THE CRISIS. [WRITTEN ON LEARNING THE TERMS OF THE TREATY WITH MEXICO.] ACROSS the Stony Mountains, o'er the desert's drouth and sand, And from the mountains of the East, to Santa Rosa's shore, O Vale of Rio Bravo! Let thy simple children weep; Let Sacramento's herdsmen heed what sound, the winds bring down, Of footsteps on the crisping snow, from cold Neveda's crown! O countrymen and brothers! that land of lake and plain, green; Swift through whose black volcanic gates, o'er many a sunny vale, Wind-like the Arapahoe sweeps the bison's dusty trail! Great spaces yet untravelled, great lakes whose mystic shores The Saxon rifle never heard, nor dip of Saxon oars; Great herds that wander all unwatched, wild steeds that none have tamed, Strange fish in unknown streams, and birds the Saxon never named ; Deep mines, dark mountain crucibles, where Nature's chemic powers Work out the Great Designer's will:-all these ye say are ours! Forever ours! for good or ill, on us the burden lies; scale? Or shall the Evil triumph, and robber Wrong prevail? The day is breaking in the East, of which the prophets told, Is this, O countrymen of mine! a day for us to sow To run anew the evil race the old lost nations ran, And die like them of unbelief of God, and wrong of man? Great Heaven! Is this our mission? End in this the tears, The toil, the strife, the watchings of our younger, better years? Still, as the old world rolls in light, shall ours in shadow turn, The Crisis presses on us; face to face with us it stands, By all for which the martyrs bore their agony and shame; So shall the Northern pioneer go joyful on his way, To make the rugged places smooth, and sow the vales with grain ; FREE! THE KNIGHT OF ST. JOHN. ERE down yon blue Carpathian hills The sun shall sink again! Farewell to life and all its ills, Farewell to cell and chain. These prison shades are dark and cold, But, darker far than they, The shadow of a sorrow old Is on my heart alway. For since the day when Warkworth wood Closed o'er my steed and I, An alien from my name and blood, A weed cast out to die, When, looking back in sunset light, I saw her turret gleam, And from its casement, far and white, Like one who from some desert shore Doth home's green isles descry, And, vainly longing, gazes o'er The waste of wave and sky; So from the desert of my fate I've wandered wide from shore to shore, I've knelt at many a shrine; And bowed me to the rocky floor And by the Holy Sepulchre I've pledged my knightly sword Oh, vain the vow, and vain the strife! In vain the penance strange and long, The prayer, the fasting, and the thong, The eyes of memory will not sleep, Its ears are open still; And vigils with the past they keep And still the loves and joys of old Do evermore uprise; I see the flow of locks of gold, Ah me! upon another's breast I see upon another rest 66 The glance that once was mine! "O faithless Priest!-O perjured knight!" I hear the Master cry; "Shut out the vision from thy sight, Let Earth and Nature die! |