The Two Brothers, and other poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Thus lower'd the storm of vengeance, drear and dark:
Its folds of ruin wrapp'd the noon-day sky:
Heaven's thunders murmur'd coming wrath. But hark!
From that great city one repentant cry
Rose like a fragrant incense-cloud on high.

And mercy pleaded and prevail'd: it pass'd,
And left her in her scatheless majesty:
The blue heavens smiled, so lately overcast,
Of her unclouded skies the loveliest and the last.

XX

Woe to the land of Asshur!—after-years
Too soon forgat the warning voice of Heaven:
And mock'd derisively their fathers' fears,
And proudly strove with God as they had striven,
Unheeding, unrepentant, unforgiven.
Ah, woe for Nineveh—the tempest lay
From off the skirts of her horizon driven,
But ready to descend with baleful sway
The moment God announced her fatal judgment-day.

XXI

Have ye exhausted all the mines of Ind?
Have Egypt's dark-brow'd captives all been sold?
Or doth the idle unproductive wind
No more from Tarshish waft her stores untold
Of spices and of purple and of gold?

Why grasp ye at the solitary gem,
Which, from all jewels of the earth, of old
The Lord hath chosen for his diadem—
The favourite land of heaven—beloved Jerusalem?

XXII

Oh weep with weeping Israel! Broken-hearted,
Far off she mourns, the Gentile's prisoner:
Her beauty and her bloom hath all departed,
For her transgressions great and grievous were;
And therefore hath the Lord afflicted her .
Like some wild vision of the night it seems—
Her old men crave a speedy sepulchre;
Her sons in fetters foster hopeless dreams;
Her daughters hang their harps by far ungenial streams.

XXIII

Yet half the tempest fell not: Jordan still
Fenced Carmel's forest and Siloah's spring.
But lo, a darker tempest-cloud of ill!
Innumerable hosts were marshalling
Beneath the banners of Assyria's king—

Wilt thou not manifest thy glory there?
Wilt thou not spread, O Lord, thy guardian wing?
Wilt thou not listen to that piercing prayer?
“Spare us, O Lord our God—spare us, Jehovah, spare.”

XXIV

On like a vulture to the field of doom
Sennacherib came hasting thro' the land;
He march'd in vengeance, like the fierce Simoom
With clouds and pillars of hot burning sand,
That sweeps o'er Afric's desolated strand.
Proudly he taunted Heaven, and ask'd in wrath,
What God or man his armies could withstand?
Fool, fool, who never in his blood-stain'd path
Had wrestled with the calm omnipotence of faith.

XXV

'Twas midnight, when the angel of the Lord
Went forth and look'd upon that teeming glen,
And waved above that host his silent sword;
Nor sheathed the fearful blade of death again
Till more than eighteen myriads of men

Slept their last slumber on the blasted heath.
In fear the scanty remnant fled, and when
The morning rose, no living man drew breath
In that vast host of slain—that silent camp of death .

XXVI

But woe to thee, Assyria, who hast striven
To mock Jehovah with thine impious tongue;
Guard thine own city from the bolts of heaven!
Thy hour is coming. Zion's virgin young
Already hath thy funeral dirges sung:
Already Israel's bard has seized the lyre ,
The awful lyre of prophecy, and flung
These scathing words of heaven's avenging ire,
To brand thy withering pride with everlasting fire.

Lamentations i. 5.

Isa. xxxviii.

Nahum; he appears to have uttered his burden of Nineveh, which the writer has attempted to paraphrase in the following lines, the very year, b.c. 713, in which Sennacherib invaded Judæa.