University of Virginia Library

FITZ-GREENE HALLECK

[There have been loftier themes than his]

“There have been loftier themes than his,
And longer scrolls, and louder lyres,
And lays lit up with poesy's
Purer and holier fires:
Yet read the names that know not death;
Few nobler ones than his are there;
And few have won a greener wreath
Than that which binds his hair.”

ALNWICK CASTLE.

Home of the Percys' high-born race,
Home of their beautiful and brave,
Alike their birth and burial place,
Their cradle, and their grave!
Still sternly o'er the Castle gate
Their house's Lion stands in state,
As in his proud departed hours;
And warriors frown in stone on high,
And feudal banners “flout the sky”
Above his princely towers.
A gentle hill its side inclines,
Lovely in England's fadeless green,
To meet the quiet stream which winds
Through this romantic scene
As silently and sweetly still,
As when, at evening, on that hill,
While summer's wind blew soft and low,
Seated by gallant Hotspur's side,
His Katharine was a happy bride,
A thousand years ago.
Gaze on the Abbey's ruin'd pile:
Does not the succoring Ivy, keeping
Her watch around it, seem to smile,
As o'er a loved one sleeping?
One solitary turret gray
Still tells, in melancholy glory,
The legend of the Cheviot day,
The Percys' proudest border story.
That day its roof was triumph's arch;
Then rang, from aisle to pictured dome,
The light step of the soldier's march,
The music of the trump and drum;
And babe and sire, the old, the young,
And the monk's hymn, and minstrel's song,
And woman's pure kiss, sweet and long,
Welcomed her warrior home.
Wild roses by the Abbey towers
Are gay in their young bud and bloom:
They were born of a race of funeral flowers
That garlanded, in long-gone hours,
A Templar's knightly tomb.
He died, the sword in his mailed hand,
On the holiest spot of the Blessed Land,
Where the Cross was damp'd with his dying breath:
When blood ran free as festal wine,
And the sainted air of Palestine
Was thick with the darts of death.
Wise with the lore of centuries,
What tales, if there be “tongues in trees,”
Those giant oaks could tell,
Of beings born and buried here;
Tales of the peasant and the peer,
Tales of the bridal and the bier,
The welcome and farewell,
Since on their boughs the startled bird
First, in her twilight slumbers, heard
The Norman's curfew bell.
I wandered through the lofty halls
Trod by the Percys of old fame,
And traced upon the chapel walls
Each high, heroic name,
From him who once his standard set
Where now, o'er mosque and minaret,
Glitter the Sultan's crescent moons;
To him who, when a younger son,
Fought for King George at Lexington,
A Major of Dragoons.
[OMITTED]
That last half stanza—it has dashed
From my warm lip the sparkling cup;
The light that o'er my eye-beam flash'd,
The power that bore my spirit up
Above this bank-note world—is gone;
And Alnwick's but a market town,
And this, alas! its market day,
And beasts and borderers throng the way;
Oxen, and bleating lambs in lots,
Northumbrian boors, and plaided Scots;
Men in the coal and cattle line,
From Teviot's bard and hero land,
From royal Berwick's beach of sand,
From Wooller, Morpeth, Hexham, and
Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
These are not the romantic times
So beautiful in Spenser's rhymes,
So dazzling to the dreaming boy:
Ours are the days of fact, not fable;
Of Knights, but not of the Round Table;
Of Bailie Jarvie, not Rob Roy:
'T is what “our President,” Monroe,
Has call'd “the era of good feeling:”
The Highlander, the bitterest foe
To modern laws, has felt their blow,
Consented to be tax'd, and vote,
And put on pantaloons and coat,
And leave off cattle stealing;
Lord Stafford mines for coal and salt,
The duke of Norfolk deals in malt,
The Douglas in red herrings;
And noble name, and cultured land,
Palace, and park, and vassal band
Are powerless to the notes of hand
Of Rothschild, or the Barings.
The age of bargaining, said Burke,
Has come: today the turban'd Turk,
(Sleep, Richard, of the lion heart!
Sleep on, nor from your cerements start,)
Is England's friend and fast ally;
The Moslem tramples on the Greek,
And on the Cross and altar stone,
And Christendom looks tamely on,
And hears the Christian maiden shriek,
And sees the Christian father die;
And not a sabre blow is given
For Greece and fame, for faith and heaven,
By Europe's craven chivalry.
You'll ask if yet the Percy lives
In the armed pomp of feudal state?
The present representatives
Of Hotspur and his “gentle Kate,”
Are some half dozen serving men,
In the drab coat of William Penn;
A chambermaid, whose lip and eye,
And cheek, and brown hair, bright and curling,
Spoke Nature's aristocracy;
And one, half groom half Seneschal,
Who bow'd me through court, bower, and hall,
From donjon keep to turret wall,
For ten-and-sixpence sterling.

