Poems

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B. B. Mussey & Company, 1850 - History - 408 pages

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Page 93 - A weight seemed lifted from my heart, — a pitying friend was nigh, I felt it in his hard rough hand, and saw it in his eye; And, when again the sheriff spoke, that voice, so kind to me, Growled back its stormy answer like the roaring of the sea: " Pile my ship with bars of silver — pack with coins of Spanish gold, From keel-piece up to deck-plank, the roomage of her hold,— By the living God who made me ! I would sooner in your bay Sink ship and crew and cargo than bear this child away!
Page 372 - God calls our loved ones ; but we lose not wholly What he hath given : They live on earth, in thought and deed, as truly As in his Heaven.
Page 151 - Just God! and these are they, Who minister at thine altar, God of right! Men who their hands, with prayer and blessing, lay On Israel's ark of light. What! preach, and kidnap men? Give thanks, and rob thy own afflicted poor? Talk of thy glorious liberty, and then Bolt hard the captive's door? What! servants of thy own Merciful Son, who came to seek and save The homeless and the outcast, fettering down The tasked and plundered slave! Pilate and Herod friends! Chief priests and rulers, as of old, combine!...
Page 5 - I LOVE the old melodious lays Which softly melt the ages through, The songs of Spenser's golden days, Arcadian Sidney's silvery phrase, Sprinkling our noon of time with freshest morning dew.
Page 314 - Father ! is this evil world of ours; Upward, through its blood and ashes, spring afresh the Eden flowers ; From its smoking hell of battle, Love and Pity send their prayer, And still thy white-winged angels hover dimly in our air ! FORGIVENESS.
Page 329 - Oh, brother man ! fold to thy heart thy brother ; Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there ; To worship rightly is to love each other, Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer. Follow with reverent steps the great example Of Him whose holy work was " doing good ; " So shall the wide earth seem our Father's temple, Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.
Page 336 - O, — fruit loved of boyhood ! — the old days recalling, When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling ! When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin, Glaring out through the dark with a candle within ! When we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune, Our chair a broad pumpkin, — our lantern the moon, Telling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam, In a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team ! 126 HAMPTON BEACH.
Page 142 - 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...
Page 134 - Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies; There's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind.
Page 372 - With silence only as their benediction, God's angels come Where, in the shadow of a great affliction, The soul sits dumb...

About the author (1850)

Whittier, the Quaker poet, was a "man of peace" but also "the poet militant." While his nonconformist religion demanded passive resistance in the physical arena, he was vigorous in opposition to slavery and the enemies of democratic principles. Born near Haverhill, Massachusetts, and educated at local schools, Whittier became editor of several country newspapers and in 1831 published his first book, Legends of New England in Prose and Verse. This was followed by a number of volumes of poetry, nearly 20 between 1836 and the outbreak of the Civil War, but a literary life was not uppermost in Whittier's mind during these turbulent years. Having been drawn into the antislavery movement by William Lloyd Garrison and others, Whittier became one of the most effective voices in the fight against slavery through his poetry and other writings. He himself said that he "set a higher value on his name as appended to the Anti-Slavery Declaration in 1833 than on the title page of any book." It has been said that his Voices of Freedom (1846), raised in the cause of abolition, was second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin in influencing the public against slavery. Following the war, Whittier felt free to turn his primary attention from politics to other themes and matters in his poetry, most successfully to the New England folk life that he had known so intimately during his years in rural Massachusetts and which is reflected in Among the Hills (1869). Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl (1866) is a long poem celebrating those rural values that Whittier had known in his youth but that were now vanishing before the industrial and urban forces that were transforming the American landscape and, some feared, character. In this, one of the most popular poems of nineteenth-century America, Whittier seeks in his personal past, as Robert Penn Warren pointed out, "not only a sense of personal renewal and continuity, but also a sense of the continuity of the new order with the American past." Other poems of high merit from these later years include "Abraham Davenport" (1866), the exquisite "Prelude" to Among the Hills (1868), and "In School-Days" (1870). 020

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