilt of war:
But break the chain-the yoke remove,
And smite to earth Oppression's rod,
With those mild arms of Truth and Love,
Made mighty through the living God!

Down let the shrine of Moloch sink,
And leave no traces where it stood;

Nor longer let its idol drink

His daily cup of human blood: But rear another altar there,

To Truth and Love and Mercy given, And Freedom's gift, and Freedom's prayer, Shall call an answer down from Heaven!

THE CONTRAST.

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

Thy love thou sentest oft to me,
And still, as oft, I thrust it back;
Thy messenger I could not see

In those who every thing did lack,
The poor, the outcast, and the black.

Pride held his hand before mine eyes,

The world with flattery stuffed mine ears; I looked to see a monarch's guise,

Nor dreamed thy love would knock for years, Poor, naked, fettered, full of tears.

Yet, when I sent my love to thee,

Thou with a smile didst take it in,

And entertained it royally

Though grimed with earth, with hunger thin, And leprous with the taint of sin.

Now, every day thy love I meet

As o'er the earth it wanders wide, With weary step and bleeding feet,

Still knocking at the heart of pride, And offering grace, though still denied.

THE ARSENAL AT SPRINGFIELD.

BY HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.

This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling,
Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms;
But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing
Startles the villages with strange alarms.

Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary,
When the death-angel touches those swift keys!
What loud lament and dismal Miserere

Will mingle with their awful symphonies!

I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus,
The cries of agony, the endless groan,
Which, through the ages that have gone before us,
In long reverberations reach our own.

On helm and harness rings the Saxon hammer,
Through Cimbric forest roars the Norseman's song,
And loud, amid the universal clamor,

O'er distant deserts sounds the Tartar gong.

I hear the Florentine, who from his palace
Wheels out his battle-bell with dreadful din,
And Aztec priests upon their teocallis

Beat the wild war-drums made of serpent's skin; The tumult of each sacked and burning village; The shout that every prayer for mercy drowns; The soldiers' revels in the midst of pillage;

The wail of famine in beleaguered towns;

The bursting shell, the gateway wrenched asunder,
The rattling musketry, the clashing blade;
And ever and anon, in tones of thunder,
The diapason of the cannonade.

Is it, O man, with such discordant noises,
With such accursed instruments as these,
Thou drownest Nature's sweet and kindly voices,
And jarrest the celestial harmonies?

Were half the power, that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth, bestowed on camps and

courts,

Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals nor forts :

The warrior's name would be a name abhorred !
And every nation, that should lift again
Its hand against a brother, on its forehead
Would wear forevermore the curse of Cain!
Down the dark future, through long generations,
The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease;
And like a bell, with solemn, sweet vibrations,

I hear once more the voice of Christ say, " Peace!"

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.

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