MARCO BOZZARIS.

At midnight, in his guarded tentt,
The Turk was dreaming of the hour
When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,
Should tremble at his power:
In dreams, through camp and court, he bore
The trophies of a conqueror;
In dreams his song of triumph heard;
Then wore his monarch's signet ring:
Then press'd that monarch's throne,—a king;
As wild his thoughts, and gay of wing,
As Eden's garden bird.
At midnight, in the forest shades,
Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band,
True as the steel of their tried blades,
Heroes in heart and hand.
There had the Persian's thousands stood,
There had the glad earth drunk their blood
On old Platæa's day;
And now there breathed that haunted air
The sons of sires who conquer'd there,
With arm to strike, and soul to dare,
As quick, as far as they.
An hour pass'd on—The Turk awoke;
That bright dream was his last;
He woke—to hear his sentries shriek,
“To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!”
He woke—to die 'midst flame, and smoke,
And shout, and groan, and sabre stroke,
And death shots falling thick and fast
As lightnings from the mountain cloud;
And heard with voice as trumpet loud,
Bozzaris cheer his band:
“Strike—till the last arm'd foe expires;
Strike—for your altars and your fires;
Strike—for the green graves of your sires;
God—and your native land!”
They fought—like brave men, long and well;
They piled that ground with Moslem slain;
They conquer'd—but Bozzaris fell,
Bleeding at every vein.
His few surviving comrades saw
His smile when rang their proud hurrah,
And the red field was won;
Then saw in death his eyelids close
Calmly, as to a night's repose,
Like flowers at set of sun.
Come to the bridal chamber, Death!
Come to the mother's, when she feels,
For the first time, her first born's breath;
Come when the blessed seals
That close the pestilence are broke,
And crowded cities wail its stroke;
Come in consumption's ghastly form,
The earthquake shock, the ocean storm;
Come when the heart beats high and warm,
With banquet-song, and dance, and wine;
And thou art terrible—the tear,
The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier;
And all we know, or dream, or fear
Of agony, are thine.
But to the hero, when his sword
Has won the battle for the free,
Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word;
And in its hollow tones are heard
The thanks of millions yet to be.
Come, when his task of fame is wrought—
Come, with her laurel-leaf, blood-bought—
Come in her crowning hour—and then
Thy sunken eye's unearthly light
To him is welcome as the sight
Of sky and stars to prison'd men:
Thy grasp is welcome as the hand
Of brother in a foreign land;
Thy summons welcome as the cry
That told the Indian isles were nigh
To the world-seeking Genoese,
When the land wind, from woods of palm,
And orange groves, and fields of balm,
Blew o'er the Haytian seas.
Bozzaris! with the storied brave
Greece nurtured in her glory's time,
Rest thee—there is no prouder grave,
Even in her own proud clime.
She wore no funeral weeds for thee,
Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume,
Like torn branch from death's leafless tree,
In sorrow's pomp and pageantry,
The heartless luxury of the tomb:
But she remembers thee as one
Long loved, and for a season gone;
For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed,
Her marble wrought, her music breathed;
For thee she rings her birth-day bells;
Of thee her babes' first lisping tells;
For thine her evening prayer is said
At palace couch, and cottage bed;
Her soldier, closing with the foe,
Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow;
His plighted maiden, when she fears
For him, the joy of her young years,
Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears:
And she, the mother of thy boys,
Though in her eye and faded cheek
Is read the grief she will not speak,
The memory of her buried joys,
And even she who gave thee birth,
Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth,
Talk of thy doom without a sigh:
For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's;
One of the few, the immortal names,
That were not born to die.

TO ****

LOVE.

CONNECTICUT.

FROM AN UNPUBLISHED POEM.

TWILIGHT.

WEEHAWKEN.